Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Archive 33

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Someone has requested bot tagging of articles for this WikiProject

A user has requested that I have AnomieBOT tag all articles in Category:Physicists by nationality and all subcategories with {{WPBiography}} and {{physics}}. AnomieBOT has already been approved to do things like this, as long as the WikiProject affected approves of the list of categories to be processed. At first glance, the list of categories looks OK to me with the possible exception of Category:Albert Einstein. Also, I have a few questions:

• Articles will be automatically assessed as "disambig" "dab" if they are in Category:All disambiguation pages or "stub" if they are in any category ending in "stubs". Is this acceptable, or should either/both be turned off?
• Do you want non-article pages tagged; for example templates with {{WPBiography|class=template|importance=NA}}, subcategories with {{WPBiography|class=cat|importance=NA}}, and/or user pages and such with {{WPBiography|class=NA|importance=NA}}? A list of namespaces is at WP:NS#Basic namespaces.
• Do you want any transclusions of redirects to {{WPBiography}} to be replaced with {{WPBiography}} when the page is edited? This may happen for example if the page already has {{WP Bio}} but the bot can auto-assess it, or if the {{physics}} banner is being added.
• Are there any task force (e.g. s&a-work-group) or other parameters that should be applied? I can do this based on the article's membership or non-membership in any category; I can also check templates or anything else on the article page itself, but that makes a bit more work. In particular, I can easily add "living=yes" if the page is in Category:Living people.

If you want this done, just reply here to let me know. If you don't want this done, I won't be offended. I won't do this unless at least one person approves, and I won't do it if consensus is not for it. Anomie⚔ 00:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like a good idea. In addition to the Albert Einstein category you may want to be a little wary of Category:Ancient Greek physicists as it appears to include at least two non-bio articles.

• The template supports "Dab" instead of "disambig", but an automatic assessment for Dab and Stub would save time with initial assessments later on.
• Automatic recognition of non-articles would also be useful. Applicable class parameters are "Template" and "Cat". I don't think there should be any User pages mixed in there, but if there are any other namespaces then "class=NA" would be most appropriate. However, instead of "importance=", the bio template uses "priority=" (e.g. full parameter would be "priority=NA").
• Replacement of redirects is not much of an issue. If the question will affect the performance of the bot then I would suggest using whatever is easier for you, but otherwise it can probably be left alone.
• The "s&a-work-group=yes" parameter would be appropriate to include articles within the Science and academia work group as all the sub-categories are related to scientists. The parameter for "living=yes" would also be useful.

Thanks for offering this service. If you don't mind I may ask you for similar help on another WikiProject I work with. Regards. Road Wizard (talk) 17:24, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I can easily skip Category:Ancient Greek physicists too. How odd that this project's banner deprecated the seeming standard "importance", but I can handle that (when I looked at the template code, I saw that "priority" and "importance" seemed to both be supported; I missed the deprecation notice in there). The replacement of redirects is just a nice "general cleanup" that some projects like; it's not worth the edits required to orphan the old redirects, but when the bot is editing the page anyway it may as well do that too if the project wants them orphaned. The difference to the bot between doing it and not doing it is negligible .

Feel free to request the same for any other project, or for this project for any other category for that matter. If you want to streamline the process, feel free to copy my list of questions above to start the needed discussion on the project's talk page. For reference, BTW, I can also have the bot assess mainspace redirects with "class=redirect" ({{WP Bio}} doesn't support that, but some do), and I can even do some tricky things like "Tag everything in Category:foo unless it's also in Category:bar" or the "living=yes" determination being done here. Anomie⚔ 19:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

It has been a week, AnomieBOT has begin tagging. Anomie⚔ 02:14, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

The bot seems to be done with the tagging, after tagging 1137 articles with {{WPBiography}}. Feel free to request any additional runs at User talk:AnomieBOT (be sure to review the instructions at the top of that page). Anomie⚔ 20:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Naval bios

Editors who use PD text from the Dictionary of Naval Fighting Ships may be interested in a template change under discussion here. Maralia (talk) 03:16, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Article reassessments needed

