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2012 Asian American representative approval period (Now until 18 December)

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Asian American#Representative approval. RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 06:29, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Gazetteer of India

Hi all,

As some of you may know, I've been working at the British Library for the past six months. A project I've recently been spending some time on is taking an old collection of nineteenth-century scanned books and uploading selections from them for Wikisource; see the first completed example here. As you'd expect, there's a substantial amount about India, though most of it is European travelogues and memoirs, which aren't desperately interesting.

However, I did discover that the scanned collection includes a full fourteen-volume set of the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1885, second ed.; there's also an eleven-volume 1880 ed.).

A couple of example entries:

Ahankaripur (Gosainganj).— Town in Faizibid District, Oudh, 22 miles from Faizibid town. Population (1881) 4280, of whom 2796 were Hindus and 1455 Muhammadans. Named after its founder, a Barwir chief called Ahankari Rii. Considerable export trade in hides to Calcutta. Government school. An important railway station on the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway. A considerable market is springing up in the neighbourhood of the station.

Lánjí.— Town in Búrhá tahsil, Bálághát District, Central Provinces; 40 miles east of Búrhá town. Lat. 21° 30' n., long. 80° 35' e. Lying in low ground dotted with tanks, and bounded on the north by dense jungle, in which stands an old temple dedicated to Mahádeva, surrounded apparently by the remains of the original town. The fort, now out of repair, but once a strong place, was probably constructed by the Gonds, circa 1700. On the edge of the moat round it, a temple has been built to Lánjkái (the goddess Kálí), from whom the town takes its name. Population (1881) 2240, namely, Hindus, 1990; Muhammadans, 151; Jain, 1; and aboriginal tribes, 98. Lánjí has a good Government school, and a police station; and the District post connects it with the imperial postal lines.

For larger locations, the entries can be very lengthy and include a summary history; the entry for Ahmedabad District runs to eleven and a half pages, with another five on the city itself. Volume VI is entirely given over to the entry for "India", which is a shade under 750 pages long.

The content is of course obsolete in very many ways, but it might be a useful resource for historians or for the history sections of our own articles. However, it's a large undertaking! If I did put this up, would anyone be interested in working on proofreading it, or making use of the text in other ways? Andrew Gray (talk) 16:30, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Hm. I spend a lot of my time removing citations to those Gazetteers, for the reasons that you state. There were many, many things wrong with the British Raj depictions of Indian history and society. As a snapshot of the state of a given place in 18XX they might have some utility, but I suspect only on infrequent occasions. If you are going to go down this route then you might first want to check the Digital South Asia Library project as I think that they've already transcribed at least one series. - Sitush (talk) 16:39, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

DSAL link for the lazy. Also, gazetteers digitized by University of Massachusetts are available at archive.org (example). For the history of towns and villages, they can be a good (and sometimes the only available) source. utcursch | talk 00:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

would anyone be interested in working on proofreading it, or making use of the text in other ways

–Yes, sure! Count me.. --Tito Dutta (talk) 16:57, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Old images of Charminar

Can anyone find a public domain image of Charminar that shows it without the present-day Bhagyalakshmi temple structure? The temple structure was created in 1969 (the local Hindu organizations claim that the shrine existed as a holy stone before that). Surely, there must be a pre-1969 image of Charminar that shows the relevant portion of Charminar (unfortunately, the images in commons:Category:Historical images of Charminar don't). A new user has uploaded some images (e.g. File:charminar100.jpg), but these will probably be deleted soon given the lack of proper sources. utcursch | talk 17:16, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

As per your request, this article, from The Hindu, compares old photo of Charminar without Bhagyalakshmi temple with the latest photo, and (as i read somewhere) as per the commons policy in India a image of 60 years older, needs no licence to publish, Regards.:)--Omer123hussain (talk) 21:16, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Case of mixed identity

Help needed. More details at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Film/Indian_cinema_task_force#Double_roles. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 05:02, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Poor quality articles

Hi. I work with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors who attempt to copy-edit all articles so marked. We've encountered a seemingly endless stream of unreferenced, un-infoboxed, stub articles in highly fractured language, covering small villages, minor festivals, temples, etc. Many are so poorly written that they're unintelligible. While we have done our best (and have edited hundreds of such stubs), the result is unsatisfying to us and to any subsequent reader. Notably, many (such as Valsang Jatra were not authored by the subject of this thread.

Rather than copyedit them, I propose that they be sandboxed until they're in some kind of shape. An alternative would be to merge them into their nearest "parent" article until enough content accumulates (beyond a few sentences) to be of distinct interest to someone. The latter is my plan, without objection...

I'd appreciate your thoughts. If I should repeat this request in another forum, please let me know.

Lfstevens (talk) 16:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

See Mass Deletion of Varanasi above. - Sitush (talk) 16:31, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, but I'm not sure what the outcome was or how we should proceed. If merging is not the answer, should we establish a category for them? Again, copyediting really doesn't help, and yet they are so-tagged. Lfstevens (talk) 19:02, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I added a subheading for this thread to differentiate this from a separate thread.

No consensus could be generated so far. Most of us agree that there are a very large number of such articles of poor quality. Merging to the nearest parent could be a workable option. Howev, what would be that nearest parent article? To standardize the nearest parent articles, I once again propose "List of towns and villages in X district". List of towns and villages in Thane district is a good guide. However, creating such lists for all the districts of India would need a coordinated effort.--Dwaipayan (talk) 19:58, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I would merge sub-village articles into the village and villages into the "List of". I'll give it a try and see how it goes. Lfstevens (talk) 21:32, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Something to watch for: I just tried to open List of towns and villages in Thane district and got a warning that a script was threatening to cause my computer to lock up. I don't know how to find out what script, but the list is 165Kb. Are we sure that merging lots of villages like this won't have undesired consequences? --Stfg (talk) 18:14, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it is a problem with any large article. I toyed with the idea of having List of towns and villages in Thane district (A to M) and List of towns and villages in Thane district (N to Z) but policing that scheme across the myriad of districts would be well-nigh impossible. Tbh, if the article is entirely unsourced then it should be proposed for deletion; if it is unambiguously sourced to census data - and this is a pretty basic requirement - then perhaps there is scope for splitting towns from villages.

My suspicion is that (regardless of the ridiculous general community consensus re: notability of populated places), it would be far more encyclopaedic to delete many of the smaller villages. For example, my street in Manchester has maybe 200-250 residents and it has appeared in numerous news stories, local council statistical exercises etc, but I'd never anticipate it having its own article and I rather think that if I or someone else tried then it would be thrown out - it really is not notable except as a populated place in a much bigger populated place. It is not listed as a constituent place in the town article, and nor should tiny villages be listed unless there is some greater notability than mere existence. - Sitush (talk) 23:59, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Regarding that warning Stfg got, I have never seen that. Of course the size of the list is huge, due to the fact that the number of towns and villages in any district is so large. If we decide to make such lists, I think the average size would be around that of Thane list.

That alphabetical break of each list would be difficult to follow in a standardized way, as Sitush has told. Whether we delete/merge/improve the small village articles, at least they will be listed in the the district-wise lists.--Dwaipayan (talk) 04:41, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Is there a break below the district level that we could apply to create more manageable articles? That may require greater geographical knowledge than us ordinary editors posess.... Lfstevens (talk) 06:42, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

The next break below the districts are called "sub-division" or "taluka". As you can see in the Thane district list, the article is actually divided into lists according to "taluka"s. The census website that is linked as reference uses the term "Sub District", IMO, to avoid confusion, since in some states the term "taluka" is used while in other states "sub-division" is used (there may be other terms also such as "Tehsil" and "Mandal"). Sub-District has been used in the census website to stand for all such terms denoting the next hierarchic level below district.--Dwaipayan (talk) 06:55, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

If the census has standardised on a term and various other bodies use various other terms, then we should follow the census. It is a national institution and it will avoid cross-article naming issues. - Sitush (talk) 11:20, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Might it be a good idea to have redirects for the name form preferred in each individual state, too? --Stfg (talk) 22:33, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, the space that is used is cheap enough. I'm not entirely sure how the concept would pan out but I am also not someone who has much experience of geographical articles and the ramifications of such manoeuvres. - Sitush (talk) 03:19, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Bumping this - it is the second time recently that the issue of how to deal with village articles etc has cropped up. Are we any closer to a resolution? - Sitush (talk) 20:37, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Isn't there no change in the situation? Keep the stub articles whatsoever. Do you mean we should start cleaning these? Or do you mean we should find a way out of one-liner stubs? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 03:56, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Policy on Userpages that serve as article forks?

Does anyone know quite how to address Userpages which have a high hit ranking on Google, to the point of being among the top hits? The second hit for "are Nairs Kshatriyas" is User:Snnair/Nair, which in fairness caveats itself as This is an incomplete study. Please don't rely upon the present content but still basically serves as a Nair advocacy argument. Should the author put a NOINDEX tag on this to prevent it showing up in Google hits since it's an "internal" document just for discussion on Wiki or his personal reference? If he does not or can't be reached, is it appropriate for other editors to NOINDEX it to prevent it being mistaken for a proper article? MatthewVanitas (talk) 03:08, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I have experienced this too. I was creating an article in sandbox. Due to lack of RS and my laziness it took almost 1 month to complete the draft. There I found if searched with subject's full name, Google is indexing my sandbox as the first result. I have two suggestion,

• Add a notanarticle template (can not remeber the exact template name now)
• Add Magic word, __NOINDEX__. --Tito Dutta (talk) 13:39, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Use:

 {{Userspace draft|date=February 2012}}

. — Ganeshk (talk) 19:14, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't even noindex it. This particular example goes back to a period of warring on the Nair article, it has not been developed for ages and it should therefore go to WP:MFD under the WP:STALEDRAFT provisions. - Sitush (talk) 19:28, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I was not familiar with WP:MFD; listed: Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#November_23.2C_2012. MatthewVanitas (talk) 19:48, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Deletion proposal

See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List of Indian castes. - Sitush (talk) 12:10, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Requested move for Rajarhat

I have made a requested move for Rajarhat to New Town, Kolkata. All are requested to participate in the discussion here. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 02:35, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Spoken Wikipedia for India-related / Indic Language Articles?

In India, We have electricity and internet problems, and even Offline Wikipedia also shows limitation if person is unable to read/person with disabilities to read..

It may be useful to have basic health related Indic articles covered on Spoken Wikipedia. It will create general awareness about common diseases like Diabetics, Cancer, Dengue etc.

(Multimedia) Mobile Phones penetration in rural area is high, and Indic Language Spoken articles can be circulated easily via chain messaging or via operators.

Please have a look at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Indic_Languages

What do you think?

AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 08:02, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

It seems to be difficult at this time. And since articles like Diabetics, Cancer, Dengue should not be tagged as Indian articles, it'll be better if native English speakers record these. You can contact WikiProject Medicine! --Tito Dutta (talk) 06:55, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

We are planning to record those articles in Indian Languages. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 20:23, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

New article watch

Those who are aware might know that the Tedderbot was down for last few and was not updating the New article list. Now the bot has updated the list retrospectively. I request the interested members to have a check on the articles for quality and other issues from 8th November onward. Thanks. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 14:07, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

I notice Form 2E among that lot. Does this mean that we're going to get an article on each form used by the ICS etc? Surely there must be some limit! - Sitush (talk) 14:13, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes! Not just ICS, but soon you will also be able to download school admission forms from here. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 03:46, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I have put a PROD on it and I note that it is not the only one that the contributor has created. I might be wrong about the PROD but unless a decent explanation is given for any de-PROD that happens, I'll probably take it to AfD. - Sitush (talk) 04:09, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Should the "History of the Republic of India" article be rewritten as the "History of independent India"?

The story of the modern state begins on 15 August 1947, even though we weren't technically a sovereign power then. Established, magisterial sources such as Ram Guha's India After Gandhi and Bipan Chandra's India Since Independence well reveal as much from their titles itself. The founding of the Republic, although vitally important, is really looked at something that happened during the course of independent India's history, not the point at which the story starts. Thoughts?—indopug (talk) 13:59, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Posted here to generate more discussion. Left a link at the article talkpage to this discussion.—indopug (talk) 14:06, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

The article itself seems to include 1947-50; if you were to reword the lead slightly and drop the first sentence, you'd have a fairly decent coverage of 1947-today. I'm ambivalent on the title; while "Republic of India" technically only covers 1950 onwards, it feels reasonable to use it to cover all of post-independence history. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:18, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Not really. India has been an independent nation for most of its history and the article covers only the post 1947 history which is best, even though it is not completely accurate, identified as the Republic of India.--regentspark (comment) 01:42, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

please pardon my ignorance! could you please explain the rationale why you think "India" has been independent for "most" of its history. for the record, I havent heard a compelling argument yet why the article should be named either way! --CarTick (talk) 18:19, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi CarTick (and welcome back!). India was independent until before the arrival of the British, technically it was a colony only between 1858 and 1947. A history of independent India would then, naturally, cover almost everything covered by an article titled History of India, less, of course, the British rule. The Republic of India on the other hand clearly refers to the post-1947 India even though it is inaccurate at the margin. --regentspark (comment) 03:54, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

An additional issue is that the India referred to by "not independent" India is not the same as the post-colonial India since India, under the British, included what today is the Republic of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (less Goa, Daman and Diu, and Pondicherry). While accuracy would be great, historical titles are rarely obliging enough to be completely accurate. I think our current distinction between the Historical India and the Republic of India is, perhaps, the best available. --regentspark (comment) 22:32, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Somvanshi Kshatriya Pathare

The article Somvanshi Kshatriya Pathare has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Unreferenced POV fork of Pathare Prabhu.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. MatthewVanitas (talk) 19:34, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

This is a bonafide community and is different from the Pathare Prabhus. The pre-fix Somvanshiya Kshatriya may be of more recent origin (i.e. the 1800s ). This community claims to be instrumental in building Bombay for the British where the community men were employed as master builders. The community also claims to produce more architects per unit population than other communities.

Matthew, I have not produced any verifiable references here but please extend the period before the article is deleted. Jonathansammy (talk) 23:16, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Redirecting/ I'm not sure which ultimately should be the target per WP:COMMONNAME, nor am I massively happy with the sources, but see Panchkalshi. - Sitush (talk) 00:04, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Naming Dravidians under Black people

Hello every one there is RFC going on here, which is trying to acertain if dravidians and other races in the world fall under black people (races) based on skin tone or other notions , I have started a survey please contribute Shrikanthv (talk) 08:37, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dusi Benarjee

It seems this singer existed before the internet age so it is quite difficult to find sources to demonstrate notability. If someone would be able to help with sources that would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 00:24, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Can someone please ask this question to members of Telugu Wikipedia?--GDibyendu (talk) 07:31, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Mon people

There is a scheduled tribe called the Mon in J&K. Among the many disambigs for "Mon" is Mon people. Obviously, the J&K Mons are not that community. However, are they the same as the Monpa people of Arunachal Pradesh? And if I have to create a new article then does anyone know what the preferred title should be, given that "Mon people" has gone? - Sitush (talk) 07:08, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

I doubt if they're the same as the ones in Arunachal. Do we know for sure that this J&K scheduled tribe exists? --regentspark (comment) 19:25, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

They're listed in the 2001 census. Of course, it could just be some people who made up a name on the day. Wouldn't be the first time, would it? - Sitush (talk) 20:40, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Can't help ya then. They're probably a different people with no information about their origins, habits, etc. --regentspark (comment) 21:40, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

15th (Imperial Service) Cavalry Brigade

Hi I have just added this projects banner to the 15th (Imperial Service) Cavalry Brigade, which I have been working on. It was already independently graded B Class by WP:MILHIST so I have graded it B for this project. Can someone check that OK with your guidelines. Thanks. Jim Sweeney (talk) 10:22, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

M. S. Golwalkar

Could somebody weigh in on the edit war I've found myself engaged in this article? (TL;DR: I feel the article is written in a highly unencyclopedic tone that is hagiographic towards Golwalkar; the other editor feels it is "informative and neutral".)—indopug (talk) 18:56, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

One of you should have initiated a discussion at the talk page. In any case, I've reverted the last edit. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 19:26, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

And I've warned the other editor. --regentspark (comment) 19:38, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you both.—indopug (talk) 04:07, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Tamil Nadu Electricity Board and TNEB Limited

There is an ongoing dispute if the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board and TNEB Limited should be one or two articles. The proponent of separate articles says that they are different entities and therefore should have have different articles. Proponents of merged article say that even if they may be legally different entities, TNEB Limited is a successor of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board which took over Tamil Nadu Electricity Board employees and obligations and restructuring of the company alone is not a reason to create a separate article if the article duplicates information already provided in another article. The TNEB Limited provides mainly information about the restructuring of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board. Therefore, these articles were merged on 22 May 2012. Afterward, there merger was undone several times by now blocked user and his/her sockpuppets. The latest re-creation of TNEB Limited was done by new user on 24 November. The merged version is here and restored article is TNEB Limited. This is little bit messy as there has been recently a number of copy-paste moves but hopefully the situation is understandable. Your comments are appreciated. Beagel (talk) 05:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, an article that your project may be interested in, has been nominated for an individual good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. AIRcorn (talk) 12:58, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

help to find citation

Hi, Earlier this citation presented the world bank report pollution and transportation and we sourced it multiple times in Hyderabad, India here. But currently it appears to be dead link, can someone help to fix and find the report from any reliable site. We are working on the article towards FA. Regards :)--Omer123hussain (talk) 21:46, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

[1] Try the 08 report. Otherwise ask me on my talk for individuale links.Darkness Shines (talk) 21:55, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

B. S. Nijjar

Works by B. S. Nijjar are frequently cited in India-related articles, and in particular his/her Origins and History of Jats and Other Allied Nomadic Tribes of India, published by Atlantic I am trying to figure out whether Nijjar is reliable, given that GScholar shows pretty much only self-referenced citations (ie: a Nijjar work citing another Nijjar work). Of those works that I have been able to view, none appear to give any sort of information regarding their academic standing etc and nor can I find out anything using GSearch to see if they are associated with a university or whatever. Does anyone know anything about this rather prolific writer? - Sitush (talk) 04:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

This is taken from the two About the Author's given here and here

Dr. Bakshish Singh Nijjar, M.A. (History, Persian and Punjabi), Ph.D., is a well-known authority on the history, culture and language of Punjab. He had a long experience of teaching post-graduate classes in History. He was Director of Punjab State Archives. He was also member of Indian Historical Records Commission. He is sub¬editor to the Encyclopaedia of Hinduism (Pittsburgh U.S.A) on Sikh History, Religion and Literature. He has written a large number of books including History of the United Panjab, Panjab Under the Sultans 1000 — 1526, Panjab Under the Great Mughals 1526 — 1707, Panjab Under the Later Mughals 1707 — 1756, Panjab Under the British Rule 1844 — 1947, The Anglo-Sikh Wars 1844 — 1849 , Maharani Jind Kaur, The Indian Panjab 1947—1966, Jawahar Lal Nehru and Jaito Morcha, History of the Babar Akalis 1920 — 1942. He has also contributed more than one hundred Research Articles in leading Journals. He retired as Director, Punjab State Archives & Archaeology, Patiala where he put in 21 years of distinguished service. He was also a... Curator, Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska, USA. Presently based in California, USA, he takes keen interest in historical research and writing on its various aspects.

