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A fact from Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the Did you know column on 31 July 2012 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
In this edit i just made, there are about 11 words matching between source and destination. This was sort of "detected" in the toolserver link given at
Template:Did you know nominations/Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani, but not all the words were bolded. Five words are (after my edit) an internal Wikipedia link. This 11 word length is more than the 7-8 word length i suggested in the Template:DYK discussion for using quotation marks if we include the link, but it becomes only 6 words if we exclude the link. I cannot see any simple, straightforward way to say the same information in a different style - we could use the word "universal" to describe human rights concepts, but not all readers are familiar with this - "everyone" is more common English. IMHO quotation marks are not needed. This is also the difficult case where there is ambiguity about whether quotation marks refer to the person's words or to the publication's words.
Boud (
talk)
11:56, 28 July 2012 (UTC)reply
I've re-worded it to "Al-Qahtani believes that all people, even those suspected to have terrorism activities, have the right to a fair trial." I hope the meaning is preserved this time :) oh and sorry for the disturbance I seem to have caused to you! Mohamed CJ(talk)22:27, 28 July 2012 (UTC)reply
No need to apologise :). Wiki, wiki,
wiki! There is still a problem though, which is why i said it was difficult to say this in another way.
WP:WEASEL - the word "even" implies that it is normal to exclude terrorism suspects from "all people", and suggests that al-Qahtani's point of view is an extreme POV. The word "including" is more of a disambiguation - since different people have different POVs for interpreting "all" (as in
Animal Farm, "some people are more equal than others"). Another way of saying it: "including" is more neutral here than "even". This gets back to what i'm saying about a source that uses the simplest way of saying things - it's not easy if there is just one source and it uses rather neutral wording. I would also say that "all people" sounds a bit awkward, but i won't change that back. I'm just doing a minor change for "even" and for more natural English, other Wikipedians will edit further :).
Boud (
talk)
09:05, 29 July 2012 (UTC)reply
Snowballs?
"problems will snowball out of control" — is this really a translation of what he said, or is it a rather inappropriate paraphrase? This was an Arabian, talking to other Arabians. I wonder how many of them had ever seen a snowball.
Maproom (
talk)
21:57, 31 July 2012 (UTC)reply
I did actually wonder about that myself. Snowballs in KSA are probably quite easy to control - they melt and evaporate long before they grow big. However... First let's quote from this Wikipedia article: "Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani has a PhD from Indiana University in the United States." Chances are he saw snowballs there. Even without seeing them, he must have become reasonably fluent in English in order to get a PhD. He could have picked up the metaphor and forgotten that it might sound odd in KSA. The source states that this is from "an e-mail message after the charges were filed." We don't know if it was sent to the author (
Thomas Lippman) or someone else. But a quote from an email should be word-for-word. In any case, the responsibility for misquoting/paraphrasing - if that was done - would be Lippman's.
Boud (
talk)
22:56, 31 July 2012 (UTC)reply
Eh, a stereotype? Actually using snowballing example is common in the Arab world. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and some more have snow naturally, while in other countries there are things such as
Ski Dubai. Yes it's
like an oven here in Bahrain during the summer and that gets worse due to humidity (40-60% of electricity is used on air conditioning), but we still can see snow in literature, TV... etc. Mohamed CJ(talk)10:36, 1 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a
move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
Per WP:COMMONNAME, as this is the name most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources. BBC News uses "Mohammad al-Qahtani" here:
[1]. French news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) uses "Mohammed al-Qahtani" here:
[2]; however the spelling with an "e" in Mohammed is commonly used by NYT and other reliable sources for the Guantanamo Bay prisoner. The English language Middle East publication, Jadaliyya also also uses "Mohammad al-Qahtani" here:
[3].
Neotarf (
talk)
22:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Oppose.
Muhammad_(name), including the various transliterations, is the most common given name in the world according to a source cited in that Wikipedia article.
