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. |
If you put a note here saying you posted in section such and such with the date & time,
And there'll be no reason to move your contrib.
Comment on DW/Jackie S. matter contributed by Jerzy 23:54, 2003 Oct 20 (UTC) is above under heading "Enormous defense of DW & Critique of WP".
Gordian knot answer from Jerzy 04:23, 2003 Oct 21 (UTC) in section "Casing of Names Beginning with Prepositions".
When reading biographies of individuals, I find that the introduction part is chronologically organized rather than being organized by their importance. A case in point is Eduard Shevardnadze. I would normally expect people to know him as a former President of Georgia first, and then as a former foreign minister of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The article prefers to introduce him in the reverse order. Is it a convention in wikipedia to follow this methodology or is it upto the editors? Left to me, I would change the order, but I find simply too many articles like this, and I thought I would ask first.
I tried to find the answer in Wikipedia biography style guides. But, I found no specific answer. chance 06:22, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)
Just a question: How to write the birth and death dates for someone when they are not known or unsure? gbog 11:33, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I note that full dates are preferred, even in the opening 'graph. IMO the alternative is to put at most years in that 'graph, and put full birthdate in the first 'graph of the chronology, and full death date in the last 'graph of the chronology, bcz full dates are too much detail for the opening 'graph. And having to find them in the text is only a problem if everyone thinks they'd only be in 1st 'graph, bcz very few people care about more than what general time-frame to think of the person in. However, the standard is clear & i don't mind checking my contributions & fixing the ones i've done that way. In the longer run: if others agree with my argument, they could note that here. -- Jerzy 02:43, 2004 Jan 12 (UTC)
(from the village pump)
User:Wik seems to insist on replacing ndashes – with ASCII dashes -. Style guides for printed work such as encyclopedias, as well as Unicode, state that for ranges such as dates an ndash (1998–2000) and not a dash (1998-2000) should be used. One advantage of using the correct dash is that a linebreak won't occur on the right of it. Is there some official policy from the Wikipedia on this, or should I just wait until Wik tires of his game and restore the correct dashes? Jo r 01:00, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)
General discussion on how and whether to use em and en dashes has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. The discussion here should address only which to use in standard bibilographic entries. Elf 21:15, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I chanced upon William Fox and felt that the way the personal details of the person was tabulated is very impressive. The reader has the option of looking at the basic details in the table or read the entire biography. I'd like comments on this kind of style. Or if there are other biographies that follow the pattern can I get some links. Jay 13:48, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Pasted in by Morwen - Talk 13:19, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC) - this is referring to the Patrick Califia article, which I changed to avoid all use of female pronouns
User:Morwen changed all the pronouns / usage to male-identified only. I reversed this as Patrick on his own websites (and books) is happy enough to identify the pre-transition stuff as female/lesbian. On a generic point, I feel that articles on trans people should probably always work on a pre-as-'A' / post-as-'B' basis as otherwise readers could get very confused. James / Jan Morris is another example where it would be misleading to rewrite history. -- VampWillow 12:00, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This is undoubtably a very tricky question. That is probably the reason why it took me so long to finish this text. That and a small edit war on de:.
There are two things that have to be balanced, one is the right of transgendered people to have their life and personality respected, the other the right of the readers to understandabel texts. And yes, both are equaliy valid points. And both are not simple, either.
Transgender people obviously deserve to be respected. That means that the pronouns that are used for that person post-transitioning are obvious. There is no obvious answer to the question of the pronoun when refering to the time before transitioning, though. The answer is not obvious for several reasons:
Therefore, the claim of some people here that it is undisputed that all transgender people perfer or even insist that after trainsitioning the "new" pronoun has to be used, even when refering to the time before transtioning, can not be substantiated, since this use is not consistent even within the transgender community.
Readers do expect texts they can understand. However, understandind of a text does usually not only depend on the information that is presented in a particular text, but also on previous knowledge and understanding, whether accurate or not. So let's see what they might be used to, and what the resulsts of this usage is:
It seems obvious that this is both wrong and most disrespectful. It is also used to actively discriminate against transgender people. Therefore, this can not be the solution. (And I only wrote about it to be reasonably thorough.)
