France Unassessed

This article is within the scope of WikiProject France, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.FranceWikipedia:WikiProject FranceTemplate:WikiProject FranceFrance articles ??? This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Biography Stub‑class

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles Stub This article has been rated as Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Middle Ages Unassessed

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Middle Ages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the Middle Ages on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Middle AgesWikipedia:WikiProject Middle AgesTemplate:WikiProject Middle AgesMiddle Ages articles ??? This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Hugh Capet and his forebears certainly opposed the Carolingian monarchs for personal aims, but it is completely false to claim that Hugh killed King Lothair in 986. Lothair died prematurely of unknown causes but murder was never suspected. As for Louis V, he tried to contest Adalbero's right to the archbishopric of Reims and primacy of the French church, but no foul play is really considered with his death. The general conclusion is that he died in a hunting accident.

Also what 'military might' are we talking about for Hugh here? In his own reign he was beleagured by the opposition of most of the French barons and had to call on Normandy and Aquitaine for assistance in upholding his brittle regime

Simon

found a nice one in the russian article [1]. there is another one used in the french [2] and arabic [3] versions. both are waiting for someone to migrate them in the wikicomons... if you get what i mean Paris By Night 16:47, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I object strongly to the inclusion of ugly, obtrusive ancestry charts. Either the information is important, in which case it must be included in the article text, or it is not important, in which case it hardly needs to appear at all. What's the justification for including this? I'm not seeing anything obvious, and WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a directory suggests to me that this is not something we ought to include. Angus McLellan (Talk) 00:39, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They can be helpful in demonstrating familial relationships (which is naturally relevant for monarchs). They're to help the reader...which is the point of wikipedia. Michael Sanders 00:40, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Does the Britannica include this sort of thing? I never saw an encyclopedia yet that did as a matter of course. And while I don't have a book on Louis V specifically, I do have one of the Carolingians and one on Louis VI in front of me and neither includes any sort of ahnentafel. There may be circumstances in which a family tree would be important, but this isn't one of them.

This is no more than the normal judgement we apply to all things. Why should genealogical information be treated any differently from any other sort of background material? We don't actually mention Henry the Fowler or Hugh of Arles in the content, so how does their appearance on a table help the reader? Everyone has great-grandparents, but the only time it will be worth mentioning them is when they bear on the person we are writing about. Neither Henry, nor Hugh, nor Alda, nor Bertha, make any appearance here. If the article were vastly expanded we would be able to work in Charles the Simple and Eadgifu of England, but that's it. Just names to confuse the reader, not context which informs them. Angus McLellan (Talk) 01:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Amen, Brother Angus! Srnec (talk) 03:11, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Angus and Srnec. -- SECisek (talk) 15:17, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Angus. Dahn (talk) 17:56, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Further, I see, for example at Henry II of England, that the ahnentafel is duplicating information contained in a box using Template:S-fam and its friends. Angus McLellan (Talk) 16:14, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And Henry II also contains {{House of Plantagenet}}, while this one has {{Kings of Western Francia}}. Unlike things such as {{Kings of Northumbria}}, which are unobtrusively relegated to the bottom of the page, these are quite visible (and intrusive) templates, although not so much so as the ahnentafeln. All this template cruft is simply unnecessary. Angus McLellan (Talk) 16:18, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem with a small family tree, say to grandparents or great-grandparents, those can be useful for people who visualize things better as charts than as a paragraph. Six generations is a bit much though! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ealdgyth (talk • contribs) 16:27, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Template:S-fam at the bottom of the page should be all one needs. -- SECisek (talk) 16:29, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

