Talk:List of Hillary Rodham Clinton Controversies

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[edit] Category or list

A discussion is occurring here about whether this list should instead be replaced with a category.Ferrylodge 19:57, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article should not exist

The list article was created as a back-door way of getting around the dismantling of the old full controversies article. It doesn't belong in Wikipedia, for the same reasons of WP:NPOV, WP:Content forking, and WP:Criticism as in the full case. All of the controvery material on HRC is still in Wikipedia, you just have to read the main articles and subarticles to see it in its historical and biographical context. What Wikipedia does not provide is a "one stop shop" for everything ever said bad about a person.

Moreover, this is not particular to Clinton. Controversies/criticisms subarticles or sections for political candidates' articles are on the way out for everyone. Of the 16 Dem and GOP candidates currently still running for president in 2008:

  • Never had such articles/sections: Obama, Edwards, Kucinich, Gravel, Romney, Paul
  • Had them but since dismantled/disbursed: Clinton, Richardson, Biden, Giuliani, McCain, Hunter
  • Still have them: Dodd, F. Thompson, Huckabee, Tancredo

As you can see, the dismantling has not been a partisan enterprise. What editors should be doing now is finishing the process for the final four, not trying to restore this back-door list. This is hardly the time to start regressing on this matter. Wasted Time R 05:06, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Just thought I'd mention that I did not create this list as a "back-door way" of doing anything. Creating the list may have been a good idea, and it may have been a bad idea, but there's no need to attribute any sneakiness to creation of the list. The list was created after plenty of discussion, and after explaining the reasons for creating it (perhaps the same cannot be said of the list's deletion).
I am not now seeking to restore the list, and may or may not in the future. But it should also be noted that it was never meant to be a "one stop shop" for everything bad said about Clinton. It was meant to also include all of the things said in her defense, regarding each listed controversy. The articles about Clinton are so numerous and dispersed that some indexing seemed appropriate to me, and this list was meant to serve such a purpose. And regarding partisanship, please note that (in the past) I have also argued in favor of having a controversies article for Fred Thompson.Ferrylodge (talk) 19:17, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I can say three things.

  1. Yes, I got rid of the list somewhat summarily. I was moving Hillary Rodham Clinton to FAC and I didn't want to get into a huge digression over the 'controversies issue'. The major backer of the list (you) was banned at the time. As it turned out, of the many critiques of the HRC article, lack of a controversies subarticle or list was not one of them.
  2. I've seen two arguments for the list (or controversies articles in general). One is, "I don't want to have to wade through all the stuff about what good person X did; I just want to see the controversies." In this context, a list is just a back-door way of circumventing the same WP:Content forking and WP:Criticism guidelines that caused us to dump the controversies section in the first place
  3. The other is

Wasted Time R (talk) 01:57, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I was banned, Wasted Time R. And the bogus ban was overturned by the ArbCom. None of which is really relevant here, is it?
I don't know if you're going to complete your last sentence or not. But I wish you would reconsider the way you attribute motives to those who have supported the existence of controversy articles. While you may or may not be correct that a controversy article has a tendency to go against WP guidelines, it does not inherently do so. If a controversy article identifies matters that are indisputably controversial, and then objectively presents info about both sides of the controversy, then no WP guideline need be violated.
You ought to review WP policies on good faith before you suggest that I've attempted to circumvent guidelines here. Wikipedia has a featured article on global warming, and also a separate wikilinked article on global warming controversy. I doubt that the global warming featured article would link a controversy article that attempted to circumvent Wikipedia guidelines. In any event, as I said above, I am not now seeking to restore this list.Ferrylodge (talk) 02:14, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Whoops, real life interfered and I hit "save" just to be sure not to lose what I'd started. Here's the whole thing I was going to say:

Well, I can say three things.

