| Explaining why, and how I drafted , then published the articles “Ryuukyuuan mon”, “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, “Yuan dynasty coinage”, Southern Song dynasty coinage”, “Jurchen Jin dynasty coinage”, “Liao dynasty coinage”, “Western Xia dynasty coinage”, “Nagasaki trade coins”, and the “Qing dynasty coinage”.
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| Well, the story starts not on Wikipedia but elsewhere, specifically in my browser favourites ⭐ on Microsoft Edge, I had already prepared a list of numismatic websites in a folder 📁 dubbed “Numismatica”, I had originally planned to wait until I would buy a new (“less crashy, less buggy”) laptop 💻, but for now my Cell.-phone suffices and it’s better to add content today than to wait for tomorrow (with things like “linkrot” and all, so if you’re planning on contributing to Wikipedia DO IT NOW. The reason why my laptop 💻 is so horrendous is simply because I NEVER DELETE ANYTHING, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, not a single e-mail 📧, picture 📷, draft (even if I can’t send it), or anything, in real life I'm an obsessive, compulsive hoarder and that translates into my digital life as well, to this end the hundreds of application programmes I had installed ruined my ability to use my laptop 💻, and I can't force myself to use “factory 🏭 reset” because that’s simply against my nature, now welcome to me editing on my cell.-phone 📞, where do I begin? Well, let’s start chronologically with the first article I had created with this account, the “Ryukyuan mon”. In my favourites there’s a link called the Ryuukyuuan coins by Dr. Luke Roberts from the University of California at Santa Barbara. But let's first explore how I got here before we get to the article creation bit.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Now I write these things here for what one might find a rather… ehhh… “stupid” reason, if I’d ever become a person that would fit English Wikipedia’s WP:NOTABILITY that I don’t have to explain my life based on (rather vague) memories in interviews, I could then always just point at a computer 💻 and say “my entire life, my every thought is there, feel free to look for it”, but that’s besides the point, I don’t write about my personal life here, only about my “WikiLife”, and what I do, how I do it, why I do it, and what obstacles I (had) face(d) and hopefully let the one (1) or two (2) people that will ever read this learn 🏫 to make themselves into better users/editors while at it, I don’t know, just an idea 💡.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. Now let me first explain my prior experiences on Wikipedia before entering the world 🗺 of Numismatic articles below. 💫⬇💫
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| I had already greatly contributed to Wikipedia for years, but in a completely different field, most of my other contributions were in the field of information computer technology, specifically the technology developed by Microsoft. Well though I did edit there as an I.P. for years I wasn't that serious about adding content until one day I had stumbled upon a user from India whose I.P. address changed every 2 days and did literally nothing but delete Microsoft-, and Nokia-related content often with only one word justifications like “redundant”, “concise”, and “esthetical” never really adding any content, always just deleting things en masse, now any sane Wikipedian reading this (though I don't expect anyone other than bots to actually read this) would probably say “why didn't anyone revert him or her?” good question, but I have no answer, though I would have some edits reverted based on literally no justification despite doing so on consensus regarding to mergers or the moving of content forcing me to challenge them on talk pages taking sometimes hours or days what SHOULD only take 5 (five) minutes this Indian I.P. could simply mass-delete content and literally NEVER even receive a warning for it, but editing on Wikipedia teaches you to cope with double standards, so I took it upon myself to start reverting this troll and I had left around the same message on his/her 40+ I.P. addresses, though it’s highly unlikely that they ever saw any of those messages as they would only receive the same I.P. maybe once in every 2 years, the article was reduced from around 60k to a mere 4k (yeah, that person just literally got away with mass deletion unchallenged before me), but it wasn't until there was a discussion and edit war in the talk page of a(n) (kind of) unrelated Microsoft article that I created a Wikipedia-account I'll use for a long time, at first my edits mostly concentrated on “hunting” that troll down, finding references, and sources, and then adding more content to Microsoft articles, so I made a very looooooooooooong list of Microsoft articles that needed expansion and I made it my “mission” to make sure that any useable source I could find had their information added to these articles, this was a process that took several years but it’s completed now, and if you had fun 🎉 reading full detailed Microsoft articles with lots of sources chances are that you can have me to thank for. Eventually some articles I had created, and/or greatly expanded grew “too large” (WP:SIZERULE) and I was forced to split (WP:SPLIT) them, this I had little issue with as no information got deleted, articles that were previously unsourced or relied exclusively on WP:PRIMARY were now filled with dozens of reliable secondary & tertiary sources, and I had effectively “tamed the troll” often finding their messages on my talk page with requests to ADD content, though there was (and most unfortunately still is) a clique of bullies on the Microsoft articles who co-ordinate in real life to have several editors attack users they dislike with reversions, and though this clique has been accused of WP:OWN several times and reported countless of times by various users for some reason administrators just let them do what they do and reporting them might even get you warned for “whining”, and like in real life the bullies get away with their non-sense, but they aren’t “deletionists” so I can only hate them so far, though I am not exactly a fan of their behaviours and for some reason they care more about the style of the articles there is a completely different clique on those same articles who envoke WP:NOTCHANGELOG in irrelevant circumstances in order to delete content they dislike because they probably never read further than the title of that policy, however they prefer to stick to “copyright © paranoia” as their means of attack I had spent days finding references for a changelog that was removed solely because it relied only on Microsoft then it was later deleted purely because it used “similar words” now users are encouraged to paraphrase when adding content to avoid copyright claims and I did that, but their reasoning was “the source says USB, you said USB therefore you're infringing on their copyright ©” (this was the Xbox One 🎮 chabgelog), I remember my last “big project” on Microsoft articles being adding as many secondary and primary references to “Windows 10 version history” as I can find, I probably single-handedly “saved” that article from deletion and to finish off this paragraph I will explain how adding content for technology articles is very, VERY different than adding content for numismatic articles with online references, first (1st) of all whenever someone at Microsoft, Alphabet (formerly Google), Apple, I.B.M., or Verizon even sneezes thousands of outlets report it within a minute, if you want to contribute to Microsoft article on the day something happens to that product/service thousands of outlets names “Win[this]”, “MS[that]”, “Nokia[whatever]”, “WP[randomname]”, Etc. All have articles detailing everything about that, and WP:NOTABILITY is literally never an issue, neither is WP:NOTCHANGELOG only the laziness of editors with dozens jumping to the scene immediately adding content but only listing Microsoft, and then me coming there with my WP:CITEOVERKILL (something I kind of take with pride 😅 ) making sure that it lives up to Wikipedia’s standards. One might wonder, “if you liked doing it so much, then why did you stop doing it?” well it was hardly my own choice, after installing Microsoft Windows 10 on my laptop it became so slow ans buggy 🐛 that editing Wikipedia became a nightmare, on Microsoft Windows 8.1 (Blue) I could easily add 5 references ans write whole paragraphs in 5 minutes, but after my computer 💻 “upgraded” to Microsoft Windows 10 ot would take at least 2 hours to add a single reference due to the constant crashing, reloading mid-editing, and other bugs, editing now on a Microsoft Lumia 950 XL those same bugs plague me forcing me to even write this as an e-mail draft and saving it periodically (sometimes Microsoft Outlook just randomly crashes, reboots my cell.-phone, and deletes anything I had added to a draft causing me to sometimes take “Wikibreaks” out of anger), but despite that I still kept adding to those articles untl I had noticed that plenty of other editors started “Copying me” and made sure that WP:PRIMARY sources weren’t the only ones added, essentially “my mission” there was completed, just as I started hating Microsoft (yes, and ironoically it was also Microsoft that prevented me from making sure good neutral content was written about them).