Dr B. S. Nijjar passed away in September this year. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 05:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Brilliant! Thanks very much. I've no idea why they did not appear in my GSearch but I really should have thought to check his publisher's website. With a bit more digging around it might even be ok to write up a small biographical article about him, although it would seem that I for one will not be able to do it unless there is some background on the various museum sites etc. Having his full name should help. - Sitush (talk) 06:26, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. On a cursory glance, using his full name doesn't seem to add any new information to what we already know. I'll try and dig deeper, let's see if something worthwhile comes up. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 12:17, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Shatavadhani Ganesh

Seeking eyes and people to verify sources to ensure that Shatavadhani Ganesh actually meets WP:N and the content is being presented in a WP:NPOV, and not just as a promotional advertisement. Thanks! -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 16:40, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Phonetical astrology

The article Phonetical astrology has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Articles that cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources, including neologisms, original theories and conclusions

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. --Januarythe18th (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Needs deletion , seems to be rehortical Shrikanthv (talk) 09:51, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

A mess

Marehra article is more of a mess than I can clean up, not knowing the topic. It looks like a good portion of this might be split out to a biography. - Jmabel | Talk 17:03, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Cleaned the mess, mercilessly. --Dwaipayan (talk) 18:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

List of most populous metropolitan areas in India

Please see thread at [2] and post any comments you have there. Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 07:53, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Alerts page

More people need to watch this page: Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Article alerts, it gets updated daily by a bot. There are 20+ articles with GA nomination, where review hasn't started yet. For those who can, please participate.--GDibyendu (talk) 14:34, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Railway station names

In most countries, names/ titles on railway station pages are suffixed ‘railway station’. (See Category:Railway stations in Solihull, Category:Railway stations in Sydney, Category:Railway stations in Amsterdam). In India, while many editors stuck to this rule, me and some other editors started suffixing some railway station names with ‘Junction’. I propose that all railway station names in India be suffixed only with ‘railway station’ and also correct (move) such pages as are suffixed otherwise. Other editors may please give their views, so that we can reach a consensus on the matter and act accordingly. - Chandan Guha (talk) 13:42, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I can not understand your proposal. In which articles you have made changes? Junctions and railway stations are not same! --Tito Dutta (talk) 14:48, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Examples:Kamarkundu Junction, Asansol Junction. Now, I feel that Junction is a special type of railway station and we need not put it in the title. These should have been Kamarkundu railway station, Asansol railway station. - Chandan Guha (talk) 21:37, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Imo, we should use the name the station is known by. For example, Cochin Harbour Terminus is correct while Kochi Railway Station or Cochin Harbour Railway Station would be incorrect. Railway Station should be added only if it is necessary for disambiguation. --regentspark (comment) 15:11, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Do you think that Birmingham New Street railway station or Regents Park railway station are wrongly titled? - Chandan Guha (talk) 21:50, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean. Those stations are not in India and, I assume, don't follow the same naming conventions as Indian stations do. --regentspark (comment) 03:53, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

e.g. Howrah station, Patna Junction, Lucknow Railway Station. I agree that they rather should be Howrah Railway Station, Patna Railway Station and Lucknow Railway Station. Junctions are nothing but Railway Stations with special status - there is no point in mentioning that in page title. For airports, all airports in India are named "<place> Airport", one exception is Lucknow Airport, which has been created as Chaudhary Charan Singh International Airport, but the website of the airport does not include the word International in its name. After seeing RegentsPark (talk · contribs)'s suggestions, can we have it as Cochin Harbour Terminus Railway Station, i.e. <common name without the words station/junction> + Railway Station? Does Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Railway Station sound good? --GDibyendu (talk) 15:23, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure if "Railway Station" is necessary after something like Cochin Harbour Terminus (or Mughalsarai Junction, which I was surprised to see was still a red link!). My inclination is to go with the common name and disambiguate with Railway Station only when necessary. That's what fits best with the WP:COMMONNAME.--regentspark (comment) 03:53, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

And what do we do if a city or town has two railway stations? Chennai Central, Chennai Egmore. Mangalore Central, Mangalore Junction? --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 15:29, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. Chennai Central and Chennai Egmore are better than Chennai Central Railway Station and Chennai Egmore Railway Station as are Mangalore Central and Mangalore Junction. The "Railway Station" is redundant in all those cases. Also, appending railway station to everything will add oddities like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Railway Station. In India, Junction, Terminus, Central, etc. often a part of the name of the station itself. --regentspark (comment) 15:35, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

According to me, it is not necessary to have "Railway station" appended to each station's name. While it is necessary for disambiguation purpose when a city has only one railway station and no other COMMONNAME exists like Junction or Terminus appended along with the name. The Junction and Terminus are not only COMMONNAME but OFFICIALNAME as well is most of the cases. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 16:05, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Wiki pages of almost all the railway stations of UK are having names such as ABC railway station; started checking with dab-page Manchester railway station, then by checking FL List of railway stations in Greater Manchester. Checked the links, clicked one Hag Fold, then the category Category:Railway stations in Wigan. Commonnames: if you mean to talk about local common names, then consider these things. a) Most people of Patna won't refer to Patna Junction using this name, but would use either Patna station or Patna Railway station or simply station or railway station. b) Most people of Bangalore refer to Bangalore Central railway station as simply Majestic, but that name does not provide any hint to people outside Bangalore. c) People of Chennai refers to Chennai Egmore railway station as simply Egmore. --GDibyendu (talk) 07:28, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I carefully read all the earlier comments and discussion. I also though over the issue. However, I was unable to come to any conclusion. --Bhadani (talk) 08:33, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what the common name is in the UK, but if we're looking at other countries, the US, Canada, and France articles use the common name. Thus, it is Grand Central Terminal not New York Grand Central Railway Station, and Union Station (Chicago) not Chicago Union Railway Station or even Union Railway Station (Chicago) (the city disambiguation is necessary because there are many Union Stations in the US). Station is usually a part of the common name for US and Canadian stations (though, as with the Grand Central example, not always and when it isn't it only shows up in a redirect). Similarly, for stations in France, Gare is always a part of the common name and so we get Gare du Nord not Gare du Nord Railway Station or Paris Gare du Nord Railway Station. Where disamb is necessary, we follow the French example as in Paris-Gare de Lyon. Disambiguation in titles should only be done when necessary and appending Railway Station to everything merely for consistency is not something we should be aiming for, especially when we end up losing a part of the common name (as in Terminus or Junction).--regentspark (comment) 15:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Even with all the arguments of regentspark, we can see that all countries prefix and suffix a railway station name with station/railway station/gare and so on, with some exceptions. It is so for other areas also. All rivers are suffixed/ prefixed ‘River’ with some exceptions. All districts are suffixed ‘district’, even when disambiguation is not needed – Birbhum district, West Godavari district, Gautam Buddh Nagar district. All Lok Sabha constituencies are marked as such, even when disambiguation is not required – Mumbai South (Lok Sabha constituency), Chennai North (Lok Sabha constituency). Specific names have specific suffix/ prefix. That helps in easier identification. Once this is agreed upon, we can discuss on the options for railway stations – station or railway station or something else. Exceptions can be made for names like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus because the name itself carries a specific suffix. I have a feeling that ‘station’ is more commonly used colloquially in India. Many pages have 'Junction' as suffix. Can someone say whether it is part of the official name or just a functional suffix? If so thought fit we can think of two suffixes also - 'Junction' and 'Station'. Following the suggestion of regentspark, we will only enhance the chaos that is developing in naming railway station pages in India - Delhi Junction Railway Station, Alipurduar Railway Junction. Fortunately, there are only a few now, but many more will definitely come up. - Chandan Guha (talk) 03:37, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree with regentspark. I disagree that disambiguation within the name such as by adding 'district' or 'river' suffixes or prefixes is the norm in Wikipedia. It certainly has become the norm within certain categories of India related articles, but it is certainly not universal even there (e.g. Yamuna, Dakshina Kannada. It is necessary only when disambiguation is necessary, such as in the lists quoted in the first post, e.g. Category:Railway stations in Sydney where every station is named after an existing locality. Many of the unnecessary additions of suffixes such as 'river', 'district' have been due to renaming without discussion and agreement. WP:Name is quite clear - use the most common name. Imc (talk) 07:37, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh and additionally, when a disambiguation suffix is added it should be in lower case since it is descriptive and not part of the name. As in the items in aforementioned Category:Railway stations in Sydney, otherwise there is a clear implication that the formal name of the station includes the suffix. I believe there is a WP policy statement saying this. Imc (talk) 07:43, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I too would go with "no standard format required" concept. If "Junction" is commonly used, as is in Bhopal Junction, it should be left that way. If "railway station" is commonly used, as is in Dadar railway station, it should be left that way. There is no point in moving all to any particular suffix. In case anyone wants to suggest moving a specific article, please use guidelines of WP:MOVE. §§dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 08:13, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Fine, we will have to live with the chaos that is coming up - Delhi Junction Railway Station, Alipurduar Railway Junction, Tatanagar Railway Station, Dadar railway station, Howrah station, Bhopal Junction and so on. Everyone can have it the way he likes. Variety is the spice of life! - Chandan Guha (talk) 11:41, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Just because your view wasn't accepted by everyone, that doesn't mean it results in Chaos. --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 14:56, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I have shown six variations of suffixes used in the few railway station pages that we have in India, as against one for railway stations in most other countries and in many other areas in India. Anyway, I will go by the majority opinion. I intend to change the suffix 'Railway Station' used by other editors to 'railway station', as that appears to be within the rules cited. Rest railway station pages of other editors will remain untouched. For the railway station pages I have put up or will be putting up, I am following the majority opinion. Check: Rourkela railway station, Eklakhi. However, I would like to clarify that my intention was not to hurt anybody. If it has, I am sorry. - Chandan Guha. (talk) 11:53, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Merge proposal: Pseudo-secularism

I'm proposing merger of pseudo-secularism into Secularism in India. Please contribute to the discussion here SPat ^talk 18:36, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Large amount of un-patrolled bad edits

While editing protected areas articles I came across an outstanding amount of messy edits (testedits, vandalism, non-consttructive edits) of India related articles, which have been in the articles for months. Here was a massive removal of content un-reverted for 2 months, other examples are 3 months, 2 months, 9 months... but there are dozens. Either more patrolling is needed or some kind of page-protection. --ELEKHH^T 07:58, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, sheesh. You are asking for the holy grail or something here ;) Thanks for doing some clean up but there are thousands of poor contributions to India-related articles every day and the number of people available to patrol is small compared to the burgeoning Indic user base (you can blame the WMF for some of that, I guess). If you think that the situation is bad at article X, Y or Z then be bold and whack it to WP:RFPP. Otherwise, we'll just have to keep muddling on, I guess. - Sitush (talk) 08:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

What I'm saying is that this seems unsustainable, regardless of any degree of boldness. I agree that obviously there are not enough editors patrolling. So we need protection, but RFPP in its current form is not useful. The only solution I can see is flagged revisions across all India related articles. --ELEKHH^T 08:31, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I thought that the wider en-WP community had rejected FR for now? I can't say that I am wonderfully enamoured of it. - Sitush (talk) 08:38, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh yeh, I meant pending changes. That would hide bad edits as in the examples above being seen by thousands of readers. The massive removal of content I already mentioned has been experienced by 30,000 readers. I am less than enamoured of that. --ELEKHH^T 09:29, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I've never really looked at PC. I think it went live a day or so ago but couldn't be bothered reading the reams of grumbling that preceded it by some months! I guess I'd better read the description etc - presumably it can be applied to a subset, eg: all articles tagged as being of interest to this project that are not tagged for any other project? I mean, if we start treading on the toes of others then it may not go down well. - Sitush (talk) 09:34, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I've read WP:PCPP and am not sure how it is really going to help in a lot of cases. Obviously, there will be some exceptions but the qualifying criteria is fundamentally as for page semi-protection, ie: you have to demonstrate persistent vandalism, violations of BLP or copyright violations (the latter presumably on more than a one-off basis). I can see that the way it operates might be nice but the trigger for deploying it seems little different. All articles in the India-Pakistan etc sphere are subject to sanctions, btw, although using them for the examples that you give above would probably raise a few eyebrows. - Sitush (talk) 11:10, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, those are the standard guidelines but WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY and WP:IAR could apply if there was consensus within the WikiProject to tackle a general problem in a systematic way. --ELEKHH^T 22:10, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Could we have something that's a mixture of WP:FLR and WP:PCPP? Meaning; when an editors cleans and tidies some article, they can set a flag to that revision. This flag would not be setting this version as the visible version. It would only be set to mean that this version is a verified and better version. That way when a patrolling editors sees some vandal, they can simply revert it to this flagged version. Its not always easy to find which version is good one. With this flag, it will be easy. All articles with such flags will be grouped in some maintenance invisible category. Regular patrolling in this category will be quite easy. I have myself had to revisit many article to find a huge lot of mess. Even though not very easy, finding my version is not very difficult. But i would be unable to do that if i was not a regular visitor of this page.
What say Sitush, how many times have the List of notable people been added back to articles once you have already cleaned them? Actually, this should be applied for every article. But then it wont serve our aim of ease in patrolling. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 17:55, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Huh, a "last good edit" privilege could be interesting, wherein recognised good editors could "mark" a version as having been properly reviewed in some way highly visible in the History. It'd have to have some clear guidance for usage, so that folks only plant their flag when they've carefully gone through and hacked out POV and uncited material, but still has some potential.

I agree that South Asia topics have some sustainability issues that, to my eyes, seem more pronounced than many other regions of the world. Due, again to my eyes, to having a large number of English speakers, but some of limited proficiency, a huge internet-using population, and a number of really hot-button social issues that are relatively insular to their area to the point that not many non-local editors are inclined to wade into some of the caste issues, regional politics, etc. This is not meant as a slam on India, so much as recognition there may be somewhat of a "perfect storm" situation occurring; I have also wondered if WMF penetration in areas of Sub-Saharan Africa with high rates of English speakers and internet access might have accompanying waves of adjustment in the future. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:04, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

The proposal by Dharmadhyaksha sounds appealing and applicable. Somehow flagging the good version of an article. Some invisible maintenance category sounds good. If we have a working consensus here, how would we apply that, I mean what would be the technique?--Dwaipayan (talk) 18:14, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

(ec) Since flagged revisions are not enabled on en wikipedia, I don't think we have a way to indicate "good revisions" through a formal flag. We do have edit summaries though, so something like "This is a good version" from an editor in good standing would be one way to informally indicate that a revision is a good one. I'm a little vary of blanket application of PCP because we don't as yet know how well the backlog can be managed and also because vandalism on India pages won't always be obvious to other editors and we might assume that an accepted edit is automatically a good one. But, you're right that we need some sort of process in place to manage the junk that keeps showing up (while, at the same time, not turning off genuine new editors). I wonder if a bot can automatically add articles to a category of the "India articles needing edit verification" sort? The backlog will be huge but, at least, we'll have a placeholder. --regentspark (comment) 18:16, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

@RP: The edit summary way seems very crude one. If we could somehow club these articles on one page with their info like, date and time on which this good version was made and whether it was edited after that, then it would be easy. And it looks like some bot can keep updating this huge list. If not, we will personally or in a group have to maintain such a list. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 18:42, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that it's crude but I can't see any way of maintaining good versions in our current set up since we don't have flagged revisions. It seems to me that, unless there is some other way to flag articles, the only way is to run a bot that adds articles with edits from unconfirmed editors to a category and an editor who confirms the edit simply removes the category from the article (we'd need to prevent the bot from re-adding the article unless there is a new unconfirmed edit). I'm not bot savvy enough to figure this out but hopefully someone else is. --regentspark (comment) 18:55, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Do you want to suggest we should run such bot on all articles in Category:WikiProject India articles? That would not help in patrolling and is also not really necessary. We can't crowd this category with all articles. Lets start filling it up by adding reviewed articles to it one by one. A bot would be needed to only update a remote list with necessary info of these articles. Periodic updation is sufficient, no live reports required. This flag things would most probably have to be something new. WP:FLR wont work. Please notify some bot-man you know of this discussion. They might help us more practically. Or else we would sit and come up with many amazing ideas with our fertile brains, but would not be able to implement any. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 19:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I actually think it better to run it on all India articles. If we follow a review-add to list-review cycle, we'll be focusing more on articles that we already focus on and not on the vast majority of articles where vandals fly in under the radar. The bot doesn't have to run in real time or even every day. Run it once, add every article where the last edit was from an unconfirmed editor to the category. Reviewers review the article and delete the category. Every subsequent run (perhaps monthly) the bot needs only look for articles where the last edit is from an unconfirmed editor and was made after the previous run and add the category to it (if it is not already in that category). That way we always have a comprehensive list that we can use. (Perhaps a bot writer - Tinucherian? - can chime in here.)--regentspark (comment) 19:30, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

This above plan by RegentsPark sounds plausible. Although there will be a huge pile of articles in the beginning, over several months the number will gradually decrease. --Dwaipayan (talk) 20:18, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure how practical it be to turn the idea into a bot but this sounds like a way to avoid treading heavily on the toes of projects that also have an interest in an article. It won't, of course, help if the article has not been tagged as being of interest to us in the first place, and I'm constantly finding examples of completely untagged articles. But the latter is a different issue and doubtless if I look hard enough there will be a maintenance category for articles unassociated with projects. ... and some poor soul slogging through it every day trying to fix them and getting no thanks at all! - Sitush (talk) 22:17, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

@Sitush: Category:WikiProject India articles has 1 lakh 18 thousand plus articles; sufficient enough for us all. Don't worry of those untagged articles now.
@RP: When you say "confirmed users", do you mean WP:CONFIRM? But there is no difference between "confirmed user" and "auto-confirmed user" as is defined at WP:AUTOCONFIRM. There are many confirmed users (4 days old and 10 edits +) but who would not meet the criteria that we want here. We would hence have to go for reviewer/rollbacker or such rights. This category idea could also work. But even with this category thing, we would still require some easy way of identifying which version is verified one. If some page is favorite of IPs, the reviewed version would easily be lost.
@MV: I don't think this concept could be used to keep check on POV and uncited stuff too. Although Mr. Wales says "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information" and that "citation needed" tags should also not be used, it isnt practical. There will be many things that aren't verifiable then and there. But removing them in this mission would only harm.
Anyways... that's a question we need to tackle in late future. Lets figure out how to practically begin this with. Have informed Anomie and Tinucherian about this discussion. Hope they can help us. Don't you think whole of the Wikipedia should be interested in this than just WP:IN? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 08:57, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

There's more to Wikipedia than merely WP:IN ? Blimey. - Sitush (talk) 09:00, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Arbitrary Section break 1

This tool allows for monitoring recent changes on WP:IN articles. Though there is no way to filter the changes to unconfirmed users. May be we can ask User:Dispenser to add that functionality. — Ganeshk (talk) 13:21, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I have left a note on Dispenser's talk page. — Ganeshk (talk) 13:33, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Ganesh for this tool. Didn't know about it. But this isn't what i imagined. Here, the list will keep on changing and all article would not be patrolled. In my mind, the list/table of articles is static; arranged 1 to Z. Its status is written in front of it; as in if its current revision is a reviewed one or not. By current i don't expect the list to be dynamic like this tool. Current is as to the time when the bot was run. Could we do something like that? Should we experiment on a small scale? Maybe use sub-project like Category:WikiProject Indian literature articles? It has a bit less than 2K articles. That means enough scope and it also attracts less but sufficient vandals/non-confirmed users and would be easy to maintain. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 18:08, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Go to Category:Indian television actors and then click on "Related changes" in the toolbox on your left (monobook skin, must be something like that on vector skin too). And you can also find a script that will highlight changes that happened since your last visit to that page etc. To try it out, you can check the related changes on this page, I just found out that there were two odd edits to my user page today, which I missed on my watchlist! —SpacemanSpiff 18:17, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Didn't know of this either. But still doesn't help. At the instant when i checked, the top 50 had same repeated names of Vidya Balan, Rakhi Sawant, Ram Kapoor, etc. listed more than once. This won't help patrolling remote articles. What we need is; okay Vidya Balan, last edit was by Bollyjeff, and he flags it as All-Okay, then i dont need to visit it. If he hasnt flagged it, maybe i should go and check revisions from its last flag and then edit and set flag here. Last edit was by some unknown guy, maybe i should do the same check. (Are my demands getting over board?) §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 18:45, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists, there's some scripts and if your wikicode savvy enough, you can modify some of those scripts to do what you want and place it in your common.css. I have User:SpacemanSpiff/common.css configured such that changes since I visited the page are highlighted. I have no idea about wikicode stuff, so if you find someone who does, you may be able to accomplish at least part of what you want -- you could see who posts the most un-understandable looking stuff on VP Technical and ask them for help! —SpacemanSpiff 18:56, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what to do with States of india by hindi speakers

