Talk:Agriculture in China

Suggestions for Improvement (Copied from Wikipedia:Requests for feedback)

I recently created this article on the agriculture of China, and I need suggestions on what improvements might be made. Specifically, are there any important segments of information anyone feels I've left out or need expanding? Are there any statements in dire need of citations? How could the article be improved graphically? Thanks! johnpseudo 19:22, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

That's a very nice article! It's well organized into sections and is well written in an easy to read style. You are right in that some additional citations could be used. There are several entire sections that don't have a single citation, including the introduction, Communism in China, and Major agricultural products. You might want to use citation templates for your references since the simple links provided for your online sources aren't very informative of what the sources are. Also, the images should all be related to the content of the article and they all should be captioned. For example, it would be more appropriate to have a climatological map rather than a political map of the country (if you can find or get someone to make a agricultural map, that would be even better), and the image of terraced fields should be related to something in the text regarding the use of terraces in Chinese agriculture. Overall it's a very nice article. Thanks for posting and happy editing! —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 12:46, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

livestock

that paragraph appears to be cut-off, mid sentence.

Proposed merge

Regarding the tag that Vmenkov just put up: I agree with merging, and think anything short of merging these two articles would be frivolous. I had never noticed Agriculture in the People's Republic of China before, but if I did I would have done the same as Vmenkov is doing now. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 07:20, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Merging from Agriculture in the People's Republic of China?

Until recently I did not even completely realize that we've got two separate articles. I've noticed it when I was looking in one of the articles for an edit that I thought I had done there earlier... until I realized that I had done it in the other one.

I suppose the rationale for having two articles was to have Agriculture in the People's Republic of China talk about agriculture in today's PRC and its history since 1949, while the other would also somehow cover Taiwan (it doesn't, and there isn't that much on agriculture in the Economy of Taiwan article either), Agriculture and aquaculture in Hong Kong, Macau (not that much agriculture in the latter, though...), and the pre-1949 history (but we have a separate article on the history anyway). So the current situation is that we've pretty much got duplication: different people talking about the same things in two articles, in different words and in somewhat different order. In my view, having two articles (none of which is a disambig page) will keep resulting in similar editors' and readers' confusion - mostly because there isn't all that much to say in Agriculture in China that won't also fit in Agriculture in the People's Republic of China.

We can consider at least two possible reorganization options:

1. Move most of the content into Agriculture in the People's Republic of China, keeping Agriculture in China as a sort of a disambiguation pages, containing just links into Agriculture in the People's Republic of China, Agriculture in Taiwan, whatever HK/Macau pages, and some kind of history page.
2. Fully merge Agriculture in the People's Republic of China into Agriculture in China; the latter article would also contain small sections on pre- and post-1949 history, Taiwan, HK, Macau, with an appropriate {{more|Specialized article}} tag in each one.

Vmenkov (talk) 07:29, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I support option #2. It's crazy that this has gone on for over a year now. I noticed when someone created the History of agriculture in the People's Republic of China article (which was just a big copy-paste from a website), but I didn't catch the Agriculture of People's Republic page. Honestly, I don't know what the politically-correct thing to do is, but I think that keeping this article's title will be pretty straightforward to most people, especially since as you said, Taiwan doesn't have much agriculture. johnpseudo 14:29, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I also support #2. No matter what we do people will try to turn it into a political battle, but in any case, #2 is best for the encyclopaedia, and that's what matters. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 15:34, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Why we should be careful about using large tables

Even though wikipedia is not paper, we have to limit the size of articles in order to create material that effectively informs our readers in a limited amount of time. A page-long table that effectively just says "China is the largest producer of a lot of things" is a waste of space. It's not important for the general "Agriculture in China" article to note specifically which year and by what amounts China was able to achieve the "largest producer" role for every specific agricultural product. If anything, we need to simply improve and elaborate on the table that is already there, and focus solely on the top 10-15 products that China produces. If we can't fit all of the information that we want to fit into a small table, then we have to find some way to categorize and break down the information into smaller charts. johnpseudo 17:10, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

This table looks like little more than boasting to me, since it lists only times that China was the "largest" producer, rather than using any objective quantitative inclusion criteria. Why should "largest" producer one year be included, and "second largest" producer another not be? From a numbers standpoint, the difference between the two might be very small. The difference is just in bragging rights. Coming from the country that's eagerly building the largest dam in the world and that rushed to put a man in space when basic needs of a large portion of the population are still not met, it's no surprise that bragging rights seem to be playing a big role in this table. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 19:56, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree.johnpseudo 23:20, 3 December 2009 (UTC)