Talk:Malagasy cuisine/Archive 1

Drinking Age?
What is the Legal Drinking age in Madagascar? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.31.43.117 (talk) 18:50, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Quick note on eating lemurs
It might be worth mentioning that the earliest settlers on the island hunted and ate the giant, subfossil lemurs, which are classified as extinct. The article about the subfossil lemurs is FA, so you should be able to easily pull out a source for that piece of information. There should probably also be a mention of the growing bush meat trade in the country. Otherwise, the article looks pretty nice. I'll try my best to join in the review soon. –  VisionHolder « talk » 01:05, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I made some changes to the article to address this issue. How does it look to you? -- Lemurbaby (talk) 15:55, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Looks very good. Only thing left is possibly a mention of the bush meat trade, which is increasing due to several factors, including movement of native people to new regions and economic hardship.  Sources for this are available on the Lemur article.  However, it may depend on how you define "cuisine".  Does that include anything they eat, or just specialty dishes?  If the former, then bushmeat needs a mention; if the latter, it does not.  I'll try to do a full review soon. –  VisionHolder  « talk » 20:40, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Great job
Congratulations to those who got this made a Featured Article of the day today. It's a fascinating read. —  AjaxSmack  02:02, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Food & Drink Category: high importance
I've changed this back to high importance because national cuisines strike me as very highly important - more than regional cuisines, possibly more than historic cuisines, certainly more than most individual sub-types of foods (brands of chips, species of apples etc). The categorization system on the Food & Drinks page is very inconsistent right now, with some national cuisines at high importance and others at low, but no evident reason for the ranking. It would be great if this page could spur a re-assessment of current page rankings to bring some kind of consistency into the classifications. Please discuss the idea here before making changes to the ranking of this page. Cheers, Lemurbaby (talk) 20:31, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I just reverted the last edit, which dropped the importance down to mid without providing justification here. Not only is this a top-level article as a national cuisine, but it's also a cuisine that has found a market throughout the Indian Ocean region and into Europe. It therefore seems most appropriate to keep the current classification. Please discuss here. Lemurbaby (talk) 06:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I dont edit war over importance ratings, and i wont make any further changes here, but i want to point out there is a real reason few national cuisines are rated top importance: not every cuisine is equally influential or important. I have not given American cuisine a top rating (despite its huge influence in terms of fast food/brands/popular foods), and had considered only Indian, Chinese, french, and italian for the top rating for national cuisines (regional cuisines are mostly all top now). Ethiopia didnt appear to be rated top (what is PC-Importance?), and nigeria wasnt, both of which are demonstrably influential. I think we can all agree that Chinese cuisine is of higher importance in terms of this project than malagasy cuisine. The ratings for projects are highly subjective, by necessity, and we cant really cite references for it. I note you just altered your rating from top to high (and have modified my comment here): If malagasy cuisine is a top or high importance, and not mid, then nearly every other national cuisine needs to be given a top or highrating, and the rest mid importance. I think its a good topic to bring up at the project page. And i agree it needs to be discussed, if anyone feels differently. i was being BOLD, and thus am expecting some reversions. PS your advocacy for this article has me curious about the topic, and will take the time to read the article in its entirety (i hope we dont feel we have to read an article in full to rate it!)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 15:37, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Mercurywoodrose, and thanks for helping to keep the Food & Drink project active. I agree there needs to be discussion about the importance ratings. To be honest, I don't think ratings matter much to anybody except the people currently or potentially contributing on the project, to potentially help them prioritize what articles to develop first - although it seems to be the case on WP that people develop articles on topics that interest them, regardless of the rating. In short, a simplified ratings system is probably the most helpful given how subjective this all is anyway. I do believe all national cuisines should be at least high level, if leaving that one degree of difference between high and top helps the editors to prioritize (otherwise I'd give all country cuisines top level). There is such a wide range of possible articles in this category, and something like a national cuisine seems very top level to me. That's because the country cuisine would be top, a regional cuisine within the country would probably be high or mid depending on its scope, and a particular dish limited to one region could be mid or low. I do think the English WP is biased toward the Anglophone world (mainly Western countries but South Asia to a lesser extent) whereas the African perspective is practically absent. So for example someone might want to rank Mexican cuisine as top level, but if the editor were French they would be more likely to rate it as mid or low because Mexican restaurants are common in the US but relatively rare in France, where something like Argentinian, Peruvian or Brazilian cuisine is much more well known. Same with African cuisine - an American might be more inclined to give Ethiopian cuisine a high level of importance, but a French editor would think of Algeria or Madagascar... or any of the former colonies, since those cultures are much more visible there. Ditto for Congolese or Rwandan cuisine in Belgium, etc. You see the challenge here? To avoid subjectivity and bias, a simpler and consistent ratings criteria needs to be established, to the extent (in my opinion) that it helps editors prioritize the work. Lemurbaby (talk) 18:28, 26 July 2013 (UTC)