User:Mustafaa

Likely to be entirely absent for much of May.

"And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the differences among your languages and your colors; in these are signs indeed for the knowers." Qur'an 30:22.

Articles of particular interest to me: Anything linguistic, especially Semitic languages and historical linguistics.

Algeria WikiPortal preparation

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Language articles I've been particularly involved with

Language isolates and unclassified languages: Jalaa language, Laal language, Shabo language, Shabo lexicon, Kujarge language, Oropom language, Weyto language, Bung language, Wutana language, Bete language, Lufu language, Imraguen language, Nemadi language, Mpre language, Kwavi language, (Oropom, Andamanese languages), Category:Languages whose existence is uncertain.

Other African languages: Fur language, Berber languages, Northern Berber languages, Chenoua language, Soddo language, Korandje language, Gimira language, Tuareg languages, Saho language, Senhaja de Srair language, Tarifit language, Ghomara language, Komuz languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Tifinagh, Old Nubian language, Tagoi language.

Semitic languages: Varieties of Arabic, Samaritan Hebrew, List of Proto-Semitic roots, Soddo language, Moabite language, Phoenician languages, Edomite language, Ammonite language, Canaanite languages, Hebrew names, pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions, PERF 558, Nubi language.

Language stubs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Language_stubs) need work...

Some other Wikipedia linguists

User:Gilgamesh - Semitic and Hebrew
User:Mark Dingemanse - African languages
User:Garzo
User:Pasquale
User:Node_ue
User:Nickshanks
User:Chrajohn
User:Kwamikagami
User:Ish ishwar

Language pages that deserve to be Article of the Week

Gbe languages - by Mark Dingemanse
Aramaic language - by Garzo

Non-language articles that I've been particularly involved with

Not necessarily exhaustive...

Articles that I've written lots in: MEMRI, Kingdom of Nekor, al-Fatiha, al-Alaq, Qur'an, Rif, Muqatta'at.

Articles that I've written less in: Abd el-Krim, Palestinian, Ifriqiya, Djerid, Ha-Mim, Banu Isam, Berghouata, Salih ibn Tarif, Darfur, Darfur conflict, sura, Jerusalem#In Mandaeanism.

List of long articles that need fixing

Due to massive POV attack (not that it was much good to begin with): Jihad. (See also: Template:Timeline of Islamist militancy, Template:Islam.)

Due to incompleteness or inadequacy of Islamic history section: History of Palestine, Galilee, Persecution of Muslims, Martyr, Muhammad as warrior.

Due to amateurism (delightful, but sadly not quite up to Wikipedia standards): Nuer language.

POVs

I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tragic though it is, is massively overhyped - it gets more media coverage than most conflicts ten, or even one hundred, times as lethal (see Congo Civil War), and I'm not an expert on Islamic theology, but the persistent tendency of some people to add Islamophobic and anti-Arab propaganda to articles on both those topics is a real danger, and one I am often forced to respond to. I should add that I am a proud anti-Zionist of the second type: that is, I advocate the quixotic notion that everybody ought to just get along and live together peacefully, or in the article's words, argue for "a state in which Jews and Palestinians live together as equals."

On historical linguistics, I incline much more towards the long-ranger view than the ultra-sceptical positions that seem to be prevalent, which too often strike me as being founded more on a priori objections than on empirical evidence. I firmly support the comparative method, but regard mass lexical comparison as not a competitor but a necessary prelude to it. However, I also consider some long-rangers' work - in particular Merritt Ruhlen's - to suffer from unacceptably large degrees of semantic latitude.

Zionism and Racism

A very nice recent edit to the article; almost the paradigm of NPOV.

Good job,

Guy Montag 11:07, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Countering Systemic Bias

Template:WikiProjectCSBTasks

Possible articles in progress

It would be interesting to do a series on the presentation of other religions in the Qur'an, but I lost steam on that... so I'm leaving a link to User:Mustafaa/Judaism in the Quran in case I ever finish it. At the moment, series I'm working on include unclassified languages and, more desultorily, suras.

A few more ideas:

People I'm not

Users that I am not: the blocked bigot User:Mustaafaa; nor User:Mustafa, who is real but has never edited anything. (Actually, "Mustafa" conceivably may be a previous incarnation of me; if so, however, I've long since forgotten the account details.)

How not to NPOV an article

A gallery of egregious examples:

"Some people use this lack of solid evidence as a basis for believing that there has never been a matriarchal society. Critics point out that this type of argument is illogical, and appeals to the fallacy of negative proof." (Matriarchy (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Matriarchy&diff=12372298&oldid=12372263))
"With the help of his wife, some say he cheated many people, and made great money, especially selling an elixir which would make people live forever and keep their beauty. Others claim that he gained great fame by giving freely to the poor, and offering his healing talents for free. Some people say that he himself claimed to be very old, sometimes putting his age at two-hundred. Some people also claim that he also pretended to make gold out of other metals, and many noble and rich people believed that he could." (Cagliostro (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alessandro_Cagliostro&diff=8757148&oldid=8687626))
"Some allege that the army was a proxy for the Israeli Defence Force, and that Israel therefore bears some level of responsibility. Israel contends that the use of the word "proxy" is just propaganda and that the Phalangists were simply allies fighting a common, brutal enemy." (Israeli terrorism (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israeli_terrorism&diff=12291428&oldid=12291356))
"Kfar Kassem Massacre, carried out by the Israeli border police in 1956. The Arab side alleges that 49 Israeli Arab people claimed to have been civilians were killed. They claim it included 11 children." (Israeli terrorism (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israeli_terrorism&diff=12291684&oldid=12291519))
"According to historians, rapes were often performed in public during the day and often in front of spouses or family members. It is believed that rape was systemized in a process where soldiers would search door to door for young girls. It is as well said that many women were taken captive to be gang raped and some were kept to be raped again. It is considered that it was common for a woman to be killed immediately after being raped usually by mutilation. According to the testimonies, some women were forced into military prostitution as comfort women. It is even believed that the Japanese troops often forced families to commit acts of incest; sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape daughters." etc. Nanjing Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nanjing_Massacre&diff=12414312&oldid=12414172)
"The Life and Religion of Mohammed is a book by author J. L. Menezes. It was written in 1912 in India and provides an account of what it believes is Mohammed's life and what the beliefs of the religion of Islam are." The Life and Religion of Mohammed (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Life_and_Religion_of_Mohammed&diff=15652934&oldid=15643894)

Common themes in such cases include vagueness about who holds the alleged views, straw man arguments misrepresenting opponents' views the better to knock them down, and - worst of all - a refusal to address the issue of what actually happened or did not happen, as opposed to what X thinks about it.