There is a growing number of requested (re)assessments for this project over on the Assessment page. I've been doing some of them, but ideally it could do with the attention of a few more editors (not least because I have a few requests on that list myself). Thanks in advance! PC78 (talk) 08:04, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Mercy Lewis update

I think that the section under Mercy Lewis, "The Afflicted Children," should have its own page because there has been more and more research on the children as a whole. There are more than a hand full of accusers, but only Mercy's page shows the afflicted children as a whole. I think a more in depth study on the afflicted girls about their afflictions, the symptoms, their behavior, and why they acted as they did is neccessary as its own page because of the amount of information available. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Biggs05 (talk • contribs) 2 December 2008

Biographical pages with more than one different date of birth

There are over 7,500 biographical pages with more than one incompatible date of birth. In these pages different elements of the page - persondata, a category, an infobox or the first sentence of the bio - differ from each other. Any help sorting these out welcome! Dsp13 (talk) 00:41, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow, it even tells you which information is conflicting in the list! Fixing errors in Wikipedia has never been so easy! Thanks for the heads up. Kaldari (talk) 17:10, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Borges - review as good article

Jorge Luis Borges has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Articles are typically reviewed for one week. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. Tom B (talk) 18:21, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

State by state 100,000 population city and mayors templates

Over the last week or so I have created 15 templates that list Mayors of each state's 100,000 population cities as well as {{Top 50 U.S. City Mayors}}. They are in Category:City rankings by population templates. Some of these templates (IN, LA, NY and OH) have existing articles for all mayors. Several states such as CA, FL and TX have many redlinks. These templates have been placed in three types of pages: 1.) biographies of the mayors, 2.) the article for the state, and 3.) the articles for each city. There has been extensive debate at WP:CITY about the propriety of these templates (see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cities#100k_city_templates). Creating these templates caused me to notice the articles that have not been created. I have as a result created two new biographies for articles that did not previously exist (Scott Smith and Tom Weisner). You can see the how the templates look on these pages. There have been complaints that the templates contain cities and that this is a problem. I have defend this by pointing out that most templates within Category:United States political leader templates and its subcategories such as U.S. state Chief Justices, U.S. State Secretaries of State, U.S. State Treasurers, Speakers of U.S. state Houses of Representatives, and U.S. State Attorneys General show both the leaders and their dominion. There have also been arguments that the templates merely add clutter and that the templates are arbitrary by using 100,000 population as the cutoff. I had been using List of United States cities by population, but a little research shows that 100,000 is the cutoff used by the U.S. Census Bureau at [1]. Feel free to comment on the usefulness of these templates be mindful that conversation should probably discuss each of the three types of pages. I think they should be kept on the bio pages, the state pages and am not convinced they should be removed from the city pages.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:10, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

The templates are uselessly redundant clutter on the city and state pages because the state templates already list the largest cities in a state. Personally I don't care that much about whether they appear on the mayor pages (for those that exist). Being elected mayor of a city of 100,000 without some other accomplishments is really pretty borderline in terms of notability as far as I'm concerned. older ≠ wiser 22:26, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Which state template lists the largest cities with ordinal rankings like this one does? I think you are mistaken. I just looked at Illinois and I can not figure out which city is the largest or second largest from the template. Which state are you looking at?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:04, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Did you try looking at Illinois#Largest_cities? The sort of information that could be included in various templates that someone might possibly find interesting or useful is potentially unlimited. However, including all such templates would actually reduce the overall usefulness of the article. I see no compelling reason for including such a template on either the state pages or on articles for the cities. older ≠ wiser 13:04, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree, it's clutter. This would be much better served by Category:United States Mayors with subcategories for each of the 50 states and a subcategory for very large cities - I'd put the cutoff at 1M not 100K.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidwr (talk • contribs) 22:38, 6 December 2008

I was using 100k because this is what WP uses in its largest city list and as I said above what the U.S. Census Bureau uses. Do you have sources that use 1M?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:13, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

