Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers)

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[edit] Background

Over the past year I've seen the number of Wikipedia articles on assorted political institutions from around the world snowball exponentially; it seems that I haven't been alone in this particular guilty pleasure of knowledge.

I'd like to look into getting consensus on how best to format the names of articles for things like government Ministers and/or Secretaries as well as the Departments and/or Ministries they may head. The conventions as-is create some interesting grey areas in terms of what might be the best course of action. Some time ago I came up with a personal logic for names of new articles on such things, and while I'm pleased to see many others have picked up where I left off and extended my system throughout the wiki, at no point have I actually sat down and laid them out. I'm interested to see if there's broader support and making this or something similar the policy for the whole wikipedia.

In brief, the names used for departments and officials in governments around the world are drawn from a pretty small English-language pool—more countries than not tend to have a Minister of Public Works or a Department of Justice or a Ministry of Education, either by those exact names or something really close. In order to ensure disambiguation, article names must incorporate some kind of identifier linking the position/department to the jurisdiction in which it exists. (an aside: while I'm focussing on countries at the moment, I anticipate this covering the governments of subnational entities, too, once us nerds get around to them.)

Now, in some cases the identifier is almost always added in as part of its general use (e.g. President of Germany, Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Supreme Court of Canada or Parliament of Australia) These cases are a non-issue.

But, to draw an example, the legal name of the chief politician in charge of Canada's finance department is the Minister of Finance. Not Minister of Finance of Canada, Canadian Minister of Finance, Canada Minister of Finance, Canada's Minister of Finance, Finance Minister of Canada, Canadian finance minister or Minister of Canadian Finance etc. The name, in it's standard usage, does not include the jurisdication in question. Now, we can squeeze in a jurisdiction name in there somewhere, should we so choose. The questions, however, remain:

  • do we do always insert a jurisdiction name?
  • where and how do we insert that jurisdiction name?

[edit] Proposed Solution

My solution has been to pre-disambiguate.... Minister of Finance (Canada), Minister of Finance (New Zealand), Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry (France) and Minister of Finance (Manitoba) can all happily co-exist. No article is given precedence over another, and the article title recognizes that Minister of Finance is the actual true-to-life name of the thing we're talking about, with the addendum (Canada) or (New Zealand) outside the actual name but in there for informative purposes. There is no need for an artificial and arbitrary corruption like Newfoundlander and Labradorian Minister of Finance or Finance Minister of New South Wales that morphs the title away from its accurate form.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, the only position with the exact title "Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry" in the world is in France, so wikipedia convention would have us name that article Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry and dispense with the parenthetical jurisdiction altogether. I'd like to propose that the jurisdiction be a mandatory part of the name in all but one circumstance, for the following reasons:

  • Admittedly, this area is still far from complete and government nomenclature is ever-changing. We may discover that Estonia had a position from 1993 to 1996 called the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry... this means retroactive disambiguation which could've been prevented in the first place. Likewise, the equivalent position in India could be renamed tomorrow and we'd need to wade through potentially dozens of occurrences and add in jurisdictions.
  • Wikipedia's notion of "Most common English usage" mucks with this subject, not least because so many of these names come from translation. I'd hate to have the Department of Justice in, say, the UK (I know there technically isn't one, work with me) go undisambigged while Iran's Department of Justice gets a big fat (Iran) tagged on, simply because English-speakers are naturally more familiar with the British government and/or because the article on the British one was started first and is substantially larger. This is even an issue in disambigging between English-speaking jurisdictions: should Ministry of Education go an article about Ontario's ministry of education while a smaller Canadian province like PEI have to make do with Ministry of Education (Prince Edward Island) because the former is a better-known entity?
  • A huge portion of total names, while technically unique, still rub very close to one another... we have may have only one Minister of Environment, one Minister of the Environment, one Minister for Environment, one Minister for the Environment and one Minister of Environment and Conservation in the world, but I pity the wikipedian who's going to try to keep them all straight and match articles with correct jurisdictions.
  • Obviously, some department/secretary/minister names are going to need to be disambiguated... anything "...of Defence", "...of the Interior", "...of Justice" or "...of Labour" can be readily assumed to be only one of several That said, how about "...of Environment and Heritage" or "...of Human Services" or "...of Corrections"? Checking uniqueness there is a headache. From an editor's point of view, it's much easier to operate in a system where one assumes the need to insert a jurisdiction rather than the conventional wikipedia conventions where you disambiguate only if necessary.
  • For simply getting information across in the article titles, it makes sense to have the jurisdiction in there.

