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Names of towns in Karnataka not changed yet!

This is to notify that the names of some of the towns in Karnataka which have been proposed for renaming by the Karnataka Government have not been renamed, due to the fact that the Union Government has not yet given its approval. The names are not official unless the Government of India approves it.

Further, if one argues that article names on English Wikipedia are based on how much the name is assimilated into the English Language, here are some statistics based on Google searches, which is an accepted way of determining assimilation into the language:

Proposed Name Search engine hits
Mangalooru 29,200
Hubballi 263,000
Shivamogga 88,400
Mysooru 69,000
Chikkamagaluru 35,000
Original Name Search engine hits
Mangalore 8,150,000
Hubli 7,110,000
Shimoga 7,350,000
Mysore 9,740,000
Chikmagalur 636,000

I think its quite clear beyond doubt that the Original names are more in use, and the 'Changed names' haven't been approved by the Government anyway, so I think all the pages relating to these towns in Karnataka need to be moved to their Original names.

These tables are not exclusive, and these statistics extend to other towns in Karnataka as well. I've gone through the earlier discussion in the archive, and found that it wasn't properly substantiated through hard facts and references.

Please refer to the following articles/discussions, one is an article from the Times of India, Bangalore, and another is a discussion on the Bangalore talk page. Name change not official yet Talk:Bangalore/Archive_4#Bangalore_or_Bengaluru.3F

I'd like to request editors to edit/move with caution (as I'm having a bad time requesting moves for all these pages). Regards. Swaroop (talk) 11:46, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Mangalore and Mysore (both FAs) are still at their original locations. I suggest that the rest could be moved over redirects. Any other ideas? Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 13:06, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
I'm having a tough time trying to request a move for Hubballi, and haven't started thinking about the others. Swaroop (talk) 12:06, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
"official name" does not matter for wikipedia. If that is the case India should be moved to Republic of India. Most commonly used name is what matters here, wp:mos. For ex. Hubballi are more used than Hubli, while Bangalore is more than Bengaluru. So it is better to have individual discussion at article talk pages than single discussion at common place, like here you call it consensus of just 2 users! Uber crowds (talk) 10:10, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2010-07-29/Hinduism

A dispute about the inclusion of Bali Sacrifice in the article Hinduism is on on Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2010-07-29/Hinduism. Please help build a consensus by giving your comments. Thanks. --Redtigerxyz Talk 16:58, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

IIT FAR

I have nominated Indian Institutes of Technology for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Dana boomer (talk) 17:04, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Difference between Itihaas and Buranji

What is the difference between Buranji and Itihaas? Your thoughts please! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.40.6.143 (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

What does "Pt." mean? As in "Pt. Purushotta Walawalkar" ?

At the article Harmonium, in the India section there's a list of harmonium players, and most of the names are prefixed by "Pt." What does this stand for? Is it some sort of title? MatthewVanitas (talk) 10:48, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

I am not familiar with the abbreviation, but I can make a guess: it's a short for Pundit? Since this is not a common abbreviation, perhaps spelling out the whole word would be better. --Ragib (talk) 10:52, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it is (in the context of music, at least) short for Pandit. An alternative term is Ustad. Both of these are, however, honorifics, and IMHO, should be removed from the page title in accordance with policy. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 10:56, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
Great info; removed the honorifics from the article, and also put in a bullet at article Pt indicating that it can be an abbreviation for "Pandit". Plus created a redirect to pandit from redlink vidushi (the female equivalent). Thanks for the support! MatthewVanitas (talk) 07:43, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

New category: Category:Harmonium players

While working on the article Harmonium (and noting the mass of redlinks for supposedly noteable players), I discovered that there are plenty of WP articles (of varying quality) on harmonium players, but no category joining them. Accordingly, I created Category:Harmonium players, which should help expand the music/musicians tree. MatthewVanitas (talk) 07:48, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Indian Gazetteer

Gazetteer of India that comprises of various locations and the information gathered is authentic. They are full of detailed information of almost everything in India. British developed it for the benefit of their officers so that they can manage the country properly. The process of updating these valuable volumes stopped after they left India on 1947. I want to suggest to Wikipedia Administration to make all the Gazetteers available on Wikipedia mainspace; there is no problem of verification as far as these Gazetteers are concerned. A separate Category should be created to accommodate them, named "Indian Gazetteer". By a special arrangement with the Government of India and States they can be had without any difficulty. Pathare Prabhu (talk) 07:46, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place for archiving them - wikisource is. And some of the older gazetteers are available in archive.org. --Sodabottle (talk) 08:02, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Sodabottle, I am presently working on an article on acient links of a community called Pathare Prabhu. I have chronicle records of this community in a book. This book is often required for references by the community people for essential references. If I want to put that book on Wikisource, how to do it? That book is printed in 1862 and it is no more available in new print and so I have taken out photos of every page. I am presently uploading them on Wikipedia Commons. Please guide me. Pathare Prabhu (talk) 08:07, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

After uploading to commons, you can transcribe them to wikisource. I am not that familiar with wikisource, but help for digitisation (formats, proofreading etc) is available here. --Sodabottle (talk) 08:25, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Some new military history articles on India

AshLin (talk) 13:52, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Do people know about AlexNewArtBot. It has a feed with all of this YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 07:33, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Kerala Nadvathul Mujahideen

This article was uncategorised since May and has apparently had no references since it was first written in 2006! I have restored the deleted categories, and tagged it for 'maintenance'. Could editors with expertise (and NPOV) in this area please take a look at this article and improve it? I personally have no idea about its' subject. Thanks! 220.101 talk\Contribs 15:03, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Gorakhpur

Needs attention; see more at Wikipedia:No_original_research/Noticeboard#History_of_Gorakhpur. East of Borschov 21:24, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Kaagaz Ke Phool

Is it really known as Paper Flowers (1959 film)? The imdb entry is that way, but imdb is seldom right about these things. I can't ever recall hearing the title Paper Flowers in reference to this movie. Recently moved citing WP:UE which like many things around here is a confused policy. —SpacemanSpiff 06:37, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, the movie is known and notable as "Kaagaz ke phool". Paper Flowers should be the redirect not the main article title. Can we have consensus for this please? AshLin (talk) 06:46, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
That discussion should happen on the article talk page, my query was more towards if it really is known as Paper Flowers except as some arbitrary translation somewhere. —SpacemanSpiff 06:51, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Not an arbitrary translation. See [1]--RegentsPark (talk) 15:14, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Hmmm, that I think justifies a move back, it's billed as "Kaagaz Ke Phool" and a translation is provided as "Paper Flowers". I think a move back discussion is probably in order on the TP. I hate WP:UE, one of the most confused policies on WP. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 12:53, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

List of richest Tamils

potential deletion candidate? --CarTick 14:56, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I think it has delete written all over it, nothing more than an OR POV push, Reddy's are Tamils of different language origin? —SpacemanSpiff 16:47, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Rupee Sign

Whether it is ok to use this {{nowrap|[[Image:Indian Rupee symbol.svg|8px|link=Indian rupee sign]]}} long sentence to disply a single rupee sign or any alternative available? incrazy | talk

You can use {{INR}}, until Unicode comes along. utcursch | talk 10:12, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
I updated the size of the template to 7px because 10px made the symbol stand out of the text - please change or revert if not acceptable... Virtualage (talk) 11:35, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
I like the 7px. Johnuniq (talk) 11:15, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
I have asked a question about {{INR}} at WP:VPT#Indian rupee template regarding whether there is a reasonable way to handle the fact that lines can wrap so that the rupee symbol and its following value are on different lines. I've just done a bunch of editing using {{INR}} but I think I will wait to see if anything develops before doing more. We should also update the template documentation to specify whether there should be space before the number (I have omitted that space). Johnuniq (talk) 11:15, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology

There is an Afd going on for PC Pandey - a winner of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (which is the highest award for science in India). Unfortunately because of nature of this particular article (SPAs, vanity pieces, peacocking etc), the entire prize's notability is being questioned at the AfD. I am afraid, if they establish a precedence that this award is not-notable in this AfD, articles of other awardees will follow this one into AfD. I have explained as best as i can there. Can someone tell these people why the top award for science in India is notable.--Sodabottle (talk) 06:04, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Nice work cleaning the article, Sodabottle! Ironically, it would have be an easy keep if only all the SPA/socks would stop voting for the article to be retained - now the closing admin will need to wade through the mess-of-an-AFD.
Request: can anyone with a few minutes take a look at India International Friendship Society and see if it worth retaining or not (I just prod-ed it after seeing it linked from Prem Chandra Pandey). Abecedare (talk) 07:40, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
Do have a look at your talk page, Abecedare. Kochank (talk) 11:27, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

DYKIndia on Twitter

Not sure if everyones following Wikimedia-India mailing list,so cross posting it.We have launched DYKIndia at WP:MBL17 aiming at reaching out to twitter folks with DYK facts related to India.Some relateed links :-Thread on mailing list,Code that powers it,GerardM blogpost. I would like to thank every DYK creator here and this is possible only because of you folks.If you have any questions / suggestions please ping me. Srikanth (Logic) 14:11, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Dosa and Udupi

I would like draw your attention to this long standing edit war. I have opened a discussion here. --CarTick 15:17, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

FAR

I have nominated Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Dana boomer (talk) 16:06, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Maharashtra#Marathi_statement_dispute

There is a dispute on Talk:Maharashtra#Marathi_statement_dispute about inclusion of the following ststements in Marathi (lead), Maharashtra and Pune articles:

Please help to form a consensus by giving your valuable comments. Thanks. --Redtigerxyz Talk 09:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Interesting

The interesting article and discussion thereon Talk:Stray cow problem in India. Shyamsunder (talk) 10:57, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Angamoozhy

I deleted this article, the deletion was later overturned on grounds that there was enough context to permit the article to remain. I suggested to the other editor that the matter be raised here for an opinion on the project whose tag appears on the article's talk page. Is a one liner on a village like this notable insofar as WP:INDIA is concerned? TomStar81 (Talk) 23:56, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Sardar Vallabhai Patel

A move request is open for this article. --RegentsPark (talk) 21:32, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Did someone dispute this move earlier? If not, I think you could have boldly moved it and saved the discussion - it seems a matter of common sense. Ncmvocalist (talk) 05:59, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
I wasn't sure about this. Vallabhai Patel does not exactly pop into mind (Sardar Patel is more likely the common name of this person). However, as always, 'let the community decide' is not a bad principle. --RegentsPark (talk) 16:19, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
True. Ncmvocalist (talk) 16:59, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
The community decision seems clear (no need to hit me over the head with it!). So I've closed the discussion and moved the article. --RegentsPark (talk) 21:16, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Prahlad Jani

Could someone please check the dispute here, as well as other issues on that talk page (if you have the time for all of them). Thanks. -- Nazar (talk) 18:17, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Marathi language dispute

Content about one dialect out of the 40 odd dialects (sometime referred to as varieties) of Marathi has been disputed by some experienced users. The dispute is a long one spanning almost 3 weeks and it can be found in three sections: [2][3], [4]

Several allegations have been made against this content, all of which have been addressed IMO. User:Redtigerxyz alleged WP:Fringe which ended up being the longest discussed one in terms of responses and duration. User:Redtigerxyz's allegation was eventually thrown out by the fringe theory noticeboard [5] so why should we simply accept User:Redtigerxyz's POV and continue to exclude my content from the article? My content has been lying in talk-space and out of article-space for more about 3 weeks now. I am a newbie on Wikipedia whereas all of the people I am defending my content against are experienced users such as User:SpacemanSpiff, an admin, User:Deepak D'Souza another very experienced user and User:Redtigerxyz who has been around very long. In fact User:SpacemanSpiff has left a warning on my talk page to block me regarding the very same content [6]. This was misguided on User:SpacemanSpiff's part because his actions came too soon and despite my efforts to communicate with him as edit summaries and histories will show. I feel intimated because if I go ahead and include content in Marathi lead, Maharashtra and Pune, I might be blocked. I welcome help from any other editors or admins who can insert the one line stated at the top of this section [7] in the three articles Marathi, Maharashtra and Pune. I will take off the content if the RFC [8] comes back negative. Thanks. Zuggernaut (talk) 23:02, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Notification of renaming proposal

Should the titles of the articles on the last British kings/emperors of India contain the phrase "of the United Kingdom"? Please see Talk:George VI of the United Kingdom#Requested move and comment there if you wish.--Kotniski (talk) 07:18, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Help! Yadav confusion

Hi! Over at the disambiguation pages with links project, one of the older disambiguation pages on our maintenance list is Yadav. Basically, everyone is uncertain how to deal with it. We need to fix these links to the disambig, but need help doing it. The worst is, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to decide when an article should link to Yadav caste, and when it should link to Yadu. Could you help us out? Thanks, --JaGatalk 23:49, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Done. utcursch | talk 06:35, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Afd for Greater Bangladesh

I request the attention of interested editors to this Afd. Thank you, Shiva (Visnu) 13:56, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Name of legislative assemblies

Hi - I am noticing some confusion about what is the correct, uniform name for India's state legislatures. Some articles are titled using "Vidhan Sabha", others using "Legislative Assembly." Should this link to the NIC website be used for correct naming? Shiva (Visnu) 15:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

i would think so.----CarTick 11:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

1984 anti-Sikh riots‎

The page was moved to 1984 Sikh Genocide and I reverted. Now a duplicate GFDL vio has been created at the latter title. Can someone else take a look at this please? I've got to be offline for a while. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 03:51, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Urgent opinion required for The Signpost

Hi, we're writing a short piece on Google's "Health Speaks", and there's a translation on the Hindi WP of the enwiki article on aspirin that I've been referred to. I wonder whether someone could take a look at the translation and comment on it, since I speak only English. diff of translation. Copy deadline is less than 24 hours away. Thank you. Tony (talk) 02:30, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Clearly no one is interested. Tony (talk) 03:34, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Mohammed Tayab Khan

A few years back I had created a stub on Mohammed Tayab Khan a noted craftsman from Jodhpur in Rajasthan who was awarded Padma Shri award in 2004 by Government of India. The article was recently deleted. I did not notice its nomination for deletion. How can it be revived. Can someone please advise. Thanks. Shyamsunder (talk) 06:47, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Since it was deleted by PROD I've restored it as contested after deletion. —SpacemanSpiff 10:21, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Many thanks SpacemanSpiff. Shyamsunder (talk) 11:24, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Jathedar Sekhwan - can you help?

The article on a former president of Shiromani Akali Dal, Jathedar Sekhwan, has been tagged as an unreferenced BLP since May 2008 (which is the current focus month for the UBLP Rescue Project). I have tried, and failed, to find any suitable third-party references to support the text (notes on the article talk page). I'm posting here in the hope that someone with better knowledge of the field might like to take and interest and be able to help.--Plad2 (talk) 07:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Not a BLP. I have sourced and cleaned up the article.--Sodabottle (talk) 08:55, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Wow! That was quick! Thank you.--Plad2 (talk) 09:15, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Minor point. Shouldn't it be at Ujagar Singh Sekhwan with a redirect from Jathedar Sekhwan rather than the other way around? --RegentsPark (talk) 12:30, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
RP, can I get you a cup of coffee? ;) —SpacemanSpiff 12:44, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Help form consensus at Talk:Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#.27Indian_freedom_struggle.27

I recently created a template Template:Anglo-Indian Wars to link the various events and movements leading to the Indian independence. Specifically I linked various wars such as the First Anglo-Maratha War, Second Anglo-Maratha War, Third Anglo-Maratha War, First Anglo-Sikh War, Second Anglo-Sikh War, Indian independence movement, Indian rebellion of 1857, the four Anglo-Mysore Wars, etc. The template is a mere chronological linkage of events/movements with similar objectives. It looks like:

Preceded by:
Second Anglo-Maratha War 		Indo-British conflicts Succeeded by:
First Anglo-Sikh War

Please help form consensus at Template_talk:Anglo-Indian_Wars#.27Indian_freedom_struggle.27 regarding the matter. Thanks. Zuggernaut (talk) 19:40, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Here's one of my responses in the debate summarizing my position:

Another relevant discussion is at Template_talk:Anglo-Indian_Wars#Appropriate_title Zuggernaut (talk) 19:47, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

West Bengal article urgently need some peer review and Image Selection

After a long inactiveness, I have returned back to find out some pages like West Bengal, Kolkata has been mercilessly edited and lots of POV and outsourced comments has crept in between. The pages has been filled up with images, which might not meet the criteria of a FA article. I would request all my Wikimates to have a look and decide the images that should be used in those pages and correct the pages as required. Amartyabag TALK2ME 02:15, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

War between Rajputs and Gujjars

There's some sort of off wiki canvassing to change WP articles on this, constantly changing many history and dynasty articles to replace one or the other. I removed references to both from our main articles and have protected quite a few of these dynasty and history articles. If someone wishes to clean up, all they'd need to do is monitor the links into Gujjar and Rajputs to see the daily changes. If you have some time to spare, please do that. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 05:12, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Leng

To the article about Leng, a fictional place, someone has added information about Leng Khua, a village in Mizoram. If such a place exists, and there's enough to say about it for it to merit an article, can someone farm it out to an appropriate article, as it obviously doesn't belong in the page about the fictional place. I can't find much of merit when searching Google in English. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 11:30, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Lion FAR

I have nominated Lion for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Otters want attention) 00:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Upper cloth revolt

Can someone pls keep an eye on what User:Southindia is doing in Talk:Upper cloth revolt. guess he has mistaken discussion page for the main page. --CarTick 18:30, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Featured article - India; 37 million Indians died under British rule in 19th century alone

Please help form consensus regarding inclusion of content about the starvation deaths of 37 million Indian during the British era. The relevant discussion is on the talk page of the article at [[9]]. You will also find relevant objections raised by other users in the preceding sections. Thanks. Zuggernaut (talk) 22:04, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Featured Article British Empire Contains WP:SYN about India Famine Deaths (IMO)

I've taken this British_empire#East_India_Company_in_Asia content from British Empire to the WP:SYN notice board here - Wikipedia:No_original_research/noticeboard#British_Empire_-_15_million_Indian_famine_deaths. Please help form a consensus. Thanks. Zuggernaut (talk) 01:21, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Meeting in Mumbai 20 Sept 2010

Hello! Barry Newstead, who has recently come on board as the Foundation's chief global development officer, comes to Mumbai 20-21 Sept as part of a weeklong India visit.

