Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Ancient Egypt and race/mediation

Ok, as it looks like you both accept me as your mediator, I would appreciate it if you both would post a short ( less then 500 words) summary in the provided sections of why your version is better, and whats you see as different. Please try to make sure to explain what is different. I would also appreciate it if you both gave me a link to each of your versions. (In a sandbox, whatever it takes). Thank you, and hopefully with luck we can figure something out that is satisfactory to both of you. :) ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 20:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Urthogie
Content issues:
 * Taharqa's version is flawed because it asserts certain views are mainstream, which actually aren't.
 * Taharqa's version is flawed because it violates style guidelines, which advise against excessive blockquoting. A third party has commented on how these quotefarms detriment the article.
 * Taharqa's version is flawed because it removes the essential discussion of Afrocentrism.

User issues:
 * too many to list. (see talk page)

Suggested remedy: --Urthogie 21:31, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I request that the page be protected, fully, until the major issues are agreed upon. Today the page was moved to Racial origins of ancient Egypt without group consensus (By a user who had never edited it before), adding further stress to the editing environment.  I was forced to move to Race and Ancient Egypt because now it is impossible to move to Ancient Egypt and race.

Taharqa
Well he requested mediation extremely late after other entries were added and significantly for that reason alone I'd suggest that the current version, excluding the trivial sections at the bottom be top priority over the highly outdated version which only differs in wording from the intro.

Current version(last edit by Thanatosimii): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_Egypt_and_race&diff=131706415&oldid=131705753 Minus this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt_and_race#Myths

My last revision: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_Egypt_and_race&diff=131584433&oldid=131572227

His last revision as of May, 8th: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_Egypt_and_race&diff=129377716&oldid=129341566

^The notable difference is again, the intro.. He sees to rearrange statements and citations in a different order from where I originally placed them, giving priority to a statement made by him which hasn't been sourced since then and is seemingly OR(see differences in 3rd paragraph and last sentence). My entry/revision basically sums up the paragraph through mainstream consensus in the form of 4 or more mainstream anthropological and Egyptological sources, backed by empirical and cultural studies updated and widely accepted with in the mainstream. His revision ends with an unsubstantiated claim, a rearrangement of my contribution and doctoring of the original entry to fit his unsourced contributions and seeming OR(his sources also don't reflect his statements and doesn't give the impression he does in his wording which is mis-leading, one he hasn't even read and it was admitted that it doesn't concern "race" or Biology by someone who has), and a undermining of the research conclusions which clearly places Egypt with in a NorthEast African context, just where it happens to be(it's basically a matter of his blanking). It is not a matter of POV imo, but a matter of accurate and reflective information from reliable sources. Also the intro is much too long imo, but I guess that's a different complaint.Taharqa 22:01, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

^I also feel that the two statements preceding the last sentence in my revision should be removed and rewritten for lack of reliability of sources that don't reflect the impression given about "disagreement" and more research needing to be done, which are his words, not theres, don't concern "race" or Biology, and is Original research. He claimed himself that his personal opinion was that there was Mesopotamian influence on Egypt and went so far out of his way to provide evidence that he even typed those exact phrases into google books and used the first source that he saw. google books - mesopotamian+influence+demographic+egyptTaharqa 22:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

What is this article about?
I would like to ask you both what this article is about. What is the gist of the of the article to you? I ask that you don't involve each other or worry so much with what version of the article is correct. I'm more interested with what your ideas are on the basic topic of the page. Lets see if we can't find some common agreement. :) ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 00:20, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Taharqa
It is an article which overviews older and current data concerning the biogeographical origins and population relationships of the Ancient Egyptians from the predynastic to the classical period, and how it applies to any race concepts we may have in the 21rst century. I'm funny about the title however, because concepts of "race" are generally found not to be useful among bioanthropologists; any mention of it in the article tends to be controversial. Major emphasis should be placed on Clusters and Clines and population relationships, including any possible demographic effects..Taharqa 19:34, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Urthogie
It is an article which deals with all of the mainstream sources that are relevant to the intersections between Egyptology and "race." I agree with Taharqa that the title is not appropriate, as race does not exist. We have been discussing some splits on the talk page.--Urthogie 15:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Title
Good, we seem to have agreement on the basic concept of the article. Correct me if I'm wrong, its an article on Egyptology. Specifically from the predynastic to the classical period, and how it applies to "race" concepts that we have in the 21st century. Please tell me if I have a good summary or not. :) In addition I notice that the title has been moved from the original Ancient Egypt and race. Was the original title acceptable? If not what do you consider is a decent title, and why. Cheers! ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 23:57, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Urthogie
First off Eagle 101 I want to thank you for starting with this question. My view is that new titles are the only way to solve this dispute. The talk page, if anything, shows that we just can't come to agreement on at least 10 issues surrounding this page. (I have just now decided to stop editing the talk page and devote all of my efforts at solving this conflict to this mediation.)

