Talk:Bill Foster (Illinois politician)

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Contents

[edit] Copyright permission requested - February 2008

I noticed that large portions of the page are apparently taken from the Bill Foster campaign website; rather than listing the page for deletion at the moment, I have sent a request to his campaign for permission for the text to be used. If permission is not granted within a reasonable timeframe, this page would have to be listed for deletion.Ngchen (talk) 18:09, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Permission has been requested and subsequently granted by the Bill Foster campaign. The email was forwarded to the OTRS. The permission granting email is reproduced below (reformatted for readability).
... you are free to cite materials from www.foster08.com under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
Thanks for your question,
TOM
Thomas C. Bowen
Campaign Manager
Bill Foster for Congress

Ngchen (talk) 04:07, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

OTRS icon The permission for use of this work has been archived in the Wikimedia OTRS system; it is available here for users with an OTRS account. To confirm the permission, please contact someone with an OTRS account.

Ticket link: https://secure.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=1348491

[edit] December 0

Foster's date of birth is listed at December 0, 1955. What on Earth is December 0??? --Dstrozzi (talk) 15:55, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Apparently no one knows his exact birthdate, so someone made it December 0. I have removed it, pending someone's finding out.Ngchen (talk) 19:49, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
It wasn't manually set to December 0, it was set to '1955|0|0' (mmdd). The birthdate template/magic word/whatever converts that into December 0. If you don't like the results, I suggest you do whatever one does to fix the template so no month and no day is displayed. If we have no date at all, then the place of birth is not displayed. If we don't use the template, his age is not displayed (as you probably noticed when you 'fixed' the problem). That's not at all helpful either. There are lots of infoboxes that use 0|0 because of this same situation before.Flatterworld (talk) 05:38, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
It was pointed out before that no information is better than wrong information. So until someone fixes the template, it's better to not have it display the place of birth and his age (which are covered in the text anyhow), than to have the glaringly wrong December 0.Ngchen (talk) 13:57, 27 February 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Infobox needs changing

It says that he's a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives... while Foster won the election he is not a member of the House yet. He's going to be sworn-in in April. The proper title is Congressman-elect. I would change it for myself but the infobox is specifically for members of Congress. Is there an infobox for Congressmen-elect? --Tocino 05:44, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Change made.Dcmacnut (talk) 02:04, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
    • I have also hidden the Succession box until he is sworn in, as you say, he is not in office yet. Stealthound (talk) 15:16, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removed from article

In the 2006 House of Representatives election, Foster helped Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy, a Democrat, in Murphy's successful campaign for U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 8th congressional district. Murphy defeated the one-term incumbent, Republican Mike Fitzpatrick.[citation needed]

Unsourced para removed from article page and moved here. --Neutralitytalk 21:26, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Idiotic Revert

Reference 11 CLEARLY states that Foster voted to table a bill that would create an independent ethics committee. Whoever keeps reverting, please stop. 75.62.233.141 (talk) 06:34, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

The confusion probably is a result of opposite meanings of the word "table" in US as opposed to British English. In US English, to table means to kill, to defeat, and to vote down. To my knowledge, the opposite is true in British English. Since this article refers to an American figure, US English is being used. He voted for the ethics bill, causing it to pass.Ngchen (talk) 16:56, 18 May 2008 (UTC)