Talk:Gerald Durrell

Merge Corfu trilogy article into his biography page

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Suggestion to merge Corfu trilogy into this page. The article itself is extremely short, and if anything, provides links to the three books individually. I suggest a merge/re-direct of the article to this page. Thanks conman33 (. . .talk) 06:18, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I disagree - works and their author are two district topics. The trilogy article is very short, almost functioning as a disambiguation post, but I think it still serves a purpose for somebody interested in the trilogy rather than the author. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:44, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I support a merge/re-direct of the article. — Sadko (words are wind) 20:45, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Support merge: The diambiguation role could be served by section in Gerald Durrell#Books; the books have a page, the author has a page, so having a third page is unnecessary duplication. Klbrain (talk) 11:10, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Support merge. I would not generally suggest the merging of articles on works into articles on authors if there is much material on the works, but this is not the case here, as we have well-developed articles on the individual books. This one only serves as a superfluous extra level that we (and the reader) could do without. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 09:20, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I've just changed Corfu trilogy into a redirect without making any further changes to this article as it appears to contain all that information anyway. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:55, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Planning to work on this article

I am hoping to work on this article, and possibly take it to GAN and/or FAC, so I'm leaving a note here to let other editors of the article know in case they want to collaborate.

The first thing I'm going to do is regularize the citation format for books -- Botting is currently cited in long form in the footnotes, then in short form. I think it would be cleaner to have Botting listed in the sources and then use short form. I'll go ahead and make that change; if anyone disagrees, I'll revert and we can discuss it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:01, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Split out list of works

I propose to split the list of works out to a separate article; it's far too long to fit comfortably in this one. A selection can remain. If there are no objections I'll make the change some time in the next few days. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:18, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

No objections, so done. I have not left any part of the list in; as it turns out the article itself is going to cover the main books in sufficient detail that I don't think it's necessary. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:48, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

"Jacquie"

Why are we calling her by her first name? John (talk) 08:02, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

For most of the article, calling her "Durrell" would be confusing. Before she marries Durrell it's not clear when we should call her "Wolfenden" and when we should call her "Rasen" (see note 1) since we don't know exactly when she changed her surname, and in addition it would be easy to confuse "Wolfenden" with her father, who also figures in those three paragraphs. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:50, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

That makes sense. There's an annoying tendency to refer to adult women by their first names, either because of factors such as those you cite, or because of unconscious sexism, or a combination thereof. I wonder if anything can be done in this article to name her more respectfully? John (talk) 15:48, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it's pervasive in all kinds of writing. I'm certainly not immune to it; when I wrote Daisy Bacon I had to consciously go through and make sure I was converting "Daisy" to "Bacon" at every opportunity. I think the problem is particularly difficult here, though. It would at least be nice to call her "Rasen" rather than "Jacquie" in the first paragraphs that mention her, but without the date of her initial name change from Wolfenden I don't see a safe way to do it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:53, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

The Durrells

Maybe a brief mention about the BAFTA-nominated tv series The Durrells, loosely based on his three autobiographical books? Stronach (talk) 09:43, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

The article is already very long, so I included mention of his writing but not of secondary material he had nothing to do with directly. It's included in List of works by Gerald Durrell, which is linked in the "See also" section. A sentence or two about the series could go in the "Legacy" section, but how would we decide what TV material deserves inclusion? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:55, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Guinness

How much is "a crate" of Guinness? John (talk) 14:53, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately the source just says "crate". I would guess twelve bottles, but I think it's better to leave it as the source has it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:55, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Understood. In the modern context it could mean anything between 8 and 24 cans, or bottles. At the time bottles would have been more likely. That's a lot of Guinness! Shame there isn't a more precise measurement. John (talk) 15:44, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Centenary

