Talk:Soil fertility

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nicholas Stoney.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Queries

Aap puri tarah satik jawab nhi dete ho 2405:204:A4AC:43B2:F00:F268:E2DD:563C (talk) 01:37, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: BioEE1610 WIM

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 March 2022 and 31 March 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nova.WIM (article contribs).

Historical context drowns out actual information on soil fertility in this article.

There are a few different problems with this article which I'd like to elaborate on.

1. There is too much historical context in this article making it read like an article on soil fertility in a historical context instead of an article about soil fertility. The historical context with regards to colonialism, slavery and south america along with the "Humans and soil" section makes up over half of the text in this article.
2. There is too much unrelated information in this article. While the impact of burning practices is quite clearly related to soil fertility, the story critizising the USFS for their handling of the burning practices of the karuk tribe is only tangentially related and it doesn't make sense to put it in an article about soil fertility. The part about South American dark earth I found very fascinating but it's role in carbon sequestration and climate change really doesn't have anything to do with soil fertility. Almost the entirety of the Humans and Soil section is unrelated to soil fertility. The positive health effects of soil are most likely unrelated to the quality of the soil and the entire subsection about "Reconnecting Communities with the Soil" has nothing to do with soil quality. There are several long quotes in the article, especially in the slavery and colonialism subsections which don't always seem to be related soil fertility but I find these a bit more difficult to judge.
3. Questionable source/incorrect information; source 21, for the first paragraph of the: "Soil Depletion and Enslavement" subsection uses a questionable source with factually inaccurate information. It claims that: "The sacred relationship between Black people and the soil can be traced back to Cleopatra’s reign in Egypt in 51 BCE" which is a weird thing to say because Cleopatra was Greek, not black (Ethnicity of Cleopatra) and Egyptians weren't a single race but rather racially heterogenous with skin colour varying between different regions (Ancient Egyptian race controversy). The source does refer to some studies which could be used as a source instead of this secondary article but conclusions about relationships between black people and soil derived from ancient egypt should be removed.
4. Placement of the historical context in the article. Currently the historical context is added as subsections for soil depletion which seems like a weird place to put it. It makes more sense to place the historical context under its own header since not all historical context refers to soil depletions specifically but more towards soil fertility in general.

I have not edited Wikipedia a lot and I am not sure what the best way is to solve these problems. I created this talk page because of a suggestion from @Barkiechaser who reverted my reversion to an older version. In hindsight my edit was indeed wrong since there is a lot of useful information that I deleted so instead I hope that this talk page can fix the issues with this article.

Parcynthia (talk) 15:20, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Parcynthia, thanks for your worries about this article, hopefully I can answer some of your questions here. It sounds as though you are concerned about proportionality for this article, which makes sense as I agree that there is a lot of historical information on this page. But this information contributes to the depth of this page, it's not as though you can't find anything related to soil fertility, when you can just scroll down a little and find everything still there. If you have specific items of information you want to remove due to the reasons you stated above, please remove them individually with the reasoning you gave above, do not remove an entire section of 20,000 characters without proper justification.

I'll quickly say about your suggested revision in point 3. that Cleopatra's "race" is indeed controversial, so I don't think it's fair to either mention her as Greek or Black. I'd suggest to remove the opening sentence in the section "Soil Depletion and Enslavement", or change something as you see fit.

I think you have plenty of good points here, but individually changing them would be a lot more helpful in terms of seeing what should be reviewed. I hope all of this was clear, thank you again for your attentiveness and care. Barkiechaser (talk) 18:20, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I have edited the article again, this time preserving as much as possible and only removing information that is unrelated to soil fertility or of questionable veracity. The current state of the article is not perfect but it does address most of my complaints. Feel free to look through the edits and if you think any of them are egregious I'm open to discussing them.

Three things I am still unsure about are:

1. Whether or not the: "Humans and Soil" section should exist.
2. If the headers and subheaders I chose are good.
3. The quality of the references after I deleted a few of them, I'm not sure if the list is still formatted correctly. Reference 23 doesn't seem to have formatted correctly.

Parcynthia (talk) 18:29, 17 November 2024 (UTC)