Basically, think of the convention for warships. There. That's accomplished things more clearly than the last x hundred words.

The one exception I've made to the above mandatory disambigging has been for titles where the jurisdiction name is already included in the basic name... Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (Canada) is needless as a realtively-intelligent dog could assume that the article will be at Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

So, to recap:

Off the top of my head, the jurisdictions where the aforementioned naming scheme has been implemented (as far as I know, anyway) in Wikipedia articles include Canada, Canada's provinces, France, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

[edit] Implementation Issues

Finally, on a more practical note, I don't really propose aggressively knocking articles into conformity just yet. By way of example, the word "United States" is unique in that is both the name of a jurisdiction and an adjective that can precede various institutions. This little grammatical quirk means American articles already have a relatively uniform structure (United States Congress, United States Department of Health and Human Services, United States Secretary of State) that I'm recalcitrant to start ripping into. The Irish political articles are likewise well-ordered in their own way and unproblematic. It's the woolly frontier of countries that don't yet have a well-developed article network that I'm most concerned with standardization.

On the other hand, British political articles tend to unilaterally hog nondescript terminology that is used by dozens other countries. Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and Department of Health are among the most blatant offenders. While it would be a nightmare to add (United Kingdom) or (UK) to each one and clean up the hundreds of redirects, in this case I think it's something that's worthwhile in the name of NPOV.

As we say at this point in the game, Thoughts?

-- The Tom 04:16, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

First of all, good work for going through the confusions, now I can clearly see what problems we got. Mostly, I agree with you; we should always use an official name whatever it is. Putting a suffix "of France" or such would make the title less factual. Then I am not sure if we want to go to preemptive disambiguations. The problem I see is twofold. (1) it looks very silly, say, to put (Japan) to Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications. And, we would be needing to coach people about this, which they would see little need. (2) Not sure the extent of this convention. For example, does Defence Agency need to have (Japan) as a suffix? If so (I think so), what about Cabinet Office or National Safety Public Commission (which is like CIA or FBI in practice) ? If the boundary is unclear, then the convention would appear arbitrary to the contributors. This [1] gives a good chart of government agencies in Japan. Anyway, this is an interesting question I don't think we have discussed in the past. -- Taku 06:45, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with the proposal. True, it could be hard to get everyone to follow a new convention, if they don't see the need, but I think that the need is there. I think that all of the examples cited above (by Taku) could use the "(Japan)" suffix. Perhaps "Cabinet Office" is a title used only in Japan, I don't know, but some other country certainly could have a cabinet office. (Of course, I assume that that is an English translation of some Japanese title, which complicates things further.) Additionally, I am thinking about a way that the system could automatically create disambiguation pages from things like [[Foreign Secretary (Japan)]] and [[Foreign Secretary (Canada)]] , etc. The idea would be that someone could type in "Foreign Secretary" and get an appropriate automatically created disambiguation page. Morris 14:49, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)
About the abstract above: Would that apply just to the U.S. federal government, or also to states, etc.? Maurreen 09:19, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Excellent question. A quick punt around the database shows that wikipedia's coverage of US State Governments is rather sparse to date, so having them grow in accordance with the standards probably wouldn't be too hard to arrange. Obviously this can be open to further debate; the main reason for giving the US federal government and Irish government a provisional exemption is because industrious Wikipedians have already built a very extensive article network with internally-consistent names that just happen not to match the Canada/Australia/France/Germany/etc. bloc. --The Tom 03:23, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • When the Library of Congress catalogs materials by and about government agencies, its style (and therefore what will be used in thousands of libraries) is JURISDICTION NAME. AGENCY. SUBAGENCY. E.g. "United States. Department of State. Office of Consular Services." ; "Ohio. Governor."; "Ohio. General Assembly. House of Representatives. Committee on Education."; "United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Rules." For foreign governments the style is the same, "United Kingdom. Parliament. House of Commons. Select Committee on Trade." I've done a few articles on goverments and I've written them with the judisdiction first, e.g. Ohio Ballot Board, Ohio State Board of Education. PedanticallySpeaking 20:16, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)
That sounds more logical to me. For example, that hierarchy puts Ohio articles together instead of putting board of education articles together. Maurreen 05:10, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
That is an interesting proposal, but it does not take into account whether the name of the jurisdiction is actually part of the official name of the agency or not. For that reason, I think Tom's proposal is better. Josh 21:19, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
  • Maybe the official name doesn't contain the jurisdiction name, but in many instances we're not using the official name anyway, we're using a translation. I do object to the Library of Congress's style for many foreign agencies because it requires you to know the foreign language name. For example, the KGB is under "Soviet Union. Komitet Gosundarstvennoi Bezopasnosti." We should file things under the jurisdiction name, with the English enquivalent, e.g. "Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs" or "United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office". PedanticallySpeaking 18:26, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I like the proposal as well. I find that it would be very easy, when editing a related article, to insert something like [[Foreign Secretary (Canada)|]], knowing that only the title will show up, and that the piped link will point to the proper page (missing or not). -- Netoholic @ 15:34, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)

