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This is regarding RCraig's comment in the edit summary "PLEASE insert <ref.../> tags if you feel you must explode a sentence". Firstly, what do you mean by "exploding a sentence"? This sounds rather negative. I have broken some long sentences into two or three, yes. I think this is normal practice when trying to improve the article's readability. Have you looked at the readability tool for this article? I am currently going through it and tackling those paragraphs where all the sentences are in dark red (= hard to read).
When I break a long sentence into 3 shorter sentences, I think it is not necessary to add the same ref to the end of each sentence UNLESS it is not clear (logically) that the sentences belong together. For example take this case: "There are several examples to explain this phenomenon. One of them is the lack of XX. The other one is the abundance of XX." --> These three sentences can just have one ref at the end of the third sentence, rather than one ref for each sentence. This is also in line with the sourcing style. See WP:WHENNOTCITE ("Per WP:PAIC, citations should be placed at the end of the passage that they support. If one source alone supports consecutive sentences in the same paragraph, one citation of it at the end of the final sentence is sufficient. It is not necessary to include a citation for each individual consecutive sentence, as this is overkill."). To be safe one could repeat the source (if you insist I can do it) but I'd like to point out that it is not required, and can actually be distracting. Some of the sentences that I tackled were crazy long to start with. This makes them hard to read for those who don't have a university education or are not native English speakers. Please put yourself into their shoes. That's what I am trying to do.
(moved from above, this referring to this edit by RCraig09)
Also, the term "progressive organization" is ill-defined. What is your definition of "progressive"? Something that is left-leaning/liberal? If you want to use this term because the source used it then it should be put into quotation marks to indicate that it was their wording, not our judgement. This is referring to this edit. The sentence works equally well without "progressive organizations". EMsmile ( talk) 21:38, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I propose to either delete this paragraph or to move it to "Society and culture > Trivia". In my opinion it is not
WP:DUE and does not relate to the core topic of this article (the usage of the term) but just about a font type that happens to be called climate crisis:
In 2021, Finnish newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat created a free
variable font called "Climate Crisis" having eight different
weights that correlate with
Arctic sea ice decline, visualizing how ice melt has changed over the decades. The newspaper's art director posited that the font both evokes the aesthetics of environmentalism and inherently constitutes a
data visualization graphic.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:06, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Here are some hard to understand sentences which I think we need to simplify:
A. In September 2019, Bloomberg journalist Emma Vickers posited that crisis terminology—though the issue was one, literally, of semantics—may be "showing results", citing a 2019 poll by The Washington Post and the
Kaiser Family Foundation saying that 38% of U.S. adults termed climate change "a crisis" while an equal number called it "a major problem but not a crisis".
Difficult words: "posited" (why not just "stated"); I don't understand this (sorry I am not a native speaker): "though the issue was one, literally, of semantics".
B. Another example that I find hard to understand, very academic language here: Others have written that, whether "appeals to fear generate a sustained and constructive engagement" is clearly a highly complex issue but that the answer is "usually not", with psychologists noting that humans' responses to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) can be maladaptive.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:31, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
C. Another example which I don't understand: the characterization spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the
internet" to books and film.
Any edits to make this clearer would be appreciated.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:44, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
D. I also don't understand this with the corresponding response among Republicans tripling
. Overall, I think the section on "Psychological and neuroscientific studies" goes into too much depth on one small study (primary source) with just 120 participants and in the U.S. Also it doesn't come out clearly why there was a not to split the group along party lines. In any case, I think the sample size would be too small to draw conclusions about how the responses to the term differ by party. And it's U.S. centric. So I think it should be condensed.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Also, I don't think we need to mention the names of each and every journalist who has written about something. Can't we just make the statement and cite the source and if people want to see which journalist wrote it and where they can just look it up? Unless the author is very notable. EMsmile ( talk) 22:18, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
<ref />
footnote superscripts for the substantive reason of ensuring future insertions won't render sentences unsourced. EMsmile reverted, with apparently the only reasoning being that her application of the formal WP:WHENNOTCITE guideline "makes a lot of sense here".Reply to 22:18, 28 Feb post:
A. "Said" is like claimed and is therefore stronger than posited (synonyms=postulated, proposed). But at this point I won't argue.
