Talk:Asmara

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rachelm23.

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Old talk
Have a listen to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/africalives/features/listenagain.shtml

On the BBC, a very interesting report

Fair use image
The pic of the building is fair use. I suspect its possible for someone else to get a pic of it, hence its marked as fairusereplace. 68.39.174.238 05:41, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Gallery
I have added some pictures but am unsure how to organise them into a gallery. I think that many of these pictures accurately represent asmara so could someone arrange them into a gallery for me? Thanks Segafreak2 10:30, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Asmara became Italian on August 3, 1889.
Asmara, the formar capital of Ras Alula, became Italian on August 3, 1889. General Antonio Baldissera took the town.

Asmara in WWII.
During WWII Asmara was attacked by the British Royal Air Force (the first air raid took place on June 11, 1940). The British took the town on April 1, 1941 after the bloody battle of Keren.

War cut this short however, but his injection of funds adversely made Asmara what it is today, and was supposedly a symbol that Fascism was working and an ideal system of government.
I do not understand what is meant by the adverb 'adversely' here (under the Features sub-heading in the Asmara entry). Does anyone else? Maybe a clearer wording could be substituted by someone who thinks they understand the writer's intention. Please? Charles01 (talk) 12:11, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

changed the altitude of Asmara to 2400 meters
I changed the altitude of Asmara to 2400 meters (7,874ft) as I was there all over the city (and the country) with a 3d GPS and Asmara is at 2400 or slightly above as are most of the mountain tops and plateaus in that part of the country.

--Rachelm23 (talk) 04:02, 9 November 2016 (UTC) Education--Rachelm23 (talk) 04:02, 9 November 2016 (UTC) I added more information about the University admission process.

Asmara
In regards to the changes of Asmara (1)

1. ኣሥመራ is not a 'Native script variant name,' as previously stated, Tigrigna does not use the letter ሥ, only ስ is used. In Eritrea this is always the standard, even for direct Ge'ez loan-words which used the former spelling.

2. In all native use, Asmara is spelled ኣስመራ, the citation given (2) is not an example of native use.

3. a) This citation directly denies any claims of it's accuracy. "The information regarding ኣሥመራ in Eritrea on this page is published from the data supplied by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a member of the Intelligence community of the United States of America, and a Department of Defense (DoD) Combat Support Agency. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of ኣሥመራ information contained here."

3 b) The information on this citation seems to come from the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (3) which gives a similar disclaimer: "The geographic names in this database are provided for the guidance of and use by the Federal Government and for the information of the general public. The names, variants, and associated data may not reflect the views of the United States Government on the sovereignty over geographic features."

4. There is zero relevance of this additional citation which seems to be the geographic coordinates of a random church.

5. In addition, the letter ሥ is used only in Ethiopia, where it (in addition to ስ) is still used in Amharic; also that the additional citation "Ye’Inglīz Bēte Kristīyan" is clearly Amharic too; this provides additional evidence of irrelevance.

Simply put, Amharic is a foreign language in Eritrea and should not be used to describe the capital of Asmara. This is the same reasoning why the English wikipedia article on London does not list the French (Londres) as a native variant. Mesfin (talk) 11:53, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Mesfin asked me to take a look at this dispute over an alternative name for Asmara as a third party. While I am not an expert in either Amharic or Tigrigna (let alone know how to even read a menu or give directions to a taxi driver in either), I do have some concerns about this alternative name:
 * The Geospatial data base is simply a collection of placenames drawn from maps by agencies of the US government. While this collection is accurate as far as the transcription of these placenames & the fact they appear on published maps, having worked with this database in depth, I have found that its sources vary greatly in their accuracy & in their age. (See Articles for deletion/Ad Arisc for a recent example where a placename is shown to be wrong.)
 * Then there is the nature of this name. As I said, I'm not an expert on either language, but I do know that "Bēte Kristīyan" means "church" in Amharic (literally "Christian house"), & I suspect that the full name -- "Ye’Inglīz Bēte Kristīyan" -- means "The English Church". Asmara has been in existence for at least a few centuries (I have found 17th century references to it & suspect the settlement is even older), long before people from England ever visited that stretch of the Red Sea coast. This placename most likely refers to a mission church run by English missionaries, not the entire city; I do know that the Geospatial data base contains coordinates for a number of churches. This is not unusual: churches are commonly considered permanent landmarks, & Asmara is large enough that landmarks inside of its boundaries make sense.
 * On the point of the Amharic version of Asmara, I believe that can be included -- as long as it is properly flagged as the Amharic spelling. Wikipedia does include foreign names of cities & places. (See the long & acrimonious disputes over including the German names of cities & towns in Poland as well as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Last I looked, they are included because the German form is used in older English works.) But I'd like to see a citation -- other than the Geospatial data base -- that this spelling is commonly used by Amhara users before I'd feel 100% comfortable with including it. And even if it is included, there is the question of where it should be included & how much attention this variant spelling deserves. -- llywrch (talk) 17:48, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Added information under the sections of: economy, religion, and transportation. Economy: The city of Asmara is a center for agricultural products and tanning hides. The primary industrial products of Asmara are: textiles, clothing, footwear, processed meat, beer, soft drinks, and ceramics. Religion: The city of Asmara is a center for agricultural products and tanning hides. The primary industrial products of Asmara are: textiles, clothing, footwear, processed meat, beer, soft drinks, and ceramics. Transportation: There is one airport in Asmara, the Asmara International Airport. The airport is very limited in capacity and land extent. The short length of the runways inhibits large air crafts from flying to the Asmara airport, and instead these planes must land at Massawa International Airport, located in the city of Massawa. After the independence of Eritrea, the roads of Asmara went under construction. The old roads were renovated and new highways were also built. There are only five primary roads out of Asmara: it is one of Africa’s most isolated capitals. Sources: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Asmara#Economy http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-its-like-inside-asmara-one-of-africas-most-isolated-capitals-1445390907

