User talk:Ravenpuff/Archives/2017/October

Compose vs. Comprise

So the good news is that we agree on what theses two words mean and how they work (the whole comprises the parts, the parts compose the whole). The bad news is that we disagree on what the sentence means and what the logic of the situation is. Here's the sentence:

While most cardinals belong to the Latin Church, which encompasses the vast majority of the Catholic faithful (97.7%), a small number of cardinals belong to one of the twenty-three autonomous (sui iuris) Eastern Catholic Churches, which make up the other 2.3% of Catholics.

That we disagree on the logic of the sentence should be evident from the fact that your suggested compromise was a synonym of "compose" ("make up"), while my suggested compromise was a synonym of "comprise" ("encompass"). Here's why I think my reading of the sentence is better. (1) It reads the two halves of the sentence (about the Latin Church, and then about the Eastern Churches) as being precisely parallel, not just in overt syntactical structural but also in underlying meaning (the Latin Church encompasses 98% of the faithful, the Eastern Churches encompass the rest); your reading of the sentence, on the other hand, implies that, despite the exact structural parallelism of the two halves of the sentence, they don't actually underlyingly represent parallel relationships, but rather opposite ones. (2) A mass of the faithful is not a unity (i.e., not a whole), but rather just a collection of parts. A church comprises its faithful (as the Latin Church does), and multiple churches comprise their faithful (as the Eastern Churches do). Each particular church is a real whole, and its faithful are the parts which it comprises. (3) There is no whole for the 23 ECCs to be composing. They do not as a group make up any particular unity. There is not a single collective "Eastern Church" to pair as opposite to or coordinated with the (Western) Latin Church. At the top level, you have a unity of the whole Catholic Church, and then the next level down has 24 units, which are all coequal and more or less uncombinable except all together. And this "other 2.3% of Catholics" is not a unity as such, so there's nothing for the 23 ECCs collectively to compose.

If I have convinced you that my reading of the sentence is correct, then let's please change "make up" to either "comprise" or "encompass"; if I have not convinced you, then please offer a counterargument. If we find ourselves at an impasse, I'm afraid we're going to have to reword the sentence quite dramatically to avoid this issue because I can't (so far) make your reading of it work. Cheers! LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 05:24, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: Firstly, thanks for taking the time to write an in-depth summary of your case. My original intention was not actually to substitute a synonym of ‘compose’ but rather to use a more generic term (‘make up’) for it – in the sense to ‘complete an amount or group’. After reading your argument, though, I feel that it might not be the best way of phrasing it. That said, I don't think we necessarily disagree on the nuances of the sentence (in regards to the unity of the Eastern churches etc.). Let's consider the matter resolved; I'll change it back to your proposal. RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 08:05, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the reply. Glad we were able to settle this amicably. LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 12:43, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Retaining the <standard data-sort-value>

In the html note for List of living cardinals, there's a note saying that we should retain the <standard data-sort-value> for Cardinal bishops "for reference." Why? The only way you can see this is by pulling the code on the table and that hardly seems like an appropriate place to be storing "reference" information. The table already explicitly shows what consistory each Cardinal was created at, and anyone interested in the order at the consistory can go look that up somewhere else and see where the now-deceased cardinals from that consistory fit in as well. What am I missing? LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 16:05, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

It does seem to me like perhaps the table should link to each consistory. Would that change help here? LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 16:05, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: My rationale for including that is purely as a ‘reference’ for editors only, to keep and use the cardinal's original data-sort-value for whatever reason (e.g. the assignment of references or on the off-chance that a cardinal bishop happens to be demoted to a lower order). Hope that explains it. RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 23:30, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

The off-chance of demotion has, as far as I am aware, literally no precedent at all in the history of the church. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) If we set that aside, why isn't the fact that consistory dates are already given for each of the Cardinal bishops adequate for whatever other possible uses editors might have (like the assignment of references)? Keeping this value and with a special instruction about it just seems needlessly complicating to me. LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 23:38, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: While dates of consistories are certainly present in the table, the data-sort-value also conveys information about that cardinal's rank within a certain consistory itself, which can be useful (e.g. named references are attached to the most senior of each consistory). I don't believe adding this massively overcomplicates the table, seeing how we maintain it in status quo with data-sort-values. Appointments of cardinal bishops are relatively rare to start with anyway. RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 08:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Okay, I'm still not convinced that this is worth preserving, but you've heard my point and I haven't convinced you, so I'll let it go and you can keep them. What about the other point I mentioned, though, of wikilinking the consistory dates to the relevant consistory articles? Yes, no? (It could hardly present a problem of overlinking since we're already literally linking every instance of each Pope's name in the table.) LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 13:15, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: If we do that, we might as well link the countries in the table as well. Another alternative might be to give more prominence to the ‘Cardinals created by …’ articles that are currently in the See also section (perhaps by changing the links for popes to the relevant page), as the ‘consistory articles’ are simply sections of those articles. Any thoughts? RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 14:11, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I would not have any problem with linking the countries in the table as well. In fact, I would probably prefer it. I tend to think that anything someone reading the article might be interested in looking up should have a link immediately available. As it is now, there are links to the Popes elsewhere in the article, so they don't need to be linked in the table particularly either, but I think it is useful have the links for them there. I think changing the links on the Pope's names to links for their consistories would unexpectedly take readers somewhere other than where they expect to go by clicking, so I would not do that. I say add links all around. (I would also link the countries in the tables later in the article.) LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 14:38, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: That sounds like a viable idea, although I would incline towards preferring to leave individual consistories themselves unlinked but perhaps somehow placing the ‘Cardinals created by …’ lists higher up in the article; it seems more likely to me that readers would click to learn more about the cardinals created by one pope, not in only one consistory. I'd rather not overwhelm the reader with too many links. That said, I would still link countries in the table(s), though. RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 16:14, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the "too many links" thing is a red herring, especially in a table. If we were really concerned about that, we should delink the popes because there's just no excuse for that when there's only three of them and they're each being linked dozens of times in the same table. And I don't see why we need to try to guess what potential readers might be more interested in learning more about when we can easily accommodate multiple possible interests. Some people might be interested in who all the Cardinals created by a single pope were; others might be more interested in a particular consistory. Why not allow for and accommodate both interests? LacrimosaDiesIlla (talk) 00:07, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

@LacrimosaDiesIlla: While I still don't really see it as entirely in place here, I suppose you may go ahead and add the links in anyway. My opposition to it isn't that strong. RAVENPVFF | talk ~ 23:46, 26 October 2017 (UTC)