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Existing articles that should be considered

The following discussion predates the adoption of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template; at this point, what articles to consider in designing the template is a closed issue, although probably all of these would merit conversion according to the template. -- Jmabel 02:09, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Here are some existing Wikipedia articles we might want to consider along these lines. Some of them are heavily tied in with other issues (typically a past, present, or projected nation-state or affiliation with a religion).

We will need to study these articles to begin to develop an appropriate template. Some of these articles are little more than stubs, but they are a good reminder of the diversity of groups we will need to think about.

Please feel free to add to this list. Try to maintain the organization. This list is not a place to gather random bits of controversial POV opinion about ethnic groups. This is a place to indicate existing articles about ethnic groups, which might be useful in establishing how we would build a template.

See also, and very usefully, List of ethnic groups.

Additional articles that could be written

  • Additional ethnic groups
    • Bajau -- Borneo, Malaysia -- Trying to find a venue to document their participation in sea piracy (in fleets of thousands of boats) in the early 1800s to present day. Known today as Sea Gypsies. Their name is a synonym for pirate in some countries. However the Bajau currently deny they are pirates, of course.
    • Barbary pirates
    • Cossacks which is not a synonym for Kazakh
    • Goans
    • Mbundu southwest African ethnic group of tribes
  • Groups currently subsumed into articles about countries
    • The French
      • The role of the French Foreign Legion in granting citizenship in France
  • Articles on ethnic groups within particular countries or geographic areas
    • Jewish Americans
    • British Moslems

Ancillary articles, not fitting the template, that need to be written in support of this work

  • We will probably want to expand the article on Ethnicity to take up more of the issues of the difficulties of this concept and to explain the way we approach the concept in these templated articles.
  • Not to mention self-determination. The trickiest issue with self-determination is the definition of the borders of the country that will select the government. Just ask the Irish. -- Jmabel 08:58, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)
  • We will also want to revisit the List of ethnic groups. For example, that list currently does not include Overseas Chinese; it also seems, at least generall not to cover ancient ethnicities. -- Jmabel 07:35, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Topics that will need to be covered in the template

I've started a draft template at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ethnic_Groups_Template, so

Discussion of template moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Ethnic_Groups_Template. -- Jmabel 07:41, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Origin

This project was started in response to the following exchange on Wikipedia:Village pump:

Working on topics related to Eastern Europe, I have found it inconvenient that, for ethnicities/nationalities that have a nation-state associated with them, we always have an article about the nation-state and never, it seems, about the ethnicity. This is not a problem a single person can even begin to address -- I can tell that just by looking at some of the conflicts that have arisen about related issues such as German vs. Polish place names -- so I thought I would raise it here.
For example, the article Ethnic German (one of the few articles about an ethnic group) is just a disambiguation page. When referring in the List of political parties in Romania to Forul Democrat al Germanilor din România, the political party of ethnic Germans in Romania, a link to Ethnic German is what is I would presume is called for. However, someone recently (and probably appropriately) changed that to link to Germany instead. Why? Presumably because Germany has a real article and Ethnic German does not.
Nonetheless, I would argue that these two concepts are separate enough to merit separate articles (and the same for ethnic Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, you name it). We would never conflate Jews and Israel. We would never conflate Celts and, say, Eire.
I admit that I have something of an axe to grind here: I am not a fan of ethnic nationalism. I feel that Wikipedia's current organization of this material constitutes an implicit endorsement of an ethnic nationalist point of view.
I am not sure if this page is the best forum for this discussion, but it seems to be at least the place to open it. If someone wants to suggest a better forum, I'm totally open to moving this.
-- Jmabel 02:07, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Good point. WormRunner 02:42, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Maybe you want to start a project so you can first collect ethnicities and then write article on them? Kokiri 11:05, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)
A fine idea. I'll start Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Jmabel 22:41, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Discussion of project, compunctions, etc.

In starting this project, I realize I am wading into a minefield. Ethnic groups have only slightly more epistemological validity than races, and the concept is possibly even more subject to hijacking by extreme nationalists than the concept of a nation itself. Nonetheless, I think it is important that we work out how Wikipedia will handle the issue of articles about ethnic groups, proto-nations, etc.

