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Wrong title

This article is in the English Wikipedia not the American English Wikikipedia! The word welfare in most English speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in others such as India where English is a secondary language) do NOT use the word WELFARE to mean a system of government aid. Only American English spoken in the United States uses the word WELFARE to mean WELFARE PAYMENT. I do not deny that some writers in countries outside the U.S. will occasionally refer to welfare as shorthand for welfare payment (i.e. "those living on welfare"), but it is not normative to do so.

I went to government web sites in Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and searched using the word WELFARE as the search term and what came back were, as I expected, references to WELFARE in the normative sense of WELLBEING. Examples were child welfare (the wellbeing of children) and animal welfare (the wellbeing of animals). References in non government websites to WELFARE STATE also do so in the normative sense of being a government that ensures the welfare of its citizens. And this can be done by law (such as preventing exploitative child labor, providing basic education, employment rights etc., and not just guaranteeing wellbeing through government financial aid for the poor.

From the comments in sections above, I see that this issue has come up before. If the article is to be about Social security systems then it should be renamed as such. Welfare means wellbeing, but only in the United States does it also mean government financial aid to ensure welfare.--84.250.230.158 (talk) 10:39, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I see that there used to be a more appropriately titled page, [[Welfare (financial aid) (now redirected to Welfare and in the talk there, there seems to be several other people who have made the same observations as I have had, that WELFARE on its own does not mean a financial aid program outside of the United States. Here for example are the comments from that page: (See http://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Talk:Welfare_(financial_aid)&action=edit&section=8)

Could I just point out that the bold opening statement "Welfare is financial assistance paid to people by governments" is incorrect. 'Welfare' in this context is specific to North America. European English (UK & Ireland) uses terms like 'social security' as does Australian English. While we understand what Americans mean by 'welfare' and 'being on the welfare', the use of this word is culture-specific and not simply a global term as the article imples. A simple clarification to point out that this is a north American perspective would help here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Toxteth o'grady (talkcontribs) 13:42, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Indeed, the very word welfare has such a vastly different meaning in the US than in, for instance, Finland, I think there should be separate articles (i.e. Welfare in the United States, Welfare in Nordic countries, Welfare in Europe, Welfare in Latin America, etc.). Welfare in Europe would only need a hatnote to indicate the Welfare in Nordic countries article, which is sufficiently distinct to have its own article, as is Welfare in the United States. Wilhelm_meis (talk) 15:44, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

It strikes me that we really must address this problem. I am sure an American editor can come up with an alternative title to plain vanilla Welfare which offends the sensibilities of people in other countries where welfare means WELLBEING.--84.250.230.158 (talk) 19:58, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Usually you can tell from an article's lead what its topic is, and try to make the title reflect that. Here, however, the lead was mangled in this diff of last August to say the welfare is "broad discourse"! If you look what it was before, it seems clear that the topic would be better described as Welfare program, which already redirects here. If somebody has claimed at some point that this topic is WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for Welfare, I'd dispute that. So make a WP:RM and let's fix it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:58, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
I still think (as I have indicated in the past) that we need to review the whole series of welfare program related articles with a comprehensive approach, and either make welfare a dab page listing related articles or use summary style where the welfare article sums up and ties together the various branch articles (such as Universal welfare, Welfare in the United States, Welfare in Nordic countries, Welfare in Europe, etc.). The biggest problem I see with the way WP has handled "welfare" to date is that "welfare" is a huge topic with many interpretations (which vary among different countries/regions/cultures) and yet Wikipedia's content has been strongly influenced by the controversial politics of the American welfare system as if that has any bearing on welfare elsewhere in the world. Wilhelm Meis (☎ Diskuss | ✍ Beiträge) 22:21, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
I think you're ignoring the point that in most of the world, even though they may be very familiar with welfare states and welfare programs (often by other names), this word just doesn't come across as recognizably conveying those concepts. Dicklyon (talk) 00:43, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
Dicklyon, do we disagree in some way? I thought we were both pointing out that the term welfare means dramatically different things in different places outside of the USA, and that the wiki does not seem to reflect a world-wide view of the topic. Wilhelm Meis (☎ Diskuss | ✍ Beiträge) 04:18, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
Well, let's see if we do. Your option to "use summary style where the welfare article sums up and ties together the various branch articles" still contains the ambiguous title welfare, which is the problem I felt you were ignoring; this is not a good title for a summary of welfare programs, any more than it is for an article on such things all together. On the other hand, welfare as a disambiguation page is not a problem. As for whether there's a whole suite of articles needing overhaul, I take no position; I'm just responding to the immediate title question. The simplest first step is to just move it to welfare program, though it's a halfway step, I agree. Dicklyon (talk) 06:12, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

