Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Tahir Abbas (3rd nomination)

Note to closing admin

Please remember that a "no consensus" defaults to delete on BLPs. Cheers. Cla68 (talk) 00:24, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I had the impression that you were thoroughly familiar with BLP policies, but it appears that impression was mistaken. Let's quote what WP:DPAFD actually says: "Discussions concerning biographical articles of relatively unknown, non-public figures, where the subject has requested deletion and there is no rough consensus may be closed as delete." Key points: applies to "non-public figures" (not all BLPs), and it may be closed as delete (not "defaults to delete"). If you would like the deletion policy to say something different, you might pay a visit to WT:DEL. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 00:50, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Problem with close (from User talk:Sandstein)

I noticed that in the deletion you say:

At WP:DPAFD, the policy provides that "Poorly sourced biographical articles of unknown, non-public figures − where the discussions have no rough consensus, but also have no editor opposing the deletion − may be deleted after discussions have been completed", which does not apply to this case.

If you look at the history of the policy page, however, that text was added [on December 24], just before you closed the AFD. Previously, only the sentence before that was present, which says:

Discussions concerning biographical articles of relatively unknown, non-public figures, where the subject has requested deletion and there is no rough consensus may be closed as delete.

As you'll notice, that sentence has no qualifier about "no editor opposing the deletion", so would indeed apply in this case. Given the timing of the change, the whole thing looks very suspicious--I wonder if someone added that text specifically to try to kill this AFD. I just took it out again, considering that it hasn't been discussed in the deletion policy talkpage.

You closed it as Delete anyway, but you might want to consider modifying the close a bit to take this into account. Ken Arromdee (talk) 21:55, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, and I am embarrassed to say that I appear to have overlooked the first (and now only) remaining sentence. But as you say, this has no impact on the outcome of the closure - indeed it supports the deletion of the article - so I don't think a modification of the closing rationale is required. I'll copy this thread from my talk page to the AfD talk page, though.  Sandstein  09:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)