Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom/Ministries

This page is a guideline of how the Politics of the United Kingdom WikiProject should handle articles related to the successive ministries (governments) of the United Kingdom.

Conventions

Ministry articles should follow these conventions:

• The use of the term “ministry” is sanctioned by sources such as Butler's British Political Facts and Dod’s Parliamentary Companion.
• “Ministry" refers to all ministers of a government, not just the cabinet, but does not include the Civil Service.
• Ministries traditionally begin after each election, even if the same Prime Minister is returned to government. For our purposes, we shall consider each of these terms worthy of one ministry article.
• Articles should be titled “Name ministry”. In the event that a PM serves multiple terms, his ministries should be titled “First Name ministry”, “Second Name ministry", e.g. First Major ministry for John Major's first ministry, and Second Major ministry for his second ministry.
• There are exceptions, for example, David Lloyd George's first and second ministries are covered together at Lloyd George ministry.
• Articles that cover the ministries of two or more PMs should be named “Party Government xxxx–xxxx”, e.g. Labour Government 1974–1979.
• PMs are combined in an article because the primary source, Butler’s British Political Facts, lists them that way.
• That was done (in the source) because few ministers changed in the ministry, even though the PM changed.
• Ministries with a special historical and common name, e.g. Who? Who? ministry, should be titled as such.
• Each article of these types should contain a cabinet shortlist and a full list of ministers, along with a brief history and image.

Examples of good ministry articles

Use the following two articles as models. The tables used at Cameron ministry are ideal, and should be copied for future ministry articles. If anyone wishes, they may undertake updating older ministry pages with these new-style tables. Future ministry articles should focus primarily on basic history and minister lists, as a new type of article the Premiership of… series (e.g. Premiership of David Cameron), has taken on the role of long-form documentation of the history of governments.

• Cameron ministry

• Lloyd George ministry

Assessment

All Ministry articles should be tagged with the {{WP UK Politics}} banner and assessed on their quality and importance to the project.

Quality

Articles should be judged on the standard quality scale set out by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is replicated on this project's Assessment page.

Label	Criteria
List	All ministry articles Examples: Cameron Ministry, Lloyd George Ministry

Importance

The importance assessment is a judgement by each individual WikiProject on what they consider to be their priority articles. In theory the Top importance articles should be the first to reach a level of quality sufficient to be included in Version 1.0 (or a subsequent version) while Low importance articles will usually reach the same level of quality at a later stage.

The following table lists the importance criteria for ministry articles within the WikiProject.

Label	Criteria
Mid	All ministry articles, except the current ministry Examples: Lloyd George Ministry
High	The current ministry Examples: Cameron Ministry

Exceptions

While the generic importance criteria above should apply to the majority of ministry articles, a small number of exceptions can be made if editors feel a particular party has a different level of importance. If you wish to make an exception to the criteria, please add a new section to the project talk page to explain why you think an exception is necessary. If there are no objections then you are free to make the exception.

Categories & Lists

• List of British governments
• Category:British ministries

Templates

Infobox

• {{Infobox government cabinet}}

Navbox

• {{British ministries}}

Sourcing

All ministry articles must comply with WP:V, WP:RS and avoid breaking WP:OR. This section attempts to set out some problems and solutions with sourcing ministry articles

• For a current ministry, use the official PM’s office website.
• For ministries between 1900 and 2000, use Butler and Butler’s British Political Facts.
• For ministries before 1900, use Cook and Stevenson’s British Historical Facts series.

Open tasks

• All of the Kingdom of Great Britain (Coalition ministry through First Pitt the Younger ministry) need cleanup to meet the conventions listed above.
• List of British governments could use a better table to represent all the British governments.