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I've just reluctantly reverted an addition by MB. I'll reproduce the text below:
===Nationality & Citizenship===
Most biography infoboxes have nationality and citizenship. Generally, use of either should be avoided when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with
|birthplace=
. When needed, for example, due to change of nationality after birth, dual "citizenship", or other unusual scenarios, use|nationality=
unless|citizenship=
is more appropriate due uncommon legal reasons. Use of nationality and citizenship simultaneously should rarely if ever be necessary (complex cases should be explained in the article prose). Neither field should be used to specify ethnicity.
The basis of citizenship is usually derived from one of two principles: jus soli (right by "soil" or birthplace) and jus sanguinis (right by "blood" or heredity), but there is no hard-and-fast rule which can tell you which country uses which principle. Anyone born on US soil has the right to be a US citizen, but in the UK your citizenship depends only on your parents' citizenship, not where you were born. Unfortunately that means that the well-meaning addition by MB is misleading and is likely to result in editors assuming that being born in a country automatically grants you the right of citizenship to that country. In may cases, it doesn't.
There is considerable debate about the meaning of nationality and the situation is complicated in several countries; for example, the UK can be regarded as containing at least four nations. In Spain, there are 17 autonomous regions (comunidad autónoma), several of which meet our definition of nation: "a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." – and so on in many parts of the world. The situation is often too nuanced to be summarised in one word in many infoboxes and those are the cases where the parameter needs to be omitted in favour of a proper description in the article text. Sadly, I don't believe we can give more comprehensive guidance than that. -- RexxS ( talk) 01:09, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
|nationality=American
or |nationality =French
. There are even infoboxes with examples in their documentation that have a totally redundant nationality. I was trying to say don't use them when they are redundant with |birthplace=
, i.e. when the nationality CAN be inferred.
MB
01:18, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with |birthplace=
.
" is either ambiguous or plain wrong. It gives the impression that if |birthplace=
is specified, then the citizenship can be inferred. That would be a recipe for arguments between editors when one of them inappropriately removes parameters, relying on their reading of your text. If we can't give accurate guidance, we shouldn't be giving any at all. --
RexxS (
talk)
17:13, 10 December 2019 (UTC)|nationality=Welsh
in his infobox? If you're giving guidance based on "Can you infer it from his place of birth?", then that guidance has to explain how to determine the answer to that question, not simply leave the editor hanging. Too many editors simply assume that US law applies everywhere, so they infer that someone born in
Pontrhydyfen will automatically be Welsh, but that simply isn't true. We should not be giving advice that is so open to misinterpretation. Now put yourself in the place of an editor who likes tidying up infoboxes and spots an infobox for someone like
Mick McCarthy, who was born in England to Irish parents, and sees |nationality=Irish
in the infobox. They remove it, thinking the person was English because they were born in England. What advice are you going to give to prevent them making that sort of mistake? How about the case of someone born in France to Polish parents? What advice can you give them to help them decide whether to add or remove |nationality=French
in the infobox, because that is far too complex to be decided by just "inferred from the country of birth" (although that's part of it)? Have a look at the two articles I linked above, and tell me the form of words you want inserting into the Manual of Style to help editors make the right decisions about including or removing nationality or citizenship. --
RexxS (
talk)
16:08, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
{{
Infobox person}}
doesn't spell it out clearly and it already uses the phrase "inferred from the birthplace". I think my proposed addition here is an improvement because it makes the point that an editor should have a good reason to use the fields beyond just wanting to emphasize a person's nationality by repeating it two or three times. To answer your point above, in each case the editor should just do what they think is best and if someone disagrees, they work it out on the talkpage just like always. I myself do a lot of infobox "tidying" and would like to reference this section to explain my edits in edit summaries when removing redundant fields.
