Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foday Sillah


 * 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 no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. While the nomination was without merit, several valid Delete views were expressed, but no consensus was reached. Owen&times; &#9742;  14:53, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Foday Sillah

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

The title and status he has earned are not encyclopedic. Redivy (talk) 21:58, 10 April 2024 (UTC) Relisting comment: Ordinarily, I'd close this AFD as a procedural Keep due to the lack of a valid deletion rationale but we do have an opinion to Delete this article so I'm relisting to see if editors can come up with additional sourcing to demonstrate that this subject is "encyclopedic". Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 23:04, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sportspeople and Sport of athletics. Redivy (talk) 21:58, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It is inappropriate to call one of the best athletes from an African nation as "not encyclopedic"; whether we can find the coverage to demonstrate notability, that will be another story. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:59, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Olympics and Sierra Leone.  WC  Quidditch   ☎   ✎  00:06, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete: I don't see coverage about a person with this name, a few hits on a school in The Gambia with this name. Happy to revisit if others can turn up sourcing. Oaktree b (talk) 00:29, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment - nominator needs to familiarize themselves with WP:NOTENCYCLOPEDIC. Low effort nominations like this are going to be thrown out whether the subject is notable or not. Sergecross73   msg me  00:32, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep based on Sergecross73's comment, Low effort nominations like this are going to be thrown out whether the subject is notable or not. I was able to find a lot of verifiable information about this person that was not mentioned at all in the nominated article or nomination statement, including his exploits at the World U20 championships where he was the highest-placing male Sierra Leonean athlete ever, he was actually a two-time Olympian and not just at the 1992 Olympics, and he has a still-standing national record at 200 metres. Finding contemporary African news reports from this period is difficult, but I believe there is enough evidence here to know that further coverage exists. --Habst (talk) 17:37, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment. The information can often, as well as in this case, be found via What Links Here. It still needs non-database sources Geschichte (talk) 06:55, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * FWIW I don't think anyone, besides maybe some people who are already editors, looks up people without articles here and then finds and clicks "what links here" to find information about them. A standalone article is much more beneficial to readers, as that way we get both the bare information one would get from a table-link-mention and plenty of other interesting, additional details explained with context. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, thanks for bringing this up. Not all of the information could be found via What Links Here, for example the fact that Sillah's World U20 performance was the best by any Sierra Leonean. Also, if the article were to be deleted, the standard practice is then that any links to the article would be un-linked per WP:REDLINK ("Red links should not be made to articles deleted because the topic was judged unencyclopedic or lacking notability"), meaning that Special:WhatLinksHere would be useless (text searches are not reliable because they could include people with the same name) and much of this structured data would essentially be lost to history. --Habst (talk) 17:05, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @BeanieFan11 My point was about using What Links Here for nominators (and other editors). The reason why Lugnuts' articles were so horrible, was that they typically mention competing in a single Olympic event, where the athlete's career often had much more longevity. Geschichte (talk) 20:35, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Doczilla  Ohhhhhh, no! 05:03, 25 April 2024 (UTC) Relisting comment: Final relist. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The Herald (Benison) (talk) 17:03, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep, as the article stands today it seems enough for the article to not be deleted. Themanwithnowifi (talk) 15:15, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment. The nomination statement notwithstanding, not a single source with significant coverage has been located. Sillah wasn't that high-ranking as an athlete that we can jettison the demand for sources because we think WP:ITSINTERESTING. Geschichte (talk) 20:35, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, there is no deadline for Wikipedia. I believe the info we know about Sillah is conclusive that coverage must exist of him based on his accomplishments making him the best in his country, but it's a matter of having access to the African sources from the 90s that would have covered him. Scans of these may become available in 1, 10, or 20 years – that's why WP:NEXISTS is a policy, to allow for time to get the sources. But saying to