On Nov 7, 2007 2:25 AM, <charles.r.matthews(a)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