MB
18:09, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
|nationality=
for someone like
Cesar Chavez, whose "political nationality" is American and whose "ethnic nationality" is probably best described as Mexican–American or Chicano? Wikidata has probably sorted this out by separating the two concepts into two separate properties, but we still cling to the answer that matches our own
WP:ENGVAR.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
01:45, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
ANYWAY, yes, I agree that a) the gist here is to advise not adding redundant parameter entries, especially when some of them may be controversial ("only the birthplace should be listed" if they would all resolve to the same thing); b) yes, the template docs do get into it a bit, but have not done so consistently or clearly, and MOS:INFOBOX is a better place to do it; c) no, we don't need to wade into some big block of guideline text on how to determine "nationality", since d) yes, it can be complicated (and is a content/RS matter, not a style one), and it's generally done on a case-by-case basis.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:13, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
|birthplace=France
and |nationality=France
), or the potentially confusing |birthplace=France
with no information specified about the person's nationality, in which case your guess is as good as anyone else's as to whether the nationality is French or merely unknown to Wikipedia editors. It is my impression from these repeated discussions that editors prefer to leave some readers confused than to provide (allegedly) redundant information. NB that I'm not saying that it's a good idea, even though for most people, and throughout almost all of history, your nationality, your birthplace, both of your parents' nationality, and your parents' birthplace were all exactly the same, sometimes right down to being born in the same house as one of your parents. I only present this as what editors seem to edit up saying repeatedly: they see it as a needless repetition, and are unconcerned about the occasional edge case.
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
00:43, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
|birthplace=France
isn't confusing by itself, when |nationality=France
would match it, especially since the lead is going to contain something like "Foo X. Bar is a French underwater basketweaver". Infoboxes are not stand-alone "mini-articles"; they're simply summaries of the most pertinent information, and should be as concise as we can reasonably make them. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
13:01, 2 January 2020 (UTC)SMcCandlish, per the close of the RFC below, I think we can put this back in. You weren't completely satisfied with my wording ("the country to which the subject belongs"). From the lead in nationality, it is "a legal relationship between an individual person and a state. Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state." I was trying to condense that into "belongs". Do you have a alternate? How do we succinctly say "the country to which you turn to when you are stranded somewhere else and need help because you lost your passport or all the flights home were cancelled due to the Coronavirus? MB 20:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Consolidating place-naming details at MOS:PLACE. We have a concurrent thread open at WT:CITE also about coming up with some place-naming rules, and there's a danger of WP:POLICYFORKing conflicting rules if the discussion and what comes out of it isn't centralized. Given that we already have various bits of geographical naming style advice in at least two other guideline pages ( MOS:LINKS and MOS:ABBR), it's probably past time to consolidate this material in one location anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:25, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Putting an RfC tag on this (with a 1-2-3 question format) since the discussion above is dwindling but without clear resolution.
Should our guidelines:
|nationality=
or |citizenship=
when the country would match that found in |birthplace=
;|nationality=
or |citizenship=
even if the country would match that found in |birthplace=
;|nationality=
or |citizenship=
, even if the same, when it cannot be automatically inferred from birthplace (i.e., for any country not listed at
Jus soli#Unrestricted jus soli, for modern subjects)?The original post opening the discussion is above (and was in turn a followup to discussion at Template talk:Infobox person and User talk:MB). PS: I think the material in question (under version 1 or version 2) belongs in MOS:BIO rather than MOS:INFOBOX, because it is bio-specific and doesn't pertain to infoboxes in general. However, I don't want to fork off another thread on another page rather than resolve this one; I'll just notify WT:MOSBIO of the discussion. @ RexxS, MB, and WhatamIdoing: Notifying previous participants. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
|birthplace=Paris, France
|nationality=France
|citizenship=France
is redundant in over 99% of cases (and remains redundant even if you remove one of the latter two). We only need to use |nationality=
when it cannot reasonably be inferred from |birthplace=
, and we should not use |citizenship=
at all, except for unusual cases (which are often better treated in detail in the main text anyway). The lead will already say "French" in it, probably within the first few words. Infoboxes should be as concise as we can reasonably make them. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
13:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)|birthplace=Paris, France
and either |nationality=France
or |citizenship=France
is not redundant because the citizenship rules for France are far too complex for French citizenship to be inferred from being born in Paris. It is perfectly possible for someone to be born in Paris and not have French citizenship. So if we know the nationality of someone born in Paris, we should state it whether it's French, Algerian, or whatever. We should leave the citizenship blank for people born in Paris only when it is not known. If we followed option 1, we would not know when a citizenship is French and when it is unknown. Information loss. --
RexxS (
talk)
22:04, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
... even if the country would match that found in |birthplace=; for obvious cases like Americans, put
|nationality=American
but don't repeat the obvious "U.S" in the birthplace. However, this RfC is too far along to expect people to revisit their !vote or participate in discussion below. Stay with status quo #3, and revisit with refined RfC.—
Bagumba (
talk)
17:39, 11 January 2020 (UTC)|birth_place=
is propagated, but nationality is not, are readers supposed to infer from a lack of data that the person is considered a national of that nation? We typically don't make inferences from a lack of information. Maybe someone never bothered to add a different nationality. Maybe the content was deleted by vandals? I think both pieces of information serve a purpose. This is one area where I don't mind a redundancy. That said, I don't think |citizenship=
should be propagated when a nationality is present, as nationality tends to imply that someone is intrinsically linked to that nation as a citizen, unless otherwise specified. I could maaaaaaybe be swayed on this in favor of an Option 1, though I haven't seen many instances where someone would have Nationality A and then Citizenship B, because typically once you're a citizen, you're that nation's national. I'm sure there are weird exceptions, though.
