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talk page for discussing improvements to the
Human article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information. |
Frequently asked questions To view the response to a question, click the [show] link to the right of the question. Q1: Why does the Human article use the
third person? Aren't we humans?
A1: The third
person ("Humans are..." or "They are..." as opposed to "We are...") is simply the conventional mode of writing for Wikipedia and other reference works. We realize this may cause some phrases in
Human to sound quite strange — "a majority of humans professes some variety of religious or spiritual belief" sounds almost like it was written by
space aliens. However, the occasional strangeness this approach may lead to is still preferable to the alternative of inconsistency.
If we were to use "we" in the Human article, it would mean sometimes switching strangely between persons as we narrow our topic of discussion. For example, even if an editor were female, she would be forced to write things like "We humans, and especially those females...." Whenever a subgroup of humanity became the article's focus, we would need to switch to the third person; a sentence about humans would use "we", but a sentence about adults, Asians, engineers, or heterosexuals would need to use "they". It is far simpler to just consistently use the third person in all contexts, even if this doesn't always seem completely natural. A related issue is the fact that, as a general rule, Wikipedia prefers to avoid self-references. In addition to being human, all editors on this site happen to be English speakers — yet we treat our article on the English language the same way we treat every other language article, in order to avoid bias and inconsistency. Likewise, we treat Wikipedia the same as other websites and reference tools. Analogously, we ought to aspire to treat Human in much the same way that we treat every other species article. Ideally, we should make exceptions of Human only where objective, verifiable facts demand that we make exceptions (e.g., in employing a lengthy behavior section). This is the simplest and easiest way to avoid bias and to prevent editorial disputes: When in doubt, follow the rest of Wikipedia's lead.Q2: Aren't humans supposed to be purely herbivorous/frugivorous despite our modern omnivorous habits? Aren't we jungle apes albeit highly intelligent and largely furless jungle apes? Most jungle apes eat no meat or very little.
A2: No, we really are natural omnivores. Contrary to popular belief, we humans did not evolve in jungles. We actually evolved on open grasslands where fruit-bearing trees are nowhere near as plentiful as in the jungle, where most of our surviving close relatives evolved. Evolving in such a place, we would have always (for as long as we've been humans rather than Australopithecines and other even earlier fossilized genera) had to supplement our diet with meat in addition to plant material. We evolved also eating plant-derived foods to be sure; the Savannah (grassland) has some trees with edible fruit although comparatively few and far between, and grain-bearing grasses are far more plentiful there than any tree. (Some evidence suggests that the first bread and beer were made from these tropical grains long before recorded history.) Even so, the grassland being much less fruit-rich than the jungle caused us to evolve as true metabolic omnivores, not pure herbivores/frugivores. See the Archived Debates on this subtopic for source documents. Q3: How was the lead image chosen?
A3: The current lead image was added on
15 September 2009 following
this discussion and given
this explanation. In short, an editor looked at
commons:Category:Couples and picked one. Due to alphabetical sorting, this one came up early (the filename starts with "A"), so they picked it. They were looking for an adult couple standing side-by-side. The use of this image has been discussed many times over the years, including but not limited to:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9, and
10. The current wording of this FAQ entry was decided following
this discussion. See also
our policy on photo galleries of people. Q4: Is it possible for an infobox image to perfectly and accurately represent all of humanity?
A4: No.
Q5: Is it possible for the text of this article to perfectly and accurately represent all of humanity?
A5: No.
Q6: If we can't make a perfect representation, should we still try to make the best representation we can?
A6: Yes. Of course. Because Wikipedia
is a work in progress.
Q7: How should the infobox image best represent humanity?
A7: The lead image should illustrate important features of the subject — in the case of
Human, these include an upright bipedal gait, hands specialized for manipulating tools, and use of cultural products such as clothing.
Lead images can attempt to encapsulate the broad strokes of the diversity and variation in its subject (e.g. Frog, Primate). The current consensus is that attempting to do further like that for humanity is not practical. There is a guideline MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES that exists due to issues on this topic in the past, stating that we may not assemble a gallery of many images into the infobox. And regardless of MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES, by picking just one image, we leave space for showing important details of that image which would be obscured if we shrank it in order to fit multiple photos in. Sometimes, what a collage gains in diversity, it loses in detail and clarity. In this case, the current consensus is that the topic covered at Human is best served with a single image — a collage of faces, for example, would fail to illustrate the human body. Q8: Shouldn't the lead image show more major groups of humans?
