Talk:Glossary of early twentieth century slang in the United States

Article statistics

Moved here from the article, as it is metadata about Wikipedia, and not content about an encyclopedic topic. Could be moved into a header banner instead, if desired, using a {{Tmbox}}. Mathglot (talk) 18:55, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Moved into header. Mathglot (talk) 20:19, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Problematic article title

The title of this article currently is Glossary of early twentieth century slang. However, the WP:LEADPARAGRAPH starts out by saying that it is:

... a general list of slang terms commonly used by silent movie critics, theater owners, and film fans to describe the melodramatic films they are reviewing or screening. This glossary offers a fast reference to the slang used in these movie reviews.

The title and the lead paragraph (and even the body) are at odds, and must be brought into alignment.

Either the topic of this article really is a glossary of early twentieth century slang, in which case it should be greatly expanded to include slang terms from baseball, dance culture, prison slang, and from other English-speaking countries (maybe even non-English speaking). Or, as seems much more likely given the lead paragraph and the body content, the topic is actually something else, and the title should be brought into line with the body content.

To me, it looks like the topic of this article is more something like Glossary of early twentieth century film slang, or even Glossary of early twentieth century American film slang, as I didn't go through the whole thing, trying to figure out if there are British or other foreign films included. Even the term early is problematic; is that a substitute for the more precise term "silent film era"? If so, then it should say that explicitly. So in that case, maybe something like, Glossary of American slang from the silent film era.

What needs to happen here, is number one: you have to decide what this article is really about, and then describe that in the MOS:LEADSENTENCE. As a glossary is a type of list article, the issue of selection criteria also applies: if some other editor wants to add something, how do they know what slang terms are in-scope, or out of scope? Are terms from things other than films allowed? Baseball terms? If it's only about film, is just American film? Just film from English-speaking countries? Are we talking strictly about the silent film era (1894 – 1929), or is it less restrictive than that? You can list your selection criteria in a section labeled == Scope ==. You could also could add a top-level section header 'Introduction' as the first body section, and then move 'Background' under it as an H3 subsection, and place 'Scope' there as a second H3 subsection.

Finally, once you have decided what it is really about, you should WP:MOVE the title to reflect what the topic is. Courtesy ping: User:Mtjannetta. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:41, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your observations. This project started out as a simple table listing slang terms used in US silent movie reviews. This explains the veribage at the beginning of the listing. Another editor objected to using a table for these terms, so I converted the table to a glossary.

After I created the glossary, I decided to expand the glossary to include selected US slang terms from the 1920s. Another editor pointed out that each slang term must be sourced. I have spend the last two months sourcing each term. A few days ago, I redirected my efforts to rewriting the header and background.

I will digest all the recommendations you have proposed and try to implement them.

Thank you again and I sure I will be hearing from you the future.

Michael Jannetta (talk) 02:51, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Mtjannetta I appreciate the work you have been doing, and also the path you have taken based on various feedback. There is a kind of hierarchy of importance in Wikipedia standards, in rough order from the top: the Wikimedia Terms of use (not a factor here), then policy with legal implications (not a factor), then policies, then guidelines, then Info and Help pages, then instructions without broad consensus such as template instructions or other local conventions such as WikiProject preferences about how Ship articles should be named and structured, and finally user essays. You have already taken care of referencing (thank you for that!) which is governed by our core policy of WP:Verifiability, so that is good, and important. Whether to use a table or not, is pretty far down the scale, possibly a WikiProject local consensus, possibly even just one editor's opinion which you can accept or ignore; (I could be wrong, but since you've already done it, we're past that now.)

Rewriting the header and background is good, to round out the article. I'd just point out that glossaries are List articles, and not all list articles have much text in them besides the list items themselves. (For that matter, many lists, and possibly even glossaries, are unreferenced. Their argument is that as long as each list item has a blue link to an article, and the article is referenced, then it is okay. While I disagree with that approach, there is enough support for it, that you could go that route, if you wanted to. However, it does depend on the terms having their own article, which seems very unlikely here, as you wouldn't write a whole article on the slang term babe, if for no other reason than WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary (policy). So, your work on referencing everything is well worth it, and important.

I see that by bringing up another issue, namely that of the article title and content, it may feel to you like another editor jumping in pushing you and the article in another direction. That's not my intention, but I realize it may feel like that. As it happens, WP:Article title policy is one of the most important ones, as "The title indicates what the article is about and distinguishes it from other articles." So it is important to get this right, and as the article author, you have a lot of sway, here, because although once you publish it doesn't belong to you anymore but to the community, nevertheless you are the only one who knows what your intention was when you chose to write about it. So I suggest you ponder this, and think about what makes the most sense for this article, and then let's get the title, and the content, aligned with each other, either by changing the title, or by changing the content (or both). There's no rush, but it cannot stay in its current state indefinitely. Does this make sense? Mathglot (talk) 04:26, 22 September 2024 (UTC)