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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Karanacs 03:39, 4 September 2010 [1].

Pig-faced women

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Pig-faced women (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s):  – iridescent 15:52, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because... there is currently no Featured Article which includes the sentence "Once shaved, the drunken bear would be fitted with padded artificial breasts, and dressed in women's clothing and a wig", and I hope to rectify that situation.

This is the story of how garbled half-recollections of an obscure and long-forgotten morality tale ultimately led to thousands of people who should have known better becoming convinced that human-pig chimeras were roaming the streets of major European cities. Yes, it's all true. – iridescent 15:52, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Brief note: I'm sure ending on a pull quote probably breaks some part of the MOS, but I think it has much more impact to end on "as he did so, the figure slowly faded away and vanished", without in any way breaking the narrative or informativeness of the article. – iridescent 15:56, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I believe the article now meets the criteria; another interesting read on a, well, interesting issue. Ucucha 11:17, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

More comments:

  • "On being told by her husband that the choice was hers"—do you mean "When her husband told her that the choice was hers"?
  • The link to Volkskunde does not lead to a journal, but redirects to German folklore (the redirect is dubious; "volkskunde" means "ethnology" in Dutch and German)
  • Piping "Margaret of Henneberg" to House of Henneberg seems dubious, especially as the target doesn't mention the legend.
  • I was assuming that if I didn't, someone would just add it later, and the fictional character was presumably intended to represent a member of this family. If anyone has strong opinions, feel free to take the link out. – iridescent 16:56, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "There is at present a report,in London"—is the unspaced comma in the original? Also: "We ourselves, unwittingly put"; "in whon", "desparate"; a spaced question mark in the letter by "M. A."
  • Fixed. The spaced question mark is in the original, but I've removed it—I've tried to keep to original spelling in quotes, but I don't think that particular one has any advantage to being kept. – iridescent 16:56, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd fairly certain they were American black bears. Asian black bears are more aggressive, and would have been far scarcer than American black bears in England and Ireland in this period—there was (and still is) a fairly steady trade in bears from Canada to Britain for the fur trade. – iridescent 16:56, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Although the sources just say "black bear" or "bear", I think it's vanishingly unlikely anyone would have been importing Asian bears to England other than the occasional specimen for zoos. I can take out the link and just go with "bear", but I'd really rather keep the image; the similarity of an upright bear and a human is counter-intuitive, and the image makes it clearer. If it's kept, the U. americanus image appears to have come from here, according to its Commons page (you have to type "black bear" in the search box to bring it up). It's already used on the FL List of mammals of Florida as well as Bear itself, so I assume someone's checked out the legitimacy—it certainly appears to be a genuine federal government work. – iridescent 17:10, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • How about this as a compromise? It doesn't really matter to the reader what kind of bear it was, and the caption hopefully makes it clear that the image is of a representative bear's posture, rather than that this particular bear was used? – iridescent 17:13, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • That looks fine to me. Asian black bears were often used in entertainment, so I don't think it is very unlikely. As for the image, I noticed that link, but I don't think a link to a homepage suffices; you'll need a link to the actual image. (And I'm sure you know that an image having been around for a while and appearing in an odd FA or FL doesn't guarantee that it is in order.) Ucucha 17:55, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fixed, I think. I've never understood PD-gov, and what is and isn't covered; I assume Elcobbola or Jappalang will shout if it's not correct. We have surprisingly few pictures of bears standing upright. – iridescent 18:13, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I found this source (quoting The History of Doctor Steevens' Hospital, Dublin, 1720–1920 [1924] by T. Percy Kirkpatrick), which claims that the story of Steevens being pig-faced only gained currency after her death, contrary to our article's claim that it started during her lifetime. Ucucha 18:25, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm fairly certain that will be wrong. It's well documented that Griselda took to sitting in public view to refute the "pig" rumour, and commissioned a portrait despite her reclusiveness, specifically for