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 no consensus‎. The discussion has derailed into a quarrel about who's responsibility it is to find source material (cf: "You show me the sources!" "No, you show me the sources!) and there's been no significant agreement that the (admittedly, hard to find) sources discovered during the debate can be used to write a decent article. I don't think the discussion is going to generate any further insights, so it's best to close it now. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:59, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ismael Mahmoud Ghassab (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

3 of the 4 provided sources are databases and insufficient for meeting WP:SPORTSCRIT and WP:NOLY. The other source [1] doesn't appear to be SIGCOV. No evidence of actual third party indepth coverage. LibStar (talk) 01:30, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sportspeople, Olympics, Sport of athletics, and Jordan. LibStar (talk) 01:30, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Did you search any Jordanian news sources? BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:20, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I can't read Arabic. Did you do any searches? LibStar (talk) 02:42, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not the nominator. If you can't search for sources (WP:BEFORE), why should you be able to nominate this for deletion? BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:45, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I've searched for sources and can't find any. If you are supporting keep (which I guess you do), please provide sources. Thanks in advance. LibStar (talk) 02:46, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I've searched for sources – in Arabic? Because any coverage that exists would be there, not in English. BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:49, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Please provide evidence of sources. LibStar (talk) 02:51, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As I said previously I can't read Arabic. Please stop playing games. LibStar (talk) 02:51, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  "playing games"? Suggesting that someone should actually look for sources before mass nominating articles for deletion is not "playing games"... BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:23, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I have searched "news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR" Prove me wrong and show me some sources. I'll happily withdraw this AfD is actual sources are find. LibStar (talk) 22:27, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And think about it: how many of those have anything from 1980s Jordan, or even Arabic? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:29, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Have you done any searches? Instead of arguing here. LibStar (talk) 22:31, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Prove me wrong and show me some sources. LibStar (talk) 22:32, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You're the one mass nominating articles for deletion! See WP:BEFORE. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:33, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'll ask again, you seem to be avoiding the question. Have you found any sources? Or do you prefer just to argue more? LibStar (talk) 22:35, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I do not have access to any of the sources that would have covered the person. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:36, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  So there aren't sources? Or do you have something that would support a keep vote? LibStar (talk) 22:36, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @LibStar There are sources, the issue is that you haven't done the WP:BEFORE work of finding them given the context of this article and what we already know about the subject's accomplishments. Sometimes, searching for sources takes more than just typing words into a search engine. --Habst (talk) 13:40, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Onus is on the keep voters to provide sources. LibStar (talk) 13:54, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @LibStar No, the onus is on the nominator to do WP:BEFORE. If you agree that sources exist, then you should withdraw the nomination like you did at WP:Articles for deletion/Chae Hong-nak. --Habst (talk) 14:11, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I withdraw when there is evidence of sources. When there is no evidence I support delete. Do you accept the 2 athlete articles were deleted in the last 24 hours despite your best efforts? LibStar (talk) 14:13, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I did not withdraw this one because no sources were supplied. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Moustafa Matola. Other editors and the closing admin agreed with delete. LibStar (talk) 14:17, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @LibStar Do you accept the 2 athlete articles were deleted – Yes, they were deleted. What is the point of this line of questioning? Each application of NEXIST needs to be looked at on its own merits.

  P.S. as there are so many ongoing threads, please ping me on responses so I won't miss it. --Habst (talk) 18:53, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment part of WP:BEFORE is to make a reasonable effort to search for sources. Because the nominator didn't search Arabic sources for coverage for this Jordanian athlete, I think a procedural keep is appropriate. On the merits, we'd expect someone who finished 13th at a global marathon championship, from a country that rarely performs that well, to have local coverage. --Habst (talk) 13:52, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Expect to have local coverage? We need to see evidence of it. LibStar (talk) 22:04, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @LibStar, with respect that's not what WP:N says. I don't think enough care is being put into these nominations and PRODs in such a narrow subject area, 52+ and counting this month. Coverage exists for many of them as in WP:Articles for deletion/Chae Hong-nak, but it takes significant time to do the research and having so many nominations flooding the zone makes it impossible to do in a week. --Habst (talk) 13:31, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You seem to able to respond and comment extensively in all AfDs. LibStar (talk) 22:25, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Do you have any understanding that mass nominating articles for deletion in a limited subject area on topics that are highly likely notable but it is ludicrously hard to search for sources for could make it a little difficult to respond to all on time? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:27, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Ask for a change in AfD rules then. Habst and you seem to have a lot of time for arguing, perhaps time better spent searching for sources. LibStar (talk) 22:29, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  From the person who mass nominates articles without looking in any relevant places for sources, then accuses anyone frustrated at this of playing games... Sheesh... BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:32, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You seem to spend more time arguing than actually looking for sources. I ask again have you found any sources? LibStar (talk) 22:33, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You've made at least 10 comments here, potentially 10-20 minutes of your time, that could have been spent searching. I welcome any sources you have identified. LibStar (talk) 22:36, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It looks like the online records for The Jordan Times only go back to 2015, so that's unlikely to be helpful for an athlete who was competing in the 1980s. Its Arabic sister paper, Al Ra'i, gives search results back to at least 2006, but still not far enough. Ad-Dustour doesn't seem to go that far back.

