Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amin Husain

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The result was ‎ keep, withdrawn. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:29, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Amin Husain

Amin Husain (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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No pass of WP:PROF and newspaper coverage does not indicate separate notability from Decolonize This Place. BLP concerns have been raised at BLPN Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Amin_Husain Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:08, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Withdraw per overwhelming consensus of other participants. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:44, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators and New York. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:08, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Palestine-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 18:12, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Redirect to Decolonize This Place. The project appears to be marginally notable, but I think it's a WP:BLP1E for Husain. Little sign of WP:NPROF. As far as GNG, there is some coverage of the subject's recent suspension from NYU, mostly (but not entirely) in blacklisted right-wing publications; I do not think that it is enough that we need this article. There is some possibility for WP:NCREATIVE, but I didn't find anything outside of the one project. Watching in case better evidence of NCREATIVE arises. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 18:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I really don't care if Husain keeps his own article or not (Wikipedia already has too many BLPs and not enough quality editors to maintain them), and think it's silly to myopically focus on a single recent event, but coverage "mostly (but not entirely) in blacklisted right-wing publications" is quite misleading: New York Daily News[1], The Forward[2], Washington Square News[3], Hyperallergic[4], and The Messenger[5] are hardly rightwing publications, and while National Review[6], The College Fix[7], Israel National News[8], Jewish News Syndicate[9], The Jewish Voice[10], and Campus Reform[11] lean conservative, they are not black-listed. The only formally deprecated or generally-unreliable sources I can find (without descending into the dregs of Twitter and bot content scrapers) are this article in the Daily Mail and an editorial in the New York Post. And for the umpteenth time, "right-wing publication" does not necessarily mean "bad" or "unreliable", no more so than do the many "left-wing" publications commonly used on Wikipedia, and indeed, systematic disregard of sources simply due to their editorial or political stance would (or should) fundamentally violate WP:NPOV: an event can be significant even if left-leaning media largely ignores it. --Animalparty! (talk) 21:36, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Changing to Keep, in light of the Occupy Wall Street coverage uncovered by Red-tailed hawk, which I did not find. The recent remarks about Hamas contribute somewhat to notability, although I am still unconvinced that it would overcome WP:BLP1E on its own. Although the sources covering the latter are a mixed bag, I do think there is enough coverage that it should go into the article. Apologies for delayed response; limited Wikipedia time this week. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 10:31, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. There's a lot of recent coverage about recent comments, which is probably why this article was created, but this activist seems to have a long history that goes back at least until the early days of Occupy Wall Street. Long story short, he's been given significant coverage as an individual by independent reliable sources in the context of at multiple events. These events include:
  1. Occupy Wall Street. A 2012 profile in New York Magazine, which dedicates several paragraphs to him, names him ten times, and states that Husain is characterized by a number of the prime movers as one of OWS’s "deep thinkers". He is also mentioned in The Toronto Star and Mondoweiss in relation to OWS, although the coverage is more brief. Husain also granted an interview in 2014 with Waging Nonviolence about his role in OWS.
  2. Decolonize This Place. There is significant coverage of Husain in a variety of sources that relate to his involvement in Decolonize This Place. Coverage from The Jerusalem Post includes a standalone article specifically about his role as well a second standalone article about calls to fire him over it. He's heavily featured in an article by The Paris Review regarding DTP, as well. His mentions related to this project date as far back as 2017 in Hyperallergic, and 2016 in The Guardian. (There's also a fairly long blogpost by Verso Books about media coverage of Husain's participation in DTP, though I think that it's self-published as a blogpost, and thus wouldn't be usable for a BLP. I note it merely for posterity sake.) Passing mention also occurs in a 2021 piece and a 2019 piece from The New York Times, which describe some of his art-related protest organizing.
  3. Hamas denialism. Recent comments that seem to have denied aspects of the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, as well as the backlash to it and his firing, appear to have been covered significantly by a good number of sources. Such sources include The Forward, JNS, Israel's Channel 7 News, Hindustan Times, Hyperallergic, Washington Square News, The Messenger, and of course The Free Press (which seems to have been first to report on this). Some of these are possibly non-independent (Husain was a contributor at HyperAllergic, and WSN is NYU's student paper), but nevertheless there are multiple independent reliable sources here.

In addition to the above, he seems to have conducted an interview with the online affiliate of Monthly Review, another with the Center for Artistic Activism, yet another with Arts Cabinet, and yet another with Jewish Currents. As such, this is not a WP:BLP1E nor a low-profile individual by any means; he has both actively engaged press coverage by granting various interviews regarding his work in relation both to OWS and to DTP and he's given public speeches about it. He has also has been significantly covered in the context of multiple events. What all the sources above point to, therefore, is a very clear pass of WP:NBASIC/WP:GNG.

Some have indicated concerns about the current article's content. However, as the deletion policy itself notes, when editing can fix these reasons for deletion this should be done rather than deleting the page. There are enough sources to write a reasonably detailed article about this individual that is not doomed to be about a permastub. As such, the article should be kept and improved. After all, deletion is not cleanup. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 02:50, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Clearly meets GNG. Thriley (talk) 03:12, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: GNG appears to be adequately met, per Red-tailed hawk. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:10, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]