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Disclaimer: In the above I describe “a Clique of bullies” which I do so not because of some bad editing style but specifically because they resort to personal insults when they interact with other editors in the talk pages, and/or when they revert edits, also this is not a personal attack on them I have (in vain) tried pointing WP:CIVIL out to them (as have many others) but if you post anything to them they will immediately call upon their friends to call you “a talk page stalker” and other ad hominem insults rather than address the issues, and as I’ve said before reporting them didn't seem to work for me or others, though in general I have very little against their overall editing style and the only reason I cannot respect them is because of their arrogance and personal insults, they basically insulted my first “made-For-editing” account wherever I went, but the reason I stopped using that account was very simple, I lost my password 😅, meanwhile there was another user who DID have a bad editing style that basically consisted of reverting a user, then re-inserting THAT EXACT SAME CONTENT (and occasionally with a different source, sometimes because he didn't like the name because it sounded “too bloggy” in his ears, welcome to the world 🗺 tech-Wikipedia, also this user edits other tech articles from Android, ABD/and iO.S. as well.), this person isn't a member of that clique and clashes with them too, the reason I call them “a clique” is because they openly conspire together to make sure none of them ever break the 3 revert rule, this is not an insult towards them but simply pointing out why I use the words I use, I do think that they (probably) act in WP:GOODFAITH and that they believe that they’re improving Wikipedia but it's just that I dislike it when they insult people (not just me, people in general because I believe in civility). In retrospect I could've probably written this as a part of some “goodbye letter” on the second account I had created for editing as I didn't even give that one a User-page. 🤔 Anyhow the “Deletionist clique” probably think that removing all, and any changelog they can find will “save” Wikipedia from future lawsuits, even if they were reworded up to standards, and I do think too that they genuinely believe that they're helping Wikipedia with their actions.
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| Note 📝: After I had created a second account solely for uploading a few images of products I noticed that those same people stopped insulting me, so that account wasn't a WP:SOCKPUPPET in any way, I just genuinely thought that “my work was over” but I just wanted to upgrade the last few “stub” articles I could find, after that I stopped editing there because I felt like I wasn't contributing but “racing” other editors to see “who could add content first” and all of the issues I first saw had been resolved anyhow.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| 2nd disclaimer: I never used those accounts to WP:SOCKPUPPET, and generally avoided talk pages, discussions, or even articles I had discussed with the former account.
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| The real reason I stopped contributing to Microsoft articles: Well, it's actually quite simple and I won't go around it (well, I often find myself writing WP:TOOLONG messages, and since I could talk at 9 (nine) months old I have practically always been blabbering non-stop 🤚🏻 since), the real reason I became less passionate about Microsoft was because Steve Ballmer left the company, his vision for Microsoft was one I liked and the moment Satya Nadella came at helm and started cutting both divisions, products, and services I started to see the “deletionist” mentality of Google, and MySpace manifest itself at Microsoft, to this end I became less passionate about adding content, I expanded and created a few Microsoft articles here and there, and with the Xamarin acquisition I temporarily felt passionate to write on Wikipedia again in order to document Xamarin’s history but after that I realised that my addiction to reading Microsoft-related news 📰 websites, and commenting on their and Microsoft’s official “fora” (forums), and “covering” them had become an unhealthy addiction so I just added references every now, and then so articles wouldn't fail WP:PRIMARY, but most articles were already filled it, and “a hot new generation of editors” usually beat me to adding the content anyhow, there were many factors that lead me to stop 🤚🏻, but in general I think that it was mostly the disappointment from Windows 10 essentially “bricking ” my laptop 💻 as I really didn't want to spend 2 (two) or 3 (three), and in one case 8 (eight) hours editing a page that used to only take 5 (five) minutes.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Above my original prime motivation was to make sure that “Microsoft Mobile Oy was better documented than Nokia” at first creating more references, links, redirects, and even articles, after succeeding I started to move to other Microsoft articles, I had effectively created a world where one could use Wikipedia to check on Microsoft articles related to mobile devices and not need to venture outside for much (additional) information, to that end I also edit Asian numismatic articles. Now I used to exclusively use a pre-prepares “citeweb” references for Microsoft articles all the time, not only are they so well documented that good sources are “a dime a dozen”, but generally speaking they’re so easy to find that you can’t NOT stumble upon them, and though I still take some (well… a lot of) pride in improving all of those Microsoft articles, and creating a fair share of them too, I simply can't say that this editing style translated well into the Numismatic “region” of Wikipedia, you see Wikipedia is like a multiverse, there are “ocean-planets” of information you can find, all connected somehow, but the Numismatic articles are kind of “special” as in that their web documentation is less than optimal, numismatists today (as of July 18th, 2017) still largely rely on paper works for reference, and to obtain any of these works one must often travel 🚢 (in person) to those places to obtain all the books 📚, many of them are so obscure that they're not on the internet, or even when they are can only be ordered in the(ir) country of origin, so what can we add? Well as editing numismatic articles require a lot more research it also often requires us to use sources that don’t easily fit in the “citeweb” reference formula, I had attempted it but it's not uncommon for some parameters to not be able to be filled in, authors may be unknown, the date of publishing is rarely mentioned (even with Microsoft-related articles I could still find it in the U.R.L. if I couldn't find it in the body of text), with the “Ryuukyuuan coins” article by Dr. Luke Roberts I can kind of more lucky 🍀 did document some of his publishing dates, but only when they were last updated.
