Talk:Snake (zodiac)

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[edit] celebrity list

I find the "list of people born under the year of the snake", in this article, really redundant. After all, since there are 12 kinds of years in the chinese zodiac, exactly 1/12 of all people ever born were born on this year. If there are 120,000 articles on people in Wikipedia (and I'm just making this number up), we'll have here a list of 10,000 people! Even if you limit this list to "really famous people" (and who determines that?) you'll still have hundreds or even thousands of names on the list.

Therefore, I'd recommend removing this list altogether from this article (and from similar zodiac articles). If this functionality is still desired, how about the following idea: end this article with a list of links to year categories, like Category:1948 births (see link below) Category:1948 births? There's only a limited number of those links (8 per century), and this list will be far more exhaustive.

Nyh 06:54, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

--Why, the same logic could be applied to Western astrology. Since there are 12 MONTHS, it should follow that "exactly 1/12 of all people ever born were born [i]n this" or that MONTH (ignoring that the Chinese year and the astrological sign don't correspond exactly to the Western year and month). However, that's all just ideal probability, and it is interesting to see which acclaimed people you might have something in common with.--

After waiting in vain for several months for comments, I decided to go ahead, be bold and delete the celebrity list. If someone doesn't agree with me, maybe it's time they explain why on this talk page, and hopefully tell me what criterion is used on which celebrity of the thousands out there should be listed here?

Nyh 22:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Someone (anonymous) added a celebrity list again, and I deleted it again for the same reasons as above. If someone really thinks we need a celebrity list, please, answer my concerns on this talk page. And please explain what criteria you used to choose the celebrities to list. Nyh 07:41, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I do think it would be a good idea to have a celebrities list, all of the other animals' pages (except for the pig's) have celebrity lists that are not too long (about 20 - 30 people.) However, I do recognize your concerns, Nyh, and I think the category lists sound like a good, workable compromise that would, yes, be more exaustive and probably more convienient than just a regular list. - Square pear 01:13, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi Square pear, I don't understand what you mean. You mean that it's good to have people listed, but as long as there are just 20-30? But what should we do as people add more and more "celebrities" to this list? Like I said, there must be 10,000 people to list there (or perhaps just a few hundreds if you limit yourself to "really famous" people). If we want to limit ourselves to 20-30, it's fine, but we need to define how. And I don't see anyone suggesting any definition. If we just list 20 random people out of 10,000, frankly, I can't see the point. What can anyone do with such a partial list? Nyh

I'm sorry, I'll clarify. I meant that a short celebrity list would be acceptable but considering the difficulty in deciding who should be on the list, it would be better to go ahead use the year categories that you suggested above instead. I would have gone ahead and done myself but I am still new to Wikipedia still and am not sure how do that. - Square pear 00:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Someone add a celebrity list yet again, and sure enough, as soon as the "Celebrities born on the year of the snake" heading appeared, vandals started to add stuff like their teachers name to the list. PLEASE, I'm not saying that I have any sort of right to make the decisions here, but how hard is it to just reply here and say why you think this list should be on this page, and what were your criteria for deciding who should be listed, and who shouldn't? Nyh 06:51, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I saw the Snake page was blank in early March, and added a few names there as well as to some of the other signs. I came back the next day and discovered someone else had added a few really helpful new entries. (I, too, noticed the teacher name had been added; whether it was added by the person who followed up on my list, I don't know. I figured it was some culturally influential--albeit esoteric--identity that I didn't know about (the link popped red as well).)

Coming onto this site, I'm also aware of some dialogue that's been in play concerning whether celebrities names should be on these pages at all. (1.) I will submit that "celebrities" or "well known figures" is the only way to communicate a common denominator; the concept of "celebrity" is, in the sense of identity, a lingua franca--that population more than likely to be known by a wider audience. (2.) As to who should be included, I would suggest that the personality (of anyone added to the list) must be readily apparent, must come through with a more easily sensed association to that sign. So far, these do. (For example, while their personalities are probably undeniably known to those close to them, I anticipate no one's going to be submitting too many newscast anchors, baseball players, doctors, etc.). (3.) The list belongs because it's helpful to compare a real-life personality with the archetype definition.

I also believe that content shouldn't be removed wholesale without first reconciling the issue in discussion.

