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Allegations of apartheid

• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid
• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid (fifth nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid (fourth nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid (second nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid (third nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Allegations of apartheid in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

Allegations of apartheid (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Delete This article has long been a source of controversy, and is regarded by many as a WP:SYNTH violation consisting mostly of original research. Most of the articles cited in the footnotes contain only fleeting references to the term "apartheid", and I do not believe that any make formal accusations that particular countries are guilty of the Crime of apartheid. (The Bosnia reference is especially weak, as it refers to "apartheid" solely in terms of rich and poor ... normally, there's some reference to class, ethnicity, gender or religion as well.)

For those curious, the first afd ended in utter chaos (the closing admin's comments must be seen to be believed), the second ended in a deletion that was subsequently overturned, the third resulted in a "keep" vote, and the fourth ended with a procedural closure. In other words, there is no strong historical precedent that this article should be retained.

I should also note that the previous four nominations took place against the backdrop of controversy over the page Allegations of Israeli apartheid. As this page has now been retitled as Israel and the apartheid analogy, and all of the other "Allegations of Apartheid" pages have been removed, there seems little reason to retain this article. CJCurrie (talk) 03:37, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, of course. These kinds of allegations are made by many reliable sources, referring to specific types of (perceived) institutionalized discrimination with a great deal in common - which is why, of course, people use a common term for it, "apartheid". What has marred these discussions are the contributions of a specific banned editor, and his 20 or more banned sockpuppets, who have collectively done little but create heat rather than light on this specific topic - including creating the original "Israeli apartheid" article, and then creating strawman sockpuppets for the purpose of fake AfDs, which would then ensure that articles he preferred were retained. On this article alone he has deleted most of the content, deleted what little was left, put it up for deletion, deleted even more, then deleted even more again, all in a desperate attempt to make this article deletion-worthy. While the allegations against some countries (e.g. Israel, Brazil, Cuba, France, China) have received more attention than others, what should really be done with all of these "apartheid" articles is that they should be merged into one main article - this one - and this article should cover the whole topic to the extent that it deserves. And if CJCurrie's issue is with the phrase "Allegations", there's no reason why this article couldn't be renamed "Apartheid analogies", in line with the other article renaming. Jayjg 04:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Comment I suppose I was naive to hope this could be drawn to a quick resolution.

In response to Jay's statement, I should note that this particular controversy actually predates the creation of the Israeli apartheid page. To the best of my knowledge, it began with the creation of this subsection of the "Apartheid in South Africa" article on 15 November 2004, which in turn led to this retitling less than an hour later. This material was later spun off to "Apartheid Outside South Africa" (which, in turn, was later retitled as Allegations of Apartheid) via this edit and this edit on 10 June 2005. The section on Israel was removed in February 2006, and the article was reduced to a redirect later in the same day. It was only expanded again on 5 June 2006, when Jayjg tried to merge Israeli apartheid (phrase) into a larger article.

I'm quite aware that Jayjg has never accepted the legitimacy of an article on Israel and the apartheid analogy, but that matter now been resolved to the satisfaction of most parties, and Jay's suggestion that all of the "allegations" should be merged into a single article is a complete non-starter. The partisan gamesmanship that's taken place on both sides of this debate has been one of Misplaced Pages's least edifying spectacles of the last few years, and I think it's time we all moved on from this. Retitling Allegations of Israeli apartheid was a good start; deleting Allegations of apartheid would be a good next step. I could add that past situations involving now-banned editors are not germane to the present discussion.

