Talk:Virginia

Condensing

Hey Nikkimaria, let's chat! I agree this article is long. I will quibble with "too long." I think it is comprehensive, and as the only U.S. state FA (asterisk for D.C.), I hope it sets a good barometer for the other 49. Most of the bits you condensed are fine, and that does make it shorter. I'd say some of what the length tries to do is keep the prose "engaging and of a professional standard" so we make sure the story we're telling here both makes sense and is encyclopedic and super accurate. So if sometimes there's a bite like "they crossed the Atlantic to found Jamestown", its about saying it as accurately as possible so that no reader is confused about the story got out of London, even though I know that's obvious to you and me. I'm happy to go through and give a rationale for those restored bites you marked, so let's get into it:

• Before 1676, the colonists weren't legally allowed to attack the native tribes, and only warriors that threatened the colony could legally get taken as slaves, and not for life, because I guess they were legally just prisoners of war. So the sentence here is trying to note that what Bacon changed was about legality in the colony, and that after 1676, any native could be deemed hostile, which opened up this campaign of kidnapping women and children onto plantations. The citation has this text: "the 1676 law allowed for the enslavement of captured Indians and in part because of the demands for exterminating them, [historians] have seen the rebellion primarily as an escalation of Anglo-American expropriation of Indian land and territory." Not all of it is on Google Books preview, but I do have it as a PDF I could share. I also added an additional ref.
• Virginia is the Commonwealth of Virginia. I do think it's good to define commonwealth and show where it came from. The article goes on to use "the Commonwealth" as a euphemism for Virginia about 30 times, but actually doesn't do it before that point in the article. That is both because it hadn't historically been declared that yet, but also because the article hasn't defined it yet.
• The story of desegregation in Virginia goes on for two paragraphs, but I do think it's important to start it with a student who's actually at a segregated school, and to make clear that's what she is. Johns was not a parent, not a lawyer, she's a student. I know this seems like a geography article, but its secretly an article about humans and what happens when they happen to share a space. So "16-year-old" is her job title, the same way we introduce George Washington as "Major."
• Virginia doesn't own any of the Potomac. One of the things we do a lot on the U.S. state articles is try to highlight the various ways the subject is different from both its category and its collection as a whole, so this is one of those things. Most borders go down the middle of a river. (The Hudson is the other major U.S. river that isn't evenly split.) And that comes up again and again in Virginia's history. They don't get even rights to drinking water, or to fishing in it, or building bridges over it. National Airport was constructed on mudflats in the Potomac River, and to this day, the airport has a D.C. zipcode. Actually most of what that photo of Great Falls shows off is not "Virginia", even though it's taken from the Virginia side of the falls.
• Spanish speakers in Virginia (or a the U.S.) are not a monolith. The section is about Demographics, and I think its important to note that, demographically, there's a difference between older Spanish speakers that are statistically less likely to speak English, and the youth, who are more likely. It echoes the previous sentence where we note that younger people in general are more likely to speak Spanish as their first or second language.
• Cutting the sentence down to "the Virginia Marine Police patrol coastal areas" makes it a sentence that doesn't really tell the reader anything. Like, "highway Police police the highway." We probably don't 100% need to mention the existence of Marine Police (though again, not every state is going to have an organization like that), but if we are going to mention them, then maybe we can give one fact about them. I don't want this to be an list of "this thing exists in the state." And again, it mirrors the following sentence where we say how the Capitol Police were born in the colonial days.