Al-Qahtani is also common enough: the present al-Qahtani disambiguation page has 9 entries, 6 of which are links to existing en.Wikipedia articles. Moreover, 4 out of the 6 existing ones concern four different people all called Muhammad (with transliteration variations) al-Qahtani; 6 out of the 9 full list are called Muhammad al-Qahtani. With 2/3 of the al-Qahtani's being Muhammad al-Qahtani, the risk of ambiguity is huge. Let's also think of Wikipedia long-term development. Notable people from the Arabian Peninsula are probably under-represented in the en.Wikipedia at the moment, so the number of en.Wikipedia Muhammad al-Qahtanis is more likely to increase over the next twenty years rather than decrease. As you say yourself, AFP uses the "e" rather than the "a" latin spelling. Instead, I think the real question is whether we need a separate disambiguation page
Mohammed al-Qahtani (in one of the transliteration variations), with other spellings redirecting to that page, given that (at the moment), literally most en.Wikipedia-notable people called al-Qahtani are called Muhammad al-Qahtani (with transliteration variants and along with other names that disambiguate), or whether the
al-Qahtani disambiguation page is enough on its own. IMHO it should be OK to create either
Mohammed al-Qahtani (disambiguation) or
Muhammad al-Qahtani as an attributed copy/paste of the al-Qahtani disambiguation page, with the 1/3 of non-Muhammad's removed. We would then proposed a requested move from
Mohammed al-Qahtani to
Mohammed Mana Ahmed al-Qahtani.
Boud (
talk)
23:51, 5 September 2012 (UTC)reply
According to
WP:CRYSTALBALL, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. "While scientific and cultural norms continually evolve, we must wait for this evolution to happen, rather than try to predict it." In fact, there are only two individuals named Mohammed/Mohammad al-Qahtani who currently have Wikipedia articles. They are:
Mohammed (Mana) (Ahmed) al-Qahtani (Guantanamo Bay prisoner)...... currently at
Mohammed al-Qahtani
Mohammad (Fahad) (Muflih) al-Qahtani (economics professor and human rights organisation co-founder)...... currently at
Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani
There is also a redirect at
Mohammad al-Qahtanithat unfortunately points to the prisoner, who I think we can agree is not the
primary topic here.
WP:TITLE policy is clear that "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." Adding the father's and grandfather's names may be more formal in Arab culture, but the English-language sources are not using it for either of these individuals.
Let me just add that although I am interested in title policy, this is the first time I have ever requested a move myself. I do not usually bother to try to rename articles. This one however I have been using to create a new article, and I had a lot of frustrations trying to find it. If you read the BBC article, then google "Mohammad al-Qahtani" (as the article refers to him), the only Wikipedia article you come up is about the Guantanamo Bay prisoner. If someone like me who is somewhat familiar with Wikipedia and already knows an article exists has so much trouble finding it, how much more difficult will this be for an ordinary reader who sees the BBC piece and just wants more information.
You seem to think that this is the primary topic, however the other has more views. If neither of them are primary we should make a disambiguation page that links to both of them. The main point of discussion here is whether there is a primary article or not and based on that we can create disambiguation page, move pages and/or add hat notes. Mohamed CJ(talk)09:29, 7 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Google is a powerful determinate of page views, and Google is sending all requests for Mohammad or Mohammed al-Qahtani to the article about the prisoner. I'm surprised that anyone at all has been able to find the activist's article.
I suspect a lot of the recent page hits were people looking for Mohammad al-Qahtani, the activist, instead.
BTW, there is no technical need to disambiguate. Since the software recognizes differences in spelling, they are technically not at the same title, and therefore no need to determine "primary topic".
(edit conflict)Both articles already have a hatnote pointing to the other; according to
WP:TWODABS a disambiguation page is not necessary if there are only two articles with the same title. I certainly wouldn't object, but it seems like unnecessary work.
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a
move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
Additional names
There is a new article today from Al Arabiya News that identifies al-Qahtani as "Mohammad bin Fahad bin Muflih al-Qahtani" (son of Fahad, son of Muflih).
[9] Accordingly I have changed his full formal name in the article to "Mohammad Fahad Muflih al-Qahtani". Also I have changed the redirect, but I doubt if that will help much. BTW, has anyone else noticed he doesn't seem to have an article in the Arabic wiki? Doesn't that seem odd?
Neotarf (
talk)
18:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)reply
This Fahad al-Qahtani was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 2013, effectively because of human rights activism
BBC; it is extremely unlikely that he is "Chairman of the Board of Directors of Al-Salam Holding Company", and quite absurd to believe that he "described Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi," an authoritarian leader under whom dissidents are imprisoned and tortured on a massive scale, "as the dean of humanity and a man of peace".
