Talk:Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by reviewer, closed by Vaticidalprophet (talk) 04:30, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

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al-Majdhub

• ... that the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub (pictured) reflected in his work an awareness of belonging to Black and Arab cultures? Source: Historical Dictionary of the Sudan page 265
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Li Haoshi controversy of 2023
  • Comment: The source state "Negro" but I find the word offensive espically when used in English, so I replaced it with "Black" .. As for the image, photos date back to more than 25 years are public in Sudan, he died in 1982 so any picture for him is free .. QPQ coming

Created by FuzzyMagma (talk). Self-nominated at 17:22, 23 May 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Good well-written article. 1) After reading sourced text from the book and the hook I would suggest OP to see if he finds scope to concise the hook by simply using word 'longing' instead of 'awareness of belonging'. it may change some thing like "..longing for Black and Arab cultures both? 2) Article and subject's poetry both seem to have weight not just for Black and Arab culture but substantial weight for also for Sudaneseness (Sudanicism). Is it possible to coopt that aspect too in the hook, if possible, I suggest. 3) Picture copyright is not my area of expertise, confirming that can take some time for me or may be some other reviewer help on that aspect. Bookku (talk) 10:20, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

thanks for reviewing the hook and article. Below are some alternatives as for the picture, let me know what do you need to make your call

• AlT1: ... that the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub (pictured) reflected in his work a belonging to Black and Arab cultures?
• AlT2: ... that the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub (pictured) reflected in his work a longing to both Black and Arab cultures?
• AlT3: ... that the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub's (pictured) work embodied the Sudanese identify of both Black and Arab cultures? FuzzyMagma (talk) 13:29, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

All hooks are okay. Personally I recommend AlT3:. Confirmed copyright free status rules for image @ Commons:Copyright rules by territory/Sudan. Bookku (talk) 05:37, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@Bookku:, if we are going by ALT3 then let me make it simpler please

• AlT4: ... that the work of the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub (pictured) embodied the nation’s identify of both Black and Arab cultures? FuzzyMagma (talk) 16:47, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@FuzzyMagma:, It's kind of catch-22 for me, I can't claim of knowing the poet and the Sudanese culture more than you on the other hand @ Wikipedia we go more by available reliable source. The source seem to indicate some additional nuance. On Page 265 of the source provided by you Historical Dictionary of the Sudan the author mentions a quote of al-Majdhub

..Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub expressed the idea of Sudanese literature "written in Arabic but infused with the idiom of our land because this is what distinguishes the literature of one nation from another." ..

. Previous and later sentences on the given page in source book indeed talk about Afro-Arabic identity, but wording 'infused with the idiom of our land' indicates for the poet Sudanese identity is certainly made of Afro-Arabic identity but is not limited to that but is topped up with 'idiom of Sudanese land'. So I doubt we can reduce to simplistic Sudanese identity is just equal to Afro-Arabic identity. I am not sure I alone can take call on this and better we have one more view to decide upon current paraphrasing in Alt4 is adequate or has some further scope of re-paraphrasing. IMHO This additional discussion may take a little further time but will take better care of nuances involved.

Requesting review by another reviewer as explained above. Bookku (talk) 05:17, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

@Bookku: your bring some good points. It’s indeed true what you said. An identity of nation is the fusion of the locals adaption to different cultures into their own culture, and my hook does not make this distinction clear. Let me try again and thank you for your time.

• AlT5: ... that the work of the renowned Sudanese poet Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub (pictured) embodied the nation’s identify?