The capitalisation of States of india by hindi speakers clearly needs fixing. However, the title feels awkward and I'm not even sure whether the content should exist as a standalone list nor, if it should, whether it would be better both to adjust the title and turn the list into a sortable table. I'm going to leave a note concerning this thread on the list's talk page. - Sitush (talk) 13:55, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I think that it can be a stand alone article, however, needs work. For now, I renamed it to List of states and territories of India by number of Hindi speakers. Any suggestions? TheSpecialUser ^TSU 14:45, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Can someone add a column with total population of the state (in 2001), in order that one can understand what percentage of the population Hindi speakers formed? - Chandan Guha (talk) 15:58, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I would move it to the article Hindi under a new section of Demographics if anyone seconds this thought. The section can also grown on to include stats of Hindi speakers around the world. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 17:17, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Merged it anyways to Hindi#Demographics! §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 08:27, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think that a merge makes sense. - Sitush (talk) 15:49, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Good merge! --regentspark (comment) 16:04, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Now moved to Hindi languages#Demographics per discussion at Talk:Hindi#New_section_-_Demographics. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 03:43, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:Indigenous people of India

Category:Indigenous peoples of India is being considered for renaming to Category:Scheduled Tribes of India. Contributions from people connected with this project at the CfD are desired.John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:30, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Change of article name from "sarapatel" to "sorpotel"

Although I've come across articles which have both the names "sarapatel" and "sorpotel", "sorpotel" is the actual name of the dish. It might be called sarapatel in certain regions, but as a Goan and growing up with this dish, I recommend the name be changed to "sorpotel", while it may be mentioned in the article that the dish is also called "sarapatel" in some regions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geminicris (talk • contribs) 10:39, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I took a look at this. Apparently, the dish is common in Brazil as well and there it is known as Sarapatel. Whether Sorpotel or Sarapatel is more common is uncertain and I suggest you initiate a move request on the article talk page if you think Sorpotel is the correct title. See WP:RM for instructions on how to initiate a move request or ping me on my talk page for help. --regentspark (comment) 15:03, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Change of Importance Scale

I have found in three instances, to name them Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble and Suresh Raina; the article's importance scale has been changed to top by Whitetararaj. However I don't know if he has taken these steps on his own or discussed it with someone. Please look into this.--Vyom25 (talk) 17:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

The importance rating practically doesn't matter. So if you wish to change them back, do that. If this reverting results in a fight, i would recommend you to back off and not pay attention to it. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 08:16, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I could have reverted it back but I didn't because to me it is not that important but I thought of asking it here if anything is fishy. I am leaving it alone.--Vyom25 (talk) 13:34, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

This regularly happens with actor and cricketer articles with changes based on personal preferences. Sometimes I change back if I notice. —SpacemanSpiff 15:34, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Noticeboard

Resolved

Can anyone have a look at the Noticeboard. I guess there is some problem with the code due to which the layout is not displayed properly. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 04:39, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I looked at it. Although i know i am duh! with codes and scripts. I couldn't even figure out on what page the error must have occurred that is resulting in failure of display here. But just so you know... i looked at it. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 07:53, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

There are no recent edits to any of its related pages. Should be some kind of mediawiki malfunction. I have left a message on the talk page of the creator of the layout. --Anbu121 (talk me) 08:29, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I have fixed the issue. — Ganeshk (talk) 13:19, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Rajya Sabha debates

I'm after a page or two from Rajya Sabha proceedings. While some proceedigs are online, the search function is not great and I've not been able to locate the one that I need. I only know of its existence because it appears here in snippet view on GBooks around p. 239 of "Parliamentary debates: official report, Volume 180, Issues 18-20". Can anyone get hold of this or perhaps even narrow down what date applies and what the proceedings were entitled? My guess is that it is going to require access to a good library. - Sitush (talk) 09:03, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

What debate are you exactly looking for? Or just samples? Their serve seems slow. Try http://rsdebate.nic.in/community-list if you havent already tried that. One such sample is here on "Rehabilitation of poor families living on Railway land in Gujarat under RAY" on 21-Dec-2011. But this sample is verbatim and hence you would only get to read English words (most of which are "please sit down"). §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 10:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

LOL! GBooks metadata is often not reliable, but they claim this volume is from 1997. I've no idea what the debate or whatever concerns but the page is listing OBCs. I'm not even interested in the list, just the terminology that is used. In particular, the word "synonym". Pages 238-240 would probably be enough to clarify because p. 239 appears to be the start of the list. - Sitush (talk) 10:36, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

This is all I could scoop from GBooks: approached the Commission for inclusion of Muslim community in the Central List of Backward Classes for the State. ... Cutchi Menmon Navayat Turukkan, Dakhni muslims on the basis of findings of and independent study conducted by Anatha Krishna Iyer, international Centre for Anthropological Studies, Palakkad and other available sources of information with... (c) The Government have reconstituted the National Commission for Backward Classes recently and the pending requests for Castes/sub-castes/communities shall be... The Government of India, vide the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pension (Department of Personnel and Training) O.M. No.. sub-castes/synonyms) for inclusion/amendment in the Central Lists of OBCs in respect of the following States ... the list follows. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 11:03, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Text on the page is headed "Annexure" and then continues "Inclusion/Amendments in the Central List of other Backward Classes in respect of the following States:" (that is their capitalisation). A table of state names follows, of which I can see "1. Bihar", "2. Goa" "5. Orissa" and "6. Uttar Pradesh". Aside from p 239, the word "synonym" also appears around the same area, eg: p. 241 deals with the Haryana list and says "Names of Castes/Communities (including sub-castes/synonyms) in the Central List of OBCs"

What I am trying to nail here is how we interpret these lists when it comes to article linking - which are synonyms and which are sub-castes. Most of what I have seen appear to be synonyms, but not all. Somewhere, the GoI/NCBC must give a proper indication of this, surely? Although, having said that, since there isn't even a definition for "Tribe" in "Scheduled Tribes", perhaps my faith in an orderly system in misguided. - Sitush (talk) 11:05, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I couldn't locate anything in the archive link that i gave you. As said before, they are incomplete. Maybe Wikimedia Foundation or WikiSource or someone like that should start dialogues with government authorities to allow hosting files and historic information. If they start now, they might get something in coming decades. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 10:39, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The UK nearest equivalent is Hansard, which is available online from practically the year dot. I rather think that the US Congressional Record and the proceedings of the European Union are similarly available. I find a lot of Indian government websites to be somewhat confusing and, yes, even incomplete but they'll get there eventually, I am sure, and it may even just be a cultural thing whereby my expectations differ. Who am I to argue against a billion people?! Still, for the purposes of my enquiry, it does seem that the nomenclature of the OBC lists is imperfect because they do not clarify which are synonyms and which are subdivisions. - Sitush (talk) 13:02, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Dildarnagar Kamsar

Hi. Could someone from the project take a look at the article Dildarnagar Kamsar, the template Template:Dildarnagar Kamsar and the book Book:Dildarnagar Kamsar? I cannot find any reliable sources that discuss Dildarnagar Kamsar and the article's author Zamania123 (talk · contribs) has already shown that he can insert very dubious information in articles (for instance, changing the population of Dildarnagar Fatehpur Bazar from 11,000 to 390,000 [3]). Another problem is that he has created a whole bunch of unreferenced fourteen-word stubs on small villages in Dildarnagar Kamsar that should either be referenced properly or merged into a more meaningful list article. In any case, I'm not familiar enough with the area to sort this out so I'd be grateful if someone here can do the clean up. Thanks, Pichpich (talk) 14:53, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't seem to be officially designated place -- can't find any sources at gov.in or nic.in. This Hindi-language newspaper page mentions that कमसार ("Kamsaar") is one of the two major "social" divisions of the Zamania Assembly Constituency in the Ghazipur district. This page says that Nasir Hussain was a native of the locality known as Kamsaar, and established the Kamsaar Film production company. The Ghazipur district website also mentions this company, and says he was born in Usain village near Dildarnagar (most probably wrong -- multiple reliable sources say Hussain was born in Bhopal; his ancestors may have been from Ghazipur, though). Several self-published sources mention "Kamsar-o-bar ("कमसारो-बार") -- a couple of Hindi newspaper articles mention this term. E.g. [4] and [5] indicate that "Kamsaar-o-bar" is an area in Dildarnagar. The image in the article is that of a Mughal Palace at Ghazipur -- I've requested the name change on Commons.

In short, the place called "Kamsaar" or "Kamsar-o-bar" does seem to exist, according to the local Hindi newspaper reports. But it doesn't seem to be an officially designated area. It could be possible that it's the name of a former administrative block, which no longer exists. Or maybe the official English transliteration is different. utcursch | talk 06:11, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Apparently, this "Nasir Hussain" is different from the Bollywood filmmaker Nasir Hussain. utcursch | talk 04:32, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Indic Scritps

Hi guys sorry to bring about same topic again, but i noticed one more thing inbetween here RfC: Native languages in lead there was sub opinion comment on Use Indic (state specific) for geographic locations and most have voted support, so i am going to do an RFC again just for this subpart what do you think Shrikanthv (talk) 14:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I second that. Though the previous one got clear consensus, I feel that a bit more input is needed. Thanks. TheSpecialUser ^TSU 02:24, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Use of Indic (state specific) for geographic locations

Can Indic coptics be used for articles related to Geographic locations ? Shrikanthv (talk) 14:52, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Alt 1 : "Articles on presently populated places that are part of the census or governance hierarchy, can contain the official language script(s) of the state/UT and or their own local jurisdiction in addition." Suggested by SpacemanSpiff

Alt 2 : "Adding official langaugages in the info box in the pages and not to use any indic scripts in the lead section" - suggested by ? (Indian community)

• Query - how would this affect the nomenclature of trans-state rivers, mountain ranges etc? - Sitush (talk) 08:57, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

§§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 10:08, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

• Suggestion Adding names according to how they are called officially by the governance authority in the involved states, in there langauage. it would really be more comprehensive as same river is called in different names,hopefully a single river or mountain range for sure is not crossing the whole country ! Shrikanthv (talk) 15:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

• Geographical features can get very problematic - at one point, Indus River had sixteen names in thirteen languages, plus nine transliterations, plus four "literal names"... all in the lead sentence! The "populated places" limit below makes sense. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:19, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

• This is too non-specific for an RfC; ideally I'd like to see a specific proposal that spits out what language script should be allowed also. My starting point would be "Articles on presently populated places that are part of the census or governance hierarchy, can contain the official language script(s) of the state/UT and or their own local jurisdiction in addition." This would mean that Delhi would contain Hindi (Devanagari), Urdu (Nastaliq), and Punjabi (Gurumukhi -- not Shahmukhi), while Mumbai would include only Marathi (Devanagari), and Hyderabad would include Telugu and Urdu (as it as an official language of the city). The census or governance rider should take care of the issues brought out by Sitush above. Anyone can feel free to use this as a starting point to put forth a proposal. As I mentioned in the earlier RfC, there's value to having local scripts for such places as checking governmental sources becomes easier, especially with the transliteration issues. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 15:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok I am adding your suggestion to the above RFC proposal as it seems that it is more specific Shrikanthv (talk) 15:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

That would be better but in the interests of keeping track of changes and the problems of subtle vandalism etc discussed generally in the original RfC, any such scripts should be sourced. - Sitush (talk) 15:48, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

• Query What about trans regional places? E.g. (I know I keep bringing this up!) will Delhi have nastaliq, gurmukhi and devanagri? Chandigarh? Palghat? Darjeeling? Locations in Goa? Places in Uttar Pradesh? --regentspark (comment) 16:09, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

RP, lets not drop this whole indic script system just because it is difficult and incorrect to finalizes one or two scripts for such limited few articles. A suggestion of using footnotes for such cases was given in that RfC. I would also suggest that if not in lead, indic scripts should only be placed in infobox so they do not clutter the very opening line. Infobox is exactly right there besides lead and i dont suppose anyone would object that. (I was against indic scripts on biographies and miscellaneous articles in the 1st RfC. But since then i have come across instances where non-Indian editors have asked for indic scripts at AfDs and this has helped in proving notability. Hence, lets not think of this minority as a majority.) §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 17:38, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not against indic scripts in geographic articles, but we need to think this through carefully or we're going to have all the usual edit warring problems. Using official scripts is easy enough but it leads to over scripting (Delhi, Chandigarh, UP articles, for example) and anomalies (Darjeeling and Palghat are good examples of those). The infobox only suggestion is a good one though. --regentspark (comment) 17:59, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)That was my point in the previous RfC, as far as places go, it's extremely easy to get the info based on the local script, not to establish notability, but just to get the necessary village/taluk website at the least as many local governments have their websites in the state language only although the links are in English. Chandigarh, Delhi etc have multiple official languages so they get multiple scripts, Palghat doesn't so only Malayalam script. IMHO that's a better solution than creating exceptions for the Palghat/Coimbatore region or the Bangalore/Dharmapuri region etc. Likewise, for Pondicherry it would include French everywhere, but also Telugu for Yanam and Malayalam for Mahe. For UP/Bihar, the governments treat Urdu as a secondary official language and all gazette notifications are published in that, so I'd say we add Devanagari and Nastaliq. That said, I'm open to not having this in the lede, but only in the infobox or some such solution. —SpacemanSpiff 18:01, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I could see what the british would have gone through while granting independence to India :) , I would also support the infobox for these type of articles, we can forget about adding this in lead section but to have an info box containing official languages of the region , ya i would support this and adding this idea as alt 2 in the top and using Devanagiri or Nastaliq on pages of states like Tamilnadu ,Gujurat or Punjab , I would feel would be nightmare, its better go with suggeston only in the info box .Shrikanthv (talk) 07:03, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

@RP and @SS: So you don't mind including more than one language on these specific articles if they are added in infobox and not lead? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 10:41, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I think we'll have to when there is more than one official language since we can't go around picking only one for inclusion. --regentspark (comment) 14:14, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree with RegentsPark that we'll have to show > 1 in the infobox if this proposal is successful. We then have to determine what order they appear in, otherwise people will be fighting even over that! Alpha-order by Romanised language name? Bengali, Hindi, Marathi - you get the idea, even though it wouldn't be those three in one article? Or is someone going to say that there is a preferred official language for place X and that should take precedence? - Sitush (talk) 14:33, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd say go with local hierarchy and if there isn't any Romanized alpha of language name (not script); so in Delhi it would be Hindi - Punjabi - Urdu (which incidentally happens to be Romanized alpha also), but in the case of Pondicherry it would be Tamil-French + Telugu/Malayalam where applicable. And yes, I'm fine with multiple in the infobox and not including in the lede. —SpacemanSpiff 16:29, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Order by demographics is logical. I don't think any town will have same %age of people speaking two languages. But that sorts out towns. What about rivers/mountain ranges? Do we count how much they flow in each state? Here too i suppose we could get a rough idea and fix the order. But looking at people fighting over what to include, i am sure they will fight over what should sit on top. Alphabetical order is also okay for me. If not, let the disputing parties decide it on respective talk pages and have it per their consensus.
Now whether one or more, for uniformity, should we have all indic scripts only in infobox?
And answering Sitush on sourcing the script, i think that would be difficult. Do you mean you want a source that says "Rajkot is written as રાજકોટ in Gujarati"? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 17:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Not quite, D. Census reports or an official list of some other description should suffice as verification in almost all cases. - Sitush (talk) 10:13, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

IMHO explicitly leave out rivers, mountains -- peaks and ranges, etc out of this. We don't need another Cauvery water dispute carrying on here! I don't think we should do demographics -- that becomes difficult, official status is simpler IMO. Delhi is crystal clear = Hindi is the primary while Punjabi and Urdu are secondary. If you go for demographics then places like Ambala will be difficult to tackle. —SpacemanSpiff 17:12, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

What about places like Darjeeling? Will it have Bengali script before Devanagari?
Sourcing of script is necessary as without it concept of verifiability would be breached. In the absence of proper sourcing, I've to ask my Tamil fellow to verify which one of கங்னம் and கங்கை is Ganges. — Bill william compton^Talk 17:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

• Suggestion - Transwiki Link: I have seen many feedbacks (AFTv5) where people ask for a translation of the article in the regional language. The languages toolbox in the sidebar doesn't catch their eyes. If Indic scripts are added to articles, can we have a transwiki link attached to it? And this would partially take care of the verifiability of the script. --Anbu121 (talk me) 17:33, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

• @BWC: Per my proposal Bengali (Bengali script) would come ahead of Nepali (Devanagari) for places in Darjeeling district.
• I also think Anbu's suggestion is quite good, where we have "home wiki" articles, the easiest way to reference would be to link to मुंबई for Mumbai, or சென்னை for Chennai. However, for many villages, "home wiki" articles don't exist and for those we ought to have a separate way to identify by having a repository of district websites or something. (This isn't very different from Chinese names for places, incidentally there was this ruckus over 1000 such articles on Chinese villages which had wrong spelling etc and I think they were all deleted about a year back, so this isn't a new or unique problem). —SpacemanSpiff 02:31, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

West Bengal currently has six official languages, viz. Bengali, Nepali, Santhali, Oriya, Hindi and English. So, what do we must do in case of articles from WB? Any solutions. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 10:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

• They have official status only in districts and blocks with a population greater than 10%, so it's not all WB per my understanding of West Bengal official language (amendment) bill, 2012. —SpacemanSpiff 12:19, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Options

Option 1  :- Use of Transwiki links in lead if the articles are present in the concurrent langauge wikipedia, and to use info box if not present and to mention official languages of the Geographical place for which the census or governance hierarchy, containing the official language script(s) of the state/UT and or their own local jurisdiction in addition will be considered as a reliable sources (suggested by Anbu, [User:SpacemanSpiff|SpacemanSpiff]] .... )

• Support we do know that India is of Multilanguages and every 10 KM in any direction in the country can bring about some change in diaelect or langauage. To make wiki articles more localised and help people to navigate local sources for information use of indic scripts is needed.

