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Help identifying this Himachali string instrument?

I've run across a few clips of a small fretless lute apparently played in Himachal Pradesh (perhaps by the Gaddis?). I think I've seen some spellings like ruwana/rowana/etc., but found one single forum post somewhere (google "riwana melodyjunction" to see the forum) where someone shows a nice clear picture, description, and labels it riwana. I made a very rough stub riwana, but would like to find more data on this instrument to get the article going. Anyone have any idea? I've had similar experiences with Asian instruments where just finding the right spelling/term to GoogleBooks suddenly allowed an article to flourish. In the meantime, here's a cool YouTube clip of a singer strumming the instrument with one hand while playing drums with the other: just search "A Folk Singer, Himachal Pradesh, India". Note that I have to provide search-terms vice links since YT won't allow ELs to such non-RS sites. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:40, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Editor needed for Street children in India

Hello everyone,

I recently nominated Street children in India to be a Good Article, but it does not yet have an editor. If anyone is willing to be the editor for the nomination, that would be wonderful!

Thanks! KiaraDouds (talk) 02:08, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

If you mean a reviewer, then you should not be asking here, and I believe that anyone who sees this message here should decline to do the review. GA's should be reviewed by someone wholly independent, not someone specifically sought out at a related topic board. Also, please note that there are articles awaiting GA review from January, so you should expect that it will take a few more months for it to be reviewed. Qwyrxian (talk) 03:18, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Hindi volunteers wanted!!

Whilst preparing to set User:FlagBot loose on some India articles, I generate a lot of data that can be used for other purposes. For instance, I can scan for interwiki links, follow them, and analyse the pages on the other end. Just over 6% of WP India articles have an interwiki link to the Hindi version of Wikipedia, and over at User:FlagSteward/sandbox I've created lists of articles that could be improved with reference to the Hindi Wikipedia :

  • English articles with no image, where the Hindi article does have an image
  • English has images, but Hindi has more
  • Hindi article is >10% longer than English article (and has at least 3 refs to ensure the hi.wiki article is a sensible one), so there may be useful information there to transfer into English
  • en->hi>en interwiki "loops" that don't come back to the same place. In many cases these will be trivial, either redirects or because a Wikipedia simply doesn't have a particular article, but there's definitely some of them that are wrong.
  • Hindi articles that don't have a return interwiki link back to English.

I don't know any Hindi so having generated the lists it's over to you guys! I'm keeping myself more than busy at the moment - the Flagbot data is great for catching malformed articles, things like articles without categories, and stub templates on articles that are 20kb or more in length(!) I've also been checking up on some of the population data in infoboxes - it's a pretty good rule that any population ending in ,000 is suspect, and there's a lot of them. It's also been surprising to me just how many of those population figures have been vandalised over the years - examples I've caught include Gudiyatham, Gun Carriage Factory Jabalpur, Behror and Birsinghpur. It doesn't help that we're still waiting for the full data from the 2011 census, so aside from the vandals, we've got good-faith editors adding a mix of 2011 district data and unreferenced post-2001 estimates of population. It's not worth really attacking it until the full data arrives, but it's going to be a big job when it comes. Anyway, I hope people will at least look at those lists in my sandbox - those lists of images and text represent a great source of "easy meat" for improving en.wiki, and even just checking a few interwiki links would be helpful. FlagSteward (talk) 01:03, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Regarding being > 10% longer and at least three references, I hope that if anyone does anything here then they bear in mind WP:NOENG when it comes to the citations. - Sitush (talk) 06:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
All this data should certainly be very useful. Good going! Lynch7 18:53, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Balwant Singh Rajoana

Balwant Singh Rajoana article appears to be cut and paste but cannot confirm the source.It is about the assassin of Beant Singh(Chief Minister).It has NPOV issues .It is a current issue article as the person is in the news.Can anyone please take a look.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 14:20, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Assessment drive - please can you use edit summaries

Would it be possible for those engaged in the tag and assess drive (I am one, although not signed up) to at least add an edit summary when they assess. I am seeing far too many talk page contributions that lack summaries & it is confusing, if only because that style is often indicative of someone turning up to refactor old comments etc. I am probably seeing 10 or so examples per day, from a wide range of participants. Even typing "assess" would be better than nothing. - Sitush (talk) 23:23, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Denzil Smith

Does anyone have plans to write Denzil Smith? I found his website http://www.denzilsmith.com/film.htm - He plays Lee Kap in Ek Ajnabee WhisperToMe (talk) 07:59, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

No plans to write as such. But if you are starting, i can try & chip in. But i frankly dont find him that notable as film actor. Could be in theatre. So will have to check that too. -Animeshkulkarni (talk) 14:31, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Re-evaluation of List of The Doon School alumni

Hello everyone,

Can someone please re-evaluate this list for India project? It is currently marked 'Low' though it's a Featured list candidate now...I do't believe it should be low. I may be wrong as I'm not fully aware of the criteria but it looks pretty good now (i have recently reforemed it) I am looking forward to your comments and evaluation! thanks! Merlaysamuel :  Chat  11:56, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Alumni list for a particular school in India would be low from WP:India POV. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 12:12, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
Agree with AroundTheGlobe. -Animeshkulkarni (talk) 14:19, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
The rating "low" is not saying its not a valid topic, it's a recognition that it's not among the absolutely key articles necessary for an understanding of India as a whole. So, for example, Ganges and Hindi language might be rated at the highest levels of importance, as fundamental to understanding India, while plenty of people/places/foods/buildings/events that are quite interesting to read about would be rated "low" because, while enlightening, they are not individually vital to an understanding of the nation overall. It's not at all a judgement of the quality of the article, since an article can be "top" importance but still be poorly written. So "low" is no knock on your article, just a recognition that it's a very specific topic. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:02, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the clarification :) Merlaysamuel :  Chat  21:00, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Historic high schools in India

Having spent some time lately looking at the Featured List candidate List of The Doon School alumni, I began to think about India's more historic schools, some of which seem to be languishing in little stubs. It would be good if someone here is willing to look at those pages and add reliable content to them. Here is a small list (off the top of my head). Please add other historic schools to the list as well.

Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:01, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Adding these two.--Dwaipayan (talk) 15:02, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

New article feed by Alexbot

Are you all aware of this new article feed by Alexbot - Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/New_articles. It works by scanning new articles as per rule set in this page - User:AlexNewArtBot/India. Useful to add new articles to the WikiProject. AshLin (talk) 03:42, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM results for April 2012

As per the voting which happened on the nominations page, the results are as follows:

I shall be publishing the report of the March collaboration - A. P. J Abdul Kalam soon! Looking forward to some healthy collaboration for the month of April.

Happy Collaborating :) BPositive (talk) 05:33, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Unassessed WP India articles

The number of unassessed articles on WikiProject India currently stands at more than 18,000! Im wondering if there is an active task force or even a single member of the project that is dealing with these assessments? [1] Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 12:28, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

User:Naveenpf has recommended on list that the solution for this is a TAG & Assess drive akin to the drive held in 2008. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Naveen. I really like this idea & promise to participate. Please add your name below. Basically you agree to:
  • Understand the process of assessing and correct placing of WikiProject India tag.
  • Assess at least 200 articles (become eligible for awards as you assess 50 & more). :))

AshLin (talk) 18:26, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Add names here for participation

  1. User:AshLin
  2. Animeshkulkarni (talk) 18:43, 26 February 2012 (UTC) (Dont know how this works. But lets try.)
  3. -- ɑηsuмaη ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ 10:03, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
  4. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 10:09, 27 February 2012 (UTC) Since the backlog is huge, will try to give a hand, but my contributions may be limited
  5. Anbu121 (talk me) 11:59, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
  6. --sarvajna (talk) 13:36, 27 February 2012 (UTC) I can try
  7. — Nearly Headless Nick {C} 18:06, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
  8. — Bill william comptonTalk
  9. Markvs88 (talk) 18:30, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
  10. --ÐℬigXЯaɣ 19:16, 27 February 2012 (UTC) (Will try to cover some articles whenever I can)
  11. basic.atari —Preceding undated comment added 01:30, 28 February 2012 (UTC).
  12. naveenpf (talk) 01:36, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  13. ssriram_mt (talk) - will keep tabs on Tamil Nadu, Hinduism, Tamil Civilization.
  14. Amartyabag TALK2ME 02:53, 28 February 2012 (UTC) Count me in like the last time.
  15. VasuVR (talk, contribs) 04:25, 28 February 2012 (UTC) Especially Indian music articles. Done about 40+ as of now.
  16. Nitika.t (talk) 05:57, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  17. -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 15:10, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  18. utcursch | talk 15:14, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  19. --Redtigerxyz Talk 17:12, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  20. --Dwaipayan (talk) 19:55, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  21. Noopur28 Noopur28 (talk) 05:04, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
  22. Nicke.me (talk) 16:37, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
  23. Abhilasha369 Sorry for joining so late! I've not been editing for a while now and I'll be busy till July but I'll do my best to contribute anyway! :) Abhilasha369 (talk) 02:39, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
  24. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 08:55, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
  25. Yasht101 :)
  26. Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 20:07, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
  27. User:Gauravpruthi Gaurav Pruthi 16:34, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Comment

  • I am really heartened to see as many as 19 editors volunteer to assess the articles, I expected single digit response. My thanks in advance to those who have volunteered. :) AshLin (talk) 19:52, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
  • In the meantime, I have cloned the Tag & Assess 2012 competition page. I now need help to load links into the 50 odd page lists which are being listed out for assessment.

Once that's done, we can be on our way. :) AshLin (talk) 19:52, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Since the tool generates on a daily batch, the positions would be relative and the range would be varying? Also, can we have an expressional search and execute - something like temple *, station *, constituency *. In the past few months i have assessed close to 3k articles in TN. So a state-wise (bit complex as until we read, we never know the state) or theme wise assessment is fine? Ssriram mt (talk) 02:16, 29 February 2012 (UTC)ssriram_mt
If you look at the Tag & Assess 2012 page , you will realise that there are two places to update. One is your entry as a participant where you enter the total number of articles you assessed or re-assessed next to your name. Since you may be assessing articles other than the workgroup system below, you need to keep count next to your name.
The other is the worktable. We need people to tackle the bulk of the huge amount of un-assessed articles which cannot be done by selective choosing around the pile. So each page is being created which has articles permanently listed on it. (I've asked for help with regard to this). Volunteers can choose a workgroup of 250 links to assess. Once that is done, they can choose another. This is from the point of view of the WikiProject's accounting, not the personal achievement.
As soon as this is done, I will inform this group. I understand that experienced editors will not need to wait for me to set up instructions. They have already started editing. Thank you guys! The good news is that the number of un-assessed articles was 18,200 plus articles two days ago is now down to 18,085! Wonderful progress folks!
As far as newbies are concerned. Please bear with, me. I will have a "How To/FAQ" page set up in a couple of days, and also the WorkGroup pages loaded and you can begin editting after reading and understanding that!
Thanks once again for the great response guys! AshLin (talk) 04:31, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
I have started tagging article talk pages with WP:INDIA banner on untagged articles. This will get more work for the tagging team to do soon. Let me revise my old lessons (I was out of touch with Wikipedia for more than 3 years). Amartyabag TALK2ME 14:38, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Volunteer coordinator

May I also request for a volunteer to coordinate this event. We would appreciate someone who is not already associated with city SIG/Language SIG/outreach or GLAM project to run this. If you are a new to this kind of responsibility and willing to volunteer, I will guide & help you & hold your hand through the process. AshLin (talk) 18:26, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

  • Comment - I think the coordinator must be someone who has considerable experience of reviewing articles, since the volunteers signed up so far seem to have indicated that they dont have much review experience. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 10:11, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
  • In the meantime, I have begun the process, I would be grateful if someone else will volunteer to run it, so that I can jump-start more processes, else I will get completely bogged down with this. Anyone is welcome to volunteer, notwithstanding our remarks above. if you are not volunteering only because you feel inexperienced, we will provide you dedicated support as mentioned above. AshLin (talk) 19:47, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
I volunteer to co-ordinate this activity. If some more are also in game, let us do this together. Ssriram mt (talk) 04:03, 29 February 2012 (UTC)ssriram_mt


I would like to take this opportunity to thank Sriram (User:Ssriram mt) for volunteering to take on this responsibility. It is great when experienced editors stand forth and lead and I'm sure he will do a great job. Please welcome him to the team of people in charge of responsibility in WikiProject India. Sriram, you have the complete support of the community. Happy editing. AshLin (talk) 04:37, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

list of unasessed articles is not getting Updated

Hi All,

I went through the list of articles coming up as unassessed and I came across 16 articles that I have assessed and yet they are showing up in the list. I did the assessment on the 25th of March. Can someone please look this up?--Wikishagnik (talk) 20:08, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

This is part of the ongoing Toolserver replication lag. Be patient. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:14, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
If you look into the Category related to the unassessed articles, it will no longer be there, within Wikipedia. If you are looking into the Toolserver data which is maintained separately, as mentioned by John above, Toolserver is being upgraded and hence there is tremendous lag. Please be aware of both views. --VasuVR (talk, contribs) 11:04, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM Report for March 2012 - A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Hello all,

A report of the previous months Collaboration of the Month (COTM) has been posted at Wikipedia:INCOTM/INCOTM Reports. Now onwards, all the reports will be posted on the same page. Feel free to post your comments. Happy collaborating :) BPositive (talk) 14:28, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

WP:India Recognised content

There are 2 pages for listing recognised content on WP:India - [2] and [3], while the former seems to be up to date, the latter is not. I think we should delete the latter. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 13:42, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done Iv redirected Featured and good content to Recognized content. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 07:37, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

WikiWomen's History Month follow-up

Hi everyone! I just wanted to follow up with your project and see if any article creations or improvements took place in regards to Wikipedia:WikiWomen's History Month! If so, it'd be great if you could please post your article outcomes on the..you guessed it...WWHM outcome page! Thanks everyone for all your efforts! Sarah (talk) 20:53, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The outcome of India Wikiwomen's Edit-a-thon has been added to the WWHM page. --Netha Hussain (talk) 08:58, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

One more volunteer coordinator for task forces of WikiProject India

I would like to inform the community that we have one more volunteer who has agreed to coordinate Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Indian cinema task force – User:Animeshkulkarni. We welcome Animesh to his new role! Please welcome him on the talk page. —Vensatry (Ping me) 03:06, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Minor mess on Cinema of Andhra Pradesh

I request any editor who's working in the films area of the project to please have a look at Cinema of Andhra Pradesh. It seems to be a very trivial issue, but there's an editor who's quite "excited" about it. Please discuss on the talk page if necessary and contact me about it. Thanks, Lynch7 19:53, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Never mind, sorted itself out. Lynch7 07:46, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Calling volunteers for Wikipatrika 2012

Dear all, This is a call for interested volunteers to help out with the English page of Wikipatrika that is going to come out by the end of April 2012. User:AshLin has kindly agreed to help out with it. User:Karthikndr has also offered to help. It would be great if we had few more volunteers who could help compile all the news related to English Wikipedians in India. Here is how the page looked in the last issue. All you have to do is list your names below and I hope AshLin can direct us where to add the news after that. Thanks! Noopur28 (talk) 18:42, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

List of volunteers

  • AshLin

Buddhist Brahmins

User:Buddhakahika, who created the page Buddhist Brahmins, has been blocked indefinitely for abusing multiple accounts (Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Buddhakahika). I worry that since this page has largely been edited by Buddhakahika and his/her sockpuppets, that it lacks a neutral, objective perspective. I also worry that, given Buddhakahika's other efforts on Wikipedia to promote a particular religious organization (headed by Zen Acharya, who is cited in Buddhist Brahmins), the page may not be factually accurate, and may ultimately promote the position of this organization. I am not an expert in this, so I hope more expert eyes could look over the article. (I am also contacting WikiProject Buddhism.) Michitaro (talk) 03:37, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Bharata Khanda

So, what do we call it? Please comment at Talk:Bharata_Khanda#Article_title.--regentspark (comment) 15:28, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Wipe and re-write at Ghasidas

The article Ghasidas (initator of the Satnami denomination of Hinduism in parts of India, and among the Chamar) has been a nightmare of POV for years. Following some suggestions in the Edit Summaries, I've wiped the article, built up a stub based on a few sources, and we can go from there. Here are the the diffs if anyone's curious how bad it was. As an example, it used phrases like:

  • He is Successor of King of whole world Parikshit. God provide a king for whole human community for stability, well administration. God always protect his Lineage. He travels whole chhattisgarh by foot and by yogik power.he done a lot of impossible welfare work.
  • The date of death of Satguru Ghasidas is unknown. No kabra no samadhi place present of Satguru Ghasidas.
  • The main teaching of Satguru Ghasidas is only one word “Satnam” seed. Rest of all the things in world is stem, branches and leaves. And a 7 metre long Standard Cylindrical White Universe Victory Pillar (Shrishti Vijay Stambh) with a white rectangular flag of Satnam.
  • Satguru Ghasidas is incarnation of "Sat" \ "Truth" in the human form. He is only one Satguru. He is only one God. His Place (Tapobhoomi) Giroudpuri is full of Welfare Spiritual Proof. He Give appearance to many people in that holy hill and forest area. He has supernatural powers.

