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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   23909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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If a trans person was not notable before transitioning, their former name is of no interest to the public and there is no reason to include it, and a good reason – namely, courtesy – to exclude it.

This is only true if there was a legal name change exactly concurrent with the transition, and everybody that noted the person did so under the new name.

See e.g. the page on the Zizians. That Ziz's birth name is Jack is notable because Ziz was arrested before legally changing name (I legit don't know if there has even been a legal name change to Wikipedia's insistent "Ziz LaSota") and as such "Jack LaSota" is the name on the court documents and in much of the press. But "Jack" only appears in the citations, with no explanation.

I've looked at the relevant policies and I see nothing that would preclude "Jack" from being included, especially if it is widely used in the press. If it's still her legal name, it's obviously acceptable, and if it was her legal name at the time of the arrest, a footnote a la Elliot Page would surely be acceptable. Have you tried adding it, ideally accompanied by an explanation on talk that cites this bit?

Former names under which a living person was notable should be introduced with "born" or "formerly" in the lead sentence of their main biographical article. Name and gender matters should be explained at first appearance in that article, without overemphasis. In articles on works or other activities of such a person, use their current name by default, and give another name associated with that context in a parenthetical or footnote, only if they were notable under that name.

I can help with the markup if you want. (I'm not going to do it myself because I don't want to link my Wikipedia account to this account.)

Yeah, I figured that you saying that was a possibility.

This is kind of awkward to point out right now, but... I already quit Wikipedia. I thought the problems could be fixed bottom-up. Maybe they could have. I'm now convinced that they can't, not since No Nazis* and the lab-leak purge - attempting to fix them is now considered evidence of being an enemy infiltrator. So I'm on strike as a WP editor, for years now, because "no longer lend our strength to that which we wish to be free from" i.e. the admin/crat class and to an extent WMF.

*If you want to be bitterly disappointed, look at the history of the talk page on that essay. I thought I had it bad when my objections got hatted as NOTFORUM; afterward, they just straight-up deleted all the dissent against it.

Well, then I guess we'll never know.

I found your post on Wikipedia talk:No Nazis, and I don't see why it was hatted when the surrounding threads were allowed. In case you were suggesting your post was deleted, it wasn't; it was archived, as is standard practice on talk pages with lots of activity.

Regarding the lab leak hypothesis, the consensus in the mainstream media early on during the pandemic was that it was baseless, so that's what Wikipedia reported. Wikipedia isn't really set up to deal with instances of the mainstream media lying. The entire thing is based on the assumption that they are reliable. See: Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth. (Not that they I'm saying they were lying – I don't have a strong opinion on the lab leak hypothesis.) Your only hope is that eventually the media will correct the record. Sometimes the principle fails and the media do lie, but what's the alternative? Trusting random Substacks? If you're going to suggest evaluating the evidence yourself, it's worth noting that the publicly available evidence for the lab leak hypothesis is largely circumstantial or speculative, like the alleged implausibility of this happening right to the next virology institute.

I've looked at the relevant policies and I see nothing that would preclude "Jack" from being included, especially if it is widely used in the press. If it's still her legal name, it's obviously acceptable, and if it was her legal name at the time of the arrest, a footnote a la Elliot Page would surely be acceptable. Have you tried adding it, ideally accompanied by an explanation on talk that cites this bit?

Well, then I guess we'll never know.

I changed my mind. Here.

(The former discussion was here; the edit removing it was here.)

I didn't technically do what you asked me to do, for reasons I explained in that post, but would you still consider this an adequate test?

In case you were suggesting your post was deleted, it wasn't; it was archived, as is standard practice on talk pages with lots of activity.

I wasn't suggesting that. I'm aware it was archived. But a bunch of later complaints by others were not; they were removed outright.

(NB: I believe I've seen that essay cited in a ban comment; I know it says it's not policy, but it's highly-questionable whether this is true.)

Regarding the lab leak hypothesis, the consensus in the mainstream media early on during the pandemic was that it was baseless, so that's what Wikipedia reported.

So, what I mean by "lab-leak purge" is not that WP didn't support the lab leak hypothesis. It's that WP categorised it as "misinformation" - which is an extremely-strong term, implying not just unlikelihood but certitude against. A bunch of people tried to push back on this overconfidence, and a very large number of them (though not me) got banned for it due to the perceived urgency. That bad blood (including from the ban evasion and canvassing attempts that followed) made it much harder to fix WP's bias problem, because it made the admins start considering ideological heresy to be evidence of bad faith (as this issue largely split along partisan lines).

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