Talk:Polyamory/Archive 3

message: See Archive 2 for further discussion of these people. 
Ezra Pound, William Wilkie Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh, François Mitterrand: Multiple relationships confirmed, partners' consent not confirmed.
Emma Goldman: spoke in favour of 'free love' but appears to have meant a serially-monogamous version. Made poly-friendly remarks but does not herself seem to have been poly.  (End summary of archived material - --Calair 01:59, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Summary of archives: Proposed, insufficient evidence

message: * Bertrand Russell, Mathematican,  Constance Malleson and Miles Malleson
* Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson, Diplomat, and Violet Trefusis
*  E. Nesbit, Hubert Bland, und George Bernard Shaw
* Etty Hillesum, author of a nearly mystic diary, killed 1943 in Auschwitz, and Julius Spier, Psychochirologist, Source:  An interrupted life: the Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (translated by Arnold Pomerans, New York, 1983)
* Book listed in Resources for Triads "Three in Love : Ménages à Trois from Ancient to Modern Times", by Barbara and Michael Foster and Letha Hadady reviews famous ménages à trois in history. They have a pretty broad definition of the term, which literally means "household of three." The authors are a long-term triad themselves. The book covers, among many others, Alexandre Dumas, Casanova, Friedrich Nietzche, Salvador Dali, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Voltaire, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Pablo Picasso, Emile Zola, and Greta Garbo. It seems we're in good company!
* William Wilkie Collins, Caroline Graves, and Martha Rudd
: Sackville-West, Nicholson, and Nesbit are already in the article. We need to be wary about including ménages à trois, because a lot of them were forms of 'tolerated cheating' that would not be considered 'polyamorous' by modern standards. For instance, my understanding is that Eleanor Roosevelt was very unhappy about FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer; AFAIK, Eleanor & Franklin's relationship was more of a political partnership than a romantic one by the time Ms. Hickok came on the scene, and I'm not aware of FDR's ever okaying her relationship with Eleanor. Wilkie Collins was on the list at one stage but I removed him for similar reasons (see discussion elsewhere on this page). --Calair 11:38, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps the authors of the book themselves should be added to the list? Kit O'Connell (Todfox: user / talk / contribs) 11:47, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

text: The Oneida Society certainly had a long-term nonmonogamous arrangement going. I think whether it counts as 'polyamory' hinges on the question of consent. This bit from the OS article, in particular: "The more senior members, male and female, had the right of first marriage to virgins of the opposite sex, both for spiritual and sexual indoctrination. Subordinate males and females had little choice but to accept the marital arrangements." It also indicates that although in theory every male was married to every female, Noyes had some involvement in determining which relationships formed, and that part of the reason for the group's eventual disintegration was his seeking a sort of droit de seigneur with the girls. --Calair 08:31, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thus the discussion I wanted to start here -before- editing the main article.  I agree with your arguements here.  Seems to me like a debate of Theory vs Practice.  (Thoughts added after this first edit) I think it should be included.  We're using Polyamory in the broadest sense, and every member of the Oneida Society, from what I can see, was free to leave.  They knew the "complex marriage" was a part of the Society, and even if it was manipulated in practice, they knew they what they were getting into when they joined and didn't leave.LezChap 02:58, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  That may be so for the ones who joined the society from the outside - but what about the children who were born into it, and expected to sleep with Noyes at age 14? Even if they were physically able to leave, they presumably wouldn't have been able to take any property with them (it was communally-owned), which is a pretty major obstacle. As per recent discussions on Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Roosevelts, and various others, I don't think a multi-partner arrangement that persists because some of its members have no good alternatives should be grounds for inclusion. --Calair 07:27, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Patricia Ireland, in her book "What Women Want", indicates that she is involved with both a man and a woman.  It doesn't seem too far a stretch to read into it (in context) that they both know, as evidenced in part by her inclusion of the information in her autobiography.  --Joe Decker 16:48, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I added Patricia Ireland.  There didn't seem to be any reason not to. AMProSoft 22:40, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pretty sure:

