Wikipedia talk:WikiProject India/Archive 2

Kamal Haasan
Please vote for the Kamal Haasan article to become an article to be improved to be featured here, Article Creation and Improvement Drive Thamizhan 14:50, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Symbol for kilometers
As I have pointed out before on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Indian cities, the symbol for kilometers is not "Kms" and not "KMs" and not "kms" and not "km." and not "Kms.", etc.

It is km, lowercase, no full stop, no s.

Why does this remain such a pervasive problem in all India-related articles? Is this something systematically mistaught in India? Gene Nygaard 15:07, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Google: kms India -user -talk site:en.wikipedia.org  243 hits
 * Will someone please do somethig about this problem? Gene Nygaard 20:20, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Tamil N. location categorisation
The stub type has become quite large, and unfortunately for my standard-issue attempt at a quick and dirty fix for this, is also quite low in categorisation. (By district would be the obvious way to do so.) Is anyone working on these at present? I could generate a list of the articles lacking such categories, if that'd be of any use to anyone... Alai 22:09, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This would be the case for all Indian-state stubs, not just for Tamil Nadu. No-one is currently is working on all of them. Few popular towns get updated. Not sure what you mean by "lacking categories", all these stubs would be part of the Category:Cities and towns in Tamil Nadu. I agree, district wise would be way to go to split them up further. Regards, Ganeshk  ( talk ) 22:29, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * TN merits specific mention because it's sufficiently large that it's on the stub-sorting project's list of oversized categories to be split and re-sorted (WP:WSS/P). (I wouldn't be in the least surprised if others are lurking just beneath.)  That's exactly what I mean by "low in categorisation":  800+ articles is a distinctly large number to have in one (near-)monolithic category.  (And "lacking" applies to the (hypothetical) district categories.)  The offer of a list may be pretty redundant, though:  I hadn't noticed that the distinct categories aren't just under-used, they don't exist in the first place.  So read as, the whole category...  I'll have a look to see if  looks to be numerically feasible;  if any other districts seem likely to have more than their fair share of stubs, that'd be handy to know too.  Alai 22:49, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Just curious, How do you plan to create such a category (Kanyakumari district geography stubs). Do you run a bot or a tool to do that? - Ganeshk  ( talk ) 23:19, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It should use the small 'd' for the district name per convention. Thanks, Ganeshk  ( talk ) 23:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll bear that in mind (though it's not a naming convention, and it seems to be "more honoured in the breach" on the actual district articles). I do have a bot (Alaibot), and an offline copy of the database for running category-based queries -- but it's of no help in this instance, given the lack of categories (or other list).  I plan on having a look via google, and via backlinks from the district articles.  If nothing looks viable currently, I might just start adding district-based categories, and revisit the stub question later.  Alai 00:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 15:13, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Kerala-related help sought
I'm not sure what to make of this sequence of edits in the articl about the song "We Shall Overcome". I have my doubts—especially about describing Kerala as a "traditional Congress party stronghold" (rather than the previous description "traditional Communist stronghold")—but I'll admit to being no expert on India. My guess is that some of the changes are right, some wrong. - Jmabel | Talk 03:33, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Indian Improvement Drive
If you may have noticed, recently, the WP:INCOTW is seeing dwindling consensus in all its process (nominations / support / opposition / subsequent collaboration). It seems WP:INCOTW and in general WP:INDIA needs a good boost.

A more holistic approach...
I feel, WP:INDIA should be the gateway for all India-related projects.
 * Develop WP:INDIA as a portal specifically for Indian Editors/Contributors, which would give editors more focus. We can create a portal in the portal namespace for WikiProject India, I think the Portal:WikiProject India in the portal namespace would substantially improve all the collaboration efforts. I think Indian Community Portal would substantially improve all the collaboration efforts.
 * Bring in all Indian Wikiprojects under one portal (I'm not asking to merge all India Wikiprojects), so that an editor can easily move on to the project where he/she is more interested.
 * Club all the non-article related processes and projects under one meta project, (say, Wikiproject India Meta, which includes all project and portal maintenance/Indian esperanza support processes/assessment/photography/cartography/other media projects and processes)
 * Redefine/redesign WP:INDIA the way we collaborate. Currently we simply do not know where a contributor is working. Not everyone is working on the same project everytime.
 * WP:INDIA should be the place to hit for general India related talk and then directing subject specific talk. I'm not saying the current model is bad, but currently most of us are working in clusters and all those clusters are not adequately inter-related.
 * Very often, requests for help are posted at a wrong place and therefore help doesn't get that. Visiting every single usertalk page and asking for help is really very tough for editors.
 * The current situation is like an organisation with a number of departments but without a department that would provide appropriate link between all the departments. Hope you get what I'm talking about.
 * I'm suggesting a change, which may seem unfathomable, may take some time to realign, and we may have an inert feeling to resist change, but structurally once implemented it would help the Indian Wikipedian community a lot.

