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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 merge‎ to 2024 Lebanon pager explosions. We are close to even when looking at policy based arguments for retention and deletion with a slight edge to deletion. However we have a viable ATD here and many of the delete arguments were making the case that it could be covered in connections with the attacks for which the devices are notable Star Mississippi 17:17, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Gold Apollo AR924

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Gold Apollo AR924 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Doesn't seem to pass WP:NPRODUCT. Seems only notable within the context of the 2024 Lebanon pager explosions, and doesn't appear to warrant a standalone article. Article did not exist prior to the explosions, nor seemingly any reliable sources covering it, failing the "sustained coverage" requirement of NPRODUCT. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:00, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This particular model of pager seems to be notable only in the context of the 2024 Lebanon pager explosions. I can find no mention of "Gold Apollo AR-924," "Gold Apollo AR924" or "Gold Apollo AR" outside of news sources reporting the Israeli bombings. "Gold Apollo pager" returns only results for these news articles, the company's website, patent documents, and similar. The sources currently cited at the article fail the criteria for addressing the article topic "directly," as in the "significant coverage" criteria of WP:GNG.
While the particular model of pager is likely to receive a good amount of (temporary) media scrutiny from a few outlets, this will likely be only in the context of the above-mentioned bombings. Although WP:SUSTAINED does not apply to non-BLP articles, WP:NPRODUCT does, and although secondary sources refer to this particular device, there seems to be no claim to notability outside of this single event, for which we already have an article. Thus, I believe this article fails to establish notability for the topic, and our status as not an indiscriminate collection of information is applicable. Evan (talk|contribs) 00:06, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The model exists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x50wwGjX2Ao
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20240917160632/https://www.apollosystemshk.com/product/42.html Mheretakis (talk) 23:06, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well yes, we know it exists, that's not the issue being discussed. Oaktree b (talk) 00:40, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete No other model of pager produced by the company exists on Wikipedia, information related to this product should be at most made a small section on the manufacturer's page. Beyond recent events, it is otherwise completely irrelevant to anything other than the company. JohnWarosa (talk) 01:21, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete was a completely non-notable model of pager until this recent news story. Andre🚐 01:24, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep → Speedy keep. This is a weapon used in an attack. With up to 4000 victims, the event can have multiple articles. Possibly move to BAC Consulting. The technical details of the pager are not important, but the supply chain is. Note, that other weapons (talkie-talkies) were also used in the attack. The key question the article needs to answer is who made the pagers and who is responsible for their safety, Gold Apollo or BAC Consulting. Protecting Gold Apollo from bad publicity is not a reason for deleting the article. If they go bankrupt because of this, they fully deserve it. They had a responsibility to protect their trade mark.
P.S. - Wikipedia has an article on Stuxnet, but no article on the attack itself or the damage it caused. The Stuxnet article focuses on the weapon and on how it was delivered. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 01:48, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is very flawed. The weapon was the explosives. Stuxnet was specific malware that exploited four zero day Windows vulnerabilities, and the article is about the engineered malware, and not about the model of USB drive it initially infected. But also that argument is off the point. The pager product is only notable if there are reliable independent secondary sources that significantly discuss the pager (not the attack, but the actual pager). Do we have any such sources? Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 07:34, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Petri Krohn; There is an article for the attack itself. Parham wiki (talk) 13:31, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am now changing my !vote to speedy keep. It is becoming evident that the AR924 was not just some random Gold Apollo pager intercepted by Mossad (presumedly), but it was designed and manufactured by the Israelis using the Hungarian company BAC Consulting as a front. This implies that this was a multi-year Israeli operation, started in 2022 at the latest. This covert operation is distinct from the bloodshed that happened in Lebanon this week. I am redirecting BAC Consulting, to the article, as evidently the fake company had no other purpose than to produce these killer pagers.
@Parham wiki; Thank you for the link to Operation Olympic Games. In the Stuxnet case the article on the weapon is ten times as long as the article on the attack itself. I believe we will see a similar trend here. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 19:41, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. - Someone has stated Draft:BAC Consulting. I have suggested that it be merged to Gold Apollo AR924. The company is a fake front, established solely to produce the AR924 killer pagers. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 20:11, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You should only bold one of your keeps. By convention at AfD we only bold our !votes once. Also you have not specified a speedy criterion. I don't think any are eligible. I think you mean you are moving from keep to keep. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 19:53, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The flaw in this argument is that the exact make and model of pager that was manipulated does not provide justification for an article. Similarly, we have Bulgarian umbrella that details how umbrellas have been rebuilt into a murder weapon - but without creating an article on the actual model of umbrella that was modified - exactly because the make and model of the modified implement does not in itself provide it with notability. Lklundin (talk) 11:45, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The point is that the discussion of this device and the supply chain should be in the main explosion article, which is currently a small fraction of the size that would warrant a WP:SIZESPLIT. Hemiauchenia (talk) 13:25, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are currently 19 sources on the article —danhash (talk) 16:32, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Which of these meet WP:NPRODUCT and WP:SIRS? Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 16:44, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. There are already articles for both the attack and the company who had the pager manufactured. Some information could go there. There are a lot of sources mentioning the pager, but only in the context of the attack. Specific coverage is lacking. Cortador (talk) 21:06, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