A great pleasure to see Durrell on today's front page. A nice article on him in The Guardian today, too: "He wouldn’t hurt a fly – literally": remembering Gerald Durrell at 100 Tim riley talk 15:32, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! It was one of the most enjoyable articles to write that I've worked on since I started editing Wikipedia many years ago. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:48, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Excellent, and I loved reading and reviewing it, but pray keep your bleeding snakes out of my sodding bath, bloody boy! Tim riley talk 16:45, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Citation style

pinging @Mike Christie as reverter and @DuncanHill as recent contributor. I apologise for updating the refences against policy of WP:CITEVAR, thus here I am to establish a consensus before reverting back (latest revision). while the plaintext version is established per your edits, it creates a lot of hassle to manage, including a large number of automatic refnames due to reference grouping, a larger article size and inadequate formatting. the {{sfn}} solves these issues and I see no reason not to switch. Juwan (talk) 01:43, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

As a reader I'm not a fan of any form of short citations, but find sfn vastly preferable to plaintext, as it makes it less difficult to look the references up. I appreciate that 99% of readers and editors ignore the references, but don't think we should pander to them. @JnpoJuwan: you hadn't removed the "|ref=none" field from the citation templates, which prevented the sfn refs working properly, I was fixing this when @Mike Christie: reverted. In the course of my edits I realised that 1) there is no "Beolens et al. (2009)" work cited, and 2) there are two works which "Haag 2017" does not adequately distinguish between. Both of these problems are common with short citations, and much easier to spot with sfn than baretext as they will trigger error messages and the membership of error-categories, thus grabbing the attention of muppets like me who'll come along and fix them. DuncanHill (talk) 02:01, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

@DuncanHill thank you greatly, oh lovely copyediting muppet! Juwan (talk) 02:05, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Fully agree here, though my preference is {{Harvnb}} so VisualEditor works well with it, it helps ensure we have actual citations linked up and catches errors beforehand. Plus, users can click on it to go to the citation itself to see.

Support switching to a templated style. Chew^{(V • T • E)} 02:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

As the main author of the article I would prefer to keep the citation style as it is. I think CITEVAR is intended to defer, to some degree, to the editors active on the article. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:24, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

@Mike Christie would you like to give some arguments for why to keep it as such? Duncan and Chew have both raised important concerns for updating these to templates. otherwise, this stance seems more like claiming control over the article. Juwan (talk) 02:34, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

It's personal preference; I don't like editing sfn and I don't think the benefits are that important to readers, so I don't use it. No, I don't own the article, and if the consensus goes against me I'll accept it, but I do think that for citation style, and other matters where editors have discretion, the opinions of editors who are actively working on an article should be considered to have a bit more weight than the opinions of editors who are just passing by to express their opinions. If that weren't the case we could take a majority vote on citation style and require the winner to be implemented on every article. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:39, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I completely understand your judgement that the opinions if page's editors should hold more weight over decisions, but I believe that these should still be able to stand on their own.

with all good faith, this is a complete lack of an argument that again doesn't address Duncan and Chew's points on whether plaintext would be better than {{sfn}}. a personal preference shouldn't have weight upon a non-personal article. Juwan (talk) 03:35, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

What is CITEVAR for, if it doesn't allow for personal preference? Why would we need CITEVAR? CITEVAR was created to stop arguments, not because all forms of citation are exactly the same. If you worked on an article and four editors showed up and insisted on changing the citation style to one you felt was worse than your preference, would you think that was productive? And if your argument is that short citations like the ones used in this article are never the right choice, then that is definitely against the spirit of CITEVAR which is that those are not decisions that should be made globally. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:43, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Juwan, here's the relevant quote from CITEVAR: "Wikipedia does not mandate styles in many different areas; these include (but are not limited to) American vs. British spelling, date formats, and citation style. Where Wikipedia does not mandate a specific style, editors should not attempt to convert Wikipedia to their own preferred style, nor should they edit articles for the sole purpose of converting them to their preferred style, or removing examples of, or references to, styles which they dislike." Your original edit converted the article to a style you preferred. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:34, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Reference error - Beolens 2009

There is no work "Beolens et al. (2009)" listed. There is a " Beolens et al. (2011)", but the details for that are muddled - the title is given as The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals but the ISBN is for "The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles". The reference is in connexion with a mouse, so it must be the mammals book that is intended, but I don't have access to it to check. DuncanHill (talk) 02:56, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks -- I will follow up on this and clean it up tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Now fixed. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:34, 9 January 2025 (UTC)