Taharqa and I agree that the article should not refer to race in the title. However, Taharqa's suggestion that the page be renamed to "biogeographical origins of the ancient Egyptians" is extremely limited. It would exclude any discussion of art, appearence, demographic influences, genetic clusters, myths, and afrocentrism. In other words, it would subtract everything from this article except the subsection, "origins." I doubt this is what Taharqa invisions her proposed page encompassing, but that is what that name would actually entail-- a wholesale removal of notable info related to subjects that touch on ancient Egypt and "race." My suggestion is a split to several page titles, thereby adding the most to Wikipedia's coverage of ancient Egypt. These are not POV forks, but common sense titles. Furthermore, I think they would largely eliminate our dispute. Here:


 * Genetics of the ancient Egyptians
 * Population history of ancient Egypt
 * Ancient Egyptian state formation
 * Appearance of the ancient Egyptians
 * Race in Egyptology
 * Egypt in Afrocentrism
 * Myths about ancient Egypt

Other stuff could be merged to existing articles:


 * Art of ancient Egypt
 * Ancient Egyptian language
 * Great Sphinx of Giza
 * King Tut
 * Origin of the Nilotic peoples

My belief is that this would solve the entire dispute. I am completely open to compromise concerning several of these splits. For example, the article Egypt in Afrocentrism is not very important to create any time soon, nor is Race in Egyptology. Myths about ancient Egypt seems like it would be a useful article, similar to HIV/AIDS misconceptions-- I am nonetheless willing to forego its creation if Taharqa objects, just so we can resolve this stressful and time-wasting dispute.--Urthogie 01:45, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Taharqa
Actually since it applies to concepts of "race", it is more in the realm of mainly biological anthropology and genetics, culture/linguistics, and Egyptology, among other mainstream data. This is to assess more or less the cluster or closest biogeographic relationships they may of had, and I guess how that would translate into terms of "race", concepts of which aren't in current scientific use. The title should simply reflect the same topic but appropriately, like "biogeographical origins or population relationships of ancient Egyptians".. Just not "race".. "Race" should not set the tone for the article and only deserves mention where it is useful imo..Taharqa 00:32, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Title 2
Ok it looks like there is agreement that the scope of the article is larger then what the current title says. Now there already seem to be two different suggestions as to what we can do. We can re-name it to some thing more broad as suggested by Taharqa. Or it can be split out into various articles as suggested by Urthogie.

Perhaps a third solution that you guys can look at would be to have one main article under a broader title, and several sub articles. See the article science for an example. Have a broad article, like science is very broad, and cover the main stuff in that article, whatever you guys deem that to be, and then have several articles that go into more depth on each section. See how the article science has a section called the scientific method, and in that section is a link to the article scientific method as a more in depth coverage. The article that you both are working on seem to have quite a bit of information that could be split out like this.

Please tell me what you guys think of the various ideas. The idea set forth by Taharqa, Urthogie, or the one of the many possible alternatives explained by me. Once you guys get a general agreement on what title or titles should all of the information go under, attention can then go to layout and formatting of the article, or articles. Cheers! ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 08:02, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Taharqa
Well I feel that separating it into several different pages is unnecessary.. I have no problem with the article as it is and most of the other editors don't either(maybe 1 or 2 others who don't contribute, I don't know), we can simply figure out a better title that encompasses more. I feel that if there were more articles edited by Urthogie and/or me(concerning this topic), there'd simply be that much more conflict so I feel that we should concentrate on the article first and whoever else would like to create another article of course is welcome to do so. I like your idea Eagle however, that we can create articles for issues that deserve elaboration, but I'm against having pre-defined sub-topics about this very issue and creating articles about this, starting from scratch, which will as I've said, only invite more POV clashing. I'd like to name this article something like "Biogeographic relationships of Ancient Egypt", or "The peopling and demographics of ancient Egypt".. We can discuss "race" in the sub-context of that. I never considered the title of it to be that much of an issue(even though it is of course) relative to the POV conflicts, but I see that Urthogie feels differently about that.Taharqa 16:56, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Update: The article was/is about 'Race' Urthogie, my suggestions cover the scientific aspects that involve any concepts of "race".. This covers clusters and clines, etc, the extra stuff is trivial and only deserves a sub-section and/or its own article imo.Taharqa 23:50, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Urthogie
"Biogeographic relationships of Ancient Egypt" is limited and "the peopling and demographics of ancient Egypt" is limited. Neither of them cover:


