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A fact from John Johnstone (East India Company) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 July 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that in 1765, Scottish nabobJohn Johnstone, aged 31, returned from India with a fortune equivalent to £25 million in 2014?
I see no reason to keep this. We know he is Scottish as a few lines up we say he was born in Scotland. Can the reader not work this out for themselves? This is, once again, dumbing down on a massive scale, and completely redundant in the circumstances. Cassiantotalk 19:44, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately not easily. Unlike in the USA, a child born in the UK does not automatically receive citizenship merely because of their place of birth. We need to know their parentage to establish their nationality. In this particular case a reader would have to: (1) understand the complexities of British law relevant to the period; and (2) follow links at least to Sir James Johnstone, 3rd Baronet to be able to make any reasoned inference about Johnstone's nationality. We can save them all of that by summarising such research into a simple entry in the infobox. It has the additional advantage of making both a microformat and a key–value pair available to automated tools. --RexxS (talk) 21:16, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
