Talk:Voluntary childlessness

The pet rooster
Is the image of a woman talking to her pet rooster really the best image to represent voluntary childlessness? Fephisto (talk) 04:27, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
 * From what I have read, some people prefer pets to children. Pick another picture if you want. Nerd271 (talk) 16:44, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Absence of criticism section
Should there be a criticism section? I say this in relation to the article being voluntary childlessness and thus a choice. Perhaps criticism in relation to ideological aspects like antinatalism, a view that does have note of criticism in its article. Zilch-nada (talk) 11:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Moral reason
There is no mention of the most important reason to be child free,IMO, that it is immoral to impose a life of struggles and pain onto another being. 50.206.145.234 (talk) 21:58, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Celebrities
I'm not sure if we need a large section on celebrities who pursue this lifestyle. Nerd271 (talk) 00:11, 10 July 2023 (UTC)


 * 100% agree. Why is this wiki entry so long? 18.10.77.197 (talk) 20:52, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, and what's up with all the really strange, unnecessary pictures? It's like it's purposefully edited to make this lifestyle look as kooky and crazy as possible.  Fephisto (talk) 16:23, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Page Changes
My main goal was to try to be bold and clean up some of the accretion here. The article goes on for quite a while and it's difficult to read. Importantly, a lot of the lists had items that were listed multiple times and were very redundant, so I tried to recategorize them and bundle them together a bit more. Finally, a lot of the pictures seemed really haphazard or looked so weird that I wonder whether they were an attempt to discredit the page, so I tried to limit it to one per section.

I think the statistics section could really be condensed into general view instead of a "country by country" or "region by region" view, as there's a lot of unnecessary overlap with the "Aging of..." articles.

As for the third section, it has a lot of overlap with the first section, but I don't quite know how to handle it. It might be best to try to merge the first and third sections into one somehow. For example, the "Selfish" issue/ethical reasons/religion seems like parts of a good lede for the "Philosophical" reasons section. Something like that maybe?

Fephisto (talk) 21:31, 19 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Please keep working on this article. I could use some attention. Nerd271 (talk) 20:53, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I copied the page over into my sandbox. If you want to help rewrite this article, please go there. Nerd271 (talk) 23:03, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In case you have not noticed, and I rewrote this page. We both agreed that the previous (major) version was much worse because it was more like an outline than an article. We did it on my sand box. Like everyone else, you are welcome to improve this page. Drive-by templating is ill-advised. Nerd271 (talk) 14:25, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * In case you have not noticed, and I rewrote this page. We both agreed that the previous (major) version was much worse because it was more like an outline than an article. We did it on my sand box. Like everyone else, you are welcome to improve this page. Drive-by templating is ill-advised. Nerd271 (talk) 14:25, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

NPOV
This article has a fair amount of weasel wording problems, but also a lot of issue with overall tone. The photo captions certainly are an issue; they should just describe the image, not use it to say "Oh look and that proves...". Similarly, a good deal of the rest of this article seems to be advocating this position, rather than simply describing the fact that it is and has historically been controversial, why, and presenting referenced facts about it so that the reader can learn about it and make up their own mind. While I personally agree that it's perfectly fine for someone to decide not to have children, the article shouldn't be pushing that, or any, position. It should present actual facts (environmental impact and so on), of course, but in a neutral way, and if "some say" something, it needs to be specified who "some" is and why their thoughts are of particular significance. Seraphimblade Talk to me 14:13, 14 June 2024 (UTC) We can rephrase the captions to better match the body text, if necessary. We are talking about opinions here. So it is perfectly fine to use opinion or commentary articles. This is like the Reception section for an article about a movie. Nerd271 (talk) 19:57, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Public opinion polls do not generally state the identities of the interviewees for obvious reasons. And since this is still a controversial topic, of course certain things are going to be vague. Moreover, we have both sections explaining why some want to be childfree and why some criticize this lifestyle choice. I don't see a problem here, except that more information could be added. Nerd271 (talk) 14:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The "who" need not be an individual. If it's results from an opinion poll, it can be specified as (for an example, this is not of course actually the case) "In a 2015 Gallup poll, 60.3% of respondents answered 'Yes' to the question...". Then the "who" is, well, 60.3% of respondents to that poll; we don't need or want to individually list all their names, and of course couldn't anyway. But that's then specified in some way, rather than a nebulous "Some...". Seraphimblade Talk to me 14:41, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This has previously been addressed. Saying, "According to this poll,..." again and again is repetitive and tiring. So another editor,, decided to change it to more or less where it is now. You are free to bring some of that back. I suppose switching between the two styles for the sake of variety is a good thing. Vigorous writing should not bore the reader to death. This does not mean that we should pursue sensationalism, of course. But there is nothing in this article that could be categorized as such. Nerd271 (talk) 14:49, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, the style could be varied, but "some" without further qualification isn't workable at all, even once. (And I know for me, reading and seeing that is a record scratch, not good style&mdash;"Wait, who is this 'Some' who say this, and why do I care what they think?".) But I'm sure there could be some different