Talk:Louis Alexandre, Prince of Lamballe

Redundant & trivial content

A lot of unsourced edits are being uploaded rapidly to articles on French royalty. Some appear dubious, others wrong. Yet requests for reputable citations are ignored, deleted, or inadequately sourced (page numbers in books are essential to verify if the citation is accurate) -- while the wholesale editing continues. Please respond to these requests, either with reputable sources or more careful edits, before adding additional unsourced material. Also, much of the added material is redundant, excessive, or trivial. I've already recorded repeated objections to 1. unsourced allegations (e.g. that seem unprecedented, unlikely, or undocumentable) are apt to be deleted unless precisely sourced 2. redundancies (if it's in a box on the page, it's apt to be deleted from the text): 3. excess (details which belong in another person's article [e.g. parent, spouse, child], or which describe hard-to-verify details [e.g. "She felt envious": unless it's an attributed quote from a diary or correspondence -- how is it possible to know what someone who died hundreds of years ago "felt" or "thought"? Let's stick to what they verifiably said or did]), 4. gallicization (names and titles when combined, OK [but members of dynasties that ruled outside France -- Lorraine, Savoy, Modena, Bouillon, Monaco, etc -- shouldn't be gallicized, except for cadets born into a branch naturalised in France]; well-known phrases, yes; untranslatable terms, maybe; just for the sake of a more "French" sound or "feel" to the article -- not usually, and subject to deletion). Other editors will, of course, have their own views. Please don't use sockpuppets. I look forward to better mutual cooperation -- and better Wiki articles. Thanks. FactStraight (talk) 06:54, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Redundant & trivial content -- again

Efforts to reduce inappropriate style and content in this article may require request for external intervention. To avoid this, please let's stop adding and re-inserting non-encyclopedic matter, especially that which has been challenged. This has been complained of for years (see the "Redundant & trivial content" section of this talk page), but the editor responsible (committing the same errors at numerous biographical articles on the Capetians and their spouses and in-laws, as well as the Lorraines, Savoys, Estes, Gonzagas, Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and French ducal families) seldom engages in talk page or edit discussions, instead re-inserting deletions while dismissing fact tags and edit summary objections. The problem persists in two forms: inappropriate style and inappropriate content. The content violates Wikipedia's exclusionary policy against genealogical minutiae and exposition of insignificant details. It consists of excess in: Speculation (assumptions about the "feelings", "thoughts", "attractiveness" or "relationships" of long-dead persons, presented as if factual or probable yet not cited from the person's diary, correspondence or quoted statements); Trivia (information unimportant to the historical significance of the topic); Redundancies (information that is repeated more than twice in the article or duplicates info that is/should be in a different article), Extranea (superfluous information, only tangentially related to the topic). These edits reduce the professionalism of Wikipedia because they:

1. Include unsourced (and often, unsource-able) assertions that may be inaccurate
2. Use an editorial voice more appropriate to narrative in a novel than to an objective encylopedia
3. Divert the article's focus from facts which make the subject encyclopedically significant
4. Pad the article, making it harder to notice when sourced expansion is needed. FactStraight (talk) 18:55, 8 August 2010 (UTC)