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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 2605:ad80:40:472:8966:8379:ff2f:85d5 (talk) at 00:29, 14 January 2021 (→‎Revised proposal). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

There is a consensus for the first two sentences of the lead to read as follows:
Chad Fredrick Wolf (born 1976) is an American government official who was named the acting United States secretary of homeland security in November 2019. His appointment was ruled unlawful in November 2020.
In my opinion, it seems to be the non-explicit intent of the commenters in this AfC that this consensus apply only so long as Wolf occupies, or claims to occupy, the office of Acting Secretary. Sorry --- there was a copy/paste error in the original close, which indicated the wrong text above; it is corrected as of the revised timestamp Chetsford (talk) 02:45, 23 December 2020 (UTC); edited 07:53, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Given that Wolf's appointment as acting United States secretary of homeland security has been subject to at least one successful legal challenge, what should the first two sentences of the lead be? AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 04:06, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Please select options for both the first and second sentences, if applicable. (If you select option D for the first sentence, a second sentence may not be necessary.) For example, a !vote for option A1 would be for the following:

Chad Fredrick Wolf (born 1976) is the acting United States secretary of homeland security. His appointment was ruled unlawful in November 2020.

First sentence:

Second sentence:

Thanks, all, for your input! AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 04:06, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Survey

  • Option C1. I prefer this option because it seems most neutral to me. As far as I know, only one judge at the trial level has ruled Wolf's appointment unlawful, so it seems a little premature to declare in wikivoice that it is unlawful. But it also seems not right to say, without qualification, that he is the acting secretary. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 04:08, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option C1: I'm going to push back a little bit on AleatoryPonderings' assessment that the district court ruling is not enough to call the appointment unlawful. The judge has the ability to make that call, and it does stand as such until it is overturned by a higher court, which may or may not happen. However, I think that option D is problematic because it implies (in my opinion) that it was obvious from the start that the appointment was unlawful, which doesn't sufficiently convey that the legality of his appointment was either accepted or merely disputed for most of his tenure. Option C1 is best because it neutrally states both facts—that he was named acting secretary, and that the appointment was later ruled unlawful—while also making clear the timeline of events. ― Tartan357 Talk 04:41, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option D best reflects the legal situation -- at no point was Wolf exercising legal authority and orders he issued are invalid and without force. The 2019 naming, widely criticized as unlawful at the time, was in fact unlawful. Feoffer (talk) 05:05, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option C1: It strikes a proper balance in both describing the appointment as unlawful while accurately describing that he is an American government official and that he was named secretary. Gbear605 (talk) 05:22, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option C2: I'm going to take a different tack from the others: I think C2 is most neutral, as it allows for him to be described as the (admittedly, de facto) acting secretary while noting that only a trial judge has declared his appointment unlawful—that also allows for additional information for appeals (if any happen later) to be added. In short, "1" is just ever-so slightly too final for this encyclopedia: if it's been ruled unlawful, well, why is he still in office and all, etc.? So I think C2, while conveying the information fully, still allows us to add more information later, information that might otherwise conflict with such a bold declaration if we choose "1". — Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤) 22:42, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Javert2113, I think he's still in office because Trump is choosing to ignore the ruling. I haven't seen any evidence of a stay or injunction that would allow Wolf to remain pending an appeal. That's not to say that the rest of your point is invalid, but I think that the "why is he still in office" argument is a weak one. ― Tartan357 Talk 22:50, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm afraid you've erred, my friend Tartan357—I meant that to be the response of a random reader to reading C1 and seeing the infobox. That's all. — Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤) 22:53, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Javert2113, oh, okay. That is a good point, then. It's possibly a WP:SURPRISE consideration. ― Tartan357 Talk 22:55, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed, and just one of general readability (gotta get our wikilinks in, somehow, right?). — Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤) 22:56, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Either C1 or D: It's important to describe both that there was an attempt to appoint him acting secretary of Homeland Security, and that this attempt was unlawful. I don't think it matters if this attempt is described in the first sentence or in a second, separate, sentence. Loki (talk) 01:18, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's quite