Talk:Khadi

I tried to add as a bibliographic reference to this page Lisa N. Trivedi's Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007) but someone deleted it, asking why include this reference and, to be honest, I'm befuddled. This is the Wikipedia page for Khadi and Trivedi's book is one of *the* scholarly monographs to focus on the topic of Khadi. Surely this is something that merits inclusion on this page, no? --Cjslaby (talk) 15:12, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

@Cjslaby: I have no doubt that your attempts to add a bibliographic reference were made in good faith. However, as I advised at your user talk page, edit warring is unacceptable. Also, in case you missed it, I direct your attention to my edit summary in reverting your disruption: "This is not the correct placement or formatting – please see MOS:BIB and WP:BIBLIOGRAPHY." You are not a new contributor. Since 2018-11-03, you have made 52 edits and earned autoconfirmed user rights. I respectfully suggest it is time to better acquaint yourself with this project's policies and guidelines. Finally, since you have identified your Twitter account at your user page, please let me observe that complaining on social media about your mistreatment ("Wikipedia is, I say again, a mess") is not constructive. To me, the most telling of your recent tweets about how "pissed off" you are at our community is this: "I also still have no idea what I'm doing. So there's that, too." Indeed. NedFausa (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

I find NedFausa's comment here highly inappropriate. Ned, if you had looked at CJS's edit history at all, you would have seen four edits in 2018/19, two of which were to a Meetup page, and then no activity until July of this year. Last month was the first month this user had made more than two edits in a calendar month. This is the definition of a new user. In having successfully navigated the AfC process, they're probably one of our more successful new users as well. Your statement that complaining on twitter is inappropriate is also deeply ironic coming from you, given your use of your userspace. Latching onto the final tweet of his thread about WP is so beyond unhelpful as to be insulting--it's a complete newbie, stop rubbing it in his face that he doesn't know what he's doing and should suddenly know better and acquaint himself with thousands of words of policies before he edits more. Alyo (chat·edits) 19:02, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

I added a new section to include Clothing Gandhi's Nation. NedFausa (talk) 20:34, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

NedFausa, thank you for adding the new section with the reference.

As this is the talk page for the entry on Khadi, I'm going to kindly suggest any discussion beyond this of me as a person or a Wikipedia editor move to a personal talk page (or, you know, just stop). I do appreciate the guidance on formatting, which clearly I was not doing appropriately. And I am very grateful that the reference, now properly formatted, is back up. I am indeed relatively new at all this. I read a Wikipedia page as a reader and realized I was aware of a relevant piece of scholarship so I tried to add it. It is disappointing and frustrating that because I didn't do it quite right, didn't follow certain expectations of formatting, that the reference was removed. If someone went through the trouble of finding fault in and removing the reference, could they not just as easily have reformatted it? (As you’ve now done!) That's what's really disappointing and frustrating and concerning, that some people seem more energized to police formatting (and rather than help fix it, just delete a perfectly appropriate reference) than to further enrich the site. As for this business about "edit warring,” I added a (perfectly reasonable though improperly formatted) reference, someone deleted it (for no good reason as far as I could tell, beyond, apparently, perhaps a desire to enforce formatting rules in a particular way, that is by deleting rather than helping reformat), and I, thinking it more important for readers of the page to see the reference than not, decided to undo the deletion. Edit warring apparently involves "repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be." I have done no such thing. I clicked once to undo the deletion of the source (so that readers of the Wikipedia page wouldn't be denied seeing it) and have not touched any other content since. Please refrain from inaccurately describing such a mild and simple act with such charged language. As for being frustrated, well, as I've clearly laid it out, I am. And yes, I am a real person. I am editing Wikipedia and on Twitter in a mostly professional capacity. I am a professional scholar who exists in public. Society has invested in me and I see it as part of my duty in repaying that investment to be active in productive ways in the Information Age, as we are in, and that includes doing things like tweeting and editing Wikipedia. Personally, it matters to me that I'm a real person attached to this account. I understand there's a lot of anonymity on the internet, even sometimes for good reason, but I make it a point not to debate my right to express how I feel (or whether I'm even allowed to have feelings or be frustrated or otherwise be a human person) with anonymous people on the internet.

Alyo, thank you very much for your help. I really do appreciate it. I didn't mean to give such a sense of universalizing in my tweets as I perhaps did. The community on Wikipedia is, I imagine, like "the" community on Twitter. Which is to say that there are lots of people on both, some of whom act in ways that people might experience as frustrating, but clearly many others of whom act with great kindness and helpfulness.

Okay, now can we please talk some more about South Asian homespun fabric? That's what we're here for, right? Cjslaby (talk) 01:38, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Cjslaby, I'm glad you can take this all in stride. As I said on your talk page, if you happen to have access to this book I'm sure that would make for excellent expansion material. Alyo (chat·edits) 03:26, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Cjslaby, as the editor who initially reverted your addition I feel I should pitch in here since you still seem to be operating under the assumption that you were wronged somehow by my actions. Millions of edits are made daily on multiple pages on Wikipedia and I keep track of hundreds of such pages on my Watchlist. Reverting badly formatted and unsourced edits does not take more than a couple of seconds but understanding the context in which you added the reference and applying it to the appropriate section or paragraph takes longer.

