Talk:Green party/Archive01
We've only been through this 20 times.
This is now WRONG. The Marijuana Party or LNSGP is just as "Organized" as (the Global) Green Parties (plural).
The term "green" is *generic* no matter how much "Greens" want it not to be - the name is in common and widespread use generically, and there was a good example of that in Green Party.
restore the names please. I see no meaningful distinction between a "party" and a "Party", other than formal registration which is hopelessly tied to national political customs.
There is however a drastic difference between the many criteria and "(the Global) Green Parties" which already cooperate in a global community.
They do not, much as they might like to claim, have any monopoly on what constitutes an "Organized Green/green party".
The agreement between "(the Global) Green Parties" is an entirely bottom-up consensual agreement between themselves that cannot be forced on anyone else who calls themselves "green" or even "Green". That is critically important to the philosophy of "(the Global) Green Parties" and the terminology now in use confuses that distinction beyond sanity.
Please, understand the material, before you change the names of things:
NO ONE says that "(the Global) Green Parties" have or maintain any control of the term "green party" or "Green Party" - they are simply one of many groups attempting to control the public's mind-share re: what it means to organize such a party.
For instance, opponents of "(the Global) Green Parties" often try to characterize them as single-issue advocates, as top-down imposers of a particular value system, or (as you are doing) seeking to control the iconic use of a very common word.
The purpose of wikipedia is to make this distinction clear but NOT to take sides. The name "Organized Green Party" clearly takes a side... whether it has capitals in it or not.
I repeat, again for the record, that wikipedia *MUST NOT ADD SPURIOUS CAPITALS* in the user interface, and that we will keep having these arguments until it is fixed.
I'm tired of this. All of this was discussed in the talk, several times, and people who don't read it, and who also don't understand the material, keep changing the names.
- Maybe part of the problem is that you keep writing pages and pages of material that make little sense. You keep saying "(the Global) Green Parties". Is that a fixed term in common use, or did you just make that up? In any event, what exactly does this term refer to? AxelBoldt
- Please don't accuse people of not reading the talk pages. Honest people can disagree.
- If most people don't understand the material, then it's important to word it so somebody not steeped in green v. Green debates can understand. One way of making the distinction is to simply say that there are many parties who call themselves green/Green, some of whom give a particular meaning to "Green" embodied in the four pillars/ten key values. Others use other meanings. Then there is "no monopoly" on "green", "Green", "Organized", "Global" or anything.
- Also, these talk pages are not the place to discuss capitalization anymore, especially not by shouting. It's listed on bug reports, you can discuss the merits there. We've lived with many different capitalization/namespace/subpage schemes here and learned to live with them or change the software. Be creative, be bold. Find new, exciting ways to get around the challenges posed. But please don't shout. It's loud enough in here already. DanKeshet
- I repeat, again for the record, that wikipedia *MUST NOT ADD SPURIOUS CAPITALS* in the user interface, and that we will keep having these arguments until it is fixed.
(1) This is not ever going to be fixed, because it's not a bug. Get over it, and work with the medium like a resonsible writer. Wikipedia titles begin with uppercase. Always have, always will, period, end of story, forever and ever, amen.
(2) There is, without question, a single global organization that the mass media of most countries thinks of as "the green party", and that organization (loose as it may be) deserves to be covered in its own right. Pick a name for it--I called it "Organized Green Party", but maybe that's not a good name. OK, call it "Global Green Party" or "Consensus Green Party" or something, but give it a name, let it have its own article, and make the other parties links on the generic green party page.
1. Sorry, Lee Daniel Crocker, but it is technically possible to get in and hack up the source code to fix the bug. At some point in human history the revolutionary pressure to do this will come to some breaking point, and that is obviously exactly what Karl Marx meant in his manifesto. ;-) Spurious wikipedia capitalization confusing proper and generic nouns enraged the proletariat to reclaim the source code, then their language, then the world. <-- what future history will say.
- As I argued elsewhere but will repeat here, even if--and I don't necessarily grant that this is the case, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument--even if this change in the software would be better for this article, that doesn't make a valid argument for changing the software to better suit the purpose of Wikipedia as a whole, which is far more important. Personally, I argued that the fact that the software uses the same string of letters for a page title and a page identifier is a bad thing; but there's a facility in the software to make them read better (the | thing), and the benefit of making ad-hoc links easier to create for writers outweighed that concern. Likewise, the benefit of easy searches, and being able to make lowercase links inside sentences that link to properly capitalized article titles far outweigh the awkwardness of this one case. --LDC
2. I agree completely. The term "Global Green Parties" is exactly the one these parties use for themselves, and it does deserve to be covered more or less as it defines itself. Members of these are specifically "GlobalGreens" (all one word) which is a subset of "Greens" (Four Pillar type) which is a subset of "greens" (anyone who claims that breathing and drinking clean water is a moral necessity and has some weird rationale of that...)