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/2024. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Gyrofrog (talk) 18:59, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Aside from the copyright concern, the text (as written) violated WP:NPOV. I cited the website in question as a reference, and worked it into the existing text in the "Features" section. -- Gyrofrog  (talk) 18:59, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Assessment comment
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ethiopian/tigrayan vandals are attacking this article
To every good faith editor on here, please be alert to vandals from ethiopian/tigrayan backgrounds who have been vandalising this article for years now. Go through the history and you will see their edits. Do not hesitate to revert their edits because it is being done with malice and not good faith editing. You can normally tell the edits by the bad english and hyperbole use of language to inflate "ethiopian/tigrayan" things and attack "eritrean" things.HarryDirty (talk) 06:37, 19 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Please ignore the advice above: bad edits should be discouraged, and good edits should be encouraged, independently of trying to guess the ethnic or national or citizenship backgrounds of the editors. The above editor appears to have been blocked as a sockpuppet. Boud (talk) 14:20, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Notable people
According to, some level of criteria needs to be met to be considered notable. Also would be better to add or create a page for this (e.g List of people from Accra, see and linking to it rather then adding a long list of names. Leechjoel9 (talk) 10:35, 4 April 2020 (UT* C)
 * 1) Since you went on the talk page (and this is good), the stable version of the article should be kept until consensus has been reached. Beacause of my revert, it is clear that at the moment there is no consensus for this removal;
 * 2) According to WP:BIO, condition necessary to write an article about a person on wikipedia is his/her notability. Since all the cited people in this article have an article, they are per se notable. If - despite that - you think that one or more of the cited people are not notable, please open a discussion on the respective article or go the project Biography;
 * 3) If you think that we need a list of notable people of Asmara, feel free to write it and to cite it in this article. Until then, please don't remove anything from the article, since removing text without a valid reason is considered disruptive editing, and can lead to a block. Alex2006 (talk) 12:47, 4 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Good that you engaged in this discussion. Just being born in a city is not a reason to be considered notable, but in this case this is not the major issue. You are arguing for adding  list of persons to this article, a list that can grow by hundreds of names which will not last in the long run. The best way to handle such list is by creating an article and cite to it in this article, which  also seems as the best practice according Wikipedia. The person that you are arguing for should create such article. Leechjoel9 (talk) 14:28, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Very good! If the number of notable people will grow by the hundreds, as you say, and will become unmanageable, I will create a list, and link it to the article. Until then (currently there are 8 entries), there is no need to split it (about that, please see Manual of Style/Lists), and the list, as the manual says, will stay in the article. Cheers. Alex2006 (talk) 08:59, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Notable people again
A suggestion is to include only people of Eritrean origin in this section, since some people is causing controversy, or create article with link to notable people of Asmara and remove the list from this article. Leechjoel9 (talk) 18:29, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Neither nor. Wikipedia cannot be censored. Alex2006 (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2021 (UTC)


 * This is not a censorship, there is different views on the matter. Your view is to keep it as is. This article should be relevant to Asmara and people of Eritrea which it should represent. Another alternative is to create a list for notable Eritreans from Asmara and another one for notable non Eritreans from Asmara. Still a link to these lists is more preferable instead of presenting them here, since these list or some people in them has nothing to do with Asmara or Eritrea other than being born or lived there.Leechjoel9 (talk) 21:31, 26 February 2021 (UTC)


