Talk:Mali

Old talk

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French Sudan originally a department of France? Was French Sudan originally a "Department" of France (like Algeria was)? I added this but I'm not sure this is true. Badagnani 00:48, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

suggestion: PRONUNCIATION GUIDE FOR "MALI" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.80.66.119 (talk) 17:52, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Slavery?

Should this be mentioned? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7692396.stm says: "Slavery is also still practised in Mali and Mauritania."

~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.106.12 (talk) 00:18, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Economy section: NPOV

I have reviewed the "Economy" section in all country articles on Wikipedia; unfortunately, many of them have NPOV issues, and by my reading, this article is one of them.

Common issues with this section include:

• verbatim quotes from the CIA world factbook
• describing a country's economic policy as "sound", "unsound", "imprudent", etc.
• assuming a link between economic health and low inflation
• using expressions like "the GDP improved" (should be increased), "beneficial levels of inflation" (should be low levels of inflation), etc.
• postulating cause-effect relationships that seem controversial.

Issues in this specific article are:

• pro-IMF POV (this is also unsourced)
  • "an IMF-

This note will stay up for a week before I'll make any further changes. Please feel free to be bold and fix the article yourself, though! I'll also be monitoring this discussion page, and will try answering any concerns.

If you want to discuss the entire project, you can do so on my talk page or at the talk page for this specific prject.

(Note: this is only the second country page I'm trying this on, and I haven't gotten any comments so far, so please let me know what you think about the idea.)

RandomP 16:43, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Changed the daylight savings time information -- Mali does not use DST. Chris 11:43, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Wrong Motto in English

On the English page on the right hand side it says, 'Un peuple, un goal, une equipe' translated as 'One people, one goal, one faith'. Equipe in French means team, not faith, and "goal" is not a French word. Then I saw on the French page, the motto is said to be, "Un peuple, un but, une foi." This needs to be corrected on the English page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.80.38.19 (talk) 00:53, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Hydroelectriciy

Electricity - 700kWh generated through hydro electricity contributing 50% of the countries electricity? 700kWh is roughly equivalent to a car sized tank of diesel. perhaps the unit should be GWh —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.74.210.239 (talk) 03:47, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

That's what the source said. miranda 04:07, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

The two major Hydroelectric projects in Mali are Manantali Dam ( 200 megawatts, reported to generate " 432.85 GWh in 2002, 846.52 GWh in 2003, and is operating at an acceptable availability level. Energy sales to the three national power utilities amounted to 372.80 GWh in 2002 and 775.31 GWh in 2003." and Selingue Dam (44 megawatts, producing 200 million kilowatt-hours per year). Can we generate an aggregate from these that makes sense? I'm not electrical engineer. T L Miles (talk) 06:40, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to change. miranda 08:02, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Percentage of Christians?

On the main page it says 5%. On the demografic page it says about 1%. Any one an idea which figure is correct?HichamVanborm 15:08, 23 October 2006 (UTC)mali is the bomdigidia

Section about Songhai

I made some minor changes to the grammar, but it appears as if the entire section has written in another language and was run through an online translator. I cannot understand the basic premise enough to fix it so that it is beneficial to the article. If someone else could that would be great. --Cdank (talk) 17:38, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

history

how does the Bambara Empire fit in the history section? It is not currently mentioned. I don't know enough about the subject to merge it in. phoebe 04:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Amazigh language?

I do not believe the Amazigh name for Mali is required for the top of the article. The lingua franca of Mali is Bambara, not Amazigh -- I think English and French are the only two necessary. Any thoughts as to whether or not I should remove it?

reply: don't remove it. a person who is Amazigh might read.

     from: Fver

I still disagree that the Amazigh name should be displayed; I can think of numerous languages that are more widely-spoken and recognizably Malian than Amazigh. Why don't we put those there? N'ko, Malinke, Arabic etc. Chris 18:49, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Music!