As the person that has seemingly come around to reviving this question again I want to make a few observations about the above comments, and at least one other observation. Firstly. the diff did remove reference to the very different treatment accorded to the meaning of WELFARE in the US verses EUROPE (though as I have found out, Canada does not refer to social programs as WELFARE) but the text before that change still referred to welfare as a social program in Europ but claimed (wrongly IMHO) that the difference between Europe and America was universality. My point is that in Europe, welfare is NOT a social program of ANY KIND. It is a word which means WELLBEING (as in animal welfare, child welfare, the welfare of the elderly etc.). As such, outside of the U.S., the word WELFARE has overwhelmingly positive connotations. The word WELFARE outside the US does not equate at all with social program. The general term used outside the US for a program untended to provide a minimum level of welfare is SOCIAL SECURITY (but unfortunately, this LAST term has a special meaning in the United States, meaning a particular social program providing a pension in the case of old age or disability). Secondly, creating further articles such as Universal welfare, Welfare in the United States, Welfare in Nordic countries, Welfare in Europe, etc.) just exacerbates the problem! Welfare means WELLBEING and only in the US does it also mean social program. In the past there was a welfare sidebar which included linked all the associated articles in which it was placed to articles on communism and socialism, which frankly is ridiculous. It seemed to have been done with the sole intent of further damning the very word WELFARE by association away from its true meaning of WELLBEING.

As to what to do, I think Welfare should be a disambig page with a reference to the two usages of the word and a link to Social security which is a lead-in article to the general topic (with links to national program articles). Those looking for the US program known as social security can easily get to that article from there. I think a disambig page is better than a simple redirect because Welfare does generally mean WELLBEING even though there may not be any articles yet on the subject of wellbeing. There ought to be one I think because it is undoubtedly measured differently in different places.--84.250.230.158 (talk) 05:37, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

More American misunderstandings in the lede to Right to social security. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did refer to social security but meaning the general security of the person (having a right to provide for themselves and their family) but it certainly did not mean that people have the right to maternity, employment injury, unemployment or old age benefits!!!! It left it to signatories as to how to guarantee this security. How wide is this problem in Wikipedia?????--84.250.230.158 (talk) 06:00, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Okay, anon, I can see the merit in your approach. I will say that while I was studying in Sweden, I wrote a 10-page comparative essay on "welfare programs" in Sweden, Finland and the United States, and that's what they called it in the class - "welfare programs" - so it's not like Europeans have no inkling of that sense of the word (this was a "Nordic Politics" class at a Swedish college, with a British instructor and mostly European students). While many of the European words for such programs more closely translate as social security or pension and few of them carry the stigma attached to welfare in American usage, most of the English language materials I have seen on European social programs do tend to use the word "welfare". Nevertheless, taking a college course in Europe certainly does not make me an expert on European social programs, and I do see a certain functional elegance in the approach you described above: Welfare should be a disambig page with a reference to the two usages of the word and a link to Social security which is a lead-in article to the general topic (with links to national program articles). I think that may be the most neutral and unambiguous approach. Wilhelm Meis (☎ Diskuss | Special:Contributions/Wilhelm_meisx270D; Beiträge) 20:53, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
OK. I will think about the content to be moved over before doing the redirect.
I find it no surprise at all that the term "welfare programs" was understood in a European context because they are programs that are intended to bring about the welfare (or wellbeing) of their citizens. But the single word "welfare" on its own in Europe means "wellbeing" or "doing okay", and not a social program. That's why to me, as a European, the current article title and its content do not align. Brits in common vernacular use term like "being on the dole" or "being on the social" but newspapers and politicians say "living on social security". The gutter press might refer to people who try to defraud the social security system as "welfare cheats" but I think that is headline abbreviation and neither common nor particularly encyclopedic. --84.250.230.158 (talk) 22:19, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
This IP seems to have some linguistic beef with the word "welfare", but nowhere in any of this soapboxing have I seen any indication of an alternative meaning, or indication that, outside of their assertions of "European" usage, (a Finnish IP btw), that the term is used incorrectly. This is a commonly used term, obviously in the U.S., but in Europe as well, and by most English speaking countries. The IP has the burden to prove otherwise. There's clearly some ideological issues at play here as well. Shadowjams (talk) 10:30, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Ok. Try this. Google the Australian government web site for the term welfare (i.e. enter "welfare site:australia.gov.au" as the google search term). For every use of the word WELFARE in the hit pages try substitution WELLBEING and then GOVERNMENT AID and see which makes sense. I have done this and it shows that WELL BEING is the meaning of the word and not GOVERNMENT AID. You can do the same for South Africa (gov.za) and the UK government portal (direct.gov.uk). If you find an exception where GOVERNMENT AID fits better than WELL-BEING, do please let us know. --84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:04, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