Cyphoidbomb (
talk)
19:23, 7 February 2020 (UTC)Regardless, I added your option 4 to the list (with a link to the unrestricted jus soli countries, so people will know what that option resolves to in modern cases). The real problem with this option is that it presumes vast and highly specialized knowledge on the part of the readers, most of whom are not international citizenship law experts (much less ones with expertise covering multiple eras). I.e., virtually no one can really infer anything different for the US or for France, or for Australia before and after 20 August 1986. The
WP:Common sense approach is of course that most people born in a country are born to citizens of that country, and thus we need not browbeat readers with the obvious, only clue them in to unusual cases. Example: born in the Philippines, permanent resident of Canada, with dual Philippine jus soli citizenship and Canadian naturalized citizenship, as in the case of pool player
Alex Pagulayan. Example: born in British-occupied Ireland, technically a British citizen for much of his life, but an Irish national in an encyclopedic sense (and Irish nationalist), as in the cases of writers
James Joyce and
W. B. Yeats. Even in such cases, it is not necessary for the i-box to get into all this; Yeats has no i-box, and Joyce's doesn't mention British citizenship; Pagulayan's i-box has his birthplace, but glosses over the nationality/citizenship stuff with |sport_country=Canada
.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
|citizenship=
, so it's a moot point. "the absence of that information from the [James Joyce] infobox is an editorial decision based on long debates" – Yes, exactly. We do not need to have that kind of strife at a zillion more articles. We need to set basic defaults and not vary from them except for really good reason. I want to return to my own key point: "The
WP:Common sense approach is of course that most people born in a country are born to citizens of that country, and thus we need not browbeat readers with the obvious, only clue them in to unusual cases." Another way of looking at this: When we indicate that someone is a living person, only in cases of someone dying from cancer do we need to say they are dying from cancer. We have no use for an "is not dying of cancer" statement in the article much less in the infobox. We similarly have no need to say someone is a French national if they were born in France; it's the default condition. Given a sourced birth place in the infobox, we should say they're a French national or citizen if they were not born in France, of if they were born in France but there's some reason people might have doubt (e.g., born in France but lived 95% of their life in Tonga as a missionary and a child of missionaries). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)|citizenship=
parameter exists; in such a case, the citizenship cannot be deduced from the birthplace, or from the nationality (in probably any sense); it's a legal matter particular to a specific person's bio. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)Why not just 'delete' the nationality & citizenship fields from all infoboxes. GoodDay ( talk) 15:42, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
|ethnicity=
and |religion=
, too, yet they were deleted by a landslide in RfCs at
WP:VPPOL. The more people struggle over this, the more likely the community will just say "shut everyone up by deleting the source of the fighting". —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases this will be the country of which the person is a citizen .... On the other hand, it says:
Ethnicity, religion, or sexuality should generally not be in the lead unless it is relevant to the subject's notability.Not sure in the case of the ethnicity/religion poll if it caused the MOS to change, or merely reflected the existing MOS.— Bagumba ( talk) 14:11, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
|religion=
and |ethnicity=
infobox parameter RfCs didn't cause MoS to change (see a diff from before the RfCs, e.g.
