Talk:Zalmay Shah

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Zalmay Shah article.
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This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.

Contents

[edit] Article lacks WP:A to establish WP:N

There is no way that this article meets WP:BIO or WP:BLP when the only citation provided is in violation of WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided, i.e., it requires registration to view ... unless someone can find another link to the story, and reasons why this individual is "notable" besides the fact that he is one of dozens detained, abused, and subsequently released by American authorities every month, then this article will probably have to go. —72.75.73.158 (talk · contribs) 09:26, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I missed this comment when it was made.
First, WP:EL is not a policy. It is a guideline. An article can't be "in violation" of a guideline.
I have a lot of concern as to how people try to stretch WP:BLP. Perhaps 72.75.73.158, this anonymous verizon user, is suggesting that Zalmay Shah falls under WP:BLP1E. Well, the guy:
  1. Initially cooperated with US forces, helped them track down opponents.
  2. Was thrown into prison, and treated brutally.
  3. Now declines to cooperate when asked by US force to help them track down opponents.
That seems to me to clearly be three events -- not one event.
If US forces are seeking out his aid then he is as important as a mayor, or State legislator in the USA. The wikipedia is a worldwide project, not a solely American project. Significant figures in other nations merit the same level of coverage as US mayor, State legislators, sports figures, and porn stars.
Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 18:57, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to be bold and remove tags that seem to be satisfied here. Bearian (talk) 22:32, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Wait, I see a dead link. I'll wait. Bearian (talk) 22:34, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] {{prod}} concern?

Someone {{prod}}ed Zalmay Shah.

One of the justifications offered was that a reference had gone dead.

Sorry, I think there is a misunderstanding of policy here. I'd like to ask that contributor whether they were you policy requires deleting articles if the reference they cite go dead?

I asked some questions about references on WP:AN/I. One of the things I learned was that dead links shouldn't be deleted. I didn't know that. I regret I have deleted some. What I was told was that, so long as the references provide enough information for someone to go look up the paper copy, it satisfied verifiability.

I am sorry that link went dead. I wasn't finished with it. But I have very firm doubts over whether the link going dead is a justification for removing the article.

The contributor who placed the {{prod}} asserted" "Detainees are not individually notable unless they get widespread coverage of their treatment."

Some other people who have made similar assertions about the Guantanamo captives were willing to engage in civil dialogue. I found when they expanded on their arguments, those arguments were based on misconceptions. They wrote that those captives were no different than "other POWs". They wrote that those captives weren't any different than the "convicts" in the Louisiana State Prison system. You can read my response to one of those respondents here.

Briefly, captives apprehended by the USA in Afghanistan are not POWs. It is the policy of the Bush Presidency that they don't qualify for the protections of POW status. And they are not convicts. Up until 2007 none of them had been convicted. As an Australian I presume you know that Hicks is the only captive who could be called a "convict". As an Australian perhaps you have read about how he pled guilty when his commission's Presiding Officer barred his Australian lawyer under highly questionalble circumstances? Including Hicks only eleven of the Guantanamo captive ever faced any charges.

The Guantanamo captives aren't ordinary captives. And neither are the Bagram captives. All the Guantanamo captives who had previously been held in Bagram described Bagram as being worse. The treatment of Dilawar and Habibullah wasn't unique. As I am sure you know they were slowly and brutally beaten to death. The isolation, suspension from the ceiling, sleep deprivation, and beatings by any passing guard -- that was routine in Bagram. Many captives survived the suspension, sleep deprivation, and beatings that killed Dilawar and Habibullah.

I don't know how frequently the contributor who placed the {{prod}} uses the template. I believe the wikidocuments that describe how to use it recommend giving the article creator a courtesy heads-up. The contributor who placed this {{prod}} didn't extend this courtesy. If they ever use the template in the future I urge them to extend this courtesy in the future. WP:NOT#wikipedia is not a battleground. Failing to extend courtesies to other wikipedians erodes the good faith required to reach decisions by consensus.

