"I dread to think how many megabytes of discussion are spent on discussing nationalities." So why are you discussing it?

"I dread to think how many megabytes of discussion are spent on discussing nationalities." So why are you discussing it? Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:56:46 +0100 From: Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Nationality in the lead of articles To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Message-ID: <AANLkTikBOYNem7wE4UD6GpYJSxYPcgZquNDV7KJmRawx(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 One thing that annoys me about some Wikipedia articles is the tendency for editors to argue over the nationality of a person in the biography article about them. The classic example is Copernicus, which has some justification in that there is sourced discussion of the history of an actual dispute (though the dispute was long after Copernicus). This kind of dispute was seen again in the John Michael Wright article that Scott MacDonald mentioned recently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Wright The wording there is fine, but it can lead to convoluted writing, such as in the Descartes or Copernicus articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus "John Michael Wright (May 1617 ? July 1694)[2] was a portrait painter in the Baroque style. Described variously as English and Scottish" "Ren? Descartes [...] was a natural philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic" The current solution on the Copernicus article seems to be to omit mention altogether from the lead. I can't see any reason myself why Descartes can's simply be described in the lead as French. Go into detail later, yes, but people tend to be too sensitive about what is said in the lead and sometimes require too much detail in order to achieve precision and accuracy. Another one is Robert Boyle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Boyle Again, the question of whether he should be described as Irish or British or Anglo-Irish (or whatever) is avoided in the lead. Extensive discussions have taken place on the talk page. But this is an example of an article where the rest of it should be improved, while resolutely ignoring the storm going on around that one small part of it. I dread to think how many megabytes of discussion are spent on discussing nationalities. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l