User talk:J JMesserly/WikiProject Obama administration

Discussion on scope and placement

Excellent concept. We currently have Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Government which has several child and other related projects, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Congress (which covers Congress from its founding through today, including all members and topics) and Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Government Agencies (now merged due to lack of interest).

As I understand it, you want a 'current administration' cross-topic sort of matrix project. For example, as the current members of Congress will be connected with any legislation in the Obama administration, their articles should be worked on (issue positions, voting records, and so forth, which is provided in depth in the External links section but which could be summarized in the article itself). We aren't interested in past members of Congress no longer active, as the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Congress is. For now, 111th United States Congress.

We also need to work on the articles on current government agencies and their people.

As you said, the major topics (and options of addressing) in the current government also need to be addressed, especially what's being being referenced in the media and congress. We aren't an economics textbook, but if someone reads an article referencing 'Keynesian economics', we can help them understand what that means. Same with your examples of the electricity grid, hybrid vehicles and so forth. I wouldn't see this as an 'Obama agenda' project so much as a 'current U.S. government' project. We currently have the Presidential transition of Barack Obama article, and that's a good jumping-off point as everything wikified in it (people and topics) probably needs some work to make the articles as useful and up to date as possible. So to start with, I suggest you rename this project Obama administration or Current U.S. government (the latter being preferable).

This is going to be a bi-partisan administration, and since ideas are being requested from members of both parties I think Obama agenda may be misleading and simply encourage more of the typical pro/anti partisan posturing. There's nothing inherently Democratic or Rebpulican about hybrid vehicles and the electricty grid, so let's highlight that by keeping the focus of the project on what is and needs to be addressed. Flatterworld (talk) 00:02, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Just saw your suggestion. Broadening the name of the project sounds fine to me. -J JMesserly (talk) 23:17, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Re your comment, 'Current US Administration' is fine imo. You may want to invite people from various existing MyBO groups before they wander off. ;-) Rapid Response, Online, Wikipedians (2 groups) for example. Maybe you could work this in with the Change Is Coming house meetings. You could also email the people actually involved in these topics (in business, academia and government) and ask them directly for some input. Surely there are some bored post-grad students somewhere.... ;-) Flatterworld (talk) 00:39, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I just realized Wikipedia has Category:Obama_Administration Flatterworld (talk) 01:09, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

OK- what the heck. I will cobble this up as a real wikiproject- the worst than can happen is that it falls into disuse and gets merged with something else. Re people wandering off. It would not be like Plouffe to let 10 million folks simply drop off the radar screen until the next election cycle. After the Kerry campaign everything online pretty much went silent except for times JK would send out a notice on some vet issue. I'd probably have to do an online change is coming house meeting, because I am not aware of a single volunteer on this island that has edited WP. I directly contacted the two admins on WPians for Obama but no response. I think everyone deserved a rest, but as hair raising as that last little bit was, the real work is ahead of us. Surely there are one or two interested among that 10 million to help clarify the concepts related to the enormous amounts of legislation that is about to hit the fan... -J JMesserly (talk) 07:41, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I intend to name it Wikipedia:Wikiproject Obama administration to follow the cat name precedent, instead of the precedent of the US congress wikiprojects. No response from potential participants from MyBO group blogs, or direct emails, so recruitment may be an issue. Obama wrote that he observed that people liked helping him, and the 10 million who joined his site are testament to that. So I think instead of the anonymity of the Current adminstration idea, I will leverage his name, following the pattern of the naming category:Obama Administration. There is a pattern of these cats Category:United States Presidential administrations so I am on firm ground there. There aren't associated WKPs though, but it's not a reach to assume there might be wikiprojects of history buffs working on Wikiproject Jefferson administration, Wikiproject Lincoln administration and so on. -J JMesserly (talk) 17:51, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

John - sorry for the delay. I'm the second admin from the Wikipedians for Obama group. Tom Jenkins emailed the listserv today (thanks!), and I've approved the 11/26 post you made to the group's blog. Hopefully there will be some response from the group members after this. Unfortunately I didn't check my Wikipedia talk page sooner - I'd suggest you should use the "email this user" link on the left sidebar of a user's page for the fastest response.