As an Esperanzian, I feel, this suggested change of notion will give us a new focus, as well as providing a refershment psychologically.

Also...
In line with the new Article Creation and Improvement Drive (Talk), I'd like to propose a change in WP:INCOTW to become Wikipedia:Indian Article Improvement Drive (WP:INAID). I'd also like to propose that the WP:INCOTW (or more preferably WP:INAID) should focus on developing assessed WP:INDIA stubs/articles (again the selection be through consensus) instead of random nomination.

I'm asking for consensus. Please give your views and more ideas on this. Cheers -- Ch e  z  ( Discuss  /  Email  ) &bull; 05:15, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Comments
A holistic approach is always preferable. And I feel small collaborations should take place. The current "collaboration of the week (WP:INCOTW)" is a bit too FA-oriented. I think collaborations should be initiated even for small articles, so that they can be improved to atleast PR-status. For this a "WorkGroup" would be a better idea. I agree with your point that currently we do not know where a contributor is working and not everyone is working on the same project everytime. But, I think, that's what talkpages of Projects are for. The onus is on the contributer to post a message on the talkpage aout the article he is contributing to and the other members of the Project have to respond to him, which I think is not happening that much. There is a need to link all the Projects to a "Meta" project, but that can easily be done, simply by providing links to all those WikiProjects. For that renaming/merging of the current Projects is not feasible. Nevertheless, a revamp of the Project is welcome if it provides more collaborating opportunities and improvement of articles. -- N R S | T/M\B 06:23, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Ganeshk's comments

 * Portals are considered article namespace. Wikiproject related content in the portal namespace will violate self-reference. But you could create something in the lines of Community Portal in the Wikipedia namespace.
 * INAID is a good idea. But I am not sure a change of name will boost it's activity. There has been some discussion about improving INCOTW in the past. We had plans to send out newsletters to interested Wikipedians. That is still in the works.
 * I don't see a need for a seperate meta project for photography/collaboration etc. They are already linked on the navigation menu.

Regards, Ganeshk  ( talk ) 07:10, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Ganesh, for pointing it out. I'm wasn't suggesting a separate meta project, but some cleanup work may clarify things. For example, Cartography and Workgroup for Maps are one and the same. I'm doing some work on it. Let's see how it goes. -- Ch e  z  ( Discuss  /  Email  ) &bull; 09:05, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * They are still one-and-the same, Cartography redirects to Indian-maps project. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 14:44, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Comments by Lostintherush
Chez, I fully agree with your first sentence. WP:India is and should be a gateway for all India related projects. But I dont understand why develop it into a portal. I feel Indian Community Portal is essentially duplicating WP:India. Why not continue with uniting all projects under WP:India. All Indian projects are already listed as workgroups of WP:India.

I agree that all India related discussion/ wikiprojects should have a common talk page else the discussion gets scattered. So unless there is too much unrelated discussion happening on these pages, maybe we should make all other talk pages redirects to a common one. That, coupled with the dashboard on WP:INB and now the mother project WP:India should link the different "departments". -- Lost (talk) 16:22, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I see where he is going. The portal would be like a giant collaboration dashboard so that we can see everything in one place. I feel it can co-exist with the root project. WP:CRIC had setup their main-page like a portal. WP:AUS setup their noticeboard in a portal format. May be we should do the same instead of creating a brand-new page. Why can't we redesign our noticeboard in a portal format? -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 16:52, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, I am in agreement with the concept of having a centralised page to begin browsing our project pages. I have no preferences about how its designed as long as it gets done. So whether its a portal or a wikiproject page or a noticeboard, any is ok with me as long as they are not duplications of each other -- Lost (talk) 17:20, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. We should avoid duplication as much as possible. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 17:22, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Indian Wikipedians' notice board
I have created Indian Wikipedians' notice board as a proposal to redisgn our noticeboard as a portal. Please feel free to make changes you see fit. If the community likes the new format, we could redirect the noticeboard to the new page. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 17:54, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Ganesh, You got what I was talking about. It is one thing to bring in ideas, and it is another to implement it successfully. I should say, I'm better at the first that the latter. That is where you come in. Kudos. Now, in that board, we can bring in links for the departments and workgroups, a help section, and link to the discussion board. I'll pitch in more when more ideas come in. Cheers. -- Ch e  z  ( Discuss  /  Email  ) &bull; 23:51, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I have brought in all the sections of the old noticeboard. Help section is at the Tools link in the header bar. Please check. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 05:31, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I have put-up new design proposal at India notice board page. Let us see what others feel. Regards, Ganeshk  ( talk ) 05:43, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Reg to changes in WP India
(copied from User talk:Chezhiyan)

