Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Donnchadh, Earl of Carrick/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by SandyGeorgia 22:07, 8 August 2009.

Donnchadh, Earl of Carrick

 *  and 

Alright. Coverage is pretty much full, and Malleus and I have given this thing the copy-edit going over quite a few times now. It has been reviewed quite thoroughly by User:Hamiltonstone too, and I can't think of any reason to delay any further presenting this as an FAC. A fascinating region and period, of which Donnchadh is as good a representative as any. Owing to to the topic's obscurity, it was a bit difficult to illustrate, so thanks especially to User:Notuncurious, who has made some very helpful images and helped alleviate that problem! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 23:42, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 *  Problem Oppose Why is this article titled Donnchadh, Earl of Carrick, and not Duncan, Earl of Carrick? This is, after all English, not Gaelic Wikipedia, and it would seem that the name of the subject of this article was known by, even in his own time, was closer, in written form, to Duncan than this invented "modern Gaelic" formulation. Wikipedia naming guidance states that the English name of a subject should be that used by preference in articles. A quick check on Google turned up 7,960 hits for "Donnchadh, Earl of Carrick", and 58,300 for "Duncan, Earl of Carrick". This would seem to indicate that the Duncan form is around eight times more popular in English, and should therefore be the form used. Use of the term "Donnchadh", although perhaps preferred by some modern Celtic nationalists, is also problematic for two reasons. 1) The quaint neo-celtic spelling is indecipherable to most English-speakers in the UK, never mind elsewhere, and doesn't even hint at the word Duncan.  2) It is confusing. Most history books and other sources will use "Duncan", which most people will not correllate with Donnchadh. We should not be confusing the majority of WP users.   Xan  dar   18:42, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
 * "This would seem to indicate that the Duncan form is around eight times more popular in English," - actually I think it suggests that the Duncan form is around eight times more popular in Google. Parrot of Doom (talk) 21:41, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't regard the spelling as problematic, and it's certainly not an "invented modern Gaelic formulation". It's the way most historians would spell it in this century too (with or without the leniting "h"). It would be, in any case a matter for WP:RM rather than FAC. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 18:53, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well this major history text book, written in 2000 and published by Cambridge University Press, and this one published by Edinburgh University press use "Duncan" and "Gilbert", for the subject and his father respectively, rather than "Donnchadh" and "Gille-Brighde" as used in this article. In the text of the article "Gille-Brighde" and other gaelicisations have also been used constantly and without the more normal English language equivalents. I am sure these are not the spellings that appear in the historical documents either, therefore they ARE newly-derived. I do feel the article is in danger of putting politics or PC ahead of the interests of the the average reader. Apart from being a breach of WP guidelines, this is making the article impenetrable to most readers with a mass of unpronouncable, similar-looking and newly-devised "alphabet soup" names. If the article is confusing, or of little use to the average reader because of this, it cannot meet the FA criteria.  Xan  dar   19:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Well examples such as these would show use of the other spelling. I researched the article and am aware of when spellings are used. The text book in question specialises in a later period. No matter. Duncan was not his name, and is anachronistic. If you want to change the spelling, take it to RM. It's been at this name since it was created a few years ago,; if you want to use its FACing to force your own POV about spellings on the article, that's not particularly dignified, but I can't stop you. It would be disappointing for all of my own and Malleus' work to go nowhere because of this, but I can't do anything about the existence of this kind of objection, as I firmly disagree with its merit. I also don't believe that the article's likely readers are so culturally inexperienced that they won't be able to handle such names. But there you go. What's does my opinion matter?! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 19:33, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * This issue has really been done to death. The "this is the English language wikipedia" argument is not relevant. The body of the text is in English, as it should be, while the article topic is in the language relevant to it - as are tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of other articles on the English language wikipedia. As for google searches - these might occasionally be useful as a sort of guide when deciding the notability of an article but for revealing the type of orthography used in modern academic scholarship? Not so much.


 * Use of the term "Donnchadh", although perhaps preferred by some modern Celtic nationalists, is also problematic for two reasons. 1) The quaint neo-celtic spelling is indecipherable to most English-speakers in the UK, never mind elsewhere, and doesn't even hint at the word Duncan.