that reason. – iridescent 18:40, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yet all those are from long after her own time; Kirkpatrick says though the story later became prevalent, there was no actual evidence that it existed during her lifetime, and none of those appear to give that evidence. (I can e-mail you the article, which in addition to the Irish text contains a number of long and interesting quotations on pig-faced people, if you wish.) Ucucha 19:45, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally, I'd say that with at least seven "began in her lifetime" sources (including two university presses plus Robert Chambers) and only one "began after her lifetime", we're into WP:VNT territory. It's not down to us to decide what's true, it's to report what other people have said. – iridescent 19:58, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not all of these are quite explicit that the rumor arose during her lifetime, and I would view Kirkpatrick—as far as I can see, a historian who actually reviewed the issue, not a popular writer who just repeats an interesting story—as more reliable than most other sources. Ucucha 20:00, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not buying it. I could see stretching to an "although Kirkpatrick (1924) states that the rumour did not begin to circulate until after her death", but I don't see how we can rewrite a section against a pretty overwhelming consensus among sources, based on a single author writing 180 years after her death. – iridescent 20:08, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • This seems precisely the kind of situation where people parroting each other create their own truth, even when actual historians know better. We should use the most reliable sources, not just count who says what. Kirkpatrick states explicitly that there are no records of the rumor from Steevens's lifetime, and given that he wrote a book on the hospital's history, he surely must have had some familiarity with those records. Another history doesn't even bother to mention the rumor, and neither does the (brief) DNB entry for the Steevenses. Ucucha 20:21, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • You have to look at who the "people parroting each other" are, though. When one of them is Robert Chambers—arguably the most influential Scottish historian ever—and another is Desmond Guinness, possibly the world's leading expert on 18th century Ireland, you can't just dismiss them as "not actual historians". I agree that there doesn't seem to be any mention of the rumour prior to about 1800—and there's circumstantial evidence for it not being in wide circulation, in that people like Swift don't mention it—but we have to report what sources are saying, not what we personally think is true. Does this work as a compromise? It makes it clear that when the rumour surfaced is in dispute. – iridescent 10:31, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks. That seems reasonable enough to me, though perhaps it's good to add some additional "according to the rumour" to the sentence about her sitting on the balcony. I looked for a few more sources; this says "During the nineteenth century she became part of the folklore of Steevens', and was said to have the face of a pig."; JSTOR 30105460, on the other hand, says the belief was widespread in her lifetime; doi:10.1007/BF02957318 says that her rooms in the hospital were on the ground floor (make of that what you will; I also read in various sources that the balcony she used was near but not in the hospital, and that she would sit at a window). Although I may have underestimated the reliability of some sources, what makes me consider Kirkpatrick particularly reliable here is that he appears to be the only source who gives positive evidence that he has considered the question of when the rumor arose, and the only one who cites primary evidence. Ucucha 11:17, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can't access the article; what exactly does it say? I'd be surprised if someone has a source for ACR; it's definitely unattributed in the original other than a printer's name, and none of the catalog entries at Worldcat give an author. Was it definitely A Certaine Relation that it says he wrote, and not one of the ballads mentioned in footnote 1? The section of the article I can see describes him as a ballad-monger, and ACR certainly isn't a ballad; it's a single huge poster-size sheet covered in densely-written prose. – iridescent 18:40, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • p. 457: "If one were anxious to injure Parker's reputation, one could advance strong evidence to show that he soon outdid himself by writing anonymously a prose tract called A certaine Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman called Mistris Tannakin Skinker, who was borne at Wirkham." Ucucha 18:45, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually, it doesn't seem implausible that that is the original source—it goes from a peep-show with a representation of Griselda eeting from a silver trough, to Bondeson claiming that many thought the trough had been Griselda's, to this article saying it was alleged to have been Griselda's. Ucucha 19:02, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Now, this is an article I don't mind reading, and one I'd love to see promoted.

