Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/History of the Jews in Gaza City

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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 was keep‎. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:06, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

History of the Jews in Gaza City[edit]

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History of the Jews in Gaza City (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Fails to meet Wikipedia's general notability guidelines for the topic to have a standalone article. There is no significant coverage, no independent sources, and no reliable sources dealing directly with the topic. Makeandtoss (talk) 10:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Speedy Keep historical facts are obviously notable. Many sources exist on the topic. JMWt (talk) 11:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't see any reliable and independent source in the article that has significant cover of Jewish history in Gaza specifically, so this does not satisfy WP:GNG. However, as you said historical facts are obviously notable, in the appropriate article: History of Gaza. Makeandtoss (talk) 13:20, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I mean. Have you done any WP:BEFORE? What you are claiming as being absent is clearly in the academic record. Sources exist. Many of them. JMWt (talk) 14:21, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes I did. No independent, reliable and secondary sources that report significant coverage seem to exist; certainly not plenty of them. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:34, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm sorry - you are trying to tell me that there are no RS about the history of Jews in Gaza? There clearly are. Jews have left archaeology there going back thousands of years.
    It is distinct from a general article about the History of Gaza just like every other article that shows the history of an ethnic group in an area such as History of the Jews in Wales. Your replies do not reflect normal practice on en.wiki JMWt (talk) 16:15, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/23729416 this is an extensive history of the area, the best so far. Oaktree b (talk) 16:21, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    "No independent, reliable and secondary sources that report significant coverage seem to exist". My words are clear, so please do not play with them. Please do not engage in ad hominem if you are unable to defend your position. I saw the JSTOR article, and since I am not a Hebrew speaker, I cannot comment on what it means with "Jewish settlement" or what the scope of the article is. I have commented on the rest of the sources presented. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:01, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Keep. Easily notable per WP:GNG. Suggest speedy keep as not to waste time of other editors on a pointless vote. Some sample sources:
    • "The lost history of Gaza's Jewish quarter". Hadeel Al Gherbawi.
    • "Gaza’s Rich Jewish History Includes Decades of Friendship with Local Arabs". Nadav Shragai.
    • Ancient Jewish communities in Gaza. Schwartz, Joshua. (1999, Dec 15).
    • Kidron, Anat, and Shuli Linder-Yarkony. “A Hebrew Community in a Mixed City? Acre during the British Mandate.” Israel Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 2019, pp. 50–74.
    • Handbook of Oriental Studies: Handbuch Der Orientalistik. The Near and Middle East. Corpus inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP). By Moshe Sharon · 1997. p.28-29
    • "Gaza, like you never knew it". Nadav Shragai. Israel Hayom [1]
Marokwitz (talk) 14:22, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Before we begin to analyze these sources and what they say, please present links, because this purported article by the Washington Post doesn't seem to exist. [2] Makeandtoss (talk) 15:32, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It can be found on Proquest; however, upon a second check, it is was published under letters to the editor section and cannot be considered a reliable source. Striking it out. Marokwitz (talk) 16:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Five of the six sources you cited are problematic:
First source while it is useful, is about the quarter in the city, and not about a 2-3 thousand history of Jews in Gaza.
Second source is a magazine affiliated with Tikvah Fund, a neoconservative foundation [3]
Third source doesn't seem to exist either. [4]
Fourth source is not available for online reading so no verification is possible.
Fifth source: nothing about Jewish history in Gaza pages 28 and 29 [5]
Last source: Israel Hayom is a tabloid.
If you want to convince us of this article's notability, then a higher standard than this has to be met.
Makeandtoss (talk) 08:02, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are pages upon pages of information about the history of Jews in Gaza in the Handbook of Oriental Studies. You can search within the book, which is available on Google Books for easy verification. [6]
Israel Hayom is a wide circulation newspaper (the most widely circulated in Israel) used extensively in Wikipedia and is considered a reliable source. It is a Tabloid only due to its printing format, this term is used only to describe size, not to refer to other qualities of the publication.
Being associated with a neoconservative foundation does not make a source unreliable. Reliable sources are not required to be neutral.
You can't convince me that the article about the history of the Jewish Quarter of Gaza is not about the history of Jews in Gaza. It is not required to discuss a "2-3 thousand year history." Marokwitz (talk) 18:36, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The last source is extensive, seems ok. Oaktree b (talk) 16:07, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: Literally the first source, about an ancient synagogue in the city, is proof. The photo at the top of the article is proof of the long history they have in the city. Unsure why this wouldn't be notable. Oaktree b (talk) 14:53, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I hope you are not meaning israelandyou.com, the shabby blog? We are not discussing if Jews have a history in Gaza, we are discussing if this warrants a standalone article per Wikipedia guidelines; it doesn't. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:28, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't know now, it's been removed from the article. Oaktree b (talk) 15:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I removed it, unreliable sources like that one are not acceptable for usage in WP. