Talk:South Asia/Archive 6

Delimitation: various problems
tldr: A raft of sourcing problems.

Lede
The article begins like this:

There are several issues with this passage:
 * 1) The physical geographic boundaries are given without sources, and there's nothing in the Geography section that supports this information.
 * 2) This text is very confident in giving a definitive list of countries, when in fact there's considerable variation in the inclusion of some peripheral countries, as evident from the article's own "Definition" section as well as from the previous discussions (for the case of Afghanistan, they're listed above).
 * 3) The list of 8 countries has a ref at the end. You'd expect that to be some quality high-level source that discusses in depth the existing definitions of this region and comes up with some solid conclusions? You'll be disappointed. This ref is actually a bundle of 9 distinct links. The first one is to the search results for "Afghanistan" on the eldis.org website (in the archived version, there's a blurb about the country and it appears under the heading "South Asia). The second link is to the UNSD list of region codes, from which it's clear that it defines "Southern Asia" as including the countries listed her as well as, incidentally, one that isn't: Iran. #3 is a niche development studies paper that covers five South Asian countries, but it's unclear why it's listed here as it doesn't seem to have any sort of discussion of the region as such (maybe it was used because Afghanistan was one of those five countries?). The 4th ref points to the search results for South Asia at the World Bank data portal (?). Number 5 (which I've touched on above) finally has some discussion of the delimitation of South Asia, but that concludes with a set of 7 countries (Afghanistan and Myanmar being judged as peripheral to it). Ref #6 is for the events listing of one university's South Asia department (??). The seventh link is to the BBC country profile for Afghanistan (with no relevant content there either). Number 8 links to the Brookings Institution web portal page for South Asia; from the short blurb there it only becomes clear that India and Pakistan are included in the region. The last ref is to the CIA World Factbook page for South Asia (current link), but that also has a different definition to the one given in the lede (it includes the British Indian Ocean Territory).  All in all, we've got one source here that may be useful in a discussion of the varying geopolitical delimitations of the region, a few that may be useful as WP:PRIMARY data points (though secondary sources should obviously be preferred), while the rest are absolutely irrelevant. – Uanfala (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Definition section
The article's first section, #Definition, has the beginning of what may one day become a good overview. But it's also infected by some of the same problems that plague the lede. Its first paragraph is:

The first sentence reiterates the list of countries from the lede, and its refs (#1, #2 and #3) are also copies of ones in the lede, they're among the least relevant of the mostly non-relevant refs there. The second sentence (about "some" excluding Afghanistan) is also badly ref-bombed (ref #4 has nothing on the subject, and #9 has only a passing mention). But at least – and at last! – we are now presented with sources that have some actual discussion of the definition of South Asia. There are brief paragraphs on the topic in refs #6, #7 and #8, while #5 dedicates three pages. (Btw, it's strange to see the only decent sources so far supporting a view that the Wikivoice declares as marginal). The third and fourth sentences talk about British rule in Afghanistan and Burma, a tangent that's likely to confuse any user who's not reading the article backwards. The oddness doesn't abate in the next sentence: surreally, it declares that Singapore and Somaliland are not, in actual fact, parts of South Asia. The sixth and last sentence (sourced to a kid's book!) talks about Aksai Chin, a patch of desert that almost nobody will otherwise have anything to say about.

The second and third paragraphs finally bring some clarity (I'm omitting the refs to save space):

These two paragraphs would seem to do a much better job of introducing a "Definition" section, and I think they should be the ones doing it. That leaves the first paragraph without much to do. I think it's mostly unsalvageable, except for the bits about Afghanistan and Myanmar, which I reckon can be retained and worked into the rest of the text. – Uanfala (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Going forward
Ideally, the article should recount the various perspectives from which the region has been understood and then detail for each perspective how the region has been delimited. I can see the seeds of that in the article, but expanding them would be quite a task. I'm afraid I won't be of much immediate help here: I've already spent so much time on this (and much more than I'd wanted)! I'll be leaving the more constructive part of the work for others and all I can do at this stage is cut out the dross (as outlined above). As far as I can see, what the remaining sources would allow us to say, and in the absence of anything of quality brought up in the interim, is the following: South Asia can be defined, at least at the general level of the lede, as containing the five core countries of the subcontinent, with then Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Afghanistan typically/commonly/often/sometimes included. We'd still need sources about that last qualification (are the other countries included often or just sometimes?). So far, the only thing that we can say without going into WP:OR is that some sources include them and some don't. – Uanfala (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Always included in South Asia:
 * Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
 * Sometimes included in South Asia:
 * Afghanistan and the British Indian Ocean Territory.
 * Occasionally included in South Asia:
 * Iran and Myanmar. 120.18.220.112 (talk) 08:29, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Sports
Cricket is the most played sport in South Asia. Countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan are dominant powers in this sport Mehfuz arshad (talk) 08:39, 12 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Bangladesh and Afghanistan are hardly "dominant" powers in cricket though. 120.18.220.112 (talk) 08:34, 6 July 2023 (UTC)