He and I are hoping to meet with wikipedians in Mumbai on 20 Sept eve - informally, to share and discuss the Foundation's plans for India, and to hear from the community on how to boost and strengthen projects in English and other Indian languages.

Would you be available and interested to meet with us on Mon 20 Sept eve? Please leave a message on my talk page. Thanks!

Bishdatta (talk) 13:51, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Please find here for WikiMeetup pages for Mumbai (20 Sep) , Delhi (22Sep), Bangalore (24Sep) . Kindly spread the word -- Tinu Cherian - 13:45, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

My city is the biggest

Folks, of late we've been having a lot of city size related vandalism on the two main list articles as well as on individual city articles. List of most populous cities in India and List of most populous metropolitan areas in India can serve as starting points. On clicking through to different cities on these links I've found that they contradict the list(s) which are correctly sourced and/or multiple cities have grown at levels beyond belief. When you have a few minutes can you check as many of the individual cities as you can? The sources on the two lists can be used as they are standard sources for all such articles across WP. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 11:54, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree that there have been many views on this. It may not be always considered as Vandalism, as the definition of the borders of a city is not standard. For example, Area of Bangalore can be considered as the area of the Bangalore Urban District, or as the Metropolitan area(controlled by BBMP/Municipality), or as the area upto which some other agency operates. So the sources themselves may not be considered wrong, but just that there is no standard. It would be helpful if someone could regularise the lists properly. Thanks. MikeLynch (talk) 16:45, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, if a reliable source reports a different figure and it's cited it isn't vandalism, randomly changing sourced population figures is vandalism. That's the problem I'm commenting about. As for WG, the standard source used across most geographic articles on WP (and apparently by a few others including Time magazine etc), they use the boundaries as set by the Census of India (except for Metros which is not defined in the census). —SpacemanSpiff 17:11, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Need your suggestions

I've made some sandbox changes to India (article) which can be seen here. Your observations and suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Please post them here. Also read these talk topics, Famines in India, Famine, starvation deaths during British era and Famine, starvation deaths during British era to understand the background and the reasons behind making the modifications.

Regards,...

Amartya ray2001 (talk) 19:22, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Amartya - I not too experienced with featured articles either but I know that they are the best articles from the community so, it best to take up changes bit by bit - adding and expanding paragraphs before splitting them in to smaller ones. Zuggernaut (talk) 04:01, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Ganga not Ganges

Could someone high up in the wikipedia admin system take this up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ganges#Ganga_vs_Ganges It's 'being' discussed for over 3 years now. All the major organizations in India refer to the river as Ganga. Not Ganges --SpArC (talk) 16:02, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
Sparc - I haven't looked at the debate but it makes sense to use the Indian name Ganga. I will participate soon and more the article to Ganga if there is consensus. Zuggernaut (talk) 04:03, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

The Indian Ministry of waters and Central Water Comission refers to the river as 'Ganga'. There is also a 'Ganga Flood Control Commission (GFCC)' a subordinate office of the Ministry of waters.--SpArC (talk) 09:05, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Mecca Masjid bombing

Please have a look at this article without bias and help in bringing out the facts to that article.Wasifwasif (talk) 14:57, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't like the insinuation that we normally look at articles with bias. Its time you stopped this tiresome "those who dont agree with me are vandals/pov pushers" spiel.--Sodabottle (talk) 15:42, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

List of magazines in India

Can someone please fix format of List of magazines in India.I do not know how to. Thanks. Shyamsunder (talk) 23:52, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

hope it is ok now. --CarTick 02:48, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
It is.Thanks. Shyamsunder (talk) 05:08, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

In the course of evaluating the copyright concerns related to the source Banglapedia, a contributor discovered more copyright concerns in the contributions of one now retired editor, which is going to necessitate looking at his articles to make sure that we are not publishing copied content in more articles. The full list is at Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20100917 and subpages.

This one looks like it could be bad. :( This contributor was most likely acting in good faith but unawareness that we can't copy content from previously published sources with jeopardizing the legal standing of Wikipedia itself. This involves over a thousand articles, many of which are of interest to your project and many of which are quite extensive. Some of his content looks okay, but some of it is obviously copied from books and other websites.

What we really need here are volunteers to help review these articles who can carefully evaluate to see if content is copied, directly translated or closely paraphrased who can then either remove or replace unusable content. Please, any assistance you can provide will be much appreciated. It can be very discouraging to look at a stable, well-written article and realize that it must be cut apart or rewritten because of copyright concerns, but in the long run this is a great service to Wikipedia, our readers and our fellow contributors. Thanks for reading. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:16, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

The date change vandal is back

Our old friend the date change vandal is back. He has now switched from Malayalam and film related articles to other india related articles but is continuing the same "changing date" pattern. The block on his range expired on sep 11. I have asked at ANI for an extended block. If some admin sees this before, please block this range ASAP for atleast a year. This guy shows so sign of abandoning his mission to disrupt wikipedia.--Sodabottle (talk) 17:37, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

now blocked for a year.--Sodabottle (talk) 18:08, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
why bother changing dates. will never understand. --CarTick 18:27, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Chandigarh articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the Chandigarh articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

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Haryana articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the Haryana articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

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India articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the India articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

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Jharkhand articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

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We would like to ask you to review the Jharkhand articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

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Quit Kashmir Movement (2010)

This article needs help from editors knowledgeable about the issue and is currently a POV mess. Thanx.--Wikireader41 (talk) 18:10, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Category:Hindu terrorism

There is currently discussion at the talk page of the above category regarding what would be the optimal name for this subject. Any input is welcome. John Carter (talk) 18:06, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Requesting help on possible merges

According to some information I got at the reliable sources noticeboardhere, Ayyavazhi may be an alternate name for the Vaikunta branch of Vaishnavism. If this is true, it would help to note that, and maybe merge or at least link some of the related content together. John Carter (talk) 21:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Review of British Empire

I have nominated British Empire for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Zuggernaut (talk) 01:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

FAR notice Ahmedabad

I have nominated Ahmedabad for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. -- Cirt (talk) 04:53, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Tamil Kshatriya

are there really Tamil Kshatriyas? looks like a case of WP:OR ans WP:Synthesis. would like to nominate the article for deletion. what do you guys think? --CarTick 13:58, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

I guess they can find enough tamil printed works to support what the article says (there are enough crackpot theories floating around). worth a try. but probable outcome would be that don't delete but change to "some claim tamil kings are kshatryiyas"--Sodabottle (talk) 14:38, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

NPOV Title

Hi.... we're having a bit of an issue with the title of the Invasion of Goa 1961 page. Some say that 'Liberation of Goa' is too much Indian POV, while others say that 'Invasion of Goa' sounds like Portuguese POV. As such we're short of NPOV ideas for the title

We would like your opinion on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:1961_Indian_Annexation_of_Goa#Title_tag Tigerassault (talk) 10:17, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Gattara

The article Gattara has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

A search for references found no published (gBooks) support for any content in this article. Fails WP:V and WP:N

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:40, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Ezhava and Eelavar

Ezhava says: "They were formerly known as 'Ilavar'". Is this the same as the Eelavar mentioned in Eelam ? Apokrif (talk) 17:04, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ Dr.P.V.Ramesh

Hi, if possible, can anyone look at this proposed article - see if it is acceptable to be made live. Thanks,  Chzz  ►  03:28, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

looks like run of the mill middle ranked IAS bureaucrat. News coverage in reliable sources is not about him as a person. More like "official X" said. I believe the subject doesn't meet GNG or BIO.--Sodabottle (talk) 04:28, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion's

Can anyone give their suggestion's to improve the Pallar article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tamil1988 (talk • contribs) 15:55, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

This is a suggestion i would like to give to all caste articles. Please do not use self-published sources (in this case, books, articles and websites known to be written by Pallars) for any "history", "origin" and 'etymology" claims. Use of these books for sourcing customs, traditions, cuisine and other non-controversial information should be fine. In some cases, books written by agenda-driven non-Pallars (for anti-Pallar POV) may also be discouraged. --CarTick 16:03, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

India at the 2010 Commonwealth Games

We should create stubs for all winners of gold medal for India. see list at India at the 2010 Commonwealth Games They deserve it. I have created a few but request others too to do so by taking one or two winners each. Thanks Shyamsunder (talk) 21:18, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Coverage of the Lusophony Games in India

Hi there, a discussion between a few editors has led us to ask here if the Lusophony Games receive active media coverage in your country? Since India is one of the participants of the Games. In case you don't know (which we hope not), the Games is the Portugese-speaking equivalent of the Commonwealth Games.

If you would like to know more... We're proposing a WikiProject Multi-sport events, and are wondering if Lusophony Games deserve a taskforce of its own. You can always participate in our discussion and support the proposal. ANGCHENRUI Talk♨ 07:21, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Never heard of them in any of the major English/Hindi TV channels or newspapers. utcursch | talk 07:45, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
first time. --CarTick 10:33, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
me too -- Tinu Cherian - 11:39, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Interesting. That's sad, I thought we could do with some help from you guys. Thanks btw, ANGCHENRUI Talk♨ 09:41, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Your help needed on Economy of Chandigarh Capital Region

Hi everyone. I ran across this page doing new page patrolyou can help!, and it is way outside my areas of interest or expertise. It needs quite a lot of cleanup in terms of English usage, needs references as well. I am not sure whether Chandigarh is a notable enough region that an article about its economy is needed, either. Cheers. → ROUX ₪ 08:06, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Government English Higher Primary School

The article Government English Higher Primary School has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

A search for references found no published (gBooks) support for the content of this article. Fails WP:N and WP:V

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:51, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Barwar (caste)

Hi, we seem to have some concerned newbies who aren't very happy with the sourced info at Barwar (caste). Would someon from this project mind running an eye over it? Thanks ϢereSpielChequers 22:31, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Famine in India

I'm trying to improve Famine in India to a GA level article. However some sections of the article are being called to have an "Indian nationalist" viewpoint. If you have an interest in the topic, please help improve the article to GA level. I've asked for a peer review for the article. Zuggernaut (talk) 16:46, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe this is an accurate characterisation of the situation at Famine in India. Far from neutrally "trying to improve" the article, as you say, you have in fact been actively seeking to promulgate a specific viewpoint, eg, that the British were/are responsible for famine and malnutrition in India and that it was either deliberate or concerted and drawing comparisons with famine in Ireland using your own research. You are welcome to hold this opinion, but in Wikipedia we try to achieve a nuetral view and we don't use personal research. Finally, you seem very, very unwilling to attempt to achieve consensus first on the talkpage of that article, which is why a number of editors reverted your edits. Please discuss such large changes first at the article in question with the editors who take an interest and stop trying to "recruit" people whom you hope will share your opinions. Thanks. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 17:02, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry to say but it's your characterization that's inaccurate. I'm trying to improve the article to GA level and continued working on it as I've been doing over several weeks. Suddenly you and a few other editors showed up from British Empire] (which I've requested for FA review) and started undoing my changes. Once the changes are undone we obviously go into a discussion per WP:BRD. 100% of my edits are sourced and comply with WP:NPOV. You and a few other editors have been implying that authors such as Coramac O' Grada and Amartya Sen who have studied famines in-depth and academically are "non-neutral". Zuggernaut (talk) 17:13, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Well we can let other editors take a look and judge for themselves. You seem to be making an effort to discuss now at any rate. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 17:18, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
It's best to respond to individual talk pages of editors as User:The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick did, precisely for this reason as well as for complying with WP:Wikihounding. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:30, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


There's no hounding. You made innacurate statements and I was correcting them and you were attempting to recruit for an edit-war, which is also against policy. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 17:34, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard can be useful. but, i wouldnt be surprised if nothing improves afterwards. --CarTick 17:42, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

NPOV noticeboard has already endorsed my edits [10] [11] but User:The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick has re-introduced the POV tag without any explanation. I've taken the article to RfC to address that. I would encourage Jamesinderbyshire to take Amartya Sen and Cormac O' Grada sources (or any of the 57 references from 65 citations) to the RS noticeboard to have this sorted out. Why do you say that "i wouldnt be surprised if nothing improves afterwards." Zuggernaut (talk) 17:50, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Also following me from British Empire to an unrelated Famine in India to obstruct the improvement of the article by making random allegations seems like hounding to me. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:52, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
[12] guess you are referring to this discussion. it appears, the issue is about Amartya Sen and Olivier Rubin. Both editors commented in the noticeboard seem to agree with you. User:Macwhiz thinks the objecting editor is in error. There is no enforcement mechanism from what results in noticeboards. often, people still stick to their guns even afterwards. there is no change unless you guys decide to work out a reasonable compromise. --CarTick 18:09, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing out the error in the link - I've fixed it now. Yes, reaching an agreement in a cordial way will be the first (and given the support from the boards, hopefully the last) step. But there are other avenues per Wikipedia policies to pursue this to closure if the problem persists. Zuggernaut (talk) 18:41, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Such as? Those two editors who commented in the NPOV forum hardly backed up your view wholeheartedly. One said "the only issue I see is about the amount of space to be allotted to Sen's view and the criticism of it. Arguably, the discussion is more about the nature of democracy than about the nature of famine. Sen is a very prominent figure and his views on more or less anything are notable, but two or three sentences should be ample space to cover this". Which is hardly the blanket coverage you (Zuggernaut) are apparently trying to include in the article. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 19:19, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Ayodhya debate

The article Ayodhya debate has been renamed to Ayodhya conflict by an editor without any reference or discussion. I must note here that Ayodhya dispute is clearly not an armed conflict like Kargil Conflict and neither the mainstream media or government refers to the Ayodhya dispute as conflict. Even the term Ayodhya conflict has never been used in the article itself. Could someone revert the name of the article back to Ayodhya debate or dispute.--UplinkAnsh (talk) 08:11, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Shovon76 moved it back. I've set up an RM for discussion on moving it to Ayodhya dispute. --RegentsPark (talk) 13:02, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
Update: Has been now renamed Ayodhya debate.--Redtigerxyz Talk 15:52, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Indian Map

Among all the articles on wikipedia about countries only main Indian and Pakistani articles seem to be showing disputed territories in the political map on article. I must note here very few countries in the world are totally free from territorial disputes but the political map in these countries only show the territories claimed by that particular country with no references to disputes. In this example that I gave Russia is shown without any territorial disputes. Also even in India's map only the disputed regions of Kashmir are shown and the rest of disputed regions are not shown. Why is the territorial dispute in Kashmir been given a special place?? I would request other editors to have a look at this List_of_territorial_disputes including rest disputes that India has. I think the disputed map should be added in the article about the particular territorial dispute.--UplinkAnsh (talk) 18:56, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

RfC: Indic Sysops

Kindly take a moment to read the Indic Sysop proposal in meta and express your opinion. Thanks --Jyothis (talk) 19:25, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

ANI (Jamesinderbyshire) per WP:FAKE for Famine in India article

I have reported User:Jamesinderbyshire at ANI for providing ficticious references attempting to bolster his claim that 26 million Indians did not perish of famines during 1875-1900. Separately, my attempts to include the a line about Green Revolution in the lead section of the same article is being resisted by the same user. Please vote/participate in both the ANI as well as the inclusion of Green Revolution in the lead. Zuggernaut (talk) 00:04, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

This comment is clearly designed to make it sound as though I deny there was a mass famine in late-19th Century India, which is most emphatically not the case. It also attempts to recruit for a POV battle. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 08:07, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Ganga/Ganges

I've posted it before. Posting it again. Would any kind sirs/madams take at look at Ganges. It should be Ganga. And how does one reach consensus on something? How many should agree? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ganges#Ganga_vs_Ganges --SpArC (talk) 16:23, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Kharwar

Can someone on this project take a look at this article. It clearly has some merit but needs a considerable amount of work to bring it up to scratch. Cheers. Daemonic Kangaroo (talk) 18:12, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

bot needed to wikify

The constituencies need to be wikified to their respect pages, if they exist that is. Bihar legislative assembly election, 2010#ScheduleLihaas (talk) 10:01, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Here's a forthcoming meetup - in case you missed the announcement!