B. I removed/rearranged some language to simplify.
C. The language "ironized hellscape of the internet" is unique, to show how the term's usage (important here) has spread. The language contrasts scrappy social media with more respected mainstream "books and film". The language can't be adequately replaced by Wikipedia editors' rephrasing, and now includes three links to Wiktionary to clarify.
D. Though it's really not clearer, I changed the simpler "tripling" to "increasing by 200%".
—
RCraig09 (
talk)
05:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi User:Baffle gab1978, thanks for your recent copy edits to this article, much appreciated! I have a few small follow-up questions. (If you don't have time for this, I understand; some of my questions might go slightly beyond pure copy editing issues)
1. Regarding this sentence: According to researchers Susan C. Moser and Lisa Dilling of
University of Colorado, appeals to fear usually do not create sustained, constructive engagement; they noted psychologists consider human responses to danger—
fight, flight or freeze—can be maladaptive if they do not reduce the danger.
.
1a. I find this hard to understand. Firstly, is it necessary to mention the two names of the researchers and their university? Could we shorten it to "researchers of the University of Colorado", or even just "academics"? If someone wants to know who said that they can find it in the ref provided.
1b. Secondly can we explain better to layperson readers what "appeals to fear" and "can be maladaptive" means?
2. The next sentence that follows also starts with "According to" and mentions the name of that researcher three times even though he is not a very notable person. In fact, the term "according to" appears six times in the article. I looked at WP:WIKIVOICE which says "Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice, for example the sky is blue not [name of source] believes the sky is blue. Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion, although it is helpful to add a reference link to the source in support of verifiability. Further, the passage should not be worded in any way that makes it appear to be contested." So I am just wondering if it's necessary to name those persons there who said that, unless they are very notable like Guterres. Or do we think this is all highly contested and hence the name and affiliation of each person who said something needs to be spelled out?
3. I find this difficult to understand, can it be explained better and in simpler terms?: In 2022,
The New York Times journalist
Amanda Hess said "end of the world" characterizations of the future, such as climate apocalypse, are often used to refer to the current climate crisis, and that the characterization is spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the internet" to books and film.
. The wording "the ironized hellscape of the internet" is unclear to me.
4. And what's your take on the term "progressive" in this sentence: The
Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace, and other environmental and progressive organizations joined in the group's letter to major U.S. media on June 6, 2019, which said
. I have argued above on this talk page in conversation with RCraig09 that "progressive" is not neutral and ought to be omitted from this sentence. The sentence would not lose anything if the word was omitted. I suspect it's a native-English speaker thing where "progressive" is used in different ways than the (translated) word would be used in other languages. In German for example, "progressive" translates to "fortschrittlich" which is for sure a term that is not neutral but which contains a form of praise; so any organisation would like to be called "fortschrittlich", not just the left/liberal ones...
EMsmile (
talk)
08:00, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
quotationof the sentence in question?
According to Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, fear is a "paralyzing emotion"; van der Lindern favors climate crisis over other terms because it conveys a sense of both urgency and optimism, and not a sense of doom. Van der Linden said: "people know that crises can be avoided and that they can be resolved".I find it a bit baffling that Sander van der Lindern has to be mentioned so many (three) times. Is this content so controversial that it has to be attributed to one particular person? If so, shouldn't we then also present other points of view in the same section? I am not used to having the name of a person who said something so prominently. I am more used to WP:Wikivoice ("Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice"). EMsmile ( talk) 10:06, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
@ Baffle gab1978: Your edit comments in edits in which you dissolved quote boxes to inline text, refer vaguely to WP:MOS. Please explain specifically. . . . It is my strong opinion that Wikipedia's quote boxes provide needed emphasis for important statements, essential summaries, especially from notable individuals or organizations. Would you object to my returning the quote-box presentation to the article? Keep in mind that many viewers "only look at the pictures"—and quoteboxes function similar to pictures in their function to emphasize important points. — RCraig09 ( talk) 16:44, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
Pull quotes do not belong in Wikipedia articles. [my emphasis] These are the news and magazine style of "pulling" material already in the article to reuse it in attention-grabbing decorative quotations. This unencyclopedic approach is a form of editorializing, produces out-of-context and undue emphasis, and may lead the reader to conclusions not supported in the material.
