Talk:Indian/Archive 1

Old comments

Rather than "American Indians" it should be specified for the sake of clarity those "Indians" ("Native Americans") in the United States of America (though the soverign Indian Reservations may perhaps be called other countries). --Daniel C. Boyer

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The motorcycle manufacturer has been reborn. --Daniel C. Boyer 13:30 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)

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2 The language spoken in India

Really, which one? Hindi, Urdu, Gujurati, Punjabi ..... nobody could say "in India they speak Indian". -- Chris Q 14:01 Nov 20, 2002 (UTC)

Having removed this entry and had it reinstated, I have changed it to "any one of...". I still don't think anyone educated would refer to a language as Indian, except in the sense of a language from or related to India. Maybe some primary school Kids might say "that guy from India was speaking Indian", but surely nobody in high-school or beyond would say that. -- Chris Q 08:47 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

You are right of course. I'll take it out again. Sorry! -- sannse 12:58 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

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Does or did anyone call residents of the East Indies Indians or East Indians? If so it should go back in the list as a separate item. --rmhermen

I don't know, but but in my Canadian part of the world I have heard the term "East Indian" used to refer to people from India. -- Stephen Gilbert 16:54 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

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Christopher Columbus didn't name them Indians because he was lost. He named them from the Spanish words for "people of God". India was called Hindustan at the time. The current info on the page is a common misconception. -- LGagnon

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Moved from article: The idea that "most U.S. Indians now call themselves Native Americans" is incorrect! Any statement which " with "most Indian" is incorrect! More than 500 Federally recognize American Indian Tribes exist in America today, each calling themselves by their own historic names. While non-Indians have decided to refer to American Indians as "Native American's", American Indians who retain their tribal identity refer to each tribe by their specific tribal name. For example, Ponca Tribe of American Indians, Osage Tribe of American Indians, Hopi Tribe of American Indians, Navaho Tribe of American Indians, and so on. Comment left by User:209.184.133.249

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Indian Queens is a village near Newquay in Cornwall in England.
Please note that this is true, not a hoax and not a joke. If you don't believe me, look at a map. Anthony Appleyard 07:27, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

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Why is the Indus constellation mentioned in this article ? How is it related to the Indian disambiguation ? Jay 07:50, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It belongs because Indus is "the Indian". I would add it back, except that it's not clear which section it belongs in. See Talk:Indus (constellation). --207.176.159.90 (talk) 02:42, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Now I know. Added it back. --207.176.159.90 (talk) 00:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

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LGagnon's "una gente in dios" story would appear to be nothing more than an urban legend: see here. --Cholling 23:28, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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There might also be a (U.S.) military meaning to it: search [1] for Indians for reference. It might be archaic, though.--Moritz 13:37, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Play by Arthur Kopit

There is also a play called "Indians". I'm not sure if that refers to people from India or American Indians, though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.171.165.144 (talk) 14:40, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Why Columbus called them Indian

There should totally be an article that describes why Columbus decided to call the Native Americans "Indians." Or at least a much more in-depth discussion on this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.169.13.238 (talk) 19:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Such an article would IMO be a good thing. It should probably be Indian (terminology), Indian (etymology), or Indian (usage), depending on scope, and the title might change as it develops. IMO it should focus on the vagueness of European geographers' grasp of everything beyond probably the Sahara, Persia, and (i suppose) the Urals. Include Indus, India, Hinduism in what is now Indonesia, Indochina, the East Indies, the West Indies, American Indian, Amerind, and the terminology of colonial languages other than English. Mention the one or two scholars who take "in Dios" seriously. (Either include the late-20th-century innovations, or link to something like Aboriginal-identity movements/ Identity politics.) The content of such an article is well beyond the scope of the accompanying Dab page, but a lk to it would definitely belong on the Dab.
--Jerzy•t 09:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Not an article