Photo:Mumbai Skyline, Mumbai


—Preceding unsigned comment added by AshLin (talk • contribs) 15:15, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Hello all. I am posting this message in regard to a new issue that has come up in regard to electoral symbols of Indian political parties and their copyright. I had created some files and had uploaded them on Wikipedia. A user is claiming that it is copyright infringement. I would like to know if this is the case. The files in question are:

I really doubt that this is the case as most Indian parties have their party logos and flags uploaded on Wikipedia when users create these files. Cheers --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 07:40, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Exactly, that is why it is my copyrighted work. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 13:34, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • If these are solely your works, then they are not the electoral symbols for these parties, and there's no reason for them to be here on this project anyway. If they are recreations by you of the actual electoral symbols, then they are derivative works and the original copyright holders still maintain copyright. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:38, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Do you know anything about India and its electoral system? Could I request you to ask someone if you don't? Any depiction of the so called electoral symbol can be used by the party. It is (listen up again) NOT a court of arms or logo. It doesn't have prescribed dimensions or orientation. For example the Congress Party in India uses "palm of an hand" as its symbol and it doesn't even matter if it is right hand or left, or a picture or a line drawing. Anything can be used as a electoral symbol and they are not (like in your adamant interpretation) come under any copyright. Why don't you have the patience to wait and see what editors who know about this have got to say? I'm assuming you are confident enough that you are right. In that case there is no reason to shy off. Isn't it? --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 13:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • You've been unable to refute the cite I have provided from the Government of India's Copyright Office. Do you or do you not acknowledge what that office says is law in India? Do you believe that only coats of arms and logos are copyrightable? And why should I be silenced in this debate? It is obvious to me that you do not understand the very basic precept of copyright; a creative work can be copyrighted, and under Berne convention that copyright is conferred on the moment of creation. It doesn't matter if its a coat of arms, a logo, a statue, or the drawings of a random person in a random province on a random day of the week. Copyright is conferred upon the moment of creation. Now, would you please answer the question: Are these solely your works and not derivative works? If they are not derivative, there's absolutely no reason for them to be in the article mainspace on Wikipedia, as they are not the actual electoral symbols. Otherwise, anybody could create any drawing they wanted, claim it's the electoral symbol, and place it on the article. We could have a gallery of thousands of "electoral symbols" created by every resident of Tamil Nadu. Either these are, in fact, the electoral symbols of the parties (in which case you do not have full rights to the images), or they are not, in which case they should not be appearing on any mainspace page. There's no middle ground here. You can't have it both ways. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:54, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Let us put it this way: Breaking it down helps sometimes. Pattali Makkal Katchi uses Mango as its party electoral symbol. So would you claim that it is a copy right infringement if someone uploads a picture of mango on wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiality123 (talk • contribs)

  • If someone uploads an exact or derivative copy of the mango symbol they use, yes. If they upload an exact or derivative copy of File:Mango and cross sections.jpg, no. Anybody can create their own drawing of a mango, and copyright is conferred upon that creation immediately for that image. In theory, there could be a thousand drawings of a mango, and every one of them can have a separate copyright for them. If this were not the case, then any artist who created a still life of fruit in a bowl on a table could never claim copyright on their creative work. --Hammersoft (talk) 14:06, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
That is it. There is nothing called exact or derivative copy of the mango symbol they use. This is exactly you fail to understand. Any figure of mango can be used as their electoral symbol. Period! --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 14:10, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Very funny indeed. If you have better picture of mango, then feel free to upload it to the page and nominate the one already there for deletion as orphaned. That would be constructive to wikipedia. FYI: The image I have created uses the party colours, and flag as a ribbon. So much so the AIADMK itself pinched my image and modified it on their site a few times in the recent past. So if you make something better, feel free to replace my image. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 14:28, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Fair use on English Wikipedia

Note to the uploader: Please refer to Wikipedia:Logos and Wikipedia:Fair use for the current policy on the use of non-free images on the English Wikipedia. As long as the uploader asserts that there are no free alternatives available for the logos and is willing to reduce the resolution of the images, your uploads are acceptable under the fair use exception in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The Indian Copyright Act is irrelevant since the servers are located in the United States. — Nearly Headless Nick {C} 15:23, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

  • The problem is the uploader claims rights, and also claims these are the electoral symbols of the parties in question. Yet, if they are in fact the electoral symbols of the parties in question, then the parties hold rights, not him. He's attempting to take a non-existent middle ground between the two; that he holds rights and that they are the accepted symbols of the parties. Attempts have been made to retag these as {{non-free logo}} [13][14], but Wikiality keeps insisting these are his works [15][16], claiming others have to prove an image is copyrighted [17] (when in fact copyright is granted automatically on creation), removing PUF discussion tags [18], and etc. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:34, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks. It appears that these images are exclusively uploaded on Wikimedia servers and I cannot find any verifiable pages that link these symbols to the political parties in question. Therefore you can nominate them for WP:FfD under WP:NFCC#4. If these were logos of political parties then they would be copyrighted and any publication on Wikipedia would fall under the United States fair use law. The uploader cannot release copyrighted material or derivative works of copyrighted content under a GFDL license. — Nearly Headless Nick {C} 16:33, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

take it easy guys. I understand both side of the argument. I understand Hammersoft's argument that derivative works are still copyrighted to the original creator. I also understand Wikiality's argument that Indian parties use such common objects (such as mangoes and hand) as symbols and it is not really clear if these common objects can be considered their copyright. I guess this is a grey area that has to be addressed with elaborate consideration. I would say it is important we demonstrate (cite Indian law or court judgements) which clearly says Indian party symbols are (or not) necessarily copyrights of the parties. Until then (because wikipedia has a strict copyright policy though I am doubtful Ramadoss is preparing to sue us), we can use these symbols in party's pages using Fair use rationale (like Nick suggested above). --CarTick (talk) 16:17, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

  • Sorry, but it is absolutely clear; If I create a drawing of a mango, I own complete rights to the drawing. It doesn't matter that there are zillions of mangoes around the world. It's my drawing, and I can claim rights. It's creative work, and far exceeds the threshold of originality. There's no need to cite court decisions; India observes the Berne convention. Their own copyright office, as I previously cited, acknowledges that copyright is conferred at the moment of creation. This notion of there being a grey area here is absolutely and provably false. _IF_ these images are the actual property of the parties, then I support retagging them as non-free. If they're not the parties' logos, then they have no business existing in mainspace purporting to be their logos. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
It is clear to me that Indian law allows copyright to creation as soon as they are created. I guess your argument is, you can use the drawing of a mango in Mango article but not in Pattali Makkal Katchi article? --CarTick (talk) 17:10, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Creating a logo that is not a derivative work, and then claiming that it's the "Party logo of Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) a regional party in India." is absolutely wrong. That's what Wikiality appears to have done. I'm quoting from the image description page. So if it's the logo of the party, he doesn't have rights. If it's not the logo of the party, it has no business being represented as the party's logo. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:47, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
i see, you mean he did not even create the Mango logo, he just copied it from somewhere. I dont know about it. I will be surprised if he did. He has done a lot of valuable contributions to Tamil Nadu related articles and we know from his user page he is staying away as he has gotten busy a bit in real life these days.
I am just trying to understand the copyright issues and hopefully will be able to solve these election-symbol related issues. Let us say, if he indeed created the mango drawing by himself, can it still be used in the PMK article under the description "Drawing of mango used by PMK as election symbol". or like I said, it can be used in Mango article but not in Pattali Makkal Katchi article because it can be construed as a derivative work of PMK election symbol?
On the other hand, can we use photographic images of Mango? --CarTick (talk) 18:31, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't know if he created it himself entirely independent of any logo, if his work is a derivative work, or if it's a direct copy. I can't get an answer to that. I've been asking, but no answer has been forthcoming. What point to use it in the Mango article? That's well illustrated already. As to using it as a party logo, absolutely not unless it's shown to be the party's logo, in which case it's not his work and must be used under WP:NFCC here. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:38, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
I am not sure i am convinced and need to hear from more people. I am not even sure if election symbols are the same as logos. They are not necessarily permanent. it is assigned by the Election Commission of India during every election. Big parties hold on to their symbols forever, but smaller parties that can not maintain a minimum consistent number in assembly or parliament cant. Allotment of election symbols is well documented here. You might want to look at this article List of political party symbols in India as well and it would appear there is a lot to be deleted. --CarTick (talk) 18:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm at a complete loss as to figure how to convey this very basic concept; creative works are copyrighted at the moment of creation. I've cited this from the India copyright office, noted the Berne convention, etc., to no avail. I just don't get it. Where am I failing in conveying this point? What the hell does it matter if these symbols are like logos or not? It has absolutely no relevance. It's blatantly obvious these are creative works (because otherwise, as I previously noted, still life paintings could never be copyrighted, and they most emphatically are). They are therefore eligible for copyright and were so at the moment of creation. There's no wiggle room on that. The issue isn't whether or not these can be copyrighted. It's blatantly obvious they can be. The issue is whether or not the uploader created them as entirely new works of creativity without them being derivative works, or not. If not, then we can not tag them as being freed of copyright by the uploader since he does not have the right to release all rights. THAT is the question. All this stuff about whether or not they're logos, whether or not mangoes are copyrighted, whether or not they are kept by a party, etc...it's rubbish, the lot of it. It has nothing to do with this. Absolutely nothing. The FACT is these were created, and being beyond the threshold of originality, they were copyrighted at the moment of creation. PERIOD. If this isn't clear, I just fail to see how in the world I can possibly make this clearer. I'll be bald faced honest here; I see an utter lack of understanding of copyright on the part of the people arguing that these are not copyrighted. I'm desperately trying to educate on this point, without any success. But, regardless of my ability to educate or not, the fact remains these were copyrighted at the moment of creation. What remains is being able to prove they have been released from those rights. Right now, since the uploader has refused to respond on whether he created them entirely independent of the parties or if they are copies and/or derivative works of other originals, we must assume the rights have not been released. --Hammersoft (talk) 19:14, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

what you are not understanding is that I have difficulty accepting elections symbols are creative works of the parties for the reasons cited above. but i understand my "belief" has no value without a reference. so, i am not going to stand in your way if you decide to nominate all the election symbols in List of political party symbols in India for deletion. --CarTick (talk) 19:28, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Hammersoft, sorry for asking again. But are you saying
any depiction of mango - creator has copyright
any depiction of mango as party symbol in India - ECI has copyright

--Sodabottle (talk) 13:42, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

From page 31 of this link, it appears that parties dont hold copyright to the symbols. I have been arguing ECI doesnt really create images, just allots the symbols. But looking at these images [19], i am begining to think i may be wrong. If anyone knows more about this. If this is the case (may be even if not), ECI could be copyright holder of all Indian election symbols. --CarTick (talk) 14:40, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
I was pretty sure that the parties do not hold any rights on their symbols. But it is a good question if ECI does though. I have sent them an email asking this, but can't be too sure about the reply. However, another question is still left open. Does any depiction of the electoral symbol be still considered legitimate? For most Indians this would pass as common knowledge. However, it is best to see if that’s the case. I guess this is what Sodabottle too is concerned about. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 08:04, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
On second thoughts my logic tells me that even ECI can't hold copyright claims on electoral symbols since some of them like Hammer and sickle and Spinning wheel (formerly used by the Congress before the split by Indira) predates the ECI's first election in 1952 where it started allocating symbols. It is not possible, as far as I can see, for ECI to claims rights over symbols that predates itself. All they seem to claim by their 1968 act is that they hold the final say in allocation of the symbols in the state and national level. Comments are welcome. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 10:05, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
our assumptions have been correct, that these are not logos and not copyrighted to the parties. u r probably right about these two symbols. but, it appears ECI holds the copyright to most (if not all) symbols. --CarTick (talk) 12:15, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Cool, can you specify the page numbers? And how about the depiction of the electoral symbol. Are they specific? If I am to go by their publicity materials, most parties would seem to be campaigning for someone else. A simple example would be the two leaves depicted on ECI's official document, the one on AIADMK's official website and the party's leader's. The question is the same as we were dealing from the begining. Is there a fixed depiction for the electoral symbols? --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 14:24, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

If you go to the bottom of the link, you will notice all the symbols. on the second page is the copyright notice. Though these are depictions of common objects, it would be considered copyrighted to ECI though the document doesnt explicitly say that. ECI still holds copyright to these depictions even when its derivative works will be used as an election symbol either in elections or wikipedia or anywhere. --CarTick (talk)
Election symbols like the Elephant are used by various political parties round the World.Unlike Company Logos they are not exclusive.In India both Samajwadi Party and the Telugu Desam and earlier the Tamil Manila Congress used the same cycle symbol.I do not think anyone holds the copyright.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 17:34, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
Isn't that the copyright notice for the document per se? When at least a few of the symbols are not ECI's, how are we to cherry pick that they really do hold rights on the symbols. To put it in simple words, a copyright notice in a book which contains pictures from public domain doesn't mean that the entire content is now protected by the publisher. FYI, ECI's website itself has a copyright notice for all contents taken from them. Although the Information on [the] Website is protected by Copyright ... since this information has been put in public domain, it may be quoted in print/electronic/other media subject to the condition that the source "Election Commission of India Website "http://eci.nic.in" is clearly acknowledged. Cheers --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 10:08, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Official depictions

I am starting a new section to discuss the second issue in regard to electoral symbols of Indian political parties. How stringent are these symbols in terms of depiction?

My understanding is that they are very flexible. That is, if a party has been allotted Elephant as its symbol, it would freely use any depiction of elephant and does not restrict itself to how Election Commission of India might be representing it. So all these depictions are in fact used as the party’s electoral symbol. I am not without reason to believe so.

1. DMK and its versions of rising sun: Party’s official page and its chief’s official page
2. AIADMK and its versions of two leaves: Party’s official page and its chief’s official page

All these are markedly different from each other AND with ECI’s. Comments are welcome. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 12:43, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Administrative division in India

I get the confusion when I look into the WP:CAT section of administration. I'd like to know if the categories section follow the administration section recognized by the Indian administration see here. As an example, if I go to Category:Villages_in_Pathanamthitta_district it shows about a 100 villages, where as the official one has only 68. I guess the question is how to divide villages further. There are articles of small developed(township)/rural hamlets which are classified as town/villages. If we have a different category for these, it would reflect the official version. Mathew Joy (talk) 12:30, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Mathew, the link you provided shows "revenue villages" and not "geographic villages". Often for the sake of administrative ease, two or more smaller villages are combined into a single "revenue village". This is for taxation and land revenue purposes. The "village" we have in wikipedia is a geographical feature. IMO it is a bad practice to follow revenue zones because often they make no sense in the real world. I have seen cases where part of revenue village actually lies in the suburbs of a town or where two villages a couple of km apart are clubbed together as one. reorganisation is difficult and takes time in India, so growth in population is not reflected properly in revenue divisions. Lets keep things as it is now.--Sodabottle (talk) 12:50, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
Well, I get the point you are making. But that poses another problem. If in the lead section, I say, so-and-so is a village in Pathanamthitta district, how do someone verify it? I think (but not sure) the revenue villages is more or less same as geographic village in the Indian context. So if you go to the Census of India website you can see that it correlates to 'villages' mentioned else where in other official sites (for instance, the site that I mentioned previously). So in other words, the 'geographic village' has to be recognized by some official organization, right? The point I am making is, I have a small 'village' that is not officially recognized either as revenue or geographic village, then how is that categorized as. If it is categorized as a village, then how do someone verify it? Mathew Joy (talk) 13:21, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
hmm. thats strange because for Tamil Nadu, the census mentions the geographic village and not just the revenue village (as far as i have seen ). Lets see what others think. (i will try to find if postal codes list villages geographically)--Sodabottle (talk) 14:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
i am not sure if census mentions "geographic" villages. i also cant imagine Indian state governments do not have a record of these "geographic" villages. i bet they are sitting in some government offices in native languages. --CarTick (talk) 14:05, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
ha i remembered where i have seen those before. ECI's voting booth level documents mention individual geographic villages.--Sodabottle (talk) 14:29, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

New infobox template for famines

I've created a new infobox template that can potentially be used in every famine article on Wikipedia. For a list of articles where it can be used, see the categories famines in India, famines and other relevant categories. The usage documentation still needs some improvement and the template might undergo minor teaks further - all feedback/suggestions for improvement are welcome! Feel free to link to or re-post this message in relevant places. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:19, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Newsletter

I have posted a partial draft of the latest issue of the newsletter here. Please help in expanding it and providing suggestions or making changes. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 06:40, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

It'll take a few days for the Wikipedia Mumbai Meetup 3 images, slides, blog posts etc to come in. Consider postponing the Newsletter to say the 5th Nov or so? AshLin (talk) 07:35, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Indian reunification

This new article needs work. mrigthrishna (talk) 07:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the effort, but unfortunately, this article has no references, does not seem to be notable, and appears to be bordering on a fringe theory (searches on Google and Scholar produced no usable results). IMHO, it would at best be merged into Greater India as a section, or at worst proposed for deletion. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 13:08, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Famine in India - POV tag

Can someone take a took at the Famine in India article and evaluate if the {{NPOV}} tag can be removed? I have addressed all of the concerns raised by those who added/supported the addition of the tag. Here's the direct link to the details on the talk page. Per the instructions on {{NPOV}} template, anyone can take off the tag if the discussion has become dormant or the concerns have been addressed. Both conditions have been satisfied IMO. Thanks. Zuggernaut (talk) 03:58, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Hello, WPINDIA. I'm hoping you can help — in the past week I've tagged a number (at the present time, six and growing) of articles on Indian educational institutions (and sub-institutions like colleges and different campuses) for copyright violations. It appears a good number of these articles are simply the schools' "about us" web pages copied and pasted. I hope the Wikiproject can help go through other educational institution articles and search for more possible violations. Regards, Strange Passerby (talk • contribs) 16:57, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject cleanup listing

I have created together with Smallman12q a toolserver tool that shows a weekly-updated list of cleanup categories for WikiProjects, that can be used as a replacement for WolterBot and this WikiProject is among those that are already included (because it is a member of Category:WolterBot cleanup listing subscriptions). See the tool's wiki page, this project's listing in one big table or by categories and the index of WikiProjects. Svick (talk) 20:51, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Great work! This is very helpful for those doing maintenance tasks. utcursch | talk 04:28, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

FAR nomination 2007 Samjhauta Express bombings

I have nominated 2007 Samjhauta Express bombings for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. --JN466 22:57, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Economy of India FAR

I have nominated Economy of India for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Dana boomer (talk) 17:03, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Newsletter

The final draft of the latest edition of the newsletter has been posted here. Please go through it and make any required changes; it will be sent out for delivery tomorrow or the day after. Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I will wait for a day for the delivery of the newsletter to talkpages -- Tinu Cherian - 14:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Shezada Hyder Ali

Hello, my friends: A group of us are working on clearing the backlog at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sources_from_October_2006. The article in the above header has been without sources for the past four years and may be removed if none are added. I wonder if you can help do so. Sincerely, and all the best to you, GeorgeLouis (talk) 07:36, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Punjabi Jatt vs. Jat people

Punjabi Jatt should not be merged and/or redirected into Jat people? Can someone help me clarifying it? Also, the Punjabi Jatt article "relies largely or entirely upon a single source."--Cannibaloki 12:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

The text is lifted from
H.A. Rose, IBBETSON, Maclagan (1996). Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North West Frontier Province. Asian Educational Services. ISBN 9788120605053.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
with some paraphrasing. If someone can check it completely and do the necessary tagging that'd be good. If not I'll take a look later and see if it can be G12'd. —SpacemanSpiff 13:10, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Okay, thanks!--Cannibaloki 13:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

BTM Layout

Hello, my friends: A group of us are working on clearing the backlog at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sources_from_October_2006. The article in the above header has been without sources for the past four years and may be removed if none are added. I wonder if you can help do so. Sincerely, and all the best to you, GeorgeLouis (talk) 15:54, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Ganges -> Ganga

A move/rename request has been issued for Ganga (as against Ganges). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_moves#November_16.2C_2010
Please add your consensus here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ganges#Move_Ganges_to_Ganga Thank you! --SpArC (talk) 09:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

The discussion is interesting and I acquired a lot of new information on the topic. I've provided my support to rename the article to Ganga. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:38, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Sultanate of Mysore

The new article Sultanate of Mysore appears to duplicate Kingdom of Mysore#Under Haider and Tipu. Is "Sultanate of Mysore" the generally accepted term for that state during this period? Should the new article be merged to Kingdom of Mysore? There are also some unreferenced claims in the new article which appear to be original research. Help from editors with expertise in Karnatakan history would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Top Jim (talk) 10:24, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

The generally accepted term is "Kingdom of Mysore". "Sultanate of Mysore" is used by a small minority of sources. In its current state has nothing new. It should be redirected to Kingdom of Mysore#Under Haider and Tipu--Sodabottle (talk) 10:43, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Are these guys the same?

