Oregon Project‑class | ||||||||||
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This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
WikiProject Oregon/Government page. |
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So one of the goals of this subproject should be to get the articles Government of Oregon and Politics of Oregon up to a decent standard. If we ever want to try to get the Oregon article up to GA or FA status, these will need to be filled out, as they will then become "see main article" redirects under those headings in the Oregon article. You can see Government of California and Politics of California for examples of what this should look like. Can't let our neighbors to the south get the better of us, can we? ;) BTW, only Minnesota and West Virginia have reached GA status and no U.S. states are FA yet. Katr67 20:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Today, I posted articles on Charles Crookham and Oregon Attorney General. With them, we now have articles on four of our five statewide elective offices, and at least the last few individuals to have served in those posts.
The recent mass deletions of fair use images has wreaked havoc on "mug shots" in our politician infoboxes. Several which have been spared remain only because they have been inaccurately tagged as free use images. Although I'm having a conscience struggle over the issue, I've decided not to correct those tags until we can obtain replacements. -- J-M Jgilhousen 07:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Click "show" to view the original discussion on this topic, from winter '06-07. |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Confession: The MoS and other policies and guidelines are so voluminous, I have to admit that I had not read the entire section on naming conventions, and have been relying solely on the "most popular name" provision when creating articles. Recently, I had occasion to delve into it more thoroughly, and it seems that I may be running afoul of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers) as I go through Oregon government and politics to fill in gaps, de-redlink, etc. In mitigation, I appear to be in good company, as I browsed through the correlary articles for California, Wisconsin, and a few other states before starting to name government-related articles, and they seem to be equally noncompliant with the guideline. Since I expect to be creating a good number of articles in the next few months, I want to prevent the occasion arising where our noncompliant naming conventions becomes an issue requiring the renaming of a daunting inventory of articles. On the other hand, neither do I want to use a naming system that is so inconsistent with the ones which already exist within the scope of the Government and Politics subgroup. The logical course would seem to be to rename the existing articles according to the guideline, and then follow it in the naming of future articles. Frankly, I am not keen on interrupting the research and writing I'm doing in order to undetake such a massive "clean up" project. Any thoughts? And should I move this discussion to the project, sub-group, or other talk page? -- "J-M" Jgilhousen 01:20, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I definitely think we should set our phasers on *ignore*. As it says: 3) Pre-disambiguation shall not be carried out:
True, here in Oregon, it is officially the "Department of State Lands" and not the "Oregon Department of State Lands" but despite my professional bias, I think moving to the parenthetical would just be silly. Though it isn't an "of Oregon" like it says above, it should still count as the "overwhelmingly-utilized" (which I note is improperly hyphenated </snark>) natural part of the subject's name. I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but it's "Department of Transportation" not "Oregon Department of Transportation", but even ODOT calls itself ODOT. If some MoS stickler takes this up, I think we can make a pretty good argument for leaving these how they are. BTW, did you ever see my argument for moving "Treasurer" to "Treasury"? I think I'll relent on that one. :) Katr67 00:24, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
|
It seems to me that having articles for both state agencies and their leaders is unnecessary. For instance, Oregon Commissioner of Labor and Industries and Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. There are several cases like this. I think one should direct to the other, and a single article should cover both the agency and the position of its director. Seems best if the article lives under the agency's name, not the title of its director. Thoughts?
Also, a special case of this. Do we need separate articles for the Oregon Dept. of Justice, Supreme Court, and Attorney General? This department seems sufficiently complex to justify more than one article, but do we need three? Or is there a good way to combine into two?
