User:Yfmai/sandbox

"Article Evaluation"

For my Week 2 assignment, I reviewed the article entry about the Transition of power from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty.

The entry had a lot of information and I was very impressed with the actual content that was written. Everything in this article was relevant to the discussion as it spoke about the events leading up to the actual transition of power and the aftermath of the Qing takeover. Obviously, the Qing didn't win over the whole country with the capture of Beijing, so the article expanded on by writing about the conquest of the Southern Ming territories in the later years. I really appreciated this because it was vital information that showed that the transition of power between the two Dynasties was a long and arduous process in which many people died. The article was pretty neutral as it condemned neither the rebel leader, Li Zicheng, nor the Manchus who invaded. Also, the article maintained its neutral stance by not appearing as sympathetic to the Ming deterioration. The story of the last Ming Emperor's suicide was a sad one and could easily be biased, but the article reported this very neutrally. There needs to be more citations behind the information in the early synopsis. There was over several paragraphs worth of information, but there was only one citation at the very end. In fact, that citation wasn't even that good because it was just one page out of a Chinese History book when the information that was described is enough to fill a whole historical textbook. There is no way that a single page could cite such a vast amount of information. I see that the sources and citations were from very old sources when there are new historical research that had been published recently that is very useful in explaining this topic. Such example include the book "Imperial China, 1350-1900" by Jonathan Porter. Incorporating new sources as citations would go a long ways in updating the quality of this Wikipedia entry.