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Inferring citizenship or nationality

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)

I did not want to get into that kind of discussion. I specifically said "generally" to allow for whatever makes sense is a particular situation (e.g. UK). But there are many cases of someone born in, for example, the US or France where editors add |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)

I'm sorry I wasn't clearer. In your text, saying "generally" doesn't help an editor decide whether your advice applies in a particular case or not. The qualification "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)

I support this addition in principle, though the exact wording may need tweaking ("country to which the subject belongs" is a bit awkward). We have a continual problem that people who don't really know what they're doing treat the existence of a parameter as possible in a particular infobox template as something that "must" be filled if it's possible to fill it. This defeats the purpose of infoboxes, which is to provide an overview of key details for a particular topic. When this problem is compounded with the common "national pride" issue – people sticking nationality/citizenship labels (and flags) everywhere they think they can get away with it – we end up with really crappy infoboxes repeating the same nationalistic junk over and over again. MB is correct in the gist of this, and in supposing that this needs to be in the guideline instead of just in particular infobox's template documentation. I'll repeat what I said at User_talk:MB: We need to clarify that nationality and citizenship should be left out if inferred from birthplace, while retaining the advice to not use both, if they're redundant with each other, when using one of them for good reason. That is: usually birthplace is enough. Sometimes either nationality or citizenship may be useful to add when there's a mismatch, and it's usually nationality unless there's some very good reason to be legalistic about it. Only in rare cases will all three parameters be needed. I can't even think of an example. Maybe if Alex Pagulayan had been born abroad, e.g. in the UK, raised in the Philippines and establishing his adult career there, then taking on Canadian citizenship in later adulthood? He was born and raised in the Philippines, though. Anyway, it's probably worthwhile for the docs to explicitly say that in complex cases it is generally better to explain the matter in the prose of the article, not try to summarize it in the infobox. This has been said many times before about any complex scenario, in all the debates about infoboxes over the years. The consensus for this was so strong that we ended up removing the religion and ethnicity parameters from most infoboxes because they're simply too often too complex for infoboxing and are prone to generating more heat than light. Any birth/nationality/citizenship disagreement that also leads to raucous dispute is obviously a case for detailed explanation, not infoboxing (lest we start removing even more i-box parameters). PS: As for RexxS's objection, it seems to be missing the point. When citizenship or nationality can be inferred from birthplace, we do not need to re-add the same country name again. So, no discussion needs to happen here about cases in which such things cannot be inferred from birthplace; there will always be such cases, and the "when it can be inferred" proviso wouldn't make sense otherwise. MB's later comment gets to the core of the real issue: "There is considerable debate about the meaning of nationality and the situation is complicated in several countries" – Yes, and when it is complicated for a particular subject, that kind of detail belongs, with context and sufficient explanation, in the article body, not in the infobox.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:36, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Let's see how we might move this forward, then, as I agree that it would useful to give some accurate advice. Put yourself in the position of an editor creating an infobox for Richard Burton. We have sources for his place of birth and for his Welsh nationality (he was a British citizen, but that's not a key fact for him). So what advice do you give to determine whether we should include |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)

RexxS, we can't possibly give thorough instructions in a MOS on how to determine nationality/citizenship in all cases. We already "leave the editor" hanging with the existing instructions. The current info at {{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)

@MB: I agree it would be good to give better advice to editors than we currently do. I simply disagree that your wording is an improvement. The problem with putting guidance into the MoS that is capable of being interpreted in different ways is that it will be used by editors to bolster their own POV, even when that interpretation is wrong. No, if we are to improve our guidance, it needs to have at the very least a pointer to the articles that explain how to tell when citizenship/nationality can be determined from birthplace, otherwise we're no further forward. --RexxS (talk) 00:50, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

It sounds like the desired guidance has nothing to do with "inferences" at all. It sounds like what editors want to say is that if the birthplace, nationality, and citizenship are all the same, then only the birthplace should be listed.

