User talk:Natalie Wilkinson/sandbox

Seems like you have some good sources you'd found in your leads section, and I understand you're reformatting sources so I won't comment on that. I do however, see that you have a long way to go still with the integration of your quotes into useable facts on Wikipedia. There's plenty of time to do this, so it's not too much of a worry; remember that having quotes on Wikipedia is generally frowned upon unless absolutely necessary.

For your introduction, I think you still need to expand your opening paragraph. I see you haven't changed the one sentence summary from that which was provided on the original article. Summaries are tricky, but typically you want more than one sentence. I suggest adding something about his philosophy and finishing that second sentence with what his advocation resulted in. For example, plenty of people were protesting the mine; why was what he did important/noteworthy?

I like that you split the paragraphs up; it needed it. The philosophy section looks a bit underdeveloped to me still, but that might just be because of the many sources and quotes present. I worry that it just doesn't flow very well regardless. Once you have re-integrated your quotes, try maybe rearranging things so that the main points about his philosophy are at the top.

I really like the writing section. And as your notes suggest, expanding that one writing would be a great idea!

Good job overall, and good luck!

Kafkanaut 11:05, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Instructor comments 2020
Natalie, you’ve got a solid start on this, but it is time to turn you focus to this project and get it polished and ready to move to the main space. It should be complete and ready to go by the time of our last class session.

Lead could be a little more substantial. You might mention there that he was elected to the lower house of the diet and give the year. See Matt’s comments on this issue and others. I basically concur with his comments.

First paragraph of “early life” has spelling/grammar/typo mistakes. Footnote number always goes after final punctuation. Sentence about being imprisoned for political intrigue is too vague. How does one get prosecuted for “political intrigue”? What actually happened? Second paragraph is a quote from Walker that is too long. Paraphrase the quotation.

Philosophy section: Get Stolz piece cited correctly, and correct the spelling of Stolz’s first name as it appears in the bibliography. Popular Rights Movement is a big deal in Japanese history. You should link to the Wikipedia entry for it, but also read that entry as it might help you understand the environment/context in which Tanaka is operating. This whole section appears to be your rough notes drawn from Stolz. Time to get this polished.

Later life section: if Tanaka was a Christian you need to say so. I wasn’t sure, so I did a simple google search for “Tanaka Shozo Christian” and came up with some good secondary sources that confirm, and that might give you additional info.

Regarding sources, the NDL website is a good source. NDL is the National Diet Library (of Japan), which is the equivalent of our Library of Congress. The two other websites are not the greatest of sources, but I think you could leave them in if you are simply going to use the original sentences that cited them from the old version of the article.

I think you are on the right track with what you have so far, but you need to work on getting it finished at this point.

Elyssafaison (talk) 01:49, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Instructor comments 2020: Second Round
Natalie, you’ve done a lot of good work on this and it is getting closer, but still needs a bit more work. You need to do a very careful proofread and pay attention to word choice, capitalizations, syntax, spelling, etc. Here are specific comments:

In the Lead: “Popular Rights Movement” gets capitalized each time you use it. Is there an article about it in Wikipedia you can link to? I see in the next section you do link to the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, but you need to render the name of the movement again using capital letters. Also, the article you link to calls it the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. These are all different translations of the same Japanese name for the movement. None of them is wrong; but you probably want to pick one and stick with it so your readers don’t get confused. I might suggest calling it by the name used in the Wikipedia article (Freedom and People’s Rights Movement), linking to that article the first time you mention it, and then maybe also say parenthetically (also referred to as the Popular Rights Movement) to make it clear.

Did you look at Julia Thomas’ book that we read? Your reference in the lead to Tanaka’s contributions to philosophical concepts of nature made me realize she talks about him in Reconfiguring Modernity.

In the Early Life section, “the headman of Konaka Village in the village of Konaka” is redundant. In the following section, be sure to write “headman” instead of “head man”.

Political Activism section: Needs a lot of proofreading. This sentence does not make sense: “In May 1868, Tanaka was imprisoned for challenging a higher-ranking official, who he believed to have been embezzling money from the government, by submitting a petition for his arrest.” Lots more proofreading errors in this section, then towards the end: “against the ineffectual hostility of such measures” does not make sense. In your discussion of the jikiso incident, you should link to the Kotoku Shusui article, and should also check the second (mis)spelling of “jikiso”.

Are you aware the Robert Stolz does indeed have a book out, which probably supersedes the dissertation you are working from? https://books.google.com/books?id=OmKGAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT77&lpg=PT77&dq=jikiso+incident&source=bl&ots=sZ_hLItBWc&sig=ACfU3U0SPuaJxe6TqnJO93p3pS1dL9Qn1Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilhp380YnpAhUDIKwKHTdLByQQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=jikiso%20incident&f=false

I am still not clear on why the Factory Law reference is there. The Fatory Law was not about industrial pollution, so I would need to be told in what ways it addresses that issue to make it relevant to this article. Citation? Needs a bit more explanation, or leave it out.

Later Life: might be better to say “protest against various environmentally harmful construction projects.” Citation 42 looks weird.

For some reason you have failed to capitalize some names in your sources list.

Elyssafaison (talk) 22:29, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Instructor comments 2020: Third Round
Lead: “Tanaka was a participant and leader in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement which led to the Meiji restoration.” This statement cannot be true: The Meiji Restoration took place in 1868, and the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement did not emerge until the 1880s.

Political Activism: “Tanaka moved to Yanaka and protested via a philosophical discourse portending the ineffectuality and hostility of such measures.” This sentence does not read well.

Ashio: “Tanaka gave a famous speech questioning why the Meiji government had not suspended Ashio's operations based on Meiji constitutional property law.” I see where you are getting this from in Walker, but you have to be careful about language and meaning. “Constitutional law” and “property law” are two different things. Might you might be trying to say is “based on the Meiji constitution’s guarantees of individual property rights.”

“An activist movement consisting of farmers, fishing households, soil scientists, Tokyo intellectuals, nationalists, anarchists, Christian socialists, and early Marxists developed in retaliation to the mine.” They are not relatiating against the mine, but against the environmental pollution caused by the mine. I don’t think “retaliation” is the right word, either.

FN 26/29 at end of that paragraph appear to have a page number after them that should go in the reference/citation. This happens again later in the article.

You still have “Jikiso scandal” spelled incorrectly. Also immediately after that I previously noted that you have a long quotation from Walker set off as its own paragraph. This is not a good idea. Paraphrase the quotation and then provide the citation.

Proofread again: you are missing possessive apostrophes in several places and have several other typographical mistakes.

It is not clear to me why the discursive part of fn 45 is there. What does Akihito have to do with the sentence in the article you are citing? I realize the source material is in Japanese, which means it must have been part of the original article before you changed it. Make sure that citation is in the right place now that you have added so much.

Elyssafaison (talk) 22:20, 1 May 2020 (UTC)