You get the basic idea. That version is no more, mentioning here for posterity, any scholars of discourse analysis, etc. and as a general example of the terrible articles that have lingered far too long, and this one for a relatively major figure in a significant branch of one of the world's largest religions. MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:47, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Created the category Category:Satnami and cleaned/set up several more articles for it. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:04, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Tirumala Venkateswara Temple

You are invited to join the discussion at [[Talk:Tirumala Venkateswara Temple]]. Pavan 01:43, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
Please participate in the RFC discussion of whether Thondaiman has built the Tirumala Temple. Pavan 01:43, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

ASSESSMENT BAR - A new tool from Yuvi Panda to help in Tag & Assess 2012

User:Yuvipanda has created an excellent tool to help editors who are assessing manually in Tag & Assess 2012. The tool is under Beta release and we request assessors to please install, use it and give him feedback. Since the post is long and includes the instructions to setup, to use & to give feedback, it has been made available as a Google document freely accessible to all.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/176bySLlr-fRcMYw-h4k-btL5x08qegY7Ipj2DQLHdQE/edit?pli=1

AshLin (talk) 22:33, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

TL;DR version, load User:Yuvipanda/AssessmentBar/install.js on your vector.js and start assessing :) Srikanth (Logic) 06:03, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Please move the document to Wikipedia. A Google account is necessary to access it. --Redtigerxyz Talk 06:19, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes, shall be moved today. AshLin was using that as a quick way to get the word out. Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Wanted to know is it possible to minimize the toolbar which appears at the bottom? -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 06:28, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
It already hides when you're on a non WP India article. I'll investigate better ways to hide it when not in use. Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Feedback:

  1. Make the bar at the bottom overlap the article tab (as Provelt reference tool overlaps "edit the page" option [4])
    1. I am not sure I understand what you mean by overlap the article tab. Can you explain? Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
      1. See Screenshot: Provelt overlaps the Article tap. The Assessment bar goes under the tap (See image). --Redtigerxyz Talk 12:41, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  2. Remove FA, A, GA from options
  3. Can Save is successful be pointed out better? Saving -> Saved (instead of Save???) Is it is necessary to wait on that page till the save is done or can I move to the next article?
    1. Shall be fixed. Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  4. A small documentation of features will be really helpful.
    1. I thought the document AshLin wrote was pretty good. What more documentation are you looking for? Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
      1. Features and their use.--Redtigerxyz Talk 12:41, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  5. How is the "Next article" chosen? I was led to Bandholi from Jose Brasa, but it was already assessed. Also I observed the daughter project "madhya" was seen since on the bottom bar and on the left.
    1. It is chosen by randomly picking one out of the appropriate category. However, I realized the tool I use to do this has been broken on tool server for the last few days. It is possible that next article would give you articles that are already assessed. Will be fixing this today. Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  6. Overall, I like the tool and start reviewing again. after reviewing some 200 articles in the drive, Was bored by number of mouse and keyboard clicks I had to do to assess an article, besides the more important job of reading and reviewing it. Thanks a lot for making me feel to review articles again, Yuvipanda. :)
    1. Woohoo, thanks :D Yuvi (talk) 10:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

--Redtigerxyz Talk 06:52, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

On Tara (Ramayana), the bar shows class as Stub, but it is marked as GA. Please check. --Redtigerxyz Talk 06:22, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

FA Vithoba also appears to be a stub. The problem seems to be my request to Remove GA, FA and A. The code is such that GA, FA and A will appear as stub. I checked your .js file, but couldn't edit. Adding them again will solve the problem. --Redtigerxyz Talk 09:46, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
re-added them. Shall remove later after more testing Yuvi (talk) 09:58, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
The change works after cache is cleared. Thanks. --Redtigerxyz Talk 12:17, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks :D Note that this tool is generic and can be easily adapted to any WikiProject, not just Wikiproject India :) Glad you find it useful. Yuvi (talk) 15:13, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Incredible tool! Even a tech-illiterate like me could use it with ease (I had some difficulty in installing it, but that is due to my total ignorance about how to install such stuffs). Excellent. Thank you Yuvi!! Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 20:32, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Glad you found it useful :D Don't hesitate to poke me on talk if you want any support on this. Will be glad to help Yuvi (talk) 23:12, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Great tool. Could you please add redirect/na class to the dropdowns? Also, a lot of WP:India articles require tags like {{references}}, {{refimprove}}, {{single source}}, {{notability}}, {{cleanup}}, {{Wikify}}, {{inline}}, {{MOS}}, {{lede}} etc. - could these optione be added in a dropdown? Cheers, Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 08:51, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
WP:TWINKLE addresses those and wide variety of tagging aspects for mainspace. This tool is limited to assessments. Srikanth (Logic) 10:17, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes, TW is a great help Logic, but it would be better to have on the assessment bar as well as every second article needs some tag on avg, so it would help speedu up. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 05:49, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Ganges River dolphin

I notice that we have a species article South Asian river dolphin, and a subspecies article Indus River dolphin, but the official Indian animal, Ganges River dolphin is only a redirect... Shouldn't an article be built for the subspecies? 70.24.248.211 (talk) 08:33, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

You should ask this question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cetaceans. — Ganeshk (talk) 11:35, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
Let the sources dictate for you. In the first instance develop material for the Ganges one within the context of the main species article; if there's enough material for a subspecies then you can create a new article for it. There's advantages to keeping all the material within the main species article if you can, don't create a new article just because "Pakistan has an article for their dolphin, but India doesn't". WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is no argument. FlagSteward (talk) 10:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Documentation for "Assessment Bar"

Documentation for Assessment Bar has been created and integrated as Part 4 of the user guide :

Suggestions for improvement welcome on concerned talk page.

AshLin (talk) 11:44, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Is there any way to turn it "off" if I wish to?--Dwaipayan (talk) 15:41, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
Delete/Comment out the concerned js install script in your user page & purge. AshLin (talk) 15:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)


Features for release 2 of Assessment Bar

Are being compiled here - Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_India/Assessment/Tag_&_Assess_2012/Guide_-_Part_4#Improvements_planned_for_Release_2.0. AshLin (talk) 16:17, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Concerns about Ravidassia religion articles

There has been a recent push by a few editors to get a "WikiProject Ravidassia" going, so I dropped in to check it out. The group is showing some initial skill at formatting and some level of semi-decent sourcing. However, lots of the typical issues of overly flowery devotional prose, lengthy scriptural quotes, praise of key saints, etc.

Most troubling, my vague impression from glancing around is that Ravidassia was a sub-set of Sikhism, but extremely recently (in the last few years) broke away after Sikh extremists killed several Ravidassia. My concern is that these articles are being given a historically revisionist slant to eschew any past association with Sikhs, and to promote a view of Ravidassia which claims an independent line of religion back to medieval India.

This bears some watching, and I'm going to talk to some of the major editors about these neutrality issues and the like, but if anyone else is interested in smaller Indian religions, and feels neutral enough to tackle what I presume is also a sensitive issue on the Sikh side of the house, it would be good to ensure Wiki doesn't end up being slanted on an agenda. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:05, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I'd bumped into some of the edit warring in passing through Amritbani Guru Ravidass Ji, their holy book - I brought it to the attention of the GERC noticeboard and WP Religion, although noone seems to have picked up on it. One particular concern is that they are appearing to add referenced facts which aren't actually supported by the references supplied.FlagSteward (talk) 10:15, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
At first I thought it was just a basic "my religion is awesome" POV issue, but did a little digging, and realising that a denomination (arguably) of Sikhism that declared its independence and wrote a new holy book literally in the last five years, is being portrayed as a religion stretching back to medieval India. I posted a variety of concerns here Talk:Ravidassia_religion#Major_cleanup_needed_to_address_POV and from the very first reply it seems we're hitting some Wikipedia:Beware of the tigers territory. Already loud insistence that the religion is somehow totally unrelated to Sikhism (despite basically every scholar covering it in the context of Sikhism), and claims that if we try to mention Sikhism in the article it will somehow engender Ravidassi-Sikh communal violence (odd coincidence, that, if they're supposedly so unrelated). I actually vaguely recall the Ramanand Dass shooting in Vienna being in the news in 1999, and vaguely wondering what kind of Sikh schism was going on, so imagine my surprise when I realised that this Ravidassia thing was that very issue, which you'd almost be totally unable to tell the way WikiProject Ravidassia covers it. MatthewVanitas (talk) 14:55, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
As a minor sidenote, ran across the same problem at Sant Nirankari Mission. Several of these Sikh offshoots like to avoid any mention of their historical ties to Sikhism, and of the sectarian violence involved. The SNM article was almost entirely primary-source fluff about "universal brotherhood", and minute detailed explanations of ceremonies and prayers. But not a single mention of Sikhism, the assassination of their guru by Sikh radicals, etc. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:19, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposed Merger Guidance

Dear all, hello! I have recently proposed a merger of several stubs of a repetitious/duplicating nature i.e. Painda Khan, Mir Jehandad Khan, Muhammad Akram Khan, Muhammad Khan Zaman Khan and Muhammad Farid Khan (all former rulers of a former Indian princely state, Amb) into the main Amb (princely state) article, which is quite detailed and already contains sufficient biographical material on the ruling house/dynasty and all of the above members. Im not sure, however, if it would be better to merge or just simply recommend these stubs for deletion? I have left comments on all the relevant talk pages. Would be grateful for help/guidance. Thanks Khani100 (talk) 00:30, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Khani100

I recommend asking the same in the talk page of WikiProject Pakistan for the decision. That is the more relevant forum & their choice should prevail. AshLin (talk) 13:27, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Indic scripts in lead

Hi,

I just had a look at this discussion regarding use (or lack thereof) of Indic scripts on title and it seems the outcome was not to use Indic scripts at all. My question is, shouldn't we have some sort of new policy page clarifying this? or atleast we could add some relevant information on one of the existing pages, say:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Indic)?

Best, SPat talk 21:00, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Would you care to update it? Please include the pointer to the discussion. AshLin (talk) 13:30, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
That'd be useful indeed. Lynch7 13:33, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
But that policy page wouldn't be suitable. The RfC applies to all articles related to India, whereas that proposed policy was only for article names of "Indic" origin. Maybe we can create another page. Lynch7 13:37, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
I was thinking of reopening that discussion because of reasons listed at my talk page. Even if the decision stays the same, we should have a new policy page. I was only aware of this when an editor took down my translations on the article I'm working on. Fireblazex3 (talk) 03:18, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Can we re-open the discussion on why not to use INDIC scripts ? it makes no sense as the article are not complete , the articles about Tokyo , shanghai, all look fantastic, even the above cities have multiple language speaking people. can we start this discussion again ? Shrikanthv (talk) 11:20, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Not really. The discussion is very recent and if anything the outcome is less draconian than that which was really intended by many of its supporters. Open the thing again and it is as likely that all scripts will be removed as that all will be reinstated. I, for one, would support complete removal due to the continued examples of warring etc. It is up to the participants in other projects to determine how they wish to portray subject matter in articles related to those projects: perhaps there is less disruption in those areas than is apparent in the Indic sphere. - Sitush (talk) 13:15, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
Well, there should be at least English translation for it because this is the English Wikipedia - the Indic scripts stuff, well, I'm going to have difficulty doing it because I don't know Hindi or Urdu. Fireblazex3 (talk) 14:52, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I've added a policy note on the WP:INDIA page: here. Let me know if the language describes the consensus properly. I've put it under the heading "manual of style", so that similar future policies can also be put up there. Cheers, SPat talk 13:52, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Islam

I just created a new article on Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Islam. I think it is important. Jinnah has an interesting relationship with Islam. I am hoping that this turns into some like George Washington and religion or Thomas Jefferson and religion. There are some academic sources that I have come across that cite his relationship with secularism. I plan to cite them in the following days as I try to build this page. Casprings (talk) 03:06, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I would refer your case also (as the one in the section preceding this one) to WikiProject Pakistan where Jinnah figures as a central figure. You would be more likely to find expertise, cooperation and collaboration about this topic there. AshLin (talk) 21:24, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Merge comment needed - Nambiar (Mizhavu)

Are Nambiar (Mizhavu) and Nambiar (Ambalavasi/Mizhavu) about the same thing? Should they be merged? Please comment at Talk:Nambiar (Mizhavu). D O N D E groovily Talk to me 04:34, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Redirect to India-Norway foreign relations

Redirects are needed for India-Norway foreign relations and Norway-India foreign relations.

If someone were to take that section that now has been redirected (to), and make that, the new article—then they would have my support. --Sywoofer

And if references are needed, for new text, then please feel free to ask here (or on the discussion page of the new article)—if you have ideas about any new text. --Sywoofer (talk) 09:43, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Indic Script In Article - In Search Of Alternative!

Indic script in article, I feel we can add Indic scripts like this! I have prepared a demo.
Demo: User:Titodutta/sandbox/Archive_5, click on alpha ref after the first word (i.e. Swami Vivekananda in the article). I have not made any change in the main article!--Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 11:16, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

No. It solves nothing but the clutter issue. The warring would continue & it is a massive time-sink. - Sitush (talk) 11:21, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Tito Dutta's link which has an audio is a good example of how IPA could go wrong. ʂāmiː biːbeːkānoːnɗo isn't how an Indian Bangla speaking person would pronounce the name when speaking English. I don't do IPA but it is pronounced something like Sw(ine)-Me We-Way-Ca(r)-None-Thu(s) (ignore the letters in the brackets), with no aspiration. The IPA TD has provided is how a Bangla speaking person would pronounce it while speaking in Bangla. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 11:47, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Agree with Yogesh. Talk:Swami_Vivekananda#IPA_-_Swami_Vivekananda_-Lead. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 11:51, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) discuss/post in article's talk page! --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 11:52, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
No TD SV is referred as an example, larger issue is of how to write names in the lead, which is very much for this place. I must point out that Indian English has its own identity and it has a certain standard - such as represented by professionals using it say in the media such as newsreaders, IPA should be based on the way it is pronounced by them. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 12:11, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I meant, post in the link Animesh has given and continue discussion there! You can copy paste relevant content from this page to start your post--Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 12:19, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Dada I'm under a topic ban cant discuss historical figures Yogesh Khandke (talk) 12:26, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

New category: Category:Manuals and gazetteers of India‎

As a fan of historiography, and changes in narrative over time, I reckoned we should have a cat for all the various attempts over time to encyclopedically document India's regions. So I created Category:Manuals and gazetteers of India‎. I made a few new stubs (Cochin, Travancore manuals), and also moved in a few books that had been in Category:Gazetteers.

Hope folks find this interesting, and can maybe lend a hand in populating the cat. It's also my goal, for all books where they are in the public domain, to add a good image of the frontispiece to each article. Thanks for your interest! MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:25, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Cleanup at Mahar

The article Mahar has been terrible for a while, so I did just a basic cleanup (see diff) and cut it down to half-size, got most of the tags off it, and into a reasonable wiki-format. Among the issues:

  • The prior versions often bowlderised the entire issue of the historical untouchability/Dalit nature of the Mahar, which is fundamental to understanding the community.
  • Someone spent several WP:UNDUE paragraphs explaining one battle in which 22 Mahar were killed, outweighing all the rest of their military history
  • Ambedkar's mass conversion of Mahar, though a key point in the article, was addressed multiple times in often redundant and highly disjointed ways. Current version doesn't give it enough weight, but I can get some sources and flesh that out.
  • The section on Mahar saints in Hinduism was very unclear and confusing
  • The usual general puffery about "important community", "renowned", "excelled at military service" etc. As usual, "telling" instead of "showing".
  • There seems to be some underlying push to (surprise, surprise) classify the Mahar as Solar Race (Kshatryia and Rajput implications?), and also some disjointed Nagavanshi claims. Separately, there seems to be some push to endorse Mahar "Neo-Buddhism" as a reversion vice conversion, imputing that Mahars were traditionally Buddhist. While there may be crossovers between the ancestors of Mahars and Buddhism, given that whole swaths of India were Buddhist in ancient times this seems a bit of a disingenuous argument. More so still, since the Buddhism introduced to the Mahar had spent centuries percolating outside India.

So those are a few of the concerns I've tackled. There are many things that certainly need to be added to the article, and I'm sure we can find some good historical photos of Mahar communities as well. But just wanted to list this as another historicall/sociologically significant Indian community which has been hobbling along for years with a poor article, and now we're tackling at least some basic cleanup. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:48, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

  • Another problem, they were citing Balakdas as a major Mahar saint. I went to create a stub article on him, and couldn't find any material saying he was Mahar, but some saying he was Chamar. And, not surprisingly, the cite in the Mahar article explicitly claimed Mahar content that was nowhere to be found in the book. So I still have the stub, but have removed that section from Mahar, and will watch for other Mahar saints to fill out that section. MatthewVanitas (talk) 16:11, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
Chamar and Mahar are both dalit communities. In Maharashtra, Chamars may be considered as a part of the broader Mahar community. On occasions, the two may be used synonymously. AshLin (talk) 15:42, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
I had a feeling that was the case, thanks for confirming. In whatever event, it would still be Synthesis to say "Balakdas is a Mahar", simply because Chamar and Mahar are semi-synonymous, unless they can find RSs clearly identifying him as Mahar. MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:51, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
I am informed by Yogesh Khandke off-list that "The Mahars converted to Buddhism, Chamars did not." You may like to factor that into your understanding. AshLin (talk) 10:52, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Impressed by YK's attempt at sanitising sanction-dodging, but the GoogleBooks hits for this are pretty convoluted. There's plenty of mention of "Chamar" converting to Buddhism, though as folks note above the terminology appears to go back and forth. Regardless, it seems an oversimplification to say "The Chamar did X, the Mahar did Y" if the terms are often used synonymously. Further, Yogesh is not the person to be making this observation since he's under General Sanctions, though I presume he would argue that he had absolutely no intent that people he knows off-site would quote him here. Is it simply that difficult for him to show an interest in any of the world's 150+ countries which do not fall into South Asia? MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:13, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I know about his ban & considered whether to post this. Actually, he did not ask me to post his comment which was made in a remark to me but I felt that it was an input and a harmless talk page comment. So no fault of his. However, for sake of attribution, I have mentioned him. AshLin (talk) 06:47, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Removing Indic script from lead affecting article traffic??

