Talk:Koreans in Mexico

Population figure

(moved from User talk:61.18.190.165 so that other users may comment as well)

I notice you reverted my addition of secondary source material because of the existing presence of a MOFAT source.

• 1. There is a five year difference between 2009 and 2013 so it is new information that the population is constant
• 2. Articles are supposed to rely on secondary sources so you want these things to be cited.

Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 23:26, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. However there's three things that should be pointed out. First, WP:PRIMARY does not claim that secondary sources are better in 100% of cases, it says "Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are appropriate on any given occasion is a matter of good editorial judgment and common sense". Second, WP:RS says that "Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made and is an appropriate source for that content" and "For information about academic topics, scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports." And third, it is WP:OR to assume that because two disparate sources of widely-varying reliability give the same population number in two different years, that means the population being measured is "constant".

Governments in general have a reputation for going out and producing reliable counts of populations. In this specific instance, this reputation is confirmed by the fact that scholarly sources which study the Korean diaspora in Mexico are happy to cite the South Korean government's figures ([1] at p. 9, for example), but not random numbers from the newspaper.

Newspapers in contrast clearly do not go out and count populations themselves; they get facts & figures from other sources. So where did the NYT reporter get his number from? He might have interviewed a community leader who pulled the number out of his ass. He might have asked the embassy. He might have even cribbed the figure from Wikipedia itself, in which case we have a WP:CIRCULAR citation. We have no idea which of the above. An unattributed statement by a journalist about the size of a population (particularly in an article which doesn't even focus in-depth on that population, but merely a throwaway line in a shallow overview of a much broader topic) is hardly more useful to readers (let alone reliable) than a government figure.

The vast majority of other diaspora articles cite the relevant sending or receiving governments for the population figures they give; the best ones don't even bother with random throwaway lines in newspaper articles which roughly confirm the government population figures already given, but only mention alternative population figures if they're coming from academic sources. Thanks, 61.18.190.165 (talk) 08:33, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Page 3/4 of the article says "Officials at a newly opened Korean cultural center here say at least 12,000 Koreans now call Mexico home," - So the specific source is a Korean cultural center. I'm not sure how many of them are in Mexico.

I'll bring it up on the WP:RS noticeboard: Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Newspaper_sources_for_population_statistics_in_addition_to_official_government_sources. One more thing:

"And third, it is WP:OR to assume that because two disparate sources of widely-varying reliability give the same population number in two different years, that means the population being measured is "constant"." - Careful: I never wrote explicitly that "it was constant". I only used it as a reason for keeping it in the article. You can have a reason why a piece of information be included in the article, but it can be OR to state that reason explicitly within the said article. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:45, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

This article is good

😌👌🏻 Thank you for doing a good job. Many Korean history articles are in a bit of a rough state, so it's always a relief to see these.

If you're interested in Korea specifically, please join WikiProject Korea if you haven't already and help out. We have a lot of people working on Korean pop culture, but not enough on Korean history or traditional culture. toobigtokale (talk) 04:09, 29 September 2023 (UTC)