Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chinese prisons by Sarcelles

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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 of the debate was no consensus; all kept. Johnleemk | Talk 11:19, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese prison articles by Sarcelles

This page is a consolidated discussion for deletion of User:Sarcelles' prison mini-stubs.

[edit] List of prison articles

[edit] Discussion

Comments moved here from individual discussions that are largely identical.

This is a nonnotable prison stub of no real importance, the only information I could find on it all came from Falun Gong websites such as www.clearwisdom.net and www.clearharmony.net Abstrakt 18:02, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete for above reasons Abstrakt 18:02, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. This is a newly created article and I see no POV statements. I would have liked to see this tagged as needing references for a while before a nomination for deletion was brought forward. Something may have to be done with the title, unless that is the proper name for the prison. Movementarian (Talk) 18:30, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Wouldn't be deleted if it was in the US or UK so this shouldn't be either. It is probably a much more notable than average prison and the nominator has provided no evidence or arguments to the contrary. CalJW 20:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment - You wrote "Wouldn't be deleted if it was in the US or UK so this shouldn't be either. It is probably a much more notable than average prison and the nominator has provided no evidence or arguments to the contrary."
      • 1) I have already provided evidence why these articles were not notable in the first place, they generate no hits when searched for, in fact one of them generated a grand total of 6 hits! These are not notable articles by any means. I noticed you wrote probably meaning you yourself do not know if these articles in fact notable or non-notable. Perhaps you should check it out yourself before jumping to conclusions and making statements such as "...It is probably a much more notable ..." Please search for them and tell me what you can find on them.
      • 2)If it is ok to write up meaningless articles about non notable prisons in China, then would it be ok for me to write up meaningless stubs on every prison in my state? In fact if I were to do so, every last one of my articles would be nominated for deletion. See my point? Abstrakt 21:11, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as non-notable. --Thunk 22:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep and expand per above. I see no valid reason to delete this. Every prison in NY State has an article-- JJay 22:30, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. The problem with these articles is that they are ompletely unverifiable beyond Falungong sites which have established POV. If anyone can find any credible site (meaning other than Falungong) that has info on these prisons, feel free. I should also comment that the same user was banned on the German, French, and Italian Wikipedia for the same offense. I can get some of them to comment here if you want. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 23:38, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete per Mib. BlueShirts 00:17, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment You were looking for this Miborovsky? I found this on an old backlog. Abstrakt 01:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

