User talk:Charles Matthews/Imperial Japan

Article move

Note that Observations of Japanese Soldier in Chinese front has been moved to Nakamura Diary. A couple of us are working to improve the content of this article to make parts suitable for usage in other articles...as well as establishing a high enough standard for it to stand alone. Part of that process was creating a less cumbersome title.

Thank you for adopting this user's contributions and heading them off from the VfD page. Yes, its is a struggle keeping up with his contributions and shaping up the english, but the content is good as is the intention.

Tobycat 16:48, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

the japanese articles

i cleaned one up (linked from my user page), but we might want to set up a temporary project page or designate a single user's page as the place to work on these, so people arent cleaning up the same texts again and again. Nateji77 14:56, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Japanese_expansion_in_mainland_Asia

Hello,

I submitted Japanese_expansion_in_mainland_Asia in a VfD (Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Japanese_expansion_in_mainland_Asia). I just noticed that you were handling the matter, sorry about that, if I knew I would have talked to you first. I still think the article is not encyclopedic though.

UnHoly 00:34, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Japanese Fascism:the bases to conduct at Japanese Nationalism

Just to let you know that I spotted this article on VFD. It appears to be by the same author and I thought you might be interested. Leithp 10:58, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

oh god

Well, I stumbled upon the works of our "friends", too... looks like there is a lot to clean up, but I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to translate the stuff from Japanese myself... My Japanese is not that good but at least I can trust my english.

I created the Category:Empire of Japan to catch all the articles, then at least they would be all in one place and one would find them. -- Mkill 11:36, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

You can't say User:Reader72 is not willing to learn. I asked him on his talk page to categorize his articles and... now he does! Good boy. -- Mkill 19:11, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Lost in Translation

Hi there... I´ve just seen the polemic about these articles. Why don´t the users post the articles in spanish, in es.wikipedia.org, so we can help in the spanish/english translation?? NIC1138 06:29, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

That's what I suggested to them on their user page. No reaction. -- Mkill 18:59, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Salvage

Pages such as

• British diplomatic peace proposes also political struggle between Toho Kai and Kodoha groups in 1942
• British diplomatic action and political movements in Japan during 1942

are quite salvageable (I've just come across your November 2005 nomination of these at AfD). The editor(s) responsible are prolific contributors here. I have made a point of collecting all I can of this material at User:Charles Matthews/Imperial Japan. Much better dealt with by copy edit, merge and redirect. I'd appreciate it if you'd just let me know of any such pages you find in future. They are quite characteristic, and are not machine translation (I found these by googling some signature typos). Charles Matthews 19:55, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. The problem with these pages was that a couple of the versions were genuinely unusable - as if someone had machine-translated them into Spanish and back again. The coherent versions had their own problems: a) being unsourced and b) revealed as cut&paste (ie copyright violations - automatic grounds for deletion) when I found the sources. The editor didn't help by just reinstating identical copies under increasingly lumpy titles instead of following guidelines by rewriting.

Best move, then, would be to go to those sources and use them more appropriately. They are:

• Forgotten Campaign: The Dutch East Indies Campaign 1941-1942 website.
• Kogun: the Japanese Army in the Pacific War, Saburo Hayashi, in collaboration with Alvin D. Coox. First published in Tokyo, 1951, as Taiheiyo senso rikusen gaishi. Reprint of the ed. published by Marine Corps Association, Quantico, Va. This can be found at www.tecom.usmc.mil/utm/kogun.txt. If this gives an 'access denied' error, there's currently a Google cache here but I don't know for how long. Tearlach 20:35, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

OK, I know that copyvios do occur with this material. That obviously rules out keeping those pages. I think machine translation doesn't explain the nature of the texts (and I have spent many hours on them). Charles Matthews 21:37, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

It's a mystery, then. I just found the version in question: [1]. It could probably have been cleaned up with a lot of work, but I proposed it for deletion because a coherent version already existed. Tearlach 13:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I really don't like treating it as a bad joke. It's the make 'fun of foreigners' riff for anglophones, which has run long enough AFAIC. I can read it without problem. Charles Matthews 14:52, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the first part; but I didn't put it there.

