User:Fowler&fowler/Information, Summary Style, and Hagiography

Information, Summary Style, and Hagiography in the featured article Kingdom of Mysore. Imagine yourself, dear FAR reader, in the shoes of an Average Modern Person (AMP) who reads the following lead sentence from the Economy section of this article. Sentence: "The economy of the kingdom was based on agriculture, due to the majority of its people being villagers." If AMP interprets "people being villagers" to mean "people living in villages," (and not, attributively, as "people being simple,"), how will they go about establishing a connection between village and agriculture? Clearly, none of the meanings of "village" in the OED (for example, "an inhabited place larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town,") will help them. Will a handy copy of the 1901 Census of India help AMP? What will they find there about Mysore? Well, for starters, they will find that only 66% of the population of Mysore was either engaged in agriculture or dependent on agriculture. What does it mean, AMP will then ask, to say that the economy is based on agriculture if 34 per cent of the population, a full third, is not living off agriculture? If AMP also has a general background in History, they will likely know that the population of much of the world—and India is no exception—commenced living in villages after they gave up their nomadic ways and took to cultivation. Isn't the cause, the effect, and vice-versa, AMP will wonder: the population lives in villages because they live off agriculture? Issues such as these are not issues of "brilliant prose" or of literary elegance. They are bread and butter issues of communicating information in a unambiguous way. I claim that most sentences in this article suffer in such ways, and indeed I leave you to mull over the meanings of each of the remaining sentences in the lead paragraph of the Economy section. Click now on the mother article Economy of the Kingdom of Mysore and read its first paragraph. While the writing is not perfect, it certainly flows better than the paragraph above. So, user:Dineshkannambadi is certainly capable of writing more meaningfully, we will say to ourselves. Perhaps the deterioration in the prose was the result of summarizing. If we now read the rest of the article starting with the History section, we will soon find ourselves asking, "Why, if the Sword of Summary Style is hanging over our heads, are we cutting corners in important sections, such as Economy, but yet regaling our readers with sentences such as the following": "In 1637, the celebrated Narasaraja Wodeyar, known for his valour, wrestling skills and his interest in the fine arts, came to power. A popular account of Narasaraja Wodeyar recounts his victory over a champion wrestler of Tiruchirapalli. He is said to have proceeded incognito to Trichy, defeated the wrestler and left quietly without accepting any gifts from the local ruler, instead leaving a note that read 'someone from Mysore has defeated the wrestler'" (History:Period of Sovereignty). The Culture section, in particular, is full of such verbal dross. In fact, I would wager that any time the word "Wodeyar" occurs in the Culture section, it is accompanied by an entourage of fawning fluff. And the Culture section is more than half of this History FA. (Please move your scroll bar to the middle.) All this while, AMP has been asking, "What crops did they grow in Mysore?" It would be great to be able to report that these are all our problems. Why? Because such problems can be fixed with copy-edits, revisions, or rewrites. However, if AMP next leafed through the history literature, they would quickly discover a few things: (a) most contemporary general histories on India don't mention either the Wodeyars or their cultural achievements (Please search.) (b) Does it mean that Mysore—their kingdom—is not an important topic in Indian history, AMP will wonder? A quick search in the same texts will establish that Mysore actually is an important topic, but that the two people who keep turning up under "Mysore" are the father and son duo, Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan who ruled from 1761 to 1799 and fought in the Anglo-Mysore Wars. (c) Does it mean, AMP will wonder again, if Haidar and Tipu are mentioned mostly because of the glamor or tragedy of their military exploits? To answer that question, though, AMP will likely need to supplement the general histories with monographs and journal articles. Once so equipped, AMP will notice that historians write not only about Tipu and Haidar's military skills, but also about their political and economic innovations. (d) Ever more perplexed, AMP will now wonder, "Does the specialist literature mention the Wodeyars?" With a little more work, AMP will track down the Wodeyars, but will be surprised to find their assessments among historians to be mostly negative. Indeed, AMP will find that Nicholas Dirks's blunt characterization, "defunct family of rulers," doesn't just apply to the Wodeyars in 1799 but also during other times in their "rule." What, then, will our Average Modern Person, make of this Wikipedia article? Will they not increasingly wonder about the likelihood of hagiography in the narrative of Wodeyar rule? Will they not wonder so, regardless of how they assess the representations of Haidar and Tipu? That can't be good for Wikipedia. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:25, 7 December 2008 (UTC)