Talk:Attack on Pearl Harbor in popular culture

Why is it called a surprise attack?

When it was not a surprise, and why is there no mention of this prior awareness? https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1214001/pearl-harbor-us-president-roosevelt-warned-attack-world-war-2-japan-spt Balupton (talk) 15:37, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

See response on Talk:Attack on Pearl Harbor#Why is it called a surprise attack?. Tarl N. (discuss) 21:32, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Short description

Seeking consensus for the short description of this page. I argue it should be intentionally blank per WP:SDNONE as the article title already sufficiently indicates what the article is about. I'm not opposed to other descriptions as long as they aren't simple restatements of the article title. The short description should answer the question of "what is this article about?" without restating the title. Uhai (talk) 22:39, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that your argument for blanking the description isn't clear. Are you implicitly arguing this a list article? Viriditas (talk) 23:52, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

@Uhai:, I see your argument about "in popular culture" articles is supported, but I can't see where it is explicit on WP:SDNONE. I took a random sample of ten in popular culture articles and none had descriptions. I will remove it for now, but could you make it more explicit at WP:SDNONE? It shouldn't be this difficult to get a straight answer from a policy, guideline, or essay.Viriditas (talk) 23:58, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

@Viriditas: I agree that WP:SDNONE could be made less nebulous and the one example given there isn't particularly great. However, the gist of it is that if the article title already makes it obvious what the article is about, then the short description should be intentionally blank. If I asked you "what is this article about?" and you said "it's about the cultural impact of the attack on Pearl Harbor", I'd say "well, duh! That's what the article title says!" If I asked you what the Tom Cruise article was about, assuming I had no idea who he was, and you said "It's about an American actor and producer born in 1962", I'd say "okay, understood."

As I already stated, I'll note I'm not against the short description not being intentionally blank (if one can be written that's good enough), however Beyond My Ken disagreed with my addition of an intentionally blank short description saying there should be consensus without providing any argument as to why they disagreed. Furthermore, they then added a short description without consensus, that, in my eyes, was totally against what WP:SDNONE is trying to say. Instead of edit warring, I took it to the user's talk page, where I will admit I became a little uncivil, but have since apologized (which was reverted).

Speaking of consensus, I add hundreds of short descriptions to articles per month and Wikipedians collectively add tens of thousands. If we needed consensus for each and every one, then we wouldn't have any short descriptions at all. I'm not against someone disagreeing and asking for consensus, but I think they should at least provide an argument for why they disagree before we start seeking consensus from other editors. If not, I could revert any good faith edit I choose and say "no, get consensus" and nothing more.

I should also dispel confusion and clarify that there is a difference between an article having an intentionally blank short description (where the template's value is "none") and having no short description (the template isn't present on the page). If one goes to the Gadgets tab of their preferences and enables Shortdesc helper under the Editing header, it is a lot clearer. According to Wikipedia:Short description#Pages that should have a short description: "All mainspace articles should have a short description (including those that are intentionally blank[)]". Therefore, every page should transclude the short description template and some of those pages should have that template's value be "none", meaning intentionally blank (as this article should, in my opinion).

I would like to hear arguments as to why the short description shouldn't be intentionally blank along with some candidates for what it should be. This is what I asked for from Beyond My Ken in my now-reverted message on their talk page. Uhai (talk) 00:30, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

P.S. It's a short description. It's really kind of lame to argue about anyway, hence my initial comment regarding consensus on Beyond My Ken's talk page. I could totally understand wanting consensus prior to any major changes, such as a page move to a new title, but for short descriptions? Uhai (talk) 00:38, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Another solution is to link to the updated version of SDNONE when you make the initial change so that users don’t get confused in the future. Viriditas (talk) 02:36, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I see in the page history that you did that originally, but when I click on the link it says "some article titles are sufficiently detailed that an additional short description would not be helpful" and that’s just too vague for me, even with the current example. Is there, for example, a unique case where an in popular culture article should require a short description? Probably not, so how about rewriting it to include that as an example? I understand that these things are kept intentionally vague to prevent gaming, but for those not familiar with the short description, what about writing an additional essay that informs the practice and linking to that as well? Viriditas (talk) 02:41, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

The Shortdesc Helper tool does link to SDNONE in the edit summary when a blank description is added. I'm also running a modified version of it that adds "This short description is INTENTIONALLY "none" - please see WP:SDNONE before you consider changing it!" in an HTML comment next to the template in the wikitext to further reduce confusion.

I'll see about boldly making some changes to SDNONE to make it clearer. Uhai (talk) 02:58, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

For fun, I did some data analysis: quarry:query/75727. Of 777 mainspace articles that end with "in popular culture", only 128 (16.4%) currently transclude the short description template. Of those 128, 71 (55.5%) have non-blank descriptions and 57 (44.5%) have intentionally blank descriptions, which is actually less than I thought. You can see the issues, however, when looking at the non-blank pages' short descriptions:

• Adolf_Hitler_in_popular_culture: "Depictions of Adolf Hitler in popular culture" - Wow...
• Atlantis_in_popular_culture: "Depictions of Atlantis in creative works" - Again, not great.
• Ares_in_popular_culture: "Ancient Greek god of war" - This one seems better, but it's not because a short description is not a definition per WP:SDNOTDEF. It's not the short description's job here to define who or what Ares is here, its job is to describe what the article is about. The Ares article's short description itself can say that he's a Greek god, as it does.
• Jane_Austen_in_popular_culture: "Jane Austen novels adapted to theatre, film, and television" - This one looks better too because it doesn't seem to restate the title, but it's really not great because "in popular culture" literally means appearances of a subject in media, which includes theatre, film, and television.

Admittedly, not all of the ones I looked over are terrible (and as I said, I'm not completely against the short description not being intentionally blank if there's one that's good enough), however most of them could, and probably should, be intentionally blank. I also found an instance of unreverted vandalism from 18 months ago while doing this analysis, so that's cool. Uhai (talk) 03:54, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Good work. Viriditas (talk) 05:57, 9 August 2023 (UTC)