Talk:Isawiyya

Copyediting note
I've copyedited through "professionalization." May come back to it in a bit. I've done my best not to change facts one way or another, as it's not a subject I'm farmiliar with.76.118.23.40 (talk) 15:49, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your efforts! -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:22, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Hangon
It is a short definition of the word and its origin —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tripolitan (talk • contribs). 06:15, 13 August 2006

Article issues
I had just added to this article and I'm about to add. I'm impressed with the amount of content in this article, but without footnotes, it is impossible to tell what text (if any) may be attributed to a reliable source. There is a very lengthy bibliography, but there is no indication whether any of these sources are actually used as references in this article. As for the text itself, I don't intend to offend anyone who has worked on this article, but some of this is impossible to understand. I have the impression that this was either fed through a translator program (e.g. Babelfish) or someone has randomly dleted or re-arranged some of the words. For example, I cannot make any sense out of "In Morocco, the brotherhood – the musicians, their ritual and their music - currently enjoy a vogue without similar." Meanwhile I have deleted a couple of sentences from the introduction: they were unattributed, appeared to be original research and were quite difficult (for me) to understand. Thank you, -- Gyrofrog (talk) 21:07, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Copyright query
Gyrofrog (talk)

I have since found something rather curious on Google Books: link. It fairly much mirrors the text in this article (or perhaps vice-versa), warts and all. The book was published in 2009, while most of the extant Wikipedia text was added during one series of anonymous edits in August 2007 (link). The first of these edits (link) added a very large amount of text at once, including much of the awkward language that I described in my earlier comment (though as this large edit had wiki formatting etc. perhaps I should instead congratulate the anonymous editor for using the preview button). I suspect that one of these has copied its text from the other; chronologically, it would certainly appear that the book has copied from Wikipedia. However, it's also possible that both the book and this article are copies of some other source (hence my placement of the "cv-unsure" template), though so far I am unable to find one online. There is also another copy which claims a 2009 copyright. Note also that that the book's text about Inayat Khan is quite similar to the Wikipedia article on Inayat Khan. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 20:50, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Some parts of the book (based on fairly random checks here and there) are very similar to Wikipedia articles on the same subject. The book's entry on Manzil is also quite similar to this 2006 Wikipedia edit (itself, again, a large and fairly well formatted addition in one edit). On the other hand, other topics appearing in the book do not appear in Wikipedia. For example, the entries immediately prior to and following Aissawa in the book ("Ahmed, Bijan" or Bijan Ahmed, and "Al-'Adawiyyah, Rab'iah" or Rab'iah Al-'Adawiyyah, respectively) do not appear in Wikipedia (as of this writing), so the book would not seem to be simply a Wikipedia mirror. -- Gyrofrog  (talk) 21:17, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I had commented about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Islam. Someone there pointed out that an earlier version of the book was published in 2007 (see Google Overview), thereby making the Wikipedia article a copyvio.  However, page iv of the book does say "First Edition, 2009" . -- Gyrofrog  (talk) 22:19, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Meanwhile, in the course of attempting to sort out the business with the Google Books source, I found another source -The New Encyclopedia of Islam by Cyril Glassé -- which states: "The scholar of religions, Mircea Eliade, guided by Van Gennep, wrote the observation that the Aissawa are in fact a Maennerbund, that is, a lycanthropic secret society. In other words, werewolves." (link) I am not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, or a between-the-lines comment about Eliade and/or Van Gennep (I'm familiar with neither of them). Here is another account, from 1882. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 23:41, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * It appears that the material in the book was copied from this version of this article from the 15th May 2008. All the changes by other editors following the large addition of text by the ip until this date are in the book, whereas edits following are not included (for example:, , ). I don't know where to report this (or even if it's necessary) as WP:FORK and WP:REUSE seem only to deal with websites. Of course this doesn't mean that the wikipedia text wasn't copy-pasted or badly translated from some other source.  ascidian  | talk-to-me  15:40, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Good detective work. I do think the book needs to be reported, somehow, as an uncredited fork, though again, there are articles in the book that do not appear in Wikipedia (and from what I could tell, never existed here). I still suspect the August 2007 edit is a copy-paste from another source. Thanx, -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:46, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and reported it at WP:MF (see here), and left a note about it on that project's talk page. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:17, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Found where it came from - it was translated from the French Wikipedia (google translate), which was added a couple of days before the august 07 edits here and also heavily edited by the same ip. That article was also added in one big chunk so may be a copyvio of a French source (which is a strong possibility given that French is the unofficial second language of Morocco). My French is poor to say the least, so I don't think I can investigate any further. ascidian  | talk-to-me  16:34, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I have a similar command of the French language. However, I cobbled together a note and left it at fr:Discussion:Aïssawa. Thanx again, -- Gyrofrog  (talk) 16:50, 17 March 2010 (UTC)