  • The "standard elements" section really doesn't agree with the explanation in the lead, and doesn't explicitly give dates- is that what was believed from the seventeeth century right up to the twentieth? In all those locations?
  • Aside from the single instance of the "Jewish convert" version, yes. The lead (briefly) covers the evolution of the story; "Standard element" summarizes those parts which didn't change. – iridescent 17:43, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Did Dickens believe in pig-faced ladies, then?
  • Hard to say; he believed that the legend had been around for a long time, and wrote to that effect, but nowhere does he say if he actually believes it. (It's unlikely he did, although most of the other "prodigies" he mentions, such as the "piebald negro" and the "lobster-handed child" are verifiably genuine.) The "in every age" quote used comes from this article. He seems to have had something of a fascination with PFWs; they turn up in quite a few of his works (see [2]). – iridescent 17:43, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't mean to patronise, but are you sure you mean Holland? Holland and the Netherlands are not the same thing, the Netherlands are just sometimes incorrectly (or, I would call it incorrectly) referred to as Holland. To complicate things a little (and I admit I had to check our articles to get all of these), throughout this period, you could reasonably be referring to a period where the Netherlands were under Spanish rule, the Dutch Republic, the (short lived) Batavian Republic, the (equally short lived) Kingdom of Holland, a period as part of the French Empire, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and, finally, the country we currently know as the Netherlands. I appreciate that's not what this article is about, but a little clarification would be good.
  • I mean Holland, not the Netherlands or any of its successor/predecessor states—more specifically, the Amsterdam area onl. A Certaine Relation talks of "the lands of the Hollander", not "the Netherlands", and the Dutch versions of the story all appear to be set in or around Amsterdam. – iridescent 17:43, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • For the period in question, all European prints are technically "Old master prints", whatever the printing method used. I have no intention of using the term, since 95% of readers haven't a specialist knowledge of archival jargon and understand something different by "old master"—there's too much chance they'll think Rembrandt or Hals painted her, or something along those lines. – iridescent 17:48, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Linking "Margaret of Henneberg" to the house is a little deceptive- I was expecting an article on the pig herself :P
  • "During Mrs Skinker's" You previously referred to her merely as "Skinker", which is probably a little more encyclopedic.
  • "Skinker" refers to Tannakin (the PFW); "Mrs Skinker" to Parnel, her mother. I didn't really want to keep writing the names in full, but can do if you think it's confusing.
  • Reworded the Skinker family in first-name terms per the MOS, although to my eyes it looks odd (in this 17th century context, it would be deeply disrespectful). I have kept a couple of occurences of "Griselda Steevens" in full even though it technically violates MOS, as I think it reads more clearly that way. – iridescent 18:45, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll finish the article in a little while, I have to head off for a few minutes. J Milburn (talk) 17:37, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, continuing to read-

  • The Griselda Steevens section, again, has some family naming stuff- refer to the MOS link above. It looks fine how you've done it, to me, but we may as well go along with the MOS.
  • Not sure about the category on pig-faced women- this is the only article in the category, and the image pages could very easily end up speedy-deleted as the images are hosted on Commons. If they should be categorised, it should probably be on Commons.
  • When the category was set up, this was going to be a series of short articles rather than one long one. I've no objection if anyone wants to delete it. I'll strongly and noisily object if anyone tries to move the images to Commons and delete the local copies. The lead image is almost certainly not PD in Commons terms; more importantly, this is the kind of article Reddit picks up, and if they move to Commons (where we can't protect them if need be), we'll be spending all day reverting pictures of friends/enemies/Sarah Palin from it. – iridescent 19:04, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I thought no; aside from that hoax, it doesn't seem to have caught on in France in the same way as in London, Dublin and Amsterdam. Not sure what others think. Feel free to add categories; I'm aware that my attitude to categorization is narrower than most people's. – iridescent 19:04, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I guess you know, but that article is beautifully researched and fantastically well written. I literally laughed out loud on several occasions, yet everything included was highly relevant, and written in the right tone. It doesn't follow a very standard format, but this is hardly a standard topic! This really has the umph that it'd be nice if all featured articles had. J Milburn (talk) 18:51, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Although you can't see it in the history (it was cut-and-pasted from a sandbox) this actually took more time than even monstrosities like Brill Tramway (made more difficult by the fact that nobody's put A Certaine Relation online). In a neat bit of synchronicity, I've just discovered that Ulysses includes the line "Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the house of Lambert", which brings the last few weeks back to where they began in a neat circle. – iridescent 19:07, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sources comments: Nitpicks only:-

  • Bibliography: for consistency, "Hyder E. Rollins, ed" should be formatted: "Rollins, Hyder E., ed."
  • Likewise, "John Wilson"
  • Another consistency point: refs 47-49 show publisher details in parentheses, whereas 13 doesn't.

