Wikipedia talk:History standards/Archive

Maybe for nicknames, we should just automatically create a page for the nickname and redirect to the number? e.g., Philip the Fair (redirect to Philip IV of France)...JHK

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What's wrong with using italics for genera and species? It's a standard I've seen elsewhere. --corvus13 Why is the genera bit here? Surely all the Kings and Queens are Homo sapiens? :D Dave McKee

The genera bit is for the archaeologists and palaentologists among us who are likely to be working in this field: those of likely to draw a distinction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis, for example, because that is their timescale... There's nothing wrong with using italics, in my view; but for reasons of consistency with our colleagues working in Biology, etc, we should try and use something which is in keeping. sjc

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To all these rules: who says? Wouldn't it be better to model this page after rules to consider? --LMS

indeed. Have done.

-- Larry: It was just an outline to try and get some sort of consensus established on systems of nomenclature in History. It is becoming a useful focal point. sjc

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Hi Everybody --

I have a quick comment about adding articles and what to call them. We are rapidly heading into an area where I foresee a great big train wreck coming on. I know that we all want to get as much written as quickly as possible. However, I think that enthusiasm is often given precedence to careful thought as far as what the entries should be called. This is especially true for biographical articles. For most of the period between late antiquity and the High Middle Ages, the majority of people didn't have last names per se . Moreover, there are WAY LOTS (so to speak) of famous people with the same name -- not surprising, when we think about the fact that most important families used "leading names," names that associated them with their particular family.

Most recent case in point is Fr. Jonat's Eadgyth, aka Edith (I'm only using this example b/c it's from today). Frankly, the first Edith I think of wasn't alfred's granddaughter, but Harold Godwinson's (and Hardrada's, I think) wife and (I also think) the daughter of Leofric and Godiva/Godgyfu. Somebody else might have thought of another one. There are a BUNCH of Ediths/Eadgyths/Eadgyfus out there. Can we please try to decide how we are going to separate them BEFORE we just throw them onto the site? PLEASE!! Thanks -- JHK

Especially for the minor characters of history (younger sons, wives, dull monarchs) I don't see that there's anything wrong with a name page with multiple entries. --MichaelTinkler

not entirely opposed -- except that I think we also need to do one of those combined name thingies, so that you can get there by typing any of the possible spellings...JHK

Also, check out just plain Alexander.

Can history be truly NPOV?

The point and ideal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopædic body of knowledge which is both comprehensive and written from the Neutral Point of View or NPOV. Subjects, however, such as politics, religion and philosophy are problematic in this respect; to a greater extent in this respect than any of these is the subject of history.

History deals extensively (both on the macro and micro level) with conflict and upheaval of one sort or another; it tends not to overly concern itself (rightly or wrongly) with societies and states which are in a state of balance or inertia. For a take on this, the immortal line spoken by Orson Welles in the persona of Harry Lime in the film version of The Third Man speaks volumes: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock...". Considerably more history has been written and produced on the subject of a few of the major players in Renaissance Italy alone than the entirety of Swiss history.

This manifest and constant focus in particular areas is itself unbalanced and inherently non-neutral in its nature. Is this imbalance rectifiable within the context of Wikipedia? Probably not. If anything, Wikipedia tends to attract as contributors particular individuals who write from a perspective which they would like to think is NPOV; the reality is of course that one writes entirely from within one's own perspective and mindset of social context and references.

A writer on the subject of as outwardly uncontroversial a subject as the history of English place names is adding weight and significance to the primacy of English language; a writer on the subject of English kings and queens adds weight to a traditionalist view of the monarchy and credence to a particular form of history. If history is to be neutral in this respect, and to be written from a neutral point of view, the argumentum ad absurdem is that everybody who ever lived deserves an article. This of course is frankly unfeasible and unrealistic.

Social historians are sadly and inevitably always outnumbered by historians of facts, dates and battles. This is a direct consequence of the fact that looking up dates is a comparatively simple task relative to the monumental effort which is required to unearth even the vestiges of the ostensibly mundane lives of the off-stage and undocumented behaviour of a disparate group of individuals. We have therefore to accept that content-wise and contextually much of the history to be found herein is explicitly non-NPOV from the very simplest of outsets.

Without labouring a point, history deals with conflicts between sides in which propaganda and ideological manipulation are inextricably a part of the process of the conflict. In these situations even the basics of semantics are problematic, and a sea of shifting sands on which the historian treads ever at peril. During the establishment of the state of Israel, for example, the Jewish settlers were depicted as the terrorists; now it is the erstwhile and formerly indigenous population to whom the term is applied, when some atrocity is committed. Over the period of fifty years the term has turned full circle.

Articles on history will also be thoroughly revealing of nationalistic preference or bias. How possible is it really to write a NPOV article about the Battle of Waterloo, which really was one of the principal crossroads (or had Napoleon prevailed, carrefours) of modern European history? For the English writer of history, it will be a glorious triumph of Wellington's superior tactics, roast beef and two vegetables; for a French writer of history, it will be a depressing defeat engendered by the incompetence of Napoleon and his chosen generals in the field in not pressing home the advantage. Is there a middle NPOV to be drawn between these extremes? To say that it was neither one thing nor the other is to miss the central salient point of history: that history is written by the victors at the expense of the vanquished. In this respect, history is never, ever, neutral.

If we are indeed to write history in a direction more compatible with NPOV we need to address these central areas of deficit with rigour. We need fewer kings and queens and dates and more detailed social history; accounts of battles should be written from the perspective of both sides where practicable; both content and semantics and language of articles should be written with a due care and caution for ethnocentric, sexual and social bias.

A healthy contribution to history studies would be an approach that looks less at the destination or conclusions in history, but the journey or method of history. A fresh exploration of the process of formulating history would illuminate the challenges that POV presents to a truer representation of the past.

What we need is a discovery of the philosophy of history.

Rather than discuss "he said this" it might be interesting to really examine how we come to accept as truth (see epistemology) that he really said it. How do we authenticate and verify something that has happened in the past? What makes us assume that history and truth are synonymous?

Judgment (see axiology) has also played a role in how histories have been passed down. Especially when we are looking at a history that is more social than natural, "good guys and bad guys" tend to vie for sympathies. If even perhaps as an extension of biological "survival of the fittest" where one side wins the fight and therefore win the right to preserve "our story" while destroying "their story," history is very often more a product of propoganda, disseminating an idealogical view to the discredit of any competing views. But, surely we can appreciate that, while "we" feel we are the good guys, "they" feel they are the good guys, too. Hence we might be uncovering a tendency to appeal to some higher moral compass to observe a universal right, and naturally write our story in alignment with that observation.