Looking forward to a meaningful discussion.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 18:38, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi, once again, sorry for not providing you with a prod notification.
With only one cited reference, this article does not assert individual notability of Zalmay. A second solution would be to redirect this article to Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which includes a list Zalmay is included in.
For an individual article to remain, either WP:BIO or WP:N need to be met: ie there needs to be an indication of two references substantially about Zalmay. So far there are no references substantially about Zalmay: there is one substantially about Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which it seems happens to mention Zalmay as one previously interred person.
For all I know, Zalmay might feel shamed or otherwise victimised due to having an article on Wikipedia about this attrocious treatment, and under WP:BLP any article about Zalmay needs to be thoroughly sourced.Garrie 21:32, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply.
Regarding:
  1. Redirection to BTIF;
  2. Complying with WP:Notability;
  3. Zalmay's feelings;
I hope you don't mind if I tackle them out of order.

[edit] Zalmay's feelings and {{blp}}?

About your concern about Zalmay's feelings -- I've got to ask you something. Usually when someone asks some variation of, "Are you being serious?", it is a prelude to mockery. But in this case I really want to know.
Are you being serious? About a month ago another wikipedian voiced a similar concern, claiming I had abused the Guantanamo captives, by using the Summary of Evidence (CSRT) memos prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, and their Administrative Review Board hearings, and the transcripts and other documents arising from those proceedings. I gave him a long, thoughtful reply, and in that reply I addressed his professed concern for the captive's welfare, at length. His reaction was surprising. He was angry. For a moment he let his real agenda slip out. His real view was that the DoD was doing a good job in Guantanamo! It seemed all his claims of concern for the feelings of the subjects was just a duplicitous ploy.
So, trusting that the concerns you expressed are sincere, may I suggest that since Zalmay sought out a journalist to tell his story you can set aside your concern that citing, quoting and paraphrasing that reporter's account would violate his rights.
(interjecting)
You tell me that Zalmay sought out a journalist - unfortunately I have to take your word for that because I don't have access to the single source used in writing this article. Generally WP:N etc require multiple sources independent of the subject. Now if Zalmay sought out a journalist - is even this first article independent of the subject?
By the way - if Zalmay is in a country with a political regime which results in individuals being incarcerated without being charged and potentially tortured or just outright assaulted - then yes, I am pretty wary of Wikipedia having an article which says not only did he act as an informant against his countrymen to what many see as an invading army, but he then turned his back on that invading army as well. We should ensure that we have irrefutable sources to both statements.Garrie 00:37, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Concerning notability

Concerning "notability" -- I know many people treat it as if it were an official wikipedia policy. Last time I took the time to closely read WP:BIO it was just a guideline -- an unofficial essay. It was an opinion piece, and stated so right in the first paragraph. In my opinion it would be a mistake for notability to ever become an official policy.
In my experience "notability" is a deeply flawed metric -- at least for articles on controversial topics. Notability is far too vulnerable to being colored by the unconscious judgments of those making the judgment. In my experience the more willing people are to accept the press releases of DoD spin-doctors at face value, the less willing they are to accept that there is anything notable about the GWOT captives.
This seems to be the case with all controversial topics. Some people don't bring the objectivity to the table to recognize that ideas or topics that they don't personally accept can be notable.
The citizendium, a project similar to the wikipedia, has abandoned the whole notion of "notability". The first sentence of WP:VER says:

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth."

