A rigid consensus on inclusion criteria for this list has not been reached. It is preferred to propose new items on the talk page first.
Any proposed new entries to the article must at least fulfill the following:
The common misconception's main topic has an article of its own.
The item is reliably sourced, both with respect to the factual contents of the item and the fact that it is a common misconception.
The common misconception is mentioned in its topic article with sources.
The common misconception is current, as opposed to ancient or obsolete.
If you have an item to add that does not fulfill these criteria but you still think should be included, please suggest it on the talk page with your rationale for inclusion.
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.
List of common misconceptions is a former featured list candidate. Please view the link under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. Once the objections have been addressed you may resubmit the article for featured list status.
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Assess : newly added and existing articles, maybe nominate some good B-class articles for GA; independently assess some as A-class, regardless of GA status.
Cleanup : * Sport governing body (this should-be-major article is in a shameful state) * Field hockey (History section needs sources and accurate information - very vague at the moment.) * Standardize Category:American college sports infobox templates to use same font size and spacing. * Sport in the United Kingdom - the Popularity section is incorrect and unsourced. Reliable data is required.
* Fix project template and/or "to do list" Current version causes tables of content to be hidden unless/until reader chooses "show."
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Popular belief asserts that individuals of either sex who are not in sexually active relationships tend to masturbate more frequently than those who are; however, much of the time this is not true as masturbation alone or with a partner is often a feature of a relationship. Contrary to this belief, several studies actually reveal a positive correlation between the frequency of masturbation and the frequency of intercourse. A study has reported a significantly higher rate of masturbation in gay men and women who were in a relationship.[52][64][65][66] Benjamin (talk) 17:19, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This diff seems to be advocating a decidedly left-wing ideological and polemicist position. The "average" ordinary person regularly uses the nickname "Mama Cass" as do countless 1960s music playing radio stations, both internet and in the real world. Plus, "average" ordinary people don't use the terms "fat shaming" or "connotations" and wouldn't readily understand them or care if someone tried to explain, especially the latter. IMO, the IP is applying something that should not be done so in Wikipedia's "voice". 180.150.37.138 (talk) 19:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No need to characterize the edit as "left-wing" or comment on the phrasing used in the edit comment. The only question is whether we should include the name "Mama Cass" in the entry about Cass Elliot. That she didn't like the nickname isn't dispositive. The main question is whether including the nickname helps users identify her: is "Cass Elliot (of The Mamas & the Papas)" clear enough, or would it be helpful to write "Cass Elliot (Mama Cass of The Mamas & the Papas)"? According to Google nGrams, the name Mama Cass is about twice as common as Cass Elliot, so I think it's reasonable to assume that it's more familiar. It is also a name used for her in a Mamas & the Papas song, and the cited NYTimes article says "she found it hard to shake her nickname". So the name is widely familiar and I agree that it should be restored. --Macrakis (talk) 22:30, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While it's pretty clear that she did not like the name (at least in later life), unless someone can point to some relevant Wikipedia policy regarding nicknames that are disliked by the person we should include the more common identifier to make it understandable to the average reader. The fact that the edit comment and the initial comment above included some irrelevant editorializing shouldn't affect our decision on whether to include the alternate, more common identifier.
I'm in favor of restoring "Cass Elliot (Mama Cass of The Mamas & the Papas)". Unless someone can point to some policy prohibiting or disfavoring it. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 16:14, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to Wikipedia policy, when writing about an individual, the preferred name to use is the one most commonly used in reliable sources, which includes respecting a person's self-identified gender and preferred name, even if it differs from their legal name or how they were previously known in the public eye. Cass Elliot (which is not her birth name) is the name she chose for herself. Her father nicknamed her Cass after the Greek mythological prophetess Cassandra, and she chose the surname to honor a friend who died in a car accident.
Which Wikipedia policy is that? The closest policy I can find is at WP:PUBLICFIGURE which says biographies
... should simply document what these sources say. If an allegation or incident is noteworthy, relevant, and well documented, it belongs in the article—even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it.
WP:COMMONNAME says Wikipedia "generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources)." Kingturtle = (talk) 03:37, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Re "the preferred name to use is the one most commonly used in reliable sources" -- yes, that is the policy for article titles. It doesn't say that other names shouldn't be used. We document names like William the Bad. And in the case of Cass Elliot, it seems that Mama Cass is a better known name than the name she preferred, a bit like Ivan the Terrible and Bloody Mary, which I think you'll agree are better-known names than Ivan IV of Russia and Mary I of England. --Macrakis (talk) 13:43, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That policy is about article titles, and if adhered to strictly would require renaming the topic article, Cass Elliot, to Mama Cass. I don't think anyone is arguing for that, and this is the wrong place to have that discussion.
