Talk:Act of Free Choice
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After editing the articles Suharto and History of Indonesia and several others, I believe an effort needs to be made to refine existing articles on historical events in Indonesia, and to correct the omissions on English Wikipedia by creating new articles on major events/periods in Indonesian history (e.g. Pre-colonial, Colonial, Post-Independence, Confrontation, 65-66 Civil War etc.).
This would allow the article History of Indonesia be a more general summary-style page (for those who want a broad overview of the area's history), and allow those who wish for greater depth to examine the articles on historical eras/events. That is, those who wish to examine Indonesia under Sukarno could look at a Post-Independence Era page, without being burdened by having to navigate stuff on the Majapahit Empire.
I've started some work, creating an outline (as well as a template that can be applied to History of Indonesia related pages) that can be seen here: Template:History of Indonesia. For an idea of what I believe the target for quality and organization, please take a peek at History of Russia.
I understand this is a long task, and that no one person could be/should be in charge of all this. (Especially not me, since being born/raised in the United States, the sources I have tend to give the buleh view of things.) So I am posting this message on applicable Talk pages, and ask that folks think it over, and if possible offer any help. Especially appreciated would be any folks who could streamline the process by translating related Wikipedia Indonesia articles into English.
Please steer comments to Wikipedia_talk:Indonesia-related_topics_notice_board. --Daniel 21:29, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Sources and Lobby edits
The Wikipedia community needs to take more care with these subjects for which there are only a small number of 'experts', when the general community does not know the subject themselves; please DO ask for sources. Although those are also often limited, in this case we have some fine sources. e.g,.
Second Indonesian statement about West New Guinea voting rights
Interview with UN Rep. Ambassador Ortiz-Sanz
As noted in the article there are several U.S. telegrams that give fine understanding of the situation and the why the West Papuan people were trying to get the Indonesians to go back to Asia. For Americans a more important document may be the 1962 summary which explains why Kennedy thought he had to force the Netherlands to sign this New York Agreement, see 3rd paragraph of summary. The real reason Kennedy was being forced into this was that Standard Oil had found the world's richest gold and copper deposits in West Papua in 1936, and that neither the Dutch nor locals had any interest in selling mining rights. The gold deposit was kept secret but in March 1959 the Dutch revealed they had found alluvial gold and were searching for which mountain it was coming from. This was when Rockefeller got his Freeport Sulphur company to sign a deal with a Dutch East Borneo company to mine the 'copper' of West Papua (see P.45 1961 Report to UN), thereby stopping the discovery of the gold source until after the territory administration could be moved (Freeport was employing Bechtel to advise and later build the Grasberg and other mines) to Jakarta.58.107.10.239 08:09, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
