Category talk:Political prisoners

Deletion 2009

KEEP or suggest a category name which includes Laura Ling and Roxana Saberi. Please don't tell me there is no category in which they belong together: That is pushing WP:NPOV to an extreme which is actually rather POV. Erxnmedia (talk) 17:50, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

After undeletion, categories are empty - do they have to be manually repopulated?

Hi folks - this is the first time I have gone through this process of a category (and subcategories) being deleted and restored - is it the case that I will have to go to each article and add the tag for the appropriate subcategory manually? --Dan Carkner (talk) 05:04, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I have mass reverted the actions of JJMC89 bot III from that block of time. There may be a few I missed. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:39, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Looks better now. Thanks! --Dan Carkner (talk) 05:53, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I have reinstated the articles that I removed from the top category, except those which are now within the new subcat Category:Political prisoners according to Memorial. – Fayenatic London 06:49, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Best practices for inclusion

Since the category has proven somewhat controversial, it may be a good idea to discuss best practices for inclusion. While we cannot control what is added, I think we can discuss a rule which would ask editors not to restore challenged entries without first showing references and achieving consensus on respective articke's talk pages. Thoughts? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:23, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a big fan of people mass adding articles to categories they have not really engaged with. I know it's permissible on Wikipedia but I don't think it always gives thoughtful or good results. Anyways here are my thoughts about this category. Of course it should be documented in the sources and not the opinion of the editor alone.

• I think people arrested or detained for membership in banned political parties or movements (whether real or simply accused membership) should be uncontroversial as political prisoners whether or not we find their movement sympathetic or not.
• People designated as political prisoners by Amnesty and other such groups, I think most will agree are not controversial to be categorized as such.
• This will depend more on context but I think people detained with or without charge on statutes claiming to be related to public order or social peace, but for which the detainee was arrested for political or journalistic activities, ought to probably be considered political prisoners even if the pretext for their arrest was not about party membership. But whether brief detention on this basis qualifies one is another question.
• People recognized as belonging to a political prisoner population in a historical context should also be strong contexts for inclusion in my opinion - those who were kept separate from common criminals and described at the time, and in subsequent scholarship, as being in the political prisoner population or sub-camp.
• More ambiguous cases are those who are arrested under normal laws but possibly targeted due to their political views or membership. For these, I believe we have to be more careful and see what the sources say.
• Finally, another ambiguous type of case are those targeted as members of an ethnicity or national minority perceived as disloyal by the government doing the arresting. These may or may not have been members of anti-government parties as well. For these cases I think we also have to look carefully at how they were viewed at the time and in secondary literature. Dan Carkner (talk) 14:40, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

  Few thoughts:

  • Amnesty doesn't designate people as political prisoners, but as prisoners of conscience. That topic is both wider and smaller than pp; for example, it excludes anyone who has made comments AI deems to aggressive or advocating violence, on the other; it includes conscientious objectors who are otherwise totally apolitical. So just a note that AI is actually a relatively 'useless' organization to mention here (anyway, we have a category for AI POCs and that's good and uncontroversial).
  • yes, detainees are political prisoners. I believe I clarified this in political prisoner. Ditto for victims of forced disappearance, who are confirmed or likely suspected of being imprisoned by the governments without said government's confirmation.
  • I generally concur with you regarding the other points, and note that in general, many political prisoners were not members of a "political party". It's better to think of them as activists. There's also a related concept of dissident.

  Anyway, I am less concerned about the detailed inclusion criteria than about setting up a procedure to avoid edit warring over some controversial cases, which seemed to be a major concern for several people who objected to this category's existence in the past. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:45, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I don't have much to add at the moment but left me know if I can be of help in the future.--Dan Carkner (talk) 05:17, 16 August 2021 (UTC)