Talk:History of South Africa
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An event in this article is a April 26 selected anniversary (may be in HTML comment)
Added a refernece to the bantustans/homelands and migrant labour, it needs some filling out. anyone with more info? Peregrine
This article needs beefing up. I wanted to link to an area called "ant-apartheid movement" and then discovered that there wasn't one. This article makes it sound like the calendar solved apartheid: "...the 1990s ushered in a new government...". Need some knowledgeable people to fill in here in this important topic.
- I've been writing in chronological order and working towards that time frame, but as you can see I've only got to Soweto so far. Please do go ahead and add some stuff if you can. -kwertii
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The stuff about everyone rushing off to Australia and the economy going into rapid decline is nonsense. I've replaced it, but it needs much more detail - an analysis of RDP and GEAR, increase in growth rate at the same time as the increase in unemployment, AIDS, etc
-- Can you cite a case of UK etc AIDS money going to cars? The KZN AIDS fiasco meant the money was lost, not misused.
This is a good article. But there is some duplication between this and apartheid. Paul Beardsell 19:46, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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Xhosa
You have confused Xhosa who are a Bantu-speaking people with the Khoisan, who include Khoi-Khoi (once known as Hottentots) and San (formerly Bushmen) who speak distinctive click languages, with sounds made by clicking the tongue. The archeological evidence suggests that the Khoisan were the hunter-gatherer people who dominated until around 200 A.D. when they were dispalced by an iron-age cattle herding people, presumably the Bantu. This is based on archeological evidence which can only confirm the material culture, but fits with the linguistic evidence and continuity to historical times. There is some inter-action, the Khoi-Khoi had iron tools and cattle by the time of the Dutch arrival and it is presumed that the acquired them by trade or escaped slaves from the Bantu.
The above anonymous contribution may or may not be correct but the point is: Edit boldly! Edit the article, not the talk page. Paul Beardsell 11:40, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
What's SA doing now that the shine is off Novirapine's marble?[1] (http://guerrillanews.com/articles/article.php?id=1011) Kwantus 19:35, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC) (Who has been crisped quite enough Boldly Editing Sacred Cows thankyouverymuch.)
Rewrite
I just posted a large rewrite to this article. While I highly appreciate the contributions of everyone who has worked on this article before, I found that the previous article did not flow every well, and the apartheid section was quite massive while other sections did not seem to join into the next. I tried to address that with this rewrite, as well as adding images. I am more than willing to re-incorporate content from the previous version, in fact, I would appreciate it. Thanks so much! Páll 21:31, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I tried to make article NPOV, as it was clearly anti-apartheid. Maybe I moved it too far, but if I did at some places you can change those places into something else. Also I changed names of paragraphs which were uninformational and emotional, and it wasnt clear from reading them what the paragraph would be about. Also written a new chapter about downsides of current south africa. Edit if you want but I dont think there is a need to revert page, as the previous form of article was really biasedDeirYassin 04:51, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- While I agree that there are parts of the article that isn't as NPOV as I'd like, there are a lot of bad changes (grammar and inflection) that you are introducing. For that reason I think it is best to revert it; maybe you would find it usefule to tackle the article section-for-section, so that we can work on it systematically? Dewet 10:15, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- Actually, now that I've thought about it, this article is way too long already. Maybe it would make sense to split it into subarticles by date, similar to the Cape Colony series?
If there are changes you agree with, I think you should leave them there ; if you cannot corect mistakes yourself, I am sure someone else would soon if the article is left on, that's how it always happens; English is not my native language. While after deleting useful info and changes and NPOVing, it will take a way longer time before someone else would decide to do itDeirYassin 12:54, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree with yoru statements, DeirYassin. Your changes made the article worse, and in only few ways better. You introduced spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and made the flow of the article much less elegant. It is much better to start slow, then to make huge changes and then complain when people blanket revert them ebcause they don't want to go through the text sentence by sentence to fix spelling mistakes introduced by someone. Páll 14:26, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
POV-check
Given the sensitivity of the topic, I'll spell everything out on the talk page. I've rewritten some statements I considered too POV. Mind you, I agree with them.
- "Darkest times"—too emotionally loaded.
- "Gusto" implies an inappropriate enthusiasm.
- "Most odious" by whose standards?
