Talk:Bayajidda

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 Bayajidda was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Reviewed version: April 18, 2007
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Well, he certainly qualifies as royalty, because he was born a prince, married a princess, and then married a queen. But he still stands out, both in name and in content, from a lot of the rest of the royalty and nobility work group articles. Picaroon 03:26, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA nomination

I am failing this page for several reasons.

1a) The prose is grammatically incorrect at times and there are spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, etc.
1b) It is very difficult to tell from the page whether Bayajidda was in fact a mythical person or not. The page says that "some think" he was and "some think" he wasn't. Who are these people? Where does the preponderance of the evidence lie? Also, the page flips back and forth between referring to him as a character in fictional works and as a historical personage; it is extremely confusing. These issues need to be resolved or explained much more clearly to the reader. Also, if Bayajidda's historical reality is in such dispute, I would recommend a much more extended discussion of that topic with more scholarly sources. Awadewit 23:12, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
1a) Could you please point to the places which are incorrect or, better yet, fix them yourself? The article is 99% my own words and I have read it many times, so I can't exactly fix it myself. Thank you.

I am not going to copyedit the entire article. If you do not feel up to the task yourself, I urge you to list it at the League of Copyeditors. Here are some examples from the lead:

  • Originating in Baghdad, Bayajidda traveled across Africa and arrived in the Kanem-Bornu Empire, where he married a local princess; tensions with her father, the king, forced him to flee.
  • First, it should be made clear that "According to legend..."
  • Second, "originating" sounds odd in this context. Was he born there?
  • Third, it should be "arrived at".
  • "tensions with her father, the king, forced him to flee" sounds awkward.
  • The lead does not make clear why the knife is special.
  • With this knife he proceeded onto the final stopping place on his jorney, the city of Daura, where he slew a serpent who terrorized the townspeople and married the local queen, Daurama.
  • "onto" should be "on to"
  • "final stopping place" sounds odd
  • "jorney" is misspelled - it is "journey"
  • Verb tense should be clearer - "where he slew a serpent who had been terrorizing the townspeople"
  • The reader still thinks he is married to his first wife; the reader's assumption will probably be that he cannot marry another woman, but since this is myth and those boring rules don't apply, make it clear that he is indeed marrying again.
  • While some Hausa maintain that Bayajidda was real, others hold the view that he did not actually exist, but is instead a personification of a group of people from West African history. - This should say that some Hausa think he was real but that scholars doubt his existence.
1b) "It is very difficult to tell from the page whether Bayajidda was in fact a mythical person or not." It's as simple as this, Hausa people think of him as an integral part of their ethnic history. Many believe he existed, and I have found no reference to a Hausa publicly stating their disbelief in Bayajidda. Scholars, meanwhile, take it with the same grain of salt they take all myths with. The few scholarly works related to Bayajidda are not going to state "Bayajidda didn't exist," they're going to assume the educated readership can make their own conclusion. This is both a fact and unverifiable at the same time. Picaroon 00:14, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
The article should be written from a scholarly perspective, since those are the verifiable sources. I'm sure that scholars say in their writings that some Hausa believe that Bayajidda was a real historical personage, so you can cite that belief from those sources as well. The page is extremely confusing because it does not clearly articulate these distinctions. Since the scholarly sources on this say he was probably mythical, I would argue that the page should be written as if this story were a myth. Some parts of it read as if Bayajidda were real. That does not mean that the page should not acknowledge that some Hausa believe in Hausa, but it must be clear to the reader that this is a myth. Awadewit 03:46, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Alright, thank you for your comments. I'll work on the article more over the next week. With regards to "originating," that's the best I can do - the various versions of the legend say he was a Baghdadi prince who left Baghdad for Africa, and that's it. No mention of birthplace or his mother. Picaroon 03:57, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

What about "Bayajidda, who originated from Baghdad, traveled across Africa..." or "Bayajidda, who was originally from Baghdad, traveled across Africa..." Awadewit 04:11, 20 April 2007 (UTC)