Talk:J. K. Rowling/Archive 14

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Jessica rowling

Why they gave a name for portuguese tradition? Are she is a british national or a portuguese national? Ow man this is annoying since maternal name is the 1st surname while the paternal name is the 2nd surname Please anyone want to know and ask? Why jessica has a wrong surname ordering? She is actually a rowling in the last name! UrutoramanGuy66 (talk) 05:17, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Sources (and Wikipedia) say that Portuguese naming customs are the opposite of Spanish, for example. In Spanish naming customs, the paternal name would be first (Jessica Isabel Arantes Rowling). But in Portuguese, sources say it is typically the opposite: the maternal name always comes first (Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes). See Portuguese name#General; other sources say the same, although Portuguese is more flexible than Spanish, and either is possible.[1][2]

I have not seen any source discussing her nationality; I'm unclear why that is relevant. Regardless of what nationality she now has, she was born in Portugal, which means she would have both last names unless she was not recognized by her father.

That said, her full name was in the article before the Featured article review, but the source used [3] does not actually include the double last name; they don't give any last name. I can't find any source that claims her name is Jessica Rowling rather than Jessica Arantes. What is your basis for saying her name is Jessica Rowling? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:50, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

And Pugh, page 3, has the full name as Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:06, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

New Politico article

Anything in the following article worth using? I wasn't too involved in writing J. K. Rowling#Transgender people so I wouldn't really know. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 15:25, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

• Wheaton, Sarah (3 July 2022). "The metamorphosis of J.K. Rowling". Politico. Retrieved 3 July 2022.

I read it yesterday, and didn't find anything I thought we hadn't covered or discussed, and additionally, am unsure how others feel about using Politico, although I found the article very comprehensive (it seemed to cover all issues well, and from all sides). I did note that we say "critics" call her transphobic, while Politico points to fans: "have been denounced by fans as transphobic". I still prefer our term, as more encompassing. The other thing I noted (and also in other sources) is that the institutions who benefit from her writing seem to be hedging their bets more now; eg, Warner Bros came out and defended her when an external PR group disallowed a question about her at an interview of one of the actors. Politico says she "seems to be winning" the debate, but I doubt anyone would be comfortable adding that based on such a source. I came out at the same place where I sensed we were left at the end of the FAR: several months down the road, a new survey of scholarly sources will be needed, and after that is done, we may then be in position to re-discuss the lead, with sufficient distance from the ill-prepared RFC. So I didn't immediately spot anything we could/would use there for now. The article brings a lot of new points that are already covered by some of the newer scholarly sources, and my hunch is that, several months down the road, we will be in better position to lower the use of less scholarly sources, so am unconvinced we should bring in another one now. I hope we'll hear from others on this particular source, as it is quite complete in its coverage. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:33, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

I too think it is broadly in line with what we already have in the article. I was tempted to suggest we could include her recent championing by Vladimir Putin, and her annoyance at being associated with him. It's certainly contemporary and nicely illustrates the difficulties of her stance on trans issues. Perhaps this has been discussed already? If not, could we spare a sentence to mention it? It's easy to find good sources for it, certainly. --Wubslin (talk) 14:25, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

We had what I recall as a well-attended discussion on Putin, and I can't understand why I am unable to locate that discussion now. What we decided was basically not to include Putin until/unless scholarly sources did, because a) length and DUE weight issues, and b) not to entertain Putin's fantasies. I suggest the broader issue of cancel culture can be dealt with without invoking Putin's fantasies ... and there are scholarly sources for the broader issue. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:38, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

At last ... found it ... Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/J. K. Rowling/archive1/Archive 3#Putin ... it continues in Archive 5, but no one responded there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:21, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your trouble in looking it out. Having read over that archive, I agree with not including it. Even though the Politico article does. --Wubslin (talk) 16:36, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

"Female privilege"

This content about "female privilege" was inserted a second time after these user talk notices, and with no article talk discussion. I am unable to find any high-quality sources using this terminology, much less anything to support due weight. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:45, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

The female privilege article has just been reverted to a redirect. It was created (and recreated) by the same user who was adding the reference to this article, so I suspect they might have an axe to grind. — Czello 11:53, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Suspicions are wrong. I don't have an Ax To Grind. I was creating a link to JK Rowling as there was an article concerning her and Trans. I was googling female privilege and trans, she came up. I put it in both articles to create a more substantial article. I have no issue with either JK Rowling or female privilege. BlackAmerican (talk) 12:10, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Please read WP:BLP, WP:RS, WP:DUE, and then contrast Wikipedia policies with the low-quality junk that turns up when you google "female privilege" Rowling. Those are not the kinds of sources Wikipedia uses for biographies of living persons, and adding the content here would be unduly weighted. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:29, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, as a lifelong learner. Thank you for the information. I will go forth and use it. BlackAmerican (talk) 12:44, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Her title is stated as FRCPE, but she is not a physician

Was this added as a troll? The citation listed doesn't include any references to her being a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Citation needed or mark for deletion 2604:CA00:17C:C007:0:0:1064:FC71 (talk) 02:39, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

It's cited in the body to this, which lists her in a list of fellows for Author. For services to Literature and Philanthropy. She does appear to be the only non-medical person on the list. Hog Farm _Talk 02:46, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

I have removed both of the honorary fellowship post-nominals - she isn't a physician. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 12:01, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Conspiracy theory

There is a conspiracy theory that says that she doesn't existe, sources — Preceding unsigned comment added by 191.113.195.220 (talk) 16:56, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Not worthy of inclusion, and the only reliable source of the bunch is from 2017, linking hers in with a bunch of other useless conspiracy theories. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:18, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Agree, completely WP:UNDUE to include. Hog Farm _Talk 17:32, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, it's not worthy of inclusion. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:37, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

It's an entertaining meme, but not suitable for inclusion here. John (talk) 20:50, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

References

Semi-protected edit request on 29 August 2022

Under views, transgender people, change feminists to people. Feminists does not accurately represent the full scope. 84.71.121.131 (talk) 14:14, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

 Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. This content was workshopped heavily during the featured article review. Changes are possible, but they will definitely need discussion (which should start with sources). It's also unclear which use of "feminists" you are referring to. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:20, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Feminists is what the sources support and what was the consensus wording during the Featured article review. Other supporters are also mentioned. The issue for JKR is that she views the proposed legal changes as an affront to women's rights, as do the "some femininsts" who support her, hence the sources that focus on feminists. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:24, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

People is a rather large subset of ... um people. I hazard a guess that this was based on zero reliable sources. Its bad enough implying that the few vocal gender vexed/trans-exclusionary radical feminists individuals with platforms and a couple of small fringe groups (called "Some feminists" in this article) amounted to anything remotely close to equalling the majority of feminists and feminist organisations worldwide (See Feminist views on transgender topics ). As for people, even in the United Kingdom where the are relatively a few more of these anti transgender radical feminist type extremists, research collected in NatCen's British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey shows that most people's attitude towards transgender people is in fact broadly positive [4]. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 17:24, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I myself am confused why "individuals" are referenced in support of Rowling but not in opposition: "These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations and some feminists, but have received support from other feminists and individuals." aside from the misspelling of "criticized" and "organizations". Why would it not be "These have been criticized as transphobic by LGBTQIA rights organizations, some feminists AND INDIVIDUALS, but have received support from other feminists and individuals."? Seems to infer that ONLY LGBT organizations and some feminists are in opposition when that is clearly far from the case.Kiwisoup (talk) Kiwisoup (talk) 22:10, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Please see WP:ENGVAR; the words are not misspelled (it's British English). Wikipedia content reflects secondary sources, and the sources behind this content has been considerably reviewed by a couple dozen editors. Have you read them? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:48, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

User Kiwisoup is correct in pointing out the inconsistency of individuals only being included on Rowling side in the lede. After all in the body of this article we write that her statements had fuelled debates on freedom of speech, academic freedom and cancel culture (suggesting individuals on both sides) and prompted support for transgender people from the literary, arts and culture sectors (more individuals). Plus the leading actors of the Wizarding World franchise, as well as Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organisation, and additionally we mention non LGBTQI / non feminism organizations such as Human Rights Campaign and the Harry Potter fansites MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron. So i think it is correct to point out the inconsistency... Individuals and maybe other organizations (non-feminist/trans rights) should be included. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 19:05, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

The lead was the subject of a long and contentious RFC, and the body of the article was worked considerably during the FAR and stayed within the bounds of the RFC. If we are to change something now, we need a concrete proposal for discussion. So far, I don't know what the proposed change is, and what sources support it. I suggest starting with the body, initiating a proposal in a new section, and doing it in the format that served us well during the FAR. See below. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:25, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

The change is incredibly simple and certainly more accurately reflects the body of the article, In fact the body directly refers to more trans supporting individuals than individuals supporting Rawling. However, I will follow your suggestion. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 22:30, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Suggested format for draft proposals

I suggest starting a new suggestion for proposals, below, using this format. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:27, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Current (diff and word count)	Proposed (word count)
Text that is currently in the article	Text that is the proposed change

Sources
References

This new draft proposal more accurately reflects the text currently in the body of the article

Note: Citations are not normally required in the lead, especially when they are clearly provided in the body of the article.

This proposal relates to the lede section covering section 9.3 Transgender people.

The current lede has an inconsistency, while it mentions individuals supporting Rawling, it fails to mention the various non-trans/non-feminist supporters of trans rights. After all, in the body of this article we write that her statements had fuelled debates on freedom of speech, academic freedom and cancel culture (suggesting individuals on both sides) and prompted support for transgender people from the literary, arts and culture sectors (more individuals) and are sourced in the body. Plus the leading actors of the Wizarding World franchise, as well as Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organisation, and additionally we mention non LGBTQI / non feminism organisations such as Human Rights Campaign and the Harry Potter fansites MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron are all mentioned and sourced in the body. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 22:50, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Current 47	Proposed 49
Since late 2019, she has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations and some feminists, but have received support from other feminists and individuals.	Since late 2019, she has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations, feminists, other organisations and individuals; but have received support from other feminists and individuals.

Discussion of proposed change to lead

The current wording was the subject of an extremely well attended RFC, Talk:J. K. Rowling/Archive 11. I am unsure we can change it without another formal RFC; I've started this discussion section. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:09, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

And now that I understand what the request is, my own views is that, if we are to launch a new RFC, we could do better than this on the wording (as we did in the body of the article, where we weren't constrained by the pre-existing RFC). Some feminists support Rowling, others don't. Some individuals support her, others don't. Some actors, artists, etc support her, most don't. We covered all these groups in the body of the article, but the way the sentence in the lead is constructed now forces us to be unnecessarily repetitive. Before launching an RFC, we might discuss how to improve the wording overall, rather than just patching it up, as the original RFC was about text that was not even supported by sources. If we have to run a new RFC, we should get the whole thing right. What we did in the article body, reflecting sources and lowering the repetition, was state that her views "divided feminists", which avoided the whole "some" but "other" business, and the need to repeat feminists twice in the sentence. But we did much more than that when we looked at sources and got the content in the body right; I think we could do more of that here if we're ready to really run a new RFC aiming at fixing the lead. Discussion and nailing down the text better before a new RFC would be a better route to success. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:31, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Going straight to your advice on reducing repetition in the lede text, I have suggested a new version below. Apologies if it is in the wrong place. The newer version below also reduces the word count. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bodney (talk • contribs)

Just FYI: you mentioned non LGBTQI / non feminism organisations such as Human Rights Campaign. The Human Rights Campaign is an LGBT organisation. Cheers, gnu57 16:37, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks (I am not based in the USA and should have checked) ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 16:46, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

While it's been a while since we last discussed an RfC, has sufficient time passed such that editors won't immediately think "You're joking, not another one!"? While we do recognise the flaws the last RfC have left us with and the impact it has had on smithing this section, and I'm not opposed in any way to holding another to fix that situation. I just worry that regardless of how much care we put in to the question and explainer, there will be a cohort of editors who will procedurally !vote "Bad RfC/too soon". I could also be mistaken though, and I'm worrying over nothing. Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:04, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Reducing repetition and reflecting the body accurately

Current 47	Proposed 37
Since late 2019, she has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations and some feminists, but have received support from other feminists and individuals.	Since late 2019, she has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations and other associations, and has divided both feminists and other individuals.

