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Not that it makes a huge difference but what do you think is dodgy @ Tim riley? This is the frontispiece from his authorized biography. GordonGlottal ( talk) 17:09, 26 May 2022 (UTC)
I added to the Shaw article the fact that an Irish navy ship was named after him. Another editor has removed this addition to the article twice, latterly arguing that it is merely "trivia."
The naming of a navy ship after someone is a significant event, not trivia, especially in a very small navy. In such circumstances with few vessels it is a particularly notable honour in the writer's memory. There are four ships in the Irish navy named after Irish writers: Beckett, Joyce, Shaw, and Yeats. It cannot seriously be held that such rare honours (rare because the Irish navy is tiny) can be dismissed as mere trivia.
Other people who have ships named after them have the fact recorded in their articles in the encyclopaedia. It is normal practice to include such facts.
The editor who twice removed mention of the ship left the edit summary: Shaw has numerous things named after him: why single out a boat rather than the London theatre, Parisian street etc? No need to trot them out.
The purpose of Legacy or Honours sections in articles is precisely to trot them out. The theatre and street may be added by any editor who wishes to do so.
If the ship is removed again from the article without a credible justification and consensus from a number of other editors that it should be removed, I will take this dispute further.
There is nothing illegitimate whatsoever about adding the ship to the article – a common feature of the encyclopedia – and an additional removal will simply be a peculiar personal bias against recording such a (literally) large honour to Shaw. O'Dea ( talk) 23:43, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
Mentions in articles of navy vessels (and many other things) named after people are a commonplace and uncontroversial feature in biographical articles. Indeed, in some biographical articles, the list of things is so long, it is broken out into its own stand-alone article, dedicated to all the things named after the article subject. A few illustrative examples follow to demonstrate the widespread principle in action:
Accounts of honours such as these cannot be casually dismissed when they are a form of calibration of national esteem and notability. An honour – paid by a nation! – cannot with any seriousness be sneered at as trivial. It is notable – by definition.
Reply to Nikkimaria ("your claim here, on the other hand, does not seem to be based in any policy at all"):
Reply to Nikkimaria ("The existence of an article on the ship does not satisfy that requirement"):
Reply to Nikkimaria ("Rarity is not automatically correlated with significance"):
Firstly, you have misunderstood consensus. You made an addition to an FA which was reverted. The onus is therefore on you to establish consensus on the Talkpage for the inclusion of your edit, not for others to gain consensus for its exclusion. To an extent, that is what you are doing. However you should not put the disputed edit back while discussion is ongoing, and I would ask that you revert it. Secondly, you might find it easier to gain support for your view if you moderated your approach. Throwing around words like “ridiculous”, “delusion” and “senseless”; making appeals to “common sense” (always a dodgy position); and threatening to “take this dispute further”, are unlikely to bring other editors to your way of thinking. Lastly, you might want to think about placement. FAs are hard to write - the Summary style required means that many undeniable facts about the article topic won’t be included. You have chosen to place a fact that you deem important in a highly prominent position, at the article’s very conclusion. It is possible, though not certain, that a less prominent placing would meet with less opposition. An alternative would be for you to write an article Things named after George Bernard Shaw, along the lines of the articles you quote above. KJP1 ( talk) 07:15, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
See here for the Fabian Tract - check downloadable photographs for confirmation - and here for To-Day. Harfarhs ( talk) 17:27, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
"..after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw"."
This may have been the case in conversation, though direct evidence as opposed to subsequent self-reporting appears to be lacking. It is certainly not the case as regards writing; in the Collected Letters 1874–1897 one can readily see that Shaw, predominantly throughout 1885 and for a time into 1886, signed himself "George Bernard Shaw" alike to strangers and intimates. Writing in March 1885 to the wife of William Archer, his valediction is
and therefore, as a writer who at that stage was barely published and thus entirely uncommitted to a particular pen name, he is highly likely to have had no revulsion at the thought of in future being revered under the name of "George".