The idea is not to demoral minor communities, but may be better integrate them locally, for sake of few disputed language places let us not abonden the idea for the whole nation, my suggestion would be let us start with the above option and will ammend as we come across complexcities Shrikanthv (talk) 07:15, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Requested move for Durgapur, West Bengal

A discussion for moving the article Durgapur, West Bengal to Durgapur is going on. Please leave your comments and opinions here. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 10:44, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Posted, though I saw it in my watchlist! --Tito Dutta (talk) 10:55, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Malls in India

Have a very keen interest in writing wikipedia articles for Indian malls. Have sufficient information in terms of observation, notable references for the malls in Mumbai. Need volunteers from other cities where malls become part and parcel of our daily lives for shopping, pleasure and business. Reference for the list of mall - List_of_shopping_malls_in_India. If we have enough volunteers, would love to take this forward as a WikiProject. Moksh Juneja 07:06, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikiproject Indian Malls? I am not optimistic! Sorry! --Tito Dutta (talk) 10:56, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Your WikiProject already has some task at hand. Try and save these article if you can. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Empress City Mall, Nagpur and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Poonam Mall, Nagpur. After that please re-assess your proposal. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 11:51, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Category:1865 establishments in Pakistan

There is a CfD proposing merging Category:1865 establishments in Pakistan to Category:1865 establishments in India. Since the idea of a seperate Muslim state was not propsoed until 1930 (see Pakistan Movement) and the name Pakistan was not proposed until 1933, it seems extrelely anachronistic to use the designation in 1865. Your comments on the CfD would be appreciated.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:15, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Swami Vivekananda Featured article on 12 January 2013

That is 150 birth anniversary of Vivekananda. Can we aim to make the article featured article on that day? --Tito Dutta (talk) 08:14, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

You mean to work to take it from B class to FA status and feature it also? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 08:27, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Ya, work can be done very quickly if someone lists the works and then comes featuring! --Tito Dutta (talk) 09:22, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I support , Applying for GA first Shrikanthv (talk) 09:38, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunate! You could wait for a while! I had to undo the nomination! The article would be quick failed if nominated. One major issue (close paraphrasing in some paragraphs) needs to be fixed still! And there are CN tags too which I have been fixing today! At least one reference needs to be replaced with a better and more reliable one! --Tito Dutta (talk) 10:46, 17 December 2012 (UTC) 10:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

HI , I haver renominated for GA , As i guess most of you guys have reworked the article plenty, also trying to bring a reviewer to achieve this , remember the dead line is not too far Shrikanthv (talk) 13:30, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Help with cites at Potti Sreeramulu

This bio of an independence activist and supporter of the formation of Andhra State wasn't terrible, but had some POV and misformatting. I've done a basic cleanup, but it could use some more citations. These should be plentifully available online, so if there are any Andhra enthusiasts here, this may be a good window to get an key Andhra bio up to GA. Just a suggestion. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:52, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

CFD for Category:Ezhava People

There is an ongoing discussion regarding Category:Ezhava People. The discussion is located here. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 02:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Peer-review

Hello there, Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Peer review page is mentioned at WP:INB's Announcements section! While the "WP:WikiProject India/Peer review" is inactive since 2009 with a {{historical}}. So I think it should be removed from WP:INB page. There are several new requests by Users lately and those are pending since, except couple of have reviewed by Redtigerxyz and others. Thanks! -- ɑηsuмaη ^{ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ} 10:05, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Removing from INB's announcements sounds right. But with Wikipedia:Peer review present do we even need our separate peer review page? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 10:34, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The page-link should exist in WP:INB, so that people who are interested to join the department, can do so by enlisting themselves. However, the list of requests from this page should be archived. Editors who want to raise peer-review requests from members of WP:IN can do so by adding peer-review=yes, in the WP India's banner in the talk page of the article. Once that is done, it creates a link of a subpage under Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Peer review, where the reviewers can add their review comments. The fact that a request has been raised gets listed in Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Article_alerts page.--GDibyendu (talk) 18:04, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

I was wrong; the alerts page is now showing only the peer-review requests which are raised at Wikipedia:Peer review.--GDibyendu (talk) 18:32, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Gibberish requires fixing

Uruthikottai Vattagai Nagarathar seems mostly to be gibberish and has been multiply tagged for many months. I rather think that it is intended to be an article about a social group who are an offshoot of Nagarathar but its only category is as a village article. Can it be fixed or should it be redirected to the (presumed) main article? - Sitush (talk) 15:13, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Gibberish doesn't belong here, I can't understand what the article is supposed to be about, so prodded Crusoe8181 (talk) 05:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Spider Girls

Hi. I'm looking for the India Wikipedia version of this article. Can someone please help? Thanks. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 03:37, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Greetings and new year wishes behalf of Noticeboard for India-related topics. India Wikipedia version? Did you mean articles in Indian languages (most probably we don't have any)! --Tito Dutta (talk) 01:00, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello. Thanks and greetings to you too. I meant Hindi or some of the other language wikipedias. The girls are pretty famous I think. I'm surprised that they probably don't have an article. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:07, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Very nice article Anna, but does this file really qualify WP:NFCC? I've created Hindi version of the article (also a DYK there). — Bill william compton^Talk 16:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't it qualify in a way better manner than the film posters, album covers and wedding gowns of celebrities? And good job of the Hindi version. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 18:13, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Posters, album covers, etc, have explicitly claimed copyright status. WP:NFCC#1 states: "Non-free content is used only where no free equivalent is available, or could be created", I can accept that no free equivalent is available but it's hard to understand why one cannot be created. They are circus performers and anyone can take their pictures. — Bill william compton^Talk 19:11, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Thats right. Hence i have edited the "replacable?" section to "Yes, when free equivalent of the subjects is available." Posters go in public domain after a certain period, deceased people's snaps also go in public domain similarly. So a free equivalent of everything is available at a certain later time. With that logic no images should be uploaded under NFCC. I don't support uploading non-free images of all people. But here their notability and anatomy is best explained through image. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 19:40, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Pondicherry→Puducherry RM

I generally don't post my RMs here. But, it is an important one. I am not asking you to support. Support, oppose or do whatever you want. The discussion is here --Tito Dutta (talk) 20:21, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Project members may be interested in another requested move discussion that falls into the project's field at Talk:Orissa#Requested move (on moving Orissa to Odisha). Skinsmoke (talk) 09:31, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Bicholim conflict

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bicholim conflict - previously assessed as a Good Article under WikiProject India. I believe this is the longest undetected India-related hoax article, surpassing Talinsfadasporia. utcursch | talk 02:06, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Ehhh: This is in the news too Yahoo, PCWorld. --Tito Dutta (talk) 14:08, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Has been added to List of hoaxes on Wikipedia. — Ganeshk (talk) 00:21, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Incredible! And amusing.--Dwaipayan (talk) 02:26, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Caste identification

My apologies to everyone for raising this point again, but after looking at policy more carefully, I realize that I and others have made fundamental mistakes regarding policy and that I think we need to seriously consider relaxing our current rules. This has been discussed in a number of places; for two from this board, see this one and this. In those discussions, people generally looked to WP:BLPCAT to draw a parallel, and argued that caste is equivalent to ethnicity, and thus require for living people evidence that the caste is connected to the person's notability along with evidence that the person self-identifies as being in that caste. Unfortunately, this parallel is fundamentally flawed, because WP:BLPCAT only places restrictions on religion and sexual preference, not on ethnicity. And while it places restrictions on categories, lists, navboxes, etc., it certainly places no restrictions on article text themselves. This has to do with the fact that article text can cover details, caveats, and the like, while cats, etc., cannot (they "factually" "state" that such and such a person is religion X).

If we look at the parallel of ethnicity, we will see across Wikipedia that we list people's ethnicity explicitly in articles, usually in an "Early history" or "Personal life" section. Often we do this by stating things like "X's father came from Country X" or "She was born to Jewish parents". Of course, we still must have a WP:BLP compliant source (high quality RS, but we don't need a self-identification, nor do we need some connection to notability. Note that for people related to Judaism, we do this even when the person has explicitly rejected the religion, under the grounds that Jewish-ness is still an ethnic identity (though, of course, we would also provide a sourced statement saying that the person has rejected that identity).

I have to say that upon reflection, I was wrong to attempt to apply the stricter religion/sexual preference requirements to caste, and think that we should instead apply the ethnicity rules. That is, for living people, we still require a source, but we do not require either self-identification or connection to notability within article texts. Finally, of course, WP:MOSLEAD still applies, so we would not mention the caste in the lead. Qwyrxian (talk) 07:16, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! Now if others also don't mind this or mind this, lets discuss it here and later on add some text in WP:BLP or other appropriate place. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 09:46, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

We should not be assigning a caste to someone who has not self-identified because it is a hot potato socially & they should have the right to choose. In the south of India it is often deliberately avoided - people there are reluctant to mention it and we should respect their reluctance, regardless of WP:CENSORED. Contradictions arise; people actually disclaim caste (notable Bachchan); and despite endogamy, there are inter-caste marriages that cause problems with defining it. Furthermore, it is rarely relevant to anything that makes these people notable, with occasional exceptions such as B. R. Ambedkar. - Sitush (talk) 11:57, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that if there are cases where a person has explicitly declaimed it, we have to make an editorial decision, either omitting or explicitly stating the objection. But, in my opinion, the "rarely relevant to anything that makes these people notable" is a red herring. The exact same thing is true for ethnicity (including, in many places the "hot potato socially"), yet our articles on living people from other parts of the world regularly include the info when we can reliably source it. As has been pointed out on a number of article talk pages, often people don't state it because they don't have to. Furthermore, aren't we demanding something that the vast majority of notable but not super famous will never meet? What I mean is, for example, if a notable professor happens to say in an interview that his parents came from Elbonia, it's pretty unlikely that the writer is going to pick that as something worth quoting, though the writer may still include the ethnicity in the article. In that case, the person did self-identify, but it just didn't get reported that way. Sure, for people from first world countries who are super-famous (especially who are entertainers) may get interviewed on camera, in which case we do see the whole interview verbatim...but that's not the case with many other people who are nonetheless notable.

Just to clarify, of course, I'm not suggesting that we relax our sourcing requirements, nor am I suggesting that we use the "last name = caste" false argument. But I think that if an Indian newspaper writes and article about Bollywood Actress #17812 and says "She comes from an X family", that that meets all of the requirements we would have for any other piece of BLP info except for sexual preference and religion. To me, unless someone can somehow show evidence that caste is more like preference and religion than it is like ethnicity, than I think we have to go with the rules governing the latter. Qwyrxian (talk) 12:40, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Is sexual preference considered to be a choice rather than how one is "made" (poor choice of word)? - Sitush (talk) 12:44, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

I would assume that, as a matter of policy, Wikipedia takes no stance, though I also wondered if that's the connection. I actually don't know the history of the division of those characteristics at BLP. One possibility is that it's a very American/Western European distinction, in that religion and sexual preference are often intentionally hidden, while ethnicity is, in the sense that it often matters in that context, "written on the body". That is, in the US, one is visibly "white" or "black" or "Asian" or "Latina" or "Middle Eastern", and that distinction itself drives much of the prejudicial behavior (thus, one cannot effectively hide their ethnicity)...in other parts of the world, however, one's exact clan/tribe/caste identification is actually more important, and there may not be strictly observable physical differences. That is, the distinction itself may be a form of systemic bias...but unless we are going to change WP:BLP, we have to abide by it here. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:28, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Regarding 'caste', I'd have thought it was more or less self-evident that the stricter rules regarding self-identification ought to apply, given that it is a contested religious and political concept as much as an 'ethnic' one, given the obvious risks of mislabelling, given the fact that it is an individual's choice as to whether to recognise the validity of the caste system at all, and given the simple fact that it is very rarely of any encyclopaedic note anyway. WP:BLP policy in general is to write "conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy" - and shoehorning people into categories they may well not recognise the validity of, just to suit the objectives of Wikipedia contributors, is neither 'conservative' nor showing much concern for the individual concerned at all. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:12, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Andy, I think I finally see where you are coming from (probably why many Westerners have problems understanding the 'caste' issue.) In India, there are two words, both of which are translated into 'caste' in English, but mean very different things. The first word is 'jati'. Jati is from the Sanskrit word 'Jat', means birth or origin. Jati, therefore, simply means your origin, or as used commonly, it can be translated into 'tribe'. For example, Ezhava is a Jati. It denotes the people of the Ezham (country) - probably referring to the old Tamil kingdom (Ezham) of Cheras. Then there are Nair, Nambudiri etc., which are all Jatis. A jati, in other words, is very similar to the concept of 'Jewish'. Except in the big cities, Indians tend to be largely (95%?) endogamous, preferring to marry within the tribe (due to various factors including compatibility of social customs, morals etc.) Jati is not a modern concept, anymore than 'tribe' is. It is reminiscent of people's history. In case of Ezhavas, for example, it reminds them that they were part of the Ezham in the old days. However, there is no shame attached to belonging to any particular tribe by most people in it. There is yet another concept, which is also converted into 'caste', which in India is called Varna (literally, colour). This is a five-fold division of the society (actually the Jatis) into Brahman (self-appointed intellectuals), Kshatriya (protectors or warriors), Vaishya (economically productive people - tradesmen, cultivators), Shudra (slaves) and Avarna (literally 'those without a Varna.) Different Jatis (tribes) are put into one or the other Varna by Brahmins, who probably created the Varna system. So, in the above example, the Ezhavas are avarna (without varna), the Nambudiris are Brahmins and the Nairs are Shudras. Not surprisingly, except for the Brahmin Jatis (and to some extent the Kshatriya and Vaishya), most other Jatis don't like this classification system. And 95% of people whose Jatis have been tagged 'shudra' may not like to call themselves shoodra. In this sense, Sitush's concern is not misplaced. As far as this concept of varna is concerned, AndyTheGrump opinion that "it is a contested religious and political concept" is valid. It is indeed contested. And so is his contention that "it is an individual's choice as to whether to recognise the validity of the caste system at all." As such, perhaps, it may not be appropriate to call someone a 'slave' (shudra) varna (caste) in his biography without being prejudicial. However, we can still include his Jati, which is actually just the name of his or her tribe -- like Maratha, Rajput, Ezhava, Vokkaliga Rajput etc.. These are all tribe-names, Jatis, and not Varna, and are not to be confused with the 'caste system', by which, most Westerners mean the 'Varna' system. These can be left out, if you insist. However, it may be noted that even here, there is a political movement Reappropriation that is going on to reclaim these words as non-pejorative, and make them a rallying and unifying identity. See Shudra:_The_Rising, for example. In short, I suggest that Jati or tribe, which is an ethnic identity, may be ascribed without self-identification and Varna or caste need not be. And thank you to Qwyrxian for showing openness of mind.

Specifically with regard to Ezhava, I think that you will find many more sources refer to them as a caste than as a jati. Certainly, that is so from my reading and although Google Books is not a great way to prove things one way or the other, a simple search on "Ezhava caste" here returns > 20,000 hits whereas "Ezhava jati" returns 259. More generally, regarding this distinction please see page 244 of Bates, Crispin (1995). "Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry". In Robb, Peter (ed.). The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-563767-0. and pages 45-46 of Béteille, André (1965). Caste, Class & Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520020535. I think that the entire caste versus jati issue in relation to BLPs is pretty much irrelevant to the core issues. - Sitush (talk) 09:26, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Yeah sure, if you search for English language results, caste will return more results (after all, that is the English word that is used in place of Jati). Try searching for malayalam language results, and jati will return 100 times more results than caste. I don't really know what that proves, though. When you say 'Caste vs Jati' issue, what do you mean? Thanks to the Englishmen, the English word for Jati is also Caste. So when you say Caste vs Jati, it just means Caste vs Caste. I think what you mean is Varna vs Jati. If you search for 'Ezhava Varna OR Jati' in Google, you are unlikely to find even one result that calls Ezhava a Varna (caste in the shameful/individual choice sense..) Anyway, I do support Qwyrxian's opinion that caste, in the sense of Varna is a matter of individual faith, as a majority of South Indians do not accept the validity of the Varna system (for the simple reason that 90% or more of them in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are classified as shoodras or avarnas (outcastes)). So, to impose the Varna system on them would probably be unfair. But the majority of people have no issues with identifying with their Jati, even if they are so-called shoodras like Nair. I think this compromise/resolution can be reached and settled? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sreejiraj (talk • contribs) 18:44, 31 December 2012

We do not negotiate 'compromises' that go against WP:BLP policy. Furthermore, you have provided no sources whatsoever to back up your arguments. Unless and until you do, there is nothing more to discuss here - we are not going to assign living individuals to subjective and controversial categories without (a) evidence of self-identification, and (b) evidence that it is of relevance to their notability. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:54, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

AndyTheGrump Animeshkulkarni I think we are just going around in circles and there is a real risk of wasting everybody's time if we do that. So let's reduce the issues to the core. The Wikipedia policy on Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality does not overtly say anything about how Caste (Jati or Varna) identities should be treated. But it speaks only of ethnic origin, gender, religion and sexuality. I think it can be reasonably assumed that Jati does not refer to gender or sexual orientation. Therefore it has to be one of either ethnicity or religion. Both ethnicity and religion have different policies regard self-declaration. One requires it and the other does not. My question to you is simply this - which policy should apply to Jati and Varna - that of ethnicity or religion?Sreejiraj (talk) 19:41, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Sreejiraj. This is the English language Wikipedia. We have other Wikipedias for Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam etc. Béteille touches on the confusion that you refer to but, really, whether you call it caste or jati makes little practical difference here. We are asserting something about a living person that they not accept themselves etc, per the various arguments raised above and in past discussions. If people have no problem identifying with their jati, as you suggest, then we should have no problem finding sources where they do so.

The WP:BLPCAT issue is also something of a sideshow and although it certainly was mentioned in earlier discussions concerning this problematic issue, it was one among many arguments. You will notice that I do not mention it in my standard advisory explanation at User:Sitush/Common#Castelists. BTW, your comment concerning varna in South India is something that I and others involved in cleaning up caste articles have been working on for some time; oddly, it is usually people from the South who object to the claims that you mention (notably, at Nair ... except when it suits them, of course! - Sitush (talk) 18:59, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Sitush. First of all it needs to be clarified that caste is some thing that is not the choice of a person. A person's caste is the caste in which he is born into . Ie, is caste is something like a ethnic community . So, unlike religion where one can make choice whether he belongs to or not at any point of time in his life , one can not change his caste. This basic understanding is required to discuss this topic. So, when you realize that caste of a person is not his own making , but only relate to his lineage and ethnicity it is no more personal choice .That being case, the requirement for one to declare his caste is uncalled for and do not make sense. The argument however though is valid for one's religion as it is matter of persons choice. To make it clear , caste is not a belief system or some thing that can be accepted and rejected during one's life. Requiring that a person self declare his caste is like requiring a red haired person to declare him self red haired before he is described as red haired in Wikipedia by someone else. So, in short, there is no logical requirement for one to declare his caste for him to be listed here.Sanjeer (talk) 19:15, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Exactly, someone who is born into the Ezhava tribe cannot change it and become a Nair if he or she feels like it. This is not something that the person keeps changing. This is his background, ethnic origin. Would you insist that anyone who has to be referred to as a Human being has to self-identify as a human being? I mean, going by your logic, if people have no problem identifying as a human being, then we should have no problem finding sources where they do so?Sreejiraj (talk) 19:19, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I don't want to put a dampener on this discussion but I would encourage any new contributors to Wikipedia to read WP:SOCK and WP:MEAT. There have been some slightly odd goings-on, here and elsewhere, and it would not be the first time that, for example, an Indian community has organised itself on Orkut or similar in order to attempt to change consensus. If you're not socking or meating then, obviously, there is no problem. My apologies if this sounds accusatory: it is not my intent. - Sitush (talk) 19:22, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Regarding your "human being" example, please see WP:V. We do not need citations for the blindingly obvious, such as that water is wet. - Sitush (talk) 19:23, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Can I ask you a simple question? Is 'caste' or Jati more like religion or more like ethnic background?Sreejiraj (talk) 19:30, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

My opinion is that there is no easy answer to that: it is in the eye of the beholder and, as such, we must treat it conservatively in the case of BLPs. I refer you once more to Amitabh Bachchan and also, for example, to Sree Narayana Guru (a now-dead alleged Ezhava who specifically disassociated himself from caste/jati). And, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether it would not be easier generally to follow the precedents established for categories, which have long held that we simply do not assign caste to anyone, dead or alive. Of course, that does have a few pitfalls, of which Ambedkar and Narayana Guru are classic examples because they are among the exceptions to the rule: their caste origins are intrinsic to their notability. - Sitush (talk) 19:39, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

