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This Month in Education: May 2022

Vietnamese nationalist historiography sources to use

This Month in Education: May 2022

New sections in "Bawl!"

@Alexis Jazz:, Whenever I want to start a new section it just opens up an editing area at the bottom of rather than bringing me to a separate new section editing page. I can see why this is beneficial but there are no ways to circumvent this.

It might be wise that there's an option that if you click twice (2x) on the text balloon above that it will do it in the traditional "New section" way. --Donald Trung (talk) 08:30, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

RE: Laska666's edits at Nguyễn dynasty and Nam tiến

Hello @MarkH21:, I will reply here on-wiki because I prefer to have my criticism of this user be public for the record. Namely for the people investigating bias on Wikipedia in the future who tend to "follow the trail".

Regarding their edits, I am actually quite busy with a large number of projects and don't really like to engage in edit wars with other people, but I will make some time to give some context about this person. According to editors at the Vietnamese-language Wikipedia who know him on Facebook he's an ethnic Cham who is a Cham nationalist and a multiethnic Vietnamese nationalist. I personally am glad to have such a person of those persuasions here to combat the widespread Kinh-centric interpretation of Vietnamese history. Another good thing about Laska666 is that they have a lot of academic books and papers about Vietnamese history and Vietnamese ethnography that they use to build and expand articles with.

So what's the issue?

Well, Champa is Indian in nature, all of South-East Asia is culturally Indian and (Northern Vietnam) is culturally Chinese. Why is this important? Well because this user really doesn't like this major difference between the culturally Chinese Kinh people and the Indo-Islamic Cham people. They tend to remove all and any references to the Chinese nature and Chinese origins of Vietnamese history wherever they can (this is something they actually share with Vietnamese nationalists they disagree with, but his methodology is especially different).

Laska666 tends to have a unique way of interpreting sources, so while they use a lot of high quality sources written by reliable authors they will interpret them in a way that fits the narrative that they are making. For example the "Kingdom of Vietnam" article being a content fork of the "Nguyễn Dynasty" article based on how they wish to interpret Vietnamese history, that is that the Vietnamese court became utterly irrelevant in 1885 and Vietnam became culturally French overnight. They also view the French conquest of Vietnam as one long conflict rather than a collection of largely independent but related conflicts that caused French Indochina to be established in 1887.

They also want to treat Đại Việt like one continuous state that ceased to exist in 1802 when it was replaced by the "Kingdom of Vietnam", in reality the name was used until 1804 and they deliberately grouped in different periods of Vietnamese history, some of which didn't even use the name "Đại Việt", to foster a new narrative of state continuity. This is despite the earlier period of the Later Lê and Revival Lê being completely different periods.

Sometimes they do work well with fighting Kinh-centric bias in articles that praise the subjugation of indigenous peoples as "morally good" (the Kinh nationalist interpretation), but more often than not they try to fight bias with even more bias.

Another good example is how they wrote multiple articles about various Nguyễn Dynasty institutions like the Cabinet, Military, and Government and claimed that they all ended in 1885, despite the Cabinet existing until 1936 and the military and government until 1945. This is because the continued existence of these institutions are "an unfortunate inconvenience" for their narrative. I can only guess at their underlying motivations, but I think seeing what is essentially Imperial China exist in Vietnam for three (3) decades after it stopped existing in China itself is something that they want to deny. They are also especially hostile to Traditional Chinese characters and sees them as not intrinsic to Vietnamese history and culture and tries to remove all references to this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/998817213

Here is an example of where they wrote a claim that only a quarter of Vietnamese vocabulary is Chinese in origin, but like Japanese and Korean 60% of the total vocabulary is Chinese, but only around 20% is used for the most common words. This is like Germanic and Romance in English where around 60% of the words are Romance (Latin and Norman-French) but over 90% of the most commonly used English words are Germanic in origin.

So it's not rare for them to add correct information, but to then remove any other correct information that is in conflict with their narrative. I would classify this as "lying by ommision".

Overal I'd say that they're a net positive for Wikipedia, but that people have to constantly police them for biases. Thankfully that IP address undid their vandalism as they blanked a well-sourced section as "irrelevant" while also adding an unsourced POV-pushing sentence. --Donald Trung (talk) 12:56, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I looked at these edits:

They're amazing and this is actually the type of content I'm glad that Laska666 is adding to Wikipedia, but only issue with it is that he keeps calling Vietnam "a Kingdom", but that's just a preference as some historians use "Empire" (often more accurate) and others use "Kingdom". But generally speaking I don't see an issue with these edits, they improved the formatting and added a lot of content that gave more context to the article. One thing he left out is how this process was actually praised during the early 20th (twentieth) century due to Social Darwinism. My bad, didn't have the time to read it all when K wrote that, yeah, he really did put it into proper perspective. I'm glad that made those improvements. --Donald Trung (talk) 13:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Regarding their edits at Nam tiến; I am extremely happy with most of them (although I do still see a few [ weird ones]), he is deconstructing the Vietnamese nationalist and Kinh-centric model of Vietnamese historiography and explaining why and how this bad historiography is so common. This is something that I also wanted to address on Wikipedia in the future and I'm glad that he's adding so much more about the history of Champa. This is all amazing.
Yes, I'm usually critical of his edits, but in general I believe him to be a net positive to Wikipedia and just think that some POV-pushing should be challenged, but in this case he's doing a wonderful job deconstructing a massive Nationalist POV narrative that has built up on Wikipedia for years. --Donald Trung (talk) 19:45, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia translation of the week: 2022-23

Tech News: 2022-23

02:44, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #523

Name of "Vietnam"

Wikipedia translation of the week: 2022-24

This Month in GLAM: May 2022





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Wikidata weekly summary #524

Tech News: 2022-24

16:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)