User talk:Skylercafferata/Choose an Article

Thank you for identifying four possible articles to edit and generally choosing good sources that could help you.

I went to the MA thesis on the guzheng and perused its bibliography. That was very helpful and I highly recommend it. I learned that it might be more useful to search for sources on the zheng or Chinese zither than on the guzheng. And sure enough, I found quite a few more sources than what I had found earlier.

As I wrote via email to you, I'm a little worried about focusing on "political music in China" because it might pull you towards popular music whereas I'd really like you to engage with unfamiliar and traditional forms of music. However, I'm willing to let you explore the topic if you think you can make it work. Please note that I think your two sources for "political music in China" are the same...? I also see on the article talk page that some kind of edit war was going on for a while (albeit back in 2009). I recommend caution if you edit this page. If nothing else, I would strongly recommend preparing folks for any impending edits with a note on the talk page about your plans.

You've found some good sources on Chinese opera; unfortunately, most scholarship seems to focus on Peking opera and Wikipedia's peking opera page is already very well developed and not worth editing. Note that there are some books on the subject as well as articles -- these might be worth accessing, if possible.

I'm not sure that it would make sense to make a separate article for music of the Han culture since the Han peoples are by far the most dominant group in China (even more than whites in Canada, for example). Music of the Han culture is, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of Chinese music.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to access the CNKI database, although I suspect that most of its holdings are in Chinese and not in English. However, you could ask our SASS librarian, Martin Chandler, for help.

You might want to make sure that you can format text in Wikipedia -- all of your text is bolded. If you edited the "option" headings with your article titles, the page contents listed at the top of the page might make more sense. It would also help if you linked article titles to the actual Wikipedia articles and if you provided actual citations for your proposed sources so I didn't have to go to each one to see what it was.