Talk:Identity in the Eight Banners

Copy editing needed

I am adding the issue for copy editing needed for the whole article. I think it was written by a non-native English speaker, and it has a myriad of errors. I will continue to work on it, but the information is confusing because of the lingual construction. Especially confusing is the endless Chinese names that are clarified in parenthases that make identity impossible to distinguish for English speakers. Mechanic1c (talk) 22:23, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

My thoughts

I originally split the contents of this article out from Rajmaan's contributions to the Eight Banners article, because it was too marginal to the main topic of that article. It's not really clear to me what the proper scope or "angle" of this article should be. As it is, the content is a somewhat random collection of information related to the subject of ethnicity in the Eight Banners organization. I feel that it's a bit inside baseball and not a good fit in an encyclopedic context. There needs to be more of a point to it -- what are all the individual facts and events adding up to? What's the big picture? Individually, each piece of information here feels like minutiae, and not notable on its own. The subject is worth covering, but what's here doesn't really clarify anything or answer any questions in its present state. Difference engine (talk) 00:17, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

The Chinese wikipedia has additional articles on the Manchu, Mongol, and Hanjun (Chinese) Banners, in addition to an article for every colored banner. This information would normally have gone into those articles but on English wikipedia we don't have those individual articles yet.Rajmaan (talk) 04:34, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

w:zh:Template:八旗

w:zh:Template:八旗制度

I agree that there should ultimately be separate articles for each banner, and for the three ethnic divisions of the banner system. The articles on the Chinese Wikipedia are unfortunately just stubs and won't be of much use to guide us here. I made a start on converting the Plain Yellow Banner redirect into a real article last year, but did not have enough information to give a completely satisfactory overview of the subject. Feel free to create new articles for these subdivisions of the Eight Banners, but I'm concerned about whether we have broad enough scholarship available to do them justice. Much of what's been written about them has been ethnographic, whereas I'd like to see more of a focus on their organizational structure and a chronological account of their activities (i.e., more like other Wikipedia articles about historical military organizations). Difference engine (talk) 23:29, 7 January 2015 (UTC)