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discussion and question

This list-article is under construction. It seems to me to be an obviously beneficial list for Misplaced Pages, and creating it is meant by me to facilitate improvement of related list-article List of Indian castes, which has heretofore included many scheduled caste items which more properly belong here, I believe. And it complements new List of Scheduled Castes. I am open to discussion, but would mostly value help developing this list. --doncram 00:41, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Editors, please be civil in your edit summaries and otherwise. Please discuss serious content here. In the development of this list-article, it will from time to time include links that are not to the correct caste/community group article. It is part of the development of the list-article to try and fix links that do link to the right article, or which point to a needed article (a redlink). I have tried and already fixed some links myself, and have now noted editor Sitush changing/fixing some. I welcome others adding and/or fixing links as appropriate. The point is to develop a useful and fully accurate Misplaced Pages list-article. This is an article in progress. --doncram 21:43, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Editor Sitush, please be civil. In this edit, Sitush called some work "crap" and proceeded to remove sourced mention of term "Dhobi" as an official name of an OBC in Goa. I believe it is important to hew closely/exactly to the official names. The column is labelled "Official name(s) as OBC". Sitush, do you mean to replace official names by some other naming of your own? Please reconsider that edit, and comment here, please. --doncram 22:19, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

If you add crap then I'll fix it. You are not even reading the sources correctly, let alone paying attention to WP:COMMONNAME etc. You are linking to the wrong groups, adding inappropriate content in the articles that you link to and generally making a complete balls-up of it. Honestly, you know nowt about this and your oily words are not going to help in the slightest. Why the fuck should people have to clean up your mess on such a big scale? You've done it with NRHP stuff and I'm blowed if you're going to get away with doing it for Indic community stuff and thus create even more toxicity in an already-toxic area. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep track of your mistakes, which will ultimately spread over several thousand articles and lead to a phenomenal amount of disruption. At which point, I'm willing to bet that you will have disappeared to do other things again. - Sitush (talk) 22:32, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Your language is vile. I can probably ignore the nastiness in your approach here, and continue to contribute. However, I don't appreciate your tone and intent and what seems like arrogance here.

On point of content of this list-article, you have made a number of changes away from the officially provided names of OBCs as provided in official sources cited. I think that is dangerous, as it is based on your personal knowledge or beliefs, without sources. I think it is important to use the exact official language in the "Official names" column. If you have other notes to make, please do so in the Notes column which I have added (and, these notes should be sourced, too, either from the getgo or eventually). Okay? --doncram 22:37, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Sourced eventually? No chance: you source such claims immediately or make no claim. The only exception might just be if the claim is already sourced in the linked article. If you are going to make a link then you need firstly to take a proper look at the target: even if it appears to validate the link, is it sourced reliably, is there any puffery going on, are you 100% sure it is the same community etc. Since you are fairly new to the subject matter, I'd guess that exercise would initially take you at least 15 minutes or so per article. You might manage 10 minutes on some, I suppose.

If you do add to the articles that you link then you need to use a construct such as {{As of}} and relate it to the date of official designation: it is common with Indian sources to find that there are contradictory versions knocking around even on official websites, and the amount of ire that a mis-statement can cause will stagger you. You also need to be specific that this refers to the central list, which is by no means the be-all and end-all and, indeed, often has less impact than state lists (much of Indian politics at regional levels is based on what you would probably call castes, and corruption + nepotism etc is rife).

As far as naming goes, the official lists have no particular order to them and this reflects the chaotic environment that is India, an environment that quite a few who live there have told me is probably more confusing and depressing to visitors than the sights of poverty etc. Since our article titles are supposed to reflect the common usage, we should use that common name even if the lists show a different order. I accept that some articles may be mis-titled but I'd advise running against local opinion unless you have sufficient evidence to support a WP:COMMONNAME argument in a WP:RM discussion. - Sitush (talk) 10:09, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

As was pointed out by me at the ANI proceeding, Sitush, 6 minutes after my last comment above, opened the ANI proceeding. And ten hours later, in the just-above comment dated 10:09, 9 December, showed an apparent key misunderstanding. Sitush apparently thought I was calling for unsourced information to be added. No, I was removing Sitush's deviations away from official language, and removing his phrasings to a Notes column, and asking Sitush to provide sourcing please. Given that Sitush, not recognizing what i was saying, proceeded to delete his own unsourced phrasings, and I agree the unsourced phrasings should not be left in, too, perhaps we have gotten somewhere. Great. And there were other things commented upon usefully in the ANI, by several editors.

Proposal Can we therefore agree:

1. no, zero (exactly and approximately) unsourced information is to be allowed
2. the list should include, in the column labelled "Official name", exactly and only the naming given in the official source document
3. that value added by this list-article will include that it covers, in one searchable list, what no known official Indian document covers in one place, i.e. a complete listing of OBCs from the linked source lists. So for example one could search and find every regional instance of a people named Koli being an OBC (I am not asserting that each such instance is referring to one and the same community)
4. that value is to be added by wikilinking from items here to corresponding articles about communities/groups...and wherever a link is made, the linked article should gain a properly sourced statement that the group is named an OBC since a given date, in a certain region.
5. that value is to be added by showing redlinks, where no corresponding article yet exists
6. that each item should include date (which it did in the last version edited by me). About use of "as of" template, I think that is not correct to use as has been introduced, because it seems to suggest that a given group was designated OBC only as of the very first date, say 1996, that it was designated. When in fact the relevant "as of", in common meaning of this phrase, would be the current date. I.e., the official website states, as of right now, the given group has been designated an OBC from 1996 until the current date. I think the dating, with dropping of the "as of" template use, is and was clear in each row. I do take it as a good suggestion that the entire article can and should be labelled in its lede as being valid "as of" a certain date, i.e. the date at which some amount of editing is completed and the list is done for a while.