(Of course, the other thing that has to someday be solved is whether that parameter means "relationship between you and a sovereign state" (e.g., not Welsh) or if it is meant to include the "An ethnic group forming a part of one or more political nations." What would be the "correct" thing to put in |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)

On en.wp, it's basically always referred to the nation-state when applicable, though with deference to a) disputed territories and the subject's identification with the "underdog" claimant (e.g. Yeats and Joyce were Irish writers, not British ones, regardless of the then-status of Irish independence), and b) subnational (in international-diplomatic-relations terms) entities still defined as nations in a way that is consonant with the supranation's own laws (thus Welsh, Scottish, English, and Manx are nationalities, but Northern Irish and Cornish are not, at least when it comes to modern subjects; if you go back many centuries, Cornish would be, but we'd also be in an era were nation-states weren't really a thing for the most part). But "Chicano" or "Mexican-American" are not nationalities for WP purposes. Even Native American tribes called "nations" in a particular, different, sense under US laws and treaties aren't. Things like Wales are special cases. Similar ones might be, say, the individual Soviet socialist republics under the USSR, though I'm not sure we implement it that way in the content and infoboxes when writing about Soviet people.

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)

@WhatamIdoing and SMcCandlish: If we were to give guidance to omit nationality when it would be the same as country of birth, then how does a reader know what is the nationality of someone born in London? How can they tell the difference between someone for whom we have a source stating their parents were English (and hence nationality=English, which you then advise to omit), and someone whose nationality we don't know because we have no source and is therefore omitted? It's not good guidance to omit sourced information when it leads to ambiguity. --RexxS (talk) 03:15, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

What's unclear about "when it can be inferred"? For example, the elder of my sisters was born in Oxford, but is American. If she were notable, it would not be sensible for her infobox to only have Oxford, England, as a birthplace and no indication of nationality or citizenship, since they don't match. That is, the nationality cannot be inferred from Birthplace.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:47, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

The options are either stating the same location twice (e.g., |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)

But |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)

Nothing right this second comes to mind. I can live with "belongs". If anyone ever finds it confusing, I'm sure we'll hear about it. >;-) Venting at great length and proposing to delete entire sections of MoS any time one is confused or has a quibble seems to be the official international sport of Wikipedians.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:20, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Consolidating place-naming advice

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Never mind; the thread linked to did not produce a conclusive result before archiving away.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:08, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

---

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

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 discussion above 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.

RfC on birthplace, nationality, and citizenship parameters with matching values

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:

1. advise not using |nationality= or |citizenship= when the country would match that found in |birthplace=;
2. advise filling in at least one of |nationality= or |citizenship= even if the country would match that found in |birthplace=;
3. remain silent on the matter;
4. advise filling in |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)

Comments

• Option 1, for reasons given in detail in the parent thread. In short: having something like |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)
• Option 1, avoid redundancy, possible confusion. Hyperbolick (talk) 13:43, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
  • Hyperbolick, how could it be possibly confusing to state that a person was born in New York and also an American citizen? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:04, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
    • People put American. Italian, English, Japanese. Common error, actually. Hyperbolick (talk) 02:19, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 4 State nationality or citizenship when it can't be inferred from place of birth and is known. To correct SMcCandlish: having something like |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)

  Response in the ext. discussion section, below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

• Option 1, as OP. Infoboxes are to summarize key information. MB 22:10, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 1, seems reasonable not to use the others for the sake of it if they are the same. MilborneOne (talk) 22:37, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 1. Can I just second everything SMcCandlish has said in this discussion? Bondegezou (talk) 15:45, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 3. We don't need a general rule for this imo. I might explain more on this opinion later, but I can see this causing a lot of unforseen problems. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 01:05, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 1. Personally I'm not sold on the idea that we should be encouraging the inclusion of nationality/citizenship in any case, but that's another discussion entirely. CThomas³ (talk) 22:36, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 3 keep flexibility with infoboxes. There are some cases where nationality/citizenship are useful (such as sport). We don’t need a blanket rule. Rikster2 (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Option 1 does not deprecate the parameters; they certainly can be used when useful. Option 1 just says don't use them when they are not useful, i.e. redundant. MB 19:51, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