A8: There is no good way to decide which groups of humans are the "major" ones. We currently just show an example of male and female, this is a middle ground that represents the current consensus: only show biological sex groups, not others. Showing further groups, such as along ethnic lines, is contentious and does not have consensus.
While many Wikipedia articles on diverse subject matter (e.g. Spider, Bird) do attempt to encapsulate that variety through galleries and selections of images, we are prohibited from doing so on this article per MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES even if we wanted to. Other articles on diverse subject matter sometimes similarly have few examples, or even one example, rather than a collage in their infobox (e.g. Whale). Fortunately, this article is not called "humanity", but simply " human". We are fully justified in just picking some human off the street as an example, rather than getting wrapped up in unverifiable species-wide generalizations and categories. We have only taken one further reasonable step of showing a couple, one male and one female.Q9: The current image is [blurry] / [low resolution] / [JPG artifacted], shouldn't it be replaced?
A9: The current consensus is that this isn't that big a deal. When viewed as normal at thumbnail size at a glance, you can't really tell.
Q10: The current image shows two people, not one. Doesn't that violate
MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES to begin with?
A10: The current consensus is that group photos probably do not violate
MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES. That guideline is based on a RfC, and is to be interpreted narrowly. It specifically only prohibits galleries or photomontages to illustrate ethnic groups or other similarly large human populations. The consensus on this page is that a group photo does not count. Past discussion of this can be found
here.
Q11: Could the lead image be a different photo? Perhaps a group photo with more than two people in it? Or a photo of an individual?
A11: There is nothing prohibiting that, it is just not the current consensus to do that on this page. It would likely take a large discussion and very strong arguments for why the alternate image is an improvement.
Q12: Other ethnic groups have lead images such as a flag or map (e.g. of population density). Could that be the lead image (instead of any image(s) of humans)?
A12: There is nothing prohibiting that, it is just not the current consensus to do that on this page. There already is a population density map at the bottom of the infobox.
Q13: Why isn't the lead image more abstract or symbolic?
A13: Because any attempt to symbolically or nonliterally depict humans will subtly express an editorial opinion about what the "essence" or "nature" of humanity is. Even if we pick a famous artist's work to put at the top of
Human, the fact that we chose that particular work, and not another, will show that we endorse certain non-encyclopedic
points of view about humanity. The only real way to avoid this pitfall is to not pick an image that is even remotely symbolic or nonliteral — a completely literal, straightforward photograph simply depicting a human, with no more "deep meaning" than our lead image for
Brown bear has, is the most neutral option available.
It is also worth noting that most abstract depictions of humanity remove a great deal of visual information. Wikipedia's purpose is educational, and our readers include non-native English speakers, young children, neurodivergent people, and other readers who will be best served by a clear, unambiguous, and factually rich depiction of the topic at hand. Imaginative works also tend to be much more subjective and idiosyncratic than photographs, reflecting the creator's state of mind as much as the subject matter itself. The purpose of an article's lead image is to accurately depict the article's subject matter, which in this case means accurately depicting a human. |
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. |
Human is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Human has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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level-1 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
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This article has been
mentioned by a media organization:
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Text and/or other creative content from this version of Homo sapiens was copied or moved into Human with this edit on 14:31, January 19, 2017. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
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I think it could be more fitting to have the picture be of (a) human(s) in a more current environment, such as at a computer. This better represents the current state of humanity, which is highly integrated with technology. Paperclip petter ( talk) 08:31, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
For example like on the article Jews there is a symbol and a map showing populations around the world, but no actual photos of Jews. I think it would be a good place to start to do the same on this article. Then we could discuss what to put instead.Maybe someone should WP:BOLDly move the population density map from the bottom of the infobox to the top, replacing the current image? Leijurv ( talk) 18:13, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
There are 14 uses of the word "they" referring to the human species. If my assumption that the author is human is correct, this error should be corrected by editing it to "we". If my assumption is false, I have bigger worries than the accuracy of this article. LegitGopnik ( talk) 05:33, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
'''[[
User:CanonNi]]'''
(
talk|
contribs) 05:43, 22 April 2024 (UTC)I'm not really an editor, but there's a typo in the 'ancient history' section. It says 'Indus Valley Civilisation' instead of civilization. I'd fix it but I'm not 'established'. Thought I'd let someone more experienced know! 23disembodiedvoices ( talk) 21:46, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Correction to the evolution portion of the page, Africans carry neanderthal dna between .3 and 1% on average. https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna Napow27 ( talk) 14:38, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Human 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: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35Auto-archiving period: 30 days |
The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information. |
Frequently asked questions To view the response to a question, click the [show] link to the right of the question. Q1: Why does the Human article use the
third person? Aren't we humans?