This was a very wise choice. Verifiability is lot easier to reach agreement on, than "truth". And the citizendium's decision to abandon "notability" in favor of "maintainability" was a similarly wise decision. IMO the wikipedia would be well advised to deprecate notability.
Note what WP:CSD#A7 says about notability as a criteria for deletion. It specifically exeCmpts articles on controversial topics from being speedy deleted on the grounds of notability.
(interjecting again)
While WP:BIO is only a guideline - WP:BLP is an official policy. It has a lot to say about Articles about living people notable only for one event, and IMO (I know your opinion varies from mine) this article is such an article (very few local translators / informants have been written about in newspapers and chances are most of the articles would be about being an informant, probably using pseudonyms and relying on anonimity). Shah was written about because of what is presented as an unverified claim that he was mistreated while incarcerated without just cause. That is one event.
Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional levels of referencing. If mistreatment at that place is so widespread then there should be more than one source. If Shah was so mistreated - to a level that he is individually notable for his level of mistreatment - then there should be sources for that.
An analogy: genocide of the jews during WWII is extremely well documented. However it was so widespread that in general, being one of the jews who was killed because they were a jew is not notable and it is likely that there is very little information published in reliable sources about most individual jews who were murdered. I'm not dismissing the genocide as an atrocity: but we don't need individual articles about every victim.Garrie 00:52, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
One last point is, why mention WP:CSD#A7? There was no attempt to speedy this article.Garrie 01:37, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Concerning merging and redirecting this article, and mergism in general

Concerning redirecting Zalmay Shah to BTIF... I am going to need you to explain to me how there is any advantage to this. Are you suggesting we paste everything in this article into BTIF? What about the other sixty or so Bagram captives we know about? Are you suggesting we cram all the details of all of their stories into the BTIF article?
There are other reasons why I think this is a bad idea. But, let me point out, some of these guys were subsequently transferred to Guantanamo. Should we cram all the details of their stories into the Guantanamo Bay detention camp article? Some of them are listed in other articles, because they were minors captured in the war on terror, or because they were captured wearing a Casio F91W digital watch, or because they were accused of having an association with the Tablighi Jamaat movement, or they were accused attending the al Farouq training camp. Are you suggesting we cram all the details their lives into all these articles?
Let me repeat the choices:
  1. Leave the information we can document in articles about the individuals, and link to those articles from the other articles that talk about what those individuals have in common with other individuals.
  2. Delete the articles about the individuals, and try to cram the information about the individuals into the articles that talk about what individuals have in common.
I will interject again here.
I hold up the same standard on every article: if there are multiple independent sources signficiantly about the subject of the article then I don't have a problem with that article. If you have mulitiple sources for specific detainees then by all means create articles for them. If you only have one source for a specific detainee then please only include them in other articles - possibly including in a list article.Garrie 01:09, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
May I suggest some problems with centralizing information as you seem to be suggesting?
  1. Either you are going to have to abandon some information about the individuals, when you merge it into the articles about what the individuals have in common, or you are going to have to degrade the usefulness of the article you merge it into, by keeping everything.
    • If you make the decision to keep everything, that information would be constantly exposed to other editors, who can't figure out why, for instance, an article about the al Farouq training camp has information about individuals wearing Casio F91W watches.
  2. And, if a well meaning individual comes across new information about one of these individuals, where do they add it?
    • If they decide to add it to all articles that mention that individual, how are they even going to find all those instances.
My biggest frustrations with the wikipedia arise from the deletion fora. WP:CIV, WP:AGF, WP:NPA, WP:BITE are routinely violated there. And, IMO, there is a terrible problem with the internecine warfare as people fight over their competing visions of the future wikipedia.
I have no problem with people having different visions of the wikipedia's future from mine. But I would like to see a meaningful dialgoue where the advocates explored the strengths and weaknesses of the different visions. But that doesn't happen. There is no venue for this discussion. So, the advocates fight it out in the deletion fora. It is very rare to find someone who is actually willing to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the competing visions.
My own vision of the wikipedia is heavily influenced by the work of Ted Nelson -- the guy who coined the term "hypertext" back in the 1960s. He is a very foresightful guy, and there is still a lot to be learned from his work.
Nelson HATES the world-wide-web. The links are all uni-directional. When you are looking at a WWW page there is no way for you to what other pages link to the one you are looking at. That is an enormous weakness. There is no good way to know whether the links on a page are still "live", or if they are 404.
Mediawiki wikis, like the wikipedia, fix that. If a mediawiki wikilink is not live, then it is a redlink. If you click on it, you can still click on the "what links here" button.
Mediawiki wikilinks are bidirectional. Clicking on wikilink takes you to the linked article. And when you get there clicking on the "what links here" button tells you what other articles link to that article. This is an extremely powerful feature.
The power of the bi-directionality of wikilinks -- of the "what links here" button -- is insufficiently recognized. It is not just useful when someone is considering some administrative task, like deleting an article. It is a feature that is potentially extremely empowering to readers.
Consider you are a reader, you have a specific question you are interested in. You look at the article that seems to be the obvious first place to look for your answer. But that article doesn't really answer your question. And neither do the articles it links to. You can try the "what links here" button, and see which articles link to the article you first thought would answer your question. One of them might turn out to the article that has your answer.
In Nelson's original vision of the ideal hypertext system, his equivalent of the what links here button could work for paragraphs, single sentenses, phrases, even acronyms.[1] Wikimedia wikilinks don't link at such a detailed level. The granularity of Wikimedia wikilinks is at the article level only.
When I read Nelson's seminal work, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, I read a chapter that expressed a profound idea I had never seen expressed so clearly before. All hierarchies are arbitrary.
All hierarchies are arbitrary. Some hierarchies have proven very useful -- biological taxonomy for instance -- but they are all artifacts, human inventions. Some hierarchies have proven useful, and some have proven useless, or detrimental.
In the days when all documents were printed documents -- printed, scrawled in charcoal, or with a goose-quill or literally chiseled in stone, all documents were inherently linear. Books have a first page, a first sentence, and progress linear to the last page, last sentence. Authors from the days of physical documents can't be blamed for laying information out in rigid progression.
But we left our bounds to physical documents behind decades ago. Why should we continue to let others rule over how the information we want should be presented to us.