I would like to construe the term "ethnic group" in its broadest sense. There may be identifiable ethnic (sub)-groups within an ethnic group (such as the Ashkenazi within the Jews). I think our templates have to allow for a way to talk about that. Often, ethnicities will border on being nationalities, such as the native "First Nations" of the Americas, or will be heavily identified with a particular nation, such as the Ethnic Germans. This last case is part of the motivation for this project: there needs to be a way to talk about the Volga Germans or the Saxons of the Siebenburgen that acknowledges their connection to an ethnicity without implicitly viewing them as the misplaced nationals of a different country.

I am not sure if we will want a single article template or several, although the existing approach to languages suggests that we can get away with one.

-- Jmabel 23:25, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

-- 169.207.89.188 11:52, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC) I think my interpolations into this page are convincing me that requiring a statement of ethnicity in a Wikipedia article would be a counterproductive policy, in general. However, I agree that statement of an ethnicity/belief/action system can be illuminating when used with discretion, but I think not as blanket policy for Wikipedia. For example, to identify XYZ as Irish Catholic sets up the expectation that XYZ is against suicide and abortion, but no such expectation is justified in a court of law.

Rather, this project seems to be a venue for marginalizing individuals and groups. In fact the word should, as used in this proposal makes the project prescriptive. If instead, the words might and may were used, then the project might be illuminating.

To make this point plainer, it can be and has been dangerous to a person to be publicly identified as Jew or Arab or Gay or Goy. How about dropping the idea. 169.207.89.188 12:13, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

  1. I certainly don't think people in articles should be routinely identified by ethnicity. (By the way, I think the use of the word "Goy" in the preceding is awfully close to baiting: when used in an English-language context, that word is something of a slur.) The issue here is mainly how we write about ethnicity when we do write about it. Let me clarify the things I want to achieve with this project:
  2. I'd like to bring some uniformity to the treatment of ethnicity. So far, different ethnicities are very differently handled. For example, most Native American ethnicities are dealt with mainly from a historical and anthropological point of view whereas other groups such as the Overseas Chinese are dealt with from a contemporary political point of view. If we had a template for these articles, it would serve as a reminder that (for example) Native American groups are still present in the world today and (conversely) European ethnic groups also have anthropologically significant sub-ethnicities.
  3. In fact, we frequently do reference the ethnicity of an individual, but we generally do so by a very inappropriate reference to a nation-state, rather than what could be an appropriate reference to an ethnicity. For example, when we call someone a Romanian of Hungarian extraction, we should be able to link "Hungarian" to an article about an ethnicity, not a nation-state.

We obviously disagree about this, at least so far, but thank you for raising issues that are helping me clarify my intent. I need more of those. -- Jmabel 18:48, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi. I did a few articles on smaller ethnic groups a while ago, and would be happy to put them into shape if there was some format. The articles are: Amungme; Awá; Banawa; Cong; Enxet; Himba; Jopadhola; Lhoba; Mingo; Muckleshoot; O Du; Ro Mam; Si La; Tujia; Xucuru Danny 20:29, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi, this looks like a useful conversation. I agree that it is important to try to make different articles consistent. I do, however, take issue with some of the claims the main page for this topic -- the attempt to clarify the difference between ethnic group and nation, and the use of ethnic group in its broadest sence. Although I personally sympathize with both positions, my concern has to do with both NPOV and the nature of an encyclopedia. First and foremost, our task is not to arrive at a definition of "ethnicity" or "ethnic group" we can all agree upon. Our task is to come up with an article about "ethnicity" and "ethnic group" that we can all agree is NPOV. The purpose of an encyclopedia is not to provide a place for us to develop or represent our own points of view even if all active contributors agreed! The purpose is to provide a clear account of the popular and scholarly uses and meanings of a particular concept. In some cases this is pretty straightforward. In other cases, and I think this is one example, it is not for three reasons:

  1. how people use the word "ethnicity" varies from place to place
  2. how people have used the word "ethnicity" has varied over time
  3. even at the same time and place, people sometimes debate the meaning of the word "ethnicity" (or, the differece between ethnicity and race and nation).

