Talk:Memogate (Pakistan)

Charges of Treason

We need to be very careful not to imply that anyone committed an act of treason without there being a legal decision to that effect. Saying that Haqqani (or anyone else) asked Mansoor Ijaz to deliver a treasonous memo makes it sound like the actor was asking someone to commit treason which assumes facts not yet in existence. Tim Wilcox (talk) 14:00, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Media reaction

It seems like the only media reactions included in the article were negative ones. Were there not any news reports that dealt with the claims in a positive way?—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 11:44, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Scandal or controversy?

I think calling this a "controversy" is more neutral than calling it a "scandal". "Scandal" implies judgement on the part of Wikipedia, but this is usually not ok, because Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view. Actually, most sources seem to just be calling this "memogate" and not using another word for it. The only reason we are not using "memogate" seems to be that Memogate redirects to Killian documents controversy. If this event becomes better known than that controversy, then maybe we could move this one to Memogate. Or maybe we could move it to Mullen memo controversy, if it needs to be better disambiguated. But I can't really see any reason for using "scandal". Also, we should be using "memo" and "controversy" in lowercase, per our manual of style on capitalization. Best—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 15:00, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Dear Mr.Stradivarius, I think most of your suggestions above make good sense, and fall within the ambit of Wikpedia standards and guidelines.

— Khani100 (talk) 15:43, 29 November 2011 (UTC)Khani100

I line with events of a similar capacity, e.g., Killian documents controversy and Watergate scandal, the name for this particular political incident can be justified as being both a scandal or a controversy. If you check the Wikipedia entry on the Scandal page, it clearly states that a political scandal in United States is usually referred to by adding a suffix -gate. However, this isn't the only qualification for calling Memogate a scandal – scandals usually have whistleblowers and in this particular case, Mansoor Ijaz fits the bill.

Events whereby government officials are caught in the act, exposed at a later date, etc., are known the world over as political scandals. In fact, the term "political controversy" on Wikipedia would even lead you to the page on political scandal. So, indulging in a debate waving the WP:NPOV flag isn't the solution to this problem. In my opinion, when it comes to the issues of what this article should be called anything goes – both scandal and controversy is fine and holds an equally neutral POV.

— Arun Reginald (talk · contribs) 08:52, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I think that the most helpful thing for this situation would be to look at our policy on article names. The main five things to look for in a title are recognizability, naturalness, precision, conciseness, and consistency. Let's look at our three current proposed titles, "Memogate scandal", "Memogate controversy", and simply "Memogate".

1. Recognizability: I don't see any difference between these titles here.
2. Naturalness: "Memogate" wins here, being the name chiefly used by news sources. I don't see any difference between "Memogate scandal" and "Memogate controversy" under this criterion.
3. Precision: All three titles are weak on this criterion, because "memogate" was also widely used to refer to the Killian documents controversy.
4. Conciseness: "Memogate" is best here, obviously. There's no real difference between "Memogate scandal" and "Memogate controversy" under this criterion.
5. Consistency: This is a tough one to call. Our list of scandals with "-gate" suffix should be instructive in drawing up numbers, but on a quick glance through it seems that under widely-recognised scandals the "-gate" suffix is not normally used, with neutral wording being used instead. Also, for widely-recognised scandals, "controversy" is most common, followed by "scandal", then the "-gate" name.

Thinking about it, I would rather go with a descriptive title without "memogate" in it at all. This would avoid the precision problem between "memogate" titles and the Killian documents controversy, and looking at respected English-language news sources, many of them do not actually use "memogate", or try to avoid implying it is an "official" name. This BBC report, for example, puts memogate in scare quotes rather than simply using it as-is. How about something like Pakistan–US memo controversy? Regards—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 10:12, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I disagree to your suggestion of changing the name to Pakistan–US memo controversy, but nevertheless agree to most of what you said. My concerns are quite primarily of a different nature – this is not entirely an American or British affair and it should rather be justified by obtaining evidence from a largely Pakistani source. BBC uses scare-quotes and so does CNN, Foreign Policy, Guardian and Telegraph. However, more recently Foreign Policy, one of the online magazine that broke this story is starting to rather accept Memogate as a proper noun rather than it being just a colloquial term under scare-quotes.

