User talk:Stonejamcar
on calling out slaveholders
[edit]Hello. I find what you are doing very to be very disruptive, and have reverted most of your edits. While slave-owning was a fact of life for some wealthy people in history (I'm sure you're educated enough to know slavery is not a uniquely American invention), and a painful legacy for Americans, your robotic mass addition of "enslaver" to hundreds of descriptions seems agenda driven and contra the guidelines at Help:Description: (Avoid opinionated, biased or promotional wording. Avoid controversial claims...) Most items to which you're adding this aren't particularly known for slave owning, and I think you are clearly pushing an agenda. Wikidata is not the place to do so. The instructions at slave owner (Q10076267) discourage using it as an occupation, when it's more appropriate as a social classification (P3716) (as is enslaved person (Q12773225)). Would you say that an enslaved person's occupation was slave, rather than cook (Q156839) or laborer (Q12713481)?) Is a convict's occupation prisoner (Q1862087)? While morally reprehensible by today's standards, owning a human or car or a house or legal and social matters, not occupational. slave trader (Q17769800) is an occupation that would be appropriate to add to the description of people who are most known for such. slave owner (Q10076267) is a social/legal classification, and it shouldn't be added to description just as we don't add "homeowner" or "land owner" to people whose primary notability isn't their property nor how they acquired it. -Animalparty (talk) 07:08, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Animalparty: Sorry, I have to fundamentally disagree with this take. These are cited historical facts regardless of how common one might feel they were at a particular point in time, and I would object to any removal of this information from statements in these items. Gamaliel (talk) 15:59, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
- Gamaliel To be clear, I have no objection to denoting slaveowners as a sourced social classification (P3716). But appending to the description of hundreds of items like "Congressman and enslaver" makes about as much sense as "athlete and drug user" or "actor and domestic abuser" or "scientist and homeowner" (which is to say, little sense at all). I object to taking a single fact and implying it is a major defining/distinguishing trait. -Animalparty (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
- Animalparty Thank you for clarifying, I'm glad we can agree on the fact being present in item statements, I was concerned that you supported removing it altogether. Gamaliel (talk) 18:05, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
- I disagree, I don't see why adding "enslaver" is an issue. It is an occupation these individuals held. One person's label is "renowned statesman and orator." Shouldn't we also identify them as a person that owned other human beings? The purpose of the project where I received the data from (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/congress-slaveowners-names-list/) was to contextualize how significant slave ownership is to our country's history.
- Also, it really is not fair to compare "Congressman and enslaver" to "Athlete and drug user." Drug use is an addiction, not a moral failing or occupation. Stonejamcar (talk) 20:19, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- As I've stated, and as usage notes for slave owner (Q10076267) indicate, human ownership is considered more a social classification than an occupation for the purposes of Wikidata. Again, I have no issue with adding sourced slave ownership as a social classification, or otherwise denoting this bit of data. I'm not even going around and removing "slaveowner" from every occupation (although a bot might be established to move these from P106 to P3716, with community consensus). And there may well be historical figures on Wikidata for whom slaveholding was a primary reason for their entry into the historical record. But however morally corrupt, or ingrained in the history of the United States, owning humans was an incidental means to an end, just as "plow owner" or "typewriter owner" aren't occupations, but "farmer" or "writer" are. Yes George Washington (Q23) owned slaves (which has its own Wikipedia article), and had many occupations. Similarly George H. W. Bush (Q23505) also had many roles and occupations before and after his political career, and these are enumerated in P106. But for the sake of succinctness and generality, none of those need mention in the description (Wikidata descriptions do not linger in obscurity deep within the bowels of Wikidata, but rather are widely broadcast across the internet by any source that draws from it). Recklessly appending "and enslaver" to description fields is like calling Albert Einstein (Q937) a "physicist and violinist" or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Q55223040) a "politician and former bartender": pedantically true yet placing disproportionate emphasis. If I think baseball is an important and underappreciated aspect of American political history, and used an ESPN article to add "and baseball player" to the descriptions every politician (and their spouse) who ever swung a bat, that would rightly be seen as equally agenda driven, and hopefully frowned upon. -Animalparty (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- You removed "enslaver" from Jefferson Davis, who started a war in order to keep owning slaves. You are accusing me of some agenda, yet you seem determine to erase this history from the record. They owned slaves, they started a war in order to keep doing it, this doesn't seem tangential to their lives like Einstein playing the violin. Enslavers themselves were proud and spoke of how important enslaving people was to their way of life. They didn't believe it was incidental, so why should we? I didn't call them names, or evil, I just added one word to note this huge part of their life. Wikidata allows me to add this as an occupation, it seems rather neutral, actually, to add to the description like their other jobs.
