Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Economics

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[edit] Suggestions from the Talk page archive

ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 16:40, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Talk page archival

I'm new to this Wikiproject, and this talk page is rather long. I think it could benefit from automatic archival from MiszaBot. I'll set it up if I don't hear any objections in a day or two. Of course, if you agree that would be nice to hear also :-). -FrankTobia (talk) 19:48, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Go ahead. Be bold and everything. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 08:43, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
I object. I prefer manual archiving on principle. I'll archive it real quick? ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 16:23, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
May I enquire as to the nature of this principle? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 16:26, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
When things are automatically archived, summaries don't get made and important points get forgotten and re-hashed. Plus, archiving is an art; some things should be taken out, some things shouldn't. Since I feel I've summarized the most major topics, I took out everything. ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 16:50, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Whoa! Some things should be taken out? Now, for the record, I'm also opposed to bot archiving, and also, in principle, favor manual archiving. However, I would strenuously object to the archives being abridged in any way. That is the historical record—good, bad, and ugly—and the r'aison d'etre of archives is to preserve that.
I prefer manual archiving because bots sometimes fail to preserve the continuity of a discussion. Anyone with much wikexperience knows that discussions are often linked even though they may be in different sections. Indeed, sometimes a new section is created simply because a discussion has gotten so long that it's clumsy editing it, and a new section helps. Yet that new section needs, when archiving occurs, to be included in with the previous discussion, something that a bot can't recognize. Botarchiving on one's talk page is fine, because a) it is, after all, yours to do with as you'd like, and b)discussions tend to be brief, rarely more than two or three exchanges. But on article talk pages and project pages, I prefer manual archiving. Just don't pull any 1984 stuff when doing it. Unschool (talk) 17:15, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
By 'some things should be taken out' I mean that some things should be kept on the page rather than archived. ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 17:33, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Good thing I wasn't bold :-). Thanks for taking care of things. -FrankTobia (talk) 18:27, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, thank you for clarifying that, Imp Inf. You had me a bit nervous there, as I'm sure you could tell. Looks like your username is especially appropriate. :-) Unschool (talk) 20:07, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestions for the disambiguation page quasilinear?

Hello economics folk,

I'm working on cleaning up the disambiguation page Quasilinear. My ultimate goal is to find the most appropriate article for each entry to direct to. With some help from the editors at Wikiproject Mathematics, I've been able to find good articles for the first two entries. As the third entry seems to be economics related, I was wondering if any of you might have any ideas of what the best article would be to link to to discuss "quasilinear" in the economic sense described there. Any help you might have would be much appreciated! -- Natalya 18:41, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

On first inspection I couldn't find any existing page that would be suitable to link to. A candidate that doesn't yet exist is Quasilinear utility, which is kind of alluded to here, where Exponential utility and Homothetic utility have their own pages while Quasilinear utility doesn't. As it stands, I think the write-up on the disambiguation page would make for a decent stub, but I don't know how comfortable everyone is with moving it to its own article. -FrankTobia (talk) 19:23, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Stubbing it was actually something I meant to ask about, so I'm glad you thought of it. If the information could make an okay stub, that would easily be the clearest solution. But that depends on if it can, I guess. -- Natalya 20:15, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I think I'm going to go ahead and make a stub out of it, if no one objects. -- Natalya 11:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
No objections here - sounds like a good idea. If Homothetic and Exponential Utility have their own articles, there's no reason for this not to. Be bold and go ahead. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 14:19, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Inactive WikiProject

