Talk:Abraham Kovoor's challenge

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[edit] Article derivation

This page was origically part of Abraham Kovoor and it got deleted during an editing of that page. Atleast one user,Andries in his comment on 7 Dec 2004 in the talk page of that page expressed that the details of the challenge were informative but for some reasons he did not reinstate the paragrah. Even the user, BM who deleted that paragrah during the editing war agreed that he had no objection with the details of the challenge being published in the pages of Wikipedia. His stand was that it should not have been part of the page Abraham Kovoor and it should have been titled Abraham Kovoor's challenge. But he did not create that page for some inexplicable reasons.

I still find the challenge important not only as a historical fact, but as very relevant at present, at least in India. Godmen in various hues mushroom in my country claiming precisely the miraculous powers which Dr. Kovoor (and later others) challenged. The fact that nobody could successfully contest this challenge during his life-time also means that they are pure nonsense and those who claim that they have these powers are mere frauds.

Hence the creation of this page.

MANOJTV 05:07, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sourcing and number

I've added an {{unreferenced|date=August 2006}} tag to the article to encourage readers to provide a source for this information. Besides the standard Wikipedia policy of no original research, I'd like to get a specific answer to the question of what the original amount of the challenge was. The quoted number, "1, 00, 000 Srilanka rupees", does not conform to any numeric denotation that I'm familiar with in the English-speaking world. Standard English numbers use either commas to separate sets of 3 terms of positive magnitude and periods for decimals (American-style), or the reverse, periods and commas respectively (European-style), if I'm not mistaken, and neither style includes spaces. The quoted number has two commas separating varying amounts of digits and no periods, so it's unclear whether this is supposed to be 100,000 (incorrect 1st comma), 1,000,000 (missing zero), or something else. (This list of numbers suggests why spaces are bad within a number, given the overloaded use of both commas and periods.) A source would help editors to eliminate this confusion. Thank you. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:51, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I think the problem lies in that subcontinent numerical notation may differ from European notation in using the lakh instead of the million as the virgule point. thefamouseccles 02:00, 29 Mar 2006 (UTC)