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| 3rd disclaimer: Though I write above that it was my “mission” to always make Microsoft-related articles bigger, and with more references than their competitors’ articles this didn't imply that I would delete content from those other articles (as I would still sometimes contribute to those), it simply meant that I would prefer to add “as much content as possible, with as much references as possible” for this “competition”, I am “a Radical Inclusionist” and would be against deleting content even if I passionately hate that content, I just hate deletion even more… ✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻
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| With technology articles WP:NEWS 📰 ends right on the doorstep, whatever news 📰 you read about technology will probably be on Wikipedia tommorow, and that’s not a bad 🙅🏻 thing, however with Numismatic articles both the nature of the sources written about. Them, how you can integrate them into Wikipedia, and the research you must conduct to add them are all radically different, but I’ll explain how different those are later below. A little bit about my style on Wikimedia Commons before I’ll dive too deep into the thought process of writing numismatic articles for Wikipedia. 📝 🤔
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| As I had said I have long seen Wikimedia Commons as “basically another Cloud service for storage” but that doesn't mean that I would upload images here that fall “out of scope”, to that end I use the Facebook, and a myriad of other services to back those up, my “new” mentality is that “1 cloud ☁ service isn't enough, there should be a minimum of 5 just in case one gets discontinued”… during the beginning of what I like to call “The Cloud ☁ Era” I started to excessively back-up all of my flash-drives online, I had moved every file 📁 from external drives into my laptop 💻 to only move those to online services, several years ago I took it upon myself to bring all non-copyrighted files into Wikimedia Commons, and sometimes by coincidence I still stumble upon my old pictures on Wikipedia (and once even in a news 📰 article) but that’s besides the point, after that I even decided that Wikimedia Commons would become “my primary host for non-personal images” superseding Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, MEGA Privacy 🔏 and Google Drive, concurrent with me using the Facebook (and Facebook-Messenger) for personal files, of course I have already explained before that when I take pictures I make sure that they’re ”within scope”, and it's actually quite rare that I even look at my older pictures so the only reason I even keep them is because I’m”a crazy hoarder”, but how does this relate to me improving Wikipedia? Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and would always need images, and a lot of images here can be used on other websites and even “the Outernet” (real life) as well. So we’ve established that the closets filled with U.S.B. Sticks, external hard drives, and floppy disks, C.D.(-R.O.M.)’s, and D.V.D.(-R.O.M.?)’s I (used to) own are now publicly available, and that I seem to hold this mentality with even my own thoughts, how can that lead to an improvement of those articles? Continue reading for the answer.
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| Note 📝: I said “used to” because I specifically “donated” (read: Gave away(, as gifts 🎁 )) my external storage devices after moving all of the files out into the Cloud ☁, with services like Wikimedia Commons.
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| Just to be clear: COMMONS:NOTHOST ends where the usability of pictures 📷 for educational purposes begin, there’s plethora of users who have uploaded more pictures 📷 to Wikimedia Commons in a year than most (if not all) gratis Cloud ☁ storages would allow, I’m not arguing for a justification of my actions, just that my actions are already justified, when I take pictures 📷 I make sure that I can use them for educational purposes, and lately I sometimes only took pictures 📷 to upload to Wikimedia Commons rather than the other way around. And yes, even the most “mundane” things can find their way to educational uses here, I only uploaded a few pictures of food by accidentally clicking on them with an older account and recently found out that they’re on the top of a Wikipedia page about them, if you read this and think about not uploading a picture 📷 of some tree 🎄, DO IT (well, after checking if there aren't plenty enough pictures 📷 of that tree 🎄 here already. 😅).
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| So naturally the next step would be to write about what the differences are in adding numismatic-related references, and technology-related references.
