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)

I share your bias in principle, and even more in theory. This comes from work in more traditional media. But, I am complying with the "most common name" policy, and even have come to agree with its use on Wikipedia because of the peculiarities of search technology, etc. Consider the case of the American Episcopal Church, whose "official" name could be argued to be that of the corporation holding its assets, "The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America." We don't have anything quite that absurd amongst the various corporate entities of the state government, but some are separated therefrom only by degree. The "common name" matter is a settled one, anyway.

By the way, predisambiguating is not entirely foolproof. Some well-meaning person could very well that the existence of the redirect page indicated that the DFMSPECUSA in the example above warranted a page of its own, and turn the redirect page into a stub. Meanwhile, as the matter grinds through the nomination for deletion or revert process, all of the links to the church go to an oddly named stub. If that sounds outlandish, think about all the pages that link to List of Governors of Oregon in the context of the office. Of course, when it's moved, I will use AWB to find and change all those links, but that doesn't always happen, and in the hypothetical referenced above, it would mean changing links again when the DMBSPECUSA page got turned back into a redirect.

What I was really raising was the specific form prescribed by the guideline: "Name (jurisdiction)." As I read it, that would mean Oregon Department of State Lands, for example, should be changed to "Department of State Lands (Oregon)". I find that awkward, counterintuitive, and at odds with other provisions of the MoS. It may make sense for "Minister of Agriculture (Guatemala)" but not for our articles. So my question remains, is this a rule we should ignore (which makes me nervous about the Wikipedians whose primary contribution to the project is MoS enforcement, and the possibility that when they are finished with deleting images they may well turn their robots on article titles), or if it is one with which we should comply, should we just do so for new articles, or go back and rename our existing inventory in the Name (jurisdiction) style?

By the way, I suppose I should say my inclination is to ignore. I could be swayed fairly easily, though. The images purge has made me a bit gun-shy, to the point of giving serious consideration to spending my time elsewhere. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 23:34, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I definitely think we should set our phasers on *ignore*. As it says:

3) Pre-disambiguation shall not be carried out:

• in the event of the jurisdiction name being a natural part of the subject's name (c.f. Statistics New Zealand, Canada Border Services Agency, Royal Australian Navy, Minister of Canadian Heritage)
• in the event that the suffix "of Jurisdictionname" is a natural part of the subject's name and/or is the overwhelmingly-utilized means of disambiguating in common speech.[emphasis mine] (c.f. Cabinet of Germany, Prime Minister of Japan, Treasurer of Australia.) Care shall be taken to avoid Something of Something of Jurisdictionname constructions.
• in the event that a proper noun within the natural name of the subject unmistakably identifies it with a particular jurisdiction (c.f. Mount Fuji Conservation Authority, Ministry for Paris and Lyon Affairs, State Secretary responsible for Hindi standardization; NB: artificial examples)

True, here in Oregon, it is officially the "Department of State Lands" and not the "Oregon Department of State Lands" but despite my professional bias, I think moving to the parenthetical would just be silly. Though it isn't an "of Oregon" like it says above, it should still count as the "overwhelmingly-utilized" (which I note is improperly hyphenated </snark>) natural part of the subject's name. I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but it's "Department of Transportation" not "Oregon Department of Transportation", but even ODOT calls itself ODOT. If some MoS stickler takes this up, I think we can make a pretty good argument for leaving these how they are. BTW, did you ever see my argument for moving "Treasurer" to "Treasury"? I think I'll relent on that one. :) Katr67 00:24, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I brought this up only because I am poised to create a ton of articles over the coming weeks, and have already seen many of my articles robotically edited on the basis of MoS provisions which were buried so deep that I had difficulty even finding them. Then came the whole questionable image jihad, the aims of which I supported, the execution proving devastating. Forgive me if I'm over-reacting in hopes to avoid yet another round of "incoming."

Thanks for confirming my initial inclination to continue naming articles based on logic rather than legalism. At least we are in better stead than most states in that the legislature seems to have seen fit to include "Oregon" in most official titles, and have been acceding to efforts by the executive branch to rename agencies to a more intuitive hierarchical scheme (e.g., Department/Division/Section). It gets a little stickier, as you know, when it comes to Bureaus and Boards, some of which are only advisory, and others regulatory or even governing, but much different than some states in which I've lived where the terminology was all but random (Departments sometimes being under Divisions, and sometimes the other way around, for instance).

As to the Treasury/Treasurer thing, I have very strong feelings about maintaining the distinction between officeholders, their offices, and the agencies they may head. In most cases, I think they would be merged at peril of hopeless confusion.

I feel far less strongly about how far back one should go in counting the order in which an officeholder falls. The Secretary of State asserts that the Clerk of the provisional government was numero uno, a notion I find dubious at best. And is Kulongoski really the 36th Governor of the State of Oregon, given that we didn't achieve statehood until 1859. If so, is Wikipedia consistent by counting from the days of the Republic of Texas for that state? Frankly, I think referencing democratically elected officeholder by number order is a silly throwback to the age of kings, but with it hard-coded into the infoboxes, I think we're stuck with it.

So, I'll get back to gathering source documents now for my next surge of composition. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 00:45, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Work group banner

Unless there is objection, or some other reason of which I am unaware that I shouldn't, I would like to put the following banner in our collection, and use it on the talk pages of the subproject articles (until such time as we have a more comprehensive project banner that does it more "automagically"). It would really help with tracking, sorting, and prioritizing the work. Here it is:

This article is supported by the Oregon Government & Politics Workgroup.

And it would go directly under the project banner (it is the same width and conforms to the style and wording of the correlary workgroup banner of the Biography project). -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 13:35, 18 December 2006 (UTC)