Talk:Baltimore

NPOV issues with quote selection?

@Illegitimate Barrister I started writing a more lengthy and detailed question/comment about NPOV issues with quote selections in this article and then started feeling like there's a degree of futility in trying to get consensus to fix it and just filed it away in my zettelkasten instead. Would you be open to building consensus around relocating some of the more ideologically slanted quotes here (and in the Detroit page, often from the same sources) and adding some more diverse and compelling quotes about the city itself (and perhaps by people that have actually lived in the city)?

There is a lot of charming and interesting quotes about the city and its character and it'd be very easy for them to be lost in the current sea of Ted Cruz, Breitbart, and National Review quotes.

Even the one (1! singular!) Mencken quote is sort of middling at best given how many things Mencken had to say about the city... and that isn't even considering that Breitbart and the National Review are quoted more than Mencken or any other notable writer from the city

Something just feels dreadfully wrong that the W section of this page is the wall street journal and a florida senator that has never lived in baltimore, but we don't have any John Waters gems like this:

"My favourite characters are people who think they’re normal but they’re not. I live in Baltimore, and it’s full of people like that. I’ve also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they’re crazy, but they’re completely normal. I get my best material in Baltimore – you get dialogue that you just couldn’t imagine. I asked this guy in a bar what he did for a living and he said he traded deer meat for crack. I never realised that job even existed. You could make a whole movie about that person."

As starting points... The prologue of Crenson's "Baltimore: A Political History" has a buffet of interesting options to choose from (Both from Crenson and other people). At least one quote from Dr. Lawrence Brown about the Black Butterfly also feels particularly warranted, given the utility of that concept in understanding the city, its relevance in modern discourse about the city, and its current absence from wikiquote.

If this is a conversation you or anyone else is willing to have, I'll absolutely make an account, we can ✨ build some consensus ✨ and work towards improving the articles in this space.

All the best, a dirty IP poster (at present) 104.234.212.140 17:38, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

If you have better (sourced) quotes to add to the page to provide more balance, then by all means please add them. ~ UDScott (talk) 11:56, 12 October 2023 (UTC)