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| Well, let's take a closer look at Dr. Roberts’ work shall we, on his website he specified a few sources as to where he gets his information from, all of those sources tend to be in Japanese (with one notable exception regarding Korean coinage), with technology-related news 📰... Uhhhm “articles” you’ll find that most of these are just “copy-and-paste” pieces with some MINOR commentary on it, often copied directly from the source or from another site, that copied it from another site, that copied it from the source. All of these are usually easy to trace online, and when someone says “the internet is not a substitute for your local library” I get angry... though recently I learned that they're quite right (FOR NOW), if I want to research the local history of some neighbourhood in some random German village, chances are that I’ll have to go to that village or the nearest larger urban settlement to find sources about it's history, and with finding sources for numismatic articles it’s unfortunately not that much different. The majority of websites I could find on Asian coinage were last updates in the 1990’s (no joke), and most refer to books 📚 that simply aren’t accessible online.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Now with the “Ryuukyuuan mon”article I simply mostly used Dr. Roberts’ work and I couldn't find any other English language resources to use, so I had to resort to using more Japanese resources as I can read Chinese characters 🀄 I can easily peruse through Japanese Wikipedia, though Shinjitai is a pain in the... neck, I can still convert it to Kyuujitai in order to convey the message, after that I started to more excessively “migrate” all of my numismatic browser favourites onto Wikipedia. 🌟➡📚
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| My next article up for expansion was “Korean mun”, simply because for years that article had bothered me, before I started expanding it the entire history of Korean currencies in it were basically just 3 (three) very ambiguous sentences “Goryeo produced some coins” (never specified which coins, when, or for how long, what the inscriptions read, or their denominations, only that they briefly produced coins, then abandoned it), “Joseon made coins before the Sangpyeong Tongbo”, (same complaints as before), and “the Sangpyông Tongbo coins were produced for a long time” (no reason was given as to why, how, barely when, and no information when it started, who started it, and why it remained so popular for so long, or why it was discontinued), of course anyone interested in these coins would learn... That they existed, and that’s about it.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| However in my Microsoft Edge favorites there lies an article called Korean coins written by one Gary Ashekenazy on his website Primal Trek. Now take a look at the treasure trove of information in that article, it details so much while at that point in the the “Korean mun” article detailed from almost nothing to nothing, the Primal Trek article lists the complete monetary history of pre-colonial Korea in vivid detail, it names the rulers, the economic circumstances that lead to the production of coinages, as well as the reversion back to barter. So I added this one source to the article, there’s a HUUUUUGE list of 52 different mint marks that I had to configure for Wikipedia, and I “invented” a new list for the pre-Joseon coins… then suddenly I got a copyright © strike, despite spending days in Microsoft Outlook rewording and paraphrasing the sentences for some reason it got seen as “not different enough” well, I couldn't just let the article shrink like that so I took ALL of the lost content, became OBSESSED with Wikitables, and then hosted it only in Microsoft Outlook until I could find a way to reinsert it back into the article.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Well, meet other sources, I started looking for more and more sources on the Korean mun until I could add that back, this is where the beauty of Wikipedia plays very beautifully in, though “I” (the world 🗺, really) gladly didn't lose the mint marks table the article was still missing some crucial information, so I added more sources in order not to become “too dependent” on Primal Trek alone, then I could re-publish the old content (half of which was now in a Wikitable), with lots of new information. This is what I love 💘 the most about Wikipedia, Primal Trek details some things, other sources others, Primal Trek only uses Chinese so I had to add the Joseon’geul (partially because I had become paranoid that if I wouldn't do it that another copyright strike would be given 😰 ), and the article grew even larger than it was before the content was removed.
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| I started Revisiting the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article after that looking for more sources as I was afraid that the same bot might strike that article too, I kept looking, and looking and didn't find much English language information to I started browsing Japanese language websites and I found a tonne of information I thankfully could use, I inserted (yet another/a) Wikitable, and added more references, and sources to differentiate it from Dr. Roberts’ page.
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| So why is this on Commons? You might ask, well very simple, I want Wikipedia to be in itself “independent” for direct relevant information 🛈 from other places, mostly because I fear 😱 that the other websites aren’t as durable as Wikipedia but here I would ask you, I added more information 🛈 to the “Korean mun” article than Primal Trek has, and more information to the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article than Dr. Luke Roberts has... ¿Haven't I essentially made both of those obsolete? Information-wise 🛈 probably “yes”, but generally speaking there’s still 1 (one) thing both most unfortunately still do better than Wikipedia. When it comes to a subject like coins an image “speaks a thousand words”, before I used to loathe it when people said that, but... How does a Setaka Tsuuhou look? Or a Chuuzan Tsuuhou just by visiting the article I had created? Well, you don’t know, and even though Daise Tsuuhou, and Setaka Tsuuhou coins are described as “not uncommon”, and “cheap” I couldn't find any on eBay to buy to later take a picture 📷 of so I could “donate” it to Wikimedia Commons to insert on Wikipedia. Now take a close look at the “History of Korean Coinage” article by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy, one thing it does exquisitely is present you with images of every Sangpyông Tongbo mint mark, and every miscellaneous character used, in fact Gary Ashkenazy went all the way to host other people’s pictures 📷 on his website to make sure that his readers will get the most complete information 🛈, now look back the “Korean mun” article, after expanding it information-wise it's easily superior for those that only come to read, but let’s say you own a Korean mun coin and wish to know what every symbol means but you aren’t the best at recognising written Chinese characters? Well, then the work 🏢 done by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy still serves you better. 😅 ... For now. Do you want to know how many images of mint marks of Korean mun coins are there right now (as in July 18th, 2017) in Wikimedia Commons... Take a guess... 1 (one), the are around 5.000 different variants but literally only one (1) is here available for you to see, or use on Wikipedia, sad 😢 isn't it, I personally owned 3 (three) at the time of expanding the “Korean mun” article, and bought 10 (ten) more on eBay for the sole reason of taking pictures 📷 of them for Wikimedia Commons.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| Now let's quickly dive a bit deeper into the mentality behind me wanting to make sure that as much mint mark pictures are available as possible, and for that one needs to smply look at how I store things in my life. As of now with merely 3 boxes 📦 📦 📦 I could move all of my stuff from home 🏠 (not counting that of my spouse or offspring, just myself 3 medium-sized boxes, also excluding clothes 👚), I wrote before about having a myriad of external storages, well Wikimedia Commons & the Facebook plus a few dozen of other Clouds ☁ helped me give those away, closets filled with books 📚? Yeah, in my youth but anything I can have as an eBook I will donate to charity or give away as a gift 🎁, how about personal documents, receipts, other paper? Well, except for a select few I send them all to the government for various reasons. And this mentality extends to my internet browser bookmarks 🔖, my dream is to only put “Wikipedia” in my “Numismatica” folder 📁, and to that end I actually quite accomplished it 😊, this fear 😱 comes out of a phobia for link-rot, or the fear that when the physical administrator of those websites die 💀 that all of the information they had published will be lost forever, to this end I hope that by “storing” all of their words on Wikipedia that in such an event will happen that those interested in those numismatic articles will still find the information 🛈 on Wikipedia. This further leads to me contacting the makers of those websites if they would want to upload their pictures 📷 to Wikimedia Commons with some mixed results...
