User:MichaelSegura/sandbox

Article Evaluation
The article I reviewed is Autonomy.

The article focuses on autonomy through the view of different educational subjects, as well as the idea of autonomy from famous philosophers. The article is completely neutral. Additionally, there don't seem to be any claims that favor a particular view, but rather summarize the various views.

The Philosophy and Medicine sections of the article seem to be overrepresented in comparison to other smaller sections, such as Sociology and Politics. However, this may simply be due to the fact that autonomy is such a significant issue in both philosophy and medicine.

There was a section that listed the authors and name of a book, but did not contain links to the author's pages or a citation for the book. I fixed the incorrect author name, added links to each of the author's names, and added a citation to their book. However, I did not have the chance to check if the book supported the claim. Not all facts in the article are referenced with reliable sources.

The talk page includes conversations regarding typos, expansion of a section, clarification of a definition, renaming of a section, and a comment that is lacking any citation at all. The banner at the top of the article page reads, "This lead needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed." The banner is pretty much just saying the article needs more work and cited sources. The article is currently a part of WikiProject Philosophy, WikiProject Systems, and WikiProject Politics.

PETER HUJAR
The artist I have chosen for my article contribution is Peter Hujar. I intend to include more information on how his work was influenced by the AIDS epidemic and how his work influenced the work of other artists which he preceded. I am currently trying to figure out which sources to use, and have the following two as options.

http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T097265

http://www.glbtqarchive.com/arts/hujar_peter_A.pdf

Lead
Peter Hujar (October 11, 1934 – November 26, 1987) was an American photographer best known for his black and white portraits. Hujar's work was known for stripping his subjects of their identity down to their innate, vulnerable forms. His photography has also been known to capture the individuality of each of his subjects. Whether his subject was a person, animal, or object—Hujar stressed that each is one of a kind.

Artistic career
As early as 1956, Hujar began taking photographs that showed signs of his particular style and point of view. After meeting artist Joseph Raffael, Hujar accompanied him on a Fulbright to Italy, where he took many photos. In 1963, Hujar secured his own Fulbright and returned to Italy where he explored and photographed the Palermo catacombs. On this trip, Hujar was accompanied by his lover Paul Thek who would be one of the important relationships of his life.

Back in New York, Hujar was part of the downtown art scene. He appeared in one of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests (which Warhol later included in a series called "The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys"). He worked for a spell for successful commercial photographer Harold Krieger and shot for Harper's Bazaar and GQ. He moved in to his deceased friend Jackie Curtis's loft at 189 2nd Avenue. Hujar took many photos of his friends, combining many of them with his Palermo photos for a book called Portraits in Life and Death, published in 1976 by Da Capo Press. The introduction was written by his close friend Susan Sontag and her portrait appears in the book. Using the people in his life as subjects, Hujar took iconic photos of Sontag, Ethyl Eichelberger, Candy Darling, Divine, and his lover David Wojnarowicz. His photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed in the hospital has been frequently reproduced.

Death
Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January 1987, and died ten months later on November 25 at Cabrini Medical Center from AIDS-related pneumonia. Wojnarowicz was with him when he died and made a brief video recording of his body, head to toe, and took 23 photographs. While on his deathbed, Hujar shot photographs of Wojnarowicz in his final attempt to capture life through the lens of a camera. Per Hujar's wishes, his funeral was held at Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village. He is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.

Adding to Tong article
This article seems to have some good information, so I will be trying to make any adjustments that can give a better understanding of these Tong organizations to the Wikipedia community. The lead and history portions are both decent, but can still be worked on and added to. I intend to create a "Tongs in America" section, while emphasizing a "San Francisco" subsection. I then plan on discussing how Tongs were used by the Chinese during the San Francisco Chinatown Plague.

These are the sources I will be using:

Works Cited

Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: a Narrative History. Penguin Books, 2003.

Zhao, Xiaojian, and Edward J. W. Park. “Tongs and Tong War.” Asian Americans: an Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History, Greenwood, 2014, pp. 1118–1120.

TONG ARTICLE
A tong is a type of organization found among Chinese American immigrants living in the United States and Canada. In Chinese, the word tong means "hall" or "gathering place". These organizations are described as secret societies or sworn brotherhoods and are often tied to criminal activity. In the 1990s, in most American Chinatowns, clearly marked tong halls could easily be found, many of which have had affiliations with Chinese crime gangs.

Today tongs are, for the most part, members of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations, which are pro-Kuomintang traditional groups. These associations provide essential services for Chinatown communities such as immigrant counseling, Chinese schools, and English classes for adults. Tongs follow the pattern of secret societies common to southern China and many are connected to a secret society called the Tiandihui, which follows this pattern. Other groups worldwide that follow this pattern and are connected with the Tiandihui are known as hui, Hongmen, and triads.

History
Tongs first appeared in China in 1644 when the Ming dynasty was overthrown by the Qing dynasty. One of the first tongs was established by the secret society Zhigongtang (Chee Kung Tong), which aimed to restore the power of the Ming dynasty by removing the new Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty. These Zhigongtang tongs were located in the province of Guangdong, which was home to many of the first Chinese migrants heading to America—some of which would take the notion of a tong with them to America.

Tongs in America
Prior to the 1840s, a few Chinese emigrated to the United States or Canada—despite the large number of people leaving China, particularly Fujian and Canton, since the seventeenth century to seek their fortune in southeast Asia and Taiwan.

After settling in San Francisco and other California cities, Chinese workers faced hostility from their American peers who felt threatened by the Chinese who worked for lower wages. As labor unions and angered workers became more aggressive, many Chinese felt pressure to leave and go east, where they heard life would be less dangerous. As a result, many Chinese immigrants moved to cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston where today there are large enough populations to build communities known as "Chinatowns".

Many Chinese soon organized voluntary associations for support and protection. These focused around their originating district in China, family name, native dialect in the case of Hakka speakers, or sworn brotherhoods. Unfortunately, as Kolin Chin has asserted, many of these volunteer societies did not have the financial ability to fund community events or look after their members, and those that did tended to focus inward and provide help only to their own members. As a result, many tongs with little or no hereditary financial value had to either disband or operate activities such as gambling houses. This transformed them from benevolent associations to providers of illegal services. Notably, many of the illegal tong activities were legal in China, but not North America. The early Chinese populations in the United States and Canada were overwhelmingly male, a situation that worsened when sex-restrictive immigration laws were passed in 1882 in the USA and 1923 in Canada respectively. (see Chinese Exclusion Act and Chinese Immigration Act, 1923) For this reason tongs participated heavily in importing women from China both for marriage and to serve as prostitutes. A large percentage of the "tong wars"—disputes between the rapidly growing and powerful tongs—of the 19th and early 20th century often centered on these women. In the early years they employed "hatchet men" or boo how doy as hired killers to fight the bloody street battles that ensued over turf, business, and women.

San Francisco, California
San Francisco was the home of the first tong in the United States—a direct result of the hostility Chinese immigrants faced from American workers upon their arrival to America.

Structure and aims
Tongs in North America showed many similarities to Triad of Hong Kong and British-controlled southeast Asia. These included similar initiation ceremonies and paying respect to the same deities. This is because both are similar organizations that follow the patterns of southern Chinese secret societies and sworn brotherhoods. The Triad societies were underground organizations in British controlled areas that also existed for self-help of members, but spoke of the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. Ko-lin Chin outlined that most tongs have similar organization and have a headquarters where one can find a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a treasurer, an auditor, and several elders and public relations administrators. Today their main aims are to care for their members and their respective communities.