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At Cyrus Cylinder the number of 'the Great's has suddenly more than doubled, from about 20 to about 45. On the talk page this is explained as " it might feel a bit denigrating to the original figure, Cyrus the Great, to merely call him Cyrus. A good comparison would be using Attila, instead of Attila the Hun.". But our article Attila refers to him only once as 'the Hun'. Are there any guidelines on this? It isn't necessary as a way of distinguishing him from some other Cyrus in the article. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 09:52, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there any standardization for using foreign characters after the subject's given name. I see that a number of Americans of Greek ethnicity as well as Asian(hope thats politically correct term) ethnicity use them in the lead sentence. I am limiting the scope of this discussion to folks with ONLY US nationality/citizenship if that helps. Anyways, TIA -- Threeafterthree ( talk) 19:26, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
There's a discussion here about adding headers such as "Biography" and "Life" to short biographical articles. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 10:55, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
As far as writing style goes, it's the most convoluted piece of wikilaw I've read in a long time. It also uses words such as "permits", which are not normally found in guidelines. Tijfo098 ( talk) 13:26, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
From time to time I come across a biography beginning, for example:
I tend to delete the letters FRSA, explaining that they are inappropriate, and nobody seems to object. I wonder whether we could establish a policy of non-inclusion for this set of postnominal initials. It seems to me that this section is for memberships in organisations which denote genuine recognition of merit, e.g. Fellow of the Royal Soceity, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Academician, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, etc. FRSA is a membership which most people can purchase for £150 p.a. (+£75 one-off joining fee). I know somebody who was approached by the RSA offering him a Fellowship, and, as somebody twice honoured by the Crown and a Fellow in two learned societies, he declined, stating that FRSA was no honour at all and just something one could buy. Other people take is as a genuine honour and are only too willing to accept, little knowing what they are buying. I know somebody else who is an FRSA but who does not use the letters because he says that he only acquired Fellowship because he wanted to be able to take guests to the RSA restaurant.-- Oxonian2006 ( talk) 12:13, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
Is the convention that there should be a space between the dash that separates the birth and death in the lead (e.g. John Smith (1711 – 1798), not John Smith (1711–1798). At present, there are 2 examples showing no spaces. Should these be converted to "with spaces", and should some text be added to the MOS to indicate that spaces are preferred? Eldumpo ( talk) 08:02, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
The following was recently added to the 'Marriage and family' section of the Aaron Burr article:
"Reverend Andrew Eliot was married to a cousin of Aaron Burr and, in a series of weekly letters from January 1777 to August 1778, he detailed the extent of spy participation by Thaddeus Burr (a first cousin of Aaron Burr). These missives were inherited by noted Long Island television and radio personality Bernadine Fawcett."
My first thought is to revert this edit because the info about one of Burr's non-notable cousins adds nothing (in my opinion) to the article. I found no guidelines or policies about this kind of thing. Thoughts, editors? WCCasey ( talk) 03:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
WP:SURNAME says, People who are best known by a pseudonym should be subsequently referred to by their pseudonymous surnames, unless they do not include a recognizable surname in the pseudonym (i.e. Madonna, Snoop Dogg, The Edge), in which case the whole pseudonym is used. I am curious about the application of this to the artist Siouxsie Sioux. To me it is clear that 'Sioux' is her pseudonymous surname and should be used. Any thoughts? Elizium23 ( talk) 19:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
After I added a "Biography Section" to an article about a person, the section was erased by another editor, the argument being that the material was already mentioned in the reference section, thus represented a "duplication", and "we" at WP don't do this. I wonder about this, as it appears inconsistently handled in WP. For example, if you check the article about Vladimir Nabokov, you will find a listing of his various published biographies, even though this represents a "duplication" as they can also be found in the references. In contrast, the article of Martin Luther King, Jr. does not display such a section, and you have to go to the references to search out his published biographies. I certainly find the situation in the former article better it being more informative and giving me an easy and concise overview, while it is not so easy in the latter case. Not only is it laborious to find them, they are haphazardly distributed, and biographies that are not referenced will be missed. Thus, it is my opinion that Biography Sections that list published biographies of persons are preferable and should generally be encouraged. Ekem ( talk) 21:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I propose that individuals who do not use postnominals (for instance royals, who often have altogether too many! e.g. Charles, Prince of Wales) be explicitly exempted. D B D 22:45, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Is naming someone in the opening sentence by their nationality like, John Doe is an English/Irish/French/German blah blah against the guideline namely Ethnicity or sexuality should not generally be emphasized in the opening unless it is relevant to the subject's notability. Mo ainm ~Talk 08:28, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. Mo ainm ~Talk 16:17, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I just removed instances of "Mr.", "Mrs.", and "Dr." from a lengthy list of board members of an international institution ( http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Forum_of_Federations&action=historysubmit&diff=433953618&oldid=426656123 ). They are commonly used in academia/journalism in some dialects, like Indian English, but are not as widespread in academic/journalistic American English or British English. Is there an official ruling for when the terms can be used? samwaltz ( talk) 22:39, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Editors may be interested in this RFC, along with the discussion of its implementation:
Should all subsidiary pages of the Manual of Style be made subpages_of WP:MOS?
It's big; and it promises huge improvements. Great if everyone can be involved. Noetica Tea? 00:27, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
I've been cleaning up a lot of biography pages lately, and I've noticed that very few have infoboxes. Is there any sort of consensus as to when Template:Infobox person should and shouldn't be used? -- Kerowyn Leave a note 18:17, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
This section needs clarification. No comma before the Jr., Sr., or Roman numeral prefix, such as "Sammy Davis Jr.," but Sammy Davis, Jr. has a comma before Jr. Eagles 24/7 (C) 02:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
I hate seeing nicknames in the lead. Unless that's how the person is referred to the vast majority of the time, it shouldn't be a lead IMO. It seems to be a problem mostly for sport figures. Is there a style guideline I can cite when removing these, or do I just to go with the standard sort of subjective "not sourced well enough" or something gray area-ish like "not commonly referred to this nickname"? Here's an example: Mike Epstein. In this case, the nickname is weakly sourced in one of the external links. I know I can remove it based on sourcing, but am curious if there's something else I can use as justification. Thank you -- CutOffTies ( talk) 13:49, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
We currently have the phrase "In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a citizen or national". In the case of the United Kingdom it has been the long standing norm to use Welsh/English/Scottish/Irish if that is a part of the person's identity, or self-identification, otherwise "British" is used. This has applied for a long time to actors, politicians, sportsmen and women etc. etc. In sports the constituent countries of the UK compete in their own right in many tournaments (Football, Rugby, Commonwealth games etc.). The qualification "most" allows for this, but we have some cases of where people are interpreting "most" as "all" so I thought I would raise it here for clarification. -- Snowded TALK 09:14, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I would prefer "British" myself for all (although personally I tend to identify myself as "English") as that is our official nationality, but given that many would object I think the status quo should be kept. The constructions "from England" or "born in England" are contrived given that we describe ourselves as "English" or "British". -- Necrothesp ( talk) 22:54, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
The MOS in question was
changed on 26 October 2010 (without discussion), from In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a
citizen or national, or was a citizen when the person became notable TO In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a
citizen and/or national (according to each nationality law of the countries), or was a citizen when the person became notable. It seems the edit was to make a point about South Korean nationality law (see
here), but had unintended consequences. Any objections to reverting?
I agree with Snowded that we should go with whatever the sources say e.g. English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, British, unless the subject is reliably sourced to self-identify differently to mainstream sources, in which case the self-identification should be preferred.
Daicaregos (
talk) 14:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Even reverting that change, the guideline still states to go with where they are citizen/national of. For the UK there is only one option and thats British. The regional/ethnic nationalities that are Welsh, English, Scottish, and Irish/Northern Irish don't equate to citizenship in any form. In fact does point 3.2 not say we shouldn't state ethnicity unless is relevant to subjects notability? That alone is highly questionable for many articles, whereas its not for others.
