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File:Maenad.png listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Maenad.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. Kelly hi! 08:02, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
Dvārakā
Someone added this article to Category: Ancient Indian cities. Since Dvārakā is only mentioned in the Mahabharata and Puranas, is it appropriate to call it an Ancient Indian city(which is like saying the city actually existed in historical times)? I am thinking of creating a new category for epic Indian cities, Puranic cities, etc. What do you think? Jayakumar RG (talk) 09:47, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
The Mahabharata is pretty much the definition of "ancient India". There is no other meaningful scope of a category "Ancient Indian cities". But I know what you mean. In the end, we mirror terminology found in scholarly literature, and google books has 9,000 hits for "Ancient Indian cities", but zero hits for "Epic Indian cities", so that term is out. The best thing would be to keep a category "cities mentioned in the Sanskrit epics" or similar, and make that a subcategory of "Ancient Indian cities". "Puranic cities" is even less meaningful, as the Puranas are medieval, and they do not focus on geography, their geographical scope is pretty much based on what is found in the epics. --dab (𒁳) 12:39, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
Apep (disambiguation) listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Apep (disambiguation). Since you had some involvement with the Apep (disambiguation) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. uKER (talk) 12:47, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Hindu-Islamic relations
Came across this article today, which till my recent deletion claimed that Hindu scriptures prophesied the coming of Muhammad as demonic power, which reminded me of our work on Bhavishya Purana all those years back. In any case, any suggestion on what can be done with this article personal essay (see my note here). Hope you are doing well. Abecedare (talk) 16:15, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Yes the Hindu history articles are terrible, here we are after ten years and we still don't know how to handle this. I am sure the 'demonic' bit can be referenced (i.e. the claim must have been made somewhere interesting off-wiki, perhaps even in the medieval period?), but the point is that they always ramble on without even a pretense of understanding the concept of "reference". But more recently, my attention has been attracted by much the same problem on the "Islamic" side, only much less blatant, and as such much more difficult to catch. This typically involves claims of achievements of the "Islamic Golden Age" which on closer inspection turn out to be bogus. E.g. the "Arab Agricultural Revolution" looked like a perfectly credibly item until it turned out that it wasn't. There's a lot more like that, as in Fatima al-Fihri , a Muslim woman touted as the "founder of the world's oldest university"; invention of zero (which for once is really an Indian idea, even though not found in the Rigveda, written as we know, in 70,000 BC or thereabouts), and what have you. While the Hindu-history bogus is almost endearing in its naivete, and nobody in their right mind would even consider using them as an encyclopedic source, the Islamic stuff is in a sense much worse because it is presented with more skill. --dab (𒁳) 17:02, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
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- The Muhammad in BP can be easily referenced - Ramanujana discusses it; as does Alf Hiltebeitel, who date the passages to the 19th century, and use it to make the point of the open-ness of the Puranic corpus. On wikipedia it looses all this context, and simply becomes a form of childish insult, "I called your mother a &^%$%. What are you gonna do about it?" (funnily though, the original 19th c. authors of the Muhammad passages were also perhaps acting out a similar impulse. Plus ça change...)
- Agree that the outright tall-claims written in indecipherable English are relatively easy for a reader to recognize as fluff, and dismiss accordingly. It is the more skillfully presented stuff with a patina of encyclopedic-ity that is more dangerous. Most dangerous of all are the real-world walled gardens of "scholarship" created by motivated ideologues (Homeopathy is an obvious example in medicine; I am sure you can think of analogs in history, religion, economics)... wikipedia is ill-equipped to deal with these, but then so is the real-world. Abecedare (talk) 17:29, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
- actually, I used Arab Agricultural Revolution as an example illustrating that Wikipedia is indeed able to deal with this, but it takes time. First this was an unnotable 1970s (dead-tree) paper, not verifiable online. Then it gets blown out of proportion in an agenda-driven Wikipedia article. Then it sits there unchallenged for five years (this is the problematic part). But then it is found out and researched properly by Wikipedians, and this is because it was misrepresented (nobody would have bothered researching the thing if it hadn't been). From that time, Wikipedia, and by extension the internet, is as it were inoculated and the thing is now part of the knowledge that made the jump to the digital age. So this is my "wiki-triumphalistic" philosophy of how bad-faith editing is in fact instrumental in improving content. --dab (𒁳) 17:44, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
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- Agreed on your central point :-) It is eminently possible that my version owes some intellectual credit to you. Hard to keep track. Abecedare (talk) 17:56, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
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- Abecedare, I see Dbachman has a good rationale here, and it is also relevant for this article. If you read a few minutes older version[1] or [2](few days), you would find it to be very pro-islamic. As per your actual concern, it can be confirmed from these versions that we had well included the mention, that these editions to the scripture might be recent. Problem was, that much of the information of that section was obviously made up, tagged and it cannot be found elsewhere. E.g. Hindus think narashansa is not reference to muhammad, or Muslims consider narashansa to be 'praised one'.. I know that you are considering the current version to be a personal essay, of course it is, but if you had visited it few months earlier, you would know that it was worse than now. Bladesmulti (talk) 03:14, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
- so what you are saying is, Muslims and Hindus are in a competition as to who is better at falsifying history, and the Muslims are winning? I am really not sure how that is supposed to reflect on either community. It's just sad, man. --dab (𒁳) 10:42, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
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Conical asian hat just moved to Rice Paddy Hat
It was just moved toRice Paddy Hat, I think because the editor thought the old name was racist. You took part in a discussion about that in 2010. The result of that discussion was to move it from Straw hat to Conical asian hat. Thoughts on this new name "Rice Paddy Hat"? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:53, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
I see, high and mighty when it comes to sweeping judgements of "racism", but not bothering to learn the most basic guidelines such as article name capitalisation. --dab (𒁳) 10:32, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
Still, I have to say I'm not a fan of your (equally undiscussed?) move of "conical straw hat" to "conical Asian hat", for grammatical reasons. The way adjectives work, a "conical Asian hat" is an "Asian hat" that is also conical, while what we are looking for here is a name for a type of conical hat that is often found in Asia. As long as "Asian hat" isn't a meaningful concept, "conical Asian hat" isn't really valid either. But I think I suspect that in a world where what counts is accusing one another of "racism" based on close analysis of vocabulary used and far-reaching leaps of logic, nobody has time to bother about such questions of grammatical scope. --dab (𒁳) 10:35, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
- Points taken, my friend. Please consider weighing in at Talk:Rice Paddy Hat#Page move from Conical Asian hat to Rice Paddy Hat. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 11:53, 27 October 2014 (UTC)