 * section 3.3 clusters and clines
 * section 3.4 appearence
 * section 5 Art
 * section 5.1 great sphinx of giza
 * section 7 afrocentrism
 * section 8 myths

Several other issues exist with these names as well. "Biogeographic relationships of Ancient Egypt" is a nonsensical title, as it sounds like it would be the name of an article which dealt with all biogeography related to ancient Egypt, not just human biogeography. "The peopling and demographics of ancient Egypt" is redundant, because peopling falls under demographics. Lastly, neither of these article titles use terms that you ever hear mentioned in the scientific literature related to their subjects, violating a key encyclopedic principle that word choice should reflect what is actually used in the relevant literature.

They seem to both be failed attempts at giving scientific synonyms for "race and ancient Egypt", an unscientific subject which clearly covers more than how a place was peopled and/or affected by demography. Splitting is the only way not to sacrifice perfectly good info related to this page, and if you look at the suggested splits, they're perfectly good and reasonable titles that could actually solve this conflict.--Urthogie 23:27, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Reply to Taharqa: "Biogeographic relationships" doesn't include clusters/clines, or appearence, or art, or surrounding issues, it only covers biogeographic relationships. I know you may be aiming for that, but human biogeography doesn't by definition cover those things.--Urthogie 23:52, 27 May 2007 (UTC) See below.--Urthogie 22:41, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Title 3
I'm going to start a list of possible names as if there is to be one broad page, with perhaps some split offs (more on this below), I would appreciate it if you guys would add in your own ideas. Please don't comment on each other's names, just add a bunch of names and we will go from there. ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 03:33, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

The list

 * Race and ancient Egypt - where it is now.
 * Ancient Egypt and Race - where it was.
 * Sociological topics of Ancient Egypt
 * Biogeographic relationships of Ancient Egypt - suggested by Taharqa
 * The peopling and demographics of ancient Egypt - suggested by Taharqa
 * Split page to multiple sub pages as suggested by Urthogie
 * Split page to several page titles, (perhaps after having one broad topic, put some of the stuff thats in it into other articles? The article is 43 kilobytes.)?
 * biogeographical origins or population relationships of ancient Egyptians - suggested by Taharqa
 * More ideas?

Please list new title ideas above, and lets see if we can't find one that is suitably broad. Perhaps this can be done by having one article with most of the info and some of the sections that can't be fitted into the broader title split off to their own articles. This would be a compromise between Urthogie's idea of splitting everything and Taharqa's idea of keeping everything in the same location. Please keep in mind that when listing new titles above to just list them, and don't bother with countering each other as of yet, lets just come up with ideas.

I also left some sections below for you guys to comment in on other ideas as to how to carry out the structure. Right now it looks like Taharqa wants to keep everything in the same location, while Urthogie wants to split out the information. Please consider the alternative above, and if you don't care for that idea toss out a new idea below. I'll wait for everybody to get a chance to add topic ideas to the list above, and to comment below. ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 03:33, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Urthogie
"Sociological topics of ancient Egypt" refers to every social phenomenon related to ancient Egypt. "Biogeography of ancient Egypt" or "Biogeographical relationships of ancient Egypt" don't seem to be sensical titles, either-- are we to discuss the biogeography of the lizards and the ants and the bacteria? Perhaps Taharqa means to suggest we call the article Human biogeography of ancient Egypt. This would be a nice big article, yes, but it would still not have any discussion of the appearance of the ancient Egyptians. So, Taharqa, in an effort to make a compromise, here is my new suggested split:


 * Human biogeography of ancient Egypt (Taharqa's suggestion, basically... we would have the current title we have now redirect to it)
 * This would include all of section 3 (Research) with the exception of section 3.4 (Appearence) and all of section 6 (discarded hypotheses)


 * Appearance of the ancient Egyptians
 * This would include all of section 2 (ancient writers), section 3.4 (appearence), section 4 (mummy reconstructions), and section 5 (art and architecture)


 * Afrocentrism and ancient Egypt
 * This would include the content we currently have in section 1 (defining race) and section 7 (Afrocentrism)


 * Myths about ancient Egypt
 * This would include not only section 8 (myths) but also tons of myths about ancient Egypt that don't relate to race. HIV and AIDS misconceptions would be the style to go for.