If someone dissociates himself or herself from his or her ethnic background, we should mention that, and say that although this person was born in a Jewish family or Ezhava family, he dissociated himself or herself etc.. A good example is Mark_Zuckerberg. The fact that he was born into a Jewish family is mentioned in his biography, along with the words "although he has since described himself as an atheist." If you leave out Jewish from the article, it is a less complete article. If you mention that he was born into a Jewish family, his atheism is not going to lose its lustre, nor is he going to sue you for it. Here, we are talking about people who have not even dissociated themselves from their ethnic groups, and we should mention their ethnic background just like we do for Larry_Page and countless others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sreejiraj (talk • contribs) 19:55, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I've never really got involved in the mess that is Jewish identity on Wikipedia. However, as someone who lives in one of the most densely-populated Jewish areas in the UK, I'll pass on my local, unsourced opinion: there is and has for a long time being a huge debate concerning whether being Jewish means being a member of a race or of a religion. For that reason, I do not think that Zuckerberg etc are going to be terribly helpful as examples here. - Sitush (talk) 20:00, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Are you doubting that Jews form an ethnic community? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sreejiraj (talk • contribs) 20:04, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Like I said, I've never really got involved in how Jewishness is treated on Wikipedia. I've seen from a distance that it can be messy, as can caste. If you want me to take a guess, I'd say that they are an ethnic-religious community, defined by both common origin and common belief. But don't take my word for it. I think we should let others have a chance to comment here, don't you? - Sitush (talk) 20:09, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think I am blocking anyone from commenting here. But I do sense double standards here -- when it comes to Western Ethnic groups, there is no need for self-identification, but when it comes to Indian Ethnic groups, you need them to self identify. I reiterate what I said before, if you apply this yardstick, 95% of the items in all caste lists will have to be deleted, including the much eviscerated List_of_Ezhavas. So if that is the policy, you should apply it for all the items, and not just be keen to delete only the ones that I added.Sreejiraj (talk) 20:14, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I have been cleaning up caste articles and lists for 18 months or more now. It takes time. - Sitush (talk) 20:25, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Let me help you out there, of the dozen or so people on the list, reference for self-declaration has not been provided for even a single person. That would leave you with a grand total of 0 people in the list of Ezhavas. Sreejiraj (talk) 20:32, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

That is really an issue for discussion at Talk:List of Ezhavas but I note that some of those entries are for people who are dead and for whom, therefore, WP:BLP does not apply. OTOH, there have been examples where lists have ended up blank and have been redirected to the main article; there have also been examples where lists have become so short that they have been merged with the main article and redirected. - Sitush (talk) 20:37, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I am sorry, but WP:BLP doesn't say that ethnic identities have to be self-declared. As for lists turning empty, that is only to be expected if you don't stick to the guidelines. Sreejiraj (talk) 20:45, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

And I am sorry also, Sreejiraj, because you are going round in circles here and not advancing much at all: BLP says treat things conservatively and you are not addressing this. I really do think it would be better to wait for input from some other people. I am pretty sure it will come. Let's give it 24 hours, hey? In many parts of the world, people will be partying etc. - Sitush (talk) 20:50, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Yup - WP:BLP says that "Biographies of living persons ("BLP"s) must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy" - including living individuals in such controversial categories as caste without self-identification looks like a clear breach of policy to me. And as yet, I've seen no argument whatsoever as to why such irrelevances are encyclopaedic at all. If caste matters to these individuals, fine, they can say which caste they think they belong to, and if it seems noteworthy possibly include it in articles. Wikipedia is not a database of ethnicity, and such lists seem to me to be entirely unwarranted, and a breach of individuals privacy. Maybe it is about time we settled this once an for all, and deleted the lot of them, as the colonial relic they are... AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:55, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll agree that they are retrograde and the result of mutual suspicion and possibly hatred that prevented people from marrying others who looked/spoke/acted/lived differently from themselves. But it's also a fact that the such tribal affiliations are extremely important in today's India -- most political parties are based on them (even if overtly they are based on ideologies etc..) Or to put it more mildly, most political parties cater to such identities. If you apply for any government job or admission into any government-owned educational institution, you have to specify which tribe you belong to.. and based on that, you get special treatments, or you fail to get special treatment. And it's seriously not got anything to do with any colonial power. What happened was that people simply distrusted each other, and as newer and newer groups of people immigrated into each other's territories, they just wouldn't mingle genetically (marry each other.) Some did mingle - for example, the Ezhava identity is more of a shared past identity (from having been the subjects in a Kingdom) rather than a genetic one, but they too now don't marry much outside the group. And over time, from a cultural identity, it's morphed into a genetic one. No one is trying to legitimize these things - but the fact is, they are there whether we like it or not. People think in those tribal ways, they look at which candidate in the election belongs to their tribe and sometimes vote for him.. They want to know which of the big film stars belong to their community, and sometimes quietly feel proud about it. In other words, it's as important as race is in the US.. In fact, India has rules that give special benefits to offsprings of mixed marriages, but still these communal groupings have survived. They do get dissolved in the big cities, but even now, on a guesstimate, I'd say 90-93% of the total marriages happening in India would be endogamic with respect to these tribal identities. Now, the question is, does Wikipedia have a policy against such identities and does it actively try to dissuade people from searching or identifying with them? I don't think so. I think Wikipedia just needs to reflect the ground realities, instead of patching over stuff. I mean, I know that the government of India frequently rubs out portions of Indian history that it deems inimical to "communal harmony" and school kids are taught a very sanitized version of history. Many kids grow up and read real history books and go 'oh, shuck, no one told me that was what happened.' The question is, does Wikipedia have a stand on this? Is Wikipedia a missionary? Does Wikipedia Judge? If it does, what is the pedestal from which it judges? Does it judge from the pedestal of Western, Christian values? Is that the right attitude for a collaborative website to take? What will happen if Indian editors of the Wikipedia delete all mention of homosexuality, and say "Oh, it's not something that should be encouraged.. it's the decadence of a civilization in decline?" How would you feel if your culture was judged according to our cultural norms? Sreejiraj (talk) 22:27, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Sitush : Since you have not addressed the point and conveniently skipped it I present the case again. I expect there are people capable of logical reasoning amongst Wikipedia moderators who address the issue . My case presented here :" First of all it needs to be clarified that caste is some thing that is not the choice of a person. A person's caste is the caste in which he is born into . Ie, is caste is something like a ethnic community . So, unlike religion where one can make choice whether he belongs to or not at any point of time in his life , one can not change his caste. This basic understanding is required to discuss this topic. So, when you realize that caste of a person is not his own making , but only relate to his lineage and ethnicity it is no more personal choice .That being case, the requirement for one to declare his caste is uncalled for and do not make sense. The argument however though is valid for one's religion as it is matter of persons choice. To make it clear , caste is not a belief system or some thing that can be accepted and rejected during one's life. Requiring that a person self declare his caste is like requiring a red haired person to declare him self red haired before he is described as red haired in Wikipedia by someone else. So, in short, there is no logical requirement for one to declare his caste for him to be listed hereSanjeer (talk) 02:50, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

And yet again, you fail to cite sources for your arguments - and as for "caste is not a belief system", that is utterly nonsensical. Of course it is - it is almost an archetype for a social construct. Anyway, unless you are going to provide the evidence from reliable sources to back up your repetitive arguments, I think that we can assume that they don't actually exist, and consider the case closed. Or if you prefer, you could start a WP:RfC - though note that general policy (i.e. WP:BLP, and the need to respect privacy) cannot be overturned by an RfC on a particular subject, so any decision made would have to comply with existing policies. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:26, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

AndyTheGrump do you know the difference between a jati and a varna? You are confusing the two and it seems plain that you don't know the difference between them. I suggest your read the Wikipedia articles on Jati and Varna. Jati is a person's ethnic origin or tribe. It is certainly not a "belief system", unless you say that African_American is also a belief system. Members of the same Jati, such as Rajput and Chitpavan tend to share similar genes that give them a distinct genetic profile. This is not a belief system. Hope you will at least learn the basics of Indian social organization before commenting on these things. Sreejiraj (talk) 08:08, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Sreejiraj, I happen to have a first-class honours degree in anthropology from a leading UK university. I don't need clueless repetitive bullshit from you to know that in spite of your assertions to the contrary, both "ethnic origin" and "tribe" are social constructs - and yes, 'African American' is a social construct too - I've never suggested otherwise. And as for your waffle about 'genes' you cite no sources whatsoever - unsurprisingly, since they don't exist. Take your nonsense elsewhere. AndyTheGrump (talk) 09:02, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

AndyTheGrump I don't want to get into name calling, because I don't have a degree in Anthropology from "a leading University in the UK." But your degree doesn't seemed to have helped you figure out that Jati and Varna are two different things. Secondly, your argument is a bit of a straw man because I did not say they were not "social constructs" (whatever that means), I said "It is certainly not a "belief system"". Now, would you say that ethnic origin is a "belief system" that people change when their opinion changes?Sreejiraj (talk) 12:27, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

If you don't know what 'social construct' means, how can you possibly say my argument is a straw man? And yes, people change their ethnic self-identification (not 'ethnic origin' - a dubious weasel-worded phrase best avoided) all the time, as those conducting censuses on the question often discover. I suggest that rather than engaging in discussion, you do a little research. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:34, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I also support the argument that self-identification is *not* needed for caste. Caste is by birth and cannot be changed and in India there is reservation based on caste for jobs and Government websites publish the names

of candidates who qualify for different castes. See for reference. If there is a reliable source then that would be more than enough. Bobgali (talk) 09:51, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Sreejiraj, you say that people cannot change their caste. Please then explain why there were 1646 identified communities in 1901, 4147 in 1931 and 4635 in the 1990s, although the latter figure was self-admitted to be on the conservative side. It is impossible to correlate these identifications because communities in India come and go as a consequence of both fusion and fission, often at a very localised level, and the methodology of classification is variable - Bhagat, R. B. "Caste Census: Looking Back, Looking Forward". Economic and Political Weekly. 42 (21): 1902–1905. Please also explain why 2011 census enumerators were under instructions to accept what they were told (pages 24-26) rather like the Jedi census phenomenon. Please explain hypergamy among the Namubidiris & Nairs, exogamy in Indian cities and rejection of caste by people already named above. - Sitush (talk) 10:05, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

What you are citing is the number of castes is legally recognized by the government, that keeps increasing. It's like saying there were only 10000 identified species of plans in 1800 and now there are 1,000,000 - therefore there has been an exponential growth in biodiversity :-) Or that because there are now 100,000 known galaxies, compared to 100 galaxies 50 years ago, the universe has grown 1000 times in 50 years. The fact that the government takes time to enumerate and identify castes for legal use does not mean that people who are born into a Jati can change their Jati later. I don't really know why something as basic as this has to be explained to you. It's plain common sense. Sreejiraj (talk) 12:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Sitush, it isn't necessary to ask for explanations here - it is for those who wish to argue against WP:BLP policy to provide the necessary arguments in the appropriate place for such policy to be revised. It has already been shown that 'caste' is as subject to BLP policy as any other subjective and controversial categorisation, and none of the arguments here are remotely sufficient to suggest that WP:BLP policy doesn't apply. Unless and until WP:BLP policy is revised, any assertion that a living individual is a member of a particular 'caste' may be deleted on sight, unless at minimum based on verifiable self-identification, as a violation of multiple Wikipedia policies - not least as a violation of privacy. None of the 'pro-caste' bullshitters here have the guts to raise this issue in a broader context. Ignore them. Revert there violations of existing policy. Let them then argue that policy is on their side. It isn't... AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

AndyTheGrump, calling names doesn't help. WP:BLP need not be modified for mentioning the caste of a person in an article, because it doesn't mandate that ethnicity be self-identified. Bobgali (talk) 10:38, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Besides, no one is calling for changes to WP:BLP policy at all. All I, and Qwyrxian and others have requested is that the policy be implemented. The policy does not require self-declaration for ethnic identity, and no self-declaration is insisted on for identifying a person's ethnicity when that person is a non-Indian. The only request is that this 'privilege' be extended to Indians as well, and people like Sitush stop vandalizing Wikipedia articles in the name of a mistaken reading of official policy. Sreejiraj (talk) 13:00, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

And Sitush, cross ethnic marriages happen in other cases also, like say b/w Tamil and Kannada. If we don't have a problem categorizing in such cases, hypergamy etc won't cause any problem for caste also. Or may be when there is confusion like in such cases, we can demand self-identification. Indian cricketer Sreesanth has identified himself as a Brahmin (his father is a Nair and mother is a Brahmin). But self identification is not needed by default, when father and mother both belong to the same caste. And it's a no-brainer that caste is by birth. You can't claim to belong to a caste other than that of your father or mother. Of course, you can disclaim also, and can be treated similar to the the case of the facebook founder. Bobgali (talk) 10:46, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

If someone disclaims then it is easily dealt with but more often than not probably irrelevant. If someone doesn't claim, then we should not mention it at all because of the numerous reasons given above. So far, I've not seen a valid argument to the contrary, let alone one supported by some sort of source or policy. - Sitush (talk) 11:02, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Sitush, what about the Wikipedia policy on citing ethnic origins? Isn't that valid enough policy for you? Or are you saying Jati is not ethnic origin?Sreejiraj (talk) 12:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't categorise anyone by 'ethnic origin' - 'ethnicity' is the phrase used, for very good reasons. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:54, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

The only one solution to this problem is to explicitly include 'Jati' (caste) under the title of "ethnic identity" in Wikipedia policy on Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality

Please sign your posts - and no that isn't the 'only solution' - there are several others, including making it policy that caste can only be assigned to living individuals in cases of self-identification. If there is a proposal to change policy, I shall argue for precisely that, on the basis that caste/jati categorisations are potentially an invasion of privacy, of little encyclopaedic merit, often derived from questionable sources, often rejected on principal by the individuals so categorised, as much a political/economic/religious category as an 'ethnic' one, and thus in violation of multiple WP:BLP core policies. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:44, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I saw a note at WP:ANI about this discussion. I think that adding a caste-related hard "fact" in the form of a category or infobox statement should not be allowed for BLPs unless the person self-identifies with the caste, including both jati and varna definitions of caste. In the article body it is a different story, with possibilities of explanation and context supplied from reliable sources, all described in the article's prose. In the article body, the normal rules requiring high quality sources for BLPs will suffice to determine whether caste can be discussed. Binksternet (talk) 00:52, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm doing my best to get on top of the categorisation issue and, yes, as noted earlier in this thread, it seems to fail WP:BLPCAT. But it goes further with categories: there have also been numerous WP:CFD discussions about this and things are being resolved "in reverse" from that end. Indeed, there is currently one that is ongoing - see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2012_December_19#Category:Ezhava_People. - Sitush (talk) 01:01, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Adding statements of fact in Wikipedia's voice such as "person X has property Y" should not occur unless the claim is very reliably sourced, and of demonstrable encyclopedic value. A case for including such information in a particular article could be made if there were reliable evidence that property Y had influenced the life or work of person X. The only thing definitely known about this topic is that it has been accompanied with severe disruption, and that proves the topic is not a simple matter of looking up who has property Y in a chart somewhere. Accordingly, claims about castes are not suitable for the encyclopedia that anyone can edit (with rare exceptions). Johnuniq (talk) 02:41, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

what if some person has claimed the benifit of reservations provided by the government in Jobs and education? The reservations are based upon a person's caste (actually a group of caste) also there are reserved assembly constituencies in general and local elections so for example this person is a elected representative from this constituency which is reserved. Can we assume that this person has identified himself with a particular caste?--sarvajna (talk) 03:14, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Interesting point but, as far as I know, there is no requirement in India that the person elected to an assembly from any given constituency has to come from that constituency (eg: have been born or be living there etc). I'm pretty sure that I've seen examples of people being given a ticket for a constituency other than that in which they were born or reside. Is this correct? - Sitush (talk) 09:38, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

You're right, there is no geographical restriction on where a person can contest from. However, certain seats are reserved for SC/ST candidates where candidates from different political parties and independents can only contest if they belong to these groups. I think this is what sarvajna is alluding to. IMO, contesting elections from reserved seats can be safely considered to be public self-identification with a group of castes/tribes. This argument can be extended to reservation in jobs and educational institutions though there could be WP:BLPPRIVACY issues and finding reliable sources for those will be harder. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 10:17, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Sure. If a person is elected from a reserved seat then they have effectively self-identified as being a member of a SC/ST. Are seats reserved for only one SC/ST? That is, could there be competing candidates from more than one scheduled community in a given seat? If so, we'd still need self-identification that they consider themselves members of community A or community B, etc. - Sitush (talk) 10:24, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

AFAIK, seats are not reserved for specific castes. So candidates from different Scheduled communities can compete with each other. Yes, we would still need self-identification with a particular caste. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 10:36, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

You can't identify yourself as a 'SC/ST' before the law. You can only identify yourself as belonging to a caste. And you can't identify yourself as belonging to ANY caste, but only those of your parents. Sreejiraj (talk) 20:14, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I am surprised to see that a qualified person on anthropology talks about "social constructs" which actually falls in the boundary of sociology and not anthropology . Btw, the caste in India is not a social construct at all .Any Indologist who studies about the society and culture in India would agree to that easily. It is surprising to see some of the Moderators stooping to the level of name calling and using abusive and repulsive language (<quote> "bullshitters" <Unquote>) . Does Wkipedia has a policy of how to engage in civilized debates..?Sanjeer (talk) 09:53, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Caste by no means is a dynamic social construct . If that being the case parent-hood also is a dynamic social construct . What one should understand is that caste is tightly and irrevocably coupled with the parenthood. The caste of a person is (1) NOT his choice (2) NOT a title society gives him/her (3) NOT something an authority decides. Caste of a person is the caste of his parents , which further derives from the caste of their parents and the chain go on backwards. Essentially caste is indicative is directly related to the family lineage. Now if it is understood properly one can failure out that caste of a person is decided even before he is born. For example an ezhava marries another ezhava then their children in future will be of ezhava caste irrespective of what ideology they carry. It is politely requested that moderators who lack in the basic knowledge may not attempt to conclude on a matter on which they have very poor understanding irrespective of their claims.Sanjeer (talk) 10:03, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

That's ironic, I was about to ask you not to tell others what topics are studied and used in anthropology. I'd be amazed if any anthropologist wasn't very familiar with the concept. And I would politely request you to begin using reliable sources. Like "Caste is a social construct rooted in endogamy"[6]. Then there is [7] which described how the British developed the caste system through the use of the census.(This lead me to our interesting article on Denzil Ibbetson which discusses the issue. It looks as though caste is indeed a dynamic social construct if by that we mean a social construct that has changed over time. I'd argue that self-identification is necessary. An aside - there are no moderators here. Dougweller (talk) 12:21, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I read [8] What it says is that historically, castes may rise up in power or fall down. It also says that historically, castes may splinter into subdivisions as well. All fair points, but do they also not apply to all manner of ethnic divisions? For example, the Jewish ethnic group - does it not have sub divisions? The Arab group, does it not have sub-divisions, splinters and evolution? Caste is also another like that. It can't be immutable. But you have to look at the time period that these changes occur in - it takes hundreds of years for these things to happen. The Ezhava caste, whose case perhaps started this discussion, is itself composed of several sub-groups such as Thiyyas, Thandayans etc.. But Ezhava is the legal name of this group. If a group that can splinter and evolve cannot be used to identify, we can't use even nationality. Most of the nations in Europe are much younger than most of the castes (jatis) in India. So, someone who is a Scot cannot be described as a Briton? Legally, the person is both. Similarly, a person who is part of a sub-division of Ezhava, such as a Thiyya, is both. Legally, they are all mentioned as Ezhava, as that has been accepted as the over-arching description (Like Briton for the Scot). Tomorrow, the Scots may become separate and declare Independence from Britain. Does that prevent someone from describing them as belonging to Britain now? Of course, if Scots were changing their status every two years or so (moving in and out of Britain), it would have been more difficult to categorize them as British. But here, we are talking about relatively long periods of time (in case of castes, hundreds of years..) Sreejiraj (talk) 16:38, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Finally, whatever arguments have been raised here in favor of self-identification (we are all here in favor of individual freedom, aren't we?) can all be used for any ethnic identity whatsoever. So why is there a distinction of ethnic identities inside India and outside India? What is this prejudice? If it is enough for any court of law that someone born to parents of a caste is automatically and legally considered a member of that caste (and cannot claim to be the member of any other caste), why is it not enough for Wikipedia intellectuals from outside India? Do you seriously think that the judiciary, the government and the entire legal system in India cannot be relied upon on this matter?Sreejiraj (talk) 16:38, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, there is a List_of_ethnic_groups which contains all identifiers to which rules regarding Ethnic_group can be applied? If so, is it enough to add an Indian Jati, like Chitpavan to that list to qualify to be treated on par with any other global ethnic groups (in other words, not have a self-declaration requirement)? Actually, there are already several Indian castes in the list already. So I am assuming the policy regarding identifying ethnic origins can be applied to those groups.Sreejiraj (talk) 16:48, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, a decade does it and centuries certainly is not necessary. This was the experience of the British Raj censuses, as I have intimated in an earlier post to this thread. - Sitush (talk) 16:51, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Does the British Raj census say that a group of people stopped marrying into another group of people in a span of 10 years?Sreejiraj (talk) 17:04, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Sreejiraj, You are talking non-sense. Ezhava and Thiyya are not legally same. Both claims reservation in same category. At times Ezhava were sharing reservation with OBC. Does that make all OBC caste sames? Also, I am a born Thiyya. I do not like to call myself as Ezhava which are considered backward castes in Kerala. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.137.126.55 (talk) 09:01, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Ezhava and Thiyya are not the same and the book written by Edgar Thurston does make it clear . So please stop the nonsense about Thiyya being legally Ezhava and so forth . I am born as Thiyya and I will never let go of my identity as Thiyya . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.96.226.18 (talk) 10:46, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Sreejiraj, your continuing and repetitive resort to off-topic issues, engagement in speculative original research and sythesis, refusal to provide sources for the claims you make, and apparent inability to comprehend that articles must comply with Wikipedia policies is making your continued presence here disruptive. If you wish to discuss this further, I suggest that you stay on topic, discuss how your proposals may comply with policy, and provide sources to back up your assertions - if you carry on as you are doing, I shall ask that you be topic banned as disruptive. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

So are we off the track again? I see that the discussion had changed from "inclusion of caste in the article" to "caste categorization". Hence i have one doubt. Are we considering inclusion equivalent to the WP:CATEGORY? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 09:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I request people outside India, such as AndyTheGrump, Sitush and Dougweller to read the following widely-quoted and exhaustively documented (to the point of being often quoted on hundreds of websites) judgements of the Indian Supreme Court and High Courts and hopefully accept that caste is hereditary and membership in caste is involuntary (the Court says so) and that the Courts find it difficult to accept that someone can change his or her caste. Therefore, if caste is hereditary and membership involuntary, it is an objective fact and not a subjective fact like religion (which can be changed and membership of which is not involuntary.) If it is an objective fact, why should there be a requirement of self-declaration? In case of religion, self-declaration is insisted on because the individual is free to change his religion. However, when the individual has no choice ("membership is involuntary", what is the point of saying he has not said that he belongs to the caste?

