Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ali Mirzaei

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 keep. The issue of sourcing appears to be adequate adressed by the Phil Bridger and T L Miles. The only opinion supporting the nomination relies on Google hit counting to determine notability, which is a poor measure for non-English subjects. Since the "keep"s are both in a majority, and have more persuasive arguments regarding sourcing, I'm closing this a a keep. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:25, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Ali Mirzaei

Ali Mirzaei (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Non-notable chairman of a sports club (not a league, but a team in a league), was chair for one year, no sources on him the individual, notability not by association. MBisanz ^talk 22:14, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:01, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
• Keep. Nobody would dream of nominating a chairman/president of a team in the NFL or the Premier League for deletion. There are online sources in English that confirm the subject's position, so verifiabilty isn't an issue, and I can't believe that there wouldn't be plenty of coverage in Persian language sources about the chairman of a club in the top league of Iran's most popular sport. Notability isn't a matter of what sources can be found online in English, which is why we have specific guidelines for people such as politicians and athletes that say that we can assume that sources will be available for certain classes of subject. It would be assumed that any player for the club of which this man was chairman has been covered by reliable sources, and common sense would suggest that the same should apply to the subject. Phil Bridger (talk) 00:35, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

• WP:ATHLETE exists because it is presumed that an athlete is famous, having a following of fans, box scores in newspapers, etc, the same cannot be assumed about the head of the company that employs them, because that is a different class of employment that does not bring the inherent public exposure. It would be the same thing as saying that the CEOs of all 3,000 companies on the NYSE are notable because their companies are notable. Or that the members of the board of directors of the company that owns a sports team are notable because the sports team is notable.

Also, the current source establishes he exists, it is an article about the team withdrawing from the Professional League. It does not provide his notability. Just because a topic is mainly documented in a foreign language does not mean we can throw out WP:RS or WP:BIO. MBisanz ^talk 00:51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Just to give an idea of how much media coverage top-division football club chairmen get I've checked what Google News shows for the chairmen of the clubs currently lying bottom (thus avoiding the superstars) of the top division in an anglophone country smaller than Iran. "Jeremy Peace"+("West Bromwich" OR "West Brom") gets 1970 hits; "Steve Gibson"+Middlesbrough gets 4160; "Mike Ashley"+"Newcastle United" 5130; "John Williams"+"Blackburn Rovers" only has a meagre 1590 hits; "Peter Coates"+"Stoke City" is the runt of the litter with 286; and "Peter Storrie"+Portsmouth gets a respectable 2790. Isn't it reasonable to assume that someone in such a position in Iran will get similar coverage? The fact that the article subject was chairman is verified, which is what needs to be shown beyond doubt, and even if he gets only 10% of the coverage that English chairmen get (but there's no more reason to think that than that he gets 1000%), there will be plenty of reliable sources available to show notability, which is a guideline based on balance of probabilities rather than the absolute proof demanded by verifiability policy. I'm rather tempted to mention how notable the life president of the club that I support and live within shouting distance of is, but I think I heard somewhere that he may have some separate claim to notability. Phil Bridger (talk) 02:24, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Iran-related deletion discussions. —Phil Bridger (talk) 00:35, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Football-related deletion discussions. —Phil Bridger (talk) 00:35, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
• Delete. Several points to consider here. There are 80 Google search results for this person while filtering out Wikipedia and its clones. Only 6 of those search results are even possibly connected to his former position with the sports club. With only 2 search results in Google news, there is a pittance of news coverage for this individual. Even when searching for all occurrences of the Ali Mirzaei in Farsi (علی میرزایی) along with the name of the club he was in charge of (باشگاه فرهنگی ورزشی پرسپولیس تهران), there are only 4 results. In the end, if we don't have sources we can't cover it--and since he's not currently holding the position then it's even less likely that he'll ever be notable. ←Spidern→ 13:19, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. I very much doubt if people writing about this club would usually refer to it by the fully-blown Persepolis Athletic and Cultural Club - in English it usually seems to be simply referred to as Persepolis, so I tried a Google search for the subject's name with "پرسپولیس" and got several hundred hits. As a non-Farsi reader I can't make any sense of anything in those results, but it would be good if someone who knows the language could look through them before we decide on deletion. I really can't believe that sources wouldn't exist on the chairman (even for a short period) of one of Iran's two most popular football teams [1] that attracts crowds of up to 90,000 [2] to its matches. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:28, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

• Keep: Just look at the results of searching current chairman, Abbas Ansarifard. (also his previous, Dariush Mostafavi) Now, Persian Language webs are much stronger than 2001-2002, when Ali Mirzaei held the post. Therefore, Iranian football medias are too weak in past events statistics. Ettela'at Newspaper has used the information I put about the club's chairmen history fawiki. Amirreza ^talk 19:56, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

• This is not a deletion debate about the any other chiefs, previous or current, nor is it about the club itself. The question remains: how many reliable sources can you find that report on Ali Mirzaei? We can't write an encyclopedia article without sources. ←Spidern→ 22:00, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean what you understood. anyway, I can find some reliable sources. Amirreza ^talk 15:29, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Is Hamshahri enough? Amirreza ^talk 16:06, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Keep: There are now two reliable references for this stub. The fact, perhaps unknown to others here, that Persopolis is the biggest club in a huge, obseesively football mad nation, makes the likelyhood that the chairman has recieved extensive press coverage %100. Even if you can't read farsi -- and assuming the references we do have establish he was chair of this club -- he's notable. It's like saying, because you can't read English, that a recent chair of Man U can't be proven to you to be notable. Perhaps it is outside the US experience, but these people are in the press every day, to a MUCH greater extent than a US sports franchise owner is, even more than someone like Stienbrenner is here in New York. T L Miles (talk) 17:54, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

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.