 * This just doesn't hold water to be honest. First of all the idea that there is some kind of mythical 'Celtic nationalism' which insists that historical personalities have their names written in the relevant language rather than use bastardised Anglicised forms is absolute bunk and one that would be recognised as such by anyone familiar with the nature of Scottish nationalism and historiography. This may well (and i'm fairly sure is) an existant factor in Ireland and possibly Wales but certainly not in Scotland, where the Celtic/Gaelic origin of the nation has been largely divorced from Scottish nationalism and Scottish ideas of history for centuries. As for the Gaelic forms being incomprehensible, perhaps you might like to take a second and ask yourself how anglicised forms of Gaelic presonal names like Duncan, Donald, Malcolm or place names like Glasgow, Inverness, Kilmarnock came into existence if the original Gaelic forms from which they are derived were, and are, "indecipherable". The reality is that an English monoglot coming into contact with "Donnchadh" or "Dun Dè" will decipher them just as easily as their predecessors did centuries ago when they corrupted/converted them to the English forms of "Duncan" and "Dundee". Anyway all that aside, the question of whether or not the one form is dominant over the other amongst the relevant modern scholars is not something i am qualified to comment upon. Deacon, however, is more than qualified to comment upon it and given his background in the topic and his record on Wikipedia you should have a fairly good reason to try and derail an article en route to Featured status when you don't seem to have any arguments beyond the old ones which have been covered before, many times, and in great detail, on other articles of this nature. siarach (talk) 20:33, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey Siarach. Yes, in wikipedia practice these names (Gaelic or otherwise) are not normally anglicized for the sake of it, and are so only when there is a considerable body of popular writing on the topic, such as for most monarchs. That's the practice normally followed (e.g. Gruffydd ap Rhys, not Griffin son of Rees). If there was lots of popular stuff on this Donnchadh calling him Duncan, I'd be able to overlook academic usage and quite frankly accuracy, but there isn't. And yes, google-ization of books focuses on old books and maintream topics, and most of the works likely to be used for this kind of article to make it decent aren't online. This would be a very short article indeed if I were relying on internet books. Most of the works in English written fairly recently used for this article preferred the name Donnchad(h), as you would expect if you know the mentality of insularist historians. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 21:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not concerned about the politics but the readability and intelligbility of the article. Of the Links that Deacon alleges support "Donnchadh" as the spelling, the first, when searched, mentions no "Donnchadh"s but three "Donnchad"s - none of them the person in question. The second example doesn't use Donnchadh. His third example, Melrose Abbey actually uses Duncan, on pages 232 and 243. Professor G.W.S. Barrow, one of the article's chief sources, also uses Duncan in his books: in the title I quoted earlier, in The Anglo-Norman era in Scottish history, and in Robert Bruce and the community of the realm of Scotland. These are heavily referenced in the article, and do not use Donnchadh.


 * As far as I can see, very few books use the name Donnchadh - which this article is titled. A few use "Donnchad", without the "h", but the vast majority use "Duncan", and this is the form found 8 times to 1 ahead of Donnchadh in Google. And it's not just a matter of the title. Many other names in the article are transposed into neo Gaellic or Irish. (For which no pronunciation guide is given.) I have already mentioned "Gilbert," who becomes "Gille-Brighde". The article speaks of a king of "Tir Eoghain", which again is puzzling, until you discover that this redirects to County Tyrone. Why not just say Tyrone?  "Gall-Gaidhil" redirects to Lords of Galloway. Why not just say this, and help the reader understand, instead of creating confusion? These usages are unhelpfully obscurantist.  There is also "Gofraidh, King of Mann," who, although named here in Gaellic, is actually of Norse origin, and is listed in Wikipedia as Godred II Olafsson!


