Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1412–1414)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. I see no other closure possible. Future action--Merger, rename, etc.-- can be discussed on the article talk page. Liz Read! Talk! 03:48, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1412–1414)

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Largely a WP:OR/WP:SYNTH reconstruction based on very old primary sources, about battles and sieges we don't have articles on, which were part of a 3 year campaign we don't have an article on, which was part of an 11 year war we don't have an article on. Fram (talk) 10:38, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: History, Military, Lists,  and Myanmar. Fram (talk) 10:38, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep Hybernator's points are convincing, though it might help to mention the Forty Years' War in the lead. Not sure how 19th and 20th century sources are a primary source for the 15th century wars. Using published books that are referred to seminally in the field of Burmese history is probably better than relying on random 21st century websites anyways. I'm not an expert on WP:OR but I'm not sure putting things into a list is necessarily WP:SYNTH even if they were not in the original sources.  EmeraldRange  (talk/contribs) 13:53, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The Herald (Benison) (talk) 04:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
 * , a few points:
 * The chronicles are definitely not primary sources. They are in fact secondary (tertiary and beyond) sources. They were written long after the war took place.
 * This article is part of the Forty Years' War, which is covered in a number of English-language academic books/papers. It's not some obscure war. (The war's specific campaigns are also covered in the Minkhaung I, Minye Kyawswa and Razadarit articles.)
 * Re: OR/SYNTH: The chronicles literally provide these lists throughout. (In fact, some historians have called the Burmese chronicles essentially the military history of Burma.) Academic works essentially follow the chronicle narratives; See (Harvey 1925) and (Fernquest 2006), both listed in the Bibliography. The main thing they (Harvey and Leiberman) question is the size of the forces--which I have mentioned in every order of battle article I've contributed to. (Per Harvey's analysis, I've reduced the force sizes by an order of magnitude.) In any case, I have provided what the chronicles actually state so that readers could compare.
 * This was fine with my previous orders of battle articles; in fact, the Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1385–1391) was a DYK article.
 * As for the main article not being there, first, where does it say that an order of battle article can be written only after an article on the war has been written? Secondly, the Forty Years' War can be the main article until someone decides to write a more specific article on the 1408–1418 campaigns (as I did with the 1385–1391 and 1401–1403). But even if I don't end up writing, this article can stand on its own.
 * Anyway, I welcome suggestions, edits and contributions to this article. I don't see why it needs to be deleted. Thanks. Hybernator (talk) 19:54, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The Herald (Benison) (talk) 16:55, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep per article creator. How dare you accuse Myanmar's main royal chronicles of being primary sources without evidence! The Burmese royal chronicles are definitely not primary sources. You can't judge another country's national chronicles, especially since you're not Burmese and clearly lack knowledge about Myanmar. You're attempting to challenge the Burmese project, but there are few active Burmese editors. The list of royal orders for battles is clearly important and worthy of having a standalone article as part of Myanmar's historical events. I'm shocked to see you nominate the article for deletion, especially since the subject exceeds the notability guideline. So what's your problem? Before making judgments on national historical books, you need evidence to support your claims. Thank you. 1.46.91.225 (talk) 19:46, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't understand why some are making baseless AfD (Articles for Deletion) for unknown reasons. That's why I retired from editing Wikipedia. It's very depressing. 1.46.91.225 (talk) 19:52, 2 March 2024 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE – Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * While I agree that this AfD should've been closed as Keep already, no need to be hostile. Please assume good faith- Royal chronicles can be primary sources, it's just in this case that the earliest source used for these 15th century wars is an epigraphical 18th century book. The AfD may be baseless but it's easy to see how an average reader (who would also clearly lack knowledge about Myanmar) may mistakenly think the chronicles cited are from the 15th century.  EmeraldRange  (talk/contribs) 18:33, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
