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. I'm closing this as no consensus. Feel free to relist if need be in the future, or continue to evolve and improve the article. Thanks everyone for their input. SarahStierch (talk) 20:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline of the Syrian civil war (from May 2013)[edit]

Timeline of the Syrian civil war (from May 2013) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:NOT. I believe this is a grave problem for Wikipedia's neutrality stance: Most of the information in the Timeline of the Syrian civil war (from May 2013), particularly the daily death tolls, are directly adopted from the partisan sources of the Local Coordination Committees of Syria (LCC) and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). These two organizations are aligned to the Syrian opposition, rendering much of the timeline to a kind of rebel newsfeed. They routinely call opposition casualities "martyrs" and we have no way of verifying the tolls from independent sources. The Syrian Army for its part has stopped reporting casualities in their ranks in mid-2012, so we could not even attempt to counterbalance the rebel LCC and SOHR with biased info from the other side, in the unlikely case somebody would advocate such an approach.

Although the issue was raised at the neutrality board a week ago, dispute resolution attempts through cleaning up the timeline have eventually came to nothing. Note that this timeline is part of a whole Timeline of the Syrian civil war series which are all affected to a varying degree by these issues and, therefore, may all be subjected to a reevaluation by the community. It has been proposed to move whatever reliable information is savable to Human rights violations during the Syrian civil war. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 15:00, 1 June 2013 (UTC) Gun Powder Ma (talk) 15:00, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Syria-related deletion discussions. Sir Rcsprinter, Bt (gab) @ 17:33, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. Sir Rcsprinter, Bt (deliver) @ 17:34, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: This does not address the underlying problem. As of today, two thirds of the references still rely on the rebel-affiliated Local Coordination Committees of Syria (= http://www.lccsyria.org) – despite a week of trying to fix the problem on the neutrality noticeboard. And day by day still more references to them are added. It is difficult to see what raison d'etre this timeline has if its contents can (and are) only built up on the basis of biased data from opposition sources. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 18:10, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have replaced half of the LCC sources with reliable sources quoting the LCC - so we keep those. Sopher99 (talk) 22:56, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Government has stopped reporting on the numbers of dead soldiers DGG, only one who is still documenting and reporting is SOHR. EkoGraf (talk) 23:17, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:17, 3 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. EkoGraf (talk) 11:11, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a list of articles on Syria, Syrian human rights, and the civil war

There are many others, though the first four in the list are the most relevant.--Luke Warmwater101 (talk) 09:46, 10 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: The current state is in fact as bad as before the AfD. As of today 25 out of 75 footnotes are directly sourced to the rebel LCC. This is one full third flying in the face of WP:RS and WP:Neutral. And the LCC continues to be the source for most of the other casualities, only indirectly so via cited by other news outlets, but while these media at least regularly inform the reader that they don't have independent sources to confirm the LCC numbers, the WP article creates the impression to the reader that the numbers are from the unbiased news outlets themselves (unless they bother to read the cited source). In other words, the timeline in its current form is still a case of source laundering and LCC Timeline of the Syrian civil war is a more fitting name. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 11:23, 13 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NPOV does not mean that we not include sources and arguments from both sides, instead finding a balance. Less than 1/3 of the sources are not reliable, less than 1/3 of the sources are neutral. I fail to see the problem. IN FACT, the LCC sources have now been removed, which means there is now no problem at all. Ansh666 23:23, 13 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Relisting comment: I was about closing the discussion as no consensus, but following the request of Bearian, I am relisting it for another week.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ymblanter (talk) 09:14, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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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.
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