 * Duncan/Donnchadh himself is not as purely Gaelic as the article treatment would suggest. He is heavily linked with the anglo-Normans. Even his seal, reads "DUNCANI", which shows that HE used this name. So, for many reasons, we are not talking about "anglicizing" names that have always been recorded in Celtic, we are talking about preserving the standard names of important people and places as used currently in English and in the major academic literature. Wikipedia should not be introducing new minority naming systems. Someone reading this article and then looking for some of the related people or places in other books and reference sources will generally draw a blank because of the terms used. For this reason, Wikipedia guidance states to use the most common version of a name name in English, and in reliable reference sources. This hasn't been done in the article, and instead it has been made unnecesarily confusing and even misleading, by the use of obscure naming and terminology.  Xan  dar   01:02, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Please don't take offence, but your post is riddled with historical misunderstandings. I let stuff like "Celtic nationalism" and other stuff go above, but "Neo-Gaelic"? What? Gilbert "becomes" Gille-Brighde? For goodness sake. What is "Duncan/Donnchadh himself is not as purely Gaelic" meant to mean?
 * But yeah, you got me on the Melrose book ... here's another to replace it. The "h" is there to indicate it is lenited (it occurs alternatively in the texts with a dot above); I'm agreeable to moving it to h-lessness if you want, but that'd take it out of sync with the images, and really there's no reason to other than google popularity. Spellings are synchronised for reasons of cognitive dissonance.
 * Listen, if you want to give the article a serious review on sentence structure, and the things you're good at, do so. If you wanna talk spellings, go to the talk page. You've already heard my opinion on it, and posts like that aren't gonna change my mind. It is a community decision in any case, and it's not my article. But if you want me [to agree] to change the spelling because of that kind of historical nonsense, then you're gonna be disappointed. I follow conventions of modern historical writing, and I don't agree that dumbing down for some fantasy stupid reader when it will damage the article's quality is good practice. I mean, do you want me to change all the spellings, wait for this to pass and then change them back? To appease your POV, this would be really the most sensible thing. Determining names based on google hits is not an FA criterion. No more needs to be said on this topic I don't think. FAC is not WP:RM. Regards, Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 01:55, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, as [Insular] Medievalist wikipedians aren't numerous or interested enough to come up with a relevant MoS that improves the encyclopedia, for good histiographil practice the recommendations outline in the Scottish Historical Review MoS guideline (section ii) are relevant to this particular article, and they recommend the style used in this artcile. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 03:19, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It's not a matter of "dumbing-down". The major historical works on the subject published by sources like the Cambridge and Edinburgh University presses are not "dumbing-down." It's about following wikipedia naming policy and using the standard, most accessible and popular English terms. These are matters which you have not addressed. And you have by no means proven, or even provided significant evidence that use of the Gaelic terms in the article is current academic or popular usage, while I have provided significant evidence from the sources of this article that standard English language terms are used. Wikipedia is not a specialist publication. It is aimed at the average English-speaking reader around the world, not a small coterie of Gaelic-users. And the problem lies in the article text as well as title. Using "Tir Eoghain", for Tyrone, and Gall-Gaidhil for Galloway is obscurantist and tends strongly towards jargon (see OBVIOUS). Nor is this a matter of a "Fantasy-stupid-reader". Wikipedia aims at a WORLDWIDE audience, 12 years and up. I would guess far less than 1% of these readers will be familiar with confusing Gaellic terms like Gall-Gaidhil and Gille-Brighde. This is not a specialist audience, and is why standard English terms are needed. As for attempting to read this article out to another person - with no attempt made to provide a useful or accessible pronunciation guide - would be impossible. As far as I'm concerned this article breaches WPguidance on Jargon, POV, use of English, use of standard terms and accessibility. It is therefore not FA until these matters are dealt with.   Xan  dar   11:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You can rest assured that neither the works using Duncan or Donnchadh followed wikipedia naming conventions, your interpretation or not. "Tir Eoghain" is not used for County Tyrone, it is used for a kingdom that doesn't have an article (and spelling it that way is normal English). County Tyrone is an administrative unit that is loosely based on that kingdom's borders as they were centuries later, but it is not the same thing. It redirects there because it has no article. Likewise, Gall-Gaidhil doesn't have an article either (I was planning to give it one shortly). It could equally redirect to Norse Gaels, but the choice of redirecion is certainly not based on "obscurantism". Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 12:33, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Comment on name issue only. I find myself in a quandary here. I have recently used versions of Xandar's arguments here on the talk page at Talk:Scotland during the Roman Empire, arguing against a user who suggested it be moved to 'Caledonia during the Roman Empire', suggesting that Scotland was 'anachronistic' (see one of Deacon's points, above). My view then was that the naming should, firstly, be tied to the prevailing practice in the contemporary literature and, second, be whatever makes it easiest for a WP lay reader to find the article. Unfortunately, these two criteria do not appear to produce quite as clear-cut a result in the present discussion. Having said that, can I make two pleas. First, is it not possible, given the varied use of the term in the literature, to simply create two or three redirects to the present article? And second, let's focus on the FAC for the content. I think Deacon's work is excellent, so if we can deal with other issues, the naming question really is secondary (though I accept it may be not only about the article title, but also treatment of the name(s) in the text), and can be resolved either here or at WP:RM, without getting in the way of a decent FAC discussion. hamiltonstone (talk) 01:39, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * This isn't just aboput the title though. The problem is throughout the article. And I would say that this issue is actually more extreme than the Caledonia one - since a much larger minority of potential users know that Caledonia means Scotland, than that Donnchadh means Duncan, Gall-Gaidhil means Galloway or Tir Eoghain means Tyrone. This is a matter of accessibility. The over-use of Gaellicisation, even of non-Gaelic entities (Anglo-Norman, Norse etc) also infers a false picture of a totally Gaelic region - which is untrue and therefore POV by implication. Anyway. I'm not a dictator here. That's my view, and we'll see if other editors disagree. I'm not insisting we have to change the headline name (though I would prefer it), but definitely the article text needs a LOT more use of standard English, and fewer obscure Gaelicised names and terms.  Xan  dar   11:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * See above. You are misunderstanding why Tir Eoghain and Gall-Gaidhil redirect to the places they do. If you believe that Ireland and south-western Scotland were not Gaelic in speech in this period, please publish an article on the topic and enlighten everyone.Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 12:36, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * (question to Xandar). I'm no expert in this field. However, do both parties (Xandar and Deacon) agree that the use of names such as Donnchadh and Gall-Gaidhil is "Gaellicisation"? I thought they represented the prevailing contemporaneous names in extant primary sources, not a retroactive Gaellicisation. I can see this whole issue is a minefield across WP. See Marc Antony, for example, where the modern English usage is used throughout - and then I note that it has fallen from former FA to humble C-class! I'm not sure where this debate ends up, but I don't have a good feeling about it. Might this be a discussion better taken elsewhere; and has it already been had somewhere of which any experienced editor is aware? hamiltonstone (talk) 12:48, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * The discussion is part of this FAC because the over-use of scarcely-translated Gaelicisms is making the article very hard to understand, or to cross-reference with other sources. This applies even within WP. King Máel Coluim mac Donnchada for example, links to Malcolm III of Scotland, with nothing to indicate this in the article. Donnchadh and Gall-Gaidhil etc, may appear in some primary sources. I'm not sure. However Latin and ONF sources will be the majority, using Duncan and variants. The point is, however, that while these people and places may have had Gaelic names at the time 1)These were not universal, and 2) Wikipedia policy (for good reason) is to normally use English forms, especially so where these are better known popularly and better attested in the literature. So we use Turin instead of Torino, Munich rather than Munchen and Christopher Columbus rather than Christoffa Corombo or Cristóbal Colón. For significant figures with standard English names, we should use those names, to make things easier for the reader. Saying the "Lords of Galloway" is far less obscure and obfuscatory than saying the "Gall-Gaidhil" since the reader knows what a Lord is, and can find Galloway on a map or other reference source. The "Gall-Gaidhil" could be a three-toed cat as far as most casual readers will know. And it is no use saying that the borders have changed since then. The borders of Spain have changed too, but the entity that retains the core is still referred to as Spain. If Gelic forms must be used by the authors, they need to be amply and immediately translated in the text.  Xan  dar   23:00, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Gall-Gaidhil is not the same as "Lords of Galloway" ... one is a people and one is a title. The current redirection is just convenience pending an article. You are free to read the whole section devoted the Gall-Gaidhil, and to look at the maps made for this article, and in both you and any straw reader will discover they are not a three toed cat. ;) Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 23:20, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
 * The image at the top of the article shows quite clearly how Donnchadh himself liked to spell his name when it mattered most. Srnec (talk) 04:51, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Deacon, You actually make my point for me, in that the article as currently constructed led me to the error about the "Lords of Galloway" - hence the need for terms like Gall-Gaidhil and other similar Gaelicisms to be properly translated in the article.  Xan  dar   00:53, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

