Template:Did you know nominations/Fan Xiaoqin

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The following 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: rejected by reviewer, closed by BlueMoonset talk 05:48, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Article was deleted per AfD; there is nothing that is eligible for DYK, so closing nomination as unsuccessful.

Fan Xiaoqin

Created by Bremps (talk). Self-nominated at 17:18, 8 November 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Fan Xiaoqin; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

  • Apologies, this article does not appear to be ready for DYK status due to the presence of possibly unreliable sources (see the note at the top of the article.) Generalissima (talk) 03:14, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the comment. Because Sixth Tone is listed as a reliable source for non-political issues at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, and The Paper (the Chinese language source) is just the same publication in Chinese, I narrowed the unreliable sources down to the WhatsOnWeibo citations (which are now gone). The other sources, such as CNN or the Straits Times, seem pretty solid in my opinion. Bremps... 13:54, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
      • @Generalissima Bremps... 23:11, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
        • The previous reviewer communicated to me that she wasn't able to finish this one, but I'm willing to pick it up. Will make comments within the next couple days -- I checked some sources and there's a complicated situation here, so can't write up a full review yet. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
There's an extremely strange situation here -- I can't think of anything I've seen that's similar.

When reading the article, I noticed that buried in the middle was a mention of the subject being intellectually disabled. This is a hell of a thing to bury in the middle of an article, and many terms for intellectual and developmental disabilities translate poorly, so I checked the source to see if this was a mistranslation. My Chinese is very weak, but I was able to confirm that no, that's the correct translation/implication of the statement. The source specifically mentioned Fan being diagnosed with "intellectual disability level 2", which doesn't translate directly to English. Checking some Chinese sources, with again significant caveats, this seemingly translates to a severe intellectual disability -- corresponding to someone with very limited communication and self-care abilities who's unlikely to understand the consequences of being internet-famous. Descriptions of him in both Chinese and English sources agree that he has a very restricted vocabularly and doesn't seem to comprehend why people were paying attention to him.

Looking at the longread article in Sixth Tone, there's a lot of detail on the context under which Fan became internet-famous. There's a fairly consistent narrative that the fame was mostly his father's doing. This is agreed with by The Paper and at least alluded to by a number of other sources I could access. In particular, the "begging" that the article focuses on is clearly not something Fan understood the implications of. This article really doesn't get any of this across -- like I said, the mention of intellectual disability is very buried. While there are good sources cited in the article, they're poorly utilized.

The number of standalone biographical articles on intellectually disabled subjects is limited. I can't think of a single article that's had to have an "is this article hiding that the subject is severely intellectually disabled?" conversation, and I really can't think of one where that's combined with a high language barrier. It definitely needs, at bare minimum, serious revisions. I'm not convinced there's a good BLP case for this article existing -- it's a very sad and complex story about exploitation, for which the coverage is fairly limited. I'm posting this to WP:BLPN to get further thoughts -- I have that noticeboard watchlisted, but this is way outside the range of even normal BLP issues, because of just how complex and sensitive the situation is. Vaticidalprophet 13:20, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

@Bremps: Have the above issues been addressed? Z1720 (talk) 02:01, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
We're still in the middle of a deletion discussion. Bremps... 03:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
The article has been deleted, so I am marking this as unsuccessful. Z1720 (talk) 03:27, 9 December 2023 (UTC)