@MB: Some domains always specify nationality but don't put the county in the birthplace when it's redundant e.g. Americans born in the US, Canadians in Canada, etc. Option 1 is an invitation for warring over blindly removing nationality and placing country in "birthplace".—Bagumba (talk) 19:59, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't understand "domains" in this context. What do you mean? MB 20:35, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

He means subjects - sports, politics, etc. Also, I have expressed my opinion and don’t need you to explain the other options further. It’s a tad insulting, actually. Rikster2 (talk) 20:43, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

• In order of preference Option 2, 4, 3. Stating the Nationality or Citizenship gives the reader clarity and avoids any confusion on the matter especially since some notable people may be born in one country and have a completely different nationality.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 21:43, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 3 for now, mainly because the other options are not flexible enough to support existing practices in some domains. Polls are hit or miss; in this case, the concerns below at #Extended_discussion_of_the_RfC probably won't be addressed by people who have already !voted, and any new !voters are likley not to read the discussion. My biggest concern in this particular case is that it doesn't meet WP:PROPOSAL to "documents existing practices, rather than proposing a change to what experienced editors already choose to do." Some projects like Basketball already avoid duplicating the country, but not as described above. Suggest closing and tweaking a new proposal.—Bagumba (talk) 10:18, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 3 Bagumba and some others above sum up pretty much exactly what I came here to say. -DJSasso (talk) 14:38, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 3. As stated by those who posted the same vote, there should be flexibility here. Darwin Naz (talk) 23:05, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 2, or second choice Option 3. Nationality is more relevant to notability than place of birth. It is important enough that it should be set out explicitly, rather than requiring the reader to make dubious assumptions about it. I don't see the benefit of the citizenship field at all; if it is different than nationality, it will either be in an obvious way that doesn't add any useful information to the infobox (e.g., Welsh people are UK citizens) or in a technical and complicated way that requires explanation in the body anyway.--Trystan (talk) 16:45, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

  @Trystan: I agree nationality should be in the infobox. We generally have it in the lead sentece already. I disagree with the latter part: ... 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)

• Option 1 as first choice, Option 3 as second choice. We should avoid being overly officious and redundant where not needed, but I do recognize there may be occasions where the normal rules don't make sense. Still, even allowing for the odd exception doesn't mean that guidance is unnecessary; I would prefer to have Option 1 be standard operating procedure, where variances could be discussed on a case-by-case basis if needed. --Jayron32 17:13, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
• Notice of notice: I've re-notified WP:VPPOL, WT:MOS, WT:MOSBIO, WT:BLP, WT:NCP, WT:WPINFOBOX, WT:WPBIO, Help talk:Infobox, and Template talk:Infobox person of this RfC, and asked for more input. This RfC will have been a waste of time if it closes with a no consensus tie.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:59, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
• Option 1 Johnbod (talk) 05:49, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
• Neither Citizenship isn't really relevant or useful for infoboxes; it's relevant, potentially, in the text of the article, and it's relevant to different jurisdictions, travel, and working arrangements. Nationality is a vague and somewhat ambiguous term...what would be useful is for a birthplace parameter and for a principal residence parameter, as well as repeatable parameters (numbered sequentially) for other residence and former residence.

Failing that, though, Option 1 then Option 3 per the nomination rationale (SMcCandlish) and MJL, respectively. I still feel, though, the parameters are not named in the most useful fashion. What people want to know is where the person was born, where they live primarily (or lived primarily), and what other residences did they have. The rest is only useful to demographers and government statisticians. Doug Mehus T·C 17:36, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

• Option 2 - I don't understand any option that fails to bring clarity to poorly-defined parameters, as Option 3 makes me feel. And no disrespect to MJL personally, but arguments like "We don't need a general rule for this ... I might explain more on this opinion later ... I can see this causing a lot of unforseen problems." are just limp and should be ignored, since nothing was actually argued. And differing from Cthomas3, I think nationality is a key aspect of a subject's basic identification--a normal piece of data you'd include to satisfy the 5Ws. Moving on, if |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)
• Option 1. Infoboxes exist to help the reader quickly see simple basic info, not dogmatically list parameters. If there's something additional to say about nationality or citizenship after stating birthplace that wouldn't be assumed otherwise, then great -- go ahead and state it. If not, restating the same info is literally just extra verbiage without additional information. The only effect of insisting the parameters must be filled out is adding a bit of distraction to the reader from actual information. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 00:21, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Extended discussion of the RfC