It's not a matter of sources, it's a matter of size and effort to maintain such a large list. If you feel up to maintaining templates for cities above 100,000, go ahead, I just think it's better to start small and work up than start big and get exhausted. Remember, the bigger your list, the more work there will be when the 2010 census results come out. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 23:26, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

If your only qualm is a question of my ability to do upkeep, then you should be able to sleep at night. However if we were to restrict the list to 1 M, no state would even be worth doing. There are only nine cities in the country with a population of a million according to the U. S. Census Bureau's latest estimates.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:31, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, I guess I can sleep at night. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 00:17, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm just not convinced that "the mayors of the state's largest cities" is a relevant navigation criterion on state pages. Mayors just don't have a huge influence beyond the borders of their city or county, with a few notable exceptions (Chicago's Daley or New York's Bloomberg, for instance). On city pages, again the mayor seems an odd navigation metric. A template listing some of the state's largest cities might be useful, but as Bkonrad points out, it's largely redundant with the existing state templates (the only difference being the ordering, which is something that could be changed on the state template if it's deemed relevant). Powers ^T 22:10, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

When you say redundant. I believe you are saying that an ordering of the largest cities by population is redundant with a list of cities that gives no information about size. That seems an odd perspective for an encyclopedia to take where information like the largest cities in a state is an encyclopedic topic of interest. Rank ordering of cities is a commonly accepted template topic on all large city pages. Look at any city and you will see their rank in the world or in the U.S. If rank ordering in the world and in the U.S. are considered encyclopedic. What is different about rank ordering by state? Can you explain why it is not encyclopedic interest to know which cities are largest in order by state when it is by country or within the globe. I do understand that for states where people have largely not done the work to create the articles the template may not look so good on some pages, but I think a template listing the important mayors in a state is encyclopedic for the state.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:31, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't even know where to start, Tony. I said "largely" redundant, not "completely" redundant, and I pointed out that the existing templates can be modified to order cities by population if that's deemed desirable. How do you get from that to the assumption that I think city ranking by population is "not encyclopedic interest"? (Not to mention that we're talking about navigation templates, not actual article content, here.) Encyclopedic-ness is not the metric we should be using for navigation templates; usefulness is. Powers ^T 00:19, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

O.K. lets discuss your navigation criteria. It seems quite standard at Category:United States political leader templates to add templates to both the leader and his dominion. See all of the following: U.S. state Chief Justices, U.S. State Secretaries of State, U.S. State Treasurers, Speakers of U.S. state Houses of Representatives, and U.S. State Attorneys General. How are mayors different than these other leaders?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:36, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, now that I think about it each template probably should be moved to the Mayor of City X page from the City X page. I think that might be where my logic is wrong. Let me know what you think about moving it from say San Francisco to Mayor of San Francisco for each city that has such an article.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:45, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That's probably a better option, though I'm still not sure I see the usefulness. I tend to think the navigation templates should link like with like -- if it's linking to other mayors, then it should be linked from the mayors' articles, not necessarily the articles on their offices. Powers ^T 14:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Taking the U.S. state Chief Justices template as an example, I'd say it belongs on those justices' articles, but I'm tempted to remove it from an article such as New York Court of Appeals. Powers ^T 14:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Of the five I mentioned, I you chose the only one I created. I was following the logic that already prevailed, which links the templates to the offices and officeholders. I believe all of the others were created before mine. They all seem to be collaborations of many wikipedians. They all seem to link such templates to both the offices and officeholders. Prez2016 (talk · contribs) created both {{U.S. State Attorneys General}} and {{U.S. State Secretaries of State}} in March and January 2006 respectively. Jack Cox (talk · contribs) created {{U.S. State Treasurers}} in March 2006. Darth Kalwejt (talk · contribs) created {{Current Speakers of U.S. state Houses of Representatives}} in March 2008. It seems that there is longstanding agreement even before I created {{Current US state Chief Justices}} in October of this year to use links for both office and officeholder on these templates. I think Mayor of City X would follow established convention. I think I wrongly placed these on City X articles.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 17:58, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, then note that the {{U.S. State Attorneys General}} appears on the Andrew Cuomo article but not on New York State Attorney General—even though the template links to that article! The reason is because the template is for navigating among the various individuals who hold those fifty offices, and so it properly appears only on those fifty individuals' articles. Powers ^T 22:40, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