I think an article on "race" should provide an account of different scholarly views of ethnicity, and of different popular usages of the term, as they have varied from place to place and over time (I would start with Herder and end with people like Cox, Wolf, maybe Anderson and Gellner, and I am sure sociologists, political scientists, and perhaps even social psychologists (as well as anthropologists) who I don't know about. I think this itself is a daunting task, but I think we need to do this before anything else. Slrubenstein

Nothing here I really disagree with, although we seem to focus differently. Again, let me get back to what I see as the my two key issues (though they're not the only issues on the table) and ask how you would approach them:
  1. The existing Wikipedia articles about ethnic groups are very different from one another, and there is no guidance in how to write about such subjects. Consider Haida and Overseas Chinese for two very contrasting examples.
  2. Currently, we have many (in my opinion) inappropriate links to nation-states for matters that are really about ethnicity. See, for example List of political parties in Romania, where "Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania" is linked to Germany (and similarly for other ethnic parties) or London, where we are informed that in the 2001 census, 10% of the people "classed their ethnic group as... Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani" with links to articles about these respective countries. (Not to mention that I'm sure that a lot of these people consider their ethnic group to be, for example, Bengali rather than Bangladeshi, or Punjabi rather than Pakistani. Bangladeshi and Pakistani are nationalities, not ethnic groups. E.g., a Bengali from Calcutta is not a Bangladeshi.
Again, how would you approach these questions? I may well be on the wrong track myself, but I am comfortable in saying that at the moment Wikipedia is not on the right track.
Also, let me add: the difference between an ethnicity and a nation is murky, controversial, and POV, but the difference between an ethnicity and a nation-state is presumably much clearer. We don't really have articles on nations, we have articles on nation-states.

--Jmabel 02:12, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Yes you are quite right that the difference between nation-state and ethnic group is clear; it is the difference between ethnic group and ntion that is unclear. I would, however, take minor issue with this phrase: "the difference between an ethnicity and a nation is murky, controversial, and POV," -- instead, I would say that there are multiple POVs concerning the difference between ethnicity and nation -- and articles must represent the different POVs. As to your questions about Romania and Germans, or Bengals and Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan -- I have no answer, as I have done no research on these countries, their nations or ethnic groups. Sadly, I have no time right now to research these. But I would call on anyone who has researched these to contribute to the appropriate articles by giving an account of how the people involved (non-Germanic Romanians, Germanic Romanians, Germans) identify themselves and one another and why, and how this has changed over time and why, and what are the different scholarly interpretations and debates? In the meantime, I will check this page regularly to see what others come up with. Slrubenstein

It is a great idea. There are ethnics that live outside the "Mother country". The articles about countries are concentrated on that country alone (geographic, historic etc). The article about Germany says little (if at all) about germans living Russia, Romania, Swiss etc. All those groups have unique characteristics and some of those groups had little or no connection with Germany for long periods of time. There are also ethnic group without a country of their own. This project could also refer to ethnic groups that don't exist anymore (as in the last mohican). There are many aspects that everybody agree on (not just wikipedians) and for the controversial aspects we could mention all points of view, like it was done regarding Origin of Romanians. MihaiC

Samples

I've attempted the first of what I hope will be several samples at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups/Pequot. I can see that we will still have to refine the template, but I think the results are interesting (compare to Pequot). Among other things, it really points up a lot that could be covered in such an article and isn't in this one. Have a look, edit at will, and let's hope to supersede the existing article with this, soon. Meanwhile, if someone else wants to try to do an example or two, that would be great. -- Jmabel 01:13, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Another sample: Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups/Basque. Again, interesting. Have a look there and at my remarks on the corresponding talk page. -- Jmabel 03:10, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have copied the Cajun ethnobox to Wikipedia:Infobox, so if any changes are made to the template, please make sure it is reflected there. One the box is adopted and begins to be implemented in the article namespace, please move it from the "proposed" section to the regular section. Tuf-Kat 04:37, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Institutions

I have removed the unused header "Institutions" from the article Tuareg. I will do the same for unused headers in other articles. The template should be a guide to help us writing good articles, not a rigid mold which we have to fit articles into, whether or not their contents fit it. DanKeshet

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