In response to Snowded: None of those have constituent countries, or people who identify their nationality based on a country within the sovereign state. The term "constituent country" implies a far great degree of self-determination than actually exists and has no legal status and is a simple play on words. Instead those countries (Canada, Russia, USA, Australia) have states that have FAR more legislative independance and are more like countries than the so called countries of the UK - in the case of within the US, they refer to themselves as Texans or Californians not Americans, just as within the UK people refer to themselves as Scottish or Welsh. Internationally those same Texans and Californians would identify as American as that's their citizenship/nationality. Are English/Welsh/Scottish/Irish used by these people in an international context or inter-UK context?
Also ethnic wise, how many times do you read/hear of Americans identifying themselves as Irish-American or Italian-American etc? What about the various different ethnic populations in Russia who may not refer to themselves as Russian? Yet we still call them all American, Russian, etc. We don't use their ethnic nationality, we use their citizenship as that is what nationality refers to first and foremost in the world.
Having said that i have stated before i can back the use of ethnic nationalities in the lede as long as use the correct nationality (British) in the infobox which as far as i'm aware means citizenship, because no matter how you personally identify, you can't overrule your own citizenship without changing it.
Surely that would be the most NPOV stance on the matter - allow for their self-identification (of ethnic nationality) in the lede where they self-identify as that but state their actual nationality (citizenship) in the infobox. That way we don't cater to a nationalist agenda by keeping "British" out of the article, whilst getting out the fact the person identifies as one whilst stating what citizenship they hold. Mabuska (talk) 11:00, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
I've noticed a lot of bios have so much trivia in the lede that the reader has to wade through half a paragraph before getting to the opening line. One of the culprits is pronunciation. WP:PRON advocates moving the pronunciation out of the lede if it becomes too heavy, but that hasn't been discussed here. In the astronomy articles, the pronunciations were moved to the info boxes a couple years ago. The main bio boxes also support a pron. parameter. If there are any comments, a thread has been reopened here. — kwami ( talk) 22:09, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I fixed all the archive page links by moving the pages but MiszaBot archive search does not appear to like the current location being a search a subpage of a subpage, so the archive search does not work. Does anyone know how to fix it? ww2censor ( talk) 15:39, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
Starting a new section to discuss the style that should be used in the lead section of biographical articles. The current discussions centre on concerns that too much information is placed in the lead and clutters it up. All information needs to be in the main body of the article or sourced in the lead. A possible compromise is placing material in a proper footnote with a reference used down there. There are also suggestions to use infoboxes to hold information where possible, but that is not always possible as the use of infoboxes is not uniform across Wikipedia's biographical articles. The following should probably be discussed in terms of location and sourcing. Either just in the lead, or in both lead and article, or just in the article, or just in a referenced footnote.
The current wording is here, but confusingly uses the term 'opening paragraph'. Can someone clarify if that refers to the paragraph after the lead section, or whether it is another name for the lead section? The current wording of WP:LEAD is here and includes this (simply a redirect to here), this (on BLPs), this (on clutter) and also some material in footnotes 7-11. This all needs discussion if sweeping changes are going to be made. Carcharoth ( talk) 15:42, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
Here are the examples I posted in the original discussion. First, one I ran across recently, Genghis Khan. (Here as I found it, apart from one adjustment to fix the display of a misbehaving template):
How do we expect anyone to read that? Now compare it to the non-parenthetical text plus dates:
That's way too much stuff to move to the info box, of course, so I put the more important there and the rest in footnotes.
For a more typical example, consider:
with
We can make vital information available without bludgeoning our readers with it.
For an example of templates which support pronunciation (and not added by me), see iron and 4 Vesta. — kwami ( talk) 19:43, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, information in the first sentence should be full name, common alternative names (e.g. FDR) or bithname (e.g. Temujin) and full dates of birth and death, along with nationality (or acceptable alternative) and occupation or reason for notability (in general terms). Nothing else needs to go in the first sentence. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 20:48, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
I would also like to turn the question around and ask kwami what reasons there are for removing birth and death dates from the lead, when those elements contribute very little to the clutter. Pronunciations, and excess name variants, I agree, should be part of the de-cluttering, but why birth and death dates? Those don't actually clutter, IMO, and provide a degree of precision that makes Wikipedia different from other biographical publications (the ones I looked at were the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Australian Dictionary of Biography - both of which don't have lead sections in the same way Wikipedia does, so comparison is difficult - of course, neither of those publications have infoboxes either - someone should do a proper survey of Category:Biographical dictionaries).
But if kwami can provide reason other than 'clutter' for removing birth and death dates, I might be able to support that, though only if someone can provide concrete numbers on how many biographical articles there are (I think it was somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million at last count, wasn't it?) and how many actually conform to the style guide and how many would need to be changed. Some reasons I can think of is that it would make bot-generated name disambiguation pages easy to produce. Though really, the lead sentence should be constructed from elements obtained from the {{ persondata}} template. Has that possibility ever been seriously considered? I'm now reminded of Wikipedia:Biographical metadata that I wrote once. Maybe this time someone will make a serious effort to harness all that data. (Completely off-topic, but if anyone has yet solved the problem of being able to identify how many of our biographical articles are about men and how many are about women, there is a barnstar waiting for them - quite why gender is not tracked for biographies, I don't know). Anyway, kwami's examples with birth and death dates included and not included are:
Taking a few issues in more detail, the full name should be given uninterrupted, with any nicknames given separately unless commonly incorporated with the full name; this is partly for reasons of making the sentence flow smoothly, but also because it can cause confusion: it's not entirely clear whether 'Terence Alan Patrick Seán Spike Milligan' chose to use the fifth of his Christian names or whether he had only four to begin with and adopted a nickname to replace all of them. The urge to put a nickname in the opening line on all occasions should be resisted when the name is obvious, for example someone formally called Robert who is normally known as Bob; most people can be expected to know that Bob is short for Robert. Full birth and death dates are far the most frequent detail which people wish to check, in my experience; by the same token, birth and death places are far less important and also far less likely to be found. With regard to pronunciation, few readers are immediately familiar with IPA notation (I am only a beginner) and so the pronunciation guides can appear as gibberish; at the same point it would be unwise to go to any alternative standard for pronunciation which would be technically inferior. Sam Blacketer ( talk) 22:58, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
The fact that birth and death dates are omitted in many other encyclopedic publications makes a strong case for why they should be omitted here. They certainly belong in the article but I don't think they compare to other lead-sentence material in terms of priority. That said, I'd be fine with keeping them as long as we got the more offensive material (pronunciation) out of the way. — Designate ( talk) 21:59, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
-- Boson ( talk) 17:53, 21 September 2011 (UTC)With identity theft on the rise, people increasingly regard their full names and dates of birth as private. Wikipedia includes full names and dates of birth that have been widely published by reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object. If the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth, or the person is borderline notable, err on the side of caution and simply list the year. In a similar vein, articles should not include postal addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, or other contact information for living persons, though links to websites maintained by the subject are generally permitted. See above regarding the misuse of primary sources to obtain personal information about subjects.
There is a discussion at Talk:Michael Groß#Spelling of surname in English; contested 2011 page move which may be of interest to members of your project, on which you may be able to share your knowledge and expertise. Dirtlawyer1 ( talk) 15:23, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
The MoS does not seem to cover how to describe places of birth and death for historic people. An editor has been doing a number of changes, mainly to infoboxes, so that, for example Raphael was born in the Duchy of Urbino and died in the Papal States, rather than just Italy. While the historic entities should usually be mentioned in the text ("then in the ...." etc), modern political entities should imo be used in the first sentence and infoboxes. Such edits are also often made from nationalist/regionalist motives, though I think not here. Unless there is disagreement I will add something along these lines in a few days. It is different for figures from the ancient world I think. Johnbod ( talk) 19:21, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
FYI, something like the above discussion has been going on (but has subsided for now) at Wikipedia:Peer review/Jacques Offenbach/archive1 - scroll down to Geography —The Prussia/Prussian issue and the link from there to the preceding discussion at Talk:Jacques_Offenbach#Cologne_is_not_a_Prussian_city. Enjoy! -- Guillaume Tell 15:18, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
(outdent) Since I am the editor that "has been doing a number of changes", I would like to give my input here (I am aware of WP:TL;DR, but it's hard to avoid verbosity in a discussion about potential policy making). To be noted at the outset is that the issue at hand is not actually a discussion about ethnic disputes, nor a discussion about infobox-filling. However, since this issue was raised as well, I begin by making a passing remark on it.
