Talk:Blackbeard/Archive 5

Edit request on 10 March 2012
It says on place of death 'Ocracoke, Province of North Carolina' on the 22 November 1718, but it was called Province of Carolina until 1729, 11 years after blackbeards death. So I request that it be changed from 'Province of North Carolina' to 'Province of Carolina'

91.20.70.111 (talk) 19:58, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ Thanks! Dru of Id (talk) 01:06, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

"a sloop belonging to ye subjects of the King of Spain"
"a sloop belonging to ye subjects of the King of Spain"

"ye" = "the". It is not pronounced as "YE". The letter Y in this era was used for the letter Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ)--one of the old Anglo-Saxon letters representing a TH sound. So "ye" in this context is not pronounced as if it is another form of the word "you". Why not have this quotation spelled in modern form as "a sloop belonging to the subjects of the King of Spain", instead of helping to prolong this silly idea that many people have, and in their ignorance who pronounce it wrongly: "ye olde curiositie shoppe" etc??? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.71.8.75 (talk) 06:17, 3 April 2012 (UTC) sorry ... forgot to add the tildes...

68.71.8.75 (talk) 06:41, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Economist Peter Leeson believes that pirates were generally shrewd businessmen, far removed from the modern, romanticised view of them as murderous tyrants
Economist Peter Leeson believes that pirates were generally shrewd businessmen, far removed from the modern, romanticised view of them as murderous tyrants

Is "tyrants" the right word? Usually a tyrant is a despotic king or some other type of leader, such as Castro, etc. Can a man who is captain of a ship be a tyrant? 68.71.8.75 (talk) 06:40, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Born in South Carolina?
I am not saying I advocate this theory, but I met the author of the book listed here, and he seemed to have done his research. Should something be added to the article about this, perhaps involving speculation in the least?

http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20111205/PC1602/312059917 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.58.196.197 (talk) 07:38, 17 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Duffus admits much of his writing is speculative, and it would appear his book represents a fringe theory. The book is also published by Looking Glass Productions, which was established by none other than...Kevin Duffus. Parrot of Doom 08:54, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 22 November 2012
The third sentence reads "settling on the Caribbean island of New Providence"... It should read "settling on the Bahamian island of New Providence"...

New Providence is NOT in the Caribbean. It is in the Atlantic Ocean, one of the islands of the Bahamas.

Barreav (talk) 18:02, 22 November 2012 (UTC)


 * You're talking about now. The article talks about then. Parrot of Doom 22:21, 22 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Actually, you're right. I'll change it now, thanks for pointing it out. Parrot of Doom 22:39, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Place of Birth?
Only Captain Johnson says Blackbeard was born in Bristol, and he uses no background sources. The author Ken Duffus postulates he was born in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Anyone want to tackle this? alot of the Charleston historical community is starting to consider this theory — Preceding unsigned comment added by 153.9.254.113 (talk) 19:35, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Duffus's book, The Last Days of Blackbeard the Pirate, is published by none other than Ken Duffus. Until his theories gain weight, I think he'll remain on the fringe of historical research. Parrot of Doom 20:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Edit request on 26 March 2013
I would like to edit some simple misunderstood facts.

Coga16 (talk) 22:47, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
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Last Name slowburn edit war.
Question. In modern times, isn't the man far better known as "Teach"?

If so the article should go with Teach, per WP:COMMONNAME. APL (talk) 16:57, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Citation comments
Apparently Editor Parrot of Doom believes that changes that I have made to citations in this article are detrimental – I can't be all evil because Editor Parrot of Doom has made changes based on the templates I added. So, I'll explain the other changes I made.

In this citation, title is the title of Leeson's paper but url points to a list of all of Leeson's papers. This forces readers to search for the paper.

The changes I made pointed url to the paper referred to in title; I added format because the document is not html and because the pdf icon does not have  text for those who use screen readers; because the paper is dated, I removed accessdate:

This citation refers to an article on Scientific American's website.

I changed publisher to website and wikilinked the magazine's article for proper formatting and because raw urls are ugly; because the interview is dated accessdate is not required:

This citation lists as publisher the incorrect name of the magazine Proceedings:

I changed publisher to magazine for proper formatting; I used the magazine's correct name with wikilink; I added volume and issue number, and even found an online copy of the article on the Proceedings web site (I had noticed that the article's name was incorrect though I failed to fix it in my edit – it's corrected here):

This citation is to an article in The New York Times:

I changed publisher to newspaper for correct formatting with wikilink; I removed extraneous text (", hosted at nytimes.com") from the citation so that it doesn't become part of the citation's COinS metadata; and again, I removed accessdate because the article is dated:

And the last is a citation to a web site:

I changed title to use the full title on the web site's home page; I changed publisher to website:

That's it. So, I object to Editor Parrot of Doom's reversion of my edit.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:03, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for spotting the errors (now corrected), however my point still stands - the changes you've suggested above are your personal preference. Not mine.  As per WP:CITE, you shouldn't really make such changes. Parrot of Doom 18:29, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * You're welcome. But, I think you seem to be asserting ownership: ... the changes you've suggested above are your personal preference. Not mine. You are saying to me that my preference for proper use of  to produce correctly formatted citations does not align with your preference so the changes I made to improve the quality of the article's citations are disallowed as improper. You have given no reasons for reverting my edits except your own personal preference and a claim that I have violated WP:CITE which claim seems to be lacking in substance.


