Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 March 13

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March 13

Hindenburg

Did Hindenburg share hitler's belief that germany should violate the versalis treaty and become an expansionist power? If not what right wing oppondents of hitler shared this view. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.152.23.8 (talk) 01:15, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Paul von Hindenburg was too old and senile by the time Hitler came on the scene to have much of an opinion. However, based on his earlier actions, your guess sounds about right. StuRat (talk) 05:51, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

This is a MASSIVE oversimplification of the situation, but during the inter-war period most right-wing Germans agreed with Hitler's views on the Versailles Treaty. See the stab-in-the-back legend article. Even his opponents (on the right, at least) agreed with the view that Germany had not been defeated but betrayed, and a factor in Hitler coming to power was the feeling of 'well, he's so obviously right about that, maybe we should give him a chance'. As I say, grossly oversimplified, but that's the gist of it. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 11:48, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Hope you don't mind that I fixed your link -- Ferkelparade π 12:04, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I tried twice to get it right and failed miserably. Much obliged to you - Cucumber Mike (talk) 12:41, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Note that violating Versailles wouldn't necessarily mean being expansionist; it could mean things as prosaic as simply saying that Germany should not have to pay back crippling war debt, or that it should be allowed to have a defensive military force. It doesn't necessarily mean "take over all of Europe." --Mr.98 (talk) 12:35, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Lollards

In the John Wycliffe article it says: These itinerant preachers spread the teachings of Wycliffe. Two by two they went, barefoot, wearing long dark-red robes and carrying a staff in the hand, the latter having symbolic reference to their pastoral calling, and passed from place to place preaching the sovereignty of God. How do we know that they went "two by two" as the Lollard article does NOT say that and there is no reference to this in the Wycliffe article?--Doug Coldwell ^talk 12:36, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

This part of our Wycliffe article is plagiarised, as a Google search for the phrase demonstrates. The clue is in the style (i.e. the writer of this passage has one, so is unlikely to be a Wikipedian). Henry^Flower 12:47, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

It is not "plagiarized" if credit is given (which I think it is). Whether it is a good idea to use these old-fashioned sounding public-domain texts is debatable (my personal take is that it's a fine stopgap but should be cleaned up at some point) but let's not throw around words like "plagiarism". --Trovatore (talk) 23:28, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually it has been there since the article was created on December 18, 2001, when the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion article was copied over in its entirety. I imagine what actually happened is that James Stroud, the author of the book you found on Google, copied it from Schaff-Herzog too, or, what I find more likely based on the author blurb at the beginning of the book, he lazily plagiarized it from Wikipedia. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:07, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd class lazy plagiarism from Wikipedia as about the level of lazy plagiarism to it. Henry^Flower 13:27, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I guess, but Schaff-Herzog is in the public domain and was a handy source to populate Wikipedia in its early days. I don't know what Stroud's story is, but his book was published in 2010, at least 8 years after the text was added to Wikipedia. In any case, preachers usually did go "two by two", because that's how Jesus sent out the apostles, according to Luke (and it's probably safer than going out alone). Adam Bishop (talk) 14:42, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes it is, as Jesus Himself found out. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:23, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for answers.--Doug Coldwell ^talk 12:36, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Most dog-loving country

What is the most dog-loving country in the world? Have there been any surveys/studies to measure this? 205.156.136.229 (talk) 15:26, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

"Love for dogs" is not a quantifiable metric. But dog ownership is, and there have been surveys on this. World Animal Protection has data from 2007 that shows the raw dog ownership by country; USA ranks the highest, followed by Brazil, China, Mexico, Japan, and Russia. Taking the data from the top 19 or so and combining them with population data (obtained from Google) gives us this nice (sortable) table of raw dog populations as well as dogs per capita:

Country	Dog pop.	Human pop.	Dogs per capita
USA	67085100	311,591,917	0.21529794689764
Poland	7050000	38,187,488	0.184615442628748
Argentina	6594400	40,412,376	0.163177735454109
Australia	3484000	22,328,800	0.156031672100606
Brazil	30334800	194,946,470	0.155605792708121
Mexico	17500000	113,423,047	0.15428963039584
Ukraine	6870000	45,870,700	0.149768806667437
South Africa	7440000	49,991,300	0.148825895705853
Canada	5002000	34,108,752	0.146648578640462
France	8360000	64,876,618	0.128859984655797
Spain	5498500	46,081,574	0.119321011040118
Italy	6965000	60,483,521	0.115155332970777
United Kingdom	6734000	62,218,761	0.108231020543787
Japan	13179000	127,450,459	0.10340488455989
Russia	12325000	141,750,000	0.0869488536155203
Philippines	8088500	93,260,798	0.086729903383413
Germany	5245000	81,702,329	0.0641964563825347
Indonesia	8000000	239,870,937	0.0333512683948035
China	26800000	1,338,299,512	0.020025412667116
India	6480400	1,170,938,000	0.00553436646517578

All of which seems to say that the USA both has the highest ownership of dogs both in terms of total numbers as well as dogs per capita. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:59, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the effort. Albeit, in order to answer which country has most dogs per capita we need a few different data sets and more reliable raw data of amount of dogs in the country (as pets). All of the countries in the table are large and typically it is the small which are the outliers (i.e. where is Luxembourg, etc). The conclusion does not appear credible to me as it (1) relies on raw data from a private survey and (2) only includes the 20 largest countries according to population.

