[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[John Lee]

On Nov 7, 2007 2:25 AM, <charles.r.matthews at 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