I should note, in both of these cases, one of the articles has yet to be created, so now seems like a good time to decide the future direction the articles will take…
- Pete 22:46, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Unless there is objection, or some other reason of which I am unaware that I shouldn't, I would like to put the following banner in our collection, and use it on the talk pages of the subproject articles (until such time as we have a more comprehensive project banner that does it more "automagically"). It would really help with tracking, sorting, and prioritizing the work. Here it is:
This article is supported by the Oregon Government & Politics Workgroup. |
And it would go directly under the project banner (it is the same width and conforms to the style and wording of the correlary workgroup banner of the Biography project). It would add the talk page to
Category:WikiProject Oregon Government & Politics.--
"J-M" (Jgilhousen) 13:35, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Article with this title "beta" version done. More information on its talk page. It gives us an overview of the bureaucracy, and I am getting an idea of which stubs to develop and which to merge (Department level and major Divisions obviously belong in the former category, as do those which frequently end up as political footballs. Professional licensing and regulatory boards in the latter. Advisory and governing boards I think should probably be dealt with case by case, as some are more active and/or politically "hot" than others.) Input invited, either here, or on the respective talkpages. Assistance in de-redlinking would also be appreciated, although I don't want to pull anyone from other projects... it's nice to see cities and towns doing so nicely, for instance. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 12:45, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was actually surprised to find that the professional licensing boards do not formally fall under the Department of Consumer and Business Services, but are organizationally autonomous. Since the DCBS is the primary business regulation agency in the state, licensing everything from insurance companies to electricians, would it be inappropriate to add a section with an intro to that effect, followed by brief summaries of the different boards, and then point the items on the list in that direction? (It would turn almost a third of the red entries blue overnight.) -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen)
Proposal for
has been filed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Proposals in case anyone wishes to support or object. (This is not a political solicitation, just an informational notice.) -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 12:49, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
The last few months I have been adding pages for the OSC justices past and present. I have plenty more to go and was wondering if your group would like me to tag them as supported by this workgroup as I go? Aboutmovies 19:13, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I came accross this infobox for legislation, for those working in that realm:
{{Infobox Legislation | Name= | Parliament/Congress/Senate it was passed in= | Logo of that parliament or congress= | longtitle= | introducedby= | datepassed= | datesigned= | amendments= | relatedlegislation= | tablewidth= }}
Aboutmovies 17:22, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone know what the Oregon Shield Law was/is? There's a redlink to it on University of Oregon, saying that the Oregon Daily Emerald was instrumental in its creation. Anyhow, if someone's interested and wants to write an article on it, that would be cool. a kendall 21:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
What do people think about the prospect of having articles for all state legislators? User:Duff recently wikilinked all legislators on the Oregon House of Representatives and Oregon State Senate articles. This seems inadvisable to me for a few reasons: (1) I'm not sure every legislator is sufficiently notable to have an article, (2) Even if they are notable enough, there are very few articles, and all the red links are unsightly; and (3) simply creating the wikilinks has, in 5 or 10 cases, resulted in links to completely different people of the same name, which is bad news. Opinions? - Pete 07:13, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
With the templates, they really are all the same Infobox Elected official now, even for the politician one. So if you leave the template intact and just copy the line "| state_senate =" and paste it into the existing article it would work the same without all the conversion work. I personally would be against the external links as too SPAM like. Aboutmovies 07:41, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
With regards to state legislators, feel free to stop by WP:IOWA/Government - we've laid out a bunch of relevant templates there. Also, I've recently (around December) created articles for all of our state legislators - please check out Steve Warnstadt, which is the "model" article.
Keep up the good work - it's always nice to find someone else interested in keeping Wikipedia up-to-date on state government. :) -- Tim4christ17 talk 05:47, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Oh you betcha! Thanks for the kudos and the tip on some fine templates and the great work over there too! - Duff 16:28, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I imagine this will fall under the heading of Pete's worthy crusade to break this old(?) state habit of claiming that the State holds the copyright to the people's governmental and state foundational documents. I note that on the front page of our project is a wikisource link to the Oregon Constitution, which is great....but Wikisource has no such document, at that link or via searching. Please advise, and let's go on ahead and heat up the discussion of how to procure access to and free-use to all of OUR OWN state documents, at the very least of all the State Constitution, I mean...for Pete's Sake! - Duff 22:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm working for the Oregon Council on Court Procedures, a division of the OJD. We noticed that there is a reference to the Council on the OJD page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Judicial_Department) but no separate page for the Council. I'm happy to provide the information for this page (including membership) but never having worked with Wikipedia before I have no clue how to go about this. Can anyone give me a hand? Thanks! Sharicn 17:42, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks so much for all your information, and sorry it's taken me so long to get back here to thank you. I've also found some sources that might provide information for someone to write an article. Here are the links: http://www.osblitigation.com/ http://www.osbar.org/publications/bulletin/07dec/barnews.html https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/state/judicial/court-procedures.aspx http://www.ojd.state.or.us/aboutus/ccp/index.htm http://oregonlegalresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/oregon-council-on-court-procedures.html The Council's own website is http://www.counciloncourtprocedures.org. Let me know if I can suggest anything else. Sharicn ( talk) 20:59, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey guys. I hope this isn't a dead subproject. I wonder if anyone is working on maps showing things such as election results for various state offices by county, House and Senate districts color-coded by the party of their incumbent, and so on. I had this idea just now and was excited to find WikiProject Oregon.