It might be too early to comment on this and I am not very sure if anyone else feels the same, but, I think, removing Indic script from lead is reducing article's traffic. For example, in Swami Vivekananda we had been getting approx 3000 visitors per day, now in last one month it is approx 2400/day.
I don't know what is the exact reason (might be is affecting those search results where people are searching in native language, I know some people who use Google Hindi, Google Bengali, I also sometimes use Google Bengali, there might be other reasons too – something similar) --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 08:42, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

I think we should be able to use Indic scripts in the lead - we should reopen the discussion since a fresh set of reasons has surfaced. Fireblazex3 (talk) 09:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Oh, Fireblazex3, stop this incessant carping, please. - Sitush (talk) 09:40, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Yeah! Fireblazex3, there is a discussion going on just two topics above this. Take part in that. Dont say afterwards that you werent aware of it. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:55, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
@Tito: Your reasoning of lower traffic might be right. But i am not sure how much wikipedia weighs that. Ofcourse wikipedia is for users and we try & make sure that they get what they want. But if i search Vivekanand in Tamil google i wont come to wikipedia. That shouldnt mean we should include tamil script also to attract traffic. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:55, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
That is a nonsensical, and probably even a ridiculous thing to suggest. There is no correlation (that I can think of) between the removal of scripts and article traffic. Even if there is some correlation, Correlation does not imply causation. Statistics 101 anyone? Lynch7 09:56, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
@Tito: In fact, isnt it good that searching "স্বামী বিবেকানন্দ" in google leads you to স্বামী বিবেকানন্দ instead of Swami Vivekananda? It would be really weird if i search "Mumbai" in google and first result is მუმბაი. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 10:07, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict)@Tito, I mean, I appreciate your observation, but I just did a test run for "Hugli" in Google Bengali, and there are no results for English Wikipedia (not in the first few pages at least) [5]. I really doubt that this is a cause for decrease in article traffic. Article traffic depends on many things, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. Lynch7 10:11, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) (edit conflict) Lynch7, I did not suggest anything, and I'll not be surprised if we finally find there is no relation between Indic script removal and traffic, we are getting less traffic because people are not searching Swami Vivekananda in internet or they are loosing interest etc. But, still we can spend some time, I feel to concentrate on this point, what do you think? I have added a notice (see above), feel free to edit/delete it. Animesh, what's up? How are you doing? Well, I feel we need to observe this for few more articles too... umm, Gandhi, Krishna, Gita etc, what do you feel? --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 10:22, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Purely from a statistics point of view, I think that its too premature to say anything. I mean, we have a sample set of around 50-60 days worth of article view statistics, and the set is simply not large enough to say anything conclusively. Besides, the article viewing patterns are different for different sets of articles. Gandhi's viewership stats are likely to be governed by a more wider audience than would be Swami Vivekananda's, and so on. This would make a nice small statistics project. Lynch7 10:29, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
This is a really fascinating issue; I will grant that I have found local scripts helpful in a few cases. Not on WP:India but for some other non-Latin languages I know I've used the local spellings to look up references in media articles (reading slowly and laboriously) or find GoogleImages pics of the subject. That said, if "Foo" is so important to, say, Marathi language speakers, there should be a link at the bottom of the page which takes us to the Marathi article, so the local script is there for those choosing to look for it, and it does make sense that a Marathi keyword typed into Google should lead to the mr.wiki page. So my follow-on question (to the specific question raised at the top of this section): if thiere is indeed a diminishing flow to en.wiki India pages following removing local scripts, do we see any corresponding increase in people going to the local-language Wiki page directly? MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:04, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Adding year in the title of articles

Hi!
I have previously raised this discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (events) over here but got little response. Final response from User:Blueboar was to take this discussion on particular projects and thus not care for others. So here i am....
While naming the articles of events it is easy and important to distinguish various similar events with location or year in the title. However the recent trend of naming the article is observed to be "Year-Location-Event", which according to me is least useful while searching articles. A disadvantageous point in prefixing Year is that we have to remember the year. If i want to read about the Mumbai terrorits attacks that happened in 2003, i have to already know the date because we have four articles 27 January 2003 Mumbai bombing, 13 March 2003 Mumbai train bombing, 28 July 2003 Mumbai bus bombing and 25 August 2003 Mumbai bombings of events that happened in 2003. Also as many years have past, i could be confused if it was actually 6 December 2002 Mumbai bus bombing that i wanted to read about. The dropping down suggestions while searching for these articles dont help as i dont know the exact date. (Similar thing happens if i want to hyperlink an article while editing.)
However if the date was suffixed, the dropdown would atleast give me options. The suffixing of the year is usually practiced for films as is in Devdas (2002 film), Devdas (1955 film), Devdas (1953 Telugu film), Devdas (1935 film), Devdas (1936 film), Devdas (2012 film) and Devdas (1937 film). Parenthesis, as used for films can be used here too to avoid the awkward comma as is placed in Singaporean general election, 2011.
Currently a discussion for moving 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings to 2006 Mumbai train bombings is going on at Talk:11_July_2006_Mumbai_train_bombings#Requested_move. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:36, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I can understand the issue that the current convention creates, but can you be more clear with what kind of new name convention you're suggesting? Do you mean to suggest something like Mumbai bombing (2006), Bangalore blasts (2007) or something like that? And how do you propose to make room for multiple events in the same year? Thanks, Lynch7 13:31, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
Right! '"Location Event (Date Month Year)". We anyways cant remove date-month-year for reasons of disambiguations. Ofcourse date and month will come only if there are two events in same year. But this way we atleast get some dropdown options while searching. Date-Month-Year combo at the start is just of no help. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:50, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
Also i dont know why bus and train bombings are distinguished so clearly in the title. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:52, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
I agree that putting the date in front is confusing, though the year may make sense. Alternatives: Mumbai bombing (January 2003), 2003 Mumbai bombing (January). The first perhaps?
I've recently seen an article called something like Indian anti-corruption protests, 2012 when there was a similarly titled article for 2011. I really could not understand why there was a need to distinguish the two but, hey, they were both very poor and I simply did not have the time to get involved again (I tried to keep some order on the 2011 version in, erm, 2011, but gave up out of sheer frustration - we are not a rolling-news website etc). How would things such as this fit into the various proposals above? - Sitush (talk) 15:34, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps the various articles could be merged into a Terrorist attacks in Mumbai article, or even 2003 Mumbai bombings type articles for each year if there are many such attacks. Separate articles for major incidents is ok but we don't really need an article for each incident. But, that's an editorial choice and I haven't looked at the articles themselves. --regentspark (comment) 16:17, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
@Anonymous: The first.
@Sitush: FYI those are 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement and 2012 Indian anti-corruption movement. The 2012 is recently made on 16th March. I dont know why. They can very well be clubbed together as the events in themselves are in continuation.
@RP: I wasnt talking only about the bombing articles. They can be merged but are in my opinion better left separate as they are independent events. We have articles like 2011 census of India, 2011 Indian Premier League, 2010 Indian Federation Cup, 2001 Gujarat earthquake, 2008 Indian floods, 2009 India floods, (why did they miss n!?) etc. where year is prefixed and will not be merged. For me, when i want to reach any article of event, most of the times it is to find out the date when it happened. It would be very rare that someone would want to read about all the events that happened in 2008. But most of the people would want to read of earthquake that happened in Gujarat irrespective of its date. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 17:19, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Also we have similar problem with separate articles of awards. Though this is mostly related to films, i thought it best to raise here because of the similarity. We have such varieties in this group. List of accolades received by Priyanka Chopra, List of awards and honors received by K. Balachander, List of awards and nominations received by A. R. Rahman, List of awards conferred on Satyajit Ray, List of awards received by Lata Mangeshkar. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 18:27, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Sports and film awards (Filmfare, etc.) articles are best left in the year-first format, as well as other annual events. They are classified based on the year of occurring, and nothing else. The same cannot be said of unexpected events and disasters. So I think we should leave out sports and film articles out of this. But the system you are suggesting might turn out to be very complex; when you say you want to read about a Gujarat earthquake, there cannot be an article titled "Earthquakes in Gujarat" (well, there can be, if there's enough generic data to be filled in). There were two major earthquakes in Gujarat in the recent past, and there has to be some form of differentiation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue seems to be only about the difficulty in the searchbar. Such an issue may be fixed by simply creating a redirect from "Gujarat earthquake (2001)" to "2001 Gujarat earthquake".
I agree with the awards lists issue; have to standardize a wording. Lynch7 18:45, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
Okay! If the redirects can fix it, thats fine too. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:33, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
Should all award lists be moved to "List of awards and nominations received by XYZ"? I also prefer them in "XYZ (awards and nominations)" or something that starts with the name of the person. These brackets are bad. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 06:09, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Major re-org at Category:Dalit

Took a look at Category:Dalit and it appeared that most of the articles could be subcategorised. There were about 150+ articles in the cat, so I created a few new subcats (Dalit history, politics, culture, etc) and started plugging, and now it's down to about 7ish articles, and the rest cleanly subcategorised. Hope folks find this helpful, and I'm open to any further ideas on building the cat tree within Dalit. MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:55, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I had a look and it seems okay. Thanks for the cleanup. AshLin (talk) 12:39, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Diffusing cats (sub-categorising) at Category:Indian society and Category:Indian culture

The "culture" and "society" cats should generally have very articles in them directly, but most articles should clearly fall into the various subcats. I moved a number of India articles from "society" into subcats, and have got "culture" from 150 or so down to 70ish. If anyone can lend a hand figuring out how to subcategorise more of the "culture" articles that would help. Some of them I'm not sure how to subcat, and some we may need to create new subcategories to hold them, but I want to do it carefully so as to be parallel to other projects. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:26, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

India's three stage nuclear power programme

Hello everyone, I have been adding content to this article over the last few weeks. One experienced user has suggested that this article should be taken to FA status if possible, and I have said I will attempt to do that. So, I will be putting in a request for a peer review on this soon for the GA to start with. Before that however, would like to have people's comments on whether I have missed any low hanging fruits on developing this article. Am a new user, so it is likely, I have missed some things. Please advise and critique. Charminarin (talk) 16:14, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Uttar Pradesh

I've had a few editors come to me over concerns of the editing of Uttar Pradesh. It appears that IPs and brand new editors are making whole sale changes. Some of the changes involve removing swaths of paragraphs starting at a random point mid-word. My knowledge of the state is very limited. Could somebody take a look at the situation. Bgwhite (talk) 21:26, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like vandalism. Be bold in defending the pages where you feel it is vandalism or POV. Specific examples of edits which are troublesome to deal with should be referred here so that others can give appropriate guidance, help or intervene as the case may be. AshLin (talk) 06:37, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Soni Sori

I began an article on Soni Sori this evening, a Chhattisgarh teacher arrested on accusations of Maoist links and then allegedly tortured and sexually assulted by police. She's gotten significant coverage by The Hindu, The Times of India, etc., which makes me assume there's a lot of coverage in non-English sources as well. Would anyone more knowledgeable about India (regardless of what languages you speak) be interested in helping to expand this one? Cheers, Khazar2 (talk) 07:08, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I've also started an article for the police official in the case, Ankit Garg, who turned out to be surprisingly high profile. Khazar2 (talk) 17:38, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

deletion of local names

Although I'm generally in favor of more accessible leads (I've tried and failed to get all the junk removed from the standard opening line of our biographies), I've reverted some deletions of Indian names per the discussion in Archive 48. First, was there any agreement to delete the local-language name from the infobox? I see no problem with it there: there is a field set up for it, we do it everywhere else in the world, readers sometimes need to know what it is in local script, and it is tucked out of the way. Also, it makes no sense to give the transliteration of the orthography without the orthography, nor the pronunciation of a local name without the local name. I've seen articles where the English name is given a Kannada pronunciation, or vice versa, local names without any indication of which language they are in, the local language claimed to be English, strings of accented letters without any indication of what they are or what they mean, etc. There are a lot of improvements (such as at Andaman and Nicobar Islands), but maybe a bit more thought needs to go into implementing this? — kwami (talk) 11:20, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Per WP:LEAD, lead sections summarise the article. Infoboxes do the same, in a pointed sort of way, and appear next to the lead section. If the name is removed from the lead then it should also be removed from the infobox. As the archived discussion noted, the scripts are prone to warring and removal from the infobox is a common-sense extension of the principle established by the RfC. - Sitush (talk) 13:00, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
Any problems associated with the scripts are likely to crop up in the infobox and other places where the scripts exist as well. I disagree that having the scripts is the only way to clear the pronunciation issue (kwami, I think this is the issue you were touching, let me know if I'm mistaken). We can always mention the "Native pronunciation" or something like that. It is important to remember that the pronunciation (especially of Geographic locations) is, more often than not, independent of language. I mean, Lucknow is pronounced the same in Hindi, Urdu or most other native languages. So, we can just write the pronunciation as "Native pronunciation"? Thoughts awaited. Lynch7 13:31, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
The RfC did refer to IPA for pronunciation. - Sitush (talk) 13:35, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
The infobox is as prone to a plethora of scripts as is the lede. India is peculiar in the number of different languages with multiple languages often applying to the same locality (Delhi, and several north western states, for example, would need Hindi, Urdu and Gurmukhi; Darjeeling would need devanagri, tibetan and bengali; regions at the borders of multiple states could have multiple scripts. Rather than getting into script wars, it is better to remove all native scripts, stick to English, and the IPA for pronunciation. --regentspark (comment) 14:01, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
My views exactly. Endorse it fully. --VasuVR (talk, contribs) 14:41, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
+1, its best to remove all. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 15:22, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I also dislike the detritus that tends to collect in the lead like seaweed at a high-tide mark, making the lead more and more illegible, but the native name of a town, state, or country in native orthography is often of interest. I've come to WP articles for that info often enough, and that's why we have that field in the info box. Do you know how difficult it is to use as a reference a map or atlas of China that doesn't include the Chinese orthography? India's not that different. If it gets abused, well, that's what we police the articles for. If it's a complex case, then we can set apart a section on naming. But the IPA is not an answer. If there are three scripts, that is generally because there are three languages, and therefore three pronunciations and therefore a need for three IAST transliterations and three IPA transcriptions. It's a mess regardless; removing the local script does little to clean it up, and IMO all that IAST and IPA does not belong in the lead or infobox either. (And I'm an IPA-pusher, not a deleter.)

IMO, the only pronunciation in the lead should be the English. In the info box, the native name should be the dominant script(s), maybe limited to two in the case of something like Hindi/Urdu, but otherwise, say, requiring individual justification on the talk page. Greater detail – spelled, transliterated, and pronounced ABC in languages XYZ – should occur in a separate 'name' section, and then only for languages which actually have something to do with the place. An exception would be stubs that do not have separate sections, though perhaps then a separate paragraph, so that a reader can skip over it all if they're not interested. Or something like that. I think we can have a presentable article without removing information that is useful to some of us. This is a work of reference, and what people sometimes need to refer to it for is a name in local script. That could be as simple as verifying that they identified a place correctly. — kwami (talk) 19:36, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

GoogleMaps? Satnav? Co-ordinates? I do not understand your map point at all. - Sitush (talk) 19:45, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
I mean, a reader comes here because they came across a name in local script, and want to verify it is place X. This happens all the time, at least to me. I hate lead clutter, and such info is usually not very important, but occasionally it is, and as a reference we should supply it for those occasions. — kwami (talk) 20:10, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
(ec) India is definitely not like China in that English is an official and much used language in India so the issues that you describe for China won't arise with India. In fact, English is the preferred choice for reference texts, maps, etc. in India. It is, unfortunately, not even possible to limit local names to two scripts (see my Delhi example above) and I don't think this is a road that is worth traveling on. The benefits, if any, are few. The costs, definitely, many. --regentspark (comment) 19:47, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
But how does deleting the scripts and leaving the IAST and/or IPA solve the problem? Someone said that all the languages are the same so we can just call them "local", but that's not true, at least in general. Consonants and vowels that exist in one language don't exist in another. So we still have a Panjabi pronunciation (which has tone), a Hindustani pronunciation (which does not, but has murmured consonants), Bengali (which has [ɔ] or [o] for Hindustani [ə], as well as other differences), etc etc. The only real savings is in Nagari v. Urdu script for Hindustani, but that isn't much of a reduction, not if we have a name section anyway. And without the script, even editors get confused about the pronunciation. We just had two editors from this project mistakenly give the English name of Karnataka the Kannada pronunciation. With the script, at least the reader is alerted that it isn't English (though I do agree it does not belong in the lead regardless). — kwami (talk) 20:08, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
I think we disagree on the usefulness of the local script. As far as India is concerned, English is a much used language (the federal government and every state government uses it). So, there are well used English language equivalents for almost everything Indian. I don't see much point in including local scripts (that most wikipedia editors cannot read or even check for accuracy) on the off chance that a couple of editors use a different pronunciation when a perfectly good and well used English version exists. --regentspark (comment) 20:14, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
So, should we remove non-English IPA from the lead as well? If not, how do we determine which local language is allowed via IPA, when we have had constant edit wars with people pushing them via their scripts? Or are we assuming that the local-script pushers are illiterate in IPA and so won't know enough to do this?
In China, the govt pushes pinyin, and every place name can be transcribed that way. But you still come across Chinese text, sometimes just the mention of a name, and it can be useful to verify what that name refers to. — kwami (talk) 20:19, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
This is an encyclopaedia and its purpose is to give useful information. For a name, its etymology and source is useful and even essential for reference. Indian names are recent in the incapable Latin script (Latin is incapable of reflecting the range of Indian sounds, let alone English, which is why we have its IPA and other derivatives to try and give one pronunciation). There is this tension in Wikipedia in the question of whether it is a popular work or a scholarly one, but there is no point in taking out information that could make it more scholarly. If there is no interlang link to the source language, there is then not even any straightforward means of finding this source text. It might as well be argued that you take out latitude / longitudes from a place article because who knows or remembers that anyway, sensible people just search for the place name on an atlas. Imc (talk) 20:47, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
I think the problem is two-fold: cluttering up the lead with relevant info that very few people need or are able to use, and language inflation, where people go through and add the name in their language to every article they can, even where it is irrelevant. I fully support tackling these problems. But if there is a local language and an official state language, then a naming section where we give the names in those languages is IMO entirely appropriate. And when we give a name, we should be thorough: local script, IAST, and IPA. All three are relevant, any of the three may be what a reader is looking for, and anything less would IMO be unscholarly. If local script is too much clutter, then the IAST and IPA will be too much clutter as well; where the IAST and IPA are appropriate, the script will be useful and do no harm. As for people who cannot read the local script, well, we have people who cannot read the IPA either. — kwami (talk) 20:59, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Q: Is this new discussion of local names/indic scripts/IPA for geographical locations alone? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 21:26, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I would think similar logic would apply to bios. At least, I'm in favor of cleaning the clutter out of bio intros, but not of deleting the info altogether: all we need in the first line is name and year (not full date) of either reign or of birth and death; full dates, location, pronunciation, script, parents, spouse, religion, etc. can go further down in the intro, in the infobox, and in the body of the article. IMO, at least. But the name in local script, in the script they themselves used, is often useful. — kwami (talk) 21:44, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
OK, I think that we need to stop now. The last couple of posts, although well intentioned, are moving this towards a review of what is a very recent RfC. We cannot go around revisiting such things so soon after the event. Yes, consensus changes but dragging up the same issues every few weeks is a massive time-sink. And I think that all who have participated in this particular thread are very productive contributors and could better spend that time elsewhere. There are all sorts of major problems with India-related articles: some are being addressed on a big scale (eg: tag and assess) and others are being dealt with by those of us who know our way around. Diverting such productive contributions to what amounts to a full-blown review of a recent RfC is not a net positive. Maybe revisit the issue in six months or a year? I speak, admittedly, as one who cannot read any Indic scripts and merely finds them to be an unnecessary waste of my time when it comes to dealing with the fall-out. Far simpler to have none and a clear policy that says so, than to start creating exceptions. - Sitush (talk) 23:35, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
No, not a good time to stop, because this makes even more of a mess. If we're going to delete the scripts, fine: but what about all the now-unidentifiable detritus left behind? Do we really want to say that Kannada is a dialect of English, or that Hindi and Bengali are the same thing? Do we cut all transcriptions and pronunciations, because we have no guideline as to what to leave in? — kwami (talk) 02:47, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
I think that we do have a guideline from the RfC: IPA. - Sitush (talk) 06:12, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
But it doesn't really say anything. It doesn't address the two editors now who have given the Kannada pronunciation to an English name, saying I can't remove it because it violates the RfC. That's as wrong as trying to spell English in the Kannada alphabet.
I kinda get your point here, but the real problem comes when we have to decide which language gets to be in the lead/infobox. There are many problem cases here, and for geographical and biographical articles, I don't see the problem stopping. I think that the negatives associated with having these scripts (communities putting their "stamp" on articles, undetected libel, edit warring, etc.) outweigh the positives associated with it. Lynch7 05:15, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I certainly understand how that can be a problem. But deciding on a language doesn't get easier just because we transcribe it in the IPA: it's still the same decision. Though I can see how not having the script would seem like not having the language to a lot of people, so perhaps it would lessen passions. — kwami (talk) 06:19, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes, that's a point. The very presence of scripts in an article is kind of a trigger for vandals to vandalize, and people to edit war. So my suggestion is that if we really really have a need for scripts, then lets contemplate it. But if we have some better choice, then lets use that. Lynch7 07:25, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
If adding a bunch of scripts after the English name is too much clutter, wouldn't adding a bunch of IPA be too much clutter? And if we're in a POV dispute over whether a language is appropriate or not, it's irrelevant whether we write it in the local script, IAST, or IPA—it's the same language regardless. I (hypothetically) could go through all of the Indian geo articles adding Telugu names, and the fact that I use the IPA rather than Telugu script to write them doesn't make it any less POV-pushing. — kwami (talk) 01:40, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

