I imagine many people world-wide will be looking right now at our coverage of politics in Pakistan. I have a story about that.
[[Siddiq Khan Kanju]]: a part Foreign Secretary. An article submitted about him was at AfC for over a yers.
[[Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi]]: politician with a Prime Minister son, another son in politics, regional Chief Minister nephew. First article was speedied under CSD A7.
[[Chaudhry Ghulam Ahmed Zamurrad]]: mayor of a large city, speedied under CSD A7.
Common factor here: systemic bias in action. None of the original submissions was writtten in good English. However, in each case bad decisions were made. User:MastCell is claiming I was mean to him in the case of Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi. As we know, however, A7 can often give the wrong result for the encyclopedia, if taken at the letter. As here. Buck stops with the deleting admin, who is supposed to be on the side of the content. User:Addhoc, at fault in the case of Chaudhry Ghulam Ahmed Zamurrad, which was not irretrievable nonsense as he claimed at all, has gone in and scalped the article.
So, this is systemic bias at work. A couple of articles that should have been stubs speedied, and an article languishing at AfC from October 2006 because the reviewer thought it was hard to read.
I'm always on the side of the content.
A7 must still die, as everyone should know.
Charles
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On Nov 7, 2007 2:25 AM, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I imagine many people world-wide will be looking right now at our coverage of politics in Pakistan. I have a story about that.
[[Siddiq Khan Kanju]]: a part Foreign Secretary. An article submitted about him was at AfC for over a yers.
[[Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi]]: politician with a Prime Minister son, another son in politics, regional Chief Minister nephew. First article was speedied under CSD A7.
[[Chaudhry Ghulam Ahmed Zamurrad]]: mayor of a large city, speedied under CSD A7.
Common factor here: systemic bias in action. None of the original submissions was writtten in good English. However, in each case bad decisions were made. User:MastCell is claiming I was mean to him in the case of Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi. As we know, however, A7 can often give the wrong result for the encyclopedia, if taken at the letter. As here. Buck stops with the deleting admin, who is supposed to be on the side of the content. User:Addhoc, at fault in the case of Chaudhry Ghulam Ahmed Zamurrad, which was not irretrievable nonsense as he claimed at all, has gone in and scalped the article.
So, this is systemic bias at work. A couple of articles that should have been stubs speedied, and an article languishing at AfC from October 2006 because the reviewer thought it was hard to read.
I'm always on the side of the content.
A7 must still die, as everyone should know.
In all fairness, [[Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi]] in its original state was completely unsalvageable. In the case of [[Chaudhry Ghulam Ahmed Zamurrad]], though, there was a clear assertion of notability; at the very least, the onus is on the tagger and/or admin to do some basic Googling to see if there's a prima facie indication that this isn't patent nonsense.
These aren't the best examples to illustrate problems with the current deletion system, though. Every now and then when I check up on [[C:CSD]], I see articles like [[Maki Pulido]] tagged for speedying despite clear *examples* of notability within the article itself. This is systemic bias at its best; Pulido's article is especially interesting because after I removed the speedy tag, the tagger tagged it for PROD under the dubious reason that it had no sources (honestly, why is this a deletion criterion?) - something easily refutable by the fact that the article linked to the Philippine TV station's webpage on Pulido.
Not related to speedy deletion in particular, I still remember the time that someone insisted that the upper and lower houses of Malaysia's Parliament were insufficiently notable to be separate articles, and proposed merging them into [[Parliament of Malaysia]]. It's very clear to me that we have a substantial systemic bias when it comes to new content, although I'm reluctant to draw any wideranging and broad conclusions from this.
Johnleemk
On 07/11/2007, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm always on the side of the content.
A7 must still die, as everyone should know.
Today's lovely example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Franz-Hermann_Br%C3%BCner&diff...
"''Franz-Hermann Brüner''' is the director general of [[OLAF]] the European Anti-Fraud Office" ... [two more sentences, two refs]
Tagged as A7 within four minutes.
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 07/11/2007, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm always on the side of the content.
A7 must still die, as everyone should know.
Today's lovely example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Franz-Hermann_Br%C3%BCner&diff...
"''Franz-Hermann Brüner''' is the director general of [[OLAF]] the European Anti-Fraud Office" ... [two more sentences, two refs]
Tagged as A7 within four minutes.
There seems to be a general bias against articles not about the Anglosphere. I doubt the appointed head of some major US or UK government agency would've been similarly tagged with db-bio and the explanation "appointed bureaucrat?"
I'd propose that people should be *very* careful about speedy-tagging people and things from countries they're not from, especially non-English-speaking countries, unless they're either obvious crap (i.e. an autobiography by a high school student) or the person has first done some research to establish that the thing is not notable even in that country---keeping in mind that the fact that a German person is not well-known _in the US_ is not a valid reason for speedy deletion.
-Mark
On 14/11/2007, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
There seems to be a general bias against articles not about the Anglosphere. I doubt the appointed head of some major US or UK government agency would've been similarly tagged with db-bio and the explanation "appointed bureaucrat?"
The guy is in the Anglosphere or at least is if you read a certain scurrilous rag.
I'd propose that people should be *very* careful about speedy-tagging people and things from countries they're not from, especially non-English-speaking countries, unless they're either obvious crap (i.e. an autobiography by a high school student) or the person has first done some research to establish that the thing is not notable even in that country---keeping in mind that the fact that a German person is not well-known _in the US_ is not a valid reason for speedy deletion.
Civil servants are always a tricky one since while they may wield considerable power they don't tend to make the front pages much (they may appear more frequently on the political pages and the like).