User talk:Mikebauer

December 2010
Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed maintenance templates from Mir Asedullah Quadri. When removing maintenance templates, please be sure to either resolve the problem that the template refers to, or give a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry, as your removal of this template has been reverted. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. --DAJF (talk) 06:49, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi ,

Firstly, I am a great admirer of the Wikipedia site and the work that you guys as administrators do! I was just reading your page of issues you handle and I must say that I really admire the kind of detail you guys check in posts to help keeping the Wikipedia page neat! Kudos to you all on this! I just wanted to quickly chat with you about the problem we have with the Shaikh Aseduallah Quadri post by guide99. I guess there has been some problem about the authenticity of the article and I just read the (war page:)) between the admin group and guide99. I also think you guys suspect that me and guide99 are the same person. Well, your doubts are valid. I just wanted to clarify that we are definably not the same person. I have been following Wikipedia for a very long time and I just signed up to register my account here. I know the Shaikh personally and I admire his capabilities and used to follow this page on Wikipedia for all the articles guide99 used to update (am sure you can check the history of my ip address or so). I was really surprised to see that this page was called not authentic, and hence, I reached out to guide99 recently in a social gathering and spoke about this. He told me about the issues you guys have with the authenticity part of the article and you needed references. Which is why, I edited the page - but I am guessing the edited information was not convincing enough. I am very certain that you want to help us,Which is why I am reaching out to you sincerely. Could you please tell me what are the problems with the references I gave in my edit and what more references you would need. I would love to help you to have this post online. Please know that Shaikh Asedullah Quadri is extremely popular in India and have a lot of followers on Wikipedia for articles on him. I speak on behalf of all his fans and it would be great if you could help me fix this issue. Looking forward for your help and guidance here.

Thanks! Mikebauer (talk) 06:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

On finding refs for Mir Asedullah Quadri
Greetings, thanks for writing to my Talk page. This article has been contentious, so it's good to keep open lines of communication. Hope you'll forgive our suspecting your being a sockpuppet of Guide99, but his blockage and your immediate registration and reversion to his edits did look a bit coincidental.

In any case, hopefully by looking over the Talk page of the Quadri article, you can get a feel for what everyone's issue is with the article. Fundamentally, this comes down to the slogan "Wikipedia is about verifiability (WP:VERIFIABILITY), not truth." That is to say, we're not out to right wrongs and establish the truth, we're here to report and organise that which is already being said in the world.

Here's the basis of our concern: none of the references provided for the Quadri article have met the standards set forth in WP:RS ("reliable sources"). Every reference has been a CIFA page, a forum thread, Facebook, or a data-dump site. What we're looking for is a site unaffiliated with CIFA or Quadri, which is recognised as authoritative in some way (not editable by anybody, but a site that has professional/journalistic/academic standards to maintain), and that specifically states some basic facts we can use in the article. The problem is that, as things currently stand, all we have is Quadri's view of basically every single fact in the article; we don't have any outside view from a newspaper, academic work, etc. It's not to slight Quadri personally, it's just an issue of principle. Ideally, we don't let anybody just say "seriously, take my word for it, I say so myself."

Furthering our concern, Guide99 and now yourself assert that Quadri is notable; Guide99 claims that Quadri is the spiritual leader of 350 million Muslims. However, we're not finding a single unaffiliated reference mentioning him. One would imagine that such a figure would be mentioned in someone's academic work on Islam in India, or in the Delhi Times when he makes some statement or visits somewhere, or simply something along those lines.

So does that lay out the (uniformly held amongst everyone but Guide99 in this debate) stance of the concerned editors? Do you feel that you have a good grasp on what a "neutral, third-party reference" would be? Are you, like us, having trouble finding outside mention of Quadri, or are we somehow not just finding it, or is it in some online newspapers or articles in other languages? MatthewVanitas (talk) 07:31, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Matthew for reaching out and helping me clearly understand the issue. The concerns you have are clearly valid and I understand your point if view here and agree with it completely.

I have gone ahead and added some more references to his page. It would be great if you could quickly look at the page to see the additional references I have added, These range from third party sites, to some other leaders like Ahmad Deedat reaching out to the shaikh for help and guidance.

The problem here is that Shaikh is a person who has always liked to maintain a low profile in his life, which is why we may not have newspaper publish information for him for he rarely comes into the media. But I have provided and added some other references, which will surely help you guys in figuring out the popularity of Shaikh in Islam.

Please do go through all the references, and please let me know if you think you would need more.

Again, thanks a lot for your help here. I am proud of working with people like you who are willing to help.

Thanks Again! Mikebauer (talk) 07:52, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mir Asedullah Quadri
Greetings, just noticed the article is at AfD, and wanted to link you in: Articles for deletion/Mir Asedullah Quadri. Again, note the emphasis that nobody is against there being an article on Quadri, it's just that we can't have a BLP (biography of living person) where not a single references meets WP:RS. At any future point that a reliable source becomes evident, the article can be created, provided it properly uses reliable sources and uses affiliated sources, such as CIFA's site, in very limited ways as described in RS. MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:15, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I have asked all members of our community to come forward to vote against this deletion.They all used to follow wikipedia but since you guys want people to register and be online (as it seems to me that for you, popularity is limited only to being online),I have asked them all to register now.Mikebauer (talk) 06:46, 23 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a democracy (see WP:NOTDEMOCRACY). It's not a matter of counting the number of people who vote for or against a deletion.  If you or your people can produce a handful of Reliable Sources, the article will remain even if 100 Wahabbis show up to say "I hate Quadri and he shouldn't have an article."  Likewise, even if you bring in 100 "keep" votes, unless someone can bring the article up to acceptable standards it will be deleted.  Asking more people to help you find Reliable Sources (please make sure they read WP:RS to make sure they know what to look for) is great.  Bringing in a bunch of people to just say "don't delete it" without any new information or sources won't accomplish anything.


 * Again, absolutely nobody here is against having an article about Quadri if it can be reliably sourced. But we can't let a biography, especially a Biography of a Living Person, remain without neutral, 3rd party sources. MatthewVanitas (talk) 07:43, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion regarding Mir Asedullah Quadri
You may wish to consider creating an article about Mir Asedullah Quadri at one of the Wikipedias in languages other than English. These other Wikipedias do have their own policies about what topics are notable enough for inclusion on them, and what kind of sources they require. Of course, you will still need to follow their policies, just like on the English Wikipedia. However, it is possible that their requirements for articles are not as strict. Also, mostly those decisions will be made by different people.

The complete list of different language Wikipedias is at: http://www.wikipedia.org/

Some example Wikipedias in different languages that might be relevant, are:
 * Urdu Wikipedia http://ur.wikipedia.org
 * Punjabi Wikipedia http://pa.wikipedia.org
 * Farsi Wikipedia http://fa.wikipedia.org
 * Arabic Wikipedia http://ar.wikipedia.org
 * Indonesian Wikipedia http://id.wikipedia.org
 * Hindi Wikipedia http://hi.wikipedia.org

Another suggestion is that the scans of documents regarding Mir Asedullah Quadri are not ideal as sources for any Wikipedia because of their very large filesize (about 25MB for each document). You may wish to create smaller versions of these scans (for example, in PNG format rather than TIFF format). These smaller versions would allow the reader to quickly see the content and relevance of the document, but you could still make the original full-size scan available for anyone interested in seeing it. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 17:58, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Please do not attack other editors, as you did at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mir Asedullah Quadri. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. Dougweller (talk) 06:24, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Please convey the same to the other editor also Mikebauer (talk) 09:01, 27 December 2010 (UTC)