Wikipedia talk:Citizenship and nationality

Request for comment

Please offer your assessment of this proposal. If most people find it acceptable, I will add a ‘Citizenship’ field to the template, and a link in the documentation to this guideline (note that the proposal is written as though this is already the case). Discussions that lead to this proposal can be found here and here. I look forward to your comments! – SJL 05:20, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Personal, ranty, idiomatic, political and questionable

There are some good ideas lurking in this, but this initial draft is entirely too one-editor to ever make it as a WP guideline. Aside from tone and phrasing, it spends far too much time advancing interpretational theories and trying to source them (I'll bet real money that countersources are just as easy to dig up) instead of using plain language that near-everyone who fluently speaks English already agrees upon. I.e., if you have to cite sources for your definitions in a would-be guideline, then it is probably not guideline material. If you are citing sources for highly persnicketty idiomatic (even if more precise) definitions against the way that English words and phrases are generally used by fluent speakers (e.g. saying that "League of Nations" and "United Nations" are wrong) then you are soapboxing and this is definitely not WP guideline material, even if the "pet peeve" ranting character of it were eliminated. Ultimately, I think that it is more reasonable to note that "citizenship" and "nationality" as sometimes distinguished by people who think about such things can, as concepts, be noted as clearly different in theory but almost always overlapping and usually coterminous, and also recognize that English as used by most people does not make this distinction, requiring descriptive phrasing, not simply a word switch, to annotate the difference where that difference exists and matters. This proposal is basically linguistic activism. There is nothing wrong with linguistic activism per se (cf. the widely successful putsch for gender-neutral wording over the last few decades), but Wikipedia is not the place to launch a new campaign of this sort. The real question to ask here is "will this help our general readership?" Clearly the answer is "no", because the average English speaker/reader does not draw the legal technicality distinctions this essay draws. In closing and just to be clear, I do not think that nothing good can come of this, I just think that as written to date it is about 2/3 off-base on an applicable level, however much the analysis in it may be "right" in one sense or another (principally a sense that matters only to people like immigration, restitution, and indigenous peoples' rights attorneys and judges, in courts of law). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 09:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Response

Thank you for your comments (delivered with characteristic enthusiasm). I understand your concerns, but disagree with most of them, and hope that I can satisfactorily explain why. To do this as clearly as possible, I have organised my responses to correspond to the four categories that your concerns seem to fall into: the proposal (1) does not conform to ‘everyday’ English; (2) advances a personal, idiosyncratic interpretation of the terms under consideration, and does so for political purposes; (3) may be correct in theory, but is almost irrelevant in practice; and (4) is unhelpful to Wikipedia’s general readership.

While it is true that English speakers in the United States are unlikely to differentiate between ‘citizenship’ and nationality’ in everyday language, this is not the case in other countries such as United Kingdom and Canada, respectively home to the second and third largest native English-speaking populations in the world (see the article on the English language). The United Kingdom, for example, works on the understanding that Scotland and Wales are nations, and officially recognises the Irish as a people with the right to self-determination. Similarly, the Canadian government recently recognised the Québécois as "a nation within a united Canada", and it is common practice to refer to the country’s aboriginal peoples as ‘First Nations’. The more important point, however, is that it is not clear that Wikipedia policy should be dictated by the meaning of terms in ‘everyday language’, even if that meaning were not context-specific, as is the case here. This leads me to my second response.
I do have an agenda, but not the kind that you seem to think I do. I joined Wikipedia with the intent of improving its quality in my fields of expertise (see my user profile). This applies both to articles and to the way that they are framed, which is why I have put forward this proposal. The distinction between citizenship and nationality that I have outlined here is not my own idiosyncratic interpretation, or an attempt at “linguistic activism” — it is a sincere effort to improve the accuracy of the encyclopedia by using scholarly definitions of terms. While there are certainly sources that use citizenship and nationality as synonyms in passing, I am unaware of any academic literature that actively asserts that these two terms denote the same thing. Even the strongest of nationalists recognise that the term ‘nation-state’ is not a redundancy. Also, I am far from the first person to describe the League of Nations and the United Nations as misnomers, and I have added a citation to verify this (if you do not have library access to a copy of the book, you can view the page that I cite through Google Books). Finally, in advocating the use of the ‘everyday language’ meaning of the term ‘nationality’, you imply that it is politically neutral. This is not the case. Using ‘nationality’ to denote both its referent and citizenship privileges a particular political perspective at the expense of others. Accordingly, I am suggesting that we give preference to citizenship because it is a legal status that is objectively verifiable, unlikely to be contested, and does not privilege a particular political position, which cannot be said for nationality.
Your assertion that citizenship and nationality are “almost always overlapping and usually coterminous” is simply false. The millions of naturalised immigrants living in adopted countries around the world is alone strong and sufficient evidence of this.
The argument that adopting this proposal as a guideline would not benefit Wikipedia’s general readership “because the average English speaker/reader does not draw the legal technicality distinctions this essay draws” does not follow, for two reasons. First, this is not ‘merely’ a legal or technical distinction – the difference between the two terms is substantive and consequential. Second, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to convey information as accurately as possible, and this often requires going beyond common perceptions. In this case, while most readers will not consciously recognise the difference, they will come away with more accurate information that does not tacitly promote a particular world view.