The First quote the Supreme Court upholding a Kerala High Court judgment saying that a wife cannot opt to change her caste of her birth to match that of her husband. -- <quote> Valsamma was a Syrian Catholic woman (forward caste) who married a Latin Catholic man (backward class) and the question arose whether by virtue of her marriage she was entitled to appointment to a post of lecturer that was reserved for Latin Catholics (Backward Class Fishermen). The full bench of the Kerala High Court held that though Valsamma was � married according to the Canon law, being a Syrian Christian by birth, she could not by marriage with a Latin Catholic become a member of that class nor could she claim the status of backward class by marriage. Mrs. Valsamma Paul vs Cochin University And Others on 4 January, 1996</quote> Here is the link to the actual judgment

Second quote from a High Court judgment -- <quote> It is not necessary for our present purpose to trace the origin and growth of the caste system amongst the Hindus. It would be enough to state that whatever may have been the origin of Hindu castes and tribes in ancient times, gradually status came to be based on birth alone... The history of social reform for the last century and more has shown how difficult it is to break or even to relax the rigour of the inflexible and exclusive character of the caste system. Thus, membership of a caste is involuntary. Historically persons carrying on one particular occupation may belong to one particular social class forming a particular caste. A person born in a family belonging to a particular caste which is associated with a particular occupation may not continue the occupation. But still he remains and continues to be a member of a social class forming the said caste. The reason is that the label remains. For the purposes of marriage and all other social functions up to his or her death, the caste continues to be relevant. When a woman born in a scheduled caste or a scheduled tribe marries to a person belonging to a forward caste, her caste by birth does not change by virtue of the marriage. A woman who is born into a scheduled caste or a scheduled tribe, on marriage with a person belonging to a forward caste, is not automatically transplanted into the caste of husband by virtue of her marriage and, therefore, she cannot be said to belong to her husband’s caste.</quote> Rajendra Shrivastava vs The State Of Maharashtra on 22 January, 2010

Further, another Supreme Court Judgment, part of which was quoted in the above judgment by the Bombay High Court states -- "The above material makes it amply clear that a caste is nothing but a social class - a socially homogeneous class. It is also an occupational grouping, with this difference that its membership is hereditary. One is born into it. Its membership is involuntary. Even if one ceases to follow that occupation, still he remains and continues a member of that group. To repeat, it is a socially and occupation-ally homogenous class. Endogamy is its main characteristic.... This is the stark reality notwithstanding all our protestations and abhorrence and all attempts at weeding out this phenomenon. We are not saying it ought to be encouraged. It should not be. It must be eradicated. That is the ideal - the goal. But any programme towards betterment of these sections-classes of society and any programme designed to eradicate this evil must recognise this ground reality and attune its programme accordingly. Merely burying our heads in the sand -Ostrich-like - wouldn't help. One cannot fight his enemy without recognizing him. The U.S. Supreme Court has said repeatedly, if race be the basis of discrimination - past and present - race must also form the basis of redressal programmes though in our constitutional scheme,." Full Judgment - Supreme Court of India - Indra Sawhney And Ors. vs Union Of India (Uoi) And Ors. on 8 August, 1991Sreejiraj (talk) 14:58, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Completely and utterly irrelevant. Wikipedia WP:BLP policy concerns relate to the right to privacy of individuals, and to which content we determine to be of encyclopaedic interest. Nothing the courts of India decide has the remotest bearing on this. On that basis, given your complete and utter refusal to discuss the issue with regard to Wikipedia policy, I suggest that this topic be considered closed here. If you wish to start an RfC, do so. If you wish to raise this at WP:BLPN do so. However, if you persist in posting endless repetitive off-topic material here, my next post will be at WP:ANI where I shall ask for you to be topic banned. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:07, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy, i don't see why you want Sreejiraj to be topic banned. Its not like he is disrupting any articles. If his talks are really that painful to you, you may leave from here.
Sreejiraj, your point of "caste is hereditary and membership in caste is involuntary" is a good one. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 05:58, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

No - I have no intention of letting POV-pushers advocate violations of core Wikipedia policy on the basis of irrelevant arguments. As I have already written, Wikipedia WP:BLP policy concerns relate to the right to privacy of individuals, and to which content we determine to be of encyclopaedic interest. Labelling individuals by caste without self-identification is a violation of privacy, regardless of whether caste membership voluntary or not, and is of no overriding encyclopaedic interest unless directly relevant to the individual's notability. I can see that I am going to have to raise this elsewhere - but meanwhile I ask that those arguing for caste identification prepare arguments that relate directly to the issue at hand - the applicability of WP:BLP policy. This nonsensical stonewalling with off-topic waffle is unlikely to achieve anything but further discord. There have been no arguments whatsoever put forward here as to why arbitrary labelling of individuals over something of no relevance to the reason they are mentioned at all is of encyclopaedic interest - and unless those are forthcoming, it looks a certainty to me that we will get the necessary clarifications of existing policy to ensure that such labelling doesn't occur in future. AndyTheGrump (talk) 06:12, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy do not threaten a newcomer with ANI, above in the same thread he was asked to provide evidence for his argument so he did it promptly, Sreejiraj has a good point here, according to the local laws the caste is defined by one's birth. A person identifies himself or not he still belongs to that caste. I wonder what happens to this privacy policy when we mention about someones ethnicity or nationality.--sarvajna (talk) 06:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

The same should apply. What is so difficult about this? - Sitush (talk) 06:31, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

I have nothing further to say here, given your complete and utter refusal to discuss the matter in regard to the WP:BLP concerns raised - I shall be proposing an amendment to WP:BLP policy to clarify the matter, and expect the end result to be the removal of the labelling of individuals by caste except in legitimate encyclopaedic circumstances - if you wish to keep a database of individuals according to this obnoxious colonial relic, you will need to do it somewhere else. Wikipedia wasn't set up to prop up the ideological dregs of the Raj, and those who wish to do so would be best advised to find another forum. AndyTheGrump (talk) 07:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

discussion --sarvajna (talk) 08:36, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

I would not like to see caste or slavery added to the BLP policy but I agree that caste is solely of historic interest, and should not be identified with anyone living after say 1950. Apteva (talk) 09:52, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, but your opinion displays a gross lack of understanding. Caste is alive and well, like it or loathe it. Indeed, many communities in India rely on it for official positive discrimination in the fields of education and employment. - Sitush (talk) 09:56, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy, we are talking about biographies of people. If you consider mentioning caste as "arbitrary with no relevance", so is gender of a doctor, the place where a painter lives, birth place of a politician, schools that an astronaut attended, etc. This is encyclopaedia. If you want to write only about notability, CVs are to be uploaded on employment websites. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 09:57, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy and Apteva, I am very clearly which Dharmadhyaskhsa and Sitush on this. There is no policy based justification for whole-scale excluding a fact (if BLP-compliant sourced, of course) from all Indian biographies. Can you imagine your same argument applying to ethnicity? What about religion? What about nationality? Personally (i.e., off Wikipedia), I think nationality is a "relic" of a former time that has no business existing in the modern world...but, alas, it does, and I would not suggest that we remove information on BLP's nationality simply because it may not be relevant to their notability. By the way, could we please either discuss this here or at the Village Pump? To different forums for an identical discussion aren't helpful. If it's easier, we could close this one and direct everyone to the other, since it has a wider audience. Qwyrxian (talk) 11:21, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Qwyrxian, I would hope that you as an admin would at least be familiar with what WP:BLPCAT says about the necessity for self-identification regarding religion - evidently you aren't. Please familiarise yourself with the policy. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy, if you are forking the content on various pages, informing us about it would be a great favour. Of course unless your strategy is to get "consensus" from majority of irrelevant editors. It certainly is not the first time that Western editors are taking decisions for Indian articles without informing this group.
The forked discussion is at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Is_labelling_individuals_by_caste_a_violation_of_privacy.2C_per_WP:BLP.2C_and_if_so_should_we_make_this_explicit.3F. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 18:03, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Lol, that's funny. From what I've seen so far, AndyTheGrump is a jerk. He cannot actually discuss anything. Whatever he tells is on topic and anything against it is off topic and whoever says

anything against his argument would be banned. :) Bobgali (talk) 09:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Given the abject refusal of many of those to accept that WP:BLP policy is the relevant issue where caste is concerned, I will discuss the attempts by individuals here to violate it, along with WP:NPOV and other Wikipedia core policies anywhere I like. This noticeboard has no authority whatsoever to overrule policy, no matter how much POV-pushing bullshit is posted here. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

As per WP:BLPCAT , only if a person is categorized under "a belief system", his/her self identification comes into context. Since caste is NOT a belief system , for a person to be listed under the a caste category do not require to be self identified.It is plain common sense. Sanjeer (talk) 17:25, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Andy, I think you should not take this personally. I know that you have a point -- and I too personally feel that a society should not remain vertically split along ethnic lines, and should instead mix, like it happened when Europeans settled the New World. But the fact is, many Indian tribes did not mix. It's like the Irish, the French, the Italians etc. simply refused to marry each other in the U.S. and remained separate. Later, some of these groups were given a 'higher' status, and others were given a lower status, possibly because the former succeeded in a power struggle. In today's society, when members of the middle and lower castes try to instill confidence among their fellows, they like to say things like "Look, the chief minister belongs to our caste.. this Hollywood director belongs to our caste etc.." Of course, it is also true that 'forward' castes use these lists to feel good about themselves too. Now, the issue is - if you prevent people from compiling such lists, it is not going to wipe out caste system from India. All that it will do is that it will prevent people from actually knowing who belongs to which caste. My feeling is -- when people, both 'high caste' and 'low caste' -- see that talented people are found in all communities, it may do more to make more broad-minded than if no such lists existed. It will instill confidence in the so-called 'low castes', and it will show all castes that talent knows no ethnic boundaries, and all castes deserve their respect. That is why these lists tend to evoke so much emotion. The caste system is not a vestige of the Raj. Before the Europeans landed in India, this place was still pretty messed up in this way. Anyway, as someone living in India, I can tell you that Jati is not a theoretical concept or an optional concept or anything. Legally, it's certainly not. In the big cities, you can live without having to disclose your Jati. But believe me, the minute someone becomes even a little famous, his Jati is immediately identified. People are curious to know which caste someone is. There is nothing that person can do to truly dissociate himself from how people see him -- social perception. Just because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't follow the Jewish religion now does not mean that most Americans don't see him as a Jewish person. They do. And it's the same here. Most people are fine with that. Some people, like Amitabh Bachchan, are not. So they overtly dissociate themselves from it. In such cases, a statement like "Bachchan explicitly rejected his association with the Kayastha caste and caste system in general" will do more to help the cause of unifying Indian society than simply omitting the mention of his caste. And that's how we deal with ethnic origins, isn't it? So allow them their lists, let them also feel proud. Stamping on this right is like banning 'black organizations' because you are against racial discrimination. The fact is - racial prejudice and atrocities happen in the society, and banning people's attempts to organize themselves to counter-act won't help the cause of creating a just society. Most probably, it will do the opposite -- you are depriving the African Americans of a strong means of defense at their disposal, while not really doing anything to lessen the prejudice and injustice they may experience in the society in fact. Let the lists remain, let people be identified by caste (jati). The only touchy subject is to ascribe varnas (class) to jatis -- such as saying that X to Y jatis belong to the shoodra (slave) group, X to Y belong to vaishya (economically productive) group etc.. You will not find Supreme Court judgments upholding such identifications. And perhaps rightly so. But for Jati, it's just the name of the tribe that people used to belong to -- named either on account of an occupation, or on account of the tribe's origin or some other such reason. People who dissociate from such Jatis should not be included in the lists, or identified as belonging to X jati in their biographies out of deference to their privacy. For others, let jati remain in Wikipedia as long as it remains in people's minds. And may it be banished from both places as soon as possible.Sreejiraj (talk) 18:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Khandadhar Falls

Harichandan kar has moved Khandadhar Falls to Khandadhar Odisha and then to Wikipedia:Odisha Khandadhar. There was no problem of disambiguation with the original article name. Please help by setting it right. - Chandan Guha (talk) 15:03, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done I have restored the article and its history to the original title at Khandadhar Falls and deleted the confusing trail of redirects created by all the moves. JohnCD (talk) 15:49, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks and cheers. - Chandan Guha (talk) 16:00, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I have also given Harichandan kar some advice, but you might like to watchlist the page, and also keep an eye on him in case he needs more help. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 16:08, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Merge needed

See item above. Harichandan kar (talk · contribs) has now created a parallel article at Khandadhar Fall (singular). It has more information, and pictures, so I do not think it should be deleted per WP:CSD#A10, but it is written in too tourist-guidey a style. It needs to be merged into Khandadhar Falls which, from a quick Google, is the more common name. I have placed "mergefrom" and "mergeto" templates, but I do not have time actually to help with the merge. Help requested from interested editors. Harichandan kar is a keen new contributor but may need some guidance. JohnCD (talk) 17:05, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Now Harichandan kar (talk · contribs) claims that there are two falls with the same name, one in Sundergarh district and another in Kendujhar district (earlier name - Keonjhar). These are neighbouring districts. He has removed the merge tags and again moved only the Sundergarh district falls for disambiguation. The separate falls he claims in Kendujhar district has the same height and is on the same river. The references of the Kendujhar district falls are those of the Sundergarh district falls. The World Waterfalls Database mentions the falls as being in Sundargarh, Orissa but location etc. has not been confirmed by WWD. Other references mention it as being in Sundergarh district. Some websites refer to the Kendujhar district falls but I doubt their reliability. There is no mention of any place near which the Kendujhar disrict falls are located. The only additional information in the Kendujhar district falls page is the unreferenced description of the falls by the editor (or may be a cut and paste job from somewhere) and some photographs (two of which seem to be those of the author). As of present, the new editor is no mood to allow the merger. A cursory glance at his talk page reveals that an earlier separate article on the same topic was deleted. It was only after that he started moving the Sundergarh district falls, disambiguating it. - Chandan Guha (talk) 02:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

I have been searching the website. Here is some information on You tube:

"I don't know how many have encountered this confusion but i guess there are two waterfalls in odisha by the name of khandadhar; one in keonjhar and another one in sundergarh! i myself never knew until i went n saw the one at keonjhar! the internet is full of videos n pics of khandadhar where the two different falls are interchangeably shown as one which is definitely not the case! i will need to inquire further! many maps show two falls by the name of khandadhar but this somehow is consciously absent from the collective psyche of tourists and others! the one i saw n whose video is posted here is a near plunge fall at least 150 m tall while the one in sundergarh is a horsetail type and greater than 240 m tall! many others confuse this with the similar looking but much smaller pradhanpat falls (around 30 m tall) of nearby debagarh district!"

Taking this as reliable, we may have two pages but the Kendujhar waterfalls page should have referenced information about that falls and not create confusion by adding information about the Sundergarh falls. All information about the Sundergarh falls should be deleted from the Kendujhar falls page. Once that is done both the pages can be disambiguated and the base page can be made a disambiguation page. - Chandan Guha (talk) 03:53, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Keonjhar district, the website put up by the Keonjhar district administration also talks about the Khandadhar water falls in Keonjhar district.

There is an unreferenced entry in the Kendujhar district page as follows:

“Khandadhar : A sparkling waterfall of 500 ft. amidst lush green forest. A shower in the cascading water is a great experience. This waterfall is a smoking waterfall because of the "Smoke like" appearance created by the spray of the plunging waters of the waterfall at this spot. The spot is ideal for picnic. It is 60 km from Keonjhar town ( of this about 40 km fair weather and only jeepable). No accommodation facilities at the spot. Tourist will have to stay at Keonjhar.”

It is confirmed that there is a Khandadhar Falls in Kendujhar district, which is different from Khandadhar Falls in Sundergarh district. Once it is agreed that we can have two pages, I can go ahead and clear the Kendujhar district falls of Sundergarh district falls information, disambiguate both the pages in a similar manner and develop a disambiguation page. - Chandan Guha (talk) 04:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:MOS on Indian English

Is Indian English an acceptable variant of English language? And is Taj Mahal an appropriate example of MOS:TIES? Please comment here. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 19:26, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Chola dynasty

Chola dynasty is nominated 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. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DrKiernan (talk • contribs) 15:55, 13 November 2012‎ (UTC)

Dummy sign for auto-archiving. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 06:06, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Kumbakonam

The article has been nominated for reassessment of GA. All the review comments have been fixed and one of the users has acknowledged it. Can folks here weigh in your opinions at reassessment? Thanks a lot in advance.Ssriram mt (talk) 04:58, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Anybody know about Jajpur, Orissa

Can someone confirm that Yajna Varaha Temple and Varahanatha Temple (Jajpur) are same or different? --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 18:20, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Hindustani

FYI, the usage of Hindustani is up for discussion, see talk:Hindustani -- 76.65.128.43 (talk) 04:31, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Support is Needed for Page move . Tirumala Venkateswara Temple be renamed and moved to Thiruvengadam Temple.

Want to know more .please kindly clickTirumala_Venkateswara_TempleEshwar.om^{Talk tome} 11:30, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Flower punctuation mark ⁕

Does it really represent something related to South Asian writing? Is it actually a punctuation mark or something else?

