Talk:Oromo conflict

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sleuthsr21. Peer reviewers: Donkask.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:59, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

POV and grammar problems

The article has recently become a mess of pov-pushing ideas and poor grammar. I've tried to fix some of them, but there's quite a lot to do. Eridian314 (talk) 19:46, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

civil war

I understand the definition of a civil war is several factions being pitted against one another. How does the Oromo-Tigraya alliance fit this??? Thanks!!!! Bokoharamwatch (talk) 16:01, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Rewiting this article

I've been thinking of nearly completely rewriting this article for a while. Currently, it's more of a timeline than an overview of the conflict. On top of that, it has a major POV problem. I've been thinking of making it more similar to other conflict articles and completely getting rid of the POV. What do you think?--Garmin21 (talk) 17:40, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

@Garmin21: Removing POVs is a bad idea, but NPOVing would be good, if you're aware of missing POVs based on good sources. A lot of the academic sources for the older events may be offline, which will make it difficult for others to check the info, but we may have to live with that: the assumption is that sooner or later, people with access to the offline sources will check the edits.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "similar to other conflict articles", since that depends a lot on whether they're recent or old armed conflicts, and the quality of the editing and balance between editors. Recent conflict articles tend to focus mostly on whatever gets shouted the most by the Western mainstream media, and often get lots of copy/pasted copyvios with reportedly newsy type reports of what reportedly happens, reportedly and allegedly. The recent (by year of event) material in the current version of this article is (I think) mostly by me, and I can quite believe it's rather POV, but that's due to the random nature of sources I happened to notice and had time to use: individual sources are not very often NPOV on their own (despite claiming to be neutral, which differs from NPOV). Adding missing POVs to my edits there would definitely be useful.

I've started a WP:SPLIT for the 2021 phase, but that's quite independent to any plans to reorganise this page, which mostly covers three decades of the XXth century, and then mostly has a timeline of the pre-Abiy-Ahmed epoch. I suggest that more info on the 2021 phase should go into Oromo conflict (2021), and then the summary of that (apart from the context) should come back to this article, appropriately reworded and referenced.

I would suggest first considering if it's possible to WP:SPLIT OLA from OLF as you suggested, mainly starting from 2018. Boud (talk) 00:06, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

@Boud: Unfortunately, Wowzers122 attempted to split the OLF article into the OLA here Draft:Oromo Liberation Army but his submission was declined.

What I mean by "similar to other conflict articles" is like how other articles have sections for specific things for instance in the Tigray war article the timeline is just one part of the article while other events like protests, reactions, Humanitarian crisis, and attempt peace proposals fill the rest of the article. In other words, I want to separate the engagements (the actual battles, ambush, and skirmishes) from the other parts of the conflict like protest, attempt peace proposals, and war crimes. I am also fully aware that in conflicts and especially in African conflicts the difference between a riot and a full-blown battle kinda blends together but I will try to make do.--Garmin21 (talk) 18:22, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

@Garmin21: I would tend to agree that Draft:Oromo Liberation Army of 14:17, 19 September 2021 doesn't have much new material, and as it stands, would probably not survive a merger proposal if it were started as a separate article in the main namespace.

On your list of aspects of a conflict, there are also the long-term sociopolitical and competition-for-resources reasons. Historians make claims, in principle based on evidence, of why and how the conflict developed. That evidence can take many years to gather and analyse. The Tigray War article is about a conflict with long-term roots, but the article itself is on the very recent past - just 12 months, and mostly based on news reports and a few academic comments, not on historians' analyses. A longer term perspective - in 5 or 10 years' time with sources from professional historians - might motivate a completely different structure to that article. A better example than the Tigray War could be the Iraq War or the Syrian civil war, although these both start in the world-wide-web/mass-Internet epoch, while the current Oromo conflict article starts in the 1970s. Addis Ababa University has an http-only open-access research repository which you could look through for sources. You could look through Category:Universities and colleges in Oromia Region to see how many universities provide similar OA research repositories. My guess is that quite a bit of info is online, but you would have to make some effort to find it. Archiving the sources (Wayback Machine for pdfs, and be patient - the server quite often takes 10-15 minutes before the archived file is ready) would be a good idea, even though there's no hint that the TDF-OLA-et-al-coalition have any plans to pillage and destroy universities like the Eritrean Defence Forces did in Tigray Region. Luckily, several of the Tigray universities' web pages are stored in the Wayback Machine.

Anyway, my suggestion would be to make sure you keep the current content in your proposed restructuring, even though re-ordered and reorganised. Maybe start it off as a user subpage if you don't feel confident in doing the whole thing in one go or if you're worried that others may be upset if you accidentally remove the content that they contributed. Another suggestion is to give an outline of the likely section, subsection, subsubsection headers here on the talk page to see if anyone objects. @CentreLeftRight, Madbrad200, MfactDr, Catlemur, محمد العجاني, Wowzers122, and Applodion: - you are the main contributors to this article and might wish to comment on Garmin21's proposal of a restructure. Boud (talk) 00:10, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

A few quick examples at the AAU OA repository [warning: you have to allow access to ajax.googleapis.com for javascript, so don't expect any privacy, especially since it's http, not https]:

• a search on 'Oromo conflict' gives 29 results
• a search on 'Oromo' gives 322 results

Boud (talk) 00:21, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

@Boud: Thanks, and yes, I always write everything I'm adding to the article in my sandbox before I actually add it to the main article, and obviously I'm not gonna rewrite everything. I'm gonna keep most of the page and just rewrite the things that are POV and add new sections like a war crimes section, refugees, and peace proposals section.--Garmin21 (talk) 01:02, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

@Garmin21: I think your list of new sections is justified and I hope you find some good sources. I started off Oromo Liberation Army. Boud (talk) 02:39, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Removing copy edit tag

I went through the article and found relatively little wrong, although I did remove several emotional sentences with no additional specifics. I am leaving the matter of WP:DUE for someone more familiar with the situation. The English itself is fine at this point though, as far as I can tell. If somebody disagrees and wants to re-tag, fine; I would however ask that the post something here to explain what that is —missing context for example, although that isn’t really a *copy edit* problem. Elinruby (talk)