Wikipedia: Hanseatic League/Talk

Yay, JHK! Good job. Very helpful. Questions on a first read:

1st paragraph - any examples of special trading privileges to offer?
Nice on the limitations (segregation in merchant quarters)
To what extent was the League a league of merchants rather than a league of cities? Or, to what extent did the merchant-traders actually rule in their home cities?

To JHK Nice job on starting the Hanseatic League. But you did not look at a map, again!!! Luebeck in German Democratic Republic ??? Hurry up and fix your booboo !!! As I keep telling you you need to look at maps!!! H. Jonat

Oh for Pete's sake...I wrote this article mostly off the top of my head after working a twelve-hour shift and didn't bother to check a map. Sorry I put Lübeck in Eastern Germany. All I remembered last night was that, when I lived in Germany and several horrific attacks on Turkish residents occurred in Lübeck, the news repeatedly talked about how Reunification had affected the city, whose residents were largely from the Eastern Bloc -- led me to a careless mistake.

That said, Helga -- if I HAD looked at a map, I'd have got it right. You use maps all the time, and still get things dismally wrong. mea effing culpa. JHK

Do you think the info on Lubeck from that paragraph should go in the Lubeck entry? I'm thinking it might fit better there -- a worthwhile anecdote, but I'm not sure that it goes with much of the rest of the Hansa entry -- Paul Drye

: Probably should, although I think the Hansa cities that actually WERE ( ;-) ) in the Eastern Bloc need mention -- I think there's an argument to be made that their traditions of independence may have helped them to assist in the collapse of the Iron Curtain. JHK

I know it's an attempt at being helpful, but I really *detest* adding weblinks to articles. Although there is a lot of great stuff on the web, the majority of scholarly literature is still to be found in libraries (remember books?). I would really hate to see the Wiki (or Nu) -pedias being used by lazy high-school and college students et al. as a glorified search engine. Don't laugh -- this is a very good possibility. I would ask other contributors to think about whether adding links is really to the benefit of the article. In regards to the ones added here, I have read Postel's article, but it is definitely not comprehensive. JHK

It may be a good idea to have the links show for a while for wikipedians (maybe in a seperate section as a reference) , then remove them ?? H. Jonat

: I think that still defeats the purpose. And some links really are better than others -- for example, the Postel article gives a very good overview of the history of the Hanse cities. It's more informative than harmful, written by a member of the scholarly comunity whose other works we can presumably access. On the other hand, the average person hitting the link won't really ask himself if the article might have been geared towards a specific purpose -- I think I remember it being addressed to a chamber of commerce or something like that. That might have some influence on what facts were included or omitted. Other links that have been posted are to personal web pages or web pages of cities, economic or genealogical organizations, etc. Here, the information must be considered suspect and biased (or maybe just less reliable, since people don't have to verify their sources and can just say what they want) until proved otherwise. This is why I am so leery of adding links anywhere -- except maybe to public domain documents. I just think it's so much better to write an article that doesn't rely on random web sites to prove its point.