Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abdul Qudus


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. Coffee //  have a cup  //  ark  // 13:33, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Abdul Qudus

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Non-notable individual only recognized for one event. Article is primarily general and could (and is) repeated for a number of similar individuals. Limited if any non-trivial coverage.  Grsz 11  15:37, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep, 900 prisoners, 38 of them determined to be wrongfully imprisoned. Abdul Qudus was the youngest of them (I believe?) at 15 years old, and there are other third-party sources about him. Bad articles should be improved, not deleted. Sherurcij (speaker for the dead) 17:52, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * What are those third-party sources? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 06:51, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. On reflection, changing my vote from keep.  Just not notable enough.--Epeefleche (talk) 07:57, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep -- Dog bites man is not notable. Man bites dog is notable.  During the 20th Century and early 21st Century millions of individuals were held in secret detention, without charge, under brutal conditions.  If we count the 12 million the Nazis kept in concentration camps, the Soviets held in the Soviet Gulag, and in Red China's similar camps, in Cambodia's similar camps, there may have been over 100 million individuals subjected to these kinds of conditions.  What makes Abdul Qudus stand out among these 100 million individuals?  Simple.  99,999,221 of those individuals were held in secret detention, without charge, by brutal, totalitarian regimes, who no one expects to respect the principles of fundamental justice, and the presumption of innocence.  In Guantanamo we have 779 individuals who were held in the conditions otherwise used by totalitarian regimes by the USA, a country generally characterized as the most freedom-loving, freedom-respecting nation on earth.  Aldus Qudus is not just one of those 779 individuals -- he is one of the two dozen minors held under adult conditions during years of extrajudicial detention.  That makes his case an instance of "man bites dog".  Geo Swan (talk) 20:28, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Why is that an argument for an article on him individually, rather than an article on all similarly situated people?--Epeefleche (talk) 21:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Tim Song (talk) 03:25, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Delete. As with several other Guantanamo detainees whose articles have come up at AfD in the past, the problem here is a lack of secondary sources with coverage of the subject. The most promising-looking secondary sources cited in this article, articles from BBC News and The Age, don't mention Qudus. Nor does the Congressional Research Service report. That leaves five sources, all published by OARDEC and/or the U.S. Department of Defense, which are all primary sources relating to Qudus's detention or its review. Of those, three of them have only a single line of data about Qudus amid a list of other detainees. One of the other sources is a broken link. According to the article No longer enemy combatant, Qudus was released and returned to Afghanistan over 4 years ago. Yet, despite the ongoing international controversy over the detentions at Guantanamo, no media sources have been found which have discussed or even mentioned Qudus as an individual. Googling for his name reveals that "Abdul Qudus" is a common name so I would have difficulty finding sources about him myself. The burden should be on the supporters of the article to find secondary sources about the subject. Finally, I note that these Guantanamo detainee articles are getting so generic that this article actually relies on a template, CSRT-Yes, to supply two and a half paragraphs of boilerplate that is apparently being dumped into numerous articles of this kind (see Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:CSRT-Yes). --Metropolitan90 (talk) 06:51, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per Metropolitan90's exhaustive work. Much appreciated, it is, to keep me from having to do it. Redirect to a generic article about Gitmo detainees afterwords, or something. Ray  Talk 19:58, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Terrorism-related deletion discussions.  --  Ray  Talk 19:58, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Guantanamo Bay detainment camp-related deletion discussions.  --  Ray  Talk 19:59, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Metropolitan90 and I have shared our views before. We have some honest disagreements about a number of issues.  I believe we should use a consistent definition of "secondary source".  In any other context the "summary of evidence" memos would be recognized as secondary sources.  Primary sources are documents prepared by a single researcher or team of researchers -- or interrogators.  Secondary sources are documents which independently collate, synthesize, summarize other documents prepared by other researchers.  When the author of a document has to make judgment calls about the reliability of the information in the documents they are synthesizing, when the author of document has to make judgment calls about how to reconcile conflicting information in documents from different sources, then that document is a secondary document, by definition.  This is the definition of secondary source used in the real world, and generally used for other topics here.
 * I think Metropolitan90 has implied here an idea often taken for granted, but not supported by our policies. Our policies don't say that our sources have to be newspaper reports.  Our policies say that our sources should be verifiable, authoritative, and independent.  I have had other correspondents who interpret "independent" to mean press sources.  But what our policies actually state is that the source should be "independent from the subject".  In other words documents written by Abdul Qudus, his friends, family, publicist, would not be considered "independent".  But I continue to believe the OARDEC summary of evidence memos fully satisfy all the requirements our policies reguire of our references.  We have something like 3 million articles now, and there are lots of perfectly satisfactory articles with perfectly satisfactory references that are not press reports.  There are lots of differnt kinds of topics, which, by their nature, aren't covered by the MSM.  Other kinds of topics where the perfectly satisfactory references include scientific topics and historical topics.  Geo Swan (talk) 14:54, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Not notable as Metropolitan90 nicely demonstrated.--Staberinde (talk) 12:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Delete Abdul Qudus is considered as one of the youngest Guantanamo detainees. Only 13-14 years old.. If we would go by Metropolitan90's strict rules than we need to delete about 670 of the about 700 BLP's of Guantanamo detainees. I think being one of the youngest children kept in Guantanamo makes him more notable than the other. Sure the article needs work. IQinn (talk) 12:44, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That other stuff exists is not a reason for keeping. I'm a great admirer of Geo Swan and others' work in putting up information about Guantanamo Bay, but he has fairly regularly run into notability issues in the past. If that means that 600 or so BLPs are of non-notable detainees, then we should delete those on a case by case basis. Let's not forget that, however legal and neutral the language, there is a very negative association in the minds of many for being profiled as a Guantanamo detainee. If the information doesn't belong and coverage is not significant, then that's what we have WP:BLP1E and WP:BIO for. Ray  Talk 15:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You are right. I am changing to delete. Lack of sources to write an NPOV article. I had also a closer look at the "OARDEC" sources. They look like primary sources for me. At least they are highly problematic. I found this past AfD where Brewcrewer and BWH76 gave some explanation why they are problematic. IQinn (talk) 07:59, 28 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete. The classic wp:blp1e. Besides, the article is terribly written. Instead of a bio, we have the US case (or lack thereof) written up here. Clearly a WP:COATRACK for something else.-- brew  crewer  (yada, yada) 00:06, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.