Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Operation Show Me How


 * 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. Sandstein 16:15, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Operation Show Me How

 * — (View AfD)

Nomination for deletion Fails WP:V for its claims of encyclopedic notability. This badly sourced article came to my attention and thousands of others when it appeared as a "Did You Know?" item on Wikipedia's front page on December 16, 2006. I was surprised by how badly referenced this front page DYK article was and commented at the time:

''This article has insufficient references and if it were not a current DYK, I would nominate it for deletion. The external link provided gives very little information on this operation - not even the year when it happened. I ran a Factiva search for "Show Me How" and "Interpol" and received zero relevant hits. I found this magazine interview which gives the operation a mention and dates it as starting at around 1998 but gives no end year for the operation. BUt the interview does not support the article's claims that this was an encyclopedically notable operation. The claims that this was an unprecedented drug bust involving unusual use of the postal system are so far unverifiable, as is the claim about the children's colouring book. Even if proven, I'm not sure how these amount to encyclopedic notability. I'm having difficulty understanding why this is a DYK too.''

Despite being on the front page and being scrutinized by thousands on that day, the only further reference added was a History Channel documentary episode on heroin. This documentary episode is easily found on Youtube (I won't add the link here due to copyvio concerns) - I watched the whole thing and there is no mention of this international 1990s police operation at all (the most modern era part of the documentary focuses on the USA and ends in the early 1970s and ends with a mention of an "Operation Golden Flow" (I'm not kidding) - the first US government mass urine drug-testing operation - applied to US soldiers leaving Vietnam; possibly this is what the person who added the History Channel reference was thinking about but it is totally irrelevant).

It is has not been proven that this operation is sufficiently notable for an encyclopedia or even significantly more notable than the other operations carried out by Interpol that have been mentioned alongside it e.g. Operation "Hostal" and Operation "Black Powder".

~51 google hits

No google books hits

Single hit on Google Scholar (same ncjrs link as mentioned above)

Bwithh 23:59, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Delete all, notability not established. Presumably Interpol does this all the time as part of their job. --Dhartung | Talk 04:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. Fails WP:N. -- Wizardman 04:50, 4 January 2007 (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.