Talk:Kwame Nkrumah

Osagyefo: "Redeemer" or "The Victorious One"?

Most sources claim that "Osagyefo", a name that Nkrumah called himself, translates to "The Redeemer". These sources include the International Herald Tribune [1], the HyperHistory article that I cited in this article [2], Encarta [3], TIME Magazine [4], and PBS [5]. However, the English Wikipedia's article states that it means "The Victorious One". There are even sources online which repeat that. It gets a lot less search engine hits (see [6] vs. [7]), but any contrary claim is worth investigation. So here is what I found:

The first result is from a paragraph which is a paraphrasal of the Wikipedia article, so similar it is not very worthy of even being called a paraphrasal. Since it is so close to the Wikipedia article, I would assume that it was copied from there. The text originally said "victorious leader", then it was changed to "saviour" by an IP, closer to the translation backed up by reliable sources. It was then changed to "the victorious one" by another IP, in February 2007. It was apparently left unchanged.

The second result I never really checked, but since it is a blog, it is not considered a reliable source. Results #10, #13, and #25 are also links to the "travelblog".

The third result, written on August 1, 2008, is an exact copy of this version of the English Wikipedia article. Since Wikipedia itself is an unreliable source, this also can be dismissed as untrustworthy. Results 4-20 are also copies, in one form or another, of the Wikipedia article. Zazzle, a site that sells products, is a site that has Nkrumah memorabilia clothing with unattributed copies of the Wikipedia article alongside them.

The twenty-first result for "Kwame Nkrumah" Osagyefo "Victorious One" -wikipedia, a sports magazine, seems reliable, but that is only one source. There are multiple sources that say that Osagyefo translates to "Redeemer", five of them I pointed out above. One versus five, hmm... 22-24 is more Wikipedia scraper sites. 26 is just "hip-hop rumors", and one comment on the gossip article copies the WP article, and it is followed by two more scraper sites. 29 is a dead link, but can be retrieved through the cache. It is an article about this, in a students' union newspaper. Another reliable source, but that's two against all those other reliable sources. I'm not sure how this is to be dealt with. — Jonas (talk · proposal) 01:42, 19 October 2008 (UTC)