 * I presume that you meant WP:CITEVAR. Not really applicable here because none of the changes above violate the restrictions listed under To be avoided. While explicit approbation isn't given to these particular changes, common sense would suggest that changes that bring citations into compliance with the  documentation and common practice are improvements and so allowed under that extraordinarily vague heading Generally considered helpful.


 * Since my change to Wood (2004) bringing the subscription required link-note inside Wood's citation with yes is apparently acceptable, why then are these others unacceptable?


 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:55, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * They're my personal preference because I wrote the article. There's nothing wrong with how its citations are formatted and I want them to remain as they are.  Now please go away and bother someone else with your technobabble. Parrot of Doom 22:02, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Trappist, CITEVAR applies to more than just the specific restrictions given under "To be avoided". Editors are permitted to use any style of citation they please, whether or not it corresponds to a particular template documentation. As long as there are no obvious errors (and Parrot has fixed these, correct?), any idiosyncrasies of the established citation style are allowed to stand pending a consensus to do otherwise. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:10, 4 May 2013 (UTC)


 * @Editor Nikkimaria: Did you read my explanations? Did I fail to clearly state the reasons for the changes? Do you not see that the changes do not modify the article's citation style but instead make improvements to five individual citations? I am not interested in changing the article's citation style.


 * Yes, Editor Parrot of Doom made two fixes not detailed above – a reference without a matching citation and a citation not referenced in article text.  The changes I made do fix what I consider to be errors, either in content or, as in the case of naked urls, contrary to a guideline or policy (Link titles).  To reiterate:


 * Leeson (2010): The link does not support the cited text in the article because it points to a list of all of Leeson's papers when it should point directly to the paper named in the citation's title (and as it did when the citation was added to the article with );
 * Matson (2008): The citation lists the web site scientificamerican.com as the publisher and as a naked url; WP:COinS metadata is corrupted because Scientific American in this case is not a publisher but is a magazine (COinS metadata is  but should be
 * Ross (1974): United States Naval Institute Proceedings is not the name of a publisher. Ross's article is in a magazine titled Proceedings which is published by United States Naval Institute; the incorrect publisher also corrupts the CoinS metadata in a manner similar to Matson (2008). It was this citation that caught my eye and caused me to examine the other citations in the article;
 * The New York Times (1997): Extraneous text included as publisher (which should be newspaper) corrupts the WP:COinS metatdata in a manner similar to Matson (2008);
 * Black Beard's Cove: Not much to be done with this one except complete the web site's name; on re-inspection, the date parameter seems unnecessary (2007 copyright date?); It may be desirable to use an archived version because the current site does not appear to be the same as the versions held at Internet Archive through 20 April 2013.


 * None of these changes change the article's citation style. The errors exist and should be fixed.


 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:47, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I disagree with this interpretation of WP:CITEVAR. Its references to "citation style" clearly mean whether the article is styled using CS1, Vancouver, Harvard with inline footnotes, Harvard with parentheses in the text, etc.—that is, the system of referencing in the article as a whole, not the details of individual citations. (I speak with some confidence because I think I can actually remember what got this written into guidelines; there was a dustup on FAC about 7 years ago over whether it was acceptable to use parenthesized Harvard references (SlimVirgin, 2006) rather than the "little blue numbers" of inline footnotes for referencing.) CITEVAR prohibits the wholesale rewriting of citation styles, e.g., the way B'rer Rabbit used to convert Truthkeeper's articles at FAC to incidental to fixing broken references. (And look where that got him.)
 * Your position that the template documentation is not binding is tantamount to saying that citation templates have no fixed semantics, which vitiates their use in creating metadata, among other things. I disagree. I think the templates do have inherent semantics, that is just as much a statement of fact as "The book was written by X" in the text of an article, and is similarly subject to correction. If authors don't want to be bound by those semantics, an available alternative is to hand-format their references rather than use the templates, which remains a perfectly legitimate way to write articles.
 * Look, I'm intimately familiar with the wikipolitical history here, and I know the promoters of the latest shiny new technical toy (references! infoboxes! coordinates!) have been, frankly, colossal dicks preoccupied with steamrolling the people who actually write articles with bogus invocations of WP:OWN and so on. At times I've been in there arguing with them about that behavior. Trappist is not, from what I've seen of his activities, one of those people. His changes (with the possible exception of flipping from to  ) seem rational to me, and I think he deserves to be responded to without the assumption that because he's technically knowledgeable, he's here to poke a stick in authors' eyes. Choess (talk) 01:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)