It appears on many AG articles such as Massachusetts Attorney General and California Attorney General. I am not sure why it is on some and not on others. If the consensus is that leader templates are appropriate on officeholder pages that is fine. Just don't single out mayors. When I clicked on a few it seemed that they were on them all. Maybe not. Either these types of templates don't belong on pages like Governor of California or Massachusetts Attorney General or they belong, IMO. It is hard to figure out what is proper protocol. I concede the mayor templates don't belong on City X, but if Governor of California should have {{Current U.S. Governors}}, shouldn't Mayor of San Francisco have a leading mayor template or two?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:55, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

By the way, the other major difference between the templates you linked and the one you created is that the former are all exhaustive. The mayors templates use an arbitrary (but necessary) inclusion criterion. Powers ^T 14:26, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I am at the Michael Bloomberg article and see that Bob Foster (politician) is mayor of Long Beach, California. Why would I want to see that on that page? To me that is irrelevant. The same counts for the other mayor templates. A link on the article in the "see also" section ok, but this is too much. Garion96 (talk) 22:06, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

There are all kinds of reasons for someone who is astute on politics to be interested in several mayors. Suppose someone who was looking at a mayors page was interested in coalitions of mayors such as Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition or a council of mayors such as the United States Council of Mayors, which needs an article. It would be natural to bounce from mayor to mayor, for example. It is common practice at Category:United States political leader templates to link leaders who share a common office. Are mayors lesser leaders to the extent that they don't have the same grouping needs as other leaders. Do you have the same feeling about {{Current U.S. Governors}} as you do about {{Top 50 U.S. City Mayors}}?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:35, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

As I mentioned above, the sort of information that could be included in various templates that someone might possibly find interesting or useful is potentially unlimited. However, including all such templates actually reduces the overall usefulness of an articles. There needs to be a more compelling reason for inclusion than someone might' want to look. older ≠ wiser 13:04, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Well. Just be consistent. Don't say someone might want to look at {{Current U.S. Governors}} so it is O.K., but the fact that someone might want to look at {{Top 50 U.S. City Mayors}} does not make it O.K. The templates serve the same purpose, AFAICS. In fact, I believe your argument pertains all of Category:United States political leader templates that don't work in the same political body does it not? See all of the following: {{Current US state Chief Justices}}, {{U.S. State Secretaries of State}}, {{U.S. State Treasurers}}, {{Current Speakers of U.S. state Houses of Representatives}}, and {{U.S. State Attorneys General}}. Let me know which ones serve a different purpose other than someone might want to look.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:32, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

To be blunt, after a quick perusal, all the ones I looked at seemed pretty crufty to me. older ≠ wiser 17:38, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I tend to agree. Not to the point where'd I'd nominate for deletion, but I wouldn't support further proliferation either. Powers ^T 19:49, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I thought you were just picking on mine. So what is proper use for this category. Keep in mind that these are generally the only templates for current Mayors and current State Chief justices.

Well, where do we go from here, then? I'm thinking we should remove the templates from city and state articles and leave them only on articles for the persons named, and maybe for the offices (if one exists). Powers ^T 23:40, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Peer review for Yip Pin Xiu

I wrote an article about Singaporean Paralympic swimmer Yip Pin Xiu. The article is currently on peer review in preparation for a GA nomination. Members of this WikiProject are invited to review the article. Any and all feedback is welcome. In particular, I wish to ensure that the article adheres to the BLP policy. --J.L.W.S. The Special One (talk) 11:40, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I have taken the liberty of correcting your "review the article" link as it was pointing to a peer review about a movie instead of the Yip Pin Xiu review page. Road Wizard (talk) 14:55, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! What an embarassment. Perhaps you could also help review the article? --J.L.W.S. The Special One (talk) 15:05, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Lazare Ponticelli at FAR

