Talk:Qatari soft power

Funding of mosques in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa

In March 2023, it was uncovered by French media that the UAE had been actively promoting anti-Qatar sentiment by associating Qatar's government with the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE employed various methods to increase its influence in France in order to spread negative information about Qatar. At the request of Abu Dhabi, over 100 articles were published annually. A Swiss-based financial intelligence company called Alp Services was identified as the orchestrator of the UAE network. This network, also known as the Emirati network, released a series of articles under the title "Qatar Papers," which contained allegations against Qatar. The authors of these articles were Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. [1][2] Morgan1811 (talk) 06:20, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Irrelevant and opinionated content deletion

There were irrelevant and opinionated content in the category "Other sports". As per the guidelines of Wikipedia, nobody can add opinionated and biased content. 87.11.15.137 (talk) 05:46, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Requested move notification

An editor has requested that Italian soft power be moved to Soft power of Italy, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion.

Not a WikiProject, but editors may be interested, as the suggestion is to standardise article titles in this series. IgnatiusofLondon (talk) 14:36, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

TNT and Rewrite

In light of the comments made at AfD, I am considering how this article can be rewritten by jettisoning the OR the sockpuppet creator placed here, and instead creating essentially a new article based on the sourced posted by Red Tailed Hawk. The sources are:

1. In the first paper (Brananagan & Giulianotti, 2018), there is a critical look at the concept of soft power, both positive, and looking at how it can backfire. The Qatar world cup bid is analysed in this respect.
2. In the second paper, (al-Horr, Tok & Gagoshidze, 2019), Qatar is again analysed as an example, in what appears to be a more clearly positive slant, considering an outlook to global international relations, but I have not yet obtained or read this paper. It looks like it will discuss Qatar in some detail.
3. The third link is a policy brief (Roberts, 2019). This one stresses the Islamist side of soft power whilst showing that Qatari soft power goals are not wholly islamist. That groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are funded, but that Qatar has and wishes to retain good relations with the U.S.

Any thoughts as to how this rewrite should be structured?

References

• Brannagan, Paul Michael; Giulianotti, Richard (1 September 2018). "The soft power–soft disempowerment nexus: the case of Qatar". International Affairs. 94 (5): 1139–1157. doi:10.1093/ia/iiy125.
• al‐Horr, Abdulaziz M.; Tok, M. Evren; Gagoshidze, Tekla (November 2019). "Rethinking Soft Power in the Post‐Blockade Times: The Case of Qatar". Digest of Middle East Studies. 28 (2): 329–350. doi:10.1111/dome.12188.
• Roberts, D (April 2019). "Reflecting on Qatar's "Islamist" Soft Power" (PDF). Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University. Retrieved 2 April 2024.

Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 16:45, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the takeaway from the two acrimonious deletion discussions is that there's no consensus for blowing up the article and starting from scratch. The remedy for questionable content is to use the normal editing process. That's not the case if you simply delete or replace every scrap of text that remains from the original author, whether or not it's relevant or verifiable. That'd be the very definition of WP:SPITE, which multiple editors cautioned against in the preceding discussions. Since there was such strong opposition to deletion at AfD, it seems inappropriate to set about achieving deletion by stealth, one sentence at a time.

That doesn't mean that large-scale editing can't be done to this article; but it needs to have some other purpose than merely eliminating all traces of a particular author's work. I suggest that a more productive approach would be to treat the original text like any other contributions by an editor whose approach you may not like, but whose work comports with basic Wikipedia policies. Once you take automatic deletion off the table, you can focus on things that actually need to be reworded, rewritten, or replaced. Otherwise each edit needlessly becomes a potential battleground. P Aculeius (talk) 02:05, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

That is not my takeaway. This discussion refers. User talk:OwenX#AfD of Qatari soft power. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 06:40, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Pinging SportingFlyer from that discussion. And it is not merely to remove the sockpuppet's work. It is to balance the article on the secondary sources discovered, rather than to preserve the sockpuppet curated OR based on primary sourcing that we currently have in the article. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:09, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Balancing the perspectives introduced by the original author is not the same as purging all of that author's contributions, along with those of all of the other editors who've contributed to this article, which is what you're proposing to do, and which was strongly opposed by many of those who participated in the two deletion discussions. I don't see how it should be acceptable to disregard all of those opinions simply because you've started a new discussion here. Also, any interpretation of those two discussions should be based on those discussions and their contents, not a private conversation between one of the involved editors and a discussion closer, on the closer's talk page.

