Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Safal Committee

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. There is no mention of this subject at the proposed redirect target. Any editor is welcome to add any verifiable, relevant information to 2025 Nepalese Gen Z protests (observing WP:DUE), and recreate this page as a redirect there. If done, please ping me to restore the history behind the redirect. Owen× ☎ 14:36, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Safal Committee

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This is not even a thing. Only on Wikipedia does this "Safal Committee" keep popping up in connection to the recent Nepalese Gen Z protests. Among the references, the actual independent news sources don't mention the organisation, only primary sources and what appear to be propaganda/activism outlets do. On google, the only result for the Nepali name in the infobox was this article. I have never seen this organisation mentioned in connection to Nepali politics outside of Wikipedia. Usedtobecool ☎️ 17:33, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Organizations, Politics, and Nepal. Usedtobecool ☎️ 17:33, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Multiple independent and reliable sources report that Safal is indeed a real thing. Sources such as Freedom which talks about and analyses the Safal commitee have been listed as being "highly credible."^[1]. As such it satisfies WP:RS and makes it incorrect to describe these as "just propaganda outlets" and is an extremely selective reading of the reporting. Ultimately, RS' have judged that this committee is in fact real, and per how WP:RS works, we should treat it that way. Other sources that mention or otherwise analyse the Committee include Diario Socialista^[2], Organise^[3], and some others. To be sure, these generally have a left-wing slant, but are nonetheless reliable. Thus satisfying WP:RS.Genabab (talk) 17:41, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

Genabab, here's what I see. A tweet goes out from a twitter account named Safal (@safalcommittee, created Sep. 2025) on 9 September declaring that "We" have decided to start a "Safal Committee" for defence because the protestors deaths of the previous day was an act of class war by the government. Your evidence for this Safal Committee sometimes going by the name Safal is the fact that the twitter account's display name is "Safal". The account so far has 2700 followers. Number of replies to the dozen or so tweets so far are 59, 23, 15, ..., 0, 0. Aforementioned first tweet and a second release by the same account titled "Revolutionary Salute!" are reprinted by a couple sympathetic sources, Dariosocialista.net and organisemagazine.org.uk. I am sure the Safal Committee exists in the minds of however many real people there are among the 2700 followers of that account, as it does in the mind of, for all we know, that one guy that came up with the brilliant idea to create that twitter account and those releases. But none of these sources are independent. As such, they can not be used to judge notability. Do you have anything that does not originate in that two week old twitter account? — Usedtobecool ☎️ 07:20, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Usedtobecool

> But none of these sources are independent.

Whar are you basing this off of? I assume you mean this because they are left-winged sources, but that doesn't mean they're not independent??????? I'll remind you WP:RS does not say that a source having a political leaning, be that left or right makes it unreliable. That's not how that works.None of these sources have any connections to Safal or Nepal for that matter so they're definitely independent too.

The bottom line is, reliable sources report that Safal exists, so this page should stay. Genabab (talk) 18:43, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Genabab, the standard is WP:NORG. As for independence, being an independent publication is not enough, the page that we're citing has to have been independently produced. Since both sources simply reprinted and repeated what was in the tweets, they are not independent secondary sources. See WP:PRSOURCE. — Usedtobecool ☎️ 01:23, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Usedtobecool

NORG states "Wikipedia bases its decision about whether an organization is notable enough to justify a separate article on the verifiable evidence that the organization or product has attracted the notice of reliable sources unrelated to the organization or product." The listed sources in the page no doubt meet this criteria. They are all independent, they are all reliable (I believe it was "organise" that was noted by another edit as being considered very reliable, for one example).

Secondly, it is misleading to say the sources just reprint or repreat the tweets. It's common for sources examining a political organisation to repeat those organisations' demands and statements. Furthermore, other sources also provide their own analysis of Safal as well.

Look, there's no doubting that Safal is a small organisation, and I don't want to imply they led the protests, because they did not. But we've both seen the number of independent sources covering them is grounds for some form of inclusion of the movement in Wikipedia. Genabab (talk) 10:15, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's doubt that Safal is even an organization. Where is it registered? A social media post does not count as proof of existence. PenGear (talk) 17:25, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

> There's doubt that Safal is even an organization.