WELFARE as Financial Aid

I just reverted an edit which added into the article a large tract of information about the United States welfare system. The problem with this is that this is NOT the main meaning of WELFARE in the English speaking world. It is fully understandable that WP users in the United States who understand WELFARE to be social programs will be surprised NOT to see this article discussing this matter. A similar argument at one time affected American readers with the article on corn which redirects to maize, the more common name used outside of the United States. It is for this reason that the disambiguation has been added at the top and the additional section directed at surprised readers in the U.S.

Under WP rules of local English spellings and names. it would be perfectly okay to have an article titled Welfare in the United States and for it to focus on social programs in that country, because welfare id the common term used in that country. However, for a general view of social programs in a global context, the proper place for this is in Social security which is about the general idea of welfare (i.e. wellbeing) in a social context and the systems built to ensure welfare is enjoyed by everyone.

The simple fact is that WP already has too many overlapping articles on this subject and it has been made worse by the language confusions which means that articles may be found under the title welfare and social security. Welfare and social security mean different things to US Americans than they do to Europeans, Asians, Australians, and for all I know South Americans too. Canadians I am sure understand the American usage but it is not the accepted term in their own country. As you can see if you search for Welfare on government websites in those countries what comes back is welfare meaning well-being. Animal Welfare and Child Welfare are examples and hardly any reference to a social program called Welfare. Welfare is the AIM and not the MEANS of social programs in most countries outside the U.S.

I have only just scratched the surface of this problem within WP but it has clearly been raised before if you read the history on the Discussion page. This article really ought to deal with the issue of Welfare (the objective of the social programs) and how it is measured and defined. It is absolutely impossible to do so if the article continues to treat welfare as meaning something quite different. I would be curious to know how it came to be that WELFARE SUPPORT became just known as WELFARE in the U.S. because it seems that Americans have lost sight of the object of WELFARE as WELL BEING. --84.250.230.158 (talk) 23:58, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Same issue as the thread above. Let's keep it to one thread. Shadowjams (talk) 10:31, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Article's been essentially rewritten

I didn't realize how extensive the 84. IP has rewritten this article. I first came across this as part of Huggle patrolling because huge swaths of it were being removed. I didn't realize how large these were. This article was whittled from a 43k document about the general concept and its application around the world, to a 3k article of 4 paragraphs.

The IPs ideas about what the term welfare means are synthesis or original research at best. While it's quite acceptable to discuss that the term may vary across countries, the IP has tried to rework the article about this concept into a discussion of what he/she thinks the word welfare means. This is not a dictionary.

I didn't appreciate the scale of this change before, and that it's kept going since I last looked.

This is simply unacceptable.

  • This is the initial changes the IP made
  • This was what was done after the initial discussion.