More work needed on the writing. Here are examples just from the top.
 * Awkward piping: "As a result of his father's conflict with Uhtred and the Scottish king William the Lion, Donnchadh became a hostage of King Henry II of England." See the specific explanation here. There's another in "King John".
 * Remove "comparatively"?
 * "He married the daughter of Alan fitz Walter, a leading member of the family later known as the House of Stewart, future monarchs of Scotland and England."—it's OK, but the last comma might be better as a dash, since it has a quite different function to that of the previous commas (announces an explanation).
 * "documented well"—reverse order?
 * "Charters provide a little information about some of his activities, but overall their usefulness is limited. This is because no charter-collections (called cartularies) from the Gaelic south-west have survived the Middle Ages; the only surviving charters relevant to Donnchadh's career come from the heavily Normanised English-speaking area to the east." Possibly better relationships between the clauses thus: "Charters provide a little information about some of his activities, but overall their usefulness is limited; this is because no charter-collections (called cartularies) from the Gaelic south-west have survived the Middle Ages, and the only surviving charters relevant to Donnchadh's career come from the heavily Normanised English-speaking area to the east." See what you think.
 * I wondered why "Ireland" was linked the first time; but twice within a minute?
 * "late-12th century"—No hyphen, I think. Mid- yes. Am I right? (Unsure)
 * "Historians are reliant"—Rephrase as two words?
 * Check overlinking: for example, "ethnicity"—is that a stretch for most readers? Tony   (talk)  06:17, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I implemented your suggestions. I delinked ethnicity and barony. The double linking, I thought it was the custom [at some stage] to start link counting separately in the lead and body? Ireland might be part of the overlinking in any case, I don't think there are many who would need to click on it. I tried to solve the nominal group/King problem, though not quite sure that I grasped it. :) Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 12:31, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments -
 * Query - any reason why you've got the Acta of Malcolm and William in the secondary sources instead of primary as I would expect them?
 * Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:21, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes. Well spotted. They are in the secondary section because they were used primarily (if not entirely, I can't remember) as secondary sources. I.e. the introduction sections were the parts of those works drawn upon. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 15:02, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Saying so in the article (which implies that the curious reader should find this edition, and not expect much in the primary source) would be a good thing. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:19, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I haven't returned to the article, but I guess you've visited the section at WT:MOS where the green/yellow map has been talked about. MASEM agrees it's not yet good. (Do you have control of the original? If so, can you remove the in-pic title? The "in" is missing from it, as well as its rather in-your-face presence. Tony   (talk)  12:02, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I also find it glarish, at least at the standard settings of my monitor - can we tone down the saturation a little? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:51, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Hold I must join Xandar in my uneasiness on the naming. The Complete Peerage describes our subject as "Duncan, son of Gilbert, son of Fergus, the Celtic Lord of Galloway". That seems to me standard usage in English; what Deacon has done is like naming our article on Ovid P. Ouidius Naso. Such a title, contemporary spelling and all, has its uses - but they are uses for specialists, who have better resources than us. We are intended for lay readers. We are writing in English, not Gaelic; even this title is inconsistent, in not using mormaer and Carraig - or whatever the thirteenth century forms would be.


 * When I get back from vacation, I will see what the sources actually use and what they mention. They may convince me to support on this issue. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:51, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.