here where both religion and ethnicity, along with sexuality, are already in that material, which was then part of MOS:BLPLEAD, without a CONTEXTBIO shortcut). I'm not even sure
WP:INFOBOX actually resolved to an MoS page at that date, anyway (I checked: it didn't, it went to the wikiproject, and between that and
Help:Infobox,
MOS:INFOBOX was actually quite disused at the time, until
this). The bulk of the RfC discussions had to do more with
WP:BLP (and
MOS:BIO) matters and with
WP:DRAMA surrounding conflicts between the BLP principles and what various infoboxes' documentation said and/or how the templates were being misused despite both policy and documentation. Kind of like the above issue of commingling birthplace, nationality, and legal citizenship in ways that tend to cross
WP:NOR lines. Anyway, CONTEXTBIO probably shouldn't be using the word "citizen" in that sentence, and instead should address nationality as found in the majority of reliable sources. (It actually used to be better in this regard; see the first diff I gave above.) A large number of people technically have citizenship in countries to which they have no connection that relates to their notability or self-identity. (E.g. one of my sisters has citizenship in another country by jus soli, but in her 40s now has still never been back to that country since we left there when she was still in diapers. She's technically a dual citizen, since she's never done anything to formally renounce that jus soli connection.) If she were notable, that trivia likely would not pass
WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE to even mention anywhere, and she should be described as American without any qualifiers, with a correct |birthplace=
but also with |nationality=United States
, and no need of |citizenship=
. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:22, 29 January 2020 (UTC)@ DougHill: Could someone join in the conversation at Talk:Country Walk case? Or give some clarification here? In a nutshell: The article is about a particular child sex abuse case that arose during the day-care sex-abuse hysteria, but the subject isn't at all relevant to the argument. Rather, it's about placing an infobox about a TV movie next to a paragraph that talks about the movie (and the book it's based on). The TV movie isn't itself significant -- at least, it appears not even notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article. My take is that the infobox isn't appropriate there, nor is the write-up of the movie. By comparison, McMartin preschool trial mentions two movies about the subject, but just includes the linked names of the movies, one of the redlinked. In this case, all that exists is a redirect to this article. I'm pretty unused to seeing infoboxes in (for example) "in popular culture" sections of historical articles. --jpgordon 𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇 20:43, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
Please see: Template talk:Infobox person#Proposal: Repurpose and redocument the home_town parameter.
As I know that changes to major infoboxes are often controversial (and many to that template in particular have been WP:VPPOL RfCs in their own right), it seemed pertinent to notify broadly of the proposal.
Summary: We removed |residence=
, but kept this parameter for childhood non-birthplace residence, despite that being usually trivia. The proposal would repurpose this parameter for long-term residency places during the subject's period of notability.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
21:32, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
In infoboxes, should we use sentence case or title case? For example, in political party infoboxes for the political position, if the political position in question is "Center to Center-left", should it be kept that way (title case) or changed to sentence case ("center-left" would be lowercase)? Thanks, Ezhao02 ( talk) 15:41, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
It is now 7 years since the Infobox war ended, and maybe it is time to revisit with an open mind whether classical music composers (and only the few most notable ones) should be an exception to the simple infobox that is used for all other biographical articles. As a regular Wikipedia user and occasional editor with no axe to grind, I find this mystifying, and also rather inconvenient. Hyperman 42 ( talk) 14:58, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
A problem we have from time to time, and this is often caused by unnecessary infobox forking, is inconsistent design across infoboxes of the same type. For example, an infobox on a city should look roughly the same in terms of design (the order of params should be roughly the same, it shouldn't have completely different colours or styling, it shouldn't have a completely different structure). It creates an inconsistency and creates a surprise when viewing different places. Differences, where appropriate, should be carefully considered so that the avg reader doesn't consciously become aware of them.
Thus, I propose adding to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes § Causes of inconsistency something along the lines of:
Infoboxes, particularly infobox forks for the same category of articles, should maintain a consistent appearance with related infoboxes, particularly in relation to layout, colour and structure. For example, readers expect a degree of similarity when viewing the article for London vs New York City.
ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 21:12, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
![]() | This 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. |
Archive 10 | ← | Archive 14 | Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 |
I've just reluctantly reverted an addition by MB. I'll reproduce the text below:
===Nationality & Citizenship===
Most biography infoboxes have nationality and citizenship. Generally, use of either should be avoided when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with
|birthplace=
. When needed, for example, due to change of nationality after birth, dual "citizenship", or other unusual scenarios, use|nationality=
unless|citizenship=
is more appropriate due uncommon legal reasons. Use of nationality and citizenship simultaneously should rarely if ever be necessary (complex cases should be explained in the article prose). Neither field should be used to specify ethnicity.
The basis of citizenship is usually derived from one of two principles: jus soli (right by "soil" or birthplace) and jus sanguinis (right by "blood" or heredity), but there is no hard-and-fast rule which can tell you which country uses which principle. Anyone born on US soil has the right to be a US citizen, but in the UK your citizenship depends only on your parents' citizenship, not where you were born. Unfortunately that means that the well-meaning addition by MB is misleading and is likely to result in editors assuming that being born in a country automatically grants you the right of citizenship to that country. In may cases, it doesn't.
There is considerable debate about the meaning of nationality and the situation is complicated in several countries; for example, the UK can be regarded as containing at least four nations. In Spain, there are 17 autonomous regions (comunidad autónoma), several of which meet our definition of nation: "a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." – and so on in many parts of the world. The situation is often too nuanced to be summarised in one word in many infoboxes and those are the cases where the parameter needs to be omitted in favour of a proper description in the article text. Sadly, I don't believe we can give more comprehensive guidance than that. -- RexxS ( talk) 01:09, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
|nationality=American
or |nationality =French
. There are even infoboxes with examples in their documentation that have a totally redundant nationality. I was trying to say don't use them when they are redundant with |birthplace=
, i.e. when the nationality CAN be inferred.
MB
01:18, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with |birthplace=
.
" is either ambiguous or plain wrong. It gives the impression that if |birthplace=
is specified, then the citizenship can be inferred. That would be a recipe for arguments between editors when one of them inappropriately removes parameters, relying on their reading of your text. If we can't give accurate guidance, we shouldn't be giving any at all. --
RexxS (
talk)
17:13, 10 December 2019 (UTC)|nationality=Welsh
in his infobox? If you're giving guidance based on "Can you infer it from his place of birth?", then that guidance has to explain how to determine the answer to that question, not simply leave the editor hanging. Too many editors simply assume that US law applies everywhere, so they infer that someone born in
Pontrhydyfen will automatically be Welsh, but that simply isn't true. We should not be giving advice that is so open to misinterpretation. Now put yourself in the place of an editor who likes tidying up infoboxes and spots an infobox for someone like
Mick McCarthy, who was born in England to Irish parents, and sees |nationality=Irish
in the infobox. They remove it, thinking the person was English because they were born in England. What advice are you going to give to prevent them making that sort of mistake? How about the case of someone born in France to Polish parents? What advice can you give them to help them decide whether to add or remove |nationality=French
in the infobox, because that is far too complex to be decided by just "inferred from the country of birth" (although that's part of it)? Have a look at the two articles I linked above, and tell me the form of words you want inserting into the Manual of Style to help editors make the right decisions about including or removing nationality or citizenship. --
RexxS (
talk)
16:08, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
{{
Infobox person}}
doesn't spell it out clearly and it already uses the phrase "inferred from the birthplace". I think my proposed addition here is an improvement because it makes the point that an editor should have a good reason to use the fields beyond just wanting to emphasize a person's nationality by repeating it two or three times. To answer your point above, in each case the editor should just do what they think is best and if someone disagrees, they work it out on the talkpage just like always. I myself do a lot of infobox "tidying" and would like to reference this section to explain my edits in edit summaries when removing redundant fields.