I'm going to be bold and revert this back to what it was, and then readd the new sections the IP added about the name. I'm sorry if this catches other, useful, intermediate edits in the path. I'll try to add those back as well. Shadowjams (talk) 15:27, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Part of that series of previous edits included moving sections of this artcile into Social programs in the United States. I'm perfectly fine with that idea, although it needs to be done in a much more restrained manner, not the wholesale slashing of this article.
But if I read the impetus behind this correctly, it's that there are some uniquely American features covered here. As the IP was told eariler, WP:Requested Moves is the right place to deal with this. We shouldn't be rewriting a whole topic (a rather notable one). It is possibly though to keep the current article's meaning though, while making it more international. So, with that in mind, I'll try to incoroporate most of the history into the U.S. specific article. Shadowjams (talk) 15:38, 21 April (UTC)
The changes may be large but I did discuss them on the talk page and I did put most of the important history section into the other article which appeared quite comprehensive but lacking any historical context. But the general principle of the move is right. This article is about WELFARE and in most countries of the world that means WELL-BEING. That being so it was wrong for the article to be about a completely different subject.
If you can demonstrate by some logical means that there are other countries that officially use the term welfare on its own to mean "government support" I would be please to be corrected. But as I say, I went to Australian, South African, Canadian and more recently to the irish government portal and in none of these is it possible to substitute the term "government financial aid" for the word "welfare" and with it making any sense. I daresay if you look hard enough you will find some ordinary people who might use it in the American way (as a short hand way of saying "welfare system") and some newspapers, but I would venture to say that you will not find any official government websites using it that way and if you look carefully you will find that it is much more common to speak of "benefit fraud" instead of "welfare fraud". Is this OR? Not in the WP sense because I am not citing it as expert citation in any article. But if we get together a collection of WP editors whose mother tongue is British English, Australian English, South African English, Irish English etc.. I think they will tell you that what I am saying is correct. Doing counts of Google Searches and testing (as I did above) whether the word WELFARE stands up to substitution is a pretty good indicator that what I am saying is correct. There is nothing WRONG with the American usage of saying WELFARE instead of WELFARE SYSTEM. Its just not normative in most countries and that is quite easy to verify. We can do the hard way (by getting together some editors as I have suggested) or the doubters can simply do the tests I have suggested to discover if what I am saying is correct. And I do not want anyone to DISTORT what I am saying. Its not that people outside the U.S. do not understand American usage . its just that we mostly do not use it ourselves. And that is why I think it is best that an article dedicated to the title WELFARE should be about what WELFARE is in most countries. That is WELL-BEING and how it is defined and used. The American usage is valid and should be discussed, but it should NOT dominate the article (as per Wikipedia policy).
I was looking today at the article Individual mandate. Every government law mandates all or some of us to do something - pay out taxes on time, insure our motor vehicles, ensure our kids are educated, arrange for our garbage to be collected.... but instead this article is focussed almost 100% on a tiny section of one U.S. law !!!! If you want to be useful you can go and tell those guys editing that article that they are abusing WP!!! I am only trying to follow WP policy by making this article chiefly about the subject of WELFARE (which means WELL-BEING) in most countries of the world. I am happy to take this to dispute resolution if you like.--84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:04, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
The conceptual impasse here is that you're thinking of this as though it were a dictionary, not an encyclopedia. There are things, concepts, nouns, etc., that have different meanings in different regions or styles of English. That's a long understood part of Wikipedia. We have policies to deal with that. Often, when there's no other clear choice, the first meaning is adopted. That's the case with Maize. The discussion about that, if you're interested, is at Talk:Corn (disambiguation)#Fix the corn - maize mess.
That's essentially what's going on here. You're asserting, (and I'm not sure the sources back you up on this... but let's assume for a moment they do) that because the American term "welfare" means means-tested social assistance, but the other English speakers use it to mean general welfare (not sure if this is more than a dictionary definition), or Welfare as in Welfare State (which we have an article for), then this page should be changed.
Your use of individual mandate is particularly apt. As far as I know, that term is not used regularly in political discourse in other countries, and if there are examples of it, those are massively overshadowed by its use in the U.S. That's why "individual mandate" is entirely appropriate for that article. If there is confusion about its usage, then that's what hatnotes are for, or in extreme cases, disambiguation.
Wham! can also mean a sound, but we have a different target for it.
The appropriate way to do that is this: 1) You need to provide sources that there are these divergent versions of the term "welfare" in contemporary use. 2) You then need to say why that new usage should be preferred over the current one. If there's consensus on both of those things, then we'll move the article that's here to some other name, and then create a new "Welfare" article that covers the meaning you're discussing. Or perhaps create a Welfare disambiguation page that then points to one of these two articles.
The answer is never though to wipe out the previous article. Shadowjams (talk) 00:02, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Shadowjams (talk) approach here is in keeping with Wikipedia's goals, policies, guidelines, and best benefits all the readers. This approach keep the text before the person using IP 84.250.230.158 (talk) modified this article, while working toward adding text with WP:RS that showed the non-American variants in the use of the term Welfare. This new text could include a general paragraph/section, as well as adds to each country's/region's sections, IF and only if WP:RS can be found to support the adds.

