Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics/American politics

Requested move at Talk:Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis#Requested move 11 August 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis#Requested move 11 August 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 05:04, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

William Howard Taft has an RfC

William Howard Taft has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Emiya1980 (talk) 02:43, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Attempted assassination of Donald Trump#Requested move 15 September 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Attempted assassination of Donald Trump#Requested move 15 September 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 02:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Question: what is the policy for listing and citing committees?

I recently edited Chris Rabb and noted that there was a list of Committees without sourcing under the heading "Committees". When I searched for a source, I found the official website for the Pennsylvania General Assembly -- which I would expect to be the most up-to-date source for current committee positions. The committee information on the Wikipedia page was out of date, so I updated it and cited the PGA's committee pages.

• Agriculture & Rural Affairs
• Commerce, Majority Subcommittee Chair on Local Business
• Finance, Majority Subcommittee Chair on Tax Modernization and Reform
• Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Corrections

The entire section was removed, as being "primary sourced content", as was a sentence citing the Pennsylvania General Assembly's list of Bills by Sponsor. Since the PGA is aggregating and publishing this information, not Chris Rabb, and since it does so for the entire group of elected politicians, it seems reasonable to me to consider it authoritative and unbiased aggregated information and to cite it.

I've seen other pages where committee information is listed without citations and the unsourced information has been left on the page. Is there specific policy around how lists of committee positions are presented and sourced for politicians? I would appreciate clarification on what's considered acceptable inclusion and sourcing before I attempt to further update politicians' pages. Thank you, Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 15:40, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

That's utterly ridiculous. You are allowed to use primary sources. While they generally don't establish notability for a topic as a whole and you should take care that the source does not have some sort of POV and that you don't use OR to interpret it, that is certainly not an issue here. Is is relevant to include a representative's committee assignments? Yes. Citing that to the original source is also the most reliable source, and the information is perfectly verifiable. This is not the sort of thing that would need to be sourced to independent news articles to verify or establish relevance. As a comparison, it would not be particularly relevant to use the legislature's website to list every bill the member sponsored. That might be trivial and we should use independent sources to tell us which of those bills are significant and worth mentioning here. But I think committee assignments are a core part of the legislator's position that can be concisely listed in any member's article, and using the General Assembly's website to cite this is perfectly appropriate. Reywas92^Talk 17:30, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Primary sources and non-independent sources can be used to cite information, but they do not show whether the information is important/noteworthy enough to include. Is it relevant to include a representative's committee assignments? I don't know if it is, especially without any independent sources for it. Committee assignments are often based on requests and may involve a lot of work or absolutely none at all, and they often change every 2-4 years. Wikipedia is supposed to be written for what will be important and noteworthy in 100 years, not just today. Why would the current committee assignments be noteworthy but not the past ones? Are we going to start including all past committee assignments, too? Any committee assignments, even ones that don't meet or the legislator has never attended, just as long as they are posted on a government website? Committee assignments are usually determined purely by the whims of the head of the legislative chamber and do not conate any expertise. Being the chair of a committee or taking some significant action on a committee may make that commmittee membership relevant, and that will often be reported in independent sources. However, I do not think the listing of all committee assignments a legislator has ever had with no independent sources is adequate enough to show the content is noteworthy enough for inclusion in an encyclopedic biography, which is supposed to discuss the most important aspects of a person's life, not reflect every indiscriminate detail (WP:INDISCRIMINATE) or act like a resume (WP:NOTCV). – notwally (talk) 21:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, primary sources, especially official sources, can be used to cite information. In general, I think there needs to be a balance (for current elected officials), between providing useful information to readers (such as current committee assignments) and what is most noteworthy to include in a biography. - Enos733 (talk) 22:09, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Since he is listed as a Subcommittee Chair on two of the committees, I would argue that a list of his committees is relevant to include and cite. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 22:10, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

For this particular article subject, each one of the committees that he is on has over 20 members, and between 1-5 subcommittees. I don't agree with the suggestion that any politician who is a chair on any committee or subcommittee should have every one of their committees listed, resume-style, on the Wikipedia article about them when there is no independent sourcing to show why they are significant enough to include. Is there any indication that the article subject has done anything noteworthy on any of those committees or subcommittees? If so, then why not include those in prose in the relevant section with sourcing?

I would also prefer to have a discussion about a particular article on the article's actual talk page, so that other potentially interested editors, both now and in the future, can be aware of the discussion. If this is instead meant to try to create some new policy for all political biographies to include committee assignments without any independent sourcing to show the importance, then I would recommend an RfC. – notwally (talk) 22:53, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Regarding your question: "Is there any indication that the article subject has done anything noteworthy on any of those committees or subcommittees? If so, then why not include those in prose in the relevant section with sourcing?" I already did that, some weeks ago. Regarding "If this is instead meant to try to create some new policy..." I didn't ask to change policy, I asked for clarification on what the policy is. This is a relevant place to determine that. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 19:35, 30 October 2024 (UTC)