~ BOD ~ ^TALK 09:36, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I think that a very good start. I'd suggest giving it a week or so for other followers here to tweak, opine, etcetera, and then once/if we have some agreement here, you launch a new and separate section as a formal RFC. In a perfect world, we shouldn't have to do that, but the last RFC was so widely attended, and so contentious, that it seems the safest course, to avoid a repeat of that debacle (which was a premature and pretty much malformed RFC that we got stuck with). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:41, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

PS, somewhere in the FAR, we had a ping list; if others feel it appropriate, we could ping the FAR group for feedback on this wording before we launch an RFC, as they are the group most familiar with the sources. For now, I'm hesitant to use that ping list unless others think it the right way to go pre-RFC. We did clearly discuss on the FAR that we would need to revisit this later in the (this) year, so from that angle, I can sorta/kinda justify reconvening the FAR group for a new look at this sentence. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:48, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

That ping list is here; we had also discussed re-examining the section heading, but I wonder if we should keep the two items separate, or attempt one RFC to address them together? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:55, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

i think keep them separate, to keep discussions simple. This one is about the lede/lead. The other is about the section. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 16:04, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Works for me, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:05, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Pinging everyone who was previously on the ping list for the JK Rawling FAR @4meter4, A. C. Santacruz, AleatoryPonderings, Aza24, Barkeep49, Bastun, BilledMammal, Bodney, Buidhe, Crossroads, Ealdgyth, Endwise, Extraordinary Writ, Firefangledfeathers, FormalDude, Guerillero, Hog Farm, Hurricane Noah, Innisfree987, Ipigott, Johnbod, LokiTheLiar, Newimpartial, Olivaw-Daneel, RandomCanadian, Sdkb, Sideswipe9th, Silver seren, SMcCandlish, Vanamonde93, Xxanthippe, Zmbro, and Z1720:

Reason for the ping : I have suggested a change to the text in the lead/lede section to make it more accurately reflect the agreed upon sourced text in the J. K. Rowling#Transgender people subsection. Kiwisoup pointed out that in the lede (added text in italics) "individuals" were referenced in support of Rowling but not in opposition, looking at the relevant subsection there are in fact clearer examples given of individuals critical of Rowling than those supporting her. Details are given twice above, including at Talk:J. K. Rowling#This new draft proposal more accurately reflects the text currently in the body of the article. This proposed change also removes the repetition in the current wording. (I have never pinged other editors before or set up a RfC, I hope I did the first stage OK) ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 17:38, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

My issue with this sentence has been that it portrays support and opposition as similar, when they are not; folks' feelings about Rowling's statements mirrors other social and political divides, and also divides within the feminist movement. I recognize it's difficult to do that in a sentence, but I remain less than thrilled with both the present and the proposed versions. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:44, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Vanamonde. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:02, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm in agreement with Vanamonde here. The proposed replacement trades off specificity for brevity, and creates an implication that is unsupported by the sources in doing so. For the sake of ten words, I don't really see a reason to trim in this way. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:54, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

My problem with this sentence is that it's excessively indirect. I understand why it's so indirect, but I don't think that really reflects the sourcing we have here. Like, it's not just LGBT rights groups that have criticized her about this, it's up to and including most of the crew of the Harry Potter movies. (Not to dismiss the fact that there's sourcing which disagrees, just to say that it seems like one of these views is the majority.) I think Bodney's change is good as far as it goes, but believe that the ideal would be that this sentence should be rewritten pretty significantly. Loki (talk) 19:14, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

True, evidence given in the Transgender people subsection indicates the level of support and opposition to her opinions are not the same. However, sadly this topic has been, on a multiple occasions, a very divisive section in this article, so I am trying to be exceedingly neutral. Improved wording that accurately reflects the subsection and sourced reality, and improves upon my wording, is of course welcome. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 19:37, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

My objection to the sentence is that it's *not* neutral though. A neutral version of this sentence should mention that large parts of the Harry Potter fandom and most of the cast of the movies have objected to Rowling's statements on this issue: that information is well-sourced, and is also clearly DUE since she's mainly notable for Harry Potter. Right now it's portrayed as purely a debate between LGBT activists and, uh, ambiguously defined "individuals" (which is my other objection, at least say the words "trans-exclusionary feminists", or at least "gender-critical feminists"). This isn't a neutral portrayal of the accusations: rather it privileges the POV of supporters of Rowling's statements over the POV of those that oppose them. Loki (talk) 01:46, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I also strongly agree with this, especially that it would be helpful to the reader if feminists supporting Rowling were correctly identified as "gender-critical feminists" (or "trans-exclusionary feminists"). ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 10:21, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Given the amount of long-term debate over this, I don't think the lead's sentence should change without an overwhelming consensus to do so. The proposed text does not really parse right to me; "divided ... individuals"? What, it's giving some people split-personality disorder?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:43, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Do you agree that a Lede should accurately reflect the agreed sourced text in the body of the article? As to the simple matter of wording and grammar, I am the first to welcome suggested improvements. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 20:42, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

1. Yes, but the devil is in the details. 2. I don't think the existing language is deficient enough to get into suggesting how to rewrite proposed replacements for it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:09, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose change. Current is more specific. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:17, 13 September 2022 (UTC).

Is it better just to add the "and individuals" then, despite the repetition, so we have the more even-handed version in place? Silverseren^C 22:47, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

That was my original idea, but another repetition in sentence did not look good to me, but I am not against it.

• Please note: I realise now that I failed to include the 3 existing wiki links, which should remain in the proposed text. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 00:20, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Bodney, I was out working much too hard all day on a fundraiser, bone tired, and perhaps too tired to think straight right now, but I don't think the way the ping was positioned allowed other editors to understand what was being asked (or what should have been asked). My position was not to propose a specific change; it was to reconvene other editors from the FAR to gather suggestions about how to, or whether to, work on the sentence so that next an RFC could be launched. Instead, we have people weighing in to oppose a specific version of a proposal in progress. The boat was missed here. I'm sorry I was out all day, and am now much too tired to type coherently, but this is what we did not want to have happen. We need to work together towards refining the wording, as discussed during the FAR, and only after that, and then as the next step launch a formal RFC reflecting our best attempt at new wording. That's how RFCs work best. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:29, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I really don't think all this is worth the massive time sink that another RfC would be. I always took it as a given that the opposition includes "individuals" - it goes without saying that other people outside those specific groups opposed her views. I can't imagine that people would seriously conclude otherwise as all sociopolitical disputes work this way. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:01, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree that the first question is whether there is even a sense of concensus that we need to change anything; it was left somewhat murky at the conclusion of the FAR, because we couldn't rock-the-previous-RFC boat. If others still feel comfortable with where we are for now, we don't need to reconvene at all just yet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:11, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

It does seem unnecessary to say that some individuals think this or that, because every topic works that way, and our readers already know that. But this worm-can of tweaking this sentence in the lead should not be opened again absent a showing of strong consensus that what is there currently is deficient.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:09, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I understand I made an invitation to discuss error, but not exactly how, due to my inexperience with more systematic editor discussions and have never set up RfC and preamble discussions. Can we back peddle the boat? I also appreciate any improvement to my wording. Maybe individuals should be dropped from both sides or transferred to the critical side, where the is a lot more sourced evidence in the subsection, as exampled by the cast and fandoms of her creative universe. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 10:17, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Bodney; sorry I was much too tired yesterday after a day of working a fundraiser to better explore this. My impresssion at this stage (that is, taking into account further feedback) is that there is still a strong (enough) feeling that we can't fiddle with this wording without holding another RFC, but several feel that the time is not yet ripe. So please don't worry about the extra ping; I suspect the ping yielded information that is useful for now. As we discussed at several points during the FAR, over time, scholarly sources will appear that will be useful to give us some well-cited wording and perspective. My conclusion is to let this ride for another (maybe ???) three months, and then should there be new sources or a better time to re-approach the wording in this one sentence, remember to take a very deliberative, systematic approach as we did on the FAR. That is, multiple steps and iterations to work through the proposed wording, being sure all feel heard and respected, and making sure that any discussion is carefully framed vis-a-vis drafting through iterations rather than leaving the impression of yea or nay proposal. We have a seriously bad (as in poorly designed and implemented and yet widely attended) RFC to overcome; it has to be done right ... right meaning avoiding anything that appears to solicit opposes or supports until we have really held a solid pre-discussion and come to some wording that is worthy of a !vote. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:29, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks for your always very helpful advice, sorry for my delay in replying. I am happy to step back for the time being. Honestly, I do not feel that I am the best person to open RfC's in the careful, structured style you use with success. I am scatterbrained with wobbly language skills/memory. I do think the sources are already there, both in this very article and many more in the best quality, reliable news media. ~ BOD ~ ^TALK 09:25, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Much in the way that the prose of the article has been drafted over many revisions on the talk page, I believe any future RfC to resolve the problems with the previous one will also be heavily drafted first on the talk page. So don't worry about wordsmithing that for now :) Sideswipe9th (talk) 15:29, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Robert Galbraith name

I have reverted this edit as not cited to a high quality source, and WP:UNDUE. Please gain consensus. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:35, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

There are a few reliable sources on the Robert Galbraith name issue; HuffingtonPost, Them.Us, op-ed in Time, however it is something she denies. At least one subject matter expert (Florence Ashley) has said it is unlikely that Rowling picked the name intentionally, as Robert Galbraith Heath's links to conversion therapy weren't as well publicised at the time Rowling would have been picking the pen name.

As problematic as some of the content she has published under that name is, even with higher quality sourcing I do not think this is due for inclusion.

Quick note, I've included Ashley's commentary here to help with the discussion only, and I'm not suggesting we include it in the article as it is obviously self-published commentary about another person. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:09, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

That means the edit can go ahead with the above higher quality sources. It's a clarification of the pseudonym and the reader needs to be made aware i.e. with the correct context of the LGBT community's comments on the similarities and Rowling's spokesperson making a statement to clearly say it was not intentional The edit is about similarities; not whether it was intentional. NoMagicSpells^talk 22:55, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm opposed to putting in this edit. That pen name is also similar to Kenneth Galbraith and when asked early on about the similarities she explained how the name came about, which is in the article. She explained that it's "a name she took from Robert F. Kennedy, a personal hero, and Ella Galbraith, a name she invented for herself in childhood" >> see the "Adult fiction" section. Victoria (tk) 23:07, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but Rowling's spokesperson made the statement about Robert Galbraith Heath NoMagicSpells^talk 23:20, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

And the Beatles claim that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had no connection to LSD, either. The subject is not always the most reliable testimony for veracity of a claim. Zaathras (talk) 00:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Fully agree with this reversion. Undue and seems like it's there for WP:AXE reasons. — Czello 23:22, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

The information appears to be quite neutral. I think some editors are not giving a strong enough argument other than "I don't agree". Perhaps ownership issues, judging by the edit stats on this article? Why deny the reader clarification on the pseudonym? NoMagicSpells^talk 23:45, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

I support inclusion. Zaathras (talk) 00:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The information is too trivial to include in Wikipedia. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:58, 4 September 2022 (UTC).

It's not trivia if Rowling's spokesperson makes a statement. Why would you block a clarification? NoMagicSpells^talk 01:09, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes, and the sources supporting it are themselves strongly biased and poor quality. It's borderline conspiracy theory and Florence Ashley's comment - who is by no means sympathetic to Rowling's trans-related views - is the nail in the coffin. The whole argument makes no sense - why would the same author who declared Dumbledore is gay and whose controversial comments have solely to do with gender identity and not sexual orientation pick a name as a nod to a long dead psychiatrist who tried to "cure" homosexuality, and for books that have nothing to do with LGBT issues at all and that began to be written long before she ever said anything controversial about trans issues? Crossroads ^-talk- 02:54, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

It's not about the argument. There is no conspiracy. This edit is clarifying the names for the reader. Giving the context as to why this subject was brought up. Followed by the response from Rowling's spokesperson. It's a neutrally worded edit giving facts; not opinions. Higher quality sources will be used. Why are you blocking a clarification? NoMagicSpells^talk 01:15, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

None of the sources listed in this discussion rise a) to the level required for a Featured article, or b) to the level of WP:DUE. Sideswipe's post above did not pretend they were high quality sources; only higher than the original sourcing, but we don't write FAs around the Huffington Post or op-eds in Time magazine. The content in the article now about the name is sourced to scholarly literature, not tabloid rags. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:23, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

"... we don't write FAs around the Huffington Post" HuffPost is a listed WP:RSP. HuffPost Politics/contributors is considered unreliable. Also, here's a Time source that's not opinion. So we're covered for reliable sources. "... sourced to scholarly literature, not tabloid rags" Really? So why is this rag in the References...twice? If you're going to mislead editors; frustrate or obfuscate facts, then you're bringing Wikipedia, and this article in particular, into disrepute. I suggest you refrain from this behaviour and not block a clarification with these tactics. NoMagicSpells^talk 02:40, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

NoMagicSpells, could you please invest some time in understanding what a featured article is? Nowhere in any post I have made in this section did I ever refer to the term reliable sources; you don't seem to understand the distinction. As to why "this rag" (as you call it) is in the sources, please spend some time understanding WP:DUE. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:55, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

If you two disgree about it being due, instead of arguing about whether it belongs in a featured article here, why not take it to WP:RSN? As NMS notes, HuffPo and Time are considered reliable and I personally see no reason to exclude them from this article, featured or no, as long as they meet the criteria for WP:RS-- 2600:6C51:447F:D8D9:AC97:1F7E:5860:FC2F (talk) 04:55, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

The 11 editors agreeing the proposed content is WP:UNDUE would be that reason. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:04, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Not going to say where, but I noticed a recent, out of nowhere, uptick of "JK Rowling is anti-gay, blah, blah, blah" in a couple of chatty circles. Now I know where they got it from. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 11:35, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The name is just a coincidence and not worth noting in the article per WP:UNDUE. Pawnkingthree (talk) 11:29, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:UNDUE - leave it out. Johnbod (talk) 15:38, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any weighty sources taking this seriously enough to include. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:01, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:UNDUE, though worth coming back to in a month or two if it becomes a significant part of her story and a lot more heavyweight sources pick it up. Right now it isn't, and they haven't. John (talk) 21:06, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Agree that this is WP:UNDUE, at least for now. If coverage of the issue continues, revisit. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 08:56, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

"It is the best-selling book series in history."