Most experienced editors are quite aware of the problems infoboxes cause; but until the community decides to "burn them in Hell" forever, we ought to find a way to deal with them properly. In the case of former country infoboxes, the solution is usually to either not have an infobox at all (see Francia; where the infobox obscured everything that the article tried to explain) or to actually have an infobox featuring elaborate/cluttered information as an attempt to include all relevant subtleties (see Kingdom of Saxony).
Now in the case of historical biographies, my understanding is that (at some point) several editors started "changing place of birth or place of death to reflect contemporary political status" (this is is an actual edit summary I have come across with and now regularly use myself) either in infoboxes or in the body of the article. So for example (I will cite only articles I have never edited): Tesla was born in the Austrian Empire, Einstein in the Kingdom of Württemberg, Galileo in the Duchy of Florence, da Vinci in the Republic of Florence, and so on.
There are literally hundreds of articles that follow this practice (and I have made changes to a dozen more myself in order to "keep it consistent"). The only articles I am aware of in which the discussion led to following a different practice regarding the respective infobox were: the article about Mozart (no infobox) and the article about Schopenhauer ("according to Danzig/Gdansk vote policy. No further Prussia/Poland or other details [for the sake of lessening the controversy]. Leave that to the city articles"); in both cases, this happened because lame/persistent ethnic disputes were involved ("Mozart was (not) German"; "Schopenhauer was (not) Polish"), but even in these cases, the body of the article does give all the relevant historical information.
Now, I defend the view that we should always indicate the contemporary political status along with the present-day one (either in the infobox or in the body of the article; there is no reason to deem this "too much information"). Including only the latter (the present-day status) may often be:
1) Trivial; on the other hand, finding the contemporary (i.e., historical) political entity that included a modern city a few centuries or a few millennia ago on Wikipedia is not that easy; some Wikipedia articles about cities or villages don't even include this piece of information.
2) Unscholarly: what is common in scholarly publications is to always include detailed historical-geographic information in biographies (especially biographies of Eastern European/Russian/German/Italian artists or philosophers or scientists): e.g., "former district, f. region, f. province, f. kingdom, f. empire" or "f. uyezd, f. governorate, f. empire"; this may seem too tedious for encyclopedic purposes but it is very informative and reflects historical reality. (Some easily accessible Google-book links: [5], [6], [7], [8]; note also that Russian Wikipedia is meticulous regarding this issue: e.g. [9], [10].)
3) Confusing (at variable degrees): "Kant's birth place" is an obvious argument for illustrating this. But there are less obvious ones; when, for example, one indicates/hyperlinks just "Germany" as the place of birth of someone who was born in Berlin in the late 19th c. one assumes that the reader knows that Berlin was then part of the German Empire or that, for the purposes of a bio, these details don't actually matter. My experience is that these are a hasty assumptions: only a minority of readers have the necessary background to know when a present-day entity was established; and it is useful for the reader to have easy access (that is, within the biographical article) to information regarding whether, e.g., a person was born/flourished/died in Weimar Germany as opposed to Third Reich, or in West Germany as opposed to East Germany; this helps the reader put biographical information into historical context and avoid anachronistic fallacies. One solution is offering a piped link (an "Easter egg link" as is ironically referred to by Johnbod) containing a former country's constitutional/academic name (as opposed to common English name which is the one to be displayed) would do the job just fine; e.g.: "b. Rome, [[Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)|Italy]]" instead of just "b. Rome, [[Italy]]". (Please note, incidentally, that English Wikipedia does have a separate article for nearly every European European country, no matter how short-lived it may have been; e.g. see Ukrainian State or Russian Republic). Alternatively, one could include a parenthetical note; e.g., b. Tartu, Estonia (then Derpt, Governorate of Livonia, Imperial Russia) as is done in the article about Wolf von Engelhardt). The reason for having an overall policy is to ensure consistency (as opposed to doing this only in some "special" cases; e.g. only for people born in "German Straßburg" or in "Prussian Danzig").
A final, somewhat trivial, remark regarding the need for terminological subtlety: It is common knowledge that in Europe, since at least the High Middle Ages, one can speak of definite political entities (republics, principalities, duchies, counties, and other domains) with well-defined borders. This entails that, after some point, people from Europe (please note that while we mostly talk about them here, similar arguments also applies to a variable extent to people from Ancient South Asia, Pre-Columbian America, Colonial Africa, Colonial India, the British Commonwealth Countries, the Arab World, etc) are not simply natives of broad geographical areas/cultural regions (such as Silesia, Prussia, Westphalia, Galicia, Macedonia, Candia, Normandy); and they are certainly not natives/subjects/citizens of "perennial states" (such as "Germany", "France", "Poland"). They are, instead, natives/subjects/citizens of specific polities (often bearing a specific formal designation or administrative name) which were established at a specific date (such as German Reich (1933–1945), French Second Republic, Tsardom of Poland, Silesia Province, Westphalia Province, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Kingdom of Prussia, Socialist Republic of Macedonia, Kingdom of Candia, Duchy of Normandy). If we are to render this basic fact more intelligible, we should have an overall policy that will encourage knowledgeable editors to add this kind of historical-geographic information (a useful supplement to strictly biographical information) to biographical articles either in the form of a footnote, or of a piped/explicit link in the body of the text, or a piped/explicit link in the respective infobox. -- Omnipaedista ( talk) 05:03, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
Interesting discussion. My view is that the aim should be to provide the information and context the reader needs to understand the article. Sometimes that will be only a link, sometimes, if the situation is more complex, both the then-current and present geographical and political context will be needed. I rather like the approach taken where one is provided in the main text and the other in parentheses after it. You can't expect readers to realise that using the current country name is an oversimplification, but neither can you just name and link a historic entity without providing some modern context. To give one example, I recently had reason to look up Sigismund von Herberstein in order to write a brief line or two on him for another document. The Wikipedia article describes him as 'Carniolan', but for my purposes I needed a simpler way to put who he was. As he was born to a German-speaking family, I described him as German, which is likely a gross oversimplification, but is what I needed to say up front. I later said he was born in Carniola and was a diplomat for the Austrian regions of the Habsburg Monarchy, but failed to mention the Holy Roman Empire connections (that gets confusing at the best of times). Another example is someone called Achatius Hilling and his son Gregorius Hilling. The son was German, but how would you describe his father? The description here states that the elder Hilling was from Elbogen, Bohemia (now Loker) and had fought for Frederick V (briefly King of Bohemia) at the Battle of White Mountain, and then fled Bohemia and settled in Nuremberg. But as I said, the concept of nationality within the lands of the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire has always confused me. Balancing the need to be accurate with the need to not throw a mass of confusing history at readers in the first few sentences (let alone in infoboxes), has always been tricky. How should those two cases be handled, and how should things be handled in general? Carcharoth ( talk) 23:31, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
Putting on my "consumer of Wikipedia" cap on, if I was doing a quick read of some biography, I would want to get an idea of where a person was born geographically, what political regime he was born into would be of secondary importance, unless that was a factor in his notability. Therefore the modern geographical location should be in the info-box to facilitate the quick-read, while the trivia of the historical political regime should be in the text of the article for the more detailed read. -- Martin Tammsalu ( talk) 11:01, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
See Talk:George IV of the United Kingdom. It has been suggested that we should make some attempt to reduced the number of succession boxes in some biographies, as a large number can clutter up an article, particularly with some royal figures. This is particularly an issue in some cases where e.g. there is a large (though unfortunately not total) overlap between some posts e.g. "Heir to the British throne", "Prince of Wales", "Duke of Cornwall", "Duke of Rothesay". Any comments? PatGallacher ( talk) 14:53, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
My hope is to make the first sentence of bios more readable and less cluttered by eliminating duplication. Here's a typical example - along with the accompanying infobox - taken from Rachel Roberts (model):
Rachel Roberts | |
---|---|
Born | |
Spouse | Andrew Niccol (2002–present) 2 children |
Modeling information | |
Height | 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in) |
Hair color | Blonde |
