Talk:Constituent assembly

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I have reverted Iota's renaming of this page to "Constituent assembly" (with the lower-case "a"). Reason: Proper nouns should be capitalized. "Constituent Assembly" is a proper noun, just like "National Assembly" or "Indian National Congress." It is not a descriptive noun, but a noun that has been the formal name of numerous legislative bodies and constitutional conventions throughout history. David Cannon 01:09, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The move was obviously too hasty. I disagree with your point though. The word constituent assembly has appeared in the titles of many bodies and as part of a title is of course capitalised. But constituent assemblies are not limited to just those bodies that entitle themselves as such. As I understand it a constituent assembly is any body elected for the purpose of, and with authority to, adopt a constitution, and I'm sure that historically not every such body has called itself "Constituent Assembly of X" (the Democratic Constitutional Congress of Peru is listed in the article so might be an example). So Constituent Assembly (upper case) is a title, but a constituent assembly (lower case) is a type of institution.

This article is currently just a stub. Until I changed it today it was tagged as a disambiguation page. This would be appropriate if the subject matter were just a particular title used by various bodies. But I think there is potential for this to become a detailed article not about a title but about a particular type of political institution. That's why I've changed it to a stub, and why I think lower case is appropriate. I hope I'm making sense.

National Assembly I think is different because national assembly (lower case) is really just a synonym for national legislature. So the National Assembly article is really just about a number of bodies that happen to share a name. Iota 02:33, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining. I think I can see now where you are coming from. I'll wait to see what other users think, but it might be a good idea to expand the list to include every Constituent Assembly we know of, and rename the article as a list. I'm not sure ... I'm in two minds about that. Maybe you or some others will have some idea. David Cannon 11:04, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation

The above is mostly right, but no one's acted on it, so I went ahead and did it myself. Soo 18:03, 26 August 2006 (UTC)