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:49, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Please stop removing things as we're trying to review the suitability in AfD, you aren't helping the situation. "because I say it isn't" doesn't help me review the source for notability. Oaktree b (talk) 16:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I would have assumed it was a travel site, but now that you've removed it, we can't evaluate it. Please undo the changes. Oaktree b (talk) 16:06, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Frankly, as a Veteran Editor, I'd expect better from you. You can't change things you don't like while they're being discussed, it's borderline disruptive and not helping the case here. Oaktree b (talk) 16:08, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    As a veteran editor, I can identify unacceptable sources as soon as I see them. You are better off expecting better from the editor who used these blogs to create a Wikipedia article. Makeandtoss (talk) 08:03, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This source is fine [7], this provides background [8], this in French [9], this traces the history of a young Jewish individual in 1665 in the area [10]. Oaktree b. Page 93-94 mostly here, but the rest of the volume is useful [11]. (talk) 16:00, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This from a 1943 newspaper gives context of the area [12] and this is the history of the Jewish settlement in Gaza [13]. Not sure how much more we need at this point. Oaktree b (talk) 16:19, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Israeli settlements are covered in the Israeli settlements article. The Almonitor source is about the Jewish quarter which is a different topic. The rest cannot be considered as significant coverage. Makeandtoss (talk) 08:05, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The definition of "Significant coverage" in WP:GNG is "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Can you elaborate why the sources provided by Oaktree (except for #8) cannot be considered significant coverage of the topic "History of the Jews in Gaza City"? Marokwitz (talk) 19:52, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: History, Judaism, and Palestine. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 16:48, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep one minute of WP:BEFORE on JSTOR shows https://www.jstor.org/stable/23729416 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/23723826, in addition to the links above. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:32, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The sources here are in-depth reliable and verifiable references that clearly establish notability. Alansohn (talk) 18:15, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Article has several books cited which by nature provide deep material + direct online sources including by other countries' for International and further neutral coverage - and the ad-hoc pro-palestinian magazine "This Week in Palestine" as the 1st source which merited it's own English-Wiki article and describes (at flaky glance) Jews situations-population such as during the Hellenic period 2000 years ago; probably more when reading the entirety of it. (* Side-note: comparing the magazine old-issue source to the Wiki-link shows a same writer, so same magazine). WP:FORK - Big amount of material with vast sections for different periods from biblical lands of Israel-Judea times up to 20th century, and the "history of gaza"'s length (and "GA" status BTW), satisfies WP:SPLIT + as said about independent notability of a nation-population history in X-place. *BTW, another flaky glance: doesn't seem to be much info on Jews in "history of gaza", so support adding few summary-lines (where/if missing) on that general article's period-sections. אומנות (talk) 18:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete on verifiability grounds, not on notability grounds. Almost entirely unsourced. Only a few sentences in the article have any source cited, and a not insignificant percent of them are merely small factoids, e.g. one of the only sentences with a source is one claiming that one rabbi was from Gaza, but scholars disagree that this means a Jewish settlement existed in Gaza City at the time. The vast majority of the article is unsourced material that must be deleted. Where is this material coming from? Is it a verbatim quote from an unknown source? Is this a copyvio? Is this an original research essay? We don't know. But if you were to trim the article down to only what is sourced, it would not warrant a WP:SPLIT, and I do not know of any appropriate target for a merge.  Vanilla  Wizard 💙 19:22, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    One editor above has been removing items as sources during the course of this discussion, we had 14 items as sources at one point. Oaktree b (talk) 20:58, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    True as that may be, having reviewed some of the sources removed, them being in the article would not change that the material is unverified. Citing a source listed at WP:RS/P as unreliable is no better for establishing verifiability than having no source at all. Though I should also add that when I wrote my !vote I didn't even have in mind all the CN tags where a source used to be before the nom removed them, I was referring to the vast majority of the article that never had any sources in any revision.  Vanilla  Wizard 💙 21:40, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Slightly adding onto my !vote: I also support draftifying per the side conversation below. No denying that good sources exist on the subject, but I feel like I must not be looking at the same article as the keep !votes that suggest that the article is well-sourced right now. An article with almost 20K bytes of text, only a minuscule percent of it sourced, is not ready to show to readers.  Vanilla  Wizard 💙 18:12, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep There have been enough sources invoked in this discussion to make me believe this is a notable topic of scholarship Zanahary (talk) 23:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I believe there is no doubt that the topic is important, in my understanding the article is quite detailed and full of reliable sources. There is always the possibility to improve the article, And it would be good to do this instead of opening another deletion discussion. Eladkarmel (talk) 18:23, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You wrote the majority of the article, correct? It might have been wise to say that. JMWt (talk) 18:37, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I thought it was pretty clear to those who are here in the discussion. So yes, I created the article. Eladkarmel (talk) 20:46, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - There is a lot of important and sourced information here. Dovidroth (talk) 09:38, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So far the only verifiably reliable sources presented have been these two: [14], [15]. Neither can be described as having significant coverage of Jewish history in Gaza, however, they could be used for an article on Jewish quarter in Gaza. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:06, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming the article will be kept, which seems very likely, a cleanup process is in order after the AfD ends. I will wait until after it's closed to delete the aforementioned paragraphs of text that never had any sources to verify any of their sentences, but sooner or later we do need to remove all the unsourced material. An article with this much text and almost none of it sourced being in mainspace isn't acceptable. Perhaps an alternative to deletion is draftifying?  Vanilla  Wizard 💙 18:07, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: per above, there is ample sourcing for an article shown above and in the article.  // Timothy :: talk  11:37, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, for all reasons listed above. The corresponding article on Hebrew Wikipedia (which the English article appears to borrow from heavily) is fairly well-cited; it would be worthwhile to go through the references there and incorporate them into the English article.  Ploni💬  16:07, 7 December 2023 (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.
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