Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Parliamentary Procedure

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[edit] Standard Abbreviations

I added a list section of standard abbreviations on Wikipedia:WPPP project page. RONR and TSC are abbreviations that are both promoted by their respective books and therefore would be proper to use in articles, as they are verifiable (I probably should add citations). I've noted that there is some Wiki-use in parliamentary procedure articles of the abbreviations 'DEM', 'RID', and 'MAS'. While use of these abbreviations is appropriate for template: cite parl, their use as standard abbreviations within articles is not supported by any citations that I can find - although I'll keep looking. Use of a short name of a work should either be promoted by the author or be accepted as a standard or in general use by the community.

Demeter, in particular, included in his books how to correctly pronounce his name, so he probably would not have supported shortening it to DEM. "Demeter", "Demeter's", or "Demeter's Blue Book" are commonly used. "Riddick" or "Riddick's" is commonly heard/written, never RID. "Mason", "Mason's", "Mason's Manual", or "Mason's Legislative Manual" etc., but not MAS.

This abbreviation list could include not only abbreviations for parliamentary authorities, but any accepted abbreviation that would be recommended for use by editor's of the parliamentary procedure articles. Parlirules (talk) 14:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering about the non-standard abbreviations myself. I have not added any, as the only authorities that I have cited are RONR and TSC. Even those abbreviations need to be used with caution in articles; in some cases, they have been used when there is no "full reference" to the book in the article. Since we are writing for a general audience, the abbreviations should be used only on "second reference." The non-standard abbreviations should be removed from the citation template -- but by someone who is more skilled at template coding than I am. Neutron (talk) 20:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree on using RONR and TSC as shorthand only when it is clear to the general population, and that usually means only when the full title appears prior to their use. We can leave DEM, RAS, and MAS to be used in the template variables as it is a shorthand that doesn't show up in the article. I changed Template:Cite parl to move the year up to the second position, right behind the author's name. I did this in order to mimic the citation that is formed when I use the Template:Cite book for books not automatically handled by the "cite parl" template. I don't have a favorite citation style, be glad to discuss it, so we can adopt one style over all the articles that comprise the core of WPPP. Wiki Citations suggests that the APA style is used for the social sciences, so that may be a good candidate. Parlirules (talk) 23:58, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

Are all these categories necessary? Are there others? What guidelines should we follow in placing the various categories and sub-category links on each article? The cite parl template places the categories that start with "Articles that cite..." Is this necessary; do we want more such cite categories? Parlirules 14:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I believe that fewer, more meaningful categories is better than a lot of categories, which can get confusing. I personally do not see any point to having those "cite categories." I also think we could live without "incidental main motions classed with motions that bring the matter again before the assembly" or whatever it is. The remainder of the "motion class" categories make sense, and the assessment categories are pretty much automatic and somewhat helpful in identifying tasks for the project. I cannot think of any new categories that we need at this time. Neutron (talk) 16:36, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
I removed "incidental main motions classed with motions ..." from the Infobox Motions template - so now there are no articles in that category (there was only one to begin with.) If no one objects, I'll take steps to remove that category entirely - it is empty now. As for the cite parl induced categoriess (RONR, TSC, Mason's) they might be of value if one wanted to find all articles with RONR citations (or at least the articles that include the use of the cite parl template. For now, we can leave them there, but I am going to make them hidden categories, so their names do not show up in the category listings on the individual article pages. I might also look into renaming them with a shorter name. ~ Parlirules (talk) 19:23, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cite Parl template changed

Changes to Template: Cite parl now allow the ability to just enter the shorthand title for RONR, TSC, DEM, RID, and MAS and the reference citation will be produced for the latest edition.
Example {{cite parl|title=RONR|pages=120}} [1] will produce.

  1. ^ Robert, Henry M. (2000). Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, 10th ed., p. 120

Parlirules 22:40, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] abbreviated citations

I added another feature to Template: Cite parl. If one uses Title=ronr, tsc, dem, rid, or mas (all lowercase), the template will produce an abbreviated citation. This is useful if the book has already been cited on the page. If the page gets edited/rearranged and the first full citation gets deleted or moved, one will only have to change "ronr" to "RONR".