ways found to word it, so that every "Some" is made specific and contextualized without being unduly repetitive. The weasel words aren't the only issue, though; there's a fair few overall problems in tone. I'll try to collect some of those as well The photo captions were one example, those need trimmed down to just describing the image. A photo caption shouldn't generally be very long. But in the end, if the choice is "boring, repetitive, and neutral" or "exciting, varied, and non-neutral", well, we've got to choose the former. I don't think those are the only two choices, but currently it's more toward the latter, and we've always got to be very careful when trying to write "vigorously" that we don't, in that vigor, cross over the line of POV. Neutrality is more important than "vigor". Seraphimblade Talk to me 14:58, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Vigor, conciseness, clarity, and neutrality are all important. We should not write in a formulaic, chore-like, or robot-like manner. (What's the point of having human editors, then?) Since we are presenting people's varying viewpoints here, this means that at times, things might seem subjective, even if we tried our best to remain neutral. This is a lifestyle choice, after all. The top two sections present two classes of opposing opinions. (Again, you are free to present more viewpoints in the second section if you think this is too biased in favor of the childfree/voluntarily childless.) As for the captions, I suspect you may not have seen that many from the news or scientific publications. Some of them amount to a short paragraph. As long as they are relevant to the article and support the body text, and as long as there is enough space, there is no problem here. Nerd271 (talk) 15:07, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * As to captions, that may be true for news and science publications, as they have no policies against original research or synthesis. For articles, though, extrapolating anything about the image beyond what it directly depicts is those things, so captions can't do that. I'm definitely seeing a lot of other problems too, though. I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few: Citation of the claim In line with policies of family-friendliness, governments and employers typically offer support for parents, even though people without children might have to care for invalid, disabled, or elderly dependents, commitments that entail significant financial and emotional costs is sourced to, which does not so far as I can tell in any way discuss the issues of adult caregiving in connection or contrast with childlessness, so that's SYNTH. The source would have to explicitly make a connection between them in order for the article to. This claim, The "life" aspect of the work-life balance is often taken to mean parenting. Non-parents, including the childfree, are thus assumed to be career-focused and willing to work extra time, which is not necessarily the case. What they do with their free time is not considered as important., is stated as fact, but is sourced to , an editorial (note the "Commentary" tag.) Editorials can be used as a source for what their author's opinion is, but not for factual statements. There's also this source, , which is used for several claims&mdash;but while being published by the New York Free Press probably makes it reasonably good reliability-wise, I don't know if the book actually supports those claims or not, because book cites need page numbers, not just a citation to the book as a whole. And that's on a spot check of a couple paragraphs&mdash;so if there's more sourcing issues like those, there's a lot to be done. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:05, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, the style could be varied, but "some" without further qualification isn't workable at all, even once. (And I know for me, reading and seeing that is a record scratch, not good style&mdash;"Wait, who is this 'Some' who say this, and why do I care what they think?".) But I'm sure there could be some different ways found to word it, so that every "Some" is made specific and contextualized without being unduly repetitive. The weasel words aren't the only issue, though; there's a fair few overall problems in tone. I'll try to collect some of those as well The photo captions were one example, those need trimmed down to just describing the image. A photo caption shouldn't generally be very long. But in the end, if the choice is "boring, repetitive, and neutral" or "exciting, varied, and non-neutral", well, we've got to choose the former. I don't think those are the only two choices, but currently it's more toward the latter, and we've always got to be very careful when trying to write "vigorously" that we don't, in that vigor, cross over the line of POV. Neutrality is more important than "vigor". Seraphimblade Talk to me 14:58, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Vigor, conciseness, clarity, and neutrality are all important. We should not write in a formulaic, chore-like, or robot-like manner. (What's the point of having human editors, then?) Since we are presenting people's varying viewpoints here, this means that at times, things might seem subjective, even if we tried our best to remain neutral. This is a lifestyle choice, after all. The top two sections present two classes of opposing opinions. (Again, you are free to present more viewpoints in the second section if you think this is too biased in favor of the childfree/voluntarily childless.) As for the captions, I suspect you may not have seen that many from the news or scientific publications. Some of them amount to a short paragraph. As long as they are relevant to the article and support the body text, and as long as there is enough space, there is no problem here. Nerd271 (talk) 15:07, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * As to captions, that may be true for news and science publications, as they have no policies against original research or synthesis. For articles, though, extrapolating anything about the image beyond what it directly depicts is those things, so captions can't do that. I'm definitely seeing a lot of other problems too, though. I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few: Citation of the claim In line with policies of family-friendliness, governments and employers typically offer support for parents, even though people without children might have to care for invalid, disabled, or elderly dependents, commitments that entail significant financial and emotional costs is sourced to, which does not so far as I can tell in any way discuss the issues of adult caregiving in connection or contrast with childlessness, so that's SYNTH. The source would have to explicitly make a connection between them in order for the article to. This claim, The "life" aspect of the work-life balance is often taken to mean parenting. Non-parents, including the childfree, are thus assumed to be career-focused and willing to work extra time, which is not necessarily the case. What they do with their free time is not considered as important., is stated as fact, but is sourced to , an editorial (note the "Commentary" tag.) Editorials can be used as a source for what their author's opinion is, but not for factual statements. There's also this source, , which is used for several claims&mdash;but while being published by the New York Free Press probably makes it reasonably good reliability-wise, I don't know if the book actually supports those claims or not, because book cites need page numbers, not just a citation to the book as a whole. And that's on a spot check of a couple paragraphs&mdash;so if there's more sourcing issues like those, there's a lot to be done. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:05, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Vigor, conciseness, clarity, and neutrality are all important. We should not write in a formulaic, chore-like, or robot-like manner. (What's the point of having human editors, then?) Since we are presenting people's varying viewpoints here, this means that at times, things might seem subjective, even if we tried our best to remain neutral. This is a lifestyle choice, after all. The top two sections present two classes of opposing opinions. (Again, you are free to present more viewpoints in the second section if you think this is too biased in favor of the childfree/voluntarily childless.) As for the captions, I suspect you may not have seen that many from the news or scientific publications. Some of them amount to a short paragraph. As long as they are relevant to the article and support the body text, and as long as there is enough space, there is no problem here. Nerd271 (talk) 15:07, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * As to captions, that may be true for news and science publications, as they have no policies against original research or synthesis. For articles, though, extrapolating anything about the image beyond what it directly depicts is those things, so captions can't do that. I'm definitely seeing a lot of other problems too, though. I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few: Citation of the claim In line with policies of family-friendliness, governments and employers typically offer support for parents, even though people without children might have to care for invalid, disabled, or elderly dependents, commitments that entail significant financial and emotional costs is sourced to, which does not so far as I can tell in any way discuss the issues of adult caregiving in connection or contrast with childlessness, so that's SYNTH. The source would have to explicitly make a connection between them in order for the article to. This claim, The "life" aspect of the work-life balance is often taken to mean parenting. Non-parents, including the childfree, are thus assumed to be career-focused and willing to work extra time, which is not necessarily the case. What they do with their free time is not considered as important., is stated as fact, but is sourced to , an editorial (note the "Commentary" tag.) Editorials can be used as a source for what their author's opinion is, but not for factual statements. There's also this source, , which is used for several claims&mdash;but while being published by the New York Free Press probably makes it reasonably good reliability-wise, I don't know if the book actually supports those claims or not, because book cites need page numbers, not just a citation to the book as a whole. And that's on a spot check of a couple paragraphs&mdash;so if there's more sourcing issues like those, there's a lot to be done. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:05, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * As to captions, that may be true for news and science publications, as they have no policies against original research or synthesis. For articles, though, extrapolating anything about the image beyond what it directly depicts is those things, so captions can't do that. I'm definitely seeing a lot of other problems too, though. I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few: Citation of the claim In line with policies of family-friendliness, governments and employers typically offer support for parents, even though people without children might have to care for invalid, disabled, or elderly dependents, commitments that entail significant financial and emotional costs is sourced to, which does not so far as I can tell in any way discuss the issues of adult caregiving in connection or contrast with childlessness, so that's SYNTH. The source would have to explicitly make a connection between them in order for the article to. This claim, The "life" aspect of the work-life balance is often taken to mean parenting. Non-parents, including the childfree, are thus assumed to be career-focused and willing to work extra time, which is not necessarily the case. What they do with their free time is not considered as important., is stated as fact, but is sourced to , an editorial (note the "Commentary" tag.) Editorials can be used as a source for what their author's opinion is, but not for factual statements. There's also this source, , which is used for several claims&mdash;but while being published by the New York Free Press probably makes it reasonably good reliability-wise, I don't know if the book actually supports those claims or not, because book cites need page numbers, not just a citation to the book as a whole. And that's on a spot check of a couple paragraphs&mdash;so if there's more sourcing issues like those, there's a lot to be done. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:05, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * It is fine to use opinion articles as a source of opinions, which means to attribute the opinion to its holder and present it as such. But we cannot use opinion articles and present what they say as fact, "in Wikipedia's voice" so to speak. So, we can certainly use an opinion article, and present it as "John Doe, in the Example Times, stated that Foo is A and Bar is B, because C and D", and that's fine to source from an editorial, because we make it clear that it's Doe's opinion. But we cannot use that to source "Foo is A and Bar is B, because C and D". Seraphimblade Talk to me 21:20, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I just want to say that this was what we originally had to work with when we slowly started picking away at this. So, before chastising us too much, please take a look at where it's come from.