Thanks. I totally neglected to note the pipe-rule advantage myself; it's an excellent point. -The Tom 04:30, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree with the basic proposal. The Library of Congress system was designed for use in a card file, where a greater-to-lesser taxonomy is most-helpful to the user. Given modern search technology, the use of the taxonomy is less to help find the item as it is to identify the item. Many users simply browse and open articles because they look interesting. The simple parenthetical jurisdictional reference is quite useful there. In many cases in the United States and the several states the jurisdiction is identified in the proper name of the entity, as has been noted above. The proposed convention addresses that situation adequately. --Mddake 00:31, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Oppose

This is not the way to force policy. Especially as it appears to be a retaliatory response to the Wikipedia:Requested Moves debate over moving Japanese Cabinet to Cabinet of Japan. I should recommend this for VfD, but I won't, like I did with the Macao and Hong Kong convention that was attempted when someone was ticked that a lot of people opposed the move from Macau to Macao. This is bad policy formulation. Just creating a "Wikipedia:Naming Conventions" article does not a naming convention make. I look forward to how this turns out. —ExplorerCDT 15:31, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wow, don't so defense man. This is still just a draft discussion. --Golbez 17:58, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)
In my own defence, I think you're drawing connections that shouldn't been drawn. The Cabinet of Japan/Japanese Cabinet thing is purely a single aesthetic debate that, if not for a double-edit on the re-direct page, would have quietly done with no fanfare. Surely if you're going to throw around the "retaliation" word, you might point to something that I'm actually retaliating over?
This is about the broader question of whether we want some kind of unified naming style for these articles as they grow rapidly. I thought it was an appropriate time to stop my own somewhat unilateral imposition of standards (which, I might add, have ran in to virtually no opposition in the past, and even been utlized by numerous other contributors without my knowledge) and open up the question to other Wikipedians. Surely there is no better way to begin such a discussion than a draft naming convention article? Until such a time as either my proposal or some other one meets wide approval, then we'll continue to let these articles grow under whatever names the author is inclined to give them and have discussions about renaming on case-by-case basis. - The Tom 02:52, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] RFC?

Does this page still need to be listed at WP:RFC? Maurreen 07:07, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Also grandfathered

  • Departments of the United Kingdom Government and government ministers of the United Kingdom
  • Bureaux of the Hong Kong Government and secretaries of Hong Kong

  — Instantnood 19:17, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New Zealand Government Agencies

The current de facto naming convention for New Zealand Government agencies is New Zealand Agency Name. A suggestion that the more standard Agency Name (New Zealand) be used has been raised at Talk:State sector organisations in New Zealand, and feedback would be welcome there.-gadfium 20:22, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Province of Saskatchewan

Should the Government departments be named departments or ministries...On the Government of Saskatchewan web site, the choices are to choose a ministry such as the Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure the actual web page comes up with this title however, Saskatchewan Department of Highways and Transportation looked after by cabinet member Honourable Wayne Elhard Minister of Highways and Infrastructure. So the name of the wikipedia article should be Highways and Infrastructure (Saskatchewan) according to Wikipedia MofS? Or should it be...Department of Highways and Transportation (Saskatchewan) / Ministry of Highway and Infrastructure (Saskatchewan) / Highways and Infrastructure (Saskatchewan) / Saskatchewan Highways and Infrastructure / Saskatchewan Department of Highways and Transportation / Saskatchewan Ministry of Highway and Infrastructure OR... Highways and Transportation (Saskatchewan)...? Would like to begin a few articles and start right from beginning. Kind Regards SriMesh | talk 02:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not seeing "Department" on the webpage in question, and "Ministry" seems to the formal title as far as I can tell. Accordingly, Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure (Saskatchewan) would be correct. The Tom (talk) 16:20, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
Shortly after the Saskatchewan Party took power, there was an announcement saying that all government "departments" would be referred to henceforth as "ministries". I can't find the news release but the information on the government web sites would appear to corroborate that.
Thank youSriMesh | talk 16:03, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Just recently found this in 2005 archives as well...Federal Government Departments Style SriMesh | talk 16:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)