Eye color | Blue-green |
There is no reason to duplicate the birth date and place of birth. It's all in the infobox. It would be much easier and more readable to just have this straightforward sentence:
If that's too short, this would still be an improvement:
If the person is deceased, then something like this would suffice (1934 - 1978). What think ye? -- Brangifer ( talk) 03:28, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
I posted a query at BLP regarding nationalities, although the query applies to all Bio's really. If you have any comments please post there. Thanks. Eldumpo ( talk) 16:05, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
I am coming from this discussion and my intention is to make a wide discussion about this so we could possibly reach a principle to be applied in these cases. I created numerous biographies, and until now I have been using allways the place of birth, preferably city+country existing at time of birth. The issue was also discussed often at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football ( last discussion) and there seems to be that historicaly acurate names and sovereign countries have the most of consensus. Our problem there is not so much with obscure middle age principalities, but more with recent former countries. Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are widely used for people born in those countries while they existed, in oposition to the ones that gained independence by their disolution. The last one has to do specifically with Estonia. In my logic, a person born in Tallinn during Soviet occupation period (1945-1991) should have as birthplace Tallinn, Soviet Union, following the widely accepted agreement of using city+country at time of birth formula. But as middle way, for the Soviet case there has been the tendency to add the Soviet republic in between, exemple: Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union. Yugoslavia or Czechslovakia don´t have this republic in between usually, and even the usage of (current Xland) has somehow not been welcomed. Now, what we have is a number of editors from Estonia that for several reasons want to use Tallinn, Estonia as birthplace for all people born there since 1945, totally ignoring Soviet Union. My main issue has to do with the fact that Estonia didn´t existed as such between 1945 and 1991, so how can a person born in 1976 be born in a country that only regained its independence in 1991? As I already mentioned in one exageration, that would be like saying that Moctezuma II was born in modern day Mexico! Now, Estonian editors have a series of argumens that range from illegal unrecognised occupation, to "Estonia" as geographical unit being more accessible to people nowadays than Soviet Union, however, despite understanding the specific sensible situation of the occupied Baltic States, I still don´t see a major reason why should they be exception towards other similar situations in the world. Also, my main concern is that creating such exceptions would encourage all editors from all these "recently liberated countries" to use their current states as place of birth as well. Exemple, if an Ukrainian editor sees written "Estonia" for a person born in Soviet period, what will prevent him of replacing all "Soviet Union´s" by Ukraine then? From the experience I have, I can say that a couple of years ago there was a big number of editors and IP´s changing former states for the new ones in many of those cases, however recently seems that people finally started accepting their past, and things have been much quit nowadays. However, seems that we still don´t have a written guideline on this, so perhaps is time to do it? My vote goes definitelly to historical accuracy when dealing with birthplaces in bio infoboxes. Best regards, FkpCascais ( talk) 09:56, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
I am sorry to say, but for time being the only reasonable and easy managable solution seems to be city+country (at time of birth) for infobox purposes. The proposal of geographical units is confuse and just an excuse. People can only be born in one precise place at one time, and that place can only be described encyclopedically with historical accuracy. We can debate not clear cases, but I really think that we should accept historical accuracy as principle for place of birth in biogaphies. As way to simplify the discussion, can we agree that a person born in 1960 cannot be born in a country that only existed from 1991 on? Basic logic. FkpCascais ( talk) 21:36, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
To me it has to be name at time of birth. This is accurate information. Changing it to what it is now isn't encyclopaedic or factually correct. Edinburgh Wanderer 22:18, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
Whichever way this point gets decided, information should be added to all infoboxes clarifying exactly what should be put in the field. The argument against historical name is well-illustrated by the Estonia/WWII point above. What happens during short periods during a war, what happens when there is not agreement on the country name at a given time. The argument against current name is that you would have to change loads of articles if a country's name changes. Maybe we should stick to what the sources say. Eldumpo ( talk) 21:56, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be most fruitful just to start an appropriate section in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Baltic states-related articles talk page and after a rough draft has been achieved, notify the editors of the appropriate wikiprojects? It is pretty obvious that "one size fits all" solution will not happen, as there are just too many unique variables in history and modern-day countries - and in great many cases, even sources may contradict themselves on different pages. I will start a small idea collection there in a moment. -- Sander Säde 07:29, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
Sadly I think this discussion is pointless. Whenever this issue gets periodically raised by a sensible editor correcting an article, all the various nationalists and revisionists come out of the woodwork and wikilawyer and filibuster until rational editors give up and they are left to impose their POV on the articles related to people from their countries. Without huge outside input (which never happens), this will continue to go round in circles. Number 5 7 10:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
How should one properly show non-English spellings and pronunciations in a bio? For example, I came across the following mess in the lead sentence of the article Yuri Alexandrov (ice hockey):
I think that it would be useful if MOSBIO would be updated to show the proper way to deal with lead sentences such as this. Dolovis ( talk) 13:54, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
Could somebody here please chime in at Talk:Charlize Theron? Some misguided soul thinks that we should "Americanize" this actress who clearly achieved notability while a South African national simply because the films she acted in were American films. She had 12 years of notability as a South African national before becoming a naturalized American citizen in 2007, and according to WP:MOSBIO should be described as South African, as that is the nationality she held at the time she became notable. Yworo ( talk) 06:21, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm against it, I don't remember seeing it in A-class articles or FAs, and I think there's an argument that the MOS:HONORIFIC section already covers it ... but Ruhrfisch and I were wondering if there's been any discussion, and if that section would be clearer if we specifically include the word "rank". - Dank ( push to talk) 03:48, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
Forgive me if this has been discussed before.
WP:OPENPARA states: "The opening paragraph should have: ... Context (location, nationality, or ethnicity); In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a citizen or national, or was a citizen when the person became notable."
This guideline often causes disputes (see Charlize Theron section above, for example). My view is citizenship is often irrelevant. In the case of Theron, she did not become notable until she moved to the U.S. To call her a South African actress makes little sense. But let's posit a more extreme example. You have a person who is born in the U.S. and moves to England when she is 3 days old. For whatever reason, she remains an American citizen but becomes famous in England. Do we really want to label her an American actress? (As an aside, I wouldn't mind sticking to the facts and calling someone like Theron a South African citizen (or born in South Africa) but who became notable as an actress in the U.S., but that becomes cumbersome for a lead.)
I've seen some editors who argue that citizenship subsumes residency, which then means you can call Theron an American actress and my hypothetical actress an English actress. However, that is not what citizen means literally and, when challenged, it's hard to hold on to that argument.
Does anyone here believe the guideline should be changed?-- Bbb23 ( talk) 01:38, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
There's obviously a flaw in this guideline; suppose someone was born in, say, Nigeria, voluntarily (as in most cases) becomes American and in multiple interviews declares "I am proud to be American, I love my country, that's all I am. I hate Nigeria, I have nothing to do with the fucking place, and do not associate with it in any way." — we'd still insist that this person is Nigerian.
This makes about as much sense as saying "In wikipedia articles, a person's marital status will be the one the person had when s/he became notable, regardless of their current marital status. By default, all individuals who became notable before the age of 16 will be described as single." Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 10:32, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
"The opening paragraph should have: ... Context (location, nationality, or ethnicity); In most cases this will mean the country the person resided in when the person became notable, or, if unclear, the country of which the person is a citizen or national."