[edit] Whose in charge here, anyhow?

Mergism, deletionism, inclusionism, all concern themselves with who should be in charge. Mergists, and deletionists want to control how readers traverse the tree of human knowledge. They want to set the hierarchies, the order in which information is presented, which connections are important -- "notable", and which are beneath notice.
Brilliance and creative genius happens when some bright spark can make a new connection between ideas. So, why the heck should us readers allow some goldarn deletionists strip us of the power to make a connection between two previously unconnected ideas, by suppressing coverage of one or both of those ideas?
Similarly, why should us readers allow some goldarn mergists to confine those ideas, or information, to their idea of the natural order?
All theories, all hierarchies, are human inventions. When a project, like the wikipedia, has a larger number of smaller articles, then it is easier for readers to navigate their own path through the multidimensional network of human knowledge, than if we let mergists shoehorn that same information into a smaller number of larger articles.
Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 16:13, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Sorry to say - you have more time to type than I have patience to read.
I would hate to tell you who is in charge here. All I know is that I came here because the article had been tagged as non-notable since February 2007 and I found only once source on it so because it does not meet a very widely held up guideline - and I know the difference between guidelines and policies - and because I could not find any additional material regarding Zalmay Shah - I proposed the article be deleted. So far, despite all the rhetoric and typing on talk pages, nobody has improved the article to the extent that would justify removing the {{notability}} template - ie by providing two sources significantly about Shah. So far there is one source only, which is about Bagram air base rather than being about Shah himself.
If you have more concise concerns you want me to respond to then please explain to me what you are looking for.
By the way: if I want to contribute according to the policies of citizendium I wouldn't be responding to you here because I would be at citizendium not Wikipedia. So please don't tell me how great their policies (I'm sure they also have policies, guidelines, founding principles, tolerated practices and niceties ) are because if I was interested in their policies then I would be contributing there not here.Garrie 01:04, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 404 -- see talk

I changed the citation template from {{cite news}} to {{cite paper}}, to reflect that the original reference has gone 404. It is my understanding that references are still considered verifiable even if they are no longer online, because readers can look up the paper copy.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 12:32, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I have always understood {{cite paper}} to be intended for "academic papers" eg a thesis or similar. But it's no real change to the citation and you could use bare ref statments without the "cite (format)" templates.
The citation used does not change that Zalmay Shah seems to have been a small element in an article where he was used "merely" to provide an example of the treatment being handed out.Garrie 21:52, 2 December 2007 (UTC)