Sudanicism is a difficult topic to navigate in Sudan given the very diverse population and I thank you for bringing this excellent point FuzzyMagma (talk) 10:21, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Approving Alt 5. --evrik ^(talk) 21:49, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

FuzzyMagma and evrik, ALT5 expresses an opinion in wikivoice. could another hook be found? (not for nothing, but the intersection of sources that both 1. use negro to refer to Black people and 2. are reliable standalone as secondary sources is vanishingly small in my book.) theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 07:10, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Theleekycauldron: I understand I used one ref for the hook, but critical analysis and claims that al-Majdhub poetry is about Sudanism is motioned many times from different scholars and critics. He is known for shifting Sudanese poetic tradition from the using standard Arabic to Sudanese Arabic. He is the poet that a simple Sudanese man can easily understand. Wikivoice does not apply to this as it is not contested and not from one source, plus I did not get why you were questioning the reliability of the source. Having said that, you can suggest alternatives that dance around the spirit of Sudanism FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:42, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Theleekycauldron: Do you have a suggestion to fix Alt5 and remove wiki voice? --evrik ^(talk) 15:58, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I would recommend attributing inline to a source. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 08:38, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• Do we really need to put "renowned" in the hook? I thought "renowned" was a word to avoid. Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 01:43, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• let’s remove then. As for the other comments, there is no “one source” there is many as written in the article FuzzyMagma (talk) 19:13, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Take this is a second review. I was trying to have a jab at finding another hook, or rewording the above, when I was struck by the article's sheer incomprehensibility, its being written seemingly against any grammatical convention. Take this paragraph for instance: "al-Majdhub founded with Mahmoud Muhammad Taha the Republican Brotherhood in Sudan in 1945.[11] Republican Brotherhood was independent, against sectarianism and democracy, and it was involved in public political life, fighting against the dual rule - the British-Egyptian colonialism, and it was one of the first to be arrested in the Sudanese political movement that arose after the Graduates' General Congress. He has poems praising the positions of the Republican Party and Mahmoud Muhammad Taha." Or this: "Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub was born in 1919 in al-Damar, the capital of the River Nile state in North Sudan.[2] His father is the Sufi sheikh, known in Sudan as Muhammad al-Majdhub, who belongs to the Ja’aliyin tribe of the north-central Sudanese tribes. Like his peers, he was Khalwa educated, where he learned reading, writing and the Qur'an.[1] The Khalwa's fire of the Qur’an, kindled by his grandfather, let him to call his first collection “The Fire of Majdhib”, that fire about which he says in the introduction to the collection “The knights, jurists and paranormal people watched around it, glorifying and chanting, His Eminence among people and security comfort, for centuries). His upbringing contributed to his cognitive and psychological formation, which was increased by the upbringing of the Sudanese writer and academic Abdullah Al-Tayyib (1921-2003) in their home after the death of his father. Both grew up close friends and poets.[1]" Bookku: under what definition is this a "Good well-written article"? Dahn (talk) 07:28, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Tbh I agree. I will try to rewrite these parts and will appreciate some pointers FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:34, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

They would have to be entirely rewritten, as will much of the article, as frankly every sentence appears to have major grammatical and/or style issues (such as a pesky editorial voice: consider that the Quran does not have a fire within it, the metaphor is exclusively Majdhub's). Even the paragraphs that are more cogent (and thus seem that they are closely based on the source, perhaps too closely) have significant issues.

Consider this one, used for the hook: During this era, there emerged ephemeral yet vibrant publications such as al-Sudan, al-Nahda, and al-Fajr. Within the pages of al-Fajr, writers such as al-Tijani Yusuf Bashir and Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub made their initial debut. The members of the Fajr group possessed an understanding of Sudan's hybrid cultural heritage and the historical currents that contributed to its distinctiveness. They aimed to shape the linguistic symbols that would define a national identity. Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub articulated the concept of Sudanese literature "written in Arabic but infused with the idioms of our land, as this is what sets the literature of one nation apart from another." The Fajr group's rediscovery of the collective origins of identity and creativity found its earliest manifestation in the works of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub. He became the first poet whose writings reflected an awareness of belonging to both "Black" and "Arab" cultures. Interestingly, this block of text with an entire account and a number of quotes only carries citation at the end. Two of them. Is it likely that both sources would feature the same account, back the exact same facts, and include the exact same selection of quotes? No, no it is not; and this is why the first of two sources only backs some bits of the text, the other presumably does, but it is unclear on which of the 30 pages cited it does. (30 pages is not a citation: you should add the full source at the bottom of the article and provide page-for-page citations in the notes -- such as "Fakhreddine, p. X". This is actually required not just in general, but in particular for hooks presented at DYK. As is, it cannot be considered a verified hook.)

