User talk:Mallyahm
Welcome!
Hello, Mallyahm, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
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- How to edit a page and How to develop articles
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Triona (talk) 08:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
I realize this article has a lot of cultural significance. However, I found it unreferenced and in very poor shape, with a lot of material that from my impression doesn't pass our content standards of verifiability, reliable sources, notability, and no original research. Please don't take this as an insult to your culture, I would love to see this article built up again, and was hopeful that by bringing it back to a stub, someone would take that as an incentive to write a better quality article. The old version of it is there to build from, but it's not in a shape that's fitting of an encyclopedia. Looking at it now, I think we can salvage a bit more of the text, and I'm going to try to do so. I tried for some time to find solid English language references to work with, but there's not much available to me - in fact, most of the Google results out there are text taken directly from Wikipedia. I think the challenge in making this a good article is going to be to find a native Hindi speaker that has a sufficient grasp of both English and Wikipedia to be able to understand how to write the article well.
While I'm not myself willing to revert to the previous version, I am willing to stick around and try to help get this to a better shape than it was in, with all the information properly referenced and verifiable, and to help go through the old version and save what we can. Triona (talk) 08:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
- English-language sources are preferable, but they are not the only sources we can use. We use sources written in other languages primarily when English language sources don't exist, or are inherently flawed - for example, if the only English language source is clearly biased, it's not very useful as a source. We can't however have original research - we report on published information, much like one would in an academic paper. If you can help find sources (in any language) for the Devanga caste, they would be most appreciated - even if I can't understand them myself, I will try to reach out to editors who can. Also, as you hopefully already know, anyone can edit at Wikipedia, we welcome contributions from anyone, with or without an account - if you can improve the article, please do so, just remember how Wikipedia works as you do so - those content standards I mentioned above are especially important in such an open environment - if we didn't have them, people could literally write complete nonsense about a whole host of topics, and we'd have little chance of ever being the wiser about it. Finally, you can (and should) sign your posts by typing ~~~~ after your message, just remember that signing is for talk pages and other discussions, not for articles themselves. Triona (talk) 02:13, 12 September 2010 (UTC)