  1. Yes, I got rid of the list somewhat summarily. I was moving Hillary Rodham Clinton to FAC and I didn't want to get into a huge digression over the 'controversies issue'. The major backer of the list (you) was banned at the time. As it turned out, of the many critiques of the HRC article, lack of a controversies subarticle or list was (as far as I remember) not one of them.
  2. I've seen two arguments for the list (or controversies articles in general). One is, "I don't want to have to wade through all the stuff about what good person P did; I just want to see the controversies." In this context, a list is just a back-door way of circumventing the same WP:Content forking and WP:Criticism guidelines that caused us to dump the controversies section in the first place.
  3. The other argument is, "I want to find out about aspect A of person P; I don't want to wade through all the articles about P just to try to find out A", where 'controversies' is just one possible value of A (others might be 'legislative achievements', 'historic firsts', 'personal life milestones', etc. This argument I do have a lot of sympathy for. One of my great frustrations about WP is that it's all just raw text, organized only in table-of-contents form; the only "indexing" is brute force text search, which isn't very satisfactory; it lacks any kind of semantic tagging or structure. Maybe someday something like Semantic Wikipedia will be in place and we can choose among multiple semantic perspectives on a subject, such as the one you want. Until then, though, we'd have to construct manual "index articles" ... doesn't seem like a feasible proposition.

Hope this sheds some light. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:27, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

As for your later comment, I didn't mean "back-door" to connote "sneaky", but rather "alternate". I will wholeheartedly affirm that there are people with legitimate motives and reasoning on both sides of the 'controversies' debate; it's a "close call" kind of question, not a "no brainer". I've recently added the whole thing to the Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections page so that it has more visibility. As for you, I have no knowledge of what you got banned for (it wasn't anything in the articles I was involved in), nor do I want to know; the less I see of WP internal politics, the better. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:34, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ways to index articles

Wasted Time R, you say "we'd have to construct manual 'index articles' ... doesn't seem like a feasible proposition." Why not? Isn't that what I did for Clinton?Ferrylodge (talk) 02:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

No, because it can't be precise. It can only link to full articles or to sections within articles, and the latter often get broken by editing changes to section titles. It can't link to paragraphs within sections, or to sentences, or to footnotes (where in practice 'controversies' sometimes get located to satisfy WP:UNDUE considerations). Again, another need for an indexing/semantic tagging mechanism. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:50, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Wasted Time R, you underestimate Wikipedia's technical capabilities. A list can indeed link to footnotes. For example here is a link to a footnote about Hillary's choice of last name.Ferrylodge (talk) 02:55, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Not bad, but it's an external link (goes outside WP via full URL). Any way to do that internally? And is there a MediaWiki tag that we can add to regular sentences, so that we can link to them too? Wasted Time R (talk) 03:05, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

If you prefer a wikilink instead of an external link, that's no problem: Hillary_Rodham_Clinton#_note-lastname.
You can also wikilink directly to the point in the text where that footnote occurs. Hillary_Rodham_Clinton#_ref-lastname_0
Additionally, you can wikilink directly to the point in the text where the previous footnote occurs. Hillary_Rodham_Clinton#_ref-gerth-66_1 Cool, huh?Ferrylodge (talk) 03:11, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Yup, good finds. But if I want to wikilink to a sentence that doesn't involve a footnote, what do I do? Introduce a fake footnote and use some kind of <noinclude> tag? Or is there some anchor tag that can be used in this case? Wasted Time R (talk) 03:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Virtually all controversies are accompanied by footnotes to provide a source. Therefore, I don't think there's a great need for what you suggest. If what you suggest exists, I don't know about it.

[edit] Should there be a controversies index?

Do you feel differently now, about deleting this HRC Controversies list?Ferrylodge (talk) 03:37, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Well. I have to say, and this is my personal opinion rather than an interpretation of WP guidelines, that I've grown to dislike just about everything about the WP usage of "controversies". Take a look at the state of John McCain a month ago, before I started doing a lot of work on it, here. About half of the table of contents was taken up with "Controversies"! Here we have this larger-than-life American character, who's famous for his military heritage, who's perhaps the most famous POW of all time, who's held high office, who's been involved in landmark legislation, who's run for president twice, and what do we highlight? And these aren't controversies to be viewed in isolation, they are part of his personal and political character. As the John McCain#Cultural and political image section that I introduced says, remarks such as these are aspects of his personality that have stayed with him his whole life. So the remarks deserve inclusion in the article, but in a biographical context like everything else.

