Talk:T. M. Devine

Edit request from article subject
I am a volunteer email agent at WP:OTRS posting on behalf of someone who made a request by email. At private ticket:2019013010012296 the subject of this article made suggestions and offered information. This person also agreed to apply the standard Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license to the text of their request and asked that I post it here, so I am sharing their text here below:

--- Many thanks for your helpful response. The issues which concern me are: In 1998 I moved to the University of Aberdeen,becoming inaugural Director by invitation of the newly-established Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies(later the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies) and thereafter foundation Glucksman Research Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies.Left Abdn for EU in 2005. Hope this helps.
 * 1) omission of HonMRIA after my name,though referred to later in the text;should be placed after‎ FRSE in list of accolades.
 * 2) Yawning gap in my CV between leaving Strathclyde and joining  EU in 2005.
 * 1) ‎Honours:inaccurate ;should read '... in the British Isles for which he is eligible'.
 * 2) Ref to UK Parl award;again inaccurate.Should read '... in Historical Studies by a Joint Committee of the UK Parliament, Lords and Commons,the first ever presented to a historian in a Scottish university'.

I am copying information be included‎ in my bio to the email address you recommended. Your colleague at that address should note: --- Other editing suggestions are in the article's history log.
 * I have already added to the bio the corrections I sent you below on 31 Jan.
 * the verifications for these are my EU profile(referenced in your own response) and the profile Sir Tom Devine Centre for Global Migrations ‎Otago University NZ.These are also the verifications for the additions or changes requested below.
 * delete after Education Univ of Edinburgh;add full list of degrees affiliations etc after my name at beginning as in UoE bio;add the following at appropriate point in the text: RSE Royal Gold Medal,Scotland's supreme academic, presented by HM The Queen 2001; Wallace Award American Scottish Foundation,New York 2017.
 * 29 January 2019 edits
 * 3 February 2019 edits

 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  11:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Reply 8-FEB-2019
If the COI editor wishes to resume their request here on the talk page themselves, they are welcome to open a new edit request at their earliest convenience. Regards,  Spintendo   19:07, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) OTRS is the appropriate place for the subject to go to for confirmation of who the subject is.
 * 2) The combination of identity verification task with an edit request task goes slightly above what is appropriate here,  as evidenced by my colleague Bluerasberry bringing those requests here to the talk page. (I thank them for that. )
 * 3) The problem with the COI editor using OTRS as a courier for edit requests is that the COI editor now has removed themselves from the back and forth question and answer phase which typically occurs in edit requests, so that further questions I have as reviewer may not make it back to the COI editor. I certainly don't expect Bluerasberry to have to act as relay for my questions back to the COI editor, as this would not be an appropriate use of Bluerasberry's time.
 * 4) Additionally, the COI editor making changes to the article without posting the connected contributor template on this talk page is in poor form.
 * 5) In light of this, and due to the lack of access to the COI editor from my perspective to answer additional questions and/or provide references here on the talk page (instead of through diffs) the bulk of the edit requests may be declined as WP:NOTCV.

note
For the benefits of future talk page readers who come across this like I did: According to Special:Diff/1082704931 it was not in fact checked whether this was the article subject, and from the edits before and since this request my personal conclusion is that this is impersonation, over a period of years. I read this first, but I kept thinking to myself as I then looked through the article edit history and cleaned up the sourcing mess "Come on! This cannot be the work of the article subject, surely?" Uncle G (talk) 04:30, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

COI / CV Type Content and Sectioning
During my clean up of this article, I note several things which may, upon agreement from the community, may be applied to improve this article:

Career

 * The 'prose' in paragraphs, includes such text which looks to sell or advertise, for example, within the section regarding the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies it is written; "It became one of only two designated centres in the UK to be recognized in the phase two awards." Such text should belong within a new article on the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, without further expansion, the correlation between the Subject's involvement in the "recognition" is unclear, which may make similar text unsuitable.
 * 'Public Appointments...' - I ask, is this list relevant? If so, perhaps it should be in its own section?

Awards and honours
This section tends towards reading like a personal advertisement, for example, it is currently written; "Devine has won all three national prizes for research and writing on Scottish history: Senior Hume Brown Prize for the best first book in Scottish history (1976); the Saltire Society Prize for best book on Scottish History (1988); and the Henry Duncan Prize and Lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Scottish Studies (1993).". It may be more appropriate, as an example, to re-write such paragraphs "Devine has been awarded the Senior Hume Brown Prize for 'Best First Book' in Scottish history (1976); the Saltire Society Prize for 'Best Book on Scottish History' (1988); and the Henry Duncan Prize and Lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Scottish Studies (1993)."

There are other issues with the article, such as 'Alphabet soup' and a tendency to switch between styles.

Textualism (talk) 13:37, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard
BLP noticeboard

Textualism (talk) 12:03, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Raised at the BLP noticeboard
BLP noticeboard DuncanHill (talk) 16:04, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

To-do list
Here are some as-yet unused sources. Uncle G (talk) 20:50, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
 * For Exploring the Scottish Past:
 * For The Transformation of Rural Scotland:
 * For The Transformation of Rural Scotland:
 * For The Transformation of Rural Scotland:

Conversation with Gordon Brown
Wikipedia rules sometimes lead to odd situations. Here we have two sources. The one with a detailed apparently first-hand factual account of the event (from someone who by the looks of it was sitting in the 5th row) is a 'blog with an author "Andy Watson", who apparently writes about things that xe does living and working in Edinburgh, that I cannot identify. The one on a University WWW site has no author, reports the event in the future, and tries to sell us tickets. Not even The Scotsman (c.f. in the article) has a past tense report on the event stating that it happened. Uncle G (talk) 05:42, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 3 August 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved (non-admin closure) Iffy★Chat -- 18:37, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Tom Devine → T. M. Devine – This is the name all his books are published under, and how he is most often referred to in source material. Compare "T. M. Devine" Scotland search results at Google Scholar versus "Tom Devine" Scotland results (I added "Scotland" keyword to weed out false positives and because most of Devine's published work is about Scotland). News.google.com no longer produces number-of-hits figures, unless there's some way to turn that back on. General Google search results for same strings (also with "-wikipedia -wiki -forum -blog"): "T. M." versus "Tom". It's less of a stark difference, but "T. M." still clearly leads. T. M. Devine already redirects here. From what I can tell, use of "Tom" shot up after he was knighted, because of the British habit of "Sir Tom"-style addressing; it strongly favors using a first name rather than initials. But WP wouldn't generally refer to him with the honorific except in the lead sentence of his own article, which is already more complete than that: "Sir Thomas Martin Devine OBE FRHistS FRSE FBA (born 30 July 1945) is ...." For some in-context case in which it was actually import to refer to him as "Sir Tom Devine", the post-move redir will still work. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:44, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.