These district maps would help in this endeavor. There are statewide .jpg maps available, as well as .zip folders with files that apparently can be used to make vector maps, which I would do if I knew how and had the tools. I see we have good maps showing the 2006 gubernatorial election results, our Senate districts, and the results of the vote on Measure 36. And I have already made (very rough-draft) maps of which party currently holds each seat in the legislative assembly, just to get an idea of what they would look like.
So, is there anyone actively working on this stuff already? Äþelwulf Talk to me. 13:27, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi folks, I created this article to resolve a redlink at the Wordos article, but felt it deserved some care from devoted Oregon government editors, so I thought I'd give you a heads up. -- Good Damon 17:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
Okay, well, to me it's "the big question." Tonight. And some other nights.
As I understand it, people register with a state party, never a national party. And the state parties are the ones that nominate candidates. The only national nominating convention I'm aware of are for presidential candidates.
So, since we have perfectly good (okay, I'll admit, they are actually far from "perfectly good") articles for the Oregon Republican Party and the Democratic Party of Oregon, shouldn't biographies of Oregon politicians link to these, rather than the national articles they presently do?
The only reason I can think of why not is that the nationally-oriented articles are presently much more thorough and informative than the state-oriented articles. But that can be fixed, and the state ones do link to the national ones.
Thoughts? - Pete ( talk) 08:25, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
This is a recap of a discussion that started on Talk:Charles Starr, but applies to all recent state legislators. "The Good, the Bad, and the Awful" is a series in the Willamette Week that comes out at the end of every legislative session. In my opinion, it fails miserably as a reliable source, and I think we should agree not to use it as a source. I hope others will weigh in on this so we can develop some consensus, as this will affect biographies on all recent state legislators.
In the intro sections, the WW basically brags about their departure, in this series, from accepted journalistic ethics: they interview lobbyists, and then publish the results anonymously. As a rule, journalistic ethics require reporters to name sources. Sources go unnamed when there are compelling reasons to do so, and where the story does not suffer as a result; the journalist is typically understood to put his/her reputation on the line by doing so. But in this case, the WW makes a regular practice of leaving sources unnamed in order to produce a more salacious story -- decidedly not a compelling reason.
I have concerns about libel, and also don't think there is much encyclopedic info to be gained from these articles that can't be found elsewhere. (In the Charles Starr article, all these articles add are the observations that he's "unintelligent", "honest", and "nice".)
Aboutmovies rightly pointed out that WP:RS generally applies to publishers, not individual article series; but in this case, where WW makes a specific claim about their approach for this one series, I think an exception is warrented.
One year, the article's intro begins: "Reader Beware: What follows is largely gossip and opinion…" and another year, it says: "(1) This survey does not claim to be anything more than a number-crunch based on unscientific scores given by people who closely follow legislative antics."
A group of journalism professors addressed anonymity here: "Medill professors emphasize that unnamed sources should be used sparingly. Students routinely are required to submit names and contact information for every person quoted in their articles as a guard against fabrication."
That famous unsourced online encyclopedia has this to say: "The downside is that the condition of anonymity may make it difficult or impossible for the reporter to verify the source's statements. Sometimes sources hide their identities from the public because their statements would otherwise quickly be discredited."
A team of online journalists for the Poynter journalism school asserted this as part of their guidelines: "For the most part, though, it's difficult to make the case that the credibility of anonymous content can ever match that of material whose author is known. As journalists, our default position is to publish material only with full names attached. We make exceptions only in rare cases, only for compelling reasons, and only with explanations attached explaining the reason for the anonymity."
In short, WW makes a flippant case for rewriting journalistic standards in the case of this one annual(ish) feature. They state they're granting anonymity to ensure they're "…not getting mealy-mouthed answers." It's not me, but WW that first said this feature should be considered differently from the rest of their content.