On the other hand, media in Pakistani has mixed opinions on how to use the word 'memogate'; however, most sources refrain from using the quotes, e.g., Dawn, Express Tribune, The Nation, Frontier Post and The News International. Moreover, all the Pakistani sources I included herein, use the word as a proper noun and capitalised to "Memogate" – and while you confirm this by going to the mentioned links, also observe that the Pakistani media has also been calling this incident a 'scandal', and it's seldom that they'd ever talk of it as a 'controversy'.

I hope you're not suggesting that we write a predominantly Pakistani article with an American (or British) perspective?—Arun Reginald (talk · contribs) 12:21, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Arun, and thanks for the reply. On reflection, I think you're right - WP:TITLE says the title should be in the local variety of English, i.e. Pakistani English. So using "memogate" does make more sense from that perspective, although there are still the precision concerns that I outlined. I do think we should be careful of giving this article a label like "scandal" that could make the article appear biased to a certain point of view, even if "scandal" is common in Pakistani news reports. Maybe a better solution would be to disambiguate the title instead - how about Memogate (Pakistan) or something similar? We could turn the present Memogate redirect into a disambiguation page, and link to both this article and the Killian documents article from there. Let me know what you think.—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 15:46, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I feel the same about the word 'scandal' but I think 'controversy' would be okay for now. As far as naming it Memogate or Memogate (Pakistan) is concerned, I did a little research regarding the overall popularity of the two incidents - both the 2004 and the 2011 one. The Google Trends search results for 'memogate' seem to suggest that the search volume index for the 2011 event is almost a third of the 2004 incident. However, if you look below at the news reference volume index, you'd see that the Pakistani memogate is more popularly expressed in the news. The 2004 incident is more likely to be known as 'Rathergate' on the news-vines (see results for 'rathergate and memogate' to compare the two). I can't think of any reason why Memogate should not just directly be linked to this article, rather than for there to be a disambiguation page. Can we not just do that and put a byline on top saying, "if you are looking for the 2004 controversy, see Killian documents controversy", as it already does on the KDC page now?

— Arun Reginald (talk · contribs) 15:00, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

One lighter note, are we as human beings done with "political correctness"? – see the trends for 'scandal and controversy'. :)

— Arun Reginald (talk · contribs) 15:15, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Nice finds! Thanks for doing all that research. I'm afraid that the links you provided look like evidence against having the article at Memogate, though. Per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC a topic must be much more likely to be searched for than all the other topics sharing a particular term for it to be considered as the primary topic. As the 2004 "memogate" was searched for more than the 2011 one, I think it would be a long stretch indeed to call the 2011 one primary. People may be more likely to be looking for the Pakistani memogate now, but this might not be true next year, or in five years' time (and the 2004 events are bound to be mentioned in the news during the run-up to next year's US Presidential elections, at least a little bit). I think we do need to disambiguate here, which in my mind rules out "memogate", "memogate scandal" and "memogate controversy". I really don't mind if we go with Memogate (Pakistan) or a descriptive, neutrally-worded title, though - I'll leave that up to you.—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 15:55, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I've moved the page over to Memogate (Pakistan) and created the DAB page at Memogate. Feel free to tweak the title if you want - it's not set in stone. Best—Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 06:20, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Unsourced and poorly sourced edit

This edit [1] by an unregistered IP user, seems to have introduced significant amount of WP:OR, some of it sourced to a now-dead web site. I am deleting all questionable statements. If anybody has reliable sources supporting them, please feel free to add them back with the sources. - Kautilya3 (talk) 20:04, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

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