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Template:Did you know nominations/Political prisoners in Saudi Arabia

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by PanydThe muffin is not subtle 13:41, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Political prisoners in Saudi Arabia

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  • Reviewed: Clouded salamander, Wandering Salamander
  • Comment: With the sources available so far in the article, it's not so simple as government versus opposition, since the government's own estimates (as reported by other groups) range from 0 to 5000 to 10,000. So we can't put something like "government claims no political prisoners at all" in the hook, since (as per the sources), sometimes it does claim this, sometimes it doesn't.

Created/expanded by Boud (talk). Self nom at 00:28, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

  • I have moved this nom from lower to upper case title, and made some corrections to article itself, including commas in article layout, as well as top section title per Wikipedia:Guide to layout. According to one source: "The Saudi administration denies that political prisoners even exist", and according to second source for the hook: "Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry has said there are no political prisoners in the kingdom." To say that estimates range from "zero" is therefore slightly misleading, because "zero" is not an actual number here but rather a purported claim of "no political prisoners". Poeticbent talk 17:52, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
  • I don't quite follow "slightly misleading" - "no political prisoners" and "zero political prisoners" mean the same thing. Maybe you mean the style is not so common, i.e. it's more common to say "I have no televisons in my house" rather than "I have zero televisions in my house"? In any case, I've modified the style of the lead of the article and the lead of the section on the topic. Does this satisfy your concern? As for the hook, I'm not sure if you see any problem in it, and I don't see an obvious way to improve it. This is the Wikipedia, so the implication of a statement of a numerical fact of "between M and N" can reasonably be expected to mean "with the true value depending on RS and POV or maybe a parameter that is unknown to humanity". If we want to be careful, we could add "(inclusive)" to the hook to clarify that it's not "between (exclusive)", but it could sound a bit pedantic (this is DYK, not the article itself). Or, for the readers who are not familiar enough with sourcing, we could add, ", depending on who you want to believe", i.e. a 7-word summary of WP:NPOV. Feel free to propose an alternate version of the hook. I couldn't think of anything that was short, snappy, and consistent with the sources. I would tend to go for ALT2 - it's a bit longer but it makes it clear that the range of estimate is POV-related. Boud (talk) 23:43, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
ALT1: ... that there are between zero and 30,000 (inclusive) political prisoners in Saudi Arabia?
ALT2: ... that there are between zero and 30,000 political prisoners in Saudi Arabia, depending on who you want to believe?
  • . Between zero and 30,000 means anything "between zero and 30,000" (including one, and two, and three, and four...) which is not what the article says, and not what the sources say. Please drop the "zero" from your hook like you did in the main copy (following my comment from above). Everything else seems fine. Poeticbent talk 03:43, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
  • How is ALT3?
ALT3: ... that recent estimates of the number of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia range from a denial of any political prisoners at all, to 30,000? Boud (talk) 19:52, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
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