Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon/Government

Government of Oregon, etc.

So one of the goals of this subproject should be to get the articles Government of Oregon and Politics of Oregon up to a decent standard. If we ever want to try to get the Oregon article up to GA or FA status, these will need to be filled out, as they will then become "see main article" redirects under those headings in the Oregon article. You can see Government of California and Politics of California for examples of what this should look like. Can't let our neighbors to the south get the better of us, can we? ;) BTW, only Minnesota and West Virginia have reached GA status and no U.S. states are FA yet. Katr67 20:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I still think de-redlinking Government of Oregon is step one toward that end. I've searched in vain for a comprehensive org chart of the various agencies, bureaus, divisions and departments. The Oregon Blue Book list is redacted, and the list on [Oregon.gov] doesn't clearly indicate hierarchy. I'll see what materials I can find at the local library Monday. I'll start creating missing articles on statewide offices and governmental agencies in the meantime. --J-M Jgilhousen 06:03, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I may have an alphabetical list laying around here somewhere. I tried to find it on the website of the agency I used to work for, but I think it was an in-house thing. I'm rather familiar with ORS too, so if you need help sorting this stuff out let me know. Katr67 07:00, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

New articles

Today, I posted articles on Charles Crookham and Oregon Attorney General. With them, we now have articles on four of our five statewide elective offices, and at least the last few individuals to have served in those posts.

The recent mass deletions of fair use images has wreaked havoc on "mug shots" in our politician infoboxes. Several which have been spared remain only because they have been inaccurately tagged as free use images. Although I'm having a conscience struggle over the issue, I've decided not to correct those tags until we can obtain replacements. -- J-M Jgilhousen 07:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Naming conventions -- State political offices and government agencies

Confession: The MoS and other policies and guidelines are so voluminous, I have to admit that I had not read the entire section on naming conventions, and have been relying solely on the "most popular name" provision when creating articles.

Recently, I had occasion to delve into it more thoroughly, and it seems that I may be running afoul of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers) as I go through Oregon government and politics to fill in gaps, de-redlink, etc. In mitigation, I appear to be in good company, as I browsed through the correlary articles for California, Wisconsin, and a few other states before starting to name government-related articles, and they seem to be equally noncompliant with the guideline.

Since I expect to be creating a good number of articles in the next few months, I want to prevent the occasion arising where our noncompliant naming conventions becomes an issue requiring the renaming of a daunting inventory of articles. On the other hand, neither do I want to use a naming system that is so inconsistent with the ones which already exist within the scope of the Government and Politics subgroup.

The logical course would seem to be to rename the existing articles according to the guideline, and then follow it in the naming of future articles. Frankly, I am not keen on interrupting the research and writing I'm doing in order to undetake such a massive "clean up" project. Any thoughts? And should I move this discussion to the project, sub-group, or other talk page? -- "J-M" Jgilhousen 01:20, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be good to copy this discussion to the sub-group talk page, with a note on the main project talk page. My professional bias would be to name things according to what the state calls them, with redirects from what people might actually search for. I believe this automatically "pre-disambiguates" them as most of the state agencies have the word "Oregon" in them. Can you give some examples of articles you feel don't fit with the guideline? BTW, a quick rummage through my training materials from the legislature does not reveal an official list of state agencies and divisions but if there are any questions in this regard, I'm pretty qualified to figure them out. (See answer to ORS question, below.) Katr67 22:53, 17 December 2006 (UTC)