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| To all “Deletionists” out there reading this, the content I add is well condensed down enough to be “encyclopedic”, I may find myself guilty of WP:CITEOVERKILL, but not of adding irrelevant details. 📝 With “Deletionists” one can’t argue though, you take them to the talk page and they'll revert your edits there too, many argue that if an account gets blocked that any page and/or image they’ve ever created should get deleted too, they’re bullies that don’t listen to reason, Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia and doesn't have to be limited to the limitations of its paper siblings but these people do want to reduce it to nothing but that. Excuse me for ranting, I just get angry at the amount of personal insults one can expect on Wikipedia... Some people are used to it like my wife’s best-friend calls her “ugly”, “fat”, “stupid”, Etc. Evety day but I have an (unwritten) agreement with my best-friend that we simply don't insult each other and those different personality types can meet and what would seem normal to them would be insulting to me, sometimes I even avoid talk pages because of bad experiences with editors lime that, so let ne get back to my motivations for editing Wikipedia, and why that immediately affects me here on Wikimedia Commons.
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| Now with the Tenpou Tsuuhou I feel(/felt) great shame, in fact last Christmas 🎄 (2016) I had bought 2 (two) Tenpou Tsuuhou coins for my sister, and my best friend. When I wanted to show them information on the history of that coin the only real information I could find was from this video-game blog right here. “That’s not problematic” many would exclaim, well if you would go to the “Japanese mon (currency)” article before I touched it literally no information 🛈 where other than that “tempo” is Japanese for 100 (one-hundred), which it really isn't. So naturally I had to look for more reliable sources because a video-game blog isn't reliable enough for a numismatic article, and I had later found out that some of the information 🛈 she wrote was plain wrong 👎🏻, to this end I had to use Bing a lot, I had one vague memory of fake Tenpou Tsuuhou coins being a collectible gift 🎁 for children in the 1950’s with the fakes being worth more than the real ones but had trouble finding that (rather bloggy) source.. Which I eventually did but that still wouldn't be enough, and since I never do “articles for creation” but also never had any of my articles deleted I felt that I had to look for more sources (my “8 references-rule” I kept from my “Microsoft period” where any Microsoft or Nokia service article I found with a “lacks WP:NOTABILITY” tag would have at least that much references inserted by me from different sources ABD/AND different authors.), thankfully the above video-game blog had some sources, but Wikipedia was 2 of them, and the rest barely talked about the coin, so I began digging on Microsoft Bing to look for English-language sources and found... Some, enough, but barely, many sources I would often never use because they don't meet my criteria but I had to and then I was lucky 🍀 enough to stumble across a .pdf file 📁 that talked about how that coin caused inflation on the Japanese market, and that .pfd was both academic 🎓 and contained plenty of sources in itself for me to use, then I was forced to go to Japanese Wikipedia and find some Japanese sources to find out other stuff what the aforementioned video-game blog was wrong 👎🏻 about, and to find out who the original designer of the coin was, and it was ready for publishing, doing all of that work 🏢 made me hungry to edit some more.
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| Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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| A quick (little) disclaimer: I did not exclusively start the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article because I ONLY wanted to publish the Tomb Raider (blog) article, I added an image of a Tenpou Tsuuhou coin to the “Japanese mon (currency)” article and thought to myself, “well, now my work 🏢 here is done on that subject”, it wasn't until I found the article”20 yen coin” that I said to myself “well, precedent has been set, time to work on a Tempou Tsuuhou article”. 😅 In fact the “infobox_coin” I used for the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article is wholly derived from that one. 📝📜📝
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| Now the story of how I found the references I used for the Tenpuo Tsuuhou article is too interesting to leave out, E.g. Did you know that Gotou San'emon’s personal Kaou appears on the Tenpou Tsuuhou? Well, apparently prior to publishing I was the only English-speaking person that knew that. 😒 Now first of all the Tenpou Tsuuhou was the only coin not covered by Dr. Luke Roberts from the University of California at Santa Barbara, second of all I had trouble establishing a WP:COMMONNAME as some sources claim that “Tempou Tsuuhou” is correct, while others swear by “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, I eventually settled on “Tenpou Tsuuhou” after taking note from the “Tenpou” era Wikipedia article having clearly established precedent to lean on. My search for references started at the bottom of the Tomb Raider website/fansite, the blog-post/article states that the Kaou belongs to Gotou Shozaburo Mitsutsugu, or at least his family 👪🏻, she names a source clarifying the Gotou family history and what they’ve meant foR the monetary history of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but though I did use the source to establish the WP:NOTABILITY of why their family 👪🏻 history should be mentioned in the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article, it didn't mention anything about his kaou being that on the Tebpou Tsuuhou coin, while looking for references I stumbled upon this entry on Charm.ru (linked there also by the Tomb Raider website/fansite) which claims that the kaou is the “Composed signature of mintmaster Hashimoto Mitsuji”, now a quick Bing search 🔍 later and I literally can’t find this name anywhere, and this name only pops up on the Chinese Coinage Website, searching the name in Chinese characters (Kanji) gets me exactly 0 results, though skeptical of the claim I still inserted it (to my regret) into Wikipedia. If one would look at the “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, and “Japanese mon (currency)” articles’ history one would find me engaging in an “edit war” with myself over the mint-master, well the answer was already there on Japanese Wikipedia. Naturally the Japanese Wikipedia article of the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” was where I would find the answer, another English-language source claimed that the Kaou belonged to “the Gotou family 👪🏻” but never specified anyone, so after digging some more I found some reliable Japanese language references that definitively states that the kaou belongs to none other than Gotou San'emon, the contemporary head of the Kinza. At this point I had become more dependent on the Japanese Wikipedia article and started doing more translation work from there than research on Microsoft Bing. While looking on Microsoft Bing literally every other result was just a blog post of someone who doesn't know how to properly spell “Tenpou Tsuuhou” what the coin is, thankfully the people who replied tended to name books and quoted from those books, from a reliable English language (or Dutch language/Belgophone?) source I found the mintage number of Tenpou Tsuuhou coins to be around half a milliard, dubious at first I checked the Japanese Wikipedia ABD/and this claim seemed to hold true. Eventually I dug up 👆🏻 a(n English language) blog dedicated to Tenpou Tsuuhou’s and I finally had enough sources to publish the article with substantial information 🛈 . This time I didn't even need to make pictures 📷 of the Tenpou Tsuuhou I own because there were already plenty on Wikimedia Commons. Upon publishing the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article pbably became “The most authorative source on Tenpou Tsuuhou coins in the English-speaking/-reading world 🗺”, it’s also the only article I have written about literally just one coin. 💰