That leaves room for all kinds of controversy and crap here in 'green party', and lets 'green' versus 'Green' live in the 'g/Green' def'n (where literally everyone on this planet can fight over it - this is no doubt where human society unifies itself, thank you for participating).
- -)
3. I apologize. It wasn't so much that you changed "Green Parties" to "organized Green Party", it was more that this came after a bunch of truly mindless hacks by someone else and was wasting my time at a moment when something else had to be done. I overstated my objections.
Now, would you like to do the honors, or should I?
Some people here think I'm really being a prig on this point, but since you came up with teh right solution, I'd like to let you settle it... an edit by me on this file is sometimes a target for someone's undoing.
- I couldn't find the term "Global Green Parties" anywhere on the net. "Global Greens" is used, as is "Green Parties world wide". AxelBoldt
Then Global Greens refers to the members and supporters and vague fellow travellers of those parties and their Four Pillars, "Green Parties world wide" describes the general concept without committing to a specific idea of how they cooperate.
Also, as a side issue, GlobalGreens refers specifically to the conference and Charter from the 2001 Australia conference (which is treated in the article but is not given any exclusive status as defining the roles - it is a "Ten Key Values" rather than "Four Pillars" basis of unity, and not all Greens went...) - i.e. the GlobalGreens (all one word) are the very few people communicating at http://globalgreens.org
Whereas, the Global Greens are the very many people vaguely supporting the parties at http://greens.org
I believe those are the definitions they use themselves... which is fair in the longer article but not in this short one...
With all due respect to the 'gentleman' across the aisle, there is nothing wrong with putting an article topic in lower case. I do it frequently.
Remember to distinguish the article title from the URL, e.g., http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/greens
See sting for an example of an article about two uppercase Stings and two other lowercase stings.
Furthermore, when making a reference with double square brackets, you can use whatever capitalization you like: Sting is a British rocker, and a bee has a sting.
What's all the fuss about?
Ed Poor -- very good, always helps
What's wrong with that approach is that like a dictionary, an encyclopedia must distinguish between Proper and generic names. It could do that with single or double quotes, in titles or URLs, but it must do it reliably.
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Greens and http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/greens must be able to be different things in the same sense that http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Sting and http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/sting are totally different and unrelated things. URLs are case-sensitive after the domain name, for this among other reasons.
Another solution is two different name spaces, one for proper names and acronyms and attributions only, the other for generic use of terms that are contested in the language-space as opposed to in the meat-space...
The server appears to be case-insensitive for the first word of article names, and case-sensitive for words after the first. Try these:
- http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/robert_heinlein - fails
- http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/robert_Heinlein - works (surprisingly)
- http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Robert_heinlein - fails
- http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Robert_Heinlein - works (as one would expect)
I think we would agree that the server's convention is at best on crack.
Very dumb idea: add "the_" before proper names, so it's "the_Sting" (or as wiki presents it "The_Sting" umm oops well namespace problems again)... At least then "the_Green_Parties" is presented without a big problem, and "green_parties" can be given a neutral treatment. The wiki UI bug can be fixed later.
This is becoming important since there are distinctions made in [political economy] between generalized positions of [socialist parties], [capitalist parties], [libertarian parties] and [green parties] - which concepts should not be confused with current global associations of political parties that only *claim* to represent those points of view...
i.e. it's fairly clear that there is a difference between the dozens of [socialist parties] and the International Socialists, or the ILO, or etc., even though many groups would like to say that they represent all "Socialist parties", it just isn't true.
Likewise the U.S. Libertarian party isn't particularly libertarian about where deeds in land come from... straight from King George III.
- -)
This encyclopedia does distinugish between generic and proper names: by explaining, in plain text, the distinction (when needed) on a disambiguating page, which points to more specifically-named titles, all of which are capitalized, just as is done in every other encyclopedia in print (but not, as you point out, in Dictionaries--but Wikipedia is not a dictionary). That decision has already been discussed for months, ad nauseam, and that decision has already been made. We, as a community, had many long discussions about the various merits of doing it that way and 20 other ways, and we are all very smart people who came to our present decision on how the software works for many very good reasons, and your personal convenience wasn't one of them. If you want to participate here, you need to respect the conventions we have created, and work with the software we have produced, and stop whining about it.
I, like several other people here, am a professional writer, and I think the conventions we have here are very good. And as I point out, encyclopedias also capitalize article titles, and explain the distinction between generic and proper terms when necessary. The time for your arguments is past--now it's time for you to help us choose an appropriate title for the content which is now "Organized Green Party", but which you point out is not good. "Global Greens" is my preference, because that's what the actual greens.org web site uses. But if that particular organization is really a subset or superset of what the article describes (I don't know--you're the green fellow, my expertise is writing), then we'll have to use something different. So please, give us some suggestions that follow our conventions. Help us out. Work with us. --LDC