Talk:Alaska House of Representatives

Alaska Legislature pages

See discussion at Talk:Alaska Legislature for proposal on organization of Alaska Legislature pages. Please comment there if you've got a problem with what I'm proposing. Thanks. --AKfax 19:36, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Coverage bias

Has anyone noticed that all the Democratic members have articles, while only one Republican does? It seems to be pretty blatant systemic bias. Superm401 - Talk 04:45, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

So go ahead and create a few Republican ones? It's not all that hard and you can get an idea for which sources are most useful by looking at the Democratic legislators' pages. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 12:47, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Majority

The House Majority website suggests that a few Democrats are part of the majority. This doesn't seem to be reflected in the article. What's the situation now? Qqqqqq (talk) 05:25, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

All current members of House now have pages

I see that someone recently created a page for Pete Petersen. I just created a page for Neal Foster, so that means that all current members of the House now have their own pages. Don't forget that there will soon be a vacancy in the House with Nancy Dahlstrom's pending resignation. RadioKAOS (talk) 07:01, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Lora Reinbold

Rep. Reinbold was ejected from the Republican caucus in 2015, and I was curious if that rift has mended or if she still has no caucus? She was seriously challenged in the 2016 primary as well. If so, she should still be noted as having no caucus in the table of members. Thinking specifically of User:RadioKAOS for this question. Thanks! Nevermore27 (talk) 01:02, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. First of all, Reinbold is front and center in the photo on the homepage of the website you included in the EL section, in between Cathy Tilton and Chris Birch. Second, the Alaska Dispatch News started paywalling their website this week, so that makes a lot of prime news sources inaccessible to a lot of folks. However, thankfully other sources still exist.

Despite that, such matters are the least of my concerns for this article. In Talk:Alaska Legislature#Alaska Legislature pages, it was proposed nearly a decade ago to move this sort of content to articles pertaining to specific legislatures, leaving this and related articles to cover more generalized aspects of their associated topics. Take a good look at 26th Alaska State Legislature, an article with next to zero substance for nearly six-and-a-half years but with plenty of people piddling around making unproductive edits the whole time, while content and sources related to that topic are buried in past revisions of other articles. Same with other legislatures. Why? I took a shot at fixing it several years ago, giving up before I saved anything after realizing that those responsible for the mess in the first place have been around long enough to know better than to validate the concerns of others that we're really trying to be a directory or a news site. Those editors have instead chosen to spend years and years fixated on an undue weight exercise known as dwelling on inordinate details of caucus organization. From watching the legislature on television and from reading any number of book sources, their real work occurs in committees, yet that aspect has been relegated to the level of a glorified footnote. "Wikipedia is not a directory/newspaper" means that you don't spend most of your time focusing on edits which have a short shelf life, yet that's exactly what's happened here and in thousands of other places across the encyclopedia. We should take the advice given in {{Historical election article}} that we're not here to be a daily tally sheet.

On a related note, the list of members was a bit disturbing in terms of redlinks versus recently-created articles. I couldn't help but notice a pattern over the past year of giving priority in creating new articles to a) clients of a certain political consultant and b) folks who aren't white males. I've known Chris Birch for roughly 30 years, so I may have a conflict of interest. However, we're talking about someone whose political career began in 1984 in an elected office with a constituency of well over 50,000 people and has included serving on the governing bodies of two of the three currently most-populated municipalities in Alaska, among other claims to notability which also stretch back decades. We're really trying to portray him as being notable only for holding this particular office and nothing else matters? That's what's I've seen in countless other cases. It was really shocking to come across Helen Wise and only see mention of her being a one-term state representative with a constituency of a little more than 50,000 peop;le, when several years before that she was president of the National Education Association, which at the time had a membership of 1.3 million. Do the editors responsible for that think they're fooling anyone other than themselves? Back to Alaska, David Wilson, Dean Westlake and Ivy Spohnholz are absolutely small potatoes compared to Birch, Tom Begich, Natasha von Imhof, Chuck Kopp and Jennifer Johnston. Speaking of Spohnholz, it further shows a lack of credibility by failing to acknowledge the existence of her mother, who herself served in the House, I believe representing pretty much the same constituency in East Anchorage. In other words, get it together. If I can see right through all this, so can anyone else. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 06:44, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Erm, User:RadioKAOS I think your concerns would be better put to use elsewhere? I mean, be bold and make changes if you think it would make wikipedia a better place, as long as they don't conflict with WP. In the mean time, I'm pretty sure you didn't even approach my question as to whether Rep. Reinbold is a current member of the Republican caucus? Nevermore27 (talk) 02:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

And redux...

So, from reading the non-explanation above, putting my energies to better use elsewhere really means I should stay away from content that others are trying to WP:OWN, pawning off all sort and manner of bullshit in the process? Allow me to explain...

