Talk:Biographies

From dKosopedia

The ADL surely shouldn't be listed as a progressive organization.

1 Biographies v. Histories
2 Idols
3 Codifications
4 Organization
5 Reference Wikipedia, don't Copy
6 Other
- 6.1 group bios by background
- 6.2 Categories

Biographies v. Histories

--bgod Tue Jun 1 09:44:30 PDT 2004 I suggest moving the organizations off of this page and out of the "Individuals and Events" section of the main page into its own section on the main page. Either that or do some renaming of that section. Organizations are made up of individuals, sure, but I still find it counter-intuitive. I had been looking for organizations earlier and only stumbled upon them here.

DRolfe - I agree that it's pretty lame to have organizations under bio- (life, a life, about a life) graphies (a list, a science, a technique for inscription: compare, bilblio-graphy, geo-graphy, calli-graphy). For this reason alone groups shouldn't be listed here. Un-living things like corporations, organizations, countries, etc -- they have histories. Sorry if I'm sounding pedantic, but words have meanings and all that.

Idols

--Jumbo 13:11, 31 May 2004 (PDT) added sub-indices.

Lestatdelc 10:56, 31 May 2004 (PDT)Ok... why are American Idol contestants on this?

--Jumbo 11:43, 31 May 2004 (PDT) Because American idol contestants have biographies too. Are you getting elitist on me? Also. There should exist a page called "Biographies" which is simply a long, nearly useless, list of every name of every person who has a wiki about them. Then you should put a list of links to sub-indexes of "right wingers" "left wingers" "government officials" "american idol contestants" and any other sub-index that people think is useful. Otherwise it's like we've got 20 different dudes trying to organize the same record collection at once. "No, no Howard Dean goes under 'Jazzy-funk' not 'funky-jazz'"

--lapis 11:57, 31 May 2004 (PDT) It's not about being elist. And btw, that's a GOP slur. What's next? Is it too Intellectual to disagree with posting American Idol bios? This site, more than once, is called: "A left/progressive/liberal/Democratic site." It's also a community site so, according to my understanding of how these things work, people can put up and take down whatever they want. It would just be nice if everyone tried to stick to the stated goal of the site.

--Jumbo 12:06, 31 May 2004 (PDT)

It would just be nice if everyone tried to stick to the stated goal of the site.

Good luck with that. American Idol, Brittany Spears, these are all hugely influential cultural artifacts just waiting for your progressive genius to deconstruct and discuss the socio-political importance of. Turning up your nose at them and hinting that they ought be purged is just so un-creative.

--lapis 11:21, 31 May 2004 (PDT) Great. Who's next, Brittany Spears?

Codifications

Lestatdelc 20:05, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Should AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee really be in the progressive groups section? It is a stanchly pro-Isreali group. They are more center-right I thought.

--lapis 12:35, 30 May 2004 (PDT)From the page history, it looks like Stirling made the changes. Hopefully he'll add to the discussion here because I'd like to understand his point of view on it. My preference is to have two groups to the effect of "left of center" and "right of center." People like McCain are not exactly "freepers" and Lieberman could hardly be called progressive. I do think broad groups in the context of the bio page is helpful.

Agreed. I can understand wanting to find a suitable taxonomy for group names so there can be a solid, broad, clear, categorical groups Lestatdelc 13:02, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

--Aaron Gillies 12:24, 30 May 2004 (PDT) No idea why it was removed. Whoever did it did not remark on this talk page why it was. However, I do believe it is a good idea to preserve alphabetizing by last name. This is the style that I reverted to in my change (and is consistent with what is found in Wikipedia). Maybe this page is trying to be too many things ...

I have ZERO problem with alphabetizing by last name, and it was when I left last night. Not sure what the thinking was, if any, to remove the delineation between rational people and the Fright-Wingers™. Can we get a consensus on re-separating them back into two groups, people? Lestatdelc 12:31, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

Why was the separation of the right-wingers removed? This is dumb idea, not only have I been using standardize bottom page formatting that reference a "list of notable right-wingers" on the individual bio-pages for said people, now you can't tell "friend" from "foe" and there is no longer an easy look-up reference to use that list to name-check if someone they have seen on CNN or something is a Fright-Winger™

Bad move and a colossal waste of my time last night standardizing the footer formating on the bios last night Lestatdelc 12:11, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

Organization

--Edverb 11:16, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Is there a preferred protocol for linking to speeches from within individual biographies? Perhaps a subheading?

--Aaron Gillies 08:12, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Roll back to last name alphabetization. When the list gets too long, make sub-pages called Biographies: A, Biographies: B, etc.?

DRolfe 02:25, 31 Jul 2005 (PDT) - Ack! Just Say No to sub-pages. Leverage the wiki. Use categories and keywords in each article and then visit Special:Whatlinkshere.

