Talk:Little Syria, Manhattan

Neighborhood template?
Fine article. My only qualm is including this historical neighborhood in the neighborhood template. Ordinarily we've included just existing, not past neighborhoods. Thus Italian Harlem was removed. To be consistent, we need to remove this article and Radio Row from the template, and also this template needs to be removed from the article. ScottyBerg (talk) 14:14, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Description of neighborhood
One of the sources for this article is a NY Times piece by David Dunlanp "When an Arab Enclave Thrived Downtown". Some quotes from it:


 * "To be clear: this neighborhood, called Little Syria, was south of what would become the trade center site, while the Islamic center would be to the north. And Muslims, chiefly from Palestine, made up perhaps 5 percent of its population. The Syrians and Lebanese in the neighborhood were mostly Christian."


 * "Historical accounts describe no mosques on Washington Street, but there were three churches that served the Lebanese and Syrian Christians.

St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite still stands, at 103 Washington Street. It may be the last recognizable remnant of Little Syria. It is now Moran’s Ale House and Grill."

Clearly, the article is describing what is predominantly a Christian neighborhood, with a small (5%) Muslim componwnt. A POV editor has taken that 5% and because of it wants to take these sentences in our article:


 * "The overwhelming majority of the residents were Arabic-speaking Christians, Melkite and Maronite immigrants from present-day Syria and Lebanon who settled in the area in the late 19th century, escaping religious persecution and poverty in their homelands – which were then under control of the Ottoman Empire – and answering the call of American missionaries to escape their difficulties by traveling to New York City. The New York Times estimated that as many as 5% of the area's Arab residents were Muslims, who mostly came from the area of Palestine.[2] The Christians lived on Washington Street to the south of the site of the World Trade Center, where they established three churches, including St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite, which as of 2010 survives as Moran's Ale House and Grill,[2] and which was designated a New York City landmark in 2009.[5] (emphasis added)

and change "The Christians" at the beginning of the third sentence to "The Syrians". That is clearly a misstatement of a generalized fact. "The Muslims", in general, lived in a neighborhood north of where the Wolrd Trade Center was, which "the Christians" live in the neighborhood this article is about, not withstanding those 5%. I would not object to an article about the other neighborhood referring to is as an Islamic one, and the other editor has no reason to object to the description in this one. He should stop making this change. BMK (talk) 00:40, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
 * This is not a misstatement, by employing "Syrian" I was trying to being inclusive, moreover not to confuse readers who might make the assumption that all people who lived on Washington Street were Christian, that's all! It's a small edit, I am open to a change in the semantics, but I cannot support the present sentence, which will confuse readers into thinking that all Christians lived on Washington street and all Muslims lived on another street.George Al-Shami (talk) 00:59, 10 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Where's the pov? I made one simple little edit, which if you read the whole paragraph carefully, you'll see that it is more encyclopedic. The wiki article mentions, before the sentence in question, that around 5% of the Arabs that lived there were Muslim. The NYT mentions that the 5% were chiefly from Palestine, however the article then states that "The Syrians and Lebanese in the neighborhood were mostly Christian". By saying that "The Christians lived on Washington Street", then you are implicitly implying that all the Muslims lived on another street. Keep in mind that Little Syria was not 100% Syrian/Lebanese, the wiki article then goes on to mention that "other ethnic groups lived in this diverse neighborhood, and it mentions Turks, who are mostly Muslim. Therefore my intention by substituting "Christian" with "Syrian", was to back up the previous sentence that mentions the 5% Muslims, and to make the article as npov as possible.George Al-Shami (talk) 00:51, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Please do not make changes to the article involving this issue until there is a consensus to do so. Per WP:BRD, the article stays in the status quo antewhile discussion goes on. In any case, your change was not acceptable to me, as it still does not accurately reflect what the source says. BMK (talk) 01:15, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Please explain your objections to the employment of "most" just before the sentence in question. I wanted to add it, as a compromise, to delineate the obvious, that not all Christians lived on Washington Street. Sure the presence of the three churches, shows that an overwhelming majority of the Christians lived next to the churches, however not all lived on that specific street; there were other tenements on other streets where the Syrians/Lebanese Christians lived. I repeat, the article says that "Most of the Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in the area were Christian", again the word "most" implies that not all the Syrians and Lebanese were Christian. My initial objection to the current passage is that it confuses readers into thinking that there was an equally large Islamic community right next to Little Syria or within Little Syria itself, which was definitely not the case. The proposal about the Ground Zero Islamic community center in 2010, is situated in an area that was never an Islamic community, nor a Muslim majority area for that matter. A successful Muslim-American man bought the high-rise building, however that does not mean there was a Muslim majority community in that area. My second reason, is different, in that "The Christians" implies that all Syrians and Lebanese Christian lived on Washington Street; Washington street was only one street in Little Syria. I'm still open to other ideas that rectify the possible confusion that might arise when a reader reads that sentence in its current form.George Al-Shami (talk) 21:56, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Dynamic image sizing
Why are you hung up on the magical number "267px" and defending it so forcefully? What make that THE number instead of the default values? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 04:08, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
 * He's grown too attached to this article WP:NVC to the point where he thinks he owns it or it's his baby and he will enthusiastically revert any edit that he disagrees with.George Al-Shami (talk) 22:02, 10 March 2015 (UTC)