It is unnecessary to have names written in any other script but Roman, the spelling should be that used in Indian English, and the pronunciation should be as it would be pronounced by English speakers in India. If there is a variation in local English pronunciation it should be indicated. Like for example Bengaluru ought to be the spelling and its pronunciation should be how it would be pronounced by a local at that place when he would do speaking English - local newsreaders could be a good, verifiable guide. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 04:41, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Note that the spelling and the pronunciation should reflect English as she is used in India - where she is used by a decently large number of users with a varying degree of competence. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 04:49, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that is not our policy, especially since it has been repeatedly rejected. For one thing, we are an international encyclopedia, not a national one. For another, there is no "Indian" pronunciation of English: there are a whole bunch of Indian pronunciations, depending on the speaker's language background. — kwami (talk) 06:09, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
There are advantages of having indic scripts in article especially of those languages where google translator doesnt have (eg. Punjabi). Even if google translator has it, its always easy to have it there on wiki page itself. (I have found it useful for verifying if the film's poster image i am uploading is really of that movie or not.) But there are disadvantages also of having indic scripts as any gibbrish might be added there and it might go unnoticed. But as kwami says, we should actually not remove it just because it might be wrong. Thats an easy way out. Also if cluttering in the lede is the problem, we can look for some collapsible box options in the infobox. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:49, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Kwami there is a policy of local names in English, also I have written about pronunciation - as a standard source would pronounce the name when speaking English say ... a local news reader. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 08:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Also I don't see how using different scripts would be useful in an International English encyclopaedia, what is the utility? Yogesh Khandke (talk) 08:44, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Krami, your position also fails to provide any mechanism to choose which local scripts to use, which was exactly the problem that triggered the last RfC. You say that if there are problems, that's why we police articles. That simply does not work in this circumstance, because there is literally no rational way to determine inclusion, especially for larger areas where there may be a dozen different local scripts in wide use. It's irritating and a waste of editors time to have to argue about whether we should include Langauge X, since its users represent 3% of the local population, but not Language Y, whose users represent 2% of the local population, but we should include Language Z, even though it's rarely used now but was widely used 50 years ago. Especially since such language data is generally not available. I also agree with others that the analogy to China is not particularly convincing due to the much wider acceptance of English (including at the official, governmental level) in India. Qwyrxian (talk) 09:02, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

@Qwyrxian: For places, a ground rule of including the state language was proposed in the RfC. (& the way i look, i thought that it had consensus for geographical locations.) Exceptions like border-line places and metros were to be handled case by case.
@Yogesh: Having indic scripts might be useless to most wiki readers globally. But it does help Indian readers atleast. I dont think any indian reader would bother reading IPA or whatever if a devnagri script is available for him. Complex IPA are not very helpful in knowing how Durga is pronounced as दुर्गा and not दर्गा. (Just an example.) §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:13, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
The Devnagari would be gibberish to anyone who cannot read it. I don't see the point. To me anyone who reads Devanagari would also be able to pronounce its romanisation correctly, without help from the Devnagari text. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 09:34, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Ofcourse its gibberish for some. Most of the articles written in english are also gibberish for me as they use too many technical terms or use complex sentence structures. Example Racism in the work of Charles Dickens. But thats not reason for removing them, especially if they are of use to others. Having the name of the place in the script that is used mostly at that place is not absurd. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:51, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Absurd or not, it is an issue that has only recently been decided upon. - Sitush (talk) 13:57, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
BTw, Animesh, this is English Wikipedia. Articles are written in English and thus may indeed be incomprehensible to non-native speakers etc. There is a Simple Wikipedia that might assist in such situations but, hey, there are also plenty of Indic WPs. - Sitush (talk) 14:00, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Recently decided or not, we have faced queries from various editors on this decision. This discussion wasnt any automated discussion that popped out after a set time. It came only when its need arose. If you dont wanna discuss, you should not. And wikipedia compiles useful relevant information at one place. You should not be saying "Go elsewhere to read that". And in case you wanna do that, do that for all articles. Lets just list references and deleted the whole article. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:13, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Regarding the RfC bit of your comment, I may have to refresh my memory of WP:TE because you are pushing this at every opportunity & basically ignoring the fact that we work by consensus and the consensus is recent. - Sitush (talk) 14:23, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
If this is about script then there are many examples where native scripts are used: example: Russia, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Greece, etc. Even for Roman script, the native language can have certain additional characters used, for example Germany, France, Spain etc. Therefore it would be extra-ordinary to do otherwise, for it is upto reader to ignore what is unreadable to the the reader.इति इतिUAनेति नेति Humour Thisthat2011 14:26, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
@Sitush: You should also revise the clause that say "Consensus change". And "recent" is a relative term. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:34, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
That is another argument basically saying other stuff exists. The RfC (and this discussion) is clear on what is being discussed, and it specifically relates to the problems being faced in Indian articles. We don't know if other Wikiprojects are facing similar problems, but we face it, and that's why we're discussing it.
@AK, "Recent" indeed is a relative term; but the timeframe we choose to work on is not always same. In some situations, 3 months may be "recent" while in many others, 1 year may be "recent. Lynch7 14:42, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

It may be called as "Other Stuff exists" or "India-related pages are not consistent with other pages of wikipedia".
I know that we have had a huge complex discussion on this and we had reached a consensus, which btw was found wrong by few especially for geographical places and was also raised at the closing admin's talk page. Leaving that aside, many have also pointed that other Indian subcontinent country projects should also have a similar discussion and find some consensus. I guess that should happen now before we rediscuss this topic. Also as this brings inconsistency through out WP, i think a bigger forum should also agree to this. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 15:06, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

"Consensus" means general agreement by a large number of people. People may agree or disagree with consensus, but there's nothing called a "Wrong" consensus. How can notification of other projects be a prerequisite for discussion? (I don't mind any other project being notified). This is a discussion on India-related topics, and will stay as such. I don't mind consistency, but at the cost of consistency, should we let our articles suffer? The problems presented here are in many ways unique to India. Lynch7 15:32, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I agree. We're talking about consensus on a guideline. By definition, that is a broad agreement and cannot be right or wrong. Looking at the discussion above, clearly there is continuing broad agreement that for India articles local scripts are best excluded. There really isn't much point in discussing this now, we'll just keep going around in circles. --regentspark (comment) 15:39, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Ofcourse the "consenus" cant be wrong. But the closing conclusion of it can be wrong. Anyways.... i did not mean that we cant discuss anything till other projects do it. We can do whatever we want. But to save time in discussing this again and again its better to stop for now and wait for results from other projects. If other multi-lingual country projects want to keep scripts, we should reconsider our so-called consensus not because they disagree with us but because they dont find it problematic and only we do; implying we might be lacking competence in maintaining scripts and removing them is not a corrective action. As for consistency i am sure some policy somewhere calls for it. Also doesnt it feel odd that the country that calls itself multilingual doesnt reflect so through all of its articles when provision is present? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 16:24, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I don't think you understand that what you are suggesting is the problem itself. Multilingual? Sure. That's a reason for littering our articles with scripts? Sorry, we're building an encyclopedia, not showing off our multilingual status to the world. That's only rhetorical at best. Lynch7 16:49, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Many of the problems are unique to India. The Chinese/Russian/Korean/any other project would not be/may not be facing the problems that we face. I don't see the point in waiting to see what someone else does. Lynch7 16:49, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
Did you see the suggestion which Titodutta suggests below through User:Titodutta/sandbox/Archive_5? Will that also be littering? How about some sort of collapsible box that i suggested above? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 18:01, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I like the look of what Tito suggests, though it does not solve the problem of "Which script should we use?", and libel will be even harder to detect there. Collapsible boxes in the infobox would probably be overkill, because it'll end up becoming an indiscriminate collection of information which will be much like trivia I suppose. Besides, with internet connections being as slow as they are in India, I'd always prefer not to up the loading times for pages with extra collapsible boxes etc. ! Lynch7 18:10, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

There seem to be several arguments here, some on the same side at odds with each other, and some frankly rather irrational. Here's what I'm gleaning from them.

Con:

  1. Indians are too emotionally attached to their scripts for us to use them. If we do, they will spark endless debate; they also attract people wanting to 'stamp' WP with their ethnic identity. Better to substitute something neutral, like IPA.
  2. Not enough editors (even Indian editors) can read (enough) Indic scripts to correct errors and vandalism, which is easier to spot in IPA. We simply aren't capable of handling them.
  3. There is no consistent way to decide which languages to include. [This is irrational: transcribing those languages in IPA does not change the decision we need to make.]

Pro:

  1. Local script may be useful for those who need it, either actively (to produce it) or passively (to recognize it); it's encyclopedic information.
  2. The language question will need to be solved even if we don't use the script, and that will solve the script question anyway.

Tito's box is an example of the problems that come up when removing local scripts. Several of you have pointed out that this is English WP, yet the lead of that article confounds English with Bengali, and the Bengali is wrong. How many of us can spot where the wrong language is used? How many can spot the errors in the Bengali? So, even assuming we remove the Bengali script from the footnotes, how does this solve our problem? — kwami (talk) 19:14, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Classifying the disagreement

First I think we must classify and differentiate the topics in WP:India to decide weather to use INDIC scripts or not to use in the Lead,

As i can see some people are talking about using coptics for articles over cities , places and some over famous people and some other literature topics. so here is how we can divide it and talk about it

1. People 2. Places 3. Political 4. Economic 5. Social/Culture (History inclusive) 6. Environmental 7. Legal 6. Techonlogy 8. Religious

From the above we can be sure to keep topics like Religious , Techonology , Environmental, People,( I believe Indians speek more langauge than one !! ) , Legal and Economics out of Indic script headache but topics like places , culture should have Indic scripts !! (for those who are just saying this is a English wiki , please come up with better argument than that, adding this also pushes wiki of other languages to have more article thus growing WIKI in the whole, or try to remove all foreign langauges together in wiki english e.g china , japan , greek .... )

2) Delhi has more than 3 langauge speaking how can we know this !! and do we need to add all !!! ? - Argument

Common just choose the official language choosen by the local Govt representing office !! (Indian Govt has done already the job of survey and your "mental" make up saying they speek that and this has no proof!! ) , e.g State related to Karnataka all Govt offices have 2 langauges ( English , Kannada ) and Kerla ( English, malaylam ), Punjab (English , punjabi ) . Please do not try to argue about bordering cities , go to their Govt offices and see the documents and decide (e.g Munnar , ooo they speak only tamil there eventhough it is in Kerla !! - Argument . pls go the local GOVT representaive office , you will now it !! , and the statment argueing has no backup proof other than your mental makeup!! )


3) yes its difficult to Forigen editors !! , but hey it improves and broudens thier knowing too , rather being a closed society which i believe what wiki is not !!!.

Shrikanthv (talk) 06:19, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

All of these points were dealt with in the RfC, including local government naming conventions etc. BTW, scripts do not broaden my knowledge in the slightest: they are completely useless squiggles in my opinion, but others may differ. I realise that they mean something in India and we are not supposed to adopt a geo-centric position but, honestly, the cons massively outweigh the pros. I do worry that people are commenting here without having read (or refreshed their memory of) the RfC. - Sitush (talk) 06:26, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

All of the points were dealt in RFC but its time to do it again, stop taking things personnely , try to remove yourself out of the picture and see if things really help , and i now know you know it all, the cons !! ? seriously wiki has to be open for discussion any time ,not show history and shun new approach . and stop worrying about people wont help wiki , i guess same was said to aristotle before shown RFC's and told not to think about more.

It would be better we start discussion again on this matter and not shun people like what middle ages did to aristotle!! Shrikanthv (talk) 08:25, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Tessy Thomas

Some text ([File:|frameless|alt=]) lies above the image. How do we remove it? Samba1234 (talk) 20:26, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Check edit summary for tip. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 21:18, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Sources for Public Domain India images

I've posted this a few times in the past, so adding here my running list from my User page of sources of Public Domain India images. I've suggested in the past that we have some actual WPINDIA page to list out public-domain sources to both images and older texts (gazetteers and the like), but I don't think we've started one yet.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by MatthewVanitas (talk • contribs) 18:23, 14 April 2012‎ (UTC)

MatthewVanitas (talk) 13:37, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Excellent! That's a big problem for me always - finding public domain image! I support your suggestion! --Tito Dutta (Message) 13:55, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Striking one, now flickr images by Claude Renault are All rights reserved. Support suggestion. I have a repository of image links too. Will add that too once a page is created. --Redtigerxyz Talk 14:05, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the CR update; so far as your list, if you want to either copy-paste it here, that might get some ideas flowing while we're figuring out the best way to institutionalise our go-to PD photo sources. So far as how best to make a sub-page of WP:I (if consensus supports) I'm not the best at those methods, so defer to others who have good ideas on project sub-pages without it becoming cluttered or a rat's nest of "must read"s. MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:07, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
You've got to be a wee bit careful of Flickr - their licencing doesn't give many options and you can find people aren't as careful about licences on Flickr as they could be - in this context Flickr is just a way of finding photos, you really need to identify the source of any images. It's pretty standard for Projects to have "resource" or "library" pages, which list not only readily available internet resources but also Wikipedians can list any reference books they have access to, so need for a consensus for that, just be WP:BOLD! For India, there's potentially a large resource opening up with the collaborations with the likes of the British Museum, British Library and Britain's National Archives (WP:GLAM/BM, WP:GLAM/BL , WP:GLAM/TNA ) - the BL will be getting a Wikipedian in residence soon.FlagSteward (talk) 17:34, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Nagpuri and Sadri language

I've nearly finished going through 393 pages identified by my scans as having problems such as the Talk page being disconnected from the article, this is a bit different. Until recently, Nagpuri was a redirect to Sadri language. Recently an anon editor has added a few sentences about Nagpuri. My gut feel says that if nothing has really been added to the Sadri page about Nagpuri in 5 years, then at best it's a minor dialect which is best treated within the context of the Sadri page, and Nagpuri should go back to being a redirect. However it's not something I know anything about so could someone else take a look? FlagSteward (talk) 17:38, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

The earlier redirect referred to the language spoken in the Chota Nagpur region, by the tribals of Jharkhand. The content added by the anon refers to the language spoken in Nagpur, Maharashtra. utcursch | talk 05:05, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Varma Kalai

Hi WP:INDIA members. Would anyone here happen to be knowledgeable on the subject of Varma Kalai? Is this a legitimately notable concept or something more WP:FRINGE? If anyone here is familiar with it, could they stop by the page and add some info and sourcing? Thanks! SÆdontalk 01:14, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it is a popular (or at least notable) martial art of South East Asia. You can search in Google to get some information (most probably you have done this already, have you?).. and in Google Books too, I can see multiple mentions about the article, although we can not ignore that currently the article needs lots of additional citations! --Tito Dutta Message 00:58, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM for May 2012

Please nominate an article for the next month's collaboration of the month(COTM). You can nominate it on the nominations page.

Just to remind that the current COTM is Gateway of India. Also, Tripura is the article which we are trying to take to GA/FA status. Do join us in shaping these articles BPositive (talk) 13:33, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

I've nominated a few pan-India articles in an attempt to get something that will have wider interest than one of the state articles that would perhaps be better tackled by the relevant state taskford, people may want to take a look and see if any of them interest you. I've also mooted an idea used by other Projects, of having a general theme each month, within which people can tackle biographies, history or whatever else interests them. An obvious theme at the moment is articles connected to India at the Olympics, whether its the institutions, history or Olympians. Regardless of whether it's selected at COTM, Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav really, really needs a copyedit by 27 July. Another article with a bit of a deadline is Calcutta High Court - it would be nice to get that to GA in time for its 150th anniversary in two months' time.FlagSteward (talk) 17:40, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Problems with Sikandar Hayat Khan (Punjabi politician)

Dear WP India Reg the above article, it is still in the start class and I have been mostly working on it, along with some other occasional editors. For some time, some minor vandalism/dsiruption had occured and we took care of that but of late, there seems to be some sort of 'online family feud' going on between various representatives (or self-proclaimed reps) of various factions or groups of the subject's family, which is disrupting our editing process. They seem to object to some names, spellings, additions of some relations but not others etc etc--Ive left v detailed comments time and again on the talk page of the article and also warned one persistent disruptor/vandal. I have tried to assume as much as I could, good faith, on the part of this user (IP address), However, almost all of our new development is now stopped because of this anxiety. Today, the user from this same IP purporting to be from 'Grandsons of Sir Sikandar' left some further, truly bizarre comments and orders on the talk page. I have left appropriate comments and requests for advice and help in a number of places but Im afraid that this is developing now into a classic problematic, controversial article. Slowly and steadily, we were building up a good article, over time, but now I almost dread to find a new issue awaiting me herein and I dont know if its worth continuing with anymore. Your help and guidance is direly needed pl, thanks, Khani100 (talk) 18:17, 21 April 2012 (UTC)Khani100

Looks very frustrating, but since it's mostly IPs if I were you I'd go to Wikipedia:Request for page protection and request IPs and new-regs be prevented from tampering with the article. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:48, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Samundar (television serial)

Another editor created Samundar (television serial). I added context to the article so that it would not be speedy-deleted, but I do not have the resources to expand it. I would be grateful if you could look at the article and improve it. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 05:39, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Can you find anything in Google search/news. --Tito Dutta Message 00:50, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
To clarify, I can not find anything "helpful" in search engines. --Tito Dutta Message 00:51, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Could you please help me in getting the article Caste-related violence in India cleaned up and organized by adding more references and more contents ?