• The overwhelming frustration I have for the special treatment given to bios of British people, can't be overstated. We use Canadian for those born/live in Canada, American for those born/live in the USA, Italian for those born/live in Italy, etc etc. But, we don't use British for those born/live in the United Kingdom. GoodDay (talk) 13:57, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

  That's kind of off-topic (this RfC is about potentially redundant parameters, not about what specific values, like "British" versus "English" should be in particular parameters). I would direct you to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Using "British" vs "English" to describe a person/company/work. The same matter was also recently raised at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#Nationality of people from UK, and at Wikipedia talk:Nationality of people from the United Kingdom.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:44, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

  You'll find that they're all interlinked with the 'special treatment' given to the UK articles. GoodDay (talk) 15:49, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

  The only reason why "special treatment" is given to UK bios is because the UK is composed of four distinct countries, while being a country in itself. The same "special treatment" is needed for any other country with that complexity in relationship. The sources recognise that Dylan Thomas had Welsh nationality while being a British citizen and we follow the sources if there is any question. --RexxS (talk) 22:04, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

  RexxS, are there any other countries with "that complexity in relationship", in which people from Countries A, B, and C join together as equal parties to form Country D, and then say that they are all citizens of D (thus D owes them certain duties associated with citizenship, such as intervening if another country tries to force you into military service), but some say they are nationals of only A (rather than members of ethnic group A), so that A owes them certain other duties (the ones associated with nationality, such as forcing its nationals into military service if necessary)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing: No two examples are identical, because the historical backgrounds are inevitably different, but Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR come to mind in Europe, Tanzania in Africa. France as distinguished from Metropolitan France is a pan-global country – even Metropolitan France contains the nation of Corsica. Depending on your viewpoint, Tibet is now effectively a part of China, and so on. Check out the difference between the number of national soccer teams and the number of nations represented at the Olympics to get more examples. --RexxS (talk) 03:09, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  I believe that people who belong to Overseas France are French nationals and French citizens, not (for example) nationals of St Martin but citizens of France. You are telling me that someone can be a national of Scotland (but that nobody is allowed to be a citizen of Scotland) and a citizen of Britain (without being a national of Britain). Those are not comparable situations.

  To put it another way, I'm pretty sure that the standard in international law is that if you are a citizen of Country X, then you are automatically also a national of that same country (although the converse is not true, because non-citizen nationals are a thing, especially in past millenia). Saying that someone has British citizenship without having British nationality is ... maybe not technically possible? Like they're using the same words (possibly for very sound political reasons), but they're not actually talking about the same thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:23, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  I said that no two examples are alike, but it's easy to show some differences between examples and then claim you've refuted the point. That's not how to conduct a debate. I'm sure that just as many inhabitants of St Martin who regard themselves as a member of that nation as there are inhabitants of Wales who regard themselves as belonging to the Welsh nation. The problem with the terminology is that some folks understand nationality to be synonymous with citizenship, while others regard it as the condition of belonging to a nation – and there are many shades of grey in between. The examples I gave are very comparable when it comes to considering whether "special treatment" is needed. This is the point we were discussing, not the differences between citizenship and nationality. Try and tell a Catalan that the nation they belong to is Spain. Are you now going to tell me that Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, etc. are not comparable with the UK as well? "British nationality" is not a sensible phrase unless it is simply being used as an alias for British citizenship, because Britain is not a single nation, and never has been. What's next, "united Kingdom nationality"? --RexxS (talk) 14:11, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  About these "inhabitants...who regard themselves as a member of that nation". Nationality is not a matter of your feelings. You seem to be talking about national identity. Nationality is a matter of courts and laws and treaties. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:31, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

  Another annoying area (not sure if it applies to the Rfc), is the push to deny that Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia were ever a part of the USSR. We see this a lot, in bios of Soviets who were born or died between 1940 & 1991 within the Balitcs. GoodDay (talk) 02:08, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

