Talk:Stewart Fotheringham

Puffery

I have removed a large amount of puffery in this BLP. It may be desirable to remove more surplus detail. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:51, 18 November 2023 (UTC).

@User:GeogSage. Do you have any connection to the subject that you should declare under WP:COI? Xxanthippe (talk) 04:52, 18 November 2023 (UTC).

No connection to this professor at all, I've never met him (I saw him at a virtual conference session once). I do really enjoy his work and consider it foundational to my own personal research. My current personal project on Wikipedia is to create pages for the big names in quantitative geography as I do my dissertations literature review. Fotheringham's book "Quantitative Geography: Perspectives on Spatial Data Analysis" is a major part of that review, and what prompted me to make this page.

I apologize for puffery, it is just my writing style and GIS fanboy leaking. I don't believe the edits I made following your correction were very extreme, two minor wording disagreements (GWR is his most notable contribution if you check his Google Scholar citations), spacing and formatting, and I salvaged a citation for GWR you deleted and put it in the GWR section of the page.

I'm currently trying to work on a page for GWR, so much of that section will probably be moved there. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:08, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. Be warned that too much puffery could reflect badly on the subject by making them out to be a vainglorious boaster. You might even ask the subject if he wants a BLP about himself. Some people do not for that reason. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:53, 18 November 2023 (UTC).

Thanks for the response. While I will try to keep from making them seem vainglorious, I think that the authors/academics themselves are public figures and significant enough to warrant a page as a subject in of themselves, and other then my love for their work I'm not trying to promote them personally. My writing style when approaching a page for a person is to, after I see smoothing that makes them notable, find their CV and take relevant information from it. Then, I hunt down 3rd party sources for that information where ever possible. I believe part of the problem is including items on the CV such as smaller awards in these.

In geography, it seems that we don't have many people covering our concepts/academics within the Wikipedia project, and that is making certain things much less notable internally then in reality. For example, Fotheringham is noteworthy for being heavily involved with GWR. A search of GWR on Google Scholar gives 534,000 results, and on Pubmed yields 15,907. I use GWR about once a week, and about half of my fellow grad students are probably using it in their dissertations to some extent. However, not only did Fotheringham not have a page, but Geographically Weighted Regression doesn't have one (something I am trying to work on, and then I'll move a lot of the GWR content from this page to the one for the statistic). This is true for a lot of the mainstream spatial statistics, and concepts in spatial analysis.

I'll try to avoid words that seem unencyclopedic, and narrow down the included details. Generally, I consider the page a start and am hoping for collaborators to come in and help with the editing process, as you have, which I greatly appreciate.

(I want to stress I welcome and encourage discussion, help, and collaboration, and am not trying to edit war or express ownership. That does not mean I won't push back on a page though, to a point, if I disagree with an edit. For example, I'm really both confused and confident in the idea that tables are better then bullets, especially on a mobile phone. Trimming out superfluous information and poor word choice is welcome, although I tend to be more of an inclusionists then exclusionist when it comes to content within an article. I'm personally worried that valuable information about our academics is being lost to the sands of time, and in 100 or 200 years someone we might not suspect may be quite famous from our time, but the facts of their life will be lost.)

Thank you for your help and guidance. I hope to continue working with you and proactive editors like you on Wikipedia pages. It is a refreshing experience from the amount of feedback I often see on pages. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:32, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not going to format stuff to fit your tastes. Please don't remove content and demand it be reformatted to your preference.

If you don't like tables, fine. While I've seen many people have opinions on the matter, nothing has risen past the point of individual preference. Unless you have a strong argument on why they should not be included, please don't assert your opinion like its law. The only reasonable consensus I can see on this matter from the discussion on the other group that is internally consistent with Wikipedia design recommendations, templates, and other pages was: "My general thought is that the person who creates the article selects the list style and others follow that style unless there is a compelling reason to change it." GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:45, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Formatting

I've been reading up on this for a while.

Wikipedia:Manual of Style: "Where more than one style or format is acceptable under the MoS, one should be used consistently within an article and should not be changed without good reason."

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists on tables: "They are a complex form of list and are useful especially when more than 2 pieces of information are of interest to each list item."