I think it's a mistake to include anything acknowledged to be gathered from anonymous sources, with such tepid justification, in a serious encyclopedia article. - Pete ( talk) 14:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
We have lots of similar articles (and redlinks) for state commissions and state departments. I'd like to suggest that we generally make the state department the article, and have the commission redirect to the department. The article can then explain the distinction between the two. Any objection? For an example: Oregon Department of Transportation and Oregon Transportation Commission. (Note, we discussed something similar above, regarding departments and the Commissioner thereof.) - Pete ( talk) 18:38, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Oregon Project‑class | ||||||||||
|
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
WikiProject Oregon/Government page. |
|
So one of the goals of this subproject should be to get the articles Government of Oregon and Politics of Oregon up to a decent standard. If we ever want to try to get the Oregon article up to GA or FA status, these will need to be filled out, as they will then become "see main article" redirects under those headings in the Oregon article. You can see Government of California and Politics of California for examples of what this should look like. Can't let our neighbors to the south get the better of us, can we? ;) BTW, only Minnesota and West Virginia have reached GA status and no U.S. states are FA yet. Katr67 20:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Today, I posted articles on Charles Crookham and Oregon Attorney General. With them, we now have articles on four of our five statewide elective offices, and at least the last few individuals to have served in those posts.
The recent mass deletions of fair use images has wreaked havoc on "mug shots" in our politician infoboxes. Several which have been spared remain only because they have been inaccurately tagged as free use images. Although I'm having a conscience struggle over the issue, I've decided not to correct those tags until we can obtain replacements. -- J-M Jgilhousen 07:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Click "show" to view the original discussion on this topic, from winter '06-07. |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Confession: The MoS and other policies and guidelines are so voluminous, I have to admit that I had not read the entire section on naming conventions, and have been relying solely on the "most popular name" provision when creating articles. Recently, I had occasion to delve into it more thoroughly, and it seems that I may be running afoul of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers) as I go through Oregon government and politics to fill in gaps, de-redlink, etc. In mitigation, I appear to be in good company, as I browsed through the correlary articles for California, Wisconsin, and a few other states before starting to name government-related articles, and they seem to be equally noncompliant with the guideline. Since I expect to be creating a good number of articles in the next few months, I want to prevent the occasion arising where our noncompliant naming conventions becomes an issue requiring the renaming of a daunting inventory of articles. On the other hand, neither do I want to use a naming system that is so inconsistent with the ones which already exist within the scope of the Government and Politics subgroup. The logical course would seem to be to rename the existing articles according to the guideline, and then follow it in the naming of future articles. Frankly, I am not keen on interrupting the research and writing I'm doing in order to undetake such a massive "clean up" project. Any thoughts? And should I move this discussion to the project, sub-group, or other talk page? -- "J-M" Jgilhousen 01:20, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I definitely think we should set our phasers on *ignore*. As it says: 3) Pre-disambiguation shall not be carried out:
True, here in Oregon, it is officially the "Department of State Lands" and not the "Oregon Department of State Lands" but despite my professional bias, I think moving to the parenthetical would just be silly. Though it isn't an "of Oregon" like it says above, it should still count as the "overwhelmingly-utilized" (which I note is improperly hyphenated </snark>) natural part of the subject's name. I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but it's "Department of Transportation" not "Oregon Department of Transportation", but even ODOT calls itself ODOT. If some MoS stickler takes this up, I think we can make a pretty good argument for leaving these how they are. BTW, did you ever see my argument for moving "Treasurer" to "Treasury"? I think I'll relent on that one. :) Katr67 00:24, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
|
It seems to me that having articles for both state agencies and their leaders is unnecessary. For instance, Oregon Commissioner of Labor and Industries and Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. There are several cases like this. I think one should direct to the other, and a single article should cover both the agency and the position of its director. Seems best if the article lives under the agency's name, not the title of its director. Thoughts?
Also, a special case of this. Do we need separate articles for the Oregon Dept. of Justice, Supreme Court, and Attorney General? This department seems sufficiently complex to justify more than one article, but do we need three? Or is there a good way to combine into two?