JRM · Talk 08:42, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)
- Quite like your edits, keep up the good work! Páll 08:45, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Images
As discussed in the FAC nomination, there were problems with a bunch of the images. Someone has discovered that a lot of the apartheid-era photos are actually available from the UN without the noncommercial restriction, and has retagged them -- yay! I've also gone through and replaced some of the legally problematic images with ones from the UN that don't have the legal problems, and I've added some more images from the UN archive. In some cases, this has resulted in the juxtaposition of photos from one time period with text from another. For instance, next to the discussion of the Separate Amenities Act, I've placed a photo of a segregated beach from 30 years later. There are simply a lot more images available from the end of the 20th century than from the beginning, and it's not practical to cram them all in at the end of the article. In some cases I had to put a photo in a subsection before or after the subsection where it really belonged, just because of formatting concerns.--Bcrowell 16:51, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Splitting up article?
Now that the History of South Africa article has been renominated for FA, there has been some discussion about taking out some of its content and moving it into other articles. Some people think the apartheid-era section of the HSA article is out of proportion to the article as a whole. Other people, including me, think that it's not out of proportion, but that the article as a whole is simply too long, and should be split up. (The recommended upper limit on length of 32k is a rough guideline, but the HSA article is currently about 60k, which is indeed very big.) Complications: (1) the HSA article is currently being discussed as an FA candidate, and splitting it into pieces might derail that; (2) a lot of the apartheid-era history is duplicated in the apartheid article, but that article has been enduring a revert war. To me, it would make sense to split the HSA article into three parts: before apartheid, apartheid era, and post-apartheid. I don't think there's any useful distinction between the kind of stuff that's now in the apartheid article and the kind of stuff that's now in the apartheid-era section of the HSA article, and I think the useful contents of both should be merged, and should replace the current apartheid article. User:Maveric149 originally volunteered to move a bunch of stuff out of HSA and into apartheid this weekend, but doesn't seem to have done it, and has not responded to my attempts to initiate discussion about how to do it -- probably he's just been busy.--Bcrowell 21:40, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- Yes - I was busy this weekend. On the spur of the moment my partner and I decided to spend most of the weekend in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I think your idea for splitting makes a great deal of sense in the long term but there still will be a need for a general survey-level article that introduces the whole history of South Africa. As a first step I can split off the ==Apartheid== section to history of apartheid, leave an abridged summary of that here (just under half the length of the current section) and then create a lead section for the history of apartheid article from the abridged summary. This should take me a couple hours. That new article can stay as-is until the revert war at apartheid settles down. Then we can merge the two if that makes sense. Once the ==Apartheid== section is thus reduced we can get a better idea of what else needs to be trimmed and by how much. I think it will be very hard to do justice to the history of this country with anything less than 40KB. It is always harder to be comprehensive using less text but the result is often much more useful to readers. --mav 00:46, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- That sounds like a good plan to me. It's great that you're willing to put in the work! Let me know if you can use a hand with anything.--Bcrowell 03:25, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've looked back at the FA discussion, and my perception is that the discussion is no longer active, and there is not going to be a consensus in favor, so the article will fail to become an FA. If other people agree with my perception, then I don't think the FA process should stop us from going ahead and doing major changes. Or...hmm...maybe I'm wrong; it looks like Maveric149 may be saying that he'd change his vote once text was moved, and Carnildo has crossed out most of the objections about the copyright status of the images...? --Bcrowell 21:54, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- Somebody will also need to add a whole bunch of inline cites as well before I remove my objection. But I'll help with the summarizing either way if there is consensus to go down that path. I'll be able to do this after work on Tuesday. --mav 00:46, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
This is harder than I thought it would be and will take longer than I estimated. But I'm still working. Since I'm reducing text it does not matter if others edit the longer version since all those edits will be moved once I'm done. --mav 03:33, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've run out of time for now (have a vacation to get ready for). That, combined with the fact that nobody seems interested in providing the needed inline cites means that this FAC will almost certainly fail. What little I've done so far is at Talk:History of apartheid. Much work still needs to be done and I'll try to get back to this sometime after I get back from vacation. What is really needed is for somebody more familiar with this country's history to work on the summary. I simply don't know what bits are more important than others. It might be easier to start with a really old version of the longer sections and just clean them up to act as summaries. --mav 01:39, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)