User talk:Remsense

I see that the word "de facto" is currently italicized in the infobox of the Yuan dynasty article. I thought you had approved this edit by User:Malik-Al-Hind earlier. I wonder why you think it should be italicized in the Yuan dynasty article but not in the Qing dynasty article? I do not think this should have anything to do with the differences between the two dynasties though. Thanks! --Wengier (talk) 04:14, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it should be italicized anywhere—this is somewhere I'm trying to balance my opinion (which I do believe to be correct and most consistent with site guidelines, but understand no one else really wants to fight over at all) with that aforementioned reality. If it's italicized elsewhere, it's either because I didn't notice or didn't "test the issue" there.

I really do wish the MOS explicitly said it shouldn't be—barring that, I think there are genuine style benefits to having that be the case on an article-by-article basis, as long as it doesn't make anyone mad—it's just visually weird to read an article where "de facto" is italicized but "per se" or "e.g." are not.

(Anyone else reading this is free to jump in and tell me I'm being too particular about this still, though like I said I'm trying not to be pathological or disruptive about my preference here.) Remsense ‥ 论 04:20, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) I've probably mentioned this elsewhere, but I low-key hate the term de facto (which I do italicise, with {{lang}}, but do so here as a use–mention distinction). It seems to get sprinkled all over the place in a somewhat lazy fashion where regular English qualifiers – after a smol rewording – would work as well or better, like "in practice", "essentially", "acted as", "unratified", "in reality", "recognised as", "for all purposes", etc. ("Pretty much" is another parasynonym, disqualified on TONE.)

Moreover, it's often the case that the most educational way to explain a de facto thing is to leave the thing unqualified, and explain why it was not officially recognised as the thing it was de facto.

By definition the reason we have to use this term in the first place basically amounts to some missing paperwork, and I'm not sure why we choose to qualify historical realities with the caveat that no one bothered to tack on an evidently unnecessary seal of approval. Folly Mox (talk) 14:25, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For example, at Qing dynasty § Reigns of the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, why did Yongzheng's Grand Council (Qing dynasty) eventually [grow] into the emperor's de facto cabinet for the rest of the dynasty? Did later emperors have an official cabinet in juxtaposition? (This is a genuine question: I'm fairly unfamiliar with Qing bureaucracy.) Couldn't this group be construed as the emperor's personal advisory committee?

At § Claiming the Mandate of Heaven, it should be obvious to any reader that if a compromise installed Hong Taiji's five-year-old son, Fulin, as the Shunzhi Emperor, with Dorgon as regent, then Dorgon exercised the imperial authority, and the explanatory coda and de facto leader of the Manchu nation is not necessary at all.

The de factorum at Yuan dynasty could be replaced with "in practice" with no change in meaning. Folly Mox (talk) 14:49, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I probably declined that incorrectly since it's now been over a quarter century since my most recent Latin class (and my Latin dictionary is all the way over there), but as a final off-topic reply to myself:

I'll note in passing that I perceive concerns over the consistency of individual terms being formatted in oblique or upright as one of Wikipedia's most trivial trivialities.

I'll confirm that my preference for native English terms is entirely inconsistent: although as stated I do hate de facto, I also regularly use prima facie, ceteris paribus, and other terms I find more convenient not to render in English.

I'll confess that I have never before used or encountered the term "parasynonym" before my first comment above, and found it by looking up 近義詞 at Wiktionary and clicking through some links. Folly Mox (talk) 15:10, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I lied about the finality. Because I couldn't help myself: I think it should be de factis. Sorry for the four notifications, Remsense. Folly Mox (talk) 15:24, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

	The Special Barnstar
	For your diligence, patience, and hard work to limit the problems caused by the copyediting edit-a-thon. It is tough when groups of good-faith but not quite competent users do their best to improve Wikipedia and can't understand what the problems are. bonadea contributions talk 14:21, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Appreciated! This is another incident where I feel I have a lot I can do better in the future, in any case. Maybe I should put myself on both "2RR" and "don't claim big lists before triple-checking them" New Years' Resolutions. Remsense ‥ 论 20:00, 28 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For your precious work.

