Talk:Tara Teng

Good article reassessment
Transcluded below. epic genius (talk) 02:48, 10 November 2015 (UTC)



This article is absolutely ludicrous
Someone needs to take a flamethrower to this article and give it a serious stubification. It's an article about a freaking beauty queen written in a tone like she's Harriet Tubman. To portray her as some sort of serious agent for social change is silly and makes a laughingstock of the project. So far as I can tell, like most beauty queens, she took up a social cause as expected and made some public appearances during her "reign" and did some other expected PR nonsense. From what I can see from searching, she's pretty much done nothing significant since she stopped being Miss Canada. She apparently got herself a rich husband, had a baby, and now it seems like she just mommyblogs and posts selfies on Instagram. Kelly hi! 01:00, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

BLP is far too long - basically "MEGO" material with the details - but she decidedly is notable per Wikipedia guidelines, and (were I given the cleaver) the BLP would be down to under 20K in length. Collect (talk) 02:22, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * (ec)Yes, she's notable, this just needs a serious pruning and change in tone. I looked in the history and it appears it was even worse in the past. Obsession-level bad and pretty much all written by one author. Kelly  hi! 02:37, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

As an editor who has made minor changes to the article in the past, I have looked over the article and agree with the assessment above. Someone needs to cut a lot of that stuff ASAP. For instance, "Teng and Joy Smith spoke at a breakfast in the Rural Municipality of East St. Paul" is not really that notable of an event. So is "In October 2012, Teng appeared unannounced at restaurant Szechuan Chongqing". epic genius (talk) 02:34, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm no fan of pageant queens but I actually recognized her name on the ArbComm board from hearing it in the news a few times. Article could use a trim though. Legacypac (talk) 03:43, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Article must be depuffed pronto. I'm too nauseous right now - maybe when I've forgotten all 6,000 permutations of "titlicking" I saw today. —Мандичка YO 😜 05:04, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I just deleted a whole bunch of non-notable stuff like she likes the Aquarium and which kid invited her to the high school down the road. Needs a lot more axing but I'm hungry. Legacypac (talk) 05:48, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

FYI was the article before the cleanup efforts. Legacypac (talk) 08:16, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * At one point it was up to over 100k, making it longer than Dalai Lama! But this is great work,, thank you. Looking at the history of the article, other editors have attempted trimming this article but got reverted for whatever reason. Kelly  hi! 09:15, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

A related article, same Admin, same problem. She Has a Name Legacypac (talk) 15:05, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * That article was once a good topic, with 180,000 combined bytes. At least it's only 83.4k now. (Still may need to cut that down as well, though.) epic genius (talk) 16:47, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe some of us have a misconception. Articles grow organically and the length of any particular article does not need to correspond to the length of any other particular article at any particular point in time. So, for example, it's irrelevant that her article is longer than the articles for more notable people. We don't hack off the limbs of healthy trees to make them match the stunted ones. It doesn't make sense to gut a comprehensive article about a marginally notable beauty queen because people haven't written as much about the Dalai Lama yet. Applied across the project, this reasoning would senselessly destroy most of our content.