-- this unsigned comment by: User:70.22.176.146

Hi anonymous editor. I obviously know what a celebrity is. The problem is, as I stated above, there are simply too many of them. For whatever definition of "celbrities", if there are 1,000 of them then this page will list 1/12th of them, i.e., nearly 100 people. This sort of huge list will not be informational or helpful one bit. Your assumption is that once you added the 20 people that you personally found interesting (a few US presidents, and some other people - I have do admit I never even heard about a few of them), people will not come in and add many more "newscast anchors, baseball players, etc.". I think this assumption is probably very wrong - when somebody sees a list with his favorite singer not on it, his country's president not on it, or even his teacher (!) not on it, they will go ahead and add it. In fact, the reason I wanted to remove this list in the first place - and did it again now - was exactly because people constantly modified this section adding their favorite "celebrities" (often quite obscure ones) and sometimes even non-celbritiies like specific teachers. The celebrity list became the center of this article, instead of some small section to illustrate it. Nyh 08:54, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

The assumption is based on the observable fact that over time that hasn't happened. No one has contributed to expand the list to a gross of anywhere more than a few dozen, and I believe contributors are smart enough to realize that any more would dilute the impact of having a list. Every eastern astrology book on a store shelf has a list of examples; I'm not an uncritical conformist, but I don't see why a web page should be different in this respect. Those that understand that both personological features and facial characteristics comport with the archetypal definitions of the signs, and see immediate similarities--wouldn't feel short-shrifted by the inclusion of 40 names or less, and those that don't wouldn't care. List aside, there isn't a lot of content left on the page to compensate for razing of what little there is. This is a community exercise.

Exactly what I predicted happened. Look at this article, and at Pig (zodiac), for example. They now list dozens of "celebrities", many of them I never even heard of (scottish botanist? french composer? chinese warrior? graffiti artist? executive???). And look at the edit history of, say, Pig (zodiac) - every few days someone comes in and adds more of these silly (non-)celebrities to the list. Nyh 07:21, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

I suggest that either for fairness' sake, you go delete every celebrity list (hey, nobody can stop you), or you do the same amount of research for people born in the year of the pig (perhaps not incidentally the sign opposing the snake). Initially you complained that the list would have to include 10,000s of people, and now it's closer to that than it ever was. Since I haven't seen you complain about the celebrity lists for other signs, I imagine you simply can't take it that someone born in the year of the snake could achieve something. Besides, these lists are primarily for purposes of entertainment (or perhaps encourage people to learn something about others they might have something remote in common with).

Hi anynymous editor. I know it must sound weird I only objected to the lists in the Pig and Snake entries. The truth is, I have absolutely no opinion on either of these signs. To tell the truth, I don't really know anything about these signs, or even on which sign I myself was born. I have no agenda to defame certain signs or anything... I just ran across this page by random (I often surf Wikipedia by random, to see what I come up with, and if I can contribute to it), and found room for improvement. I found the "celebrity list" not only useless to understand the meaning of these two signs, but even ridiculous - because people were adding, every few days, their favorite obscure non-celebrities to this list. When I first came across the Pig and Snake pages, they (and all the other chinese zodaic pages) were filled with a very long list of non-celebrities, at least 50% of which I never even heard of. I warned about this situation in both pages, and the only reason I didn't do it for all 12 signs was because I wanted to wait and see what sort of discussion ensues, and I didn't want to repeat it 12 times. After half a year was passed, and nobody bothered to discuss this issue, I decided to be bold and remove this section myself. A month later, someone returned a list to both pages, and ever since the lists continue to grow, and grow, and grow. I don't want an edit war, so all I'm doing now is writing here how I still think these lists are futile - they'll never be complete (a complete list will have 10,000 people on it), they'll never be representative (everyone will add his favorite people, not "representative" people), and frankly, it's very hard to even make sure they're correct. So instead of having an article where 90% of it is an incomplete, unrepresentative, and potentially inaccurate list, I thought it's better not to have this list at all. Or, perhaps we should have separate articles for these lists? Nyh 08:15, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

You can feel free to point out the inaccurate ones--I agree those should be (re)moved. If your info is correct and you're 31, you were either born 1975 or 1974, making you a Wood Tiger or Wood Rabbit. Just because you don't know somebody, doesn't mean they haven't contributed anything significant to the world! You yourself admit not understanding Chinese astrology, so why bother arguing with this vague metaphysical pseudo-science? Seriously, though, how can something so harmless be so offensive to you?

[edit] Split

I vote for making a new article, List of Celebrities Sign (chinese zodiac) - with a list of famous persons of all signs (separeted by sign/element), something like the List of games Daniel Leite 04:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Since no one protested and I agree with you, I boldly went ahead and created the Category Category:List_of_Celebrities_(Chinese_Zodiac) and the subcategories for each sign. I'm currently adding the categories to the current Year of the Dog celebrities (I will remove the section afterwards, replacing it with a link).