Hey all. I see that this project is rather inactive. I'm completely new, but I'm interested in taking an active role getting WikiProject Economics up and humming once again. I'm thinking we should start with a list of open tasks, and getting Assessment more organized. If anyone's interested in helping lead, feel free to list your support here or just pitch in. Thanks :) -FrankTobia (talk) 19:14, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I signed up for this long time ago, as the first Wikiproject I was interested in. In signing up, I indicated that I didn't really know what to do, but never got any guidance. So the long and short of it is this: I don't feel qualified to lead, as I don't really understand what we are to do. But I have a few ounces more knowledge regarding economics than the average bear, and so I'm willing to contribute if someone merely points the way. Unschool (talk) 20:00, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
If you ask me, I think that this project would work best if we grouped people together and worked on building Featured Articles out of articles that are under the WikiProject Economics umbrella. I find it fruitless to continue assessing new articles under the umbrella if we don't do anything about them. This was the first WikiProject I joined, and as you can see, I cleaned it up a lot but nothing came from that. If you look at my Successful Nominations, you'll also see that I'm no expert in Economics, but have always been interested in. I'd like to volunteer my skills as a article-fixer and less of a person who adds content; I'll let the experts do that. Gary King (talk) 20:06, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree that getting a (relatively) massive collaboration going to get an article to FA is the best way to jumpstart this project. I worry about assessment only in deciding the importance of various articles, which should indirectly dictate what gets worked on first. For instance, Ben Bernanke is currently rated top-importance, and Adam Smith is high-importance, which doesn't feel right. Deciding on importance criteria isn't urgent, but I plan on addressing it as time allows. And in the meanwhile we'll get an article featured :) -FrankTobia (talk) 02:00, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Featured Article

I guess, looking at the project page, that one thing that we are supposed to do is to get articles up to Featured Article status. I see that Milton Friedman failed. That's a shame; I propose that we make that a goal, to get an article on arguably the most influential economist of the 20th century listed as an FA. And really, though I think he's largely been eclipsed, Keynes deserves an FA quality article as well—for better or worse he dominated economic thought for at least four decades.Unschool (talk) 20:06, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I was the one that submitted Milton Friedman. It was my first nomination, so I was a total newbie at the time. My last two FAC nominations have been successful, though, so I can help out with that now. Gary King (talk) 20:10, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
So how do I change this? Why did the nom fail? Unschool (talk) 20:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
The article was insufficiently comprehensive. To be honest, I didn't know, and still don't know much about him so in retrospect, of course the article should have failed at the time. Gary King (talk) 20:21, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Okay, so the problem was insufficient material. Right now we need some high-protein content, and we can trim body fat later. That make sense? Unschool (talk) 20:24, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Sounds good. It would help if some participants have references immediately available (books are probably better than web in this case since tons have been written offline about him). I can get some from the library. Gary King (talk) 20:26, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Uncle Miltie

Okay, well when I looked at it just now, the article was longer than I expected it to be. But it's been over two months since it was rejected for FA status, so I thought maybe a lot has been added since then. But here are the diffs between the discussion and today, and while there are additions, they're not all that huge. I think I'll have to study this more, including the FAC discussion, but I definately want to see this happen. Unschool (talk) 20:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Gary, the main thing that I'm reading from that FAC discussion is that there were POV concerns. That will be a real chore to recify (though, of course, its entirely doable), if for no other reason than MF realigned the mindset of economics in his time; as such, the majority of economists today agree with probably most of Uncle Miltie's ideas. We do need to be balanced, but the article will probably never be 50/50 pro-MF and anti-MF. Unschool (talk) 20:41, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Some criticism needs to be added to the article at the very least. We should first focus on the voting, since I'd like to be certain that more people are interested in the article. If we have, say, five people working on one article, that would be amazing and we could definitely give life to this project again. Gary King (talk) 20:44, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Some criticism needs to be added to the article at the very least. Naturally. I'm just saying it's not necessarily going to be one critical source for every supportive source.
  • We should first focus on the voting What do you mean? Unschool (talk) 20:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm saying that there's no need to discuss the article now, since that can be done if and when we choose to collaborate on that article. Gary King (talk) 20:52, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] How do we pump life back into this WikiProject?

