User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/review/talk-Uighur house

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hangon
This redirect was tagged with db-g3 -- pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes. I am doing my best not to respond in kind.

I can't count how many times I have reminded the contributor who tagged this article that we do our best to comply with WP:VER.

I don't believe the contributor who tagged this article is disputing that references confirm that over one hundred Guantanamo captives had their continued detention justified, in part, based on allegations they had stayed in a suspect safe house or guest house. I don't believe they are disputing that the Guantanamo intelligence analysts conflate all suspect safe houses and guest houses as if they were run by al Qaida or the Taliban.

I believe what they dispute is whether these assertions are reliable.

But this is serious misunderstanding of our policies. What we personally consider true, or reliable, is irrelevant. What matters is what is verifiable.

A series of over a dozen academic papers, from three different academic institutions, have explicitly recognized the conflation apparent in the intelligence documents the contributor who placed this tag is doubtful about. This too has been drawn to the contributor's attention on multiple occasions. Geo Swan (talk) 06:17, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Its not obvious enough for speedy but I have some doubts about this. Uighur house might possibly have this meaning, but it means other things too, including the plain meaning of a house in which Uighur people live. I'd suggest trying an article on the phrase instead--this is a little too complicated for just a redirect..  DGG ( talk ) 08:23, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * The edit summary in connection with the tag says misinformation. Instead of a ad hominum attack against a good faith contributor and filibustering and talk as if some sources would be reliable you may provide us first with detailed references and preferable quotes of sources that draw this exceptional connection between the houses of an ethnic group and Al-Qaeda.


 * Instead of attacking someone that question some of your work you should show of detailed proof for this connection so that it is more than your personnel POV and words. The Uighurs are an ethnic group. Imagine just we would do this with any other ethnic group. To say Uighur houses = Al-Qaeda safe houses is an exceptional claim and exceptional claims need exceptional sources.


 * Sufficient references and quotes please from reliable sources - secondary and tertiary sources are preferred for this exceptional claim. Anyway please provide us with your strongest references and sources and than we still have time to discuss in detail if they are reliable or sufficient. You have not offered us any detailed references or quotes actually no references at all, please do so. IQinn (talk) 13:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

ANI - Speedy deletion Uighur house
There's a discussion concerning this redirect at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Justin W Smith talk/stalk 21:52, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * User:Iqinn started that WP:ANI thread. Administrators have admonished User:Iqinn in the past for failing to inform involved parties when they have initiated a thread on WP:ANI.  On those past occasion(s) User:Iqinn plead ignorance, and promised to always inform all the involved parties, on any future occasion they initiated a WP:ANI thread.


 * Nevertheless User:Iqinn did not choose to leave a heads-up on my talk page, and I only learned about this WP:ANI thread last night, after it had already been archived.


 * I consider this extremely unfortunate. Here on the wikipedia we are supposed to reach our decisions in an open and transparent manner.  We are supposed to aim to arrive at a consensus of all the involved parties.  And WRT this redirection, that includes me.  We are not supposed to reach quasi consensuses, false consensuses, arrived at by neglecting to inform those contributors who might contradict us.


 * I presume contributors who were curious about this redirection were mystified when they clicked on the what links here button for "Uighur house", and found no incoming links from article space.


 * There is a reason for that. There had been incoming links from article space.  User:Iqinn removed those wikilinks to Uighur house:, .  Last fall User:Iqinn removed several thousand valid and useful wikilinks in a series of 250 edits, listed here.  No, I am not exagerrating, you read that correctly -- several thousand valid and useful wikilinks.


 * The sole explanation User:Iqinn offered for these excisions was in edit summaries, most of which were identical, and said: "clarify and unlink interpretation of a questionable source".


 * I have been extremely frustrated. I have asked Iqinn literally dozens of times to try to offer me an explanation I can understand for their assertion that some policy authorizes them to excise wikilinks that they think rely on "interpretations of a questionable source".  While they have offered replies it honestly seems to me that none of those replies, so far, have offered an explanation based on the wikipedia's policies or guidelines, or to any long-standing convention.  It has seemed to me that if I were to paraphrase what I think they meant theirs would a personal objection -- that they were personally challenging the credibility of what an WP:RS was asserting based on their own personal conclusions.


 * My interpretation of the wikipedia's policy on verifiability is that our personal conclusions, my personal conclusions, User:Iqinn's personal conclusions, are simply not relevant. Summarizing, paraphrasing or quoting what we find in reliable sources, from a neutral point of view, is what matters.


 * It is quite possible that User:Iqinn didn't remember excising the incoming wikilinks to this redirection when he placed the speedy tag db-g3 -- pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes. Let me explicitly state I am not accusing User:Iqinn of vandalism in the removal of the several thousand valid and useful wikilinks they removed, in the placement of this tag, or in their failure to make sure all involved parties were aware of the WP:ANI discussion.  I will state that the last two acts would then be very careless acts.


 * The first act, the removal of the several thousand valid and useful wikilinks remains far more disturbing to me.


 * After I thought my many requests for an explanation of what they meant by "questionable source" and why that opinion justified these excision had gone unanswered I started restoring those wikilinks when I found myself editing an article from which they had been removed. User:Iqinn strongly objected -- accused me of edit warring -- claimed the issue was "under discussion".  So, basically, none of those 250 excisions has been reverted.


 * In the last couple of weeks I have told User:Iqinn, several times, that I accept at face value their assertion that they believe they have offered sufficient explanation. I have asked, in return, that they accept that I have looked for an explanation based on our policies and guidelines in all their replies, and that I honestly can't find one.  Therefore I have asked User:Iqinn to either cut and paste the specific passages that contain their explanation as to why they think their interpretation that a source is questionable authorizes the excision of wikilinks, or that they provide diffs, or that they paraphrase what they remember saying.


 * I am very sorry to report Iqinn has explicitly declined to cut and paste, paraphrase, or provide diffs to the explanation they assert they had already offered.


 * I think the redirect should be restored to the status quo ante. I think all of the several thousand excisions of wikilinks in those 250 troubling edits should be restored.


 * I am concerned that there may have been other redirects which have been successfully speedy deleted, when the administrator who reviewed the speedy deletion couldn't find any incoming wikilinks -- because the incoming wikilinks had been previously excised. Geo Swan (talk) 12:57, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Those who haven't been following the cases of the Guantanamo captives closely wouldn't know that hundreds of them had their continued detention justified, in part, based on allegations that they had stayed in suspect guest houses or safe houses. The Guantanamo documents the DoD has been forced to publish don't explicitly distinguish between safe houses and guest houses.  Some of the houses seem to be referred to using either term in different documents.  But over a dozen academic papers have been written, by teams of academics from across the political spectrum, that have analyzed, or commented on, the Guantanamo analysts use of these terms.  I started an article on the general instance, al Qaeda guest house.  I started some articles on the most commonly mentioned guest houses, like the Faisalabad guest houses.  The Uyghur guest house mentioned in the documents, and which previously linked to Uighur house was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan's most populous city.


 * So, this redirect was not a general redirect, intended to imply all Uyghurs were associated with al Qaeda. This redirect was intended to direct readers who came across the term in the quote to the relevant article.  Geo Swan (talk) 13:50, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Most of your post here is ad hominum, false and has been discussed at ANI. If you want to discuss the content issue than please continue the started discussion Talk:Uighur_house and provide sources as ask for. Thank you IQinn (talk) 00:02, 29 April 2010 (UTC)