A1: The third
person ("Humans are..." or "They are..." as opposed to "We are...") is simply the conventional mode of writing for Wikipedia and other reference works. We realize this may cause some phrases in
Human to sound quite strange — "a majority of humans professes some variety of religious or spiritual belief" sounds almost like it was written by
space aliens. However, the occasional strangeness this approach may lead to is still preferable to the alternative of inconsistency.
If we were to use "we" in the Human article, it would mean sometimes switching strangely between persons as we narrow our topic of discussion. For example, even if an editor were female, she would be forced to write things like "We humans, and especially those females...." Whenever a subgroup of humanity became the article's focus, we would need to switch to the third person; a sentence about humans would use "we", but a sentence about adults, Asians, engineers, or heterosexuals would need to use "they". It is far simpler to just consistently use the third person in all contexts, even if this doesn't always seem completely natural. A related issue is the fact that, as a general rule, Wikipedia prefers to avoid self-references. In addition to being human, all editors on this site happen to be English speakers — yet we treat our article on the English language the same way we treat every other language article, in order to avoid bias and inconsistency. Likewise, we treat Wikipedia the same as other websites and reference tools. Analogously, we ought to aspire to treat Human in much the same way that we treat every other species article. Ideally, we should make exceptions of Human only where objective, verifiable facts demand that we make exceptions (e.g., in employing a lengthy behavior section). This is the simplest and easiest way to avoid bias and to prevent editorial disputes: When in doubt, follow the rest of Wikipedia's lead.Q2: Aren't humans supposed to be purely herbivorous/frugivorous despite our modern omnivorous habits? Aren't we jungle apes albeit highly intelligent and largely furless jungle apes? Most jungle apes eat no meat or very little.
A2: No, we really are natural omnivores. Contrary to popular belief, we humans did not evolve in jungles. We actually evolved on open grasslands where fruit-bearing trees are nowhere near as plentiful as in the jungle, where most of our surviving close relatives evolved. Evolving in such a place, we would have always (for as long as we've been humans rather than Australopithecines and other even earlier fossilized genera) had to supplement our diet with meat in addition to plant material. We evolved also eating plant-derived foods to be sure; the Savannah (grassland) has some trees with edible fruit although comparatively few and far between, and grain-bearing grasses are far more plentiful there than any tree. (Some evidence suggests that the first bread and beer were made from these tropical grains long before recorded history.) Even so, the grassland being much less fruit-rich than the jungle caused us to evolve as true metabolic omnivores, not pure herbivores/frugivores. See the Archived Debates on this subtopic for source documents. Q3: How was the lead image chosen?
A3: The current lead image was added on
15 September 2009 following
this discussion and given
this explanation. In short, an editor looked at
commons:Category:Couples and picked one. Due to alphabetical sorting, this one came up early (the filename starts with "A"), so they picked it. They were looking for an adult couple standing side-by-side. The use of this image has been discussed many times over the years, including but not limited to:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9, and
10. The current wording of this FAQ entry was decided following
this discussion. See also
our policy on photo galleries of people. Q4: Is it possible for an infobox image to perfectly and accurately represent all of humanity?
A4: No.
Q5: Is it possible for the text of this article to perfectly and accurately represent all of humanity?
A5: No.
Q6: If we can't make a perfect representation, should we still try to make the best representation we can?
A6: Yes. Of course. Because Wikipedia
is a work in progress.
Q7: How should the infobox image best represent humanity?
A7: The lead image should illustrate important features of the subject — in the case of
Human, these include an upright bipedal gait, hands specialized for manipulating tools, and use of cultural products such as clothing.
Lead images can attempt to encapsulate the broad strokes of the diversity and variation in its subject (e.g. Frog, Primate). The current consensus is that attempting to do further like that for humanity is not practical. There is a guideline MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES that exists due to issues on this topic in the past, stating that we may not assemble a gallery of many images into the infobox. And regardless of MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES, by picking just one image, we leave space for showing important details of that image which would be obscured if we shrank it in order to fit multiple photos in. Sometimes, what a collage gains in diversity, it loses in detail and clarity. In this case, the current consensus is that the topic covered at Human is best served with a single image — a collage of faces, for example, would fail to illustrate the human body. Q8: Shouldn't the lead image show more major groups of humans?