I would like to order the index based on the dates I would prefer a format of YYYY Village, District, State. In case of casualties, specify that along with deaths if any. The lead from the sub page would have been apt.

Almithra (talk) 10:15, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

That is a dreadful article and is highly subjective - who defines what is caste-related violence, for example? Frankly, I doubt that it should even exist here. - Sitush (talk) 23:29, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Hi Sitush - yes, its subjective. I was wondering how this could be a reference. Categorizing the relevant page and updating the cat details might be fair enough - what say ? RegardsAlmithra (talk) 09:52, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
Not only is it highly subjective, but also very poorly sourced, and almost certainly violates WP:BLP policy multiple times. I'm almost tempted to blank the entire article on that account alone, but perhaps (seeing as I'm not exactly popular with some admins at the moment), it would be better for me to raise it at WP:BLP/N instead. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:42, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
I am not sure about the relevance of contents - I tried cleaning up a little bit, but its a huge topic. Thanks Andy for raising it at WP:BLP/N. Regards Almithra (talk) 09:52, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
It seems to be a list. And your ref 1 where you have explained "cast related violence" is asking for username, password to view the page, can you replace the reference so that we can see what you actually mean by "cast related violence"! --Tito Dutta Message 23:57, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Though it asks for password, you can just click cancel and you will be taken to the page. FYI - I am not the one who put up this page - I just came across while browsing few categories. Regards Almithra (talk) 09:52, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

It was pretty bad well before Almithra took a shot at it, though I think rather than the edits he's tried we just need a general re-work of the concept. Part of the problem is it's a bunch of nearly stand-alone (in theory) articles jammed together. Much like Pakistan's rather poor (but in the past far worse) article Blasphemy law in Pakistan. Almithra has been writing some good articles on caste violence (settling into WP tone and format conventions), so this is a good time to figure out where to "hang the hat" of such articles. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:43, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Filing NPOV noticeboard complaint regarding editors at Dera Sacha Sauda et al.

Complaint filed here Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard#Tampering_by_advocates_of_Dera_Sacha_Sauda_.28Indian_religious_group.29 regarding DSS advocacy and censoring of court cases against the group and its leader, as well as general puff/honorifics at Dera Sacha Sauda, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, etc. MatthewVanitas (talk) 14:37, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Resolved, as User talk:Vikas.insan was indef-blocked for Long-term edit warring and POV-pushing at Dera Sacha Sauda. He has a history of socking, there are a few other pro-DSS folks pushing POV, and there have been a few vandalism attacks that might be either drive-by IP vandalism, or (odd as it seems) some almost feel like false-flag attacks due to timing. In any case, if a few other folks interested in religion could watchlist this, it'd help me out. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:51, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Editing wiki entry on late Vice Admiral Nilakanta Mahadevan and including his name in the list of Iyers

I started a wiki entry around late Vice Admiral Nilakanta Krishnan. He was the younger brother of Nilakanta Mahadeva Iyer, ICS, CIE. The entry of both these brothers in the List of Iyers- is being edited. The reason cited by Sitush is "I am sorry but I reverted that edit of yours. Some of it was not in the cited source, another aspect was poorly source (see WP:Citing sources), some was undue weight, etc." This editor asked me to seek help at the India Project talk page, which is why I am posting this entry here.Anant (talk) 05:27, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

You misrepresent what I said and, indeed, what you asked me. The issue of who can and cannot appear in lists such as the one to which you refer was discussed on this talk page not too long ago and my edits are in compliance with that discussion. - Sitush (talk) 11:44, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the list is not a encyclopedia material, I do not understand the whole reason for listing people based on caste, which is nothing to do with thier achievments or work, Just qouating one or two famous person would have been enough , may be the whole list has to be deleted , so to remove racism or caste based bias Shrikanthv (talk) 06:49, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposal for deletion of the article list of Iyers

I propose for the deletion of the article, it serves no purpose in a encyclopedia , being an iyer does not have anything to do with achievments or field of work. the only thing it is trying to connect is religious beliefs with people's achievment!!! and also to bring about rascial bias Shrikanthv (talk) 06:49, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

I wish! It would make my day if we could get rid of all of these POV-magnet "List of members of X caste" articles, but I doubt very much that you will succeed in any request. - Sitush (talk) 09:34, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Yeah! Lets also delete "List of people from (City/State/Country)". Lets also delete List of Indian mathematicians. Maths is universal. Lets also delete List of Indian snacks. You can get & eat these snacks anywhere. Plus they don't have passports to prove nationality. Also delete List of Indian records in swimming. We cant prove these records were made only because they were Indians. After all swimming has little to do with nationality. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 10:24, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
I prodded a few of these lists whiles assessing articles as part of Tag and Assess 2012, but they were contested. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 10:44, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
This type of discussion arises quite frequently, both in relation to India and more broadly. To the best of my knowledge, it has never succeeded and I doubt that things are any different now. It is common for people to propose that categories do the job just as well as lists and therefore the lists are redundant, but that also has never had much success. If this goes to AfD - and it would have to do so - then be prepared for quite a fight from people who have no particular interest in India articles but have a principle to uphold. - Sitush (talk) 10:51, 24 April 2012 (UTC)


wooow wait these is turning out to be just like type of "intellectual " battles that Indian politians have (to get votes heyyy :) ) , any way back to topic Satuatury notice : Showing 10 to 20 wrongs cannot be a reason to do one more wrong !!

1) Listing of Indian snacks background (unknown eatebles to all people so breif listing and description is still encyclopedia )

2) List of Indian Mathematicians (Helps people to identify which country he belongs to , and also may help in writing article about India's contribution to Maths ) 3) List of Indian Swimmers (please do not super impose swimming with nationality , list of Indian swimmers in Indian sports supports the article ) now List of Iyers : (helps people to identify which religious faith they had for "achieving" or "working" something!!! , ) Please keep out religious beliefs and personnel attachement to beliefs, out of wiki Shrikanthv (talk) 12:57, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Unknown Iyers to all people so brief listing and description is still encyclopedia! Helps people to identify which caste they belong to, and also may help in writing article Iyer giving their present and past contributions to various fields. You don't get to decide whether their faith or beliefs have played part in their achievements. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:32, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Nomination of List of Iyers for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of Iyers is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Iyers until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. Shrikanthv (talk) 13:18, 24 April 2012 (UTC)


Links to old articles on the Indian Express website (late '90s and early '00s) are no longer accessible under their indianexpress.com url (eg: http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19980508/12850934.html). And their archives don't seem to be working properly either. For now, the urls can be accessed by mapping http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/ to http://www.expressindia.com/ie/ (eg: http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19980508/12850934.html). Last Contrarian (talk) 11:41, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Chaitanya Maharaj Deglurkar

Could someone with Marathi language expertise please review Chaitanya Maharaj Deglurkar, and if possible improve it? There's almost no online coverage of him in English, but I can see some mentions of him in Marathi-language papers. Is he notable per WP:BIO? Thanks, Scopecreep (talk) 14:27, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

The Facebook, Blogger profile URLs can not be used as reference, you can delete ref 1, 2. There is no mention about this person in Google News and Google books. --Tito Dutta Message 00:38, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. I can see several mentions of his name on a Google search for it spelled in Devanagari: "चैतन्य+महाराज+देगलूरकर", at lokmat.com, Yahoo News, eSakal.com etc., but since I can't read a single word of Marathi I can't tell whether those hits are WP:Reliable sources: what do you think? Scopecreep (talk) 06:13, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Sakal and Lokmat are regional Marathi language newspapers quite popular and widely read in Maharashtra. They are RS. I cant find any marathi to english online translator. But will try and give you some jist of the articles.

  • This one from Sakal says the subject was speaking in a series of lectures given on writings of Samarth Ramdas. The report also says that www.dasbodhabhyas.org was inaugurated. It also gives a jist of what he talked. Location is Pune, 27th Nov 2011
  • This one also from Sakal is a news of how he was presenting awards to a competition held for writing the lines of Dnyaneshwari. (Competitions of recital and writing from memory of Dnyaneshwari are many times held.) He says how just writing or by-hearting it (or anything) is not good; but getting the meaning behind it is important. Location is Nasik, 21st Apr 2011.
  • This one from Yahoo News reports what he said on some series of lectures organised by some organisation. Here also he is speaking about works of Samarth Ramdas and his preaching. Location is Nasik, 27th Dec 2011.

These are just short jists. Dont use these very things in the articles. I havent read these all links completely. Just giving you brief idea. The subject is notable for sure. And the links are RS. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your help. Scopecreep (talk) 14:13, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Group AfD started

I have started a group AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Central List of Other Backward Classes in Rajasthan. I may be adding additional articles to it in the next few hours, should I find any more. - Sitush (talk) 19:26, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Kishangarh

I just cleaned up some spam, but felt the "Economy" section (by the same author...) might be okay to keep. If someone can maybe verify / add sources and brush up the style please? -- Windharp (talk) 08:18, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I have done some clean-ups and edits. Most of the references (at least the first/only two I saw) they have added as reference there - page can not be found! The article needs additional citation! --Tito Dutta Message 01:16, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks -- Windharp (talk) 09:52, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Siachen conflict

There is a discussion on Talk:Siachen conflict on the issue about Casualty in Siachen conflict and reliable source for it. -- ÐℬigXЯaɣ 14:48, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM - Report for April 2012

Hi all,

A report for the collaboration of the month for April 2012 has been published on the reports page. Please have a look at it. BPositive (talk) 18:50, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM - Articles selected for May 2012

Hi all,

The following articles have been selected for the colloboration of the month project for the month of May 2012.

Happy Collaborating! :) BPositive (talk) 18:52, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone have info if there is some work group working specifically on articles related to Category:Corruption_in_India and other such categories/articles? Given the fact that corruption has become one of the most important and most discussed topic, would it be a good idea to start such a focused group? Onkar 19:58, 30 April 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Onkarr (talk • contribs)

I think we do have a "Politics Workgroup", but its not an organized Wikiproject in itself. Instead of just focusing on corruption, lets focus on politics; its a more general topic, and Indian politics articles could use a facelift. Lynch7 08:06, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Hindi translation help

Hello. Can anyone help with a translation from English to Hindi, at the Reference Desk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language#poster / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language#poster.2Fhi Thank you. 184.147.123.69 (talk) 15:59, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to Bill william compton for the translation. 184.147.123.69 (talk) 19:40, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Siddha Yoga

Can someone in the know take a look at Siddha Yoga and Siddhayoga? At the least one of the pages needs to be moved to a disambiguated title as it's very confusing to have such similar titles for different articles. I'm not sure one bit about the content in either article. —SpacemanSpiff 09:07, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I think Siddha Yoga is commercially motivated frauds , most of their references is leading to self published source and their own website !!. may be needed to be nominated for deletion .

while Siddhayoga seems matching with wiki needs — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shrikanthv (talk • contribs) 11:28, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Shrikanthv, why on earth does "Siddha Yoga" need to be deleted? You are making a fair few poor deletion decisions at the moment and I would encourage you to read the relevant policies before you make any more. If one or other of these articles passes our notability requirements etc, and both are fundamentally about the same subject then a redirect from one to the other would suffice. Certainly, both are reasonable spellings for the same thing. - Sitush (talk) 12:21, 2 May 2012 (UTC)


Sitush i just informed that it is closer to deletion but did not recommend it for AFD , i have asked this to be merged with the main article. please visit the referenced website what the new one ( Siddha Yoga ) is claiming , it is asking for credit card details and sells manythings , compared to Siddhayoga, the claim by Siddha Yoga is really fanatical e.g claiming for modern religon etc . Shrikanthv (talk) 12:44, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Or rename it as Sidhdha Yoga_(movement).इति इतिUAनेति नेति Humour Thisthat2011 12:47, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

reliable source/s re some articles about NWFP/Khyber Pakhtunkhwa figures, tribes etc

Hello, I have started a discussion on the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard relating to some articles in the above areas and some of these might also relate to WP India; and Id be glad if you could also kindly give it a look and contribute to the discussion, thanksAsadUK200 (talk) 17:03, 2 May 2012 (UTC)AsadUK200

Help

All India related articles need lot of improvement especially Indian colleges and universities articles. Please see my User page to know the edits I have made. Almost all the articles in my userpage need editing. You can have a talk with me on my Talk Page.
Harsh2580 (talk) 16:15, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Hello All!
The TV serial related articles are extensively edited by IPs and SPAs to update daily happenings of the shows and brag about the TRP achievements. They also vandalize by removing maintenance tags and change infobox colours just to match the serial's font/theme colour. (Eg. Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon? is always turned pink as the show's poster is pink!) Some crazy ones also remove references! They also copy-paste material from various websites, usually official sites and various discussion forums. The articles have very less references, almost none being reliable. The references, if at all present, are of some discussion forums. We are assuming these editors probably are PR folks of these shows. The problem doesn't stay only on these articles. Fork articles like "List of characters of XYZ", "List of Episodes of PQR", "ABC (LMN serial character)" are also created. Single show hit actors also have got their separate biography articles. These bios cant be tagged for BLP PRODs as they have some reference, usually to such discussion forum or passing mention in some RS.
Recently with help of few editors various copyright material is removed. I have also nominated various articles for AfD and boldly merged few articles. The reason for bringing this here is to bring to attention the plight of these articles. Although a separate WikiProject Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian television exists, it is as good as dead. The AfDs so far have got little response, which is normal. But few responses that have been received compare Indian TV show articles to American ones and doubt the deletion requests. WP:TVSHOW which speaks about the notability of shows calls them notable "if it airs on a network of radio or television stations (either national or regional in scope), or on a cable television network with a national audience." Now which show doesn't air on national TV? This thus makes 2-days old show also notable. Although most of these articles would fail WP:GNG, bit stricter and more clearer guidelines for specific notability are needed. I could very-well take this up at WP:Notability. But i am sure they wont understand a thing what Indian TV soaps are. Hence here.... to get views and ask for path forward. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:05, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Your time is probably better spent working on different areas, maybe just stripping these articles of copyvios and leaving them alone. If you spend more time in this area you're just going to get frustrated. Wikipedia has a great love for trivial topics, partly because of the demographic of our editors (not readers), much to the detriment of real encyclopaedic topics. This isn't restricted to India topics and there is not really much one can do about it. After all, one qualifies for an article if one has received an award nomination for a 10 minute porno, but not if one was the mayor of a city with a population of over 500000, so our priorities lie elsewhere. You'll find your editing experience more enjoyable if you work on your areas of interest that match Wikipedia's, trying to change this will be a frustrating experience. —SpacemanSpiff 12:37, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
It's true, however the articles are essentially illiterate, written by the production companies and used as promotional blogs for the programmes. They generally flout every guideline Wikipedia sets out for its articles. Tags don't last more than a few hours, COI editors happily sock if blocked. Are you suggesting that we should just leave them to it? Span (talk) 12:49, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Not exactly suggesting that, but I think these articles need to come to a boil before the problem gets noticed by the community at large. Unfortunately, with just 2-3 editors working on these, it will eventually lead to their burnout. It may sound like a cop-out, but stripping them of BLP vios and copyvios and just focusing on the many under-covered but encyclopaedic areas would be more fruitful for individual editors. It's unlikely you're ever going to get most of these articles deleted, so do you spend your time looking through them for problem content or would you rather spend your time expanding Category:Novels by Mulk Raj Anand or Category:Works by Premchand which may not have the same number of views but actually have an academic impact. Also, no edit wars, hardly any vandalism and so on.—SpacemanSpiff 13:26, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
What strikes me is a void in policy, if there is a proper policy in place, it would help editors combat this menace easily. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 13:30, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
@SpacemanSpiff: Your this plan seems right for this case. It would be lovely to remove all these articles from my watchlist and put go-to-hell tags on them. But with NO ONE monitoring them at all, i dont find it as the best solution. Its just a solution out. If nothing productive comes up i am sure i will give this up. But that way we will be encouraging all SPAs.
An observation; currently on-air shows are main targets. Very few SPAs meddle with old shows. This quantity, of shows is less. But biographies are many. As of now i would request you all to add these articles in your watchlist and keep reverting to the best possible version you find (if there is any!). That would be a great help. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:21, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Deletion requests are unlikely to be successful for TV serials so you'll only get frustrated if you go down that route. Best to delete copyvio and promotional content and leave it at that. If IP editors continue to add flaky stuff, then report it here and an admin will semi-protect the article (or you can ask at RFPP but here is probably better). --regentspark (comment) 14:57, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Animesh, do you have a list of the affected bios? (the categories would contain way too many to add to a watchlist) Those are probably better focus areas for people. —SpacemanSpiff 18:46, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
@RegentsPark: I haven't AfDed any serial articles yet. But i might do that in near future for old flop ones. Even the current ones should fail WP:GNG. But.... will keep that adventure for future.
@SpacemanSpiff: You will find many article links at User:Animeshkulkarni/sandbox2. I havn't paid much attention to bios. You all would love cutting them. Enjoy! §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 20:46, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Not all bios listed in the link are affected. Only the handsome, beautiful and young ones are fan followed. Will separate those out soon. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 21:30, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

List of National Institutes in India

A concern has been raised (by Muhandes (talk)) regarding the definition of "national institute" and whether to delete/rename the article List of National Institutes in India. Please join the discussion here --- Aravind V R (talk) 05:30, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Category:Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan

Category:Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has been nominated for deletion. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:24, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Education articles

I have listed many education related articles to be written in a priority basis. It is very unfortunate that these centres of excellence don't have articles in wikipedia. Please contribute to create them on a priority basis. Aravind V R (talk) 06:45, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Aravind, Can you check out WP:INEI ? And add task to WP:INEI --naveenpf (talk) 23:04, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Can I add the whole list under to do list? I'm creating one heading for proposed articles. Correct me if I'm wrong. Aravind V R (talk) 04:25, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Go ahead :) Lynch7 12:48, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Request for writing contribution and improvement

I do request for writing contribution and improvement at Religious harmony in India
Mahitgar (talk) 06:12, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Difference in Importance

Before I changed it, I thought I should have a discussion on this and reach consensus so that there are no COI issues. I just saw that Indian Statistical Institute has been rated as low importance which makes no sense. It is the premier body of research and source of statistical analysis in the country. If the Indian Institute of Technology has top importance, similarly, ISI should also be given the highest importance possible. All these are the pride of India, and its remarkable to see a body like ISI be given low importance. Debastein (talk) 10:23, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Re-assessed. AshLin (talk) 14:27, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Many of Engineering Institutes are very well written. Sadly some of Indian Universities doesnt have article -naveenpf (talk) 14:58, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Cat:Indian women stubs

The category is nominated for deletion here. -- ɑηsuмaη ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ 17:54, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Dhoot

There seems to be an edit war going on at Dhoot - is it a Jat clan from the Punjab or a Rajasthan surname? PamD 08:47, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Ganbariya Rajput

Another editor created Ganbariya Rajput. Perhaps the article should be merged into or redirected to Rajput, but I don't know enough about the topic to be sure. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 10:58, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Biratpur

Another editor has created the article Biratpur. The article requires cleanup. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 11:01, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Please nominate for June 2012 INCOTM

Hi all,

Please nominate an article for the Indian Collaboration of the Month WikiProject for the month of June 2012. BPositive (talk) 18:49, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Boden Professor of Sanskrit

Readers of this noticeboard might be interested in two new articles, Boden Professor of Sanskrit and Boden Professor of Sanskrit election, 1860. If anyone can suggest any further sources for, or improvements to, either article, I'd be grateful. Thanks, BencherliteTalk 09:52, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

New article

Hello all, I came across Kalwadi at NPP, from what I have been able to gather it's a village in Junnar taluka, but I could be wrong. Could someone who knows better than me have a look and see if I am right? Cheers, --kelapstick(bainuu) 07:32, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Reg. Charlemagne to the Mughals

This is about the article Charlemagne to the Mughals. I have mentioned my reservations on the article's talk page. This article seems totally misleading, stating that a descent from Charlemagne connected with the Mughals, starting with Shah Jahan. This article is being quoted by other websites also, to propagate this false claim. Even the Wikipedia article on Shah Jahan mentions this false descent, which is a very sad state of affairs indeed. Can anybody give enlightenment about the verifiability of this article's claim? If not verifiable, I propose removal of this article. Hrishikes (talk) 15:28, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

I've formalized the merge discussion (Here). --regentspark (comment) 16:28, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Category oddities

The tag and assess drive is, perhaps inevitably, seeing some articles assessed on a multitude of occasions. I am beginning to see some oddities creeping in there and have no idea whether it is a consequence of the drive or a wikisoftware issue - my understanding of the category system is C-class, and low importance (!)