Moreover, it follows that we need not refer to him in other articles as "Bernard Shaw" if, as is the case, he is more familiar to the general reader as "George Bernard Shaw". Harfarhs ( talk) 15:07, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Bernard Shaw was born in 1856; Josif Djhugasvili was born in 1879. In other words, GBS was twenty years Stalin's senior.
In 1929, Stalin's 50th birthday was widely celebrated and he began to acquire the status of a demi-god; soon he overshadowed his contemporaries -- many of whom he would eliminate in the Show Trials of 1936-1938 and the Great Terror of 1937-1938 -- and even supplanted his patron Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), 1870-1924, in the Soviet pantheon. Bernard Shaw was, and remained, an irreverent critic of the British Establishment: he knew French but no Russian.
A fuller account of his 1931 interview with Stalin, reference supplied in text, suggests that he egged on his friend Nancy Astor in her sustained attack on the Georgian "gangster" (as she called Stalin). Shaw insisted, for example, that the unfortunate and reluctant interpreter translate all her questions into Russian. As author James Fox notes, the two of them were subsequently impressed by Stalin's self-restraint. Privately, the dictator told his daughter Svetlana that the meeting had been "most disagreeable" and that Shaw was, in his opinion, an "awful man".
This doesn't make the 'revolutionary tourism' of his brief 1931 visit to the USSR, or his serial infatuation with a succession of Bolshevik and fascist dictators, any less reprehensible. It does cast his character and attitude in a more nuanced and different light.
John Crowfoot aka Rustat99 ( talk) 09:11, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/the-anti-semitism-of-george-bernard-shaw/2015/05/06/ »No doubt Jews are obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed.«
»I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they do it as humanely as they can afford to.«
General inhumanity: »I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly-appointed board, just as they might come before the income tax commissioner, and say every five years, or every seven years, just put them there, and say, “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?” If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the big organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself…. I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel.«
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw More quotes on Hitler (admiration for the Nazi regime) and Jews: tickle me 15:30, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
George Bernard Shaw 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,
4,
5Auto-archiving period: 180 days
![]() |
![]() | Please stay calm and civil while commenting or presenting evidence, and do not make personal attacks. Be patient when approaching solutions to any issues. If consensus is not reached, other solutions exist to draw attention and ensure that more editors mediate or comment on the dispute. |
![]() | George Bernard Shaw is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() | This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on March 17, 2017. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Not that it makes a huge difference but what do you think is dodgy @ Tim riley? This is the frontispiece from his authorized biography. GordonGlottal ( talk) 17:09, 26 May 2022 (UTC)
I added to the Shaw article the fact that an Irish navy ship was named after him. Another editor has removed this addition to the article twice, latterly arguing that it is merely "trivia."
The naming of a navy ship after someone is a significant event, not trivia, especially in a very small navy. In such circumstances with few vessels it is a particularly notable honour in the writer's memory. There are four ships in the Irish navy named after Irish writers: Beckett, Joyce, Shaw, and Yeats. It cannot seriously be held that such rare honours (rare because the Irish navy is tiny) can be dismissed as mere trivia.
Other people who have ships named after them have the fact recorded in their articles in the encyclopaedia. It is normal practice to include such facts.
The editor who twice removed mention of the ship left the edit summary: Shaw has numerous things named after him: why single out a boat rather than the London theatre, Parisian street etc? No need to trot them out.
The purpose of Legacy or Honours sections in articles is precisely to trot them out. The theatre and street may be added by any editor who wishes to do so.
If the ship is removed again from the article without a credible justification and consensus from a number of other editors that it should be removed, I will take this dispute further.
There is nothing illegitimate whatsoever about adding the ship to the article – a common feature of the encyclopedia – and an additional removal will simply be a peculiar personal bias against recording such a (literally) large honour to Shaw. O'Dea ( talk) 23:43, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
Mentions in articles of navy vessels (and many other things) named after people are a commonplace and uncontroversial feature in biographical articles. Indeed, in some biographical articles, the list of things is so long, it is broken out into its own stand-alone article, dedicated to all the things named after the article subject. A few illustrative examples follow to demonstrate the widespread principle in action:
Accounts of honours such as these cannot be casually dismissed when they are a form of calibration of national esteem and notability. An honour – paid by a nation! – cannot with any seriousness be sneered at as trivial. It is notable – by definition.