 * အပိုတွေပြောနေလဲ အပိုပဲ အောက်မှာ အောက်တန်းစား လူရမ်းကား groupလိုက်ရောက်လာပြီ ဒီလိုသတောင်းစားတွေက မြန်မာpj အပေါ် ဘာမှအကူညီမရတဲ့အပြင် ဖျက်ဖို့ပဲ ကြိုးစားနေကြတယ် အဲ့တာတွေ စိတ်ကုန်တာ... Hybernatorလို ထိပ်တန်း editor တယောက် အနေနဲ့ မသေချာ မရေရာပဲ ဖန်တီးပါ့မလား အခု ခွေးအုပ်စု လုပ်ရပ်က Hybernator လက်ရှိရေးသားနေတဲ့ ဆောင်းပါး ပေါ်အပြင် တခြားဟာတွေပါ ထိခိုက်လာမယ် တခုပြီး တခု ဖျက်ဖို့လုပ်မယ် ခွေးမျိုးတွေ လုပ်နိုင်တာ ဒါပဲလေ, ကိုယ်တွေကအနေသာကြီးပါ Eng Wikipedia က မြန်မာဆောင်းပါး ၃ပူံပုံ တပုံလောက်က ကိုယ်ဖန်တီးခဲ့ပြီးပြီမို့ အေးဆေးအနားယူနေပါတယ် မနေနိုင်လို့သာ ဝင်လာပြောတာ, တကယ် စိတ်ကုန်ရပါတယ် ဒီလိုတွေ မရောင်ရာ ဆီလာလူးနေမယ်ဆို Hybernatorပါ အိုင့်လို ဒါမှ မဟုတ် ကိုဟင်သာ လို ပျောက်ကွယ်သွားလိမ့်မယ်, ကို Hybernatorအနေနဲ့လည်း သေချာလေး ဖိပီး ရှင်းလင်းသင့်တယ် ဖန် ဆိုတဲ့ အမျိုးယုတ်က တပည့် များစွာ လပ်သပ်မွေးထားတာ တချိန်ထဲ ဖျက်ဖို့မဲတွေများလာတာ သံသယဖြစ်စရာပဲ 1.46.207.139 (talk) 11:59, 6 March 2024 (UTC)  WP:SOCKSTRIKE – Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Granting that machine translation is not a perfect tool, there seem to be personal attacks in this post. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 12:38, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Delete. I would be more convinced of notability if there was more coverage from more independent sources. True enough that the 19th-century royal chronicles aren't primary sources for the 15th-century wars, but the royalty are plausibly invested in particular interpretations of conflicts between antecedent states. I would be as uneasy about citing, say, a hypothetical official chronicle of the House of Windsor for the history of William the Conqueror. Additionally, a footnote in the article reveals that the military mobilization figures in this article are reduced by an order of magnitude from those reported in the royal chronicles, per G.E. Harvey's analysis in his History of Burma (1925) in the section Numerical Note. While this might be fair scholarship, I struggle to see how it isn't WP:OR, taking one source (Harvey) and synthesizing it with others (the royal chronicles) and deriving an interpretation of historical evidence (the reduced figures being more likely than the reported figures). Finally, I struggle to identify any notable coverage of the "Ava–Hanthawaddy War" as the "Ava–Hanthawaddy War" (Google Scholar, Google keyword search), even in Burmese (Google Scholar, Google keyword search). P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 00:24, 6 March 2024 (UTC) [Self-struck P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 17:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)]
 * Delete lack of coverage in independent reliable sources; if it is necessary to reduce all figures taken from them by an order of magnitude, the royal chronicles are clearly not reliable. &#126;~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:44, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete: Article without much prose and too many charts. Regardless, I don't see notability and can barely find mention of this battle from many centuries ago. I don't see notability. Oaktree b (talk) 02:59, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment puppet students of a someome arrived here by an order from Whatsapp group. Shame!1.46.207.139 (talk) 11:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE – Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep Royal chronicles are undeniably the primary sources of Burmese history of royal kingdoms. Htanaungg (talk) 01:57, 8 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Keep: I'll try to answer the concerns raised here. I'll assume good faith as I can't assume the general audience to be familiar with Burmese history or the country's extensive chronicle tradition.
 * Notability: The Forty Years' War is considered one of the most significant and influential wars in Burmese history. It is covered prominently in every major English language work on general Burmese history. Starting from (Phayre 1883), (Harvey 1925), (Hall 1960), (Htin Aung 1967), (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2013). Many of these are available online. For more specific works on the war itself, check out (Fernquest 2006). (Aung-Thwin 2017) covers and Ava and Hanthawaddy Pegu between the 14th and 16 centuries, and the war of course is covered extensively as it preserved Pegu's independence. The war is listed in this (Dictionary of Wars by George Kohn 2006).
 * Sourcing: The extant chronicles are not primary sources by a long shot. The Burmese chronicles article covers that extensively. (For the record, I contributed to that article.) You can check out the sources. The earliest chronicle that covers the war was translated into Burmese (from Mon) in the 1560s. The first national chronicle, the Maha Yazawin was written in 1724, and the Yazawin Thit chronicle (1798) actually corrected some of the dates based on epigraphical evidence. The Hmannan (1832) was based on the Maha Yazawin and took many of the dates from the Yazawin Thit.