Kaduvetti Guru and J. Gurunathan --CarTick (talk) 01:28, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Indian Express too says so Srikanth (Logic) 10:37, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
yup same kaduvetti guy.--Sodabottle (talk) 10:59, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
which page should we keep then? I like the "Kaduvetti" title. --CarTick (talk) 21:21, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
me too. Kaduvetti is WP:COMMONNAME. No one refers to him as "gurunathan" anymore. I believe he even changed his name legally to just "guru".--Sodabottle (talk) 07:39, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Conflicting dates and confusion

Uttar Pradesh and adjoining articles have serious date issues. Could someone fix it and put in some references? I posted the complaint in detail in the talk. If I can't figure out who controlled Ayodhya from the articles connecting it, then there are serious date issues. If there are date gaps, please, please label them as such, or find additional sources. Right now the pages contradict and it's really frustrating. Thank you.--Hitsuji Kinno (talk) 10:49, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Radia tapes controversy

There appears to be a content dispute on this page, with some strong disagreements expressed by the two principal contributors, User:Achitnis and User:Tinucherian. A review/mediation by a non-involved project admin is requested. Others are also invited to take part in the discussion. (CC: User:Nishkid64, User:RegentsPark, User:SpacemanSpiff, User:Utcursch) Regards, SBC-YPR (talk) 13:47, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

This seriously needs to go to WP:BLPN, not here. I don't have time to look at it now, but I'd suggest taking it along with all the linked articles to WP:BLPN. —SpacemanSpiff 14:37, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Proposed article move Ganges -> Ganga

Update: The discussion is still going on. Some new frequency analyses have been posted on the article's talk page, and a lot more arguments presented in favour of either solution. Feel free to weigh in with your views. --JN466 12:53, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

The current vote looks like this:
Geographical locations of editors who voted in the Ganga v. Ganges debate
Position Location Number
Against Ganga (23) India 0
West 13
Unknown 10
Support Ganga (12) India 5
West 2
Unknown 5
Neutral (1) Unknown 1
Total votes (36) 36
This is most likely due to an unintentional but inherent bias on Wikipedia and I've raised it at the relevant project. Feel free to provide/suggest solutions by participating in the discussion there. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:13, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

...and echoing Jayen466 original post - the first priority would be to join the discussion at the talk page of Ganges. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:34, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Loan scam

Is there an existing article on the recent loan scam? utcursch | talk 07:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm not aware of such an article. Another one worth having in a related area is the defaulting of loans and suicides in the microfinance financial services area. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:07, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
I've created a stub at 2010 housing loan scam in India. utcursch | talk 18:10, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Articles about India

Hi

In my travels through the encyclopedia I am finding many articles on India that are badly written (or in such poor english they are unreadable), read like travel guides and generally are unencylopaedic.

For example here is the latest I have just come across - Topslip : Tagged for No References for 3 years (since Nov 2007), tagged for Written like a travel guide. Article has many problems and even includes contact details - something which should be gained from clicking on the external link, not the encyclopedia. I have also just tagged it as possible copyvio as it appears to have complete sections of text which are the same as the Indira Gandhi National Park page.

What is the procedure for the project to assess and examine its articles ?

Do you have a procedure for us to give you notice on bad articles ?

Chaosdruid (talk) 12:36, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

To give a short answer, you'll go insane if you worry about all the nonsense in subcontinental articles. But there was a list of subcontinental users with the most edits lying about somewhere, and if you look at it, you'll see why. Almost no regular editors are willing to clean up anything, less than the dozens who trying to court the Indian media etc and WMF now that money is being pumped in everywhere. Also, in this nexk of the woods, cut and pasting from internet sites, and relentless looting of explcitly copyrighted photos and saying it is personal work is unending. One can't expect Wikipedians to suddenly act different to their society; in India newspapers routinely copyvio and lift off error-riddled things from each other and Wikipedia; corruption and political cronyism is also rampant so it's no surprise that such a large proportion here are armchair officers and free lunchers; also, generally only the middle/upper class etc can have internet access, and what is the attitude of such people in the subcontinent wrt menial work, servants etc and how would that affect behaviour patterns on wiki? The WMF push into India is simply an investment in racial/religious POV and copyvio YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 00:35, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
And in addition, caste, religious and racial prejudice are important to at least a healthy minority of people, so most of these types of articles are filled with chest beating nonsense, particularly as nobody wants to clean anything. YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 00:38, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
YM has quite an accurate grasp on what is going on. We just dont have sufficient fair-minded editors. I have a lot of smart, knowledgeable friends and have tried my best convincing them to join wikipedia. traditionally we dont enjoy doing things for nothing; if nothing in it for me, why bother. who cares about accurate propagation of knowledge? --CarTick (talk) 13:25, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure that I'd entirely agree with you; there are people who do enjoy cleaning up, but the fact is we have a vocal group of POV pushers on most of these horrible articles who will ensure that the articles remain a stockpile of bovine excrement. Given that and add to it our sitewide policy of not using common sense, it's impossible for any right minded editor to function in this place. In the end many just end up focusing on keeping a few articles clean and leaving the rest as is. —SpacemanSpiff 13:31, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
our sitewide policy of not using common sense - that, I agree with. It is hard enough dealing with POV pushers, but when you add the 'quote policy at all costs' group into the mix, you need a lot of time and a high tolerance for frustration. Most of us, fortunately for us but unfortunately for wikipedia, have other lives.--RegentsPark (talk) 14:15, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
we dont necessarily disagree with each other. I am not in any way implying anything diminishing the great work done by a lot of great wikipedians, from cleanup to maintenance to content generation. I am just saying we dont have enough such editors. 50 to 100 good editors (is even less these days) is not enough. we need at least a thousand. --CarTick (talk) 13:41, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
All I'm saying is that the site policies are not conducive to getting enough such editors and I'm not sure that the entire blame lies with the average joe. We attract enough and more POV pushers and copyright violators and the like and it's just impossible to deal with them. I haven't written an article on here in more than six months because the minimal time I have to spend on WP is taken up with cleaning codswallop. And then when someone decides to take an issue to WP:RSN or other boards to fix sourcing, the POV pushers follow suit and horrible websites end up being classified as reliable sources and soon enough we'll end up with an article on the Taj Mahal saying that it was originally a Shiva temple constructed by a Rajput and that Shah Jehan just removed all reference to it in comtemporary literature and changed it to a mosque; it's also quite likely that this will end up as a GA. The fact is, many of us (I remember once Abecedare, Utcursh and I were mentioned as people from the "xxx caste" on a yyy caste internet forum and that members of that forum should come to wiki to fight this. While that one case I found because I was searching for some copyvio and found this accidentally, I'm sure it's no different from a majority of the other caste articles. We often see postings on these internet sites asking caste warriors and others to come on to wikipedia and fight it out; Wikipedia's processes do not protect that one interested editor, classic case in example is that RfC that was initiated on one editor last year. A serial POV pusher managed to convince multiple people that he was POV pushing and abusing multiple tools, now of course most of us did not notice it until finding out about it accidentally, and it was a waste of four to five weeks to sort out that matter. Given that the editor in question has a reasonably thick skin and has been around for a long time, it didn't have as much of a negative impact, but that's not the case with everyone, there are so many editors who do small activities of clean up every now and then, but they get caught in crap like this only to never show up again. Unless we get to deal with these POV pushers a bit better and bandy this AGF thing a lot less, nothing's going to change. Enough ranting for now I guess. —SpacemanSpiff 04:40, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
Well in general, Wikipedia is about gaming metrics. On Marathi wiki, they have 1200+ cricket articles but more than 95% are an empty infobox or stub template, and at most a sentence telling people to edit the Tendulkar page. Lots of other wikis like Bengali and Hindi also are full of empty articles. On en.wiki some wikiprojects tag many 2-paragraph article with sources as "B" or deliberately write FA/GA etc on dead end articles eg, a 2km road, sportsperson who played one match, hurricane that spun around at 100kph and didn't do anything etc and inflate stats in this way. Or they can simply just lie and make false claims about article quality, and most people just believe it, including the media. The media have folks who follow politics or a specific sport all year round and those guys check to see if the guy is lying or simply picking random misleading stats from the budget or sports stats. But because things like wiki, a new development by a high school or uni, is not a contested topic or anything people follow regularly, if the wikiproject leader or school principal/uni chief lies about their stats, the journo just copies it without bothering to do an investigation; I know newspaper reports on my old high school and uni were generally just some propaganda that the journo took at face value or just a flagrant lie, and the same thing often happens on WikiProject reports on Signpost or on the now inactive Wikipedia Weekly etc when some guys just make self-serving comments or flagrant BS stats and the organiser didn't do any research so a flagrant lie just stands and they only end up with lollipop questions. Secondly the only metrics people use regularly are FA/GA count etc, which can be gamed by focusing on small topics etc, and are silly anyway, as nobody judges the health on an economy by how rich the top 0.5% of a country, else the most corrupt countries in the world would be the "most developed". WP gets embarrassed the most by copyvio/entrenched vandalism/spam/hoax/POV scandals in the media, but WikiProjects aren't rated by this; there is fanfare for FA/GA etc rankings for both individuals and groups, and none for hard cleanup. In the various competitions you get the same amount of points for a FA/GA so obviously many people are going to write a 100 3k prose articles on some politician who was a backbencher and did nothing rather than reading maybe 50 scholarly books on Gandhi and getting only 1% of the credit; the wikiproject leaders have no incentive to change this as the vast majority people just look at the counts and that is good enough for them to win silly elections, paper thrones and crowns; the ethnic warlords, friends' clubs etc control the real power. And as for another general rant about society, all across Asia and the diaspora in the west, people are far far more obsessed with social status and crowing over their neighbours etc, bragging about having a more expensive/prestigious house/car "my son the doctor, my daughter in law the dentist" etc etc and if you look at the kids who do well in maths and science at high school, what is the % of people who choose to go on with it at uni and how many choose to just go for medicine/dentistry/law etc and which how the % varies with social groups; so it's no wonder Asian articles have a higher % of mess and random dumps everywhere than western articles; even when WP India was ranked second or third in FAs in 2006, I would wager that the median article was still one of the most appalling among all WikiProjects due to the fact that the regulars mostly only wrote their own FAs and DYKs. YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 00:44, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
Well a problem has been identified here (several have actually); what are the proposed remedies to get the solutions that we need? Is getting WMF to stop investing there going to change much? What should WMF be investing in? Would running a report in The Signpost help get the message across - and if so, would you all be willing to assist so that we can also show the problems? Ncmvocalist (talk) 07:20, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea, what WMF coming to India has anything to do about the quality of India articles. I for one, welcome the move. Besides the usual arm chair napoleons who arrive to hog the media limelight, the publicity is actually doing something good for the regional language wikis. Coming back to en wiki, yes it is true that the balanced editor:POV pusher ratio is worse in India related articles when compared to western ones. The solution isn't bitching about Indian society - it is bringing more people into the fold. Even if we gain one serious balanced indian editor for five POV pushers it is a net gain for the project as a whole. The astroturfers leave eventually or get blocked. The good ones stay and do something positive. Many people who came as unbalanced POV pushers here have changed into valuable balanced editors.--Sodabottle (talk) 07:42, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

  • Hate to say this, but I told you so; it took us six hours (admittedly less than the 18 hours from my post to this edit) to clean up "photographic evidence that Taj Mahal was a Shiva Temple". If this happens in any mainstream article it's immediately reverted but the India project suffers when the general perception is that these kind of edits are "content issues". No editor in their right mind is going to be reverting POVers on these things continuously and be handed out 3RR warnings when they can instead happily right something in their own space about birds native to India or something like that since we don't yet have any alternate theories on those. —SpacemanSpiff 16:22, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunately bringing five new editors who corrupt articles for one good editor means that the good editor would have to spend all their time going round fixing the mess that the five created and that really is not a net gain for Wiki. THe main problem here is that there is no perceptible overview for this project. In the long run we need a few good editors here that can keep an eye on their own project and do housekeeping to keep the Indian articles in good stead.
It is apparent that many of these articles have POV, Copyvio, plagiarism, prose problems and bad grammar. In the last six months I have personally viewed probably 60 Indian articles and out of those only 4 or 5 have not needed work. Many have been hour long edits/copyvio checks to restore them to an acceptable state. Frequently within a week those articles have more additions that reduce quality again.
It is probably a good idea to get some housekeeping underway. I will begin with an AWB sweep of all (well as many as I can) Indian aricles tonight and tomorrow.
Chaosdruid (talk) 17:53, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
I don't know about you all, but my favorite part of this collective rant was when SpacemanSpiff said "cleaning codswallop". AtticusX (talk) 04:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
I just did an AWB run (cleanup) on the categories "India" and "Geography of India" (cursive 1 level) - around 650 articles. It took around 6 hours and most of that was correcting various problems such as:
  • duplicate links, some with as many as 17 links to "India" and suchlike (or my fav - "tree" linked 4 times in one paragraph)
  • "See also" after ref section
  • fifteen headers for sections with one sentence - all in one article - for an example of one I just found Little Rann of Kutch
Now that run doesn't of course tackle the main issues - around half are unreferenced, 30% have really bad grammar and a smaller number had sections with "main" article links where they were direct copies and a few with more info than the "main" article. Many have no cats, some that I looked at had peacocking, POV and OR and Caps on headers - they all really need looking at.
I really think thats my lot with this problem for now. Someone from this project should have been by here by now to say somtehing but it seems they are all hiding in some cave in Rajavoor celebrating Diwali and waiting for Guru Har Gobind Ji to fix it all...
Chaosdruid (talk) 05:39, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. like i said before, we dont have enough active editors and we cant force the few active ones to do what they arent interested. it wasnt always like this. Besides, you request is unspecific. If you propose a list of articles you would like taken care of, we might have editors step in (just may be). the remaining thousands of articles, we can only hope that they will get better with time. --CarTick (talk) 14:13, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
Expect new users to be that careful about style, MOS, encyclopaedic content? You better get around to establishing online Wikipedia Academy classesfor newbies! AshLin (talk) 14:49, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be beneficial to take a look at some of the recent cases where editors have been found to be doing copyviolations and check up on their other work (which would perhaps save the copyvio team a large amount of headaches):

Chaosdruid (talk) 15:52, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Things that AWB fixes are the least of out problems, as they can only fix easy stuff YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 01:23, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