We can't say: "Oh, this article should be 20k because the Dalai Lama is 100k", or whatever (obviously he is more than five times more notable than Tara, anyway). Rather, the naturally appropriate length of an article simply corresponds to the amount of verifiable information published about the subject in reliable sources. Obviously it is possible to have an article that is too granular, too bogged down with trivial detail, and having compared the old and new versions of the article, I think that it was too granular before&mdash;but I also think the new version goes too far in the other direction, as people seem to be chopping away at it in an effort to artificially impose a size limit that they feel corresponds to the subject's importance. Everyking (talk) 15:58, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I really don't know how much detail we need to go into on a young woman who had a single year in a small spotlight as a beauty pageant winner, and is now apparently living a quiet private life as a wife and mother. Kelly  hi! 16:57, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, if we have judged a subject notable for inclusion, we have judged it worthy of having a comprehensive article. I just want people to exercise caution about what they are deleting and remember that this really isn't about Neelix or Tara; it's about having good articles. It worries me to see people acting under the misconception that marginally notable people should have short articles. I think some of the deleted stuff might have been helpful, and we should consider restoring some of it. Everyking (talk) 19:44, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree that we should not have articles proportional to a subject's fame. However, the text was a little too puffed-up as it was. Maybe we should talk about which parts to restore. epic genius (talk) 21:50, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was; it's just a question of degrees. A proper discussion of which parts should be restored would really require Neelix here, to make an informed case for having this or that information, because the only other people who are really taking an interest in editing this article are the ones who want to delete big chunks of it. So it's unfortunate that he has disappeared. He's a good editor who just seems to get a little carried away when he's working on a project, but that's an easy thing to do when you're getting only positive feedback and no pushback. It seems like he was getting nothing but accolades before, and nothing but scorn and criticism now. We are just see-sawing between extremes and not finding balance. Everyking (talk) 22:21, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Everyking, you wrote above 'remember that this really isn't about Neelix or Tara; it's about having good articles', and if you take this position, you should agree that we don't need Neelix here to get this article to a better place. I support the serious reductions that have been made.Dialectric (talk) 22:28, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * If we really want to make this a good article again, I suggest that we make a request at WP:GOCE and/or WP:PEER. epic genius (talk) 02:25, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Having been involved in some related disputes in the past, I'm fully aware that Neelix had a definite tendency to overdo the topic — almost literally documenting every time Teng sneezed, starting a new article about every single non-notable person Teng could ever be sourced as having briefly crossed paths with at all, and on and so forth — and I'm not at all opposed to efforts to trim back some of the puffery. However, I must also note that this needs to be done carefully — as things stand right now, there's already one citation to a stranded reference (ref name=hope) that got poleaxed without any evident effort to make sure that nothing else in the article was being referenced to it. If you're going to strip content and referencing like that, you need to be more careful to ensure that you're not dereffing other content that was cited to it. Bearcat (talk) 23:29, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The references will be rescued by AnomieBot - check the history, it's already happening. Kelly  hi! 23:30, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I stand by all my deletions. I'm an experienced editor, (though I lack the high edit count possible when you create 80,000 often useless redirects).  I looked at each phrase in the article and said to self - would I include this if I was writing about someone moderately famous, like a Member of Parliament. If not, I tended to exclude it. If we included something of what her MP Mark Warawa thought about causes, said about a fashion show, who he met at an event, all the local charity he helped, and how he learned about the underground railway in elementary school we would literally need a book. I also applied the filter of "have I done this or is this pretty common?" cause I've done a few things in life but I don't think any of my life deserves to be on Wikipedia. A three week trip to central america helping tutor kids and learning a little Spanish... is nice but does not justify a paragraph on Wikipedia. Oh, and there remains a absurdly large number of references - someone should trim those but I could only take so much diving into intimate details on Tara in one day.  I never learned this much personal stuff about most of the girls I dated! Legacypac (talk) 23:59, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * You know, several of my friends' parents have Wikipedia articles, and none of these were as long as Tara's article was before yesterday. One of them's a COO of a large company and he still only has 25 KB of text. This is indeed a messy article, but at least we have an editor who cares for it (albeit a little too much). epic genius (talk) 01:45, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

The article right now looks fine, but it's certainly not comprehensive and certainly not at the level of being considered a GA (although I guess formally it still is). We need to find a balance between the puffery of the old version and barebones approach of the new one. Everyking (talk) 23:53, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Speaking of books... the November 7 version of the article was 18 pages long. At that rate, that's 4 KB per page, and that article could probably fill a small book. A couple more articles like that, and you'd have enough content to fill Book:Tara Teng or something. epic genius (talk) 00:48, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, I am disappointed that this important fact was deleted Teng founded Undies for Africa, a charitable organization that sends panties and brassieres to Zambia. I can't think of a more important cause. Liz  Read! Talk! 02:10, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * As far as I could see that involved one underwear store in little Fort Langley. Legacypac (talk) 02:15, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * If anyone feels the need to add back photos (we cut Stephen Harper. another MP, and so many others, here is a selection of 18 images. []


