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User:Brightgalrs/MOS:PERSON

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Proposal: In all instances of our [human universal] the our should be removed.

These universal things usually relate to the location of Earth, a feature of Earth, the human body, human psychology, or human evolution.

It is usually corrected by replacing our with the, human, or the human. "human" can probably be left off if the article is obviously about humans.

Examples and solutions

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"our" corrected
our atmosphere the atmosphere of Earth
our oceans (the) (Earth's) oceans
our planet (the) Earth
our sun the Sun
our solar system the Solar System
our galaxy the Milky Way
our universe the Universe
our moon the Moon
our species Homo Sapiens / Human
our genus Homo
our ancestors human ancestors
our evolution human evolution
our DNA human DNA / the human genome
our body the human body
our brains the human brain
our eyes the human eye
our languages (human) language
our mind the human mind
our behavior human behavior
our consciousness (human) consciousness
our memory (human) memory
our nature human nature
our view the Earth's view / the view from Earth
our view the scientific view / the understanding
our understand scientific understanding / understanding

Rationale

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Existing articles written in this style

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Existing policy

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Conflicting things:
  • "Wikipedia articles must not be based on one person's opinions or experiences" - could be argued that all humans (and therefore persons) share the above opinions and experiences.
  • "Also avoid we, us, and our." - with nothing about personal opinions, so it could be interpreted as being separate from the above statement
In conclusion, whoever wrote the first sentence probably wasn't thinking about human universals at all. The policy should be clarified.
Cites MOS:SELFREF as a reason why Human is written without "our"
MOSSELFREF doesn't actually talk about this type of self-reference, though it does share the same "spirit". Could be amended.
Makes a big deal about treating all articles in the same category the same. English language is treated the same as Spanish language, even though everyone reading the article would be an English speaker. Using "our" in, for instance, the Milky Way article treats it differently than the Andromeda Galaxy article (which is actually a bad example because it uses a lot of "our").
It's different here though, because these are mentions of things, not articles as a whole.

Statistics

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  • "the Solar System" - 4,749 hits
"our solar system" - 538 hits