The Topslip article is a stub class article without an importance rating on the importance scale (now set to low). India articles that are rated important on the importance scale are well written. I do not think any special processes are required specifically for India articles. The existing processes like the quality, importance ratings, GA/FA review processes are good enough. English is not the first language of most the contributors to India articles but I have seen numerous occasions when the copy-editors guild improved these articles. Unless there are statistics comparing articles from different projects, we cannot assume that India articles have a higher percentage of copyvios or POV editors or even bad grammar. Zuggernaut (talk) 16:18, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I think you're deluding yourself and should go through a cat about Indian universities, businesses or IT parks and compare it to those in other countries. Similar for cities and towns. In those articles everyone adds their own business or group in the prose to plug it. I'm not getting started on the article on each clan, tribe and surname which claims their lineage is the bravest and has the best warriors etc YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 01:21, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
I have paid some attention to a few articles after encountering them more or less accidentally, and I can confirm that YellowMonkey is precisely correct. Johnuniq (talk) 03:48, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Making the connection between India's social problems and problems with India articles on Wikipedia is simplistic. Some of our admin friends in this area are over-zealous and they repeatedly violate WP:AGF scaring away potentially constructive editors. From what I have seen, AGF is an exception, not the norm for India articles. Another problem is the age of editors - one or two weeks ago I saw an ANI against a 15 year old Indian editor who repeatedly got banned for copyvio (and sockpuppetry) related to cricket pictures. Caste articles need to be given the lowest importance rating, perhaps by using a script/bot. Ditto for the numerous and lesser known educational institutions. If a bot can generate metrics comparing problem articles across projects, we will get a good idea of where we are and where we need to go. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:16, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
If you mean A.arvind.arasu (talk · contribs) he's been doing it relentlessly and won't stop uploading professional quality photos from all across the world with "my work" and this happens to everyone who does this, regardless of race. As for another thing, there have been several Indian FACs and GAs etc where some guy with bad prose insisted on counter-copyediting some guy who can actually write properly. Sorry, but POV pushing is bigger in countries with rampant nationalist fervour and ethnic pride, eg balkans articles, eastern europe, here and Bengali articles, where everyone is a freedom fighter and martyr and even guys who are/were FA-qualified insist on using those words everywhere. Regardless of what anyone here thinks, subcontinent is the laughing stock of en-wikipedia, although perhaps not among the politicians who appreciate the fawning of other ladder climbers at wikimeetups YellowMonkey (new photo poll) 01:29, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
Nationalism is a phase many young and developing countries like China and India are going through right now. As long as we alert editors of WP:NPOV, WP:RS, etc, I see no reason why their content should be kept out of Wikipedia. We sure might have to remind them multiple times but they will eventually learn, stick around and help in improving of articles, especially if they are not callously slapped warnings or banned. European bias is well known on English Wikipedia so it's no wonder that content from the Indian subcontinent is laughing stock. I am sure Indian and other readers in the civilized world feel sorry and forgiving towards European content and discussions such as this one in which a German and British viewpoint is expressed - whose empire was bigger, how Germany 'got' Africa where as Britain got India and the 'hunter-gatherers of Australia', etc. Problems with Indian content are limited to policies and processes and they will be eliminated as editors learn policies. What about the colonial attitudes? Zuggernaut (talk) 20:04, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
western worldview permeates wikipedia as Wikipedia:Systemic bias. Why Alexander the Great is "the Great" but not Genghis Khan. arent both murderers in the stricter sense of the word. --CarTick (talk) 01:41, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
western worldview, eh? Sorry, but this is PC nonsense. You might as well say that "western worldview permeates" the very concept of an encyclopedia. If that's what you mean, well, then there is no way around sticking to the "western worldview" if you want to edit at all.
along your line of reasoning lies madness along the lines of The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated. Sure, the Rigveda discovered quantum mechanics and 'contradiction' is a Western prejudice. Way to belittle the very real contributions to logics and algorithmic thought made by scholars of Indian antiquity. --dab (𒁳) 17:11, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
That is a Red herring. you are not going to get me to defend Hindu revivalists. i am surprised that you couldnt think that wikipedia could suffer from systemic bias with all your intellectual honesty. Is it because you dont believe English wikipedia is mainly run by native English speakers or you think some humans like yourself are somehow genetically not prone to bias. may be you are just plain arrogant that modern world as we know is largely shaped by ideas and discoveries from the west. While I do share your concerns with revivalists and nationalists, i do not appreciate your gross generalisation of all Indians and the disdainful behaviour you show towards what you seem to consider to be "lesser" human beings. --CarTick (talk) 16:06, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

I've been fighting similar fights on South Asian articles the last couple years, though since I cover mainly Pakistan and Muslim issues the religious issues are arguably worse. Particularly in terms of IPs calling me "kuffar" for deleting "His most holy and gracious" from the front of Sheikh So-and-So's name, and complaining of "disrespect" for removing unreferenced and laudatory passages about miracles and So-and-So being a master of 120 languages and memorising the Quran overnight. However, I would submit that far more concerning than the plethora of "MY TRIBE IS BEING BEST AND BRAVEST TRIBE IN HISTORY OF PAKHTUNS" or "FOOABAD IS NICE VILLAGE AND PEOPLE VERY KIND" is the historical revisionism and caste bias of the huge primary articles like Maratha and Rajput. Some may recall that Maratha clan system was an ungodly honeypot of people lising hundreds of last names, removing them, modifying them to "prove" Maratha affiliation. I did a slash-and-burn on the rather shaky Kunbi article and it's been running smoothly since then, though folks occasionally sneak in to remove the clearly-footnoted use of the term Sudra. I would submit that rather than worry (in the immediate moment) about travelogue-style vilage articles or laudatory micro-clan/caste/tribe articles, now might be a good time to get a half-dozen editors together and do a full-out assault on a major article to drag it into respectability. Maratha and Rajput have been unfootnoted for quite a long time, and Maratha gets 300 hits a day, and Rajput over a thousand. Running AWB on the tiny articles gets us some cleanup, but some big-ticket pages are still awfully rough. MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:34, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

BUT FOOABAD IS NICE VILLAGE. HOW DARE YOU INSULT FOOABAD? We are unfailingly polite, you stupid kuffar, and Highly edducatted. AtticusX (talk) 07:45, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

On a sidenote, wanted to express my concern for recent (2008-2010) books by Indian authors which appear to take chunks of text directly from WP. I haven't done in-depth analysis of the chronology to determine which are cut-pastes and which are copyvios, but the book Martial Races of Undivided India either draws extremely heavily from Rajput, or else the WP article is an extreme copyivo. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:23, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

It's not just Indian publishers. This box text on Scientology for example, in a 2010 book from John Wiley and Sons, no less, is pinched from our Scientology article, mostly the lead. I know that because I wrote it. --JN466 13:23, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
This thread has gotten to long. I am responding in the section below. Zuggernaut (talk) 18:07, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Cannot compare with Pakistani articles

I think it is safe to assume that Pakistani editors are also under-represented on Wikipedia. But their problem is likely much worse and very different than India articles so I think it probably not a good idea to compare the two.

  • The Kunbi Shudra issue is interesting because it is likely that this is a popular opinion. Does Wikipedia reflect the popular opinion or do we stick to scholarly consensus? I am not aware that caste is an active area of scholarly study anymore so do we stick to scholarly consensus from decades or even centuries back?
  • An alternative approach to the Maratha clan system is to have a link to a separate list-class article where people can add their names. I've seen this work successfully in many other articles. Zuggernaut (talk) 18:07, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
Systemic bias ? lol and from an essay page ?
"Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints."
Did you mean the systemic bias that stops every Indian village getting a whole page all to itself Hiretadashi Hirenandihalli Khanagaon - some with listings of every school, bus route, how many market stalls it has, the demographic split of its workforce, where everybody eats and lists of bus-stops and nearby roads?
You really ought to think about accuracy of information before accusing the non-Indians of a systemic bias against you ! 32,000 stubs ? come on thats more than the rest of the projects put together !
Total articles:
India 54,517
USA & United States 17,255 + 17,542 = 34,797
England, UK, Scotland & Wales 18,442 + 4,990 + 8,905 + 7,549 = 39,886
19:36, 25 November 2010 (UTC)~~


Pakistan issues may be worse, but it just demonstrates a similar problem of a neighboring country with a significant English-speaking population, rapidly increasing internet access, and a general tendency to post highly localised articles, and also to have very strong opinions on existing articles, accompanied by a lack of familiarity with Wiki concepts and a resistance to footnoting to academic works. In one particular case I had some Barelvi cheerleaders complaining that the academic sources I was citing were "pegan, hindu, and wahabi" [sic] and instead trying to jam in footnotes to discussion forum threads, hagiographic veneration sites, etc. Which leads me to the next point:
Does Wikipedia reflect the popular opinion or do we stick to scholarly consensus? Absolutely scholarly consensus. I mean, basically every tenet of verifiability on Wikipedia is based on concepts being mentioned in reputable works. Works that involve things like peer-review, publishers not wanting to ruin their reputation, etc. Not that every published work is reputable, but at least it's a step in the right direction. If we go by "popular opinion" things would go downhill rapidly. I 100% agree that the 1870 Cyclopaedia of India might have many things wrong with it, but at least it's an attempt by a (semi)-neutral party to explain what's happening in India, as opposed to a member of X caste logging on from his bedroom to give his personal take on how amazing his caste is. If the academic sources are wrong, by all means let an educated person, of any country or background, publish an actual reputable work contradicting past writings. I'd imagine that a PhD in Indian Studies would be eager to make a name for himself by clearly documenting misconceptions about Indian history.
An alternative approach to the Maratha clan system is to have a link to a separate list-class article where people can add their names. I've seen this work successfully in many other articles. This works okay for things like "List of Kodavas". Not perfect, as you'll get folks bouncing in and out to say "Raj Fulani isn't a Kodava!" and removing the name. But overall you can click on names on the list, see if the article mentions "Kodava", and get some means of fact-checking. The Maratha Clan System, however, is evidently far more contentious. Take a look at how extreme the changes were. Dozens of changes by IPs per day, the list fluctuating from its claimed "96 clans" to as low as 94 or as high as 105 as people chopped and added without explanation. Lists of hundreds of surnames were edited with no apparent rhyme or reason, and people apparently couldn't even agree on the "official" color, symbol, devak, etc of the various clans. I think the current article, is fine; it explains that there is a system, it's exact contents are disputed, and that several attempts have been made to catalogue the clans. All it really needs for improvement is a few links to older books which have attempted lists (since IPs can't go in and edit GoogleBooks to suit their personal preferences). —Preceding unsigned comment added by MatthewVanitas (talk • contribs) 15:00, November 26, 2010 (UTC)
I'm guessing that the chances of a WMF employee getting killed in Pakistan (for issues arising from religion-content related disputes, if they open an office there) are significantly higher than in India. While there might be other similarities (same neighborhood, increasing Internet access to some extent, etc), this reason alone differentiates India and a comparison isn't accurate. I might be missing something but what's wrong with posting highly localized article? If they meet WP:RS for an article on a village in Bengal or Belgaum district of Karnataka, such localized articles are an asset for WP. Lack of Wiki concepts is something we can definitely fix or improve. I'm a 2010 Wikipedian but I have begun forming an opinion that poor administratorship, especially with regard to India related articles is the cause of poor articles. Very few, if any attempts are made to engage IPs and vandals to join WP and help/guide them in to abiding by policies.
There are cases where scholarly work may lag the real situation on the ground. In some areas, changes/updates to scholarly work may never come or will take a long time to come. Not many people care about the caste system and if the Kunbi want to "upgrade" themselves to something else, there are no social mechanisms in Hindu society to stop them anymore in 2010, actually since 1950, when the Indian constitution outlawed the caste system that year. I've said before that a bot needs to automatically mark all caste related articles to low importance on the quality scale but we surely need a better solution than this otherwise we will be overwhelmed with incidents similar to what you have seen at Kunbi. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:46, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
To clarify, I have no problem with localised articles in general, provided they're referenced in some way. So the above-linked stubs which just give a name and coord and link to a census are fine. As I recall, a huge bot-sweep of US towns added like 30,000 US articles back in 2004-ish, and many of those have developed and become decent articles. What I do object to is localised articles which are nothing but a directory of local schools, bios of random businessmen, cliched fluff about "all dwelling in this tehsil are living together in peace & harmony", etc. Localised articles are fine, they're just hard to police since there are so many of them and so few people are interested in the topic. So far as the Kunbi, until some reputable work comes out saying Kunbi are other than Shurda, the century's worth of English-language academic texts declaring them Shudra should be the WP narrative. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:31, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure the specifics of the content you are referring to but content like "all dwelling in this tehsil are living together in peace & harmony" is probably something I would have preserved by simply adding a {{fact}} or {{citation needed}} tag with a date. The reason - the content was probably added by someone from rural India or someone who is aware of geographical divisions in rural India because he or she used the word 'tehsil', and thus the person was probably the non-average Indian Wikipedian. It may have been WP:OR but if sourced within a reasonable period of time, it could have been a valuable addition. In regard to Shudra, I agree about complying with last-known-good sources but I'm only saying that the popular opinion is against the use of such terminology and it will likely require policing to keep the word in there. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:03, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

break

Unfortunately it should just have been deleted from the article. It is the same as saying "the air smells good" or "and the people are all human".

These are the very issues we are talking about - completely unecessary uncyclopaedic and non notable additions. I am pretty sure that even though the editor is convinced of peace and harmony it only takes one argument between two people to make it a false statement. Chaosdruid (talk) 17:24, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

It's all speculative without seeing the actual diff but religious and caste strife is common in India and that's what the person was probably referring to. So a {{fact}} tag would have been more appropriate than a deletion. No offense to anyone but given the quality of air in most of urban India, "the air smells good" would have probably been every more valuable :-) Zuggernaut (talk) 17:31, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
It should have been deleted - people living together without killing/attacking each other over racial/religious/other issues is called normal. It is the same as saying "here we all live without hurting each other" which is expected and so is not notable.
If you do not understand this basic editing principle then you really do not understand wikipedia.
If someone walked into a pub and said "People in Norwich don't attack each other over race or religion" I would say "so what?" which means its not notable Chaosdruid (talk) 17:55, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm a 2010 Wikipedian and open to the idea that I don't understand Wikipedia. But I've seen such incomplete content morph in to content loaded with information, most often by the simple addition of a {{fact}} tag. Since this is a hypothetical example, this one could easily have taken the following fictitious path Since the 29 September 2008 western India bombings in the Nandgaon tehsil of the Malegaon district in Maharashtra, all residents of the tehsil have been living in peace and harmony.[1] or in some cases I've seen it change to mean exactly the opposite of the original statement. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:19, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Along the lines of "not biting newcomers", which is difficult on India articles due to just the sheer quantity of often well-intentioned editors adding unusable material, is there any set template on "hey, the stuff you added needs a footnote, here's links on how to do footnotes"? Kind of like the {{vw|1 vandalism tags (which I use a ton on blatant IP vandalism), but something where at least someone knows why their edit was removed, as I'm sure it must be mystifying for someone who doesn't check the History to see what's changed, but just sees their work (shoddy though it may be) disappear.

Separately, on the Kunbi and Kurmi issues with the term "Shudra": the frustrating thing to me is that there are tons of good works on GoogleBooks clearly explaining how "formerly poor Shudra classes gained political power, and were able to strong-arm Brahmins into suddenly 'discovering' links to Kshatriya status and 'restoring' them." So when editors breathlessly rush in to add "Kshatriya" to the lead of "Kurmi", we're seeing the actual process of caste revisionism, not the unemotional description thereof. I just need to work up some time and background reading to go tackle the various "recently discovered we're Kshatriya" subcaste articles. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:18, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

To notify editors that their edit lacked a source, I tend to use Uw-unsourced1, Uw-unsourced2, and Uw-unsourced3. AtticusX (talk) 18:16, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Redirect Deletion to enable Move

Please weigh-in with your opinion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion#Bajrang_Lal_Takhar. --Gurubrahma (talk) 14:39, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

There was an opinion that WP:RM is a better place for the issue. Please weigh-in with your opinion at Talk:Bajranglal_Takhar#Requested_Move. --Gurubrahma (talk) 16:41, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Some interesting pictures

I have received via OTRS some images of the 1987 South Pole expedition by an international team including Col. J K Bajaj. Col. Bajaj has released a dozen images taken by him or with his camera on his behalf.

These can be found at Commons:1987_South_Pole_expedition

I hope you will find these of interest and perhaps will be motivated to use them in articles. Col. Bajaj is keen that he share these to further our educational mission - not least as proof that yes, the Indian flag has flown at the pole! Guy (Help!) 13:38, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Good find. I have added a couple of pictures to two articles - Indian Antarctic Program and Rajiv Gandhi. But the rest are without description, so am not sure where to add them.--Sodabottle (talk) 14:10, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
Strictly speaking, the image of Bajaj should not be on Indian Antarctic Program as he was not part of a government sponsored expedition, however that was the first time, I suspect that our flag flew on the pole. There was another guy who reached earlier as part of a Soviet expedition but I do not know how he reached. Bajaj's way was toughest of all three (Soviet, Bajaj, current expedition) - he walked. AshLin (talk) 19:15, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
He is standing at the Ceremonial South Pole. AshLin (talk) 10:56, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Tamil people montage

There is a discussion going on at Tamil people about what images to add to the montage. Your thoughts are solicited.--Sodabottle (talk) 10:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Kāliyā

Kāliyā is proposed to be moved Kaliya. Please give your comments in the discussion at the Talk:Kāliyā. --Redtigerxyz Talk 15:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of R. R. Keshavamurthy

The article R. R. Keshavamurthy has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

A search for references found a few minor mentions in published works (gBooks) did not find support for notability, fails WP:N and WP:V

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Jeepday (talk) 19:52, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

For anyone else interested in Shi'a sects in India, I've been hacking away at Mustaali and Dawoodi Bohra, both of which were largely unreadable reams of script regarding these branches of Ismaili Islam. In particular, I have great concerns that many articles under Category:Mustali and Category:Bohra have been written or edited by parties with a strong POV (maybe unconciously) for the Dawoodi Bohra faction. This faction appears to be the largest, and relatively wealthy, so it may be the case that they simply have a good body of English-speaking, computer-literate supporters in India to add their POV. For example, many of the articles on predecessor branches of Dawoodi Bohra, such as Mustaali and Taiyabi, appear to have been written from a DW perspective, portraying that branch as the "rightful heirs" all the way back to the time of Ali. Note particularly Dawood Bin Qutubshah, where is basically flat-out says that he was the right inheritor of the faith and other claims are false. In addition to that, there's a strong tendency to define the history, all the way back to Ali, as "the history of the DW (Fatimids)". This rather revisionist perspective confuses the issue of when the DW became a separate entity from competing sects (mid-1500s), and ends up summarising a millenium of history in each article, with a strong DW bias. In any case, I've had fun trying to pick through this, untangle all the jargon to make it something an average reader can grasp, and try and reconstruct the chronology to make sure that each step clearly indicates where it branches off, and where it's actually "Group X's" history, and where it's just background of a larger faction. So Muslim history should be in Muslim, Shi'a in Shi'a Islam, and so on for Fatimid, Ismaili, Mustali, Tayabi, Dawudi, etc. all the way down. What they're doing now is not unlike having World War II get into in-depth explanation all the way back to the Middle Ages. Any help in untangling these threads would be appreciated. MatthewVanitas (talk) 20:12, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Kokborok Counting

The article Kokborok Counting has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

A search for reference failed to find published (gBooks) support for the content of this article, fails WP:N and WP:V

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Jeepday (talk) 16:46, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

actually, it's merely a partial copy of Kokborok language, and I therefore put an A10 speedy tag on it. I got the clue by actually reading to the bottom, where it ends in the middle of sentence. FWIW, this automated notice is not appropriate for posting on noticeboards. I'm not sure we have one, so it's better to write something oneself, or even simpler, edit the notice after its placed. DGG ( talk ) 21:10, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikiproject India userbox issue....

