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 delete‎. Randykitty (talk) 12:27, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Philippine jade culture (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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This article looks like a POV-pushing heap of WP:OR (see esp. the UNESCO section). I found zero reliable sources using the term "Philippine jade culture" on Google Scholar, a normal web search, or a Wikipedia Library EBSCO search [1]. Google Books turns up only self-published books by someone called "J.G. Cheock" [2]. Most sources cited in the article are news (Taiwan Times, Taiwan News) or primary (UNESCO), and given the apparent dispute between the two I don't think these can be considered INDEPENDENT. I will work to verify the other offline sources, but what I've got thus far is not promising. Toadspike [Talk] 10:45, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Archaeology, Philippines, and Taiwan. Toadspike [Talk] 10:45, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The article was mostly written by User:Spitmyrno and User:Gibedapse. Based on their contribs, both are SPAs. Toadspike [Talk] 10:47, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

i don't know much about this topic so i won't comment on deletion (although toadspike makes a good case in my opinion) but i've fixed the duplicate citations to help with verification ... sawyer * he/they * talk 20:26, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Scholarly and other sources in the article:

• [3] (ref 1) Is entirely about the history of ironworking in Taiwan. The Philippines is mentioned only in the context of theories by another author that ironworking was imported to Taiwan from there; the author argues that such theories are too simple (and this 2000 paper too may be outdated in 2024). Jade is never mentioned.
• [4] (ref 2), as an example of the news coverage, is an opinion piece in the Taiwan Times (unreliable), which ends on a political note. It mentions a Taiwanese "Changbin culture" and, separately, jade (nephrite) trade.
• I can't access ref 4, Taiwan Jade in the Philippines: 3,000 Years of Trade and Long-distance Interaction, which should be available here (404) or here. Situation for ref 12, A Noninvasive Mineralogical Study of Nephrite Artifacts from the Philippines and Surroundings, is very similar.
• [5] (ref 5) never mentions jade or nephrite. It is cited in a map caption, despite, afaict, not backing up anything the caption says.
• [6] (ref 8) has a lot of info about jade, jade trading, Taiwan, and the Philippines, but doesn't mention any "Philippine jade culture"
• [7] (ref 14) backs up the claims that Taiwanese jade ended up in the Philippines. No mention of a "Philippine jade culture" or "Maritime Jade Road".

That's the bulk of the reliable sources cited. Some of the others, like ref 10 ("Holocene population history in the Pacific region as a model for worldwide food producer dispersals") and ref 9 ("Philippine prehistory", 1975) look irrelevant enough from their titles that I won't bother following up.

As a side note, it looks like "Maritime Jade Road" is another term invented by Gibedapse and inserted into Maritime Silk Road#Precursor prehistoric maritime networks in this 2021 diff. A web search turns up no reliable sources. Google Scholar has several hits, but filtering for sources from before Gibedapse's insertion of this term into Wikipedia (see WP:CITOGENESIS, WP:CIRCULAR for what I'm worried about), there are no results. Filtering for 2022 [8], there are four results, all of which contain strong indications of citogenesis:

• [9] is a review of a new book, "Jade: A Gemologist’s Guide". The reviewer tellingly notes that "The chapter contains a description by Jason K. Chao, in an insert, of the nephrite deposit in Taiwan. He mentions archaeological finds of Taiwanese nephrite in the Philippines and, looking further into this, I came across a mention of a Maritime Jade Road that dates back to 3000 bce. I would have liked to learn more about this ancient jade trading route, but it was not covered further in the following chapters." Unsurprising, given this term was likely invented on Wikipedia
• [10] (accessible through the Wikipedia Library) mentions that "In the Asian realm, Persian populations operated a commercial trade across the Persian Gulf from the Sumerian period. Indian and Taiwanese sailors extended this trade in a network of navigation tracks known as the Maritime Jade Road." The entire chapter contains no inline references, and none of the twelve sources cited have anything to do with South East Asia or Austronesia. They all look like general reference works or works on other areas (England and New England), some of which are severely outdated.
• [11] is simply the same chapter on a different website.
• [12] is some sort of curriculum for a distance learning history course at Himachal Pradesh University. Not a reliable source, especially since the only use of "Maritime Jade Road" is in the context of a map cribbed from Wikipedia, alongside text suspiciously similar to Wikipedia's (page 70).

Folks, this "Maritime Jade Road" thing looks like an open-and-shut case of citogenesis to me. I'm going to go ahead and remove it from that article. Toadspike [Talk] 12:51, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Update: It looks like Gibedapse and the IP 103.152.9.5 added synthesized/OR mentions of this "maritime jade road" all over the encyclopedia in 2021, citing the exact same sources each time – I don't have the time to purge and rewrite this on several of our largest history pages right now. Hopefully I will get around to it soon, help would be appreciated. Toadspike [Talk] 13:04, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as per Toadspike's excellent analysis. I also want to point out that the entire idea that culture flowed from the Philippines to Taiwan is ahistorical nonsense. There are entire books (and articles here) about how the Austronesian languages and technology flowed from Taiwan, then to the Philippines, and ultimately Madagascar, Easter Island, and Hawaii (and possibly the Jōmon people, but that's not scholarly consensus). I've studied, visited, and edited about the Philippines here, and next month I'll go back there for another five weeks. Bearian (talk) 05:01, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nom's findings --Lenticel ^(talk) 02:10, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge with Lingling-o or change the title. The current title can function well enough as a redirect. I have no idea why you're all seemingly pretending like Lingling-o isn't a thing. Or using this deletion of a poorly-titled article as a reason for removing all mentions of the ancient Austronesian jade trade in related topics, like in here. The issues you have with this article's title has nothing to do with the notability of the actual jade network, the details of which are discussed quite correctly in the article.

