Talk:Leopold I of Belgium/Archives/2018/November

Dynastic kinship

In response to a tag requesting a source for this article's description of Leopold I as a dynastic matchmaker for the royal courts of Europe, I inserted a cite and an edit summary (dif) on how Leopold's kinships facilitated that role, also using the same source when restoring some longstanding info to his Ahnentafel that had recently been deleted on the grounds that it was unsourced and irrelevant. That info was again deleted as "absurd" because it included a non-royal ancestor, and I restored the info with my rationale ("So 'no source' was a ruse because this man's ancestry isn't doubted; the real objection is I JUST DON'T LIKE IT. I dissent from the argument that inclusion of royalty's ancestry is any more demonstrably 'absurd' than their name, birthplace, death date or other bio facts regularly included without 'proof' of specific impact - less so, because ancestry's in a collapsed section that readers must want to know about to be able to see") contextualizing the Ahnentafel's content. It has again been deleted and restored (not just the person objected to), so I'm calling for further dialogue because a difference in opinion about the relative value of content should not all be summarily dismissed from a clearly-labelled see-only-by-deliberate-choice section without any effort to compromise with an expressed differing point of view. I've been trying to sort the "wheat from the chaff" on royalty articles here for years, and I've found the way forward to consist of mutual efforts to compromise, rather than expressing contempt for other's POV. FactStraight (talk) 18:51, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

The real objection to removal is Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#I like it. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a directory is a policy and it states 'Family histories should be presented only where appropriate to support the reader's understanding of a notable topic'. Leopold's great-great-grandparents are not relevant to his notability or his life. Restricting the table to no more than 4 generations is a compromise. It is a compromise between expanding it to five generations or removing the section entirely. Only his parents are of any real relevance, because none of his other ancestors are mentioned anywhere in the text. On your final sentence, you might like to take your own advice. Celia Homeford (talk) 10:09, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

I fail to see how the name of Wolfgang Dietrich of Castell-Remlingen is relevant or helpful in this article. The same can be said about each of his great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents, and probably about his grandparents as well. None of them figure anywhere in the article. Does any RS biography of Leopold I feature the names of these people? It's not I JUST DON'T LIKE IT, it's pure trivia. Surtsicna (talk) 10:24, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Tables of ancestry aren't included in most bios. They are almost exclusively included in articles on royalty and the most distinguished historical nobility, who belong to a category of subject whose notability, especially in modern history, derives as much or more from their status as from their individual achievements or experiences. Encyclopedias have historically treated their ancestry and kinships as significant, even before Wikipedia eliminated the space limitations of print. Consequently, Wikipedia now has articles on members of most European families that have reigned since the 18th century and on many members of extinct and deposed dynasties. This treatment reflects a kind of notability almost unique to ruling families, i.e., nations do not regulate the religion and marital choices of even such powerful citizens as presidents and prime ministers, yet virtually every monarchy regulates those aspects of the lives of royalty, even beyond the monarch, because their civic prominence lies much less in what they do personally than in the dynastic role ancestry confers upon them. Thus, substantially greater scholarly and public interest in their religion, marriages, kinships and ancestry has long existed and is reflected in Wikipedia's Ahnentafels when documentable. Those tables provide information about both historically significant individuals but also about the dynast's kind of ancestry, in terms of relative status, nationalities, position, consanguinity, trends, etc. in which readers take an interest. I entirely agree (and my edits prove it) that some data can be too trivial for specific Wikipedia articles. But assessments of relevance and appropriateness call for editorial collaboration and compromise, especially in a bio section which is collapsed and thus only visible to those readers who want to see it (and whose format offers the option to delete individuals rather than whole generations of ancestors). If there has been discussion between advocates of retaining/expanding Ahnentafels and those who wished to eliminate/shrink them which yielded consensus on a rule for a fixed, reduced number of generations, I regret missing it and would appreciate the link. FactStraight (talk) 00:23, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

There's no discussion that I'm aware of, but that simply means that there is no discussion deciding it should be fixed at five. At this page, the consensus (though only two to one) seems to be that four is more than enough, given that his remoter ancestry is not relevant. Celia Homeford (talk) 08:53, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi, i've been following this discussion. Do agree that having some ancestry is very relevant for royalty - they take it very seriously, even now! It is after all their main qualification for the job... And a collapsable Ancestry section is a very tidy way of presenting it.

I note that 3 generations seems to be the standard for British monarchs - eg Elizabeth_II#Ancestry has 3 generations, George_V#Ancestry has 4(!), Queen_Victoria#Ancestry has 3. Would 3 be a reasonable compromise for Leopold? People interested in going further back can always just click on the links ... Cheers, Somej (talk) 23:58, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

For Elizabeth II three generations seems appropriate in accordance with the rationale elsewhere put forth by Surtsicna that, as royalty increasingly marry commoners whose ancestors and families are unlikely to have Wikipedia articles that enable readers to see their historical significance, their names will convey less and less information that is of interest to readers. Queen Victoria, her era's eponym, should probably have more generations -- especially in light of the hemophilia that afflicted the heirs to the thrones of Russia and Spain which descended to them through her and is usually, but not definitively, said to have originated with a spontaneous mutation in the Queen. George V's four generations seems to me a reasonable compromise between the maximum allowable six generations that our Ahnentafel format allows, and those who would eliminate or reduce the number further. Leopold I is an unusual figure who, as a relatively young man, was offered the prince consortship of the United Kingdom and the crowns of Greece and Belgium, none of whose decision makers knew him personally. So I'd prefer to see more rather than less about him, in hopes of gleaning more insight than the article currently offers as to what factors positioned this younger son of the juniormost branch of a minor German ducal family (as compared, for instance, with a younger son of the contemporaneous Duke of Marlborough) to receive such lofty offers, and be able to pass that cachet on to other family members, such that by the end of the 1800s they procured the crowns of Belgium, the British Empire, Bulgaria, and Portugal, in addition to the five thrones the dynasty occupied in Germany. The larger point, I think, is that the number of documentable generations of ancestry presented in Ahnentafel form can and should remain a matter of editorial negotiation: where some prefer to cut them down, a discussion and compromise with those who seek expanded versions should remain the norm. FactStraight (talk) 23:50, 17 November 2018 (UTC)