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| While writing for the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article I stumbled upon another article calles “Ming dynasty coinage”, my whole introduction into the world 🗺 of Chinese coinage was on Wikipedia from a similarly named “Ancient Chinese article” but I had soon noticed that their similarities ended at the name, the “Ming dynasty coinage” article was (and as of July 18th, 2017 still is) hideously sub-par. All it did was list all of the coins with only Simplified Chinese characters, and most of the article was exclusively about post-Ming dynasty, pro-Ming dynasty rebels, though all of the sources (except for one) were bare links to an auction site that didn't work ⅔ of the time 😒 , so I had to “link hunt”, while only adding minimum content as my opinion of it was/is “a cesspool that’s too much work 🏢 for me to fix 🛠”. While adding sources I stumbled upon a source that actually named all of the post-Ming Dynasty rebel coinages, when I inserted that link at a new section dubbed “sources” I had found that a minute later some bot deleted ALL OF MY ADDITIONS indiscriminately, the bot claimed that I was vandalising the page triggered by a certain link I had inserted, I reverted the bot and then placed the “spam’y” link immediately in the text as a “regular reference”, so I appealed to the bot’s creator and eventually my edits were ruled as sound additions, however this made me paranoid in future edits causing me to often change my I.P. address or withhold from editing until I was on a public I.P. in order to not get mass-reverted like that again (though it didn't happen I still behave in this “evasive manner”), judging by the state of things I went back to the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article and found that it had abruptly ended at the mid of the Northern Song Dynasty period for some reason, while in the comment section... Ehhh... Talk page I found out that the author of the donated book (Cast Chinese coins) 📚 Sir David Hartill himself found that the article should end around the year 1000 as nothing afterwards can really be described as “ancient”, I could agree with that logic, but I still had to continue where he left off so I began writing the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article.
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| I then began writing the “Yuan dynasty coinage” purely as a means to “fill the gap” between the “Ancient Chinese coinage”, and “Ming dynasty coinage” articles. Originally I bought David Hartill’s book 📚 to write this article, this was both the cause and a subsequence of what I like to call “the David Hartill Cycle 🔂 “ I found David Hartill in MANY articles on Asian coinages on Wikipedia, therefore I started using him in articles on Asian coinages for Wikipedia. However I still have to live by the “8-References rule”, and honestly my prime motivation was “making Primal Trek useless for information 🛈 on Chinese & Korean coinages”, this became my rule after finding this complete outline on he history of Chinese coinages. I mean I respect Mr. Gary Ashkenazy and all, but there’s no guarantee that his site will be up 👆🏻 10 (ten) years from now, Wikipedia will. Another reason was simply that I wanted to have a detailed overview of Mongol coinage in the Yuan Dynasty, at drafting I first started with Primal Trek “for the skeleton ☠ “ of the article, expanding with David Hartill (mostly for the list, and later “rebel (faction) coinages”), and then looking for additional references. 🙂🔎📚
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| Finding a reference list for 5000 years of Chinese coinage (in reality this only spans around 2 and a ½ thousand years.), and realising that the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article that contains a lot of material donated by Sir David Hartill made me realise that creating the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article didn't completely “fill the gap”, next up was a new article I would create solely to “fill the gap”, an article exclusively written not out of my own interest in the subject, but by my obsession to make sure that I could use Wikipedia as “a standalone complete book on numismatics” independent from outside sources, or at least that others would not need to check outside immediately for information regarding these subjects.
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| Originally I had planned to write a single article bridging the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article, and the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article. However my main problem on creating that one article was that I couldn't create a working name, I thought “Medieval Chinese coinage” but the term “Medieval” is exclusively used for European history, “Dark age Chinese coinage”, well China never had any “Dark ages” that’s unique to Europe, the Mayans, and the Khmer/Cambodians and the latter only ended in the 19th century when they came under French protection. So my decision wasn't on the name yet I create a unified formula on how these coinages would function within the same article, half-chronologic, half-alphabetic. The thing became impossible to draft, all the tables looked the same but the Tangut one needed extra characters, while with the Jurchens not all of the same information 🛈 was known, the formula kept in place for the time being but as I started thinking up 👆🏻 a plethora of redirects I placed at the bottom (kind of below the whole “Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”, but above another “Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”) I started getting confused 😖 as to where I had to write next, or which part could be filled in, some information 🛈 overlapped while others obviously didn't fit together. The original proposed style was always Lead -> Background -> History -> List, and David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coins would serve as the main source for all 4 collection of sections (mostly the lists) but eventually my phone crashed too much while working on all of then simultaneously, and as someone who drafts in Microsoft Outlook I often get the annoying bit where my phone crashes and the entire draft is deleted, then I get mad 😡, and rename the (now empty) draft to “I don't like Satya Nadella” (well, a more explicit title) and work all over again from “my last save” which I started doing obsessively after finishing every individual Emperor when I started working on the lists (even if that Emperor only had like 2 coins).