When I contacted the author (off-wiki), he replied that the only source was a chart from unicode.org. Unicode’s list of characters is notorious for its incompetence, especially about names of characters. If somebody confirms that it belongs to punctuation, then reply here or add sources to the stub, please. Otherwise I’ll tag it for deletion. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 13:15, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

It's supposed to be called phul or puspika and used in Syloti Nagri and Bengali, but my Bengali fonts do not include it. It is, however, included in several archaic fonts, such as Phagspa and Aegean. See here. (What's it doing in Aegyptus, if it's Indian?) Since we have no idea what its function is (asterisk? ref mark? verse break?), and no RS as to what it's used in, I think it should be deleted. But you might want to ask at the ref desk or at one of the script articles if you don't get anything here. — kwami (talk) 21:16, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

AFAIK, in Bengali, there is no flower punctuation mark, the image is known as taraka chinha (star mark), which is basically same as asterisk. While searching in Bengali script for puspika, I got 2 results - did not see anything on such a punctuation mark; also never heard the term before.--GDibyendu (talk) 03:39, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

That's not a Bengali language character! --Tito Dutta (talk) 03:56, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

In this browser, I can see the character better now, it is different from asterisk, and it is not used in Bengali. --GDibyendu (talk) 05:01, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

IMPORTANT: PD India image files deletion at Commons

A proposal was made at Commons to delete all those images which are PD in own countries but not in US (Wikimedia server's country). Technically they can delete these files since COM:L states a file must be in PD in both in its country and US. BTW, this was taken to ANI where they decided systematic review and deletion. But, because of the number of files involved here the issue is pending for last many months now. Recently I have learned they have started deleting those files again and it seems we can't use any such file in any Wikimedia project. I feel if all these files are deleted WP India will be badly affected. See the discussion at Commons here (permalink) --Tito Dutta (talk) 00:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Article on movie "Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna"

There is a video of an old Bengali movie entitled "Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna" that has recently been posted to YouTube HERE. It has English subtitles. The movie is long (2h 20min) and quite extraordinary. It seems quite old - perhaps 1930s or 1940s? - but I have not been able to find a date on the internet. I have heard rumors that this movie may have been based on a theatrical production, so that the actors may have been primarily theater actors. But I can cite no source. It seems to me that this is an extraordinary movie that should really be covered in Wikipedia. But there seem to be few online sources, at least in English. I suspect historically and in Bengali there must be many sources discussing this amazing movie (and perhaps a play on which it was based). If anyone has any information about this film that would allow us to establish notability and start an article about it, I think that would be a wonderful service. Thank you --- Presearch (talk) 08:08, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

For the same reason I could not start the article. Sources. --Tito Dutta (talk) 08:37, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

 Doing... Yet, trying to find few sources to pass notability barrier at least! --Tito Dutta (talk) 08:40, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

1955 movie, but IMDB does not have a page on it. Film is noted in Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (Nihalani, Rajadhyaksh et al.).--GDibyendu (talk) 09:34, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

And also at page 204 of the book by Sharmishtha Guptoo.--Dwaipayan (talk) 19:20, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Great! Using that footnote's spelling of the lead actor, I found a screenshot and mention of this movie in a recent Telegraph profile of him: Soumitra Das and Dalia Mukherje (2012, Aug. 5). "The matter-of-fact actor of many parts" Kolkata, India: The Telegraph. In that article, the movie name is spelled "Bhagaban Sri Sri Ramakrishna" and the actor "Kanu Bandyopadhyay". It seems that there are numerous transliterated spelling variants, so one search doesn't reveal everything. But I suspect we still need more info to create a page for the movie. Or do we? -- Presearch (talk) 20:13, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

A very short stub won't need more than this.--Dwaipayan (talk) 02:51, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Aacharyaa Pratishtha Sharma (dancer)

User talk:Rusianejohn created this article. It's bad now, it was dreadful before I removed the copyvio and did some editing. It's actually a copy of User:Chorndavid which still has the copyvio. Anyone willing to have a go at it? There's also been an IP promoting the the article's subject. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 19:06, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

 Doing... --Tito Dutta (talk) 05:45, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Article has been moved from "Aacharyaa Pratishtha Sharma (dancer)" to "Pratishtha Sharma". Works on structure, copyediting has been done. Some content without any source was moved to article's talk page. There were some issues in image license and permission (2 television screenshot and 1 from a "al rights reserved" site) which has been reported. --Tito Dutta (talk) 06:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, brilliant work. Expect some promotional stuff again though given past edits. Dougweller (talk) 10:32, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Suspicious contributions

Pl.check Special:Contributions/Wikiassociate - This user has been editing several Hindi movie and TV serial articles by adding the name of a child actor "Sainath Dukkipati" for which I could find no credible references online - I suspect it to be vandalism. --Gurubrahma (talk) 14:39, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

They are adding the child's name there so that they can use those articles as reference here --Tito Dutta (talk) 03:46, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Ananda Marga, particularly names

Over at WP:FT/N we've been looking at a bunch of articles related to the Ananda Marga movement and its founder Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, who is often referred to in the articles by his "spiritual name" Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti. Do we have a policy on this type of name use? I understand that "Shrii" is really a title, so would we use it in every reference?

I would also like to call for help on updating these articles. By and large they seem to have been edited by group members from a believer's perspective. I know that there is a lot of political history here as well. Assistance would be deeply appreciated given that most of the people looking at them now are westerners who don't really have a strong understanding of the religious/cultural/political context. Mangoe (talk) 22:02, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if there is a policy on honorifics on names, but personally I prefer not to see them in article titles or frequently in the body text. If they are commonly used I would note the honorific as such somewhere in the body text. The entry above this one just noted that an article was moved from "Aacharyaa Pratishtha Sharma (dancer)" to Pratishtha Sharma", for example. Śrī is not really a title, it is more of a term of respect, like "illustrious" in English. When you say "title" I think more of a functional title or job title, such as "Editor", "Judge", or "Pope". An honorific could be added to a title in that sense, e.g., "the illustrious Editor". Buddhipriya (talk) 03:05, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Ya, some users often change this to honorifics like a) "Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti" b) Baba c) Ánandamúrti Ji. Following WP:SURNAME, they should use "Sarkar" mainly!

About updating those articles, the work is already going on. Main article Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar has been copyedited thoroughly, some work was done in Neohumanism and Ananda Marga articles.. some small articles have been taken to AFD now, we should wait to see the outcome before starting working there!--Tito Dutta (talk) 03:43, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Question about Bengali name of school district

At Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language#Bengali_name_for_.22Peel_District_School_Board.22 I asked how best to express the name en:Peel District School Board in the Bengali language (translation or transliteration) - How would I best do this?

Would anyone mind searching the pages at http://languages.peelschools.org/Bengali/home/ to see if the school board made its own transliteration or translation of the name somewhere? WhisperToMe (talk) 14:46, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• Someone supplied the Bengali name. Thanks ! WhisperToMe (talk) 23:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Question about Hindi and Punjabi names of a school district

I made a post at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language#Hindi and Punjabi names for New York City Department of Education asking for the Hindi and Punjabi name texts of a school district. Would anyone mind inputting the text? Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 23:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Dover Lane music festival

Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:Dover Lane music festival#Requested move, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, Tyrol5 [Talk] 02:39, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Jajapur

Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:Jajapur#Requested move, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, Tyrol5 [Talk] 02:41, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Peer review for Independence Day

A peer review request has been added for Independence Day (India). Please provide suggestions to improve the article. Thanks.--Dwaipayan (talk) 04:47, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Real headquarters of SpiceJet

Hi! At http://www.spicejet.com/contactus.asp it says

• Registered Office: Murasoli Maran Towers, 73, MRC Nagar Main Road, MRC Nagar, Chennai- 600028, Tamil Nadu.
• Corporate Office: SpiceJet Ltd., 319, Udyog Vihar, Phase IV, Gurgaon - 122016 Haryana, India.

So that means the administrative headquarters are in Haryana and not in Chennai, right? WhisperToMe (talk) 03:29, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Registered office is the one which is registered with the Government of India. Typically, government and judiciary system will communicate to the company at its address of the registered office. Corporate office is as defined by the company, it can be different from the registered office, though not necessarily. Another company will typically communicate with 'this' company at its address of the corporate Office. Sometimes, a company may have a separate Head office, which may be different from the corporate office and the registered office, where the top ranking officials of the company will have their offices. This is as per my understanding, providing references would be difficult. However, definition of a registered office can be found in Companies Act of India.--GDibyendu (talk) 07:00, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

See also: The Companies Act, 1956

Thanks for the explanation! Doesn't the corporate office house the chief executives? If so, would it work to define the corporate office as the head office and put the company in the area Wikiproject? (I.E. a company with its head office in Haryana is put in the Haryana WikiProject) WhisperToMe (talk) 21:11, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

What to do about articles using lakhs as a unit of measurement

I realise that lakh as a measurement is used in English language writing but I don't think a lot of our readers will know what it is. Any suggestions as to what to do about its use? A template? Dougweller (talk) 14:22, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

100 thousand. You can link the article Lakh

Or,

{{INRConvert|N|l}}

{{INRConvert|10|l}} returns ₹10 lakh (US$12,000) --Tito Dutta (talk) 14:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

From WP:MOSIN - "Use the Indian numbering system of lakhs and crores. Give their equivalence (millions/ billions) alongside." Hack (talk) 14:29, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks both. I was hoping for something like that - I'd searched but failed to find it. Dougweller (talk) 15:19, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome! --Tito Dutta (talk) 15:24, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

AfD

Hello,

This is to inform you that Ahem Modi (from the soap Saath Nibhaana Saathiya), aka Mohammad Nazim, has been nominated for deletion under the grounds of non-notablity. Could some experienced editors comment on and confirm the same?

Thanks, TheOriginalSoni (talk) 15:33, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

census 2011 data

Using Population Finder tool at census website, I am able to get total population and male/female breakup for cities, towns, UAs etc. But, not getting a way to view data on literacy for these. Any idea how to get it? Tried registering at census website too, it did not succeed. Was anyone able to register there? Thanks.--GDibyendu (talk) 19:24, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Although I have not checked, literacy, religion etc may be available in the GIS databank of census. --Dwaipayan (talk) 22:08, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Can anyone dig out the religious breakup of Bhubaneswar? Even data of 2001 census is fine. Amartyabag ^TALK2ME 14:53, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Literacy, sex ratio and infant ratio for the >1 lakh cities can be found here - although [www.censusindia.gov.in] doesn't seem to be working at the moment, you can still find it if you put the URL into Google and choose Quick View. [9] appears to be an independent site which goes down to district level. The data seems to be reliable, at least the data that you can match with the government site seems to be the same, but it would obviously be better to have a direct link to the government data. So for instance the Bhubaneswar metro data is here and the city data is here - it doesn't have religious data though. I guess it's the sort of thing that would be in one of the later releases of data - for instance the British census has only just released its 2011 religious data this week.FlagSteward (talk) 15:00, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Mughal art exhibition

Hi all,

I've pulled together a page for the British Library's current exhibition on Mughal art here - it's a very interesting collection of major manuscripts and artworks, including some really beautiful illustrations.

After a chat with the curator, I've tried to pull out the highlights and most prominent authors/books/artworks, many of which we have no articles on as yet. If anyone's interested in writing about any of them, do let me know and I'll try to get hold of images for you - a large amount of the material was photographed for the catalogue prior to being exhibited, and should be available for Wikipedia. We also have a reasonably good bibliography as part of the catalogue, so I should be able to help track down of suitable sources.

I'm hoping to run a small contest around this theme shortly - I'm just waiting to get hold of a couple of books to be prizes :-) - so watch this space... Andrew Gray (talk) 23:31, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

• Super excellent news! --Tito Dutta (talk) 02:22, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Calicut

On 18 November 2012, Kozhikode, which had been stable under that name since 2002, was moved without discussion to the former colonial name of Calicut. This move has to be highly controversial, and should have gone through the Requested move process. What is perhaps surprising is that the move was made by a highly experienced editor and former administrator (though, on second thoughts, it perhaps isn't so surprising as he did a similar thing at Puducherry previously), who is well aware of the processes and the necessity to gain consensus for such controversial moves. I have requested a technical move to revert to the original name at Requested moves, so that a proper discussion can be held. Skinsmoke (talk) 02:15, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done Page reverted. Skinsmoke (talk) 23:38, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Hindi accent related question

Could one of you guys have a look at the question asked on the reference desk related to the Hindi accent, please.
It was asked before four days, but still nobody has responded to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. ···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 17:42, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Can't believe I actually watched that video. I need five minutes of my life back. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 18:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Hahaha, rofl. I skipped to a portion, watched for 3 secs!--Dwaipayan (talk) 23:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

It's all okay now, 184.* was very gracious with their reply. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 23:39, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for answering the question, very fast and helpful you are. And the above comment made me laugh a lot. You have increased the life expectancy of us;^[1] though you sacrificing yours! :) ···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 17:20, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Maroda

Hello. Can someone please develop this article. Currently an edit war is going between me and User:Manish Koli. I have thought of bringing it up at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring, but thought it would be better if I first try to develop the article. I have repeatedly warned the User:Manish Koli with {{uw-own}} with level 2 and 3. Any help would be gladly appreciated.--Ushau97 ^{talk contribs} 09:30, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Welcome to WikiProject noticeboard! Yes he is making multiple errors there! What happened after reporting? You may find some information here: Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL --Tito Dutta (talk) 19:08, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks goes to User:Utcursch for developing the article. I think User:Manish Koli have stopped it for now (even better if for now can be striked out).--Ushau97 ^{talk contribs} 11:45, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Article on Rupak

(I do not seem to be able to access any talk page on this article, so I am trying to help through this channel.) In the article I read:

[Begin Quote] The following is an example of a more complex tihai in Rupak Tala that begins on matra six.

   X X X | X X | Tira Kt
   Ta Tira| Kt Ta | Tira Kt
   Da X X | X X | X X

[End Quote]

From what I understand of tihais, they consist of equally long parts, possibly interspersed with rests, and I have not read that they change the underlying rhythmic structure of the performance.

The total number of beats starting from beat six of one rupak cycle up to and including beat one of the cycle after the next one equals 2 + 7 + 1 = 10, which is not divisible by three (although it might be divided into three played groups of 2 beats interspersed with two rest groups of 2 beats). In the above example from the article, the second rupak cycle seems to consist of only six beats, rather than seven. This is why I cannot completely understand the explanation given.

Can someone knowledgeable explain what is meant exactly with this example?

Thanks a lot!Redav (talk) 15:37, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

How are you calculating 2+7+1? --Tito Dutta (talk) 14:51, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

As far as I know, 2 + 7 + 1 = 10. I suppose that is not what you meant, though. Please explain. If I were to overlay a seven-beat cycle (beats represented by Arabic (originally Indian) numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-) with three uninterspersed tihai-parts of three beats length (beats represented by letters a-b-c-) (together nine consecutive beats), and if the last of these nine beats were to coincide with the first beat of a seven-beat cycle, I would present it this way:

   1st 7-beat cycle:  1--2--3--4--5--6--7a-
   2nd 7-beat cycle:  1b-2c-3a-4b-5c-6a-7b-
   3rd 7-beat cycle:  1c-2--3--4--5--6--7--

The quoted scheme above (from the original article) shows a sequence of three "Tira Kt (T/D)a" patterns. Supposing (as I do) that they are all three beats long, the second cycle counts six rather than seven beats, and therefore does not seem to be a rupaktal cycle.

I know only very little about talas, and I like to learn a little more through wikipedia. That is why I am trying to understand the text. If my understanding of tihai is wrong, please correct me and explain in an accessible way. Thanks!Redav (talk) 15:41, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Rupak Tala goes like this:

Wave, 2, 3 | Clap, 2 | Clap, 2

If in the second example tihai begins with the second clap, then clap 2 that makes 2; Wave, 2, 3, Clap, 2, Clap, 2 that makes 7; That's alright! But, from where hat 1 of 2+7+1 coming from? Also note, article says, it is a complex tihai, so it might be a long note. In case it is a 90 beat (matra) note (I don't think so), then 90 can be divided by 10, 9 and 3! Hope you have noticed that portion refers an offline book! That book might contain more information! In case if you don't have the book and can not collect too, you can request those particular pages here: WP:RESOURCE!

I have a long time wish to expand/improve Wikipedia's Hindustani classical music related articles! I started writing few articles too like Jhoomra, Tilwada.

I do wish to add sample sounds with each tala and ragas. The worst point is we need copyright free content (that means we can not collect from Youtube or web)! In articles like Sitar I have added sample music (file added). Let me know if you have any thoughts on Tala (i.e I don't know why in Wikipedia we write "tala", it's Taal i.e Taandava Lashya! --Tito Dutta (talk) 18:56, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanation! We seem to get closer to the issue that seems to prevent us from understanding each other. But what do you mean with `it might be a long note'?

Let me explain a part of the message that comes across to me from the article and your remarks.

a) From the article I understand rupaktal comes in cycles of seven beats and only cycles of seven beats. The line Ta Tira| Kt Ta | Tira Kt in the article suggests one six beat cycle between two seven beat cycles. Do you agree, or does that line mean something different? I am really wondering if this representation is correct.

b) My 2+7+1 relates to the same example in the article, and to my understanding that each cycle should contain seven beats, and to the text saying that the tihai starts on beat six in a certain cycle and ends on the first beat of the cycle after the next one, and on my understanding of the first part of the article on tihai. [Intermezzo: The first part of that article is very clear to me, but, according to my opinion, the examples in that article would get even more illustrative if they actually showed how the respective cycles, teental and jhaptaal, are overlayed with the respective tihais.] Well then, 2 of its beats would fall within the first cycle, 7 in the second one, and 1 in the last one. Am I correct? Hence my 2+7+1=10, and my problem of dividing these 10 beats into three equal parts containing only unit beats (and no fractions of beats).

So, I think it would be helpful if the article would explain in a clear way the subjects it embarks upon [i.e. either stick to seven beat cycles not interspersed with six-beat ones and minimize the possibilities for misunderstanding, or else at least mention explicitly that it is in fact interspersed with one six-beat cycle; and also write explicitly whether the tihai is or is not interspersed with rests] and also if the article would be self-contained in that it completes the explanation of the subjects it embarks upon. I mean: it is fine if the article refers to external sources, but the understanding of the line of reasoning of the article should, according to my opinion, not rely on the contents of the external sources. Let me stress that the first example of a tihai within a rupak rhythm is very clear to me.

I would be glad if this struggle of me - an interested layman with respect to Indian rhythmic patterns - to understand and to feedback on this article, would help someone else in getting across the intended interesting message of the article across to the public!Redav (talk) 13:09, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

I can not understand the last 1 in the last one for which I can not understand you'll end on sama with 2+7+1 unless it is a very long note! Can you give an example with bols (Ti Ra Ke Ta or something), showing a) Tihai beging and b) Sama? --Tito Dutta (talk) 13:41, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

• That reference is incomplete! I have added a "rewrite section" tag there! --Tito Dutta (talk) 13:43, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

First of all, even if I did not yet across what I meant with this "1 in the last one" (but see below), did I bring across my opinion on clarity and self-containedness of articles? And am I the only one who only counts six (rather than seven) beats in the line Ta Tira| Kt Ta | Tira Kt in the article?

My example with something (rather than bols) is already given in the beat scheme with the numerals (1 up to and including 7) representing cycle beats, and the letters (a, b, c) representing tihai beats.

But if I were to pretend knowing how to give a bol, I would do it like this, using the bol Tira kt (T/Da) from the article. In the first scheme below, I start a tihai(-like) sequence on beat six in the first rupak tala cycle (RTC for short) and then the last beat of the tihai would fall on the last beat of the second RTC. In the second scheme below, I am forcing the last beat of the same tihai sequence to coincide with the first beat of the third RTC, so the tihai sequence has to start on beat 7 of the first RTC. Finally, in the third scheme below, it is tried (in vain!) to force still the same tihai sequence to both start on beat six of the first RTC (i.e. first constraint) and end on the first beat of the third RTC (i.e. second constraint) without changing the underlying rupak tala rhythmic structure (i.e. third constraint) and without changing the tihai's rhythmic structure of three equally long repetitions of one and the same pattern (i.e. fourth constraint). Obviously (?), it is impossible fulfill all four constraints at once. [But this is what the article seems to try to do, and it seems to end up with a six beat cycle in the middle.] I am adding numerals to the schemes below to indicate the progression within the rupak tala cycle. I am using parenthesis to mark the beginning and end of each of the three tihai parts.

