User talk:Abecedare

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Mumbai GA

We do not have enough active editors on Wikipedia to help. It's a personal choice. No one gets paid here. This was a really a tough task, dear. I had to break my bones. I am sure if YellowMonkey nominates the other Indian City FAs at FAR, none of them will survive. These days, Indian FAs are getting delisted at FAR at a very fast pace. Whenever I check the FAR page, I can find at least one India related FAR. Tell me, is it possible to save Rail transport in India with just 27 citations (majority are unreliable). Kensplanet^T_C 04:36, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I think Indian articles have been hit harder by the changes to (1c) than articles from other countries because most of how heavily older Indian articles have relied on websites, particularly ones that are now ineligible as non-RS. Old discussion here seemed to indicate a reluctance to use books instead whatever is on google (see Nichalp's comments). And when I close FARs I see that Indian articles have a much heavier reliance on wesbites than other countries' FAs. In the old days, even recently in 2007, I made a big fuss on Hispanic Americans in World War II about a whole pile of family memorial websites and lobby groups being used but a group of Hispanic editors voted their way to FA anyway. Even some old FAs have independent blogs as references. The way to save FAs is to pre-emptorily renovate them gradually, because it can be difficult for a 3rd party to work out which books the info came from if the original author has retired. I suppose some kind of incentive scheme could be implemented. The problem is that many people do the least they can to get a FA, in which case it will be left behind quickly, or won't improve an article at all until it gets sent to FAR.

A lot of FAs from all places need a complete rewrite because some of them were written ages ago when standards were not high and some even have glaring holes in the coverage with entire sections absent. So doing everything on the run at FAR is hard. Since early 2008 there have been 7 Australian articles in FAR (since I can remember all of them, I use it as an example)

• Cynna Kydd - Expanded a bit to keep up to date. Kept a bit weakly early 08
• Shrine of Remembrance - Had 0 citations. Bilby (talk · contribs) and Melburnian (talk · contribs) completely redid it, 2X expansion, basically a new article. Kept mid 08
• Waterfall Gully, South Australia - Expanded a bit, more books were read up on. Broadened. a Bilby job. Kept late 08
• Dietrich v The Queen - Small expansion, added cites from legal textbooks. Kept March 09
• Sydney Roosters - Had no cites, inconsistently formatted, copyedited. Kept. Luckily, most of the info could be easily found in a general rugby league history book and only took me 2 hours to add about 50 footnotes. Kept May 09
• Lake Burley Griffin - Had to completely rewritten/expanded 3x due to random and large gaps in the coverage, unreferenced. Currently on FAR
• Cane toad - Had to be completely expanded on biology/environment and also a more international balance. Effectively a new article mostly by Bilby. Currently on FAR

That's 3/7 that had to be completely changed already. It can be pretty hard to save articles on FAR without pre-empting it, unless a lot of people will chip in, and this is rarely the case. As far as Australian articles go, most of them used reliable textbooks a lot, so even if there are no footnotes, there is a chance that the article follows the structure of one of the books and about 50% of the content can usually be cited in about 4-5 hours, eg in this list I was able to source Flag of Australia almost completely, and a lot of some others like Thomas Playford and Australia at the Winter Olympics in about 5 or so hours from a book, although that doesn't mean that they don't have other issues. Which shows the benefits of using good sources; they never go out of date and don't need maintenance. Most websites go dead eventually, bits and pieces scattered everywhere, and many of them no longer meet (and never should have met) the RS criteria, and when you google each page only fits about one sentence of the article, as well as the fact that online sources also yield a heavy slant towards tertiary sources. A lot of old internet-researched FAs are like that... YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 06:00, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Also, I can't close FARs that I nominate.... so if I nominate Indian articles I can't close them. And the other closers are a lot more lenient than I or the FAC standards, so if I nominate an article you should be able to save it easily. YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 06:00, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

An FA star is only valuable to the degree that it truly reflects an articles quality; earning or retaining a FA star by vote-stacking, reviewers' apathy, or by leniency of FA/FAR closer is essentially meaningless (except for editor's or project members' ego, perhaps).

As a reader, I am happy to see wikipedia's FA quality standards rise to value authoritative and quality sourcing instead of being satisfied by the minimal standards set by WP:RS. Unfortunately, WPINDIA articles have not kept up with improving standards due to various reasons:

1. Firstly, many of the senior project editors have retired or are less active due to which many FAs have actually deteriorated from the time they were originally promoted; especially since there are so may editors interested only in adding peacockery and decorative images (see all the debates at Talk:Mumbai archives; or see how this template went from [1] to [2]).
2. Secondly consulting offline books and academic articles requires time, effort and access to resources that are not universally available - that I think explains the over-reliance of WPINDIA articles on poor-quality web and news sources.
3. Thirdly, most editors working on Indian and Hinduism articles have a science/technology education and very few are formally trained in history, literature or other humanities; this does not matter when writing articles on general topics but shows through most clearly when one reads articles on Indian history which are often based on generic or GOI websites, outdated and popular literature, instead of relying on quality modern scholarship or even standard texts in the field.
4. And then of course there is the POV pushing and inter-nation and inter-state rivalries, but those problems are systemic on wikipedia, and not limited to Indian articles. These issues just mean that articles on certain topics (for example anything to do with Kashmir, India-Pakistan etc) will simply never be FAs.

