Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Principals and Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford


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

The list was promoted by User:The Rambling Man 07:21, 5 August 2008.

List of Principals and Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford
List of people associated with Jesus College, Oxford was given its FL star last August. Since then, many more names have been added (see the current version) and so this section was split off into its own page to save space. When the "people associated list" got its star, there were just 25 names of fellows and principals; there are now 118 names (if I can count correctly) all with references. Let me address "comprehensiveness", since this is always of interest with lists of this sort. As well as, of course, including all names in Category:Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford the list includes:
 * every Principal of the college;
 * the eight founding fellows of 1571;
 * all fellows who have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography;
 * all fellows who have entries in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography (given that Jesus College is the most "Welsh college" at Oxford);
 * all fellows who had an obituary in The Times between 1785 and 1985 (the extent of the free-access archive);
 * at least one fellow for every year from 1571 onwards.

Comments welcome. BencherliteTalk 08:59, 26 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment The following are some things I {Eustress (talk) 18:20, 28 July 2008 (UTC)} would suggest to improve the list:
 * Why do all phrases under the Notes column end in a period when not all are complete sentences? Similarly, some of the picture captions (e.g., "The college crest above the Ship Street entrance gate.") should not end with a period either per MOS
 * See above (groan!) TRM picked out that "Professor of Zoology" (Paul Harvey's note) didn't have a full-stop, and asked for consistency. I took him to mean that that particular entry should have a full stop, and so should similar entries, so I added full stops throughout.  What's the official line to follow here, please?  As for the full-stop after "gate", it's gone. Any others? (James Howell's caption feels like a sentence to me, hence the full stop).
 * Yeah, I would completely disagree with TRM. No full stop (or period, in this case) is needed if there is no complete sentence per MOS. Moreover, The James Howell caption is a participle phrase; it has no preceding subject and verb and is thus not a complete sentence. This is consistent with other WP Universities FLs. --Eustress (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Great! I'm caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea here.  The FL Director wants one thing, the next reviewer says that the FL Director himself is wrong. Fantastic. Whose lead am I meant to follow - whoever speaks last? I've reworded the James Howell caption, to make it a proper sentence with a verb and everything, but I'm not going to be caught in a ping-pong battle over full-stops in notes without someone pointing to specific passages in MOS. (Pointing to other FLs gets us nowhere fast, since I can point to another similar FL with plenty of full stops in the notes.) In any case, I have a question: when there are two incomplete sentences (e.g. William Aubrey: Regius Professor of Civil Law (1553–1559). One of the eight original Fellows of the college.) should there be 0, 1 or 2 full-stops?  Or should such notes be reworded into one sentence or one note (thus risking losing the whole snappiness of the notes section in the first place)? BencherliteTalk 00:02, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * "Regius Professor of Civil Law (1553–1559), one of the eight original Fellows of the college" ta-da! If you need to separate phrases beyond a comma insert a semi-colon (e.g., "I have three red, blue, and yellow hats; five orange, green, and blue sticks; and two black shoes."). Maybe you just misunderstood TRM? Perhaps he can help clarify the full stop issue, but I think the list looks pretty cluttered with all the periods now. --Eustress (talk) 00:16, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I have already asked TRM to pop back. BencherliteTalk 00:38, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * TRM has popped back (see my talk page if anyone is interested) and I have now removed the full stops. BencherliteTalk 08:00, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Can a description or link to an explanation of what Old Members are be supplied?
 * I've created a redirect from "Old Member" to "Alumnus". Anything else? BencherliteTalk 00:01, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
 * That link helps a lot, but it brings up another question: why is "Old Member" a proper noun (i.e., why is it capitalized)? --Eustress (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Because that's how the college itself uses the term e.g. here and here. BencherliteTalk 00:02, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Gotcha. Perhaps it should be linked instead to Old Member (Jesus College, Oxford) then, if it's a proper noun and not just another way of saying alumnus. --Eustress (talk) 00:16, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Err, no - it's not just a Jesus College thing: see various other colleges using "Old Member" (Exeter, Balliol, Univ, and that's just page 1 of the Google search). See also Cambridge. Describing former students as "alumni" is a comparatively new thing – "comparatively new", at any rate, in the context of a university that's been teaching since the 11th century... BencherliteTalk 00:38, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * What do the English really know about English anyway :-) (j/k) Thanks for the clarification. --Eustress (talk) 00:55, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Support: After responding to all suggestions (from me and others) I believe list now meets all FL criteria --Eustress (talk) 10:44, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