The article says "It is the best-selling book series in history." linking to List of best-selling books, presumably as a source. List of best-selling books though estimates that the bible (which is a series of books) has 800m sales, compared to J. K. Rowling at 500 million. Stuartyeates (talk) 19:10, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

The bible might loosely be called a series (I like Part I the best), but it is not commonly described as such. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 19:23, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't know why that edit stood for more than a week; maybe no one got around to checking it. First, it linked twice in the lead to the same article. Second, it introduced uncited text in the body of the article. As I recall, we looked for a source to back this during the FAR and didn't find anything acceptable (I could be misremembering). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:08, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Morgan

This edit by WhatamIdoing creates a conundrum as there are multiple teachers (vague), and Pugh specifically mentions Morgan (see footnote f). At minimum, since Morgan is no longer named in the article, footnote f needs adjustment if we leave Morgan out of the body. With something as widely known and published as the Morgan connection, I am unsure if BLPNAME applies ... but heading out for the day, no time to further address just now ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:49, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I see the conundrum. Perhaps label her as "her primary school teacher"? Maybe "Her teacher at the Tutshill Church of England School" and then "her stern teacher there"?

I'm looking at this through a Wikipedia:Don't be evil lens. I'd like the family and friends of this teacher to be able to read this article, which mentions the teacher putting Rowling in the dunce's row (but doesn't mention moving her back...) and feel like it wasn't a public pillorying.

BTW, Tutshill#J. K. Rowling says that the character was partly inspired by two teachers (and names them both). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

That article is poorly sourced (http://www.half-bloodprince.org/snape_nettleship.php); we're sourcing to Kirk and the scholarly Pugh, who explicitly names Morgan. Kirk and Smith go into long analyses as I recall. I am fairly certain (but others like AP and O-D know better) that the Morgan issue is so well established that it's not a BLP issue, but I won't have time to investigate for the rest of the week ... hoping that AP or O-D will weigh in before the weekend, when I may have more free time to follow up here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:48, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

PS, from my memory of reading all of Kirk and Smith, Morgan was described as quite the battle axe, so we're not likely in BLP territory. If I get a free moment this week between tests at clinic, will re-read Kirk and Smith to check, but real life got real complicated suddenly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:51, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Update: I found time to read through the main sources used in the biography last night. We have used four sources that cover Morgan (and there are many other lower-quality sources we didn't use). We have two full-length bios (old, but the best available, Smith and Kirk); one scholarly source (recent, thorough, Pugh); and one extensive news report (The Scotsman). All coverage says the same thing, which is basically that Rowling has discussed Morgan relative to Hogwarts. From my re-read, I conclude the WP:BLPNAME is not in play here, and the introduction of vague text when the subject is well covered in reliable sources is less than desirable, and we're not publishing anything that isn't already widely reported in reliable sources. My suggestion is that we re-instate the Morgan text. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:34, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that it's really vague, and I agree that it can be sourced. My main concern is that this is unnecessary trivia – the sort of thing I'd expect to find in the Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit game. Does it actually matter what her name is? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:03, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Agree that it's too trivial for this BLP. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:43, 29 September 2022 (UTC).

I have adjusted the footnote, which left vague Morgan, who was cited to all four main bio sources (Pugh, Kirk, Smith and https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/jk-rowling-story-2478095 . SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:34, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

JK/J.K.

As the article uses British English, should it use 'JK' throughout it?Halbared (talk) 20:55, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Here's her website; seems she uses J. K. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:39, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

English

Name the characters and object in JK Rowling books that exist inspired by real life 2409:4063:4082:7151:19B8:9FA:624B:FA58 (talk) 10:34, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

During the FAR, it was decided to only (or mostly anyway) mention such items in footnotes (eg Sylvia Morgan/Snape). An entire article could be created about such instances.SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:38, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Additionally, this request has a whiff of WP:HOMEWORK about it... Chaheel Riens (talk) 17:28, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Rowling's treatment of Native American topics and fans

Right. It wasn't covered in higher profile sources because she's higher profile than the minorities who took issue with her treatment. Do you realize how rare it is for Native American issues to be covered in the mainstream press and, even more rare, for them to be covered accurately? I'll see if more sources came out since then. Elizabeth Warren lauded her for the misrepresentation, as she was doing the same sort of thing, and wanted in on it. But actual Natives were protesting. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 18:32, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Notified: [5] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:46, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd support the edit if you could source the criticism to something better than a single Salon article. (I don't support the notification: AFAICT this article is not under 1RR and so CorbieVreccan's edits don't IMO rise to the level of edit warring.) Loki (talk) 19:19, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I would be concerned, even if a stronger source is supplied, that we must factor in due weight. We've got a couple dozen editors here who spent months immersed in all the highest quality sources, and I don't recall having ever seen this come up, so while it might belong at the Politics of sub-article, I don't see it having a due weight fit here.

Re the notification, I'm not an admin so the nuance is lost on me; the gist is that edit warring on any article is not good, and we should strive to keep the collaborative spirit that developed during the FAR on this page. I believe CorbieVreccan might agree, now that we've discussed a bit. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:22, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree.--Kmhkmh (talk) 19:39, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

• I've seen this issue pop up in the sources, but without anywhere near the frequency of either scholarly critique of her books, or the transgender issues. Two rather obvious reasons for this; she's vocal on twitter about transgender issues, and the material touching on Native Americans is not in an actual publication, but "bonus material", as it were, on Pottermore, which gets very little attention. I don't see how it meets the due weight threshold at this time. Vanamonde (Talk) 19:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
• Re. the move to a sub-article: doesn't this belong on Politics of Harry Potter rather than Politics of J. K. Rowling? It's about how Rowling treats Native Americans in her fiction, not on her social media (unlike the TG issues). Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 10:09, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

  Could be, but it doesn't belong where it has again been moved; it is not a matter of International politics. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:37, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

  It does have a social media component, and an international one. Native fans raised the issue with her on twitter and other platforms where she was usually very interactive. She responded once and then went silent. Then came harassment and even death threats from her fans. Rowling stayed silent on these as well. Around that time there was also other material online about her treatment of other races in her writing, Cho Chang, Irish stereotypes, etc. But like the Native American material, as I recall coverage was mostly in small publications online in Scotland and the US, and in social media, all of it international. But again, when minority populations are involved, the mainstream press often won't bother. Hence, discussions like this one. This is an ongoing issue with covering bias and prejudice, as well as protests. Up until relatively recently, LGBT concerns and even in-person protests and marches were disappeared in the same way in mainstream media. Older editors remember. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 19:16, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

@LokiTheLiar:, @Kmhkmh:, it was also covered in The Guardian: JK Rowling under fire for writing about 'Native American wizards'- History of Magic in North America, being serialised on Rowling’s Pottermore website, attacked for using an ancient culture ‘as a convenient prop’, The Washington Post: J.K. Rowling borrowed a Navajo legend for her new story. Is that okay?, and (paywall) National Geographic: Native Americans to J.K. Rowling - We’re Not Magical -The author has come under fire for equating Navajo religious beliefs with the world of her fictional Harry Potter characters among other places. I can find more, as well. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 19:26, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

I admit that this might be a bit more main reporting that I originally expected. However those basically just mirroring/superficially reporting on the twitter dispute with that some people have with Rowling. I still don't think this is really worth mentiong in this article (or due). There is imho a really unfortunate tendency in current media of turning any disagreement or differing point of into a social media event and a scandal of sorts. Wikipedia should stay away from those in doubt as long as possible. Of course if a certain threshold is passed it needs to be included in a biography, but i rather see that threshold set rather high. After all we're writing an encyclopedic biography of a person and not a yellow press biography.--Kmhkmh (talk) 19:58, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Nah, I think this is enough for a short mention in the article. If WaPo has covered an event, it's usually enough WP:WEIGHT to at least mention it. Loki (talk) 20:15, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Given that WaPo covered it, I would not object to one sentence in the Politics section, but a) it's not going to be as verbose as what was here originally, and b) I strongly suggest that we work together to craft one sentence (as we did to develop consensus on the FAR). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:33, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Reminding CV that we worked very hard during the FAR to keep the article to a reasonable size and accord due weight, and almost every political topic was tightly summarized; we should hold this one to same, and one well-crafted sentence ought to cover it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

"disappeared in the same way in mainstream media" I once encountered an Italian comic book story which satirized how the press works.: Significant political events and international news being mostly ignored, because they don't sell enough copies of a newspaper. A rock star dyes his hair with a new color, it becomes front-page news and the copies are sold out. I consider it a painfully accurate depiction of what passes for newsworthy items. Dimadick (talk) 12:55, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Dimadick, a mention in the WAPO does not pass the weight test, but I do agree with SandyGeorgia, this topic may merit a well crafted summarization. Crescent77 (talk) 22:59, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

“Death threats” claim cites biased article of extremely questionable reliability

The claim made in this article that Rowling has received death threats for her stances on trans rights issues cites a journal article I’m linking here below:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12124-021-09670-4.pdf

The article’s title is “Repressive Moralism: World Making and Petty Fascism in Transgender Politics.” If this does not seem suspect enough, its abstract straightfacedly states that groups “promoting” “transgender issues” “have much in common with the oppressive politics of fascist rule.” It should be embarrassing for any scientific journal to have published anything so clearly unserious and rooted in bad faith to begin with, but should be doubly so that anyone would think that this could be compatible with WP:NPOV.

While I’m sure Rowling has received blowback from her public stances of late, Wikipedia should not implicitly endorse garbage like this source in supporting this claim. Let’s remove this source and replace it with another that is less clearly biased. 2600:1000:B03E:1B2F:85BA:ADD4:DA9A:24D8 (talk) 07:04, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

I definitely missed this one when sources were being given in the past. I'm reading the full paper now and, first thing to note, is that a large amount of news articles and personal websites are used as references. I don't think this is standard for this journal, from the spot-checks I'm doing on other papers in this issue. Secondly, um...the writing style reads...very unprofessional. In both directions on the topic. Like, this is the second paragraph:

Transgender individuals, particularly men who transmute to a female identity and appearance are often the target of attacks by trans-intolerant hooligans (Phillips, 2013; Stelloh, 2019), of mobbing in schools (Norris & Orchowski, 2020), and of other forms of discrimination (Haines et al., 2018; Miller & Grollman, 2015). At the same time, one must not forget the outrageously high number of ciswomen - that is, women whose female identity is congruent with their biological sex, being battered and killed the world over (World Health Organisation, 2021). The authors wish to make clear that they condemn any violence, prejudice, and discrimination against women, transgender persons, and any other human being.

This...doesn't sound like any form of academic article I've ever read. It's as if a high schooler wrote it. Like, this entire paper sounds like an assignment turned in by a student. Silverseren^C 07:53, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

There's also random digressions that happen for a paragraph and are then moved on from. Like here:

A clear example of this is revealed in a "meta-empirical" study of the structure and development of events in Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible", in which the authors analysed the emergence and characteristics of a reified institutional discourse following some unusual events involving girls from the village of Salem in the 17th century (Wagner et al., 2008). Due to a psychological shock, two girls fell in a day-long stupor that some villagers explained by natural causes. Others resorted to the magical explanation of witchcraft, which was a serious offence in this pious Quaker community. Once an official court was called to investigate the accusations of witchcraft and devil's work, the to and fro of freely exchanged opinions during the first day of consensual conversations vanished, and was swiftly replaced by stiff and reserved utterances. As a high-level religious institution the court had the right and duty to execute any person found to be affiliated with the devil, which resulted in more than a dozen executions.

Like, I get that they're trying to relate this to communication and discourse, but the connection is so oblique as to just make the comparison confounding. Again, as if a student is just pulling in any reference they find that relates to the subject at hand and then trying to make it fit the theme of the overall topic. Silverseren^C 07:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for having the bravery to venture into the full text. It is astounding to me that otherwise respected peer-reviewed journals would print this. If you look at the "scientific" articles that have cited this one, you find another barely-cited article with the astounding title "Involvement in LGBQ Activism is Related to Pathological Narcissistic Grandiosity and Virtue Signaling." Note the omission of the letter "T" there in that previous sentence. A strange, barely-seen black hole of thinly veiled bigotry indeed. 24.147.9.178 (talk) 17:07, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Yeah. I'm reading through this now and several alarm bells are ringing. Leaving aside the prose issues Silverseren has identified, there's factual content in the article that I would dispute.

In particular, the way that the article dismisses the scientific criticism of the work of J. Michael Bailey (a controversial name in trans research) as purely activist driven is concerning. To quote from the paper, Activists deemed the scientists' finding of being transgender because of sexual preferences unacceptable and initiated an aggressive campaign against Michael Bailey. While there are certainly activists who have made vitriolic comments about Bailey, a significant proportion of the criticism of Bailey's work is in peer reviewed literature. And as for In other words, activists intended to assassinate Bailey's character and reputation, undo any positive praise his book received, that is a reference to The Man Who Would Be Queen, which had a large negative reaction beyond that of just "activists". Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:29, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

That JKR has received death threats is entirely uncontroversial, and Springer is recognized as a high-quality publisher. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:19, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

OP here; IP is different. I agree with both of your statements here, though not the implied conclusion. Springer is such a large publisher of journals that at some point a bad article or two is bound to sneak in somewhere. Indeed, it took The Lancet years to retract Andrew Wakefield's "autistic enterocolitis" paper even after it was in very large part disproven, yet during that time I'm sure an argument for citing an uncontroversial claim made in the article in a neutral fashion (based solely upon its inclusion in The Lancet) would not have flown with Wikipedia editors.

I'm not contesting or expressing skepticism at the idea that Rowling has received death threats for her publicly expressed views. I'm merely suggesting that if that is the case, it should be easier to find a less biased source making this claim that is less likely to mislead readers looking for unbiased further reading. That it is "uncontroversial" that "JKR has received death threats" follows from what you and I have been told by other sources, not this one in question. Were I to have come across this claim in this article first, I would be highly skeptical of it due to the fact that the authors clearly have an axe to grind with the entire trans rights movement.

