Talk:Abahlali baseMjondolo

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Huh...?

Has no one noticed how badly this is written? The introduction speaks as though the reader already knows something about the subject. ie:

Its commitment to economic struggle – to the extent that it has an economic vision or practice at all - has been channeled toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single blow on the day of a popular insurrection. Unwittingly they have saddled themselves with fulfilling an ideal and remain, for the foreseeable future, a merely ideological negation of South Africa’s class society.

the "an" is probably supposed to be "no," but I can't say for sure because this topic is foreign to me. also, what economic vision? what definitive solution? what exactly IS their ideology? aside from being vague and presumptuous, the introduction is also ridiculously long. This needs a lot of work. 76.190.157.0 18:04, 2 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- the introduction referred to here was vandalism by Bolnick of SDI (a rival political organisation).

Copyright and citation issues

So far, this article seems to be growing quickly and very well. Unfortunately, I'm a bit concerned about a couple issues. Right now, there are many uncited claims in this article, and while there is an extensive list of external links, inline citations or even footnotes (see WP:FOOT) would help the article quite a bit. Hopefully those who added the material can add citations to their work. The images are, perhaps, more troublesome, as thier is a question as to whether Wikipedia can legally host them. Many of them have "fair use" written under them, but I'm not sure this applies. I worry that the images will need to be removed (they seem to have been removed before). Smmurphy^(Talk) 07:03, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've split the article into sections, which hopefully helps with the structure. I'm not sure about the introductary paragraphs, however. Hopefully someone who knows more can look at that and see if the most important stuff is included. Their are, as is mentioned, plenty of photographs involving Abahlali online, so Wikipedia doesn't need all of them. A couple should be singled out for inclusion, and the rights to those photos should be verified. The same is true about the links at the end, only a few links need be given, especially as many of them are subpages for the same sites (such as abahlali.org).Smmurphy^(Talk) 07:22, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

bizarre caption

What does the caption "Mark of the beast, mark of resistance" mean? It doesn't sound neutral, and it certainly isn't informative. The article in general can use work on things like that. ---Delirium 16:44, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

choosing images

I've commented out some of the images which did not add to the article. Then I removed all the images which were not correctly tagged as public domain or anything. This leaves 2 images in the article, but I think that the article is better for it. If anyone has more images that they want to release and which will add to the article, that is great. We can even add images to Wikimedia Commons, and link to there. Hopefully this is ok. Smmurphy^(Talk) 18:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV?

A lot of this article seems like an ad for the movement

I've added some more NPOV information to balance it out. It was reading like an ad for the movement with a lot of adjectives and unsubstantiated claims. Hope this helps start to round it out a bit.

NPOV

Hi, I've tried to remove adjectives and claims that have no evidence. Is it better now? Would be good if someone in Durban could add some footnotes from sources other than the movement's own website (which is what is available to me).

Bjorn

NPOV

This article seems unduly adulatory in tone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dak06 (talk • contribs) 11:20, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV

Definitely not neutral both in the point-of-view and certain adjectives and phrases. Psylocybha (talk) 15:00, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This entire article is rubbish

I really don't understand how it got a B rating. This whole article is blatant soapboxing by an inconsequential organisation that hardly anybody outside of its own so called membership have ever heard of. It has practically zero profile in the general press in South Africa. It a silly little wannabe organisation with absolutely zero notability. Delete this article. Roger (talk) 17:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV : Again

This article is a joke, at best. It is a soapbox for a little known organization, (in fact, never heard about it until I came to the Durban article. Almost all the so called references are either invalid or unrelated, (and don't even mention what they are supposed to reference).

I don't mind cleaning it up, (by that I mean removing all the political drivel), but I fear that it will end up been reverted. FFMG (talk) 05:43, 4 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On the contrary

On the contrary, there are all kinds of credible references to this movement such as numerous academic articles (I quickly counted more than 20 using the search engine at my university), books (I found 3 on google books) and literally hundreds if not thousands of newspapers articles (just search any of the titles in the KZN press and lots of articles will come up), statements by the United Nations and various international Human Rights Organisations (such as the Centre on Housing Rights & Evictions, Amnesty International, War on Want etc). The fact that two middle class white men do not know about a movement of shack dwellers is hardly reason for deletion. On the contrary that facts speaks only to their prejudices and their ignorance about the country in which they live - perhaps also to racism. I can't imagine that they would want to delete an article on an organisation with 10 000 paid middle class white members....

If there are claims here that need to be referenced then they must either be deleted or properly referenced. That, clearly, is the correct response to this article. I will go through it now and, using google, try to plug any holes. Others are invited to work on the article further. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sekwanele (talk • contribs) 10:04, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This page needs work by people with constructive intentions - not rank intolerance and a clear refusal to actually read citations before declaring them unacceptable

FFMG declared citations invalid seconds or minutes after they area loaded - even when they are 50 page academic articles or 250 page human rights reports. It is therefore absolutely clear that FFMG is not actually reading the citations that s/he instantly declared invalid. As has been noted before FFMG is squatting on various pages and then simply removing content that s/he doesn't like. This is unacceptable.

I repeat that what needs to be done with this page is for people to work through it carefully noting where evidence is not provided for claims, then looking for that evidence and including it if it can not be found and then, and only then, removing text. FFMG's style of simply removing text without actually looking at the text in references provided may well amount to vandalism. In any event it is certainly unhelpful and counter productive.

Looks to me like FFMG has an agenda for deleting relevant information about the largest social movement in Africa. This group is known throught the world. It is in text books in harvard and talked about in classes at UC-Berkeley. FFMG says this organisation is a joke but he does not provide any evidence that this is true.

I would also say that the article in general has a neutral point of view. There may be instances where certain words may not be entirely neutral but all that requires is a few minor grammar changes. I believe that FFMG should, if he finds any words that are not neutral, work on changing those words rather than declare the entire article irrelevant. All conventions are followed and all sources cited by relevant sources.

I nominate this article as being neutral. inkululeko (talk) 12:42, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In the wiki article Wikipedia:NPOV_dispute, there states the following requirement: "Drive-by tagging is strongly discouraged. The editor who adds the tag must address the issues on the talk page, pointing to specific issues that are actionable within the content policies, namely Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. Simply being of the opinion that a page is not neutral is not sufficient to justify the addition of the tag. Tags should be added as a last resort." Based on this, I would say that FFMG has not sufficiently attempted to explain why the article is not neutral. He/she also has not used the tag as a last resort. Therefore, I will remove the non-neutral tag. I request anyone, including FFMG, who has issues with the neutrality of the article to first attempt to resolve those. If all other avenues are pursued, then he/she may nominated the article as not-neutral if he/she gives proper reasoning, details and examples as to why it should be given this tag. jaredsacks (talk) 15:35, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not entirely sure why you are attacking me personally, but I am not the only one who thinks that this entire article is not neutral. Look at how many discussions have started here regarding NPOV.

So, please, stop your personal attacks and leave the tags/templates until others have a change of commenting. FFMG (talk) 11:21, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with jaredsacks

It is clear that these tags are supposed to be added as a last and not a first resort and that, therefore, they should be removed. If there is disagreement with this there needs to be detailed and persuasive arguments as to where the article lacks accuracy, neutral tone etc. However it is clear that there are some parts that do require citations - but most of these have already been tagged.

(talk) 15:24, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]