List of other wikis' actions on Sarcelles

  1. German: de:Wikipedia:Vermittlungsausschuss/Problem mit Benutzer:Sarcelles - mediation
  2. German: de:Wikipedia:Benutzersperrung/Sarcelles - vote to ban, passed 30/1/2 (couldn't have been more lopsided...)
  3. French: fr:Wikipédia:Éditeurs problématiques/Sarcelles - "Problematic editor, Sarcelles". I like their straightforwardedness. :D
  4. Italian: it:Wikipédia:Éditeurs problématiques/Sarcelles - same thing here. This one's 22/12/2.
Some guy on fr also mentioned that he is active in Polish wiki too, but I haven't checked it out yet. --Miborovsky 05:15, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
  • COMMENT Please provide links or evidence of above claims. It wouldbe unfortunate if good-faith editors somehow got bamboozled into accepting otherwise fraudulent material based on an implicit urge to resist systematic bias. Eusebeus 00:39, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. I suspect each could be expanded as above, but if not they could be merged into a single article on Chinese prisons. As far as credible sources for the articles go, "these days, [freelance journalist Gao Qinrong] shares a cold, cramped cell in Jinzhong prison with criminals, serving a 12-year sentence for fraud, taking bribes and pimping -- charges that his many defenders say were invented by local officials when his reporting went too far," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 25, 2001. "This time, uniformed Beijing police officers were waiting. They told [Liu Di] only that she was suspected of a crime and took her to Qincheng Prison, a notorious facility for political prisoners," according to the December 18, 2004 Washington Post. -- Dragonfiend 00:52, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • That's only 2 of more than a dozen. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 01:30, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • From the BBC: "Wang Bingzhang['s] second son Wang Daishi told reporters yesterday that earlier he had visited his father in the Shaoguan prison ..." From the AP: "Xiang said Yu and Li were both being held at Fanyu [Panyu] Prison in Guangdong's capital, Guangzhou, and were in fair condition." -- Dragonfiend 02:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Would appreciate some direct links to said BBC and AP reports. All google hits at first glance are known Falungong site mirrors (or sites directly copying from them), which uses such tactics as spamming seemingly unrelated mirrors to boost search hits. Also, no mention about "prison enterprises" and "so-and-so coal mine" found in any of them. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 02:16, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I found these at the library, not on Google, so no, I can't give you a direct link to them. If you'd like to verify them at your own library, the AP story referenced above is from June 29, 2005 with a headline of "Chinese journalists appeal for jailed colleagues in protest of media controls" and is written by Christopher Bodeen. I seem to have misplaced the BBC story (forgive me, I didn't come to the library tonight to research Chinese prisons) but there is an Agence France Presse story from December 6, 2003 titled "Divisive issues crowd agenda as China's Wen prepares to leave for US" by Peter Harmsen which reads in part, "Wang Bingzhang, who is serving a life term in a Chinese jail, was planning a hunger strike to coincide with Wen's US visit, a rights group said. Wang declared his intention Friday to his brother Wang Bingwu, who saw him for 30 minutes at Shaoguan prison in southern Guangdong province ..." -- Dragonfiend 02:40, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • OK... but what about the "prison enterprises"? These articles are choke full of these unverifiable information. The creator has a track record of lopsided edits (such as creating 100 city stubs just to put the name of prisons there and decry commie brutality ie. blahblah is a city in blahblah province. it's prison has this many people. the prisoners are treated brutally. enditem) and was banned/rfced/rfared in FOUR wikipedias for inserting dubious and unverified information and persisting in spamming them. It simply isn't a case for AGF, every word that he writes need to be undoubtably tracable back to a reliable source, and here it isn't the case. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 03:16, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • If there is a larger problem with an editor beyond just these articles, that sounds like less of an issue for AfD and more of an issue for Wikipedia:Resolving disputes (begining, of course, with discussing the issue with the other editor). As far as the "prison enterprises" and "so-and-so coal mine" go, the January 3, 1981 New York Times article "Hundreds of Thousands Toil in Chinese Labor Camps" by Fox Butterfield seems to describe the topic of the Heiliushui Reeducation through labor article: "A few months ago, a white-haired 70-year-old former Protestant minister was released from a labor camp near the city of Datong in Shanxi Province in northern China. He had worked there in a coal mine, along with 10,000 other prisoners, scraping up chunks of black rock with his bare hands for 23 years. He had been sentenced to laodong gaizao, or 'reform through labor.'" I find the topic of the Chinese prison system to be appropriate for Wikipedia. If the problem is that these articles on single prisons are unexpandable stubs, then any user can merge them together and redirect them to Chinese prison system without going through AfD. If the problem is verifiability, then slap a cleanup-verify tag on the article while you work on verifying it. And again, if the problem is a dispute with another user, try to resolve it. I'd also suggest everyone avoid the over-the-top "What's wrong with you people can't you read" stuff. -- Dragonfiend 06:05, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • There, you proved my point. Either the article you read or the Wikipedia entry is bogus. In this case, I'd trust the Wikipedia entry even less. "Reeducation through labour" is NOT Laogai or Laodong Gaizao, which is "Reform through labour". "Reeducation through labour" is actually Laojiao, or Laodong Jiaoyang. This is the sort of inaccuracy, and if I might say, sheer crap, that User:Sarcelles wants to get on Wikipedia - he has professed that he knows next to nothing about these things, but is just copying stuff over from pro Falungong sites. The problem is not whether prisons are notable or not. The problem is, what's here more often than not cannot be verified, or simply inaccurate. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 07:56, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Hey are you people not reading or something? Read what Miborovsky is writing, what about the "prison enterprises" that the creator Sarcelles is claiming, those can NOT be verified, check it out yourselves, google it or whatever, the prisons that do exist and show up on pro-Falun Gong websites only show that Falun Gong practitioners have been jailed there, nothing of the "prison enterprises". Take out the unverified information, all you have left is "so and so Falun Gong practitioner was imprisoned at this particular prison". At this rate, Wikipedia is going to become a repository for numberous "Falun Gong" arrestees. Is that it? Are we going to set up a new precedent where we spam as much as we want on how "such and such" a group is being arrested and allegedly btutalized?
  • Since you people are all for non-notable stubs and me being a college student in a college town that's known to have clashes between students and police after basketball and football games, would be ok if I were to spam dozens of stubs about the various police incidents where students have been arrested and how they claim the students were wrongfully arrested and violent force was allegedly used by the police? -- Abstrakt 04:27, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Just asking Dragonfiend, are these political prisoners at all notable themselves? From my understanding, what you are trying to say, is if there's literature of someone being arrested at a particular prison (it could be a newspaper blurb or whatever), then that in itself is notable enough. According to you, Wikipedia should be allowed to become a huge repository listing every political prisoner in the world, even if they are not particularly notable. -- Abstrakt 04:38, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • weak keep most of these prisons get (admittedly a low number of) hits on Google. I think it unrealistic to expect large numbers of hits due to systematic bias on Google. Jcuk 01:34, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. Nationally run prison facilities are inherently notable. BD2412 T 01:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Not those that have not been demonstrated to exist. -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 02:04, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

You get my point, and 99% of these "specific hits" are off of POV pro-Falun Gong websites such as www.clearharmony.net and www.clearwisdom.net with articles about Falun Gong practitioners being jailed or allegedly brainwashed, no mention of "coal mines" or whatever "prison enterprises".