I propose that this article does not follow WP:SCHOLARSHIP guidelines based on its low citation count (only two citations per Google Scholar, one by one of the authors themselves), its status as a primary and very editorial research paper, and the fact that one of the authors, Nicky Hayes, appears to have claimed a current affiliation with a university by whom she is not in fact employed as an academic. Clearly the peer review was not thorough if it did not catch the latter. Furthermore, the article's bias is strong and pervasive enough that I'd stipulate that if it continues to be included in the article it would merit in-text attribution, per WP:BIASED. 24.147.9.178 (talk) 17:00, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

IP24, are you suggesting we need intext attribution to cite the uncontroversial fact that JKR has received death threats? That is what the particular journal article is citing, so I must not be understanding what you are suggesting ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:18, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

They're saying that we should be using a stronger source for the reference than one that is poorly written and unprofessionally worded. Since there are plenty of other reliable sources available for covering that statement, what's wrong with swapping for a different one? Silverseren^C 04:20, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Nothing (for now) ... I didn't understand the suggestion that intext attribution was needed for an uncontroversial statement. But we should also keep in mind that over the longer term, we should (eventually) be moving as much as possible towards scholarly sources (like Springer, etc). For now, it is hard to avoid recentism, but in a year or two, a survey of scholarly sources will be in order. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:41, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

If I'm interpreting the IP editor correctly, they think that it would require in-text attribution only if we kept the questionable source. This stems from the overt biases of the authors, which I can see and agree with, and the textual prose issues discussed by Silverseren above. However were we to swap that for another less questionable source, there's no need for attribution. In this case, we have another research paper, that was published 6 months after the questionable one, so we don't need to worry about reducing the number of scholarly sources we currently use. Sideswipe9th (talk) 05:04, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

See WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV; I am not seeing any circumstances under which the statement that Rowling has received death threats can ever be considered POV, so I am still confused by the suggestion; it is not a "biased statement of opinion", and attributing it would give the false impression that it is. At any rate, the source (criticized for its writing) has now been replaced by a source with writing so tortured that the meaning of the abstract is difficult to decipher (and the article isn't much better); I'm not sure it's an improvement. That is, we went from something criticized for its writing and cited by 2 to something with worse writing cited by zero; what's the improvement? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:15, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I think that might be a misreading of BIASED/ATTRIBUTEPOV by the IP editor. The issue isn't that "Rowing has received death threats" is POV, it's that using a heavily biased source (Wagner) for otherwise uncontroversial material makes it seem as though it's POV. The IP editor's suggestion that we attribute was only if we continue to use the Wagner source, and that if we replace Wagner with another source that does not have the same issues that Silverseren and myself have discussed, then we would not need attribute it.

The Qiao abstract makes sense to me. I'd re-summarise it as: The paper investigates comments made on Weibo (a set of Chinese microblogging platforms), between June 2020 and February 2022, that were related comments made by JK Rowling on Twitter in the same time period. The comments from Weibo formed a corpus (body of text), that was analysed through a word cloud and related frequency graph. The paper discusses the definition of the terms "radical feminism" and "TERF", and its development both in China and elsewhere. The paper preforms a psychological analysis on Rowling's anti-transgender comments made between June 2020 and February 2022, and contrasts that against the comments made on Weibo. In doing so, it was found that TERF sentiment in China was a hybrid of biological essentialism and individuality in identity*. And ends with a generic comment on TERFs.

* Note that this is something specific to Chinese social media that doesn't seem to translate well to Western social media, as Chinese social media (or at least Weibo) is not pseudonymous.

Hope that helps. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:18, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I dunno Sandy. While I think that Rowling receiving death threats is largely uncontroversial, having read the paper I think that there has to be stronger sources we can cite for this. While scholarship is preferable, I honestly think that one or two strong reliable media sources would be significantly stronger and more reliable than this specific paper. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:34, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Though the primary focus of the paper is on transphobia in Chinese social media, this paper published in June 2022 seems on the surface to be reasonable. While I can't attest to the accuracy of how it describes content specific to Weibo, the content it discusses that was published on Twitter does seem accurate. If there's no objections, I think this paper could replace the Wagner and Hayes citation without needing any other textual changes to the article. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm fine with replacing the source. The claim in our article is correct but replacing a source with one that's less controversial and weird is generally good practice IMO. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:04, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Sources swapped these three edits. If I've done anything wrong, feel free to clean up or undo. Sideswipe9th (talk) 05:20, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

The version in the article now received consensus after workshopping here and we shouldn't swap out good sources before going back to the drawing board if that's what's needed. The workshopping for the consensus version during the FAR can be found here (note: the FAR version doesn't mention death threats). It's better to discuss and get it right rather than quickly finding a source to replace. The only secondary source I can access easily is Pugh, who doesn't mention death threats. A quick google search returns pages of results; here are two I've chosen at random, this from The Scotsman and this from Newsweek. But if I remember correctly we compiled a long list of sources during the FAR, so it might be best to revisit those. Or perhaps even remove the death threat sentences? Victoria (tk) 19:07, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

The objection seems to be that Wagner is not a good source, and not that the content it was supporting was wrong. If I'm reading the archive histories correctly, the sentence on death threats was added while the article was featured on TFA. We could remove it, but I don't think that it's wrong per-say, and with a less objectionable source it's probably fine to stay. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:55, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

While I agree the death threats sentence is very likely true, Wikipedia isn't just a collection of facts. Rowling is, notably, by no means the only public figure to have received death threats. But we don't mention that about any given public figure unless that fact has been covered in reliable sources. It's pretty likely that we have RSes for this somewhere, but if we don't we should remove that sentence. Loki (talk) 20:56, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

The Chinese conference paper suffers from a lack of editing. For example:

• In June 2020 Rowling retweeted an op-ed discussing "menstruating people," apparently with the fact that the story in question did not use the word female. "Menstruating man. (p. 1323)
• And this exposes the misogyny of the Chinese TERF community: And this exposes the misogyny of the TERF community in China: (p.1325)

Some portions appear to have been machine-translated, like

• Extract: "If a male pervert disguises himself as a gender perception is female and goes to the women's bathroom, then the girls in the women's bathroom are not very dangerous?" (p. 1324)

As far as I can tell, Leshui Qiao has only ever published two conference papers. I couldn't find out anything more about the author. gnu57 20:42, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Politico article

[6] "The metamorphosis of J. K. Rowling", about some controversies she has been in. I don't have much interest in the topic but am posting the link here in case anyone wants to use it in the wiki rticle. 2601:648:8201:5E50:0:0:0:DD22 (talk) 22:52, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Times Article

The following edit I made was reverted:

On October 15, 2022, Rowling wrote a commentary piece for The Times regarding her stance on the Scottish government's proposal to make it bureaucratically easier for trans people to update their legal documents, in which she said that "there is no evidence to show that trans women don’t retain male patterns of criminality" and that "it is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence".

I believe it should be restored, for the reason that Joanne's previous words on trans rights have been used to articulate her beliefs, and the above shows a significant shift in what she has stated her beliefs to be. Given that, and the fact that it's in her own words, there is no reason *not* to include it

@Vanamonde93 Snokalok (talk) 00:54, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

There's two issues here. First, this is a piece by Rowling; we generally need independent sources to analyze this before we attribute anything like a shift in perspective. Second, I can't read the piece, but from what's been said about it I don't see how this is in any way different from what's already in the article. Vanamonde (Talk) 00:58, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

1. Fair enough, but notice the edit itself does not attribute that, that's merely my own statement for the purpose of including it.

2. Well for starters she made the very strong implication that trans people don't deserve the presumption of innocence, which is a significant step above "I just have concerns about women's rights" Snokalok (talk) 01:03, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

The comment on presumption of innocence could represent a significant change in her stance, and certainly it's one many have found disturbing based on commentary on social media. However without reliable secondary sources discussing the significance of this change, it would be WP:OR to state as much. Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:18, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

This lacks WP:Secondary coverage and for that reason does not belong in any article, any more than any random tweet of hers does. Even if secondary coverage existed, it still would not belong in this article as it is WP:UNDUE; we summarize her view on gender self-identification and the reactions to it here, but not every single episode of 'she writes this, people react like that'. This has all been worked out over the WP:FAR. That this specific piece shows a "significant shift" in her beliefs appears to be WP:OR; from my perspective this looks much like the same view she's spoken about for years now. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:02, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

It amazes me how any time I make an edit to anything, you're there within minutes. Truly a remarkable superpower. Snokalok (talk) 01:03, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Special:Watchlist. Those of us who contributed to the FAR have (almost all) kept the page in our watchlists, so as soon as we see an edit to the article or the talk page, it shows up there instantly. Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:05, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Snokalok please strike your unnecessary personalization. The article stats here will show you how long both Crossroads and Sideswipe9th have been involved at this article, which had a strenuous, collaborative and consensual Featured article review, almost entirely avoiding personalization of the type you just posted. I agree the content, at this point, is UNDUE. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:43, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Stricken Snokalok (talk) 17:10, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

WP:DUE is a pretty good reason not to include content. In terms of the content we already have, this doesn't really add anything new, as Rowling's perspective on trans related issues is already pretty well covered via secondary sources. I would also be concerned that including the quotations that were selected without secondary coverage into why they were of importance would be verging into WP:SOAPBOX territory.

Commentary on this showing a significant shift in what she has stated her beliefs to be needs to be demonstrated via secondary sourcing, otherwise we're engaging in WP:NOR. Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:04, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Snokalok that we should add some information on this to the article even in the absence of secondary sources. (Just a sentence though, not a paragraph: something like On October 15, 2022, Rowling wrote a commentary piece for The Times opposing the Scottish government's proposal to make it bureaucratically easier for trans people to update their legal documents.) My reasoning here is that Rowling's comments on trans issues are a pretty big and increasing source of her notability now, which to me suggests that further info on that topic has sufficient WP:WEIGHT to get into the article by itself.

Think of it this way: right now we have a short summary of the timeline of Rowling's major comments on trans issues. But without this, we're omitting the whole existence of an op-ed she wrote for a major paper. Such an op ed is a big deal by itself, and omitting it would deceptively imply it wasn't actually a part of the timeline we're already laying out. It's not new information regarding what Rowling's views are, but it is new information regarding when she held those views and how committed she is to them, and not including it implies false information about those aspects of the situation. Loki (talk) 02:27, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

References

That quote and citation should be included imho. It's current and it's a viewpoint she decided to put out under her own name, using space she got in another publication, so I don't see how to call it unrepresentative or unDUE unless someone is saying she had a hangover or smething when she wrote the piece. We're in more danger of misrepresenting her if we leave it out than if we keep it in. It's a viewpoint that might be unpopular in some circles but she has decided to own it and stand up for it. It seems completely relevant for any readers trying to make sense of her public positions over the past few years. 2601:648:8201:5E50:0:0:0:DD22 (talk) 00:11, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Today's edits to transgender section

I've reverted three edits, diff, diff, and diff. I've not looked at the source for the first one to establish whether it actually names the actors; the second includes and unnecessary explanation imho; the third is a rewording. The section was carefully worded throughout, workshopped with a number of editors and consensus achieved. Scientelensia we need to achieve consensus for these changes. Victoria (tk) 00:13, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the revert. None of the edits were an improvement, they introduced excess detail and even original research, and some parts were against the consensus developed during the FAR. Scientelensia, pls see WP:FAOWN, WP:WIAFA, and Political views of J. K. Rowling with respect to WP:SS. You might also read the Featured article review linked in the Article milestones at the top of this page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:44, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

I think if the source does include the names of specific actors, we should also, as it's an important detail for the reader that the actors in question are the actors for the three main characters. I support reverting diffs 2 and 3. Loki (talk) 02:51, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi LokiTheLiar, the first diff isn't supported by the source - it only mentions Daniel Radcliffe. We can link in here from the individual actor pages rather than adding additional verbiage here, where we want to stick w/ summary style throughout. Re the third diff, in my view "mocked" is a better description than "condemned". Victoria (tk) 21:33, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Why is Sean Smith a reliable source?

See also: Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/J. K. Rowling/archive1/Archive 1 § Biographies - to cite or not to cite

From what I can gather he's basically a celeb gossip columnist. Serendi^podous 17:54, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Connie Ann Kirk says in p. xii that she thinks highly of Smith's bio. Your concern was brought up in the previous thread we had on this topic, but there were also some pros to Smith mentioned. I suppose we could cite Kirk instead if needed (from what I remember, Kirk and Smith had pretty much the same content). Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 02:37, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Ealdgyth (FAC's best source reviewer) had a look and agreed Smith was reliable. I could find the thread, but it's somewhere in five pages of FAR archives; if I recall correctly, it's based on the quality of the publisher. Further, having read just about every bit of biographical information published as we were re-writing, I would agree with O-D that Kirk, Smith, and just about everything else written all say the same things, and all draw from the same sources. I also seem to recall that Pugh cites Smith. Even if someone considers him a "gossip columnist", that does not preclude him putting together a good compilation of reliable information, and while I was reading every biographical article, I found no reason to suspect anything Smith wrote. Almost every instance could be double-cited to multiple other sources, which we avoided doing per WP:CITATIONOVERKILL. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:35, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Addition to philanthropy section

Draft installed

I propose adding the following, citing three WP:RSP reliable perennial sources (The Telegraph, the Guardian, and PinkNews):

In late 2022, Rowling launched Beira's Place, a sexual assault crisis centre in Edinburgh meant to serve exclusively cisgender women. The centre has described itself as a "single-sex service", and has said that it plans to refer any "individuals identifying as trans women to other appropriate services in the area". Snokalok (talk) 02:17, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Tagging @SandyGeorgia into the discussion Snokalok (talk) 02:18, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Apologies for intruding on this conversation, but I would also like to note that this information has been discussed in a BBC article as well. Aoba47 (talk) 02:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional (BBC) source, Aoba47; that gives us several mainstream usable sources for due weight.

