Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1 AH

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 Closed. - Out of process since the deletion tag was not placed on the 1 AH article as required by How to list pages for deletion. -- Jreferee t/c 20:27, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 1 AH

1 AH (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

I include here all the various xAH articles, of which there are some hundreds. Almost all of them are empty other than template content (events, births, deaths, references), but that is not the problem, the problem is that this is another naming convention for years in competition with CE / BCE, but with an Islamic slant. It is thus a POV fork, just as if we had separate articles on AD / BC with the exclusively Christian content for that era. The articles are almost all empty, as I say, or at least that's my conclusion from looking at some tens of them. It might be defensible to have an article on each decade as for example 1920s in Islam, as we do for film, fashion and some other topics, but what we have now is an unmaintainable and seemingly unmaintained series of articles which look as if they are only there to remove Islamic topics from the CE / BCE convention. Wikipedia should not be concerned with what we call a year, only with what happened during it. And since the year is an arbitrary construct anyway, we might as well stick with the convention that we already have. Cruftbane 11:08, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Note - You needed to list all of the various xAH articles at Articles for Deletion AND post an AfD notice on each article to give proper notice. You could have created a sub listing such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1 AH/other articles and incorporate that into this discussion to not make this page unwieldy. You still would have needed to post an AfD notice on each article. Without that notice, deleting those articles will be out of process and WP:DRV will be overwhelmed with requests to restore them because of improper process. As it is now, this AfD only applies to 1 AH.-- Jreferee t/c 20:23, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

• Delete all Could violate the coatrack policy by being pro-Islam in disguise, but we don't need any of these articles, as any relevant events can be incorporated into, say, 622. NASCAR Fan24^{(radio me!)} 11:32, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and put in place appropriate governance and/or automation to ensure that events are listed on both year-series as appropriate. This is not "pro-Islam in disguise". It is an example of countering systematic bias (WP:BIAS). --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 12:16, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

• No it's not. Calling a year by a different name doesn't counter systemic bias. We don't have a separate date series for Julian dates. Cruftbane 20:09, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

• This is not at all a coatrack article -- and "coatrack" does not mean "bias in disguise". A coatrack article is very specific -- it is named for one subject and discusses a different one. And it is not a policy -- it is an essay. As much as I admire Moreschi (the original author of WP:COAT), saying "this is a coatrack article" isn't really a legitimate reason for deletion, nor do I think Moreschi intended it to be such. (Note that the coatrack essay suggests paring down the article, but doesn't recommend deleting it.) Getting back to the article itself, I think it's incredibly useful -- the Islamic year does not line up with the Gregorian year, so events that took place in the same year in the Islamic calendar might not take place in the same year in the Gregorian calendar. Thus it makes a lot of sense to discuss events of Islamic history in terms of the Islamic calendar. I think we should keep them all but relegate their content to events related to Islamic history. - Che Nuevara 12:59, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
• Merge into other year articles (and make a redirect) if sensible, otherwise keep. Secretlondon 14:13, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
• Comment What Che Nuevara says makes some sense, but doesn't that mean we'd need separate year tracks for all (major) year countings (e.g. Jewish, japanese, Chinese, etc.)? --Martin Wisse 16:40, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
  • In theory, it would make sense to talk about events tied to a specific calendar in that calendar. The other option would be to make "timeline" articles for the various calendars, but I fear those would become very large very quickly. - Che Nuevara 17:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Yes, exactly. So we have articles for each year, using the calendar most familiar to readers of the English Wikipedia, just as we use the English names for things rather than their original names if they were "not invented here". I'd have no objection to adding the alternative calendars to the tops of the year articles, that would be informative to readers without duplicating effort. Cruftbane 20:11, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
      • It would require slightly more than that -- the years don't match up, obviously (Islamic calendar is lunar). I would support a motion to include alternative date ranges at the top of each relevant year article (ditto for other calendars, such as Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and possibly Coptic) and, where appropriate, also including dates for items relevant to the history of the culture(s) that use(s) that calendar. - Che Nuevara 17:04, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Delete All I believe in countering systemic bias as much as the next guy, but this is not that. This is the English language wikipedia, and the most commonly used calendar in English-speaking countries is the CE/BCE calendar. I don't doubt that some clever person can invent a wiki add-on or skin that will translate dates, or even let you set the preferred mode of dates in your preferences; I would find that an infinitely better solution (if there is in fact a problem requiring solution) than creating a few thousand new year articles for the Mohammedean calendar. Deltopia 21:49, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
• Delete year articles, keep century articles I'd agree on deleting the individual "AH" years (at the moment, we're in the year 1428 AH, with Muharram 1, 1429 to happen on Jan 10 '08). And I think that the administrator should bypass the usual rule of nominating each article separately, since it doesn't take much to create new articles called "1 AH, 2 AH, 3 AH, etc." I suspect that this is a case of doing something "because we can", and that the authors have to convert from CE when they're figuring out what goes where. But there's a reason we call it the "common era" and not just "anno domini". Note that the Arabic Wikipedia article for "1066" is about 1066 CE, not 1656. We don't have articles about "5750" on the Jewish calendar either. That said, I would encourage keeping articles such as "15th Century A.H." (which began on November 9, 1980 on our calendar). For what it's worth, the Islamic revolution in Iran, happened at "around the turn of the century", and I think that a century-by-century Islam perspective on world history would be worthwhile (and no, not "limited to events related to Islamic history"... we don't regulate content THAT much on Wikipedia). Mandsford 22:56, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

• Comment That actually reminds me -- the Islamic lunar calendar in use to determine holidays and the Iranian calendar are slightly different. I had forgotten this until reading your note, Mandsford, because I remembered reading that it's 1386 on the Iranian calendar right now. So, keeping the AH calendar articles does set precedent for creating another couple thousand AP articles (Anno Persico) -- which just gives me a headache to think about. Deltopia 00:08, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

• Keep some Keep the centuries, and the decades for at least the first century or two, and consider keeping the individual years for the first 50 years. Obviously there is not much content there now, but it could be filled in. And it would be useful in organizing the material. And I agree with User:Ceyockey that this will serve to counter systematic bias. I do not think separate pages are need where only parts of a year are different, as distinct from the base of numbering-- as the Julian and the Iranian. DGG (talk) 10:39, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep selectively per DGG (1-50, first few decades, all centuries), delete all others per WP:N. Orderinchaos 01:25, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and then redirect I think merge into Wikipedia's Western calendar system (see, e.g., Category:1st millennium) would be appropriate. The encyclopedic information should all be in one article, no matter what that article is called. For example, year 622/623 information should be in the same article as 1 AH, and the only remaining decision is what to name the article. Since Wikipedia English is based in Florida, United States and the Western system is what most English Wikipedia readers understand or expect to find, that is what should be the basis for naming the article containing the year 622/623/1 AH information. Islamic Wikipedias may appeal to their likely readers with appropriate article names, too. A rose By any other name would smell as sweet and Islamic year information should read just as clearly if headed by a Western calendar system name. -- Jreferee t/c 20:11, 13 October 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.