{{cite parl|title=ronr|pages=120}}

RONR, p. 120


~ Parlirules (talk) 18:48, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Hey, that's great. I had recently done some short-form citations in a couple of articles "manually", and there are probably dozens of other articles where this had been done, but I guess over time we can gradually convert them. One thing I had not been sure about is whether the short-form cite should have the edition number. I had guessed in favor, but I see your short-form does not. I guess that makes sense. Neutron (talk) 22:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the correct short citation form should be. Usually the form is Author, then year or title, then page. The problem with RONR, TSC, and Mason is that the author is not really Henry M. Robert or Alice F. Sturgis or Paul Mason. - so for those editions that have been taken over by an organization, I left the author out and just used the short title; for others I opted for an abbreviation as in 'Demeter' to represent both the author and short title. With the Template: cite parl, if we want to change the format later, we can edit the template and it will change the citations -- for example I can change the template to include the year. I agree that the current manually inserted citations can be changed over as we re-edit those pages. ~ Parlirules (talk) 14:50, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Subsidiary Motions Template

Major Changes:

  • Renamed Template:Subsidiary motions to Template:Motions
  • Added parameter of pa with acceptable values: pa=RONR displays RONR; pa=TSC displays TSC; defaults to RONR.
  • Added parameter of class with acceptable values: class=s displays subsidiary; class=p displays privileged; class=b displays motions that bring a question back; defaults to subsidiary.
  • Added parameter of align with acceptable values: align=right box on right side; align=left box on left side; defaults to right.
  • Added parameter of width wtih acceptable values up to 100%; default value is 33%
  • Using {{Motions}} with no parameters defaults to RONR subsidiary motions on right side with width of 33%.
Subsidiary motions (TSC)
{{Motions|pa=TSC}} → →






Restorative motions (TSC)
 ← ← {{Motions|pa=TSC|align=left|class=b}}





~ Parlirules 18:45, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Assessment and Banner

Neutron-- good work on assessing the articles. There are 100 different articles that currently have the Parliamentary Procedure Project banner on their talk page. -- and probably a few articles that don't yet have the Project banner on their Talk page but should have. I think we should establish some (loose) criteria on what pages should be tagged as part of the Parliamentary Procedure Project. In particular there are a great number of voting articles that have been tagged, probably because of a past editor's special interest, but the content is drifting away from parliamentary procedure. I suggest, for our project's use, we classify articles into two different categories. - Those which are focused on parliamentary procedure and those in which parliamentary procedure is only present in one section. Then the project could guide editor's efforts into maintaining and upgrading our primary class of articles, and for the "shared" articles, concentrate on upgrading and maintaining the parliamentary procedure section. What I want to avoid is any wiki-wars or extended discussion about what should or should not be in the article. I would also like to enforce quality standards by our editors (verifiability; eliminate weasel-words, opinions and original work) on those articles and those sections that we regard as part of the Parliamentary Procedure Project. The best way to do that is to establish a clear boundary/structure for the project. ~ Parlirules 15:36, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Voting Articles - Parliamentary Procedure

I propose two main articles on voting for the Parliamentary Procedure project, potentially named something similar to:

  1. Vote Required (Parliamentary)
  2. Voting Method (Parliamentary)

Vote Required -- would be an article about majority, plurality, majority of membership, two-thirds, etc. the quantitative aspects of determining the vote required. I proposed that we rename/merge the Voting basis article into this article. I don't think we need to maintain separate articles on Absolute majority, plurality, etc. as those articles can easily go beyond parliamentary procedure aspects, but we do need an article contrasting/comparing the vote required to make a decision.

Voting Method -- would be about viva voce, division, ballot, show of hands, mail ballot, electronic (legislative), telleres, etc. - the "how" part of determining the ayes and noes. Some of the content in Voting systems in parliamentary procedure would be move to this.

These are the two main aspects that involve parliamentary procedure. I do not favor using the word system in an article title because that can too easily be expanded to the political aspects, elections etc. and there are already many Wikipedia articles on these subjects. The current article Voting systems in parliamentary procedure has more information about systems that are not mentioned in RONR, not mentioned by name, or only slightly mentioned than what is actually covered in RONR.