Now, it would be great if you and all the other regulars (Maestro, VeronicaPR, IrishPearl etc.) would each take a Zodiac Sign and do the same, since it would take ages to do this alone. Teshik 12:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Split contested, candidate for deletion

Hrmpf. In the very minute I finally got the Dog article finished, the new categories were put up into the Deletion candidates. Go here for details, and please tell if you want the categories kept, deleted, or if you got another suggestion entirely. I've stopped editing for now. Teshik 14:59, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misc

I thought I should mention that there's apparently a rather indignant Snake-born who vandalized the Dragon description and edited the Snake article to read "It is widely accepted that Snake is way better than Dragon." I've reverted his/her edits. --Jitterro 05:16, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Isn't Cancer the western equivalent to the Snake? Both tend to hide their intentions, both are said to have extremely complex natures, both boast a superior sense of charisma and elegance, and both can not take advice. -K

Taurus is. 72.24.87.83 20:09, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] who put th four sitation tags near the top?

have the statements in question been discussed? has the tagger been back? k zz* 20:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese Character

I thought the Chinese symbol for 'Year of the Snake' was 巳, as apposed to 蛇, which just means 'Snake'. I could be wrong though. Could somebody please verify which is correct. Sadako No Deshi 18:56, 18 July 2006 (BST)

I'm sorry, but you're thinking of something that isn't much used. I'm not sure where you are getting these ideas but in chinese we are using 蛇 for the year of the snake all the time. If you do a google search I'm sure you will see what I mean. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.128.234.186 (talk) 21:41, 10 February 2007 (UTC).

According to the Chinese and Japanese Wikipedia pages linked from the page, you would be wrong. Updating the character to match usage in Chinese and Japanese page. Ice-Wolf 04:12, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Occupations

What, exactly, are ideal occupations for those born in the year of the Snake?

-Snakes are so intelligent and irresistable, they'll likely succeed at anything they please. Tradition has it they excell as psychologists, philosophers or entreperneurs, but they really blow the competition away in politics, natural sciences and as beauty icons (the females in particular). Hope that helps.

[edit] INACCURACY!

Thomas Paine is listed as a Snake, but he was born two days before the start of the Snake year. He is, in fact, a Dragon.

Change it then

[edit] Augustus a snake?

Was Augustus really a snake? He was born in the year 63 bc and I can't find anywhere that says 63 bc was the year of the snake. This site indicates he would be a horse: http://www.yutopian.com/search/search.html —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bosghost (talk • contribs) 06:20, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

You MUST steal this glory from the us snakes, eh!

Can't you do any math? If you know that a certain sign will repeat itself after 12 years, and more specifically, its elemental will repeat after 60 years (60/12 = 5, so five elementals), you can take any year you're unsure of and add 60 years until your numbers align with a chart. In this case 63 BC counts as (-63). (-63) + 60 = (-3). Not so helpful yet, but given that 0 was a Monkey year, you could count three signs back and find it was Snake. Add 60 again and you get 57 which you know is either a Fire Ox, Snake, or Rooster year, but we'll have to keep adding 60 to align with our charts. To cut a long story short add 60 34 times, (-63) + 60*34 = 1977, a Fire Snake year according to our charts. We also know that Augustus' birthday was September 23, so we don't have to deal with discrepencies between Western and Chinese new year dates. Thus we conclude Augustus was a Fire Snake.

[edit] remove list of people

Do not reply here; go to centralized discussion at Talk:Rat (zodiac)#Let's remove all the celebrities lists. — coel acan — 18:19, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Colour

isnt red-green YELLOW —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.106.144.28 (talk) 12:02, August 27, 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External links

I have factual links that tell you the meaning of the Chinese Horoscope Snake, etc. They are not advertising anything personal. I feel they may help the site. If you do not believe so, please remove. They were previously posted on two articles. I want to combine them and post them on each horoscope, Including this one. Ariyen (talk) 13:25, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Equivalency" and "obviousness"

I reverted. The reason is that "obviously" is not a good reason to change. This entire article is unreferenced, and I added the specific {{fact}} tag to the "Western Sign" issue.

For reference, the Snake "traits" are:

Positive Traits Wise, profound, clever, logical, intelligent, creative, compassionate, discreet, highly-organized, honorable
Negative Traits Judgmental; critical thinker, anxious, calculating, indifferent, intense, fussy

and the Taurus "traits" are:

positive: disciplined • hard-working • good sense of humor • prudent, great work-ethic • artistic [6] • loving • creative, romantic [6] • sensual [6] • Very sexual • attentive, comforting • strong • steady• shy, • cautious • harmonious • trustworthy, calm• tenacious • stable • resourceful • easygoing • careful [6]• dependable, honest• conservative [6]• determined [6]• loyal [6], protective [6]• practical [6]
negative: controlling, stubborn [6], hyper-sensitive, gets stuck in ruts, little to say, resentful, moody, horrible temper, possessive, overindulgent [6], Jealous, overly self-conscious, rigid [6]

I don't really know what my point in putting them here is, because eve if it is "obvious" that they are or are not equivalent is irrelevant. Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth. (Though we generally hope that the two are the same). (For that matter, can a year-long Chinese sign really be "equivalent" to a lunar-year / monthly western sign anyway...?

Let's work at getting this article referenced, eh? • VigilancePrime • • • 18:34 (UTC) 24 Feb '08