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| So I started writing around 20 drafts separately, 5 lists (4 for Chinese coins, and 1 for Tangut), 4 Primal Trek history drafts, 4 Primal Trek list drafts, some David Hartill-based drafts, and additional drafts from other sources with the “5000 years” reference list being my first and foremost draft for both the Southern Song Dynasty, and the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, but as that list didn’t contain any Khitan (Liao Dynasty), or Tangut (Western-Xia Dynasty) coins I had to fill those in with other references.
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| My general drafting style was always to first use the “5000 years” reference list, then use Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek to fill in the history, then use Gary Ashkenazy’s Primal Trek to fill in (the rest of) the (coin) list, then use David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins” for additional information 🛈. For both the “Southern Song dynasty coinage”, and “Jurchen Jin dynasty coinage” articles this worked quite well. Originally after searching 🔍 for more sources on Microsoft Bing I found an academic source 🎓 explaining the economic, & monetary systems of China under the Southern Song 🎶 Dynasty, as well as explaining how the different regional monetary systems affected local cultures more than language, resources, and other things, and usable for later the outflow of Chinese cash coins to the Jurchens (The Jin Dynasty). After being quite satisfied with my “Southern Song dynasty coinage” draft I started working on the Jurchen Jin Dynasty’s coinage, first the “5000 years” reference list, then Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, then David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins”, and then the aforementioned source, then look for more, after this search 🔍 I came out quite disappointed, with the Khitan “Liao dynasty coinage”, and Tangut “Western Xia dynasty coinage” articles I did the same process as before but with the Khitan “Liao dynasty coinage” I really couldn't find any additional sources causing me to break my “8 references rule” upon publishing that article. When I was as good as done with the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article I found Andrew West’s BabelStone and an article regarding Tangut coins, I had already spent quite a lot of time using David Hartill’s “Lee Ndzen” romanisations but now I had to re-configure it. 😅😅😅
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| So I published all 4 (four) articles simultaneously, though I saw the Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin articles as being “as good as complete”, I saw the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article as less than desirable, and the “Liao dynasty coinage” article as “ready to be deleted at any moment”, in fact after realising the extreme scarcity in online sources regarding both subjects I dropped creating both “background”, and “History” sections quite early in their development, after publishing I spent days looking for additional sources, now the event that lead to me greatly expanding the “Liao dynasty coinage” article I like to dub “the Miracle of the North(ern Steppes)”, it was in the 4th, or 8th page of search 🔍 results on Microsoft Bing that I found a very long .pdf from an academic source 🎓 that explained the full monetary history of the Khitan Liao dynasty, the ethnic, and cultural compositions of all subdivisions, how regional cultures were (differently) affected by varying monetary system, the relation between nomadic lifestyles and coinage at various points in Liao dynasty history, the individual mintage numbers of every subdivision, how war-time propaganda might have affected historical records, peace-time mintage numbers, why, and how some regions reverted back to barter, and the ethnic, and cultural relations of the regions with copper (cash) coinage. In one go I could suddenly expand the “Liao dynasty coinage” article well beyond that of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, though tự this day I still check up on the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article if I could expand it... 😓
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| After that I really thought to myself “alright, time to do the Qing Dynasty coinage”, but I openly adopted a “back-seat 💺 policy” for the Qing Dynasty’s coinage because I would have to dive into an ocean 🦈 of sources, references, content, and too much to work with so I started focusing on other projects like attempting to put ALL non-Qing Dynasty-related Primal Trek content into Wikipedia, this brought me to the “Zhou Dynasty coinage” article, and though I was originally fine with simply adding the “5.000 years” reference list, and Primal Trek into external links I later migrated them, and their content into the bodies of various articles (yes, I made it my actual mission to migrate AN ENTIRE WEBSITE written by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy into Wikipedia before even contemplating the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article), this eventually brought me to the Banliang (sic) article. With the Ban Liang there were literally 0 (nill/zero) sources when I first saw it, yet no templates were placed concerning this fact, so I immediately inserted 3 (different) articles from Sir Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins”, and looked for other (sometimes more academic) sources immediately. I inserted another Wikitable (yeah, I know, I’m addicted to composing them 😒 ), and expanded that article.
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| Still obsessed with avoiding having to write the “Qing dynasty coinage” article I looked towards the “Vietnamese cash” article, I had long been grateful for that article as the links 🔗 at the bottom had introduced me to Sema’s Art-Hanoi which I have used as a reference for collecting French Indo-Chinese, and Viet-Namese money 💴 since I was a teenager. Upon expanding the article I created (yet another/a) Wikitable, this time planning on first using Ed Toda’s “Annam and its minor currency” (1882), and then using some additional information from a ... Well... Sudoku website (though they do call themselves the “Asian Numismatic Museum”), that had a detailed list of Vietnamese era dates, as well as Dr. Barker’s work. Though I did quite document how I wrote the article there myself, however as I was doing research I stumbled upon a website by a Non-Hispanic Vietnamese-American author who also wrote for the Chinese Coinage Website on his own website exploring Vietnamese history, and culture. Despite the scope of that website it contained detailed chapters on the monetary history of Japan’s copper coinages so naturally this meant that I would have to greatly expand the “Japanese mon (currency)” article, originally I began drafting a new article called the “Nagasaki Trade Coins”, while doing more research for it I found out that Japanese Wikipedia already had an article on it, and only after publishing it (well, I forced myself to both write, AND publish it as at the time I really, really thought “PLEASE LET ME DO EVERYTHING EXCEPT FOR A QING DYNASTY COINAGE ARTICLE” leading me to make that article, then while doing research I had first inserted a full list of Japanese government-minted coins, then regional coinages, after that I greatly expanded the “Japanese mon (currency)” article as well, ironically finding most information from Vietnamese sources.