An example is Rajput. The talk page header currently shows it as a B/Low importance article for the Indian history project, but among its categories are the following:

  1. Category:B-Class India articles
  2. Category:B-Class India articles of Low-importance
  3. Category:Low-importance India articles
  4. Category:B-Class Indian history articles
  5. Category:Unknown-importance Indian history articles
  6. Category:WikiProject Indian history articles
  7. Category:B-Class Indian history articles of Unknown-importance
  8. Category:WikiProject India articles

The issues:

This would all appear to happen automatically, since HotCat allows me to add cats to talk pages but not remove them. I can understand why it happens automatically, but something is wrong somewhere. - Sitush (talk) 08:03, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

These all categories are just combination of all possibilities from "B class", "India article", "Low importance (For India project)", "Indian history article" and "Unknown importance (For Indian history project)". Even if all "Indian history project" articles belong to "India project" and might seem redundant, these are maintenance categories and can be used to surf through by editors. They are quite useful. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 08:26, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
I understand their value as maintenance categories and that the intent is to cover the various permutations. The problem is, the logic seems to be screwed. Perhaps it is simply that some categories are poorly named, imo, but something is wrong somewhere. - Sitush (talk) 08:41, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
The parameter "history-importance" was missing. Hence it showed under Unknown importance related to History. After marking importance to mid for history sub-project, it now shows different categories - do they make sense now? VasuVR (talk, contribs) 13:31, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
Yay! Thanks, VasuVR, that is much better. One day, I'll get my head round all this assessment malarkey. - Sitush (talk) 14:20, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Arushi murder case

This article Noida double murder case has many words without source some of which are libelous. I just removed some. Can someone clean it up. Lots of people are visiting this article because of the news, but entire article is mess with so many speculations without any reliable source. 124.123.200.18 (talk) 20:56, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Reliability of Indian news sources

I have raised this issue before but over several months have become increasingly concerned regarding the reliability of many Indian news sources. I have mentioned a specific instance at the reliable sources noticeboard and thought it best to notify the India-specific community. The instances relates to the Noida double murder case, raised by someone else here a few hours ago. (No link, sorry, as I really need my sleep). - Sitush (talk) 23:59, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Actually, it is the thread immediately above this - Wikipedia talk:Noticeboard for India-related topics#Arushi murder case. - Sitush (talk) 00:01, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
Not specific to this news item, but many Indian news sources sometimes sound too much non-serious or gossipy. ToI is showing this tendency increasingly. The Hindu remains a pretty reliable source though. We may decide to give preference to some of the news sources compared to others. The Hindu, The Telegraph could be a couple of better news sources, especially for important and/or sensitive issues.--Dwaipayan (talk) 00:39, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Operation Bluestar rapes

The article Operation Blue Star states "Innocent Sikhs old, young and children, were mercilessly slaughtered. Women were raped by the soldiers." citing " The Gallant Defender" book by A R Darshi. Are such books allowed as references on Wikipedia? This entire book is just an exaggeration. I am a Sikh myself and greatly critical of operation bluestar but such kind of statements make others feel that all our allegations against the army are just made up lies. There should be some constraint on reliability so that crticism of operation bluestar does not look hogwash. 124.123.200.18 (talk) 04:43, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Native language RfC

Due to confusion persisting on the presence of English translations in articles, a more detailed consensus has been presented here, which can be interpreted as "removing scripts and all translations (including English), and replacing with IPA." I hope this clears up all the nonsense about "English Wikipedia, English translation" and "removing the scripts only if IPA is present". Secret of success 06:37, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

SoS, glad that you brought this here. I guess we had completely overlooked the "english translation" part in the RfC. (As far as i remember.) The removal of these english translations is something that the closing admin has decided. But is that right? Dont users need to discuss this? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:10, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Geez, it was discussed. - Sitush (talk) 07:12, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
FINE! §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:22, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Sorry if I sound dumb, but what's IPA? Fireblazex3 (talk) 08:55, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
IPA - Sitush (talk) 09:33, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Films & works of art

Pather Panchali

This is an iconic Bengali film, one of the first by Satyajit Ray and its original title is in Bengali, and for which both the Bengali transliteration and its English meaning are both academic and encyclopaedic. To the best of my understanding, the discussion on WP:INB where consensus to restrict language translation to literature to IPA, which everyone quotes as consensus, was primarily about Indic language transliterations in geographic articles and biographical articles. Film titles or works of art natively titled in other languages were not discussed. In this case, I think that there is fresh need for us to consider this set of cases on its own merits. At any rate, I do not see implementing a blanket ban is meaningful though I am myself am one of those who supported the IPA. I think we need to discuss this and get consensus to retain the native language transliteration name in native language script and its English language translation for such works of art, film, books, songs, etc. AshLin (talk) 12:34, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Its not that simple, it was clarified that the consensus could be implemented to all articles under WP:INDIA. Plus, when we have the option of Inter-wikis, why raise the issue again? Secret of success 13:42, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Secret of success, this is a case which was not covered in the decision discussions, and represents one of the few cases where there is logic and encyclopedic value in retaining some indic laguage script/english translation. The previous discussion rose over troublesome articles where there was little justification to retain the indic script and much squabbling/edit-warring. We are only trying to get a reasonable interpretation rather than persist with a mindless blanket ban. AshLin (talk) 16:40, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Please try to have some common sense besides "consensus". On one hand, we have editors warring to include Malayalam or Telugu scripts in Chennai article (!!), on the other hand we have editors who is dedicated to remove English translations of name from film articles—extreme cases. Taking AshLin's example, Pather Panchali is known by both its Bengali and English names (Song of the Little Road). Usually in most of consensus making, we (a handful of wikipedia editors) try to reach a decision, and think that must be obeyed by every one (as if we own wikipedia). A new comer, unaware of such consensus, might apply his or her common sense and get to a better result (only to be reverted soon by us, thinking ourselves to be pundits).
The reason for removal of all those Indian scripts has its roots in our own edit-warring and provincial mentality. Anyway, the result was good, and many article leads became clutter free (free of all those scripts) and easy to read. However, film articles (or work of arts such as book) need to have both native name and English translation. --Dwaipayan (talk) 15:04, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
A lot of the support in the RfC for the script removal was specific to biographies. I was ambivalent on geographical articles (I preferred only the official language scripts to be used, not "significantly spoken"). Dwai raises a very valid point, not having the Bengali rendering of Pather Panchali or Charulata or the Malayalam rendering for Manichitrathazhu etc is more of a disservice to our readers. Likewise, not having Premchand's work titles in Hindi is quite counterproductive. —SpacemanSpiff 15:22, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Thats why the initial RfC was split into various categories of films, geo-places and biographies. Only had that admin understood this. You cant just delete scripts or translations for simplicity and clean view and OMG-what-if-its-wrong from all articles. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 16:10, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

To be perfectly honest, I see little value in non-English scripts anywhere on the English wikipedia. They tend to be useless clutter and improperly rendered for most readers and adds value for no one. The native script is useless for someone who doesn't understand it and anyone who can read the Bengali for Pather Panchali or the Hindi for Idgah doesn't gain anything by seeing the Bengali, Hindi or Urdu version of the title. All we end up with is a bit of vanity, a lot of undetected vandalism, some edit warring and endless discussion (does anyone recall the Hindi/Urdu protracted argument on Bollywood films?). C'est my opinion. --regentspark (comment) 17:12, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

I concur with regentspark above. Seriously, all they do is make Wikipedia a battleground and distract the readers from the subject. Before making any hasty decisions, I suggest we take a look at File:Native Language Transliterations.pdf, a document created by User:MikeLynch. Secret of success 17:23, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Just to clarify things, my opinion—
Not having native scripts is good in the sense that reading becomes clutter free.
Having English translation of native names for works of arts (Song of the Little Road for Pather Panchali) should be encouraged and practiced.
IPA—we should incorporate IPA.
These I understand. Is it ok?--Dwaipayan (talk) 19:43, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Okay fine! We keep indic scripts out of this. Whats wrong with translation of titles of art works? How are non-Indians (some Indians too) to understand that Meghadūta means "Cloud Messenger". Without understanding the title, how will the poem connect with the title? Readers need to know that Jagriti means awakening, Ijaazat means permission, Nishant means night's end, etc. I am not saying we should translate everything even if its correct but senseless like Rang De Basanti as "Colour it Saffron" or incorrect and thus completely senseless translations like Diya Aur Baati Hum as "Lights and Lamps". But translations help. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 19:54, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
LOL at the "Lights and Lamps"! I think English translations for all films (I'm not sure about geography articles) should be included because this is the English Wikipedia itself - I understand the Indic scripts discussion. Even if it's not "official", so to speak, but if you apply your common sense, you'll know what the translation is. Fireblazex3 (talk) 02:41, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
I fail to see a rationale for retaining Indic scripts. I hope this discussion is limited to English translations alone. As Animesh said, translations for certain titles are worthless, and they must be limited to subject whose English titles have been officially used for some reason i.e. films which go to International film festivals use their English title (I can think of a million examples) and due to that reason alone, they could be added. But otherwise, its quite useless even for the reader. Secret of success 05:26, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
Ya! Now i am talking only abt translations; no scripts.
English titles and English translations are two different things. Charulata was also released under the title The Lonely Wife. The literal translation of Charulata would be "a beautiful vine". Had the film been some documentary about grape or gourd vines, adding the translation would be required along with the official English title. Here it being lead character's name, translation is not required. But for titles like Amar Prem (translation: Immortal Love), Mala Aai Vhhaychy! (translation: I Want To Be A Mother!), etc. translations are quite useful for readers and hence must be added, along with their English titles if they have any. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 19:08, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

I would like to state that the it is important culturally to retain that small bit of Indic language script associated with the name of the work of art such as books, films, paintings, statues etc in the lead. It provides the name as it is likely to be seen on the original work, or poster. Alongwith the English translation, it provides encyclopaedic value. The IPA tells the pronunciation but provides no information about the meaning of the name.

The use of non-Roman scripts in leads is extremely wide in other country WikiProjects on English Wikipedia. This is the usual practice in countries with non-Roman scripts for their mother tongue. In the specific case of works of art, please see:

I can understand people being disinclined from the overwhelming use of Indic scripts. However, imho we should not do away with Indic scripts in the lead unilaterally just because of the problems they present, but rather engage them and solve them in a reasoned and logical manner. I am not suggesting a blanket use of Indic scripts in the leads of all articles either but a very specific use in a very specific context - for works of art only.

The clear-cut consensus we had in the RFC was "'Using IPA to clarify pronunciation'". There were varying levels of support for various other options. However, the consensus to remove the Indic language altogether from leads was not clear cut, the closing admin had to make a judgement. That discussion did not consider the possibility that there could be genuine need for such indic script/translations or cater for any exceptions for such circumstances. Hence I feel that this is a case which has not been properly considered at that point of time and it is worthy to be taken up for consideration on its merits.

I request that this issue be voted upon and let the community decide what is to be done for this specific set of cases only. AshLin (talk) 19:39, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry AshLin, but this atmosphere is deviating to WP:OSE in the presence of a highly controversial issue. That's the last thing anyone will want. Regarding the scripts, are you presupposing that till now, there has been little or no attempt at all to "solve them in a reasoned and logical manner"? That is empirically wrong. Declaring that we should not do away with scripts just on the account that they cause a can of worms here is an invalid rationale, because it has been assented with everyone that the problems they cause outweigh their advantages and trying to put the two together is just a waste of time. For works of art, if you observe, the problem comes to light again, what script do you adopt and why? What if the work is of diversified languages? Will it not derange the reader from the main topic? I could go on, but that is not the purpose here. We are here to build an English encyclopedia, and considering the whim's and fancies of the readers of the art when we clearly have a solution called Interwiki, proves that there is little reason to take this further. Secret of success 11:40, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Just to clarify one thing, all these discussion about native scripts pertain only to the lead section. The addition of native scripts in the lead section leads to halted reading, and gives rise to edit warring due to easy visibility. However, no problem in including Indic scripts in relevant sections in an appropriate manner (such as etymology, or history and so on).--Dwaipayan (talk) 13:19, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
@Dwaipayan: And infobox. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:25, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
That difference is negligible. Nor is there any guarantee that scripts away from the lead will not lead to disruption. Plus, what is the purpose of providing scripts elsewhere than the lead if the lead doesn't have it? A logic.... Secret of success 13:32, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes, lead and infobox, to reduce clutter and edit warring. Other sections (such as etymology) , there is no problem in incorporating as long as it is appropriate. @SoS, the lead is the succinct summary, and should be a nice easy read. So, I agree that too many scripts may lead to disruption in quickly reading. Particularly in etymology section where the discussion is on origin of the name, native scripts can be helpful even for readers who knows the native language, and IPA and English translation helpful for non-native speakers. Please see this etymology section for example. Some articles may not have a full etymology section. History or geography sections (for location articles), or any other appropriate sections (for non-location articles such as works of art articles) will be a place to mention the native scripts.--Dwaipayan (talk) 13:44, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
This script stuff is a sideshow. As someone has already said, if you know the script then you do not need it, and if you do not know the script then it is just squiggles on a screen. Despite India having a population of 1.2 billion or whatever, and a substantial diaspora, Indic script readers will almost certainly form a minority among readers of English Wikipedia. I have no opinion regarding the translation issue right now, but I am watching and considering the arguments that are being presented. The !vote below is premature. - Sitush (talk) 13:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

