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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. No arguments for deletion aside from the nominator. (non-admin closure) Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:11, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Turks in India

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Turks in India (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Nominated per the suggestion of User:Lyk4 at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Italians in Pakistan.

The topic of this article, the Turkish diaspora (emigrants from the Ottoman Empire or the modern Republic of Turkey) in India, has not been written about at length by any scholars or journalists.

This article is part of a mass-produced boilerplate series of stubs about "Turks in Xyzland" which were created on the basis of a table of population statistics a year ago. Since then, no one has been able to find any real sources to improve most of them. The book that's been placed in the "Further reading" section to puff up the article, Keene's 1879 The Turks in India (reprinted in 2001), does not discuss the above topic --- instead it describes the Mughal conquest of South Asia. This is like trying to claim that "Icelanders in India" is a notable topic on the basis that the British once ruled India and Icelanders and Britons both have Viking ancestry. Modern scholarship doesn't continue Keene's practice of referring to them generically as "Turks" --- instead they're identified as Chagatays, etc. Thanks, cab (talk) 02:23, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Also see WP:ALLORNOTHING. When someone says, "If you delete X you will also need to delete Y", using that as a basis to take Y to AfD leads to madness, and the eventual collapse of human civilisation. Humanoid cockroaches running naked in the street, dogs married to cats, rains of Pokemon, etc. - DustFormsWords (talk) 06:14, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Failure of WP:N is quite a pertinent reason to delete an article and you have not offered any real solutions to address this problem.
(1) Then please point to such coverage. As I have stated above, Keene's book is not useful for expanding this article --- it does not cover the "Turks" who this article is supposed to be about.
(2) Wrong. See WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. It does not matter that other groups have sources about them; what matters is whether THIS GROUP have sources about them, something you have not demonstrated at all. Your argument basically boils down to "We can write an encyclopedic article about Turks in India because there are lots of books about Italian Americans." Regards, cab (talk) 06:27, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • There's an inherent difficulty in providing sources, in that they're likely to be in non-English languages; see WP:BIAS. However we can establish their existence as a logical proposition, because the contrary would be that, of every person of Turkish descent who does now or ever has lived in India, none of them have ever received significant coverage. We know that's false as a logical proposition from the material contained in articles such as Hassan Ali Effendi and Malik Altunia. There are notable people of Turkish descent who have lived in India; therefore there must be sufficient sources to write an encyclopedic article about the topic Turks in India that passes WP:N. The only bar to that would be if it represented a content fork, a duplication of material presented elsewhere, or was covered by one of the other reasons for deletion, none of which I'd argue apply here (although I'm open to being directed to another article that covers the material). There's obviously LESS to write about this than there is for Italian American but short length is generally no barrier to the existence of an article providing that there is sufficient substantive relevant information to justify the topic as encyclopedic content; that's why we have stubs. - DustFormsWords (talk) 07:03, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Notability is not inherited either upwards or downwards. A non-notable collectivity may have notable-members; conversely, a collectivity may be notable even though none of its individual members are. The existence of a few notable individuals does not magically cause there to be anything to say in general about the whole community; an attempt by Wikipedians to make generalisations based on alleged commonalities between a few people would be original research.
Furthermore regarding your WP:BIAS argument: I searched in Turkish. Your theorising about the existence of foreign language sources doesn't match what I actually found on Google. My reading knowledge of Turkish has declined a lot over the years, but I can still tell the difference between reliable and unreliable sources, or on-topic and off-topic ones. The Turkish language makes it hard to distinguish between Turkish ("of the Republic of Turkey") and Turkic (relating to the peoples who speak one of the Turkic languages) --- both get called Türkler, and some authors take advantage of this to conflate the two topics ... and anyway, all I found was material similar to Keene's book (information about Chagatay conquerors and the like, not Republic of Turkey expatriates), or information about investments by Turkish companies or tourists from Turkey e.g. [1][2], which again can't be generalised to the topic of this article, which is supposed to be the history and characteristics of Turkish expatriates in India as a whole. cab (talk) 07:40, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article isn't called "The Turkish community in India". It's called "Turks in India". There's no necessity for it to be about modern day Turks, a community, or character. It can be a historical article, provided there's no content fork involved. It's a topic of such surpassing width that it would be incredibly unlikely to NOT find Indian or Turkish sources supporting it. The reason notability isn't inherited upwards is because you can discuss the singular without discussing the general; speak about, for example, Michael Jackson without mentioning The Jackson Five. That's not the case here; if there is information about more than one person who can be described as a "Turk", that talks about their experience in India, then there is, by definition, notability for the concept "Turks in India". And, given the history between Turkic peoples and India, (such as here), it seems futile to argue that there could not be content under this header. I think the mistake you're making is confusing the content that currently IS in the article with the content that COULD be in the article. If notability is found for the topic - and given the history of control of India over the last thousand years, then you have to admit that there is such notability - then the inadequacy of the current content can be fixed through normal editing. More to the point - are you sure there isn't another article already dealing with the histories of Turkish (or Turkic) people in India? (BTW part of the point of WP:BIAS is that not only will we have difficulty finding non-English sources but outside of western Europe the chances of those sources being accessible through Google decrease dramatically, both due to the way Google works and due to lowered internet access rates in the relevant countries.) - DustFormsWords (talk) 07:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I am not confusing the content that is in the article with the content that might be in the article, I am stating that there is no encyclopedic content which belongs at this title at all. The use of this title to discuss Mughal rule in India strikes me as bordering on historical revisionism, which is why I would so strongly object to it being used/redirected for that purpose. Especially when every other instance of this title pattern is used to refer to Republic of Turkey expatriates. As I alluded to above, since Keene's time Anglophone scholars have stopped lumping together all those mysterious peoples of the Orient into one giant whole and assuming they're all interchangeable. We no longer speak of "Tartars" on the banks of the Amur or "Moors" in Peking either.
