User talk:Robin klein

Welcome to the Wikipedia

Hi Robin:

Thanks for replying. A couple of quick comments. I refer to Bernard Sergent, who is a renouned anthropologist. He is a very objective author and does not talk about races in terms of "superior" or "inferior", like many "scholars" who discourse the "yellow-skinned man" and the "dark skinned man". Let me quote some of his findings wrt Dravidians.

a) He claims that the Dravidians, dark skinned individuals, emmigrated from from the Sahel belt in what now comprises the Sudan and Senegal and brought with them the Dravidian Languages (or what we refer to as Proto-Dravidian). So we are talking in terms of tribes from Africa, that belong to an established, definate racial pattern, emmigrating to South Asia, and not differing small groups that later came together and exchanged genes. Besides, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, etc are highly evolved, even Sanskritized (Kannada, Telugu), Dravidian tongues are relatively new. So to say that "South Indians are bound together by the Dravidian languages of Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam..." is incorrect since a)They were already bound together by race when they emmigrated. In fact, it was the birth of distinct languages that culturally separated these peoples, as was the case with Kannada and Tamil and b) Tamil is the oldest one of these languages and dates back to only 250 BC, Kannada to 450 AD, Telugu to 650 AD and Malayalam to 900 AD, and so on, whereas systemized Dravidian immigration into India dates back to tens of thousands of years. My ultimate point here being that it is not language, but race that identifies these people!

While your quoting Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza might definately be valid, I doubt that he specifically analyzed the migratory and linguistic patterns of the Dravidian race. He might have been talking in general terms, as opposed to constructing a definative, all encompassing theory.

b) I agree that it is incorrect to refer to all south Indians as Dravidians. The Syrians, Jews, etc did come to the Malabar coast, but I find it hard to believe that these people did not "exchange genes" with the locals. This means that there is definately a Dravidian majority in the region. Besides, there is no "pure" Aryan or Dravidian in India anymore. Sergent also points to a third, "brown" race, the Veddas that inhabited much of India (what he calls "people of the land", since they were not immigrants). But if we talk in terms of proportions, I think we are likely to find a greater proportion of Dravidian genes in South India than any other race. Sergent's research points to a majority Vedda-Dravidian ancestory to south Indians.

c) As far as matriarchal families. Being a south Indian and having travelled extensively in south India, I have not encountered matriarchal families at all, especially among the Proto-Tamil-Kannada cultural offshoot. These societies are completely patriarchal. The Nairs that you refer to are the only practicing matriarchal society in Kerala (http://www.keralalink.com/keralalink/html/people___lifestyle.html). And Kerala is the natural candidate for a matriarchal society, being the only state/region with a majority female population. The Nairs are also one of the only 2 practicing matriarchal families in all of India, let alone south India (the Bunts of Uttara Kanara being the other). Therefore it is very incorrect to generalize and refer to South Indian family system as matriarchal, since the region is overwhelmingly patriarchal! Thanks.

AreJay 00:53, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi Robin:

The general idea is that Dravidians are not so much connected by language as they are by a common race and ancestory. The genesis of language comes out of social organization of a race or a bunch of races. So I think more than languages, it is the race that bindes Dravidians. I would like to either leave out the sentence that ties Dravidians to language, or atleast make it auxillary to a discussion on a common racial binding. Thanks.

AreJay 21:07, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Here are some links I find useful

• Wikipedia:Policy Library
• Wikipedia:Cite your sources
• Wikipedia:Verifiability
• Wikipedia:Wikiquette
• Wikipedia:Conflict resolution
• Wikipedia:Brilliant prose
• Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
• Wikipedia:Pages needing attention
• Wikipedia:Peer review
• Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
• Wikipedia:Village pump
• Wikipedia:Boilerplate text

Feel free to ask me anything the links and talk pages don't answer. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, likes this: ~~~~.

Cheers, Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 18:19, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi Robin, I saw that your contribution to the slavery artcile has unfortunately been deleted [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slavery&diff=4881627&oldid=4848521). In my opinion it is a worthy contribution to the article, but in that form it was unacceptable because it describes a view that would be extremely controversial in the US as fact. Do you have any links to articles in which this view has been expressed in this manner? It could then be added in the form "some have compared modern prison labour to slavery" etc. It would also be good if one included information about other countries with similar practices, such as China for example, so that it looks less like the usual US bashing. - pir 10:40, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Child Prodigy

Hi. Thanks for your edits on Child Prodigy. Why did you remove Robert Gupta and transfer Shakuntala Devi? Thanks --Jondel 02:17, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi Jondel,

Thanks for you mail. I moved Shakuntala Devi from the list of mathematicians because she is NOT a mathematician. She is exceptionally gifted in calculations with numbers but that does not make anybody a mathematician. calculations with numbers is to mathematics what alphabet is to Literature.

I removed Robert Gupta from the list because it is VERY common for not just 14 year olds but even 10 year olds and younger to enter music conservatories like The Juilliard School of music in New York city. If every one of those is to be listed as prodigy then the list would be literally unending. The list would then contain the likes of Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Gil Shaham .................

