Talk:Commoner

This article was nominated for deletion on 20 June 2011 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:09, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Earlier today User:Ufim moved Common People to Common People (song) with the comment "This is not the main lexical meaning of the term"

Here were my reasons for opposing the move on Ufim's talk page:

• it's confused over 50 incoming links that were to the song
• there's no reason for a phrase such as "Common people" to be capitalised as "Common People" (in fact it shouldn't be), and the two articles could co-exist with hatnotes to cross-reference them. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)
• the term "common people" is not well-defined in English; it usually has overtones of class but is basically just a conjunction of an adjective (that can be applied to many objects with a potential meaning of class) and a noun; it can also mean the people as a whole "a common people with a common destiny". For example, the article on socialist William Morris doesn't refer to "common people" (only "common life"), and even when it did the meaning isn't quite what you seem to want. Basically, Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Perhaps the article "People" gives the wrong impression, but that's what most of the uses in your edit refer to. (See also the dismbiguation page Class war for capitalisation examples.)
• There are already articles for phrases with clearer meaning, such as lumpenproletariat, hoi polloi, plebs, commoners. Surprisingly there doesn't seem to be for the history of the concept demos.
• Certainly the song is not the prior meaning, but if you do a web search for "common people" you will find the song is the most common usage online.
• the term "commons" does not refer to a group of people as claimed in the lead you wrote, and "rabble" usually has class connotations but is also not synonymous.

If you Ufim can provide references where the term is used in English in a defined way, then I would support the article creation, but not under the current title which wrongly capitalises the second word. --Cedders^tk 10:27, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently an editor considered the following to be an unreliable source and removed my addition:

Andersen, Margaret L.; Taylor, Howard F. (2010). Sociology: The Essentials (6th ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 181. ISBN 0495812234.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

The message read, "unreliable source: undergraduate textbook". This seems like dubious reasoning. How is a university textbook an unreliable source, regardless of whether it is for undergraduates? Regards, RJH (talk) 15:53, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Undergraduate textbooks have a pedagogical rather than a scholarly interest, and regularly obscure the scholarship in favour of teaching effectiveness. It isn't a RS for a scholarly term. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:09, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:GNG. Undergraduate textbooks are perfectly suitable for secondary sources. This isn't a scholarly journal, so your criteria is perhaps too rigorous. Regards, RJH (talk) 15:41, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:TERTIARY. Textbooks aren't secondary sources. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:13, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough, although to me it is bordering on the absurd how constrictive the requirements for citations have become. RJH (talk) 22:15, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Common People (song) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:29, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Heimin. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 11#Heimin until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 17:15, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if there shouldn't be something in the lead about this term having become obsolete in our age? Can('t) we find a few reliable sources to substantiate that indisputable fact? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:28, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good shout. We used to include that, and it is already in the sources used in the article. Also, IMO, once we put the emphases back on the historical, it's important for us to distinguish commoners from the clergy, as well as the nobility. Scholarly sources are near unanimous that Europe used to have a threefold social order - common people, clergy, and nobility.

It does admittedly complicate things that clerics were sometimes of both common or aristocratic origin. And that royalty is sometimes viewed as a separate division above the nobility/aristros. Yet the qualifier "regular" should makes it obvious that commoners aren't royalty, and as said sources are near unanimous about it being a three-fold order, not four fold (well at least until the system began to break down, with the emergence of the fourth estate etc.) I'll try to restore mostly original wording to the lede, hopefully you'll like it. (PS - it was me that wrote most of the content for this article, after Deltionists tried to destroy it back in 2011.) FeydHuxtable (talk) 13:47, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"royalty is sometimes viewed as a separate division above the nobility" - because it definitely is. There is a common misconception that royalty is the same thing as nobility and vice versa. That is not so, at least not in any of the 5 languages I know rather well. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 14:18, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I rolled back 2 edits which had not been discussed enough here. One of them reinstated confusing wording re: clergy which is irrelevant. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 14:21, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Rollback is a tool that should be only be used for vandalism and the like. The word 'Clergy' is indisputably relevant - as per many of the sources in this article, and per Estates of the realm , 'Clergy', along with the 'Nobility', are the two other divisions of the well known 3 fold system. A contrast versus Clergy & Nobility is the fundamental fact needed to understand the 'commoner' division. You suggest in the opening post above that you're not aware of any source even for the "indisputable fact" that the term has fallen out of use, yet assume you know better than competent editors like KnightMove, and even the editor who has read all the sources and wrote most of the article?

I'm going to restore the last version by KnightMove, as that version is better than the one we have now. And as your source free opinions are clearly not sufficient to overrule the views of editors who are well studied on this subject. FeydHuxtable (talk) 14:48, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@SergeWoodzing: To add my own comment - unlike "academia, award holders, top athletes, billionaires and all kinds of persons who may be considered social higher-ups" you can easily verify that the article has extensive coverage on clergy as a status in its own right, and it's the task of the introduction to give a summary of the main points. --KnightMove (talk) 05:04, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. @Serge, I'm sorry if my last comment was a little uncollegial. I see you do a lot of good work here. But it remains the case there is no good reason to exclude Clerics from the lede. There are thousands of sources on the three fold Medieval order, and I think you'll find they all list Clerics as the first order. So if for some bizarre reason we only wanted to distinguish commoners from one of the other two orders, there would be case we should just say they were not clerics (and not bother mentioning nobles in the lede). As per sources in the article, clerics were the "most prestigious" of the three orders, as they were seen as "closest to God". Granted, the nobles were mostly the ones who wielded worldly power, but there were many exceptions to this. His Holy Father Pope Innocent III exercised political power way above any King or Emperor, and sometimes clerics armed with maces would command and lead armies, gleefully striking down any enemy champion who would dare stand against their righteous fury. Huh, in rural Ireland, even as late as the 1980s, the priest would often be the most powerful and feared person in the locality.