@Everyone: This issue covers variety of alternatives; indic scripts in various locations (lead, infobox, footnotes, other sections), translations, IPAs, official English titles, and all applicable for various types of articles (biographies, geo-locations, art works, etc). It is not possible to apply same rule for all as was tried by previous RfC. Hence please be very clear on what type you are commenting. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:59, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I for one have been very clear: no Indic scripts, period. At least two other people have been equally clear, and we have a sound RfC + more recent consensus in a thread above. Just because you don't like the outcome of that RfC does mean that it was wrong. And, really, it is very simple: if something does not have a Roamn character equivalent then there is no option but to use the script; however, it is my understanding that all Indic scripts can be romanised & so that situation does not arise. As far as translations go, well, are we qualified to translate? Take a look at WP:NOENG, which implies that we contributors should translate only as a last resort. Therefore, if there is any reliable source that translates we should use that instead. - Sitush (talk) 14:24, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Absolutely. Translating an official title ourselves would be merely original research. It should be applicable if and only a reliable source presents it. Secret of success 14:56, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Secret of success, part of the arguments for the previous Rfc was basically the use of FUD in the case of possible disputes in two areas, geographic names and biographies, which was used to justify a project-wide ban. The bogie of continued edit wars etc is overplayed.
As for as WP:OSE was concerned, this is a case where I'm proving that the exception I'm proposing is legitimate and sensible and such a use falls under the caveats mentioned in that page's "in a nutshell". Also be aware that WP:OSE is an essay not a policy or even a guideline. There is nothing wrong in pointing out accepted usages amongst other communities. These are often used to factor in what is the existing usage in WP and to make a reasonable/logical argument. For example, no argument has been made as to why the minimal inclusion which I speak of is unencyclopedic except for "text clutter", "previous consensus" & "fear of edit-warring" which I feel are not compelling reasons to change my stance.
WP:NOENG does not apply in the question as to whether indic script should exist or not in the lead. As far as Indic script is concerned, a case can be made where the local language words are useful to a person to recognise the name in signposts, information displays etc especially with mobile Wikipedia usage increasing and people referring to it irl situations through mobile phones - where in most cases only the lead is read by users. So, imho the case for retaining it is as strong for retaining it, if not stronger, as for deleting it.
Sitush, please don't ascribe the outcome of the previous outcome of the Rfc as a case of "I did not like the outcome". I participated in that and supported it too; now I feel that we have erred in being too broad-based in applying it and I feel there are logical and reasonable grounds for reconsidering the case, and that is not because "I don't like it".
On another note, I am sorry for the premature introduction of the vote, not being well versed in how these things are to be conducted. However, if the consensus is to be developed over reasoning and logic, then that mode needs to be used to either agree or disagree with what I am saying. There is no rule in Wikipedia which says that a consensus once obtained is binding and that no person can take up the case for changing the consensus through the accepted method of public discourse on the talk page, especially when a person feels there is legitimate reason for seeking a change in the previous consensus. AshLin (talk) 18:28, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
I'm not against the discussion and am willing to be convinced that there is some merit in retaining indic scripts in, say, film and book titles. But we shouldn't be voting on things like this. What we need to see is a set of convincing reasons for carving out an exception to the previous RfC. Things like which particular works of art are you referring to, what are the characteristics of these works of art that make them different from the names of people, places and things, what is the encyclopedic value of retaining the indic script in these works, and why this retention won't devolve into the mess that the general RfC was addressing? Those sort of things. If those questions can be addressed, and I'm sure they can, we probably won't need a !vote at all. -- regentspark (comment) 19:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your clarification Regentspark, I will work on the lines you suggested. I'd be posting around/after the weekend though due to thesis commitments. AshLin (talk) 06:01, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
AshLin, I didn't mention your name in relation to Indic scripts - it is others who keep pushing the point & I know where you stand. And my mention of WP:NOENG was also not related to showing scripts but rather to translation, which is an issue that otherwise I am still considering as people make their various responses. You've misunderstood me, sorry. - Sitush (talk) 20:52, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Thank you Sitush for clarifying. My bad. AshLin (talk) 06:01, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
The entire RFC was formally for the all articles related to India as per a clarification at its beginning. Period. It was not limited to geographic and biographical articles, as I am under the impression that WP:INDIA covers a much more wider range of articles.
Regarding the OSE, discrepant kind of pages and WikiProjects are merely accounted as paradigms only to demonstrate how it would look and to bestow a conception on the usage. Despite so, an argument that "another page has it, so this should also have it" is generic and tends to be nugatory. I personally feel that text clutter (which is not the only reason) alone is a reason sufficient enough to do away with these scripts on the basis that readers will lose interest in the page, get distracted and reduce the traffic for the article. Regarding the NOENG, what if multiple languages exist for a certain place? India is a polyglot country. With 22 languages recognized by its constitution and Hindi being the most widely used language, there are certain places, which do not have Hindi signposts, but others from the 22 languages. Further predicaments which arise, comparitively libel, vandalism, and of course, edit-warring directed towards promoting the subject as having a hand-in-hand correlation with that language puts to a rest that not having scripts and directing the person who add its to an Inter-wiki is a far better solution. Do let me know if I'm wrong. With regards, Secret of success 06:43, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
@SoS: The entire RfC was applicable for all Indian articles. Right! But it was then found that we need not apply same rules for all articles as they could very well be handled separately. Hence the different types of articles were supposed to be weighed differently. We have currently got 108K+ articles under our scope. And i don't think more than 5% of these would have conflicts in deciding which script is to be used. Only few favourite hot-spot articles of personalities and places are under conflict. Just for the sake of not having to keep good watch on these, removing these scripts all together is not reasonable. We anyways have to fight other sorts of possible libels, vandalisms and edit-warings. We don't decided to blank those controversial sections for that sake. As to your comment of "translating titles would be original research"; no! Hindi "Khoobsurat" means English "beautiful", Marathi "Shyaamchi Aai" means English "Shyam's mother", Tamil "Nanban" means English "friend". Whats original research in that? "Translating" wont be original research. But calling that translation as "English title" would surely be.
@Sitush: To avoid ambiguity and confusion and misrepresentation you should refer to me directly by using my name. Its not a very difficult spelling. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 07:55, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
SOS, you're right that the RfC was about the use of indic scripts in all India articles but, as AK says, exceptions are possible and worth discussing. I'm not convinced that we need the exception but that doesn't mean we don't. @AK, it's not just about edit warring and conflicts but also about vandalism, and vandalism is very hard to catch when it shows up in non English scripts and so this affects all the 108K+ articles.--regentspark (comment) 13:42, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
That's far-fetched! Most articles remain unscathed until some drive like Tag & Assess takes place. There aren't regular as well as irregular or unregistered editors there. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 08:48, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
I don't mean that there will be vandalism in all 108K+ articles. Rather, script based vandalism, particularly in relatively un-trafficked articles, is very hard to catch. So it's not just about a conflict in a limited set of articles but about potential damage, albeit in a small number of articles, across a very large set. --regentspark (comment) 14:27, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
That's not applicable for script-vandalism alone. This way should we delete all un-trafficked articles for the fear of vandalism? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 15:04, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Script vandalism is harder to detect. Bots automatically revert, for example, the c**t word, but can't detect the hindi equivalent. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't do this or that just because of the potential for vandalism, it's just another factor to consider and I was just pointing out that it's not just the 5% of contentious articles that could be affected. Come up with good reasons for including a local script, and I'll be there, ahead of the pack, supporting that inclusion. --regentspark (comment) 15:13, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey, can anyone please write IPA or IAST for कमल. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 10:31, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

No Archiving. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:15, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
The reason being? Secret of success (talk) 16:05, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
Is it over? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 19:49, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Knock! Knock!! §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:09, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

User:AshLin, who is currently on wiki-break, has asked me to stall this until he comes back. Till then why isn't anyone giving me IPA or IAST for कमल? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 19:52, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
IAST for कमल is kamala. I don't know IPA. --Redtigerxyz Talk 18:37, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
That's right! Would you please now give IAST for the Marathi word कमळ? (I know you know Marathi.)
Anyways, don't bother! The Marathi alphabet ळ is not covered by both IPA & IAST. What do we do then? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 20:06, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
Closed! Reopening soon!
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
NO ACTION
Too soon to vote. Lets start this after sufficient discussion on all possibilities. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:21, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vote

Proposal - It is proposed that for works of art of Indian origin, where the works are named in languages other than English and which do not use a Roman script, the name in Indic script and the English translation should be permitted in the lead, in addition to the IPA.
Is voting appropriate? I suggest we refrain from jumping the gun and let the discussion go on till we can start an RFC. Secret of success 11:05, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Voting is the only option to reach a consensus. -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 11:11, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Voting might be the only option, but its better to do so @ rfc, rather than here. Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते 11:14, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
See WP:VOTE. Secret of success 11:15, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
@SoS: I too thought so. But then waited to see no comments on AshLin's last comment above. Hence voted. (I had nothing to say.) §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 11:33, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
I suggest that this be closed until our discussion reaches a considerable point where it has been extensively discussed (it hasn't). Secret of success 11:42, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Fine with me! I can wait. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 11:48, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
In what sense? You mean we are not following the previous consensus? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:27, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
I mean in the sense of WP:VOTE. Consensus is supposed to be based on arguments and reasoning, not on a vote. --regentspark (comment) 14:12, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
Oh yeah! Lets just close this in a box. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:21, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is Hindi official in Gujarat?

At Gujarat, we only say that Gujarati is official. However, at Official languages of India, we say that Hindi is coofficial. If it's not, could s.o. correct File:Hindi-Urdu as an official language.png, or let me know and I'll correct it?

thanks — kwami (talk) 11:15, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Added Hindi, with citation. Or rather, Standard Hindi. For some obscure reason the Hindi article is at Standard Hindi rather than just plain ole Hindi. --regentspark (comment) 15:17, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Map is outdated. Where are Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, and Chhattisgarh? — Bill william comptonTalk 19:24, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
Which map?--regentspark (comment) 16:30, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
The one we're discussing about File:Hindi-Urdu as an official language.png. — Bill william comptonTalk 06:15, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
Never noticed the map :) I guess we'll have to ping kwami.--regentspark (comment) 12:41, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Indic text template

This page contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

What's the deal with this template? Do we really need it wherever devnagari is used? For example, the template is prominently displayed in the Hindu Kush article but the actual use of the script is minor.--regentspark (comment) 14:47, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

I have never seen the point of it because the usage is minor everywhere, this being en-WP and all. Some people - now seemingly inactive, and in some cases topic banned - seemed to add it to pretty much every article. The same people commonly added the "uses Indian English" talk page header, even when the article did not use Indian English. - Sitush (talk) 15:01, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
Fine. I'll get rid of it wherever it appears to be pointless clutter. Thanks. --regentspark (comment) 15:08, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
This is one of the overused templates, sometimes just plain silly usage (one was where a non-free poster had devanagari script, but nowhere in the article was there any and there was a remove-add thingy going on!). —SpacemanSpiff 15:55, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
However, the template was asked to be included in case of some previous FA nominations related to India. Unless it is causing unnecessary clutter, it can be kept in some lower corner.--Dwaipayan (talk) 16:03, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
Without proper rendering, indic scripts may look strange and many people using Wikipedia are not technology geeks to know how to do it. Therefore, it is better to keep this template in articles where Indic scripts are used.There are similar templates like this. -- InarZan Verifiable 11:59, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
This page contains Burmese script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Burmese script.

This discussion is about Indic text template, my view is that non-Roman text has little use in an English language encyclopaedia. On the other hand the Indian English template is a useful template that indicates that the particular dialect is used in writing the article and so words, and spellings would be encountered that are used in Indian English, for example the article Sudheendra Kulkarni uses words like crore and it is useful to mark the article as written in the Indian English dialect. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 08:01, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

The thread concerning the Indian English template is linked in the section below this. - Sitush (talk) 08:31, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

MOS discussion regarding ENGVAR talk page templates

I have opened a discussion at WT:MOS that concerns, inter alia, Template:Indian English. It can be found here. - Sitush (talk) 12:16, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Template:Indian cuisine

Due to contentious editing at Template:American cuisine, this has resulted in the deletion of the image at Indian cuisine template. You may wish to discuss whether to keep the image or not, but someone should watch the template to see if further contentious editing at American cuisine results in spillover to your template. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 11:31, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Unlisted PRODs

I watch Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Article alerts to check PRODed articles. However it seems that the bot who lists articles there, lists only articles that have "WikiProject India" banner on them. This must be a case with all articles for all Projects. We need to find some solution for this problem. If you have some views on it, share it there. Meanwhile, these unlisted India-related articles on PROD expire on following days.

Btw, do you watch any other page for PRODs? §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 08:24, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I used to list PROD articles at WP:DSI sometime back, but stopped. You can't really fix for the bot as most of the articles prodded are newer ones which haven't been tagged or sometimes not even categorized yet. If categories exist, WP:CATSCAN can be used to check for PRODs. —SpacemanSpiff 08:38, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Okay! Someone who PRODs an article should actually notify this, in case no banners exist. (In case of wrong banners, we cant do much. So leave those.) I don't know where and how to list on WP:DSI and i find it easy to list it here. I also didn't understand your CATSCAN suggestion. Maybe you should comment at Wikipedia_talk:Article_alerts#Some_doubts and help find some solution. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 09:02, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't think much can come out of the bot discussion, bots would need some logic and there isn't anything present here. Categories also aren't helpful, but are slightly better than what the bot uses. What you can do is search for the intersection of Category:India and Category:All articles proposed for deletion using the catscan scripts (make sure you search many levels down for the India cat and get a list. The simpler option that I employed before was to look at WP:PRODSUM and scan through every day for the previous day's entries for anything that appeared to be Indian and went to Wikipedia:DSI#Automatic delete candidates and enter the listing using the example shown there. After a point I stopped as it really wasn't doing much -- people who rescue PRODded articles do so irrespective of an entry into that list. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 15:41, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Updates on Social Media pilot

Greetings! Here is a small update on the Social Media pilot supported by India Program. This pilot is running on two Facebook groups for Wikipedia activities: one in English (One is You can also write on Wikipedia) and one in Odia (Odia Wikipedia). Both of these are being piloted to see if we can explain the very basics of editing to new editors and to encourage them to make their first basic edits. This is done You can visit these groups to see the regular editing sessions that we are conducting there. So far, we have been able to get 30 first time editors in English and 10 in Odia - all of whom have completed a few basic tasks (like creating usernames, corrected mistakes, adding references, inter-wiki links!)

Facebook is a useful way of engaging with young users because they are more comfortable there. Here is a 19 point comprehensive guide that we've developed to illustrate the kind of language, nature of messages and way of interacting on Fb that you might find useful and can implement on your groups as well. Please note the mini-editing sessions we have devised with just 5 tasks to make the start of a new editor's Wiki journey really simple! If you need any help to try this pilot in your group please write to me (noopur@wikimedia.org). (Even if your community does not yet have a facebook page, or if the page is inactive right now, I can support you.) Happy to help! Noopur28 (talk) 10:33, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Hyderabad, India

I've listed Hyderabad, India for peer review here, The comprehensive editing done through the last couple of months had Improved its standards. thus, We need input/feedback from peer reviewers to make it an absolute FAN. Thanks :)--Omer123hussain (talk) 15:31, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Query re: source

Since this is India-specific, I thought that I would check here before going to WP:RSN. Any views on the reliability of Kapoor, Subodh. The Indian Encyclopaedia: La Behmen-Maheya. Genesis Publishing Pvt Ltd. p. 4369. ? I would imagine that it is a tertiary source but cannot see any of it. - Sitush (talk) 18:04, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

You are looking to see if Lohana and Mahabharata are mentioned on the same page? The answer is no. Mahabharat finds a cursory mention in page 4269 while Lohana is described in page 4369. As for the book, it appears to be plagiarized from an 1800s text, as it continues to use archaic terms. —SpacemanSpiff 18:18, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
It was with regard to this edit. However, I've seen the thing used elsewhere and there are unresolved alarm bells ringing, hence my general request here. From your comment re: possible plagiarism of a 19C work, it does not sound great. - Sitush (talk) 18:46, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
The reference supports the edit, but I'm iffy about the book, the author had many books come out in 2002 which is unlikely for something researched and created, the books are held at Stanford and University College London libraries, but that doesn't say much. The language in the book, for e.g. "They eat meat, are addicted to spurious liquors, do not object to fish or onions, drink water from their inferiors as well as superiors in caste,.." which talks about these things in the present tense isn't possible for something published in 2002 by an academic, appears to be more the work of one of those EIC census takers.—SpacemanSpiff 18:54, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Meh, I should have read the next page. The entire text is sourced to: "Vigne's A Personal Narrative, pp. 32, 53, 54, 118; Elliot's History of India; Tod's Rajasthan. —SpacemanSpiff 18:57, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Ah, my old mates James Tod and Elliot. I am going to remove it, then. Tod is definitely not reliable and, imo, Elliot is little better. As for your comment regarding use of the present tense, the dreaded Anthropological Survey of India do exactly the same thing with the states series of their The People of India. I need to get back to work on that last article, when I get some time away from firefighting. - Sitush (talk) 19:03, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
My eyes hurt, but now on looking at the Tod article, apparently I have the skill to identify East India Company hobbyist writings! —SpacemanSpiff 19:09, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
I wrote most of the Tod article, and took it through FA. However, any failings in it that are causing your eyes to hurt must surely be the contributions of others <g> - Sitush (talk) 19:17, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Oh, I meant from reading this encyclopaedia linky of yours, I just went to the Tod article for the first time now, didn't really go past the lede though. —SpacemanSpiff 19:26, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Copyvio education

Last year when IEP was going on I'd created this page on the request of the IEP folks to help students with copyright problems, but they had then decided that they had things under control and didn't need this and I forgot about it too. Anyways, as we continue to face copyvio issues within the project and many of us work with some editors who do copyvios, misguided but in good faith, the page might come in handy to explain to them with examples. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 18:42, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM - May 2012 Report

Hi all,

A report of the previous months collaborations has been published at the reports page of the WikiProject. Please have a look at it. Any suggestions/comments are always welcomed :) BPositive (talk) 18:52, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Tag and Assess 2012

The Tag & Assess Drive 2012 has been a phenomenal success so far achieving around 65,000 assessments (including quality and importance) and bringing 19,000 articles into the scope of the porject. The overall theme is to achieve

  • Quality assessments for unassessed WP India articles. Done
  • Adding importance missed during previous assessment. Done
  • Bringing more articles into the scope of the project and subject them to assessment. Done

Statistics of the initial and recent progress

Date & time Total articles in the project Articles remaining Running total
4 March 2012, 0830 hrs 95,014 59,837 3,309
31 May 2012, 2359 hrs 114,071 0 84,434

We profusely thank all the participants involved for their active participation. The post assessment activities needs to be planned, please post suggestions. Ssriram mt (talk) 01:26, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Let me take this opportunity to congratulate ourselves! This has really been a phenomenal success. Hope such community activity will continue for WP India in future. Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 01:48, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Request for research in Malayalam

We need help with the article Jayaram Padikkal - which is currently nominated for deletion but I am hopeful that it will be kept. The article does not have any biographical information about the subject - date and place of birth, date and place of death, etc. Any source would probably be in Malayalam since he was from Kerala. Can someone who speaks Malayalam look for this information, and add it to the article if found? Thanks. --MelanieN (talk) 20:31, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Followup: The AfD discussion has been closed and the article was kept, but it still lacks basic biographical information. --MelanieN (talk) 15:54, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Import Existing Photos from Assamese Wikipedia

We had arranged a photography completion on behalf of Assamese Wikipedia Community. The competition is almost successes with a result of 629 Photos and a lot of photos in Mail also which are yet to upload. We have lake of Manpower in our community. So, for importing we need help of Some bot to import those photos to commons as soon as possible. We have also lots of privious uploaded photos in our wiki. Please think about it also. This will be within the scope of WikiProject Assam and WikiProject India.

Please guide us. Can it made by a bot or something else?

Bishnu Saikia 12:06, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

There are a couple of bots on Commons that move photos from local projects to there. You should probably contact User talk:Sreejithk2000‎ as he runs a bot that does something similar and has experience with importing a lot of images from Malayalam Wikipedia. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 12:47, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I will try it once. Bishnu Saikia (talk) 18:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion MOS:TIES

MOS:TIES should be clearly mentioned in article talk or somewhere in article body, in some India related articles, British English and American English are badly mixed up. You'll see the problem specially in date formats (DDMMYYYY (BrEn) and MMDDYYYY (AmEn) and some commons words like honour/honor, colour/color etc! --Tito Dutta ✉ 13:18, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Sitush has opened a discussion about a topic much similar to this at Wikipedia_talk:MOS#ENGVAR_templates. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 14:23, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Help on finding Hindi Voice actors

Hello, Over the past few months, I've been trying to find some Hindi voice-dubbing artists of famous actors, but I am having a hard time searching, since there is currently no Hindi dubbing database on the internet. Since this is an India-related topic on this website, Can anyone online here try to help me find these following Hindi voice artists? Here's what I want to find:

  • Who is the Hindi voice actor that dubbed over Adam Sandler's role as Michael Newman in the film, Click?
  • Who is the Hindi voice actor that dubbed over Mark Hamill's role as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars films from IV-VI?
  • Who is the Hindi voice actor that dubbed over Martin Jarvis's role as Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon in Titanic? I know Namrata Sawhney gave Hindi voice to Kate Winslet's role as Rose DeWitt Bukater/Dawson in the movie, but who voiced Martin Jarvis's role as Gordon?

Once someone finds this artist, a certain Indian Wikipedian can make a Wikipedia page about a certain Hindi voice artist, but as long as they know a Hindi Dubbing Director, or might have already know the info about the Hindi voice actors of foreign films. Also, I am aware that some foreign films were dubbed in Hindi many years later, after their original theatrical release.

