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Latest comment: 6 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
The basic problem is that this article (and some related ones) present oral tradition as fact. It will take a lot of work to clear this up. Dougweller (talk) 18:47, 10 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
I don't see a problem here. The sources look pretty legit to me. I've gone through some of them and they indeed support the claim. Removing tag unless you stated the section you take an issue with.Senegambianamestudy (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:57, 14 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Just take a look at reference 32. It's not a proper reference. I can't easily even tell if half is original research or not. Part of it is a link to another article, which of course we don't use as a source. I had a lot of experience with the now indefinitely blocked editor who created this and their serious misuse of sources. One problem was that he wrote articles from the perspective of the old Serer religion, taking that religion as fact. That is'nt a big roblem here. I'm glad you've checked some sources. Doug Wellertalk21:29, 14 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Ah! I see where the confusion is coming from. Ref 32 appears to be a note supported by sources (Wade, Barry and Fage). Irritating it may be especially for those who are not familiar with the history but the editor is not wrong. Wade's chronology was incorrect, but modified by later scholars. The only problem I see is this sentence on ref 32: "For Maysa Wali's reign, see his article." I will remove that now although that is not a major issue as the editor did mention a source (Sarr) underneath that sentence.Senegambianamestudy (talk) 22:01, 14 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Senegambianamestudy: Thanks. That leaves the issue of whether oral tradition is presented as fact, which was a major issue with edits by Tamsier and one that took a lot of work to check. As I said, he took the religion as literal fact and treated oral tradition the same way, ending up with statements that couldn't possibly be true and were contradicted by historians and archaeologists. Doug Wellertalk07:27, 15 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Senegambianamestudy: For me it was a matter of Wikipedia policy and guidelines. For him it was personal. He called me a disciple of Hitler once - this ANI report covers that and various other issues.[1] That resulted in a three month block. Years later he cam back to complain about another editor. That ended badly.[2] At one point he tried to get our article on Islam deleted.[3] He was blocked 7 times for disruptive editing, harassment and personal attacks before his final indefinite block. There were a number of editors he didn't get along with. I could show you more links if you want but I think you'll get the picture if you read the links I gave you. Here is his talk page where I actually thanked him for something.[4] I tried to give details on talk pages where appropriate about the issues I had with his editing. I like to think I'm a balanced editor with a decent grasp of policy and sources, and I know I have the trust of the community having been elected to the Arbitration Committee twice. Tamsier was a hard worker and obviously not everything he did was wrong, but he never fully grasped our policies and as I imply above edited from a non-encylopedic perspetive.