It is not my responsibility to clean up after your edits. It can be, but I have chosen not to do so since I am like many other editors here, busy in real life as well. I've decided to focus my efforts on reverting vandalism, curbing unsourced edits, fixing categories and the like. As an editor who was in your position a few months ago I can understand the frustration behind having your edit reverted, I've faced it multiple times and to this day I still do. It's a normal part of editing here on Wikipedia. I was able to look past the initial frustration over time and made the effort to read the various policies and guidelines that apply to this website so I could understand where I went wrong and I suggest you do the same.

It is possible that your edits will be reverted again at another page by some other editor, and getting frustrated over it would do nobody any good. All of this aside, I hope you continue editing. Wikipedia always benefits when new users like yourself come here to share their knowledge. If you ever need help anytime feel free to reach out to me and other editors, we'll gladly help you out. Prolix 💬 06:25, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Prolix, what does "unsourced edits" mean in this context? I've looked up the term "unsourced" on Wikipedia and found a brief discussion on a page about content removal, but that doesn't seem to apply here. I am asking, really, two related questions, I think, one about the technical matters of making sure to add things in a proper and appropriate way, and the other about how editors assess things. Surely a peer-reviewed academic book, published by an academic press, and written by a credentialed scholar is not an "unsourced" entity, is it? (This is, again, a sincere question; I worry I am not fully understanding what happened here.) Thanks. Cjslaby (talk) 15:14, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

In this specific context I think (Prolix correct me if I'm wrong) that "unsourced edits" is just being used as shorthand for the types of edits Prolix often sees and reverts. As a completely random example, this addition from this article's history is content added with no source. It's very possible that these types of unsourced additions are both true, verifiable, and belong in a complete article covering the topic. However, that policy of content being verifiable is a core WP policy, and hundreds of these edits are made every minute (check this page). Thus, it's much easier to undo those edits than to research every new unsourced addition and quickly learn something about/find sources for a random topic every 3-5 minutes. In this instance, you obviously came out on the wrong side of that process, and you're very much correct that an editor who took a few minutes to examine your source, compare it to the existing references and literature on the topic, and correctly format the book listing would have improved the article. Unfortunately, because of the sheer amount of changes every minute we very much put the burden of doing all of this on the person making the edit. It's a systemic problem and is made worse by our expectation that every new editor magically understand how talk pages work and how consensus is supposed to be created. Alyo (chat·edits) 18:21, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Alyo, you're absolutely right. Fixing every needy edit is an insurmountable task, one that is exacerbated by the number of policies and guidelines new users have to go through. The recent changes page as you mentioned just shows the sheer scale of the problem. It would definitely help if more users were made aware of the 5 pillars of Wikipedia. Prolix 💬 19:01, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Alyo and Prolix: Do either of you know if there is a policy or guideline about adding a work to the Bibliography section that is already referenced by an inline citation? I've observed at other pages that some editors resist such inclusion as redundant, but I can't remember their exact rationale. I ask in this instance because Clothing Gandhi's Nation, which is the only work in this page's Bibliography, also appears as an inline citation at the end of the lead's opening sentence:^[1]

NedFausa (talk) 20:34, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

MOS:FURTHER says "The Further reading section ... should normally not duplicate the content of the References section, unless the References section is too long for a reader to use as part of a general reading list." However, I would also note that at present the citation at the end of the lead is to a review of the book, not the book itself. I'm not sure those are actually the same source/would lean towards the idea that this FurRead section isn't exactly duplicative of the references we have. We also could easily remove that source with no loss to the sentence it verifies, given the two other sources on that same sentence. Alyo (chat·edits) 20:52, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Alyo: The inline citation is not to a review of the book. Rather, it's a verbatim reproduction of the publisher's description, with an additional paragraph within quotation marks that is unattributed. You write, "We also could easily remove that source with no loss to the sentence it verifies." I agree and support such removal, unless there is consensus to retain it. NedFausa (talk) 21:17, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Whoop, yup, you're totally right. I'd love to see the book used inline elsewhere, but for now that particular cite isn't terribly independent and doesn't do anything beyond what the other two sources do. Alyo (chat·edits) 21:54, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

I removed that reference from the lead. If anyone objects, please revert my edit for additional discussion. NedFausa (talk) 18:54, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Some aggressive editor(s) with the Indian POV have edit warred here to use {{IAST}} for romanization. They are ill-informed as it is and can only be used for Sanskrit words in that very same language, not for any other language Indic or otherwise (see the template's documentation and usage guidelines). {{transl}} provides the rationale that even Sanskrit should be transliterated with it, not using the earlier template as that either transcludes or redirects back to Template:transl (although the code "IAST" can be used as a variable to specify that the language being transliterated is Sanskrit). It is clearly stated in the generally-accepted and official guideline page Wikipedia:Indic transliteration that ISO 15919 should be used for the transliteration of South Asian languages or Indic scripts. Just to be clear, ISO 15919 is supported as the transliteration system by the template "transl", and not "IAST". Idell (talk) 21:43, 16 February 2021 (UTC)