 * OK, I just heard her pronounce Tibet as "Tai-Bet" (on one of the citations): . I'm going to refrain from making a beauty queen joke here. Softlavender (talk) 03:05, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Honestly, I'm more concerned that she says "in China." (Hint: It's a geographical area in multiple countries, not even including the autonomous area...) epic genius (talk) 03:29, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I watched the videos too and I just don't get it. I mean she seems very nice and everything, but ultimately she's just your typical beauty pageant contestant at the end of the day. I don't understand how we ended up with this shrine to her here, but done is done. Kelly  hi! 03:37, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * It's unfortunate that this article was once larger than the Dalai Lama's. Oh, well. At least the situation is mitigated now. epic genius (talk) 03:50, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't really understand your 'in China' point although only listened to the first 20 seconds or so of the above link (i.e. starting the video from the time specified in the URL). Are you trying to say China is a geographical area in multiple countries and so it was wrong for her to simply say 'in China'? If so, this is a very odd claim. China referring exclusively to People's Republic of China is so common that even our article is simply titled China. And multiple countries is a little odd. Taiwan is the only other country generally considered to exist in any area commonly called China. (Two is technically multiple but normally if someone uses multiple in that way I think many people are going to think they mean more than two.) I mean technically I'm sure some extremists include Mongolia or other places, but this is such an uncommon phenomenon that even our China (disambiguation) doesn't include any such definition. Now if you're using a definition of China which excludes areas which are part the modern PRC e.g. China proper, again this goes against the fact that a large number of people simply refer to the PRC as China, and I understand even less how multiple countries comes in to it, unless you're trying to argue parts of the PRC are separate countries for some administrative, geographical or political region but again that's a fairly unusual definition and someone using the normal definition is not wrong. While it's true that the Special administrative regions of China are sometimes called separate countries, this is not a definition everyone uses, and is definitely controversial given the One country, two systems see e.g. this [//www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2127800/chinese-probe-marriott-hotels-over-geography-gaffe] (which while post dating your comment, is something not surprising to anyone familiar with the politics to even a basic level). This is unlike say the UK, where calling the UK a country or not calling Scotland etc a country is controversial. Even for those who support independence of the SAR, they may still not call the SAR as separate countries currently simply suggest they should be separate and independent countries. (Well at least Hong Kong.)  Now it's true that the Great Firewall isn't applied to the SAR. Whether or not the subject of this article was aware of that, I have no idea. But again, using China to refer only to mainland China or the PRC minus the SAR isn't exactly uncommon. I mean heck, the Great Firewall is commonly simply referred to as the Great Firewall of China. And I'm sure a search will find many, many, sources talking about censorship in China or the great firewall which don't include the SAR and don't make this clear. Sometimes this may be because the source is crap. Other times it may be because the source felt that using China in that way was reasonable and understandable to an educated audience.  Again I have no idea if any of this was understood by the subject, but the point remains using 'in China' as she did in relation to the great firewall isn't really that or unusual in and of itself. (If she used it oddly sometime later, I didn't listen to it.) Her pronunciation of Tibet is indeed odd and I don't think her description of what happens with certain terms was the best but those are separate points. Definitely it was was wrong to make the censorship claim if all we had was her word for it. P.S. If you question was over the definition of 'Tibet', I'm even more mystified. At least in the part I listened to, her only reference to Tibet and China was in relation to the effect of doing a Google search in China which has nothing to do with what Tibet actually means.  Nil Einne (talk) 07:08, 2 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Neelix tried to use that sentence in that YouTube as a citation for an exorbitant claim in the Miss World 2012 article . I've now removed the photo and the citation and replaced it with a tag, but the whole claim should probably be removed. I'll let someone else do the honors. Softlavender (talk) 04:05, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, the only source for that is a claim that Teng herself made in that softball interview on 100 Huntley Street. I'll remove it. Kelly  hi! 04:08, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I know this is really petty, but can we give credit where credit is due? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tara_Teng&type=revision&diff=556320380&oldid=556302034 this article was terrible 2 years ago but I couldn't do anything about it because the author was an admin. CombatWombat42 (talk) 05:05, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Personal life
If it's worth putting a Personal Life section: Husband's name is Chris Yamauchi. Married May 2013 (page 23 here, or search for her name). Have one child (per her numerous blog posts). Softlavender (talk) 08:13, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Would that not be against BIO as her family is not notable? Legacypac (talk) 08:20, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you are linking to, but personal life sections are standard in wiki biography articles. Softlavender (talk) 08:23, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I can't figure out what I'm trying to link to either. She is still speaking and promoting herself, but having a baby slowed her down. Her page was so over bloated for so long, maybe time to leave it short for now. Legacypac (talk) 09:44, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The only rule we have about non-notable family members, just for the record, is that for WP:BLPPRIVACY reasons a non-notable relative (spouse, child, sibling, parent, etc.) can't be named in the article if their inclusion is not supported by a reliable source — you can't insert it based on personal insider knowledge of the subject's private family life if the information isn't referenced anywhere verifiable. If the information is referenced to a reliable media source, however, then there are no restrictions on their names being included. Bearcat (talk) 15:01, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * This magazine is probably a reliable source (though I doubt that it is that reliable, since it's a religious magazine...). The blogs aren't. epic genius (talk) 15:46, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd say that marriage announcement is a reliable source - it's clear (at least to me) that the Teng family published it via the magazine so we can be confident about the factual accuracy. What it isn't is that this announcement does not confer notability (e.g. we shouldn't create articles about Tara's family members based on this announcement), but we aren't worried about that. Deryck C. 13:34, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Tara Teng and Oi Kwan
Chinese "Name" moved from my talk page for wider reference Legacypac (talk) 03:18, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