• A few comments: first, it is obvious that the various nationality/ethnicity parameters are as complex as those for religion were. Second, these parameters are as prone to dispute as the religion parameters were. Third, place of birth is usually trivial information and can be omitted from most articles. Conclusion: these parameters are not suitable for infoboxs. If important to mention, mention in text. Blueboar (talk) 22:27, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

  We already got rid of the ethnicity parameter. See same VPPOL archive page as the RfC that got rid of the religion parameter. They were back-to-back RfCs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

• @RexxS: To respond to your "Option 4" !vote: It's not "information loss", because no information should be in a bio's infobox that isn't already sourced and detailed with proper context in its main text. Infoboxes very optionally repeat and summarize facts, not uniquely contain them. And infoboxes are not for complex, nuanced information (it's why we removed the ethnicity and religion parameters). If French citizenship is such a complex matter, then it doesn't belong in the infobox. What you're talking about with France, however, applies to many countries and really isn't that complex (see Jus soli#Restricted jus soli). Despite France being a popular tourism country, on average and by an overwhelming margin, people born in Paris are French citizens, so there's no need for the i-box to say they're French. If the subject is really an Algerian national, that's worth saying. If they have dual Algerian and French citizenship, then finally we have a reason to use the citizenship parameter. It's not going to be common that we know a birthplace but do not know nationality; in such a case, the absence of any nationality/citizenship information in the entire article is what tells the reader that WP is missing information; not absence from an infobox. Various specialized bio infoboxes (sport, etc.) don't even have all these parameters, and we often don't use them even in i-boxes that do support them.

  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)

  @SMcCandlish: there is information loss for anybody who is looking just at the infobox for a simple fact. By your argument we would remove all fields from infoboxes because the information therein is "already sourced and detailed with proper context in its main text". You're confusing what is complex: the process of working out the citizenship of Jacques Hulot, who was born in Paris to pied noir parents, is indeed complex; but whatever his actual citizenship turns out to be is actually a simple fact that we can source. Having a source that says "Jacques Hulot is Algerian" or "Jacques Hulot is French" is anything but nuanced and there's then no reason to exclude it from the infobox (unless different sources have different views, of course). We actually removed the ethnicity and religion parameters because they were a continual source of editorial conflict as a result of poor sourcing.

  Working out French citizenship is a complex matter, and not one we should trust editors to decide; that would be OR. As I was the one who first pointed out the issues we face with jus soli and jus sanguinis, I'm happy you've taken notice of the links I gave earlier, but disappointed that you still think it's reasonable to expect editors to be able to infer citizenship from birthplace for any of the countries in that list, or from any jus sanguinis country. If you can't infer the citizenship from the birthplace, you ought not to be giving advice to remove citizenship from the infobox, whenever that applies.

  Although most people born in Paris will be French citizens, there will still be many who are not, and we should not be taking such a cavalier attitude to facts. If we have a source that says "Hulot is a French citizen", we should use it in the infobox just as if we had a source that says Algerian. Your proposal would still leave readers guessing whether Hulot's citizenship was French or unknown, and there's no good reason to do that, other than the desire to save a few bytes of server space. Not worth it.

  It is very, very common for us to know a birthplace, but not know the citizenship – just look at a few random biographies of folks born in the UK to see that. American editors consistently seem to think that all the world deals with the issue like the USA does. That turns out to be not the case, and if a subject was born in the UK, we can only guess their citizenship, unless we know the citizenship of their parents. That's 99%+ of all UK bios.

  The purpose of an infobox is to present key facts about the topic, and it is heavily used by readers who just want quick access to those key facts. We should not be forcing them to scan through a sometimes lengthy article to find a simple key fact that is known and sourced and could be presented in the infobox. If the information is missing or unknown, you expect them to read the entire article just to establish that, when its absence from the infobox should convey exactly that.

