Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Succession Box Standardization/Guidelines

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OK, I've thrown up a page so we can have actual examples and detailed guidelines. This is mostly on my own hook, so comments and changes are very welcome. Choess 22:54, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Good idea Choess. Phoe 23:21, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] S-jud

This was meant by me for judiciary or law offices, like Lord Advocate, Attorney General, Solicitor General, Lord President of the Court of Session, Lord Chief Justice, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas ... Phoe 23:21, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I think that this tag was much needed, and is entirely appropriate for judges. However, I very unhappy about it being used for the Law Officers of the Crown, i.e. the Attorney General and the Solicitor General.
These posts combine several functions, including supervision of prosecutions, legal advice to the government, and chief government lawyer (or her deputy, in the case of the solicitor-general). However, as far as I understand it, the one role which they do not perform is a judicial one: the Attorney General may initiate a prosecution or may stop it (by entering a nolle prosequi, but I am not aware of any circumstances in which the law officers may perform the judicial function of issuing a judgment in either a civil or criminal case. There are some functions which might be characterised as quasi-judicial (such as the A-G's issuing of guidance wrt to Public Interest Immunity certificates), but I think that is stretching things a bit.
Given a straightforward choice between {{s-off}} and {{s-jud}}, I think that s-pol is a better fit for the law officers, because these are not judicial offices, but they are political appointments. However, I don't think that s-off is ideal, because while these offices are political appointments, they are not solely political offices: the A-G's duty to give honest and impartial legal advice to the government is supposed to override their political allegiances (see Peter Goldsmith, Baron Goldsmith#Controversy_over_legal_advice_on_the_Second_Gulf_War for a recent controversy over that point).
I suggest that the only solution is to create a new heading precisely for the law officers: {{s-lawoff}}. I suggest that it could also be used for District Attorneys in the United States, because although a DA is often elected (unlike the A-G), their functions are a subset of those of an A-G.
However, I am not a lawyer. It might be useful to ask someone with legal expertise to give their assessment of this issue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:57, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I have thought s-jud also for these offices, s-lawoff was created for. Two headings for this area of offices are too much, one should be enough - otherwise we will get the situation that we we divide everything up always more: the more we will have, the more it will become more confused.
I suggest to delete S-lawoff and keep S-jud (because it is more distributed), but rename Judicial Offices to Law Offices. ~~ Phoe talk 15:13, 2 November 2006 (UTC) ~~
PS.: Maybe I'm a little bit too strong influenced by the German system. Here we have three subdivisions: Judikative, all offices that speak for the law, also lawyers, attorneys, judges; Exekutive, all offices that act for the law, also mainly police and finally Legislative, all offices, that make the law, also politician. It is much easier then the British system :) Phoe 15:13, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
PPS.: Perhaps we should also think about a show/hide function for succession boxes. Articles, that have one to ten succession boxes are still open and readable, but there are articles with more than eleven boxes and here it becomes difficult. We have a couple of colours (from the different headings) and sometimes the boxes are much larger than the whole text. These articles are ugly in my opinion. Phoe 15:29, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I think BHG's point is that in England, the AG and SG are political appointments (from judicially trained politicians) rather than independent lawyers who are supposed to be outside the political system and may determine the law quite differently from the intentions of Parliament. She thinks there is merit in distinguishing between the political (eg A-G) and the lawyers (eg the Head of the Chancery Division). - Kittybrewster 15:37, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I understand the differences , also I have had a discussion about this a month ago, but slowly we are inundated of headings. Phoe 15:43, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
Phoe, one of the features of England and its language is that very few things are as logical as they are in Germany. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on preference or mood, but a certain fuzziness is part of the English way of doing things, and a lot of the terminology overlaps, sometimes with very subtle distinctions.
However, I take your point about the proliferation of headings: not a Good Thing. I'm tempted by the idea of combining the two headings, though I'd prefer to combine them in a new s-legal, with the text "Legal offices". My hesitancy is that while "legal office" is not an inaccurate description of a judicial post, it is an unusual one. Dumping that heading into the midst of the 270 articles using s-jud might upset quite a few editors. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:24, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I could absolutely live with that. If nobody has something against this, I will create the new header and replace s-jud and s-lawoff through it. ~~ Phoe talk 18:54, 2 November 2006 (UTC) ~~

[edit] S-ecc

This was meant by me for religious titles, posts or offices like Dean, Archdean, Bishop, Archbishop, Abbot, Cardinal ... Phoe 23:21, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Right, although I would think it has to be limited to the heads of specific dioceses, abbeys, etc., etc. — to go in a succession box, there needs to be a succession from one holder to another. Choess 23:40, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] S-par