Fix the issues using the normal editing process. The fact that the article was created by a user who abused multiple sockpuppet accounts—though not, as far as we know, involving the writing of this article—does not require purging the article's contents; that was pretty strongly stated by a number of editors in both deletion discussions, and echoed by the discussion closer. Unproven allegations of paid editing—I asked what the evidence was multiple times and heard nothing except the claim repeated without any explanation—do not change the result. As the discussion closer noted, we got an article about something that we actually wanted an article about. There is nothing here that cannot be fixed through normal editing, so there is absolutely no justification for TNT. P Aculeius (talk) 13:33, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

So again, what I am proposing is to jettison original research. That was not strongly opposed at the AfD. The AfD had numerically more people !voting to delete the page, and reviewing the 8 keep votes, I only see arguments that the topic is notable, not that the page as written is. One editor argued that the contributions of other editors, not the sockpuppet, should be preserved. The point of discussing here is to agree that, while there is a notable subject, we need to find how that is covered in the secondary sources presented by keep voters at the AfD, and to rewrite the article by removing original research. I don't want to spend the time doing that, but frankly it is the only way to fix this primary sourced single editor created monstrosity. If I don't, no one else will. Which is exactly what the sockpuppet was counting when they brazenly expended multiple compromised accounts to get this article placed. I am not suggesting anything outside of normal editing practice here. I am suggesting we improve an article that is full of OR and primary sourced information by rewriting based on secondary sources. That would improve the encyclopaedia. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 13:53, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

You're literally just continuing the deletion discussions here, since it was claimed there that the whole article was original research. But the type of thing that WP:OR discusses is using one's knowledge or expertise to present ideas that aren't found in other sources, and therefore fail WP:VERIFY. This topic is real and notable; everyone except some pro-Qatari sockpuppets seems to agree on that. Its subtopics are all verifiable, and most of the individual claims seem to be supported by the sources cited. If the issue is that there are no secondary sources cited that discuss the entire topic exhaustively, then you may as well delete all of Wikipedia as "original research", because all articles consist of different facts culled from various sources and assembled into a sensible whole by individual editors.

Instead of trying to raze and rebuild the entire article, or hunt down and exterminate all of the contributions of one editor, begin from the opposite perspective: assume that each statement or claim is valid and supported, until and unless you can determine that the source doesn't support it, can't be used to support it (and remember, just because something is a "primary" source doesn't mean that it can't be cited in support of anything; in some contexts they are perfectly appropriate), or no source supporting it can be located with a diligent attempt to find one.

Reorganizing the article and its structure should be done blindly as to its previous authors: that is, without any regard for which editor did what. Everything that's good should be kept, irrespective of who introduced it; likewise everything that's not should be fixed, replaced, or deleted—again, without regard to who wrote it. That's the only way to approach this situation. Proceeding from the assumption that everything the original author wrote is bad, and only the contributions of other editors are worth keeping, is not a constructive approach. P Aculeius (talk) 14:15, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Let's see what others have to say. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 14:22, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

@Sirfurboy Support for nuking the article and starting from scratch. There's no consensus to even keep the article, since one of the main arguments, dozens of editors having participated, is faulty: the original sockpuppet contributed about 70,000 bytes, which almost the whole article. Pointing out that DENY is just an essay carries as much as weight as stating that after X number of edits, the article becomes acceptable. But even if we accept that the AfD supposedly resulted in a consensus (which is dubious), that only means the topic is notable. Cortador (talk) 12:52, 27 April 2024 (UTC)