Talk:Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot

Latest comment: 1 month ago by Robertsky in topic Requested move 18 February 2024

WikiProject class rating edit

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 03:49, 27 August 2007 (UTC)Reply

Bigot's Full Name and Portrait edit

Due to a misreading of handwriting, a typographer for the Annales de la Société Entomologique de France, typed bigot's full name in the membership list as Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot. His birth and death certificates clearly have his name as Jacques Marie François Bigot. This still needs correcting on this page.

For many years, the portrait of Bigot published in various sources was mistakenly of his nephew, Just Bigot (both have the name in lists as "J.Bigot", hence the confusion. The correct portrait still needs to be uploaded to this page. BFly52 (talk) 04:22, 10 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

@BFly52: Hi! (I'm the Iestyn you've been corresponding with by email, I found some time to look at this a bit this morning as it turned out.) Unfortunately the web link you sent me with his birth and death certificates requires an account to view the relevant details, which is annoying... As for the portrait, it looks like somebody already uploaded the correct one to Commons in 2013 under the name File:Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot (1818-1893).gif; the misattributed one is probably best instead renamed to the correct subject "Just Bigot" to avoid confusion. Monster Iestyn (talk) 12:02, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
There, I have now swapped the images here and in other language Wikipedias, as well as on Wikidata and Wikispecies, and have requested the bad image to be renamed on Commons. That should fix all the problems to do with JMF's portait for the foreseeable future. Monster Iestyn (talk) 12:19, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
@BFly52: Hi again! I've been asking about the name issue with some other users offwiki on Discord. Unfortunately without reliable sources with the correct spelling as of writing, it sounds difficult to justify renaming this article to have "François" instead of "Frangile" at least for now. (Some users also suggest that he might have deliberately used a different spelling for his name despite the certificates? But I don't know how you prove that either way.) On the other hand, there may be argument to rename the article to "J. M. F. Bigot" or "J.-M.-F. Bigot" since he never actually used his name in full in his works so I understand? Monster Iestyn (talk) 20:18, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
@BFly52 Oh, my apologies for seeding doubt, I have since learned his name consistently appears as "Bigot (Jacques-Marie-François)" in the Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France, checking for myself: [1]. Did you know he was in this society too? Monster Iestyn (talk) 22:52, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
Thanks - just getting to this now. Yes, he was a member of a number of societies. Even an Oriental Society in Paris. In doing his genealogy, there is a lot of archival information that verifies his name -- and like you've found, other society membership lists that cite his name correctly. BFly52 (talk) 23:07, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Requested move 18 February 2024 edit

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 after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved to Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot. Based on the discussion, there is an agreement to have the hyphens removed. However, there is no consensus to rename as nominated. This can be explored again when there is a more concrete evidence that the subject is being referred to as the nominated title more commonly in the future. In the meantime, a redirect is created to aid in searchability/discovery of the article. – robertsky (talk) 13:59, 26 March 2024 (UTC)Reply


Jacques-Marie-Frangile BigotJacques Marie François Bigot – Multiple contemporary sources give this entomologist's full name as "François" rather than "Frangile":

There is also an article from 2008 here that gives his third given name as "François" rather than "Frangile", but I don't know where the full name is sourced from so this may not be any good for supporting this article move.

As another editor has suggested above in this talk page, "Frangile" is possibly a clerical error originating from a mention of his full name in the Annales de la Société Entomologique de France starting in 1885 (e.g. here), maybe from trying to interpret his handwriting. According to existing available sources about him (particularly this one), he was also notorious in his day for being careless with his spellings of scientific names for flies, which he was criticized for. Possibly some misspellings also came about from trying to read his handwriting. (This may have no relevance to renaming the article, but it makes it seem plausible that "Frangile" was a clerical error.)

There was an alternative suggestion from offwiki (the unofficial Wikimedia Discord server specifically) that we use "J. M. F. Bigot" or "J.-M.-F. Bigot" as the article title instead, because he always wrote his given names as initials in his works. This however doesn't seem consistent with our treatment of French entomologists on Wikipedia: see Category:French entomologists and WP:TITLECON. Many recent sources also tend to give his name in full rather than with initials anyway (even if with "Frangile" instead of "François"), so maybe it can be argued to be the most common format: see WP:MIDDLENAME. (Though I see that some of the authority control databases use his initials with full name in parentheses, so I could be wrong here.)

Lastly, I don't actually know if his name should be given with hyphens or not, but if other French entomologists with multiple given names (that are not compound given names) tend to have spaces rather than hyphens on Wikipedia, then this one should have spaces too. Otherwise, the article title could be called "Jacques-Marie-François Bigot" instead. Monster Iestyn (talk) 03:24, 18 February 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. BD2412 T 16:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Here is a link to his death certificate:
BFly52 (talk) 06:12, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
Relisting comment: Relisting for clearer consensus. BD2412 T 16:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
  • Move to Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot. I can certainly get behind the move to remove hyphens, as I'm not seeing them in sources, but not seeing that much evidence of the "Francois" part in recent sources. Another option would be to simply use J. M. F. Bigot as that seems to be the majority usage in citations etc.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:48, 17 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
    @Amakuru: Citations tend to use only initials for all authors, so that isn't really a convincing argument for "J. M. F. Bigot" in my view. But yes, the basic problem here is that his third given name is spelled "François" mostly only in contemporary sources, while recent sources mostly spell it "Frangile". There are also no published sources yet to support "Frangile" being an error... but can the fact contemporary sources used "François" more frequently be enough to support a move to use "François" anyway? If not, I'll concede that we'll just have to wait until there are sources published on this subject. Monster Iestyn (talk) 15:44, 17 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.