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Issues

I have a few questions and issues with this page:

  1. Do we have the CC-by-SA right for this?
  2. Does the author want it here?
  3. I am pretty sure that calling Native Americans from that time period primitive is offensive and inaccurate.
  4. Is Chemurgy a "new science" as the page states?

Thanks, --Lonny 19:12, 2 February 2011 (PST)

"Pre-industrial" or "Pre-Columbian" might be less-freighted euphemisms for "primitive", but I'm not sure why the modifier is there at all. This sentence from the article:
  • "One of the remarkable things about the primitive American Indians was their use of innumerable plants for food, clothing, shelter, medicines and implements."
makes as much sense without the word "primitive". The sentence takes an unnecessarily Eurocentric, post-industrial, and rather naive view: there is nothing "remarkable" about the resourcefulness and creativity of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples everywhere have been resourceful and creative at adapting to their environments. This was equally true of ancestral Europeans before the advent of industry or even agriculture. A less naive sentence might be:
  • "To post-industrial peoples, accustomed to purchasing most of what they consume from modern department stores, it may seem remarkable that Native Americans knew how to use innumerable plants for food, clothing, shelter, medicines and implements."
We cannot assume the content is available under {{CC-by-sa-3.0}}, as it originates from a county government rather than the US Federal government which does not copyright most of its works. In the US, state, county, and local governments are less likely to place their works in the public domain. The Forest Preserve District of Cook County site, for example, says: "Copyright © 2009 Forest Preserve District of Cook County, All Rights Reserved." That site does not have an obvious search function, so we can search it with {{Google custom}}:
which does not find any hits. The source document might not be online. To obtain and document permission to publish this content freely, we would presumably follow a procedure similar to commons:COM:OTRS. A simpler method would be to reword the material so it is not a verbatim copy of the original. Since I have no access to the original, I don't know whether the Appropedia contributor did that. --Teratornis 11:46, 3 February 2011 (PST)
I just came across - User:ShaMod mentioned it, and I got to checking the source.
I'd like us to be bold in dealing with copyvios - if it's not explicitly CC-by-sa with proper attribution, then it's suspect as a copyvio, and at least deserves a {{copyvio}} tag before anything else, raising the question. That might seem a little unfriendly, but we can always soften the look of the copyvio tag :-).
Anyway, I think ShaMod might be doing some culling & maybe rewriting of the article - I emphasized that he has carte blanche to delete any or all of it. --Chriswaterguy 13:14, 26 August 2011 (PDT)
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