Sourcing and verification

The above discussion does, by the way, touch on a wider problem. Currently, following the John Seigenthaler affair, there's a blitz on sourcing.

Skimming down the list of articles at User:Charles Matthews/Imperial Japan, I think they need more than cleanup. Very few of them cite any sources. How do we know any of it is a) factually correct and b) unbiased even if the basic facts are correct? Copyright violation is also an issue.

For example, check out Organization of Japanese Intelligence Secret Services. A deal of that comes verbatim from here and here at vikingphoenix.com, which looks to me like a partisan source with an anti-Japanese agenda (see [2] and [3]).

I can see from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Articles on Imperial Japan I'm not the only person to raise this issue. At the very least, these articles need an {{unreferenced}} tag. Tearlach 19:38, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm not for an ultra-sceptical approach, and never have been. There are plenty of weaknesses there. There are things which (in my opinion) are probably lifted from communist propaganda that circulated at the time. There are comparisons with Nazi Germany that I routinely cut out. The worst single point is probably the credence given to the Tanaka Memorial; which our page says is forged. So I always cut any reference to that. There are uncritical uses of some of the anti-Hirohito stories. There are also some worst-construction interpretations (the story about the Reuters agent who jumped out of the window, for example). Looking at the sources question first: I don't think there is a problem with fabrication - this is all sourced from somewhere, that is. As such, it is in the same state as much of the rest of WP. Yes, the sources are uncritically used. But when I pick up a book about this, for example one by Richard Storry I have to hand (Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia 1894-1943), I find plenty to corroborate what is up here. That is, on specific points it is perhaps a bit wrong, but taken as a whole (and the process of creating a bunch of pages has perhaps mostly run its course) it really is something to work with.

Therefore I much prefer the 'classical' WP attitude: clean it up, look to ensure NPOV, check it out. There is intense dislike (wiki-en mailing list discussion) of the current 'culture' at AfD. The pages that have been deleted there, fortunately, have mostly deserved it (semi-ranting stuff about fascism, not particularly based in fact). AfD is supposed to operate within policy. Bad English is nothing to do with policy. Using AfD as a clean-up route is wrong, too. Posting an AfD notice prevents a page being moved to a bettet title, or partially merged, which is often the obvious step.

I feel strongly that WP has been built on: good stubs, clean-up, allowing articles time to improve. That includes:'placeholder text', which clearly this often is; scaffolding (i.e. keeping things that promote new pages once they are wikified); and allowing time for the cavalry (academic folk) to arrive. I am also a card-carrying 'systemic bias' person, and will always argue that cutting stuff because the sources are less accessible to check impoverishes the encyclopedia. Charles Matthews 20:15, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't disagree with that, as the traceable sources do check out. I'm just a little jittery that a major section of Wikipedia's historical coverage all comes, unreferenced, from a single anonymous source via a Chinese-whispers transmission. Wikipedia:Cite sources is explicit that sources should be known, and that contested unsourced material can, ultimately, be removed.

Also, one shouldn't underestimate the potential for garbling. For instance, cleanup on the Double Leaf Society led to an article saying that it comprised officers with remaining samurai links, and that the Kodaha and Toseiha factions derived from a split in it. But as I said in Talk:Double Leaf Society, tracking down the source (which appears to be a well-researched piece) finds that it said the Double Leaf Society comprised radicals who were taking the place of old-style samurai officers, and that the two factions were within the army as a whole, not the Double Leaf Society. Tearlach 14:22, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh dear, I've posted one article for AfD. It's Development_of_Japanese_Nationalists_Ideology_since_Meiji_Times. The reason is that it seemed to be almost exactly the same as Japanese nationalist thinking in the Meiji era.

Bathrobe 14:12, 13 March 2006 (UTC)