Talk:Europeans in Medieval China/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: 10W40 (talk · contribs) 06:04, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

This article represents a large investment of time and it has quite a collection of research notes (142). But it leaves me wondering, What is it actually about? It's not really about Europeans in Medieval China since that's only three of the ten sections: "European merchants in China," "European missionaries in China," and "European captives in Central Asia." The section on captives is one short paragraph, so even this breakdown overstates the percentage of relevant material.
The section titles are repetitive: I recommend "Mechants," "Missionaries," and "Captives." The article title tells the reader that we are talking about Europeans in China.
The first paragraph is a hash. It tries to provide a dictionary-type definition for the title and fails. Defining "Europeans" as "people from western Eurasia" is less than helpful. As there is no generally accepted definition of "Medieval China," there is no simple solution to this problem. My advise: Don't open with a definition. Open with an interesting or outstanding fact. There is a good example in the second paragraph: "It is thought that thousands of Europeans lived in Imperial China during the period of Mongol rule." Rework that as, "It is thought that there were thousands of Europeans in Medieval China during the period of Mongol rule" and you got yourself an opening.
One more recommendation: Get the Chinese characters out of the running text. For the vast majority of readers, they simply clutter up the text. With Wiki editing software, it's easy enough for editors to put them in the footnotes -- and for readers to access them there. Journal articles might put characters in the running text to avoid footnotes, but no book would do it that way. I have Needham's Science and Civilization in China. (OK, not all of it.) He puts the characters in secondary footnotes at the bottom of the page. Cambridge History of China puts the characters after the name in the subject's index listing. Wikipedia can't claim to be more scholarly than Needham or Cambridge. Published works aimed at the general reader don't include Chinese characters at all, not even in the footnotes or the index. 10W40 (talk) 07:39, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Note: Per the Manual of Style, Chinese characters are recommended for entities without a corresponding Wikipedia article in English. SounderBruce 07:43, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

It also recommends that we, "minimize interruption to the flow of reading." I don't see anything in the guideline that says you can't put the characters in a footnote. 10W40 (talk) 07:54, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

• Other problems I noticed:
  The paragraph on Sampul needs to go. It's not Medieval and it's not European. A European is someone born in Europe--the word should not be used in a racial sense.
  The article needs a conclusion, a paragraph or two that gives the reader an overview or at least wraps things up somehow. Here is the last sentence of the article as it currently stands: "The Ming Empire was at least willing to engage in conflicts nearby, however, when it offered relief forces to its tributary state Joseon (Korea) against invading Japanese forces in the Imjin War (1592–1598)." There is nothing here about Europeans or Medieval China! 10W40 (talk) 08:27, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The six criteria:
1a. Satisfactory as far as grammar and clarity goes
1b. The lead should prepare the readers for the major points the article will make, i.e. say something about the merchants, something about the missionaries, and something about the captives. The ending of the lead, a stress point in any article, is about Rabban Bar Sauma, who is not European.
2a. The is a large number of references, many with links, formatted consistently.
2b. The in-line citation format is used consistently
2c. It's clean as far as original research and copyright violations go. I cranked up the "Copyvio detector" tool and checked the top suggested passages. The most similar passage was given a 23.7% likelyhood as a source. After checking the passage manually, I'd say it's more like zero percent.
3a. The level of comprehensiveness is satisfactory, but it could be improved. John Mandeville gets all of two sentences. For centuries, Mandeville was the most famous of all Medieval travelers. Columbus read him eagerly. Nineteenth century scholars debunked Mandeville as a fraud and plagerist. It's a dramatic tale that could be told in greater detail.
3b. The article lacks focus. As I explained above, most of the sections are not about Europeans in Medieval China.
4. I didn't notice any POV. In fact, the article is in need some larger themes to organize the facts around.
5. Stable
6. The papal letter and the tombstone are both excellent illustrations. 10W40 (talk) 09:50, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Response by PericlesofAthens