that works fine, and I like the collapsable idea also. Luckily, bishops don't need even that much family tree! Ealdgyth | Talk 16:35, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bishops, I dunno. What about nephews? The ahnentafel is upside down for that kind of family tree. Siblings and cousins and nephews and nieces and aunts and uncles are usually more important in a narrative than grandparents. However, creating "standard" family trees is not all that obvious with wiki markup. Angus McLellan (Talk) 16:44, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Nephews, brothers, children (yes, they have kids) get mentioned when I can find them. Usually they aren't so extensive that I need to have a chart, since I'm not working with the Renaissance Popes here, thankfully. Is there a descendant template somewhere? If there is, I haven't seen it. Ealdgyth | Talk 16:48, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There's {{familytree}}. I'm quite the propeller-head - I bodge up perl and shell scripts at work - but it frightens me. Trying to create a typical family tree that might show grand-parents and in-laws and cousins would be a lot of work. Edward the Confessor is a case in point. Showing Edward's complex family relationships in a diagram would help the reader, but the work involved would be challenging to say the least. The important relationships we'd ideally want to show are with his father Æthelred, mother Emma, brother Alfred, half-brother Harthacnut, his step-father Cnut, Cnut's son Harold, his maternal Norman relations, his half-brother Edmund Ironside's descendants, and lastly his sister Godgifu's children. Even on paper that's quite difficult to do, as shown by the almost unreadable family tree at the back of Barlow's Edward the Confessor. When family trees are of interest and value to the reader, that's usually because they are complex and hard to explain in writing, or to draw using wiki-markup. Angus McLellan (Talk) 18:23, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, yes! -- SECisek (talk) 16:37, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am a firm believer that the ancestry charts are wholly understandable and not just names to "confuse" people, given that their location in a descendant's ancestry makes it obvious who they are. Six generations is a bit too much; I used to implement 4-generation templates (back to the great-great-grandparents) and still do when the ancestry is particularly interested (pedigree collapse), but more often than not, I am implementing 3-generation templates or removing entries 16 - 32 and changing the template to a 3-generation one. I don't think that they are really ugly. Maybe the colours could be worked on a little, but I think the form is fine. WP:NOT to me has always prohibited articles that are merely genealogical entries. To me, these templates are in addition to the article, rather than the whole content of it (which would make the article simply a genealogical entry). My big problem with royal articles are the huge royal house templates which mess up the formatting of the pages. I also think too much is going on in those succession boxes at the bottom, especially when ancestry is added. Charles 16:40, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't disagree regarding the other ugly templatification, but can you point to an encyclopedia, general or specialist, that includes this kind of genealogical information? My experience is that the typical monograph would include a family tree, but never, ever anything resembling the ahnentafel beloved of genealogical mavens. Why should we include what experts reject? Angus McLellan (Talk) 16:55, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Can you point to an encyclopaedia edited on the job by non-experts? Michael Sanders 21:34, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Angus. Genealogists will be the ruin of Wikipedia! This information can be much better understood through prose. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:22, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What a strange attitude. When did this stop being an encyclopedia for all readers? Michael Sanders 21:24, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The ancestry tables are not useful because their information is out of context. If the great-grandparents of the subject of the article are important to understanding the subject, why is that information not found in the body text? And if it is the family of the subject that is important, that can be easily solved by inserting a sentence like "[article subject] is a [family name]." Also, does anybody else have an opinion on templates like Template:Carolingians, East Francia, which are large and primarily genealogical? I believe they are little more than clutter. Srnec (talk) 21:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Srnec said what I would have. As far as the dynastic templates go, I would have less problem with those if they were banished to the foot of the article with succession boxes and the like (all of which should be collapsed by default I feel). Wikipedia generally has poor interface design and mediocre presentation, but the articles on European royalty and nobility are egregious. We may be amateurs, but we needn't produce amateurish work. Angus McLellan (Talk) 22:01, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I suggested a form of template at Template talk:Carolingians, East Francia which could be buried at the page bottom and set to "hidden". Would this be an improvement? Srnec (talk) 01:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There was recently a similar battle (there was no talk page discussion) about the ahnentafel for Helen of Greece and Denmark. When I expanded the article by looking at the major published biography on Helen, I noted that the first page of the biography was an ahnentafel (not a regular family tree) showing her parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents. This is not unusual. Noel S McFerran (talk) 03:13, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

