Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Malaysia–Sweden relations


 * 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. Fritzpoll (talk) 08:30, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Malaysia–Sweden relations

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

whilst the countries have embassies, it's a rather empty article in its current form. Search of Swedish govt website doesn't reveal much. same deal with Malaysian foreign ministry. neither does google news search, only really multilateral and sporting relations. LibStar (talk) 07:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep: A brief look around the website of the Swedish Embassy in Kuala Lumpur suggests that there is content to go in this article, especially concerning trade relations. Compare also the Malaysian point of view here. I think it is also significant that in 2008, the National Day of Sweden was celebrated in Malaysia. I could try and create at least a worthy stub article later. Mr_pand [ talk | contributions ] 08:42, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, those are primary sources and while they could be used to verify information, they cannot be used to establish notability for a topic. Drawn Some (talk) 08:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. Embassies routinely host functions for their national days and this wasn't a widespread celebration! Nick-D (talk) 08:50, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Change vote to tentative delete. Other sources suggest the trade links mentioned in above sources are not that significant. See here and here. Not sure about diplomatic relations, but I have not yet found anything bilaterally significant Mr_pand [ talk | contributions ] 09:24, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sweden-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 12:12, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Malaysia-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 12:12, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete no significant material. Combination and permutation of nations. Collect (talk) 16:10, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete No reliable sources adress these non-notable relations in any detail. Hipocrite (talk) 18:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. We don't need another article randomly pairing countries. Niteshift36 (talk) 03:56, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Article has no useful content and very little prospect of development. No sources discuss these relations. Johnuniq (talk) 11:29, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep I've added some notable material concerning trade and a hostage crisis involving the Charge D'Affairs of the Swedish Embassy in Kuala Lumpur in 1975 with 3rd party cites. Relations between these countries have existed for 50 years. Expand, don't delete.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 02:41, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * These countries also have bilateral agreements in place.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 03:24, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * and are they the subject of significant coverage? LibStar (talk) 03:31, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Each individual fact doesn't requires significant coverage, just the article as a whole. And by now you know that Wikipedia defines significant to mean that each fact has a reference. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:43, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment The creator of this page User:Aiman abmajid was not notified of this Afd by User:LibStar when it began two days ago. I have alerted him per WP:CIVIL.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 03:07, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep based on additional information. It is verifiable and notable. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 03:39, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete - the existence of bilateral agreements - primary sources - cannot be used to validate the notability of this relationship. We need in-depth coverage in third-party sources. As that is lacking, delete. - Biruitorul Talk 14:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * treaties between nations are intrinsically notable in real life, and should be so considered here, they are about as big a deal as one can get, short of making war. DGG (talk) 23:37, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * No, not really: treaties' importance still needs to be validated by secondary sources. For relevant ones, that's never a problem; copious sources exist on Jay's Treaty, the London Naval Treaty, and so on; for irrelevant ones, such as, well, the Malaysia-Sweden double taxation avoidance agreement, secondary sources don't deem them noteworthy, and neither, per WP:PSTS, can we. - Biruitorul Talk 00:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * You are relying on the strawman fallacy once again, can you please avoid it during discussions. One or two references in 10 does not make the whole article not-notable. Your strategy is to denigrate the weakest reference and use that as a rationale for deletion of the the entire article. There is a reason it is called a fallacy. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 23:26, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Again: treaties' importance still needs to be validated by secondary sources, which has yet to happen. Instead of pumping trivia into the article in a desperate attempt to demonstrate notability, how about finding independent sources that actually deal with "Malaysia–Sweden relations"? - Biruitorul Talk 14:12, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Biruitorul, the sources are independent and secondary. They are from the UN, the EU, and a book on bilateral investment treaties. You might want to redact your false statement above.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 15:48, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Er, no. Mere treaty texts are primary sources, regardless of who happens to republish them. We need secondary sources to validate their relevance to the article topic ("Malaysia–Sweden relations"), else we breach WP:PSTS and WP:SYNTH. For example, Jay's treaty: a study in commerce and diplomacy‎ deals with Jay's Treaty, The ABM treaty: to defend or not to defend? deals with the ABM treaty, The Pinckney Treaty: America Wins the Right to Travel the Mississippi River deals with Pinckney's Treaty, and so forth. Now, I don't expect a full book to have been written on every treaty. But a journal article, a newspaper article, or even a paragraph in one of these has yet to emerge on such documents as the "Malaysia-Sweden double taxation avoidance agreement". Well, if no academic or journalistic attention has been paid to it, why should we? We shouldn't: see WP:PSTS and WP:SYNTH. - Biruitorul Talk 20:45, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Look at the third source again. Also, the republishing of a primary source material by an independent authority on sources of that kind would certainly qualify as being the dissemination of information by a secondary source.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 22:15, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The third source tells us nothing whatsoever about "Malaysia–Sweden relations" - merely that the two parties signed a treaty the wording of which happened to be used as an illustrative example in a book about bilateral investment treaties. But you see, the context in which that treaty is mentioned is procedural requirements of bilateral investment treaties. If you want to cite that book in a section of an article on that topic, by all means. However, the book has nothing whatever to do with the foreign relations of either Sweden or Malaysia, and the way the article currently cites it is abusive and devoid of contextual relevance. And once again, no matter how authoritative the disseminator may be, mere republication of raw treaty text, without a scholarly or at least journalistic filter to ascribe contextual relevance to that treaty, is meaningless and inherently bound to breach WP:SYNTH and WP:PSTS if used. (Sure, the treaties exist, but do we have the slightest inkling why they may be relevant to "Malaysia–Sweden relations"? No, no secondary source, not even the ones reprinting them, tells us that.)
