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Talk:General Butt Naked

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Good articleGeneral Butt Naked has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
May 28, 2007Good article nomineeNot listed
March 8, 2022Good article nomineeListed
Current status: Good article

Sources for early life claims?

[edit]

Setting aside any possible exaggeration of his acts in wartime, it seems as though the claims about the sources of these behaviors being his native religion and its emphasis on human sacrifice (especially given his alleged grooming to become a high priest) are ultimately coming from him. I don't see confirmation of any of this in the coverage of religion in the main Krahn article, and even some of the sources cited in this article which otherwise report his claims credulously mention as an aside that Christianity and Islam were near-omnipresent before the start of the civil war, when stress and desperation supposedly led to some return to the old ways. As a convert who now makes a living by preaching, he would have good reason to lie about this to cast the native religion and his own behaviors in as negative a light as possible, to make his conversion more spectacular.

If there isn't academic consensus that these claims are at least plausible based on something solid (like existing ethnographic studies of the Krahn), I feel like the article ought to approach them less credulously (even just by adding "allegedly" or "according to him", etc). And if there is some kind of academic analysis of these claims, I think it would be good to describe that more clearly, because all the citations I checked out seem to be lightly researched "the craziest story ever!"-type online articles. But I'm not an experienced Wikipedia editor and I don't know if inserting "allegedly" would cross a line when the sources for the article seem to accept his claims uncritically. Ntrxz (talk) 04:20, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to improve the article by making it clear where statements are his own, not independently verified. "Allegedly" wouldn't fit there (it's others who might allege something about somebody), but phrases such as "as he described it" or "according to his own account" should work.
Also, new topics on talk pages should be added at the bottom, not at the top. The easiest way of doing so is to click the "Add topic" link below the page title. Gawaon (talk) 05:57, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Gawaon for the correction and suggestions. I've never used a talk page before, as you probably could tell. :) Ntrxz (talk) 13:16, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Don't worry, welcome to Wikipedia! You'll get used to it :) Gawaon (talk) 14:47, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]