Template:Did you know nominations/Music of Sudan

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by The C of E (talk) 16:28, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Music of Sudan

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• ... that in hakamat songs, a genre of the traditional music of Sudan, women can exert their influence for conflict resolution or countering hate speech by singing songs of praise or ridicule? Source: The social impact of these Hakamat can be so strong, that they have been invited by peacebuilding initiatives in Darfur in order to exert their influence for conflict resolution ...
  • ALT1:... that during the recent Sudanese Revolution, young urban musicians have been using the subversive power of the music of Sudan to call for freedom of expression and democratic unity? Source: young urban musicians have been using the subversive power and popularity of their music to call for freedom of expression and democratic unity of the country.

Improved to Good Article status by Munfarid1 (talk). Self-nominated at 18:27, 3 April 2021 (UTC).

• Munfarid1, I will be happy to check this one--thank you for bringing this subject to the forefront. I'll get back to it later today. Drmies (talk) 13:58, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
• Munfarid1, you have seen that I made some edits. There's a few citation-needed tags I need you to clean up; I'm sure you saw my edit summaries. I like the first hook best, though I think you should tweak it and stick the word "Hakamat" in there: "in hakamat, a genre of the traditional Music of Sudan...", something like that. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 20:53, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

• Drmies - Thanks for your helpful cleaning up of the EL and ref sections. I have added one citation about the musicians living in the US as requested, and masked the other one about the National Anthem being played on Independence Day, as I can't find a reliable source right now. - Even though it seems common knowledge to me that national anthems are commonly played at important occasions like state visits or National Days. So I wonder, if we really need a citation for this... Of course, I have also added the hakamat songs to the hook you like. Munfarid1 (talk) 11:13, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

• Munfarid1, I'll look at the article as soon as I can. But yes, even that needs to be verified. Or, look at it the other way--if it's so normal that it doesn't need to be verified, one can ask what the relevance is--does that make sense? In general, and I think the reviewer should have noticed that, artists mentioned in an overview article (which is what this is) generally need to be notable, i.e., have a Wikipedia article; if they don't, the material needs to be well verified. So I let a lot of those stand, but if the only reference is a link to Soundcloud, we can't really have that. In all I think you did a great job writing up this subject matter; I know from experience that it can be difficult to write up articles in underdeveloped content areas--I got lucky with Les Filles de Illighadad, but for many artists it's very difficult to find the sourcing, so chapeau for your good work. Drmies (talk) 14:12, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

So here's my verdict--I think the GA review was done too hastily. As one can tell from my copy edits, there are things that are not perfect, and I think that throughout the article there are bits of prose that can be improved. In addition, some of the links just aren't reliable secondary sources, like for that Sama festival, and that includes Discogs links (which shouldn't be used as references, certainly not to verify text), and I think the EL section needs to be pruned. Still, it was passed as a GA (and User:REDMAN 2019, I hope you will accept this invitation to look through the recent article history), it's a good and important piece of work, and bringing it to the main page can only improve it. So I'm going to pass it for DYK, and hope that the creator (and others) will continue to improve the article. Drmies (talk) 21:27, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, Drmies, for your comments and improvements, and most of all, for your help in bringing it up to the main page. Actually, User:REDMAN 2019 and I spent a considerable amount of work on the GA nomination. For such a long article, spanning about 100 years of documented history of Sudan, it was not easy finding reliable sources to tell the story. As you said before, there are often just not enough sources in English or other major languages, as the subject matter seems of little interest to Western scholars or journalists. In Sudan, there are some detailed studies, but I don't have access and cannot translate the Arabic text in order to quote them for WP. - As long as there are no further academic publications on this topic, this article may give useful information and fill a gap in English writing about the fascinating history of music in Sudan.

Anyway, I am indebted to both of you, and appreciate your experience in helping me to "write up articles in underdeveloped content areas." Munfarid1 (talk) 14:38, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Apologies for not responding. I am very busy at the moment and if Drmies is suggesting that the article's GA status needs to be reassessed then I will not oppose. If you do requested reassessment then I will be happy to drop any GAR credit though I may not be able to reply to any pings during the review as I am unlikely to be online again for several days. Cheers! REDMAN 2019 (talk) 15:19, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

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