JacktheBrown (talk) 02:56, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, Jack! Remsense ‥ 论 06:31, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Lugus on a "Philosophy and religion" Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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Hello, I would like to talk on a final revision on the articles in discussion if you like. please let me know on your thoughts for a final revision Lobus (talk) 22:39, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

story · music · places

Today's story comes from a DYK about a concert that fascinated me, and you can listen! For my taste, the hook has too little music - I miss the unusual scoring and the specific dedication - but it comes instead with a name good for viewcount. - Could you perhaps help with sources for Huang Zhun (composer)? -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:08, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Today, listen to Sequenza XIV. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:42, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

On the Main page today Jean Sibelius on his birthday. Listening to Beethoven's Fifth from the opening of Notre-Dame de Paris. We sang in choirs today. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:04, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Listen today to the (new) Perplexities after Escher. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:15, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, just wanted to ask why you reverted my edit on the formant page? Based on the chart and original versions of the page it should be œ and not æ. (Keep in mind I have not read the book that's in the reference, but I didn't want to buy a book and look at one reference on a subject that is actually not THAT important to me).

I based the edit on the chart later in the same page, as it lines up better. æ should be between ɛ and a from what I've seen on other charts, such as Dr. Geoff Lindsey's vowel space chart. Jaa Kimmo (talk) 23:07, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The cited source provides the data for the chart, and it wouldn't make sense to seamlessly synthesize data from other sources. Remsense ‥ 论 23:09, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if you have the book (the cited source), but what I meant to do was to undo the change from "ɶ" (œ) to æ. From 2013 it has been œ until a (possible) vandal changed it to æ.

Sorry for the mishap, and sorry for not having the cited source on hand. Anyway, I don't think it'd be a good source if it says æ when every other modern source says that it's œ. I'm not saying it's wrong (as again, I haven't read it, and can't confirm what the book says), I'm just saying we need consensus here. Someone needs to actually get the book, or we just get a different source.

Sorry for wasting your time, but this is important to me. Jaa Kimmo (talk) 23:45, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Do you know if there's a page that has every available warning template, or at least most of them? I'm looking for a more definitive list than WP:WARN, one that includes specific warnings like the "islamhon" one you used at User talk:205.164.159.46, but the search function on here is not cooperating as usual. Thank you either way. City of Silver 17:43, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here are two I saved to my home page earlier:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject User warnings
• Category:Standardised user warning templates

Feel free to raid anything at user:JMF#Antivandalism and other warnings that you may find useful. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:59, 8 December 2024 (UTC) (talk page watcher)[reply]

Remsense, based on this edit summary of yours at Translation, I believe we have a common interest in language and linguistics articles. In your case, perhaps with tedious wording, in my case, with rampant OR and vast expanses of citation-free content. Everybody feels they are an expert in their own language (and per Chomsky, they are correct, and I agree) however that doesn't exempt them from WP:V and WP:OR. Although the topic is close to my heart, imho, our modern languages articles fail V and OR more than any other major topic I follow (linguistics and dead languages less so) and makes me want to slash and burn 45kb articles down to two paragraphs, or this article down to one sentence (namely: "Hungarian has verbs.^[1]"). It almost feels like a lost cause, but so far, my approach has been to proceed with kid gloves. Maybe we could get a few people together and try to come up with a plan for this. WT:LING or WT:LANGUAGES could be a good venue. Austronesier and Kwamikagami might have some thoughts about this. Or maybe we should just give up, I dunno. Mathglot (talk) 08:12, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see that you reverted several edits I made related to the French Revolution, where I changed the phrase "Reign of Terror" to "the Terror". You stated that this was a "misguided change of terminology".

