Talk:King Khalid University

infobox, sourcing etc

To see the parameters available for the infobox, click on Template:Infobox university. This is a standard infobox - other more detailed info can go in the main body of the article.

Sourcing - see WP:PILLARS. Boud (talk) 13:56, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Name of head of university

The English language source we use at the moment says "Rector". Some other sources say "President". If the university has its own official English translation of the job title, then we can use that, if it's one of the standard English ones (another possibility is "Vice-Chancellor", who in some of the UK/Australia universities is the real head of the university, and the "Chancellor" only has a symbolic role). Boud (talk) 13:56, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

"Girls" vs "Women"

Here are the wiktionary entries for girls vs women:

• wikt:girl
• wikt:woman

Quote: "(any woman, regardless of her age): Calling a grown woman a "girl" may be considered either a compliment or an insult, depending on context and sensibilities. In some cases, the term is used as a euphemism for virgin, to distinguish a female who has never engaged in sexual intercourse whereas a woman is one who has done so."

The Wikipedia is not a place to discriminate for or against women or men, or to claim that they are not adults, or to make any claims on whether or not they have engaged in sexual intercourse. Except for rare cases (e.g. rape allegations), that's a private matter and not encyclopedic. It does appear to be the case that in Saudi Arabia, women are de facto minors in a legal sense, i.e. girls, for their whole lives (although i seem to remember that KSA has signed at least one international human rights document declaring women to have the same rights as men). On the other hand, many female Saudi Arabian adults have babies, so they are in the paradoxical situation of being minors of child-bearing age.

For ordinary text, we use standard English - this is not a problem. There is a problem for official titles, e.g. "Abha Girls' campus".

In this case, it does seem that KKU and some Saudi newspapers may use the term "girls", either as a mistranslation, or from a translation of the term in Arabic. i don't know what the Wikipedia policy should be here, but some possibilities i can see include:

1. "Women's"
2. "Girls' ( [sic])"
   • see Template:sic
3. "[Women's]"
   • shows that this is not an exact quote

Boud (talk) 13:56, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Al- vs al-

Why we use "al-" instead of "Al-": Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Arabic#Definite_article

Arabic has only one definite article, "ال" ("al-"). However, if it is followed by a solar letter (listed in the table right), the "L" is assimilated in pronunciation with this solar letter and the solar letter is doubled.

• Examples: تقي الدين (Taqi al-Din) is pronounced and transliterated as "Taqi ad-Din"

Both the non-assimilated ("al-") or the assimilated ("ad-") form appear in various standards of transliteration, and both allow the recreation of the original Arabic. For this manual of style, assimilated letters will be used, as it aids readers in the correct pronunciation.

The definite article "al-" and its variants (ash-, ad-, ar-, etc.) are always written in lower case (unless beginning a sentence), and a hyphen separates it from the following word.

• Examples: "al-Qaeda"

Emphasis added. Boud (talk) 14:00, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

University self-advertising?

In this edit, the history of the university's president being changed following mass protest was removed and a massive amount of material (mostly, or all(?) unsourced) looking like the university's PR material was pasted into the article. I didn't see obvious copyvios, though I didn't use hardcore tools for searching.

Critical info that is missing is how the university president and deans are either elected by the faculty and students, or appointed by the monarchy, or somewhere in between. A university without collegial decision-making is not much of a university... Boud (talk) 21:52, 11 July 2019 (UTC)