Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sahr Kendor

Sahr Kendor

Sahr Kendor (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Declined prod with very weak reason "Sounds a notable athlete". Could not find coverage to meet WP:SPORTSCRIT. LibStar (talk) 09:15, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sportspeople, Olympics, Sport of athletics, and Sierra Leone. LibStar (talk) 09:15, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
• The PROD was declined by what seems like a good faith IP editor who, by evidence of their contributions, seems to have some knowledge of global athletics. Why did they consider the athlete notable? Do they have access to sources? I would oppose deletion until these questions are answered at least. --Habst (talk) 00:10, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

  If you support keep, please provide sources as per normal practice in AfD. LibStar (talk) 03:19, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

  It's a normal practice, but not a necessary one. I searched for sources when this was PRODed and couldn't find any, but as with many of your recent AfDs I doubt the sources that covered the subject are digitized. --Habst (talk) 12:08, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

  As shown in other AfDs, articles are kept when sources are provided. LibStar (talk) 22:31, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

• Redirect to Sierra Leone at the 1980 Summer Olympics. Yue🌙 23:35, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
• Redirect to Sierra Leone at the 1980 Summer Olympics where his "did not advance" heat result is noted. A stand-alone article can't be supported here because there is a complete failure to satisfy WP:SPORTBASIC, prong 5, which mandates: "All sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources." (Emphasis added.) Cbl62 (talk) 20:16, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

  @Cbl62, that only describes what's necessary to fulfill WP:NSPORT, not WP:GNG. There's a policy, WP:NEXIST, that would make a keep !vote theoretically justifiable if a good case for why coverage exists can be made.

  In this case, I would say qualifying for the Olympics in three different events (or earning selection by SLAA in three events) is pretty exceptional, especially for a Sierra Leonean athlete. There are newspapers in Sierra Leone that likely would have covered that. --Habst (talk) 20:24, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

  No, no, no. The one-SIGCOV rule (WP:SPORTBASIC, prong 5) was overwhelmingly adopted by the community in direct response to long-term conduct by Lugnuts in mass-creating tens-and-tens-of-thousands (80,000 if memory serves) of one-sentence sport bio sub-stubs sourced to nothing more than a sports database. (Sahr Kendor is one of those Lugnuts sub-stubs.) The new one-SIGCOV rule established an exception to the pre-existing rules whereby sports biographies now "must" have at least one piece of SIGCOV present and accounted for in the article. The language is clear, mandatory, and unequivocal. These mass-created sub-stubs were deemed an embarrassment to the project and especially to the hard-working editors of substantive sports biographies with actual encyclopedic content. A redirect preserves the sub-stub content so that it can be revived if and when someone finds and adds SIGCOV. Cbl62 (talk) 21:44, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

  On the merits -- I am one of those hard-working editors of substantive sports biographies with actual encyclopedic content. A lot of my most substantive biographies have actually been created from stubs like this that I would not have noticed if they were redirects, because redirects tend to have much less visibility.

  On the policy -- if you're referring to WP:NSPORTS2022, I'm persuaded by the argument that "SPORTBASIC #5 was never intended, nor should it be misused, to trump or overrule the more general, overarching rule.", as said by the creator of that consensus. Every article is judged on its own merits -- you are free to disagree that the NEXIST rationale is convincing, and in most cases (to be frank) it isn't. But it's still a valid policy rationale for exceptional cases and I think this could be one of them.

  I say this with great respect for your contributions, by the way. --Habst (talk) 23:22, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

As I suspect you know, I didn't "create the consensus". The community reached the consensus -- and did so by a significant margin. As for the Vehmeier AfD, my comment had nothing whatsever to do with your contention that NEXIST can somehow "trump" SPORTBASIC. To the contrary, it had to do with a massive rewrite by BeanieFan who found mutliple borderline SIGCOV sources such that the article could suvive under BASIC. I stand by that rationale. But in this case, there is zero SIGCOV and not even any borderline SIGCOV that has been presented. In such cases, "delete" or "redirect" are the only outcomes that are consistent with the community consensus. I favor "redirect" over "delete". Cbl62 (talk) 00:10, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

P.S. BeanieFan found abundant sourcing (over 25 of them) with real substance to expand the Fred Vehmeier article, and it is now rated as a "Good" article. My "keep" vote there in no way supports a similar result for this one-database-sourced substub. If you or someone else is able to find similar sourcing for Sahr Kendor, I will gladly change my vote. Cbl62 (talk) 00:20, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

To be honest, when I was linking that I didn't put two and two together realize that you were the one who actually said that. So you can take your deserved "do you know who I am?" moment and I'll take the WP:TROUT on that one. And I should have said "creator of the proposal" rather than consensus which of course is never created by one person.

I still have difficulty squaring the two guidelines, especially for Olympians whose primary impact is sometimes more political / diplomatic in nature than sport-related. For example, one could imagine a case where Alan Turing could be written up as a sports figure – would that mean a harsher set of rules applies to him than other scientists who never participated in sport? And likewise for some Olympians who are known primarily for being slow rather than for their sporting accomplishments per se? I'm interested in exploring these scenarios further some time. --Habst (talk) 21:08, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

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.