- Might I ask, are you regularly removing occupations from descriptions? If not, why is it so important to you to do so now, in this case? Why go to bat for enslavers?
- I'm not going to get into some kind of data editing back-and-forth with you, I just ask that you reflect on why you are so uncomfortable calling people who own slaves out on it. Stonejamcar (talk) 14:39, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
- As I've said several times, slave-owning/enslaving is not an occupation, just as home owner or car owner is not an occupation, neither is captor, prisoner, slave, etc. It's abhorrent, but under slavery, humans were property. We don't call a rancher who owns many cows a cow owner or cow killer. And I am not removing anything from "the record": I have not removed any instance of slave owner (Q10076267) (although it is more appropriate at social classification (P3716) than occupation (P106)). I made wholesale reversions to your wholesale unilateral edits of descriptions, and thus there may be some collateral damage: as I've said, there may be some historic figures for whom slave owning was a defining, central aspect warranting noting in the description. In the future, please consider proposing largescale bot/automated edits at Wikidata:Project chat before making them, if for no other reason than to ensure things go as smoothly as possible. Cheers, -Animalparty (talk) 23:47, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
- As I've stated, and as usage notes for slave owner (Q10076267) indicate, human ownership is considered more a social classification than an occupation for the purposes of Wikidata. Again, I have no issue with adding sourced slave ownership as a social classification, or otherwise denoting this bit of data. I'm not even going around and removing "slaveowner" from every occupation (although a bot might be established to move these from P106 to P3716, with community consensus). And there may well be historical figures on Wikidata for whom slaveholding was a primary reason for their entry into the historical record. But however morally corrupt, or ingrained in the history of the United States, owning humans was an incidental means to an end, just as "plow owner" or "typewriter owner" aren't occupations, but "farmer" or "writer" are. Yes George Washington (Q23) owned slaves (which has its own Wikipedia article), and had many occupations. Similarly George H. W. Bush (Q23505) also had many roles and occupations before and after his political career, and these are enumerated in P106. But for the sake of succinctness and generality, none of those need mention in the description (Wikidata descriptions do not linger in obscurity deep within the bowels of Wikidata, but rather are widely broadcast across the internet by any source that draws from it). Recklessly appending "and enslaver" to description fields is like calling Albert Einstein (Q937) a "physicist and violinist" or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Q55223040) a "politician and former bartender": pedantically true yet placing disproportionate emphasis. If I think baseball is an important and underappreciated aspect of American political history, and used an ESPN article to add "and baseball player" to the descriptions every politician (and their spouse) who ever swung a bat, that would rightly be seen as equally agenda driven, and hopefully frowned upon. -Animalparty (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Animalparty Thank you for clarifying, I'm glad we can agree on the fact being present in item statements, I was concerned that you supported removing it altogether. Gamaliel (talk) 18:05, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
- Gamaliel To be clear, I have no objection to denoting slaveowners as a sourced social classification (P3716). But appending to the description of hundreds of items like "Congressman and enslaver" makes about as much sense as "athlete and drug user" or "actor and domestic abuser" or "scientist and homeowner" (which is to say, little sense at all). I object to taking a single fact and implying it is a major defining/distinguishing trait. -Animalparty (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)