The structure of the Philanthropy section is a paragraph each on:

1. Women, children and young people at risk
2. Ukraine (also children at risk)
3. Medical causes
4. Proceeds from specific publications to support causes
5. Army Benevolent fund following on the revelation that Galbraith was Rowling.

Because Beira's Place deals with rape/sexual violence, it crosses the topics of paragraphs 1 and 3 (women at risk along with medical), so it is unclear to me where the content would best fit, and whether the paragraph structure should be adjusted. (One example-- not sure if it's the best one-- would be to move Ukraine from the second to third para, leaving women first, medical second; then combine Beira's place with Ukraine in a paragraph that covers these other women/children at risk medical causes.) I don't see a stand-alone paragraph about a lesser charitable donation than covered in the two main paragraphs. Besides figuring out how to incorporate this into the existing or a new paragraph structure, the POV presentation and over-quoting in the proposed text needs to be hammered out. I picture one or two sentences at most, and don't think the proposed sentence above is quite there yet. I suggest working in the format we developed during the FAR will be helpful to hammer out a consensus. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:01, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I'll look it over now and reply when I have thoughts, though I do think that given Rowling's stance on trans rights and involvement in activism against such, and that every article above either heavily implies or directly states a connection to a row over rape crisis centers in Edinburgh serving and being run by trans women, the fact that Beira's Place was founded specifically such that it would only serve cis women is a very notable point that should be addressed in some capacity. Snokalok (talk) 03:13, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

The current proposal addresses only that POV, and leaves out considerable other important information. It would probably be easier to craft neutral text for this article, which relies on Summary style (and where we made serious cuts to Philanthropy to keep the WP:SIZE reasonable), if Beira's Place is written first. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:18, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Right, I read over the link, and while I do believe the article should still mention the actors criticizing her views as well, that's for another thread and I get the style we're working with now.

Anyway, what would be your suggested wording? Hammering something out is a lot easier with multiple proposals. Snokalok (talk) 03:20, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I am still struggling with structure (where the content fits); there's a twist in that BBC says it is not a charity, so while Rowling is funding a philanthropic venture, it's not like other causes as it won't accept donations. Again, getting more of the basics of the entity in to its own article will make it easier to hammer out how to handle it here, where we have to keep an eye on WP:SIZE.

(The article does mention the actors criticizing her views-- it's footnoted so we don't have a laundry list.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:27, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Hence why I think it should be in the transgender views section. The place was founded over trans rights, and was deliberately made to exclude trans people, by someone who - speaking neutrally - is viewed by most of the population whether for and against trans rights, as being prolifically in the "against" camp.

Speaking simply, it's not a charity, but it *is* absolutely related to her views on trans rights. Snokalok (talk) 03:33, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I should add, the structure I feel will be easier to figure out once we have a wording nailed down - though obviously you're the more experienced editor. Snokalok (talk) 03:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I will put up a draft for working through proposed wording momentarily (not helped by having sprained my wrist and my computer needs to go for repair). It would be most helpful if editors new to the article would recognize that we can't add a couple hundred words every time JKR makes headlines, which is about once a month, and that new content needs to be worked in to existing content in a way that flows. I'm not entirely happy with my first draft, as it is still too long, but with computer and wrist issues, I'll momentarily put up what I've got so far to get the ball rolling. I noted that DMVHistorian's draft was much shorter, which I think is the way to go, since other issues can be explored at Beira's Place, but I had already worked on my draft when DMV put theirs up (with some differences in claims from sources). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:46, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Just to interject, I would point out that none of the sources listed use the term 'cisgender'. There is in fact nothing in the sources to indicate that the service would not be available to either transmen or non-binary people whose sex is female, as the service utilises single-sex exemptions, which also apply to these groups. I have also added an archive link to the Telegraph article for anyone without access. 2A00:23C8:2C97:1D01:ECDC:CFC3:E310:F152 (talk) 09:11, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

What? Yes they do: the PinkNews source says explicitly that JK Rowling’s service, on the other hand, will only serve, and only employ, cisgender women. Loki (talk) 20:59, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

References

Philanthropy Draft 1

Current (481 words)

PROPOSED Draft 1 (517 words)

Aware of the good fortune that led to her wealth and fame, and wanting to use her public image to help others despite her concerns about publicity and the press, Rowling became, in the words of Smith, "emboldened ... to stand up and be counted on issues that were important to her". In 2000, while she was still writing the Harry Potter series, Rowling established the Volant Charitable Trust, named after her mother. Its mission is to "alleviate social deprivation, with a particular emphasis on supporting women, children and young people at risk". Together with the MEP Emma Nicholson, Rowling founded the Children's High Level Group (now Lumos) in 2005. She was appointed president of the charity One Parent Families (now Gingerbread) in 2004, after becoming its first ambassador in 2000. She also collaborated with Sarah Brown on the writing of a book of children's stories to benefit One Parent Families. Rowling's charitable donations before 2012 were estimated by Forbes at $160 million. She was the second most generous UK donor in 2015 (following the singer Elton John), giving about $14 million. Lumos has advocated for reform in orphanage care in Ukraine since 2013, working with an orphanage west of Kyiv. After the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rowling stated that she will personally match up to £1 million in donations made towards an emergency appeal launched by Lumos. Rowling has made donations to support medical causes. She named another institution after her mother when, in 2010, she donated £10 million to found a multiple sclerosis research centre at the University of Edinburgh. She gave an additional £15.3 million to the centre in 2019. During the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, accompanied by an inflatable representation of Lord Voldemort, she read from Peter Pan as part of a tribute to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. To support COVID-19 relief, she donated six-figure sums to both Khalsa Aid and the British Asian Trust from royalties for The Ickabog. Several publications in the Harry Potter universe have been sold for charitable purposes. Profits from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, both published in 2001, went to Comic Relief. To support Children's Voice, later renamed Lumos, Rowling sold a deluxe copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard at auction in 2007. Amazon's £1.95 million purchase set a record for a contemporary literary work and for children's literature. Rowling published the book and, in 2013, donated the proceeds of nearly £19 million (then about $30 million) to Lumos. Rowling and 12 other writers composed short pieces in 2008 to be sold to benefit Dyslexia Action and English PEN. Rowling's contribution was an 800-word Harry Potter prequel. When the revelation that Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling led to an increase in sales, she donated the royalties to ABF The Soldiers' Charity (formerly the Army Benevolent Fund).

Aware of the good fortune that led to her wealth and fame, Rowling wanted to use her public image to help others despite her concerns about publicity and the press; she became, in the words of Smith, "emboldened ... to stand up and be counted on issues that were important to her". Rowling's charitable donations before 2012 were estimated by Forbes at $160 million. She was the second most generous UK donor in 2015 (following the singer Elton John), giving about $14 million. Long interested in issues affecting women and children, Rowling established the Volant Charitable Trust in 2000, named after her mother to address social deprivation in at-risk women, children and youth. She was appointed president of One Parent Families (now Gingerbread) in 2004, after becoming its first ambassador in 2000. She collaborated with Sarah Brown on a book of children's stories to benefit One Parent Families. Together with the MEP Emma Nicholson, Rowling founded the charity now known as Lumos in 2005. Lumos has worked with an orphanage west of Kyiv, Ukraine since 2013; after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rowling offered to personally match up to £1 million in donations to Lumos for Ukraine. Later in 2022, during her advocacy against the proposed Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, Rowling stated she would found and fund Beira's Place, a women-centred rape help center to provide free support services for female-only survivors of sexual violence; with long wait times at existing facilities, Rape Crisis Scotland welcomed the services while noting rape crisis centres in Scotland had served trans and non-binary people without incident. Rowling has made donations to support other medical causes. She named another institution after her mother in 2010, when she donated £10 million to found a multiple sclerosis research centre at the University of Edinburgh. She gave an additional £15.3 million to the centre in 2019. During the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, accompanied by an inflatable representation of Lord Voldemort, she read from Peter Pan as part of a tribute to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. To support COVID-19 relief, she donated six-figure sums to both Khalsa Aid and the British Asian Trust from royalties for The Ickabog. Several publications in the Harry Potter universe have been sold for charitable purposes. Profits from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, both published in 2001, went to Comic Relief. To support Children's Voice, later renamed Lumos, Rowling sold a deluxe copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard at auction in 2007. Amazon's £1.95 million purchase set a record for a contemporary literary work and for children's literature. Rowling published the book and, in 2013, donated the proceeds of nearly £19 million (then about $30 million) to Lumos. Rowling and 12 other writers composed short pieces in 2008 to be sold to benefit Dyslexia Action and English PEN. Rowling's contribution was an 800-word Harry Potter prequel. When the revelation that Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling led to an increase in sales, she donated the royalties to ABF The Soldiers' Charity (formerly the Army Benevolent Fund).

Sources
Notes References Errington, Philip W. (2017). J.K. Rowling: A Bibliography. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4742-9738-7. Kirk, Connie Ann (2003). J.K. Rowling: A Biography. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-32205-8. OCLC 49991592. Smith, Sean (2002). J.K. Rowling: A Biography. Arrow Books. ISBN 0-09-944542-5. OCLC 51303518.

Discussion of philanthropy Draft 1

My first draft is still too long, even after cuts to older text, and I suggest DMVHistorian's much briefer addition is the way to go. Nonetheless, I re-jigged the paragraph structure to fit the new content in; we can't just plop in a new paragraph to the article each time JKR makes headlines. I have tried to create a para structure where the first para is context/overview; second para is women/children causes; third para is other medical (as rape involves medical); and fourth is publications to fund charities. I expect multiple iterations to get the prose nailed down, and would appreciate help as I have sprained my wrist. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:50, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I like how you have written it and re-structured the section. Perhaps the text starting with "with long wait times..." could be removed to shorten the section further. I have also added similar context to the Beira's Place page so it is covered there as well. So sorry about your wrist - that is never fun, especially for a writer! DMVHistorian (talk) 21:16, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Just dropped my computer to repair, apparently I need a new hard drive, but I ran out of time to investigate why your text said it was a charity when other sources say it is not ???? Now confined to iPad typing for a few days ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:57, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh no - hope it gets fixed soon... Calling it a charity was a mistype on my end - I had first seen it listed as such in an MSN/Washington Examiner article (Link). I added some additional context to the Beira's Place page regarding the registered status. DMVHistorian (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Got it, thanks; I feared I had missed something in frustration over wrist/hard drive and my hurry to get a draft up. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:41, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Works for me. Sorry this matter has been a literal pain. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:56, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Could we get more feedback from others? What do others say about cutting the length per DMVHistorian's post at 21:16, 14 December, as the content is now covered at Beira's Place? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:47, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Do we need the clause that comes after the semi-colon that begins "with long wait times ..."? The relationship between Beira's Place and Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre is perhaps best covered in the dedicated sub-article. Thoughts? Victoria (tk) 21:27, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

DMVHistorian also suggested losing that clause. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:51, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

As no one has disagreed with losing the clause beginning at "with long wait times", which has bloated the content about this one issue to an WP:UNDUE size, I will install without that clause. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:52, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

For clarity, is this the wording we are considering; In December 2022, Rowling announced that she was the founder and funder of Beira's Place, a domestic violence charity established to provides specialist services to cisgender women aged 16 and over in Edinburgh and the Lothians who are survivors of sexual violence. ? If so, I would ask that the word cisgender is removed, as it is inaccurate. This is not a term used by those involved in the centre. They have stated that the service is making use of the single sex exemptions as provided for in the Equality Act. Both trans men and non-binary people born female are entitled to protections under that exemption. The service excludes users on the basis of sex, which would therefore mean it does not serve men, trans women and non-binary people born male. I also assume the proposal is to change the word 'charity' to 'organisation'. 109.144.213.18 (talk) 09:45, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello 109.144.213.18, the current draft language being considered is included directly above in the table with the header "PROPOSED Draft 1 (517 words)" - Thank you! DMVHistorian (talk) 14:10, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Re 109; not only is that wording problematic; the sources are not the highest quality. See the full proposal above as indicated by DMVHistorian, which re-jigs the existing paragraph structure to work in the new content contextually rather than just dropping in a whole new paragraph. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:50, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

I would avoid using the term "female-only", as the implication in this case is assigned female at birth, but the term "female" is colloquially quite often applied to trans women as well. Snokalok (talk) 15:31, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps "AFAB-only" or "assigned female only" Snokalok (talk) 15:32, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Every source uses women-only; most in the headline. Every source body uses female only. No source uses the term assigned female only; see WP:OR. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:49, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Per the Beira's Place article:

In a statement provided by the organisation, Beira's Place wrote "we believe that women deserve to have certainty that, in using our services, they will not encounter anyone who is male. Where appropriate, we will refer men or individuals identifying as trans women to other appropriate services."

