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This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.
I noticed that one of the earlier discussions I contributed to (here) was archived, and it was also in a thread littered with random arguments from an editor since blocked, so I wanted to restart this clean. I definitely don't want to discuss this from the perspective of whatever biased axe-grinding.
The lead sentence right now has parentheses with a partial English pronunciation, Serbian spelling, Serbian pronunciation, and also the dates of birth and death with Old Style date for birth too. This is a bit intense, and it doesn't necessarily match the guidelines from MOS:LEADREL and similar. I figure most readers these days skip over all this, but we might want to consider thinking about it a bit for those readers who don't.
Shouldn't we include the pronunciation of the given name as well? It doesn't seem hard to guess, and these days there's even more people like that popular in parts of the English-speaking world, but it might not be entirely obvious to the average English reader. For example, while a lot of people these days have heard of Nikola Jokić, that still is a subset of the total audience, and in turn in that case I also hear a lot of people in the press pronounce that oddly. It seems to be most commonly pronounced NI-co-luh, and the most common weird one is ni-CO-la. I hesitate to just call the latter flat out wrong as a foreigner, but it makes it sound like the feminine name Nicola and it deviates a lot from the original Serbian pronunciation, so it's confusing at the very least.
At the same time, I don't know IPA very well to be able to write this down. Can someone contribute that? Maybe sourced to a Tesla biography audio book of some sort?
The inclusion of Serbian Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation is inherently relevant because it's the native one to the topic. The pronunciation is particularly helpful to supplement the partial English one; if the former matter is attended to, this becomes less important. MOS:LEADLANG would allow us to move this part to an annotation.
The Serbian spelling can be useful for readers as there's a lot of coverage in reliable sources in Serbian and in turn in Cyrillic (there's also Serbian Latin which matches English Latin to the letter). The relevance of the latter to the average English reader is somewhat hard to judge - because we have a decent coverage of Tesla in English reliable sources, it's less likely the readers will encounter foreign sources, but we still typically keep this inline.
Previously I was thinking of comparing with the examples of other people with Serbian Cyrillic name spellings, so I found Tito which has 1/3rd of the readership, and the aforementioned Jokić has spiky but increasingly 1:1 comparable readership. Another spiky example is Novak Djokovic where there's the same, plus Latin with diacritics (because that one deviates substantially), but also a hatnote and length cleanup tags, so it's unclear whether that's a great example.
Outside of biographies, examples with similar readership include Serbia where there's two long lists and everything is moved to annotations, and Yugoslavia where there's a big list of items inline and then an annotation with much more items. It's a mixed bag, and none of these articles seem to be GA class, so who knows if this topic was ever fully reviewed. I noticed the Serbia article was nominated as GA, and I also checked the Croatia article which has similar traffic, and that one is a delisted GA, which uses a lot of these terms inline in parentheses, and has an annotation at the end of the second set.
The Old Style date of birth seems puzzling, and I can't tell how this is relevant. Do biographers discuss this matter? I can't seem to even find it mentioned in the two citations that support the matching sentence in the early years section, Cheney and O'Neill. I tried using Google Books search on the Carlson book, and didn't find it either. Because June 28 is Vidovdan, this sounds like some sort of a weird talking point. I'd definitely move the mention of the Old Style date to an annotation, and in turn request a citation for that. For example:
Nikola Tesla ([...] 10 July 1856[a] – 7 January 1943) was a [...].
@Joy: I have zero knowledge of Balkan language, pronunciation, or dates, but everything you say sounds reasonable. I support removing the old style date. --ChetvornoTALK03:21, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do I smell Wikipedia:Ownership when being reverted for telling the things as they were? Why can't be mentioned that they were taught the Croatian language? It's in his maturation certificate. As if he lived in a vacuum later known as Croatia. SoupePrimordiale (talk) 18:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing in my edit said about his nationality. Someone's pusshig the narrative that everything was German, but it wasn't. You may not like the truth, but it's all well documented. We can discuss each and every sentence, but please stop removing my work. SoupePrimordiale (talk) 18:52, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The red banner that says "Note: This page is semi-protected so that only autoconfirmed users can edit it."? This is pure Ownership, sorry but it is. You're supposed to discuss every well sourced sentence. SoupePrimordiale (talk) 18:55, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I support the revert: At over 9,000 words this article is already recommended to need a trim per WP:TOOBIG. This level of detail in their education is too detailed for this article. Z1720 (talk) 19:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So his eduction and grades are unimportant, but we have "There was a rumor among his classmates that he had drowned in the nearby river". Wonderful! Great job, guys. SoupePrimordiale (talk) 19:02, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@SoupePrimordiale: The article has a lot of prose that can be cut: I would agree that this is unnecessary and can be removed. Sarcastic comments like the one above does not help with this goal. Discussion on the article does. Z1720 (talk) 19:46, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Z1720, my sincere apologies! I was accused of povpush and sockpuppetry and what not, and was told to read a banner that says nothing about fixing things that are misleading or simply wrong. I checked the other user's edit history, and they were very protective of this article from their day one. How am I supposed to further develop anything if my 4 hours of research and writing were reverted because of - what? Some unfounded fears.
Btw: I moved a paragraph or two, I didn't really add much. Why do we keep trivia like "integral calculus in his head" (many smart people can do that, to this or that extent), but cannot mention which subjects he had? How should we proceed? It this where we spend hours discussing every addition to an existing sentence? Should I just forget about everything, given the sad state of Wikipedia affairs? SoupePrimordiale (talk) 20:19, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Who said anything about his nationality and ethnicity? Someone put that everything was taught in German. That's not true. His grades are in Croatian and German. But God forbid Croatian is mentioned. Speaking of POVPUSH SoupePrimordiale (talk) 19:05, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You also added Croatian military frontier several times, which is against previous tp discussins, of course the picture of the passport which was pushed previously etc. This is really getting old. Theonewithreason (talk) 19:09, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not required to know the whole history of image edits, and I'm sure many of the facts that I added can be put back. Because: it's true he had both German and Croatian as a school subject. It's true that in 1873 that was already Croatian Military Border, as you can see it here https://www.gimnazija-karlovac.hr/media/com_digbastina/data/izvjesca/realka/1872-1874.pdf. It's said he finished 4 years in 3, which I also corrected because it's not true. Is all that POVPUSH too? Why did you overreact like this? SoupePrimordiale (talk) 19:21, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just because information is true does not mean that it should be included in the article. The information proposed was too detailed for this article. Z1720 (talk) 19:48, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
level-3 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale..jpg){kind=small}
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Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. M.Bitton (talk) 15:28, 12 November 2024 (UTC)