Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Politics and government/United States

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[edit] State articles organizing

In the Iowa section, I've removed the (minimal) content that had been there and directed them to "See Iowa Politicians." At that page, I've created a source that has all of the relevant data gathered from across several WikiProject Biography pages, as well as from WikiProject Iowa, creating a neat and concise workpage for people creating articles on Iowa Politicians. Naturally, it links back to both WikiProject Biography and the Politics and government workgroup. --Tim4christ17 talk 10:57, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, though I would rather it have been expanded to how Virginia has it, where we can keep track of GA noms, FACs, things to expand and do, etc. --plange 15:49, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

OK, I gave California a whack. See what you think, or if I missed anything important. Also, on Iowa, I agree with Plange. For this project, stick with the established format and include the wikiproject Iowa notations in related projects section. --Duff 19:31, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

So Iowa doesn't get left behind, I'm restoring upgrading to Virginia style, and including the link that was added.--71.108.231.72 07:57, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

and there you have it. Iowa, with Tim4Christ's link. --Duff 21:34, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm more interested in Oregon though, and California, so I'll leave Iowa alone for now & let someone else occupy the members section and work the Iowa angle. Moving on, here goes with the Oregon section. --Duff 21:37, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Awesome guys!!! Be sure to list any GAs and FAs you might already have, etc. --plange 21:39, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Structure

Has anyone had experience with coming up with a good structure for historical articles on Senators and Congressmen? I asked this question of another editor, see here and got a response, but thought maybe we could take a stab at coming up with something? You guys might also be interested in making a template for your state, like I did for Virginia here: User:Plange/to_do/vapoliticiantemplate - I just subst this into a redlink page and flesh it out, makes it a lot quicker to make a stubbie --plange 21:47, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gender-based categories

Yesterday, I wandered in here and noticed two redlinked categories, for women in Congress and female US Senators. I expect to be doing bios on minor (but notable) California politicians, not Senators. However, since we have two female Senators, it seemed like a nice little task to take on, so I went off and created Category:Female United States Senators and populated it by adding the category to the pages of the 14 incumbent women and to the "main article,Women in the United States Senate‎. This evening, an admin (User:EVula) deleted the category, removed all of the page edits I had made, and then editied this project to remove the two gender-based categories. The edit summaries based the removals on this CFD, which had resulted in the category being deleted 10 days before I started work. (I was under the impression that some kind of alert popped up if one tried to recreate a deleted page--I need to go research that.)

Regardless, I am interested in knowing what members of this project think about the category. These seem like the kind of gender-based categories that are allowed--it is certainly notable that there was only one woman in the Senate during most of the 1950s and 1960s, while there will be 16 next year. There used to be a Women's Caucus in the House, followed since 1995 by a non-profit version, since House funding was eliminated. There are African-American categories for Congressmembers and Senators--female categories make just as much sense and for the same reasons, I think. Both were under-represented in the memberships for most of the Nation's history, somethimes by law and always by prejudice; both women and African-Americans have or have had organized caucuses and have worked on their own issues across party lines in some significant instances; the numbers of both groups are low enough for a reasonable category, with all of the members showing on one page; there is a good possibility that a user interested in one of the members may be interested in others that belong to the category, including former Senators, whose names can't be ferreted out of the list of Senators at the bottom of the page (which does not show first names).

The CFD was originally about the women in Congress category, with female Senators added later, only a few days and comments before it was closed. It was started by members of WP:USC without any apparent discussion about it at WP:BIO, including the removal of content from your project page. Nobody left me a message about having caused any trouble, so that I could either disagree or offer to clean up after myselt.

Any advice? Thoughts about reestablishing the gender-based categories? Thoughts about maintaining the ethnic-based categories? I don't want to wander around arguing with admins if there's no point to it. --Hjal 09:14, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Since I was the person that put the speedy delete flag on the female Senators category (and apparently forgot to tell you about it, sorry about that), I should probably be the one to point you towards Wikipedia:Deletion review. If you feel the category should be recreated, feel free to put it up for deletion review and see what happens. The Women in the United States Senate article is a good one to keep, so perhaps rather than creating the category, go to the articles for the 35 female Senators and add a link that article in their See also section. --Bobblehead 16:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categorisation by party

I've left a comment here that might be pertinent to people here working on the categorisation of U.S. politicians (if that's anyone). Alai 00:34, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion about title of Political views of Mitt Romney article and policy on article naming

One alternate idea floated so far is "Issue positions of ______"
  • It seems that some modest policy guidance/creation might (or might not) be worthwhile on the naming of these pages.

For now, if you wish to, weigh in at Talk:Political views of Mitt Romney#Requested move. If there's an appropriate location for a general, multi-individual-biography policy-discussion of naming this sort of article, let me know, and also put it here.

-- Yellowdesk 05:27, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 19th century U.S. executive branch biographies

I've taken a look at a few of these biographies and have noticed a tendency to insert 20th/21st century interpretations into them. Problems include "trivia" sections detailing music or movie references, insertion of unrelated events (it took months to banish references to Dick Cheney's hunting accident from the Alexander Hamilton biography), and the use of non-academic sources to push modern agendas (by gosh James Buchanan really was our first gay president). My general approach has been to explain that editors will have a tough time getting such articles up to FA status. However, their reply has been to explain generically that "other FA" articles include Salon.com as a reliable source (apparently). They don't seem to grasp that peer-reviewed research is more appropriate for this type of article. As per W.S., "the truth will out", so I'm not particularly stressed about any particular instance. However, I thought this group might want to address detailing FA specifics for this type of article. With this in hand, it might be easier to banish what I call "pop-creep" from these articles. Of course, if these sorts of guidelines exist (guidelines specific to biographies of extraordinarily notable and well researched individuals), I'd be much obliged if someone would point them out to me. Rklawton 01:11, 27 March 2007 (UTC)