Minor issue, but is there a way the wiki project userbox for this project can be reduced?

It's much larger than the standard userbox size and way too big.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by TrevelyanL85A2 (talk • contribs) 01:12, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Muddupalani

I recently started an article on Muddupalani, an eighteenth century Telugu poet, seeking to preserve material up for deletion. Any help in expanding it, adding the name in Telugu script, and searching about whether she has an article on a sister project would be appreciated. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 18:28, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Tridib Mitra poet. Can you help?

The article on Bengali poet Tridib Mitra has been tagged as an unreferenced biography of a living person since July 2008, which is the current focus month of the BLP Rescue Project. I have tried, and failed, to find any reliable sources to support this text. There are more details on the article discussion page. I'm posting here in the hope that someone might be kind enough to take a look and help determine the subject's notability and provide at least one reliable source. If it stays unreferenced much longer, it may be nominated for deletion.--Plad2 (talk) 21:39, 8 December 2010 (UTC)-

This article has now been nominated for deletion.--Plad2 (talk) 23:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Sanskrit alphabet composition (Kristubhagavatam): How form conjuncts "kri" and "stu"?

Hello, I've created a new page at Kristubhagavatam for a notable (and multiple award-winning) Sanskrit poem. I'd like to express the name of the poem itself in Devanagiri script. However, even after viewing the Devanagari page, I'm not sure how to create the necessary conjuncts where several letters are written together. I've succeeded in making kr, but not kri. Similarly, I've made st, but not stu. So the Sanskrit version of the name looks miserable, as I've just stuck in "i" and "u" as placeholders: "Sanskrit: क्रiस्तuभागवतम". Can the two needed conjuncts even be formed within WP? Any suggestions? Or if anyone knows how to simply implement such conjuncts, the text in question is on line 1 of the lede. Many thanks -- Health Researcher (talk) 06:03, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Heh, I'd just fixed the page before noticing your message here. For future reference, see Help:Multilingual support (Indic)#Other input methods (or the rest of the page), or the external links at Devanagari transliteration, or any online transliteration tool such as this one. Regards, Shreevatsa (talk) 06:55, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Great! And I copied our interchange to the article's talk page, for future reference (since one might want to add more Sanskrit text, e.g., verses or canto titles). Many thanks -- Health Researcher (talk) 07:17, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Aathi Thamilar Peravai and Athiyamaan

Are the above notable? --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 12:23, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

nope. this is a district specific caste org. not notable.--Sodabottle (talk) 07:52, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Nominated for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aathi Thamilar Peravai.--Redtigerxyz Talk 05:27, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Special characters in article names

I am quite curious about the special characters in article names pertaining to Tamil literature. I understand that spelling this way helps with pronunciation. However, in my opinion the article names should use a common spelling found on the net. A pronunciation help or an audio file might be a useful addition.

The articles include most listed in this template: {{Sangam literature}}. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 16:39, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Er, common spelling found on the net? We'd have to move a lot of articles to misspelt titles if that were a criterion. :-) (The spelling "Paul Erdös" is about five times more common than "Paul Erdős", yet the latter is the correct spelling and the article title.) I of course agree that if we find that there is a single simple spelling that is overwhelmingly common in sources that discuss the subject, that's what we should use. But it seems that at least some of these ancient names are discussed (in English) mostly in scholarly literature, which tends to use some accurate transliteration with a few diacritic marks here and there. So if it's the name with diacritics that's more common in the sources, that's what we should use, rather than one loose approximation out of several. (What's the problem with special characters, BTW? I don't see anyone arguing that it's better to remove them from European names with diacritics, like the aforementioned Paul Erdős, or John le Carré, or Möbius strip, or Þrúðr, or…) Whatever the name, we'll always have all variant spellings redirect to the actual article, so I don't see a strong argument for having the article title not be an accurate transliteration. In fact, the large text of the title is where the diacritic marks are easiest to see, and hence most useful. :-) (Nothing that I said applies to names that are commonly discussed in English outside the scholarly literature, and always with the same spelling.) Shreevatsa (talk) 17:08, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
I see what you mean. However, to be honest, I have never seen these words spelt with diacritics, be it in text books or when they make it in the news. I did a search through Google books with Akanaṉūṟu and once again I don't find any hits for it but rather for Akananooru, Agananooru, Akananuru and Agananuru. Of course it would have been wise to search on Google scholar but I am not able to do it as the scholar thinks am a virus. I will have to try that later. Nevertheless, I am almost certain that the results would be similar. FYI, Tamil Nadu Stateboard (Government run) uses Aganuru. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 18:49, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Actually, this profuse multiplicity of spellings, characteristic of Tamil, only convinces me of the utility of using a standard spelling (short of titling the article in Tamil characters). :-) Shreevatsa (talk) 19:20, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Well if Akananuru has 3200 hits on Google books and the highest, that should obviously be the article's name. The other spellings that I have pointed are way smaller in number (with Agananuru being the second with 480). These should be redirects and may be spelt out as alternate names in the article. --Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 19:27, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
The special characters in the names are IAST. An regular English reading Indian/Tamil is told about Patiṉeṇkīḻkaṇakku, he/she may find to understand it is just Pathinenkilkanakku with fancy (read "scholarly") characters. I would prefer an Indian English spelling instead.--Redtigerxyz Talk 05:12, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
IMHO, the natural reaction to "Patiṉeṇkīḻkaṇakku" (as someone who doesn't know what those diacritic marks mean) would be to just ignore the fancy marks and read it as "Patinenkilkanakku" — which is an acceptable English spelling. This is how we English readers deal with diacritic marks in French/German/Turkish etc (those of us who are ignorant of what they mean, anyway). I can understand the objection to these spellings when ignoring the diacritic marks actually produces an unacceptable spelling: such as when IAST uses ś and ṣ for sh, or when it uses c for ch... or when there's actually an Indian English spelling that's unique and common in nearly all reputable sources; in either case there's no need to use the fancy characters in the title. Here, I don't see the problem. (BTW since it's not Sanskrit, it's not IAST but probably ISO 15919 or something similar). Anyway, since it does appear to be the case that there are no hits on Google Books or Scholar for Patiṉeṇkīḻkaṇakku or Akanaṉūṟu, it would be fine to rename the articles, as long as the name with diacritics is mentioned near the top of the article for those who cannot read the Tamil script). Shreevatsa (talk) 06:14, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Famine in India

Famine in India is currently undergoing a GA review and I would like to add back content quoting Churchill on Indians and the Bengal famine of 1943.

Source: Nelson, Dean (9 September 2010), Winston Churchill blamed for 1m deaths in India famine, London: Telegraph, retrieved 5 October 2010{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

The above paragraph was deleted in October 2010 and I think it's a substantial piece of information that can enhance the article. I am trying to re-instate the content - please join the discussion at talk page of the article to enhance the quality of discussion and help in reaching a consensus on whether this content should be included in the article. Zuggernaut (talk) 01:43, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Zuggernaut is clearly trying to canvass by using a POV statement, clearly one that was not made. I will be removing this "formerly" but because it serve no purpose other than to incite people using a statement that was never made. --Deepak D'Souza (talk) 04:49, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Not just here. I placed an AGF warning on his talk page with the link a short while ago. Its the second time we have had a canvassing issue with this editor not to mention forum shopping. --Snowded TALK 07:13, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I do not see a problem with my notification according to the way I understand WP:CANVASSING. I included a paraphrased version of the Churchill quote in the section title and this is what Deepak objects to. I'm not fully sure that this amounts to canvassing. That's because my message was neutrally worded and the section title was factual. The point Deepak may have broached is that to avoid intentional or unintentional canvassing, one must have a neutral title in addition to neutral message body. The current policy did not state this explicitly and I've have updated the policy to indicate that the title should be neutrally worded. Allegations of forum shopping are bogus as explained in my response on the talk page of the countering systemic bias page Zuggernaut (talk) 07:35, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

The current consensus is heading towards exclusion of even the one line on this so I've decided not to pursue it any further. Thank you to all of those who participated. Building on User:Shreevatsas suggestion that this content may be appropriate in the Bengal famine of 1943, I would propose that we improve that article to a good article first and then a featured article. I will add it to the "Need to be FA" list of articles on the collaboration dashboard. Reasons for doing so and some notes:

  • The death toll was huge - in millions
  • This famine was the last major famine in India
  • Several sources call this famine a "man-made" famine
  • Churchill revealed that he hated Indians (see above) and later blamed the famine on Indians for "breeding like rabbits." He also revealed that Indians were "beastliest people next to the Germans".
  • The famine has become one of the most analyzed famines.
  • This famine is the paradigmatic famine for Amartya Sen's work on famines which pretty much makes obsolete the conventional theory that famines are caused by a decline in food availability. Instead famines are now recognized as a problem of economy, i.e., famines occur due to the failure of a laborer/rural artisan to gain employment which in turn disallows him or her to purchase food. See Theories of famines.
  • The article may take 300-400 edits to before it can be nomated as a good article. At 3-4 edits a day, one person can do this in a year. More collaborators can accomplish it much earlier.
  • A list of sources to start from is at Famine_in_India#References and Famine_in_India#Further_reading.

Zuggernaut (talk) 03:04, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

1981 Karnataka liquor deaths

There is an article 1981 Karnataka liquor deaths, and somehow, I feel that the name doesn't sound right. It is supposed to mean 'The incident of deaths due to illicit liquor in Karnataka in 1981', but '1981 Karnataka liquor deaths' means something else. I had also proposed it for deletion, because I felt it was more like a news article, but I guess that was denied anyway. Ok, so now can anyone propose a new suitable name for the article(I couldn't think of one). MikeLynch (talk) 13:02, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Its a stub class article and it can be merged in to an article on illicit liquor. Name: perhaps an addition to the disambiguation page of desi can be made for desi (liquor) and this article merged with that. I'm not sure if Desi liquor is illicit but a section can be dedicated to it in that article. Zuggernaut (talk) 17:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Bhubaneswar meetup

I am looking for volunteers for a Wikimeetup in Orissa, preferably Bhubaneswar? Please contact me if you are from Odisha/Bhubaneswar. Thanks -- Tinu Cherian - 12:39, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Kendriya Vidyalayas

FYI. postdlf (talk) 04:35, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Help needed with JS Group

Hi guys, some weeks ago an IP user added a whole bunch of text to this article, covering alleged financial crimes, fraud, corruption etc, committed by the owner of this group. It is fully unreferenced and poorly written, especially there is no neutral point of view. But I thought that the information itself might be relevant, so I didn't remove it. I am neither an expert on financial subjects nor on India, so I cannot improve the article by myself. But I'm quite sure the right one to do so is a member of this Wikipedia project, which is why I'm posting the matter here. Thanks for your help! Per aspera ad Astra (talk) 21:35, 28 December 2010 (UTC) Oops, sorry, that's a Pakistan related subject. Per aspera ad Astra (talk) 21:39, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

New categories for Caste; need help populating

I noted Category:Indian caste system was getting a little cluttered, so I moved individual castes and individual leaders/activists into their respective cats, and created and populated a few new ones:

Any help populating these would be great; I'm sure the "violence" section has a ton of articles that just weren't directly in the Caste System cat. MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:09, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

The classification of the caste system is complex and I'm not sure if Category:Indian caste system by province is accurate. The rest of the categories should be alright. Zuggernaut (talk) 03:01, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
I have no commitment to the "by province" cats; I didn't create the Kerala/Goa/etc. ones, I just grouped them under a parent cat for cleanliness, so I have no objection to CFDing them if folks think it will cause clumsy over-simplification. On that note, is there any particular way to sub-cat the 400+ articles in the Category:Indian castes parent cat? Or would that just turn into ceaseless drama as every single article demanded to be put in either Brahmin or Kshatriya subcats no matter how many hundreds of Brit Empire and later area studies theses clearly identify them as Shudra? Can most/many of the 400+ at least theoretically be put into one of the four major castes, and then I suppose Dalit and Tribals? MatthewVanitas (talk) 03:50, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
can't classify all indian castes into one of those four. apart from the potential for endless editwars (the horror! the horror!), there are a lot of castes which dont have clear status. For instance in Tamil Nadu there was/is no clear kshatriya/vyshya/sudra division. --Sodabottle (talk) 09:36, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Taare Zameen Par FA

FYI, Taare Zameen Par recently became a featured Article. I think this is the fourth Indian film-related article to become FA (after Satyajit Ray, Lage Raho Munnabhai, and Preity Zinta).--Dwaipayan (talk) 21:23, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Congratulations!--Sodabottle (talk) 10:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

the "non-notable" sahitya akademi award

There is an Afd - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sahitya Akademi Award to Dogri Writers about the "non-notable" sahitya akademi award. Apparently since the prize money is "only $1000", the Indian govt's highest literary honour is deemed non-notable. Your comments are welcome--Sodabottle (talk) 10:25, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

WPINDIA policy on "list of surnames in X group" list?

I've noticed that a ton of Indian caste/community articles tend to have lengthy (and oft-edited) lists of surnames pertaining to that community. Does WPINDIA have a particular stance on such lists? Are they a valuable addition, a good addition only if cited to a specific reference which mentions those names (although that cited text is bound to be modified with no explanation by IPs regardless of what footnote links to), or are they a useless honeypot that draws in IPs to add unhelpful information? I'd like to know the group opinion just so I can know whether to delete such lists with extreme prejudice when I run across them, such as in this article: Roman Catholic Kshatriya. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I am not aware of any existing consensus on how to handle this, but nuke them if there is no source. (Caste articles attract IPs and SPAs regardless of surnames)--Sodabottle (talk) 15:37, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I feel that such lists are unnecessary, as surnames Need not pertain to a specific caste/community. Lists like these excite a lot of anon IPs as you mentioned, and they just go on adding stuff, verified or not. MakingTheMark •Wassup doc? 15:40, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
Good deal, will start deleting them as I see them barring any really clear justification/sourcing. For an example of a worst-case scenario, check out the old 63kb version of Maratha clan system, where IPs wandered in multiple times daily to change/add/delete names, affiliations, symbols. The lede states "96 clans" or "96 Kuli Maratha", but this list varied from probably 93 to 105 clans. It was ceremoniously bludgeoned down to 3kb, with great weeping/wailing/gnashing of teeth from IPs who claimed it was an awesome resource. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:15, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
You say,"It was ceremoniously bludgeoned down to 3kb, with great weeping/wailing/gnashing of teeth from IPs who claimed it was an awesome resource.. It indeed is a great ethnographic / anthropological resource. The article is just a stub now. You may be better deleting the whole thing!. Sad really.Jonathansammy (talk) 18:09, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
This is a common problem with caste articles and I feel it's better to give them a week or two by using the {{fact}} tag, then delete it. Zuggernaut (talk) 19:25, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

"great ethnographic / anthropological resource" would imply that it had any credibility whatsoever. The list changed to absurd degrees. To paraphrase one commentor: "add a name, drop a name, change a clan devak, just do whatever willy-nilly." A Wikipedia article with no sourcing that's constantly changing may be an interesting object of study, but it certainly makes for a terrible article. The current article at least explains what the concept is and its history. Having a full, complicated list just provides a target for vandalism and uninformed/POV editing. The main thing the current article lacks is some link to a page of a book offering one (of the many) claimed lists. MatthewVanitas (talk) 20:09, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

While I have you here, what's the deal with the whole "X group is associated with titles such as Raje, Sardard, etc. etc." thing? Is there an actual legitimate association between social/caste groups and titles, or is this like saying "Irishmen have been known by titles such as Sir, Officer, and Sergeant." ? Some of the more suspect editors simply love jamming title stuff in there, and I don't ever see it footnoted, so I'm looking rather askance at it. In Bhoite, the issue of titles takes up most of the lede, and I don't feel any smarter for having read it. MatthewVanitas (talk) 08:22, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Famine in India

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Famine_in_India#Recent_deletions_by_Snowded. Zuggernaut (talk) 08:01, 6 January 2011 (UTC) (Using {{Please see}})

Modern spelling of the town of "Condore"?