Things that might be considered systems such as 'preferential voting' could be covered in the Vote Required article because the more pertinent aspect for parliamentary procedure in preferential voting is understanding how the final vote count is determined. ~ Parlirules (talk) 02:32, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I have been wondering about the arrangement and titling of the voting articles myself. Neutron (talk) 02:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Not expecting any negative comments (also based on comments previously left on the talk pages of these motions) I have completed the move as suggested. ~ Parlirules (talk) 02:48, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Hoist (motion) - New article on dilatory motions.

I have placed a move request on the discussion page of Hoist (motion). If we were to do this, it might start a move towards creating articles based on functions of parliamentary motions, rather than articles on names of parliamentary motions. ~ Parlirules (talk) 02:44, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

See comment there. Neutron (talk) 10:41, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Standardizing article names

A number of our articles have the latter part of their name in parentheses, such as (motion), (parliamentary) and (parliamentary procedure). I've been using "parliamentary" for no other reasons than it is shorter than "parliamentary procedure" and more descriptive than "motion", but I don't have a strong preference for any one of these. I do favor standardizing on one, as much as possible. I suggest we don't use "motion" as that is ambiguous. If there is a consensus to develop a standard, I would accept "parliamentary procedure" - although my real preference is "parliamentary practice", since that is the name of the LOC classification and is more internationally understood. (Any movement to rename the project "Parliamentary Practice"? <smile>)

Is there any interest in establishing such a standard for this project? ~ Parlirules (talk) 15:03, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

First of all, the parentheticals in titles are generally necessary only when distinguishing (or in Wikipedia parlance, "disambiguating") one title from another, so first we ought to make sure that we do not have any unnecessary parentheticals. I will check the bot-produced list, although I do not know whether that is completely up to date. Second, although "parliamentary procedure" is a long phrase, that is the one I favor, admittedly because it is the one I am the most familiar with. Regardless of what the Library of Congress may say, I think "parliamentary procedure" is standard usage in the U.S. "Parliamentary practice" is so close that I don't really think the change would be necessary. "Parliamentary practice" would create the same issue for most people in the U.S. that "parliamentary procedure" apparently creates for others, and I don't think the issue is a very big one. "Parliamentary" by itself might create some confusion with articles about Parliament itself -- whichever Parliament you choose. I also am not sure that a Wikiproject can "impose" a naming guideline beyond those provided by general Wikipedia guidelines, but maybe someone who is more familiar with Wikiprojects can answer that question. Neutron (talk) 12:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't particularly like the use of parentheticals in titles but I don't have a better alternative, so when it is necessary to use them (to avoid conflicts with other articles that want the same name or because of ambiguity), I suggest that we (current editors) establish a naming convention for this project because: a) a standard in naming articles will help researchers find what they are looking for, and b) standards will give guidance to new editors. I am not suggesting having "rules" that must be followed; instead I would like to see established norms (based on consensus) that are easily available (listed on the project page) but that can evolve/change as later editors see fit. One of the important things that a "project" can do is to provide tools (a standard is a tool) to further the project's goals. Therefore the project guideline/standard/policy that I propose is, when a parenthetical is needed, that the preferred convention is for (parliamentary procedure) to be used, or something along those lines, and that guidelines of this type be listed on the project page. ~ Parlirules (talk) 13:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
About "parliamentary practice" - I didn't really expect to change to that phrase on Wikipedia, just trying to introduce a point. {I did earlier established a redirect from "parliamentary practice" to "parliamentary procedure".} Researchers will understand "parliamentary practice" as the preferred subject designation when researching in libraries (the brick and mortal version) and library catalogs. It is also used on the title page of the first two great books on parliamentary practice that existed before Robert. (Jefferson and Cushing) ~ Parlirules (talk) 13:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Google hits would suggest that "parliamentary procedure" is more common, although Jefferson referred to "parliamentary practice." Then of course there is always "parliamentary law." 129.174.91.116 (talk) 17:54, 29 April 2008 (UTC)