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Climate crisis article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives:
1,
2,
3,
4Auto-archiving period: 90 days
![]() |
![]() | The
contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to
climate change, which has been
designated as a contentious topic. Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page. |
![]() |
|
![]() | This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
![]() | This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This is regarding RCraig's comment in the edit summary "PLEASE insert <ref.../> tags if you feel you must explode a sentence". Firstly, what do you mean by "exploding a sentence"? This sounds rather negative. I have broken some long sentences into two or three, yes. I think this is normal practice when trying to improve the article's readability. Have you looked at the readability tool for this article? I am currently going through it and tackling those paragraphs where all the sentences are in dark red (= hard to read).
When I break a long sentence into 3 shorter sentences, I think it is not necessary to add the same ref to the end of each sentence UNLESS it is not clear (logically) that the sentences belong together. For example take this case: "There are several examples to explain this phenomenon. One of them is the lack of XX. The other one is the abundance of XX." --> These three sentences can just have one ref at the end of the third sentence, rather than one ref for each sentence. This is also in line with the sourcing style. See WP:WHENNOTCITE ("Per WP:PAIC, citations should be placed at the end of the passage that they support. If one source alone supports consecutive sentences in the same paragraph, one citation of it at the end of the final sentence is sufficient. It is not necessary to include a citation for each individual consecutive sentence, as this is overkill."). To be safe one could repeat the source (if you insist I can do it) but I'd like to point out that it is not required, and can actually be distracting. Some of the sentences that I tackled were crazy long to start with. This makes them hard to read for those who don't have a university education or are not native English speakers. Please put yourself into their shoes. That's what I am trying to do.
(moved from above, this referring to this edit by RCraig09)
Also, the term "progressive organization" is ill-defined. What is your definition of "progressive"? Something that is left-leaning/liberal? If you want to use this term because the source used it then it should be put into quotation marks to indicate that it was their wording, not our judgement. This is referring to this edit. The sentence works equally well without "progressive organizations". EMsmile ( talk) 21:38, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I propose to either delete this paragraph or to move it to "Society and culture > Trivia". In my opinion it is not
WP:DUE and does not relate to the core topic of this article (the usage of the term) but just about a font type that happens to be called climate crisis:
In 2021, Finnish newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat created a free
variable font called "Climate Crisis" having eight different
weights that correlate with
Arctic sea ice decline, visualizing how ice melt has changed over the decades. The newspaper's art director posited that the font both evokes the aesthetics of environmentalism and inherently constitutes a
data visualization graphic.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:06, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Here are some hard to understand sentences which I think we need to simplify:
A. In September 2019, Bloomberg journalist Emma Vickers posited that crisis terminology—though the issue was one, literally, of semantics—may be "showing results", citing a 2019 poll by The Washington Post and the
Kaiser Family Foundation saying that 38% of U.S. adults termed climate change "a crisis" while an equal number called it "a major problem but not a crisis".
Difficult words: "posited" (why not just "stated"); I don't understand this (sorry I am not a native speaker): "though the issue was one, literally, of semantics".
B. Another example that I find hard to understand, very academic language here: Others have written that, whether "appeals to fear generate a sustained and constructive engagement" is clearly a highly complex issue but that the answer is "usually not", with psychologists noting that humans' responses to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) can be maladaptive.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:31, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
C. Another example which I don't understand: the characterization spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the
internet" to books and film.
Any edits to make this clearer would be appreciated.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:44, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
D. I also don't understand this with the corresponding response among Republicans tripling
. Overall, I think the section on "Psychological and neuroscientific studies" goes into too much depth on one small study (primary source) with just 120 participants and in the U.S. Also it doesn't come out clearly why there was a not to split the group along party lines. In any case, I think the sample size would be too small to draw conclusions about how the responses to the term differ by party. And it's U.S. centric. So I think it should be condensed.
EMsmile (
talk)
22:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Also, I don't think we need to mention the names of each and every journalist who has written about something. Can't we just make the statement and cite the source and if people want to see which journalist wrote it and where they can just look it up? Unless the author is very notable. EMsmile ( talk) 22:18, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
<ref />
footnote superscripts for the substantive reason of ensuring future insertions won't render sentences unsourced. EMsmile reverted, with apparently the only reasoning being that her application of the formal WP:WHENNOTCITE guideline "makes a lot of sense here".Reply to 22:18, 28 Feb post:
A. "Said" is like claimed and is therefore stronger than posited (synonyms=postulated, proposed). But at this point I won't argue.
