General revisions (mostly History section)

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I've had a look at some of the article there are a number of issues I think should be looked at:

  1. The history section needed (and may still need) a lot of clean-up. (I haven't looked at other sections.) Much of the information wasn't doing do a good job of reporting what the sources are saying precisely. I've tried to clarify what I can, and even add some details.
  2. The history section also mostly focuses on Iran only. I imagine this dates from the early days of this article, when it was focused on the term "bazaar", but now that "souk"/"souq" have been merged here (see talk section above) this article needs to be more universal. If I have time, I may add some content to help (e.g. I found several entries in the Encyclopedia of Islam 3 which discuss bazaars in different regions).
  3. The long Charles White quote in the history section is a somewhat random and awkward inclusion and doesn't seem to contribute much to this section. A long description of one unidentified slave market in Constantinople (the likely outdated name "Yessir Bazary" doesn't appear in any other sources), by a more or less random European writer in the 19th century, doesn't add to our understanding of the history of bazaars in general or in particular. There are lots of well-known or important bazaars that could be more clearly described instead (if relevant), and there are lots of modern scholars we could quote or refer to instead. I've removed it per WP:BOLD, but feel free to discuss.
  4. The image selection should be revised as well. In particular, we don't need 5 or more old Orientalist paintings of bazaars in addition to another entire gallery of them near the bottom of the page. There are lots of existing historic bazaars, or actual historical photos of bazaars, which could be shared instead.

I'll try to edit more if I can, but many of these things could be revised by anyone interested. R Prazeres (talk) 01:54, 14 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Cleaning up images

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I've done a major clean-up of the images in this article (see this edit). Per MOS:IMAGES, images in the article should have some encyclopedic purpose related to the article's text and be positioned close to the relevant text/section. There was no reason to have this many images of orientalist paintings that have no particular relevance to the text, scattered or stacked across the page. For images of general interest, galleries may be a good alternative (see WP:GALLERY), and there was already a gallery specifically for paintings and illustrations, so I've moved all such images there. Some painters were already featured in multiple images both in and out of the gallery and one image even appeared twice (once inside the gallery, once outside it). I've left in the main body of the article only a few images that are at least real photos or illustrate a specific bazaar landmark of note; even these could be reasonably moved to galleries (or removed) if desired. There may still by too many images overall (even in the galleries) that don't really add anything useful to the article, but this could be revised later as the article itself is (hopefully) improved; I've focused on layout issues. I've also standardised the format of the captions in the galleries as best I can, and removed one unnecessary image with for which no author information could be easily found. Lastly, I've added a lead image of one of the most famous bazaars as the lead image; the sidebar navigation template on Arabic culture, previously at the top of the article, should obviously not be the lead image. In any case, please consider MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE when adding or revising images in the future. R Prazeres (talk) 08:12, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Reply

islamic culture, not arabic.

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hello to every one. there is a template in this article that says this is part of a series on arabic culture. this should be change to template:islamic culture, because bazaar is for every muslim country. for persians, other iranians, turks, arabs, indians and even southeast european. thanks 89.40.242.213 (talk) 12:17, 4 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Cleaning up dictionary-style material

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I've done my best to clean up the "terminology" section, which was all over the place (done across multiple edits here). This involved removing a lot of unsourced and irrelevant material. There's still some things that aren't sourced but seem relevant enough to keep or clarify for the future.

A reminder that Wikpedia is not a dictionary; articles are about topics, not words, so let's please not shovel mentions of every non-English word similar to "bazaar" or every English-language use of the word "bazaar" into the article. The article is about the traditional markets in West Asia and North Africa. Even that scope is a little loose, but we should keep material relevant to that topic only. R Prazeres (talk) 19:47, 25 May 2024 (UTC)Reply