Talk:United States Bill of Rights

Chicago, IL,

3rd Amendment doesn't protect against quartering of troops, it protects PRIVACY. Freedom from government snooping. To say it protects from "quartering of troops" is to take it so literally it is useless. The founders didn't foresee electronics, video cameras, FLIR, or other modern bugging and surveillance devices. The political goal, however, remains the same: to close off the area of private existence from the eyes of the otherwise totalitarian state. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.47.225.140 (talk) 08:42, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Georgia, Mass., Conn.

Section 2.4 states that these states ratified the bill of rights in 1792. Section 3.2 says they did so in 1939.

Footnote 1 of http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendments.html does not list the 1792 dates. I believe they should be omitted until further documentation/explanation of those dates is forthcoming. C. Scott Ananian (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 13:59, 12 April 2011 (UTC).

Unclear meaning in 'Early sentiments favoring...'

The last sentence of the last paragraph of 'Early sentiments favoring expanding the Bill of Rights' refers to the votes counted on a motion - it is unclear what motion is being referenced here. 71.241.196.71 (talk)

Extraneous link

Please remove the link to the FMK 9C1, an entirely unrelated link put on the page by the creator of that article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.100.6.20 (talk) 02:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

 Done--JayJasper (talk) 03:28, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Freedom of Religion

The freedom of religious practice and expression is conspicuously absent from the discussion on this page. Despite it being the first freedom recognized by the First Amendment, it receives no mention in the introduction explaining what the Bill of Rights is all about-- and is only mentioned in the text of the Amendment itself, and in passing, in the discussion of the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

This right is arguably the foundation upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights was built, and its absence here is difficult to understand, at best. Therefore I'm going to edit the article to include it.R0nin Two (talk) 15:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 208.47.128.148, 7 April 2011

i would like to add the Aendments

208.47.128.148 (talk) 17:14, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

The full texts of the amendments are already given in the article. - BilCat (talk) 17:48, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Article selected as United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month for June 2011

United States Bill of Rights (4 votes, stays until 31 May 2011)

Nominated 16:12, 30 March 2011 (UTC); needs 3 votes by 30 April 2011 (minimum 3 votes per month)

Support:

1. Kumioko (talk) 16:12, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
2. JayJasper (talk) 18:07, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
3. Renimar (talk) 23:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
4. Mabeenot (talk) 20:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Comments:

• I think this article is an extremely important topic in American history, it has a very high hit count according to the popular pages listing and it needs a lot of help. It says its a B class but I think that is generous given the state of the article and I think it needs work to even get to B class again. Kumioko (talk) 16:12, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

• Per Kumioko, vitally important article with obvious historical significance, in need of cleanup. One concern is the number of statements lacking sources or at least inline citations. This may cast doubts for readers of the article as to the reliability and accuracy of the content.--JayJasper (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

• With Wikipedia a convenient and well-known resource for "first stop" information shopping, articles on topics that are both well-known and complex deserve the very best Wikipedia has to offer. The Bill of Rights is frequently invoked in today's political environment. Journalists, students, voters -- they all should be able to get a good introduction about this important topic from Wikipedia. --Renimar (talk) 23:26, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

• Maybe shoot for having this article at GA status in time for July 4th? -Mabeenot (talk) 20:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

References

• For Know-It-Alls (January 2008). The United States Bill of Rights for Know-It-Alls. Filiquarian Publishing, LLC. ISBN 9781599862255. Retrieved 3 June 2011.
• David J. Bodenhamer; James W. Ely (May 2008). The Bill of Rights in modern America. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253219916.
• Bernard Schwartz (1 January 1992). The great rights of mankind: a history of the American Bill of Rights. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780945612285.
• Rich Smith (2 July 2007). The Bill of Rights: Defining Our Freedoms. ABDO. ISBN 9781599289137.
• Nancy L. Stair (January 2003). The Bill of Rights: a primary source investigation into the first ten amendments of the Constitution. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 53. ISBN 9780823938001.
• David Andrew Schultz (May 2009). Encyclopedia of the United States Constitution. Infobase Publishing. p. 59. ISBN 9780816067633.
• Charles E. Pederson (1 January 2010). The U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights. ABDO. p. 57. ISBN 9781604539486.