I think that this project is a good idea, but even with a hundred contributors the project can't encompass every political issue in the U.S. that is somehow related to the Obama administration. I think it should focus much more narrowly on keeping track of who the Obama administration people are, and what official actions they have taken.

A project of this type is likely to face accusations of bias, so it is important that we focus on providing plain, factual, notable data that everyone can agree on. Even so we are able to express our personal feelings by choosing what information we spend our time developing for Wikipedia. For example, when I started the list of bills sponsored by Barack Obama in the United States Senate, I did not deny that I was serving my own political agenda. I didn't need to: there is no Wikipedia policy that says you need to start a list of McCain bills for "fairness"... and if there were it wouldn't really have mattered, since my motivation specifically was to counter implications from some quarters that Obama hadn't sponsored legislation. So long as our main goal is a more informed public we should have Wikipedia on our side!

Thus I would suggest an organization of the project in terms of what official actions are possible. For example the Obama administration can appoint people, sign laws, issue regulations, issue executive orders, give military commands, make state visits, and sign treaties pending ratification. More peripherally, but still plausibly relevant to the narrow focus I've suggested, the administration can solicit specific pieces of legislation from Congress and make speeches directly to the people of America and elsewhere (including the agenda listed at change.gov) It should be possible to enumerate every instance within the former set of categories, and probably also within the latter, and cover them in a systematic way. However, the notability of articles is often contested (e.g. list of amendments proposed by Barack Obama in the United States Senate). Also, certain parties have misinterpreted the WP:NOT#NEWS policy of Wikipedia to exclude even well documented current events.[1] Therefore it may not be possible to provide comprehensive coverage even if sufficient people are recruited to the project, but at least it should be possible to list every action in summary form.

I don't deny that ideas such as the HVDC power grid are interesting and relevant, but I think that they should only come up within the context of this WikiProject when a specific law, regulation, or such with an Obama administration official's signature has been described in an article and it becomes necessary to hyperlink and explain the term. I don't think that purely scientific or engineering articles should be annotated as being within the scope of this WikiProject.

Mike Serfas (talk) 23:48, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Bias? (if this WPJ is branded in any way with Obama)

There will naturally be some who will regard this project- if it ever attracts participants- as a cheerleader squad for Obama. There is a word for comprehensive manipulations of subject matter to reflect a particular POV, and it is called propaganda. This is a serious matter, and it deserves a strongly worded response: Any contributor who intentionally or unintentionally has such a goal need not apply- promoting a particular POV will be thoroughly opposed as long as I am involved.

As I stated earlier, whether one aggrees with these policies or not is immaterial. If one is an opposition politician, it is useful to know what the new administration's position is. If one lives in a country whose foreign policy is at odds with US policy, it is useful to have an NPOV description of what the US policy is towards that country.

It is still unclear what the best expressions of wikipolitics are, but it seems to me that it has to do with how we collaborate on descriptions of contentious subjects like the broadly controversial Abortion, or more narrowly controversial subjects like Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 which caused Wikipedia to be blocked a few times by the PRC Chinese government. To find political common ground, we must honestly understand the rationale of the opposing party rather than demonize them or use the Colbert gut check and ignore facts in favor of portraying with certainty the truthiness of one's POV. Then there is the cult aspect the self referential quality of truthiness of the pundit or politician. There are some very emotional supports of Obama, but it is no revolution to replace the cult of followers of Bush, with a cult of Barack Obama followers. That's not grass roots, that's Day of the Locusts. -J JMesserly (talk) 20:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I commend your dedication to WP:NPOV, and fully approve of the policy. However, my experience in editing political articles is that for every minute spent researching and documenting factual information, there are ten spent in a morass of edit wars and bureaucratic proceedings. This means that the content that might have been added in that time is lost entirely. Just because a story is top news on six continents does not mean that a sentence about it will not be deleted within a few minutes. In practice, as the election approached many Wikipedia article histories came to resemble a simple vote between contributors on two sides of an issue, limited only by a fading sense of embarrassment. Under such circumstances it may be necessary that people on one side of an issue must have some sense of solidarity to prevent articles from becoming biased against them. For this reason I would not ask anything more of people than that they follow Wikipedia policies, including NPOV. This does not prohibit them from standing up for their point of view against unwarranted reversions, article deletions, the monthly drive to de-list Barack Obama as a featured article, and so on.