As the above is getting a bit tl;dr, I'll just note that there are no outstanding issues from the above comments. BencherliteTalk 00:00, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Note
 * Think procedurally it's probably up to the reviewer(s) to say whether there are issues outstanding, which I thought I had, and certainly Eustress had if he/she is supporting, however that's by the by.
 * I do have a question on comprehensiveness, provoked by the arrival of several more fellows overnight. The scope of this list appears to be well-defined and finite: either someone was a principal or fellow or he wasn't, just as in a list of footballers who played more than a certain number of games for a club, either he did or he didn't. In each case there may be no one definitive source from which to take the information, so research has to be done. If I submitted such a footballer list and said, "Well, it's not complete, but there are a lot of them, and I'll add the rest if and when...", that list would fail. Why should a different standard apply to this list? Actually, I don't expect you to be able to answer this; maybe the director can explain the difference? cheers, Struway2 (talk) 09:24, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I would point you at criterion 3 of WP:WIAFL - "It comprehensively covers the defined scope" - so, as long as the scope is adequately defined, and then the list meets the definition and the community are satisfied that the criterion 3 (and the others, of course) are met then the list can be promoted. The Rambling Man (talk) 11:52, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * So it is purely subjective, then :-) thanks for clearing that up... cheers, Struway2 (talk) 12:26, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess it's subjective subject to a consensual agreement. We've had this debate a few times (witness List of Arsenal F.C. players) and there's never been a 100% agreement on the best approach.  At least criterion 3 makes an attempt to suggest there should be a "defined scope" which is better than nothing. The Rambling Man (talk) 12:32, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

← Apologies if I trod on anyone's toes by my note earlier - I was just trying to improve general readability, but didn't want to put comments made by others into collapsing boxes.

As for the fellows that arrived overnight, it occurred to me late yesterday that some of the Welsh Supernumerary Fellows of recent years might have articles about them that didn't mention Jesus College, and so wouldn't have shown up in a "what links here" search for Jesus College (needless to say, that's a route I've been down as well to find additional names for this list and the alumni list). So I looked in my back issues of the College Record and found a few more names, and they've been added, (each with a one or two year period of Fellowship) plus a college chaplain I found lurking in the shadows without any mention of his time at JC (Graham Tomlin). In terms of existing articles on Wikipedia, I really believe that that's now it. Of course I'm not relying on the inclusion of every article on Wikipedia as being sufficient to pass FLC: if I thought that, I would have nominated a list with about 30 or 40 names (and would have saved myself a lot of work in the process, seeing as I wrote 90+ of the 125 biographies on the list, to make it as comprehensive as possible before coming to FLC).

As for more articles that could be written? Well, I've cleaned out the three major reference sources mentioned above, and ensured every Principal and every founding Fellow is included as well, and so I think the list is comprehensive, even though I can't of course put my hand on my heart and say that no notable Fellow has been omitted. Hardy's history of the College, published at the end of the 19th century, listed 369 Fellows between 1571 and 1898, but the majority aren't notable at all in Wikipedia terms. Whilst all professional footballers playing for Arsenal pass WP:ATHLETE and so meet notability standards on WP, not all Fellows of an Oxbridge college (past or present) pass WP:PROF, and certainly don't pass that standard just by being an Oxbridge Fellow. So it could never be a "complete list of all Fellows", or even "a complete list of all notable Fellows", but I've done my very best to ensure that it's a "comprehensive list of notable Fellows". Hope this helps. BencherliteTalk 16:23, 31 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Support A pleasure to deal with a nominator prepared to put a significant amount of work in before nominating their list and with enough knowledge of their subject to discuss and justify it afterwards. cheers, Struway2 (talk) 16:41, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments Otherwise it looks good. Matthew Edwards (talk • contribs • email) 16:32, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * For Thomas Charles Edwards, the date for the fellow is "1997 onwards".. Is he still a fellow? Perhaps "1997–present" would be better. Same for others that use "year onwards".
 * I think it would be a good idea to add WPBiography and/or Blp to the talk page, and look into using WikiProjectBannerShell as well.
 * Both comments actioned. Thank you, Matthew.  BencherliteTalk 18:33, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * You're welcome, and I Support. Matthew Edwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:45, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.