*Keep Edited and updated, not deleted. It should be about the AR924 mass produced and used in conflict weapon, not an article about a pager model. The story is developing and it appears this model may have only been produced as a weapon and not in Hungary which was a shell front. As a page about a weapon, it should be kept for the same reason "Little Boy" has a page, even though no one heard about it until after it exploded over Hiroshima, and it was also only used once. I am sure there is a page about the Manhattan Project, and one about the Hiroshima bombing. Yet the bomb itself has its own page. Notable weapons, especially the first of their type, need their own page because weapons have a design, explosive type and mass, range and effect, delivery method, an assembly, a development process, country that developed it, countries that possess it, number produced, uses in war. The AR924 is clearly notable for reasons mentioned by others and some of the reasons Little Boy is notable. Keysersmoze (talk) 08:44, 21 September 2024 (UTC) WP:ECR, only striking as it is referred to by other !votes. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:56, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep per Keeper of the Queen's Corgis and Cullen328, but most of all per Keysersmoze's comment above. The first instance of an entirely new kind of weapon; mass-manufactured booby-trapped remote-detonated personal devices. — The Anome (talk) 07:56, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, if these are specifically manufactured as a booby trap device and are not a standard pager that was modified with a logic board and explosive, then it clearly becomes notable. But, what are the secondary sources that show this please? We have a lot of keeps, but still there is still no source discussion at all. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 11:36, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

Delete no one has provided any example of which sources meet WP:NPRODUCT. If someone is looking for this pager model they will be interested in the pager attacks where this is already mentioned. Traumnovelle (talk) 02:12, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting this discussion as I don't see a consensus yet. A few remarks though. As Sirfurboy states, there has been very little discussion on sources that would demonstrate notability rather than this pager just being "in the news". I will mention that since its nomination at AFD, this article has doubled in size. As an aside, it might be useful to not think of this article as about a pager and instead about a military weapon. We have plenty of articles about specific military weapons, from rifles to bombs and tanks, so that might be a better comparison than comparing to other articles about tech devices.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 00:33, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete: Doesn't meet notability for products. Coverage is largely from the last few days, nothing before this time. Non-notable product a week ago, nothing sustained. Unless this happens again with the same product, I don't see notability at this time. There were also Icom radios used, so this article doesn't represent the entirety of the story. Oaktree b (talk) 00:40, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I don't necessarily think of this as a weapon, it was one of two used in the attack (the other being an Icom radio). It could be written about under the pager explosions article where we can cover both items used in the attack. My concern is also that there is no information about the "walkie talkies" used in the same attack; I can't see neutrality when we so extensively cover one of the two items used, while completely ignoring the second. Oaktree b (talk) 15:49, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

*:Hallo. Then write an entry about the second. Giammarco Ferrari (talk) 01:02, 28 September 2024 (UTC)WP:ECR. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:56, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • There's even less sourcing about the Icom radios, they aren't that popular to be honest. Oaktree b (talk) 23:25, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - The article has been expanded significantly since the RFD and its subject matter is notable due to its involvement in a major geopolitical event. --Posted by Pikamander2 (Talk) at 10:31, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to 2024 Lebanon pager explosions. Despite repeated requests for sources, none have been discussed here, and I do not believe WP:NPRODUCT is met nor WP:GNG for an article about this model of a pager. I'll get to sourcing in a moment. I have read all the arguments above, and I am most impressed by Petri Krohn's argument that this specific pager was built only as a weapon. If it were true that the whole company were set up specifically to deliver this attack through this licensed pager model, and that the pager model had no other purpose than to deliver this attack then there would be a strong argument that it meets GNG. But, we don't actually know that is true at this stage. If this were merely a pager model that was modified in this particular shipment, then the pager model is simply not the weapon. Any pager would do. But despite waiting this long to !vote, I do not see that this matter has been clearly established. We do have one source in the article: [1]. The New York Times report on an intelligence briefing that alleges there was a complex Israeli manufacturing front that even shipped pagers to normal clients. But we remain too close to this event. That briefing may not be correct. I have unanswered questions. How could Israel know that Hezbollah would purchase that model? There are possible answers to that. Someone working for Israel involved in that purchasing decision in Hezbollah for instance. But we just do not know. There are no secondary sources here. And for the avoidance of doubt, I would not accept the NY Times reporting of the intelligence briefing as a suitable historical secondary source. There is a briefing, clearly primary. There is a newspaper that tells us what the briefing said. That is a discursive primary source because it is simply recounting the detail of the primary source without synthesis. The Guardian does the same, this time quoting the NY Times [2]. And those are the only two sources that provide anything that would make the pagers notable rather than the attack. All the other sources are clearly about the attack itself. Moreover the attack did not only affect these pagers but also walkie talkies using the same attack vector. The attack is clearly notable, and we must cover it. But we also need to think of the reader. Even if it is true that every single device of this model number was made by Israeli intelligence, we still have a WP:PAGEDECIDE issue. Because readers need to be directed to the page that best answers their information need, and web pages that link people off a primary page, and require the reader to read a second page to fill the gaps, will not serve that information need as well as a page that brings all the information together in context. The merge target discusses this pager by model number. Everything that is known about and can be said about this pager model can exist on the target page. The reader is best served by having this information there. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 12:12, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - I prefer to err on the side of inclusion for something that was part of a famous event. There are details in this article about the device that don't belong in the article about the explosions. --rogerd (talk) 20:14, 29 September 2024 (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.
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