Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/AL Farik Mahmoud Shokry

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The result was withdrawn by nominator Naconkantari 02:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mahmoud Shokry

Mahmoud Shokry (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Barely enough context to avoid db-context, barely enough notability mentioned to avoid db-bio. Prod was deleted by contributor who added a museum name as a reference. This article is unreferenced in any meaningful way, the name of the article does not directly match the subject within the article text, there is limited context as to why this is notable, there is no GHits for the name, and I can not find anything to give verifiability. ju66l3r 00:30, 29 December 2006 (UTC) Nomination rescinded - This article was started such that it barely avoided a number of speedy deletion criteria. The current article is substantially improved to the point of a decent stub and hopefully future work will expand it to better describe this Egyptian military leader. ju66l3r 22:36, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• Delete, per nom. Keep per new information. DoomsDay349 01:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: "Al Fariq" in Arabic just means "the general"; a search on plain old "Mahmoud Shokry" reveals that he (or someone by the same name) has a street named after him in Cairo, which leads me to suspect this guy may be notable. Will do more research. (And if we keep this page, as per MOS, we should remove the title from his name and put it at plain old "Mahmoud Shokry"). cab 01:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Have cleaned up and added a better source (Egyptian newspaper article, available online). Still can't find much info, even on Google Books, Egyptian biographical dictionaries, etc. cab 03:18, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• keep being appointed cheif of staff of a notable country's army is certainly worth mentioning in an encyclopedia. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jujucabana (talk • contribs) 02:44, 29 December 2006 (UTC).

• keep & expand WP guidlines call for multiple (2 or more) non trivial sources. (1) The "Egyptian Military Museum in Cairo" was implied by the nominator as a non-credible source; how can that be? At WP there is the assumption of Good Faith, and why wouldn't an exhibit exist featuring a display etc. on the nation's first Chief of Staff. (2) Under an alternative spelling several documents have been found which reference this man; one clearly demonstrates notability by discussing the changes in the Egyptian army and specifying him as Chief of Staff.
  • Reliance on Google (etc.) for other than recent history is a dangerous practice, it is a tool for suggesting notability but not disproving notability.
  • Being a horse suggests being a mammal, but not being a horse does not exclude being mammal. Getting high G-hits suggests being notable, but not getting G-hits does not exclude being notable. This is especially true for non-recent historical figures. WP is a new phenomonon and we should be bold in our thinking.

--Kevin Murray 03:37, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Please note that a museum, in and of itself, is not a reliable source. What exactly is being sourced? The front desk? An expert on this area within the museum (if so, name the expert)? An exhibit (name the exhibit)? You can't just reference the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for every U.S. flight-related article. That having been said, please do not ignore that my comment on GHits is not without context. I used all of the comments in my nomination as deciding criteria for submitting this AfD. At the time, there was no secondary source (the article recently added) and the museum was the only source given. Combined with the poor quality of the article (little context, little claimed notability), I decided that it would be best to err on the side of deletion than keeping it, knowing that it could be created in the future with a better start. As it stands now, the article is much better than it was when nominated. A little better would even warrant a dismissal of the AfD. ju66l3r 04:54, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

I can't really blame User:Ju66l3r for AfD'ing this one; when he did, it had little context, didn't provide the name of the subject in Arabic to allow for further checking, and was created by a new user also having the second name Shokry (TamerShokry); that's enough to set off anyone's WP:VANITY alarm. Anyway, I'm having a hell of a time trying to find any second source about him, so help is appreciated ... none of the hits in Arabic are about him, as far as I can tell, but other people with the same name. Nor does he appear in "Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt" and similar books; the only thing I have been able to find is a one sentence mention in Tripp's "Contemporary Egypt: Through Egyptian Eyes" on p51 as "Shukri Pasha". Anyway I suspect he's known under yet another name which none of us are aware of. cab 05:37, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• Weak keep Per Kevin P.B. Pilhet / Talk 03:41, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, [personal attack removed] --Jesusthemessiah 06:42, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• Note Jesusthemessiah was blocked for his vulgarity in the above comment using the "F" word. --Kevin Murray 07:43, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• Keep if we can verify that he was chief of staff of the Egyptian army, but move to a better name per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic). --Metropolitan90 06:50, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • It is already verified by two sources (newspaper cited in the article, plus Tripp, p51 which I mentioned above; however I don't feel Tripp is worth citing in the article itself since it's just a 1 sentence mention, and the only additional information it would add is that he was still Chief of Staff a year later). cab 07:18, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Delete unless we can find more information than that he was chief of staff for a period of time. --Dhartung | Talk 06:57, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Way off base you can't make up rules on the fly! Where in the WP guidelines is there a time criterion for notability? He could be notable as the shortest serving but first serving chief of staff. --Kevin Murray 07:54, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• • It's not about "time criterion", it's about expandability. Alternately, merge to List of chiefs of staff of the Egyptian army. See also: dicdef. --Dhartung | Talk 11:55, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
    • Dhartung, are there expandabilty guidelines? i.e., (1) can an article be too short when brevity is encyclopedic and (2) do we have a crystal ball telling us that someone from Cairo won't drop in next month with a wealth of info. So how do you measure expandability? --Kevin Murray 13:08, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
      • Yes, an article can be "too short". A guideline is just that. We are not bound by guidelines. WP:V alone does not mean we must keep everything that is verifiable. AFD exists in part to judge encyclopedic quality. There is obviously a dearth of English-language sources about this person, a situation I don't expect to magically change tomorrow. --Dhartung | Talk 22:56, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
        • Dhartung, based on your comments and research which I have seen elsewhere, you are intellegent and dedicated, but you can't just cite your personal opinion that an article is too short or unlikely to improve -- how is that being objective? --Kevin Murray 23:07, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong keep - Just because we may not have heard about him in america, does not mean he exists! I assume good faith on the part of the creator, and recently, there has been several more references added! There are plenty of Americans on wikipedia, who have held less positions etc. I think that deletions of articles like this often show a systematic bias towards americans etc and many of us dont put a scond thought(I myself have been guilty of this) of slapping a {{prod}} on an article from a foreign person weve never heard of. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 12:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - appears true and referenced information. Springnuts 12:32, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Keep he's notable, but it would be better if an expert on the subject could expand upon the notability. Just H 21:05, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Edit-conflict Keep He seems notable. I added a source which confirmed that there is such a street. I also corrected some mistakes and added the transliterations and moved the page to Mahmoud Shokry. The only issue here is that I could not find any information on the man except that he is the father of Ibrahim Shokry (ابراهيم شكري) a former minister in the Egyptian government. Searching his name, gives me only results which mention the street. Online information on Middle Eastern history and early (or even modern, for that matter) facts and statistics is very deficient. Oh well, I tried. ← ANAS ^Talk? 21:14, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Bucketsofg 01:21, 30 December 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.