I hope that this clarifies the purpose of this proposal, and adequately responds to your concerns. – SJL 18:00, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Again, these distinctions are legal ones that do not reflect general usage. In Canada (the country from which I recently moved back to the US!) the general population certainly do not refer to Quebecois as a nation unto themselves, and it is well-understood that First Nations is a term of art, and that Canadian indigenous ethinicities are in fact Canadians. I'm not sure what you mean by WP policy being dictated by anything; guidelines are not policy. WP guidelines that do touch on style and wording matters generally do follow common practice. Getting traction on jargonistic usages is extremely difficult (cf. WP:MOSNUM and the BC/AD versus BCE/CE usage; a number of us want to see BCE/CE across the board, but even after years there is no consensus to go there.) What is more notable, though, is that WP generally does not call for specific wording choices, anywhere. There are some guidelines (mostly parts of the MOS) that urge avoidance of certain words because they are ambiguous or for some other reason, but we don't have guidelines advocating specific definitions of terms. Which leads into...
Advocating "scholarly definitions of terms" is linguistic activism of the kind I'm talking about. This isn't Scholarpedia or WikiPoliSciGradStudent, it's a general-use reference work written in plain English. The side point about the UN and LoN is missing the point: It doesn't matter that someone somewhere has written a book that criticizes the names of the organizations - that has not changed general usage, or influenced the names. I'm not saying you are lying, and I wish you'd stop citing sources all the time as if you are being accused of falsifying data. I'm saying that it makes no difference with regard to what a Wikipedia guideline should say, or whether it should even exist. Favoring citizenship over nationality because more readily verifiable: I can buy that. I just doubt that you'll gain WP-wide consensus for it, because most people don't care, many do not see the distinction to begin with, others see a distinction but not precisely the one you do, and those that do think about the matter are probably going to say that, like various other editing disputes and decisions, when this one is problematic it can just be resolved by local consensus at the talk page of the affected article. I.e., we don't need a new guideline about everything, only things that are sufficiently problematic that they justify another document for editors to learn, and sufficiently frequent that a "FAQ" on the issue is needed in the form of a guideline, and so intractable that it is difficult to resolve the issues without a guideline to cite.
I think we're talking past each other on this one. If I become a naturalized citizen of Botswana, then I am a Botswanan. That is my nationality. My ethnicity could perhaps be said to be "White American of largely British descent". Yes, there will be cases where things are less clear - was James Joyce Irish or British, given that the UK was occupying and controlling all of Ireland back then? - but these disputes are resolvable where they occur by normal editorial consensus-building.
You speak of "substantive and consequential" differences between these terms, but there isn't any evidence of a Wikipedia problem to be solved by drawing the distinction as clearly as you would advocate. The terms themselves also have multiple definitions (including synonymity) in multiple sources, so your selection of two very particular and very different ones, and insistence on those definitions' supremacy, is a POV exercise; this is what is idiosyncratic and wikipolitical about it. It is strongly redolent of WP:BEANS and WP:CREEP, as well as overly prescriptive/proscriptive in an area where such over-control of wording does not seem justified by any extant problems.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 02:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is exactly what we need!

I've been updating artist infoboxes and have always been confused about the nationality field. Some people put the nationality, others put citizenship. No one is certain what to put. For the Rembrandt article, I changed nationality from Netherlands to Dutch (ethnic group) and got reverted. So there's definitely confusion on this. Your proposal solves the problem.

If the infobox offers both nationality and citizenship, people will have to consider the difference between the two, and therefore be much more likely to be consistent on how they fill out the nationality field.

I'm not sure why SMcCandlish is railing against your proposal the way he/she is. The nationality field needs to be clarified; your proposal accomplishes that. --JaGa (talk) 19:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wait a sec. There's another element to the confusion - ethnicity. When I first started looking at artist infoboxes, one of the first I saw was Caravaggio. It uses ethnicity in the nationality field and hadn't been challenged, so I assumed that was the proper convention. Looking at Albert Einstein, though, I realize the important distinction. I'm sure people will hate this, but the best solution would be to have citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity available. Having citizenship and ethnicity fields would define what nationality is NOT at a glance. --JaGa (talk) 20:18, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]