Talk:Poykayil Yohannan

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:30, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Poikayil Appachan → Poykayil Johannan – Appachan appears to be a name mainly used by his devotees, while scholarly works generally use the spelling "Poykayil" and either "Johannan" or "Yohannan". We should go with whichever scholarly spelling is most common/reasonable per WP:Common name. MatthewVanitas (talk) 21:41, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Support though comment about source below undermines one of those support sources. In ictu oculi (talk) 16:13, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * We can check the statistics, but even setting aside the Gyan book there are spellings other than the current title which are more common. MatthewVanitas (talk) 16:42, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

== Gyan's Encyclopaedia of Dalits in India: Leaders ==

Writing a heads-up that the this interesting-looking book, with much info about Poikayil, is published by the notorious Gyan Publishing, and thus not generally admissible under Wiki standards. I suggest instead that interested parties take a look, and if there are engaging points that we try to find proper substantiation. It may also be that this is a re-publishing, and if we can find the original non-Gyan publisher, that might have more credibility. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:33, 6 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Gyan Publishing? In ictu oculi (talk) 16:13, 11 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, why? If you like I can try and dig up the actual discussion threads from the Source Review board or whatever they call it, where they presented numerous examples of Gyan either just copy-pasting Wikipedia articles and publishing them, or publishing older (often Public Domain) works but editing them in POV ways that basically were warpings of the text and not true reprints, but not labeled as having been "re-imagined". The Encyclopedia of Dalits appears to be a Gyan book, yes?

Title	Encyclopaedia of Dalits in India: Leaders Volume 4 of Encyclopaedia of Dalits in India, Sanjay Paswan, ISBN 8178350661, 9788178350660 Author	Sanjay Paswan Editors	Sanjay Paswan, Pramanshi Jaideva Publisher	Gyan Publishing House, 2002 ISBN 8178350335, 9788178350332 Length	335 pages


 * So that's my concern. But I see you've added a Gyan book back into the article; what's your reasoning? MatthewVanitas (talk) 16:41, 11 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Just asking. Never heard of them. In ictu oculi (talk) 01:13, 12 April 2012 (UTC)


 * No worries, I used to use them too, until I realised while trying to source Rajput with the Gyan book "Martial Races of India" that it wasn't coincidence that the book lined up with the Wiki... the book was the Wiki article. It was cleverly done, just enough words changed, and some random professorial-sounding fluff, that it wasn't immediately obvious. But I realised that the book's original publication date far post-dated versions of Wiki from years earlier, and there were little errors like mentions of non-existent diagrams/pics which the Wiki articles included but book did not. That book, by Tyagi, has become notorious on Wiki because caste articles keep trying to use it to source articles, but the book itself is simply a warmed-over hash of the 2007 versions of the articles. So you get this terribly dangerous cycle where someone says "the Foo caste is descended from Ram himself, and was greatly feared by the British for their amazing war prowess", just personal opinion someone from the Foo caste posted on Wiki in 2007. Then some Gyan writer takes that, polishes it up a bit, and publishes that as a chapter of a book in 2009. Then in 2001 some Foo caste member gets upset that we won't let him put unsourced propaganda in the article, finds the Gyan book, and says "look, this great scholarly book says they're descended from Ram and feared by the Britishers!". So that's the danger of "circular citations" where the first feeds the second and the second "verifies" the first.


 * There are certainly plenty of Gyan books that aren't Wiki-ripoffs, but even when it's a good book it's often a reprint of an older work, and other editors have compared original printings with the Gyan ones and found terrible errors where sections were removed, added, shifted, etc. somewhere in the process, without warning.


 * It's too bad, because that Dalit book might be a decent book, but since Gyan simply can't be trusted it's just hard to say. MatthewVanitas (talk) 04:39, 12 April 2012 (UTC)


 * As MV says, if the Dali book is in fact a re-hash of something else then it could well be that the something else is ok. We just need to find it. However, I have been trying to find that particular thing for quite some time now! - Sitush (talk) 09:02, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

IS THERE ANY ACTUAL SIGNIFICANCE TO THIS, OR IS IT JUST AN ALTERNATE SPELLING??? --> Komaran is a more colloquial, in this case also caste affected rendering of the proper, Sanskritized Kumaran. In that sense, the change is important.

Spellings
Also, isn't Yohannan the actual name in Malayalam rather than Johannan? Is it possible to change the title? It would make the searches simpler. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ashwin147 (talk • contribs) 14:51, 18 July 2012 (UTC)


 * The current spelling was chosen based on this being the single most common spelling used in English-language academic books. So far as searches, note we have redirects pointing to this article from all the variant spellings, and most of the common alternate spellings appear in bold in the lede paragraph of the article, so it should still be pretty discoverable by those terms on Google. MatthewVanitas (talk) 16:03, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

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 * PoikayilAppachan.jpg