I noticed you have changed templates. I have reverted some changes so that we can discuss:


 * Navigation boxes: You have hidden all the content into groups. Hiding I feel should be sparingly used. Let us discuss what parts of the navbox needs to be hidden.


 * Navigation box placement: I feel it should be on the top so that it is visible right away.


 * Outreach department: I noticed you have started seperate Indian Sign-post pages. Can't we use the templates and newsletters in the Outreach department. What do you feel about redisigning them? I have created the templates so that they are numbering individually, archived montly etc. It is better to keep all content under WikiProject India as sub-pages. That will keep WP:SELF to a minimum. Please give your thoughts.

That's for now. Regards, Ganeshk  ( talk ) 15:37, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Chez's comments
Hi Ganesh,

Reg Nav Boxes: The reason why I changed them was that, everywhere within WP India, the nav box was the most prominent entity than the actual page itself, which should be explaining everything in detail. The nav box really have to be reorganised. Some can be kept, and some can go. For example, it would be better if the following links go under discussion board or something similar. More importantly, if you follow up those links, some of those pages are not used to their full capabilities.
 * Article requests
 * Articles up for deletion
 * Collaboration Dashboard
 * New articles
 * To do


 * 1) Those pages may be revamped or
 * 2) There may be a centralized place where they are conducted. (for eg., a page where article requests and new article creation are updated as and when outdated.)

If you may notice, in many cases, the noticeboard, the dashboard and the above pages are no longer updated simultaneously.

We should work out something regarding that.

Similarly, Templates, stub sorting, manual of style can go within project help. If a link for manual of style is provided in the nav box, one cannot expect every link related to editing from Layouts, table help, to referencing help, to be provided in the nav box. The link to manual of style may be useful for some of the members, while table help will be useful to some members.

If we go on adding links into nav box, it will only grow in length, which we dont need. Instead we can simply provide a guideline page for project members on how things can be done and where to find help.

Reg, the placement, if the above stuff are worked out well, I dont see a problem in having the navbox at the top.


 * I will give this some thought and respond. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 06:54, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Reg the Indian Edition of the signpost
The work that was done at Outreach/newsletter was really good.

However, the reason why I modelled the Indian edition of the signpost is that, if it is subscription friendly, it may reduce some of the delivery work for us. Wikipedia Signpost is much simpler in the delivery format while a bit complex in the editing work that is required. Plus it is an universally accepted format in wikipedia, which means it is easier to adapt, remodel, and gain more acceptance among the community, as it is more standardised.

At this juncture, I should accept that, I'm really not that well versed with template creation, at least not yet. Even in the signpost, there can be a number of things that may be automated on the editing side.

Even before creation I did think if we can keep it within Outreach. It is fine with me. On the other hand, I felt, may be signpost related content shall go together. Currently there is only one version of signpost. We may the only WP trying to implement a version for us. In the future, some other WP may bring a customised version of signpost for themselves. In that case, keeping it within outreach would mean standing out of the line.

So, the effect here is multifold,
 * It is standardised and simple.
 * In line with main edition format
 * May encourage other projects to customise signpost like us
 * Keeps all signposts together

Please do say what you think of it. Cheers. -- Ch e  z  ( Discuss  /  Email  ) &bull; 23:37, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Other wikiprojects send newsletters. Biography and Military history to name two. It is preferrable to have a similar newsletter for the India project too. The template that is currently in the outreach page was copied from Biography project. Signpost is too detailed. It will be tedious to create it regularly. Newsletter is a much simpler format. Everyone can pitch in if it is that way. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 06:54, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Regarding subscriptions, we could provide the different subscription options on the newsletter too. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 06:58, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not averse to the newsletter format. I simply thought signpost version would be better in format and content. It doesn't have to be too detailed, and it doesn't have to be a weekly signpost. Tentatively it can be fortnightly or monthly. Either way, I feel we should keep something going, newsletter or the signpost. Let's see what the community thinks. Cheers. -- Ch e  z  ( Discuss  /  Email  ) &bull; 11:26, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree that we should keep something going. The important thing is to maintain the rhythm atleast for the first few issues. Once that is happening, then we will see more helping hands join hopefully. Either of the two versions is ok with me -- Lost (talk) 14:52, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