This is a nice concise list, and we could merge the remaining stuff to existing articles. What do you think of this, Taharqa?--Urthogie 22:10, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

A note for Eagle 101
Update: Taharqa is blocked so I sent the above to her talk page. I will paste her here if she replies. Even if Taharqa does agree to this split we will still have several difficult issues to sort out:
 * Various issues surrounding how we discuss The Land of Punt.
 * The lettter to the editor being used as a source in the Sphinx of Giza section.
 * The abundance of blockquotes in the research and sphinx of giza sections... (should they be summarized or quoted, is the argument here)
 * Various issues surrounding how we discuss the various studies done on demographic influence. (this is especially difficult because we disagree here on whether a certain study is even admissable for this section.)
 * Various issues surrounding how we discuss the research on origins. (this is especially difficult because we disagree here on whether certain studies are even admissable for this section.)

The above ^ is just an attempt to summarize the issues that would remain if we came to agreement on this split. This is so that you don't have to sift through the confusing and often off-topic talk page..--Urthogie 22:57, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Taharqa
No one said anything about "biogeography of ancient Egypt" Urthogie is confused, if it seems non-sensical to him then that's his opinion, but I feel as if lizards are the last thing that we should be talking about.

"Appearance of the ancient Egyptians" is the most absurd proposal made here imo as it is controversial and even impossible to come to a consensus on exactly how they looked. "Appearance" is a subjective term..

"So much apparent focus on 'Afrocentrism' and not 'Eurocentrism' or any other 'ism' really seems to only obfuscate the initial intentions behind the article. I don't understand why Afrocentrism would be so notable to have its own section and sub-section in an Ancient Egypt and Race article, but not any other 'ism'.

Such constant focus on so-called "Myths" seems trivial and redundant imo.. I actually feel that we should rename it to "Ancient Egypt and Race", and leave the article to explain that 'race' isn't a valid concept(as can be recognized by most of today's anthropologists). I actually agree with your compromise Eagle101, but minus some of Urthogie's over zealous ideas.Taharqa 05:02, 2 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Taharqa, earlier you just said you wanted biogeography of ancient egypt and now you're back to wanting race in the title. please stick to what you say... which one do you want?--Urthogie 19:39, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

taharqa done with editing this page
"^Have it your way Urthogie, I give up.. You've caused me too much stress over a stupid article that I've been constantly trying to truly protect from what I sincerely thought was bias(for certain information/theories) and misinterpretation. I'm done.. You were a formidable debating opponent but I definitely can't go at it like this forever/anymore(you're perhaps used to it), I just hope and pray that someone else dedicate their time to protect the page from some of your ill-informed edits and misinterpretation(unless you can learn to be neutral), even though you have indeed contributed a lot to the article, yet you undermine everyone elses so there's always conflict. I'm not a quitter, however I can't be the only one holding my own on that talk page and the article. Urthogie, I hope that I can trust you to do the right thing.. Seriously.. I may respond to your little accusations tomorrow, address the protection like once, but I'm done regardless, believe it or not. I told Luka a while ago that I was tired of going through that drama and he's the only one who talked me into staying, but I'm cool on it. Luka if you're reading this I'm sorry, but you're not being attacked and constantly blocked like me and fighting it all alone, so try and understand. Again, Urthogie I only hope that you or someone else don't mess up the article and give false impressions based on selective data, at least make it as neutral as possible. We should both agree however that the version that's up now is an inadequate rough draft and condensed version of the previous, I just hope that the relevant info is returned and reported in a neutral way(even if it has to be your way Urthogie and on a different page). Tell admin Eagle101 that the dispute is over as I'm no longer disputing anything(quote me).. - Taharqa"

Copied from her talk page, --Urthogie 03:58, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Case closed due to Taharqa withdrawing. As there is no dispute remaining with the other party, this mediation is over. I would like to thank everyone for at least entertaining the thought of mediation, and for accepting me as your mediator. ——  Eagle 101 Need help? 05:29, 8 June 2007 (UTC)