Talk:Slavery in Africa/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Irrelevant references

In the middle paragraph of the Effect on the economy of Africa section, there are many references that do not pertain to the text.

Examples: "Exchange‐Traded Funds (ETFs) and Commodity Markets". Commodity Strategies: High‐Profit Techniques for Investors and Traders. 2 January 2012. pp. 129–152. doi:10.1002/9781119198611.ch7. ISBN 9780470126318. "Application Technology – Making the Most of Money Spent on Pesticides". 1 February 2020. doi:10.1094/grow-cot-02-20-235. S2CID 240822292. "Inflation rate: food, percentage change over same period previous year". Main Economic Indicators. 2020 (6). 11 June 2020. doi:10.1787/6b269bae-en. ISSN 2219-5009. S2CID 240928666 "Trade 2004". doi:10.1787/568532110800.

Some of the DOI links go to spreadsheets that are likely not the best source of information for this topic. The inflation rate and trade references could container relevant information, but they're from the 2000s, not from the period of history being discussed.

If I knew a bit more about this topic, I would remove these references as spam/troll. 198.232.211.130 (talk) 16:49, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

I agree and have flagged the article for having multiple citation problems. The editing history shows that @Dbaidoo added an incredible amount of references in August 2020. Zoocat56 (talk) 19:14, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

There may be some irrelevant citations, or on occasion "better" ones (depending on one or another editor's own foregone biases), but care should be taken not to eliminate under this excuse the great majority of excellent citations supporting the article. It is a disagreeable topic, since the truth is often disagreeable at least to some readers. And it is on a very topical and political subject. In such an subject, the more citations, the better.175.39.122.144 (talk) 00:30, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Here is another one:

Pawnship was a common practice throughout West Africa prior to European contact, including among the Akan people, the Ewe people, the Ga people, the Yoruba people, and the Edo people

- Reference 34 does not relate to the Edo people (or to slavery at all). Rickeard47 (talk) 17:02, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

After discovering how hard it is to integrate further material into the article when the current text only appears to be properly sourced, I've done some more checking and I'm going to do a clean-up. I've run into 21st-century trade figures and an event of 1604 sourced to Machiavelli, who died in 1527. Reviewing the full set of changes after Citation bot had twice worked on them,[1] I also see many sentences and paragraphs that were already well supported by citations, but have now had further references interpolated that are at least superfluous and often irrelevant - for example supporting "Over time, they became a powerful military caste, and on more than one occasion they seized power for themselves, for example, ruling Egypt from 1250–1517" with a psychology paper titled "People judge others to have more control over beliefs than they themselves do".[2] Such cases damaged my confidence in the references even to works with seemingly relevant titles, and when I saw that many were added at a rate of one every one or two minutes and without specific page references, it became even harder to trust that there's something specific within that work that directly supports the Wikipedia text that was already there. But it's worse than that.

There is not one case of text added or pre-existing text corrected or deleted by Dbaidoo in accordance with their newly inserted references. (Wikipedia's comparison occasionally highlights text in between two new references as also new, but it turns out to have been there already.) The references have not been used to write the article, yet the entire article was seemingly already in perfect accord with all these works. It's incredible.

Wikipedia relies on and trusts editors to write text that summarises reliable sources and subsequent editors can rely on. Dbaidoo added citations that the text didn't summarise and without regard for whether the text was verified or even well expressed, making it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to see what in the article is not well supported and should be improved. A reduced list of those citations, without Macchiavelli or 2020 trade figures or guidance on pesticides or psychology, might provide a separate bibliography except that we would have no confidence that the works were selected for quality, reputation or relevance.

I began by thinking a selective clean-up would be possible and worthwhile. Now I realise it would make matters worse, by providing the illusion that the remainder had been validated. I'll do a full job. NebY (talk) 23:18, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

 Done. It was striking how often references were inserted before existing references, into the middle of referenced sentences and referenced passages, into quotations, and before quotations already followed by appropriate references, repeatedly indicating that our text was based on something quite other than it was when written. Some of these had titles with some words in common with the text but concerned something else entirely, sometimes wildly anachronistically. In all cases the edit summary was " #HeroesOfGhana - Citation added", seemingly related to a competition or challenge.

@Zoocat56:, the article still has a lot of references but I think not too many or so inappropriate. I'll remove the tags; hope that's OK. NebY (talk) 22:39, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

That's fine, thanks for taking on this task. Zoocat56 (talk) 05:05, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

References