Talk:Hilda Annetta Walker

Please discuss before removing sections

A large section of the article has been removed with no discussion or explanation. Many citations were removed. There was a reason for that section to be there. By the way, this is a British article. We use the term "firemen", not "firefighters". Why did you change that?

This article was checked by an administrator before publication, and it was approved. So I think we have a right to a discussion before drastic unexplained culling. Please discuss every single change that you made. Some of the spare material in the infobox was left there because there is more to add to the infobox; research is still underway.

Tradition, extended family, chapel morality, 19th-century culture and finance all help to explain the motivation and opportunity of this high-achieving artist. Worldwide readers cannot be expected to comprehend that without explanation. Every high-achieving biography subject begs the question of how and why they achieved. We can at least place background context to allow the reader to begin to think about that. A great deal of time and work goes into researching context. Don't dismiss it because you don't understand it. Thank you. Storye book (talk) 21:27, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

I repeat, please discuss before removing large chunks of the article. Thank you. Storye book (talk) 21:30, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

This article claims to be about an artist but hardly mentions her, at most there are ten sentences, if that, about her in it. If people are interested in Yorkshire Tradition, extended family, chapel morality, 19th-century culture and finance there are plenty of articles elsewhere on Wikipedia covering those topics and, no doubt, they are appropriately titled as such. I'm sure you have put a great deal of time and work into gathering this material but very little of it relates to Walker or her art, or is any help in understanding her and her work. Maybe this article should be renamed The Walker Family of Yorkshire, which is what it appears to be at the moment. Also, a large number of primary sources such as birth and census records have been used which are not generally regarded as reliable sources, particularly for a common surname such as Walker. Using large numbers of primary sources for a English artist seems very odd, given how many reliable, secondary sources and coverage exists for British art and artists, including this one. What I have attempted to do with my edits is to re-focus on the artist and make her the centre of this article. Hope that's clear.14GTR (talk) 22:58, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you 14GTR for your reply. Regarding your first point about how much of the article is about Walker: two subsections establish context for this artist. Four further subsections deal with what we know about her private life, so that is obviously about her. Three full sections are directly about her own work, which means that they are obviously about her, since she is an artist, and facts about an artist's work are facts about the artist. Therefore all of the article is specifically about the artist.

Re your second point about whether people are "interested in Yorkshire": establishing the context of a biography subject is not about telling the reader in general terms about e.g. their place of origin. It is about giving facts which may be used by the reader to raise questions about the motivation and opportunity (or nature/'nurture) which are clearly connected to the the high achievement of the person at issue. For example, if someone is born into a rich family, and that person and all or most of their siblings end up well-educated and with great careers, then a question is raised as to whether the biography-subject's family context has made any difference to the beginning of their career. A well-known example of that sort of connection is J.F. Kennedy who also came from a rich family of a particular religious denomination with high-achieving relatives, and who was successful himself. People may agree or disagree about how far the family background defined that president, but the point is that that context counts. You could say, for example, that if Kennedy had been born into a very poor background with little education and no supportive relatives, then with his personality he may still have been successful, but in a different way - and his success may have been less certain without the family context that we know about. So - back to Walker. All of her family had to achieve what they did through consistent, lifelong hard work. The chapel work ethic of the north of England in the nineteenth century is well-known, but not all English people experienced that. It was different in the south of England, which was mainly Anglican, and easier-going. Those northern chapels usually had places of education attached to them - they were very interested in education. So chapel people, rich and poor, were taught to read and write by teachers who were also teaching at the board schools - good but very basic. But only a tiny minority of people in England at that time could afford higher education, and Walker had that. So family money counted for her, because it meant that she was not only trained in art, but trained by a Staithes Group painter who influenced her landscape work. Without money, that would not have happened. The fact that all or most of her siblings did so strikingly well in proportion to their environment of the industrial north with its filthy towns and mass poverty does appear to make a connection between a fortunate family background and achievement. Therefore the context outlined in the article is specific to the particular aspects of family and environmental context which allowed Walker to achieve what she did as an artist.

Re your third point about the article being renamed "The Walker family of Yorkshire" is surely not a serious one. I have already demonstrated that the article is all about Hilda Walker. All new articles are subject to further research and positive growth and development (which is different from culling due to misreading of the article), and that research is currently ongoing. I believe that the Hepworth gallery has more material about her, and so do several other institutions which I'm in the process of contacting at the moment - but as you know we are effectively in lockdown here, the galleries are closed and most of the staff are at home. Therefore we must be patient.

Yes there are secondary sources about e.g. bmd dates of Walker and her family. However I have found that some of those are vague or inaccurate, and I am in the process of checking. I shall be purchasing as many of the bmd certificates (which I assure you are reliable certified UK government documents). This will cost me a minimum of £100 and I am retired, so please forgive me if I do not complete all of this task immediately. Also, again, lockdown means that documents from government departments are currently processed slowly. I should add that quite a few WP editors have told me that there is now a sense of change of attitude about using bmd indexes and certificates in biographies, and that at the very least such sources should be permitted to remain until further secondary sources can be added.

Finally I would like to ask you what WP rules govern the culling of large sections and many citations from a biography article, when those sections are about context as I have explained above? Under what WP rule was the American term "firefighter" used to replace the British historical term "firemen"? (These are Edwardian firemen with horse-drawn appliances - and all men, so it's not a sexist term, it's a historical term for that era). And I would like to ask you where are the "many reliable secondary sources and coverage exists for ... this one"? Do you have these books? What do they say? The councils have closed or greatly diminished our local libraries here. Also we are not permitted to travel to universities or the great libraries of London right now, even if they were open to visits, which they are not. So what is this information source which you have found? I suspect that Walker went to Roedean, because I know her sister Dora did. That would affect her education and therefore her later career. So have you found that information, in which case where? If you know that there is more information available, why hide it? Please give us the links to the online books here. Thank you. Storye book (talk) 11:55, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Primary sources tag

I have removed the primary sources tag from the article for the following reason:

Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source, and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors. Appropriate sourcing can be a complicated issue, and these are general rules. Deciding whether primary, secondary, or tertiary sources are appropriate in any given instance is a matter of good editorial judgment and common sense, and should be discussed on article talk pages. (Quoted from WP:OR

The point is, all statements in the section at issue are backed by at least two published, secondary sources. The bmd index references are there only as an exploration to check out the secondary sources, which are there to support all the statements. Primary sources are only exceptionable when they alone support one or more statements. That is not the case here.

One of the main purposes of WP is to provide articles which are a first stop for students and other researchers. The bmd index information is there to assist researchers to make further checks to verify secondary sources. As the great historian AJP Taylor said to those historians who may follow him, on the radio shortly before he died: "Verify your references". He elaborated, on this, explaining that he had spent his life following up citations which had been copied from one historian to another over many decades, and when he reached the first instance of a citation, it was often found to be baseless. So long as an editor provides a secondary or tertiary citation, adding a primary source with it is not a crime. We hope that all articles can be improved and added to. Gray (2019) is inadequate and therefore potentially misleading, for example. That source states that Walker had at least 7 siblings, whereas the obituaries for her father says that he had eleven children who are named in newspaper articles and in his will. Storye book (talk) 10:47, 23 December 2020 (UTC)