Dear 10W40 (talk): I want to thank you for taking the time to review this article. Unfortunately the guild of copyeditors have not yet tackled this article as thoroughly as I had hoped in these past few months since I've added the tag seeking their help. The article is okay as it stands, but just recently I've done my own bit of copyediting, removing some extraneous material and combining sentences that seemed a bit too short (instead of being crisp, they seemed to end abruptly, which was perhaps due to additions by editors other than me). It's perhaps a bit too late for them to do so now that you've chosen to review the article, but perhaps their input won't be necessary if we work together to address your specific points and concerns. Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:32, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• I have edited the section titles as you've suggested, with a small exception to the "missionaries" section where I've also added "diplomats" to the title, seeing how it also covers diplomacy.
• As for the section on captives, I don't think it would make sense to add this to any other section, but as for it deserving its own section, I'm not sure about that. It is yet another category of Europeans that shouldn't be ignored, even though they are seemingly less important than merchants, missionaries, and diplomats. I'd need more convincing, however, for the whole section to just be removed without further justification. It at least cites three different reliable sources (Goody, Spence, and Roux), so there's some evidence that it is discussed by more than one academic and isn't just some fringe topic.
• I have reworked the first sentence as you've suggested, although it is worded a bit differently from your precise suggestion. I hope that you find it more suitable than how it read before.
• As for the use of Chinese characters in this article, User:SounderBruce is entirely right to point out the Manual of Style in regards to this. I'm afraid to say that's how it is generally done in Wikipedia articles, in numerous articles that I've personally submitted and passed for both GA and even FA status. Sequestering every Chinese character to a footnote is actually not as useful as you think, since their presence in the body of the text also immediately allows other editors to create new articles on such topics when necessary, with the Chinese characters readily available for that task. If the Chinese characters took up an entire line of text or more then that would certainly be grounds to shifting non-English and non-Latin alphabet material into a footnote. However, there is presently no such line of text in this article.
• Your point about Sampul is problematic, because we do not know how many of these individuals (if any) were born in Europe or not. We certainly know about their Greek lineage, and Greeks are (obviously) a European people (in the geographic if not the "racial" or Europoid/Caucasian sense as you are alluding to here). It merely demonstrates the level of interaction between East and West and bolsters the previous points about Greeks traveling to Central Asia and spreading forms of Hellenistic art there.
• As for a proper ending to the article, the "Renewed contacts during the Ming dynasty" is there to clarify how direct contact was lost for about a century and a half. You do make a good point about the very last sentence, though (referring to the tangential topic of the Imjin War), so I've decided to just move that point to a footnote, in case anyone wants to know some further info about Ming foreign policy.
• As for Rabban Bar Sauma, yes, he was not a European, but he is present in this article (and mentioned in the intro) because he was the first known person of China to reach Europe. It's also rather relevant considering the amount of traffic going the other way from Europe towards the Mongol realm, and demonstrates yet another point about the fluidity of relatively safe travel within the vast Mongol realm. It shows that this sort of contact went both ways, not just everything gravitating towards China.
• As for John Mandeville, perhaps you're right that more could be said about him and the impact of his work on the minds of contemporary and later Europeans. However, I don't think that should really inhibit this article from achieving GA status. He is at least linked to and given a couple sentences regarding his alleged travels as well as his work of literature (that most likely borrows material from others, as I've mentioned in the article). I didn't think to write more about him in the "merchants" section, because his impact on the viewpoint of Columbus and others is rather irrelevant to that topic.
• However, Mandeville, Polo, and Pordenone's writings perhaps represent a significant enough corpus of travel literature to consider creating an entirely new section about that towards the end of the article. I don't think it should inhibit the GA status of this article as it stands now, but it is certainly something to consider in the near future. I'd need sufficient time to do some proper research and gathering of reliable sources to construct this hypothetical new section, though.

Thank you once again for reviewing the article. I look forward to your reply. Regards, Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:32, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

IMO, what the article needs is some sort of theme or narrative. Why is this material of interest to the reader? The theme that occurs to me is to present the Medieval travelers as a prelude to the Age of Discovery. We can put brief statements in the intro and conclusion about how the writings from this period influenced discovers like Columbus and Magellen. Perhaps that's an old fashioned approach. It seems my review has been rejected,[1] so I'm not sure if I have the authority to pass or not pass anything. 10W40 (talk) 04:01, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Wait, what? Why was your review rejected precisely? What happened? Do you even know why? Does this mean my article will simply return to the pool of articles available for others to review it? In either case your Age of Discovery suggestion is interesting, but quite honestly there shouldn't be much digital ink spilled about it. It's already alluded to in that final section about renewed contact during China's Ming Dynasty via the Spanish and Portuguese exploratory missions in the East. However, you bring up a worthy point about Columbus and Magellan, both of whom could be mentioned in a hypothetical new section on literature written by travelers to China, explaining its impact on the Western world thereafter. Pericles of Athens^Talk 09:49, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

It just says "disallowed," whatever that means. I put a message here to try figure what's going on. 10W40 (talk) 11:45, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

This is a misunderstanding. What 10W40 was referring to was me "disallowing" his claim for points in the WikiCup before he had concluded this review. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 13:42, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Cwmhiraeth: oh. Well that's good news, then. If I recall correctly, 10W40 (talk) is somewhat new to Wikipedia, so perhaps he was simply confused by all of these procedures. @10W40: I look forward to the rest of the review process here and hopefully sometime in the near future (when I have sufficient spare time) I can create a decent section about literature. Until that point, however, do you think this article lacks enough of a single unifying thread or narrative that it would hinder its ability to pass this GA nomination? I'm willing to make any specific sort of edits that you want to see in the article, but I'm somewhat at a loss for how to tighten things and arrange it any better. Your thoughts? Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:10, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

@10W40: Tackling this review was ambitious for your first editing experience. It seems to me that you have been doing well and addressing the GA criteria. If you need any help in bringing the review to a conclusion, feel free to ask. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 20:28, 12 January 2017 (UTC)