At Talk:Helen of Greece and Denmark you said that these tables "are very common in books about royalty and nobility," which is precisely what I suspected. The conflict here is between genealogists and people interested in the lives of royalty/nobility one hand and historians and on the other. I don't know how to solve this, but I'm with Adam Bishop: "Genealogists will be the ruin of Wikipedia!" There are many articles on minor (and even major) noblemen that are little more than genealogical depositories and lists of marriages/offspring. Any truly important information can be much better understood through prose and if it can't, that's good evidence it's not useful. As I've said before, Wikipedia isn't here to do genealogy homework for people. The information is accessible here, but not pre-sorted. Srnec (talk) 04:30, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The fact is, Srnec, as I'm sure you well know, a lot of the scholarly work on these royals is about royalty in general with touches on genealogy now and then. Queen Mother Helen was notable in her own right for utilizing her status and clout as a royal and queen mother to help the Jews during the Holocaust. As a royal though, her royal ancestry is of interest but is not the basis of the entire article. That is why including her ancestors is okay, because it is integral to her status as a royal princess. If it was the only content of the article then there'd be a problem. Adding ancestry, in my opinion, does not turn a stub into an article. Speaking for myself, I have argued time and time again against the inclusion of minor royals on Wikipedia. I do not argue against including ancestry on notable royals though. Charles 04:46, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"As a royal though, her royal ancestry is of interest..." To whom? Her royal status does not need to be demonstrated by a look at her great-grandparents. It should be sufficient that her titles are mentioned in the first paragraph. "[I]t is integral to her status as a royal princess..." Yes, but why stop so quickly? Why not trace it back to time immemorial? State her parents. Then one can easily discover her grandparents by clicking on her parents' links, or looking them up elsewhere. I stand by my assertion that these tables do not add anything to these articles. The tables are arbitrary in length and uninformative in their isolation from context. Srnec (talk) 05:18, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia isn't here to do genealogy homework for people" - I'm sorry, wikipedia does everyone else's homework for them - that's the whole point, that it includes data and sources not found in other encyclopaedia's - so why not genealogy. Genealogy is frequently relevant, or of interest, in an article about a person whose genealogy is of relevance to their position. Michael Sanders 09:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