First task - Comprehensiveness

Great choice for an article...but I haven't the faintest idea about the topic so would not know where to start. I have made an FA recipe on my user page, and this is the first task...Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree and I am in the same boat. Here are a few of the things that I think would improve the article:

1. Move the large chunk of text from the lede and move it down into a proper section at the top of the article above Text of the Bill of Rights

Done - I also expanded the history section a bit but it needs more improvement. --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

2. Create a proper summerization of the article for the lead

Mostly done - I summerized the important parts I think but as we get the article further developed well need to refine it IMO. --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

3. The info in the article jumps around quite a bit and we should restructure it to be in more of a chronological order

I started restructuring this a bit and combine a couple of redundant sections. Still need to make some adjustments. --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

4. Create a section for History and talk about some of the history of it and how it came to be. This should include moving some of the info found further into the article up into the history section.

Started doing this. Still some more info that needs to be covered though. --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

5. We should also probably discuss each of the parts of the Bill of Rights better rather than just cut and pasted copies of the verbiage

6. We have a lot of quotes and copied text in various sections that I think needs to be trimmed down.

7. some of the sections like The Anti-Federalists don't seem to tie directly to the Bill of Rights itself and should either be removed, trimmed down or clarified as to how they pertain to the article

8. I think we might want to consider breaking the Ratification timeline into a seperate list article. If we put it into a table and then group it by year we can better explain the important details about why it took 5 years to get every one to sign it. Also, adding these details to the existing Bill of Rights article would not relate toe the Bill of Rights article itself and would be off topic IMO.

9. I do not think we need the bulletized list of copies in the Copies section. I recommend we restructure that into a more prose format.

Done --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

10. The Bill of Rights as an institutional document and because of the framework of its design has been emulated in many ways by many organizations and people. Some of these are in the see also section. I think we can wrap up the article by adding a paragraph at the end discussing how it has been used as a guide for these other Bills of Rights.

Note 1. - There is an overload of documentation out there so it is going to be very easy to overwhelm this article with refs. I think we need to be careful to use only the most reliable and trusted sources whenever possible. I realize that may be hard to do.

Note2. - As we are rewriting this we should think about how the National Archives can help. They have offered to assist but I am not sure what they have or what to ask for so that is something we should think about as we develop this article.

As a parting though the Page ratings for this article are actually quite high so that is a good marker IMO to see if our efforts pay off.

Any thoughts? --Kumioko (talk) 18:14, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

great 7 - anti-federalists go in history section (their critique, brought promise of bill of rights in ratification debate)

process timeline, split this? do we have other split candidates?Slowking4 (talk) 20:08, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Not that I see yet. This one just kinda jumped out at me. It seems long enough that it could be its own list article and alow us to expand a little more on the individual arguments each state had for and against it without delving deep into the weeds on this article. --Kumioko (talk) 20:33, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Great thanks, here are some more items that need attention:

1. Lots of citations needed
2. The existing citations need cleaning up
3. We are using different citation formats, I think we need to pick one and stick to it

Note 3. - I have solicited the help of WikiProject NARA and the National Archives for this one. They are a wealth of information that should be very helpful in this such as better quality images and researcher advice.

Note 4. - The article was previously featured and there are notes about that here, here and here. --Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I am starting to work on expanding the article by expanding the various sections. It will take some time to get the content built up so if it looks like things are a little erratic andn disorganized for a couple days thats why. I will continue to refine and expand as I go along. Feel free to comment, make changes, fix my punctuation and grammer (which I have been told is less than flawless :-)). With any luck over the next couple weeks the article will be substantially improved over its current state. --Kumioko (talk) 15:55, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

NARA feedback

I have posted an initial assessment of the article by a National Archives staff member from the legislative archives at /NARA. He is actually in the middle of changing jobs soon, but I am working on other contacts as well. If you have any responses to it, I'll make sure he gets them. Dominic·t 14:56, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Those are all good points as far as I am concerned and I will work on addressing them. Please let me know if you see anything else. --Kumioko (talk) 15:02, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Text

Am I right that this article includes the text of the preamble and of later amendments, but not the text of the actual Bill of Rights itself?--109.149.34.134 (talk) 17:02, 17 July 2011 (UTC)