Elsayed Taha

Strange edit

Hello, why did you remove the links from Abu al-Makarim (Q74095) = Abu al-Makarim (1149-1209), Coptic Christian writer? The new item Abu al-Makarim (Q58450327) is missing the information about this writer. --Kolja21 (talk) 00:48, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Sorry If I caused any issues by this edit, my intention was to correct a wrong link between the Arabic article and other languages, for these were not matching, and for that I did create an Arabic article that matched other languages. Elsayed Taha (talk) 00:56, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Village of Meir and the ancient Egyptian necropolis are completely different

I reverted your edits on Meir because both places are completely different. Between both places is a distance of about 15 km! (in Egypt this is a real big distance, between both places there are a dozen of other villages).

Mainly there is a village in the agricultural land. The ancient Egyptian necropolis was established in the desert long before the village. Excavators used the name of the village to name that necropolis but both places are not identical by both location and instance. In practice it means that you have to write two articles in the Wikipedias as we did it in the German Wikivoyage. --RolandUnger (talk) 04:56, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I think the issue stems from the Arabic and English descriptions on item Q690841 which refers to it as "grave yard/necropolis", I think this is not accurate since the English Wikipedia article is about the village and goes about the history of it including excavations ... etc , and also the Arabic article is about the village, although it is lacking the richness found in other versions of Wikipedia. I'm not involved or active in Wikivoyage, so I don't know what I need to do there! but honestly I still believe these two items should be the same, so links to Arabic and Egyptian Arabic shows correctly on other versions of the same article on Wikipedia. Elsayed Taha (talk) 05:16, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I checked both the (Egyptian) Arabic articles and the articles in Western languages. They describe different places. The Arabic articles describe the village (قرية مير) with the numbers of inhabitants etc. but not the ancient Egyptian necropolis (مقابر مير‎). The other articles describe only the necropolis and classify it as a village which is a grave error. The problem of the Arabic Wikipedias is that they do not have an article about the ancient Egyptian cemetery. I reformulated the introduction of w:en:Meir, Egypt to emphasize that this is an article on the necropolis. Unfortunately the ancient Egyptian name is unknown that's why the excavators named such places after any modern village or town. This does not mean that there is any connection or historic succession of both sites.

Fortunately both sites have monuments which are important to travelers, historians, and architects. In many towns and villages — at least in al-Minya and Asyut governorates — palaces were erected in the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century — so in the village of Meir: the palace of the family of Greis/Gurays (سرايا عائلة جريس). The people from the antiquities offices in al-Minya told me of about 300 palaces only in al-Minya governorate. That's why I have to strictly distinguish between both sides and I wrote two different articles.

Unfortunately many articles of villages and towns of Egypt are very small and do not contain any information on history and monuments. That's why you will find sometimes more comprehensive articles in a travel guide than in an Arabic Wikipedia (an example: al-Maʿṣara and w:ar:المعصرة (الداخلة)). Sometimes articles from the German Wikivoyage on Egypt were translated to the English Wikipedia. --RolandUnger (talk) 05:29, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks RolandUnger for clearing this up, I understand the situation better now, and actually with your last edit on the English version of the article, it becomes easier for Arabic Wikipedia users to translate it into Arabic, this will at least avoid the confusion created by mixing these two different locations. I agree with your point about strictness, it is needed and necessary, I struggled with this confusion for some time on Arabic Wikipedia about villages (especially in the delta), and it doesn't come from the closeness of sites only, but also from the similarity in pronunciations.

There is a wealth of information written in Arabic/French/German/English sources, but it needs a lot of efforts to get that into articles, it is a lot of work, and personally I have been working on a long term goal to add as much as I can about delta sites, and these sources helped me greatly, as an example I found the work of Stefan Timm "Das Christlich-Koptische Agypten in Arabischer Zeit" to be very comprehensive, it helped me find some good pointers about some of these sites in other western books, this is the main reason behind my eagerness to link these articles, to secure the link between the different sources of information, hoping this will enrich Arabic articles with information from other Wikipedias.

In fact for some time I thought about maybe it should all be recorded in wikidata in a certain format (like this site was named such and such attested in these sources ... etc) similar to what Jean Maspero & Gaston Wiet/Émile Amélineau/Étienne Marc Quatremère/Ramzy/... and others did (all of these and more are cited in Stefan Timm's work), this way we can have a central repository of names in Hieroglyphics/Coptic/Greek/Latin/Arabic of these locations with references to where these names were used in different sources ... etc, but again I know this is easily said than getting it done. at least on my side I'm trying to add these names to Arabic articles when there is a chance, and of course time. Once more thanks for taking the time to explain these matters, the links you added I believe will benefit me in the future in a good way. Elsayed Taha (talk) 06:23, 20 May 2021 (UTC)