Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reactions to the 2021 Fall of Kabul


 * 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 keep. The only opposing !votes to outright keeping are to merge, yet many of the keeps explicitly express opposition to doing so. Consensus is to keep outright, as it isn't uncommon to have independent articles discussing reactions to a very notable event. (non-admin closure) Bungle (talk • contribs) 15:54, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Reactions to the 2021 Fall of Kabul

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Wikipedia is not news and not an indiscriminate collection of information. Articles like these tend to get made when people start putting a bunch of generic reactions into the article on a news event, and at a certain point someone forks them off into their own article to avoid bogging down the main article. Which is preferable to leaving them in the main article, but I don't see what benefit an article like this has to our readers. and § Refugees cover the most important aspects. There isn't any particular encyclopedic relevance to the fact that Finland has evacuated its diplomats or that Brazil has expressed concern. Basically every country in the world has the same response to this: "That's bad. We're evacuating our people," with an optional "And maybe we'll take a few refugees," and a fork like this just creates a few dozen items in need of update in a few months/years when editors have stopped paying attention to this page. I don't see a way where this evolves past a bunch of press releases (or uncritical news write-ups of those press releases) to in-depth coverage of the various countries' reactions.

(Also, if kept, this should be moved to , per my points at Talk:Fall of Kabul (2021) regarding capitalization.) -- Tamzin  [cetacean needed] (she/they) 15:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions.  -- Tamzin  [cetacean needed] (she/they) 15:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.  -- Tamzin  [cetacean needed] (she/they) 15:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Afghanistan-related deletion discussions.  -- Tamzin  [cetacean needed] (she/they) 15:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep It's far, far better to have this here rather than cluttering the main article. Just send it to AFD in six months time (or in this case a year). Thincat (talk) 16:35, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not delete it, and limit inclusion in the main article to things that are clearly relevant? There are many articles where editors have successfully drawn that line. -- Tamzin  [cetacean needed] (she/they) 16:46, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * because that is an argument you'll never win without a great deal of ongoing reversions. There are much better things to do. Thincat (talk) 18:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep - a lot of major events have spun-off articles detailing reactions to the events (ex: Reactions to the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, Reactions to the murder of George Floyd, Reactions to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, International reactions to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen (2015–present), etc...), the Fall of Kabul (2021) article is long enough already as it is, and this article isn't just about countries' reactions and gives space for things that are relevant and might need a more in-depth overview than what can go on the Fall of Kabul page (ex: solidarity protests elsewhere in the world, the push to the UK minister of foreign affairs fired, how reactions differed among Afghan people, political debates that are starting to brew over a potential refugee crisis, how it affects perception of NATO power, etc...) NHCLS (talk) 17:16, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Strongly agree that it's much better to include these reactions here than let them clutter up the main article. The Fall of Kabul was an incredibly important event globally, and how other countries react to it is, for obvious reasons, important information. As time goes by, this article can be cleaned up to only include the most important reactions (e.g. if a country formally recognizes the Taliban's IEA government), but I think it shouldn't need to be said that WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE obviously doesn't apply here.  Vanilla  Wizard  💙 21:15, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Trim heavily and merge to Fall of Kabul (2021) (or write that section properly from scratch and delete this outright). I am reminded of Articles for deletion/International reactions to the July 2020 Armenian–Azerbaijani clashes (which resulted in merging, for the record), and I'll restate my points from that discussion here (with some alterations): These "reactions to" articles are a blight on Wikipedia, a complete embarrassment. What we have here is a flag salad and a WP:QUOTEFARM. There is no way this passes WP:10YT; nobody is going to look at this in ten years and think "Brazil expressed concern, did they? How very interesting." This article only exists as a result of failing to properly distinguish between information with news value and information with encyclopedic value in combination with a reluctance to remove excessive material that doesn't improve the main article. Creating a sub-article for the sole purpose of keeping the main article clean is a bad solution which should never have happened in the first place. All worthwile information on this article could easily be summarized in a few paragraphs on the main article. WP:DELREASON (Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia) applies here, specifically because Wikipedia is WP:NOTNEWS. If we summarize it properly from scratch, I don't think there is even any need to retain the edit history for attribution (see WP:CWW) and the article could thus be deleted outright. TompaDompa (talk) 02:47, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Fall of Kabul (2021) is long enough and it will be cluttering it and is a major event and reactions are important to one of the most important events .As noted above many long articles above  have ben spun off, example Reactions to the murder of George Floyd, Reactions to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, International reactions to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen (2015–present),  Reactions to the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests ,Reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden ,Reactions to the Manchester Arena bombing .Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 05:20, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep As per above. RopeTricks (talk) 10:30, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Better to have this rather than let it clutter the main article. Elishop (talk) 11:50, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep as argued by others above - a summary should be included in the main page, but the substantive content here be retained with an action to remove flaglist with 'vague' statements of concern etc. and retain the stated reactions that are substantial/notable - as per other 'Reactions to'  articles given as examples by Pharaoh of the Wizards in the statement above.Kaybeesquared (talk) 12:46, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Speedy keep: per above. Nitesh003 (talk) 13:18, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Speedy keep: per above. Tyrone Madera (talk) 22:58, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Trim and merge into Fall of Kabul (2021). These articles are simply a way to remove responsibility from the editors on actually moderating included content for WP:DUE. Most of the articles in Special:PrefixIndex/Reactions to are from this century only, which suggests it to be a recentism thing. Most of the reactions are uninteresting cruft, Wikipedia would not become any worse if you delete 90% of the content here. WP:NOTNEWS perfectly describes what is going on here. (Disclosure: I became aware of this article by a screenshot that was published on Discord.) stjn 11:30, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Merging this vast sum of information, even if trimmed, would arguably overwhelm the Fall of Kabul article. There's a lot going on here, and the event is the climax of 20 years of conflict, reporting, and America's longest-ever war. To merge this into that article would be to either grossly oversimplify the global response or to risk not trimming it enough to even fit properly. Tyrone Madera (talk) 17:41, 23 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Trim and merge to Fall of Kabul. --Weaveravel (talk) 13:19, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep I think that it's actually a fairly good article. I don't support trimming because the reactions are already quite brief for each entity. BirdValiant (talk) 22:33, 26 August 2021 (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.