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proved not to be necessarily so (or even plain wrong). This applies as much as placenames as people/communities. Being mentioned by
Megasthenes appears to be a part of what some people have called the "caste glorification" tendency. I would need to do some very serious digging if it is required that I produce a bundle of evidence for this. There are a lot of "it is thought"s, "it has been suggested"s etc around all of this underlying material (when properly fact-checked) and as such this particular article would need a lot of work. While needing a lot of work is not a reason to delete, the connections are tenuous, the layout is poor, the expertise appears to be non-existent, the sources are not there, etc. It may be an encyclopedic subject but it is unencyclopedic in execution & I suspect needs a great deal of expertise. I'll see what I can dig up but I am no expert on ancient Greeks or the academic debate regarding them. My main point was simply that the thing makes no sense, but apparently it
258:, unless the article is going to be completely rewritten and reformatted. The information on this page is not well suited for a table and appears to be just quotes or paraphrases from this ancient work without sufficient modern context to make it useful. (Obviously an article such as this will include an ancient perspective, but this article talks about various Indian peoples, without giving clear indication of where they lived in terms of modern geographic names nor what these ethnic groups would be called in their native languages.) --
563:), and the name equivalencies proposed are largely unsourced, making it impossible to tell whose suggestions they represent. Basically, this is just not an encyclopedia article—I can envision an article on ancient peoples of India that might (judiciously) draw on this material; but a primary source, even presented as a table and annotated, has no place here.
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contains significant information about the ancient history. After viewing the kind of information the article has, I believe that one should focus on the room for further improvements to the article, rather than considering the deletion. Knowledge (XXG) is an encyclopedia, and We cannot look forward
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becoming one day a full sourced article of its own, then a short stub is created, and possibly some reliable sources are listed at its end. If the topic is already covered somewhere else, and the title could be vaguely useful for someone searching for information in the topic, a redirect is created.
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ah, i see the problem then, it's in the wikilinks. the authors of this article do OR every time they link one of
Megasthenes's races to an article about a name that sounds similar now, but may or may not be a people megasthenes was talking about. is this essentially what you mean? i'm striking my
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of megasthenes's indika, and wikified all the races mentioned, using the third column of the table to preserve some continuity in the sentences. it's a peculiar way to do things, but i don't think a bad one. it seems to me to be not that different from importing eb-1911 material. the translation
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The point is that the current article has no salvageable information. It's all 100% original research. It wouldn't be as much "making improvements" as "writing a new different article from scratch". In those cases, the usual practice is to nuke the whole article. If the topic shows some promise of
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Well, it isn't my entire rationale but it is a part of it. The problem is, this part is based on a limited knowledge gleaned while reading up on more specific items. In my delvings through caste articles I have come across various claims to have been mentioned by
Megasthenes which, upon checking,
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One problem with
Megasthenes' work is that little of it survives and that which does has to be pieced together from quotes made by later writers (Ptolemy, for example, IIRC). A second problem is that there is substantial ambiguity/guesswork involved in interpreting it, eg: some people believe his
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i'm guessing that at this point, such information is lost. i think that the name of the article makes it clear that this is entirely out of megasthenes, and isn't about actually verifiable ancient races, but about ancient races verifiably mentioned by him. on the other hand, i completely agree
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secondary RS, history books, etc, that happen to talk about how
Megasthenes descriptions corresponded to actual historic tribes, then this would be the moment to say so, and cite them, or at least explain some information about them, so other editors can try to locate them. That would help a lot
220:—i don't blame you for not being able to make head nor tail of it. it had my head spinning for a while. i've never seen a wp article written like this, but i actually think it's not a bad system now, although it badly needs explaining in the article and possibly doesn't need to be a table.
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and the information moved there (this is called "merge and redirect"), and then the article wouldn't be deleted because of copyright reasons (the history of the article has to show the author of the information, and it can't do that if the article is deleted). But this is not the case.
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This sort of article should be based on secondary sources. These sources can determine which tribes are pure fantasy and which are based on historic tribes. After removing all the original research, there is nothing usable left, so the article needs to be rewritten from scratch.
379:, and in the last column of the table I have had to add an {{OR}} tag because there appears to be some speculation going on which is not attributed to any source. I can pretty much guarantee that the same sort of issues will arise in the other lines of the table. -
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or unreliably sourced. It does mention
Megasthenes but I would be wary of attaching too much weight to that, given the general state of the article. As for the table in the article which we are considering here, the term "Chisiotosagi" is not even mentioned in
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and is presented in a manner that makes it impossible to determine the subject matter (despite its title). I may be wrong about this but I cannot make head nor tail of the thing, despite dealing with
Megasthenes issues across various India caste articles etc.
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is the creator and might be best advised to provide the "references to make it more authentic" which they refer to in their comment below. I would be happy to see it improved to the point where it adds to the project in a compliant manner. -
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but this is not certain. These points would have to be made and sourced to the academic debates etc. I am not sure whether this is done adequately or not because of the confusing state of the thing, but my gut feeling is that it is not. -
48:. The two "keep" opinions do not adequately address the numerous policy-based problems identified by the strong majority of "delete" opinions. This does not preclude addressing the topic in a non-OR manner, such as in the article about
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of megasthenes is pd, so why not import and wikify? the question of the individual notability of the ancient races is settled by the number of blue links to be found.—
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Well, I will strongly suggest to look for making improvements to the article, after going through the information, the article is sharing, rather than deleting it. --
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430:- This article contains very useful information about the ancient races. So it should be kept. It may be provided with references to make it more authentic.
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OK, I've just taken a look at the second line of the table - "the
Chisiotosagi (Type of Sakas), and the Brachmauae", and also at the article linked there (
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it might be just something made up by someone, with no relationship to real facts. With no secondary sources, it's impossible to know. --
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is very poor & you will see that I have tagged it for numerous things as well as deleting one or two bits that are most definitely
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Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a
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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below.
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If the article had even a small amount of good sourced information, it might be merged to
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To make my opinion clearer to the closing admin, my first choice is to
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Article is barely sourced, has the appearance of being substantially
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for some racial POV pushing, but I can't quite be sure which POV...
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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate.
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yes, i understand now. the project seems hopeless indeed.—
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And another point that needs to be made. If you know of
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479:list of Ethnic groups-related deletion discussions
39:). No further edits should be made to this page.
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224:the article creator took a few sentences out of
584:it is kept, it should be moved to a title like
643:: I believe the article should be kept, as it
586:Indian ethnic groups described by Megasthenes
309:It was Pliny the Elder, not Ptolemy. D'oh. -
222:it's certainly not original research, though.
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497:Note: This debate has been included in the
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343:make sense to you, so that is my fault.
275:that it's not well suited for a table.—
18:Knowledge (XXG):Articles for deletion
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324:keep for now, have to think more.—
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79:Races as described by Megasthenes
71:Races as described by Megasthenes
542:—per nom and above discussion.—
728:towards saving this article. --
521:to list of historical races or
246:rewrite and reformat completely
448:is the creator of the article.
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503:• Gene93k
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91:history
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519:Merge
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364:Sakas
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