In the short term, I don't see any easy way to overcome these shortcomings, and many current FAs are likely to lose their stars. Hope we see more active editors, and editors with more diverse interest who take up content creation and maintenance. Abecedare (talk) 08:09, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, if you follow the right methodologies, you can still do alright. A science/engineer can write on history and a mathematically-challenged person can write about maths. Emmy Noether was written mainly by a person who claimed to have not completed high school maths. But if it is about technical details it can be difficult and some articles appear as though the author paraphrased while still being unsure of the technial content, giving the tone a funny feel. YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 15:34, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Given that I almost exclusively edit in areas that are not areas of my real-life expertise, I certainly agree that one can make useful contributions outside one's field of education. It finally boils down to methodology though: one way is to write down what one already knows and then look for sources that support those statements; the second way is to look for good sources first, and then write down what they say. An expert in an area can get away with the first approach, but dilettantes taking that way usually end up producing an imbalanced article. Abecedare (talk) 04:07, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Speaking of pointless articles and numerical stunts, a whole pile of subcontinental wikipedias got removed from the front page display because the writers mostly made empty stubs to inflate the article count Template talk:Wikipedialang YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 03:17, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Looking through the links in that discussion I found this "year" category on Hindi wikipedia with 1500+ articles. All the articles that I spot-checked said "X is an ordinary year in the Gregorian calendar" or "X is a leap year in the Gregorian calendar" and then contained some blank sections (Events, Births and Deaths). Not necessarily bad as honeypots, as long as these stubs were not created solely to inflate article count. Abecedare (talk) 04:07, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Discussion in Talk:Iyengar

I'm reproducing for your sake the contents of page 55,56 and 57 of the book. Regards.-The Enforcer_{Office of the secret service} 04:09, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Gayatri Mantra

Hi Abecedare, Gayatri Mantra is another important article that's been an edit-war magnet because it hasn't been very well sourced. I've been trying to clean it up and reference it, and would appreciate other opinions on the talk page (the last three sections there). And anything else you would like to add or change, of course. Regards, Priyanath ^talk 20:25, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

My first reaction at looking at the article right now was, "Well, it looks better sourced than most Hinduism related articles". :-)

Nice work! I agree with your comments on the talk page and will try to do my bit to improve the article over the next few days. A quick observation: the article does not mention that the verse is in Sanskrit - blinders, eh ? Abecedare (talk) 20:55, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Blinders, indeed...I figured you would see some things I was completely missing. Thanks, Priyanath ^talk 21:00, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Santhigiri and Karunakara Guru

Take a look? Both at AfD. Gnews gave me 102 hits for Santhigiri and 44 (mostly trivial) for Karunakara Guru, but if Manmohan Singh inaugrated a centre with his name and K. R. Narayan considered him a guru, I'm sure something can be found. Can you look for something? The articles are in bad need of editing though to actually insert refs in. Cheers -SpacemanSpiff^{Calvin‡Hobbes} 21:38, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

My initial instinct is to propose merger of the two articles, but it is possible that both articles merit being kept. I'll take a more thorough look later (perhaps this weekend) and add my comments to the AFD debates. By the way, the articles need to be checked for copyvio; in my experience such lengthy articles written from a devotee POV are often cut-n-paste efforts. Abecedare (talk) 03:08, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Damn! There are copy vios within the article, I'm going to delete/rewrite now. I'm not against a merge of the two either. Man, all these AfD clean ups are distracting me from my primary goal of getting R. K. Narayan to GA/FA status ASAP, just a bit disappointed that one of our best writers has a very disorganized page. Cheers. -SpacemanSpiff^{Calvin‡Hobbes} 03:17, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Sigh, I suspected copyvios, since typically a person who puts in the effort to write a 100K+ wikipedia article from scratch usually makes sure it is at least close to encyclopedic in tone, which these article are not. It may be best to revert to a pre-copyvio version (if any) and builkd up from there, since rephrasing previously copied text is a derivative work and, some argue, is not allowable either.

Improving our article on R.K. Narayan is a very worthy goal; go for it! It's weird how we share interest in Narayan and C&H; if you also have a taste for Wodehouse, it will make me wonder if our real-life paths have ever crossed or paralleled (I know, I know that's a logical tautology) ... Abecedare (talk) 03:38, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Right ho! -SpacemanSpiff^{Calvin‡Hobbes} 03:52, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Gandhi talk page

I've posted a reply on the definition of "pre-eminence" on the Gandhi talk page. Reply at your leisure. NeutronTaste (talk) 21:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging me about this; I somehow missed your reply! I have now added further comments on the article talk page. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 02:53, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Gita

I found your justification for reverting rather sad. "Couldn't Verify" != "I'm Too Lazy To Read the Source". On the 1000BC claim, I am only parroting claims made by a wide range of experts across disciplines. 300 - 600BC is quite a narrow range, which does not take in the uncertainty with which numerous academics have approached the subject.Pectore^talk 16:38, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

See my reply and quote request on the article talk page. Abecedare (talk) 16:45, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA II

Are you interested at all in the TRUTH about Barack Hussein Obama II? From the deletion of 100% FACTUAL COMMENTS, IT IS APPARENT THAT YOU ARE DOING EVERYTHING TO SUPPRESS THE TRUTH. What is up with that?

Maxframe (talk) 08:50, 16 July 2009 (UTC)