I know this doesn't necessarily incorporate everyone's concerns, but my aim is to avoid disputes and endless discussions, not to mention sourcing issues. I also think we need to state a preference, not just provide two alternatives. A couple of items I believe my text doesn't address: (1) when a person becomes notable first in Canada (for example) but then the bulk of their career is in France; and (2) the use of dual countries, e.g., Irish American.-- Bbb23 ( talk) 16:55, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I don't think it has to do with different meanings of nationality. With the ones I mentioned, it has to do with whether one uses the country of origin or the country where notability was achieved (Perry's is a bit more complex). I have no problem with eliminating it from the lead, though, but then we have to reword the guideline to say that. Otherwise, editors will keep sticking it back in because the guideline indicates that the description should be there.-- Bbb23 ( talk) 22:17, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
I just added 'permanent resident' to the section "Opening paragraph", as in some cases, the person has no citizenship, or as in the case of Hong Kong, the territory grants permanent residence but not citizenship. LK ( talk) 07:24, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
We have a section on honorific prefixes, but nothing on honorific suffixes. In particular, should we use them for people like Helena Bonham Carter, who has been announced as being awarded CBE, in the New Year's honours list, but not yet invested? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:57, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
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This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
At Cyrus Cylinder the number of 'the Great's has suddenly more than doubled, from about 20 to about 45. On the talk page this is explained as " it might feel a bit denigrating to the original figure, Cyrus the Great, to merely call him Cyrus. A good comparison would be using Attila, instead of Attila the Hun.". But our article Attila refers to him only once as 'the Hun'. Are there any guidelines on this? It isn't necessary as a way of distinguishing him from some other Cyrus in the article. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 09:52, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there any standardization for using foreign characters after the subject's given name. I see that a number of Americans of Greek ethnicity as well as Asian(hope thats politically correct term) ethnicity use them in the lead sentence. I am limiting the scope of this discussion to folks with ONLY US nationality/citizenship if that helps. Anyways, TIA -- Threeafterthree ( talk) 19:26, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
There's a discussion here about adding headers such as "Biography" and "Life" to short biographical articles. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 10:55, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
As far as writing style goes, it's the most convoluted piece of wikilaw I've read in a long time. It also uses words such as "permits", which are not normally found in guidelines. Tijfo098 ( talk) 13:26, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
From time to time I come across a biography beginning, for example:
I tend to delete the letters FRSA, explaining that they are inappropriate, and nobody seems to object. I wonder whether we could establish a policy of non-inclusion for this set of postnominal initials. It seems to me that this section is for memberships in organisations which denote genuine recognition of merit, e.g. Fellow of the Royal Soceity, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Academician, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, etc. FRSA is a membership which most people can purchase for £150 p.a. (+£75 one-off joining fee). I know somebody who was approached by the RSA offering him a Fellowship, and, as somebody twice honoured by the Crown and a Fellow in two learned societies, he declined, stating that FRSA was no honour at all and just something one could buy. Other people take is as a genuine honour and are only too willing to accept, little knowing what they are buying. I know somebody else who is an FRSA but who does not use the letters because he says that he only acquired Fellowship because he wanted to be able to take guests to the RSA restaurant.-- Oxonian2006 ( talk) 12:13, 22 April 2011 (UTC)
Is the convention that there should be a space between the dash that separates the birth and death in the lead (e.g. John Smith (1711 – 1798), not John Smith (1711–1798). At present, there are 2 examples showing no spaces. Should these be converted to "with spaces", and should some text be added to the MOS to indicate that spaces are preferred? Eldumpo ( talk) 08:02, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
The following was recently added to the 'Marriage and family' section of the Aaron Burr article:
"Reverend Andrew Eliot was married to a cousin of Aaron Burr and, in a series of weekly letters from January 1777 to August 1778, he detailed the extent of spy participation by Thaddeus Burr (a first cousin of Aaron Burr). These missives were inherited by noted Long Island television and radio personality Bernadine Fawcett."
My first thought is to revert this edit because the info about one of Burr's non-notable cousins adds nothing (in my opinion) to the article. I found no guidelines or policies about this kind of thing. Thoughts, editors? WCCasey ( talk) 03:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
WP:SURNAME says, People who are best known by a pseudonym should be subsequently referred to by their pseudonymous surnames, unless they do not include a recognizable surname in the pseudonym (i.e. Madonna, Snoop Dogg, The Edge), in which case the whole pseudonym is used. I am curious about the application of this to the artist Siouxsie Sioux. To me it is clear that 'Sioux' is her pseudonymous surname and should be used. Any thoughts? Elizium23 ( talk) 19:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
After I added a "Biography Section" to an article about a person, the section was erased by another editor, the argument being that the material was already mentioned in the reference section, thus represented a "duplication", and "we" at WP don't do this. I wonder about this, as it appears inconsistently handled in WP. For example, if you check the article about Vladimir Nabokov, you will find a listing of his various published biographies, even though this represents a "duplication" as they can also be found in the references. In contrast, the article of Martin Luther King, Jr. does not display such a section, and you have to go to the references to search out his published biographies. I certainly find the situation in the former article better it being more informative and giving me an easy and concise overview, while it is not so easy in the latter case. Not only is it laborious to find them, they are haphazardly distributed, and biographies that are not referenced will be missed. Thus, it is my opinion that Biography Sections that list published biographies of persons are preferable and should generally be encouraged. Ekem ( talk) 21:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I propose that individuals who do not use postnominals (for instance royals, who often have altogether too many! e.g. Charles, Prince of Wales) be explicitly exempted. D B D 22:45, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Is naming someone in the opening sentence by their nationality like, John Doe is an English/Irish/French/German blah blah against the guideline namely Ethnicity or sexuality should not generally be emphasized in the opening unless it is relevant to the subject's notability. Mo ainm ~Talk 08:28, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. Mo ainm ~Talk 16:17, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I just removed instances of "Mr.", "Mrs.", and "Dr." from a lengthy list of board members of an international institution ( http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Forum_of_Federations&action=historysubmit&diff=433953618&oldid=426656123 ). They are commonly used in academia/journalism in some dialects, like Indian English, but are not as widespread in academic/journalistic American English or British English. Is there an official ruling for when the terms can be used? samwaltz ( talk) 22:39, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Editors may be interested in this RFC, along with the discussion of its implementation:
Should all subsidiary pages of the Manual of Style be made subpages_of WP:MOS?
It's big; and it promises huge improvements. Great if everyone can be involved. Noetica Tea? 00:27, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
I've been cleaning up a lot of biography pages lately, and I've noticed that very few have infoboxes. Is there any sort of consensus as to when Template:Infobox person should and shouldn't be used? -- Kerowyn Leave a note 18:17, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
This section needs clarification. No comma before the Jr., Sr., or Roman numeral prefix, such as "Sammy Davis Jr.," but Sammy Davis, Jr. has a comma before Jr. Eagles 24/7 (C) 02:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
I hate seeing nicknames in the lead. Unless that's how the person is referred to the vast majority of the time, it shouldn't be a lead IMO. It seems to be a problem mostly for sport figures. Is there a style guideline I can cite when removing these, or do I just to go with the standard sort of subjective "not sourced well enough" or something gray area-ish like "not commonly referred to this nickname"? Here's an example: Mike Epstein. In this case, the nickname is weakly sourced in one of the external links. I know I can remove it based on sourcing, but am curious if there's something else I can use as justification. Thank you -- CutOffTies ( talk) 13:49, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
We currently have the phrase "In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a citizen or national". In the case of the United Kingdom it has been the long standing norm to use Welsh/English/Scottish/Irish if that is a part of the person's identity, or self-identification, otherwise "British" is used. This has applied for a long time to actors, politicians, sportsmen and women etc. etc. In sports the constituent countries of the UK compete in their own right in many tournaments (Football, Rugby, Commonwealth games etc.). The qualification "most" allows for this, but we have some cases of where people are interpreting "most" as "all" so I thought I would raise it here for clarification. -- Snowded TALK 09:14, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I would prefer "British" myself for all (although personally I tend to identify myself as "English") as that is our official nationality, but given that many would object I think the status quo should be kept. The constructions "from England" or "born in England" are contrived given that we describe ourselves as "English" or "British". -- Necrothesp ( talk) 22:54, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
The MOS in question was
changed on 26 October 2010 (without discussion), from In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a
citizen or national, or was a citizen when the person became notable TO In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a
citizen and/or national (according to each nationality law of the countries), or was a citizen when the person became notable. It seems the edit was to make a point about South Korean nationality law (see
here), but had unintended consequences. Any objections to reverting?
I agree with Snowded that we should go with whatever the sources say e.g. English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, British, unless the subject is reliably sourced to self-identify differently to mainstream sources, in which case the self-identification should be preferred.
Daicaregos (
talk) 14:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Even reverting that change, the guideline still states to go with where they are citizen/national of. For the UK there is only one option and thats British. The regional/ethnic nationalities that are Welsh, English, Scottish, and Irish/Northern Irish don't equate to citizenship in any form. In fact does point 3.2 not say we shouldn't state ethnicity unless is relevant to subjects notability? That alone is highly questionable for many articles, whereas its not for others.