Happy to chat more, and thanks for taking the time to go through the article so thoroughly.-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 04:11, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

• Your first source says "captured Indians", not otherwise specified. Your second source says "women and children". Neither of these sources support what the article currently says, which is "men and women".
• I have no issues with saying Virginia is a commonwealth, but the etymology of that term is misplaced here.
• "16-year-old" is not a job title; "student" would be a job title.
• I don't follow what you're saying about "its category and its collection as a whole" - what do you mean by that? I'm also not sure that this particular sentence does a good job of reflecting the other rationale you're giving for it, regarding water rights in history.
• We have an article about Virginia's demographics to discuss how different groups are not monolithic, which is true of most groups, not just Spanish speakers. I'm not seeing a reason to call out specifically Spanish speakers here?
• No objection to removing the sentence. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:25, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

  • Native American terminology is a sticky issue when trying to write concisely and accurately. My preference is to directly name the nation or tribe or if it has to be a collective group, to use a specific common adjective, i.e. Piedmont tribes, and to avoid imprecise options like "Indians", "Native Americans"/"natives", or "Indigenous". "Tribal members" isn't the worst option, though "membership" is a modern concept, tribes didn't start enrolling "members" until the Dawes Commission two centuries later. Also complicated is that after 1677, many of these men and women were now included inside the colony and were therefore also "Virginians." I just don't want to loose that these are human beings forced into servitude in the name getting past their story as efficiently as possible. It didn't escape my notice that you removed our other reference to enslaved people as "men, women, and children" in the demographics section.
  • Virginia's various founding fathers were big fans of classical languages. Though Mason was the most prominent author, I'm not sure who specifically inserted the various "of the commonwealth" phrases into Virginia's 1776 constitution. It probably gets there because of John Locke, even though Locke usually made "common-wealth" two words. We could get into all of that, or we just say it was from Latin.
  • I'll add "student" and note it was "her" school she was protesting. This is also a tiny bit tricky because Johns wasn't actually striking against segregation, but against Virginia's lack of equal funding, which is what gets us this ugly back-to-back of past-tense verbs as adjectives with "underfunded segregated school."
  • There's some suggestion that Wikipedia articles should strive to point out what makes a subject unique verses its class (the fifty states) or the whole (the United States). So we have a lot of sentences that go "Virginia has the highest...", "the least...", "is above average..." etc. The things that make it different are often by their nature, notable. Again, increasing the accuracy will decrease the brevity, but yes, we could note how the Supreme Court has also been asked to weigh in on the Potomac border more than once. There's this whole dispute over which fork of the Potomac is the continuation of the river that goes into the Chesapeake, because when these English started using it as a border, they didn't actually know where the river went. Virginia "won", and that reduced this chunk of Maryland west of its panhandle. I've left that out so far, since it's mainly a dispute with West Virginia now.
  • What's the issue with age as a demographic quality? You also removed our sentence about the oldest/youngest cities, and Barbara Johns and George Washington's ages.
  • The Marine Police are not a division of the state police, like how the U.S. Coast Guard aren't a part of the Army or Navy. Again, I'm pointing at unique snowflakes. Every state has a department of corrections, but not every one has a coast guard.

  That's what I got.-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 14:40, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

• We could simply say "Indigenous people", if there is a desire to emphasize that they were people.

• I don't think we need to get into any of that.

• Suggest we just say "student" (see below).

• I think that applying that essay to article content will have the effect of overemphasizing trivia just because it's "unique".

• Someone's specific age is almost never going to be significant to the narrative outside of their own biography. Why would it matter to this article if Washington had been 17, 23, or 27 at the time?.

• I'm happy with either including or excluding "The Virginia Marine Police patrol coastal areas." as you prefer. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:00, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

  • Even though we use it in the intro, "indigenous" is also less than great, here's a long think article about the tricky business of who gets to use that label and who gets excluded. I am trying to find a compromise, so is "the taking of their people as slaves for life" something we could both live with?
  • The words commonwealth and republic both come from this same bit of Latin. To me, it is interesting and informative that they went one way. I can compromise on wikilinking commonwealth for readers to go follow.
  • "High-school student" will give the reader a good sense of her age without specifying the number, will that work for you?
  • We can note that it's been an issue for water rights, that is what the attached source is regarding, but that does make the sentence slightly longer.
  • I just think that noting the age differences in English proficiency is informative and significant.
  • If we can seriously only afford one fact about the Marine Police, I'll take the Oyster Wars and lose "patrol coastal areas", which should be self-explanatory.

  Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 21:32, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

• This seems like an awkward construction. What about "sanctioned attacks on native tribes and the enslavement of their people"?

• Sure

• Sure

• Sure

• I don't think it's sufficiently significant to warrant being called out here, uniquely among languages; it can be discussed at the subarticle.

• This appears in a section on present-day law and government, not its history. The dating of the Capitol Police is potentially justifiable as supporting the claim of it being the oldest, but there's no such reasoning for the oysters. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:32, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Image removals

@Patrickneil: Most—if not all—U.S. state articles have Köppen climate maps in their climate sections, even when they have separate climate articles. Why is Virginia the exception? As for the I-95 image, it perfectly demonstrates highway congestion in the state which is talked about in that section; it's still a photograph of traffic on the state's busiest highway regardless of its age. Waddles 🗩 🖉 22:00, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

@WaddlesJP13 So I find the Köppen climate classification system to be borderline junk science. It's interesting to, like, students in AP Enviosci, and I know it's all over Wikipedia, it's become a box that editors just love to color in. But the analogy would be like if we added a field for Myers-Briggs Personality Type to every WP:BIO, and we had amateur psychologists debating whether Chappell Roan is an INTF or ESTJ. They're both based on measurable facts and figures, but just like with what every teacher says about citing Wikipedia, better is to go around to the sources directly. To say "this the number of days of rain, these are the precipitation totals, this is the temperature averages, etc." The map, which is almost all one solid color, is on the Climate of Virginia article, but I'm really not sure how it illustrates "climate" in this subsection.

Regarding the I-95 photo, though, besides being 47 years old and black and white, I'm not sure it illustrates something specific to Virginia. Caption that with any other state, and I'd believe it. In this case, if we wanted to illustrate Virginia's traffic, I'd say better would be to show a busy bridge in Richmond or Norfolk, something iconic to the state. Does that make sense? Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 22:58, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

@Patrickneil: Because Köppen climate classification is "borderline junk science" and interesting to people who aren't you, it should not be included? If it's objectively junk, the general consensus would be to remove these maps from every article that uses them. I don't see how adding a map of climates to a section titled "Climate" is as trivial as using the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator to describe one's personality on a biographical article.

I also don't see why it matters whether or not something is "iconic to the state". You could caption the "The annual Monument Avenue 10K in Richmond" as "The annual Monument Avenue 10K in Dayton, Ohio" and I wouldn't think any differently, but I don't build my opinion on the relevance of an image based on how distinct it appears to me. Besides, I-95 is the main Interstate highway through the state. Everyone here who drives knows what it is and how congested it is if they drive it. Waddles 🗩 🖉 23:29, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

The proposed climate map addition also causes sandwiching of text, which should be avoided. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:18, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: I had noticed that at first, but then dismissed it because the sandwiching was between an image and a narrower graph, like the Demographics and Religion section have, rather than between the image I added and another large image or a wider graph. Waddles 🗩 🖉 13:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Years ago, we used to have a photograph on the left in the Climate subsection, but moved it to Climate of Virginia for just that reason, because of the sandwiching. It only gets worse if you set a fixed 300px size, which goes against the recommendation at MOS:IMGSIZE. Though I'm not sure anyone is advocating for it, removing the Template:Climate chart would be an alternative discussion we could have here. I have always noticed how much padding it has, though it's positively streamlined compared to the visual mess of Template:Weather box, which is used to present much of the same info on so many geography articles.

Why haven't I led the crusade to remove the Köppen climate maps from all articles? That might be a lonely hill to die on, and I'll say there are geography articles, typically for very large regions, where they do provide some, albeit basic, value. Like Alaska or Idaho. Others though, I do feel are a poor use of space, see the maps that are featured on Delaware or Georgia. If we did want to feature a map in the Climate subsection here though, again, I don't think Köppen is the way to go. Compare the level of detail in File:Köppen_Climate_Types_Virginia.png with an average precipitation map, a maximum precipitation map, or a map showing rising temperatures, just as examples.