Assigned female at birth is the technical term for what we're dealing with here, it's not original research, it's simple terminology. Just because the BBC doesn't see trans women as women, doesn't mean wikipedia shouldn't either.

If you like, perhaps we could simply add a parentheses of some sort saying (not including "individuals identifying as trans women", per the org) or something along those lines with citation Snokalok (talk) 00:49, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Or, come to think of it, actually we should just make it say "cisgender-women centered". That's one extra word, and conveys the org's intent far better, as "women-centered" alone is misleading. Snokalok (talk) 01:04, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Installing without the additional clause of content covered at Beira's Place, and rewriting for flow and context, results in 489 words. Keeping the size manageable meant trimming other words about JKR's much more significant philanthropy, and I concur with trimming that clause to not give undue weight to one of JKR's lesser contributions that has also been less covered by sources. It seems increasinly necessary to remind that we can't add entire paragraphs every time JKR makes news, and need to keep the flow and context and weight and size in line. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:01, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

References

Adding the citeable biological word is a good solution, but it was done in a way that compromised the prose. I have attempted repair, but the prose is still iffy now; perhaps better wordsmiths will have a look at how the entire construct can now be repaired. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:56, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Edit notice proposal

 Done Template:Editnotices/Page/J. K. Rowling created, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:05, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

I have just noticed that this article has no edit notice, and suggest that one could be helpful. An edit notice is something that every editor sees from the edit window when editing the article. As a sample of how they work, you can attempt to edit dementia with Lewy bodies, where you will see Template:Editnotices/Page/Dementia with Lewy bodies as a sample of what was added to all medical Featured articles following on these discussions:

1. Administrator's noticeboard
2. FAC
3. Milhist at FAC

I suggest we use the boilerplate language as seen in the first paragraph at Template:Editnotices/Page/Dementia with Lewy bodies (the second para is specific to medical content), as that wording has consensus. Working in specific links to

1. Wikipedia:Featured article review/J. K. Rowling/archive1
2. Talk:J. K. Rowling/FAQ and
3. Template:Ds/alert

could also be helpful for this article, but brevity is key to encouraging readability. Vanamonde93 I believe you are also experienced with editnotice pages. If we can agree on wording, either Vanamonde93 or I have template permissions to add this. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:36, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

We may want to create Template:BLP FA editnotice to mirror Template:Medical FA editnotice, but with language that references WP:BLP and WP:BLPDS instead of MEDMOS and MEDRS. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:54, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

I like that idea! It would make the template more broadly useful. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:41, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

This is also within scope for Gender and sexuality DS: also, contentious BLP FAs are relatively uncommon, and we shouldn't deploy an edit notice by default as it adds to load times. So I'm slightly inclined to prefer a notice specific to this page. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:46, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Also, almost all of the contentious edits to this page are related to gender and sexuality ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:00, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Edit notice proposal Draft 1

J. K. Rowling is rated as a featured article on Wikipedia. While the article and its content is completely open for users to edit (just like with any other Wikipedia article), please keep in mind that it went through a community review process in April 2022, which verifies and ensures that the article represents a thorough survey of the relevant literature, uses high-quality sources, and complies with the other featured article criteria. It is requested that you discuss any significant proposals or changes on this article's talk page and gain community input, support, and consensus before proceeding to make the desired changes.

This article is subjected to additional editing requirements for pages related to gender-related disputes or controversies. As the biography of a living person, this article must also comply with Wikipedia's BLP policy. Other questions may be addressed in the FAQ.

Discussion of Draft 1 Edit notice

Started above, pls discuss. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:36, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:08, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Rather than "It is requested that you discuss..." it might be better with more active voice, that is, "Please discuss..." Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 00:43, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Suggested alteration of the canned wording: Please discuss any significant proposals or changes on this article's talk page and gain community input, support, and consensus before proceeding to make the desired changes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:07, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Seems fine to me, prefer Callanecc's suggested wording. Vanamonde (Talk) 18:44, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Vanamonde93, I've created Template:Editnotices/Page/J. K. Rowling. I noticed that most of the others edit notice pages are also semi-protected ?? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:00, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Notice looks good to me. I'm not sure I see a rationale for protection; it's on a single page (ie, not widely transcluded) and only visible to desktop editors. Not pre-emptive and all that. Vanamonde (Talk) 22:04, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Thx ... I wasn't sure on that! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:04, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Also, I deleted the one sentence about BLP when I saw the article already has a canned BLP editnotice. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:03, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Gender and Transphobia in The Introductionary Paragraphs

I do not believe the introduction of this article are currently written from a sufficiently neutral point of view, specifically in that the contraversy surrounding rowling's views on gender and transness in politics are not given their due weight in the introduction, while her book series Harry potter, which is not the focus of this article, is given undue weight taking up half of the first paragraph, is the background focus of the second paragraph summarizing her life, and is given the entirity of the third paragraph for introductory literary analysis and a summary of its early critical reception.

This article is meant to be about rowling, not harry potter, and yet harry potter dominates while information about her current affairs and opinions are relegated to two sentences buried underneath four paragraphs, two standard desktop screens, and four standard phone screens. And, when the introduction does finally break the topic of conversation, doesn't to overview her opinions, but instead provides an overview of the reaction to those beliefs that is not at all descriptive. It's describing the shadows on plato's alogrical wall instead of the beliefs of the person casting those shadows, and again this article is supposed to be about rowling, not harry potter nor the people criticizing rowling. It's supposed to be about rowling.

By overweighing harry potter and underweighing rowling's current activity as a self-identified terf (as a significant portion of new articles about her have been about her alleged transphobic beliefs rather than about her work as an author), this article is failing to be neutral by eneffect minimizing rowling's very relevant current political beliefs and actions in favor of focusing on her less currently relevant old work.

It is my opinion, that revisions should be considered to bring the framing of the article's introduction more into line with my interpretation of wikipedia's guidelines on neutrality and due weight. Unfortunately, I have neither the practiced ability nor the neccessary permissions to write those revisions, and am only able to voice my disatisfaction with the current version of article. Sebastiantemple (talk) 19:19, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Rowling has an article only because of Harry Potter. She was unknown before it. The vast majority of scholarly sources discussing Rowling are related to Harry Potter, and the rest are biographies, which aren't covering her recently expressed political views, as far as I'm aware. We're going to need a lot more coverage of her views in reliable sources before mentioning them in the first paragraph would be reasonable, per WP:DUE. Vanamonde (Talk) 20:05, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Per Vanamonde93, in fact, in relation to the all reliable sources, JKR's historical position as an author, and WP:NOTNEWS, the position that the lead spends too much time on current news could be taken. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:31, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Regarding Vanamonde; yes, rowling only has a major article that people care about because of harry potter. But the article isn't meant to be about harry potter: Harry Potter quite deservingly has its own plethera of articles: Rowling has this one article, and it should be about her specifically especially in its introduction.

Focusing too much on harry potter in the introduction buries information about that's specifically about rowling like her philanthropy or (self-identified) trans exclusionary radical feminist beliefs.

Regarding vanamonde and sandygeorgia; I'd very happily believe that there aren't enough scholarly source yet cited by wikipedia about this portion of the the topic of JK Rowling, if that weren't the case, the introduction and article would have already been rewritten to reflect that. However, and I very strongly doubt that there aren't a substancial number of scholarly articles written about Rowling's political beliefs and action as it relates to gender.

Recognizing that google scholar isn't a source and is at best a barameter about how much scholars with a wide range of reputibility are talking about a topic where google's spiders can see, and it gives no information as to the specific opinions expressed in the literature about the topic it's returing results for, since google scholar results for article written containing these keywords since 2018 are at time of writing:

•JK Rowling: 15,800

•JK Rowling trans: 5,270

•JK Rowling transgender: 1,100

•Harry Potter: 17,900

•Harry Potter Transgender: 14,700

•Harry Potter Queer: 5,330

I feel I can safely say that a conversation about Rowling, her belief gender, and how that all relates to harry potter is currently raging in the scholarly community, especially if you consider that JK Rowling's all time google scholar results are 35,000, almost half of the scholarly material on rowling was written in the last six years, and a third of that comes up with the key word trans.

If my rude google scholar searches are indicative of actual patterns in accademic writing, and I grant that's admittedly an if, but granted that if, that indicates that there absolutely is enough scholarly writing about the topic to warrant it a greater due weight than it's been given, and wikipedia doesn't have those articles ready to cite because no one's done the effort of bringing that information to wikipedia, not because no one's don the effort of making that information available.

I am again restating that I believe revisions should be considered, and now based on your responses and my rudimentary I'm suggesting that an effort to review of current writing on the topic would be prudent, if for no other reason than to update the biliography and works cited. Sebastiantemple (talk) 23:40, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

That is indeed a questionable "if". I would be the first to acknowledge that Rowling's views are likely to receive more attention in sources going forward, but when on the very second page of a google scholar search for "JK Rowling transgender" I get a medium.com article and a news piece, I suggest you need to look a little deeper. Note also there's approximately 35k results for Rowling and Harry Potter as primary search subjects. Vanamonde (Talk) 04:54, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

I think we should compare this to another similarly large figure in the news recently - Kanye West.

Yes, Kanye West is a legendary musician and that was what made him famous in the first place, but the fact that he is now a self-declared Nazi and supporter of Adolf Hitler, is not something that should be particularly downplayed, the due weight is there. Rowling being a TERF is no different, and while this article does have a section on her transgender views, yes, it feels... sanitized. It doesn't mention any of the most glaring parts of her anti-trans activism or rhetoric, only the most favorably covered. Kanye received no such sanitation meanwhile. Snokalok (talk) 04:13, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

This is a sticky subject. I'm going to venture that that difference between Kanye and Rowling is that Kayne has been on a wide-ranging antisemitic tirade for about 2-3 months now, Like, solid, everything he does is digging the hole deeper, resulting in near-universal condemnation and huge financial repercussions. Rowling's transphobic remarks have angered the LGBTQ community to no end, but the condemnation is not universal...the far-right and the Christian fundamentalists love it, as do a minority of feminists. She has also not suffered financially to any great extent. So, I don't think at this time there is a basis to say more in the lede of the article than we already do. I personally find this regrettable, but, the reality is that society by & large sees transphobia as just not the 3rd rail that antisemitism is. Zaathras (talk) 04:36, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

And Joanne has been railing against trans rights since 2020. Kanye's antisemitism has (unfortunately) garnered support as well, and while I agree the condemnation is more universal, at a certain point I don't think we should be basing our NPOV on a both sides equivalence between the far right and everyone else. The midway point between far right and center, is still hard right. Snokalok (talk) 14:32, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

To play devil's advocate, she has only aired her slanted views to social media and the occasional answered question in an interview, and has not made her beliefs self- or life-defining, and neither has the media. her transgressions, thus far, have garnered controversy but they are not career-defining. Kanye's entertainment career as he has known it is all but done. That is career-defining. Zaathras (talk) 23:51, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Do you really think the scholarly literature on the impact of Kanye West's music can be compared to that of JKR and Harry Potter? If so, that might explain the DUE WEIGHT miss here. Snokalok, please have a look at WP:PROPORTION for perspective relative to one of the most successful authors of all time vis-a-vis what all has to be covered in this bio, and remember taht there is an entire sub-article devoted to her political views. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:11, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, just searching Kanye West on google scholar, I got 20,300 results, compared to JKR's 15,800, so yes, I'd say one of the most influential and successful musicians in modern history, is comparable to one of the most successful authors in modern history. Snokalok (talk) 14:27, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

If you add in the Harry Potter searches, that brings the results up to 35000 vs 20000, both of which are on the same order of magnitude as each other so, yeah, definitely comparable I'd say. Snokalok (talk) 14:44, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

What? Absolutely Kanye can be compared to Rowling. To quote his article: West is among the most critically acclaimed popular music artists of the 21st century, earning praise from music critics, fans, industry peers, and wider cultural figures. In 2014, NME named him the third most influential artist in music.

I do agree there's a line Kanye has crossed that Rowling hasn't yet, namely that "Nazi" is an extra special taboo in modern Western culture that transphobia just isn't yet. There's a reason we have an essay titled WP:NONAZIS but not WP:NOTRANSPHOBES. Like, he came out as a Nazi with Alex Jones of all people sitting next to him trying to get him to dial it back. Even anti-semitism alone isn't the kind of taboo that openly identifying as a Nazi is.

That being said, I also agree that there hasn't been enough coverage in this article of her recent comments. The transphobia is becoming an increasingly large part of her notability, to the point where if you told me someone wrote an article on Rowling yesterday, I'd strongly expect it to be about her transphobia, and not Harry Potter or anything derived from it. Loki (talk) 05:16, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Setting aside entirely my personal feelings about these individuals and their views; LokiTheLiar is correct in saying Kanye has said things that aren't considered defensible in Western society at large, while Rowling's views would have been considered mainstream not that long ago, and are still couched in terms of "protecting women's rights" (I'm obviously not endorsing that claim, but that's how she spins it) in a way that mainstream society hasn't confronted head on. We're not going to reach a consensus here by making analogies; our only path has always been summarizing what the best sources say about her, and I venture to predict there's sources available today that weren't available a year ago. I suggest we confine discussion here to the best of these sources, and if someone wishes to adjust how we're writing about her views, I suggest your first task is to identify such sources. Vanamonde (Talk) 06:14, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Okay, bet. Here's ten to start.