The person using IP 84.250.230.158 (talk) support for their changes is WP:OR, which is not allowed here on Wikipedia. Lentower (talk) 11:14, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

This is complete nonsense. Just look at the article's history!!
  • June 2003 Article created by User:Vroman expressing strong POV against the concept of social welfare
  • Nov 2003 Article changed to a disambiguation page in which the meaning of WELLBEING is stated and the alternative meaning in the UNITED STATES is given.
  • For SIX WHOLE YEARS the article remains as essentially the same disambiguation page with a manin meaning and a loal meaning until
  • Aug 2009 when this verion undoes this.
I am not doing some terrible change to the article or acting outside policy. It is not WP:OR to have given published dictionary references, one showing that WELFARE did not mean government aid for the the poor in 1913 and another showing that the meaning of government aid to the needy is predominantly North American English. Why don't you criticize the user who removed those valid references?--84.250.230.158 (talk) 10:58, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
My reply to the editor using the IP 84.250.230.158 questions at User_talk:Lentower#English_language_dispute_at_the_article_Welfare is also sufficient answer here. I'll add that this editor does not understand that the way they used the citations they added is WP:OR, and doesn't follow that policy. Also that the length of time something is on Wikipedia, has nothing to do with whether it's following WP's goals, policies and guidelines, and whether it can be improved. Lentower (talk) 12:09, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
My point is that you seem to think that my changes were something terrible to behold and non-compliant with policy and/or factually incorrect that they must be undone immediately and the status quo defended. My point is that the article was a disambiguation page for six years and the main content was in Welfare (financial aid) so the idea of this being valid structure for the content is hardly so bad otherwise it would not have lasted in that condition for so long. And as I pointed out, the change away from this structure seems to have been done by a disruptive editor and if you look, you'll see that it was done with no prior discussion at all!!!. At least in my case I discussed the changes there first and there were two possibilities .. make it a disambig page or take the issue to WP:MOVE. I chose the former because it seemed sensible, and now, having looked back, I see that this was how it was structured earlier. I'll be happy to have the content moved over to Welfare (financial aid) as that seems logical, traceable, and linguistically neutral in that is not ascribing a meaning to the word welfare that is not the main meaning and is used in this way mainly in North America (as per my reliable sources).--84.250.230.158 (talk) 18:14, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Shadowjams two part approach

Shadowjams two part approach is sensible. We do need to identify whether there is a main usage of the term and then we need to choose the most appropriate title.

Part 1 Sources for welfare as mainly "wellbeing with "welfare payment" as a secondary, mainly U.S. English interpretation

The Oxford Dictionary

  1. "health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group"
  2. "chiefly North American financial support given to those who are unemployed or otherwise in need

The Longman dictionary

  1. "health and happiness"
  2. "help for people with personal or social problems" (welfare benefits, welfare services, welfare programs etc)
  3. American English. "money paid by government to the poor or unemployed"

The Macmillan dictionary

  1. the health and happiness of people or good care
    1. good care and living conditions for animals
  2. care provided by the state or another organization for people in need
    1. Mainly American money given to people who do not have work or who are in need. (The usual British word is benefit)

The searches I made at government websites on the word welfare did not generally bring back references to government financial support.

The fact is that if you search for "welfare" as a term in Australian and South African web sites, what comes back are references to Animal Welfare and Child Welfare, which are all examples of the meaning WELLBEING and thus indicative that the original meaning is predominant in those countries. --84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:40, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

This fails WP:OR. In particular, WP:PSTS and WP:SYN. You need to find several secondary and/or tertiary sources that make your point.
You could try adding a sentence or a paragraph using these primary sources, but it would have to include Shadowjams's counter-examples below, from his and your's discussion on his talk page.
The way you have used search engines also fails WP:SET. Among other points this one is important to understand: WP:SET#Search_engine_limitations_.E2.80.93_technical_notes.Lentower (talk) 06:57, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Part 2 Which meaning is more significant and what should be the title?