Consider the first entry in the list:

• Fotheringham, A. Stewart; Oshan, Taylor M.; Li, Ziqi (2023). Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression: Theory and Practice. CRC Press. doi:10.1201/9781003435464. ISBN 9781003435464. S2CID 262209577

This has, Author information (in this case 3 authors), the date, the title of the book, the publisher, the DOI, the ISBN, and the S2CID. That is 7 points of information, and can be more if you count number of authors.

Tables are good if there is more then 2 pieces of information, bulleted lists are for simpler information at a glance. Even if bulled tables are acceptable for this instance, tables are as well. As such, they should not be changed without good reason. In my personal opinion, almost any article with a list of books should probably be converted based on increasing useability. When someone is using the list, they are looking for topics, titles, authors, and dates. A giant text wall is simply not useful. Please respond to this with relevant Wiki policy and guidelines to support any change before reverting to avoid edit warring. Any broad consensus involving pages would need to address the Wikipedia manual of style points I brought up, and would need more then 24 hours of discussion period.

We all have design preferences, mine are based on the tenets of the Association of Structurist Wikipedians, where "tables are prized". Imposing your design preference onto an article using a different one without a strong reasons is not acceptable based on the MoS. The fact other authors have tables for their lists of publications is certainly a strong indicator that it is an acceptable choice, even if you don't like it.

Also, if you have comments about an article needing work, please elaborate in the talk page. All articles on Wikipedia need work, that is not a helpful edit summary. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:30, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• We had a long discussion about this a while ago and you were the only one arguing in favor of tables in these situations. I'm not going to repeat all that. I'll just note the following:

1. When restoring the "status quo" you also undid the corrections that I had made to the citations (varying from using the wrong citation template to listing no or a wrong publisher). It took me quite some time to do that. Please restore those.
2. Your table list the books and then lists them again as "sources". Please don't do that, it makes the article appear to be better sourced than it actually is. It's also considered promotional.
3. Here, too, you are the only one wanting a table, I see from the history that Xxanthippe already changed this and was also reverted by you. You requested from them to do the formatting, which I did but you reverted anyway.
4. The table contains inappropriate (and unnecessary) bolding. That an academic book had only 1 edition is trivial, that's the fate of >90% of such books.

Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 18:45, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

There are two separate issues that are disputed here and probably need to be taken separately; tables and citations. In response to your points:

1. Sorry, I'll have to look at that more closely.

2. I have not seen any WP policy on this, and when I first started editing I was told the exact opposite. A publications existence needs to be verified for inclusion in a list, and can be verified with a citation to that publication. Putting the citation in a table listing the existence of publications avoids needing to put the ISBN, DOI, etc in the main text. That information generally should be hidden, in opinion at least, in a bibliography to avoid getting in the way of someone reading. If a publication in a peer-reviewed journal or encyclopedia was making a table for an authors books, I expect those identifying numbers would be in a reference or note section. Again, I have not seen anything in the manual of style that supports your suggestion of having books in lists without citing the book or other source verifying their existence, and it seems a bit like "parenthetical referencing," and in text citations are, in my understanding, frowned upon.

Wikipedia:No original research#Primary states:

"A primary source may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. For example, an article about a musician may cite discographies and track listings published by the record label, and an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source."

I can't think of a more basic use of these then citing a primary source to verify its existence. Further, inclusion of these citations can help improve functionality for one of Wikipedia's users, the editors, by allowing them to easily copy/paste the citation between pages if needed. According to Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Where attribution is not needed, citations and references can be copied between pages without attribution to their original page (thankfully). I have a core set of about 100 citations I have on Zotero, and am trying to put them in one place in a sandbox at the moment (something I need a lot more time for). These kinds of lists are where I, and I'm sure others, source citations from for other pages.

3. They deleted the table and told me to make a list for them during the discussion previously. If they want that format, they can make it themselves, deleting the entire section of text and insisting another editor format it was something I had never seen before. After review, I have seen no good reason to make the change format between tables and lists besides preferences of a few editors.

4. What is trivial to you may be highly significant to another user, especially in academic writing. Hunting down obscure sources is a huge challenge, and author pages for someone you're citing already are a great place to find them. While you might think its trivial to mention how Einstein liked his coffee, an actor who is going to portray Einstein may find such a point invaluable. While an extreme example, I believe the exclusionist philosophy on Wikipedia may be a bit to focused on what they personally view as "irrelevant or superfluous information." Excluding verifiable content because you view it as trivial borders on original research in some cases. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)