Anania, Valentina. "The Author is Cancelled Long Live the Authors." Makings gives a brief overview of rowlings actions relating to gender and what the audience reaction to those views mean fordiscuss what the reaction to rowling's views mean for the concept of autorship: Among citations of theory, are citations demonstrating rowling's beliefs which woulding meet the source criteria for wikipedia directly but lend credibility to the Anania, including Hibberd, (the poorly aged) indy100, and Lenker. Rowlings transphobic views are not the focus of the article, but are an instrumental jumping off point for what the article seeks to discuss.

Simpson, Johanna Consuelo. Inclusion in Fandom: How Harry Potter Fans Rhetorically Create Representation. is a Doctoral thesis which discusses who the harry potter fandom creates representation in their interpretation of the text and transformative works. It briefly touches on the subject of rowling's personal representation headcanons, not meantioning transphobia directly, but citing Fleming who's response exists as a reaction to rowlings transphobia from the perspective of a cis lesbian woman. It's not directly related to the subject, but does exist tangential to it.

Bloch, Natania. Reimagining Religion in a Contemporary Context: The Case of Harry Potter is a thesis which examines religion from a jewish perspective and then re-examines that through harry potter. The thesis isn't about rowling's views on gender but has a short section towards its end titled "Authorship and Controversy" focused exclusively on rowling's transphobic controversy.

Gwenffrewi, Gina. "J. K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of Secrets." Transgender Studies Quarterly. to quote the abstract: "This autoethnographic article attempts to capture the distress of a trans woman in Scotland at the transphobia in the legacy media's coverage of the J. K. Rowling furore in June 2020. Through the use of a frame narrative, the article analyses some of the transphobic elements of Rowling's essay published on June 10, 2020, originally titled “TERF Wars,” which prompted an online backlash and a subsequent cycle of negative legacy media coverage against trans people. The article deconstructs two opinion pieces in the Scotsman and the National that depict Rowling as a victim and trans women as abusive and/or delusional, with an accompanying association of trans women with virtual spaces, set against cis women inhabiting real-world spaces."

Dahlen, Sarah Park and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the wizarding world. Is a collection of essays about the themes of identity and justice as they appear in harry potter. I have not had the opprotunity to read it yet, but it has an essay titled "Chosen Names, Changed Appearences, and Unchallenged Binaries: Trans-Exclusionary Themes in Harry Potter." which I cannot tell from the preview to what extent rowling's views are dicussed, the following is an except: "That is, one might think that the trans-exclusionar rhetoric of the essay was a wholely new development in the thinking of the author. As this chapter will show, however, the text reveals otherwise. That being said, it is never my..."

Tudor, Alyosxa. "Terfism is White Distraction: On BLM, Decolonising the Curriculum, Anti-Gender Attacks and Feminist Transphobia. Engenderings." is a scholarly opinion piece published in the University of London SOAS, looking at the broader implications of rowlings terfdom and concern trolling for 'women's safety' means in the context of anti-Black racism, and how the two forms of bibotry are entwined.

[https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/view/8292 Uspenskiy, Andrey Uspenskiy. “Wumben, Wimpund, Woomud: An Exploration of Social Censure in the Internet Age." Is a essay published in The Morningside Review, discussing what rowling said and did to lead to the controversy surrounding her views on transness and gender, what the reaction, both generally and academically has been, and what that means for trans people and people who like harry poter.

Wahlström, Hanna. "The structural issue with cisnormative feminism: WHY CISNORMATIVE FEMINISTS LIKE J.K ROWLING IS TRANSPHOBIC." Is a gender studies student thesis. I do not have access to the content of the thesis, but the title makes it out to be relevant to the discussion, and it should probably be looked into as a potential source.

Heggestad, Jon. Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed is an accademic review of the Natalie Fiennes's Behind Closed Dores: Sex Education Transformed. It's third point discusses how Fiennes discusses coverage of "the trans issue," saying quote, "This reframing seems particularly relevant in the wake of J.K. Rowling's transphobic tweets from earlier this year-tweets which repeat much of the same problematic rhetoric that Fiennes identifies here." From this I believe Fienne's book itself doesn't discuss rowling, though it should be consided as a potential new source for citations broadly about the topic, but an accademic review of the book putting the material the book discusses next to rowling evidences that the academic community is both aware of rowling and her opinions on gender, and considering them as seporate from her status as the original author of harry potter. Rowling is being brought up in conversations about sex and gender in accademic circles because of her transphobic beliefs.

Quatrini, Amerigo. On J. K. Rowling's Discourse on Transsexual Issues, An Analysis of the Language Used on Rowling's Twitter and the Sociolinguistic Implication of Hate Speech is an article examining the rhetorical structure of rowling's transphobic statements and the broader implications that with regard to hate speech and discrimination. My attention's running thin so I'm gonna be able to focus up and read this article but it's definitely relevant.

My hands are starting to hurt from typing so I'm gonna take a break now, but these are just ten sources to start the discussion. In selecting these texts, I ignored dozens of articles from Vox and the like in the google scholar results; then after opening my tabes tabs, I rejected two articles as wholely irrelevant to trans issues, rejected two articles as wholely irrelavent to Rowling, and rejected five articles as definitely not up to wikipedia's citation criteria. If any of these are no good, I'm new here and I'm not even a fourth of the way through the tabs I over-ambitiously opened at the start of the source hunting session. Sebastiantemple (talk) 23:52, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Have you seen WP:SCHOLARSHIP? (Just because something-- like Vox-- appears on scholar.google does not make it a high-quality source as required for featured articles.) This disappointing list reaffirms my concern that we don't yet have the kinds of sources we'd optimally have before re-tackling this material. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:09, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I've read wp:Scholarship, that why I "ignored dozens of articles from Vox and the like," and these seemed fine to me, the majority are hosted on the websites of universities and journals that seem reputable enough to me.

If the problem is that I only found ten, I picked ten as an arbetrary starting point for discussion so I could get feedback to improve both my selection of sources and my synopsi of them going forward and not because I ran out of sources to consider. But, the feedback that the list is "disappointing," is so vague as to be unhelpful, so if I may ask what about any, or each even, of these sources is specifically disappointing? Sebastiantemple (talk) 03:52, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

One is an opinion piece, several are theses that need further examination, and I didn't find much of relevance that could be added from the sources on a quick glance and based on what I could access. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:12, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

FWIW you should have included articles from Vox. Vox and other mainstream news outlets are reliable sources on here, and generally outweigh weaker scholarly sources like masters' theses which don't go through traditional peer review. For a list of commonly used sources and whether they're generally reliable, see WP:RSP. (Note that in some specialized topic areas you may want to use more specialized guidelines like WP:MEDRS for medical sources, but in general news sources are good.)

However, I disagree with SandyGeorgia here in that I would definitely not call this list "disappointing". That's quite a lot of sources, and so even if each individual one is weaker than we'd normally like, as a whole they're pretty strong evidence that Rowling is increasingly becoming known for her transphobia. Loki (talk) 04:17, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

I skipped vox and other news sources not because of their reliability, but because of their newsiness. The availability of a plethera of news articles on rowling's transphobia and the events that brought it to light, was never, as far as I can tell, a point of contention.

The point of contention, was instead on how much scholarship related to rowling was focused on her transphobic views:

• per Vanamonde: "The vast majority of scholarly sources discussing Rowling are related to Harry Potter, and the rest are biographies, which aren't covering her recently expressed political views."

• per SandyGeorgia: "JKR's historical position as an author, and WP:NOTNEWS, the position that the lead spends too much time on current news could be taken."

I considered that my efforts would be best spent focused on the point of contention, that is, the amount of scholarship about rowling's transphobia, andso I skipped vox etc because theyr broadly considered news over than scholarship. If I was mistaken in that assessment, do feel free to add a selection of credible potential news sources about the topic to suppliment the scholarly sources I'll be continuing supply. Sebastiantemple (talk) 05:20, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

It is completely innapropriate to compare the two. There is a reason why Nazis are taboo and gender critical views are largely not. The two things are entirely different… whereas Nazi views promoted the murder of millions, including Jews, disabled people and Black people, gender critical views do no such thing but merely criticise views that have only really emerged in the last 20 years. Moreover, while Nazi views are not widely held due to obvious reasons, gender-critical views are often held although not often shared online. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/30/guardian-readers-nominate-their-person-of-the-year https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/30/75-of-americans-believe-in-only-two-genders-male-a/ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/two-thirds-of-voters-oppose-snps-gender-reform-plans-d8wh3wh9w Scientelensia (talk) 12:30, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

It's not inappropriate to compare 'gender critical' individuals or 'trans exclusive radical feminist' (read: transphobes) views to fascism given the history of fascism burning books on sex and gender and killing gay and trans people, because remember gay and trans people were also targets for genocide during the holocaust.

Now, I'm not calling gender critical individuals nazis. I'm just saying in the pyramid of hate model, the genocide fascists want to commit (wit regard to trans people specifically) is built on top of the rhetoric that gender criticals and terfs espouse, and it is absolutely appropriate to point that out. Sebastiantemple (talk) 21:13, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

"Even anti-semitism alone isn't the kind of taboo that openly identifying as a Nazi is." Well, your average anti-Semite is not openly advocating for a "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem, nor embracing ultranationalism in a purge campaign against all ethnic and religious minorities. Nazism has a close association with genocide and ethnic cleansing, while other discriminatory ideologies have had less violent histories. Most transphobes are not calling for mass executions either. Dimadick (talk) 14:30, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

It's pretty much a given that once Nazism is introduced into a conversation concerning an unrelated topic, the quality of discourse degrades significantly. Pretty much the same with Kayne West.

OP has a legitimate point we should focus on.

I do think the overly vague last sentence of the lede minimizes the significance of the ongoing controversy over JKR's views and should better specify what kind of support she is garnering from whom in order to give context to the issue. Crescent77 (talk) 21:49, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

The last (transgender) sentence of the lead was the result of one of the most contentious, highly attended, and poorly formulated RFCs in recent Wikipedia history. During the January thru April Featured article review, many of us discussed that it was too soon for a new RFC, and discussed plans to revisit at the end of the year, when hopefully more sources would be available. I have been constantly scanning, and don't believe actually there are more of the high-quality, journal, scholarly sources we should have to effectively revisit that sentence. (Hence my preference to wait another three or six months so we can try to get it right, and avoid WP:NOTNEWS as we now have.) When we do revisit the sentence, the old RFC provides a great example of how not to present or run an RFC. The next RFC should have proposed text well discussed and hammered out in advance, before RFC launch, and be put forward in a planned manner, with an abundance of advance discussion, so we don't again end up with a Garbage In/Garbage Out no consensus conclusion. Meanwhile, what would be even more helpful would be for new participants to the talk page to read the entire FAR, and its five archives, and be familiar with high quality sourcing required by the featured article criteria; with or without Nazis or Kanye West, it is frustrating to see so many proposals on this talk based on either no or inferior sourcing. There are few to no FAs that enjoy the breadth and depth of consensus this one has. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:17, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

• Posting at the bottom, as I've lost track of the threading here. Theses should generally be avoided in an area where better sources are available. They don't undergo peer review the same way books and articles do. Particularly when we're discussing not just the description of a controversy but how it's framed in Wikipedia's voice, we need the highest-quality sources. I'd honestly take a publication like Vox over most theses. Many of the non-theses sources above are also questionable; The Morningside Review appears to be an undergraduate journal, IJLLL may not be predatory but it looks borderline at best, and the Gender Forum source is a review of a book that doesn't apparently discuss Rowling, and contains a single comment about this issue. The only ones that look remotely usable to me are the Transgender Studies Quarterly source, and possibly the essay in Harry Potter and the Other; and two sources aren't enough to consider reframing the lead. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:24, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

  Agree ... Sebastiantemple, to become familiar with what best sources look like in this case, have a look at examples like Pugh used in the article now. Since we will eventually need to undertake a comprehensive update, it should be based on a preponderance of topnotch sources, not partial/sketchy theses mentioning points of marginal relevance. We just aren't there yet; as VM93 indicates, we are still at a stage where the news sources are better than some of the rest. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:35, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

  Right, with that helpful feedback, I'm about ready to disappear into source hunting for an extended period of time. I just have one question before I do: Regarding Vanamonde: "two sources aren't enough."

