Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic Groups/Basque
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This page is currently (7 Feb 03) being used to try out Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template. In the course of editing for this purpose, I find a lot of unattributed views on the history of the Basques and their language, and a lot of copy that seems more focused on emphasizing that the Basques are distinct from their Iberian neighbors than saying anything else about them.
I am not really trying to solve these problems at this time, but I hope that the reorganization will point up these issues so that they may be solved in the future.
For the moment, I have retained the article Basque's existing use of "Basqueland" in the historical sections, but it appears to be a dubious neologism: only 1200 Google hits. Similarly, in talking about the Middle Ages, "Spain" seems anachronistic.
There is probably considerable material in this article that belongs in Basque Country instead. Let's not try to move it until this supersedes the existing untemplated article.
The population figures are dubious, because they probably count the entire current population of the Basque country, many of whom are not ethnic Basques.
There is not nearly enough discussion of Basques outside the Basque Country.
I believe that the article I started from was not a notably good wikipedia article, so I have by no means been able to turn this into a "model" article at this time. I hope people will look at this in terms of whether the template has brought about improvement or has, instead, harmed the article. My own feeling is that it steered me toward several previously under-covered areas that I was easily able to research and that it helped me better organize the existing material. -- Jmabel 02:50, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