Main article: Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Featured Article drive

I don't think that forever assessing articles under the WikiProject Economics banner will do this project any good in the long run, nor will it help improve economics articles on Wikipedia. I suggest we start writing Featured Articles to get some participation going among WikiProject Economics members. So, here's what I want to do. I've created Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Featured Article drive - go there to propose articles that we should bring to Featured Article status and people can Support or Oppose them, then we can begin working. Sound good? Gary King (talk) 20:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm on board. Unschool (talk) 20:39, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I have contacted ever WP Economics member that has registered in 2008, so hopefully that will bring some attention to the page. I will probably close it in a few days since the project has very few participants and so activity is expected to be very low. Gary King (talk) 21:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm getting my B.A. in Economics in a week or so. I'm not quite qualified to write on the technical aspects of economics, but I can certainly help with biographies and the broad conceptual underpinnings. Incidentally, tags are evil; I don't think this project needs to be tagged as inactive, nor does it need to be tagged as a WikiProject. Leave these for other people to judge, most are obvious. Nor do I like the assessing so much; that distracts people from real work by making them think others will do it. Anyway, I think it'd be good if we focused on one really important article a week or something, or maybe just put a few articles on priority. I don't think we necessarily need to focus on doing FAR, although we can do that. I'm not experienced with FAR, but I'm worried that these could be distracting in their bureaucraticness. ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 21:28, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
FAR as in Featured Article Review? Because no one mentioned that. My suggestion is we focus on choosing, by consensus, an article to build to FA then build it to FA until that is done. When it is done, repeat the cycle. The ideal end game will be every article that we tagged is featured, before we go on and tag even more articles. Gary King (talk) 21:31, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I think that Gary has the right idea. If we just do one article a month, it will be more than this project has ever done. I have started to really examine Milton Friedman, and have placed a copy of it here for editing purposes. I don't know if this is an acceptable way to do business or not, but I'm cool with anyone working on my Sandboxed version of it and getting it ready there. Sometimes when you have to make big changes, it seems hard to get it done on the mainspace with everyone changing your changes before you get it where you want it to be. Unschool (talk) 21:40, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I'd prefer editing the article itself because it will be a pain when you have to move your sandboxed version to the article AND incorporate all changes made to the article. Gary King (talk) 21:48, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Okay by me. Unschool (talk) 23:32, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm definitely on board. I feel that assessment is important, but there are few enough articles that it won't take too much effort or be a full-fledged task force in itself. Everyone already knows what the most important topics are, and you're absolutely right that we need to bring them up to snuff. I nominate myself to tie up assessment loose ends so no one else has to. Also I agree with Gary's plan to build one article to FA at a time, and get everybody collaborating on one at once. -FrankTobia (talk) 01:43, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Creating a navigation bar

Does anyone want to spend time and create a navigation bar for WP Economics? I'm talking about something like Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/nav. I'd preferred if it was kept simple and have as little links as possible to not confuse new participants. Gary King (talk) 15:22, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea, but I don't think WikiProject Economics is sufficiently developed to have a need for one. I think a navbar is a good goal, but we don't have things like departments, task forces, or guidelines (like WikiProject U.S. Roads has). I think we should develop these bits of infrastructure, and build a navbar to go with them. Then again, it sounds like you're thinking of something smaller scale. What kinds of links do you see on such a WikiProject Economics navbar? -FrankTobia (talk) 16:22, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to have basically the "Points of interest" links at the top of WP Economics, and then a link to the Participants. That's it for now, I believe. Gary King (talk) 16:30, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
A link to the what? Strangely your Participants wikilink is not showing up on the page. Wonder what that's about. I added the Points of Interest thing. I wouldn't mind seeing some more links to it, like a link to the main Economics article (which really serves as a portal to economics), and a Deletions link. Maybe even an Announcements link as well. I don't know how the thing works though, I just copied it. ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 18:25, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
It's a good start, but I'd prefer to have a vertical bar instead of a horizontal one. A vertical one can run on the right side of the page and does not use up as much space, etc. It just generally looks really good on WikiProjects, in my opinion. One WikiProject that has a layout I really admire is Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games, which looks really awesome and clean. Gary King (talk) 18:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
I strongly urge holding off on a nav bar until we have some work to show that we are to be taken seriously. I have another editor in mind (who will go unnamed) who got a project all heated up with lots of fancy bells and whistles and bulletins and whatnot, but his "project" had done nothing. Now he looks like a damn fool, and a lot of people know it. Let's demonstrate our work ethic before we put on our cape and tights. What do you think? Unschool (talk) 19:18, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I see what you mean, although I was aiming more for improving this WikiProject simultaneously while developing our first Featured Article. Also, I contacted a lot of people to check out the Featured Article drive, which seems to be going well; I'd like to improve the WikiProject to keep them interested and returning to WP:ECON. Gary King (talk) 19:27, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sign up for announcements by watching the new Announcements page