Plus, when it comes to finding these Hindi voice artists, you can add their date of birth and where they were born from as well.

I'm not Indian and I know this seems like a pretty big job, But if anyone who is interested into Indian dubbing industries and can try to take this favor, Please try leave a talk message on my talk board and see if you can do anything about it. I've asked other people who are Indian Wikipedians and that are also involved in the Dubbing Industry, but I got no info from them yet. But, please leave me a message, when anyone can. Thanks.

You can also check out this List of Indian dubbing artists as well.

--BlueMario1016 (talk) 16:17, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Hyderabad map

Hi, can any one provide the latest map image of Hyderabad, India. --Omer123hussain (talk) 21:19, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Hope, I am not mistaken, If this is the right place to inquire or seek help for the above request, but the article is going thru PR and we need to fulfill this requirement :).--Omer123hussain (talk) 21:24, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
Try OpenStreetMap. Download SVG (Export -> Map Image -> SVG) and clean it up a bit, if required. You can seek help from the WikiProject Indian maps members. utcursch | talk 07:50, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

FAR

I have nominated Bangalore 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. →TSU tp* 09:02, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm... the article is really in bad shape. I may try in some places, but one or more really motivated editor(s) needed to salvage this. There must be a lot of editors from, or interested in, Bangalore. Anybody volunteering? As of now, among the Indian city articles, Kolkata underwent a successful FAR (that is, the article retained FA status after the review) recently. So, Kolkata could be provide some guidance/template/pattern to follow in this case. Mysore is also undergoing an FAR, and I hope it will also be successful to retain FA status. However, it being a smaller city, may not provide guidance/pattern for Bangalore.
And one fillip of hope, although the articles are typically reviewed for two weeks, if active edits are ongoing, an FA may be in FAR for several months (the FAR in Mysore is going on for nearly six months, which is unusual but possible under certain circumstances). Please collaborate to save the article... Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 01:19, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Report on the use of self-published sources

The first version of a report on the use of self-published sources is now available, in Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia reliability. Some of the self-published sources listed in the report pertain to this project.

Suggestions on the report itself (a discussion has started here), and help in remedying the use of the self-published items that relate to this project will be appreciated. History2007 (talk) 06:20, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Kmzayeem

This user is continuously changing assessment from WP:India to WP:Bangladesh! Creating huge trouble. --Tito Dutta ✉ 17:15, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

He is also removing the India project banners from a number of articles, and trying to change the templates on history of Bengal and culture of Bengal to history of Bangladesh and culture of Bangladesh. Even with repeated explanation and warning he seems to be bent of proving that West Bengal is no part of Bengal. This needs attention. Aditya(talk • contribs) 03:25, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

The legal term "stay" appears frequently in news reports concerning the multitude of high-profile corruption etc cases. Can someone with legal knowledge please add an "India" section to Stay of proceedings (sourced, of course). I rather get the impression that either the media are sometimes misusing the term or that in its Indian sense it can be synonymous with Adjournment. Thanks. - Sitush (talk) 00:56, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Portal:India anyone?

There hasn't been any activity on the portal. I am to keep recycling the Did You Know (DYK) section with new(or old) information from the India Quiz, but I need help with the policy and possible guidelines for the News section being largely unfamiliar with the way Portals work and my knowledge of transclusion is also limited. --Harsh Mujhse baat kijiye(Talk)(Contribs) 18:17, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

An Invite to join the Wikimedia India Chapter

Wikimedia India logo
- - - - - - - - - - - - Wikimedia India Chapter - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hi all,

Greetings from the Wikimedia India Chapter !

Wikimedia India is an autonomous non-profit organization. The objective of the Chapter is to educate Indian public about availability and use of free and open educational content and build capacity to access and contribute to such resources in various Indian languages and in English. It works in coordination with Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedian community to promote building and sharing of knowledge through Wikimedia projects.

As you have shown an interest in articles related to India we thought you might be interested in knowing about the Wikimedia India chapter, its activities, volunteering and process to gain membership to the society. We need your help.

More details can be found at Official Portal  • Our Blog  • Our Wiki
We welcome you to join and particpate in the India Chapter's activites. To join the chapter please click here. We thank you for your your contributions thus far and look forward to your continued participation.


Sincerely,
On behalf of the Wikimedia India chapter.

naveenpf (talk) 02:01, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Assessment Satatistics

How to update the Statistics --naveenpf (talk) 12:25, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

What do you want to update? See User:Erwin/CatCount to understand how the page works. — Ganeshk (talk) 09:20, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
it is not working now :( --naveenpf (talk) 04:25, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Portal:Haryana

Hello! I will soon start working on Haryana Portal. Anyone interested? Vishal14K | Talk 07:35, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Do start, I'm sure people will join once they see an active portal :) . Good luck. Lynch7 09:16, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Tag and Assess 2012 - Status update

The Tag & Assess Drive 2012 has been a phenomenal success so far achieving 8706 assessments (including quality and importance) in a span of 10 days. The overall theme is to achieve

  • Quality assessments for unassessed WP India articles.
  • Adding importance missed during previous assessment.
  • Bringing more articles into the scope of the project and subject them to assessment.


Statistics of the initial and recent progress

Date & time Total articles in the project Articles remaining Assessed on this day Running total
4 March 2012, 0830 hrs 95,014 60,037 540 3,309
10 March 2012, 0330 hrs 95,981 56,596 606 8,706


While numbers are indicative of the progress, the co-ordinators are ensuring quality of assessment with frequent pulse checks. There has been enthusiastic participation from all the 21 participants and we profusely thank all the participants involved. The drive is still open and we encourage participants from WP India to enroll themselves.
AshLin (talk) and ssriram_mt (talk).

Why isn't bot archiving this? This has been here for ages. Is it because of absence of any date in the signature? He will now see it in my sign and then archive, i guess. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:43, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Tag and Assess 2012 - Status update

The Tag & Assess Drive 2012 has been a phenomenal success so far achieving 27,980 assessments (including quality and importance) in the one month period. The overall theme is to achieve

  • Quality assessments for unassessed WP India articles.
  • Adding importance missed during previous assessment.
  • Bringing more articles into the scope of the project and subject them to assessment.

Statistics of the initial and recent progress

Date & time Total articles in the project Articles remaining Assessed on this day Running total
4 March 2012, 0830 hrs 95,014 60,037 540 3,309
31 March 2012, 0300 hrs 104,455 45,804 779 27,980

As many as 10,000 articles are brought into the scope of the project during the past one month of the project. We profusely thank all the participants involved for their active participation. The drive is still open and we encourage participants from WP India to enroll themselves.
AshLin (talk) and ssriram_mt (talk).

Signing so it gets archived. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:44, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Deletion conflict

I have been posing information related to Dhananjaya (Gotra), using historicial refference books. Some wikipedian is deleting the information, as if he knows all about. I would like to know the reason.

Signing so it gets archived. §§AnimeshKulkarni (talk) 13:44, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Lala Hanumant Sahai

Good Morning to my fellow wikipedians! If I am not wrong we were there in WikiConference India held at Mumbai in the month of November 2011. I am giving you all some trouble here. I had created a new article on Lala Hanumant Sahai which was immediately declined by User:Sitush some 2 days ago. As suggested by him on the tag I re-edited the article and submitted it again leaving a note on his User's talk page. Now he says he does not know Hindi I may ask some other reviewer. I know you are master of Hindi and English. I would request you to please review it and give your findings. A favourable response from any one of you will be appreciated. With thanks in advance I remain semper fidelis, Krantmlverma (talk) 06:23, 18 June 2012 (UTC) Dr.'Krant'M.L.Verma (talk•Email)

Sitush is right. This is the English Wikipedia. English is the only language the reviewer needs to know. It is your responsibility to provide professional or professional-level translations of the statements from the Hindi sources you have used (in case someone demands those translations, and I do). Other issues abound. You continually refer to the gentleman as Lalaji; Lala is an honorific. His name is Hanumant Sahai. When was he born? A date would be good. If he was convicted in the Delhi bombing case (1911), he was likely born in the late 19th century. In which case, how did you manage to take a rare photograph of him in 2011? Did you scan it from somewhere? If so, please provide that source. Who is the writer R. V. Smith? Why does a reminiscence by him (of an event of 35 years ago) in a newspaper count as a reliable source? Sahai's reading room was used by "revolutionaries," but why does that make him (Sahai) a revolutionary? What is the Bharat Mata Society? You have your work cut out for you. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 08:38, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikiproject India's 6th Anniversary on 11th July,2012

Dear fellow Wikimedians, as you all know on 11th July,2012 Wikiproject India will turn 6. Both Assamase and Kannada Wikipedia has celebrated recently thier 10th and 9th Anniversary respectively. If you planning to celebrate the anniversary and needs help please feel to contact chapter@wikimedia.in --naveenpf (talk) 13:48, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Proposal 1
  • Editors must select an high importance India related articles, and then we can work on it for a week for GA/FA, or expand upto a great extent. Editors who has contributed maximum to the article, like expanding content or adding ref's will be considered for prizes (may be top 3 editors during the period). (Note: Minor fixes need not be considered, depending on the relevancy it adds to the article.) -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 18:12, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Update on the India Education Pilot

Just wanted to inform you that we have put up a post about the India Education Pilot here. Please fell free to initiate, advance or follow the conversation on the same page. Thanks Nitika.t (talk) 10:35, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Monuments

Wiki Loves Monuments 2012

Wiki Loves Monuments is a global public photo contest around monuments, organized by Wikimedia chapters and groups. This year’s contest is planned for September 2012. Wikimedia India chapter is organising Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) with India focus. You can read more about this in the following links:

The planning for the event is being kicked off with an IRC session on 21 June 2012 at 9:00pm IST (+5:30 UTC). All interested are invited to join the IRC session. -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 12:31, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

WP:AN discussion

There is a discussion going on at WP:AN that I am sure really relates to this particular project, although the opening post does not say so. - Sitush (talk) 14:29, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Article on Polygamy

The article uses 1961 census data while more recent data just related to the issue is available. for example, the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3). 67.177.230.154 (talk) 16:51, 21 June 2012 (UTC)Pankaj Goyal

Military conflicts - defintion in IE

Can someone with knowledge of Indian English please give me some sort of definition of the term "military conflicts". I have been told that it can induce some sort of colonial cognitive bias in IE, whatever the heck that means. - Sitush (talk) 20:54, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

It appears that the context has not been provided. Can someone comment if use of “conflict” in the particular context of this sentence in the Nair article means the same. “Nairs were historically involved in military conflict” does it convey the same as “Nairs were historically enlisted in to the military” Does it convey the same meaning !!!. The disagreement on the choice of “conflict” has been on its contextual use in this lead-sentence and not as a standalone word. Kindly comment accordingly.Thanks in advance. VSVettakkorumakansnehi (talk) 09:51, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
I think "Nairs historically constituted the major warrior groups in the region" is a better lead compared to the present one. --AshLey Msg 11:57, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
That is a discussion for the article talk page, not here. My query regards an issue of Indian English semantics that is claimed by User:Vettakkorumakansnehi but not supported by, for example, a search of the India press on Google. - Sitush (talk) 12:00, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
I have some understanding in Indian English. It means nothing other than what it means in "other Englishes".--InarZan Verifiable 12:06, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Misrepresentation again. I concur, it is not the IE version of the word "military conflict" that we are interested but the contextual-use of this word in the specific Nair article lead-sentence being misrepresentative (thus giving a colonial -POV). “Nairs were historically involved in military conflict in the region” does it convey the same as “Nairs were historically enlisted in to the military” Is´nt choice of the word "conflict" misleading to project the intended message in the lead-sentence vis-a-vis the choice for Nairs being recruited in Military. That is, replacing the word "conflict" would remove the cognitive bias and come to mean that Nairs were historically enlisted in the local military such as Nair Brigade etc. There has been a lot of resultant-filibustering in the article talk page due to failure of recognition of this cognitive bias in semantics - that can be avoided if a NPOV is reached on the contextual-purport within this specific lead-sentence. What we need to project to the reader through semantic should match unambigously with the message intended. The semantics should clearly represent that Nairs connection with military is their role as soldiers not that Nairs were making “conflict” in the region. However the User has chosen to provide "Military conflict" as a standalone word for interpretation in IE -which is not the issue. !!! VSVettakkorumakansnehi (talk) 12:53, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Mysore saved!

A small note. The article Mysore survived its featured status review process, and continues to be a featured article. I request editors to help Bangalore retain the FA status, as it is undergoing review as well. Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 04:19, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Please nominate for July 2012 INCOTM

Hi, Please nominate/vote for the next month's COTM. The nominations are open and you can do the same on the nominations page of the WikiProject.
Thanks, BPositive (talk) 07:13, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Just reminding again to nominate/vote for July 2012 COTM's. Thanks, BPositive (talk) 15:15, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Perth requested-move notification

A requested move survey was started at Talk:Perth_(disambiguation)#Requested_move, which proposes to move:

Background: There was a previous requested-move survey which ran from late May to mid June. There was a great deal of controversy surrounding the closure and subsequent events, which involved a number of reverts and re-reverts which are the subject of an ongoing arbitration case. There was a move review process, which was closed with a finding that the original requested-move closure was endorsed; however, the move review process is relatively new and untried. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 03:18, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Need help from Experienced Editors

Hello fellow Wikipedians from India. I am here to seek everyone's help and support to edit and develop an article that I have started at my subpage. I have completed most parts of it, but still I think it is a very important issue and can be expanded very much. It is User:Vivek Rai/Ganga Mukti Mahasammelan. Please don't worry about title. I have also included a large no. of possible references to build upon in the links section. Thanks VIVEK RAI :  Friend?  10:15, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

RfC on neutrality of Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, and Jammu and Kashmir

Please see Talk:Gilgit–Baltistan#Neutrality. Ryan Vesey Review me! 15:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

WP:INCOTM

Hi, please cast your vote for the next month's collaborations. The nominations will close tonight and results will be declared thereafter. Here is the nominations page. Thanks, BPositive (talk) 06:29, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Collaborations for July 2012

Hi all. As per the voting which took place on the nominations page, the articles selected for collaboration of the month for July 2012 are -

I hope you all will join in and help in shaping up these articles.

Happy editing, happy collaborating! --BPositive (talk) 18:46, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

INCOTM - June 2012 Report

The report for June 2012 has been published at the reports page. Please check it out. Any suggestions/feedback are welcomed. :-)

Hope to see as many of you in the collaborations for July 2012.

Thanks, BPositive (talk) 07:31, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Commas in DAB Titles

(Crossposted to WP:Museums, as well)) Coming from Category:Science_museums_in_India, but present elsewhere, I'm sure is a little confusion. When disambiguating between the various Science City Museums, should there be a comma before the city name? I see it both ways. I also see one instance where the city name is before "Science City" and two where it's listed after. I don't have a particular preference, but I think it should be consistent. Thoughts? I'm not watching here but am watching WP: Museums. If you respond here, please ping me there or on my talk. StarM 01:49, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Majrooh Sultanpuri image

Some user had removed the image of lyricist, File:Majrooh Sultanpuri (c. 1919 - 2000).jpg, which was originally taken from here, saying it belongs to another lyricist, Shakeel Badayuni, though for the time being I have placed it in the later article so it would survive, I wanted another point of view, some clarification as web images are confusing! So that the rational template could be changed and image renamed, if it really belongs to Badayuni or the change reverted. Thanks!--Ekabhishektalk 05:06, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Mishal Husain

IP 117.220.147.79 (resolving to Ludhiana) has made very extensive alterations and deletions to this article today, including ones related to her ethnicity [9]. I have no idea whether they should remain. Could someone here look it over? The IP has posting some very odd talk page messages around WP today, e.g. [10], [11], [12], [13], which rings alarm bells. - Voceditenore (talk) 07:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I'll take a look at the article. - Sitush (talk) 08:09, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
The article edits are basically good, with the exception of the ethnicity issue (now fixed): better sources, removal of trivia, spelling corrections etc. I struggle to see how someone could do that and also come up with the weird talk page stuff - perhaps there are two users from the same IP? - Sitush (talk) 08:39, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. I've also re-added her husband's name which was referenced but removed by the IP. (See also comments.) Yes, the differences are odd. I was wondering if the IP is used by a school. Voceditenore (talk) 08:57, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Location

These caves are located om Mumbai-Pune Old highway. Nearly 59 km from Pune. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.87.42.115 (talk) 09:38, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject Kolkata

Please see WT:WikiProject Kolkata, where a discussion is underway on where to move/merge this inactive WikiProject to. -- 70.49.127.65 (talk) 02:14, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

English Wikipedia editors by location.

Checkout the http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/geo -- naveenpf (talk) 02:41, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Permission to use photo?

Hello, Ravichandar! I am seeking permission to include your photo of a Horse drawn chariot Darasuram in a textbook my employer, Wiley & Sons, is publishing. Details are as follows: Title: World History: A Thematic Approach, Volumes I and II," Second Edition Author: Steven Wallech, et al Publication date: December 2012 Photo usage: interior, black and white only Rights requested: Non-exclusive, worldwide, all languages, all media (print and electronic), for the life of the edition

I see that this image is under Creative Commons, but I would like direct permission from you just to be sure. I would also like to know your preferred credit line.

I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Linda 98.228.208.116 (talk) 08:51, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

South Indian Jingoism

Hello, i am not a regular Wikipedian and although passionate about Wikipedia and India-related articles, i am busy in real life and have little time to spend here. So i am drawing the attention of fellow users to my concern here.

The user Ancienzus has been involved in shoving in a form of regionalism to articles relating to South India. In articles relation to Malayalam cinema/Kannada cinema/Telugu cinema, the actor has been trying to put in the first sentence of the lead that they are "part of South Indian film industry" instead of "part of Indian cinema". The concept of a South Indian film industry is a delusion. All the industries are distinct and independent and all the languages of South India are full fledged languages (not dialects). I feel strongly that since Bollywood is not described in the lead as part of "North Indian film industry" and Assamese film industry not described as being part of "East Indian film industry", such a regional psuedo-industry name should not be applied to the above mentioned articles. Moreover, the user has deceivingly removed content in Malayalam article that relates to Sanskrit.

Please do not ask me to go and post somewhere else for i do not have the time to do so. Thanks if you can look into it. Snowcream (talk) 10:47, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

As i went through the history of edits, i couldn't help noticing close similarity of the user with that of the blocked user MThekkumthala, who is grouped with many other users in Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Kalarimaster. Can this be checked? Snowcream (talk) 12:02, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I've blocked them and their IP also. Elockid (Talk) 14:09, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
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