_ _ The accompanying page is not an article, but a Disambiguation page. Its only reason for its existence is to disambiguate the ambiguous title "Indian". Adding on more than the few "See also" entries that address simple mistakes, at the end where they don't impede the purpose of the page, is the only exception to the requirement of directly addressing that purpose: providing access to articles that could have been titled "Indian", but for the existence of equally or more "deserving" candidates. As Wikipedia "candidate" titles, such articles can only cover topics reasonably designated by noun senses of "Indian" (or the topic of the (perhaps controversial) etymology of the noun and adjective "Indian" in their Americas sense): That is, the entries designate a person of India, a person of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, works titled or commonly called "Indian" or Indian, some sports teams (by virtue of their using the noun in its plural), Indian (the airline), and the like.
_ _ Except in the sense that cases like these involve the adjective having been adapted for use as a noun, nothing relating to the adjectivial use of Indian belongs on the accompanying page.
_ _ There has probably been substantial effort made in compiling adjectivial uses of "Indian" on the page, and they may be of some value for the creation of lists of India-related topics, of American-Indian topics, and perhaps others. (I have too little interest, let alone imagination, to suggest the titles.) For that reason, the current version of Indian has been copied to Talk:Indian/List fodder. In any case, it can't stay where i found it.
--Jerzy•t 22:09, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but one obvious lack I see here (I just disambiguated a link to Indian) is that there is no link to India, which is what I needed (I was disambiguating a reference to the "Indian courts," which obviously should go to India). I'm not sure where a link to India would fit into the current structure of this page, but it seriously needs to be added even though using Indian to refer to India is obviously an adjectival use. --Tkynerd (talk) 15:33, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

• On the contrary, this is a Dab page listing articles that could have been named "Indian" if there weren't other legitimate candidates for the title. "Indian" in an adjectivial sense is such a candidate only in the article discussed in an earlier section on this talk page, which would be about the peculiarity that that adjective has that "Kenyan", for example, does not have: "Kenyan" is not used to describe people who have had no residential or ancestral link to Kenya, but "Indian" is also used to describe people bcz whose only residential or ancestral links are to the American continents, Caribbean islands, and the Malay Archipelago: we could have an article on "Indian (usage)" that is about the word, whereas "Kenyan" simply Rdrs to Kenya, reflecting the fact that there is nothing to say about the adjective "Kenyan" that is worth separating from the article Kenya. Anyone concerned about Indian courts who comes to the accompanying Dab page (instead of to India or court -- not courts, tho there is a Dab there, silly Dabs being cheap and virtually harmless) has been careless, or is so new to WP that they haven't learned the fundamentals of how to use it. That mistake is so fundamental that providing for it would harm the usefulness of WP more than it would help, and there should not be an India entry under even "See also" (where we often service reasonably common errors of looking for a topic on a Dab page whose title would never be a title for an article on that topic).
  --Jerzy•t 05:47, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
  

While I understand your argument and agree with the reasoning behind it, the practice on Wikipedia is distinctly different from what you are describing. Indian frequently means having to do with India, and in those cases India is indeed the appropriate dab target. See English, Swedish, French and American for examples. There should indeed be a link to India here.

I don't know what this means:

Anyone concerned about Indian courts who comes to the accompanying Dab page (instead of to India or court -- not courts, tho there is a Dab there, silly Dabs being cheap and virtually harmless) has been careless, or is so new to WP that they haven't learned the fundamentals of how to use it.

I can only guess that you are saying that links to potentially ambiguous terms like Indian should always be dabbed when the link is created. Unfortunately, that's not how things work in the real world; ambiguous terms are frequently linked without piping (either because the editor is careless, because the editor is unaware of the dab problem, or because the editor is aware of the problem but is unsure what to use for the piped link). There is no reason to attempt to "punish" editors for any of these problems by excluding a link from the dab page that is clearly appropriate and useful. --Tkynerd (talk) 18:20, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

• (I took the liberty of reformatting you in a way that made it more readable for me; i trust you'll restore it if you'd rather i hadn't.)

Those admittedly presumable parallels could suggest that you're right, or just further be evidence of how poorly Dab'g principles are understood by many who choose to edit Dabs, and may not be representative bcz Dabs are attractive to those who find articles intimidating. (Some of the intimidation is from being newcomers; i'm sympathetic, as by personality i very seldom write articles, even tho i edit them.)

Dab'g while writing is beneficial when convenient, but (besides the "excuses" you mention) not more important than the flow (of writing without constantly being distracted by the Dab'g process) that an editor may find helpful.

I confess to idealizing in my assumptions about how WP will look by next week, and i'm grateful for your drawing my attention to it. My lapse amounts to picturing use of Dabs as being used to find articles on topics that users have seen or heard mentioned outside WP, i.e., the kind of Dab'n need that we can't eliminate (or if we can, only by overtaking Facebook's and YouTube's userships!) On the other hand, the direction of development of articles that lk to Dabs is toward byp'g of those Dabs, an activity that is systematic enuf that i think my idealization is not that troublesome; it may be less troublesome than what a less charitable colleague than moi might characterize as your defeatist attitude toward the Dab Byp'g task.