User:Tony1 has nominated Lazare Ponticelli for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Dabomb87 (talk) 16:52, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

William S. Gaither needs some people to help out with autobiography issues

I've invited William S. Gaither, editing as User:Gaitherws311, to make direct edits to William S. Gaither, with the understanding that I'll come in behind him and clean up anything that is non-neutral, unreferenced, etc. See User Talk:Gaitherws311 and Talk:William S. Gaither for details. If several other editors could watchlist the article and the user page and make sure I don't let anything slip past that shouldn't, it would be helpful. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 15:53, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Big bunch of pictures

Some of you may already be aware of this but a huge set of photographs have been added to Commons after an agreement with the German federal archive. In particular, there are dozens of pictures of German (though not exclusively) athletes, politicians, military officers, artists, scientists now available. It's going to take a lot of time to fully exploit this amazing resource but one might as well start early! Pichpich (talk) 15:51, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

IP changing names of people

This may be the wrong place to list it, but IP 71.58.33.252 (talk) has consistently been changing middle names of various celebrities. The changes may appear insignificant and therefore largely go unnoticed, but if you can't even trust the name used for a person in an article, how can you trust anything in the article? The users has made relatively few edits (50 or so) and I've reverted a few. I'm posting here so that someone who's faster on reverting (e.g. with rollback) can deal with the remaining. 212.10.87.125 (talk) 03:33, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

The articles that still need a check are the ones edited by this user on 7 September 2008 or before. All newer edits have been checked and reverted where needed. 212.10.87.125 (talk) 04:02, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Rick Warren

The article, Rick Warren, has been repeatedly vandalized by dozens of unestablished users over the past couple days and needs to have a partial lock added ASAP. Manutdglory (talk) 23:59, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

You can request page protection at WP:RPP. Road Wizard (talk) 00:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Split of section on death from Heath Ledger

Earlier today an editor split out the section on Heath Ledger's death from his article. Some editors agreed with this while others did not so the split has been undone to allowed additional, and wider discussion. Views from the biography group as to whether this is an appropriate space to split this article are welcome at Talk:Heath Ledger#Split out of death while the entire original discussion can be found at Talk:Heath Ledger#Undue weight on the death section? Possible solution? -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 01:50, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Jessica Alba A Class

The article on Jessica Alba is IMO A Class. It almost meets FA criteria but for it's prose being a bit dry in places. + issues pointed out in a related peer review by another reviewer. None of which are IMHO show stoppers. Looking at the issues of A class review being frozen. That consensus decision was taken a year ago by two people. It has since been respected as if it were a actual policy. Seeing this I took it upon myself to award A class status to biographical articles who desire it.

A class review had been used as stepping stone to FA status. With the suspension of A class review and the subsequent defacto abolition of A class articles. (Since I assume articles can in a comparatively casual way be downgraded, with no mehanism to regain A class status in place eventually A class biography articles would eventually go extinct.) The peer review request I full filled were specifically asking if they were anywhere near getting to FA status. So I treated them as A class assesment reviews. Then if they deserved A class I gave it to them.

I can see no rationale for having some special annointed editors to award A class. Especially if such editors don't exist and it's questionable about who has the authority to anoit them to be such.

So I propose that in this case assesment be opened up to any editor(s) of good faith who are willing to do this. --Hfarmer (talk) 18:16, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I believe the A-Class review department was open to all and not just a select few, though it's apparent demise makes this a non-issue. The general criteria for A-Class are here. PC78 (talk) 18:28, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

William S. Gaither

What do you guys make of this edit? Is there a procedure for handling situations like this? It's unorthodox to say the least but I'm reluctant to remove it as it would be potentially WP:HARMful. There is more history on Talk:William S. Gaither and User talk:Gaitherws311.

I'll drop a note on Mr. Gaither's user talk page pointing him here.