See, and. I'm fairly confident that Oi Kwan is Tara Teng's Chinese (Cantonese, to be precise) given name. But then I guess we don't typically redirect given names to articles... maybe a disambiguation page will be more appropriate. Deryck C. 13:17, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
 * , apparently it's only a family nickname and she's never gone by it publicly. I find it highly unlikely anyone will be searching for her by this name. Kelly  hi! 13:23, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

In her own words, "I think the one word to best describe me, the essence of who I am is actually my Chinese name which is Oi Kwan, and it means loves groups of people. I was given this name as a child at two years old. I wasn’t born with it, my parents named me after my personality really came out. And that’s just who I am." Read more at http://convergemagazine.com/qa-tara-teng-canada-1974/#3lfCuhD4ojpdLCAV.99 It's just a fun story she tells to ublicize her outgoing personality. Legacypac (talk) 13:35, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
 * All the more reason that this shouldn't be included. Not her birth name; not notable. epic genius (talk) 02:55, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay. Deryck C. 09:41, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Review of deleted material
I don't know how many people still check this talk page, but now that it's been a couple of years since the dust settled on the Neelix drama, I think it's a good time to review some of the changes made to the article since its overly-bloated state. Unfortunately, I think some of the deleted material added by Neelix was notable/interesting and wasn't added with the purpose of promoting his agenda. Particularly, there are a couple of lines about her cultural background which are absent from the article as it currently is. Were the facts about her biracial background or the languages she speaks really considered stalker-ish or not notable?-- Molandfreak  (talk,   contribs,  email) 00:47, 26 April 2020 (UTC)