Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gheba
I've had a considerable involvement in numerous Indian caste/community articles. One issue that arises with articles that are suggested to be "clans" (or "gotras", or several other variant names for roughly the same thing) is the endogamous nature of the Indian caste system. Finding passing references to - in this instance - Gheba as what would be called a surname in the west is easy, but it does not verify clan or caste status in a manner that en-Wikipedia's policies generally accept. To take a different caste, there are plenty of people around the world whose last name is ''Nair'' but who have no connection at all to the Nair people of India. Basically, making such a connection without decent sourcing is |original research. Of course, there is nothing to stop us turning this into an article purely of the :Category:Surname variety, if it has notability in that context. Which seems unlikely.There ''are'' passing references to the Gheba as a community; for example, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q9sI_Y2CKAcC&pg=PA205 here. But they are so fleeting that they fail the notability test. There are sometimes more detailed mentions of them in the works of the Raj so-called ethnologists etc but, as I've said in a comment above, those sources are dreadfully poor - take a look at James Tod and H. H. Risley for a couple of well-worked examples of why this is so. And Denzil Ibbetson even went so far as to acknowledge that he and his colleagues were more or less writing "blind". Recognised societal processes such as sanskritisation have further complicated the situation and, for example, the number of documented castes has risen from around 1000 in 1900 to in excess of 4500 in the 1990s because of such factors. Basically, we have an awful lot of stub-type articles that are likely neither useful in the Surname category nor in :Category:Indian castes or similar, simply because the information is often not out there in any reliable, meaningful detail. A very few, however, have been accorded substantial coverage in the post-Raj era and really do deserve their place.I'm going to do one last trawl for sourcing the Gheba stuff before !voting. My gut feeling, based on past efforts, is that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of clan/gotra articles that really have no place here
— User:Sitush, 23:46, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:OR (Wikipedia:No original research)