User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/other articles that aren't ready yet/Arkyan reply

Thanks for your offer to help

Yeah, it was a lot of work. Well over 1000 hours. Maybe well over 2000 hours.

After I wrote to you User:Dysepsion left another message on the {{afd}}, where he repeated that the only personal stuff was in the first sentence. (presumably he meant the first sentence.) I left him a [[1]] too, which may have been a mistake, since I know it is considered bad manners to take {{afd}}s to people's own personal talk pages. After I left him a message I realized what has happened. Everyone has their screen resolution at 1024x768 or 1164x864. And they are only seeing the first screen full of the article. No one is scrolling down to the factors.

And, no offense, I remembered your comment about the looking at dozen identical articles. Initially I didn't put in those two or three paragraphs explaining the context of the combatant status review tribunal and the context of the administrative review board. I got complaints. People needed some kind of context. But very a very small handful of exceptions the articles are all different. Different allegations. Different testimony. Sometimes press reports.

Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari is one of the longer ones. So is Abdullah Khan's.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think the material in those articles merits coverage on the wikipedia. Now, I know I don't own my contributions. If I have become myopic, too focussed, and the consensus is this level of coverage is too detailed maybe union articles makes more sense.

I have a philosophical problem with excessive merging individual articles to lists, instead of having lists that supplement individual articles.

One of the little chapters in Ted Nelson's brilliant book "Computer Lib" had some cute little pictures of piiles of blocks. One pile had blocks labelled "God", "Man", "Yale". Another pile said something like "Birds", "Bees", "Flowers". IIRC he said something like, "All hierarchies are essentially arbitrary". He is right. This is deeply and profoundly true. IMO anyone who tells you that a particular order is the obvious order, has a POV they are pushing -- and probably isn't aware of it. Taid Said Zaid.

• We could eliminate his article, and try to shoehorn details about him on the list of Saudis.
• We could eliminate his article, and try to shoehorn details about him on the list of people whose names start with "Z".
• We could eliminate his article, and try to shoehorn details about him on to the list of people alleged to have attended the al Farouq training camp. (the most widely attended al qaeda training camp, one he is actually alleged to have attended...)
• We could eliminate his article, and try to shoehorn details about him on to the list of people whose names, or known aliases, were found on "a list of 324 Arabic names".

If we eliminate the article about any particular captive, and shoehorn some of the details about him onto a list, then we seriously short-change any reader who wants to traverse the tree of human knowledge through a different path than the list maker.

If, on the other hand, we have a larger cloud, or smaller, more connected articles, readers have the freedome to choose to travers the multidimensional tree of human knowledge on their own path, with no artificial restrictions.

This is profoundly powerful, and this power is lost whenever we let a list-admirer lock us in the heirarchy that makes sense to them.

If the main details, even the relatively modest ones we have about Said Zaid, are in an article devoted only to him, then all the lists he could belong in can link to his article, without shoehorning in details about him, and his compatriots, onto lists where those details don't really belong.

I warned you about my frustration that no-one wants to listen to others advance the advantages of the wikipedia's competing underlying design philosophies.

I have to be careful about those suspicious lists. I am extremely curious about them. I would love to do something like traffic analysis on them. But I can't do that in article space. That would be a violation of WP:SYN or WP:NOR. I am not going to do that. But simply wrapping a list of the the captive's listed on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's web-site would not be a violation of WP:NOR. At least I think it wouldn't. Just as it I don't think lists like allegations that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to terrorism, Casio F91W, al Farouq training camp, Khalden training camp, don't violate WP:NOR

There were a bunch of newspaper articles, shortly after the transcripts came out, that tried to list all the captives who faced the allegation that they owned a Casio watch. There were newspaper articles that listed the known alumni of Khalden, or al Farouq. They only found a dozen watch owners. Similarly, they listed a few more than a dozen alumni. Well, the wikipedia lists over a hundred al Farouq alumni, and several dozen Khalden alumni. Some people might say this is "original research", but some of the more experienced people I trust concur with me that this is merely collation, and fully complies with policy, so long as I am disciplined enough to refrain from injecting my own opinions.

About those lists...

Several captives are alleged to have their name listed on NGO web-sites, where the NGO's announced purpose is to lobby internationally for the "prisoners" release. Well Jeez Louise. This could a website as mainstream as Amnesty International's.

Some captives are alleged to have been listed on as many as five lists. There are several similar soundling lists, where the two lists generally occur together. It would be absolutely be a violation of several wikipolicies for me to make connections between these lists in article space. My personal opinion is that this is an instance were the same basic fact was echoed in multiple reports, making the captive look a lot worse than they actually were.