Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic groups

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WikiProject Ethnic Groups is a project to coordinate among articles about ethnic groups and other closely related topics. This project, founded in January 2004, has produced an optional article template and infobox to be used for articles about ethnic groups and other similar entities.

A few Wikipedians have gotten together to make some suggestions about how we might organize data in articles about ethnic groups. These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. But if you don't know what to write or where to begin, following the below guidelines may be helpful. Mainly, we just want you to write articles!

Motivation

NOTE that there is no intention of identifying all individuals by ethnic group or even of increasing the number of ethnic/national identifications in Wikipedia. Let's be clear: ethnicity is a minefield. However, that is all the more reason we need to come up with clear and consistent criteria for talking about it when we talk about it.

1. Ethnic groups have only slightly more epistemological validity than races, and the concept is possibly even more subject to hijacking by extreme nationalists than the concept of a nation itself. Nonetheless, it crops up constantly and it would be very helpful to have some standards for dealing with it. For example, almost every biography of a person who is not of the majority ethnicity of the country they are from already notes ethnicity.
2. When this project was founded, Wikipedia had relatively few articles on ethnicities; in particular, discussion of many of the world's most prominent ethnic groups was wholly subsumed into the discussion of a nation-state or a region.
3. This project came about in large measure to clarify the distinction between ethnicity and geography/citizenship and to make it possible to describe (for example) a "Romanian national of Hungarian ethnicity without linking to the arguably irrelevant article about the nation-state of Hungary (or similarly, to refer to a Hungarian national of Romanian ethnicity without linking to the article about Romania). Similarly, there needs to be a way to talk about the Volga Germans or the Transylvanian Saxons that acknowledges their connection to an ethnicity without implicitly viewing them as the misplaced nationals of Germany.
4. When this project started in January 2004, we noted that different ethnicities are very differently handled. For example, most Native American ethnicities are dealt with mainly from a historical and anthropological point of view, whereas other groups such as the Overseas Chinese are dealt with from a contemporary political point of view. As of January 2006, this has undoubtedly improved somewhat, partly through the efforts of this project in providing an article template and an appropriate infobox for these articles, which serves as a reminder that (for example) Native American groups are still present in the world today and (conversely) European ethnic groups also have anthropologically significant sub-ethnicities.
5. In addition to the articles on individual ethnicities, this project also relates, in various degrees, to certain ancillary articles which describe concepts that are necessary in order to discuss ethnicities.

Scope

This WikiProject aims primarily to provide a template for articles about ethnic groups and nationalities independent of writing about nation-states. The motivation for this came in writing about Eastern Europe, but it should relevant to any other parts of the world.

This project construes the term "ethnic group" in its broadest sense. There may be identifiable ethnic (sub)-groups within an ethnic group (such as the Ashkenazi within the Jews). Any templates we adopt have to allow for a way to talk about that. Often, ethnicities border on being nationalities, such as the native "First Nations" of the Americas, or are heavily identified with a particular nation, such as the Ethnic Germans.

Parentage

No parent of this WikiProject has been defined.

Descendant Wikiprojects

Wikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America

Similar Wikiprojects

The similar WikiProjects are WikiProject Clans of Scotland and WikiProject Languages.

Participants

1. apoivre
2. Big Adamsky (random knowledge about peoples and peoplehoods)
3. cjllw - have been working on articles relating to indigenous peoples for some time (a subset of "ethnic groups", if you like)
4. DanKeshet (on and off, probably)
5. FarQPwnsJoo I'll add what I can :)
6. Jbetak - nations and ethnic groups of Europe and the Middle East
7. JCarriker
8. Jmabel
9. Joy
10. Khoikhoi
11. Kieran I'll probably be focusing on Southern African ethnic groups, though
12. LouI - Talk
13. Neutrality
14. Node
15. Pedant (as much as I can being a white anglo-saxon 'christian' caucasian male living in the US)
16. Suryoyo - I can probably help out with the people from middleeast, more specific, the syriac people (arameans/assyrians/chaldeans)
17. Tanzeel - have an encyclopaedic knowledge of ethnicities, languages, nationalities etc of most of the world, especially Near and Middle East, West Africa, Indian subcontinent, Persia, South East Asia, Central Asia, Russia and the Muslim World.
18. Fsotrain09 - I'll help however I can.
19. NorbertArthur- I will do my best.

Structure

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template for a prototypical structure of an article about an ethnic group.

Hierarchy Definition

No classification of ethnic groups has been defined. However, the notion of hierarchy is potentially relevant, probably yielding a directed acyclic graph, but probably not a simple tree. For example consider:

           Semitic peoples
                  |
                Jews
                 / \
                /   \
               /     \
              v       v
        Ashkenazim   Sephardim
               \     /
                \   /   
                 \ /
                  v  
           Jewish Americans

Also, there may be a need to consider a (necessarily controversial) designations such as nation, subnational group, etc. Mostly, this looks like an issue to postpone for now, and to discuss at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. However, it is probably relevant to discuss for an ethnic group to what extent it is defined by ancestry, heritage, and geography. For example, an Afro-Brazilian is defined by African heritage, typically by descending from slaves (the word would be unlikely to be used for a 21st century person whose parents had come from Ethiopia, or for a transplanted family of white South Africans), and by Brazilian birth or by one's family having lived several generations in Brazil.

Again, these are just preliminary notes on a subject we have not yet really engaged, and should probably be refined in the talk page before trying to work out any standard approach. For now, there is no standard.

Article naming

As of January 2006, there is no strong consensus on naming of articles about ethnic groups. In the following table the pattern is based on an imaginary Elbonian ethnicity.