Robin klein 03:41, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi Robin:

Thanks for the mail. I was really not attempting to discuss the etymological differences between Karnataka and carnatic. Rather those sentences are really just caveats to your discussion of the Carnatic region, and as you rightly point out, people do get confused between the name of a region emanating from an ancient music artform and the name of a modern state that first appeared only in 1950. Thanks. AreJay 19:31, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Categories

I performed the necessary task, but this is not something limited to admins. Firstly, I changed eco-feminism into a redirect to ecofeminism, as the articles were exact duplicates. I then changed Category:Human Rights (I deleted the category, so this is a red link) into Category:Human rights. This makes Category:Human Rights redundant. You can list it on "Categories for deletion" if it's empty and doesn't serve any purpose. JFW | T@lk 07:01, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hi Robin:

We did have some sort of order in the privious edit. They were all arranged in terms of size of the state, and the number of speakers for the languages. But I guess one order is as good as the other, so I'll rv it back to that person's edit soon. AreJay 20:32, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Ram-Man&action=edit&section=new)| talk)

Category:Universities

Hi, I notice that you are adding Category:Universities to a lot of pages. The problem is that there is already a Category:Universities and colleges which is largely a double of that category. It also creates some other problems such as Category:Academia now being a subcategory of Category:Universities, while both the category and the article Academia actually encompass a larger field, including academies of sciences, other learned societies and other things in the same general field (and Category:Universities and colleges is actually an indirect subcategory of Category:Academia via the Category:Academic institutions).

I think the content of Category:Universities and Category:Universities and colleges should rather be merged under one category, and preferrably the latter, as it has a more inclusive name. I have already changed some to Category:Universities and colleges. / Tupsharru 08:34, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Bicycle

Hi

You look like an active wikipedian, but what happened in the article about bicycles? You added a lot of commercial links, and a lot of ugly HTML. But looking at your large number of other edits, you don't seem to be a scoundrel who is just trying to improve his site's pagerank. See here the edit I am talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bicycle&diff=8622737&oldid=8613497

--Omegium 21:36, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Early Christian

Please see my comments at Talk:Early Christian. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:58, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

World view

Robin, could you provide us with the legend for your Weltanschauung map, as it's useless without it. Kostja | Talk 18:22, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

DYK

Kochi

you have been adding text to the page Kochi, India from other websites. No matter how important the information might be, you cannot copy the exact sentence from another site. You have to write the information in your own original words. Otherwise it will amount to copyright infringment.

you have been copying from

http://www.holidayshub.com/kerala-india-travel/cochin/kochi-history.html

http://www.haikerala.com/tourism/asp/history.asp?pc=28

you have also completely copied the article on Baselius Paulos II from the website:

http://sor.cua.edu/Personage/Malankara/CPaulos2.html

It is good that you are writing for the wikipedia. but you cannot copy statements verbatim from other sites. that would be disservice to the wikipedia. you can use other websites on the internet to collect information but please rewrite the information in your own words before submitting for the wikipedia. Robin klein 03:50, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

hi robin

the fact is that i copied some material i added to Kochi, India firt time round from the http://www.haikerala.com/tourism/asp/history.asp?pc=28 as you correctly pointed out. but the second time i put up stuff, i completely made it up. i didn't copy it from anywhere and i don't know what kind of pattern matching you did. when did people start copyrighting 'sentences'?

and i didn't put up the original article on Baselius Paulos II. i only added a few links and tried to make it more readable.

you seem to be bend on reverting any change i make. come on, editors can take more effort or wikipedia is going to loose a few contributors.

152.78.254.131

Paradesi Synagogue

Seeing that you have made additions to Paradesi Synagogue, can you answer any of the questions at Talk:Paradesi Synagogue? -- Jmabel | Talk 01:32, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

DYK: Paradesi Synagogue

Lingam

Hi Robin, I notice you have complaints about vandalism linked to the Lingam page. Please read the complete article before making changes. I have left the sentences you have added for now. Please indicate why you have made the changes on the talk page.--IMpbt 17:20, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Matriarchy dispute

Aloha, Robin. Take a look at Wikipedia:Staying cool when the editing gets hot. It might help you look at the dispute from a new perspective and avoid falling into any common traps. Ashley Y is merely trying to help you develop your argument, so there is no need for confrontation. While I certainly don't agree with Ashley on everything, she seems to be a fair and reasonable editor. Matriarchy is a controversial topic, and you should expect editors to challenge unsourced edits, especially when it comes to the lead section. I don't think Ashley means you any disrespect, and she is probably helping you by forcing you to develop your argument. Any direct quotes you can provide that demonstrate that Most social scientists take the traditional nair tarwad as the prime example of matriarchal system will help, as will any evidence you can quote, beyond just citing authors. I think you can successfully make your case by adhering to the NPOV policy, so you have nothing to worry about. Also, would you have any interest in creating the matrifocality page? --Viriditas | Talk 07:18, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Collaboration of the week

I'm dropping you a note to let you know that The Seventies, which you voted on, became a Collaboration of the Week! You are highly encouraged to contribute whatever you can to the topic! Mike H 01:24, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)