Wikipedia talk:Pro and con lists
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This page does not appear to have gotten much attention from the community. I'm punting it back to the "proposals" category pending some discussion. If it finds general support, it can be promoted back to "guideline".
I can start that discussion by saying that I think bulleted lists are a perfectly fine way to summarize arguments that clearly do have two or more sides. Certainly compare-and-contrast prose is also perfectly common, and is more useful in situations where it's not clear where something belongs, or if it is complicated. Lists avoid repetition of weasel words and other redundant phrases. -- Beland 03:56, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- This sounds more like a manual-of-style entry, than a guideline. I think it has some valid points though; suppose that an article has subdivisions (history, application, pricing) then I would expect historical issues to be found under history, and not under pro or con as appropriate. Radiant_* 07:34, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
- I agree with Radiant. I would also prefer us to present the argument as something to consider rather than opening with the assertion that Pro & con lists are harmful. --Theo (Talk) 16:46, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I wrote this draft guideline. I'll admit it's a bit of a rant around the edges. The title "x considered harmful" is a traditional computer-science title form for essays against the use of a particular syntactic form or structure. The c2 Wiki page "Thread Mode Considered Harmful" (which is linked) was what I was directly referring to there.
The reason that I'm not sure it fits entirely under the style-guide rubric is that the problems I tried to address are not just stylistic ones, but social ones. I think pro & con lists harm the development of Wikipedia articles as much as they harm the style or readability of a specific version of an article. They show up in articles that have NPOV difficulties, and they then provide focal points for the worsening of those difficulties.
Indeed, part of what's harmful about pro & con lists is that they are (in a sense) too readable -- they oversimplify the subject. Not only does this mislead the reader, but it also makes it all too obvious where an editor with a particular POV should throw in their two cents. It's like a big pair of signs saying "Insert biased view X here" and "Insert biased view Y here".
So no, I really didn't mean simply to suggest alternatives to pro & con lists, but also to point out ways that the pro & con lists are, yes, harmful to the development of articles. --FOo 03:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thnak you for that explanation. I confess that I had neither made the mental link nor clicked the wiki link. As an extraordinarily small sample of our readership, I imagine that I will not be alone in my misreading of the intent here. If I, with my computer science background, missed the allusion then we can be fairly sure that many others will do the same. That aside, I think that we may agree vociferously. I see the pro & con lists as a style consequence of a general issue regarding polarisation of arguments. The policy might be "don't polarise arguments". P&C lists are a form of polarisation so the MoS would counsel against them. --Theo (Talk) 08:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I think this can safely be moved from a proposal to a manual-of-style entry. If there was any significant opposition after being listed on RFC, I'm sure it would have been mentioned here. As long as this doesn't claim to be official policy or anything thereabouts, it's mainly common sense. Radiant_>|< 12:54, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
Having worked on a number of articles with "Pro-Con" lists, I agree that they are generally the result of POV conflicts. However, they are, also, often the best deal you are going to get on a page. This is particuarly true when there is a core of non-reality based POV ("George Bush orchestrated 911", "Creationism" etc.) has a critical mass on a page. When two sides don't even agree that the other is a reasonable point of view to hold, conflating the two is often a major victory for the non-reality POV, since it implies the POV is at least taken seriously.
The present "Pro Con" proposal is, in itself, harmful. Instead Pro-Con lists should be taken as an article in certain phase of reaching consensus. Some articles will never move beyond it, because what is really going on is the assertion of talking points by various POVs. Instead, the proposal should be something along the line of an improvment tag or plate that says "This page has pro-con lists" and suggest ways of moving beyond them. Stirling Newberry 16:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