This usage also has the great advantage that it does not confuse people, but makes the situation of a particular transgender person clear at the time.
It is also extremely confusing. "She went to the male restroom." or "He gave birth to a baby." does not exactly make much sense, and it does not reflect the gender role people had at this time. Since the interaction with other people is based very much on that percieved gender role, and also it has many legal and "technical" consequences; like, in some countries, the ability or non-ability to join the army or take up certain jobs and other. Therefore, the resulting sentences might strike the reader as nonsensical. the consequence of this usage would, in my estimation, only lead to transgender people being viewed as even more "weired" as they are now already. A classical case of shooting oneself in the foot.
Therefore, I advocate very much the usage that applies the pronoun to the gender role a particular person had at a particular time. -- AlexR 18:45, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them. (biographies) recommends the standard format
but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be).
I settled for:
Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)
Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to (biographies)?)
I realize that it's couple of years late, but I think that the way we include birth and death dates breaks up the text too much as it is, so adding places would make it even worse. I always thought articles should be written like:
John Doe (1900-2005) was a blabla. He was born January 1 1900 in Lower Backwater. Bla bla bla bla bla bla. He died December 31 2000 in Upper Backwater.
I've noticed some of our fellow Wikipedians put the places of birth and death in the first lines of biographies so it would be something like "E. B. White (July 11, 1899, New York, New York ? October 1, 1985, Somewhere, Maine), e.g. John William Brown. I've not touched any of these because I didn't know what the official style was until now. I see the examples have just dates, e.g. "E. B. White (July 11, 1899 ? October 1, 1985)", which is how I've been writing them. Usually my second graf opens with the place of birth and the last graf states the place of death. Our stylebook is much neater and pleasing to the eye than the practice of including places in the lead. I do hope no change is contemplated. PedanticallySpeaking 20:29, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)
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. |
If you put a note here saying you posted in section such and such with the date & time,
And there'll be no reason to move your contrib.
Comment on DW/Jackie S. matter contributed by Jerzy 23:54, 2003 Oct 20 (UTC) is above under heading "Enormous defense of DW & Critique of WP".
Gordian knot answer from Jerzy 04:23, 2003 Oct 21 (UTC) in section "Casing of Names Beginning with Prepositions".
When reading biographies of individuals, I find that the introduction part is chronologically organized rather than being organized by their importance. A case in point is Eduard Shevardnadze. I would normally expect people to know him as a former President of Georgia first, and then as a former foreign minister of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The article prefers to introduce him in the reverse order. Is it a convention in wikipedia to follow this methodology or is it upto the editors? Left to me, I would change the order, but I find simply too many articles like this, and I thought I would ask first.
I tried to find the answer in Wikipedia biography style guides. But, I found no specific answer. chance 06:22, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)
Just a question: How to write the birth and death dates for someone when they are not known or unsure? gbog 11:33, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I note that full dates are preferred, even in the opening 'graph. IMO the alternative is to put at most years in that 'graph, and put full birthdate in the first 'graph of the chronology, and full death date in the last 'graph of the chronology, bcz full dates are too much detail for the opening 'graph. And having to find them in the text is only a problem if everyone thinks they'd only be in 1st 'graph, bcz very few people care about more than what general time-frame to think of the person in. However, the standard is clear & i don't mind checking my contributions & fixing the ones i've done that way. In the longer run: if others agree with my argument, they could note that here. -- Jerzy 02:43, 2004 Jan 12 (UTC)
(from the village pump)
User:Wik seems to insist on replacing ndashes – with ASCII dashes -. Style guides for printed work such as encyclopedias, as well as Unicode, state that for ranges such as dates an ndash (1998–2000) and not a dash (1998-2000) should be used. One advantage of using the correct dash is that a linebreak won't occur on the right of it. Is there some official policy from the Wikipedia on this, or should I just wait until Wik tires of his game and restore the correct dashes? Jo r 01:00, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)
General discussion on how and whether to use em and en dashes has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. The discussion here should address only which to use in standard bibilographic entries. Elf 21:15, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I chanced upon William Fox and felt that the way the personal details of the person was tabulated is very impressive. The reader has the option of looking at the basic details in the table or read the entire biography. I'd like comments on this kind of style. Or if there are other biographies that follow the pattern can I get some links. Jay 13:48, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Pasted in by Morwen - Talk 13:19, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC) - this is referring to the Patrick Califia article, which I changed to avoid all use of female pronouns
User:Morwen changed all the pronouns / usage to male-identified only. I reversed this as Patrick on his own websites (and books) is happy enough to identify the pre-transition stuff as female/lesbian. On a generic point, I feel that articles on trans people should probably always work on a pre-as-'A' / post-as-'B' basis as otherwise readers could get very confused. James / Jan Morris is another example where it would be misleading to rewrite history. -- VampWillow 12:00, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This is undoubtably a very tricky question. That is probably the reason why it took me so long to finish this text. That and a small edit war on de:.