Add to this that phrasing such as "ephemeral yet vibrant publications", "the Fajr group possessed an understanding of Sudan's hybrid cultural heritage", "rediscovery of the collective origins of identity and creativity" all imply an editorial voice, and it was probably the editorial voice lifted from (but not attributed to) the source you used. We don't get to establish what publications are vibrant, we cannot claim ourselves who "possessed an understanding" of this and that abstract concept, we cannot refer to any historicist cultural stance as being a "rediscovery of the collective origins" (the collective origins are not an objective fact to be discovered, as if the writers had struck oil from the ground; they are a concept that some hold as self-evident, and others do not).

The fact that this article was accepted as such by editors above is simply weird -- FuzzyMagma, I recommend you spend time familiarizing yourself the DYK inclusion criteria, the WP:MOS, as well as WP:CITE (also WP:ATTR and WP:PSTS); and so should some of the editors above. Dahn (talk) 11:50, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the fiery feedback. I removed most of the problematic wording but happy to withdraw my nom if you think the article is beyond salvageable. Cheers FuzzyMagma (talk) 14:07, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, that only addressed a small part of the concerns I raised, and in fact even there the issue still exists: you are still using a metaphor as fact, rather than attributing the metaphor to a source. Dahn (talk) 14:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

please check the article again when you have time, I kinda added “according to” to each line even when there is 4 sources saying the same thing. I hope that close this FuzzyMagma (talk) 10:02, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

FuzzyMagma: Actually, attribution is a secondary issue here. The glaring issue here is that you use Fakhreddine, a thirty-page source, with a single citation to it covering the entire page-span, for various facts in the hook, when wikipedia (and especially DYK) requires page-by-page citation; you use this system to source hooks here, which is explicitly against the rules, for very clear reasons (the exact info would have to be retrieved from its exact place in the text, not from "somewhere in these thirty pages"). It is also implausible that three references, one of which is Fakhreddine, would feature the exact same quotes from the exact same scholar (!), as well as other very precise facts for which you give three or two citations. Let alone that the text you contributed was (please accept this criticism as factual) entirely ungrammatical over three quarters of its length, but in that one place, the apparently heavily reliant on Fakhreddine, it was written in very accomplished English; this looks very much like a cut-and-paste job. Please take the time to review wikipedia's core policies, content guidelines, adapt your style to these requirements (nobody expects perfection, but this level of editing is frankly grotesque), and then, as you improve your standard of contribution, have a thorough look over DYK rules -- what they do and don't allow. Dahn (talk) 10:21, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

• Incidentally, the image, while probably PD in Sudan (which seems to have an expiration of copyright 25 years after creation) is not properly licensed. Dahn (talk) 10:46, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

fixed FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:34, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

No it wasn't. The image still uses the CC copyright license, which implies that you took the photo yourself. Dahn (talk) 12:04, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

that is licence in the source but ok changed to PD-Sudan FuzzyMagma (talk) 14:09, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Arabic wikipedia cannot be a source for wikipedia itself. Dahn (talk) 14:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

the attribution was the source. The person who uploaded it. Anyway it’s fixed. He is dead since 1982, so unless it’s a photo for his corpse, it should be PD in Sudan FuzzyMagma (talk) 10:02, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

FuzzyMagma: This was a relatively minor point compared to the very major problems your articles unfortunately presents, and which I still don't see being fixed. I mentioned the picture license as an "FYI", let's say. For future reference: you cannot claim a picture was released into the public domain just by saying another wikipedia editor released it into the public domain. Yes, Sudan is one of the few countries to have PD photos from as a recent a period (so is my own Romania), but you would still have to use the proper license, and, if possible, also detect the original source of the image (i.e. not wikipedia projects which uploaded it). Dahn (talk) 10:13, 13 August 2023 (UTC)