Why feature unique images? Fair question. I discussed this with Nikkimaria last month, but a lot of what this article is doing is comparing Virginia to other states. So we don't spend a lot of time discussing the ways the subject is typical, and I think that is an outgrowth of Wikipedia's policy on notability, which includes the old example that "dog bites man" is not worth publishing but "man bites dog" is. In the Festivals subsection, we feature a photograph of Pony Penning, something no other state has, rather than the Tysons Corner shopping mall Christmas tree, even though more Virginians probably see that tree than do the ponies. Christmas is celebrated in every state, pony penning is celebrated in one.

There is, though, a highway photograph that I've previously considered for this section and alluded to in my earlier comment, that's File:Triple Crossing area (9743296994).jpg, which shows this spot in Richmond where boats, pedestrians, trains, and cars all overlap. Crowded interstates are found in many states, but that spot is found in one. Happy for any thoughts! -- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 15:13, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

@Patrickneil: Was the removal of the climate image by consensus or your choice? "We" leads me to believe there may have been some sort of consensus about it among you and multiple other users, but if your objection to adding simply stems from your personal bias against it, I don't see an objective reason not to have it given that the vast majority of U.S. state articles as well as articles for other countries and their subdivisions, and that MOS:SANDWICH implies that having images adjacent to each other should be avoided—not that it's prohibited—and provides an example more extreme and format-breaking than my addition. Not to mention the latter is already occurring in the article in the same manner my addition was, which is between an image and a template, and there is no formatting actually broken by either existing example.

I agree that those precipitation and temperature maps show more detail, but under a section titled 'Climate', one should expect to see a generic image of the state's climates and that everything further would be more likely to appear in article that's more in-depth (like Climate of Virginia) rather than a section within an all-encompassing article of the state. Even though Virginia is made up by one climate for the vast majority, the image still shows what that type of climate is and where those other climates are in the state.

As for images being "unique"—most images on articles like this one will inevitably just be of seemingly generic things with it being up to the captions providing context on what makes it unique. For example, File:200318-N-BB298-1072_(49786116842).jpg shows two hospital workers screening someone for COVID-19, in front of "the Navy's oldest continuously operating hospital". Without this caption, it just looks like two hospital workers screening someone for COVID-19 in front of a hospital. Same goes for the images under the Ecosystem subsection. White-tailed deer and ospreys are throughout much of the United States as well as in other countries, but the context that the image captions give makes it feel more particularly relevant to the state. Same goes for any photograph focused on people. So, I still don't know why the image of traffic on I-95 that I added is the one that gets singled out. I like that image of the various modes of transport in Richmond, but the reason I picked that image I did was because it corresponded with the two paragraphs which exclusively discussed car transport. Waddles 🗩 🖉 22:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

While WP:COUNTRYCHARTS is targeted to countries rather than states, I think the same logic would apply here. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:45, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: The logic explained there is the polar opposite of the situation regarding the Köppen climate map, stating "overly detailed statistical charts and diagrams that lack any context or explanation...should be reserved for main sub articles on the topic", while my intention is to add a relatively basic map with a caption that has context. An example more akin to the situation described at WP:COUNTRYCHARTS would be if I were trying to add these charts from the Climate of Virginia article. Waddles 🗩 🖉 04:21, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

How is there nothing about Virginia's Eugenics program?

How in the world can is there nothing in this article about the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, Buck v Bell, Carrie Buck, the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded or the wider eugenics movement in Virginia? Virginia was ground zero for eugenics in America, and it not being mentioned on this page is a rather shocking exclusion. Northern-Virginia-Photographer (talk) 19:52, 20 December 2024 (UTC)