Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2017/November

Indigenous peoples tag

I believe Wikinews could benefit from an indigenous peoples category of some kind. First Nations, Native Americans, Australian aborigines and lesser known groups like the Ainu have a great deal in common with respect to their history with colonialism and the current state of their communities. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:58, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: It's an interesting thought. To make such a cat work, we'd want to plan out

• inclusion criteria, and
• a set of keywords that articles would likely link, and would naturally redirect to the cat, thus cuing populating the cat.

--Pi zero (talk) 03:47, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

To toss out some preliminary inclusion criteria, how about the article would have to significantly mention an issue affecting indigenous communities or a person acting as an indigenous person ("Mary Jones happens to be one-quarter Sioux" in an article not otherwise about Sioux doesn't count but "Mary Jones filed a petition on behalf of the Spirit Lake Sioux" would).

Off the top of my head for keywords: Native Americans, American Indians, aborigines, aboriginal, indigenous (though this can refer to species other than humans, so put it as a maybe), First Nations, Native Canadians, Canadian Indians. Darkfrog24 (talk) 10:52, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

We could handle indigenous with a disambig page. --Pi zero (talk) 12:33, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the US Census recognizes Native Americans, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians as groups of people. —mikemoral (talk) 06:57, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

As a practical matter, how do we decide whether a given group warrants this sort of recognition? Do we categorize articles abound natives in South Africa? Mongolia? We would have to draw a line somewhere, and I'm concerned that drawing it would be highly subjective. Much better, I suggest, to create individual categories for these groups when we have enough articles to do so, and make the general category internal (so it doesn't appear on articles). --Pi zero (talk) 13:19, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

We could use the United Nations' list. Around the time Frozen came out, I remember hearing that the U.N. classifies the Sami as indigenous and that they're the only Caucasians so classified. Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:34, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

The UN list (I haven't tracked it down yet, but I gather there ought to be some somewhere) evidently is political, so indeed there would be some non-neutrality in actually adopting it, but for an internal category I could see a note suggesting, in a laid back sort of way, that the sorts of things included would be as typically appear in lists such as X Y and Z. --Pi zero (talk) 12:53, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

At what point does an identifiable group become indigenous to a region? Who/what defines membership in an indigenous group? Personally I would avoid deciding who is an authority. (e.g. homo sapien sapien is only indigenous to Africa; all other places have been endogenously colonized in various waves.) - Amgine | t 20:56, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Taliban

I've been trying, in a low-key way, to sort out the difference between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. The question is, even after looking at maybe a hundred articles, how separately should they be kept? We have at least three options, and I'd really like to hear others' thoughts.

1. Keep one big category for both. Oddly this isn't what we were doing before I started; we had just one category, but its description clearly indicated it was only about the Afghan group; the TTP (Pakistani Taliban) wasn't represented at all, at least not if you read the category description before using the category.
2. Keep separate categories for each. I've been trying to set things up that way, but that's partly because of the momentum of what we had before: based on the description of the existing category, we had a category for the Afghan Taliban and I added one for the Pakistani Taliban, then found it made sense to rename the old category to be more specific (which is consistent with the way we handle ambiguity: Wikipedia has a policy of assigning the unadorned name to whichever of several same-named things they decide is most commonly meant, and this in my experience is a major source of bias, a sanctioned outlet for prejudices; we have a long tradition of qualifying all of the alternatives rather than separating out one for special treatment, e.g. Tripoli).
3. Keep separate categories for each, but also a blanket category for their union. I'm uncomfortable with this, but they are obviously related, it's often hard to sort out which is being discussed in a given article, and I've now found an example that really does appear to refer to both together: this is about an Al Jazeera survey of Pakistanis, and some of the survey questions (if the English translations are faithful) use the term "Taliban" to encompass both groups while others explicitly specify the Pakistani Taliban in particular. Unless that's only the English translation that does that. I'm concerned that if we have a category for the union, articles will end up there but not in either child in cases that could be distinguished but someone, somewhere in the reporting chain (not necessarily here), is either careless or politically motivated not to make the distinction.

(Afaik acagastya is afaik the active Wikinewsie physically closest to the two countries involved.) --Pi zero (talk) 13:28, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

(Changed unordered list to ordered list) I think it is best to keep it separate. Even if they have similar names. The union would be like having a union for Java and JavaScript (for the third case). If we choose a big category (like for Java vs JS -- programming languages) it would be Militant groups which would serve as an internal category.
acagastya PING ME! 13:37, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Discussion on Meta

See m:Wikimedia_Forum#question_on_wikinews_license_compatibility.. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:23, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

there is a simple share-alike difference hence Wikipedia’s content can not be on Wikinews. I don’t understand why they want us to change the license. Until and unless one does not come up with a good reason why we should, we should focus on more important things.
•–• 06:43, 22 November 2017 (UTC)