No, let's not punish either editors or readers, but we do have to draw a line between providing reasonable aids to use and providing for so many rarely useful conveniences that their visual, screen-space consuming, and mind-distracting burden to nearly every user far exceeds the benefit of their occasional usage. (I can picture a MediaWiki extension, that would consult a user preference, and suppress display of some text if "Expert mode" were set; it's harder to picture editors working out and complying to standards on what to provide only to new users.)

Finally, there is another factor, reflecting the fact, in my opinion, that most editor's only read How to edit if they have to. I infer this from, for instance, the 33-month survival of an approach to the Dab Supplement that shows no sign of awareness of MoSDab. The evidence is that editors learn WP style from seeing good style, and from noticing what other editors change. In view of that, IMO, India on the accompanying Dab would contribute the popular view that a Dab page is to hold everything that any editor free-associates to when they hear the Dab pg's title. India is far less harmful than would be Indian tobacco, indian ink, India (name) or India (woman's name). And India in the See-also section is far less harmful than elsewhere. In any case, i'm more interested now in clarifying my outlook than in browbeating you into doing it "right".
--Jerzy•t 21:08, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

OK. I am very sympathetic to the problem of dab pages being crowded with things that don't belong there -- sometime I need to screw up my courage, trim down Northwest, and weather the inevitable firestorm. So we're in agreement there. However, it just seems clear to me that when one of the primary senses of a dab term like Xian is "of or relating to X," then X should be one of the items on the dab page. I don't think this is misuse or overcrowding of the dab page, because it directly refers to a primary sense of the dab term. Look at it this way: it's unlikely that you would ever need [[India (woman's name)|Indian]] anywhere, while [[India|Indian]] can be assumed to be relatively common. That indicates to me that it's a suitable dab term.

I do a great deal of dab work, as you can see by looking at my contributions. For this purpose, I use an automated tool called Wikipedia Cleaner because it saves a tremendous amount of time (which you may also be able to tell from my contributions, if you look at the timestamps). In order for that tool to work, the dab targets have to be listed on the dab page. This (Indian) is not one of the pages for which I regularly dab incoming links, but when I'm processing pages, I like to handle all the adjectives of nationality that are on the page while I'm there, just in the interest of leaving the page in the best shape I can. When I ran across two instances of Indian on two different pages the day before yesterday, I wanted to dab them with Wikipedia Cleaner and couldn't. I could just leave links to Indian alone when I see them, and if you feel strongly enough about this, that's what I'll do, but I hate to leave just those links undabbed. --Tkynerd (talk) 00:17, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi!!! How are you? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.22.255.13 (talk) 13:33, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

South Asia?

User:Saimdusan has just added some text to the page that seems to imply that Indian can refer more generally to South Asia. I don't believe this is the case, but I wanted to raise the issue here rather than just reverting Saimdusan's edit. How do others feel? --Tkynerd (talk) 23:20, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The burden of evidence is on User:Saimdusan to find the sources which claim the term Indian can be used for South Asians in general. I think User:Saimdusan's edit should be reverted until they provide a reliable source for this point of view.----^DarkTea© 23:18, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

As I'm inclined to agree with you, I've undone the edit with an explanatory edit summary that also refers to this discussion. Thanks. --Tkynerd (talk) 23:58, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This article Indian People should be redirected to Indian. One does not call Pakistani People, or Chinese People or American People. Of course, I understand that it is partly because of Native Americans being called Indians in USA and Canada. For the rest of the world, Indians mean people inhabiting or having their origins to the country of India. I presume this is not an American version of Wikipedia to expect that people might mistake Indians for Native Americans. rams81 (talk) 20:19, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Article vandalized

someone apparently deleted everything on the Indian article and replaced it all with 'Indians are Aztecs'

someone should fix this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Misterian (talk • contribs) 02:35, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Etymology

Where is an etymology section on the meaning and derivation and history of the word, "indian"? Is it related to the words, "indigenous", and "Hindu" and "Hindi" and "Red Indians"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.55.20.106 (talk) 21:02, 29 September 2012 (UTC)