I've created a page, which is transcluded on WP:ECON called 'announcements'. This can be watched separately from the project page for people who only want to be updated on major announcements rather than every minor discussion or change to WP:ECON. The announcements page is found at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Economics/announcements; click here to watch the page. Gary King (talk) 18:18, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Featured Article drive is now closed

I have now closed the Featured Article drive because a 24 hour period has passed without any new edits. The following are the results, sorted by percentage of Support votes:

I think this will make a great list of articles to focus on for at least a month or two, depending on how long it takes to get each article to FA status. It's quite obvious that most people want Adam Smith to be the first FAC that WikiProject Economics produces, so whoever has got the time to contribute towards that goal, please do so. I will begin immediately, and will contact the people that voted on that article to ask for their participation.

We should probably 'formalize' this a bit more by placing an announcement on the project page and inviting members to participate in the FAC. I'll do so if I've got time; otherwise, would someone care to take the lead and do all that? I'd like to move into a more FAC advisory role than a role encompassing the entire WikiProject, if that's alright with everyone; this means I would like to focus on the articles we get to FAC one-by-one, because I believe that this is the real reason why a WikiProject should exist—to improve the quality of articles rather than simply assessing new articles.

Regarding the actual work on Adam Smith, any discussions about improving the article should be made at the article's talk page, at Talk:Adam Smith. If anyone has any useful books or other sources, please feel free to make use of them. If you have any expertise on the subject, please by all means help out. Thanks! Gary King (talk) 16:42, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] economics question

Hola WP:ECON contributors, I've a RS/COI economics question I've yet to receive an answer for; normally my questions on wikiprojects get few answers, I'm hoping this will be the exception. I'm looking for an editor with knowledge of economics to address a question that I'm not sure of. An editor added part of the following, including a referral to his own work and I would rather someone with the appropriate knowledge give the OK than an ignorant one such as I. Could anyone give me an opinion on the following?

The imperfection of the labour market is sometimes graphically presented with a UV-curve, a hyperbolic or similarly shaped curve that shows a fixed relationship between the unemployment rate on one axis and the vacancy rate on the other. If the economy changes, the labour market will move along this curve. Factors that affect friction will shift the curve inwards or outwards. It is possible to derive this curve mathematically by aggregating (infinitely small) submarkets of the labour market, if it is assumed that these submarkets follow a probability distribution. Formulae have been derived for the normal distribution[1][2] and the Weibull distribution;[3] the latter has the hyperbolic UV-curve (U x V = c) as a special case.

[1]P. Kooiman (1986), "Some empirical models for markets in disequilibrium", Ph.D. thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam
[2]Kooiman, P.; Kloek, T. (1985). "An empirical two market disequilibrium model for Dutch manufacturing". European Economic Review 29 (3): 323-354. doi:10.1016/0014-2921(85)90044-3. 
[3](1983), "A family of market transaction functions", Foundations of Empirical Economic Research 1983/1, Rotterdam: Netherlands Economic Institute

Specifically, do you see any problems with bold sections, the citation or the text it accompanies?