I noted in Rajput that the town of Condore is redlinked. Given that Indian towns have decent coverage, I wonder if this is just an obsolete spelling/name of a town for which an article exists. Here's some context for the area [22], can someone glance and maybe make a redirect to the article on the modern town? MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:25, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Probably Konduru? It is about 75km from Machilipatnam, and thus possibly near enough to be the location of the Battle of Condore? Imc (talk) 17:14, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
However this page [23] says it is Chandurthi, which is even further away. Imc (talk) 17:35, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
Well, it doesn't matter. It's pretty clear that it's referring to the Battle of Condore, so it's simplest to just make the battle the wikilink. I just did that. Shreevatsa (talk) 18:27, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
Well, it doesn't matter! Maybe it was merely a battle in a mysterious war between Britain and France that mysteriously occurred several thousand miles away from those two countries? Imc (talk) 14:50, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
What I meant was that where the article in question mentions "Condore", what it clearly means is the Battle of Condore. The question of which city "Condore" means in the name of the battle is less important for that quote, and besides linking to the battle is more useful (given the context) than linking to the actual city, whichever it is. Now, finding out why the "Battle of Condore" is called by that name, and which city it refers to, does indeed matter, but it's a matter for the Battle of Condore article. FWIW, soon after making the previous comment, I edited the Battle of Condore article, adding links to two external wikis that seem to have better information on the subject. Feel free to improve the article. Regards, Shreevatsa (talk) 15:26, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Move requested at Talk:History of Bombay in Independent India

History of Bombay in Independent India is requested to be moved to History of Mumbai in Independent India. --Redtigerxyz Talk 15:28, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Meetup/Pune announced

Wikipedia:Meetup/Pune/Invite

Jullandar

Hi,

Can anyone please try to answer my question at Talk:Jalandhar#6 A.M. Jullandar Shere? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:54, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Category:Kamma people

There is a new category Category:Kamma people. I was under the impression that there was a consensus not to categorize people by membership in an Indian caste, but I could be wrong. I don't really know enough about the issue to confidently start a deletion discussion, so I thought I'd just drop a notice here and allow anyone who wants to pursue this issue with a WP:CFD nomination. Good Ol’factory (talk) 23:53, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

That is correct, we've had this discussion before on this noticeboard and at a few CFDs, so this Category needs to go. This also results in BLP issues as the few entries that I checked didn't have any sources for the categorization. —SpacemanSpiff 04:30, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Does that go for lists to, or are we letting things like List of Kunbi people through currently? Does it make a difference whether the list is in the article or its own article, is referenced, etc? I'm down either way (and you know I love chopping sectarian/communitarian fluff), but just wanted to be apprised of the current consensus. MatthewVanitas (talk) 04:41, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
During previous discussions, it was decided to leave lists alone. However, they still need to be referenced, anything unreferenced should be snipped completely. And if there are BLPs in those lists, any snipping should be governed by WP:BLP too. —SpacemanSpiff 04:47, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
(edit conflict)This is similar to the List of Deshastha Brahmins which is a huge list. My first reaction was that such lists are all original research but the list has a lot of potentially useful information that can and should be sourced. Perhaps we should add a generic citations template at the top and give the IP editors plenty of time for sourcing their claims. Zuggernaut (talk) 04:51, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Good compromise suggestion; I'm likewise vaguely charitable-feeling towards the list as separate articles, reckoning that most people going there are really into the subject and interested in minutiae. Though I strongly doubt IP editors will source any of those claims, I am (at this juncture) fine with putting up a bunch of warning banners to indicate "this article is quite possibly crap" and letting it sort itself out where it does little external harm. On actual articles like Rajput though, I'd suggest a much, much higher standard for inclusion, and immediate deletion of any redlinks, especially obvious ones like "HON. Ch. CHALAWALI, important busynessman" which crop up so often. MatthewVanitas (talk) 05:19, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Makar Sankranti

Could someone knowledgeable take a look at the edit history of Makar Sankranti? Over the past several days, it's become a battleground with large chunks of text being deleted. I reverted to a steady version from several days ago, and now my reversion has been undone and more text removed. I don't know if the version I reverted to is actually correct or not, but it was certainly stable until the massive amount of editing over the last few days. I may have to ask for protection if the deletion of large portions of the article is not at least explained. Corvus cornixtalk 19:11, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Yikes!. Can you please revert to the stable version and ask for semi protection for this article for till Jan 16 (and people forget about it). I see a lot of puffery and "it happens like this in my town/caste/family" sort of additions. It will take a long time to go through the additions and separate wheat from chaff. I will take a look tomorrow--Sodabottle (talk) 19:19, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya_contributions_to_Indian_railways

Hi all

The page Kutch Gurjar Kashtriya was far too big and needed splitting into smaller articles. I have started copyediting the page and created a new page Kutch Gurjar Kashtriya contributions to Indian railways which I have copyeditied the opening paragraphs and end one.

Unfortunately there is a lot of work needed and a new page patroller nominated it for deletion almost immediately. Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya_contributions_to_Indian_railways

I have now been attacked by an editor User_talk:Chaosdruid#Nomination_of_Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya_contributions_to_Indian_railways_for_deletion and find this behaviouor a little lacking in respect.

The article has been nominated as there are no inline references in either the original page Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya or the new page Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya_contributions_to_Indian_railways

Can someone try and find the correct references in the original to transfer over to the new one/

thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 09:51, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I came across this bunch of articles a month or two back and they are problematic. I'm not sure that copyediting them in the current form would be very helpful. I'd asked the author of the page why they were creating essentially duplicate articles on the same topic but never heard back. From what I've seen on wiki, it appears that Mistri (caste), Kadia kshatriyas and Kutch Gurjar Kashtriya are all the same but were created separately for whatever reason. Since the major contributor didn't respond and I haven't been too active lately, I never got to doing anything. The new article IMO isn't a good idea, these articles are essentially dumps of one or more books by the group historians and don't necessarily pass muster through independent sources. At this point I think trimming of content to what's verifiable would be a better option than to copy edit what's there. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 11:20, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
Bugger - I just finished copyediting Kutch Gurjar Kashtriya - it only took me 6.5 hours lol!
I have removed a lot of the long lists of buildings made by this person and that person as they seemed to be unecessary and as you point out possibly copied from a book. I moved the railways one as it was very comprehensive and if it is true that the KGK had a monopoly on it then it is almost a complete history of the construction of the Indian railway sytem and the info was too good to lose.
The refs are the main problem as there are no inline refs and I do not know which ones to copy across to the Kutch_Gurjar_Kashtriya_contributions_to_Indian_railways page. I hope that the editor that had a go is going to do that now.
As I said most of the deleted material is just long lists so hopefully the new version is ok.
Anyway I must go to bed now lol :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 11:30, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

2011 election images

To all wikipedians living in or visitng Tamil Nadu in the next few months; Please look out for interesting and relevant election related images (cut outs, local rallies, and so on) which would be suitable for Tamil Nadu legislative assembly election, 2011. --CarTick (talk) 14:22, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Also West Bengal legislative assembly election, 2011. --Redtigerxyz Talk 16:48, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

New template for individual Upanishads

There's now a new template for individual Upanishads. If you have an interest, please help adding it to the 10-12 Mukhya Upanishads like Chandogya, Kena, Katha, Mandukya, etc as well as to the 100s of other Upanishads. An example of syntax usage is given below. Documentation can be found at the template documentation page as well.

Brihadaranyaka
Devanagariबृहदारण्यक उपनिषद्
IASTBṛhadāraṇyaka
Title meansThe great wilderness
Date1200-800 BC
Author(s)Yajnavalkya
TypeMukhya Upanishad
Linked VedaShukla Yajurveda
Linked BrahmanaShatapatha Brahmana
Linked AranyakaBrihad Aranyaka
PhilosophyThe basic identity of the Atman
Commented byAdi Shankara
Popular verse"Aham brahmāsmi"

Zuggernaut (talk) 14:57, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Sri/Shri

I don't speak much Hindi, but shouldn't the article Sri make clear that this is a completely normal form of polite address in Hindi, much like Sir or Mister in English? --JN466 00:37, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Small district categories in Category:Karnataka geography stubs

Greetings! Two or more stub types which you created have been nominated for renaming or deletion at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion. The stub type most likely doesn't meet Wikipedia requirements for a stub type, through failure to meet standards relating to the name, scope, current stub hierarchy or likely size, as explained at Wikipedia:Stub. Please feel free to make any comments at WP:SFD regarding this stub type, and in future, please consider proposing new stub types first at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals! This message is a boilerplate, left here as a courtesy, and should not be considered personal in nature. Dawynn (talk) 14:02, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Merger suggestion for Airline destination pages

There is a suggestion to merge NACIL destinations with Air India destinations - please comment here 1. Thanks, Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 14:12, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Cleanup listing

There is a new cleanup listing available for the India project. 54% of the articles require cleanup. — Ganeshk (talk) 19:47, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

census images

I would like to have some images of census enumerators at work for 2011 census of India. If we missed the opportunity in the first phase, somebody with a camera would like to snap a couple of images when these enumerators drop by their neighborhood in the second phase. Please remember March first week onwards is when you will expect them to show up. --CarTick (talk) 14:42, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Good idea. Will try to get an image.--Sodabottle (talk) 14:45, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
I think you should leave a note to Tinucherian. He seems to be involved in articles relating to the census. TheMike •Wassup doc? 14:50, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Kamal Haasan fan POV?

The article on the actor Kamal Haasan has recently undergone a significant expansion. The overall effect has been to give enormous weight to what a highly respected and celebrated guy Kamal Haasan is, so I tagged it with {{fanpov}}. Now I'm wondering if perhaps I was hasty; it's not as adulatory as many Indian actor articles I've edited, and the new additions do seem rather thoroughly sourced. The editor who has expanded the article has challenged me to suggest concrete improvements, and that's where I find myself in over my head and could use some help. I'd like to invite whoever's interested to scan through the article and share your thoughts on whether it needs any adjustments for neutrality -- if not, feel free to remove my tag -- because editing for neutrality really isn't my strength. (I'm more of a straightforward copyeditor.) If you do find room for improvement in the article's neutrality but don't feel like messing with it, perhaps you can leave a friendly message on Talk:Kamal Haasan so the editor reworking the article can know how best to improve it. AtticusX (talk) 23:12, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks to the editors who have already pitched in to help improve the article. AtticusX (talk) 05:55, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Princely states of India

Accidentally I found someone is contesting my contributions with respect to the princely states of India. I now would like to get clearance from WP:INDIA regarding the contributions I made and which I would like to do in the future. I do not want to spend time on something unwanted.

There existed more than 550 Native/Indian/Princely states.

Category:Indian Princely States contains some of them. It also contains other things, some I removed already, it seems that other users agree to remove categories that kind of do not belong to an article.

  • In my opinion ideally this category would only contain articles about the 550+ states, and one or some more overview articles, and a list or several lists. But not articles about modern day towns.
  • In my opinion each state should have it's own article.

Some of the states existed well before the British arrived, and it was them who invented the designation "princely". Some of the articles deal with the time before they were made "princely", so I in my opinion it is not correct to have the term "princely" included for each of them. If the articles are named without princely, like e.g. Hyderabad State, Bhopal (state), Pudukkottai state then they can also contain state information before the time they became "princely". I created some articles in the format of the 21 gun salute Hyderabad State. I could also have used the Bhopal (state) format. I think to have it like Hyderabad State is more convenient.

Hyderabad State format flows well with articles like:

I made some move requests and would invite you to have a look at:

See also recent:

It also flows well with

I would also suggest to merge the lists

and to make the result sortable. Maybe also include the number of gun salutes. Listings by region exist in the agency articles

Also I think all articles should get an infobox. Hyderabad State uses: Template:Infobox Former Country

I like the Template:Princely states of India. Maybe it can be extended to include all salute state as listed until 9 gun salutes, or even more.

  1. Is there agreement to have only articles about individual states, some overview articles and optionally categories in Category:Indian Princely States, but to remove articles like "History of something" etc.?
  2. Is there agreement to have an article for each state, separate from modern day towns?
  3. Is there agreement to leave out the word "princely" in the title?
  4. Is there agreement to use the Hyderabad State format as the basic format? Some cases like Mysore State (details in the article) would need other means of (further) disambiguation.
  5. Is there agreement to merge List of Indian princely states and List of Indian princely states (alphabetical)?
  6. Is there agreement to have an infobox on each article?
  7. Is there agreement to have 9 gun salute states included in Template:Princely states of India?

Thank you to User:Boing! said Zebedee who pointed me here. TopoChecker (talk) 07:49, 22 January 2011 (UTC) comment by banned user

I think this sort of cleanup is long overdue, so good luck with this effort. However, there are some minor issues, the "s" in state should not be capitalized in many cases (Hyderabad, Mysore etc being exceptions) as that's not part of the proper name. Also, whenever there's a more common name such as "kingdom" that these places are referred as, those should be the preferred title form; in some cases it would be better to have a parenthetical disambiguator such as (princely state) e.g. Bhopal (state) should actually be at Bhopal (princely state). It might be helpful if you can focus on a couple at a time so that more people can collaborate, we always find that once there are too many things to look at, interest levels drop off. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 18:36, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. For moving some to the more specific name, I think it would be needed to have a list of all including the more specific names. The more specific names can be an issue, for articles that span over a time in which two specific names were used. That's why in the first place I would really focus on a standard generic variant. The generic names can later be redirects or disambiguation pages, in cases it is decided to split two time periods of a state into two articles. Why are Hyderabad and Mysore exceptions? I would not create articles like Bastar state or Pudukkottai state, since that is not a WP common naming convention. It's all Mughal Empire, British Raj, Indian Union, Punjab States Agency, Bombay Presidency, Gwalior Residency, Berar Province, ... New York City (not New York city). See also:
TopoChecker (talk) 18:49, 23 January 2011 (UTC) comment by banned user
  • So, as you can see this user was determined to be a sock of a banned user. As such any of his actions may be overturned by any user as a matter of course as a banned users' edits are by definition not welcome. Unfortunately they sometimes make actual good edits in a misguided attempt to prove they can be helpful. I almost just zapped it all in the interest of WP:RBI, but since there seems to have been a consensus for some of these actions I leave it to those who have knowledge of this topic. Each of these splits and other changes should be evaluated by a third party to insure they are in line with policy and consensus, and may be undone without further debate if they are not. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:01, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Indian National Congress

Please have a look at the Controversies and criticisms section of the article Indian National Congress. The section is quite long, and I feel that it should be integrated into the rest of the article, or so WP:CRIT advises. Please comment on the talk page, and establish a consensus. I have also notified WikiProject Political parties about this. TheMike •Wassup doc? 16:43, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Request

As one of the editors who frequently deals with the Uncategorized Articles project, I've come across an issue that needs to be discussed.

On any given day, between 10 and 20 per cent of the uncategorized articles list consists of Indian towns and villages on which somebody has changed the existing category link to some alternate spelling that isn't reflected in our category system, with the result that the article becomes decategorized because its "category" is now a broken redlink. The most common example of this is "Orissa" → "Odisha", though this is far from the only one — but regardless, it's incredibly frustrating to have to clean up a dozen or more of these each and every day.

I realize that geographic naming can be a political issue with language implications — I'm Canadian, so trust me, I'm quite familiar with such matters — but from a strictly encyclopedic perspective, we need to maintain a consensus around how to handle naming disputes.

Could I ask that somebody involved in this project please review how the Indian-related geographic categories are named, and whether some of them need to be moved to new titles or to have {{categoryredirect}}s in place at common alternate spellings? I know it's complicated, but this constant breakage of Indian category links really needs to stop. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 00:47, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

This is a complex issue mainly because of two reasons 1) multiple languages in India 2) Local Indian names can be transliterated in many forms. I sincerely doubt if we can come up with a single solution. In most cases, only a couple of reasonable editors from the specific language region could help sort through this mess. Unfortunately, English wikipedia has disproportionally high, active and reasonable editors from some language regions and almost none from many. Bringing the issue up here for most common changes may be helpful. In this case, Orissa => Odisha change isnt wrong. That, infact, is how Oriyyans call their state. --CarTick (talk) 01:14, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
Such cases under two broad categories a) Where name in local language is different from the common english one (Orissa->Odisha) and sometimes the local one has been made the legal one through legislation b) People change spelling because of either they are misinformed or due to "IDONTLIKEIT". Is there a listing of common broken links introduced? As Cartick points out we need people familiar with the the particular region to sort this out, But if there is a central list compiled somewhere, I can take a look and can comment on which ones need category redirects and which ones need to be reverted without consideration.--Sodabottle (talk) 04:44, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
Do not forget that the "most common spelling in english" should be used? Regional variations should perhaps be added but I would suggest that a new category be introduced for that rather than keep changing them.
Take for example "Kiev" - the most commonly used spelling for the city is Kiev although the city itself transliterates as Kyiv the Kyiv spelling is less used in English and so Kiev is the one we use on Wiki Chaosdruid (talk) 08:01, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

In the short term, can we make Odisha and other common currently-non-WP spellings category redirects? At least that way we won't be losing articles to WP:UNCAT while we sort out what the preferred/official spelling is. MatthewVanitas (talk) 04:43, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

New template - Religion in India

There's now a new template (template:Religion in India) listing the numbers and percentages of all the religions in India. The template is based on the 2001 census. Please feel free to improve, expand or modify the template. Zuggernaut (talk) 04:35, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Schools

I have seen many articles about Indian towns and have observed that some lists the schools in the area. These articles are usually written in poor english too. I really doubt that the schools in the district should be put on wikipedia. What do you people think?Ysjzysn (talk) 05:30, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Having few institutions which are well known may be include but to include whole bunch of every nook and corner one is certainly not a godd practice. I have been fighting such generic inclusions on certaion articles but it is mor waste of time & energy as each time you bruch off the changes ne enthususiast will be there to add his picks to the list. We really need some guidelines what level of detail is required on articles regarding not only schools, colleges, institutes, etc but also for industries, hospitals, notable personalities, etc. --Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haidertcs 05:41, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
We just need to make sure policies like WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:OR are followed in those articles. Poor English is a problem that can easily be fixed and it should not be the criterion for deletion. And assuming you are talking about rural districts, I actually think quite the opposite - we need more content from these areas. Do you have any specific examples and can you provide a link here? Zuggernaut (talk) 05:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
Agree, that we need more information regarding these areas but filling articles with names of schools, colleges, institutes, peoples, banks, etc is too much. Few of such additions are actually notbale and have a deffinite place in the article but rest of them are just POV & propaganda/advertisment push. A quick example can ebe Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh. --Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haidertcs 05:55, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
For a lot of these things, my impression was that there's some consensus to remove any listing that can't be linked to another article. That is, if "Foo District Peoples' Bank" doesn't have a bluelink, and neither does "Fooey McFooerson, eminent local shopkeeper", then they should be removed. In some cases where it's hard to establish whether there might be enough notability for an eventual article, I've compromised by putting the hide tags around any redlink/non-link names. Also so that people might see them in the Edit window and not try to re-add them. This approach has worked fairly well; note that a lot of Indian caste/tribe/group articles like List of Reddys are now at least 85% clean, as opposed to being just masses of random people. MatthewVanitas (talk) 04:50, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
Kind of agree with MatthewVanitas, but if we are talking about rural India, then as it is, we don't have a lot of material there. We can't go about deleting every redlink there. Having said that, it shouldn't become a directory of course. What I am saying is that: let some material be there, even if it is non notable to us. Obviously, we cannot find articles about villages and such places in our metropolitan newspapers, or on the net. And that is no reason not to have information about that village. TheMike •Wassup doc? 08:33, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Scams in India

I don't know what to do with the article Scams in India. It just doesn't seem right. Can we make this into a list article, and should we move it to a name like 'List of Political scams in India', or something like that? I await comments. TheMike •Wassup doc? 08:38, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Converting this to a list and keeping the history is not ideal. Bofors and the Emergency in the same category? I think this needs to go to AfD. A list could be created subsequently without all this OR later. —SpacemanSpiff 08:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I think that we should create the list first, and put this into AfD afterwards. TheMike •Wassup doc? 09:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Wazirabad (Gurgaon)

Could somebody take a look at Wazirabad (Gurgaon) and wikify it and provide sources? The first couple of sentences alone make absolutely no sense to someone who knows nothing of India, and it seems to read like there are legal problems there, though I really can't make heads or tails out of the article. Corvus cornixtalk 06:18, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I and others have done a basic cleanup, and someone did a good job adding plenty of references on current land disputes. However, the "Land controversies" section is still rather disjointed; I believe the events can be laid out much clearer to show the general pattern of controversy, but right now it jumps back and forth between several semi-related incidents. Also, had trouble with an IP removing my {{link rot}} and {{confusing-section}} tags, which are still applicable. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:09, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Swami as common name or honorific

In the following move discussions:

--rgpk (comment) 17:27, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm crossposting this to WT:HNB as that's the more appropriate board. —SpacemanSpiff 17:32, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Location Map of India

The File:India location map.svg, misrepresents the Kashmir area. The Kashmir area should be represented as a part of India. Atleast should be represented as a different shade as "conflict land". --ashwinikalantri talk 15:32, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Expert assistance request for Nirbachito Column

I came upon the article Nirbachito Column while doing new page patrol. It looks to be clearly notable and worth keeping, but is in need of a major cleanup from someone familiar with the work and culture. I've done a basic cleanup, but have asked for assistance here and at the Bangladesh wikiproject. Thanks, --ThePaintedOne (talk) 15:56, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to classify WP:India articles under WP:Central Asia

There's a proposal to classify WP:India articles under WP:Central Asia -- Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Central_Asia#Proposal_of_addition_of_India_to_WP_Central_Asia. —SpacemanSpiff 22:33, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Photo requests for Mumbai

Hi! I have some photo requests related to Mumbai:

  • Kingfisher Airlines head office - Kingfisher House Western Express Highway Vile Parle (E) Mumbai - 400099 India
  • Jet Airways head office - Jet Airways (India) Ltd. S.M.Center, Andheri - Kurla Road, Andheri (East), Mumbai, Maharashtra 400059

Thank you, WhisperToMe (talk) 00:48, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Merge Panhwar‎, Paramara‎, Ponwar?