B. I removed/rearranged some language to simplify.
C. The language "ironized hellscape of the internet" is unique, to show how the term's usage (important here) has spread. The language contrasts scrappy social media with more respected mainstream "books and film". The language can't be adequately replaced by Wikipedia editors' rephrasing, and now includes three links to Wiktionary to clarify.
D. Though it's really not clearer, I changed the simpler "tripling" to "increasing by 200%".
—
RCraig09 (
talk)
05:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi User:Baffle gab1978, thanks for your recent copy edits to this article, much appreciated! I have a few small follow-up questions. (If you don't have time for this, I understand; some of my questions might go slightly beyond pure copy editing issues)
1. Regarding this sentence: According to researchers Susan C. Moser and Lisa Dilling of
University of Colorado, appeals to fear usually do not create sustained, constructive engagement; they noted psychologists consider human responses to danger—
fight, flight or freeze—can be maladaptive if they do not reduce the danger.
.
1a. I find this hard to understand. Firstly, is it necessary to mention the two names of the researchers and their university? Could we shorten it to "researchers of the University of Colorado", or even just "academics"? If someone wants to know who said that they can find it in the ref provided.
1b. Secondly can we explain better to layperson readers what "appeals to fear" and "can be maladaptive" means?
2. The next sentence that follows also starts with "According to" and mentions the name of that researcher three times even though he is not a very notable person. In fact, the term "according to" appears six times in the article. I looked at WP:WIKIVOICE which says "Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice, for example the sky is blue not [name of source] believes the sky is blue. Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion, although it is helpful to add a reference link to the source in support of verifiability. Further, the passage should not be worded in any way that makes it appear to be contested." So I am just wondering if it's necessary to name those persons there who said that, unless they are very notable like Guterres. Or do we think this is all highly contested and hence the name and affiliation of each person who said something needs to be spelled out?
3. I find this difficult to understand, can it be explained better and in simpler terms?: In 2022,
The New York Times journalist
Amanda Hess said "end of the world" characterizations of the future, such as climate apocalypse, are often used to refer to the current climate crisis, and that the characterization is spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the internet" to books and film.
. The wording "the ironized hellscape of the internet" is unclear to me.
4. And what's your take on the term "progressive" in this sentence: The
Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace, and other environmental and progressive organizations joined in the group's letter to major U.S. media on June 6, 2019, which said
. I have argued above on this talk page in conversation with RCraig09 that "progressive" is not neutral and ought to be omitted from this sentence. The sentence would not lose anything if the word was omitted. I suspect it's a native-English speaker thing where "progressive" is used in different ways than the (translated) word would be used in other languages. In German for example, "progressive" translates to "fortschrittlich" which is for sure a term that is not neutral but which contains a form of praise; so any organisation would like to be called "fortschrittlich", not just the left/liberal ones...
EMsmile (
talk)
08:00, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
quotationof the sentence in question?
According to Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, fear is a "paralyzing emotion"; van der Lindern favors climate crisis over other terms because it conveys a sense of both urgency and optimism, and not a sense of doom. Van der Linden said: "people know that crises can be avoided and that they can be resolved".I find it a bit baffling that Sander van der Lindern has to be mentioned so many (three) times. Is this content so controversial that it has to be attributed to one particular person? If so, shouldn't we then also present other points of view in the same section? I am not used to having the name of a person who said something so prominently. I am more used to WP:Wikivoice ("Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice"). EMsmile ( talk) 10:06, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
@ Baffle gab1978: Your edit comments in edits in which you dissolved quote boxes to inline text, refer vaguely to WP:MOS. Please explain specifically. . . . It is my strong opinion that Wikipedia's quote boxes provide needed emphasis for important statements, essential summaries, especially from notable individuals or organizations. Would you object to my returning the quote-box presentation to the article? Keep in mind that many viewers "only look at the pictures"—and quoteboxes function similar to pictures in their function to emphasize important points. — RCraig09 ( talk) 16:44, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
Pull quotes do not belong in Wikipedia articles. [my emphasis] These are the news and magazine style of "pulling" material already in the article to reuse it in attention-grabbing decorative quotations. This unencyclopedic approach is a form of editorializing, produces out-of-context and undue emphasis, and may lead the reader to conclusions not supported in the material.