Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/7th Inspection Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea

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. Consensus that the topic is notable. (non-admin closure) (t · c) buidhe 02:03, 28 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

7th Inspection Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea[edit]

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No evidence of any notability. Fram (talk) 11:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. Fram (talk) 11:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. Fram (talk) 11:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Korea-related deletion discussions. Fram (talk) 11:11, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

- Oppose Its very notable. It was formely known as the Control Commission. It has been in existence since the 1st WPK Congress. Its one of the main decision-making bodies of the Workers' Party of Korea. Its members are usually highstanding Central Committee and Politburo members. Members of the Central Committee and Politburo make up the country's leadership.
- The organ was "elected" by the 7th WPK Central Committee in its 1st Plenary Session.
- Hong In-bom - the chairman of the 7th - was a member of the Central COmmittee, and his successor Jo Yon-jun was an alternate member of the WPK Politburo.
- The Inspetion Commission is responsible for purging the party of members deemed bad. --Ruling party (talk) 11:18, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - What is needed are independent, reliable sources discussing the 7th commission indepth. Sources which are independent of the party or the government (not state media regurgitating government propaganda either), and which indicate that this commission has received significant attention. Fram (talk) 11:26, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Fram: I've added more sources. There is also a very good analysis of the composition of the Control Commission/Inspection Commission in the book Political Leadership in Korea — but I don't have access to the whole book (only through Google Books). The body is notable, and North Korea analysts write about it as notable. --Ruling party (talk) 11:32, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That book is from 2014, if my search is correct. Which means that it can't discuss this version of the commission though, which is from 2016. Fram (talk) 11:35, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

keep This appears to me to be part of a good faith effort to docuemnt important NK state bodies. Lack of obvious cites in western media is unfortunate but goes with the territory. I think the subject is notable despite the absence of cites. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:27, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
keep North Korea doesnt have much in the way of independent, reliable sources. Rathfelder (talk) 14:58, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- How is that an argument to keep something? Fram (talk) 15:23, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete It would feel good to keep everything we think should belong here. I don't blame people for fighting for something they want to see included. However, the notability guideline is what we have to rule over every article included in the encyclopedia. You may think it's broken. You may think it's the best thing since sliced bread. The point is that it doesn't matter what we think. Policy is policy. If the subject does not receive "significant coverage in reliable and independent sources" then it MUST not be retained, period. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 18:00, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsistunagiska: But the article is referenced by external coverage! And... None of know Korean so probably way more Korean (both South and North...) --Ruling party (talk) 20:20, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ruling party We can play these games all day and night. I do not assume something must be there. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Either the subject is clearly notable or not. It is not so it should not have a stand-alone article. If you have an article that you believe it should be merged or redirected to then present it. I am open to all of that as a possibility. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 20:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tsistunagiska But I don't get why its not clearly notable? :P Leading North Korean analysts write about it here in NK News: [1]

Everyone who writes about North Korea know its one of the leading bodies in the country so how is this "playing games"? YOu need to explain that part. Its existed for barely two days and we are already claiming its not notable? --Ruling party (talk) 20:27, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ruling party When an article is created is irrelevant. We have articles brought up for AfD the day they were created and some that are brought up 14 years after being created. The length of time on Wikipedia does not confer notability nor does it diminish notability. The sources, both included in the article and those found when conducting a WP:BEFORE search, are the determining factors. NKNEWS.org is not considered a reliable or independent source. I would also like to add that just because a source has a Wikipedia article itself does not confer reliability upon what it says. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 20:36, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsistunagiska: NKNews is not reliable? It was established by Andrey Lankov and is literally the scholarly hub of North Korean news anywhere. Leading North Korean scholars from all over the world write in it... So why isn't NK News a reliable source? --Ruling party (talk) 20:52, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, the word scholar is overused and carries little weight in these discussions. Just because someone calls you a scholar does not immediately confer notability or reliability. I thought we established that just because you have an article on Wikipedia it doesn't make you a reliable source so wiki-links to other articles do not change the fact this subject isn't notable as the nominator has presented above. You need to look at WP:NOT to see what Wikipedia is not. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 21:04, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsistunagiska: ???? He wrote From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960 and his greatest work, the one he's best known for, is Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 about the failed toppling of Kim Il-sung? Are we really trying to state a leading scholar whose work gets published by universities and is recognised as a leading specialist... is not a scholar? --Ruling party (talk) 21:09, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is WP:BLUDGEONING. Walls of text do not change anything. the bottom line is this: I found there are no reliable secondary and intellectually independent sources which give this subject significant coverage as per our notability requirements. Please let others weigh in without your continuous chastisements and mocking. Thank you. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 21:15, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsistunagiska: Sorry - my mistake. I will stop - I'm new to this place. I just literally cannot see how anyone could actually take the position you are taking. It doesn't make sense to me at all... Its like saying we shouldn't have an article about American secretaries of state or list the members of the Supreme Court.

