User talk:Lothar von Richthofen/sandbox

Hello,

How can I help to get the List of Assyrian Tribes article back up? It seems to be a shame to have such a rich page be taken down in such an abrupt manner.--Assyriandude (talk) 03:34, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Going forward

Hi Lothar,

thanks for putting this here. There's lots of great information on this page and it would be a shame if we just decimated it to a mere list. What do you think? How can we improve this page? I'm ready to do my part and add objective references.

Best regardsAshurpedia (talk) 02:14, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @Ashurpedia: and @Assyriandude:, sorry for the delay getting back—been a while since I edited regularly on here so bear with me.

After looking over some other pages on here, I think that we can deal with this "list" formatting trifle right off the bat by making the article just be "Assyrian tribes". It's presently a redirect to the "list" article, but there's no reason it *needs* to be that way. We have Magyar tribes, Pashtun tribes, Polish tribes, Arab tribes in Iraq, and so forth. There's no real procedural reason that we need to strip out good information to make a bare-bones "list" if we define the article as a comprehensive description of Assyrian tribes as a notable historical and anthropological subject.

It wouldn't be hard to do that—with some style/copyediting and sourcing work on what I saved to this page, it could easily serve as the core for an article like that. What we could do then is add some sections discussing anthropological attributes of the tribes: structure, geography, leadership, dialect, etc. Introduce and define relevant terms (e.g. ashiret/rayet) and concepts like Eastern and Western Assyrian, but avoid getting too sucked into touchier issues like national naming and church beyond what is relevant for describing the tribes as social units.

Collecting good sources, per WP:RS, should be our first priority though, because ultimately what will allow content to withstand criticism is having sources backing it up, and to strive to have these sources be as "academic" as possible. There is some allowance made for online news content, but anticipate having to argue more over that. Stuff off of social media is usually not accepted as "reliable", though—one of the other objections levelled against the article was that it had pictures from Facebook that potentially violated the copyright policy, which is strictly enforced here. I know that for marginalized indigenous peoples, there's often an issue in that a lot of history remains oral or informal, so it's a good idea to at least note down info from those informal sources so you can cross-check it with published works. I have some of my own books and PDFs that I'm going through to find relevant information for this—if you or your families have any books or other resources, check through those, that would be a huge help! Also if you have academic access (I don't anymore), definitely do some searches to see what you can find.

I'm happy to have more folks working on this! I may be on and off this website, but please feel free to make any edits you want to the sandbox page. If you have any questions, just ping me and I'll get with you as soon as I can. ~~ Lothar von Richthofen (talk) 23:46, 8 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've just added some new headers and subheaders into the article with hidden text outlining ideas for content. Have a look and see if there's anything you want to add or change! ~~ Lothar von Richthofen (talk) 01:15, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]