These articles appear to be alternate spellings, often mentioning each other as alternate spellings as well. A lot of the "notables", geographic territories held, etc. appear to be related. Also some of the cut-n-paste IP junk such as "JEMS OF THIS CLAN" have been dumped identically into each of these. What differences there are between the articles (particularly in terms of religion) might be POV forks rather than actual distinctions. Can someone more familiar with Rajput groups take a squint and let me know if these need to be merged? They vary somewhat in quality (just did a basic cleanup of Panhwar), and use probably eight different spelling variants between the three of them, so could be interesting work. So far as importance, they get around 300, 2500, and 900 hits monthly, respectively, so composite they could be a semi-popular article. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:24, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

I've added a project to Panhwar and rated it low on the importance scale. Zuggernaut (talk) 14:55, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The article Khudabadi Sindhi Swarankar mentions a group of Muslims in Sindh called the Panohar whose capital was Khudabad. One of the three articles above mentions Khudabad and Sindh in the context of the Panhwar; is this yet another variant spelling which should redirect? MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
Also noting there are almost no usable hits for Panhwar‎ on gBooks, except a mention specifically stating that they are not descended from Arabic tribes, directly contradicting the assertion in the article that they are descended from Muhammad's wetnurse's tribe. Which, honestly, sounds like one of those legendary claims of dubious historical backing. Barring any clear dispute, I'm thinking to redirect the whole article to Paramara (as Panhwar even explicitly states that "Panhwar" means Paramaras who converted to Islam), and put in a very short paragraph saying "this group of Muslim Paramara claims Arab descent, but this source says no." I'm finding yet more spelling variants to redirect too (Puar, etc.). Again, any help from experts to double-check that these are all indeed the same group would help. The articles are so patchy it's hard to nail down commonalities, but a mention of King Bhoj and reference to ruling Malwa appears in all three, though the dynasty listings oddly don't line up by names/dates even in the same place. MatthewVanitas (talk) 19:03, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

New template

Shares of World GDP (Percent of world total)[3]
Year 0 1000 1500 1600 1700 1820 1870 1913 1950 1973 1998
United Kingdom - - 1.1 1.8 2.9 5.2 9.1 8.3 6.5 4.2 3.3
India 32.9 28.9 24.5 22.6 24.4 16.0 12.2 7.6 4.2 3.1 5.0
USA - - 0.3 0.2 0.1 1.8 8.9 19.1 27.3 22.0 21.9

A quote that is seen often in many India articles is the one by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about the historical GDP of India. That quote often occurs in various shapes and forms so here's a new template that allows inclusion of the quote (and the data the Prime Minister was quoting from) quickly. Please feel free to improve the template or use it liberally in economy related and other articles. Direct link to the quote: Template:Historical_GDPs_of_India,_UK_and_USA

Zuggernaut (talk) 14:52, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Two new templates

{{Major provinces of the British in India in 1907}}{{Minor provinces of the British in India in 1907}}There are now two new templates for provinces of the British in India in 1907. Please feel free to improve/use in relevant articles. Direct links to the templates: Major provinces of the British in India in 1907 and Minor provinces of the British in India in 1907 Zuggernaut (talk) 05:26, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Children's literature in Oriya

As part of the WP:WWF/D/2011/F wikification project I came across the article Children's literature in Oriya. I found it was not really about children's literature but was about a children's writer, Dr. Basanta Kishore Sahoo. I have suggested on the article's discussion page that the article be renamed.

I also wikified Kusupur, the village where he was born, and removed a large chunk of the article that was irrelevant. It referred to Dr. Basanta Kishore Sahoo and had been copied and pasted from Children's literature in Oriya. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:39, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Good catch; vote that you leave the intro as a stub, and then extract all the Sahoo content into a new article Basanta Kishore Sahoo and add his name to a list of Oriya children's writers at the bottom of the article. That's assuming you feel the article isn't excessively specific; is there something distinct about Oriya that would make it inadvisable to just lump into, say Children's literature in India (not extant yet)? MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:29, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Chopped the bio content to Basanta Kishore Sahoo. I note that article has been deleted several times before for "unambiguous promotion". I'll look to ping the original editor and let him know that he needs to get some WP:RS in there if he wants the article to stand. It's probably BLP too (though doesn't explicity say), so really does need some refs to not get deleted. Left the current title and intro as a stub, as it seems to be a viable topic. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:52, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

India map and Indian law

There is a discussion going on at Talk:India regarding the legal ramifications of using a map of India, different from the official govt version. Please weigh in there.--Sodabottle (talk) 09:37, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Nainwa, Nainwan, Nainwan-bundi?

Hi, I'm looking for some clarification by experienced Indian topic editors. A new account Iamkkn (talk · contribs · count) has been editing a slew of articles related to Nainwa. He/she has created a few offshoot cut and paste versions at Nainwan bundi and Nainwan-bundi which I redirected to the existing Nainwa article. My main question is that now the Nainwa article says that it is in Hadoti and not in Bundi...so why is he still calling it Nainwan-bundi? Is there just a subtlety that I am missing here? Thanks. Syrthiss (talk) 12:41, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I've done a minor cleanup/wikify of the article, including putting the alleged alternate name in the lead. I wanted to put in the native name, but none of the three non-Latin spelling wikis seemed to make real sense for Rajasthan, so I put the {{langx|new}} version; please let me know if there's a better option. I also contacted the editor who'd been making all the fork articles, linked this discussion, and asked him to come here and let us help him figure out what changes need to be made to the article. MatthewVanitas (talk) 16:18, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
For what it's worth, it took only a few seconds to determine that (going by the Wikipedia articles, at least), Bundi district is in the Hadoti region, so "the Nainwa article says that it is in Hadoti and not in Bundi" does not make much sense. Shreevatsa (talk) 17:34, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Salumber / Salumbar

I've just found a stub for Salumber and am not sure whether it is the same as Salumbar. Please see Talk:Salumber for more information. PamD (talk) 17:50, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I've redirected "er" to "ar" -- it's the same town based on geography, both articles are about towns close to the border of Banswara district and about 70odd km from Udaipur. The "ar" spelling is used by the Census of India, but the "er" spelling seems more common on gbooks. Don't think this is an article that needs worrying about the spelling too much, either way there's the redirect. —SpacemanSpiff 19:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

SME Rating Agency of India

Can I have a few volunteers develop the article SME Rating Agency of India. It would be much appreciated. There is a lot of info on the web and I am constrained for time to develop the article regularly. Pratul 08:39, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Genocides in History

Please look into this edit by political activist user [24] to this article concerning allegations that the 1984 anti-Sikh riots was a "genocide" on par (apparently) with the Holocaust[25].117.194.195.48 (talk) 11:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Editathon at w:mr

Hello,

Not sure if this is a right forum to post this, so feel free to move it to a more appropriate place.

February 27th is celebrated as World Marathi Day. To mark this occasion, your friends at Marathi Wikipedia have organized a day-long editathon. We invite you to visit us at mr:विकिपीडिया:संपादनेथॉन/संपादनेथॉन १ to check it out and tell us about your level of participation.

We would also love it if you can spread the word among your Marathi (and non-Marathi) friends to visit w:mr and participate.

Thank you.

Abhay Natu mr:सदस्य:अभय नातू Sysop, Bureaucrat, w:mr — Preceding unsigned comment added by अभय नातू (talk • contribs) 22:46, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

What does "MBA" mean in this Deobandi context?

The article Deobandi has the following phrase: "The newly elected MBA[clarification needed] Vice Chancellor of Deoband Seminary, Maulana Ghulam Ahmed Vastanvi". What does "MBA" mean in this context? Should that meaning be added to MBA (disambiguation)? MatthewVanitas (talk) 19:30, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

It just means that he's a guy who has an MBA (Master of Business Administration). Shreevatsa (talk) 20:02, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
That's all? I guess it just through me since Americans don't generally put people's degrees by their names unless it's highly topical to the issue, and usually only higher degrees like Ph.D. We wouldn't normally toss it in when just mentioning someone. Is that kind of like how putting "Engineer" before someone's name is also a South Asian custom? If that's all it is, I'm inclined to delete it as excessive biographic detail in this context. MatthewVanitas (talk) 20:07, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Heh, I've seen "Er" before someone's name only in one place (some book), and found it highly amusing. :-) Anyway, here, his having a MBA was considered newsworthy: "Deoband head has MBA, is pro–modern education" reported the Times of India, and "With an MBA cleric as its new head, Deoband marks a generational shift" said the Indian Express. (The Deobandi heads are almost always products of the traditional madrassa system of education rather than the modern system.) In the context of that article, it's also relevant, because of the idea that as an unconventional person for the role he said something... unconventional, and was forced out. Several articles seem to make this connection: [26], [27], [28]. Phrasing all this so that "MBA" seems relevant in the article is left as an exercise to the editors. :-) Shreevatsa (talk) 20:50, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I've started a new article Ghulam Ahmed Vastanvi, and agree the MBA would definitely be worth mentioning there. But I submit it's excessive in the section on his controversy in Deobandi, as his position as Vice Chancellor (which presumes some high level of education) far outweighs the other specifics of his background. It's not controversial because an MBA said it, but because the VC of DUB said it. If you're feeling frisky tomorrow, any additions to Vastanvi's new article from the refs you cite would be great. MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:01, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm not very interested in the topic (as of now, at any rate), but just reply to "which presumes some high level of education": it presumes a high level of education in the madrassa/Islamic sense, not the outside-world sense. Anyway, glad there's one more article on Wikipedia. :-) Shreevatsa (talk) 21:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Banswada

Hi all. I've been editing the article Banswada, and I'm having a little trouble with a sentence in the intro. A previous editor has referred to the Mahabarata in discussing the origins of the town's name. Hoping someone more familiar with the Mahabarata could have a look at my comment on Talk:Banswada and help to clarify this sentence. Cheers, Katherine (talk) 00:26, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Hariharganj has problems

Please see Talk:Hariharganj#Capitalization and other uses. (Also, note that the article needs some wikification.) - dcljr (talk) 00:21, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Orissa/Odisha

I have been asked by user DailyEditor (talk · contribs) to move Orissa to "Odisha", but I am not clear from Talk:Orissa#Odisha or Orissa? whether the name change is yet fully official. Please comment there. JohnCD (talk) 16:57, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Engineering college rankings - AfD

After some thought, I put this to AfD. At present, this is neither a list nor prose. Content of this article is subject to opinion of a few magazines, and participation by all colleges is not guaranteed. Please put your comments at the AfD entry here. TheMike •Leave me a message! 15:57, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

"Indian Declaration of Independence"?

There's a page that lists each country's declaration of independence. It links to an Indian Declaration of Independence. This is the first I've heard of the phrase, and I believe it isn't actually used. Should the article be deleted or something? Shreevatsa (talk) 19:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

It's been here for close to five years!! Should be deleted, alternately you could just redirect it to Tryst with destiny as all this article refers to is a statement by Nehru in that speech that we're independent, but that would allow a revert and it may go unnoticed. —SpacemanSpiff 22:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

New lead piece for FA India

A new lead is being proposed for the featured article on India. Please participate in the discussion at new lead to enhance the quality of the discussion. Zuggernaut (talk) 03:32, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia for Schools Offline Edition (Indian version)

Dear fellow editors,

A reminder to you that work has begun on assembling a list of articles suitable for a Wikipedia For Schools Offine Edition (Indian version). At present, we have two volunteers. The project pages are located here :

http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Projects:_Wikipedia_for_Schools/Indian_version

The immediate reason for this is that the present version is tailor-made for the UK schools curriculum. User:BozMo (creator of WPSOE) has indicated that about 300 articles extra have been added for this reason. User Bozmo has promised guidance to this project once the 2011 version will be released in a couple of months time. In the meantime, if anybody feels that some particular article on India should be added to the 2011 version, please contact Bozmo immediately.

The aim of this endeavour is two-fold. The first is to have an Indian version tailor-made for our context and which will (hopefully) tackle all the issues you all mentioned in the recent thread. The second is - to have a framework of articles on Indian subjects. This list will help us to ensure that core knowledge will be developed and brought up in standard. The same list can be used to cross-check the articles in Indic-language wikipedias so as to prioritise content needing development.

The methodology and progress are as indicated :

  1. Prepare list of topics of the latest version of Wikipedia for Schools (SOS Children's Village Project version - html download).  Done
  2. Count them.  Done
  3. Check each section's topics for relevance and : (Yet to begin) - (a) Delete articles pertaining to British/North American cultural contexts irrelevant to the Indian context. - (b) Add articles relevant to the Indian context.
  4. Prepare list of desired topics from a set of textbooks in CBSE and countercheck availability on Wikipedia for Schools - Indian version.
  5. Get list counter-checked with the Learning Lab's semantic and phyllogenic web (proposed).
  6. Get domain experts in each field to cross-check if any important topics left out.
  7. During the process (steps 4 to 6) get peer review.
  8. Censorship (as required).
  9. If Wikipedia for Schools occupies less space, add articles. If Wikipedia for Schools exceeds size of DVD then trim number of articles.
  10. Compile the offline version - humungous task.
  11. Trial deployment.
  12. Usability testing.
  13. Release version 0.1.

Comments and participation welcomed. All of you are requested to please contribute timely so that issues can be sorted out during the procedure rather than having to redo the work afterward. Since this is an Indian initiative on English Wikipedia, I am using this post to inform all of you, as has been suggested earlier - get the relevant language wikipedia community in the picture.

(copy of email posted on wikimediaindia-list, slightly modified).

AshLin (talk) 18:00, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Can you elaborate what is included in the the 8th point (censorship)? An additional step would be required to eliminate offensive terminology towards Indians which is not too uncommon in older English literature (and Wikipedia sources and articles as a result). Zuggernaut (talk) 15:36, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
...and I would even go to the extent of saying that this project should be put on hold until we find a solution to the problem of systemic bias with which many of these articles are bound to be written. Extra care should be taken to ensure that NPOV is reached by the elimination of the European focus, especially in matters of Indo-British history. Zuggernaut (talk) 16:12, 4 March 2011 (UTC)


Sorry, I dont agree, millions of children cant wait for these resources. The censorship is basically to:
  • meet legal requirements such as boundary maps.
  • ensure improper material (sexually explicit material) stays out. It is already absent in this British version.
  • it is not about the issues you are worried about.
  • however, you are welcome to give your input regarding these issues as you deem fit.

AshLin (talk) 16:23, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to change map of India from 2011 Cricket World Cup

The map of India on 2011 Cricket World Cup article, shows Kashmir Valley (POK) and Aksai Chin in different shading as compare to general shade of India; which clearly depicts that they ain't under the administration of India, which is as according to other maps of India's on other articles of Wikipedia (no problem with this). But there state of Arunachal Pradesh is also shown with dotted boundaries from both China's and India's side, to signify that this is also the disputed region, which is true but the problem is why specially on this article it is shown with different boundaries as compare to other Indian states?. So, i want to propose an necessary amendment in this map to show Arunachal Pradesh solely under the administration of India only, without any special boundary.

Maps should be same on all the similar articles - check these maps - Olympics, FIFA and FIH; in all these maps territory of India is depicted as according to present situation, means POK and Aksai Chin in Pakistan and China respectively and Arunachal Pradesh completely in India without any special boundary identifier. So if Olympics, FIFA and FIH could show Arunachal solely in India than why not in this particular Cricket related article? Bill william comptonTalk 19:51, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
  1. ^ fictitious citation provided here
  2. ^ Singh 2005, p. 1.
  3. ^ Maddison & Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2002, p. 263.
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