User talk:HaEr48/Archives/2021/January

Welcome to the 2021 WikiCup!
Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank Vanamonde93 and Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are and. Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:11, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Qibla
Lurking away at the 'pedia I somehow picked up on the fact that qibla was raised to FA status, which made me curious, so I went to take a look. To my great consternation, the second sentence of the article stated that "the Kaaba is a sacred site built by the prophets Abraham and Ishmael". However, after a little investigation of the article's history I of course found out that this is not quite how it was stated in the original FA version of the article. After even more investigation (checking all the diffs, if there's a quicker method please educate me) I found out that it was changed on 23 December by an anonymous IP user, whose edit I undid. Apaugasma (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for doing that. HaEr48 (talk) 17:37, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Adi Utarini
&mdash; Amakuru (talk) 00:02, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXXVII, January 2021
The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here. If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 00:07, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Question
Would you be willing to review the GA nomination of Johannes Leimena? Thank you. Danu Widjajanto (talk) 19:39, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Interesting article, I will consider it, thank you. HaEr48 (talk) 23:41, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I took a closer look at the article. I think what it needs is a reviewer with great command of English to tidy up its style and grammar, and I don't think I am the right reviewer for it. Content-wise the article looks in a good shape. HaEr48 (talk) 21:36, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Surah summaries
Hey, I really respect your work on Wikipedia, I find it be very scholarly, so I thought I'd ask you this question for which I don't have an easy answer. Should wikipedia have summaries for every surah like Al-Anbiya? And if so, how detailed should they be. The usual answer to that question would be "well, add whatever can be reliably sourced," but I don't think that answer works in this case. I'm sure you know (and once pointed out) that Quranic exegesis is quite voluminous and sources can be found for recreating this exegesis on wikipedia. How much of that should be on wikipedia? Usually we limit content by that which can be reliably sourced, but in this case such a limit is inappropriate. This relates to the question of WP:NOT, which does not want Wikipedia to be a dictionary, nor a newspaper, even though we could easily turn it into one while still remaining inside WP:RS.VR talk 16:35, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the message, I think it is a good question. My view is that there is a place for summaries of the surah, but they should not be sourced on the exegetes/commentators themselves, but to modern scholars who cite such commentators. That's why, for example, I favor sources like The Study Quran, its entries are based on compilation of opinions from various classical commentators, but written by modern scholars and published in a modern publisher. That makes it a tertiary source, and such sources are good for evaluating and balancing due weight (see WP:TERTIARY). The Sale/Wherry versions that have been massively pushed by one user recently is the opposite, it is the work of individual author(s), and to base Wikipedia's summaries on them means taking their interpretation as the ultimate authority and giving them undue weight. Not to mention the other problems generated by this user's summaries, such as using list instead of prose and POV language in the summary. My prefered version is like Special:Permalink/996766607 or Special:Permalink/861113278. HaEr48 (talk) 17:46, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wherry's, motivation in his own words was to enable the average student of Islām to speedily acquaint himself with the main points presented. That is pretty much Wikipedia's purpose too. The Study Quran has its place but it is authors Joseph Lumbard & Seyyed Hossein Nasr are Muslims writing for Muslims and references to modern academics are noticeably absent. Saying that, we have not discussed a single instance where Lumbard & Wherry disagree. I am not pushing Wherry. He has just done the work for us already. The summary is practical - it is copyright free and prepacked for Wikipedia.  JorgeLaArdilla (talk) 13:28, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The Study Quran is not just "for Muslims". From its description it looks like it is for everyone.VR talk 03:03, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi-- brought here by a ping. Regarding The Study Quran. The authors are mainstream academics, and so this is a strong source for us to use. Being mainstream academics, their religion is not germane to this discussion, and I'm not sure what made conclude that they're "writing for Muslims". JorgeLaArdilla is correct that The Study Quran doesn't present the views of modern academics (aside from a collection of essays at the end), and that is not its purpose, which is rather to summarize a wide range of classical commentaries. Where we need to summarize traditional views, this is the best single source I'm aware of.
 * I wasn't familiar with Elwood Morris Wherry's commentary, and based on a brief review, it seems that we should be very careful about using this source. The author was a missionary seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity, and the preface of his commentary makes it clear that it was written as a tool for missionary work. This reminds me of William Muir, whose work Wherry seems to be using extensively. Muir was a diligent scholar, but the overarching aim of his work was not to produce a neutral corpus of research in the manner of modern academic research, but rather to proselytize Muslims and convince them to reject their religion, i.e., polemical in nature. Although such sources may be convenient to use, and their different portions may be polemical to a greater or lesser degree, as a rule of thumb WP should not present the views 19th century Christian missionaries on Islam in WP voice. Eperoton (talk) 04:00, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, would you also care to weigh in on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Islam (a centralized discussion on this topic)? HaEr48 (talk) 15:41, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Congratulations
Congratulations! With 15,252 total views (and 1,271 views per hour), your hook on Adi Utarini is one of the most viewed DYK hooks this month. Accordingly, it has been placed in the list at DYKSTATS January. Keep up the great work! Cbl62 (talk) 19:20, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2021
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:10, 31 January 2021 (UTC)