Talk:Benjamin Franklin, Jr.

Benjamin Franklin, Jr., not Benjamin Franklin Jr.

It should be noted that on July 26, 2017, this page was subject to an undiscussed move which, following a request at WP:RM#Requests to revert undiscussed moves was reverted on July 27.‎ The move was an element covering the same general subject as the concurrently-active discussion at Talk:Buffalo Bill Jr.#Requested move 13 July 2017, which should have been an indication that any such future moves would require a discussion at WP:RM.

In the same manner as Buffalo Bill, Jr., this Our Gang short has an on-screen comma and, therefore should retain such a comma in the main main title header of its Wikipedia entry. As already pointed out in the lengthy discussion at Talk:Steamboat Bill, Jr.#Requested move 15 December 2016, each such case requires a separate review, with no-comma film titles such as Sherlock Jr. or Santa Jr. appearing in that form within Wikipedia title headers, while those titles with the comma, such as Buffalo Bill, Jr. or Benjamin Franklin, Jr. also being granted the respect of appearing in their original historical form. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 13:47, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Requested move 26 August 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. This is not a bio nor a person, so the sources given below that show the comma in the film title were the compelling points made by opposers to this page move. (closed by page mover)  Paine Ellsworth  ^put'r there  08:11, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

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Benjamin Franklin, Jr. → Benjamin Franklin Jr. – No comma per WP:JR. Controversial move reverted. GeoffreyT2000 ^{(talk, contribs)} 04:30, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose per previous section header, above: "Benjamin Franklin, Jr., not Benjamin Franklin Jr.". This is a work of fiction, which must be rendered in its original form, with the comma. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 04:44, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support – Perhaps a comma was used on screen, but there's no reference or external link that shows that. The IMDB link leads to a vintage poster without a comma. If the promoters feel free to style it without the comma, so should we. No compelling reason to deviate from WP house style here. Dicklyon (talk) 06:27, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

The website devoted to Our Gang films spotlights Benjamin Franklin, Jr. here, while the film, itself, is available on DVD and can also be accessed here. It has also been shown on TCM, which has an entry for it here. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 06:44, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose if the comma was used on the original (it's behind a pay wall on youtube, sad to see youtube pay walls). Fictionized 'Jr's.' get to keep their comma, lucky dogs. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:31, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support - Need to bear in mind that the burden here falls on Opposes to show an authoritative reliable source for the comma. That has yet to be shown, and really the Supports don't have to say anything else (and it tends to muddy the situation when they do). What would I consider an authoritative reliable source? The opening title of the film itself, a promotional poster, or something else directly from MGM or the promoters. If even those sources can be shown to be inconsistent, the RM should pass. Please ping me if something happens that should change my !vote. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:40, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
• Comment - @Roman Spinner: I have belatedly read the preceding thread. this Our Gang short has an on-screen comma - where is this seen? ―Mandruss ☎ 16:08, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

@Mandruss: A screenshot of the film's opening title card can be seen here (second row, 6th image). Clicking on the image should enlarge it. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 18:40, 26 August 2017 (UTC) Note: a differently formatted page places the image in another position, but it can be easily spotted --- it is the 14th image, overall. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 18:49, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Finally found it at something like #100. Clicking "View image" gives you the URL of the actual image that Google is indexing. I've provided that link in my new !vote below. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:10, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose per opening title graphic, shown here. It doesn't get any more authoritative, short of some kind of legal documents not available to us. I've seen one poster without the comma, but its source is unclear and I'm not sure even five "authoritative" posters would trump the opening title anyway. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:10, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't think anyone suggests that a poster trumps an on-screen title. The point is just that if the owners were willing to publicize their title with a different styling, without that comma, then there's no evidence that the comma styling is a fundamental part of the title, or that they would see the title as altered when it's omitted, just as it's not a fundamental part of a person's name. In the same way, we don't copy style items such as all-caps and small-caps and fonts and slants etc. from on-screen titles. Dicklyon (talk) 14:15, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Show me an example of comma-less styling that is clearly from the owners (MGM), and we'll talk about it. The owners didn't have total control of every representation of the title. The fact that they chose not to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars taking somebody to court over a comma doesn't mean they didn't "see the title as altered". Even if they had taken them to court, and won (and you don't know that they didn't do so), the result of the decision would have been a ban on production of more comma-less material, not a recall and incineration of all pre-existing comma-less material. We're into lawyer-like hair-splitting territory now. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:13, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose - I can't believe we're going through this again. MOS:JR is for biographies, not titles ... it says at the top of the page "Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biographies." The title that a creator gives a book, movie, TV show or play has nothing to do with a Wikipedia biography article, as we've reached consensus on at RfCs / move discussions at Steamboat Bill, Jr., Buffalo Bill, Jr. and elsewhere where the copyrighted onscreen title shows a comma before "Jr." May as well remove the exclamation point from Oklahoma! --Tenebrae (talk) 16:50, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Benjamin Franklin, Jr./Archive 1 which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 15:02, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

@Izno: Was it your intent to archive the above RM,[1] then self-revert only half of that operation?[2] This bot seems oblivious to the fact that we don't conduct RMs (or any discussion) on archive pages. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:18, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

@Mandruss: I went to revert myself on the archive page and then discovered the archive page was created with the accidental archiving. I've tagged it for G7. --Izno (talk) 16:21, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Our bot masters have spoken, so we can now vote on archived pages. I will do so post haste, before the coding changes. [EDIT: Darn, I already voted.]Randy Kryn (talk) 16:31, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

NYT quote

Can someone please link to the New York Times article cited in 'Notes' to find a date. It won't load on my machine, and it doesn't sound like a quote which would have been printed in the Times contemporary with the film, a 1943 patriotic short. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:45, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

The earliest archive link at archive.org has is [3] which clearly does not include the text. The current text of the URL in the citation also does not include the text in question. You may need to try WP:REX, which may have access to the copy in Newspapers.com or similar. --Izno (talk) 17:33, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

The New York Times website has been hosting the AllMovie film reviews for a few years, and hundreds of these in-name-only "New York Times reviews" (such as the one archived above and also here) have been appended to Wikipedia articles as inline cites for individual film titles. In reality, the Our Gang short films were rarely, if ever, reviewed by The Times and the same AllMovie review can also be found on AllMovie's own website here. Even the same error --- "effor", instead of "effort" --- is retained in both. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 19:19, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Good find. I'd suggest removing the entire quote as it seems to not be inclusive of the reviews (if any) of the time and is a much later attempt at criticizing a past era. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:08, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Unless that quote, which is definitely from a relatively recent period, has a cited source, it shouldn't be in the article. I thought the quote might have been taken from Leonard Maltin's book, but a glance at his write-up of this film shows that his book is not the source (to see Maltin's write-up, click on "Look Inside" and then type "Benjamin Franklin, Jr." in the box "Search Inside This Book"). —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 04:19, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, and I've removed it for now. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:49, 27 August 2017 (UTC)