Moreover, there's no consistent definition in WP about what a "controversy" is. Advocating a piece of legislation that a lot of people oppose? Taking contrary stands on some issue over time? A moral lapse? An ethical scandal? A legal problem? Any random stupid or offensive remark said in public? I've seen all of these. The first is what politicians are supposed to do. The second almost invariably comes with the territory. The third is what all humans do. The last is what politicians inevitably will do — spend all your life talking in public, you'll surely say something dumb.

So to me the current use of "controversies" in WP is anti-thoughtful, if that's a word; it's a grab-bag term for anything negative that could be said about a political figure, lacking context, lacking organization, lacking connectivity with the person as a whole.

My goal in writing these kinds of articles in WP has been to make them look more like real biographies. I've been looking at some really noted biographers, such as James MacGregor Burns and Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox or Ronald Steel and Walter Lippmann and the American Century, writers and works which have won big-name awards. These books have full indexes at the back, with lonnng entries for the title subject (Lippmann's goes on for five full small-font, double-column pages). But neither indexes "controversies" anywhere, nor can I recall see any other top-quality biography that organizes indexes that way. Instead they index events items, personal life items, personal characteristics items, writings, and so on. It seems to me that that's a model we should be following.

So the long-winded answer is, no I'm not too enthusiastic about what you want. Wasted Time R (talk) 14:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I've already said a couple times here that "I am not now seeking to restore the list." So, I'm not sure where you get your impression about what I want. I continue to be undecided.
It's true that big book-length biographies usually have big comprehensive indexes. I'm not sure, though, if that model is suitable for Wikipedia. If we're going to have any kind of indexing, I do suspect it would be useful to break the index into several bite-size portions, instead of having one huge alphabetical index. The goal is to help people find what they're looking for.
A controversy is by definition a public dispute between sides holding opposing views. There is much information about Hillary Clinton that does not involve any controversy, and there is much that does. Maybe you're right that the word "controversy" is vague. Instead of having a chronological list of controversies, or an alphabetical list of controversies, we could instead have a list of controversies that divides them into controversial votes, ethics controversy, legal controversy, and controversial remarks. Do you think that one huge alphabetical index (of everything Hillary) would be better than a list of controversies (perhaps together with a list of achievements)?
Regarding McCain, I have no problem at all with your efforts to make that article more balanced. Did you know that his great-great grandfather owned slaves?[1] This is the kind of rubbish that is going into the Mitt Romney article, so the latter article needs improvement too.Ferrylodge (talk) 16:37, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

One remark .... all votes are controversial. (Other than the 94-0 proclamation to make June the National Month for Flower Appreciation kind of thing.) That's what politics is for, to decide among competing interests, leaving some people happy and some people unhappy. So ever since Hillary became FL of Arkansas, she's been involved in "public disputes between sides holding opposing views". So trying to list every time that Hillary, or any other political figure, has engaged in such a dispute seems almost tautologically pointless to me. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:56, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

There are big votes and small votes, and the amount of HRC controversy can be measured by press coverage, by the closeness of the vote, and also by whether she took a leading role. No one is remotely suggesting that a Wikipedia list should include every vote.Ferrylodge (talk) 17:14, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Well, we're really not in agreement on this one. To me, her votes are covered in the main article, in Senate career of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and in Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. If she cast a vote that was surprising, or made the crucial difference, or went against her political base, those articles would play up its importance. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:29, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Let me put it this way....You haven't indicated any HRC controversies that you think were bigger or more notable than those listed here.Ferrylodge (talk) 17:39, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
By your definitions, her vote on the Iraq War Resolution and her "Tammy Wynette" and "baking cookies" remarks would each be more important than several items on that list. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:44, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
See? I knew you could help improve this list.  :-)Ferrylodge (talk) 17:46, 9 December 2007 (UTC)