My apologies for the vagueness, I'm trying to get an opinion based purely on the sources. Also, does anyone know if this publication serve as a reference in addition to, or as a replacement? Thanks, WLU (talk) 16:11, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm unfamiliar with that area of economics, but I want to help, so here goes. First off, the source looks legitimate. At the very least it's a peer reviewed journal, so even if it's not like the best of the best, it's almost certainly reasonable. I would have to read the paper to see if the bold section fits in there, but I probably wouldn't understand it anyway. The concern I would have is that including the bold may violate WP:UNDUE, but I don't think that's the case: it's just another instance of deriving the labor market curve mathematically. For me, COI issues are only a big deal when they serve to enrich the contributor somehow, or "promote your interests". This looks more like one of those cases where a relative expert in the field is citing his own work because it's relevant, and he's in a good position to judge that. Your concerns are well-founded, and WP:COI is a rather nuanced guideline. Sorry I can't be of more help on the substance though. In closing, I say keep the bold section, it looks legit. -FrankTobia (talk) 02:26, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Just a thought: for the maths, you could ask at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 21:26, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
The curve indicatng the relationship between the employment unemployment rate and the vacancy rate is called the UV curve. Vacancy rate=vacacies/vacancies+employees; Vacancies=unfilled corporate job offers(labour shortages)=effective job offers-number of persons who found a job. UV Curve image
I don't understand why/how would move inward/outward or why/how it would be possible to aggregate infinitely small submarkets. I'd like to understand.
--Kiyarrllston 14:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Article

I just read an article in the WSJ and created an article about the theory described in it. I'm sure ya'll know more about it than I do, so I'll leave ya'll to edit it up to your satisfaction. It's Hauser's Law.---G.T.N. (talk) 11:37, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

This doesn't look like it's worth an article to me. On the face of it, it's an interesting but fuzzy idea. If you can find several discussions of the idea which clarify exactly what it is and how it relates to other things, then it might be worth an article. In any case, it's certainly not worth an article titled "Hauser's Law", because apparently that term was coined in the WSJ article you link to from May 20, 2008. There's even a [Blog entry at the Progress and Freedom Foundation] iin which the author says he calls it "Reynolds' Law after the economist who first noted it, Alan Reynolds". So, I think you should kill that page until there's something more solid.Cretog8 (talk) 23:58, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
It already redirects to another article that is very similar after some discussion this morning. Gary King (talk) 00:03, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Hi Gary--I'm newish to the wiki thing, so I might be missing something, but it looks like the article is just there. How does it redirect? Cretog8 (talk) 00:07, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, my mistake. It was redirected this morning, but someone recently undid the redirect so you are correct in assuming that it doesn't redirect. I have re-added the redirect again, per the discussion on the article's talk page. Gary King (talk) 00:16, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it ought to be redirected. The author stated that it was a direct contradiction of that law, and from what I can tell, they look very different. For now, why don't we just delete it? ---G.T.N. (talk) 00:36, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
If you want to delete it, then bring it to WP:AFD, or you can request a WP:CSD per author's request. Gary King (talk) 00:37, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
GTN, if you want it deleted a CSD would be best, just tag the page with {{db-author}}. Additionally, you can re-create it in your user space and try to improve it there, for however long you want, until eventually it's ready to be back in the encyclopedia. Leave a message on my talk page if you want help with this. -FrankTobia (talk) 02:15, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Most frequently viewed articles

I saw on the Mathematics project; they list the 500 most frequently viewed articles. I thought this was interesting and maybe this could be done for economics. Hawk8103 (talk) 23:00, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Some scripting is required. I can do it, but unfortunately, don't have the time because I'd like to focus on Adam Smith. Basically, someone needs to compare a list of all articles using this project's template and all articles on the stats page for the most visited articles on Wikipedia. Gary King (talk) 23:53, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
That looks really cool. I'm wondering how they manage it, maybe it's easy enough to adapt for Economics without much coding of our own. I think I'll drop them a message and see if they can help. -FrankTobia (talk) 00:10, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
True; if they have the script still, they should be able to change a few variables to adapt it for us. Gary King (talk) 00:18, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics

Doesn't Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics already cover WikiProject Economics issues? GregManninLB (talk) 07:45, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

The two are almost entirely separate, so Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics was started in an attempt to focus some work on economics.JQ (talk) 10:43, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
To play devil's advocate for a moment, though, I would say that both that project and this one are pretty inactive, just by looking at the talk page for each one. This is just a wild suggestion, but perhaps a merger of the two projects is in order? In my opinion, a larger but more active project is better than several smaller but less active projects. Certainly some overlap in people's interests exists over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics, so if we were to invite some of them to work on Adam Smith then some would happily respond and help out?
I was also going through different WikiProjects to see how 'productive' they were by comparing the ratio of Featured Articles to total articles assessed by each project. I usually use Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games as my baseline because I visit it often. They have got 88 FAs out of 21189 articles in total, so 0.4% of their articles are FAs. Not bad, compared to the global average of 0.09% of all articles are FAs. For Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics, it's 25 FAs of 15159, so that's 0.16% are FAs. When I looked further, though, so it's less than WP:VG but more than the global, which is expected. After further inspection, though, I realized that about 20% of all the Business FAs are featured Lists I created. Yikes. Gary King (talk) 14:45, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
(after ec)I don't think a merge is a good idea. I prefer the current setup for the following reasons:
  • Goals, scope etc become more meaningful in focused projects.
  • Working with people who have similar interests makes decisions easier and makes the project more efficient (but we can always go over to the Business project for help/advice/suggestions if we need it (as you've just done)).
  • Easier to reach consensus.
  • Easier to identify areas of inactivity (e.g. the B&E project may be very busy but no-one realises that the "B" section is inactive).
  • Joint collaborations are possible where overlaps exist.
  • Business and economics are very different disciplines and merging them for the sake of merging them doesn't make much sense.
As an example, the Investment project was recently started as a sub-project of the Finance project with very different objectives and those objectives would not have been met without the creation of Wikiproject:Investment. Perhaps we could have an over-arching "project" which serves as an umbrella for all Finance, Business etc topics where consensus can be established for stuff that affects all of the projects -- but such a "project" will be fully cognisant of the individual projects. Personally, I think that the inactivity is only a result of a lack of awareness among WP contributors. That's my 2c, FWIW. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 15:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I'd advance the thesis that the way these WikiProjects are organized is wrong, and that's what causes confusion. WP Economics should be the base one, to deal with major themes. Below it there should be roughly these three sub-WP's: "Microeconomics", "Macroeconomics", "Accounting and Finances", reflecting the real world division on the matter. "Business and Economics" would appear as a WP Microeconomics task force, and you could have a sister task force inside WP Macroeconomics with the name "Government and Economics". On top of that, each of these specific WPs could have its own set of task forces to deal with schools of thought, theories, biographies etc. Such a division of labor would makes things much easier and probably more productive. -- alexgieg (talk) 15:17, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I really like an umbrella idea. I'm thinking of a WikiProject Business with several subprojects. To be honest, I always like to think that WikiProjects should be a bit competitive so that we're always on the edge to created more Featured content, and WikiProject Videogames is kicking our butt right now! :) (Of course, I'm also active there every once in a while, so it's really a cannibalistic situation.) I'm all for whatever helps us streamline our work better.
What I think would be good is if there is only WikiProject Business, which defines some general things such as how to assess articles (these instructions do not need to be repeated for every project!), and then there are subprojects, such as at "Wikipedia:WikiProject Business/Economics" instead of an entirely separate project as it is now. I understand that Business and Economics are fairly different, but they share similar enough traits and interests that we need to take advantage of some glue to hold it all together. Also, I think that task forces setup like how WP:FILM or WP:VG does it would make sense under a WikiProject Business umbrella. Gary King (talk) 15:18, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
The problem is that Business and Economics are almost identical subjects from the perspective of Microeconomics. For a macroeconomist they have almost no relation, except maybe in the sense that Economics is all about knowing how to regulate business, while Government and Economics are pretty well linked together. So, having a WP Business as the umbrella would be very non-NPOV, as much as having a WP Government as the umbrella would. The better thing is to keep this reversed, so that both micro and macroeconomists are happy. -- alexgieg (talk) 15:31, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm now curious to know if there are any projects that have a similar situation in that they cannot define exactly where one topic ends and another begins? WP:VG and WP:FILM, both projects I mentioned, have well-defined subprojects (video games have game genres, and films have movie genres), so they are fortunate in that respect. I don't know, but is WP:BUSINESS the largest project that finds itself in this situation? This would be an interesting precedent for other projects.
Regarding the argument you have brought forward, above, I'm by no means an economics expert, so I'll have to defer this to someone else who knows more about it than I do. Gary King (talk) 15:35, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
WP Philosophy has a lot of overlapping between its task forces. WP Religion is an umbrella for a lot of semi-independent WPs, all of them with task forces and their own semi-independent WPs. And on top of that, you have the fields of philosophy of religion (mostly inside WP Philosophy, but touching a lot in WP Religion) and religious philosophies (which go the other way around). It's lots of fun, as I'm a member in many of those. :-) -- alexgieg (talk) 15:55, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