Otherwise sources look OK. Brianboulton (talk) 18:50, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed Rollins. John Wilson is the name of a publishing house, not an author. The difference in punctuation is owing to ref 13 being {{cite book}} while refs 47-49 are {{cite journal}}; any change would mean amending citation/core, which I'm not going to touch. (We have no policy, AFAIK, on the correct way to cite a chapbook.) – iridescent 19:13, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
All sources issues resolved. Brianboulton (talk) 10:20, 28 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The Times" is the formal name, and used in citations and references, and in the first usage of the term; "the Times" is what it's generally called in normal English usage and thus how it's referred to in the body text (after an initial use of "The Times" to establish which "Times" we're talking about). A look at their website confirms that this is the usage they use as well (with "The Times" as the masthead, but "Join the Times Advisory Board" as one of the links. – iridescent 15:50, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments. This is of course generally excellent, but just a few things:
    • There's some repetion of "originating roughly simultaneously in Holland, England, and France" in the last paragraph of Standard elements and the first paragraph of Origins.
    • "The other significant theory about the origin of the legend ...". We haven't been given any other theory, just a description of the earliest accounts of the legend.
  • The "other" theory is that given in the paragraph above as being propounded by Bondeson (you know my opinion of Bondeson generally, but as he was the doctor who supervised the modern tests on Pastrana's body, this is one area where he genuinely is the leading expert and thus I've put him first); that the PFW story evolved from earlier "woman gives birth to something unusual" stories and had no basis in fact, as opposed to Chambers' theory that there was a genuine woman with a facial disfigurement and accounts of her had been exaggerated. – iridescent 19:57, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Chambers speculates that the original child may have had a similar appearance to Julia Pastrana, a woman with hypertrichosis and distorted (although not pig-like) facial features, who was widely exhibited in Europe and North America from the 1850s until the 1970s." Until the 1970s? That's apparently attributed to the 1864 version of Chambers.
    • The newspaper is sometimes given as the Times instead of The Times.
    • The capitalisation of "Pig-faced" isn't always consistent, such as in "Mr F. FitzHenry claimed to have known the Pig-Faced Lady's sister" and "belief in the Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square".
  • The link to Varahi definitely ought to stay; this is about the European tradition, and there's an entirely separate and independent Asian PFW tradition dealt with there. Penelope is there primarily to discourage people from thinking "oh, they didn't mention that", and hopefully prevent the unwelcome appearance of an "in popular culture" section; it's also likely to be what the majority of people searching for "pig-faced woman" are actually looking for. Pig Bride can go if anyone strongly objects to it; it's there for the same reason as Penelope, but is less likely to be a frequently searched term. – iridescent 00:10, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Definitely agree re Varahi now that I've read that article further. I see where you're coming from on the other two, but somehow putting the other two in there essentially to discourage passing pop-culture mentions seems almost counterproductive; having those mentions at the very top of the article seems to me like the cure is worse than the disease. ~ mazca talk 00:16, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree to some extent about Pig Bride, but I do think Penelope ought to stay there. The point of Wikipedia articles is to be useful to readers, and most people aren't interested in early-modern English folklore—to my mind, most hits on this page are likely to come from "what was that movie where Christina Ricci had a pig's head?" searches. If it's in a "see also" section at the bottom, they'll never see it; having it at the top tips them off right away as to where they ought to be looking. (I also put a similar one at the top of Alice Ayres, which serves the same purpose.) As long as the hatnote doesn't sprawl indiscriminately, it doesn't cause any problems—nobody's going to think "I won't read this article, the hatnote runs onto a second line"—so in my mind, if it helps even a single user, in the end it's a net gain. – iridescent 00:30, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Makes sense to me - I see your point about the way it doesn't do any quantifiable harm to the article and is potentially beneficial. Purely an aesthetic thing I think, I might just be a person that pays more attention to hatnotes than average! ~ mazca talk 00:34, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • On reflection, I've removed the link to Pig Bride, as I don't think many people will be looking for it. I do think Penelope should stay; I can easily imagine someone looking up "pig faced woman" to try to find the film, and this is currently the first Wikipedia page that particular Google search brings up. – iridescent 00:47, 4 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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