MB
18:09, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
|nationality=
for someone like
Cesar Chavez, whose "political nationality" is American and whose "ethnic nationality" is probably best described as Mexican–American or Chicano? Wikidata has probably sorted this out by separating the two concepts into two separate properties, but we still cling to the answer that matches our own
WP:ENGVAR.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
01:45, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
ANYWAY, yes, I agree that a) the gist here is to advise not adding redundant parameter entries, especially when some of them may be controversial ("only the birthplace should be listed" if they would all resolve to the same thing); b) yes, the template docs do get into it a bit, but have not done so consistently or clearly, and MOS:INFOBOX is a better place to do it; c) no, we don't need to wade into some big block of guideline text on how to determine "nationality", since d) yes, it can be complicated (and is a content/RS matter, not a style one), and it's generally done on a case-by-case basis.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:13, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
|birthplace=France
and |nationality=France
), or the potentially confusing |birthplace=France
with no information specified about the person's nationality, in which case your guess is as good as anyone else's as to whether the nationality is French or merely unknown to Wikipedia editors. It is my impression from these repeated discussions that editors prefer to leave some readers confused than to provide (allegedly) redundant information. NB that I'm not saying that it's a good idea, even though for most people, and throughout almost all of history, your nationality, your birthplace, both of your parents' nationality, and your parents' birthplace were all exactly the same, sometimes right down to being born in the same house as one of your parents. I only present this as what editors seem to edit up saying repeatedly: they see it as a needless repetition, and are unconcerned about the occasional edge case.
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
00:43, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
|birthplace=France
isn't confusing by itself, when |nationality=France
would match it, especially since the lead is going to contain something like "Foo X. Bar is a French underwater basketweaver". Infoboxes are not stand-alone "mini-articles"; they're simply summaries of the most pertinent information, and should be as concise as we can reasonably make them. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
13:01, 2 January 2020 (UTC)SMcCandlish, per the close of the RFC below, I think we can put this back in. You weren't completely satisfied with my wording ("the country to which the subject belongs"). From the lead in nationality, it is "a legal relationship between an individual person and a state. Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state." I was trying to condense that into "belongs". Do you have a alternate? How do we succinctly say "the country to which you turn to when you are stranded somewhere else and need help because you lost your passport or all the flights home were cancelled due to the Coronavirus? MB 20:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Consolidating place-naming details at MOS:PLACE. We have a concurrent thread open at WT:CITE also about coming up with some place-naming rules, and there's a danger of WP:POLICYFORKing conflicting rules if the discussion and what comes out of it isn't centralized. Given that we already have various bits of geographical naming style advice in at least two other guideline pages ( MOS:LINKS and MOS:ABBR), it's probably past time to consolidate this material in one location anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:25, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Putting an RfC tag on this (with a 1-2-3 question format) since the discussion above is dwindling but without clear resolution.
Should our guidelines:
|nationality=
or |citizenship=
when the country would match that found in |birthplace=
;|nationality=
or |citizenship=
even if the country would match that found in |birthplace=
;|nationality=
or |citizenship=
, even if the same, when it cannot be automatically inferred from birthplace (i.e., for any country not listed at
Jus soli#Unrestricted jus soli, for modern subjects)?The original post opening the discussion is above (and was in turn a followup to discussion at Template talk:Infobox person and User talk:MB). PS: I think the material in question (under version 1 or version 2) belongs in MOS:BIO rather than MOS:INFOBOX, because it is bio-specific and doesn't pertain to infoboxes in general. However, I don't want to fork off another thread on another page rather than resolve this one; I'll just notify WT:MOSBIO of the discussion. @ RexxS, MB, and WhatamIdoing: Notifying previous participants. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
|birthplace=Paris, France
|nationality=France
|citizenship=France
is redundant in over 99% of cases (and remains redundant even if you remove one of the latter two). We only need to use |nationality=
when it cannot reasonably be inferred from |birthplace=
, and we should not use |citizenship=
at all, except for unusual cases (which are often better treated in detail in the main text anyway). The lead will already say "French" in it, probably within the first few words. Infoboxes should be as concise as we can reasonably make them. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
13:29, 2 January 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)|birthplace=Paris, France
and either |nationality=France
or |citizenship=France
is not redundant because the citizenship rules for France are far too complex for French citizenship to be inferred from being born in Paris. It is perfectly possible for someone to be born in Paris and not have French citizenship. So if we know the nationality of someone born in Paris, we should state it whether it's French, Algerian, or whatever. We should leave the citizenship blank for people born in Paris only when it is not known. If we followed option 1, we would not know when a citizenship is French and when it is unknown. Information loss. --
RexxS (
talk)
22:04, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
... even if the country would match that found in |birthplace=; for obvious cases like Americans, put
|nationality=American
but don't repeat the obvious "U.S" in the birthplace. However, this RfC is too far along to expect people to revisit their !vote or participate in discussion below. Stay with status quo #3, and revisit with refined RfC.—
Bagumba (
talk)
17:39, 11 January 2020 (UTC)|birth_place=
is propagated, but nationality is not, are readers supposed to infer from a lack of data that the person is considered a national of that nation? We typically don't make inferences from a lack of information. Maybe someone never bothered to add a different nationality. Maybe the content was deleted by vandals? I think both pieces of information serve a purpose. This is one area where I don't mind a redundancy. That said, I don't think |citizenship=
should be propagated when a nationality is present, as nationality tends to imply that someone is intrinsically linked to that nation as a citizen, unless otherwise specified. I could maaaaaaybe be swayed on this in favor of an Option 1, though I haven't seen many instances where someone would have Nationality A and then Citizenship B, because typically once you're a citizen, you're that nation's national. I'm sure there are weird exceptions, though.