Boud (
talk)
10:03, 10 August 2022 (UTC)reply
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to
join the project and
contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the
documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Human rights, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
Human rights on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Human rightsWikipedia:WikiProject Human rightsTemplate:WikiProject Human rightsHuman rights articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Saudi Arabia, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to
Saudi Arabia on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Saudi ArabiaWikipedia:WikiProject Saudi ArabiaTemplate:WikiProject Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia articles
A fact from Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the Did you know column on 31 July 2012 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
In this edit i just made, there are about 11 words matching between source and destination. This was sort of "detected" in the toolserver link given at
Template:Did you know nominations/Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani, but not all the words were bolded. Five words are (after my edit) an internal Wikipedia link. This 11 word length is more than the 7-8 word length i suggested in the Template:DYK discussion for using quotation marks if we include the link, but it becomes only 6 words if we exclude the link. I cannot see any simple, straightforward way to say the same information in a different style - we could use the word "universal" to describe human rights concepts, but not all readers are familiar with this - "everyone" is more common English. IMHO quotation marks are not needed. This is also the difficult case where there is ambiguity about whether quotation marks refer to the person's words or to the publication's words.
Boud (
talk)
11:56, 28 July 2012 (UTC)reply
I've re-worded it to "Al-Qahtani believes that all people, even those suspected to have terrorism activities, have the right to a fair trial." I hope the meaning is preserved this time :) oh and sorry for the disturbance I seem to have caused to you! Mohamed CJ(talk)22:27, 28 July 2012 (UTC)reply
No need to apologise :). Wiki, wiki,
wiki! There is still a problem though, which is why i said it was difficult to say this in another way.
WP:WEASEL - the word "even" implies that it is normal to exclude terrorism suspects from "all people", and suggests that al-Qahtani's point of view is an extreme POV. The word "including" is more of a disambiguation - since different people have different POVs for interpreting "all" (as in
Animal Farm, "some people are more equal than others"). Another way of saying it: "including" is more neutral here than "even". This gets back to what i'm saying about a source that uses the simplest way of saying things - it's not easy if there is just one source and it uses rather neutral wording. I would also say that "all people" sounds a bit awkward, but i won't change that back. I'm just doing a minor change for "even" and for more natural English, other Wikipedians will edit further :).
Boud (
talk)
09:05, 29 July 2012 (UTC)reply
Snowballs?
"problems will snowball out of control" — is this really a translation of what he said, or is it a rather inappropriate paraphrase? This was an Arabian, talking to other Arabians. I wonder how many of them had ever seen a snowball.
Maproom (
talk)
21:57, 31 July 2012 (UTC)reply
I did actually wonder about that myself. Snowballs in KSA are probably quite easy to control - they melt and evaporate long before they grow big. However... First let's quote from this Wikipedia article: "Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani has a PhD from Indiana University in the United States." Chances are he saw snowballs there. Even without seeing them, he must have become reasonably fluent in English in order to get a PhD. He could have picked up the metaphor and forgotten that it might sound odd in KSA. The source states that this is from "an e-mail message after the charges were filed." We don't know if it was sent to the author (
Thomas Lippman) or someone else. But a quote from an email should be word-for-word. In any case, the responsibility for misquoting/paraphrasing - if that was done - would be Lippman's.
Boud (
talk)
22:56, 31 July 2012 (UTC)reply
Eh, a stereotype? Actually using snowballing example is common in the Arab world. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and some more have snow naturally, while in other countries there are things such as
Ski Dubai. Yes it's
like an oven here in Bahrain during the summer and that gets worse due to humidity (40-60% of electricity is used on air conditioning), but we still can see snow in literature, TV... etc. Mohamed CJ(talk)10:36, 1 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a
move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
Per WP:COMMONNAME, as this is the name most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources. BBC News uses "Mohammad al-Qahtani" here:
[1]. French news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) uses "Mohammed al-Qahtani" here:
[2]; however the spelling with an "e" in Mohammed is commonly used by NYT and other reliable sources for the Guantanamo Bay prisoner. The English language Middle East publication, Jadaliyya also also uses "Mohammad al-Qahtani" here:
[3].
Neotarf (
talk)
22:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Oppose.
Muhammad_(name), including the various transliterations, is the most common given name in the world according to a source cited in that Wikipedia article.