 * A policy to exclude the currently most famous person in the world born in Asmara, on the grounds that he does not hold Eritrean citizenship, would be, to put it politely, absurd. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was in world news headlines almost daily for several months of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he's still in the headlines almost every week or so, depending on which sources you read. He's overwhelmingly notable, and there's no dispute (as far as I know) that he was born in Asmara. Boud (talk) 14:58, 27 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Exactly. If a person was born in place X and is notable, he/she belongs to article X. Her/his nationality is considered in the list itself, and it's like that everywhere on wikipedia. About your last proposal (two lists) here on wikipedia we don't do apartheid: your last proposal is repulsive, as well as going against another policy (NPOV), because it implies that there is a difference between an Eritrean and a non-Eritrean born and living in Asmara. And about moving the list to a separate article, this would make sense if the list contained hundreds of names, and this is not (yet) the case here. And sure a list will never be split from an article if the reason for the split is what you say, that is to hide the past of the city. If you have trouble accepting Asmara's Italian and Ethiopian past, I can understand, but your feelings about this past should in no way influence your work here. I conclude by saying that having discussions about proposals that contradict a wikipedia policy doesn't make sense: once warned that the policy exists, and explained the reasons behind that policy, the initiator of the discussion is given some time to retrace his/her steps, and if he/she does not do it, the next step will be a report to ANI, and that's what will happen in this case too.Alex2006 (talk) 07:35, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Native name in infobox
A lot of edit warring on this, but no talk page discussion, so I'll start one. The issue seems to what should be contained in the "Native Name" field in the infobox. Should it be the city's name in Tigrinya, ኣስመራ, the name in Arabic, أسمرة, both, or neither? I'll start by saying I read neither Tigrinya or Arabic, so I have no insight on whether the two names I listed are in fact the ways that Tigrinya-speakers and Arabic-speakers write the name of the city called Asmara in English. I'm just going to assume that they are, since there doesn't seem to be any dispute about that. The description of the "native_name" field in the infobox settlement template says Name in the official local language, if different from name, and if not English. As an example, the article for Vienna shows the city's name in German, "Wien," in the infobox in the native name field. The "native_name_lang" field's description says If there is more than one native name, in different languages, enter those names using -the lang template-, instead. So, there's clearly the intention that the native name field can include the name in more than one local language. As mentioned in Languages of Eritrea, the Eritrean Constitution doesn't define any official language or languages. There are various sources, including the CIA World Factbook, that describe Arabic as an "official language" of Eritrea, and others, including at least one Eritrean government website, that refer it it as a frequent working language. Hopefully we can start a productive and collaborative discussion, rather than just ongoing edit-warring on the article page. Pinging, ,. BubbaJoe123456 (talk) 19:57, 30 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for starting this discussion. The Arabic name can be considered official, and I included it in the official languages section of the infobox. Another reason it makes sense to include the Arabic name is that it is present on maps (e.g. Google Maps) next to the English name of the city. – Batreeq ( Talk ) (Contribs) 04:11, 31 December 2021 (UTC)


 * The native name should be written in the native name which is in Tigrinya, see Wikipedia naming conventions of geographic places WP:NCGN. The city was created through four villages called “arbate Asmara” meaning four Asmara in Tigrinya (see the history) who later merged together and became “Asmara”, this was in 800BCE, long before any arrival of Arabic speakers to the shores of the Red Sea of Eritrea. The country has eight native languages (Tigrinya, Tigre, Kunama, Nara, Bilen, Afar, Saho, Herab). Arabic is not native although spoken by the recognised Rashaida ethnic group who constitute 1-2% of the population and who arrived in Eritrea a little more than hundred years ago as refugees. The rest of the population are not native speakers of Arabic. The country has no defined official language at policy level, but have three working languages and all languages are considered equal according to the constitution. The native name is only displayed in “native name” field within the info box which is correct. Leechjoel9 (talk) 10:11, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I think it is important to understand if there is an important minority in Asmara that speaks Arabic. If yes, we have to put the name in Arabic; if not, no. In Italy, the municipalities of South Tyrol/Alto Adige where the great majority of the inhabitants are german speaking (basically all except Bolzano and Merano) have in the infobox only the name in German, altough Italian is also an official language: I think we should follow the same pattern. Alex2006 (talk) 06:54, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The name derived and got its meaning from the Tigrinya language per the history. In the case of Massawa that pattern seem to be more accurate, which you also added. Removal of the native name info box is also an option given the variety of languages spoken and that the English name is well established and also sufficient on the english WP. Leechjoel9 (talk) 09:40, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Thoughts on placing it in the official name section (as explained previously)? I recognize that it is not native, which is why I was placing it in the official name section. – Batreeq ( Talk ) (Contribs) 04:29, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Abdlbrii
Zakir0968453516 ABDIBRII — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.190.91.97 (talk) 17:41, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

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