important to mention the court's ruling "in the same breath" as we mention the naming, it's not as if no one noticed the naming was unlawful at the time. This makes D a better option. But if we ultimately choose C, we should end the C clause with a semicolon, not a period. Feoffer (talk) 11:04, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Feoffer, I disagree about the semicolon. Option C is long enough as it is (when I wrote it, I tried to shorten it, with limited success). I think a long, somewhat unusual-sounding sentence like "is an American government official who …" adverts sufficiently to the oddness of Wolf's legal status that a semicolon is unnecessary from a content point of view (not to mention a grammatical oddity). AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 17:44, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The rules must be different for secretary-level positions. I've never seen any publication or Wikipedia article use the lowercase under any circumstances. I think it's because "Department of Homeland Security" is always capitalized as a proper noun, so "Secretary of Homeland Security" inherits that capitalization. (If it's not a specific named position, then it would be lowercase; you'd say that "X was a deputy secretary", and that "X was the Deputy Secretary of State for Management".) In any case, the usage on Wikipedia indicates that there's a strong consensus to always use the uppercase, just like every other publication I've seen does, and the MOS should reflect this. Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 19:10, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Antony-22, If you wish to alter the Manual of Style, please establish a consensus at WT:MOS. For a counterexample to your view about secretary-level positions, see Mike Pompeo. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 19:18, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option C1 or C2 I think this best summarizes the situation. He was named acting secretary. This was later ruled unlawful. Saying he was "unlawfully named" acting secretary, though accurate, elides the important aspect that the ruling came many months after his appointment. "An American government official" is probably the best we can do in describing his current job, since that at least is true and anything more specific is under dispute. I view 1 and 2 as equally acceptable: 1 is more concise, 2 is more detailed, both are true. In any case, the wording doesn't need to be perfect, since the article will soon need to be updated to reflect new information and a changing situation. Unlawful or not, he probably won't be acting secretary for much longer. Plus, there will likely be a number of additional court rulings that could change or clarify the situation. Red Rock Canyon (talk) 09:40, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Option C1. It seems to adequately summarize the verifiable information and offers a neutral emphasis. I prefer it to D because D overemphasizes the unlawfulness of Wolf's tenure. What's most important is what he's been doing, not whether he was doing it legally. I prefer C1 to B because "de facto" is jargon-y and not widely understood. I prefer C1 to C2 because C2 is too much detail for an opening paragraph. R2 (bleep) 18:43, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • C1 or D. C1 is more neutral, but I feel it takes two sentences to say what it needs to say and it "buries" the information about the appointment being unlawful in a second sentence. I know that C is technically different from a sentence such as A, but only in context. To a casual reader C by itself would not appear to say anything more than the fact that Chad Wolf is the current secretary. D is more blunt and offers little in the way of context to how this happened (until the last lines of the lede). How about a version where C1 is reformulated to consist of a single sentence while still presenting the same information? PraiseVivec (talk) 13:40, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • C2. Simply saying "his appointment is unlawful" in the lead makes it soundly like it's a settled, widely-agreed upon fact that his appointment was unlawful, when in fact this is a single district judge saying the appointment was unlawful. On the other hand, merely saying his appointment is "disputed" doesn't go far enough in indicating the legal issues his appointment has given rise to. And I don't think that these two sentences are too much for an introductory paragraph. Orser67 (talk) 15:20, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • C1. Although option D can be considered to be an appropriate option too, but I presume that option-C1 might be a better option for it. Ali Ahwazi (talk) 09:53, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • At this point, Wolf is almost certainly going to be leaving his position not long after the RfC is closed. With that in mind, we will also need to consider how it should be phrased in the past tense. Gbear605 (talk) 15:37, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Gbear605, Yeah, I was thinking that too. Options C1, C2, and D, which seem to be the most popular, are already in the past tense, so I don't think any modification would be needed there. Re-tensing any version of option B seems harder. Maybe … is a former American government official who was the de facto acting secretary of homeland security from 2019 to 2020?
    I am also wondering how to do the infobox, which has also been the subject of controversy, but first things first I guess … AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 15:44, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Gbear605 and AleatoryPonderings: See the way I handled this at Kevin McAleenan before this RfC started. ― Tartan357 Talk 11:27, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Chad Wolf