Okay? Comments? --doncram 02:18, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I've read the above quickly, as I about to go out. From that quick reading, I object to some of your proposals. I'll explain later. - Sitush (talk) 22:18, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Your items numbered (4) and (5) are largely unattainable within our current framework. You see, despite appearances to the contrary and common misconceptions in the West, there is no system, be it called a caste system or something less pejorative. Equally, there is no official definition of what constitutes an OBC, just as there is no definition of a "tribe". Sometimes, it is also problematic to determine the geographic scope. There are lists, sure, and we can reproduce those lists and perhaps add a little value through sorting ... but we cannot link them to articles about communities that, generally speaking, are referenced to anthropological and often-dubious historical studies. Basically, something is OBC if it is listed and if it is OBC then it is listed: it is circular and without any certainty of external meaning, although with some practical effect. I've got issues with the sorting point but will return to that.

There were 1646 identified communities in 1901, 4147 in 1931 and 4635 in the 1990s, although the latter figure was self-admitted to be on the conservative side. It is impossible to correlate these identifications because communities in India come and go as a consequence of both fusion and fission, often at a very localised level, and the methodology of classification is variable. The NCBC was formed in 1993 in an attempt to bring some order to the chaos of a reservation system that makes up definitions, membership etc on the hoof without any valid reference point beyond useless data from 1931 and "who shouts the loudest". The NCBC is supposed to oversee the addition/deletion of communities to the OBC lists but "This mandate of the commission is not taken seriously due to non-availability of data on castes belonging to the OBCs". (Caste Census: Looking Back, Looking Forward - R. B. Bhagat - Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 21, pp. 1902-1905). The 2011 census became a "caste census" almost at the last minute, due to pressure being applied by self-interested communities. The results are as yet unpublished w.r.t. the OBC issue and they may never be published.

The census enumerators nowadays insist that if someone wants to be categorised as an OBC then they must declare themselves to be one of the communities on the list, even though those communities are artificial, arbitrary, bureaucratic creations that may bear little relation to what the individuals think of themselves or, indeed, how anthropologists deal with the issues. The lists are so poor in quality that they do not even indicate whether they are referring to synonyms or sub-communities when they show multiple names under one heading and, indeed, this has already caused us problems and it causes problems in real life. There is no way for us to reliably determine the intended target and, in the case of redlinks, there may never be an intended target because the community may not be documented anywhere except in the OBC lists, rather like the Jedi census phenomenon. If we link then we would be engaging in synthesis and original research, however well educated our guess may be in a few instances. Effectively, we would need to create a one- or two-line stub for each item in the lists, ignoring any existing articles as they may or may not be the same community. The only reference in the stub, which could never be expanded except to note if/when the group is denotified, would be the OBC list itself. Ans we would have to monitor all of those stubs to ensure that no-one creates a link to the existing articles in violation of WP:BLPGROUP etc. There would also need to be a large number of disambigs, of course, although we've no idea whether the names are synonyms or sub-groups & thus the naming schema will need some thought. Those disambigs would also need to be monitored. - Sitush (talk) 12:48, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

It is only semantics, I think, Sitush for you to assert you object to items 4 and 5 in the proposal. You elaborate how hard you think it is both to link to any related article or to identify that there is no suitable article to link to. Assuming it is completely as hard as you assert, then still, the points 4 and 5 stand: Value is to be added by linking to suitable articles or identifying that there is no suitable article. Yes, the area does seem to need a lot of disambiguation pages probably.

It is besides the point to assert that the OBCs designated by the government are too fleeting or amorphous to identify or name. Obviously, they have been named. And they are not so fleeting...the ones listed so far have been named OBCs since 1993 or 1996 until now in 2012. They could change, yes, and when they do their entry can be updated easily. It is subjective, external commentary to point out that the Indian governmental system is stupid or anything else...not sure whether you want to pass judgment that way or not. It is what it is. The OBCs are designated groups that persons are identified as being in, or not being in. That is all fact.

Whether or not anyone will have a cow if anyone dares to link to any other article from this one, this list-article can clearly proceed by editors adding all the OBCs named by the government, per the sources. Sitush, if it helps you, consider that these could be added without links at all, and that bluelinks and redlinks could be added gradually, later.

So, if you don't mind, let me assert we are all in agreement, there is no disagreement to what is stated in the proposal. I'll pause again. --doncram 21:16, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I've not finished stating my objections yet, so please do not misrepresent me yet again. You seem to be making a habit of it. I made it clear above that there are other issues, asides from the ones that you so naively want to gloss over. I am drafting further comments. However, if you add blue- or red-links to communities named in list then the chances are pretty high that I will revert you because you simply do not understand the issues. - Sitush (talk) 21:24, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

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