Talk:Princes of Orléans

Redundant and trivial content

Efforts to reduce inappropriate style and content in this article may require request for external intervention. To avoid this, please let's stop adding and re-inserting non-encyclopedic matter. This has been complained of for years on the talk pages of royalty biographies. The editor responsible (committing the same errors at numerous biographical articles on the Capetians, their spouses and in-laws, as well as the Lorraines, Savoys, Estes, Gonzagas, Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and French ducal families), as well as on bios of members of other dynasties and noble families.

The editor seldom responds to concerns expressed on talk pages or edit summaries, instead re-inserting deletions and moving the page while dismissing fact tags and edit summary objections. The problem persists in two forms: inappropriate style and inappropriate content.

The content violates Wikipedia's exclusionary policy against genealogical minutiae and exposition of insignificant details. It consists of excess in:

• Speculation (assumptions about the "feelings", "thoughts", "attractiveness" or "relationships" of long-dead persons, presented as if factual or probable. Yet usually there is no citation from the person's diary or correspondence, nor from a quote given by a direct observer);
• Trivia (information unimportant to the historical significance of the topic);
• Redundancies (information that is repeated more than twice in the article or which duplicates info that is/should be in a different article such as that of a parent, spouse, sibling or child);
• Extranea (superfluous information, only tangentially related to the topic).

These edits reduce the professionalism of Wikipedia because they:

1. Gossip, including and purveying unsourced (and often, unsource-able) assertions that may be inaccurate
2. Colloquialize, using an editorial voice more appropriate to narrative in a novel than to an objective encylopedia
3. Distract, diverting the article's focus from the facts which make the subject encyclopedically significant
4. Inflate, padding the article, making it harder to notice when sources, editing or more substance is needed. FactStraight (talk) 06:14, 19 November 2010 (UTC)