None of this is relevant to any of the articles I removed the ahnentafel from, or to the Winter King which was noted earlier. If you wish to include these in articles on contemporary royalty, do go right ahead, but please don't do so in historical articles. You have yet to show that this is at all common outside of (fawning Helloesque?) works on contemporary royalty. As I said before, I had never heard of nor seen an ahnentafel in decades of reading all sorts of history, until first I saw them here on Wikipedia. Angus McLellan (Talk) 10:46, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is clearly unresolved and the consenus seems to be leaning against inclusion. -- SECisek (talk) 11:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I went ahead an removed the ahnentafel because of the "leaning of the consensus," but Michael Sanders reverted me in minutes saying "I see nothing wrong with it." I guess that settles it. Michael Sanders has spoken. Srnec (talk) 02:23, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Amen! Charles 03:00, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The consensus which SECisek claims to exist leaning against the inclusion of ahnentafels clearly does not exist. The matter remains unresolved. Some editors like them; some don't. What is perhaps more important is that they are used in the published scholarly monographic biographies of many royals. An ahnentafel wouldn't be appropriate for a professional wrestler, a Nobel prize chemist, or an opera diva (since in none of those cases is multiple generation ancestry an important fact of their lives noted in the published literature about them). Since the information in an ahnentafel and that particular formatting of information is used in the published scholarly literature about royals, then those who oppose ahnentafels have to show what reason there is for not including ahnentafels in wiki-articles about royals. Noel S McFerran (talk) 12:50, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's up to editors who wish to include things to justify them; nobody can prove a negative, so it's up to those who wish to have them to prove that they are used in historical works. That's the wiki-way. So far, all we've got from those who wish them to be included is a vague allusion to a biography of a modern person, but what we should have is a demonstration that these are used in books on historical topics. If Louis V is too obscure, how about Henry I of England, or Edward I of England, or even Elizabeth I of England? Angus McLellan (Talk) 13:06, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I checked my shelves. I either have at the moment or will be recieving soon most of the recent works on the Anglo-Norman kings of England. I also have a good number of ones on the later Anglo-Saxons and the Angevins, so it's a decent shelf of scholarly royal biographies. This is the results: Paul Hill's The Age of Athelstan has no ahnentafel, but does have a genalogical chart of the kings and a descendants chart; Ann Williams' Æthelred the Unready has no ahnentafel but does have descent charts of the king and two ealdormen; Frank Barlow's has no ahnentafel but does have two very complicated descent charts in the back; Ian Walker's Harold has no ahnentafel but has three line descent charts; David Douglas' William the Conqueror has no ahnentafel, but does have nine line descent charts; Frank Barlow's William Rufus has no ahnentafel, but does have 13 line descent charts; Warren Hollister's Henry I has no ahnentafel, but does have a line descent chart; John Appleby's The Troubled Reign of King Stephen has no ahnentafel, but does have seven line descent charts; Donald Matthew's King Stephen has no genealogical charts of any kind; R. H. C. Davis' King Stephen (3rd ed.) has no ahnentafel, but has one line descent chart; W. L. Warren's Henry II has no ahnentafel; but has eleven line charts; John Gillingham's Richard I has no genealogical charts at all; W. L. Warren's King John has no genealogical charts at all; Michael Prestwich's Edward I has no ahnentafel, but has four line descent charts; Richard Barber's Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine has no ahnentafel, but has one line descent chart; Nigel Saul's Richard II has no ahnentafel but has one line descent chart; Christopher Allmand's Henry V has no ahnentafel, but has one line descent chart; Charles Ross' Edward IV has no ahnentafel, but has four line descent charts; Charles Ross' Richard III has no ahnentafel, but has four line descent charts; S. B. Chrimes Henry VII has no ahnentafel, but has four line descent charts; Jennifer Loach's Edward VI has no genealogical charts at all. Almost all of these books are in the English Monarch's series pubished by either the University of California Press or Yale University Press. Of the 22 books listed, not one has an ahnentafel, but 18 have some sort of line descent chart. Only 4 have no genealogical charts at all. For more general scholarly works that survey more than one reign, Barlow's The Feudal Kingdom of England has no ahnentafel, but does have two line descent charts; A. L. Poole's Domesday Book to Magna Carta (2nd ed) has no genealogical charts at all; Ralph Griffiths' The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries has no ahnentafel, but has three line descent charts; Geoffrey Hindley's A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons has no ahnentafel but has a very brief line descent chart; John Gillingham's The Wars of the Roses has no ahnentafel, but has a line descent chart; Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed) has no genealogical charts of any kind; Robert Bartlett's England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings has no ahnentafel, but has four line descent charts; Paul Hill's The Road to Hastings has no ahnentafel, but has a number of line charts; David Crouch's The Normans has no ahnentafel, but has several line descent charts; Richard Huscroft's Ruling England has no ahnentafel, but has a descent chart; Marjorie Chibnall's Anglo-Norman England has a sort of ahnentafel .. it lists all eight great-grandparents of Henry II in a simplified chart that runs vertically plus a line descent chart; Michael Prestwich's Plantagenet England has no ahnentafel, but has several line descent charts. That makes 1 sorta ahnentafel, 9 genealogical charts but no ahnentafel, and 2 no genealogical charts at all from 12 general survey's. Not that most of these are designed as undergraduate and graduate level college textbooks for survey classes or are part of the Oxford University's History of England series. Of other scholarly biographies Emma Mason's The House of Godwine has no genealogical charts at all; Kenneth Fowler's The King's Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont has no genealogical charts; Frank Barlow's Thomas Becket has no ahnentafel, but a line chart; Sally Vaughn's Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan has no ahnentafel, but does have two line charts; Michael Brown's The Black Douglases has no ahnentafel, but does have line charts; Eleanor Duckett's Alfred the Great has no genealogical charts at all; Ronald Scott's Robert the Bruce has no ahnentafel, but does have line descent charts; Marion Meade's Eleanor of Aquitaine has no ahnentafel, but does have a line descent chart; Harriet O'Brien's Queen Emma and the Vikings has no ahnentafel but does have two line descent charts. That gives 0 with ahnentafel, 6 with genealogical charts, and 3 with no genealogical charts at all. Lastly, there are the "popular" histories. This is works by good historians, but aimed at not a scholarly audience, but the wider reading public. Alison Weir and Desmond Seward are popular "popular" writers. Weir's Queen Isabella has no ahnentafel, but two VERY complicated line charts; Seward's Eleanor of Aquitaine has no genealogical charts; Seward's The Wars of the Roses has no ahnentafel, but has several genealogical charts; Weir's The Princes in the Tower has no ahnentafel, but does have a genealogical descent chart; Seward's The Hundred Year's War has no ahnentafel, but does have line descent charts; Seward's Richard III has no ahnentafel, but does have two line descent charts; Bertram Fields' Royal Blood has no genealogical charts at all; and Weir's The Wars of the Roses has no ahnentafel, but does have descent charts. Of those 9 books, 0 have ahnentafel, 7 have genealogical charts of some sort, and 2 have no genalogical charts at all. All the publishing information on these books can be found at User:Ealdgyth/History References

To recap this LONG list, of the 22 scholarly royal biographies, 0 have ahnentafels, 18 have other types of genealogical charts, and 4 have no charts at all. Of the 12 survey's, 1 has something close to an ahnentafel, 9 have other types of genealogical charts, and 2 have no charts at all. Of the 9 non-royal scholarly biographies, 0 have ahnentafels, 6 have genealogical charts of some sort, and 3 have no genealogical charts at all. Of the 9 popular histories, 0 have ahnentafels, 7 have some sort of genealogical chart, and 2 have no genealogical charts at all. I'd say that from my survey, line charts are actually common in scholarly works, but true ahnentafels in a chart are very rare. Ealdgyth | Talk 16:01, 23 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]