In response to Snowded: None of those have constituent countries, or people who identify their nationality based on a country within the sovereign state. The term "constituent country" implies a far great degree of self-determination than actually exists and has no legal status and is a simple play on words. Instead those countries (Canada, Russia, USA, Australia) have states that have FAR more legislative independance and are more like countries than the so called countries of the UK - in the case of within the US, they refer to themselves as Texans or Californians not Americans, just as within the UK people refer to themselves as Scottish or Welsh. Internationally those same Texans and Californians would identify as American as that's their citizenship/nationality. Are English/Welsh/Scottish/Irish used by these people in an international context or inter-UK context?
Also ethnic wise, how many times do you read/hear of Americans identifying themselves as Irish-American or Italian-American etc? What about the various different ethnic populations in Russia who may not refer to themselves as Russian? Yet we still call them all American, Russian, etc. We don't use their ethnic nationality, we use their citizenship as that is what nationality refers to first and foremost in the world.
Having said that i have stated before i can back the use of ethnic nationalities in the lede as long as use the correct nationality (British) in the infobox which as far as i'm aware means citizenship, because no matter how you personally identify, you can't overrule your own citizenship without changing it.
Surely that would be the most NPOV stance on the matter - allow for their self-identification (of ethnic nationality) in the lede where they self-identify as that but state their actual nationality (citizenship) in the infobox. That way we don't cater to a nationalist agenda by keeping "British" out of the article, whilst getting out the fact the person identifies as one whilst stating what citizenship they hold. Mabuska (talk) 11:00, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
I've noticed a lot of bios have so much trivia in the lede that the reader has to wade through half a paragraph before getting to the opening line. One of the culprits is pronunciation. WP:PRON advocates moving the pronunciation out of the lede if it becomes too heavy, but that hasn't been discussed here. In the astronomy articles, the pronunciations were moved to the info boxes a couple years ago. The main bio boxes also support a pron. parameter. If there are any comments, a thread has been reopened here. — kwami ( talk) 22:09, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I fixed all the archive page links by moving the pages but MiszaBot archive search does not appear to like the current location being a search a subpage of a subpage, so the archive search does not work. Does anyone know how to fix it? ww2censor ( talk) 15:39, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
Starting a new section to discuss the style that should be used in the lead section of biographical articles. The current discussions centre on concerns that too much information is placed in the lead and clutters it up. All information needs to be in the main body of the article or sourced in the lead. A possible compromise is placing material in a proper footnote with a reference used down there. There are also suggestions to use infoboxes to hold information where possible, but that is not always possible as the use of infoboxes is not uniform across Wikipedia's biographical articles. The following should probably be discussed in terms of location and sourcing. Either just in the lead, or in both lead and article, or just in the article, or just in a referenced footnote.
The current wording is here, but confusingly uses the term 'opening paragraph'. Can someone clarify if that refers to the paragraph after the lead section, or whether it is another name for the lead section? The current wording of WP:LEAD is here and includes this (simply a redirect to here), this (on BLPs), this (on clutter) and also some material in footnotes 7-11. This all needs discussion if sweeping changes are going to be made. Carcharoth ( talk) 15:42, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
Here are the examples I posted in the original discussion. First, one I ran across recently, Genghis Khan. (Here as I found it, apart from one adjustment to fix the display of a misbehaving template):
How do we expect anyone to read that? Now compare it to the non-parenthetical text plus dates:
That's way too much stuff to move to the info box, of course, so I put the more important there and the rest in footnotes.
For a more typical example, consider:
with
We can make vital information available without bludgeoning our readers with it.
For an example of templates which support pronunciation (and not added by me), see iron and 4 Vesta. — kwami ( talk) 19:43, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, information in the first sentence should be full name, common alternative names (e.g. FDR) or bithname (e.g. Temujin) and full dates of birth and death, along with nationality (or acceptable alternative) and occupation or reason for notability (in general terms). Nothing else needs to go in the first sentence. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 20:48, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
I would also like to turn the question around and ask kwami what reasons there are for removing birth and death dates from the lead, when those elements contribute very little to the clutter. Pronunciations, and excess name variants, I agree, should be part of the de-cluttering, but why birth and death dates? Those don't actually clutter, IMO, and provide a degree of precision that makes Wikipedia different from other biographical publications (the ones I looked at were the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Australian Dictionary of Biography - both of which don't have lead sections in the same way Wikipedia does, so comparison is difficult - of course, neither of those publications have infoboxes either - someone should do a proper survey of Category:Biographical dictionaries).
But if kwami can provide reason other than 'clutter' for removing birth and death dates, I might be able to support that, though only if someone can provide concrete numbers on how many biographical articles there are (I think it was somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million at last count, wasn't it?) and how many actually conform to the style guide and how many would need to be changed. Some reasons I can think of is that it would make bot-generated name disambiguation pages easy to produce. Though really, the lead sentence should be constructed from elements obtained from the {{ persondata}} template. Has that possibility ever been seriously considered? I'm now reminded of Wikipedia:Biographical metadata that I wrote once. Maybe this time someone will make a serious effort to harness all that data. (Completely off-topic, but if anyone has yet solved the problem of being able to identify how many of our biographical articles are about men and how many are about women, there is a barnstar waiting for them - quite why gender is not tracked for biographies, I don't know). Anyway, kwami's examples with birth and death dates included and not included are:
Taking a few issues in more detail, the full name should be given uninterrupted, with any nicknames given separately unless commonly incorporated with the full name; this is partly for reasons of making the sentence flow smoothly, but also because it can cause confusion: it's not entirely clear whether 'Terence Alan Patrick Seán Spike Milligan' chose to use the fifth of his Christian names or whether he had only four to begin with and adopted a nickname to replace all of them. The urge to put a nickname in the opening line on all occasions should be resisted when the name is obvious, for example someone formally called Robert who is normally known as Bob; most people can be expected to know that Bob is short for Robert. Full birth and death dates are far the most frequent detail which people wish to check, in my experience; by the same token, birth and death places are far less important and also far less likely to be found. With regard to pronunciation, few readers are immediately familiar with IPA notation (I am only a beginner) and so the pronunciation guides can appear as gibberish; at the same point it would be unwise to go to any alternative standard for pronunciation which would be technically inferior. Sam Blacketer ( talk) 22:58, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
The fact that birth and death dates are omitted in many other encyclopedic publications makes a strong case for why they should be omitted here. They certainly belong in the article but I don't think they compare to other lead-sentence material in terms of priority. That said, I'd be fine with keeping them as long as we got the more offensive material (pronunciation) out of the way. — Designate ( talk) 21:59, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
-- Boson ( talk) 17:53, 21 September 2011 (UTC)With identity theft on the rise, people increasingly regard their full names and dates of birth as private. Wikipedia includes full names and dates of birth that have been widely published by reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object. If the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth, or the person is borderline notable, err on the side of caution and simply list the year. In a similar vein, articles should not include postal addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, or other contact information for living persons, though links to websites maintained by the subject are generally permitted. See above regarding the misuse of primary sources to obtain personal information about subjects.
There is a discussion at Talk:Michael Groß#Spelling of surname in English; contested 2011 page move which may be of interest to members of your project, on which you may be able to share your knowledge and expertise. Dirtlawyer1 ( talk) 15:23, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
The MoS does not seem to cover how to describe places of birth and death for historic people. An editor has been doing a number of changes, mainly to infoboxes, so that, for example Raphael was born in the Duchy of Urbino and died in the Papal States, rather than just Italy. While the historic entities should usually be mentioned in the text ("then in the ...." etc), modern political entities should imo be used in the first sentence and infoboxes. Such edits are also often made from nationalist/regionalist motives, though I think not here. Unless there is disagreement I will add something along these lines in a few days. It is different for figures from the ancient world I think. Johnbod ( talk) 19:21, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
FYI, something like the above discussion has been going on (but has subsided for now) at Wikipedia:Peer review/Jacques Offenbach/archive1 - scroll down to Geography —The Prussia/Prussian issue and the link from there to the preceding discussion at Talk:Jacques_Offenbach#Cologne_is_not_a_Prussian_city. Enjoy! -- Guillaume Tell 15:18, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
(outdent) Since I am the editor that "has been doing a number of changes", I would like to give my input here (I am aware of WP:TL;DR, but it's hard to avoid verbosity in a discussion about potential policy making). To be noted at the outset is that the issue at hand is not actually a discussion about ethnic disputes, nor a discussion about infobox-filling. However, since this issue was raised as well, I begin by making a passing remark on it.