Just to be clear, I do NOT support terror, I am NOT a propagandist. I am just trying to make Wikipedia more accurate. The actual French term is the Terror. I pointed this out when editing Robespierre's article the 8th December saying that "Reign of Terror" is an exclusively English term and the French name is « la Terreur ». You reverted and stated that Last time I checked, this is an English-language encyclopedia. Apologies if I was not clear in the edit summary. "The Terror" is a very well-established term in English-language scholarship, as in French. Indeed there are many examples for the use of this term here on English Wikipedia. As just one example, Danton's article mentions "the Terror" eleven times while "Reign of Terror" is only mentioned three times.

Searching on Google for these terms alongside French Revolution, the Terror returns 632,000 results while Reign of Terror gives 616,000 results; they seem to be about equally used and if anything "Reign of Terror" is used less.

There have been many scholarly works published in English that use the phrase "the Terror" only. Here are a few:

The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation, 1935. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, 1941. "Maximilien Robespierre, Master of the Terror", 1947; the original link is down but this article is cited in Wikipedia and elsewhere. Paris in the Terror 1964. Ending the Terror: The French Revolution After Robespierre, 1989. The Terror in the French Revolution., 1998. The Terror: The Shadow of the Guillotine: France, 1792-1794, 2004. Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution, 2005. Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism, 2008. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, 2015. "From Terror to the Terror: Terror and the French Revolution", 2019, a chapter in States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature.

Articles in the New York Times from 1910 and 1936, and the Washington Post from 1989 use the term "the Terror" in the title.

Clearly, this term is well-accepted in the English-speaking world and changing this term would not make Wikipedia less accurate.

However the main reason I edited is that the term "Reign of Terror" is a misleading, propagandistic anachronism. "Reign of Terror" was not used in France at the time (or now) and was invented after Robespierre's fall by his English-speaking critics. The name was chosen to evoke images of anarchy and blood, as if only terror could reign in the place of a king.

I understand the concern that if we change "Reign of Terror" to "the Terror", people may not recognize this term. However, the term is usually mentioned in context of the French Revolution, in which the period of terror is well-known, and hovering over the link will of course display the page Reign of Terror (The first sentence of that page could also be changed to "The Reign of Terror, also known as the Terror, was a period of the French Revolution when..."). If this is not enough context, we could also use "Reign of Terror" the first time in the lead section and/or in the section headers of articles, and then use "the Terror" afterwards. Or we could keep "Reign of Terror" in quotation marks to show that this was not the actual phrase, but a name given by others.

I would welcome any civil comments you and others might have about this issue. The French Revolution has sometimes been inaccurately represented in the English-speaking world, and as Wikipedia editors we should try to present facts in an unbiased way. Curuwen (talk) 02:28, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's really not your place to unilaterally decide the English-language term in common use is misleading or inappropriate. If you want to dispute whether it is the common term in English, start a thread on Talk:Reign of Terror about it. Remsense ‥ 论 05:12, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

	The Surreal Barnstar
	I suppose it's not your actions that were surreal, but I had spent a few minutes yesterday asking myself if I was a bit crazy for thinking there had been an uptick in disruption on religion-related articles. Your start of that SPI caught an absurd number of socks. Great work! Pbritti (talk) 17:13, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, for what it's worth, I get a kick out of the socks having names that clearly suggest valid socking, yet are very much not following those standards. Good catch! ~ Pbritti (talk) 17:14, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also! Thank @Izno and @Samwalton9 for showing me the tool that allowed me to query the database for registered usernames by suffix. Remsense ‥ 论 17:20, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno and Samwalton9: Per the above, thank you! ~ Pbritti (talk) 17:25, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I was initially sceptical there was a link - well done Remsense! Sam Walton (talk) 20:49, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you're dedicated to causing a mischief on Wikipedia, apparently the gravest error you could possibly commit is to repeat some action I found slightly weird or irritating two or three times in a row. Remsense ‥ 论 20:59, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Philosophical pessimism on a "Philosophy and religion" Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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Hi @Remsense,

I noticed you've been reverting my edit about the Roman Empire flag (Flag_of_the_Roman_Empire.svg) in the article, and I just wanted to clear things up.

