Jimkay21

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Improving Victor Boutilly

I'd like to improve the article at Victor Boutilly. I would start with a good introductory paragraph or two, but having read the chronological mass of text, I can't really figure out where to start. How would you describe Victor Boutilly in one sentence? Where is he from? What did he do? And most important to introduce the article: why is he notable?

This might seem like a facile question to you, but honestly, as a layman reading the article afresh, I could only summarize and say "Victor Boutilly was born in France in 1864. He attended some schools and apprenticeships which brought him to Algeria and Tunisia, and then he returned home for health reasons. Later in life, he served in a number of roles as inspector, and some military positions in the French Army. He served to manage forestry and other agricultural concerns in Algeria. He earned a number of honours in his career."

I really want to provide some of the structure that other biographical articles enjoy, re education, career, achievements, etc. So don't treat these questions as a joke, though they are dumb questions. They're not meant to challenge, but to get answers to attract the uninitiated reader:

• Who cared about him?
• Why did they care?
• What did he do that was important, in forty words or less.
• How would you summarize his life in a few words?

Sincerely and Cheers. _signed, Willondon (talk) 06:22, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

First of all, I am happy to see that someone actually read the article. Information on Boutilly is limited. I have not been able to locate biographical information outside of his printed works and newspaper reports. There are no autobiographical writings, letters or other personal communications that I have located. You request for subjective assessments of his life and relevance strike me as odd. His importance comes from his work in the French forestry service. He rose to become one if its most senior leaders. Along the way he wrote the Forestry Code for North Africa that codified forestry practices at the time. His codes influenced practices in the US and most likely other French colonies. Some of those practices last to our current time. Foresters will fine that interesting. Non-foresters will probably not. It was not my intention to discuss the Algerian Forestry Code and its legacy as a colonial mechanism to subjugate the native population, although a source for that discussion is included in the cited works. I presumed some knowledge of the Third Republic and French colonial policies in a reader that reaches the article. BTW the specific place of his birth is in the first sentence. Further information on his "education, career, achievements, etc." is contained within the article. If these are unfamiliar then I guess I can understand how that might become "some" in your memory. He actually died in Algeria. He did not return home as you surmise (his final resting place is given in the article). My goal in presenting the article on Wikipedia was not to generate entertainment for the casual reader, but rather to create a repository for information and sources for future researchers.

Thanks for your response. I've decided to work on the article as a project. The request for assessment of relevance really isn't odd. There is a dense body of information there, and for a layman like me, it's hard at first to glean what are the most salient aspects. I think Wikipedia's goals are more inclined toward, if not entertainment for the casual reader, then accessible knowledge. It's to that end that I've used something like the Socratic method in asking you the "stupid questions"; answering them really is the heart of providing a good lede section.

The information there now is presented largely in chronological order. I expect to tackle the project by first breaking the content up into sections, which I've done. Then, I will attempt to distill each section into a sentence or paragraph for the lede. That way, there is an accessible summary of the topic, and the article remains as a repository for information and sources.

Again, as a complete layman, my challenge is to understand how to group the information into logical chunks. If you would take a look at the divisions I've made in the content, and make or suggest any changes to the section grouping and/or labelling that you think will improve things, that will help with the next step of summarizing the information for a lede section. Cheers. _signed, Willondon (talk) 23:49, 5 March 2022 (UTC)