This article doesn't include any link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malian_music —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.2.115.44 (talk) 14:47, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Africa/Mali work group

Please note the addition of the WikiProject Africa/Mali work group. Anyone willing to coordinate Malian topics can add lists/suggestions there, as well as well at Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa T L Miles (talk) 06:27, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Malinese - Malian

The article mentions Malian as the Demonym for Mali, I have also heard the word Malinese used, probably first from playing Civilization, used with the Mali Empire. Malinese does not appear very frequently on a Google search compared to Malian and does not appear in my dictionary either. Does anyone know where the word Malinese came from, if it is incorrect or an archaic term. Should it be mentioned somewhere in the article?

Carlwev (talk) 17:37, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

A quick check of google seems to indicate that this computer game uses Malinese, and that it is also the Dutch / Flemish language term for people from Mali, and some translations into English of articles from these sources incorrectly render the term Malian as Malinese. I've never heard a West African use the term, or even read it before. My opinion is that it is incorrect, and if anything, you should write a letter to the makers of that video game. T L Miles (talk) 16:20, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Mali/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

This article is not yet ready for GA status. Please review the comments below.

• Much of the article seems to be compiled from very few resources, but what's worse is that I have found entire sections of text taken directly from the source material. For example, the first sentence in the history section "Mali was once part of three famed West African empires which controlled trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and other precious commodities" is taken directly from the Library of Congress source text without indicating so. While it is not a violation of copyright (because works of the U.S. government do not have copyright protection), it is by all definitions plagiarism; please correct any instances of such behavior. If entire sections of the work are from another publication, then it may not even be worth completely duplicating it in Wikipedia but rather just linking to the article instead. Please make sure that information and text from the sources is not lifted directly but instead used to create new prose in the article.
• Even though more citations are better than too few, it is not always necessary to cite each sentence. If a group of facts come from the same source, then that source need only be cited once.
• Sections of the article are rather slim as well. They could definitely be fleshed out to meet GA standards... not too long, but a little bit more than a few sentences per section.

When issues with sourcing are taken care of please renominate for good article status. Best, Epicadam (talk) 03:11, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I am reversing my review as Wikipedia's policy at Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Plagiarism that does not infringe copyright does not require quotations of public domain material. As that was my primary reason for the GA fail,[User talk:Epicadam|talk]]) 13:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. miranda 18:21, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Notes from "Military Coups in West Africa Since The Sixties"

I can't find any notes from "Military Coups in West Africa Since The Sixties". --All N Ever (talk) 18:43, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Well I didn't add them (I don't think) but it can still be a reference without having a footnote. T L Miles (talk) 19:58, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Slavery and Cruelest Journey

There was the following section added:

Slavery and "Cruelest Journey Reference

 +  
 + Should this be mentioned? 
 + http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7692396.stm 
 + says: "Slavery is also still practised in Mali and Mauritania." 

The above entry has been removed and all reference in the history to it has been removed, but I would like to comment on it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JakeSturm (talk • contribs) 19:44, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

The Cruelest Journey

Earlier, I added "The Cruelest Journey" to the "Additional Reading" section of the Mali article. The book retraces the journey of Mungo Park, the first Western explorer to reach Timbuktu and to explore the interior of Mali, and as it retraces Pakr's journey the book descrbes the people, architecture, religions of current day Mali. It also covers some of the history and exploration of the country.

The book also explains that while slavery is illegal in Mali it is still practiced. The book explains that some of the Bella people are still enslaved by the Tuareg because the Bella are not of Arab ancestry. The author Kira Salak actually confirmed the existence of slavery by finding a slave owner and buying two women out of slavery and into freedom. Upon attending a National Geographic lecture by Salak, she was asked about this story and told the audience that the story was fact checked by National Geographic and the safety of the two women, several months after their freedom was bought, was verified by the magazine. It would be an excellent reference for the slavery section.

Unfortunately, I cannot put the reference in because the user “Miranda” immediately removes my addition of “Cruelest Journey” from the Mali reference as soon as I enter it, despite it being a book on Mali. Miranda is convinced that I am advertising the book when in reality I am only trying to give the Wikipedia users a useful reference on the country. I do not want to go through administrative channels to get this entry in, but perhaps if other users would review the book and based on an informative decision put the reference back in for "Cruelest Journey", maybe Miranda will stop removing it.