message: minor thing: CT Butler got listed as founder of Food Not Bombs. as far as I can recall, he, at most, co-founded Food Not Bombs, so I just re-edited his mention to say "CT Butler of Food Not Bombs". not the ideal solution, but the best compromise that came to my mind.
: According to the bio at foodnotbombs.net, "In 1980, C.T. and a group of friends formed the Food Not Bombs collective in Cambridge". So he was definitely a co-founder; I don't think crediting somebody as 'founder of X' automatically implies that they were the only founder. --Calair 07:33, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it is still often read as having an implicit "the" in there. I boldly changed it to "CT Butler, a founder of..." — Saxifrage ✎ 09:34, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good thinking :-) --Calair 09:52, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  CT Butler 

message: Since no one objected to me mentioning it here before, I thought I'd once again draw people's attention to the fact that Sapiosexual has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sapiosexual (2nd nomination). Myself and many other polys I know self-identify using this word, so I thought others' here might be interested in weighing in on it. Kit O'Connell (Todfox: user / talk / contribs) 21:41, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sapiosexual on AfD, again

message: I suggest to extend the section on Polyamory in the article on Queer Culture, e.g. adding the 
Poly Pride Flag and the Hearth-with-Infinity Symbol. --134.106.240.79 11:27, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polyamory section in Queer Culture 

message: Someone just added an interwiki to zh:. However, there's no page on zh: by that name. Shouldn't we wait until our Chinese friends have actually written an article before adding links to it? The Wednesday Island 22:55, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I want to leave it to the judgement of the frequent authors. However, two observations:
# One upcoming Chinese term is 多元之爱 or 多元之愛的實行者, as in ,  ,  and .
# Specifically for Asian languages, it can be extremely difficult to find a term which is neither contained in dictionaries, nor in everyday use, nor can be induced from the English or Latin/Greek terms by phonetic rules. Even in Europe, most people have no idea that such a word as polyamory exists. The idea is that the link could be helpful to start the Chinese version. --84.137.188.99 23:48, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you want to start the Chinese version, write a stub on the Chinese version in Chinese, or ask for it on their requested articles page. Don't interwiki to a page that doesn't exist. The Wednesday Island 01:33, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese interwiki 

message: Although the section does give two sides of the coin there are more opinions than just those two opinions. The specific section is also unsourced please give more points of view and refrence the points of view.--Lucy-marie 18:32, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Could you be more specific? — Saxifrage ✎ 22:46, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  its is a direct refrence to the section the stub is posted above.--Lucy-marie 22:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I gathered that much. Could you be more specific about the "more opinions" and what "more points of view" you'd like to see? Why I ask is, your first comment above doesn't say anything useful to other editors for improving the section you tagged. — Saxifrage ✎ 23:16, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed the section altogether; I'm not sure quite what the NPOV objection was about, but it's been waiting on verification for a while, and as much as I know the contents to be true I can't find a way to make this section compatible with WP:OR and WP:Verifiability. Sadly, published research seems to lag well behind 'common knowledge' on a lot of this stuff; you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody involved in poly communities who hasn't heard the 'more evolved' line, but it hasn't shown up anywhere citeable that I can find. --Calair 01:24, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for clearing this up. The section contianed Information well known with in the community but Is unverifiable. I thank you for remoing the section as, as you said it struggles to conform to the rules on original research and verifiability.--Lucy-marie 09:27, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutrality? 

message: One of the links says "as discussed here" and the footnote requires that someone have a Yahoo account and login.
Yahoo Groups are fine for reading, but the opinion should be found somewhere else so that readers can follow more easily, like an encyclopedia, and not login to other services.
24.55.47.135 23:15, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That link appears to be being used as a reference for the information that follows. You're right that it's a pain to require a login, though that's not always good reason to not use a particular reference. (Many legitimate research papers are only available by subscription, for instance.) In this case though, the link isn't eligible to use as a source because it's an email message, which doesn't qualify as a reliable source that we can use. I've removed it and tagged the paragraph as needing a citation. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:16, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  As Discussed Here -- link to Yahoo that Requires Login 

message: WOW! I'm new around here, but this is by far and away the LONGEST article I've seen yet. (Which doesn't *really* mean much...<g>)  Does it fall within the length guidelines (whatever those actually are)?  Laurie Fox 11:14, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is 49k (try clicking edit). However this is the actual size rather then readable text. Given the article has a list, quite a few external links and quite long footnotes, the size of readable text is likely to be significant smaller... According to our guidelines, if it were 49k this means it doesn't necessarily have to be split Wikipedia:Article size. However it's getting close to the level where a split should be carefully considered. Taking a quick look at it, I don't think a split is warranted anywehre except perhaps for the list. Perhaps there is some cruft that could be culled, not sure about that since didn't read it well. There are a number of longer articles BTW, take a look at George W. Bush which is 110k nominally (altho that's very extensively referenced so it's definitely quite a bit shorter in terms of readable text). Nil Einne 18:52, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Values section placed into "summary style". You like? FT2 (Talk | email) 17:19, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Length? 

