Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 January 24

= January 24 =

An "economist"?
Around several months ago, I came across a discussion regarding whether or not an article of a male official who used to work in the Obama administration should describe him as an economist just because most of the reliable sources say so regardless of his actual educational qualification. The question of whether or not Elon Musk is an engineer also got brought up. I forgot whom this discussion was referring to and I routinely deleted my browsing history. Who might this be? StellarHalo (talk) 00:46, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Jared Bernstein has a BA in music and a PhD in Social Welfare. Does the latter count as an educational qualification in economics? In any case Paul Krugman called him an excellent candidate for serving on Obama's economics advisory board. Gene Sperling's academic education was in law (JD), after which he "attended" Wharton Business School, which sounds to me as implying he did not graduate. John G. Walsh has a Masters in Public Policy, for which the curriculum will have included Macroeconomics 101. --Lambiam 10:55, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Brian May's highest academic qualifications is in astrophysics, and he has no formal training as a musician. Are we allowed to refer to him as a guitarist or a musician even though he has no degree from a music program?  -- Jayron 32 13:47, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Note that the OP didn't suggest a preference one way or another; they just wanted to ID the person who was being discussed. Matt Deres (talk) 01:57, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Talk:Jared Bernstein is about little else than whether he should or should not be called an economist. See also this edit, later reverted. --Lambiam 07:07, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * A person can be called an "X" if reliable sources call a person an "X". It is not more complicated than that.  If reliable sources should not call such a person an "X", then what people need to do is petition all of those sources to write retractions to fix their errors.  Short of that, Wikipedia is bound to reflect what reliable sources say about a person, and not what randos who show up at Wikipedia articles have to say about them.  -- Jayron 32 14:17, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Actually I would really like everything you said above to be the official guideline and policy at least for biography articles. StellarHalo (talk) 07:32, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
 * It basically is. See WP:BLP, to wit "contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately and without discussion. This applies whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable and whether it is in a biography or in some other article."  -- Jayron 32 14:04, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
 * That sentence you quoted is about keeping stuff in, not leaving it out. It doesn't say what to do when someone wants to remove well-sourced material, like describing someone as an economist.  In fact Wikipedia's BLP's of figures like Bernstein are mostly useless because so much is left out.  2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 07:58, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

US casualties in the Pacific War
Why even in Western sources data on US losses in the Pacific War are so different. Now in an article about the Pacific War they write an underestimated number of 90 thousand, some sources on Wikipedia even talk about 300 thousand dead and dead, which seems overestimated. After all, the total loss of the United States in World War II is 407 thousand dead, while in the war with Germany on all fronts 185 thousand dead. Lone Ranger1999 (talk) 14:24, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * So, if we're going to answer your question, we're going to have to read the actual articles you are reading. Please provide us links to the articles where you found this information so we can better answer your questions.  -- Jayron 32 16:14, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * About 300 thousand killed Americans answered me here. And about 90 thousand, these are the numbers in the article about the Pacific War. As for the figure of 185 thousand killed in the war with Germany, I calculated this from articles about the Western, North African and Italian fronts Lone Ranger1999 (talk) 17:08, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * 300,000 dead Americans came here, to Wikipedia, and told you they died? What on earth are you on about?  Show us where you read these numbers.  Give us links to the articles so we can read them ourselves, or we cannot answer you...  -- Jayron 32 18:20, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah, I think I've got it. From Pacific War, note 3 and ref 19, you're seeing ~300k casualties and ~90k deaths. These two things are not the same; casualties includes woundings, captures, and other events that render someone unavailable for duty, in addition to deaths. As with many questions of numbers, rankings, statistics, and the like, context and nuance matters. As Jayron notes, any further need for clarification should be accompanied by the specific numbers you're looking to compare and their sources. (edit to add: you may also be interested in World_War_II_casualties both for the high-level summary of why casualty quantification is difficult and for the by-nation endnotes summarizing the data, such as for the US) &mdash; Lomn 14:31, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

British losses in World War II
What was the bloodiest front for Britain during World War II? Just confusion in numbers, according to the wiki articles, the British lost: 35 thousand killed in Africa, 24 thousand in Italy, 41 thousand on the Western Front, 86 thousand on the Pacific Front, and a maximum of 70 thousand in the Atlantic. But where did "another 130 thousand corpses" go if the UK lost a total of 384 thousand people? Lone Ranger1999 (talk) 14:28, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Same as above. If we're going to answer your question, you first need to provide us with links so we can read the same text you are reading where those numbers appear.  -- Jayron 32 16:14, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * OK
 * Western Front (World War II)
 * Italian campaign (World War II)
 * North African campaign
 * Pacific War Lone Ranger1999 (talk) 17:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * So, in the first article, I don't see anywhere that has "41 thousand" British soldiers dead. I ctrl-F for 41, and saw nothing at all with that figure. I did the same ofr "24" in the Italian Campaign article, and "86" on the Pacific War article and so on.  It doesn't look like you read those numbers in those articles; they just aren't there.  You still haven't told us where you got your numbers from.  -- Jayron 32 18:18, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * On the Western Front, 11 thousand British died in 1940-1941 and 30 thousand in 1944-1945 according to the result of "41", about the Italian and Pacific fronts, yes, I was a little mistaken: 18 thousand in Italian and 82 thousand in the Pacific. Anonymous said about 300 thousand in this directory. I'm more interested in US casualties in the Pacific. Since the article about the Pacific War takes into account only combat losses. Lone Ranger1999 (talk) 19:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The data appears to come from The World War II Databook, by John Ellis. Here it is.  You should probably look at that book if you want a more complete image of the data in question.  -- Jayron 32 12:18, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Well, missing from your list so far are the Battle of Britain, The Blitz, the German invasion of Greece, the Syria–Lebanon campaign, the Italian invasion of British Somaliland; I don't know if the Arctic convoys of World War II are counted to your Battle of the Atlantic figures. Certainly there are more theaters missing yet. --KnightMove (talk) 15:03, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Original volumes collated in "The English Reports"
I recently built s:Portal:The_English_Reports over on Wikisource, but was wanting some help from other contributors here, in adding links to the original works, which were collated into "The English Reports".

Do any of the contributors here know of of online sources (Hathi/Google Books/IA) for the missing volumes, and for the original Reports published prior to the compiling of the English Reports in 1866 or so?

It would be convenient if contributors that can match up the abbreviations with original scans, could assist in updating the portal at Wikisource. Thanks in advance. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:18, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi, is this the same as English Reports? At the bottom of that article, there is a link to the full text at http://www.commonlii.org/uk/cases/EngR/ I'm not sure how to match that to your request as it looks fairly complete but is organized by year instead of by volume like your list. Can you perhaps explain further which pieces you'd like help finding, if this isn't what you need? 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:09, 25 January 2023 (UTC)