Talk:Social and cultural exchange in al-Andalus

Article scope and POVs
Leaving a general note here. This article has a rather vague scope and it's unclear what its purpose really is. Is it about inter-religious relations inside Islamic al-Andalus? Is it about transfer of knowledge and ideas between al-Andalus and other parts of the world? These various questions are not synonymous, but the article seems to vaguely dip into all of them without really picking a clear topic.

At its creation (e.g. see this early version), the article read like a personal essay with heavy WP:STYLE and WP:TONE issues, and worse, very few citations, which means a large bulk of it is likely WP:OR. There are many sort-of accurate statements but they are often overly simplistic and/or don't really reflect what reliable sources say. There have been some constructive edits since then, but a large bulk of the original problematic and unsourced content remains.

More recently, I see that @H20346, who has been active in promoting an obvious POV in other articles, has been doing the same here, disregarding WP:UNDUE and inserting out-of-context quotes or claims that illuminate little on the topic, or even obfuscate the issue further. Here, among other examples, they quote an explicitly polemical book (see e.g. this review) by an author who is not a historian on the subject, for apparently no purpose other than to point out a long-term demographic trend well-documented elsewhere and to make it sound like something nefarious. A similar attempt to push this author's work was previously reverted years ago.

All of this makes for a mess of various personal POVs at cross purposes, rambling WP:OR, and very poorly-cited content overall. I was initiallygoing to remove nearly an entire section ("Art and architecture") for these reasons, but now I'm not sure where to start. Maybe what's needed is wider input from other editors about what the scope should actually be (i.e. what should be included and what should be off-topic). Depending on that, a page move and/or a significant reorganization and trimming of material might be in order. R Prazeres (talk) 19:10, 3 July 2024 (UTC)