My question to Jay: how is this article not a violation of WP:SYNTH and WP:NOR? Our standards have improved somewhat from 2005, after all. CJCurrie (talk) 05:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "that matter now been resolved to the satisfaction of most parties"; a series of mostly strawman AfDs doesn't particularly resolve anything, and it sometimes takes the community quite a few AfDs to come to a decision - see, for example, Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Daniel Brandt (14th nomination). I note that the article you refer to is, after 4761 edits, still an unreadable, edit-war riven, unholy mess. As for "The partisan gamesmanship that's taken place on both sides of this debate", your nomination is hardly "moving on", but rather is just one more example of it. Can anyone honestly say that Misplaced Pages wouldn't be better served by including all of these similar types of analogies/allegations into one comprehensive article? As always, I'm willing to abide by whatever standard Misplaced Pages wants to set for its articles, but I'm hoping we'll give common sense a chance for a change, rather than trying to destroy any possibility of it. Jayjg 05:36, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Israel and the apartheid analogy could stand a bit more polishing, but there's now a general agreement that the subject matter is encyclopedic. Given the growing number of former Israeli politicians who have weighed in the matter, one would think this particular controversy should be at an end.

In response to your question, I think that Misplaced Pages would be best served by having individual articles on apartheid analogies (as applied to countries other than South Africa) when these have been the subject of serious academic and sustained journalistic discussion. In practice, this means that we should have articles on Israel and the apartheid analogy and Social apartheid in Brazil; one could possibly add Tourist apartheid in Cuba to the list, and, who knows, there may be some scholarly legitimacy to the Chinese apartheid analogy by the time the 2008 Olympic games are over.

Misplaced Pages is not served well by Allegations of apartheid, the sources for which mostly consist of passing references to apartheid comparisons in standalone articles.

And I doubt that anyone regards the Daniel Brandt situation as a stellar example of how Misplaced Pages articles should be managed. CJCurrie (talk) 05:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - this article is just the thing for a high school student doing some research for an essay. None of the related articles (such as racial segregation) quite address the exact topic that this article is about. The article is heavily referenced (the list of references is longer than the main text of the article), it is written from a neutral point of view, and it is thoroughly wikified. Keep! - Richard Cavell (talk) 05:08, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Comment I can understand this position, but I don't think it's the right standard by which to measure this article. The problem with Allegations of Apartheid is that it's based almost entirely on original research and synthesized research: most of the citations are taken from scattered references in unrelated primary sources, and these do not amount to an encyclopedic article when considered together. CJCurrie (talk) 05:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

• Delete. It is true that nearly each sentence or information has its reference. Sometimes it even has several ones. This is a good point. BUT the whole topic seems to be a synthesized research. INDEED, who are the scholars (here sociologists or political scientists are expected) who studied, as a whole, the allegations of apartheid carried against the different countries or regime around the world ? If the topic was physics, and if somebody would have gathered different experiment results or comment to point out an hypothesis, it would certainly be speedy deleted. Here, because the topic is (also) political, it seems to me other standards apply... Ceedjee (talk) 07:03, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Delete per the well argued nom and the wel argued deletion vote by Ceedjee above. They have basically argued all the objections I have to articles like this. Viridae 07:29, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, but rename to Apartheid analogies. -- Olve Utne (talk) 15:05, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Delete forthwith. It's a random assemblage of primary sources that happen to use the word "apartheid" in passing; these have been googled-up, huddled together, and awkwardly cordoned off with a sophomoric OR-synthesis: "Allegations of apartheid have been made, informally, against societies beyond South Africa...Apartheid has been used in compound phrases coined to compare actual or alleged forms of segregation, discrimination or disparity to South African apartheid." There are no secondary sources grouping these disparate items or observing these rhetorical trends, or even discussing "allegations of apartheid" as a topic in itself at all. This is purely a Misplaced Pages invention. The idea may be to create and sustain some sort of larger umbrella topic of which the Israeli apartheid analogy will appear as only one example, but this larger umbrella category of discourse – "allegations of apartheid" in a general sense – has not been recognized as a topic in the real world. For us to invent it is original research.--G-Dett (talk) 15:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Not only per the nominators fantastic reasoning as to why the sources do not establish profound notability, but as to the unnotability of the topic itself. While many countries may have had allegations of apartheid made against them, I can't see any useful reason to have a topic discussing them all (each individual case can obviously be referenced on the countires article etc.), or given the quite drastic cover of definitions of apartheid in the sources, what definition it is that actual links this articles content. The article while appearing to be structured, is nothing more than a list of indiscriminate information, which doesn't even provide useful connections to other areas of wikipedia. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 17:15, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Delete, or rather redirect to a general article on apartheid. Extended diatribes about the motives or conduct of editors, even if their content is accurate, have no bearing on the subject of this discussion, and votes (whether "keep" or "delete") based on them should be ignored by the closing admin. On point: While the individual data points used to construct this article are indeed reliably sourced, there are currently no sources provided which are actually about the topic "allegations of apartheid," ie, about the uses and abuses of the word "apartheid" in political discourse. If anybody can find a book, monograph, or even scholarly journal article which is actually about the subject (I'm mentally picturing something like a book called "The A-Word: Apartheid Rhetoric in Contemporary Ethnopolitics,") there would at least be a valid, if not necessarily convincing, case to keep this article. Absent such a source, it is clearly novel synthesis of unrelated material. <eleland/talkedits> 21:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Keep and rename, presumably to Apartheid analogies or Apartheid analogy. It seems kind of strange to me that some people think it is ok to have an "Apartheid analogy" article about one specific country, which is basically an attack piece against that country, but we can't have a more general article about the "apartheid analogy" phenomenon worldwide. (The absence of any country's name from the title of this particular article means that it does not present the same POV problems that the other one does, which is why it is consistent to favor deletion of the other one but retention of this one -- in case anyone is keeping track.) As for the current structure and text of the article, it is pretty bad, but that is mostly because after the failed attempt to get rid of it the last time, banned editor Homey aka Lothar of the Hill People basically destroyed the existing article and turned it into the current piece of garbage. Maybe we should go back to the text from about a year ago and people can start improving it from there. Presumably, any sources that do not mention "apartheid" should be removed from the article. Improvement is the answer, rather than deletion. 6SJ7 (talk) 21:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