Well done! This looks good :) A few points, though:

  1. I have used italicised text in round brackets for the text such as (constituency abolished), but I notice you suggest square brackets, as in [constituency abolished]. I don't have any strong preference (other than a slight hesitation at making so many pages off-standard!), but just thought I'd ask why you preferred the square brackets? The only real downside of them I can see is that my little mind tends to think of them in wikipedia as a linking device, and in other contexts I use square brackets for inserted text. I'm not sure how speech reading software distinguishes betwteen the two, and I'd like to suggest leaving the choice to those with expertise in that area.
  2. I have tended to list concurrent MPs in multi-member seats by surrounding that list with round brackets, like the example below, but I prefer your example without:
Parliament of Great Britain
Preceded by
Richard Roe
Lord Sunway		 Member of Parliament for Swevenham
(with Richard Roe 1689–1700
Thomas Atkins 1700–1710)
1689–1710		 Succeeded by
[constituency abolished]
  1. XHTML pedantry: the line-break tag should be <br /> (i.e. a space before the slash. I have amended the guidance page.
  2. It may be personal preference, but I find succession boxes much easier to create and maintain if they are laid out with the fields on separate lines, as below. Not many other seem to agree, though :(
 {{succession box
   | title  = 
   | years  = 
   | before = 
   | after  = 
 }}

Hope this helps :) --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I completely agree. - Kittybrewster 23:56, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah! I thought by "brackets" you meant square brackets, rather than parentheses. I'll change that. Strictly speaking, I think the spaces in empty tags are a probably obsolete compatibility measure rather than a validation requirement, but they don't hurt. (It's been a while since I had to do SGML pedantry.) Succession boxes are a bit easier to deal with when laid out like that, but that also makes them very long, for individuals with a multitude of offices. I'm inclined to leave that to the personal taste of contributors. Choess 00:07, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
BTW, while I think this is already the case, I suggest we wikilink only the years pertaining to the individual (in the "years" parameter), not those in small type, etc., etc. That would (IMO) make the box a bit too "cluttered", and they're only another click away, since the simultaneous MPs are linked. Choess 02:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Agreed, that would be unnecessary clutter. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:09, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Political and honorary offices

There's a lot to sort here. I created User:Choess/Offices, and Phoe has a sandbox diff somewhere, to deal with these questions: what is a political office (particularly in the UK, although there are things like Grand Master of France that we can box), and what is the distinction between a political and an honorary office? For instance, the lord-lieutenancy of counties originated in late Plantagenet and early Tudor times as a very functional office, responsible for raising troops, keeping the peace, and so forth, but nowadays the office is purely ceremonial. So likewise with the custodes rotulorum and vice-admirals of counties. As part of this project, we should start another page, WikiProject Succession Box Standardization/Offices, and endeavour to maintain a list of such offices in various countries and the date at which we start to treat them as honorary. (This will be somewhat arbitrary, of course, but so be it.) Depending on detail/completeness, we might be able to spin off lists for individual countries as articles in and of themselves. If you're not already familiar with them, [1] and [2] have lengthy lists of British offices. (With a few odd exceptions: no Treasurer of the Chamber or Teller of the Exchequer [of Receipt].) Once this page is well on its way, it will be much easier to check if a particular individual's titles are all properly classified, instead of having to do them one by one.

We should also consider the status of "partisan" offices, that is, offices recognized within political parties (e.g., Majority and Minority Leaders of the US Senate, party chairmen, and so forth — in the UK, of course, the Government's partisans are in fact appointed to offices of state). In the original discussions surrounding the project, John Kenney argued cogently for separating them from political/government offices. I tend to agree, but I think we have to be careful not to get too carried away in creating more headings and increasing the number of bloaty pages where each succession box has a heading. Choess 00:38, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General guidelines

Phoe made good points about accessibility in re. Parliamentary succession, and it seems that they would apply to succession boxes in general. Should we alter {{Incumbent succession box}} to comply and write into the general guidelines that the creation and abolition of offices and noble titles, their going into and out of commission, and so forth and so on, should be picked out with parentheses and italics?