Most experienced editors are quite aware of the problems infoboxes cause; but until the community decides to "burn them in Hell" forever, we ought to find a way to deal with them properly. In the case of former country infoboxes, the solution is usually to either not have an infobox at all (see Francia; where the infobox obscured everything that the article tried to explain) or to actually have an infobox featuring elaborate/cluttered information as an attempt to include all relevant subtleties (see Kingdom of Saxony).
Now in the case of historical biographies, my understanding is that (at some point) several editors started "changing place of birth or place of death to reflect contemporary political status" (this is is an actual edit summary I have come across with and now regularly use myself) either in infoboxes or in the body of the article. So for example (I will cite only articles I have never edited): Tesla was born in the Austrian Empire, Einstein in the Kingdom of Württemberg, Galileo in the Duchy of Florence, da Vinci in the Republic of Florence, and so on.
There are literally hundreds of articles that follow this practice (and I have made changes to a dozen more myself in order to "keep it consistent"). The only articles I am aware of in which the discussion led to following a different practice regarding the respective infobox were: the article about Mozart (no infobox) and the article about Schopenhauer ("according to Danzig/Gdansk vote policy. No further Prussia/Poland or other details [for the sake of lessening the controversy]. Leave that to the city articles"); in both cases, this happened because lame/persistent ethnic disputes were involved ("Mozart was (not) German"; "Schopenhauer was (not) Polish"), but even in these cases, the body of the article does give all the relevant historical information.
Now, I defend the view that we should always indicate the contemporary political status along with the present-day one (either in the infobox or in the body of the article; there is no reason to deem this "too much information"). Including only the latter (the present-day status) may often be:
1) Trivial; on the other hand, finding the contemporary (i.e., historical) political entity that included a modern city a few centuries or a few millennia ago on Wikipedia is not that easy; some Wikipedia articles about cities or villages don't even include this piece of information.
2) Unscholarly: what is common in scholarly publications is to always include detailed historical-geographic information in biographies (especially biographies of Eastern European/Russian/German/Italian artists or philosophers or scientists): e.g., "former district, f. region, f. province, f. kingdom, f. empire" or "f. uyezd, f. governorate, f. empire"; this may seem too tedious for encyclopedic purposes but it is very informative and reflects historical reality. (Some easily accessible Google-book links: [5], [6], [7], [8]; note also that Russian Wikipedia is meticulous regarding this issue: e.g. [9], [10].)
3) Confusing (at variable degrees): "Kant's birth place" is an obvious argument for illustrating this. But there are less obvious ones; when, for example, one indicates/hyperlinks just "Germany" as the place of birth of someone who was born in Berlin in the late 19th c. one assumes that the reader knows that Berlin was then part of the German Empire or that, for the purposes of a bio, these details don't actually matter. My experience is that these are a hasty assumptions: only a minority of readers have the necessary background to know when a present-day entity was established; and it is useful for the reader to have easy access (that is, within the biographical article) to information regarding whether, e.g., a person was born/flourished/died in Weimar Germany as opposed to Third Reich, or in West Germany as opposed to East Germany; this helps the reader put biographical information into historical context and avoid anachronistic fallacies. One solution is offering a piped link (an "Easter egg link" as is ironically referred to by Johnbod) containing a former country's constitutional/academic name (as opposed to common English name which is the one to be displayed) would do the job just fine; e.g.: "b. Rome, [[Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)|Italy]]" instead of just "b. Rome, [[Italy]]". (Please note, incidentally, that English Wikipedia does have a separate article for nearly every European European country, no matter how short-lived it may have been; e.g. see Ukrainian State or Russian Republic). Alternatively, one could include a parenthetical note; e.g., b. Tartu, Estonia (then Derpt, Governorate of Livonia, Imperial Russia) as is done in the article about Wolf von Engelhardt). The reason for having an overall policy is to ensure consistency (as opposed to doing this only in some "special" cases; e.g. only for people born in "German Straßburg" or in "Prussian Danzig").
A final, somewhat trivial, remark regarding the need for terminological subtlety: It is common knowledge that in Europe, since at least the High Middle Ages, one can speak of definite political entities (republics, principalities, duchies, counties, and other domains) with well-defined borders. This entails that, after some point, people from Europe (please note that while we mostly talk about them here, similar arguments also applies to a variable extent to people from Ancient South Asia, Pre-Columbian America, Colonial Africa, Colonial India, the British Commonwealth Countries, the Arab World, etc) are not simply natives of broad geographical areas/cultural regions (such as Silesia, Prussia, Westphalia, Galicia, Macedonia, Candia, Normandy); and they are certainly not natives/subjects/citizens of "perennial states" (such as "Germany", "France", "Poland"). They are, instead, natives/subjects/citizens of specific polities (often bearing a specific formal designation or administrative name) which were established at a specific date (such as German Reich (1933–1945), French Second Republic, Tsardom of Poland, Silesia Province, Westphalia Province, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Kingdom of Prussia, Socialist Republic of Macedonia, Kingdom of Candia, Duchy of Normandy). If we are to render this basic fact more intelligible, we should have an overall policy that will encourage knowledgeable editors to add this kind of historical-geographic information (a useful supplement to strictly biographical information) to biographical articles either in the form of a footnote, or of a piped/explicit link in the body of the text, or a piped/explicit link in the respective infobox. -- Omnipaedista ( talk) 05:03, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
Interesting discussion. My view is that the aim should be to provide the information and context the reader needs to understand the article. Sometimes that will be only a link, sometimes, if the situation is more complex, both the then-current and present geographical and political context will be needed. I rather like the approach taken where one is provided in the main text and the other in parentheses after it. You can't expect readers to realise that using the current country name is an oversimplification, but neither can you just name and link a historic entity without providing some modern context. To give one example, I recently had reason to look up Sigismund von Herberstein in order to write a brief line or two on him for another document. The Wikipedia article describes him as 'Carniolan', but for my purposes I needed a simpler way to put who he was. As he was born to a German-speaking family, I described him as German, which is likely a gross oversimplification, but is what I needed to say up front. I later said he was born in Carniola and was a diplomat for the Austrian regions of the Habsburg Monarchy, but failed to mention the Holy Roman Empire connections (that gets confusing at the best of times). Another example is someone called Achatius Hilling and his son Gregorius Hilling. The son was German, but how would you describe his father? The description here states that the elder Hilling was from Elbogen, Bohemia (now Loker) and had fought for Frederick V (briefly King of Bohemia) at the Battle of White Mountain, and then fled Bohemia and settled in Nuremberg. But as I said, the concept of nationality within the lands of the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire has always confused me. Balancing the need to be accurate with the need to not throw a mass of confusing history at readers in the first few sentences (let alone in infoboxes), has always been tricky. How should those two cases be handled, and how should things be handled in general? Carcharoth ( talk) 23:31, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
Putting on my "consumer of Wikipedia" cap on, if I was doing a quick read of some biography, I would want to get an idea of where a person was born geographically, what political regime he was born into would be of secondary importance, unless that was a factor in his notability. Therefore the modern geographical location should be in the info-box to facilitate the quick-read, while the trivia of the historical political regime should be in the text of the article for the more detailed read. -- Martin Tammsalu ( talk) 11:01, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
See Talk:George IV of the United Kingdom. It has been suggested that we should make some attempt to reduced the number of succession boxes in some biographies, as a large number can clutter up an article, particularly with some royal figures. This is particularly an issue in some cases where e.g. there is a large (though unfortunately not total) overlap between some posts e.g. "Heir to the British throne", "Prince of Wales", "Duke of Cornwall", "Duke of Rothesay". Any comments? PatGallacher ( talk) 14:53, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
My hope is to make the first sentence of bios more readable and less cluttered by eliminating duplication. Here's a typical example - along with the accompanying infobox - taken from Rachel Roberts (model):
Rachel Roberts | |
---|---|
Born | |
Spouse | Andrew Niccol (2002–present) 2 children |
Modeling information | |
Height | 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in) |
Hair color | Blonde |
Eye color | Blue-green |
There is no reason to duplicate the birth date and place of birth. It's all in the infobox. It would be much easier and more readable to just have this straightforward sentence:
If that's too short, this would still be an improvement:
If the person is deceased, then something like this would suffice (1934 - 1978). What think ye? -- Brangifer ( talk) 03:28, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
I posted a query at BLP regarding nationalities, although the query applies to all Bio's really. If you have any comments please post there. Thanks. Eldumpo ( talk) 16:05, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