Granted, things are different now, with clerics irrelevant to the vast majority of citizens in some countries, and moving in that direction in most others. But as you rightly say, the "Commoner" concept is mostly of historical interest. FeydHuxtable (talk) 08:03, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, in the article text, in mentioning your concept of clergy = an estate of government long ago = not commoners then in the sense that they were not burgers or farmers (do I get you right?), if you can get a sentence together that is clear enough for the average reader to grasp, and (and) if you can source that point of view reliably. It is just too far-fetched (fringe, trivial) to be mentioned in the lead of the article. Too confusing to start of with that at the top of the article.

Furthermore if there are any more changes to the lead text without discussion and consensus here first, violations of Wikipedia's editwarring rules will be reported. I made a change, that has now been reverted several times without discussion/consensus here. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:00, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

PS This section is about the fact that the term is obsolete today. Where is that now in the lead of the article after y'all have removed it several times? What is the agenda in writing in the present tense & obviously wanting the lead to look like the term is still important to society in 2021? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:07, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Please try to assume good faith and not accuse fellow editors of having agendas. Everyone agrees the Commoner social division has become less relevant. The folk who have removed reference to its decreased relevance from the lede include you yourself, with your disruptive misuse of the rollback tool. Looking forward, there's clearly consensus for you or anyone else to add back a few words to the effect that the social division is largely of historical interest. FeydHuxtable (talk) 17:10, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

OK I'll try harder when I see you guys at work, but it's pr't' near impossible when you see experienced users (who you know know better) making changes to the lead of an article to get their own way while disregarding ongoing talk. Always flabbergasts me, and I am not at my very best as a good-faith-assumer when flabbergasted. Sorry! --SergeWoodzing (talk) 08:36, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense. I guess this minor disagreement could have been avoided if Id waited for you to respond to my first reply here, rather than going direct to addressing it in the lede. Still, there will always be a little friction when different people care about a quality product for our readers. I like the change you've just done to the lede, so as long as KnightMove is also happy, we are good. :-) FeydHuxtable (talk) 09:49, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As initially has begun to be discussed in the previous section, the question is whether or not clergy should be mentioned in the lead of this article. I find not one reliable dictionary source that mentions clergy at all in reference to the word commoner. Seems to me that there is an agenda among a few users here who for reasons unknown wish to point out specifically that members of the clergy today are not commoners. Rather a moot point, aside from lack of clear relevance? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:56, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The only agenda here is trying to maintain a useful article for our readers. A basic understanding of commoners in context of the 3-fold division is useful for those wishing to understand social history, and even to those seeking entertainment from books, movies or video games with a medieval or early modern setting.

For almost all its 12 year history until you removed the word clergy a few weeks back, the article has defined commoner as someone who is not a member of the nobility nor the clergy. E.g. check this version from May 2011 before I first edited the page, which includes that definition in the opening sentence, and its also reflected in the caption for the lede pic.

While I could refute your dictionary point with reference to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary or maybe even WP:NAD, your point does have some validity. If one was defining 'commoner' to reflect the (rare) cases the word is still used in a contemporary context, then one might distinguish the word only against the nobility and not mention clergy. And the current Knightmove version of the lead is broadly inline with this. The current opening sentence defines the word with no mention of clergy. If you want to further refine this distinction, no objection from me, though I remain of the opinion that clergy should not be totally removed from the lede. FeydHuxtable (talk) 17:10, 16 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

SergeWoodzing: You're discussing the problem (?) ignoring its root. In Commoner #History, the role of clergy as a higher social status in its own right is discussed extensively. Do you agree with that or not? If yes, why do you want to keep this acpect out of the introduction, which is supposed to summarize the main content of the article? If you don't agree, then discuss the content of this section and its sources. For sure, dictionaries are not the only relevant sources to be taken into account. --KnightMove (talk) 02:25, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I now perceive this unnecessarily inflated discussion to have reached a point where we can get a lead that adheres to normal connotations, which would mean that the parliamentary/representational/legislative clergy issue of yore can be expounded on in the article (I've already said I don't care about that), but does not need to be mentioned to confuse regular readers in the lead. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 08:04, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm fine with the current wording, so no more need to argue. --KnightMove (talk) 04:41, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What about the English commoner? I believe the term was coined by Prime Minister Anthony Eden sometime after his election in 1955, but I'm not an expert at this, and hopefully someone with more exact knowledge can help. Also, when Europe was united with a single currency, I'm quite sure the English were told to disuse the term, so it's not in use anymore. However, it sure enjoyed mainstream popularity, defining the English into two groups: the elite Torries, and everyone else. Lord Milner (talk) 18:40, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]