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| While doing research for the “Vietnamese cash” article I found that Vietnamese Wikipedia has articles for the individual coinages of every Vietnamese era, unfortunately English language information 🛈 on the subject wasn't so easy to find.
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| After “completing” Korea, Viet-Nam, and Japan I went to the “Chinese cash 💰” articles, which are 3 (though technically 4 if you'd count the “Mace (unit) article) articles, at first I started writing more about Chinese Republican cast cash coins, I created (yet another/a) Wikitable, then I greatly expanded the article by adding a whole bit on how these/those coins were manufactured all the way from the beginning to end as I both didn't want to start writing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article, and thought of a new scope for the “Cash (Chinese coin)” article to be separate from all the other more detailed articles on Chinese (and neighbouring) coinages, this article could more be about the nature of those coins, but as I ran into the machine-struck parts of the article I really did finally begin to realise that I had nothing left to do, and would have to begin writing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article, so I started doing research and while typing in “Qing Dynasty coinage” in Microsoft Bing this is your first result “proudly” presented on the top, and still is (as of July 19th, 2017), a blog written in really bad English and written in a manner that reminded me of the Chinese people that “ping” me on my QQ that have never seen a foreigner in their life and just want to talk to one at least once, seemed hopeful, cheerful, and most of all peaceful, but not academic and it wasn't until I had already started drafting the “Qing dynasty coinage” article that I realised that it probably wasn't worthy to be oN Wikipedia, but it did provide SOME information, and most importantly images as visual examples (still making it a kind of “useful” external link). Well it was the only English language article etitled “Qing Dynasty coinage” before I started writing one. 😅
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| After that I finally started (kind of) drafting the “Qing dynasty coinage” article. At first I started browsing the blog by Learner and started checking out what I could write about first, I already built up a vision of how a “Qing Dynasty coinage” article would look like, and I had already envisioned a whole separate paragraph for the Sichuan Rupee after reading this post, and this follow up post, but then after first searching Wikipedia I found it in the Tibet article and eventually I made the redirects I had planned for the Qing article go there, added minimum content to the “Tibet” section, mostly just rewording it here and there and kept it relevant to the Qing while (regretfully) inserting Learner’s entry there. My next objective was adding the “5.000 years” reference list, also because that list actually included some Manchu mint marks. At first I still mostly relied on Learner but then I stumbled upon one “Wu Zhu” coin, and then another “Wu Zhu”coin causing me to first finish the Manchu list, after that I started using Sir Gary Ashkenazy’s Primal Trek for the history, split that into one for “bHistorg”, and one for “Chinese mint marks”, after finishing the “Chinese mint marks”, I merged it with the Manchu mint marks, at first I refrained from using David Hartill until the very last moment to “fill in the gaps”, after first finishing the list I found another (more accurate) list by a more academic source 🎓. This source debunked the existence of a “Guang Xu Yuan Bao” cash coin claiming it was only a struck coin, and added more information on denominations, and even some rarer coins, I kept re-writing, and then re-configuring the same list over, and over again with new information 🛈.
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| After that I “took a break” from the main body and started focusing on integrated every last bit of Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek into the article, while beginning to draft an East-Turkestan (“Xinjiang”) section, with East-Turkestan I was extremely lucky, I found a long piece written by a museum that included highly detailed information on every East-Turkestani mint, detailed analyses on the metallic content of every East-Turkestani cash coin from every period from Qian Long until Xuan Tong, it contained mintage figures, separate information 🛈 on regional differences within East-Turkestan (“Xinjiang”), and best of all a looooooong list of academic and highly respected sources in both Mandarin-Chinese, and Czech. Re-wording it wasn't difficult as it relied mostly on archaic terms and uncommon phrases I could easily replace E.g. “Junggar” = “Dzungar”, and I could easily attribute every sentence to the sources they themselves provided causing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article to have nearly 100 (one-hundred) references upon publishing. Writing this article inspired me to go to eBay to buy the coins described in this article to take pictures 📷 of for Wikimedia Commons, later in the drafting process I finally finished off Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, and then found yet another website I had already used before but now with highly detailed information 🛈, China Knowledge Germany with tonnes of academic sources, and a whole new list of Manchu mint marks, so I decided to merge that one with the ones I had after finishing off the “Later Jin Dynasty coinage” section, what was notable here is that I found that source while looking for Manchu characters to insert into the table there, I could use theirs and suddenly had enough material to start a whole section on silver coinage. Eventually I was near completion of the drafting process, then added David Hartill, and then started looking for a bit more sources, eventually despite my fear 😱 with beginning this article was that you can't avoid Qing dynasty coin information 🛈 no natter how hard you try, which is certainly true for copper coinages， specifically copper cash coins, however with gold coins literally the only “information 🛈” (if one might even call 📞 it that) I found was an image from Wikimedia Commons, as of today (July 19th, 2017) I still haven't found any non-auction site to discuss gold Qing coins. But after publishing the article I felt greatly relieved and began concentrating on other projects than Wikipedia leading me here to Wikimedia Commons.
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| After I was done with the Qing I started expanding the “Pul” coins article as it was a laughable stub 🎫. Now we've reached the end of the journey on Wikipedia, below I’ll write down how all of it relates to what I wish 🌠 to achieve here on Wikimedia Commons.
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