  How many high-quality sources would you consider 'enough'? Not as a binding agreement, but a target for me to work towards? How many would you personally consider 'enough'? Sebastiantemple (talk) 00:18, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

  Depends a lot on a bunch of factors, especially the quality of the high-quality sources and how many high-quality sources disagree with the claim you're making. But as a general estimate I'd say 5ish? Loki (talk) 18:22, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  The question is not only "how many"; it's how far removed from the news events to get a WP:NOTNEWS perspective. Also, broader scholarly reviews (all of JKR not just niche trans issues) are always good (eg, Pugh). We are still too close to the event(s) to have thorough analyses. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:03, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Discussion on critical reception

Blocked per sockpuppet of banned user, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

The article says that the Harry Potter novels have "mixed reception" and were criticized by "many" for some the views that are in it, but this is not true. The Harry Potter novels were always very well received at their time, and the views in the novels were always discussed and viewed in good eyes. Only recently people have been trying to revision the novels in a "bad light", especially following Rowling's comments on Trans people. Comments of the novels being antisemitic, racist, even pro-nazi, receiving RTs on Twitter from people who didn't even read the books just because they don't like Rowling or have never liked Harry Potter. So, the article should be changed to "some reviewers", not "many", because 1) that's not true and 2) this is only a recent discussion by Ill people. Decodingw (talk) 22:06, 16 January 2023 (UTC) That's quite incorrect, Decodingw. The criticism is widespread in the highest quality sources, and it is uniformly spread in time; much of it predates anything Rowling said about trans people. I encourage you to read the cited sources. Vanamonde (Talk) 22:20, 16 January 2023 (UTC) Agree with Vanamonde, who is solidly familiar with the entire body of sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:35, 16 January 2023 (UTC) My point is that although criticisms could have been made at the time, these are not "many" as the article says. There could be many NOW, but at the time of the releases, they were very few talked about and the novels received mostly praises. Decodingw (talk) 22:50, 16 January 2023 (UTC) As I said before, the sources we have used are spread through time; but even if there had been a shift in the reception of the book, we would need sources documenting that, or a very obvious split which simply doesn't exist. Vanamonde (Talk) 23:10, 16 January 2023 (UTC) I also agree with Vanamonde here. While I'm not as familiar with all of the sources, from those I do know the antisemetic and racist criticisms surrounding the books has existed over a protracted period. While it may be discussed more now on social media by readers/fans of the series, it is certainly a long standing thread amongst critics, academics, and even media articles. Sideswipe9th (talk) 04:09, 17 January 2023 (UTC) Again, not saying these critics haven't been made at the time, I'm just against including the word "many", and in favor of including the word "some". Also, I'm in favor of including that these critics have been discussed by fans and scholars of Rowling's work, who denied these claims made by them of the novels being antisemitic and racist. Decodingw (talk) 22:13, 17 January 2023 (UTC) Both those changes require high-quality sources in support; in this case, scholarly sources. For the first point, you need to demonstrate that most discussions of race and social division in Rowling's writing in scholarly sources is not mixed, but mostly positive. For the second, you need scholarly sources stating that fans and scholars deny the analyses cited here. Providing fan sources, as you did above, doesn't count for much. Please read WP:DUE and WP:RS. Vanamonde (Talk) 19:34, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Jessica naming convention

Why her full name follows the portuguese convention? She has the mom surname first and then dads surname second. If jessica born in uk then she would have rowling in the last name not arantes. 2404:8000:1027:85F6:B404:34A3:8805:7618 (talk) 20:12, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, the UK naming convention is "whatever the parents decide to put on the birth registration form". That said, only one of the cited sources (Pugh) mentions the full name. If this is an error, perhaps other sources will list the name differently? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 20:32, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

We have already visited the question; it should be somewhere in archives, but not sure if talk or FAR archives. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:52, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Found: Talk:J._K._Rowling/Archive_14#Jessica_rowling. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:56, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Inline citations in Lede

Why are there no inline citations in the lede/opening sections? Seems odd, considering the volume of attention surrounding the subject. Crescent77 (talk) 22:04, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

See WP:LEADCITE. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:34, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Exactly. Quoting such: "statements about living persons that are challenged or likely to be challenged must have an inline citation every time they are mentioned, including within the lead". Seems pretty clear that there should be inline citations in the lede. Crescent77 (talk) 00:13, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Featured article review/J. K. Rowling/archive1 and WP:CONSENSUS. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:27, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Please stop with the WP:Spam. Nothing in your link indicates why the lede rewrite removed all inline citations, and I see no consensus supporting that course of action.

It seems that inline citations should be included in the lede so that stabilizing edits(particularly reverts) by longstanding editors don't veer into WP:OWNership territory. Crescent77 (talk) 01:13, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

This is the pre-FAR lead; the text that was cited is no longer in the lead. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:25, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

And the text that is now in the lede should be cited. Crescent77 (talk) 01:35, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Crescent77 could you please read WP:THREAD? I've had to fix the threading on every post you've made. I believe the lead now conforms just fine with both WP:LEAD and WP:LEADCITE; pls gain consensus if you want to change that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:37, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Please stop with the malicous redirects SandyGeorgia. WP guidelines clearly indicate inline citations are appropriate in the lede. If you disagree, please indicate why. Crescent77 (talk) 01:50, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Sandy has already pointed you at the two sources for why we don't have citations in the lead. WP:LEADCITE which states The necessity for citations in a lead should be determined on a case-by-case basis by editorial consensus., and Wikipedia:Featured article review/J. K. Rowling/archive1 where through the numerous discussions as part of the 2021/2022 featured article review a strong consensus was developed that because of the strong citations in the body, citations were not required in the lead. Sideswipe9th (talk) 04:01, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Once again, there is no indication there of a consensus cocerning inline citations in the lede, the lack thereof actually appears to be an oversight that occurred during the review. Crescent77 (talk) 06:28, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Both counts above – a) that there is no indication of a consensus and b) that the lack thereof actually appears to be an oversight – are incorrect. The FAR had an unprecedented, to my knowledge, level or participation from about two dozen editors, including probably more than a dozen experienced FA writers, none of whom engage in overcitation of leads. I can indicate where you can find samples of other vetted content written by the main editors of this article if that would help. In FAs I've been the main author on, you will see I cite hard data and direct quotes in the lead. In this case, most of what was cited in the former lead was hard data, which was removed from the new lead. We were constrained by a recent RFC on one sentence, and discussed that at length. Reviewers felt it was too soon to revisit such a highly attended RFC, so we did not rewrite that one sentence. We did discuss revisiting it when better sources were available. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:59, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time for that thorough explanation.

I'm simply indicating, and it sounds like you may generally agree, that inline citations should be in the lede if there is any significant possibility of reasonable disagreement, as there is here.

I can understand why they may have been left out during the review, especially with the expectation that another review could happen again in the not to distant future.

My concern is that newer editors here are not provided appropriate context. Providing inline citations would give them some immediate material to start with.

I would even go so far as to say that in the case of an article expected to undergo significant redevelopment in the future, overcites may be the lesser of two evils. In a system developed on the concept of open editing based on readily sourced RS, providing an overabundance of information for future discussion seems much better than the exclusion of such. Crescent77 (talk) 17:06, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

FYI, I have a back injury because a tree fell on me, and must limit my daily time sitting at a real computer. I am frequently iPad editing, and two days ago, my iPad bluetooth keyboard gave up as well. Some editors who know my typing difficulties have learned to put up with my frequent typos and brevity :) I got a new bluetooth iPad keyboard yesterday, which doesn't mean my typing will get any better!

We are between a rock and a hard place with the transgender sentence, because of the unfortunate and very poorly planned, yet widely attended, RFC. When it is time to reconvene, this time we will discuss discuss and discuss before launching an RFC, should we need one. On the one hand, it may be time to reconvene and revisit that text so we can attach citations to contentious bits (do others feel enough time has passed?). On the other hand, we just had a look and found there are still not very good scholarly sources. I looked again yesterday, and fear we still don't have a lot to work with.

We should see what others think as to whether we should discuss reconvening, and if we do, I can ping the entire FAR list to get involved once we have enough of a start to be worth bothering others. I'd rather hear from the main editors first: @Vanamonde93, AleatoryPonderings, and Olivaw-Daneel: SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

PS, which bits of the lead do you think are likely to be challenged? Are we talking only about the transgender sentence? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:22, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

• I have always preferred to cite everything in the lead: the way I see it CITELEAD does not prohibit it, and I typically need to make an edit a week reverting someone who has tagged a lead as needing citation or removed content claiming it to be uncited. However, I recognize I'm in the minority here; and also that on a topic this broad, the level of summary and synthesis required in the lead does not lend itself easily to citation. So color me ambivalent. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:27, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

  Vanamonde93 I'm also interested in hearing whether you think it is time to revisit the one sentence in the lead, that we avoided changing because of the RFC. If we were to do that, I would suggest a very structured approach like we took on the FAR, where we didn't even think of crafting text until we had agreed on sources, and I fear we still don't have enough scholarly sources. I'm also wondering how people are in terms of time commitments for undertaking this just now. Barring anything unforeseen, my time is good. But also need to see what else Crescent77 wants to see cited ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:39, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

  I searched for sources last month after a comment on the talk page (see above, you participated too) and I did not find enough to justify reframing. I'm open to persuasion, however, as I'm a little busy in RL haven't been able to dive as deep as I'd like. Vanamonde (Talk) 18:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

  In terms of timing, we're probably far enough away from the last RfC that we could hold one to address the deficient sentence. As for the sourcing question, I've not seen much change on the scholarly side with regards to this, though there are more lower quality media sources available than we looked and which usually coincide with something controversial that Rowling has tweeted.

  I think the important question is, with the potential sourcing options that we do have available, can we workshop better prose than what the 2021 RfC left us with? If the answer is yes, then maybe we shouldn't let the perfect (ie more academic sourcing) be the enemy of the good (ie the best available sourcing we have right now). And if so, then once we have workshopped a sentence we could, if we feel as though it is needed, structure an RfC in such a way that it addresses the deficiencies of the previous one, and also gives us more freedom to write a hypothetical third version should the better sourcing we've been hoping for become available.

  Or if we're feeling really radical, we could IAR this, workshop a new sentence, form a local consensus around that, and just put it in place? Enough time has passed that it would be pretty easy to argue that consensus had changed even without an RfC. Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:36, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

  If we were to come to local consensus, and if we were to install and not be reverted, then theoretically we wouldn't need an RFC. Lots of if in there ... it could be worth a try. Still want to see what others have to say. As most of us know, it will probably be about six weeks of work for one sentence (or two). Is it worth it to do that now, or do we continue to wait/hope for better scholarly sources? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:06, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

  Well, I for one am on the side of 'wait for more sources, good enough for now'. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:40, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

• Based on this MOS discussion, it's not true that such citations are mandatory. I'd lean no, for the same reasons people give in that link, e.g. the lead is supposed to summarize an already-cited body, as is the case here. If certain bits have to be cited twice, as XOR'easter says, "contested" is itself, well, contestable. How many people have to be upset with a sentence for it to qualify? (There's always somebody...). Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 19:37, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
• I agree with Olivaw-Daneel. It's okay not to cite the lead and we if decide to cite it, someone will delete the citation per leadcite, so there's really no winning. Not sure what the OP is asking to be cited. Every statement in the lead or only specific statements? Victoria (tk) 20:25, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Errington 500

I own Errington <gulp - expensive>

• Pages 1 and 2, A1 (a): 26 June 1997 an edition of 500 copies published simultaneously with A1 (aa)
• Pages 7 and 8, A1 (aa) paperback: 26 June 1997 5,150 copies published simultaneously with A1 (a)

More importantly, page 8 does go on to state that neither the hardback nor the paperback "has bibliographical priority", so the "old statement [about 500] is exposed as woefully inaccurate". So, this edit is correct, and I will add a footnote. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:46, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Done, thank you TelepathicTwelve for catching that. When I accessed Errington originally, I was misled by the Timeline source, and missed the additional content of pages 7 to 8. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:56, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

My pleasure! I'm no Wikipedia editor so very happy the change to an important article was approved with no fuss & I broke nothing in the process. Your new footnote is very helpful in explaining the matter better than how I left it.

I'm lucky enough to have met Errington! - delightful fellow TelepathicTwelve (talk) 19:22, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Awesome; thanks again! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:24, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

This looks better, thanks again! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:52, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

=D

Just to explain the reasons behind the latest changes - i removed the link to that website claiming 500 copies (Timeline?), didn't feel we needed to provide an example of someone giving the false number, given that p. 8 of Errington itself discusses the widespread false belief

Your new footnote said: Old claims that the initial run of 500 hardbacks had "bibliographic priority" are "woefully inaccurate"

But what Errington really says is "woefully inaccurate" is the idea of 500 copies printed in total

Thanks once again, couldn't have formatted a footnote without you TelepathicTwelve (talk) 21:06, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Sales

Per a recent press release, the sales now stand at 600 million copies and 85 languages, making it "the bestselling book series of all time" according to the publisher. An editor added this to Harry Potter, but I haven't copied it here because I'm iffy about citing such superlatives to a primary source. Just parking this here in case someone finds a better source. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:47, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Although I don't doubt the veracity, it would be nice if we had a secondary source that analyzes the claim. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:53, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Olivaw-Daneel is there anything usable here ?

• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/newsbrief/index.html?record=4082
• https://www.barrons.com/news/the-beloved-harry-potter-saga-8b39fb50
• https://www.rtl.fr/culture/arts-spectacles/harry-potter-comment-j-k-rowling-est-elle-passee-de-l-ombre-a-la-lumiere-7900231706
• https://www.bfmtv.com/people/la-saga-harry-potter-fete-ses-25-ans_VN-202302030169.html

Barron's says it came from Agence France-Press, but I can't find that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:04, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! I've sourced the sales numbers to RTL. For "bestselling series of all time" WP:EXTRAORDINARY asks for "multiple high-quality sources", but the only secondary sources I've found for that statement are Publishers Weekly and Forbes. Forbes is fine, but I'm not sure if Publishers Weekly counts as "high-quality", so it'd be good to have a third source. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:18, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Btw, any objections to applying Template:Harvc#Basic_example to "Works cited"? It'd reduce clutter. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:27, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I thought we had done something to reduce along those lines, but if you can do more, I'm in. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:30, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Done. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 23:04, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Impressive ... much cleaner! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:09, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Podcast

I think it would be worth adding something about her participation in the podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling by Megan Phelps-Roper. 184.147.14.9 (talk) 00:04, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

What did she say that we haven't already covered? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:07, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Eassy about contribution towards Young Adults 124.240.214.91 (talk) 06:57, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Backwards copy

(AKA, plagiarizing Wikipedia): [7]

• https://gatekeepersnews.com/2023/04/16/jk-rowling-net-worth/

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:53, 16 April 2023 (UTC)