 * Ultimately, the problem here is a refusal to abide by these policies: refusal to understand that policy requires sources discussing article topics as such, not something which one Wikipedia editor tells us is relevant to a topic he may have invented altogether; refusal to write articles on topics whose notability is immediately apparent, rather than requiring one to patch together disparate bits of trivia in a desperate attempt to make it seem that way; refusal to acknowledge that neither documents (no matter who reprints them) nor media reports never noticed by us outside this series of nonsense articles can ever substitute for actual treatment of a topic by reliable secondary sources (regardless of the sleight-of-hand which pretends otherwise), and so forth. - Biruitorul Talk 00:13, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I would agree with you if the article was called "Malaysia–Sweden really really important relations". Then we would need a source to tell us which facts are only "important" and which facts are "really really important". But the article is called "Malaysia–Sweden relations" without any modifier. The guidelines that can be used are in the Department of Foreign Affairs for each country, they seem to do a good job of keeping track of them. Google News archive tells us what the media felt was important enough to record. Pick up any almanac and thumb through it. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:40, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Tiring and tendentious. Find secondary sources actually discussing "Malaysia–Sweden relations", not what you think those may be. And certainly not what scraps of media coverage you happen to pick up. Where notable relations exist, reliable sources don't hesitate to cover them. Where they don't, one is forced (well, you are; I prefer not to abuse the notion of what an encyclopedia is for) to scramble for trivia to fill the void - trivia that would never be picked up outside this series of nonsense articles, and that you really should stop cluttering up the project with. - Biruitorul Talk 02:39, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I can assure you that I find your counterarguments equally "tiring and tendentious". --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 19:02, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Being a major trade partner is notable, and there seem very good references for that. That part alone is enough to justify the article. DGG (talk) 23:37, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Care to define "major" and produce independent sources attesting to the notability of that? Mutual trade flow in 2006 was roughly $1.6 billion; for economies of $400 billion (Malaysia) and $350 billion (Sweden), that's hardly very much, and given the lack of validation of the number's importance by secondary sources, irrelevant. - Biruitorul Talk 00:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia doesn't require a specific number of dollars to be traded to be notable. It only requires that independent reliable sources report on them. That has been met. Note that Wikipedia reports that Steve Jobs makes just $1 a year in salary at Apple. The dollar amount isn't important. The question is: is some number being reported in a reliable source? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:39, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Reliable independent source on the article topic; that has yet to be met. - Biruitorul Talk 14:12, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete in the absence of multiple non-trivial treatments of this relationship in reliable independent sources.Bali ultimate (talk) 17:00, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Is there a specific number of references, some magic number you are looking for? Wikipedia only requires two references to be notable. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:41, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Where do you get that only two references are needed for something to be notable? I've never seen anything like that anywhere in a guideline or policy or any other expression of consensus.  In fact, the requirements are both not that specific as to number and much more demanding: "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article." Drawn Some (talk) 18:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep in consideration of the major improvements since the article was first nominated. Its now well sourced and nicely encyclopedic. Nice work under pressure as the clocks ticks to zero.  Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q. 03:35, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep; good work. Informative, verifiable, referenced. Antandrus  (talk) 03:41, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Keep cramming unencyclopedic trivia into it if you must, keep plastering this page with "rescue" messages if you will, but this is not an independent topic, nor an intelligent article. The only matter of encyclopedic interest is that the two countries have some sort of relationship - if this is a matter for special focus, it can be summarized into one sentence in a more generic article. The "rescue" attempt and the votes claiming it has done something for the article are blatantly dodging the point. In short: this article was unnecessary to begin with; expanding it has turned it into a rant, whose only purpose is not to add the relevant info, but to add info that would make the article look relevant! An interesting illustration of Postmodern textuality, but one of the worst possible ways of pulling out the impression of an encyclopedic article. Dahn (talk) 09:34, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I hear ya, I hate rants too. But remember "trivia", your new talking-point is subjective, and isn't a Wikipedia Pillar like Notability and Verifiability. The first line of Five pillars reads as follows:	"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia incorporating elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers." You may denigrate an almanac as a book of trivia, but Wikipedia "incorporat[es] elements of ... almanacs". Cheers. