Talk:Imjin War

Factual errors

"Japanese swords, which were sometimes collected in the battlefield from dead Japanese soldiers, would inspire some of the basic designs of later Korean swords such as the hwando." Is wrong, when you read another article about Korean swords - which is linked in the text. In that wiki-page, the author points out, that the Hwando was made in Korea before the war. 2A05:F6C2:AFEB:0:A133:7317:8AD7:B739 (talk) 09:00, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

Split proposal

Propose splitting off the second invasion section into a new article called Chŏngyu War. Article is over 24,000 words right now; well over the WP:SIZERULE of 15,000 for basically mandatory splits. For some more context, see the above move discussion. seefooddiet (talk) 20:48, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

@Seefooddiet I think it makes more sense to cover the invasions together, as I'd imagine the vast majority of readers (as do most sources I've seen) view the two invasions as one event, and will accordingly read about both together. It's more efficient for those readers if the information is covered in one article with 24k words rather than two with 24k+some thousands of words of necessary redundancies between them. WP:SIZERULE is for readability, and we shouldn't follow it if it'll make information less readable. Kaotao (talk) 05:42, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure I fully agree. 24,000 is just too long; a split needs to be made somewhere. Do you have an alternate idea for where we could split or do something else to get the length of the article down? seefooddiet (talk) 06:01, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@Seefooddiet I don't think there's anything that comes close to the Chongyu war in splitability, and splitting that section wouldn't have a significant impact on readability. The section for the Chongyu war is only about 3,300 words long, half the size of the background section. and a quarter of the Imjin war section, which already consists mostly of summaries. I think copyediting is the only solution. Kaotao (talk) 06:38, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

If sources treat them as one event, why not split it into articles focused on the major campaigns / battles / events / treaties that comprise the wars? LeChatiliers Pupper (talk) 17:10, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@LeChatiliers Pupper It already has been. Most of this article is comprised of proportionate summaries of battles with their own articles. Kaotao (talk) 17:14, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Maybe in addition to an article dedicated to the second invasion called Chŏngyu War, there can also be an article for the first invasion called Imjin War (1592–1593). Then this current article can serve as a high-level overview. _dk (talk) 10:24, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think this is the solution. Kaotao raises a fair point and I need to think about it. seefooddiet (talk) 10:29, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I do agree with Kaotao that the two invasions should be covered together and that copyediting is the solution, but this article is entirely too long and the fact of the matter is that any copyedit will have to significantly pare down the article. See, for example, how the Napoleonic Wars article (which is still very long) is split into subarticles about War of the Third Coalition, Peninsular War, War of the Fifth Coalition, and so on. _dk (talk) 10:46, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm thinking we have two possible actions that could even be taken together:

1. Split off an article for the first and second invasions. Imjin War would be the parent to both articles and only contain high-level overviews. Would need to think of an adequate title for the first invasion; I'm not sure if Imjin War (1592–1593) is the best but it may be. The second invasion would be Chŏngyu War.
2. Remove a significant chunk of the unsourced writing. I think this would be uncontroversial. There's a lot of it and at that volume it's daunting to expect people to try and source.

seefooddiet (talk) 10:53, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

@Seefooddiet I'm not sure if I agree with the first action. The Imjin and Chongyu war sections are already summaries, and to summarize those summaries would make the information of the actual wars in this article superficial. If someone's powering through 6k-8k words before getting to the actual meat of the article, I doubt they'd be sated by a summary of a summary; then we'd have the same issue of determined readers (the only ones for whom word count matters) reliably being inclined to read the new split-off articles, which would have to have a higher word count than the sections they came from.

Splitting both off is probably the most effective way of getting this article's word count, but I'm not sure if hitting the 15k mark would be worth it. This is a very different case from the Napoleonic Wars article, since 6 of its sections have their own article, and this article has two splittable ones, one of which would be a quarter of the size of the other. If the two sections, especially the second, could be fleshed out considerably, it might be more prudent to split them, but that doesn't seem likely; Korean Wikipedia's article on the Chongyu war is rather short.

As for action 2, good idea, including the "significant chunk" qualifier; a lot of important information, such as the first mention of the hwacha, is unsourced. Kaotao (talk) 19:26, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm still uncertain, will do more thinking. I'm not sure I fully agree but I understand where you're coming from.

Side note, but the Korean Wikipedia is often a pretty poor metric for how we should cover things. It's pretty underserved because the community is split due to the prevalence of Namuwiki. Many critically important Korea-related topics on it are actually really underserved. seefooddiet (talk) 20:30, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I'd like to say even a "summary of a summary" serves an important purpose since not all readers are interested in reading all there is to know down to the details due to time constraints and attention spans. The interested reader would have the choice to dive into the subarticles as many levels as they like, and this is usually the way Wikipedia deals with long and complicated conflicts. _dk (talk) 22:21, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I partially agree with this. I also think the total volume of text on a thing spread across articles is less of a worry and not necessarily restricted by Wikipedia guidelines. But I think Kaotao's point has some merit too. seefooddiet (talk) 22:42, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

@Underbar dk I suppose that is a useful niche. My main concern was that any summaries would end up functioning as pitfalls for readers willing to read through the very lengthy background section, but maybe I overestimated how consequential that would be compared to the potential benefits. I'm willing to agree to the two invasions being split off. Kaotao (talk) 00:13, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Name

I think must be the Name of the article Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–1598) because there are proper nouns that are used in other than İmjin War Ömereditss (talk) 16:24, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Could you rephrase? Grammar difficult to understand seefooddiet (talk) 19:37, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

I prefer the page title to be *Japanese Invasions of Korea (1592-1598)* because *Imjin War* is not the only name used for the war. Ömereditss (talk) 20:01, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

See the recent move request above; we follow Wikipedia's policies on WP:ARTICLETITLEs in order to determine the titles of articles. seefooddiet (talk) 20:02, 22 March 2025 (UTC)