Talk:5

Wiki Education assignment: 4A Wikipedia Assignment

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 February 2024 and 14 June 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Not Fidel (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Not Fidel (talk) 17:29, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Glyph development section

I removed material from the "Evolution of the Arabic digit" section yesterday for WP:OR concerns, but it was restored by User:Radlrb. First, thanks to Radlrb for providing the link to the source book at [1]; I can see from this that at least the basic graphic listing of the glyphs is sourced appropriately. However, I'm still concerned about the nature of the whole descriptive narrative made about them, which still strikes me as WP:OR, i.e. statements such as "The evolution of the modern Western digit for the numeral 5 cannot be traced back to the Indian system" (well, evidently it can, otherwise we wouldn't have this succession of glyphs). All the narrative about who "took" what from where and what were the defining graphical characteristics and innovations of each glyph at each stage is not taken from the source, but is some Wikipedian's highly speculative interpretation of Ifrah's graphics. The same goes for the similar passage in the 7 article I also removed, which is full of interpretative claims such as "to make the longer line diagonal rather than straight, though they showed some tendencies to making the digit more rectilinear". Add to these problems, there's the embarrassing error of referring to things like "Nagari" or "Ghubar" as if they were peoples. They are not; they are writing styles – there's no such thing as "Ghubar Arabs", any more than there's "Cursive Italians" or "Minuscule Frenchmen" or "Gothic Germans". (As an aside, all these passages were first written by a highly problematic editor back in 2004, User:Numerao, who was banned shortly after for running a sockfarm, and they have sat here uncorrected ever since.) – Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:27, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

If you read into the narrative in the book, and other sources, it's basically how it is explained in the section, however with much more concise, and less casual language. There are those embarrassing errors that you mentioned, and that should be changed, however it's not too far off. Basically, the early Indian 5 looked more like a 4, and the Europeans eventually started using a 5 that looked like a 3 or 4 from the Arabs (mainly) rather than the 5 from the Indians (that looked like a 4 still, and might be the explanation for writing "cannot be traced back to the Indian system" directly, if we are talking about maintaining most of the same original form it had). Thank you for pointing out those very obvious errors, and yes, as it stands it does read somewhat like OR, however the underlying notions, I believe, were not intended to be OR, were rather just written very casually (and quickly, possibly). It should be re-written, still. Radlrb (talk) 17:16, 29 May 2024 (UTC)