Thank you

JakeSturm (talk) 19:38, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Author is notable, but her work isn't for scholarly presentations. miranda 21:31, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

The Reliable sources rules of Wikipedia states the following:

"Reliable non-academic sources may also be used, particularly material from reputable mainstream publications"

"Cruelest Journey" is published by National Geographic Press. It was based on a published article in National Geographic Adventure. Both are reputable maintstream publicitions with scrupulous fact checking, and meet the requirements for Wikipedia. Hopefully, this will finally resolve the issues I have been having with the user Miranda as she seems to have a misunderstanding of what are acceptable references. I am putting the reference back in again now that we have finally cleared this up.

Thank you everyone.

JakeSturm (talk) 21:13, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi there. I've been keeping an eye on this and I believe that whilst I'm sure the source is interesting I'm unsure if it's relevant. I'm unconvinced that, if a person read the book, it would complement what's present in the Mali article. The book is descriptive, personal literature. While there's nothing wrong with that, it's problematic here as we are looking to find more analytical sources. Compare it to this situation — would My Life (Bill Clinton autobiography) be relevant further reading to the United States article? Perhaps this belongs more in the culture subsection than the main article. Sillyfolkboy (talk) 00:59, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I seriously agree. I think it's book spam. And, I would advise neonwhite to stop revert warring with the source until we reach a consensus. miranda 05:17, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I find that, though interesting, this should simply be on another page.

Fireheat624 12:58, 25 January 2009

Mali photo removed

Why was this photo removed twice? It was taken in Mali and the caption is not meant to be humorous. [1] Thank you. MaxMercy (talk) 19:51, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Edit request: Remove Fashion section?

The Fashion section at the end of the Mali article seems to be very much of promotional nature. It may be worth a sentence in the Culture section, but seems out of place as its own section. Couldn't find anything about this on the discussion page.

80.219.56.246 (talk) 17:11, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done. If someone feels a sentence is warranted, they can add it with a good source. CMD (talk) 00:37, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Adjustment in the lead? Regions and region

It appairs a sentence in the lead is somewhat inaccurate, or could be misunderstood (I'm not English-speaking). It is "Mali consists of eight regions and its borders on the north reach deep into the middle of the Sahara, while the country's southern region, where the majority of inhabitants live, features...", and as I read the sentence, it is indicating most inhabitants are living in the countries southern region (one of the eight??), while only less than three millions are living in Sikasso. It appairs somewhat questionable to mention eight regions in same sentence as region is used for half the country. Grrahnbahr (talk) 11:17, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

"Region" is once meant in the administrative sense and once in the broader sense. I propose to write "southern part" instead to avoid confusion. --RJFF (talk) 15:12, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

The change makes sense, we should probably restrict the use of Region to the official one as much as possible. CMD (talk) 15:19, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Azawad

The article describes the North of the counrty as "known as Azawad". The region was not known as such because noone used that term to describe it prior to the MNLA declaration. Also, for the sake of accuracy, the first section should specify that the MNLA declaration of independence is unilateral and not recognised by the Malian government, nor by the international community. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.115.1.172 (talk) 18:55, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 11 April 2012

69.138.162.20 (talk) 03:54, 11 April 2012 (UTC) THE MAP OF MALI ON THIS ARTICLE IS ERRONEOUS: WE CAN CLEARLY SEE THAT IMAGE AUTHOR IS BIASED AND HAS DIVIDED THE AUTONOMOUS COUNTRY IN TWO, HENCE PUTTING DOUBTS INTO THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF MALI. PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT THIS IMAGE IS INCORRECT AND IS SENDING WRONG INFORMATION INTO THE PUBLIC. MALI IS ONE AND WILL NOT BE DIVIDED - FYI, REVIEW STATEMENTS FROM THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE, THE UNITED NATIONS, EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND ALL AFRICAN COUNTRIES - ALL HAVE CONDEMN TERRORRIST ATTEMPS TO DIVIDE MALI AND YET WIKIPEDIA IS PROUDLY PUBLISHING THIS OUTRAGEOUS IMAGE. PLEASE REMOVE OR CORRECT. THANKS FROMA MALIAN CITIZAN