First scheme. Beginning on beat 6 of first RTC forced. The final Da then falls on beat 7 of the second RTC, not on the first beat of the third RTC. It seems to be known as Anagat (see article on tihai):

   1st RTC:  1X 2X 3X | 4X 5X | (6Tira 7Kt
   2nd RTC:  1Ta) (2Tira 3Kt | 4Ta) (5Tira | 6Kt 7Da)
   3rd RTC:  1X 2X 3X | 4X 5X | 6X 7X

Second scheme. Ending on beat 1 of the third RTC forced. The first beat of the first tihai part then falls on the seventh beat of the first RTC, not on the sixth beat of the first RTC:

   1st RTC:  1X 2X 3X | 4X 5X | 6X (7Tira
   2nd RTC:  1Kt 2Ta) (3Tira| 4Kt 5Ta) | (6Tira 7Kt
   3rd RTC:  1Da) 2X 3X | 4X 5X | 6X 7X

Third scheme. Original scheme from the article. Mind the disappearance of beat 3 from the second RTC at the position of the dots, so it is no longer really a rupak tala cycle, I suppose!

   1st RTC:  1X 2X 3X | 4X 5X | (6Tira 7Kt
   2nd RTC:  1Ta) (2Tira ... | 4Kt 5Ta) | (6Tira 7Kt
   3rd RTC:  1Da) 2X 3X | 4X 5X | 6X 7X

So, my 1 in the last one accounts for the last beat of the third tihai part that ought to fall on the first beat of the third rupak tala cycle (RTC for short) in the example of the article. Please refer to the article on tihai stating "The ending point of the tihai is calculated to fall on a significant point in the rhythmic cycle (called Tala), most often the first beat" and please also refer to the Da on the first beat of the third RTC in the example of the article.

I am afraid this is all I can do to explain what is not understandable to me. I really do not know with my counting skills how to make a total of 9 tihai beats fit in the 10 beats comprising beats 6 and 7 of the first RTC, beats 1 up to and including 7 in the second RTC, and in addition beat 1 in the third RTC.

You do not happen to mean that the final beat of the present tihai sequence falls immediately after the group of three patterns (giving a 3+3+3+1 beat pattern), do you? [I mean, it is perfectly clear that the time lapsed between the beginning of beat interval 6 in the first RTC and the end of beat interval seven in the second RTC counts exactly nine beat intervals. With beat interval I indicate the time elapsing between the points in time marked by each of two consecutive beats.] Risking to complicate matters a bit, I would like to state that my understanding of the nine-beat tihai scheme in the article, i.e. the sequence Tira - Kt - Ta - Tira - Kt - Ta - Tira - Kt - Da, actually encompasses a time interval of 8 beat intervals (indicated by the hyphens in the sequence) if it is considered that a single drum beat is a point event in time.]Redav (talk) 15:45, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

That looks good! I have not written the portion of the article and seriously facing trouble to understand/clarify/modify it without seeing the original text. I also can't understand if that reference verifies the first example or the whole section! That section can be removed or rewritten (what I have suggested). Using WikiBlamer you can try to find the editor who added it and ask h(im/er) to add clarification there! --Tito Dutta (talk) 16:05, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

I seem to have traced the original writer of the article part on tihais, and I have informed him of our discussion.Redav (talk) 16:41, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

RfC of interest

I've just opened an RfC that may be of interest to watchers of this page. It can be found at Talk:Cinema of Andhra Pradesh#RfC on use of "second largest". Please give it a look and comment if you're so inclined. Qwyrxian (talk) 23:04, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Aircraft Accident Investigation Board

Hi! I found India established the AAIB http://civilaviation.gov.in/aaib/Procedure_Manual.pdf - But the final report on Air India Express Flight 812 doesn't mention the AAIB's name, so I assume this is recent. But I'm not sure if the document says that the AAIB was formed in 2012... or if it was formed during another time...? WhisperToMe (talk) 17:26, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Air India Express head office?

There are news articles saying that the head office moved to Kochi on 1 January 2013 with the move occurring in stages but the website of Air India Express still says the head office is in Nariman Point, Mumbai. Did it move yet? What is the visiting address/physical address of the Kochi office? WhisperToMe (talk) 20:26, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Vivekananda's house in Raipur

Someone has uploaded this image and is saying this is the house in Raipur where young Vivekananda and his family spent two years. But, I am not sure, it seems to be a coaching centre! Chances are local authorities have not done anything to preserve the house, but, there are also chances that this image is a hoax. Any idea? --Tito Dutta (talk) 07:15, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

I removed the image from the Raipur article. Better less but verified than more but possibly incorrect! --regentspark (comment) 16:27, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Wow! what a complex sentence, RP! "Better less but verified than more but possibly incorrect!" It took me a while to grasp it.--Dwaipayan (talk) 16:47, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Not so much complicated if you read like this: Better less but verified than more but possibly incorrect --Tito Dutta (talk) 16:08, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Punctuation? What is that? :) --regentspark (comment) 19:24, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Here is the proof . Even swamivivekananda.org acknowledges that Swamiji stayed in this house while in Raiour in 1877 http://www.swamivivekananda.org.in/gallery/index.php/Swami-Vivekananda/220px-Vivekanand_Raipur_Home_1877 -- Theasg sap (talk) 14:32, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

The question was not whether Vivekananda stayed at Raipur, that was a common information! The question was is it the same house where Vivekananda and family lived! The website partially proves it, but, I don't know who runs this website! And who is the Owner: Soumik Bhattacharyya? --Tito Dutta (talk) 09:23, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

The owner of this house as of today is a couple Mr and Mrs Bose who both are more than 80 years old. The lady Mrs Abha Bose has inherited this property. Her great grand father Rai Bahadur Bhootnath Dey was the only good lawyer in Raipur in 1877 and he was a friend of Swami Vivekananda's father. Times have changed and the whole house compund has been renovated but they havnt touched this part of the building. The elderly couple runs a shool in this compound now but these 2 rooms are locked.The couple has refused to hand over the building to the state government who wants to convert it a memorial.Last month there was a detailed story on this in the newspaper Dainik Bhaskar whihc is the largest circulated daily in India -- Theasg sap (talk) 14:32, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Can you give the link to the story? If there is same photo in the newspaper, then it would throw some more light. Thanks. --Abhijeet Safai (talk) 10:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Here we go. Hope everyone can read hindi here http://www.bhaskar.com/article/c-16-499636-NOR.html -- Theasg sap (talk) 17:06, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Demographics

An IP has recently taken upon itself the task to change the religious demographics sections of different Indian cities. Unless a new survey has been released that I'm not aware of, then I think this might need some further looking into. FallingGravity (talk) 06:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

We don't have sources for such data on Indian cities. Census 2001 provides such data at district level. But, results published from Census 2011 still do not include such data even at the district level.--GDibyendu (talk) 19:22, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

WP India Talkback template

Often editors from other WikiProjects come to this noticeboard! I suggest/wish to create a separate WPIndia specific Talkback template (the way WP:Teahouse has one)! --Tito Dutta (talk) 19:01, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good. Go ahead! AshLin (talk) 17:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

WP:INAA

Please keep an watch on the alerts page related to India: WP:INAA. For example, the pages nominated for Afd. BTW, if you have access to reliable sources, then please try to improve Tally Solutions page, which is under Afd now.--GDibyendu (talk) 20:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

IndicScript in lead and multiple WikiProjects

WP:India recommends not to add Indic script in lead. But, there might be some confusion if an article is under multiple WikiProjects. For example Pritilata Waddedar, the article is primarily WP:Bangladesh topic and then WP:India. WP:Bangladesh has no such rule of not adding Indic script but, it might be a common practice there to add Bengali script. Removing Indic script from such articles might be incorrect. There might be similar confusion for a) Punjabi and Urdu language (WP:India and WP:Pakistan) b) Nepali language WP:India and WP:Nepal (if there is any such project), but I don't know about these! --Tito Dutta (talk) 07:15, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Must admit, I thought this was an extremely bad decision (I was away from Wikipedia at the time, I think, and missed it) and is actually contrary to the guidelines at the Manual of Style. It sets Indian articles apart from all others where the native script is not Roman (see practically any article on things Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Emirates, Qatari, Cypriot, Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Yemeni, Omani, Bahraini, Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Bosnian, Eritrean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian, Georgian, Armenian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Macedonian, Libyan, Belorussian, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Tajik, Burmese, Thai, Ethiopian, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Mauritanian, Afghan, Nepali, Bhutanese, Ukrainian, Mongolian, Sri Lankan, Maldivian, Cambodian, Korean, Serbian, Israeli, and even, in the Northwest Territories or Nunavut, Canadian).

If there is a genuine problem with displaying non-Roman scripts in the introductory paragraph, perhaps a solution similar to that now favoured in Chinese articles might be appropriate (see Ürümqi, for example). Here, the non-Roman scripts have been moved into a separate infobox, which lists the various native forms, along with IPA and the various transcriptions. Skinsmoke (talk) 02:05, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree with User:Skinsmoke. Some users like myself have spent countless hours adding these scripts only to see them removed last year. In addition, they are extremely helpful to readers who know the scripts. I hope to see WP:India realigned with the guidelines in the Manual of Style and think that a new discussion would be helpful. With regards, Anupam^Talk 04:51, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Skinsmoke, there is a "genuine problem" but our attempt to resolve it was made worse because related projects were not informed. All of this is well documented and please note that MOS is not policy. There is a simple and common sense solution: if an article concerns Pakistan or Bangladesh etc then leave the relevant scripts but continue to deprecate those that do not specifically apply to Pakistan/Bangladesh etc. We are not going to allow scripts to infest India-related content any more than is absolutely necessary: nationalism, regionalism, linguistic vandalism etc are a worse evil and are well-known problems that have been discussed extensively and in the not-too-distant past. This is English Wikipedia and India-related content is generally of a very poor standard without introducing more scope for bad contributions.

If anything, it would be preferable to extend the restriction, especially in the case of Pakistani articles as they are one of the few areas on en-WP that are even worse than those concerning modern-day India. One of the problems with this particular project is a definition of "India", ie: pre- or post-partition etc. Perhaps try addressing that one.--2.121.113.227 (talk) 15:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC) (Sitush, on a rare foray and from a public PC, so not logged in)

Hopefully a new RfC can help generate some discussion on this topic as there seem to be some editors that are interested in restoring them. As User:Skinsmoke mentioned, a Chinese style infobox may be a good solution. With regards, Anupam^Talk 17:51, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

What!? How many discussions and RfCs do you need, Anupam? I know that you've had issues relating to POV-pushing etc and I know that the original series of discussions were a palaver but, honestly, you need to come up with something better than a single-sentence RfC given what has happened in the recent past.--2.219.218.79 (talk) 19:03, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

2.219.218.79, from my knowledge there was only one discussion held last year. I didn't think another RfC could hurt but if it makes you feel better, I removed the RfC template. It seems that both User:Skinsmoke and I agree that a new discussion is needed. If you'd like to create a new RfC, please feel free to do so. I hope this helps. With regards, Anupam^Talk 19:36, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

There were discussions before the RfC and there have been discussions since it. Indeed, as recently as this month. If you want to propose a change then fair enough, but it is clear - from your last statement, among other things - that you have not considered the background--2.219.218.79 (talk) 19:41, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

My apologies, I was not aware that there was another discussion about scripts last month. If you could please point me to the discussion, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Anupam^Talk 19:46, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

A recent example is here. There are several others.--2.219.218.79 (talk) 19:53, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. What was the consensus there? It does not seem like an administrator closed it. Is it alright to add the official languages for geographical locations and cities? I look forward to your reply. With regards, Anupam^Talk 20:08, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Anupam, if I recall correctly, the consensus was that it is ok to use Indic scripts for geographical names as long as this was only in the infobox and as long as all official languages of the geographical entity were included. There was some discussion about ordering of the scripts but I don't remember if there was a consensus on that. --regentspark (comment) 20:15, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply User:RegentsPark, that's great news! With regards, Anupam^Talk 20:18, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

• Suggestion: My reading of the comments here and the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Noticeboard_for_India-related_topics/Archive_52#Indic_Scritps is that there is not opposition to including scripts in an infobox, but there is opposition to including them in the text of the opening paragraph. If I am right, then perhaps the best solution is to develop a collapsible Chinese style languages infobox (as used at Ürümqi) that can be added to a particular category of articles (say, Category:Districts of India by name) on a trial basis. If it works out there, then it could be rolled out to other placename articles one step at a time. Experience dealing with easier categories (for districts it should be fairly easy to ascertain the official languages involve), should help to solve problems dealing with more contentious fields.

I am not suggesting, at this stage, that we consider extending the infobox to anything but geographical articles (let's walk before we try to run).

I would suggest at this stage that the languages be confined to official languages in the district concerned listed in the following order:

• Official languages in the whole state by alphabetical order in English
• Official languages in the district by alphabetical order in English

and that each should show transliteration into Roman script plus IPA.

Is anyone able to produce an example, using Template:Infobox Chinese as the basis, for a couple of districts? Skinsmoke (talk) 23:25, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

For an English speaking traveler that finds themselves using Wikipedia for information when visiting some of these geographic locations, I would think that seeing the place name in the native script in combination with the English name at infobox would be particularly helpful. Alatari (talk) 12:15, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I think Anupam's solution in the Delhi article is perfect (the three official scripts placed just below the English rendering). An additional infobox will merely add to the clutter. Alatari, a couple of points. First, of course, Wikipedia is not a travel website. Wikivoyage is meant for that sort of information. Second, if you're trying to tell me that someone would see Shaheed Bhagat Singh Marg written in Gurmukhi, Urdu and Hindi on a Wikipedia article, then go to the roadway in Delhi, see a sign, and say "aha, that's Shaheed Bhagat Singh Marg - I saw it on Wikipedia", then you are far more optimistic about human capabilities than is warranted! --regentspark (comment) 22:19, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Agree with RegentsPark. If people really want to assist in improving India-related articles then there are far more significant problems that need to be addressed. Yes, every grain of sand helps to build something but, honestly, this stuff is way over-complicated, unsourced and unreliable without adding another layer to it. We have literally thousands of Indian village stubs that have no reliable verification at all, for example. And it seems to me to be not uncommon for various sources to use different "official" scripts, so perhaps we need to start by defining what we use there. The national census 2011, perhaps?--2.219.218.79 (talk) 00:20, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

The problem at Delhi (and on a lot of Indian articles), is that the scripts serve little purpose other than as decoration. The reader is not told which languages they are in, nor are they given either a transliteration or IPA, and so are unable to pronounce them. That is what the Chinese infobox attempts to deal with, while at the same time offering the option of removing the script from the main text (for Chinese articles, they usually still follow the Manual of Style guidelines, and keep the text in the introduction, but it varies). I'm not sure that I follow the argument that such an infobox is "clutter". Anyone who doesn't want to know simply ignores it, and doesn't click on the "Show" link, whereas anyone who wants to see the contents is able to do so. Despite numerous problems when the Chinese box was being developed, it now seems to be working well across thousands of articles, with very few complaints at all. I acknowlege there may be problems with official and unofficial versions of the script, but if we can manage to work out the English names (and there are often numerous different English spellings for places in India), then working out the official script version shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. As 2.219.218.79 says, it's a matter of working out the sources which are acceptable (the same as for anything else in Wikipedia). In any case, it was precisely for these reasons that I suggested carrying out a trial on a limited number of similar articles, without authorising a widespread roll-out, to see what problems occurred and whether they could be overcome. Skinsmoke (talk) 05:45, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

We need to think this through first. Anupam's edits to the Delhi article are problematic. The Devanagari and Gurmukhi rendering of Delhi (I can't read Nastaʿlīq) transliterates as dehli (देहली ਦੇਹਲੀ) as opposed to the more common dilli (दिल्ली, ਦਿੱਲੀ). dehli is neither the most common translation nor the correct transliteration of Delhi. Why are we using it as the native name? Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 21:33, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Good question. If we use the local language equivalent, then all idea of "recognizability" goes out of the window because the English language name may not be a transliteration. In the case of Delhi, I believe that Anupam's hindi version is not the local language version (Dilli) but the gurmukhi one is (Dehli). Can't read the nastaliq so no comment on that. But yes, we need to figure out what version we're going to use. My preference is, for encyclopedic reasons, we should use the local name rather than a transliteration from English to local language. --regentspark (comment) 22:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Maybe dehli is the appropriate gurmukhi version, but both Hindi and Punjabi wikis seem to favour dilli over dehli. Should we care about article titles in home wikis when determining the local name? I don't think there was a consensus in the previous discussion on how local names were to be determined. Correct Knowledge^«৳alk» 22:49, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Ping to avoid archiving. The issue of scripts in geographic articles has arisen on several recent occasions and we really need to find some sort of resolution. In the event that no agreement is possible due to the linguistic uncertainties, as suggested in the Delhi example above, then it would be beneficial to have consensus that the minefield applies here as much as at, say, caste articles and therefore that WP:INDICSCRIPT in its current form remains the preferred guidance. --2.219.218.79 (talk) 14:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Bengali speakers: Help needed

Help is needed from Bengali speakers in confirming some information in the article about actor Gurudas Banerjee. Details of what's needed are provided on the article's talk page, HERE. Thanks in advance -- Presearch (talk) 05:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Hoaxes and small villages

I just found out about the "Bicholim conflict" hoax, and decided to check if the idiot responsible had created any other articles. There's one -- Kansarpal (apparently a town near Bicholim). It looks legitimate to me, but many of the Google results are more recent than the article, and I'm feeling a bit ill today. Could anyone do a better job in finding whether this is legitimately a place that exists? Thanks. DS (talk) 14:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

This seems to indicate it exists. --regentspark (comment) 15:44, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate articles?

Is Mandu, Madhya Pradesh the same place as is described in the history section of Mandav? It looks like it to me. PamD 19:33, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

They do look the same. Unless there is a naming difference between the town and the historical site. Any ideas anyone? --regentspark (comment) 21:22, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

History of a state

Does history of a state begin when the state is formed? Please checkout the discussion here.--GDibyendu (talk) 07:08, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Category for deletion?

Categories:Indian given names Masculine given names. I'm a little concerned that the following page is getting too much like a dictionary of Indian words? Does it belong here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohit24.0.133.234 (talk) 19:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Nevermind-I see where there are 7,154 pages of given names and the need to break them down into sub-categories.24.0.133.234 (talk) 19:28, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Postal Index Number

Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:Postal Index Number#Proposed Move to 'PIN Code' or 'Pincode', regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, Tyrol5 [Talk] 03:49, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Need ref from Indian Tech Magazines

Ittiam Systems is under Afd; please check Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ittiam_Systems. If you have access to Tech magazines published in India, then please check whether any information/references on this company can be provided from such sources. Given that the products of this company are not meant for direct sell to end-users, it is difficult for traditional media to provide much information on it, by doing R&D/verification in a proper way.--GDibyendu (talk) 16:48, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Malayali actors

There is a proposal to delete or rename Category:Malayali actors. I am hoping listing it here will generate more discussion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:19, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Category:Punjwood actors

There is a proposal to merge Category:Punjwood film actors to Category:Punjabi film actors I am hoping listing it here will generate more discussion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:19, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Category:Indian actors by language

There is a proposal to rename Category:Indian actors by language. I am hoping listing it here will generate more disscussion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:19, 13 February 2013 (UTC)