Cyphoidbomb (
talk)
19:23, 7 February 2020 (UTC)Regardless, I added your option 4 to the list (with a link to the unrestricted jus soli countries, so people will know what that option resolves to in modern cases). The real problem with this option is that it presumes vast and highly specialized knowledge on the part of the readers, most of whom are not international citizenship law experts (much less ones with expertise covering multiple eras). I.e., virtually no one can really infer anything different for the US or for France, or for Australia before and after 20 August 1986. The
WP:Common sense approach is of course that most people born in a country are born to citizens of that country, and thus we need not browbeat readers with the obvious, only clue them in to unusual cases. Example: born in the Philippines, permanent resident of Canada, with dual Philippine jus soli citizenship and Canadian naturalized citizenship, as in the case of pool player
Alex Pagulayan. Example: born in British-occupied Ireland, technically a British citizen for much of his life, but an Irish national in an encyclopedic sense (and Irish nationalist), as in the cases of writers
James Joyce and
W. B. Yeats. Even in such cases, it is not necessary for the i-box to get into all this; Yeats has no i-box, and Joyce's doesn't mention British citizenship; Pagulayan's i-box has his birthplace, but glosses over the nationality/citizenship stuff with |sport_country=Canada
.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
|citizenship=
, so it's a moot point. "the absence of that information from the [James Joyce] infobox is an editorial decision based on long debates" – Yes, exactly. We do not need to have that kind of strife at a zillion more articles. We need to set basic defaults and not vary from them except for really good reason. I want to return to my own key point: "The
WP:Common sense approach is of course that most people born in a country are born to citizens of that country, and thus we need not browbeat readers with the obvious, only clue them in to unusual cases." Another way of looking at this: When we indicate that someone is a living person, only in cases of someone dying from cancer do we need to say they are dying from cancer. We have no use for an "is not dying of cancer" statement in the article much less in the infobox. We similarly have no need to say someone is a French national if they were born in France; it's the default condition. Given a sourced birth place in the infobox, we should say they're a French national or citizen if they were not born in France, of if they were born in France but there's some reason people might have doubt (e.g., born in France but lived 95% of their life in Tonga as a missionary and a child of missionaries). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)|citizenship=
parameter exists; in such a case, the citizenship cannot be deduced from the birthplace, or from the nationality (in probably any sense); it's a legal matter particular to a specific person's bio. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)Why not just 'delete' the nationality & citizenship fields from all infoboxes. GoodDay ( talk) 15:42, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
|ethnicity=
and |religion=
, too, yet they were deleted by a landslide in RfCs at
WP:VPPOL. The more people struggle over this, the more likely the community will just say "shut everyone up by deleting the source of the fighting". —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
02:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases this will be the country of which the person is a citizen .... On the other hand, it says:
Ethnicity, religion, or sexuality should generally not be in the lead unless it is relevant to the subject's notability.Not sure in the case of the ethnicity/religion poll if it caused the MOS to change, or merely reflected the existing MOS.— Bagumba ( talk) 14:11, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
|religion=
and |ethnicity=
infobox parameter RfCs didn't cause MoS to change (see a diff from before the RfCs, e.g.