There are two things that have to be balanced, one is the right of transgendered people to have their life and personality respected, the other the right of the readers to understandabel texts. And yes, both are equaliy valid points. And both are not simple, either.
Transgender people obviously deserve to be respected. That means that the pronouns that are used for that person post-transitioning are obvious. There is no obvious answer to the question of the pronoun when refering to the time before transitioning, though. The answer is not obvious for several reasons:
Therefore, the claim of some people here that it is undisputed that all transgender people perfer or even insist that after trainsitioning the "new" pronoun has to be used, even when refering to the time before transtioning, can not be substantiated, since this use is not consistent even within the transgender community.
Readers do expect texts they can understand. However, understandind of a text does usually not only depend on the information that is presented in a particular text, but also on previous knowledge and understanding, whether accurate or not. So let's see what they might be used to, and what the resulsts of this usage is:
It seems obvious that this is both wrong and most disrespectful. It is also used to actively discriminate against transgender people. Therefore, this can not be the solution. (And I only wrote about it to be reasonably thorough.)
This usage also has the great advantage that it does not confuse people, but makes the situation of a particular transgender person clear at the time.
It is also extremely confusing. "She went to the male restroom." or "He gave birth to a baby." does not exactly make much sense, and it does not reflect the gender role people had at this time. Since the interaction with other people is based very much on that percieved gender role, and also it has many legal and "technical" consequences; like, in some countries, the ability or non-ability to join the army or take up certain jobs and other. Therefore, the resulting sentences might strike the reader as nonsensical. the consequence of this usage would, in my estimation, only lead to transgender people being viewed as even more "weired" as they are now already. A classical case of shooting oneself in the foot.
Therefore, I advocate very much the usage that applies the pronoun to the gender role a particular person had at a particular time. -- AlexR 18:45, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them. (biographies) recommends the standard format
but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be).
I settled for:
Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)
Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to (biographies)?)
I realize that it's couple of years late, but I think that the way we include birth and death dates breaks up the text too much as it is, so adding places would make it even worse. I always thought articles should be written like:
John Doe (1900-2005) was a blabla. He was born January 1 1900 in Lower Backwater. Bla bla bla bla bla bla. He died December 31 2000 in Upper Backwater.
I've noticed some of our fellow Wikipedians put the places of birth and death in the first lines of biographies so it would be something like "E. B. White (July 11, 1899, New York, New York ? October 1, 1985, Somewhere, Maine), e.g. John William Brown. I've not touched any of these because I didn't know what the official style was until now. I see the examples have just dates, e.g. "E. B. White (July 11, 1899 ? October 1, 1985)", which is how I've been writing them. Usually my second graf opens with the place of birth and the last graf states the place of death. Our stylebook is much neater and pleasing to the eye than the practice of including places in the lead. I do hope no change is contemplated. PedanticallySpeaking 20:29, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)