Aside from the politicized section discussing Chinese influence on UNESCO (which this deletion is probably also an example of), the only thing made up in the article is the title.

The Neolithic maritime trade of jade between Austronesian cultures in Southeast Asia is real, and is the subject of multiple scientific papers, as evident in the references used in this and related articles (Lingling-o, Kalanay Cave, Sa Huỳnh culture). It is distinct from and is much older than the "Maritime Silk Road", and it spanned Southeast Asia, from Taiwan to the Philippines to Borneo and Indochina, from around 2000 BC to 1000 AD. Jade artifacts are abundant in archaeological sites throughout SE Asia and Taiwan, with easily traceable provenance, as discussed in the sources used here.

Excerpt from Hung et al., 2007 (linked below):

The research has revealed the existence of one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. Green nephrite from a source in eastern Taiwan was used to make two very specific forms of ear pendant that were distributed, between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., through the Philippines, East Malaysia, southern Vietnam, and peninsular Thailand, forming a 3,000-km-diameter halo around the southern and eastern coastlines of the South China Sea. Other Taiwan nephrite artifacts, especially beads and bracelets, were distributed earlier during Neolithic times throughout Taiwan and from Taiwan into the Philippines.

The absence of the terms "Philippine jade culture" or "Maritime jade road" in the sources, doesn't in any way invalidate the notability of the topic. I have no idea why you're going over the sources one by one, but ignoring what they actually say. Instead dismissing them based on whether or not they contain the title verbatim. The title is not how notability is determined. It's the topic.

As I've already mentioned, we already have related articles on the same topic, what we don't have is a main article. Since lingling-o are only one of the types of jade artifacts being traded, it is not suitable as the main topic title (though it will do, temporarily). The editor who picked the title currently used, probably based it on the fact that this trade network did initially involve the Philippines and Taiwan as the manufacturing and sourcing sites, respectively. A sound enough reason.

If the term used as the title here can't be found in the sources, change the title. OR merge/redirect it to lingling-o. Completely deleting an existing notable topic based on a bad title is WP:BATHWATER. Removing all mentions of the topic in related articles is misrepresenting the scope of what this deletion nomination entails.

Here are just some examples of academic sources discussing the topic, refuting the WP:OR claim. The fact that jade was traded along maritime routes by Austronesians in the Neolithic is not a controversial, new, or a fringe topic. Its existence has been recognized since the 1940s by H. Otley Beyer, based on lingling-o (he coined the name for it). It is notable and should be discussed in an article here, so related topics can have something to link to.

• Hung, Hsiao-Chun; Iizuka, Yoshiyuki; Bellwood, Peter; Nguyen, Kim Dung; Bellina, Bérénice; Silapanth, Praon; Dizon, Eusebio; Santiago, Rey; Datan, Ipoi; Manton, Jonathan H. (11 December 2007). "Ancient jades map 3,000 years of prehistoric exchange in Southeast Asia". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (50): 19745–19750. doi:10.1073/pnas.0707304104.
• Nephrite and Mica Industries: A Link towards the Austronesian World (Hung & Iizuka, 2017)
• Iizuka, Y., & Hung, H. (2005). "Archaeomineralogy of Taiwan Nephrite: Sourcing Study of Nephritic Artifacts from the Philippines." Journal of Austronesian Studies, 1(1), 35-81.
• Taiwan jade in the context of Southeast Asian archaeology (Iizuka, 2006)
• The Batanes Archaeological Project and the "Out of Taiwan" Hypothesis for Austronesian Dispersal (Bellwood & Dizon, 2005) --143.44.193.226 (talk) 06:10, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@143.44.193.226 Thank you for your comments. I agree that this broader topic probably has notable parts. My concern is that the article I have nominated for deletion contains many unreliable sources, significant POV-pushing, and some outright fabrications. Even if related topics are notable, at the very least this needs to be TNT deleted.

I have looked at (though not read through entirely) the sources you listed – they are similar to the ones in the article already, in that they discuss finds of Taiwanese jade in the Philippines, but never claim that there was a larger "Philippine jade culture" and never use the term "Maritime Jade Road"; this term appears several times in the article with false citations. This article is so bad, I am not sure there is a baby in the bathwater, especially not a baby that isn't already covered at Lingling-o.

Several sources discuss jade artifacts in Taiwan and in the Philippines. I suggest creating an article on Fengtian nephrite, a category of archaeological find which is notable, and perhaps also the Batanes site, which has a section at Lingling-o. Additionally, mentions can be added at Batanes#History and Prehistory of Taiwan. However, synthesizing a "Philippine jade culture" or "Maritime Jade Road" from the sources we have would, I believe, violate Wikipedia's policy against original research, even if it would give related topics can have something to link to.

I will do my best to create some of the content needed to fill these gaps, and also create an accurate description of the jade trade to replace the fabricated mentions of a "Maritime Jade Road" across a dozen or so articles. It may take some time, though. Toadspike [Talk] 08:53, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, I was surprised to see the AfD listing as ancient jade in the Philippines is a genuine archaeological topic. However, Toadspike's WP:TNT analysis is convincing. In addition, a plain reading of the article raises suspicions, and I don't think there's anything to save. The whole article has the feel of being infused with a strain of pseudohistory that is unfortunately common, which can be seen for example through the grandiose claims ("one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world", "1,500 years of near absolute peace"). The whole UNESCO section is very strange too, but it's easy to see how it fuses with the pseudohistory. CMD (talk) 10:01, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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.