Talk:60 Minutes

ꝋ?

The dead people have ꝋ, the theta nigrum ("black theta") next to their names. According to Wiktionary it stands for "obiit", died, which it seems odd for Greek theta to stand for a Latin term which doesn't have theta in it. And on the other hand according to its article it stands for Thanatos (Θάνατος) the god of death. But on the other other hand Unicode has it as "Latin Capital Letter O with Long Stroke Overlay" so it is part of the (Medieval) Latin character set, but they don't say what its' used for and it appears to not have an actual name. So who knows?

Whatever, but main point is, I've never seen this, and I've been around the track a few times. It always the dagger (†);

One reason you might might want to not use the dagger is that it displays as a cross in many character sets, including our default one I think, specifically a Christian-lookin g cross, so that'd be a possible reason to avoid it. Maybe that was the motive here, IDK. But:

1) It's not a cross. It's a dagger. It has a pointy end.

2) Even if it renders as a cross on your screen, it apparently is not "Christian cross" but rather "The point wouldn't fit with our font so this is the closest we can do".

3) And according to the article, it's never had anything to do with Christianity, historically. It's a symbol that's been used in many forms for many things since classical times, but AFAIK never specifically in any religious way. It evolved from other forms with nothing of religion involved.

3) Even if you take it as the Christian cross (which is certainly understandable, I get that), so? We generally follow most common usage. We're not anti-religion here so we don't want to go out of our way to replace any hint of religious symbols with obscure and confusing secular ones. That is POV.

Here's the relevant passage in Dagger (mark):

The dagger is also used to indicate death, extinction, or obsolescence. The asterisk and the dagger, when placed beside years, indicate year of birth and year of death respectively. This usage is particularly common in German. When placed immediately before or after a person's name, the dagger indicates that the person is deceased. In this usage, it is referred to as the "death dagger". In the Oxford English Dictionary, the dagger symbol indicates an obsolete word.

That passage has nine different refs, I didn't read them, but I mean nine.

I was confused by the ꝋ when I came across it. I actually don't know what it meant. Left-handed? Worked for other networks? Died in harness? Who knows. Yeah I figured out it must mean dead after reading the career dates, but "hey the reader can figure it out with a little work" is not the gold standard here. There's no easy way to survey, but my guess based on my own experience is that more users are going to be OK with the dagger but confused by the death theta than vice versa.

We don't even need to indicate who is dead, why are we doing this? And we could just write "dead" which is only three more characters and quite clear, if we do want to. But if we do want to use a symbol (does look cool) let's have be the dagger and not the theta. Herostratus (talk) 04:37, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

@Herostratus: I introduced the theta nigrum marker to this page in response to the comment from Old revision of Talk:60 Minutes . Upon further reflection upon your observations, I agree these markers cause unnecessary confusion. We should remove them from the article. DutchTreat (talk) 13:33, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah, very well then. Herostratus (talk) 21:40, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

List of correspondents

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2023_November_29#60_Minutes_categories had consensus to convert the category to a list. Most were already in the simple list of correspondents in the article, or mentioned within the article with appropriate prominence (Enrique Acevedo under "60 in 6"). Some were primarily producers or correspondents for the Australian version; Bryant Gumbel appeared to have been included in error. I added a few others.

However, there is scope to create a standalone list article, which could note prominent episodes that they hosted, etc. – Fayenatic London 10:22, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Why is there a Wikipedia article about 60 minutes (This is the TV show, my bad)

Like why? Switory (talk) 20:56, 25 February 2024 (UTC)