solutions and suggestions asked for a third party opinion so here goes this long running discussion makes me think of a few things in general michael is a newby so the wiki policy of don't bite the newbies seems to be relevant and it looks like for the most part is sticking to that apart from personal comments about michael's english i can relate to the fact that it is sometimes hard to figure out what someone's point is and that may be what kwami was trying to say about michael but i think it's out of line to say that someone's english is non native or that someone's knowledge of arabic is similarly less than desirable so my point on this one is this stick to the point and leave personal comments out sometimes discussions about articles and edits get pretty heated even without personal comments if you can't handle it take a wikibreak this is what i do and it works for me divide up the topics for discussion it makes it much easier for people to comment without having to read lots and lots of stuff they aren't interested in for example if i want to comment about el and ba'al where in that long discussion would i want to put my comment i think one of the best things that can be done for this article is to divide it up put the meat of the wadi al hol in an article by itself and the proto sinaitic script information in its own page what remains of the middle bronze age alphabets is a general summary of why these two are thought to be related plus thumbnail sketches of the content of those two articles with appropriate main article type links i think this will focus the discussion for example if colliss has written about one but not the other all refutation and support of colliss's arguments will be guided to the right discussion pages this topic is one of many that has scholars screaming at each other there are ways of summarizing the opposing arguments that allow casual readers to understand the controversy without getting information overload in relation to both of these scripts the article suffers from a dearth of citations appropriate or otherwise the various assertions are interesting and serve as a stepping off point for finding the actual sources so i would oppose the deletion of every single unsupported citation after all it was only a few years ago that wikipedians started to insist on citations before then there was a whole lot of original research some of which still persists without proper citations i for one would like to know how many examples of these inscriptions have been found from the current state of this article it seems like there is only one of proto sinaitic which was found in two locations which can't be right and that there are only two wadi al hol inscriptions which we can see in the illustration provided there is also a citable reference in some national geographic website about semitic anti snake inscriptions in part of unas's tomb in giza maybe that should have its own page too with an appropriate link i don't buy this business about arabic being irrelevant it reminds me too much of how european researchers dismissed all arabic scholarship about the arabic language itself however any references to arabic in an article on a topic from the middle bronze age have to keep in mind the huge time difference for example the hamza was a much later development so it sheds about as much light on wadi al hol as the development of the letters j v and w i don't accept the table at all the article is about an intermediate step that is not represented in the table the table represents conjecture about connections between two known endpoints hieroglyphic and the semitic alphabet for lack of a better term besides if the hypothesis is that the proto sinaitic script evolved from hieratic writing then why is that script not represented in the table i don't accept the business of naming these letters unless there is evidence to show that these symbols even had names at the time they were used the names are anachronistic if the names were in fact attested at a different time in a different script the person promoting the use of the names has a big burden in terms of wikipedia all we have to do is say that a particular citable scholar has made the connection and if the connection is disputed we can point to a citation that says that too it is our own editorial discretion that says how we portray that dispute for example a says x but others disagree for example b it is not clear whether x is true as claimed by a or whether y is true as claimed by b scholars disagree on whether x is tr