Talk:Malik Abongo Obama

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Please discuss a proposed merger to Obama family of Kenya#Malik Abong'o Obama here.  $\sim$ Justmeherenow (  )

The person known by various news organizations (eg----

1. The Nation (Nairobi),
2. The Associated Press, and
3. Media Matters for America)----as Malik Obama, is, according to
4. ABC News, the older half-brother of Barack Obama, whom, as Barack notes in
5. Dreams from My Father, is also known to other members of the extended Obama family as "Roy" or "Abongo," as he has also been termed by
6. the Chicago Sun-Times.

• "In Obama's book Dreams of My Father, interestingly enough, he writes about meeting Malik as an adult: 'I checked into the cheapest room I could find and waited. At nine, I heard a knock. When I opened the door, I found a big man standing there with his hands in his pockets, an even-toothed grin breaking across his ebony face. "Hey, brother," he said. "How’s life?" In the pictures I had of Roy, he was slender[...].'"----JAKE TAPPER, ABC NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT (...with the underlining of stuff of course mine :^) — Justmeherenow (   ) 05:22, 7 July 2008 (UTC))

Incidentally, this bio's notability problem has been fixed through an expansion of sources. (It had had only had two, it had now more than eight.) And the article's length now doubled.  $\sim$ Justmeherenow (  ) 13:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The article should be speedily deleted

An AfD discussion on Abongo Obama has already taken place and the article was deleted and redirected back to Barack Obama. This is a recreation of the same material. --Loonymonkey (talk) 18:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

You've already participatd in the AfD, where you can clearly see that there is a healthy debate and considerable opposition to speedy deletion or deletion at all. Articles are not speedied like that. There's no speedy criterion that applies here. And please don't re-add the tag - that was the third time. At that point its just getting contentious. Wikidemo (talk) 18:04, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually there is a category specifically for this. It is G4. This article is a recreation of an article that was just deleted through an extensive AfD discussion. The "healthy debate" you speak of has already taken place and concluded. Why are we repeating the process exactly one day later? That's not how things work. If you disagree with the result you can't just start it all over again, you have to go through deletion review. So if this gets deleted again are we going to start the process a third time next week? To what end? And no, I didn't add a tag three times. --Loonymonkey (talk) 18:20, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

G4 clearly does not apply - read it! It applies to articles recreated if:

1. "the copy is substantially identical to the deleted version" - clearly not true: look at the differences since it was recreated. I don't see how anyone could call this[1] (being twice as long and lots more sources) substantially identical, and
2. "any changes in the recreated page do not address the reasons for which the material was deleted" The added sources and additional content address the question of notability and lack of sources.

This comes up all the time, actually. If the new article is recreated in different form, or otherwise addresses the deletion reason, it's not a speedy candidate, pure and simple. It has to go through AfD. No, you do not have to go through deletion review. But I'm not the one who recreated the article. The AfD discussion has reached 35,000 bytes in 8 hours. Obviously this isn't a slam dunk for deletion. The tag has been added three times, and removed three times in a few hours. So clearly something is going on here beyond a normal deletion discussion. Some people really want to see this article gone. Speedies are supposed to cover uncontroversial cases, not cases where some people simply want an article to stay deleted - that doesn't count as a criterion. Wikidemo (talk) 18:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

removal of speedy-deletion tag

I removed the speedy-deletion tag due to a non-trivial number of editors recommending "Keep" in the AfD and the differences between this article and what I remember of the deleted article. The article may still die in AfD but it's pretty clear speedy-deleting it would be wrong and end up in deletion review. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I still don't understand why this doesn't qualify under G4. Why are we repeating a discussion that just concluded yesterday? --Loonymonkey (talk) 18:26, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