  You don't really have to be able to read Arabic to search for it. His name is اسماعيل محمود•قصاب. Just copy and paste that into a website that you want to search. See if you get results that look relevant (e.g., contain photos of athletes). If you do, run the text through machine translation. This won't help with television news (which would have been popular at the relevant point in time), but it's better than shrugging your shoulders and declaring that doing an effective search is Somebody else's problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @WhatamIdoing, I appreciate your thought but the issue is this isn't the first (or second, or third) Jordanian Olympic athlete from the pre-Internet area to be PRODed or nominated to AfD recently. Maybe there's something we both missed, but when I did a search I couldn't find a single Jordanian newspaper that has searchable pre-Internet archives. That doesn't mean finding sources is impossible, but it does mean it would take a dedicated effort that can't be split over the nearly 100 recent PRODs or AfD over this narrow subject area within a week. --Habst (talk) 13:21, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree that this is a time-and-effort problem. At some level, we all know that there is local coverage on every modern Olympic athlete, because (a) local newspapers always run the 'local kid does well internationally' kinds of stories, because articles that combine national pride, local people, and good news sell well, and (b) every time someone has actually done the work of getting access to paper copies, they've found these sources.

  The community could decide that large-scale AFDs and PRODs on subjects for which coverage is most likely to be in a language that the nom doesn't read to be a disruptive behavioral problem. We should be able to nominate articles about Jordanian athletes, but we realistically have only a handful of editors who can competently evaluate the actual notability. It's a bad idea to nominate 100 in one week because we'll get the answer wrong – and nominating 100 in one week is behavior, not content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @WhatamIdoing, thanks, and just to be clear, the nearly 100 PRODs / AfDs I'm counting since the start of this month, although we only generally have a week to respond to each one.

  Having never dealt with an issue like this, what would be the appropriate venue to deal with it as a behavioral problem? --Habst (talk) 19:03, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'd suggest one of the village pumps, if you want to create a new rule limiting the throughput for AFD ("nobody should create more than 20 separate AFDs in a single week") or if you want to create a new process for discussing larger groups of articles that the nom is unable to competently assess ("If the subject is primarily a non-English subject, and you don't read that language at all, then you have to find someone who can speak that language first"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That makes sense. Also to BeanieFan11 and LibStar, arguments are unacceptable per WP:CIVIL in debate-related pages, such as AFD. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌ Clara A. Djalim ໒꒱˚｡⋆ 11:17, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• He's covered here, but the translation I get is very choppy. I found this when searching for another Jordanian athlete. Note that the name listed by Olympedia as his Arabic name shows "no matches" when I search it at that page, but based on the translation I know it does cover him (i.e. his name, which has coverage, is a different Arabic name than the one provided – we need to figure out how exactly to search for the correct Arabic name). BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:34, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree. I assumed that Olympedia got the Arabic spelling right, but no source is always typo-free. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:52, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Please note that while WP:BEFORE is our best practice, a nomination cannot be procedurally closed simply because the nominator didn't check for sources in a language with which they are unfamiliar. Contrarily, WP:NEXIST clearly tells us, However, once an article's notability has been challenged, merely asserting that unspecified sources exist is seldom persuasive, especially if time passes and actual proof does not surface.

Please focus on finding and assessing sources.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Owen× ☎ 22:44, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. I found this coverage:

Ismail Ghassab. The third Jordanian marathon champion: The most popular athlete in Jordan in the poll conducted by Al Rai newspaper early this year is now thinking about not practicing his favorite sport. And not participating in any upcoming tournament except under his own name. He trains alone and bitterly. And indifference! Ismail Ghassab carried the name "Al Yarmouk" and is known to be the student who broke the records of the most prestigious champions in Jordan. He is the only athlete at Yarmouk University who achieved an advanced 5th place; he is considered one of the best athletes not only in the university but also in the north. What are the real reasons that made him take such a position?

There are a lot of other hits, which strongly suggests that if SIGCOV exists on a Jordanian athlete, we do have access to it and a failure to find coverage in these sources is therefore good evidence against notability. JoelleJay (talk) 01:04, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for finding this. For a differing perspective, I consider this evidence that even third-rate Olympians like Ghassab (who only ran in the 2:30s and finished 64th at the Olympics) have coverage like this, then that means most of the similar AfDs in Wikipedia:WikiProject Olympics/Article alerts should have similar levels of coverage if we look hard enough (or even if we don't look for it, the coverage still exists).

It's also evidence of how there isn't a global or universal standard of achievement in sports, and even "slow" runners will often be highly notable depending on cultural context and performance in their country. I think in most cases, the reason why coverage can't be found is due to an incorrect name in the article or lack of good digitization of these texts. --Habst (talk) 01:18, 9 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

He still is not "highly" notable. Also, it does depend on cultural context, but we can't make original, unsupported assumptions about that context. Geschichte (talk) 14:54, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

With great respect I don't think it's original or unsupported to say that Ghassab is highly notable, if the WP:V source says he was "The most popular athlete in Jordan". It's fine to disagree about the level of notability or to say that the source got it wrong, but if we have a verifiable source saying this it's not original research. --Habst (talk) 15:26, 12 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like a good archived reference, but yes, multiple SIGCOV are usually required. I believe this is your first "Keep" vote while you usually voted "Delete" or "Redirect" depending on the potential AfD outcome. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌ Clara A. Djalim ໒꒱˚｡⋆ 11:13, 9 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, per JoelleJay. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:40, 8 March 2025 (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.