By the way, I've been following this for some time. Mr. Gaither's authenticity is not at issue. The issue is how to best balance the need for encyclopedic content with WP:BLP and WP:COI. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:18, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

This warning is unnecessary and if I might say so, somewhat own-ish. This warning does not add anything to the article besides 'he was here, he looked it over, and he doesn't like or agree with the content' which is not neutral. In place of this disclaimer section we have {{fact}} or this entire section of templates. If we are to allow this person, who obviously has a conflict of interest with this article, what is next? User:Fred Phelps posting a disclaimer on his entry saying that everything there is entirely untrue? --ImmortalGoddezz (t/c) 19:41, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with ImmortalGoddezz, the personalised disclaimer is not an adequate solution either as a short term or long term measure. The individual needs to engage with Wikipedia so that we can find some balance between coverage of sources and the concerns of the individual. A disclaimer is simply an excuse to bury our heads in the sand by saying "we think this article has problems but we can't be bothered fixing them."

As a temporary measure I have replaced the disclaimer with a standard {{Totally-disputed}} tag.

Through reading some of the background to this case, I believe the individual is not happy with the balance and weighting of the biography as a single incident appears to have an undue weight. One potential solution in this scenario is provided at Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Help#Expectations:

"You can expect that if you were only notable in connection with one incident, topic or matter, and are not notable per se except for your role in that matter, then an article based on that incident or matter will often be more appropriate than one about you yourself."

Would an article about the incident be more appropriate than a biography of the individual in this case? Road Wizard (talk) 21:29, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Jennifer Brunner GAR

Jennifer Brunner has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Articles are typically reviewed for one week. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:27, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposed merger

It has been suggested that Wikipedia:WikiProject Academics be merged into this project. I would
Support such a merger. John Carter (talk) 17:51, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Could you please explain the reasons for your proposal? Is there an earlier discussion somewhere? What are the reasons for merging? Road Wizard (talk) 18:04, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

The Project claims to be a child of the Science and Academia Work Group. Wouldn't that be a better merge target? Road Wizard (talk) 18:08, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Reasons for merging are the lack of activity of the project and the fairly clear overlap between the two projects. I placed the notice on this primary talk page not because of a disregard for the Science and Academia work group, but rather to give the proposal more attention. Exactly which group it would be merged into would be open to discussion. John Carter (talk) 18:29, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Road Wizard makes sensible suggestion of where the discussion belongs, as it would be more refined. IMO it seems inappropriate for that discussion to take place at the global level of the Biography project. -- billinghurst (talk) 00:17, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Support, in view of the minimal level of activity at both the project and its talk page. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:05, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

John Hanning Speke:Cite or what?

John Hanning Speke has some IMHO odd language (in bold below) which I'm not sure how to fix:

The film Mountains of the Moon (1990) ... related the story of the Burton-Speke controversy. The film hints at a sexual intimacy between Burton and Speke. It also vaguely portrays Speke as a closeted homosexual. This was based on the William Harrison novel Burton and Speke, which explicitly portrays Speke as homosexual and Burton as rampantly heterosexual. Both of these portrayals are marked by conflations of fact and artisic license and should be treated skeptically.

This is almost the reverse of the usual situation where a contributor states that X is true without citing the info, and it's appropriate to add a {{fact}} tag to request a cite. In this case the contributor is stating flatly that X is not true and that the sources stating X should be considered unreliable. I don't know anything about Speke or Burton, what the facts or evidence are here, or whether we should do anything with this text. Thanks for your attention. -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 20:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I've removed that line, as it equates to original research, and I've added a {{fact}} tag to the preceding line. Nishkid64 _{(Make articles, not wikidrama)} 20:43, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Richard Ford

Wikipedia lists two Richard Ford's, but there is a third one writing fantasy stories missing: Richard Ford (born 1948), English fantasy author of "Quest for the Faradawn", "Melvaig's Vision" and "The Children of Ashgaroth" —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lothrien (talk • contribs) 11:26, 30 December 2008 (UTC)