(remove indent)Alexander, the trade-off between macro and micro economics can be discussed within the Economics sub-project of the umbrella. Personally, I think that Business deserves its own sub-project of the umbrella rather than squeezed in to a sub-project of Economics. Economics would have more of a penchant for theory while Business would be more practical and would probably take care of (amongst others) the articles dealing with companies. Finance would probably take care of corporate finance and quantitative/qualitative financial issues and Investment would take care of what it's doing at the moment (which is to make WP the provider of investment information to casual investors). There may be a few more but in the end we should end up with no more than six or so and everything would fall into one of them. I think it would be important that the hierachy be easily spottable by any newbie. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 15:53, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Zain, sounds good, I like that. Six or so is a good maximum number to have, and yes, I think the primary goal should be to make the whole hierarchy understandable to a newbie not familiar with the project. Gary King (talk) 16:00, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps there shouldn't be an umbrella, but rather two main WPs, Business (for everything business related, i.e., practical matters) and Economics (the academic science, i.e., theory), each one the umbrella for its own subjects. In other words, "Business and Economics" would be split, as something that doesn't make sense, much like an umbrella category "Mechanical Engineering and Physics" doesn't either. What doesn't mean that one wouldn't link to the other as a related WP. What do you think? -- alexgieg (talk) 16:03, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

That's also another possible option that I could live with. Gary King (talk) 16:05, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure - sounds reasonable but I think we'd have a problem because there are many articles that contain both theory and practice (such as Option (finance)). So we'd end up having joint collaborations almost everywhere and people might try to split up the articles which probably isn't the best thing. Something to think about, though - I'd look at it with an open mind if it turns out to be consensus.
Eventual article split ups would be discussed on each article's talk page, and would only happen if a consensus was reached. Besides, there are many articles that are worked on by different WPs. I've seen articles that are edited by six or more projects at the same time (or at least, that have that many WP banners in their talk pages), and it usually works well. So, I don't think this would really be a problem. -- alexgieg (talk) 16:40, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
As an aside, I think we should invite the folks from the other projects to contribute to this thread as they would all be affected if this goes through. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 16:14, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Reassessment

I would like Measures of national income and output to be reassessed. Is there a place where I can ask for this? Or is there none? (Bonzai273 (talk) 15:10, 31 May 2008 (UTC))

For now, this is a fine place. In the future I'd like to see Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Assessment become the place for this, but right now it's not active enough to justify. Presently, in my opinion, the article looks like it has been correctly assessed as B-class and mid-importance. I'm open to discussion to change my mind, and I'd like to ask others to look at the article and see what you would assess it as. Bonzai, feel free to ask about any specific issue you see with the assessment. Thanks. -FrankTobia (talk) 14:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)