 * I still don't quote like quite how the Statistics and Research section pans out either, given how it has the same issue of bullet-point-schizophrenia only the bullet points are hidden as different 'sections' that are frequently just a single sentence stating a poll for that region. In other words, that section still needs to be written out like an article.
 * The photo captions certainly are an issue; they should just describe the image, not use it to say "Oh look and that proves...".
 * Oh man, check out that link I posted above. I'd be in favor of getting rid of all the images minus the graphs, fwiw.  It's boring and clinical (the sleeping person with tie-dye dreams is fun, and don't get me started on the absolute riot that a Schopenhauer painting is), but this IS an encyclopedia.
 * and if "some say" something, it needs to be specified who "some" is and why their thoughts are of particular significance.
 * Could you provide a list of such statements in the article? Your guys' discussion is a little too abstract for me, so it'd help to have some concrete examples we can look at here.  At the very least, then we could go through and correct them.
 * I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few:
 * It took all my attention just to get rid of the repetition and Nerd271 helped changed it from the bullet point list monstrosity you see in that link to an actual article. I think I complained somewhere else (on your talk page, Nerd271?) that I didn't even get to the point of doublechecking all the sources.  It's just too much work for me to bother with, and I'm sorry to say, but just between the two of you, I'm getting rather sick of reading and re-reading this article.  It took all I had to just get rid of all the repeated sentences.  I agree there are issues with the sources.  Why don't you go through them more thoroughly for us?
 * Fephisto (talk) 02:04, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Certainly not my intent to "chastise" anyone. Article improvement is an iterative process, and certainly what's here now is better than that massive bullet list you linked to before. I do think we probably could do with something like the regional stuff the old version had, though; it's very unlikely that either the experience or prevalence of "voluntary childlessness" is much similar between the UK and Pakistan, so it probably would be good to have some idea of the differences that apply in that sense, rather than a lot of blanket statements that make it seem like this is essentially a globally similar phenomenon. As to "some", for a few examples: Some have argued that the conscientiousness of childfree environmentalists... (who has argued that?), The decision not to have children has been derided as "unnatural"... (who derided it that way?), Some women have argued that revealing their decision to not have children was akin to coming out as gay (who are some examples of those women?), and so on from there. It's not just "some", but weasel wording in general&mdash;"it's said", "some believe", "it is believed", "it is held", and so on. By whom? All of that is weasel wording.As to checking the sources, I'll try to get through those as I can, may make a separate section for that, but just checking a few certainly showed issues with it. Seraphimblade Talk to me 04:56, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh, and really, I don't think taking out all the photos is the answer. The one of the woman beating away the stork with an umbrella really is, I think, encyclopedic, in that it is historic and shows that this is not some new phenomenon. Seraphimblade Talk to me 05:00, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
 * and, planned to start this sooner, but had some rather unexpected things come up. I think that's sorted, and I think Fephisto is correct that a comprehensive analysis of sources would be a very good starting point. It would be rather large to put onto this talk page, so I've started it up at Talk:Voluntary childlessness/Source analysis; would like to get your thoughts if anything else would be useful to add to the table. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:34, 22 June 2024 (UTC)