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Talk:Military of the Mamluk Sultanate

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WP:NPOV and WP:OR problems

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As I noted earlier ([1]), the bulk of this article is attributed to primary sources, which is a WP:OR problem in itself. Having a second look now, things are worse than that. The lead alone, with its no less than four supposedly "official" names attributed to a primary source, is already dubious. The rest of the article seems to spend much of its time emphasizing an "Egyptian" identity on the Mamluk military, despite no such emphasis found in reliable secondary sources, piling POV problems piled on top of the likely original research. For example, a statement like "The naval fleet (الأسطول البحري) was made up of Egyptian leaders and soldiers only," cites three secondary sources by Yaacov Lev, the first two of which say nothing of this kind, and I assume the third (with no page numbers) is no better. Another examples is the paragraph with the statements "The native Egyptian element was known to be the most faithful and loyal element of the army, and this became clear in many situations, (...)" and "One of the most important policies of Sultan El-Ashraf Sha'ban was to increase the number of indigenous Egyptians in the regular military corps", attributed to two sources (Levanoni 1995 and Van Steenbergen 2011) that do not say these things. Many other claims look doubtful. There are of course some paragraphs and sections with no or few sources, but it's clear that even the existing citations should be treated as potentially dubious or misleading.

The Mamluk military is already described in part at Mamluk Sultanate; this article is so far a WP:POVFORK that is worse than anything there. I am updating the maintenance templates accordingly, in the faint hope that more serious editors can salvage this, but frankly it may merit a WP:BLOWITUP. R Prazeres (talk) 00:22, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]