There is also a newsletter for Novels. GizzaChat  &#169; 10:30, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Copyright Violations
I use the Internet tool "Copyscape" on articles related to Indian oil companies. All of the ones I have done so far, with the exception of the stud IBP, are copyright violations. I have no idea what you guys are trying to do, but this needs to stop, now. I request that whoever is running this that Wikipedia will not tolerate copyright violations in any form and doing so can cause the editor to be blocked for any length of time, including forever. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 07:27, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Ladakh
A problem in the Ladakh article, a featured article that this project rates as "high importance". Help needed by someone knowledgable. See Talk:Ladakh. - Jmabel | Talk 01:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Recipes
Hi! I've noticed that a lot of articles containing recipes link to this project from the talk page. I am a wikibooks administrator, so I'll happily import the recipes to the wikibooks cookbook if I know where they are.

Unfortunately wikibooks doesn't permit actual recipes in food articles, but of course the Cookbook does :). We're starting to get a good collection of Indian recipes there, and we could probably use some help subcategorizing them to recipes by region (currently they're all just in b:Category:Indian recipes), as well as ingredient pages on Indian vegetables and spices.

If you want help figuring things out on the cookbook, your best bet will to be to ask b:User:Kellen, who is also an administrator and so can import pages as well (I'm not sure if she has an account on wikipedia). -- SB_Johnny |talk|books 17:30, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks SB, one relevant category here is Category:Indian cuisine. -- Lost (talk) 18:19, 8 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Yup, I've seen that. I was wondering if any of those articles formerly contain recipes which were removed before we had a chance to transwiki?
 * We've only had Special:Import enabled for a month or so now, so we weren't actively looking for pages before then. If anyone knows of articles like that, let me know, because we can just import it and then bring up the diff before the recipe was removed (Import brings all versions of the article over to wikibooks, so we can just revert to that version after import if we know which one it is). -- SB_Johnny |talk|books 19:24, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

BKWSU Raja Yoga versus Classical/Patanjali Raja Yoga
Hi.

I have a problem here delineating what is classically known as Raja Yoga, e.g. Patanjali, Vivekananda etc and the spiritist practises used by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University which involves meditating on the channelled entity or spirit they call Shiva after the Hindu God, the channelling of so-called "Shiva" through BK adherents, and the use of channelled messages spoken through their founder and current medium as the new "Gita".

Now, it is perfectly clear that what the BKs are teaching is entirely novel and the use of identical terminology is entirely confusing. But how to qualify this on the wiki? Unfortunately the Western academics demanded by other editors - whether sociological or Christian theologists - are entirely unqualified to comment on the differences.


 * Does anyone know if any experienced Hindu academics or yoga specialists have analysed the BKs and their practise?

Thank you.

Does this article have the correct title?
I found T. Prakasham via Special:Random today. The article is loaded with lots of honourific titles so I'm not sure whether I was correct to move it to Tanguturi Prakasham. Help to move it to a correct title (and to clean out all the honourific titles from the article) would be appreciated. :-) Kimchi.sg 02:23, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It should be merged to Tanguturi Prakasam. I have added the merge tags. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 02:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Wasn't he better known with the initial ? Tintin (talk) 02:44, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I think he was better known with the full-name, Tanguturi Prakasam. -- Ganeshk  ( talk ) 03:04, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Raipur
In the above article there is a link in the history section (King Rama Chandra) that leads to Rama. By the looks of the second article that's not the correct link. I looked at Rama (disambiguation) and Ramachandra (disambiguation) and I'm still not sure where the link should go. Anybody know? Second is this edit correct? Again it doesn't look right. If you know the correct version please fix as I'm off for a week. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 16:47, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Removed the link and corrected the century. Thanks -- Lost (talk) 16:55, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for fixing that so quick. And just look at the person who made the link in the first place. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 17:28, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

India-scientist-stub
This stub has been proposed at WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/2006/November to sort out India-bio-stub. STTW (talk)  21:32, 14 November 2006 (UTC)