I am coming from this discussion and my intention is to make a wide discussion about this so we could possibly reach a principle to be applied in these cases. I created numerous biographies, and until now I have been using allways the place of birth, preferably city+country existing at time of birth. The issue was also discussed often at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football ( last discussion) and there seems to be that historicaly acurate names and sovereign countries have the most of consensus. Our problem there is not so much with obscure middle age principalities, but more with recent former countries. Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are widely used for people born in those countries while they existed, in oposition to the ones that gained independence by their disolution. The last one has to do specifically with Estonia. In my logic, a person born in Tallinn during Soviet occupation period (1945-1991) should have as birthplace Tallinn, Soviet Union, following the widely accepted agreement of using city+country at time of birth formula. But as middle way, for the Soviet case there has been the tendency to add the Soviet republic in between, exemple: Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union. Yugoslavia or Czechslovakia don´t have this republic in between usually, and even the usage of (current Xland) has somehow not been welcomed. Now, what we have is a number of editors from Estonia that for several reasons want to use Tallinn, Estonia as birthplace for all people born there since 1945, totally ignoring Soviet Union. My main issue has to do with the fact that Estonia didn´t existed as such between 1945 and 1991, so how can a person born in 1976 be born in a country that only regained its independence in 1991? As I already mentioned in one exageration, that would be like saying that Moctezuma II was born in modern day Mexico! Now, Estonian editors have a series of argumens that range from illegal unrecognised occupation, to "Estonia" as geographical unit being more accessible to people nowadays than Soviet Union, however, despite understanding the specific sensible situation of the occupied Baltic States, I still don´t see a major reason why should they be exception towards other similar situations in the world. Also, my main concern is that creating such exceptions would encourage all editors from all these "recently liberated countries" to use their current states as place of birth as well. Exemple, if an Ukrainian editor sees written "Estonia" for a person born in Soviet period, what will prevent him of replacing all "Soviet Union´s" by Ukraine then? From the experience I have, I can say that a couple of years ago there was a big number of editors and IP´s changing former states for the new ones in many of those cases, however recently seems that people finally started accepting their past, and things have been much quit nowadays. However, seems that we still don´t have a written guideline on this, so perhaps is time to do it? My vote goes definitelly to historical accuracy when dealing with birthplaces in bio infoboxes. Best regards, FkpCascais ( talk) 09:56, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
I am sorry to say, but for time being the only reasonable and easy managable solution seems to be city+country (at time of birth) for infobox purposes. The proposal of geographical units is confuse and just an excuse. People can only be born in one precise place at one time, and that place can only be described encyclopedically with historical accuracy. We can debate not clear cases, but I really think that we should accept historical accuracy as principle for place of birth in biogaphies. As way to simplify the discussion, can we agree that a person born in 1960 cannot be born in a country that only existed from 1991 on? Basic logic. FkpCascais ( talk) 21:36, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
To me it has to be name at time of birth. This is accurate information. Changing it to what it is now isn't encyclopaedic or factually correct. Edinburgh Wanderer 22:18, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
Whichever way this point gets decided, information should be added to all infoboxes clarifying exactly what should be put in the field. The argument against historical name is well-illustrated by the Estonia/WWII point above. What happens during short periods during a war, what happens when there is not agreement on the country name at a given time. The argument against current name is that you would have to change loads of articles if a country's name changes. Maybe we should stick to what the sources say. Eldumpo ( talk) 21:56, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be most fruitful just to start an appropriate section in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Baltic states-related articles talk page and after a rough draft has been achieved, notify the editors of the appropriate wikiprojects? It is pretty obvious that "one size fits all" solution will not happen, as there are just too many unique variables in history and modern-day countries - and in great many cases, even sources may contradict themselves on different pages. I will start a small idea collection there in a moment. -- Sander Säde 07:29, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
Sadly I think this discussion is pointless. Whenever this issue gets periodically raised by a sensible editor correcting an article, all the various nationalists and revisionists come out of the woodwork and wikilawyer and filibuster until rational editors give up and they are left to impose their POV on the articles related to people from their countries. Without huge outside input (which never happens), this will continue to go round in circles. Number 5 7 10:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
How should one properly show non-English spellings and pronunciations in a bio? For example, I came across the following mess in the lead sentence of the article Yuri Alexandrov (ice hockey):
I think that it would be useful if MOSBIO would be updated to show the proper way to deal with lead sentences such as this. Dolovis ( talk) 13:54, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
Could somebody here please chime in at Talk:Charlize Theron? Some misguided soul thinks that we should "Americanize" this actress who clearly achieved notability while a South African national simply because the films she acted in were American films. She had 12 years of notability as a South African national before becoming a naturalized American citizen in 2007, and according to WP:MOSBIO should be described as South African, as that is the nationality she held at the time she became notable. Yworo ( talk) 06:21, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm against it, I don't remember seeing it in A-class articles or FAs, and I think there's an argument that the MOS:HONORIFIC section already covers it ... but Ruhrfisch and I were wondering if there's been any discussion, and if that section would be clearer if we specifically include the word "rank". - Dank ( push to talk) 03:48, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
Forgive me if this has been discussed before.
WP:OPENPARA states: "The opening paragraph should have: ... Context (location, nationality, or ethnicity); In most modern-day cases this will mean the country of which the person is a citizen or national, or was a citizen when the person became notable."
This guideline often causes disputes (see Charlize Theron section above, for example). My view is citizenship is often irrelevant. In the case of Theron, she did not become notable until she moved to the U.S. To call her a South African actress makes little sense. But let's posit a more extreme example. You have a person who is born in the U.S. and moves to England when she is 3 days old. For whatever reason, she remains an American citizen but becomes famous in England. Do we really want to label her an American actress? (As an aside, I wouldn't mind sticking to the facts and calling someone like Theron a South African citizen (or born in South Africa) but who became notable as an actress in the U.S., but that becomes cumbersome for a lead.)
I've seen some editors who argue that citizenship subsumes residency, which then means you can call Theron an American actress and my hypothetical actress an English actress. However, that is not what citizen means literally and, when challenged, it's hard to hold on to that argument.
Does anyone here believe the guideline should be changed?-- Bbb23 ( talk) 01:38, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
There's obviously a flaw in this guideline; suppose someone was born in, say, Nigeria, voluntarily (as in most cases) becomes American and in multiple interviews declares "I am proud to be American, I love my country, that's all I am. I hate Nigeria, I have nothing to do with the fucking place, and do not associate with it in any way." — we'd still insist that this person is Nigerian.
This makes about as much sense as saying "In wikipedia articles, a person's marital status will be the one the person had when s/he became notable, regardless of their current marital status. By default, all individuals who became notable before the age of 16 will be described as single." Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 10:32, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
"The opening paragraph should have: ... Context (location, nationality, or ethnicity); In most cases this will mean the country the person resided in when the person became notable, or, if unclear, the country of which the person is a citizen or national."
I know this doesn't necessarily incorporate everyone's concerns, but my aim is to avoid disputes and endless discussions, not to mention sourcing issues. I also think we need to state a preference, not just provide two alternatives. A couple of items I believe my text doesn't address: (1) when a person becomes notable first in Canada (for example) but then the bulk of their career is in France; and (2) the use of dual countries, e.g., Irish American.-- Bbb23 ( talk) 16:55, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I don't think it has to do with different meanings of nationality. With the ones I mentioned, it has to do with whether one uses the country of origin or the country where notability was achieved (Perry's is a bit more complex). I have no problem with eliminating it from the lead, though, but then we have to reword the guideline to say that. Otherwise, editors will keep sticking it back in because the guideline indicates that the description should be there.-- Bbb23 ( talk) 22:17, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
I just added 'permanent resident' to the section "Opening paragraph", as in some cases, the person has no citizenship, or as in the case of Hong Kong, the territory grants permanent residence but not citizenship. LK ( talk) 07:24, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
We have a section on honorific prefixes, but nothing on honorific suffixes. In particular, should we use them for people like Helena Bonham Carter, who has been announced as being awarded CBE, in the New Year's honours list, but not yet invested? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:57, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
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