That could fall under WP:Original Research (the issue being that we would be taking this evaluation on where it is registered and drawing our own conclusions from it). Regardless of what you or I might evaluate about the group, it certainly is true that RS' detail and discuss it. If they agree it exists, then given how wikipedia works, we have to go with what they say. Genabab (talk) 17:33, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Delete yeah, definitely someone is just trolling. Have not seen or heard about them. बडा काजी (talk) 18:11, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@बडा काजीWhat about the sources that mention them? No need to assume bad-faith here :^0 Genabab (talk) 18:40, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. If you search for this "committee" in online search engines, you get the wikipedia page where this was first mentioned or social media pages created way after the protests. It seems to me that none of the Nepali editors know that this group exists, but western leftists keep on trying to conjure up their relevance out of thin air. At the very least, this committee does not meet notability standards, since they were not significant or even slightly significant in the Gen Z protests. Even their mention is an insult to the protests. Their sources are clearly biased, but I guess it shouldn't matter. They can't provide a single Nepali source mentioning this "group" either. It's a purely social media invention. PenGear (talk) 22:58, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to 2025 Nepalese Gen Z protests as an Alternative to Deletion. This clearly does not meet the notability guidelines for organisations, as it has not received significant coverage in independent, reliable, secondary sources. Half of the sources cited in this article don't mention this organisation at all, and the other half are primary sources self-published by the organisation itself or mirrors of it. The only independent reliable sources that do cover it (e.g. Freedom, Diario Socialista) are not cited here; they also do not cover the organisation in any significant depth, only stating that the organisation exists and quoting from one of its statements. Anyone searching for this organisation's name on Wikipedia would be better directed to the article on the protests, rather than this uninformative stub. --Grnrchst (talk) 18:48, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Grnrchst While I do disagree with notability here, the point about in-depth coverage is a good one I hadn't considered. That's a good point >_> Genabab (talk) 18:51, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Grnrchst, that a source is considered "generally" reliable does not mean that there is no room for editorial judgement and analysis. I would argue that there is no way these sources are reliable on this topic. They've simply taken the twitter account at face value, and parroted what's in the couple releases posted by it. The western press is often inaccurate on Nepal, relying on a handful of the same commentators and freelance reporters with no qualifications than that they can write in English. It's clear these sources haven't even done that. At the time those two pieces were published, it was not even clear who was who, what was going on, if anybody was leading anything. Almost all trade unionists in Nepal are affiliated with the mainstream political parties, so who is it exactly that have come together to start this committee, that again, we know nothing about except the little that originates in that two week old twitter account? I would strongly suggest that we give it no space on Wikipedia unless someone can find anything that was published after, say, 15 September, preferably in reputed Nepali press, or at the very least a reliable international source, containing at least one bit of info that's not in the tweets. Forget WP:NPOV, we risk falling victim to hoax and misinformation if we forego the minimum due diligence on our basic content policies. — Usedtobecool ☎️ 02:29, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
> I would argue that there is no way these sources are reliable on this topi

That is not for you or us to decide, and violates WP:OR.

> if anybody was leading anything

None of the sources claimed Safal was leading the protests?

> or at the very least a reliable international source, containing at least one bit of info that's not in the tweets

I believe it was the Organise source (which I remind you was deemed highly reliable) that gives analysis of Safal and its relation to the protests. So these sources do indeed exist. Genabab (talk) 11:53, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Not going to vote as I was the new page reviewer that marked the article as reviewed. I can't remember exactly how I assessed this article, however I think my main issue was the use of bare URLs. This is obviously very minor in comparison to the actual issues. Based on a cursory Google search, I am hesitant to place any credence on this committee actually existing. I made a judgement of error, and for that I apologise. 11WB (talk) 00:59, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - There are not many sources that cover "Safal Committee". The only WP:GREL sources in this page BBC and The Times do not even acknowledge "Safal". The only mentions of "Safal" I see are random social media accounts. And to User:Genabab's comment about their ref list being "reliable", no it is not. Kvinnen (talk) 12:44, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

[1] ttps://mediabiasfactcheck.com/freedom-news-and-journal/

[2] ttps://diariosocialista.net/2025/09/10/dimite-el-primer-ministro-de-nepal-tras-protestas-masivas-que-han-incendiado-el-parlamento-y-el-palacio-presidencial/

[3] ttps://organisemagazine.org.uk/2025/09/09/nepal-communications-international/

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