Talk:Thomas Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson was one of the History good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

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Date	Process	Result
June 25, 2006	Good article nominee	Listed
June 15, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed
September 3, 2009	Good article reassessment	Delisted
December 6, 2015	Good article nominee	Not listed
Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on April 13, 2017, April 13, 2018, and July 4, 2019.
Current status: Delisted good article

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This has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

Kyle Keeler (February 23, 2023). "How Wikipedia Erases Indigenous History". Slate. Retrieved May 26, 2024. Wikipedia's page on Jefferson, himself an architect of Indian Removal, draws on outdated scholarship from the 1970s to argue that Jefferson wanted what "was best for American Indians." One sentence alludes to recent scholarship arguing that Jefferson removed Native peoples to gain land. During a discussion about Jefferson's role in removal, the editor responsible for almost a quarter of the pages for Washington, Jefferson, and Ulysses S. Grant made false, racist claims, writing, "We certainly don't want to connotate any negativity towards Jefferson, do we? Okay, we can mention that many tribes were war like, xenophobic, refused to assimilate and that for everyone's own good and general welfare it was deemed best to keep the two diametrically opposed cultures in separate parts of the country."
Kyle Keeler (May 24, 2024). "Wikipedia's Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world's largest encyclopedia". Settler Colonial Studies. Retrieved May 26, 2024. Thomas Jefferson's page reads similarly. The 'Native American Affairs' section cites Wikipedia to state that Jefferson 'refuted the contemporary notion that Indians were inferior people and maintained that they were equal in body and mind to people of European descent.'

Discussions of slavery[edit]

The language used in this article in respect of enslaved people is outdated. The preferred terminology is “enslaved person” (versus “slave”), and a person “enslaved by” versus “owned by”, in each case emphasizing the humanity of the enslaved individual by divorcing the circumstances of bondage from their being. Tjembers (talk) 01:41, 6 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There were only two uses of "owned" in reference to slavery in-text, which I changed to "enslaved". (I changed "slaves" to "people", however, in these cases, solely to avoid repeating myself excessively, although it really does highlight the evil of slavery.) CitationsFreak (talk) 03:03, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Did some more edits, and I see what you mean. I'll try to change every instance of "slave" to something with an adjective and "people", although I would hate to make the article sound worse to my ears. I'll see what I can do. CitationsFreak (talk) 08:48, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]