Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Ahmadiyya Books

Ahmadiyya Books
This is an interesting user experiment. Ignoring the issues of having a bunch of modules with a completely inconsistant naming system, this Wikibook is essentially an advertisement for English translations of books that would be in the public domain now. The translation is copyrighted, which is why I think this user decided to go this route instead. The question I'm bring up here in this forum is if creating a catalog of external books is an acceptable practice on Wikibooks, especially if that is the objective and purpose of the Wikibook. I don't mind some references to external books exist, but this is seemingly a stealth advertisement to another website. --Rob Horning 07:06, 23 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Delete I don't think we want collections of links. Its ok as a temporary stage while writing the content, but we want more than just links in the end.  There have been no substantial edits for months.  In addition, I think there are major POV isues here. --Gabe Sechan 08:14, 23 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Weak delete. I left a message at the author's talk page.  I suppose this could become more than a list of books.  There is some small attempt at commentary, though I would guess that more is needed to make this worth keeping.  Will there be more detailed commentary?  Is there a unifying theme?  Will there be more discussion of Islam in general?  Will there be any clue as to what an Ahmadiyya book (as opposed to other books on or within the Islamic faith) is?  As for POV issues, it's been my vague impression that we've been a bit more tolerant of pushing the POV boundry on pages about religions than on other pages.  I don't see this book as worth keeping in its present state.  But let's at least give the author a chance to respond.  Maybe he or someone else will rescue this and turn it into something to be kept.  We shouldn't wait indefinately for this to happen, but we should be somewhat slow to delete this.  The VfD on Astronomy inspired someone to take it under his wing.  If we're lucky, someone will do that here as well.  --JMRyan 19:59, 23 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I think its a mistake to put the religion books on a different standard. Many of the religion books here need MAJOR cleanup, including the Christianity wikibook, and I think its well past time someone strong armed the contributors into doing so.  The only reason I haven't put a vfd on it already is that I don't want it actually deleted, I want it fixed.  But by putting religion books on a different standard you set the stage for the loosening of standards in general.  If anything, being such highly divisive topics they should be held to higher standards.  --Gabe Sechan 21:23, 23 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't really mean to put religion books on a different NPOV standard, I merely intended to note a trend.  I had intended (but apparently forgot) to add a "for better or worse" phrase to that sentence so that I wouldn't be approving or disapproving of the trend.  We certainly shouldn't have an official policy of being easier on religion books.  As for an unofficial de facto policy of being more tolerant of a POV slant on religion pages, I guess I'm of two minds.  On one hand, we ideally need to hold all pages to the same high standard.  On the other hand, idealism is sometimes impractical.  There is a LOT of mess on Wikibooks to be cleaned up, religion books can become magnets for POV fights, and it may not be worth the effort to expend alot of energy on such problems.  BTW, after an admittedly very brief check, the Christianity book did not seem nearly as bad to me on the POV issue as Christian Theology&mdash;though Christianity's long list of claimed prophecy fullfillment listed as fact on the front page did seem rather much.  (Note on Christian Theology.  It has a lot of links to Wikipedia pages, but a few of its front page links are to its own subpages.  Those subpages have some pretty bad POV problems.  Christianity may look worse than it is because some of its front page links are to those POV infested Christian Theology subpages.)  To get back to the subject at hand, namely Ahmadiyya Books, I think it needs some rescuing to be worth keeping and that I would want to see where such rescuing (if it occurs) goes before worrying too much about its POV issues. --JMRyan 20:08, 24 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment I actually have this entire book, except for its one longest subpage, saved into my sandbox. I decided against merging everything into one page, and was planning to move the subpages to start with "Ahmadiyya Books/". Most of the external links point into http://www.alislam.org which is a suitable reference for writing a book about this religious movement. Most of the book content appears to be summary information, not advertisement information, though I did not check the content carefully. However, the subpages do not well form a Wikibook; they describe not the relationship between the different Ahmadiyya books, and might work better as independent encyclopedia articles. The information should already be available at alislam.org or in Wikipedia; if this book was deleted, anyone could attempt a better book using alislam.org as a reference. --Kernigh 07:01, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Deleted No opposition to deletion. --Kernigh 01:02, 3 April 2006 (UTC)