Another point I'd like to make, just because something gets hits, it does not necessarily mean they are specific hits, for example I could search for lets say Paris Hilton and I could get a mass of unrelated hits for Hilton Hotels or Paris, France. See my point? I've wasted enough time with this for today. Abstrakt 02:19, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

    • Comment: The same test should be conducted with their Chinese names. The results might be different. :-) — Instantnood 18:00, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all If they exist they should have articles and Abstrakt doesn't seem to be trying to argue that they don't. Piccadilly 02:44, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
    • What kind of reasoning is that??? -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 03:03, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Ok Piccadilly I'm baffled by the inability of some people to read! The first three I've listed, do not exist! The point I was making they should be deleted since they are non notable other than the fact that some of them are mentioned on pro-Falun Gong websites. When I say specific hits I mean the subject is specifically mentioned!

If I was to search for example for "Miami Dolphins" the NFL team and I get results that have both "Miami" and "dolphin" in it but not about the "Miami Dolphins", that is NOT a specific hit. Did you not read my example of using Paris and Hilton? While we're at it with stubs how about I create some on specific streets where people have been arrested for drunk driving, huh? Sorry I'm just baffled that is all. Abstrakt 04:12, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

  • The only hits these prisons (for the ones that do exist) are on pro-Falun Gong websites and that is a reason to keep it? Had they any of these of prison stubs not originated from copy and paste information from these pro-Falun Gong websites, then I wouldn't of nominated them.

Abstrakt 04:31, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete as per Abstrakt. Prisons are not inherently notable. Johnleemk | Talk 05:46, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Do you think people dont know to search for "Paris Hilton" rather than Paris Hilton on Google? I still say if every prison in New York State can be mentioned those of these prisons that can be verified should be. Jcuk 08:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
    • I would vote to delete those prisons as well, or merge them into an article about the New York State prison system. Johnleemk | Talk 09:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete all unless some of the prisons can be shown (backed up by sources) to be notable in some way. Also, Sarcelles has a history of making dubious or false edits on topics he knows nothing about, and I suggest that all of his edits be viewed as needing verification. -- ran (talk) 09:58, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. My source is the Laogai Handbook 2003-2004.

Sarcelles 15:47, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

  • The "Laogai Handbook" is published by a Falungong organisation, which the last time I checked was a religious group and not exactly a forerunner in research into Chinese criminology. Unless the said handbook can be construed as a verifiable and trustable source, it's not. It also is quite puzzling how the Laogai handbook suddenly is talking about Laojiao... which are two separate matters altogether. Unless your handbook doesn't make the distinction between the two? -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 23:40, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • So Sarcelles you're just copying and pasting whatever you find on that Falun Gong group's website?

Abstrakt 03:20, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete as causing too much trouble to WP. Stifle 16:26, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment Miborovsky brought it up "All google hits at first glance are known Falungong site mirrors (or sites directly copying from them), which uses such tactics as spamming seemingly unrelated mirrors to boost search hits." -- Abstrakt 19:31, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep only those that are notable can be verified for their existence as separate articles, redirect and listify the rest. — Instantnood 21:46, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • So you're saying we should mention fictional places in Wikipedia as real? -- Миборовский U|T|C|M|E|Chugoku Banzai! 00:14, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Oops. No.. only redirect and listify those that are real and verifiable, but not as notable. Delete the fictional ones. — Instantnood 06:22, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete all of them. Does anyone read what Sarcelles writes? I just clicked a random article (Panyu Prison) and I read: It is situated in Huijiang, Dashi Town, Fanyu District. Shouldn't the article be under Fanyu Prison? It continues as Shaoguan Prison was established in 1995. What do these prisons have to do with each other? Or was the author of the article too absent-minded? Maybe he copied and pasted from one article to the other and forgot to replace the names? So what is correct now? Who is going to verify all this? All those who want to keep this kind of nonsense, have you thought about the credibility of Wikipedia? BTW, this user is banned in three Wikipedias already (de:, fr: and it:) for exactly this behaviour. -- Herr Klugbeisser 06:33, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Comment That is hilarious ! I must of missed that one! And still there are people here who are quite adamant in keeping all of these articles. This is quite sad. Herr Klugbeisser I'm sorry to say but it seems like we are preaching to a brick wall as I've tried to make my case with some of these users on the past activity by Sarcelles.
It is quite apparent that Sarcelles has no credibility with how he just copy and pasted those articles together. It is true, who in their right mind now would try to past off these articles as credible? Anyway thank you for pointing that out! Abstrakt 17:40, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete anything unverifiable. Prisons are inherently encylopedic, but we need to be relatively certain that they physically exist/ed. That the author is banned from the sizable .de, .fr, and .it (300,000+, 200,000+, 60,000+ articles respectively), does not inspire confidence. El_C 15:03, 14 January 2006 (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.