Talk:Virginia

Semi-protected edit request on 30 March 2024

Change "1776" to "April 1775" in Statehood, second paragraph, first sentence, as the action in Lexington and Concord is considered the beginning in these colonies of armed revolution against the crown, and as Washington was commissioned in June 1775. Jvebel (talk) 02:43, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

 Done I left out the month, don't think it's critical here, but ping me if you think otherwise. Liu1126 (talk) 13:13, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Which photo?

Patrickneil's version

Magnolia677's version

User:Patrickneil and I are at odds over which photo of Virginia's two senators should be included. I've always avoided adding Flickr photos of unsuspecting people, particularly kids. Mark Twain Middle School is a grade 7-8 school, and I'm sure none of those teens imagined they'd end up on Wikipedia when they met their senators. The notable portion of the photo is the senators and capitol building; the kids makes it decorative. The input of others would be appreciated. Magnolia677 (talk) 18:13, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Hey, I understand that point regarding kids, it is sensitive. I'd been on the lookout for an update to the one we had there previously, File:DSC 5108 (34877757420).jpg, which is now five years old. It does also feature a child, though from behind. And if there isn't much response here, I think its easiest to just go back to that. I don't really think that the cropped version is, overall, a good photo of the two men, it's warped and taken from below their eyeline.

But I went with the wide because of the larger goal that I've been trying to do with the photographs on this article, which is generally to show some sort of action happening that illustrates the section topic. What I'd like to avoid, for example, are "Sports" section aerial photos of huge, empty concrete stadiums surrounded by parking lots (ex. Massachusetts#Sports). To me, that says nothing about sports, which is why I really like the photo we have of the Monument Avenue 10K. So, like, for a "Politics" section, I wouldn't want to slap the official portraits in a Template:Gallery, I'd say better would be to show notable Virginia politicians in the act of, you know, politicking or somehow serving the Commonwealth. And standing in front of the U.S. Capitol meeting constituents seemed to meet that bill.

I'll throw out some other options. File:Black History Month Commonwealth Coffee 2024 - Virginia Delegation.jpg is also from 2024 and has two House reps, though I don't know who the man in the middle is. File:Glenn Youngkin with the Virginia Congressional delegation.jpg also has the whole delegation with the governor as of 2021, the trouble there being that Elane Luria lost to Jen Kiggans in 2022. Neither of those show much action for that matter. There's also plenty of other ones with both senators from that 2019 meeting that don't have kids, like File:MRW 9485 (46538046372).jpg. Here is a tool to see a big collection of thumbnails with both senators. Thoughts?-- Patrick Neil, _oѺ^∞/Talk 18:50, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

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)