No, if adhered to strictly, her article would be and IS Cass Elliot. We don't look to popular usage among people on the street. What matters is the name that she is referred to in sources. In biographies involving her she is referred to as Cass Elliot. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls her Cass Elliot. Kingturtle = (talk) 16:45, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"People on the street" are ordinary people and it is an average person that defines the objective norm, not outlier populations such as tertiary-educated people. Professional orgs like the R&RHOF and poli-social activists like the diff maker i objected to, are also not ordinary. JMO and YMMV. 180.150.37.138 (talk) 04:38, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There doesn't appear to be any Wikipedia policy that prohibits also mentioning the name under which she became famous, and which appears in most of the cites in the topic article. Or at least no one has been able to produce one. Given that, there appears to be consensus to restore the recent removal. I'll give it another day or so before making the change to see if anyone else wants to chime in. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 18:07, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've implemented the article split and transclusion of the sub-articles. Some implementation notes:
Having the sub-articles in a subdirectory did not work as well in the main space as it does in a user space so the three sub-articles are at the root of the main space. If anyone has a better way to do this, I'm all ears.
I've spot checked "What links here" and the dozen or so links to this page that I checked seem to work. I did not check them all.
There are still three cites that I can't figure out how to prevent from being transcluded so they show up at the end of the article. Would appreciate any help with this.
The new sub-articles have attracted attention from a few editors who don't seem to understand the context and have made some "helpful" edits - I expect more of this.
Each sub-article has its own talk page and its own history. I'd recommend adding them to your watchlist since changes to them don't appear in the history here. Not sure what to do about potentially four different venues for discussion, but maybe it won't really matter in practice.
Currently, there is no edit notice on the sub-articles. I'll take a look at adding these. UPDATE: the edit notice has been applied to the sub-pages.
I'm not conversant with packaging controls into templates, but have no objection if it accomplishes what I think it accomplishes.
I used onlyinclude because that was how User:S Marshall did it in the mockup. noinclude is probably the better way to do it, but I was not aware of that tag until now. I'll take a look at changing it, shouldn't be too hard since it's mostly just a find and replace exercise. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 18:20, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Women are often viewed as more romantic than men, and romantic relationships are assumed to be more central to the lives of women than to those of men. Despite the prevalence of these beliefs, some recent research paints a different picture." Benjamin (talk) 10:39, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Article is broken due to syntax errors in included pages
I have not read the second half of the page yet, but in the first half, I have noticed multiple occasions in which segments were clearly swallowed by other segments.
For example, the item about Du Bois reads
The African-American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois did not renounce his U.S. citizenship while living in Ghana shortly before his death. In early 1963, his membership in the Communist Party and support for the Soviet Union led the U.S. State Department to refuse to renew his passport while he was already in Ghana. After leaving the embassy, he stated his intention to renounce his citizenship in protest, but while he took Ghanaian citizenship, he never actually renounced his American citizenship.It is not true that by using the indefinite article ein, he changed the meaning of the sentence from the intended "I am a citizen of Berlin" to "I am a Berliner", a Berliner being a type of German pastry, similar to a jelly doughnut, amusing Germans. Furthermore, the pastry, which is known by many names in Germany, was not then — nor is it now — commonly called "Berliner" in the Berlin area.
clearly containing the correction for the myth surrounding Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.
The reason for this is that the included pages make extensive use of onlyinclude, and in some segments (such as the quoted one), this is done poorly: There seems to be some intention not to include the references, but by choosing to onlyinclude the text, rather than noincludeing the references, every time someone forgets to re-open the onlyinclude after the last reference of an item, the start of the next item is swallowed, all the way up to after the first reference of that segment, if the editor "properly" re-opened onlyincludeing after that reference.
This may be due to brute find/replace, since the page also includes numerous pointless empty onlyinclude segments, and in the given case, the error is caused by wrong usage of a self-closing ref-tag.
In other words: It looks like somebody brutishly replaced <ref with </onlyinclude><ref and </ref> with </ref><onlyinclude>, and in those cases where people falsely inserted XHTML-style <ref />-tags there was no closing </ref>-tag and thus no opening <onlyinclude> being included.
I have left it as is, both for documentary purposes as well as because this approach is something fundamental to be debated by the self-elected maintainers of this page and correction will probably require checking and editing all pages that make up List of common misconceptions. 77.22.117.146 (talk) 17:02, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have tested the RegEx/(?<=<\/onlyinclude>)(?:.(?!<onlyinclude>))*\n\*(?:.(?!<onlyinclude>))*/gs against both the old revision and the current one of the history subpage.
It found five matches on the old revision, none on the current.
So it does seem like you caught all the ones that were obvious. If you haven't done the other pages yet, feel free to try the Regex against their page sources.
The dodo is one of the most famous extinct species, and one of the most commonly cited examples of recent manmade extinctions. However, there are many erroneous beliefs about the dodo popularised by pop culture and misconceptions that should be on this list
"Dodo's were hunted to extinction due to their immaculate taste" This is untrue, as historical accounts wrote of its unsavoury flavour. Its extinction was mostly caused by invasive species as opposed to direct human predation like the passenger pigeon or quagga.
Reviewing the sourcing, it's not clear whether the woman depicted is supposed to be the wife or the daughter. Some sources clearly state "daughter" while others say that it is unclear. I'm raising the issue at the topic article since presumably the editors there are more familiar with the material.
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