[WikiEN-l] Nationality on the lead of articles

[Mike Dupont]

Yeah, what about the whole issue of albanians, according to the rules mother
theresa was not albanian, but by birth ottoman empire or yugoslavian
something. There are many more examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Albanians

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Fences&Windows <
fences_and_windows at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>
>
> "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 at googlemail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Nationality in the lead of articles
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>     <AANLkTikBOYNem7wE4UD6GpYJSxYPcgZquNDV7KJmRawx at 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
>
>
>
>
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-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org
flossal.org