message: I noticed the following was removed from See also:
The band Breaking Benjamin released a song titled 'Polyamorous' on their album Saturate.
In other articles I have seen a section called Trivia that was used for this kind of cultural reference to a topic. I suggest we add a Trivia section at the bottom of this article, below See also.
Another candidate for this section would be the song 'Trinity'. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. 19:53, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I know a lot of articles still have them, but separate 'trivia' sections are generally deprecated (see Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles and Wikipedia:Trivia). There are far too many cultural references to polyamory to list them all in the article; notable ones should be worked into the discussion (as is done with e.g. Heinlein's novels, which introduced a lot of people to the idea) but we don't have the space to include everybody's favourites. --Calair 00:49, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

text: A possible alternative would be a separate article:  "Cultural use of the term 'Polyamory' " or some such? FT2 (Talk | email) 09:49, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Most of the ones in that list don't actually call it 'polyamory', so that title might not provide enough for an article. Something like List of songs about polyamory could work, or (being lazy) we could just link to one of the lists already out there on the web. --Calair 13:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

text: WP:Trivia suggests that placing Trivia in a section that is NOT labeled Trivia can be ok. The real kicker is whether or not the items under it add value to the article. I think it might be of MUCH MORE value to the article if we took some quotes from these song lyrics, inserted them into the article to illustrate a specific point, then referenced the song with a proper ref tag. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. 15:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

text: "Media and cultural [or: Societal] attitudes to ..."? I think a content fork would be valuable here. FT2 (Talk | email) 02:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

text: I attempted to create such a page at Cultural references to polyamory but it is already tagged for deletion.  If anyone wants to help me by adding to it or adding references I could use the help. AMProSoft 21:37, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trivia 

message: I think a lot of the direct quotes framed in the article text take away from the prose, and should be included as references. It's also quite long, and some points seem to be repeated several times. Finally, I think it would benefit from additional referencing, and also making clear which statements each reference is intended to support (inline citations vs. dumping a list at the bottom). Seraphimblade 05:41, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The prose itself also needs a good cleanup - which is easier to deal with. I'll attend to that aspect over the next day or so. Metamagician3000 08:15, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Okay, there's more to do, but a lot of the prose should now be clearer as well as more concise - I cut back a lot of what seemed to be wordy expression of ideas, hopefully without changing the meaning. I think we should do another layer of this to have the flow right. There then seems to be a lot of material that looks like original research, which we need to address somehow, as well as issues about long quotes and so on. I'll leave this for a day or two, and I'm open to ideas. Metamagician3000 09:39, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I see we're making good progress. The big issue I now have with it is the enormous amount of what looks like original research. Metamagician3000 02:55, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Tackle it a few at a time, as is being done, rather than in bulk. A number of the (many) uncited statements seem reasonable and probably can be cited. Common experience is that knowledgable people's edits often reflect and match research (not least since research usually supports what's said by knowledgable people) even if it wasn't written that way. The article doesn't seem to state much that's controversial in the field. My $0.02. FT2 (Talk | email) 07:47, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm proposing to remove the cleanup tag. The article is still imperfect, of course, but it has been cleaned up a lot in the last two months, and is now at a good standard of presentation. Metamagician3000 10:47, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm now going to remove the cleanup tag, having given notice. The article still has flaws - some unnecessarily long quotes, need for more citations - but it is well-presented. Metamagician3000 23:45, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

text: This sounds like a statement of editorial opinion, in which case it should be deleted. Metamagician3000 01:24, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggested cleanup

