Talk:Q4184

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Autodescription — autobiography (Q4184)

description: biography written by the subject
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Classification of the class autobiography (Q4184)  View with Reasonator View with SQID
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⟨autobiography⟩ on wikidata tree visualisation (external tool)(depth=1)
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Not a subclass of biography[edit]

A biography is an account of a person's life written by someone other than that person. An autobiography is not a type of biography. It is in contrast to it, in that it is written by that person. The subclasses have been changed accordingly. Hazmat2 (talk) 16:23, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That’s a very bold claim, do you have any sources for it? Both dewiki (explicitly: „ein Sonderfall der Biografie ist die Autobiografie“) and enwiki (implicitly, third paragraph of the Biography article) disagree, and the etymology of “biography” also doesn’t suggest it. —DSGalaktos (talk) 16:30, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The sources for my statement are: Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary. Hazmat2 (talk) 21:51, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t own those, so I’ll have to refer to the web versions:
  • Merriam-Webster’s biography does not mention foreign authorship, and autobiography says “the biography of a person narrated by himself or herself”, which I would interpret as “subclass”.
  • On the other hand, CED (biography, autobiography) and OED (biography, autobiography) do mention the foreign authorship in “biography” and don’t use the word “biography” in “autobiography”.
I also checked some more sources:
  • The Duden, the German reference dictionary, does not mention foreign authorship in Biografie, and even considers „Biografie“ a synonym of Autobiografie.
  • The English version of Wiktionary does not mention foreign authorship in biography and considers autobiography to be “[a] self-written biography”, i. e. a subclass of it.
  • The German version of Wiktionary does not mention foreign authorship in Biografie and lists „Biografie“ as an „Oberbegriff“ (general term, superclass) of Autobiografie.
It would be great to get some more languages’ perspectives on this – after all, the statements here are supposed to hold for all languages – but as it stands now, it seems to me that the narrower definition of “biography” is only found in some (but not all) English dictionaries, and all other Wikimedia projects consider “autobiography” to be a subclass of “biography”. I think we should be consistent with that. —DSGalaktos (talk) 23:11, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Point taken. Nonetheless, all three do mention an author other than the subject. I'm not sure you are looking at the correct Merriam-Webster entry. The problem with marking autobiography solely as a subclass of biography comes up with something such as memoir (Q112983) which is not only autobiography, but can be written by someone other than the subject. Hazmat2 (talk) 02:19, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I fixed memoir (Q112983) to be a subclass of biography, rather than autobiography, which should fix this in terms of language differences. Hazmat2 (talk) 02:39, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, thanks! —DSGalaktos (talk) 14:15, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How do I add page about myself[edit]

I’m a young notable artist and would like to add page with links about my work how do I do that Bjanke1989 (talk) 17:22, 25 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Bjanke1989: We do not recommend that you add a page about yourself. That is not what this project is about. Perhaps you should try Facebook or LinkedIn. Bovlb (talk) 19:22, 25 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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