Talk:David Crockett Graham

Talk

I just uploaded a lot of work over the brief sketch that was put up just last month. There are still gaps to be filled and images to upload. It should be noted that David Crockett Graham was my Grandfather. I knew him well as a child. He died when I was 11. I have spent a long time working on this and have found it much more demanding than I first expected. For one thing, I found out much about my Grandfather that I had not previously known. For another, I have been constantly aware of the need to respect the neutral point of view and documentation requirements of Wikipedia, or, for that matter, any truthful scholarly endeavor. I am also aware that as soon as I put it up, it will be open to anyone to edit. I hope that such editing will be done with the same care and respect for my Grandfather and for Wikipedia standards that I have tried to show. I should also say that while I found some critical works on him difficult to read, I was impressed that they ultimately converged to positive conclusions (see, e.g., Cummings). I plan on inviting several of the scholars whose works I cited to review what I have written (I have been in correspondence with many of them already), although I can't say whether they are Wikipedians or whether they will see a need to edit. choogendyk (talk) 02:39, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing that the subject was your grandfather, and for your effort to maintain neutrality. You have done excellent work on this article, and I have rerated it as C Class. I would have liked to give it A Class - the quality of the completed sections absolutely warrants it - but it's quite clear that the Ministry and Mission section is incomplete, and there are some organization issues in the sections about his natural history collecting. I would be happy to revisit the article rating or give it a copyedit once you've done some additional work; please drop a note on my talk page if you'd like me to do either or both. Thanks for sharing your work here. Maralia (talk) 17:04, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Romanizations

Although the current article uses Graham's spellings, this is not consistent with Wikipedia's policy on Chinese Romanization. In order to keep things clear for readers across all articles, pinyin is used unless the name/phrase/etc was famous enough under its old name that it continues to be used by modern scholars. Because many older English sources use older romanizations, the consensus approach for articles like this seems to be to use the pinyin romanizations, but give the older romanization in parentheses the first time a name is mentioned (e.g., "...Beijing (Peking)..."). I plan to make this revision soon, but I wanted to note my reasoning here because their was a comment in the article that warned against this. If anyone has any objections, please voice them. SilverStar54 (talk) 06:41, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. So, for example, "Yibin (Suifu)" would use the current name but provide the connection back to Graham's writings and family history of referring to the location as Suifu. I had not done this, because it can become rather complicated figuring out unambiguously what the changes ought to be and still be correct. Just for example, Walravens (2018) wrote in his introduction to "More Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao" that he had kept Graham's Wade-Giles because of the difficulty of unambiguously going from Wade-Giles to Chinese and then to Pinyin. Of course, in that book there was far more that would have to have been translated. Christopher G. Hoogendyk (talk) 17:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Yep! That's the idea.

In theory, it should be possible to convert from standard Wade-Giles to standard pinyin unambiguously. However, Wade-Giles encodes important information in the apostrophe (e.g., "Ch'uan" is not "Chuan"), and it's not uncommon for Wade-Giles sources to accidently leave off the apostrophe. But any Chinese names or phrases that are notable enough to appear in this article should have appeared frequently enough in the source material that we can be sure they weren't misspelled. Worst case scenario, we can leave a specific name or word in Wade-Giles with a clarifying note. SilverStar54 (talk) 21:48, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and made the proposed edits. I put the Wade-Giles asides in the body so as to not clutter the lede. I also did my best to use the pinyin version of names that would have been official at the time (e.g., I used "Xuzhou" instead of "Yibin", since the latter name didn't become common until later). SilverStar54 (talk) 23:35, 25 January 2023 (UTC)