 * Some of the sources of the chronicles have survived. The Royal Orders of Burma, 1598–1885 is viewable online. There's a five volume work on ancient stone inscriptions from the Pagan to Ava periods. This earlier, smaller 1899 work has English translations.


 * Reliability: AFAIK, no historian has questioned that the war took place, or that the various regiments from different regions participated. What some have questioned about the number of troops, I have mentioned it prominently in every order of article. In general, historians consider the Burmese chronicles to be very reliable. I can supply the quotes from the likes of Victor Lieberman, G.E. Harvey, D.G.E. Hall. Are they completely neutral? Or 100% accurate? Of course not. But all of the Burma/Myanmar historians have referenced the chronicles.


 * Little Prose: This article is meant to be on orders of battle. From what I can see, most orders of battle articles have little prose. As far as the charts, I took the time to put the regiments in a table.


 * Lastly, I've contributed many articles using the chronicles, alongside other history books. And gotten 3 GAs and many DYKs, including one for Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1385–1391). Other editors found them good enough.


 * Anyway, I don't expect every editor to be fully up to speed on Burmese history. I welcome suggestions to improve the article. Cheers, Hybernator (talk) 04:31, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Notability: the sources raised would be useful if we were discussing the notability of Forty Years' War. We are not—we are discussing Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1412–1414). Just because a topic is notable does not mean every conceivable subtopic is.
 * Source reliability: if historians have questioned the number of troops, declined to provide more than a ratio, but you have calculated seemingly-precise numbers based on a throwaway line in a 99-year old source, then that is original research.
 * Previous contributions: Thousands of articles which have gone through DYK and GA have been deleted. I myself have even successfully nominated a couple of featured articles for deletion. Vague gestures to the past are meaningless. &#126;~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 06:47, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I fully agree that not every subtopic is automatically notable. At the same time, there are many precedences for "sub-topic" articles on wars. Look at the Napoleonic Wars and several "sub" articles: War of the Third Coalition, Fourth Coalition, etc. Likewise for order of battle articles: many order of battle articles are at the battle level, much more specific than at the campaign level. In this case, yes, all of the individual campaigns of the Forty Year's War are covered in the English language works I mentioned above. Don't take my word: some of them like (Fernquest 2006) are freely viewable online. (Now, I don't think being covered in an English language work or being Googleable should be the main criterion for notability but I recognize it's one of the inherent factors here.)


 * Re: "throw-away line about the troop strength" by Harvey. Well, I also quoted Lieberman's take from his 1984 book which concurs with Harvey's take. Other than dividing the chronicle figures by ten, I haven't created any what you call "seemingly precise" figures. In fact, I've gone to great lengths to list the figures reported in the various chronicles; see the article's notes section because I want people to be able to double-check the figures. You'll see that some of the battles don't have any figures because none of the chronicles provides any. In some of the battles, chronicles provide regimental commanders, but in many cases, only the lead commanders are mentioned. Hybernator (talk) 22:52, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I am accustomed to assuming good faith about sources I can't access; that is not the problem. What's becoming problematic is that even the accessible sources you tell us are about the topic don't seem to really be. The Fernquest (2006) article never mentions an Ava–Hanthawaddy War, or Hanthawaddy for that matter (except in the title of a bibliographic item cited only once). But this is only the tip of the iceberg of problems.
 * The nominated Wikipedia article states (permanent link) that The orders of battle for Hanthawaddy Pegu are mainly sourced from Nai Pan Hla's version of the Razadarit Ayedawbon. Meanwhile, Fernquest tells us on page 4 that there are problems with the primary sources used to write "Rajadhirat Ayeidawpon" (I gather this is a different transliteration of Razadarit Ayedawbon) and adds that When we read of Rajadhirat and his exploits we can never be quite sure whether we are reading historical fact or fiction (bolding added) and that the resulting "ethno-history" that we now have has to best be characterized as indigenous intellectual history, not the history of events at all (bolding added). And yet the Wikipedia article treats the Razadarit Ayedawbon as a reliable source, when it makes claims about deeds of Razadarit/Rajadhirat may not have even happened?