And the internet in Turkey is quite well developed; all of the major newspapers have online editions with archives, university professors put their papers on their websites, booksellers give online tables of contents and other previous of book content, Google Books has been busy scanning away, etc. cab (talk) 08:30, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep. A small yet notable group may be kept, as shown by the information in the article and searches online. For example, see [3]. Bearian (talk) 20:17, 12 April 2010 (UTC) I added that source; many more can be found at Bing and Google. Typing in the phrase history of turks in india into the Google search bar gets 27 million Ghits. There are plenty of possible sources out there. Bearian (talk) 20:26, 12 April 2010 (UTC) By the way, I don't think that all such "Xes in Ystan" are notable; see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Italians in Pakistan. Bearian (talk) 20:29, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • We already have a perfectly good article on the topic which is covered by those misleading hits: Mughal Empire. As I already explained above, modern scholars have moved away from the "Turks in India" and towards far more precise ethnic labelling. Note the actual content of the Google search: ethnonationalist polemics (e.g. "ISLAM WAS THE CULPRIT"), copies of Keene's book or other outdated scholarship, and mishits ("Buy History of the Ottoman Turks in India!"). cab (talk) 00:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep These types of articles are very encyclopedic. While the number of Turks in India might not be very large, that doesn't make them less notable than other ethnic groups in other nations. And no, you don't need coverage, that's just one of the suggested guidelines, not any binding policy. Those guidelines have been changed constantly over time, and no one writing them had this sort of article in mind. Every ethnic group that is in a country, should have its own article, since this is an encyclopedia, not just coverage of things mainstream media decides to write about. Dream Focus 16:50, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
All ethnic groups may be notable, but Fooians in Barland are not "an ethnic group"; they are an intersection of an ethnic group and a country of residence. You will find no disagreement from me that these types of articles about diaspora/expatriate groups may be very encyclopedic; I've written more than 150 of them, even about small groups like Koreans in Chile, and I have gone far beyond what you deride as "things mainstream media decides to write about" in finding sources for them.
But that's the clincher --- SOURCES --- otherwise what exactly are you supposed to write about? Whatever self-promoting nationalistic group members themselves choose to attach to the article? This is how we got to the poor state of the article in the first place where it tried to pretend in its nationalist-revisionist way that businessmen from Istanbul and centuries-old Persian-speaking conquerors from Central Asia are the same "ethnic group". And when you remove that flight of fancy, you are left with no article and nothing to write about. cab (talk) 01:05, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Fooians in Barland? What is that suppose to mean? And do you see any "self-promoting nationalistic group" bothering any of these articles? I find that unlikely to happen here. Showing how many people from one nation are now living in another, and listing information about them is perfectly legitimate encyclopedic content. You don't need sources for everything. Just like every article for a species doesn't have coverage other than the primary source of the researchers who found it, and a brief mention in an encyclopedia or directory that list everything, but we still consider them notable. The more popular species of course are written about plenty, but we don't just ignore the least popular ones. Is this encyclopedic in value? If so, it should be kept. The suggested guidelines were written for other types of articles, and they aren't binding in anyway, unlikely the policies. Dream Focus 04:56, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
"Fooians in Barland" is a generic shorthand title referring to the whole class of articles about people from country X living in country Y. See foo bar. Showing how many people from one nation are now living in another is easily done in a table, like at foreign-born population of the United Kingdom. You don't need a separate lemma for every single intersection of country of origin and country of residence, only the ones where there is something to actually write about the topic. The analogy to species of animals isn't even close --- here we don't even have a scholar who has looked into the topic and produced documentation. We have figures from two censuses, and a disputed list of names.
Furthermore, in response to your question "And do you see any "self-promoting nationalistic group" bothering any of these articles?" --- it's quite a common occurrence to see editors in this topic area who want to puff up the population or perceived importance of their own ethnic group or country, deride the importance of "competing" ethnic groups, delete unfavourable details they dislike, etc. Some of the more egregious examples I'm familiar with include here and here. What's more common is for people to go around creating articles about their own ethnic group in every country on earth without regard for WP:V, WP:RS, etc. What we certainly don't have many of are neutral editors reading the literature about human migration, and then coming to Wikipedia to write about the groups who are most important and best documented in each country regardless of where they come from. Otherwise we'd have articles on Bangladeshis in India (3 million people) or Afghans in Iran (1 million people) or Russians in Kyrgyzstan (500,000 people) long before anyone thought of writing about 126 Turkish expatriates in India and trying to tie them into the glorious imperial past of the Mughal Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate. cab (talk) 05:28, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Concern over some occasional inappropriate editing is no reason to delete an article. Otherwise nothing would be allowed to exist. And where does anyone try to tie them "into glorious imperial past"? That was never in the article at all. The groups mentioned can have their own articles made as well, whenever someone feels like getting around to it. This article isn't just some mindless stub. It list notable Turks living in India, and they have their own Wikipedia articles even. Dream Focus 06:45, 16 April 2010 (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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