Reply to Nikkimaria ("your claim here, on the other hand, does not seem to be based in any policy at all"):
Reply to Nikkimaria ("The existence of an article on the ship does not satisfy that requirement"):
Reply to Nikkimaria ("Rarity is not automatically correlated with significance"):
Firstly, you have misunderstood consensus. You made an addition to an FA which was reverted. The onus is therefore on you to establish consensus on the Talkpage for the inclusion of your edit, not for others to gain consensus for its exclusion. To an extent, that is what you are doing. However you should not put the disputed edit back while discussion is ongoing, and I would ask that you revert it. Secondly, you might find it easier to gain support for your view if you moderated your approach. Throwing around words like “ridiculous”, “delusion” and “senseless”; making appeals to “common sense” (always a dodgy position); and threatening to “take this dispute further”, are unlikely to bring other editors to your way of thinking. Lastly, you might want to think about placement. FAs are hard to write - the Summary style required means that many undeniable facts about the article topic won’t be included. You have chosen to place a fact that you deem important in a highly prominent position, at the article’s very conclusion. It is possible, though not certain, that a less prominent placing would meet with less opposition. An alternative would be for you to write an article Things named after George Bernard Shaw, along the lines of the articles you quote above. KJP1 ( talk) 07:15, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
See here for the Fabian Tract - check downloadable photographs for confirmation - and here for To-Day. Harfarhs ( talk) 17:27, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
"..after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw"."
This may have been the case in conversation, though direct evidence as opposed to subsequent self-reporting appears to be lacking. It is certainly not the case as regards writing; in the Collected Letters 1874–1897 one can readily see that Shaw, predominantly throughout 1885 and for a time into 1886, signed himself "George Bernard Shaw" alike to strangers and intimates. Writing in March 1885 to the wife of William Archer, his valediction is
and therefore, as a writer who at that stage was barely published and thus entirely uncommitted to a particular pen name, he is highly likely to have had no revulsion at the thought of in future being revered under the name of "George".
Moreover, it follows that we need not refer to him in other articles as "Bernard Shaw" if, as is the case, he is more familiar to the general reader as "George Bernard Shaw". Harfarhs ( talk) 15:07, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Bernard Shaw was born in 1856; Josif Djhugasvili was born in 1879. In other words, GBS was twenty years Stalin's senior.
In 1929, Stalin's 50th birthday was widely celebrated and he began to acquire the status of a demi-god; soon he overshadowed his contemporaries -- many of whom he would eliminate in the Show Trials of 1936-1938 and the Great Terror of 1937-1938 -- and even supplanted his patron Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), 1870-1924, in the Soviet pantheon. Bernard Shaw was, and remained, an irreverent critic of the British Establishment: he knew French but no Russian.
A fuller account of his 1931 interview with Stalin, reference supplied in text, suggests that he egged on his friend Nancy Astor in her sustained attack on the Georgian "gangster" (as she called Stalin). Shaw insisted, for example, that the unfortunate and reluctant interpreter translate all her questions into Russian. As author James Fox notes, the two of them were subsequently impressed by Stalin's self-restraint. Privately, the dictator told his daughter Svetlana that the meeting had been "most disagreeable" and that Shaw was, in his opinion, an "awful man".
This doesn't make the 'revolutionary tourism' of his brief 1931 visit to the USSR, or his serial infatuation with a succession of Bolshevik and fascist dictators, any less reprehensible. It does cast his character and attitude in a more nuanced and different light.
John Crowfoot aka Rustat99 ( talk) 09:11, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/the-anti-semitism-of-george-bernard-shaw/2015/05/06/ »No doubt Jews are obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed.«
»I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they do it as humanely as they can afford to.«
General inhumanity: »I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly-appointed board, just as they might come before the income tax commissioner, and say every five years, or every seven years, just put them there, and say, “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?” If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the big organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself…. I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel.«
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw More quotes on Hitler (admiration for the Nazi regime) and Jews: tickle me 15:30, 9 August 2023 (UTC)