I believe that Wikipedia has erred substantially in failing to establish a strong policy against deletions of relevant, sourced content from articles. As bad as things were before this election, I expect much worse in the future unless action is taken. Mike Serfas (talk) 00:22, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

How about an Energy Policy child group of WPJ politics?

The idea here goes back to the initial idea of focusing on Obama policy, not other aspects of the administration like whatever crises, personnel issues, news stories are circulating in the news cycle. The trouble I had with this is in putting a series navigation template on the issues of interest to a interest group on Policy. It turns out that this is not a blocking problem at all, because the series template is associated with a section of the article.

Consider Nonviolence#Green Politics. Their series represents a POV on the topic of Nonviolence, and there are linkages between that and other related articles from the Green POV. The navigation template provides a mechanism for subculture coherance by providing an alternate web of interlinkages, but it's presence is not overbearing because it is buried in its own section. That's what I want to do at the detail level of Obama policy in specific, and the broader areas of Energy policy in general. An Obama series might be too topical, but it seems workable at the general level; ie: "Part of a series on Energy policy" templates. We just put a Government policy section in an article along with an Energy policy series template, and that's that. Certainly, the coverage could be extensive for some issues of interest- eg: policy experiments at the international and local level.

What articles are candidates for Energy Policy? Smart Grid, PHEV, Net Metering, regulation of utilities, Gas Tax, Strategic Oil reserve. -J JMesserly (talk) 20:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

One problem with designing a navigational template by simply naming a list of topics is that it is hard to define what terms are included. For example, some of the terms above aren't explicitly mentioned in the Change.gov agenda. According to WP:NAVBOX, "If the series of articles is not established as related in the actual articles by reliable sources, then it is probably not a good idea to interlink them." Eventually, if challenged, you'd need to have some verifiable criteria that you can cite that would explain why those terms and only those terms are relevant to energy policy, or your template would be at risk for deletion. (Of course, your WikiProject doesn't need to justify itself if it takes interest in such a list of ideas.)

As an alternative approach, I've transcribed the change.gov agenda into Wikisource[2] so that I can begin adding Wikilinks and citations. The plan is that this text can serve as a hub from which Wikilinks can be organized. There are quite a few terms that I have not Wikilinked - especially proposed laws and programs - because they have not yet been described for Wikipedia. Mike Serfas (talk) 06:02, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you see the scope as limited to the network of articles that are explicitly Obama based? That was always the low hanging fruit in the idea for an Obama Wikiproject, but I am pushing for deeper penetration. I think it is reasonable to use the Green Party model in the nonviolence article as a format for an Obama policy navbox (however it is named, that is what it would be). There is plenty of primary source justification for the interconnections that are Obama policy based as you point out. I can see we place it under a US Policy section head under any issue article like Health Care, Economic crisis of 2008 and so on. How does that sound? -J JMesserly (talk) 19:46, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

To me it appears that the Green politics sidebar primarily navigates among subtopics of the article Green politics - mostly "green this and green that". By contrast the article Health care has only a very small section on the U.S. with the main article Health care in the United States, which already has a large navbox Healthcare for all the subtopics of that one issue. I think that any general "US Policy" or "Obama administration policy" navbox would just bring in too many articles to navigate between them usefully. I suppose you might come up with a long list of existing templates like Healthcare that deal specifically with US policy and create a master-template to facilitate navigation between them. In any case, the creation of a navbox seems secondary to the creation of a WikiProject or task force - really, it only takes one person to make a navbox and add it to a list of articles, and whether I agree or not you're free to try your idea and see what happens.

I'm planning to propose the Obama task force idea prototyped at User:Mike Serfas/Obama on the WikiProject U.S. Presidents and WikiProject Politics. Please sign up if you're interested. Even task forces are recommended to have at least five members before starting, but I'm hoping that a few members of those groups might become interested in the proposal on hearing the idea. I've decided that it should work best to start by establishing a general interest group in Obama overall, since one hasn't been created yet, then use it to focus on more specific issues. Mike Serfas (talk) 01:57, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the WP:WikiProject Barack Obama has gained critical mass. I think any future task force would be developed in association with this project and the people they've signed on so far. I think it would be best for this WikiProject to be merged into that one (as a task force, if desired). Mike Serfas (talk) 02:37, 26 January 2009 (UTC)