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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by User:Maralia (18:21, 1 December 2008) [1].

Truong Dinh

[edit]
Nominator(s): YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!)

Vietnamese militant leader, fought against French invasion in the 1860s... YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 05:44, 18 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:59, 18 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • I was hoping that discovering the specific museum might lead to specific author information, but apparently not. I've marked the author as "unknown". We'll work on the presumption he died at a normal age. :) Awadewit (talk) 18:18, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Goody. reinstated. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 01:13, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Image:Tu Duc.jpg - Can we get some verification that this is indeed a 19th-century drawing? Does one of your books discuss it, for example?

These should be easy issues to rectify. Awadewit (talk) 01:03, 19 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed the first and commented out the second. It's probably scanned from some old thing but not used in any books I could find. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 03:21, 19 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Done, YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 01:13, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose This article contains a lot of good information, but I think it still needs some polishing. I also have concerns about one source:

  • I'm a little uneasy about the balance of this article - over half of it is dedicated to an exploration of the historiographical debates surrounding Dinh. I'm wondering if this is the appropriate balance for a biography article. I hesitate to ask you to restructure the article and to place the details about Dinh's disputes with Hue in the body of the biography because I know nothing about this time in Vietnam's history. Help me understand this choice better. :)
  • Is there any other information about Dinh's wife? We hear that he marries this woman and then that she gets a good pension after his death. Anything else about their life together?
Unfortunately, the old Confucian Vietnamese history style is to deliberately stay mute about wives (or mistresses) of public officials and mandarins. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Whenever scholars are named in the next, please identify them and their expertise.
  • Dinh took advantage of his improved socio-economic status to recruit a group of impoverished people, whom he organised for clearing land and founding a đồn điền (military colony) in Go Cong. - awkward construction - It seems odd to pair clearing land and founding a colony - one seems like such a vaster undertaking than the other.
  • This occurred after Emperor Tu Duc's 1854 order, which granted General Nguyen Tri Phuong permission to organise southern levies in this manner. - I did not understand the connection between the military colony described in the previous sentence and the information in this sentence.
  • The first paragraph of "French invasion of 1859" does not flow well - it starts out with the attack and then gives the reasons for the attack. What do you think about presenting the reasons first and then the actual attack? This would also make the following paragraph, which begins with the razing of the Citadel, flow more seamlessly into the narrative.
  • Around 150 guerrillas commanded by Truc ambushed the vessel, killing some of the crew before sinking and burning the boat. - The boat was first sunk and the burned or first burned and then sunk?
Fixed. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • However, the overall Vietnamese military performance was not as successful. - Since this sentence is at the beginning of a section, its comparisons need to be explicit - "not as successful" as what?
Fixed. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The treaty was accompanied by financial compensation to France - Why was France receiving financial compensation?
War reparations/punitive taxation. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Could you make this explicit in the article? Awadewit (talk) 16:50, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The actions of Dinh in the wake of the Treaty of Saigon has long been a bone of contention - colloquial and not entirely clear - be explicit that it is the French and Vietnamese doing the contesting
Fixed. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The French had long accused Huế of surreptitiously supporting Dinh in contravention of the treaty - Do the French no longer do this? Is it really "had" or should it be "have"?
I think saying that they "did" is what is needed, as this is what they said in the 1860s. I don't think the French govt/army cares about it now frankly. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The paragraphs explaining the French view that the Hue court violated the treaty in the "Defiance of Hue" section could be condensed - there is some repetition in them.
  • The paragraphs explaining the Vietnamese view regarding the violation of the treaty in the "Defiance of Hue" section could be trimmed, perhaps by removing a quotation or two.
  • In light of Dinh's disobedience of Tu Duc, his justification for his defiance is discussed against the backdrop of the Confucian expectation for him to defer to the emperor's "mandate of heaven". - This sentence is hard to follow - perhaps an inversion is in order? Begin with Confucius and the mandate of heaven?
  • The above postulated explanations of Dinh's behaviour are seen as plausible, given the chaos engulfing Vietnam at the time and the lack of conclusive documentation. - Seen as plausible by whom? Since this is a controversial area of history, we should probably be explicit.
done. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 07:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • What do you think about putting the lines from Nguyen Dinh Chieu's poem about Dinh in a quote box?
  • The last paragraph of the "Legacy" section seems to belong in one of the sections about the historiographical debate.
  • Nguyen, Thanh Thi (1992). The French conquest of Cochinchina, 1858–1862. University Microfilms International - Is this is a PhD dissertation? How do we feel about using dissertations as sources? Frankly, I wouldn't use one unless I saw it cited in other scholarly works as some sort of groundbreaking dissertation. Most dissertations aren't worth much - the only worthwhile parts get published as real journal articles anyway. (I say this as a dissertation writer, sadly.) This source is used a lot in the article, so I think we need to extra careful.
It's cited by thsi book on googl books by Choi Byung Wook. Usually I wouldn't pay attention to PhD theses too much, but this one was done at Cornell, where there is a big SE Asia history program and her supervisors have written a few notable books and have chaired a few conferences on Vietnam and such and their conference proceedings are turned into books. It seems to available in a few Australian unis in hardcopy, does that mean it that it was a relatively influential one? The other thing is that the source was mainly used to raw events, such as various military engagements. All the parts abour style and character and conjecture/inferences etc, were from journal articles and textbooks by staff academics I think.YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 06:30, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Notable professors who were there include John K. Whitmore, David G. Marr, Keith Taylor, example conference - [2]. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 06:48, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The argument about the person's supervisors doesn't wash. This person's work has to stand on its own. It doesn't matter, for example, that my dissertation director is a world-famous novel scholar and an Austen expert. If I want to be taken seriously in Austen studies, I have to publish something myself. What has Nguyen published? What conferences has s/he appeared at? If the dissertation was published in hardcopy, that might indicate someone thought it was important, but the true test of importance in scholarship is citation. If the dissertation is only cited in one book, I would be worried (is that book her dissertation director's book? even worse!) Dissertations are not rigorously fact-checked, so I really think this source should be replaced if we can't find better evidence of its importance. Awadewit (talk) 06:41, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Err, okay, I'll wait and see what unfolds. No, the guy who cited it was not her professor. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 06:48, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Second cite [3]. YellowMonkey (click here to choose Australia's next top model!) 06:58, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Are these seminal books on this topic? And we still have only two? Awadewit (talk) 16:48, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I copyedited this article a bit while I was reading it, but I would like to see another copyeditor go over this article - there are some wordy passages. Find a copyeditor who can reduce redundancy. I'm not the best person for that. :)
  • Now that dates no longer have to be linked, you might think about unlinking the dates in this article.

I hope these suggestions are helpful. Awadewit (talk) 06:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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