Current Events > Why do American celebrities often have their ancestry prominent on Wikipedia?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's something that sticks out a lot with Americans, like is one of the first things you read about them:

X is an American singer songwriter blah blah, she released a no.1 album, she has English and German ancestry. This is especially true in short/stub articles.

So fucking what? X comes from a country and a gene pool that's still only a few centuries old, so pretty much everyone has English, Scots, Irish, German or Dutch history, right? What's the point of waving around this information like it's a sign or prestige when literally everyone else does? I'm British and it's almost guaranteed if you look into my family tree you'll see something unusual in the last 200 years or so, but I would hardly expect my distant Polish/Mongolian/Botswanan ancestry to turn up in my biography.
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It's an American thing. Since no one is ethnically "American" (except for Native Americans) we instead list off every country any of our ancestors ever stepped foot in as part of our background and ethnicity. Its gets pretty tedious since practically everyone here is a mutt but that's what we do. I suppose it also has to do with the fact that America is a "Melting Pot" and listing off every country of origin in our gene pool celebrates that part of American History.

That said, even though we're all American there are subtle differences between the different ancestral origins that I suppose most Europeans wouldn't pick up on. For example, a WASP family is a lot different from an Irish-American or Italian-American family even though all 3 are white and of European origin.
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Regular people like you and me edit Wikipedia pages, and the world worships American celebrities more than any other, so we know those obscure details.
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IronWolf87 posted...

It's an American thing. Since no one is ethnically "American" (except for Native Americans) we instead list off every country any of our ancestors ever stepped foot in as part of our background and ethnicity. Its gets pretty tedious since practically everyone here is a mutt but that's what we do. I suppose it also has to do with the fact that America is a "Melting Pot" and listing off every country of origin in our gene pool celebrates that part of American History.

That said, even though we're all American there are subtle differences between the different ancestral origins that I suppose most Europeans wouldn't pick up on. For example, a WASP family is a lot different from an Irish-American or Italian-American family even though all 3 are white and of European origin.

Yeah it does tend to be this way. The US is one of the few countries without a specific ethnicity associated with it. Also I wonder if it's the same with Canadians and their wikipedias, since they are in a pretty similar situation, just a bit less so.
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IronWolf87 posted...

It's an American thing. Since no one is ethnically "American" (except for Native Americans) we instead list off every country any of our ancestors ever stepped foot in as part of our background and ethnicity. Its gets pretty tedious since practically everyone here is a mutt but that's what we do. I suppose it also has to do with the fact that America is a "Melting Pot" and listing off every country of origin in our gene pool celebrates that part of American History.

That said, even though we're all American there are subtle differences between the different ancestral origins that I suppose most Europeans wouldn't pick up on. For example, a WASP family is a lot different from an Irish-American or Italian-American family even though all 3 are white and of European origin.

Fair enough. However a lot of the time I see this kind of thing on the biographies of valley girl popstars etc I'm like, you couldnt be any less German if you tried. Whatever cultural roots you have in your family withered away generations ago, so the fact that this gets mentioned like its relevant is pretty cute but absolutely meaningless.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber

Justin Bieber is Canadian and it also goes into great detail about his ethnic origins.
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This reminded me that I forgot to unsubscribe from ancestry.com and they auto drafted $60 out my account.

4 days ago.
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MrResetti posted...

This reminded me that I forgot to unsubscribe from ancestry.com and they auto drafted $60 out my account.

4 days ago.

What exactly does a subscription to Ancestry dot com get you?
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Access to archival shit to trace your lineage.
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