drafty in this case is essentially saying to delete the article in 6 months, because most drafts are abandoned. What do you think? --Habst (talk) 20:44, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I was responding to an older version of the reply that was a draftify vote. It was edited to Comment after I started writing my reply. --Habst (talk) 22:14, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Habst, I think there is a good reason why the rule about coverage was added. The days when articles could be built solely on databases and primary sources are over, we have to face that. Geschichte (talk) 07:48, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, thank you, which rule are you referring to? I am open to deleting this and any other page based on a rule, but I just can't see what is being violated. I've edited Wikipedia both before and after WP:NSPORTS2022, and it does not invalidate WP:NEXIST. Respectfully, --Habst (talk) 10:09, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * NEXIST = grasping at straws. You personally think there are lots of significant coverage about this and that person, but that doesn't make it true and how likely it is varies a lot. For a person like Nikolay Antonov, it was overwhelmingly likely, but here - with the highlights being an U20 performance and a slow indoor record - it is nowhere near as likely. Geschichte (talk) 08:03, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, thanks for your perspective because I think the challenge is important. NEXIST isn't grasping at straws; the idea that we can know that coverage exists based on depth of accomplishments is the entire basis of subject-specific notability guidelines existing. Yes, it was used successfully on Nikolay Atanasov, but it has also been used successfully in other cases such as Abdou Manzo, understanding that Sillah's 200m record (1069 pts) is actually better than Manzo's record (924 pts).
 * Also, I think that the subject is being sold short on likeliness of coverage. Sillah was, at a time, the best sprinter in Sierra Leone, a country of 8 million people. In order to be selected for all these international teams, he had to have won some sort of national championship or proven himself on the national level. The likelihood that there is no contemporary coverage of this person existing in the world is, in my opinion, impossible. --Habst (talk) 13:18, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Technically, every country in the world has 50 national champions every year for men and women. Not all of them get coverage. Mind exercises "in your world" about what ought to exist are not something Wikipedia can base itself upon. Do you even know whether Sierra Leone was able to arrange national championships during a brutal civil war? I think you do not. Geschichte (talk) 10:09, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, let's try to work this out together and come to an agreement. There's a difference between being a national champion, and being the fastest or strongest person from a country at a given time – the former is far more arbitrary than the latter. The results from Sillah prove that he was the fastest from his country for a decent stretch of time, representing Sierra Leone at several international competitions and setting a national record. Where there actually was a formal national championship is irrelevant in determining that fact.
 * During war-time, athletes representing countries usually receive outsized coverage, not the other way around – for example see the substantial coverage for Ukranian athletes like , not to mention the Tigray War during which several Ethiopian athletes received coverage recently. Based on this evidence, we can conclude that coverage exists, and the task of finding it up to us now. --Habst (talk) 15:42, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * A couple of articles from the US are not "evidence" for anything. If enlarged coverage during wartime is a universal tenet, where are the articles in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and San Diego Union Tribune - or any newspaper from a developed country - about Foday Sillah? Geschichte (talk) 05:42, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Geschichte, the articles are evidence of coverage in that specific case.
 * where are the articles in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and San Diego Union Tribune – I agree, I think that's the question we should be asking. We have enough evidence to conclude such articles do exist, somewhere.
 * Remember that often times athletes have one name on Wikipedia but were covered under another name at the time. This happened in the case of "Samuel Nchinda-Kaya", which was nearly deleted unanimously until I was able to find that the subject actually used a different name. Maybe that's the case here, or maybe the articles haven't been scanned into newspaper databases yet. It might take one, ten, or one hundred years to find them, but the basis of notability guidelines existing is to allow us the time to keep and improve the article in the mean time. --Habst (talk) 14:13, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Procedural keep as no accurate deletion rationale has been presented by the nominator. No qualms with someone else renominating this one with a stronger rationale. Let&#39;srun (talk) 16:40, 6 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Delete No significant coverage. Jake Wartenberg (talk) 13:56, 10 May 2024 (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.