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 17:17, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, you keep repeating that marginal interpretation as fact, and applying it to your conclusions. The rest of your speculation I should disregard altogether: as you have done me the service of noting, WP:N is a cornerstone, no matter how we try to dance around it. The claim that it doesn't apply here because you can read these articles like an almanac, and the whole set of implications you constructed on your own for that theory, are not the stuff of a constructive discussion as far as I care. And, again, the point is not even about trivia and its relation to wikipedia in general, but about using trivia and trivia in an attempt to validate a topic on which nothing can be found but trivia. Dahn (talk) 18:35, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yet, an almanac, is an almanac is an almanac. It is the number one pillar of Five pillars. Deriding something as trivia is purely subjective. To me sports is trivia, to another, it is worthy of an encyclopedia. If a computer program can't pick trivia from fact, then it only exists as a personal subjective choice. A computer can objectively determine something is a fact if it appears in Google News. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 22:56, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
 * And I have said I am familiar with this contrived theory of yours about how the five pillars would supposedly override WP:N for the purposes of keeping these articles around. The notion that one could use computers to differentiate trivia from fact (as if anyone would challenge that these are "facts", as if that were the point of this conversation), and your suggestion that you are able to determine what Google news should lead to new articles (with the immediate and absurd consequence that any fact reported in the media on that level could become an independent topic) are forms of special pleading, and the rationale moving between them a non sequitur. And, once more: I'm not using "trivia" to deride something - I'm using it to define something, so please don't put words in my mouth. Also, defining something as "trivia" is not as exposed to your relativism as you would have us believe. Tis is not about the way a person relates to info - i.e. "To me sports is trivia, to another, it is worthy of an encyclopedia". It is about the contextual importance of the info - i.e. not about "sports", but about certain aspects of sports - even if you were to judge sports not worthy of inclusion (and I won't even debate that), certain events in sports are and will be less important than others, to sports itself. That is the nature of the debate beyond the faux relativism of your analogy. Dahn (talk) 08:57, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Another collection of the usual unremarkable state visits and treaties that make up an article that doesn't assert a claim of notability on the topic itself, through sources covering the topic as a whole or of anything other than individual events. This article is made even more laughable in its attempt to be something it isn't by the inclusion of the Swedish and Malay translations of the article topic in the first paragraph. Not even an almanac would be so lacking in information. -- Blue Squadron  Raven  04:35, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete WIkipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. And this fails WP:N as no one (including myself) has yet been able to dig up evidence of significant coverage in independent reliable sources. Yilloslime T C  17:40, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete as above, viz. a random assortment of various trivial facts masquerading as encyclopedic content. Eusebeus (talk) 18:13, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete I had commented at the beginning of this discussion and it is now time to render an opinon. Despite the wordy discussion and the strident calls of "keep, keep", no one has been able to show significant in-depth coverage of the subject of the article, "Malaysia-Sweden relations", in independent reliable sources.  That is the consensus of the standard for inclusion here at Wikipedia and the editors trying to make a fascinating collection of trivia into a notable topic have failed to show sources to meet that standard. Drawn Some (talk) 18:41, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has no definition of trivia. Calling information trivia is just a way of deriding what doesn't interest you personally. It meets every standard of notability and verifiability. While the sources may not use the word "relations" in the article, the Wikipedia article is about the concept, not word. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 18:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep As the article has been expanded, the reliable and verifiable sources satisfy anyone's reading of the Wikipedia notability standard. Alansohn (talk) 18:53, 8 June 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.