Al-Qahtani is also common enough: the present al-Qahtani disambiguation page has 9 entries, 6 of which are links to existing en.Wikipedia articles. Moreover, 4 out of the 6 existing ones concern four different people all called Muhammad (with transliteration variations) al-Qahtani; 6 out of the 9 full list are called Muhammad al-Qahtani. With 2/3 of the al-Qahtani's being Muhammad al-Qahtani, the risk of ambiguity is huge. Let's also think of Wikipedia long-term development. Notable people from the Arabian Peninsula are probably under-represented in the en.Wikipedia at the moment, so the number of en.Wikipedia Muhammad al-Qahtanis is more likely to increase over the next twenty years rather than decrease. As you say yourself, AFP uses the "e" rather than the "a" latin spelling. Instead, I think the real question is whether we need a separate disambiguation page
Mohammed al-Qahtani (in one of the transliteration variations), with other spellings redirecting to that page, given that (at the moment), literally most en.Wikipedia-notable people called al-Qahtani are called Muhammad al-Qahtani (with transliteration variants and along with other names that disambiguate), or whether the
al-Qahtani disambiguation page is enough on its own. IMHO it should be OK to create either
Mohammed al-Qahtani (disambiguation) or
Muhammad al-Qahtani as an attributed copy/paste of the al-Qahtani disambiguation page, with the 1/3 of non-Muhammad's removed. We would then proposed a requested move from
Mohammed al-Qahtani to
Mohammed Mana Ahmed al-Qahtani.
Boud (
talk)
23:51, 5 September 2012 (UTC)reply
According to
WP:CRYSTALBALL, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. "While scientific and cultural norms continually evolve, we must wait for this evolution to happen, rather than try to predict it." In fact, there are only two individuals named Mohammed/Mohammad al-Qahtani who currently have Wikipedia articles. They are:
Mohammed (Mana) (Ahmed) al-Qahtani (Guantanamo Bay prisoner)...... currently at
Mohammed al-Qahtani
Mohammad (Fahad) (Muflih) al-Qahtani (economics professor and human rights organisation co-founder)...... currently at
Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani
There is also a redirect at
Mohammad al-Qahtanithat unfortunately points to the prisoner, who I think we can agree is not the
primary topic here.
WP:TITLE policy is clear that "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." Adding the father's and grandfather's names may be more formal in Arab culture, but the English-language sources are not using it for either of these individuals.
Let me just add that although I am interested in title policy, this is the first time I have ever requested a move myself. I do not usually bother to try to rename articles. This one however I have been using to create a new article, and I had a lot of frustrations trying to find it. If you read the BBC article, then google "Mohammad al-Qahtani" (as the article refers to him), the only Wikipedia article you come up is about the Guantanamo Bay prisoner. If someone like me who is somewhat familiar with Wikipedia and already knows an article exists has so much trouble finding it, how much more difficult will this be for an ordinary reader who sees the BBC piece and just wants more information.
You seem to think that this is the primary topic, however the other has more views. If neither of them are primary we should make a disambiguation page that links to both of them. The main point of discussion here is whether there is a primary article or not and based on that we can create disambiguation page, move pages and/or add hat notes. Mohamed CJ(talk)09:29, 7 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Google is a powerful determinate of page views, and Google is sending all requests for Mohammad or Mohammed al-Qahtani to the article about the prisoner. I'm surprised that anyone at all has been able to find the activist's article.
I suspect a lot of the recent page hits were people looking for Mohammad al-Qahtani, the activist, instead.
BTW, there is no technical need to disambiguate. Since the software recognizes differences in spelling, they are technically not at the same title, and therefore no need to determine "primary topic".
(edit conflict)Both articles already have a hatnote pointing to the other; according to
WP:TWODABS a disambiguation page is not necessary if there are only two articles with the same title. I certainly wouldn't object, but it seems like unnecessary work.
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a
move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
Additional names
There is a new article today from Al Arabiya News that identifies al-Qahtani as "Mohammad bin Fahad bin Muflih al-Qahtani" (son of Fahad, son of Muflih).
[9] Accordingly I have changed his full formal name in the article to "Mohammad Fahad Muflih al-Qahtani". Also I have changed the redirect, but I doubt if that will help much. BTW, has anyone else noticed he doesn't seem to have an article in the Arabic wiki? Doesn't that seem odd?
Neotarf (
talk)
18:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)reply
This Fahad al-Qahtani was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 2013, effectively because of human rights activism
BBC; it is extremely unlikely that he is "Chairman of the Board of Directors of Al-Salam Holding Company", and quite absurd to believe that he "described Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi," an authoritarian leader under whom dissidents are imprisoned and tortured on a massive scale, "as the dean of humanity and a man of peace".
Boud (
talk)
10:03, 10 August 2022 (UTC)reply