  Joyce was undoubtedly an Irish national and a British citizen in any sense you can come up with, but the absence of that information from the infobox is an editorial decision based on long debates. It is not a carte blanche to give advice to wiki-gnomes to remove fields willy-nilly from articles, which will be precisely the result if your option 1 gains traction. --RexxS (talk) 14:11, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  We agree on this: The purpose of infoboxes is not to cram as much detail in as possible, to fill in every possible field. It is to provide at-a-glance key facts that pertain to the subject's notability. This is what some people do not get and why we have debates like this. "there is information loss for anybody who is looking just at the infobox" – That's not information loss; that's someone reading an extremely compressed précis of a few key facts, and that one just didn't make the cut. If you want to slippery slope me, that fallacy can be turned right back at you: by your reasoning, we should not only fill in every parameter, we should add thousands more parameters so that every imaginable aspect of a bio can be encapsulated in the infobox, otherwise information will be "lost" for people who only read infoboxes. In reality of course, anyone only skimming infoboxes cannot be expected to get the full story, and more to the point doesn't expect to get the full story. Pretty much by definition. "disappointed that you still think it's reasonable to expect editors to be able to infer citizenship from birthplace" – Oh, I don't. The whole point of option 1 is don't put anything in there without sourcing, and don't put it in if it's the same. "Working out French citizenship is a complex matter, and not one we should trust editors to decide" – Yes, exactly. The parameter should be empty unless we have a really good reason to fill it, we can prove it's correct, and it doesn't just repeat the birthplace. "It is very, very common for us to know a birthplace, but not know the citizenship" – I didn't say otherwise; however, in the vast majority of cases, we have no reason to use |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)

• Sports bios and national teams Many sports WikiProjects regularly fill in a nationality/country parameter in bios, as it's relevant for national team participation and some domestic leagues have limits on foreign players. Some projects already omit country in birthplace (and deathplace) when it is consistent with their listed nationality (e.g. no need to append "U.S." when the nationality is listed as "American") At a minimum, bios should maintain the flexibility to choose whether or not "nationality" is relevant for the infobox, in which case the country does not need to be duplicated in the birthplace and deathplace. As an aside, nationality is typically in the lead sentence, so it seems to me that it would generally belong in the infobox, sportsperson or not.—Bagumba (talk) 08:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  To expand slightly on this point, sports biography infoboxes will typically specify the nationality in terms of sports: what country the player is eligible to participate for, if they have not engaged in international play, or which country the player actually has played for. Thus the field reflects nationality as determined by the governing sporting federation, as opposed to citizenship. isaacl (talk) 17:44, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  AFAIK, citizenship is generally required to be on a national team. So it's a matter of how each WikiProject displays multi-citizenship e.g. playing for a country where one was naturalized.—Bagumba (talk) 02:02, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

  There are cases like the World Baseball Classic where a player only needed a parent to be a citizen or to have been born in the country or territory in question. I agree that the more common case, as far as I know, is for citizenship to be expedited for the player in question so they can be eligible. isaacl (talk) 02:24, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

  I think citizenship is actually becoming a less common requirement as the rules are tightened. This may seem counter-intuitive but because countries may be willing to give out citizenship easily to those who are good at sports, requirements like residency have been added and in the process, I think they've often removed mention of citizenship See e.g. the rugby rules [1]. Even in FIFA eligibility rules, it's not clear to me that they require citizenship [2]. As a disclaimer, I don't know how well tested these are. Since it's easy to get citizenship in such cases, and most are I guess not that worried about loss of their old citizenship, I think most do have citizenship so the meaning of terms like "nationality" may not have been tested. See also [3] Nil Einne (talk) 12:46, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  @Nil Einne: In the case of FIFA, citizenship is still required, but naturalized citizens additionally needed to show a connection such as ancestry or residency.[4]—Bagumba (talk) 15:26, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  @Bagumba: I'm not saying the BBC is wrong, but I would be cautious about even good RS interpretation of rules in ways they may have never been tested and may never be tested. Frankly, I'd probably trust a good lawyer blog written by someone with experience in similar matters, more than I would the BBC, even if this isn't something that may apply to articles. The sort of person who thrives on deciding whether "permanent nationality that is not dependent on residence in a certain country" must require citizenship or can be something else. Nil Einne (talk) 15:38, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  In basketball, FIBA only allows one naturalized player per country e.g. Jordan Clarkson's case.[5]—Bagumba (talk) 15:41, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  Sport[ing] nationality and cultural nationality and citizenship are different concepts, and often do not match. The sport infoboxes and their documentation are pretty clear about this already (see, e.g., Template:Infobox snooker player/doc).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