We should also set a general order in which the headings and their associated boxes should appear on a page. Choess 00:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Good points? Me? I don't know where ... :-)
  • I think we should have a uniform picture - (means: if we italicise (constituency abolished), we should do it on (new title), (new office), (post abolished) or (abeyant) ....and so on, too. It looks better.
  • In the past the order was chronological and only peerage boxes had to be generally on the bottom. Now with the different headers we should reform that and sat a new standard (with each header on its place). How looks this:
Parliament of England
Political offices
Party political offices
Government offices
Honorary titles
Heraldic offices
Religious titles
Legal offices

Template:S-pol
Military offices
Sporting positions
Media offices
Business positions
Other offices
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Baronetage of the United Kingdom
Awards
Phoe 10:38, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] When one doesn't know the successor's name

What should one fill in when one doesnt know the name of the predecessor / successor? - Kittybrewster 09:19, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I would prefer Unknown Phoe 10:38, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I like the idea of {{Unknown}} which links to a category, indicating "attention required". - Kittybrewster 11:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Life peerages

Life peerages don't have a succession, yet they are often given succession boxes.. - Kittybrewster 10:01, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Remains. One User created them, however he had been convinced to do this not (with the same reason you have written). I'm currently going through all life peers and add their territorial designations, so I'll remove these boxes (where I find them) Phoe 10:38, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I think there is no list of Life Peerages to check them against. - Kittybrewster 11:14, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
There are various sources, I use ... normally I compare them with each other Phoe 12:02, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] MI5/MI6

These have been fully civilian services since the end of WWII. It is not appropriate to add s-mil to the headers for postwar officers as some have been doing. This seems to be an attempt to pigeonhole people into pigeonholes into which they do not fit. -- Necrothesp 14:42, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

In which case were they s-mil until the end of WWII and thereafter s-other ? - Kittybrewster 17:45, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Until the end of WWII many officers were seconded from the military, yes. I think it's only appropriate to put an s-mil tag on if the officers in question were actually military officers (i.e. held a military rank). Since WWII most MI5/MI6 officers have effectively been civil servants (although not actually classed as civil servants, I believe; but certainly nothing to do with the armed forces). They're no more military than police officers are. I think another tag should probably be created for non-political government offices - there are plenty of them - and this would be the most appropriate tag for MI5/MI6 officers. -- Necrothesp 17:54, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Plenty of them? Examples? MI5 and MI6 are specifically listed on the guidelines under s-mil. - Kittybrewster 18:04, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
All civil servants are non-political government offices. There isn't a tag for them at the moment, which seems to be a bit of a gap. As for MI5/MI6 officers being specifically listed as s-mil, why are you taking this to be an official policy? It's merely somebody's (incorrect, I'm afraid, in this case) opinion and has not been discussed here that I can see. Opinion is neither guideline nor policy.
How about an s-gov tag for these people? Lumping them all into s-other seems to be a bit strange when the police, military, judiciary etc have their own tags. -- Necrothesp 19:05, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Necrothesp, you're right, it is neither military nor politic, but the first more than the second (in my opinion). And you have also right, there are many cases with the same or a similar problem. I would welcome s-gov and would suggest to create a heading for posts in the TV, newspaper and radio area, too, probably s-med.
PS.: I don't like s-other :-), it is too non-specific. ~~ Phoe talk 19:56, 29 October 2006 (UTC) ~~
s-other was my invention, but I agree that it is not an ideal thing to use. I think it's best regarded as a sort of temporay marker, whose its purpose should be to help identify the need for other tags. A regular check on Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:S-other should help identify the need for other tags, such as {{s-media}}. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:36, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Queries

I would take s-gov. ~~ Phoe talk 19:24, 4 November 2006 (UTC) ~~

[edit] Extreme Makeover

The contents of this page have been substituted with a different version, developed mainly by The Duke of Waltham and Whaleyland in one of the former's subpages (User:The Duke of Waltham/SBS). The creators of the new page believe that it is clearer, more detailed, and more complete, and it includes guidelines for most categories of titles and offices. It remains on the honourable members of this noble WikiProject to provide their opinions and help us see whether this is true or false.

You are requested not to comment here on the guidelines outlined in this page but to do so in the main SBS talk page, at least for the time being, in order that the discussion ensuing may be centralised and thus more easily monitored. Waltham, The Duke of 08:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Order of headers changed

Apart from the improvement of the Guidelines page, many guidelines themselves have changed from their previous versions. It is important to note that the order of headers is one of them, and that the order given higher in this page is no longer valid. The current order can be found here. Waltham, The Duke of 15:55, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Fiction

What was the final decision as to whether or not fictional characters get succession boxes? Emperor001 (talk) 17:53, 26 March 2008 (UTC)