I should note, in both of these cases, one of the articles has yet to be created, so now seems like a good time to decide the future direction the articles will take…
- Pete 22:46, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Unless there is objection, or some other reason of which I am unaware that I shouldn't, I would like to put the following banner in our collection, and use it on the talk pages of the subproject articles (until such time as we have a more comprehensive project banner that does it more "automagically"). It would really help with tracking, sorting, and prioritizing the work. Here it is:
This article is supported by the Oregon Government & Politics Workgroup. |
And it would go directly under the project banner (it is the same width and conforms to the style and wording of the correlary workgroup banner of the Biography project). It would add the talk page to
Category:WikiProject Oregon Government & Politics.--
"J-M" (Jgilhousen) 13:35, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Article with this title "beta" version done. More information on its talk page. It gives us an overview of the bureaucracy, and I am getting an idea of which stubs to develop and which to merge (Department level and major Divisions obviously belong in the former category, as do those which frequently end up as political footballs. Professional licensing and regulatory boards in the latter. Advisory and governing boards I think should probably be dealt with case by case, as some are more active and/or politically "hot" than others.) Input invited, either here, or on the respective talkpages. Assistance in de-redlinking would also be appreciated, although I don't want to pull anyone from other projects... it's nice to see cities and towns doing so nicely, for instance. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 12:45, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was actually surprised to find that the professional licensing boards do not formally fall under the Department of Consumer and Business Services, but are organizationally autonomous. Since the DCBS is the primary business regulation agency in the state, licensing everything from insurance companies to electricians, would it be inappropriate to add a section with an intro to that effect, followed by brief summaries of the different boards, and then point the items on the list in that direction? (It would turn almost a third of the red entries blue overnight.) -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen)
Proposal for
has been filed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Proposals in case anyone wishes to support or object. (This is not a political solicitation, just an informational notice.) -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 12:49, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
The last few months I have been adding pages for the OSC justices past and present. I have plenty more to go and was wondering if your group would like me to tag them as supported by this workgroup as I go? Aboutmovies 19:13, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I came accross this infobox for legislation, for those working in that realm:
{{Infobox Legislation | Name= | Parliament/Congress/Senate it was passed in= | Logo of that parliament or congress= | longtitle= | introducedby= | datepassed= | datesigned= | amendments= | relatedlegislation= | tablewidth= }}
Aboutmovies 17:22, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone know what the Oregon Shield Law was/is? There's a redlink to it on University of Oregon, saying that the Oregon Daily Emerald was instrumental in its creation. Anyhow, if someone's interested and wants to write an article on it, that would be cool. a kendall 21:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
What do people think about the prospect of having articles for all state legislators? User:Duff recently wikilinked all legislators on the Oregon House of Representatives and Oregon State Senate articles. This seems inadvisable to me for a few reasons: (1) I'm not sure every legislator is sufficiently notable to have an article, (2) Even if they are notable enough, there are very few articles, and all the red links are unsightly; and (3) simply creating the wikilinks has, in 5 or 10 cases, resulted in links to completely different people of the same name, which is bad news. Opinions? - Pete 07:13, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
With the templates, they really are all the same Infobox Elected official now, even for the politician one. So if you leave the template intact and just copy the line "| state_senate =" and paste it into the existing article it would work the same without all the conversion work. I personally would be against the external links as too SPAM like. Aboutmovies 07:41, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
With regards to state legislators, feel free to stop by WP:IOWA/Government - we've laid out a bunch of relevant templates there. Also, I've recently (around December) created articles for all of our state legislators - please check out Steve Warnstadt, which is the "model" article.
Keep up the good work - it's always nice to find someone else interested in keeping Wikipedia up-to-date on state government. :) -- Tim4christ17 talk 05:47, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Oh you betcha! Thanks for the kudos and the tip on some fine templates and the great work over there too! - Duff 16:28, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I imagine this will fall under the heading of Pete's worthy crusade to break this old(?) state habit of claiming that the State holds the copyright to the people's governmental and state foundational documents. I note that on the front page of our project is a wikisource link to the Oregon Constitution, which is great....but Wikisource has no such document, at that link or via searching. Please advise, and let's go on ahead and heat up the discussion of how to procure access to and free-use to all of OUR OWN state documents, at the very least of all the State Constitution, I mean...for Pete's Sake! - Duff 22:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm working for the Oregon Council on Court Procedures, a division of the OJD. We noticed that there is a reference to the Council on the OJD page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Judicial_Department) but no separate page for the Council. I'm happy to provide the information for this page (including membership) but never having worked with Wikipedia before I have no clue how to go about this. Can anyone give me a hand? Thanks! Sharicn 17:42, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks so much for all your information, and sorry it's taken me so long to get back here to thank you. I've also found some sources that might provide information for someone to write an article. Here are the links: http://www.osblitigation.com/ http://www.osbar.org/publications/bulletin/07dec/barnews.html https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/state/judicial/court-procedures.aspx http://www.ojd.state.or.us/aboutus/ccp/index.htm http://oregonlegalresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/oregon-council-on-court-procedures.html The Council's own website is http://www.counciloncourtprocedures.org. Let me know if I can suggest anything else. Sharicn ( talk) 20:59, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey guys. I hope this isn't a dead subproject. I wonder if anyone is working on maps showing things such as election results for various state offices by county, House and Senate districts color-coded by the party of their incumbent, and so on. I had this idea just now and was excited to find WikiProject Oregon.
