Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ili River Treaty


 * 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. ‑Scottywong | [converse] || 07:50, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Ili River Treaty

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WP:V fail ; possibly a hoax. The ISBNs of the books cited are not valid. Only hits in English on Google Books for the article title are WP mirrors. Nothing on Scholar, nothing on JSTOR. There is one additional source in the Turkish Wikipedia besides the one listed here (ISBN 9789758839056), but it doesn't appear to be available online. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 05:25, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 05:25, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Turkey-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 05:25, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Per WP:COPYVIOEL I am also suppressing the copyvio links above.
 * Comment FWIW I don't think it's a hoax. But it does seem to be largely based on a single source, the veracity of which has been questioned before (see the article talk page). The editor who created this article has also added similar content to one or two others, so if this gets deleted then probably those edits should also go. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 12:16, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment I found this source talking about the treaty. They give a Wikizero and a Wikiwand source. The treaty has besides English also a Turkish and an Azerbaijani page. Pages exist since 2007 (en), 2012 (az) and 2016 (tr). Multiple languages of Ishbara Tolis say that he has been dethroned with this treaty, so definitely NOT a hoax, but simply a not widely known treaty. ~Styyx   Talk? ^-^  14:28, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I believe both Wikizero and Wikiwand are Wikipedia mirrors, and a Call of War forum isn't particularly reliable. power~enwiki ( π, ν ) 02:24, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment I found both books online. The first book is here [link removed] and is translated to English and we can see a clear mention in page 56: "The war ended in 638 with a conclusion of Ili treaty. According to the treaty terms, conflicting sides were becoming independent states, their border now passed by the r. Ili, Ükuk-shad received a throne name Ilbi-Turuk-Kagan". The second book is here [link removed] Scrolling down will lead to 12 PDF files. According to the Wikipedia article, the treaty is mentioned in page 207, 209 and 239, so we need file number 8 and 9. The thing is, the pages are in Russian, and I don't speak Russian. Also the website triggered the filter, so add http:// infront of the links.  ~Styyx   Talk? ^-^  13:25, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I've asked the unblocking of the website here, but my request was denied per WP:COPYVIOEL. ~Styyx   Talk? ^-^  13:33, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep treaty has been proven to not be a hoax, not sure about notability requirements but this debate seems pretty pointless now Yvzcvtp (talk) 02:49, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete, non-notable. It may or may not be a hoax (and I don't think anything has been 'proven' one way or the other), but it has issues. Not sure if this can even be a treaty, based on the description, or whether that's a misunderstanding or -translation, or just someone's speculation or OR. Interesting to note that the main Western Turkic Khaganate article makes no mention of this. The few sources seem dubious, which has been highlighted before. If this really happened, and was a major thing, it would have been covered much more widely by multiple historians; as it stands, I can't see it passing notability muster. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:28, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment It seems that users generally agree at this point that this article is not a hoax. If that's the case, then there would be no point in deleting it. It could remain so that other interested users who have knowledge on the subject can work on it. Keivan.f  Talk 22:28, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep -- We are dealing here with a very remote period. It concerns the history of Turkic polities, derived from Chinese, Syriac, and Greek sources.  This is obviously an obscure aspect of history, which few people will have studied.  The result is that there are few published sources.  There is probably a good case for heavily tagging this for more verification, but not one for deleting it.  Peterkingiron (talk) 17:03, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Question. Is it your good faith belief that the books cited above are reliable? (Any indication about their publisher, for instance?) I am reluctant to rely for verifiability on books that are only hosted on a pirate website … AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:13, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete as unverifiable. First, we need reliable 3rd-party sources to consider keeping this.  The "Turkic World" URLs provided above are not convincing as sources.  --Lockley (talk) 02:23, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Weak delete I've not been able to find enough (any?) coverage to justify an article. If there were any mentions in clearly reliable books, I'd !vote to keep, given that this is already an era with poor coverage, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now. Best Eddie891 Talk Work 13:19, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   08:24, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment: No vote either way, because this looks like just the sort of difficult case that can all too easily crop up in subjects like the more obscure corners of Central Asian history. I am almost certain that the article is not a hoax (though I suspect that the article creator was significantly over-estimating the importance of the subject) - while we are badly lacking in valid bibliographical information for the two cited sources (though the Russian original of the second one, at least does seem to have an entry on Google Books), the author, Yury Zuev, was apparently a respected academic in an appropriate subject, it has already been mentioned that Turkish Wikipedia provides another source (and even if Lev Gumilyov seems to have held some distinctly WP:FRINGEy views, I am currently not seeing how they would have affeted his reliability on this specific subject), and yet another potential source is mentioned, though not fully specified, on the article's talk page (, I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember the details? or anything else that might help here?).
 * Having said that, though, I would really need either to read these sources, or have someone else do so and report back here, before I would want to vote to keep - in each case, I'd like reassurance that the sources do confirm relevant points in the article, and in a way that does not depend on the author's POV. And there are a few more points where I would like (but not necessarily insist on) reassurance. I am not at all sure that this was what we would consider a treaty today (and would possibly have been considered as just an agreement even then), but it would be good to know what early sources suggest was agreed - because, even as a treaty, this might turn out to be better contextualised in another article (the Western Turkic Khaganate was already disintegrating, even if the Chinese wouldn't conquer its pieces for another 20 years) but, even otherwise, should at least be mentioned in context (because it was confirmation of that disintegration). Basically, this looks like a footnote in history - but we would be almost automatically be recording equivalent footnotes in a European context and, provided we find suitably reliable sources in any language, should also be doing so in a central Asian context. PWilkinson (talk) 15:19, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep: This article has lot of problems, but it can be fixed. Thus keep. Beshogur (talk) 09:26, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:13, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. I can find no reference to a treaty in sources that discuss the Dulu–Nushibi split, and it seems highly doubtful there are sufficient RS to make it notable for a standalone article in any case. Srnec (talk) 03:06, 19 September 2020 (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.