But I will stopp. Sorry. It wasnt my intention of bludgeoning anyone. --Ruling party (talk) 21:23, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tsistunagiska: although it won't change anything here, because NK News doesn't have any in-depth articles about the 7th Inspection Commission, I just want to say something for the record. NK News is absolutely a WP:RS. It's a South Korean specialized news website written by an international staff of professional journalists with high editorial standards and employs some of the best known university professors in the field. It's not an overstatement to say that it's considered one of the best, most realiable, sources in the field. It's also absolutely an independent source. Maybe you're confusing it with some North Korean propaganda website, like KCNA, or even some of the more problematic South Korean news sites, like the Daily NK? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:47, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment It's not possible to gauge coverage in reliable sources through a simple WP:BEFORE search in English. A great deal of North Korean studies scholarship is conducted in South Korea in Korean. There is also lots of scholarship in Japanese and Russian and, to a lesser extent, German. At any rate, contrary to what others have said above, the Inspection Commission is one of the least influential bodies of the WPK: it's not the Central Committee, Politburo or Central Military Commission, which are the principal decision making bodies, of which a lot is written. Indeed, the 7th Inspection Commission was the last Inspection Commission as its duties were delegated to the Central Auditing Commission (another not-so-important body) at the party's 8th Congress this month. Furthermore, the 7th Inspection Commission was relatively short-lived (only 5 years, cf. the 36 years of its predecessor) due to the party having returned to a five-year routine of re-electing its bodies at the said congress. But none of this matters until someone does a proper WP:BEFORE search in at least the languages outlined above. The Daily NK story cited in the article does suggest that the 7th Inspection Commission did see some action during its tenure, so there could be more sources out there. Finally, for the people looking for a merge target, Inspection Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea would be more comfortably notable with decades worth of potential sources. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:28, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Finnusertop: Great comment! :)

I would add that the Central Auditing Commission has greatly increased in importance. The Chairman is a politburo member, one of the vice chairmen is an alternate member of the Politburo and the other vice chairmen is a member of the 8th WPK Central Committee. It goes to show that Kim Jong-un's anti-corruption drive isn't just propaganda—there is some purpose behind it. He's trying to strengthen the control bodies of the party to strengthen the Central Party Leadership's control [his control in other words]. --Ruling party (talk) 21:49, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ruling party: yes, it is certainly one of the most important developments to have come out of the 8th Congress. But for our purposes in this discussion, the development has not generated a significant number of sources about the outgoing 7th Inspection Committee. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:57, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

All of this back and forth is irrelevant to the topic of this AfD. Wikipedia is not a news organization. We are not journalist nor are we reporters. The only relevant question is whether or not the subject receives significant coverage in multiple reliable and independent secondary sources. I would add that it needs to be sources easily accessible by the general population to verify the information being presented. If the answer to that is no then it doesn't belong according to the only measuring stick we have for actual notability as opposed to presumed notability. That's not my opinion but then Wikipedia doesn't operate off my personal opinion. --ARoseWolf (Talk) 13:27, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Reckon this discussion could use some more eyes and input. Currently no consensus but definitely a chance for one to form.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk) 04:01, 21 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment 3 keeps, 1 delete, not sure why this was relisted Daniel. A long time ago an article I started was relisted 5 count'em 5 times. Geo Swan (talk) 05:43, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- Geo Swan, none of the 'keep' arguments are particularly convincing from a policy point of view (two slightly better than the third). Hope is for some more input, which I think is a distinct possibility, assessing the sourcing etc. Daniel (talk) 05:49, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel, thanks for the explanation. I disagree.
I strongly agree with Finnusertop. Genuine, meaningful compliance with WP:BEFORE can be shockingly uncommon. As Finnusertop said, this failure to fully comply with BEFORE is most apparent when the article is about a person whose name has been transcribed from a foreign language that uses a non-Latin alphabet, as is the case here. It is also most apparent when namesakes have required the article title to be disambiguated.

Usually I am pretty good at searching for topics in languages that don't use the Latin alphabet. My own efforts disappointed me here.

Our expectations for the number of references we expect have to be adjusted for certain fields.

One of the AFD I participated in, 15 years ago, when I was a newbie, was an individual who had lived in France in 18th or 19th century. The nominator's justification was that, of the references, only 2 covered him in any detail, and he or she expected genuinely notable individuals to have more references than that. It has been so long I couldn't tell you who this was, but an experienced contributor made a very articulate case that left a strong impression on me. He or she argued that this was an unreasonable expectation. Yes, if that BLP was living today, or had recently died, in our world were lots of documents are digital, and are online, we'd find lots more references. But for someone from the 18th or 19th century, for multiple references to be online, this guy must have been a pretty significant figure.

This Commission is different than a 19th century figure from French literature, but the principle is the same. Fewer references were available from 19th century France, due to age and primitive technology. For North Korea fewer references are due to it being a locked down, totalitarian regime. Its central organizations are just as important as those of any other nation.

I think @Ruling party, Tagishsimon, and Rathfelder: are making basically the same point - due to the totalitarian nature of North Korea, and its much sparser pool of RS than we would expect from a free country, we should recognize that the RS found, so far, are sufficient to extablish this commission's notability. Geo Swan (talk) 14:03, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. Context is important. How many independent reputable sources exist for North Korea? I dont know, but I would be very surprised if there are not a lot more for North Dakota. Rathfelder (talk) 14:09, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Geo Swan: I don't know who you are but I like you a lot! :) Especially since I'm having trouble creating similar pages for the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, an authoritarian party with its own distinct writing script

Thanks. Since I'm not a native I'd never been able to explain it so well as you did just now. --Ruling party (talk) 16:12, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I'm honestly a little surprised by this, but there is evidence in the sources given in the article that outside observers have examined this topic an therefore there is notability according to the GNG. The "significance' prong is, indeed, open to question but any independent reporting on organs of government in the DPRK has very little information to work with. These look as significant as one is likely to find about any governmental topic in that necrocracy. There is room for tonal improvement but WP:NOTCLEANUP applies. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 17:23, 26 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - as per WP:HEYMAN. I understand the rationale of the nomination, as when it was made the article was woefully undersourced. However the improvements made by the article's creator have made it pass WP:VERIFY, and now passes WP:GNG. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 00:56, 28 January 2021 (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.