User:Wenliwang124/PREPARATORY ASSIGNMENT

Preparatory Assignment

 * On Practice
 * Long March
 * Nanjing Massacre
 * Final Reflection

On Practice
The wikipedia page for On Practice written by Mao Zedong outlines the main arguments Mao claims for perception to cognition. This wikipedia page is divided into two section, the first being the background in which this piece is written, attempting to highlight why Mao wrote this piece and under what historical circumstances occurred at that time period. The second being trying to unpack the dense philosophical arguments. It gives a summary of the main arguments Mao makes in a chronological sense from the original work. The page first discusses the process of acquiring knowledge: how knowledge is obtained from practice and experience. Following, the wikipedia page mentions how people must testify their knowledge to verify the authenticity of their conceptions. The scope is pretty detailed even giving specific examples to the philosophical claims that Mao makes. For example stating “a married couple will have to adjust their plan to buy a house according to the strength of the housing market. The fiscal requirements for buying the house will change with the market, so the couple’s plan will have to adhere to those changes.” Moreover, in this piece of work, Mao refers to Marx and Lenin, so maybe it could be better to link the works that Mao referenced to. I also think there could be a subsection on how this work impacted future events, or how was this work used later on.

Long March
In this wikipedia entry I think the contributors did a really good job in outlining a lengthy event. The timeline in the beginning really gives a clear view of the development of the Long March, highlighting the important events. Within the timeline, there are also links that can navigate you to the certain topics that people might be interested in. I also really like the categorization of the background because this event didn’t simply occur out of nowhere; rather, it was more a build up of many other events that led to the Long March. In the end, the historical controversies, also give a more objective perspective, bringing in other perspectives that might have occurred, giving readers space to think for themselves.

Nanjing Massacre
This wikipedia page is probably the lengthiest out of the ones I chose. Moreover, this topic is also a pretty sensitive one to a lot of Chinese people, so the page does a relatively good job in taking a neutral stance in trying to narrate this historical event. Instead of just including facts and dates of the event, this wikipedia page also took note of the legacy this even left behind. Towards the very end, it has a subsection on how this event influenced current popular culture. I don’t really know if Wikipedia allows video footage, but maybe more media footage could better capture this horrendous event.

Final Reflection
This assignment is definitely not as easy as I thought it would be. This assignment is definitely not as easy as I thought it would be. It is completely different than the essays we would write in class. Usually, the essays we write require us to take a certain viewpoint and argue with supporting details for those viewpoints. We are always trained to write critically, the I/O posts we do require us to assert something we learned and also raise a question in something we found. However, in this assignment, we must take a neutral stance and basically summarize a certain event or topic we chose. We cannot assert our own ideas into it. This task can be especially hard when we’re writing about Chinese philosophy where everyone might have their own interpretations. For example, for the On Practice Wikipedia entry, the contributor simply stated all of Mao’s arguments in a way that people could understand it easily. Another factor that is quite difficult is how to make our Wikipedia pages easy to navigate through. How do we set it up so that readers can move about the page and easily find keywords they are searching for.