The edit I made doesn’t introduce any unsourced material. It’s just an adjustment to how the flag is presented visually, based on how it's recognised in historical and scholarly sources. The flag in question is widely used in academic materials.

You mentioned that the flag is a "military standard" and not a "national flag", but I think that’s mixing modern state symbolism with how the Romans operated. The Roman Empire didn’t use flags the way we think of them today, so any flag we use is really an interpretation based on modern understanding. The one I added is a well-known, historically grounded symbol of Roman authority, which fits the context of the article.

Thanks, Roben Robenceic (talk) 10:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:UNDUE, part of our core content policy on neutral point of view: Undue weight can be given in several ways, including but not limited to the depth of detail, the quantity of text, prominence of placement, the juxtaposition of statements, and the use of imagery. It's not so much that your placement was itself making specific claims about the vexillum being akin to a national flag—it's just that we have rather well-developed guidelines in wide application about how to avoid representing symbols in this way. See MOS:COA, a more specific guideline that forms part of our Manual of Style. Remsense ‥ 论 10:16, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

Regarding my edit on Rumi:

I’ve learned that I can’t interfere with his nationality in the opening paragraph.

No problem, and thank you for notifying me about that.

However, can I edit the nationality section in the infobox based on sources?

Thanks! Taha Danesh (talk) 18:06, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The infobox is considered part of the lead. Given how important the article Rumi is, it is likely that certain things are the way they are for good reasons decided by deliberate consensus of editors. While you can continue to WP:BEBOLD, I recommend keeping in mind that on very mature articles, things are often the way they are intentionally, and asking on the talk page first is often a quicker way to understand the situation. Remsense ‥ 论 18:09, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. Taha Danesh (talk) 18:10, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello again,

Regarding the importance of the article on Rumi, I believe it is a mistake that his nationality is represented as the Khwarezmian Empire and the Sultanate of Rum. A specific government or kingdom is not a nationality, and we have no one identified as "Khwarezmian" (from the Khwarezmian Empire) or "Sultanate of Rumian." His infobox needs to be accurate and based on reliable sources and references, as well as logic. The current phrase does not meet these criteria. I have added more than 7 reliable sources from university-published books and professors from U.S. universities in fields such as Islamology, Iranology, and Orientalism. Additionally, basic knowledge and logic support that the Khwarezmian Empire and Sultanate of Rum are not nationalities. If his nationality should not be labeled in the opening paragraph or infobox, then the nationality section should be removed entirely, rather than presenting inaccurate information.

Please inform me what I should do if I want to edit the nationality section and add references so the article can be improved. Thank you very much for your time and help, and I apologize if I misunderstood your previous statement. Taha Danesh (talk) 18:53, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I recommend sharing your concerns on Talk:Rumi, where a larger number of editors can more directly address your concerns. Remsense ‥ 论 18:54, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I request that the use of the term "Hindustan" only for India be corrected again because the term "Hindustan" was originally used by the Persians to refer to the region around the Indus River, which includes parts of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, not just India. 3ffe.1900.4545.3.200.f8ff.fe21.67cf (talk) 00:40, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's no error to correct. We are noting that a name is sometimes used in certain contexts to indicate a particular meaning, and this is true. We're not saying the usage is formal or official. Remsense ‥ 论 00:42, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Letter names and order how are the signs similar to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin Alphabet in order but not Arabic? 2001:E68:7000:1:AC9E:F29B:4655:4771 (talk) 11:43, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

tch tch. The correct Pilgrim's Progress syntax is "in which I embark". We'll have none of that Treasure Island sloppiness! 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:59, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Małe zielone ludziki on a "Language and literature" Good Article nomination. Thank you for helping out!
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