 * And every time I reread, I seem to notice more WP:OR in the article, like this: The Razadarit Ayedawbon gives the 5th waxing of Nadaw 770 ME [sic] as the start of the Prome campaign.[10] However, the 770 ME is a typographical error since the main chronicles say the campaign took place in 774 ME. This means the invasion date was probably the 5th waxing of Nadaw 774 ME (8 November 1412). What is the second sentence cited to? Nothing. It is the Wikipedian's original research, extrapolating beyond what some troublingly unreliable sources state.
 * The appropriate step at this point would be to delete this article and to self-nominate for deletion articles like Orders of battle for the Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1385–1391), which have the same problems. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 23:37, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * The topic of (Fernquest 2006) is about King Razadarit, and most of the campaigns of the Forty Years' War that took place during the king's reign. Hanthawaddy is the classical name of Pegu. Ava–Hanthawaddy War is also called Ava–Pegu War.
 * Regarding the date (5th waxing of Nadaw 770 ME), yes, the reported date in the Razadarit Ayedawbon is different from the 774 ME date reported in the main chronicles. What's wrong with reporting that chronicles don't always agree? In fact, there are many other chronicle reporting differences, and I've taken the time to report both sides. The Razadarit was written from the Hanthawaddy perspective while the main chronicles are from Ava's. In fact, the last two pages of Fernquest's article provide a comparison between the Razadarit and the Maha Yazawin (U Kala).
 * AFAIK, all the major books on Burmese history (see above) cover the war, and they all cite the chronicles (primarily the Maha Yazawin (U Kala) and Hmannan chronicles). We have contemporary inscriptional evidence of the war. (It's surreal I even have to be arguing about this.) In fact, I'm not aware of any works that say the war and the campaigns didn't take place. It's fine to challenge/update/remove certain sections of the article. But it's another to say an article on a notable subject must be deleted. Hybernator (talk) 00:47, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * As AirshipJungleman29 already explained, gesturing to the main topic isn't sufficient to establish the notability and verifiability of this subtopic. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 00:57, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I like how you completely ignore the part where fundamental sourcing issues are uncovered, and focus on attacking an imaginary strawman where the argument is about whether a war happened. &#126;~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:58, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Verifiability: In your view, is the sourcing issue fundamentally unrecoverable? Issues regarding OR for calculating could be solved by rewriting the article to reflect the uncertainty and discussing the sources' differences rather than deleting the article.
 * Notability: I agree that the main topic doesn't make 1412-1414 notable. However, looking the overall context, it looks like @Hybernator is working to fill out the following:
 * Campaign: 1385–1391
 * Order of Battle: 1385–1391
 * Campaign: 1401–1403
 * Order of Battle: 1401–1403
 * Campaign: 1408–1418
 * Order of Battle: 1408–1410
 * Order of Battle: 1410–1412
 * Order of Battle: 1412–1414
 * Order of Battle: 1416–1418
 * Campaign: 1422–1423
 * Order of Battle: 1422–1423
 * Campaign: 1430–1431
 * Order of Battle: 1430–1431
 * I'm not sure if there's a reason in sources to split the 1408-1418 campaign into 3 orders of battles, and there may be more notability if the three Orders of Battle were merged. I haven't reviewed the sources in detail to make that judgement, I'm presuming there is some reason for the (currently unwritten) 1408-1418 campaign being grouped as it is.  EmeraldRange  (talk/contribs) 13:43, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I've split into separate articles mainly for length considerations. We could combine all into one but the resulting one would be too unwieldy. Besides most other order of battle articles are at the battle level, and are much shorter. Hybernator (talk) 02:41, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Final relist. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The Herald (Benison) (talk) 02:40, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep It's likely that this article could be classified as a type of WP:LISTV, given its focus on a significant part of the historical war campaign in Myanmar. However, if possible, this article should be merged into the main Ava–Hanthawaddy War (1408–1418). If merged, the article size would become too large and unsuitable for Wikipedia, so splitting it into a sub-article seems like a better approach, in my opinion. 180.183.224.201 (talk) 19:08, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Keep, weakly: EmeraldRange's question about whether the sourcing issue is fundamentally unrecoverable made me rethink and reread the arguments. I have struck my above delete !vote. I also got around to checking on what Hybernator said about Hanthawaddy also being known as Pegu, and it turns out that while I couldn't find the "Ava–Hanthawaddy War", Ava–Pegu War does have hits on GoogleScholar. I think the article still has problems (possibly it has the wrong name, and I think parts of it are WP:OR that should be removed), but I'm not as sure anymore that deletion is the right answer. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 17:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.