A8: There is no good way to decide which groups of humans are the "major" ones. We currently just show an example of male and female, this is a middle ground that represents the current consensus: only show biological sex groups, not others. Showing further groups, such as along ethnic lines, is contentious and does not have consensus.
While many Wikipedia articles on diverse subject matter (e.g. Spider, Bird) do attempt to encapsulate that variety through galleries and selections of images, we are prohibited from doing so on this article per MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES even if we wanted to. Other articles on diverse subject matter sometimes similarly have few examples, or even one example, rather than a collage in their infobox (e.g. Whale). Fortunately, this article is not called "humanity", but simply " human". We are fully justified in just picking some human off the street as an example, rather than getting wrapped up in unverifiable species-wide generalizations and categories. We have only taken one further reasonable step of showing a couple, one male and one female.Q9: The current image is [blurry] / [low resolution] / [JPG artifacted], shouldn't it be replaced?
A9: The current consensus is that this isn't that big a deal. When viewed as normal at thumbnail size at a glance, you can't really tell.
Q10: The current image shows two people, not one. Doesn't that violate
MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES to begin with?
A10: The current consensus is that group photos probably do not violate
MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES. That guideline is based on a RfC, and is to be interpreted narrowly. It specifically only prohibits galleries or photomontages to illustrate ethnic groups or other similarly large human populations. The consensus on this page is that a group photo does not count. Past discussion of this can be found
here.
Q11: Could the lead image be a different photo? Perhaps a group photo with more than two people in it? Or a photo of an individual?
A11: There is nothing prohibiting that, it is just not the current consensus to do that on this page. It would likely take a large discussion and very strong arguments for why the alternate image is an improvement.
Q12: Other ethnic groups have lead images such as a flag or map (e.g. of population density). Could that be the lead image (instead of any image(s) of humans)?
A12: There is nothing prohibiting that, it is just not the current consensus to do that on this page. There already is a population density map at the bottom of the infobox.
Q13: Why isn't the lead image more abstract or symbolic?
A13: Because any attempt to symbolically or nonliterally depict humans will subtly express an editorial opinion about what the "essence" or "nature" of humanity is. Even if we pick a famous artist's work to put at the top of
Human, the fact that we chose that particular work, and not another, will show that we endorse certain non-encyclopedic
points of view about humanity. The only real way to avoid this pitfall is to not pick an image that is even remotely symbolic or nonliteral — a completely literal, straightforward photograph simply depicting a human, with no more "deep meaning" than our lead image for
Brown bear has, is the most neutral option available.
It is also worth noting that most abstract depictions of humanity remove a great deal of visual information. Wikipedia's purpose is educational, and our readers include non-native English speakers, young children, neurodivergent people, and other readers who will be best served by a clear, unambiguous, and factually rich depiction of the topic at hand. Imaginative works also tend to be much more subjective and idiosyncratic than photographs, reflecting the creator's state of mind as much as the subject matter itself. The purpose of an article's lead image is to accurately depict the article's subject matter, which in this case means accurately depicting a human. |
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. |
Human is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Human has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This
level-1 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article has been
mentioned by a media organization:
|
Text and/or other creative content from this version of Homo sapiens was copied or moved into Human with this edit on 14:31, January 19, 2017. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
Other talk page banners | |||||
|
I think it could be more fitting to have the picture be of (a) human(s) in a more current environment, such as at a computer. This better represents the current state of humanity, which is highly integrated with technology. Paperclip petter ( talk) 08:31, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
For example like on the article Jews there is a symbol and a map showing populations around the world, but no actual photos of Jews. I think it would be a good place to start to do the same on this article. Then we could discuss what to put instead.Maybe someone should WP:BOLDly move the population density map from the bottom of the infobox to the top, replacing the current image? Leijurv ( talk) 18:13, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
There are 14 uses of the word "they" referring to the human species. If my assumption that the author is human is correct, this error should be corrected by editing it to "we". If my assumption is false, I have bigger worries than the accuracy of this article. LegitGopnik ( talk) 05:33, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
'''[[
User:CanonNi]]'''
(
talk|
contribs) 05:43, 22 April 2024 (UTC)I'm not really an editor, but there's a typo in the 'ancient history' section. It says 'Indus Valley Civilisation' instead of civilization. I'd fix it but I'm not 'established'. Thought I'd let someone more experienced know! 23disembodiedvoices ( talk) 21:46, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Correction to the evolution portion of the page, Africans carry neanderthal dna between .3 and 1% on average. https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna Napow27 ( talk) 14:38, 12 May 2024 (UTC)