Raw dog? As opposed to cooked dog I guess.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:06, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Whilst I'm not surprised that the USA is top of the list, I had imagined the UK to be in second or third place given its reputation as a dog-friendly nation. Even Italy is above it which really astounds me. I live in Italy and there are so many abandoned dogs roaming the streets.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 17:34, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

It isn't clear to me that the prevalence of abandoned or feral dogs correlates in any way to dog ownership. It likely correlates to dog euthanasia rates, which may or may not correlate with anything else. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:39, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the collection methods, this seems to be a mix of different types of data, but stray dogs are probably not accounted for at all, Jeanne, because it's a survey of pet dogs.

However, there are very serious problems with Mr 98's table, and he needs to run it again.

• He's read the raw data as in hundreds, when it is in fact in thousands. That doesn't affect the relative ranking of countries, but it does understate the number of dogs per capita by a factor of 10.
• I know Australia ranks highly in dog ownership per capita, and I was very surprised it didn't figure in the table at all. By my rough calculation, it should come in at about No. 3, after Poland. So, that makes me wonder how many other countries have been missed out. If Mr 98 has taken only the top 19 countries in absolute numbers of dog ownership, and then worked out their rankings per capita, it ignores the countries with smaller human populations and hence smaller absolute dog numbers but that can still work out to have high ownership per capita, maybe even surpassing the USA. He needs to consider the total data from the WSPA table, otherwise the result is meaningless. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:00, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes and the tables don't state whether the dogs are actual pets or just kept on chains in junkyards. Oddly, John Lennon made a reference to Britain's love of dogs in the film A Hard Day's Night.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 19:17, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

For you, Jack, I'll add Australia and fix my calculation error. But I won't look up the populations for the other 70 or so countries.. not enough time and patience, I'm afraid! --Mr.98 (talk) 19:39, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but as long as you're aware this table is still a case of garbage in, garbage out. Your implicit assumption is that the top dog owning countries in terms of absolute numbers are also the top countries in terms of dogs owned per capita - but that is the very thing you don't know and you have no right to assume it. Mathematically and statistically speaking, if you don't consider the data from every country that's available, you may as well not start the job at all. How do you know, for example, that Monaco doesn't have the highest number of dogs per capita in the world? The fact that it has a relatively small population of humans and dogs says precisely nothing about that possibility. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:26, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

The data is out there and explicitly cited; others are welcome to do the work as well! Plugging it into Excel isn't the hard part; it's looking up the country pops. that is tedious. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:41, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I think we may have a winner in Samoa: 1,000,000 dogs to 184,000 people, or 5.4 dogs per capita. But those wouldn't be pets, I imagine.--Rallette (talk) 07:00, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

For another take on this Q, perhaps a survey of bestiality web pages would be in order ? StuRat (talk) 07:07, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps a more accurate answer could be obtained by checking which country has the best record on animal rights issues. Ownership of dogs does not in itself imply a love of the animals. After all, many people use them to guard property or to herd sheep, whatever. In Italy (where I live) the problem of abused and abandoned dogs is constantly highlighted on television documentaries. Many people here keep dogs in cramped, filthy cages and they are rarely fed. Savage packs of dogs often attack and kill humans. Yet they rank higher than the UK, a nation noted for its love of dogs.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 07:19, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Be careful not to judge anything based on the number of documentaries. More documentaries could mean it's more of a problem there, or that people do care more about dogs there and thus are more likely to watch such documentaries, or just that the media there have chosen to exaggerate this particular issue for ratings. StuRat (talk) 07:26, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

I live in Italy and believe me it's a problem. On several occasions I came close to being attacked by savage dogs; there are loads roaming the streets near my house.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 07:44, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Mondo cane, eh. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 10:02, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Mondo schifo. The sickening thing is that so many are fine breeds such as huskies, labradors and alsatians...all fated to be eventually run over and killed by a car or truck. Scandalous.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 11:17, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

The way I look at it, there are a finite number of spots for pet dogs, so every dog intentionally bred means one more dog that would have had a home is then displaced and killed. So, dog breeding = dog murder. StuRat (talk) 11:20, 15 March 2012 (UTC)