6SJ7, we've been through this many times. The reason to have the Israel article and the Brazil article but not a general article is not that Israel and Brazil are somehow the worst countries in the world, or the most appallingly racist or apartheid-like or whatever. The reason is simply that in both cases a body of literature (in the Israel case a vast body of literature) exists which discusses the meme itself – debating its merits, describing its history and attendent controversies, and so on. Meanwhile no body of literature exists that discusses "allegations of apartheid" or "the apartheid analogy" in a general sense. As a general subject, it was invented on Misplaced Pages.

By the way, you're right that the current version doesn't read as coherently as the one from last year. But the old one had a much bigger problem in that it seriously misrepresented its sources. Material focusing on the Israeli apartheid analogy was presented as if it addressed the merits of apartheid analogies in general.--G-Dett (talk) 21:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

This is not really the place to discuss the contents of the "Israel and the..." article, but most of the sources in that article are not of the kind you describe. They are just name-calling or taking quotations out of context. (I said "most", so don't quote me counter-examples because they are irrelevant.) As for the apartheid analogy in a general sense being "invented" on Misplaced Pages, there have been dozens of examples of the analogy being used cited in a number of different articles, though whether they are all still on Misplaced Pages after last year's Great Purge, I do not know. Some, obviously, are in this very article. Would the article be stronger if there were several books about the general use of the analogy? Sure. But that's not the test for inclusion of an article on Misplaced Pages. 6SJ7 (talk) 22:18, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, that is sort of the test for inclusion. You need secondary sources about the analogy itself in order to establish its notability. Wikipedians' observations about rhetorical trends in discussions across sundry topics do not establish the notability of this or that meme.--G-Dett (talk) 22:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep: This does seem to be a case of keep nominating an article until you get the result you want. It's survived four deletion discussions and now there's a fifth. If it survives this, then someone will, I'd venture, have yet another go. Renaming to Apartheid analogies seems acceptable. Analogies of X to apartheid are common currency (and indeed overused) in political discourse and this article usefully draws these together. Nunquam Dormio (talk) 21:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. Suggest renaming to Countries and Apartheid analogies. Amoruso (talk) 22:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

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