Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bashar Abdulah

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 delete. PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 04:24, 31 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Bashar Abdulah

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This is a technical posting I'm doing for another editor. That editor, User:Ragheb.araby thinks this individual notable because there are insufficient independent sources, more specifically. and will explain in more detail below. I don't however think I agree with him, so this is not my delete !vote; I will give my opinion separately. DGG ( talk ) 14:34, 14 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean "User:Ragheb.araby thinks this individual non-notable"? --Colapeninsula (talk) 15:21, 14 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Iraq-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:10, 14 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:10, 14 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the technical help in proposing deletion, DGG. I will copy-paste the issues I raised in my own discussion page. These are the reasons that I believe the article should be deleted:

The author of the article is also the subject of the article. His intention appears (in my opinion) to be self-promotion.
The article is a biography of a living person and does not have reliable sources.
The article fails to establish the notability of the subject with reliable sources. All of the references are in Arabic and are limited to: a) a page in the opinion section of alwatanvoice.com which appears to be the author's work, with a one-line mention at the bottom that he won the Naji Naaman Literary Prize in 2005. Said literary prize is apparently a competition to promote "gratis culture" and the subject of the article, along with his co-author, was one of 32 laureates in 2005 alone. b) a broken link to www.azzaman.com. c) A Wordpress blog post that contains the same text as the first link. d) Another broken link to www.azzaman.com. e) Yet another broken link to www.azzaman.com.
The the deletion of the equivalent Arabic-language article and determined that the content was the biography of a non-notable figure. It stretches credibility to assert that an Arab author in an Arab country is more relevant from the perspective of an English-language encyclopedia than from that of an Arabic-language one, IMHO.
A web search of the author's name, in both English and Arabic, does not return reliable sources. Indeed, it does not return many results at all other than duplicates of this article on Wikipedia mirrors. There is a Kuwaiti soccer player who shares the same name, who returns many more results.--Ragheb.araby (talk) 02:03, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. The article makes only two significant claims of notability: that the author won a literary prize, and that his book "has influenced modern literary writing and reading techniques in Iraq". Only the first of these claims is sourced, though if what Ragheb.araby writes is correct, the prize is not important enough to confer notability. In addition to being unsourced, the second of these claims is quite vague. —Psychonaut (talk) 06:42, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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.