G4 is for the same content, not the same article name or even the same subject. If I post a lame article about a semi-notable band and don't include references, and it gets deleted as non-notable, then the next day someone starts over and writes a WP:GA about the same band, and he makes a clear case of notability with solid references, it would be rediculous to deleted it "just because it qualifies for G4." This article doesn't rise to that level of quality and confirmed notability, which is why it's in AfD rather than being allowed to live unchallenged. I and enough other editors think it's sufficiently different from the original that any administrator who deleted it under G4 would have to explain himself at a deletion review. Given that there is an AfD in progress, removing the speedy tag eliminates that possibility. The alternative is to find an administrator willing to delete it under G4, launch a deletion review, have the article restored, and have the AfD continue. That's a WP:BIGWASTEOFTIME. As for this article's AfD, it may have a fighting chance at reaching "no consensus to delete/default keep" if people keep improving it. Personally, I think his whole family needs to be merged into a "Family of Barak Obama" article with only notable members having their own article. See also: Ignore All Rules and POINT. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, thank you for taking the time to explain it to me, although I still don't agree that this article is substantially different from the one that was deleted just yesterday. However, the ease of AfD versus the complication of deletion review issue wasn't something that I had considered. As for WP:POINT, when I added the CSD tag, I hadn't noticed that one had already been added and removed (I missed it in the history). For that, I apologize. --Loonymonkey (talk) 18:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Merger mania!

Now that the WP:AfD discussion closed with a WP:MERGE result[2] we have to decide where to merge the info. The three logical choices are:

• A new article about Obama's Kenyan relatives (e.g. Kenyan relatives of Barrack Obama). My first choice, although I'm not sure of the best name. Other than some of the individuals themselves being notable or semi-notable this is a notable issue / concept in itself, that Obama has a heritage in Kenya and that the Kenyan side of the family is a distinct thing with its own cultural context, interest, coverage (many articles about the Kenyan family group them together), etc.
• Barack Obama, Sr.. I think this is a weak second choice. To merge all the relatives into his father's article creates a portmanteau of two different things. The Obama Sr. article is already about the life of Obama Sr. The notion of Obama Jr. having a Kenyan side to the family full of individuals with their own Kenyan cultural identity, experience, etc., is a different thing entirely and not really part of the Obama Sr. life and story. Moreover the Obama Sr. article is already reasonably long - a combined article with the man and his various children, wives, parents, step parents, etc., would get unruly, overly long, and poorly organized.
• The main Barack Obama article. Not very good because that article is already too long, and we've broken out various aspects into child articles. The issue of his Kenyan family and heritage is clearly important, but not enough to devote a large amount of text.

I should note there's a brand new WP:AfD for Sarah Obama at the moment, and if the result is merge that would reasonably go in this article too, along with Hussein Onyango Obama and some of the others. - Wikidemo (talk) 02:51, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

At first glance the "Kenyan relatives..." article seems the most attractive, but after thinking it over my vote is for merging into Barack Obama. It was the result of the Afd that Mr. Malik isn't notable enough to warrent his own article, if this also turns out to be the case for the Sarah Obama article, then I basically see the "Kenyan relatives.." as a lumping together of people not worthy of their own article, almost as if to say "These people are not notable in themselves, but if you mash them together, they equal a notable article"; that just seems too awkward to me. As for my reason to merge into Barack's article: The only reason that I can find that Mr. Malik is even mentioned is because he is related to the popular Barack. It would seem he has made some sort of impact on Barack's life, so the most simple way to show this is to add it to Barack's article. If it is the consensus that Barack's article is too long, then either only the most notable information about the man should be included (whatever that is, whether it includes Malik or not, that's for a different discussion to determine) OR a section of Barack's article should be split off into a "Bio of Brack Obama" article and a summary given on his main article (as is often done with sports teams), I don't think it'll be any problem with finding a place for Malik, Sarah, or any other person who has impacted Barack in some way on that page. Blackngold29 04:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the lumping together of unnotable people will not make them more notable. As for Wikidemo's point - if there were all of the information you talk about regarding these individuals' identity, experience, etc., and that was reliably sourced, and their notability was demonstrated outside of the fact that some might think they are notable just because they are Kenyan relatives of a presidential candidate - then their individual articles might have been deemed viable. But the information is sorely lacking. I think that Barack Obama, Sr. is the logical place for Malik/Roy/Abongo, but we don't have all that much to say about him of any note - I don't think a description of him in robes is encyclopedic. At one point the Obama Sr article mentioned Auma's occupation if I recall correctly (social worker perhaps? I don't remember now), so we can add that too and anything else of note that we might know about the other Obama half-sibs, but I don't think much is known and sourced. Thanks for the pointer to the new Sarah AfD. Here we go again. Tvoz/talk 07:30, 13 July 2008 (UTC)