Talk:Abraham Lincoln

Excessive removal

Unfortunately one editor has been removing excessive content from this article for the past month with the only explanations being "trim." This is not appropriate under WP:Content removal. There is no reason to remove information about Lincoln's family members in particular from the infobox and the biography. --Plumber (talk) 19:34, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

You are doing much more than just reverting the Inbox as you state in your edit. The material being trimmed by Nikkimaria and myself appears to be appropriate to the improvement of the narrative in the article which seems to have drifted a good deal during over-edits since the GAN several years ago. The enhancements should be retained in the current version of the article. ErnestKrause (talk) 20:17, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I am not taking any issue with any of your edits, but removing information on Lincoln's family is a clear violation of WP:Content Removal. --Plumber (talk) 20:44, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

WP:Content removal is an essay; it's not something that can be violated. If you have questions or substantive concerns about any of my edits I'm happy to discuss them with you, but I have to agree that the blanket reverting is inappropriate and should stop.

To respond to the specific the issue you raise, see MOS:IBP: "The less information that an infobox contains, the more effectively it serves its purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance. Some infoboxes need to use more than a handful of fields, but information should be presented in a short format, wherever possible, and exclude unnecessary content." This article's infobox is quite lengthy and there is already a link to Lincoln family to provide information about family members. (They haven't been removed from the biography). Nikkimaria (talk) 00:07, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

This is simply not at all a sufficient explanation. I have restored the infobox to include the names of Lincoln's children and his parents. These links are standard for US presidents and are far from unnecessary content. --Plumber (talk) 00:17, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Exactly the same argument has gone on at Talk:Theodore Roosevelt (although it has been archived, see Archive 6).

I think that the intended purpose of the Relatives parameter is for a list of links to individual people. (That is what I gathered from reading the documentation for that parameter in the documentation for Infobox Person.) So for Lincoln, we should not be linking to the article Lincoln family from the Relatives parameter of the infobox. Instead we could link to that article from See Also. I thought of linking to it using a hatnote from some section of the article, but it is, I think, tangential to the article, so that would not be a really good solution.

I think that people that we link to from the infobox, from the Spouse parameter or the Parents parameter or the Children parameter or the Relatives parameter, should be people who are mentioned in the article. That way the infobox is summarizing things that are already in the article. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:03, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

If the issue with the Infobox is more or less settled, then I'm going to support Nikkimaria to continue with her enhancement edits of the article at this time. Much of the prose in the first half of the article is somewhat unrefined and could use further enhancement. I'm supporting the further improvement of the article. ErnestKrause (talk) 01:09, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Lincoln had siblings, but they are not independently notable, so I will not mention them, or any more distant relative, in the "relatives" parameter. Later in this article, his sister's name, "Sarah", appears in blue, but it's piped to "Sarah Lincoln Grigsby", which in turn is a redirect to "Lincoln family". I think that redirect is bogus, but I will not propose to delete it -- I don't have time for that distraction right now. The pipe is also bogus, and I will remove it. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:17, 26 March 2025 (UTC)