  They match a majority (90%?) of the time, your sport may vary. In those cases, it'd be redundant to repeat country in birthplace.—Bagumba (talk) 14:11, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

• Duel Citizens as can be the case and is a very significant issue in Australia a person can be exclude from various government positions if they duel citizenship. They also deported and have their Australian citizenship revoked, which frequently happens to many people how would be notable for their notoriety. Being bron in England, and becoming an Australian citizen doesnt mean you are not still an English citizen as well given that its separate process to revoke UK citizenship. Being duel citizen is an important factor that warrants being in the info box because it not clear by birth place alone. Gnangarra 10:58, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

  Yes; this sort of thing is one of the real reasons the |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)

Hard to justify why it should not be a key fact at a glance for an infobox when most bios deem it impotant enought to have nationality in the lead sentence.—Bagumba (talk) 15:49, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

That's what a bunch of people said about |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)

Currently MOS:CONTEXTBIO says: "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)

The |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)

• This RFC ignores the biggest problems with these fields and the biggest need for advice for them: First, that they should not always be filled in. In particular they should be left blank if we cannot source the claimed information. And second, that we should not expect editors to understand and correctly distinguish the difference between nationality and citizenship. We should not have two separate fields for what is almost all the time the same thing and where, in cases where there is a subtlety to distinguish, the simple content of infobox fields makes it impossible to explain the distinction. Compared to those problems, this RFC is handling only pointless edge cases. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:18, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

  I don't disagree on the core gist of that, but they're really separate issues at one level, and both of which need to be resolved, and they are not mutually exclusive. That is, it may be more important to get your rent money than to clean your catbox, but not having all the money you need isn't a good reason to live with an overflowing box of turds in the interim. :-) These may be "edge" cases but they're very frequent, and are too often a source of editorial conflict. However, even the gist is a bit muddled here. This RfC is about whether "they should ... always be filled in", and it does encompass upgrading the template documentation to make it clearer which to use for what reasons. A clear consensus in here to not over-use these parameters just to have them and have something in them, will be a good indicator that one or another of them could be proposed for deletion from the template and its variants. So, this RfC is a good baby-step toward the simplicity you'd prefer.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:25, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above 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.

Infoboxes in odd places

@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)

For the record, User:Jpgordon and I disagree about the notability of the movie and its importance in the article. The TV-movie got significant coverage when it came out, and so could have its own page (rather than a section of the article). If and when this happens, the infobox should move to the new page. Regardless of the infobox, we still need to cover the movie on the page. If you have any opinion, I hope you'll join us on Talk:Country Walk case as User:Jpgordon requests. DougHill (talk) 22:22, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

The home_town parameter of Template:Infobox_person

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

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)

Sentence case or Titrle Case?

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)

Generally speaking, sentence case. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:32, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! Ezhao02 (talk) 16:35, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Infoboxes for classical composers

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)

Design inconsistencies

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:

Design inconsistency

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)

Can you give a specific example of articles or templates where you see this problem? Nikkimaria (talk) 21:15, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Nikkimaria, sure. Melbourne, Sydney and pretty much every Australian city or state would be one of the worst examples that comes to mind. They're completely inconsistent with every other world city infobox. The station infoboxes pre-merge would also have been good candidates for this issue. To a lesser degree we have {{Infobox award}} and {{Infobox military award}}. Whilst this change to MOS won't automatically change any of those, this is a practical issue we see currently, thus offering advice to editors to be mindful to keep such issues to a minimum seems helpful & valuable MOS advice, especially when prominent WikiProjects fork an infobox and customise it etc. (if it's to be done, it should retain constant style to the maximum degree) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:21, 8 September 2020 (UTC)