These district maps would help in this endeavor. There are statewide .jpg maps available, as well as .zip folders with files that apparently can be used to make vector maps, which I would do if I knew how and had the tools. I see we have good maps showing the 2006 gubernatorial election results, our Senate districts, and the results of the vote on Measure 36. And I have already made (very rough-draft) maps of which party currently holds each seat in the legislative assembly, just to get an idea of what they would look like.
So, is there anyone actively working on this stuff already? Äþelwulf Talk to me. 13:27, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi folks, I created this article to resolve a redlink at the Wordos article, but felt it deserved some care from devoted Oregon government editors, so I thought I'd give you a heads up. -- Good Damon 17:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
Okay, well, to me it's "the big question." Tonight. And some other nights.
As I understand it, people register with a state party, never a national party. And the state parties are the ones that nominate candidates. The only national nominating convention I'm aware of are for presidential candidates.
So, since we have perfectly good (okay, I'll admit, they are actually far from "perfectly good") articles for the Oregon Republican Party and the Democratic Party of Oregon, shouldn't biographies of Oregon politicians link to these, rather than the national articles they presently do?
The only reason I can think of why not is that the nationally-oriented articles are presently much more thorough and informative than the state-oriented articles. But that can be fixed, and the state ones do link to the national ones.
Thoughts? - Pete ( talk) 08:25, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
This is a recap of a discussion that started on Talk:Charles Starr, but applies to all recent state legislators. "The Good, the Bad, and the Awful" is a series in the Willamette Week that comes out at the end of every legislative session. In my opinion, it fails miserably as a reliable source, and I think we should agree not to use it as a source. I hope others will weigh in on this so we can develop some consensus, as this will affect biographies on all recent state legislators.
In the intro sections, the WW basically brags about their departure, in this series, from accepted journalistic ethics: they interview lobbyists, and then publish the results anonymously. As a rule, journalistic ethics require reporters to name sources. Sources go unnamed when there are compelling reasons to do so, and where the story does not suffer as a result; the journalist is typically understood to put his/her reputation on the line by doing so. But in this case, the WW makes a regular practice of leaving sources unnamed in order to produce a more salacious story -- decidedly not a compelling reason.
I have concerns about libel, and also don't think there is much encyclopedic info to be gained from these articles that can't be found elsewhere. (In the Charles Starr article, all these articles add are the observations that he's "unintelligent", "honest", and "nice".)
Aboutmovies rightly pointed out that WP:RS generally applies to publishers, not individual article series; but in this case, where WW makes a specific claim about their approach for this one series, I think an exception is warrented.
One year, the article's intro begins: "Reader Beware: What follows is largely gossip and opinion…" and another year, it says: "(1) This survey does not claim to be anything more than a number-crunch based on unscientific scores given by people who closely follow legislative antics."
A group of journalism professors addressed anonymity here: "Medill professors emphasize that unnamed sources should be used sparingly. Students routinely are required to submit names and contact information for every person quoted in their articles as a guard against fabrication."
That famous unsourced online encyclopedia has this to say: "The downside is that the condition of anonymity may make it difficult or impossible for the reporter to verify the source's statements. Sometimes sources hide their identities from the public because their statements would otherwise quickly be discredited."
A team of online journalists for the Poynter journalism school asserted this as part of their guidelines: "For the most part, though, it's difficult to make the case that the credibility of anonymous content can ever match that of material whose author is known. As journalists, our default position is to publish material only with full names attached. We make exceptions only in rare cases, only for compelling reasons, and only with explanations attached explaining the reason for the anonymity."
In short, WW makes a flippant case for rewriting journalistic standards in the case of this one annual(ish) feature. They state they're granting anonymity to ensure they're "…not getting mealy-mouthed answers." It's not me, but WW that first said this feature should be considered differently from the rest of their content.
I think it's a mistake to include anything acknowledged to be gathered from anonymous sources, with such tepid justification, in a serious encyclopedia article. - Pete ( talk) 14:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
We have lots of similar articles (and redlinks) for state commissions and state departments. I'd like to suggest that we generally make the state department the article, and have the commission redirect to the department. The article can then explain the distinction between the two. Any objection? For an example: Oregon Department of Transportation and Oregon Transportation Commission. (Note, we discussed something similar above, regarding departments and the Commissioner thereof.) - Pete ( talk) 18:38, 7 July 2008 (UTC)