Talk:Apartheid/Archive 5

message: The anon's complaints about the voting qualifications are irrelevant. According to the criteria proposed by Tomer, the vote is 11 to 1 (since JohanL doesn't meet the criteria). But even if the criteria were relaxed, the vote would still be 11 to 3 (assuming the anon would have cast one vote). So the only issue is whether the vote was 78% in favor or 92%. Either way, there's a clear consensus.
I agree with Red King and others, who suggest that the best thing to do would be to start from 1948 anyway. This article is redundant with History of South Africa, which is a very high-quality article, but too long. Pall, Maveric149, and I have already discussed spinning off the apartheid-era history, and Maveric149's work so far is at Talk:History_of_apartheid. I would actually favor a title more like History of South Africa in the Apartheid Era, for two reasons: (1) apartheid didn't start suddenly, like turning on a light switch, and (2) if the idea is to split up History of South Africa into smaller parts, then the article needs to cover more than just apartheid itself (although apartheid was, of course, the central issue in that period).
Of course, the effect of all this might just be to divert the anon into revert-warring over the History of South Africa article, which would be the only article that would actually be covering the colonial period. However, if an article has to be afflicted with a revert war, I think it's better for that article to be History of South Africa for a while. History of South Africa was nominated twice for FA, and narrowly missed the second time around. Because it went through that process, it's in extremely good shape, and doesn't need a lot of work right now. If an article has to be paralyzed by the anon, it might as well be the one that doesn't need a lot of work.
In any case, I think the vote has had the desired effect of proving that there is an overwhelming consensus against inserting the anon's agenda into *any* of these articles.--Bcrowell 8 July 2005 22:10 (UTC)
:I concur.  There is precedent for undoing the full effect of the vote, by opening a new vote on when to start the discussion of Apartheid.  If the discussion begins with the first apartheid-like laws, the discussion of where the Europeans came from will be completely mootified, as it will no longer be included in the article.  Tomer TALK July 8, 2005 22:22 (UTC)
::I wasn't even aware of the History of South Africa article, it looks very good (only thing I found questionable was the date of 500 CE instead of the more usual 1000 CE for the Bantu reaching SA but I suppose its different opinions about dating iron implements.) We don't really need the history and images duplicated in this article which should indeed focus on the history of introduction of discrimanatoy laws and Apartheid.
::BTW this piece of trash who keeps trying to add anti-semitic fantasies about Jews colonizing SA is not worth arguing with, I say ban his IP. Kuratowski's Ghost 9 July 2005 01:48 (UTC)
Not easy to do, as he's used a dozen userid and 3 dozen IPs: see User:Jayjg/Jews did Apartheid editor. Jayjg (talk) 18:53, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: interpretation of vote; starting from 1948