--Pyrrho 08:07, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Alphabetize by FIRST NAME? That means Clinton goes under W, no B? why! and you took away organization other people worked to put in. You shouldn't just wipe that out, imo, you should talk about something here that major... I wasn't happy with the categorizaiton, but I'm not happy with this either. what do you all say?

--lapis 08:17, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Definitely alphabetize by last name. Regarding the categories, I'm of two minds since people are often difficult to put into one group or another. However it is useful to have general "Left of Center" vs. "Right of Center" lists.

Reference Wikipedia, don't Copy

--Pyrrho 06:07, 30 May 2004 (PDT) Please link to Wikipedia articles and use them for research, but better a single paragraph that references a few external sources and adds only what's missing, than an identical article. The idea of then editing this original is just a fork, you can have two things that are deceptively similar. Maybe we need a vote on this somewhere. vote:CopyingFromWikipedia?

Other

Shouldn't we format the names "FIRSTNAME LASTNAME" instead of "LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME"? I noticed that on the List of Members of the U.S. House the names are in the former format. --KansasNate 15:47, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

This page pre-dates the others which started doing FIRSTNAME LASTNAME. It is a bit of a pity that folks did not follow the model that already existed before adding stuff. Not sure how to alphabetize the new pages in FIRSTNAME LASTNAME format. Any ideas? --Aaron Gillies 15:49, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Wikipedia uses FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, see Naming Conventions for more detail. I would assume that is what we are to use here. --KansasNate 15:58, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Got it. I'll do redirects on all of the LASTNAME FIRSTNAME pages that I created. This page will need to be reformatted then ... --Aaron Gillies 16:00, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

You can just move them... look to the quickbar on the left --KansasNate 16:09, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Too late. :) Anyway, won't that disturb existing links? --Aaron Gillies 16:12, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

See Wikipedia's reasons for using the move function. I think it would look neater using a move, but then again I sometimes tend to be a format nazi --KansasNate 16:19, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Alphabetizing - how much should we do it? If we have chronic non-alphabetizers then it could become difficult as people add tons of stuff to lists.--DailyKos 16:20, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Hmm. With such few names here now, it's probably fine to list FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, but alphabetize by lastname? --Aaron Gillies 16:23, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

According to conventions on wikipedia, they should be in the format of FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME and alphabetized by last name. See Wiki's entry on poets for an example. --KansasNate 16:27, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

I was more thinking of alphabetizing in general --Demosthenes 16:34, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Formatting Corps? --A Texan in Maryland 16:42, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

I'm in. Already done some formatting. Also going to make sure that all the main page links have something just to get people starting to contribute in that catagory.--Demosthenes 16:50, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

I'm just going to boldly alphabetize these myself. I guess someone might want to think about the usefulness of this page eventually, since it seems unlikely that a single page like this could reference all of the people that we enter bios for in the wiki. --Aaron Gillies 16:48, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Looks great now --KansasNate 16:57, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Okay, done. --Aaron Gillies 16:59, 28 May 2004 (PDT)

Perhaps, rather than attempting (futilely) to list all the people who have a bio, this should just be a list of pointers to other lists of people, with a catch-all for people who don't fit anywhere else. It seems that 90% of the entries here will either be current officeholders, past officeholders, or media figures. There are already entries with lists of federal and state officeholders, and something similar could be done with the media. That just leaves the "exceptional" cases, and even there it seems like there needs to be some minimum relevance bar in order to be listed here -- not every random person who happens to have an entry needs to be listed under "Biographies" (e.g., Ahmed Chalabi meets the bar, Lynndie England doesn't). --Clang 01:41, 29 May 2004 (PDT)

Please don't merely copy over biographies from Wikipedia. Needlessly forking these articles creates redundancy, and we need less redundancy. It's fine that there's an article on Condoleezza Rice here on dKos, but starting from a copy of the Wikipedia article on Condoleezza Rice just creates two versions of the same information that need to be maintained/corrected/updated. The dKos article should point to the Wikipedia version, and add supplemental material here. -- RobLa 00:54, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

Given the organization headings "Progressive" and "Right-Wing," where would a group like Log Cabin Republicans fit? Is there a place for a term "Conservative Groups" as differiented from "Right-Wing?" I'm thinking about the same on the left for groups like the DLC. --lapis 05:35, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

Yikes. Somebody de-alphabetized the entire list. Why? --Aaron Gillies 07:49, 30 May 2004 (PDT)

group bios by background

The bio list should be divided. I'm not sure how.

Foreign figures. Members of Congress and candidates. Governors. State and local pols. Media figures. Activists, non-profit figures. Military figures. Members of the executive branch.