here where both religion and ethnicity, along with sexuality, are already in that material, which was then part of MOS:BLPLEAD, without a CONTEXTBIO shortcut). I'm not even sure
WP:INFOBOX actually resolved to an MoS page at that date, anyway (I checked: it didn't, it went to the wikiproject, and between that and
Help:Infobox,
MOS:INFOBOX was actually quite disused at the time, until
this). The bulk of the RfC discussions had to do more with
WP:BLP (and
MOS:BIO) matters and with
WP:DRAMA surrounding conflicts between the BLP principles and what various infoboxes' documentation said and/or how the templates were being misused despite both policy and documentation. Kind of like the above issue of commingling birthplace, nationality, and legal citizenship in ways that tend to cross
WP:NOR lines. Anyway, CONTEXTBIO probably shouldn't be using the word "citizen" in that sentence, and instead should address nationality as found in the majority of reliable sources. (It actually used to be better in this regard; see the first diff I gave above.) A large number of people technically have citizenship in countries to which they have no connection that relates to their notability or self-identity. (E.g. one of my sisters has citizenship in another country by jus soli, but in her 40s now has still never been back to that country since we left there when she was still in diapers. She's technically a dual citizen, since she's never done anything to formally renounce that jus soli connection.) If she were notable, that trivia likely would not pass
WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE to even mention anywhere, and she should be described as American without any qualifiers, with a correct |birthplace=
but also with |nationality=United States
, and no need of |citizenship=
. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:22, 29 January 2020 (UTC)@ DougHill: Could someone join in the conversation at Talk:Country Walk case? Or give some clarification here? In a nutshell: The article is about a particular child sex abuse case that arose during the day-care sex-abuse hysteria, but the subject isn't at all relevant to the argument. Rather, it's about placing an infobox about a TV movie next to a paragraph that talks about the movie (and the book it's based on). The TV movie isn't itself significant -- at least, it appears not even notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article. My take is that the infobox isn't appropriate there, nor is the write-up of the movie. By comparison, McMartin preschool trial mentions two movies about the subject, but just includes the linked names of the movies, one of the redlinked. In this case, all that exists is a redirect to this article. I'm pretty unused to seeing infoboxes in (for example) "in popular culture" sections of historical articles. --jpgordon 𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇 20:43, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
Please see: Template talk:Infobox person#Proposal: Repurpose and redocument the home_town parameter.
As I know that changes to major infoboxes are often controversial (and many to that template in particular have been WP:VPPOL RfCs in their own right), it seemed pertinent to notify broadly of the proposal.
Summary: We removed |residence=
, but kept this parameter for childhood non-birthplace residence, despite that being usually trivia. The proposal would repurpose this parameter for long-term residency places during the subject's period of notability.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
21:32, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
In infoboxes, should we use sentence case or title case? For example, in political party infoboxes for the political position, if the political position in question is "Center to Center-left", should it be kept that way (title case) or changed to sentence case ("center-left" would be lowercase)? Thanks, Ezhao02 ( talk) 15:41, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
It is now 7 years since the Infobox war ended, and maybe it is time to revisit with an open mind whether classical music composers (and only the few most notable ones) should be an exception to the simple infobox that is used for all other biographical articles. As a regular Wikipedia user and occasional editor with no axe to grind, I find this mystifying, and also rather inconvenient. Hyperman 42 ( talk) 14:58, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
A problem we have from time to time, and this is often caused by unnecessary infobox forking, is inconsistent design across infoboxes of the same type. For example, an infobox on a city should look roughly the same in terms of design (the order of params should be roughly the same, it shouldn't have completely different colours or styling, it shouldn't have a completely different structure). It creates an inconsistency and creates a surprise when viewing different places. Differences, where appropriate, should be carefully considered so that the avg reader doesn't consciously become aware of them.
Thus, I propose adding to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes § Causes of inconsistency something along the lines of:
Infoboxes, particularly infobox forks for the same category of articles, should maintain a consistent appearance with related infoboxes, particularly in relation to layout, colour and structure. For example, readers expect a degree of similarity when viewing the article for London vs New York City.
ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 21:12, 8 September 2020 (UTC)