message: Be careful when changing the first sentence of this article. The article is not about the word polyamory, but about polyamory itself; therefore it shouldn't start with "Polyamory is a term..." —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ian Maxwell (talk • contribs) 00:39, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this is a fair point. Metamagician3000 10:39, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use vs. mention 

message: Forgive me if this has been mentioned already but this Annalee Newitz article in New Scientist may be a useful source - a respected journalist discussing the concept: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125591.800.html.
There is alsp a fleeting reference to the idea in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who is not entirely hostile but rather sceptical, or at least that is how I understood him. That might be useful somewhere, some time, if we are disussing the views of outsiders. Metamagician3000 11:04, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: I've deleted the following large chunk of unattributed rumination: Still, without more disciplined academic study in this area, the question is currently open. There is simply not enough consistent and high quality research at present comparing monogamous relationships with polyamorous ones, either in terms of longevity (as a measure for those relationships which do make a "life-long" commitment), in terms of satisfaction with the results, or in terms of meeting the expectations of those participating.  Though some research results suggest that provided both partners are emotionally capable of the outlook required by polyamory, those relationships are more capable of duration than classical monogamous partnerships. It may well be true, but unless this viewpoint has been published in a reliable source we cannot include it in the article. By keeping here, I'm offering it as a resource for anyone who can find a source for this thought or something similar and wants to include something like it back in the article. Metamagician3000 01:37, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've also deleted this: Amongst other species of mammals, social pair-bonding and stability are not usually found to be strongly related to sexual monogamy. For example, only 15% of primate species are socially monogamous, while for mammalian species in general, the figure is 3%. Genetic testing of offspring has confirmed sexual monogamy (previously believed to be the norm) to be very rare in both birds and other mammals, including species such as swans, songbirds, wolves, and others that had previously described as "faithful" or "mating for life". It was sitting there with a citation tag for a long time, and no citation was ever given. More fundamentally, it is not clear what connection we are supposed to see between what animals do and a conscious social practice by humans - such as polyamory. Not only do we need a citation for the material; we also need a citation for any claim that it is relevant (e.g. to the acceptability of polyamory). Without such an independent discussion of any connection, reported in a reliable source, this is looking like original research. Metamagician3000 09:28, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't want to bite, but I find this reasoning somewhat astounding. We spend our whole lives being told be everyone that monogamy is the norm, and are shown that even in the animals there are strong examples of monogamy. When a contributor here gives info opposing that view you say "it is not clear what connection we are supposed to see"? --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 16:28, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Exactly. I have no objection to including the information if there are sources for it and its connection with/implications for polyamory. If someone has stated the argument that BillWSmith just stated, I'm more than happy to see it included in the article; I'm not running an anti-polyamory agenda. But we are not here to do original research, and something can be original research if it makes out a novel argument, explicitly or by implication, even if the actual facts are cited (which they are not in this instance, but they probably could be). The argument itself has to be made explicit and attributed to a report in a reliable source. Metamagician3000 23:01, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion of unverified chunks of material

message: Standard Wikipedia practice is to edit articles to be consistent in spelling usage.  As I understand it, while there is no preference in Wikipedia policy in which spelling system (e.g., American spellings vs. British) so long as the article is consistent.  Based on counts of the words "recognised (-zed)", "centre (-ter)", it seemed apparent that most contributions to this article had been made in the American style and so I made the article consistent (or have attempted to!) and have no beef with folks who prefer the British spelling, if folks prefer that, go for it, but please don't simply revert these changes, instead go ahead and make the article entirely consistent with British spelling.  Thanks!--Joe Decker 18:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia Manual of Style on American vs. British spelling  --Joe Decker 18:41, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that articles should be consistent, but I'm not so sure about changing the spelling on quoted text as was done with the 'Poly 101' reference (which was linking to the wrong article, but I'll fix that). --Calair 02:42, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right, I agree entirely, I blew it.  :) --Joe Decker 06:05, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Amer. vs. Brit. spelling 

message: I removed the Poly Pride Flag from Symbols of polyamory because I've never encountered it before and can't find any evidence that it's actually used to represent the poly community by anyone other than the fellow who added it to the article.  Feel free to restore it if it is in fact a recognized symbol among polyamorists, but please don't revert the other changes (removal of self promotion and other unrelated content) that were made on the same edit. 71.243.159.244 10:51, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Symbols of Polyamory