I am extremely sorry for messing around with Chad Wolf. Suchi Sobel (talk) 22:53, 11 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Describing resignation

Special:Diff/999795692 is my best attempt at describing Wolf's resignation today without using language that suggests he legally was acting secretary. I was thinking of saying "purported to resign", because it's not clear that one can resign from an office one does not hold, but "purported" (even if accurate) reads as POV to me. Any improvements welcome. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 00:40, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Chad Wolf's current position as it applies to opening statement.

Since recent events have changed his positions: The opening statement needs to reflect his current position; not previous first while burying current. I suggest the following to discuss. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 08:21, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Chad Fredrick Wolf (born 1976) is an American government official who is the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Strategy, Policy, and Plans since 2019. He was named the acting United States secretary of homeland security in November 2019 but, the appointment was ruled unlawful in November 2020, he later submitted his resignation as acting secretary, but not as under secretary, on January 11, 2021.[4] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 08:14, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer the current version since DHS secretary is the more important of the two positions, by far. The lead doesn't need to be unduly focused on his current position. Regardless, the currently-used text has been established by the above RfC, and a new one would therefore be needed to change it. ― Tartan357 Talk 11:22, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The close on the RfC specifically says "this consensus apply only so long as Wolf occupies, or claims to occupy, the office of Acting Secretary", so it no longer has any effect. That being said, the opening sentence is worded so that it's still accurate after stepping down: it's still true that he "was named the acting United States secretary of homeland security in November 2019" and "His appointment was ruled unlawful in November 2020." Given that he'll no longer be Under Secreatary in about a week, I don't think the wording of the lead sentence needs to be changed. Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 21:43, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Surely it still has persuasive effect, even if it's not "binding"? It's consensus language on how to describe a perplexing fact. While these needn't be the first two sentences anymore, necessarily, they should still stay as consensus language. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 21:48, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Antony-22, that close says: In my opinion, it seems to be the non-explicit intent of the commenters in this AfC that this consensus apply only so long as Wolf occupies, or claims to occupy, the office of Acting Secretary. You're omitting some pretty important context there. I agree with AleatoryPonderings that it is still consensus text even if we decide it no longer needs to be the first two sentences. ― Tartan357 Talk 01:17, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You can honestly say that the current first sentence can be used in a school paper? an opening statement that needs 5 more sentences and a nest of commas to explain? We have a jumbled piece of garbage first paragraph, that is unintuitively confusing as to what his job title is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.179.168.81 (talk) 09:00, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's because his legal situation is very complex. You can't ignore that reality just to end up with better flow. This is an encyclopedia entry, not an essay. ― Tartan357 Talk 18:14, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is a website dedicated to providing current and concise clarity. The "current" beginning paragraph might be well written in 50 years as a biography. But, Currently, anyone who supports it, supports putting confusing history first while burying the top changes of today. I agree with the above that, "We have a jumbled piece of garbage first paragraph, that is unintuitively confusing as to what his job title is." Current first; unless you like sentence spaghetti that causes muddy information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 18:57, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, this is an encyclopedia. If you have a better, encyclopedic way to phrase the lead sentence, please propose it. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 19:02, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Read the first post in this section... I DID. Similar to Michael Jordan's page ... In an encyclopedic order. Current information first... and history in the history. Do you support clarity or soup sandwich sentences built on ego-over-information? I am new here and don't know what or how to create a formal Request for Comment, though you will create a biased one as I probably would - being against garbage..., will you or admin Tartan357 create one please. You both have, know how, and see that a new purple box RfC whatever that is, is being asked for. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 19:54, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see no reason for a new RfC, and I prefer the current text. I think the most notable or important position should go first, and that's clearly the fact that he purported to be acting secretary for about a year. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 20:01, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AleatoryPonderings you agree to change it to "was purported to be acting"? ... illegal acting... unlawfully acting... you agree with our own words that how it stands is not accurate and changes needs to be made. I ask again for Tartan357 who knows how to make an RfC, knowing that a member of this community is asking for one, to make one cause I don't know what or how and don't want to mess it up causing issues that happened with the last one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 20:30, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm opposed to anything that says "was porported to to be acting" "illegally acting" or "unlawfully acting". We settled on the current wording after an RFC, and that consensus still stands. The closer's additional comments about their opinion are not binding and carry no more weight than anyone else's opinion on the matter. I think the comments in the RFC about having the change the wording were more about changing the tense to reflect when he leaves office, and also (in the case of my own comments), changing the wording in the long term if additional rulings are made about the lawfulness of his position. Presumably there are or will be other challenges to his policies on the grounds that they were made by an illegally-appointed Secretary, or the next administration will issue additional some legal guidance on the issue. Also, though you certainly can open a new RFC, we just had one less than a month ago. Rehashing this same issue so soon would be a complete waste of time. In any case, the situation where Chad Wolf is serving as Under Secretary but not as Acting Secretary will last just a couple weeks. A few months from now, this brief period after he resigned as Acting Secretary but before he resigned from the department entirely will be a brief blip in his career. At that point, the highest position he served in, unlawfully appointed or not, should again take precedence as the most notable thing about his political career. Red Rock Canyon (talk) 22:46, 13 January 2021 (UTC) EDIT: after reading the complaints in more detail, I think I understand better. Everything in the lead is true, but its arrangement is not ideal under the current circumstances (it'd be best for his current position to come first rather than his previous position, even if that position was higher). Like I said above, this isn't a huge problem since the current situation will last for only a couple weeks, but I'd support just rearranging the sentences along the lines of the edit the IP has been making for the time being. Red Rock Canyon (talk) 23:08, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Red Rock Canyon I can agree to all of that. Even though AleatoryPonderings knowing it is fact the first statement should include "purported to be acting secretary" and several courts agree... we should wait for something else maybe. I still vote for putting the third sentence (undersecretary) first to create clarity without diminishing previous positions, and not adding anything to previous positions until Further proof is shown that it is needed. To put the anonymous above in my own words, "We need 5 more sentences and a nest of commas just to figure out what the first sentence is saying." and to me that is a failure. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 23:18, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Revised proposal