• An announcement was made regarding Zach Fansler's impending resignation on February 2 and was published by the media that same day. That doesn't mean the seat became vacant on February 2. While this exact practice is widespread on the encyclopedia, including quite constantly with this article, it doesn't excuse away the obvious WP:CRYSTAL and possible additional WP:OR violations. If you had bothered to actually read the sources rather than pick one at random for the sake of claiming that you're contributing sourced content, you would have realized this. I'm going to cherry-pick this story because it shows evidence of basic fact-checking. Specifically, this paragraph: "His resignation was officially announced Friday morning in a regularly scheduled meeting of the House of Representatives. The letter did not include an effective date, so Fansler’s resignation will become effective Feb. 12, 10 days after it was filed." This is affirmed by this Wayback Machine capture of the House homepage taken earlier this afternoon, which shows that Fansler is still a member. This is not the only time Nevermore27 has done this exact same thing. As seen in this edit, Nevermore claims that a Senate seat became vacant on January 9. Well, the very same reporter for the very same Juneau Empire included the following in the very first paragraph on his story about Mike Dunleavy's resignation: "His resignation is effective Jan. 15, he told the Empire". The Wayback Machine capture of the Senate's homepage from January 14 that I viewed a week or two ago seems to have disappeared. Sure enough, though, Dunleavy was shown as a member on that page at that time. This is more of the same sort of arrogance in assuming that our audience is dumbed down and will accept any shit we shovel. Please. It suggests that our purpose is to be a dumping ground for URLs which qualify under WP:RS, that it's okay to create any fanciful narrative surrounding it, and that we have no obligation to readers to be factually accurate. That's not what WP:TRUTH is about. It also suggests that the mighty global giant Wikipedia is actually on the level of a fourth-rate small-town newspaper which gives more weight to announcements of occurrences than to the occurrences themselves because rehashing press releases beats the hell out of spending limited resources on actually reporting something. In the fashion of "The Emperor's New Clothes", it seems as though the individuals who spend the most time around here are the least capable of seeing these problems.
• I was looking in the revision history for something when I see this edit summary justifying further tearing down anything not having to do with relentlessly pushing particular facets of this topic: "if we're not going to actually use the images column, there's no point in having it.". Gee, looks like there's a gang of images over there at Commons. I guess the redlink you see means there's no project page called WP:ITSNOTMYPROBLEM to try to excuse that away.
• For this one editor being all over this article, one would hope that the notation in the table regarding appointed members would be factually accurate and not reflect undue weight. It appeared it was eradicated several years ago during the mess created when the article was updated for the 28th Legislature. It was restored some time later, but originally only for Ivy Spohnholz, now also for John Lincoln, but not any other appointed members. After all, reflecting the other appointed members would be reflecting history rather than today's headlines/trending topics within the past X number of months/years, and we can't have that around here. I don't wish to spend further time checking how long this undue weight has gone on, but it may be necessary to point out that Spohnholz is another client of the aforementioned political consultant whose clients all magically have Wikipedia articles while many people with much stronger claims to notability don't.
• Speaking further of reflecting particular things, this tendency to use the "nolink" parameter in the name sorting template, mostly recently with John Lincoln. This leads me to believe that we have one more editor who feels entitled to exercise veto power over the long-held stance that state legislators are automatically notable. We saw a recent death of yet another former legislator, Mae Tischer. However, no proclamation from the governor's office, which is typically used to source the borderline WP:NOTMEMORIAL violations which keep popping up in response. Anyway, I'm honestly supposed to believe that unremarkable short-timers like Zach Fansler and Dean Westlake are "notable" because of when they served but that Mae Tischer isn't "notable" because she was an unremarkable short-timer in the legislature 35 years ago? Before you answer that, consider how far this community has already gone in collectively pushing that POV. Over on one of the encyclopedia's numerous walled gardens, we had one editor making such claims about Joshua Wright shortly after his death, yet I don't see that editor nominating the article for deletion. Can you say "paper tiger"? Good, I knew you could. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 23:40, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

• Dude, what the actual fuck. If I made a mistake, all you have to do is politely correct it, it doesn't require a manifesto. Get your head out of your ass. Nevermore27 (talk) 01:12, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Caucus confusion

Needless to say this article's coalition table might need to be reworked. I'm not exactly comfortable with it listing the coalition like it has a majority in the "Current composition" table. While they have the most members and the Speaker, 20 isn't a majority. You need 21 votes. Toa Nidhiki05 19:52, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Geran Tarr rejoins majority coalition

https://twitter.com/mattbuxton/status/1372605769560989702

I don't know how to edit that monstrosity of a table. Could someone else update values accordingly? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.152.141.173 (talk) 18:33, 18 March 2021 (UTC)