Hopefully this can be handled by local consensus. Here is a proposed new first graf of the lede. It keeps the consensus language from the RfC, with some necessary modifications in context. I don't think it's that much better than the existing text, but am not opposed to including this text instead. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 23:30, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Chad Fredrick Wolf (born 1976) is an American government official who has been the United States under secretary of homeland security for strategy, policy, and plans since 2019. Wolf was also named the acting United States secretary of homeland security in November 2019. His appointment as acting secretary was ruled unlawful in November 2020. Wolf submitted his resignation as acting secretary, but not as under secretary, on January 11, 2021.

That looks perfect. Red Rock Canyon (talk) 23:35, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I also like that line up. Much easier to understand who he is now and who he has been without deciphering. I would add in who named him after the second "2019". Similar to the other official U.S. Cabinet members. With that added it is Beautiful.2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 00:29, 14 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:ad80:40:472:8966:8379:ff2f:85d5 (talk) 23:49, 13 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
^^what does this mean? 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 00:29, 14 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:AD80:40:472:8966:8379:FF2F:85D5 (talk) 00:13, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It means that I support this action based on the reasoning put forth by the nominator. Please indent and sign your talk page comments. See WP:THREAD for help. ― Tartan357 Talk 00:18, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Wolf's appointment as Under Secretary is of little consequence, as he was concurrently Acting Secretary for all but the last week or so of that appointment. It should not be listed before the Acting Secretary position. This is a different situation than, say Pete Gaynor, who has been serving as FEMA Administator for nearly two years and is Acting Secretary for about a week; in that case it is appropriate for the Acting Secretary position to be mentioned second. In addition, the current version is worded so that it will remain accurate even after Wolf's term ends, without needing to be changed. Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 00:22, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Antony-22. ― Tartan357 Talk 00:25, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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