I think the dictionary definitions already answer that question. I think more to the point is that we should find a more neutral title. I am not against an article about government programs for the poor having the word welfare in the title because that is clearly one of the meanings. My contention is welfare on its own really does mostly mean WELLBEING outside the United States and connections to government assistance only comes when the word is used with others to complete that meaning, as in Welfare State, Welfare payment, social welfare etc. Except of course, as the dictionaries tell us, in the US welfare can mean financial aid. But that is not global usage. Which is is why I argue that the welfare article OUGHT to be a disambiguation page so that the main topic of "government financial aid for the poor" is held in a more appropriately titled page. Here we do hit another problem because social security is also ambiguous, and as I discovered looking through the dictionaries and government web sites, different countries have different terms for this and Wikipedia has at times reflected this. See for example Social security, Social protection, Social welfare provision (as it was before User:Stephen Bain re.directed it to his modified version of Welfare or Welfare (financial aid) (as it was before User:Stephen Bain redirected it). Personally I would be happy if the article about welfare as government aid was in the article Welfare (financial aid) and that Welfare was much as it was before Stephen Bain altered it. As I see it, that was very similar to the version I produced a few days ago. The title does not seem to be at all ambiguous and anyone looking for the subject will quickly find it.

What do the others think? --84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:40, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to copy over some of what I wrote on my talk page in response to 84... I'd be better if you kept this discussion in one place 84... instead of carrying out the issue on everybody's talk pages separately.
"Welfare" is not an exclusively North American term. Supposedly Churchill coined the term saying "welfare not warfare." It was used first by the British, not in the U.S. See also Social welfare in Japan, Social programs in Canada#Usage, Italian welfare state, Social welfare in Sweden... there are others.
A Welfare (disambiguation) page hatnoted from Welfare would be fine, if there are sufficient articles that could be confused with Welfare and otherwise meet the MOSDAB criteria.
The ENGVAR point and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is that when there are multiple uses of a word, the first "style" used in an article, or the first use of the word as an article title, is preferred, unless there are strong reasons otherwise. In this case "welfare" describes means tested government assistance around the world and the article's been describing that since 2003. You're asking to shift the meaning of a highly read article (averages around 1,500 per day) dramatically.
As I said before, first, prove the word "welfare" is so unreasonably out of context for commonwealth speakers that they would be astounded when they find this usage, and not the one you prefer, then demonstrate that "welfare" as meaning general well-being, or whatever way you're using it, is sufficiently notable to warrant a standalone article. If all of those criteria are met, then we can go to WP:Requested Moves and consider rearranging the order of these articles. Shadowjams (talk) 22:19, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
I again concur with what Shadowjams has written just above. Especially: "I'd be better if you kept this discussion in one place 84... instead of carrying out the issue on everybody's talk pages separately." I made the same point on my talk page in response to the editor using IP 84.250.230.158.
Editing on Wikipedia is NOT about making an editor happy.
It's about producing encyclopedic content that meets WP's goals, policies, and guidelines.
To prove your contentions would take a lot of work to produce the equivalent of an academic paper that references many reliable sources from most, if not all, English speaking countries. That would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal, as well as meet WP's goals, policies, and guidelines. Or the equivalent of finding sufficient secondary and/or tertiary reliable sources. Providing a few primary sources does not meet WP's goals, policies, and guidelines.
Though the USA is just one of over 50 English speaking countries, it has about a seventh of the English speaking people in those countries.
At this moment, there are 33 redirects to this article: http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/rdcheck.py?page=Welfare. This means care has to be taken that any reader who follows one of those redirects, find sufficient text and links to enable the reader to find the information the reader is seeking. Lentower (talk) 06:57, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes I now see that a WP:move would be the best way to do what I tried to do. Thanks.84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:27, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

User:Shadowjams makes a lot of points. Let me answer them in turn

    • The above distorts my position. I have never said "welfare" is an exclusively North American term, but that its main meaning is "WELL BEING" and through that meaning it became attached to terms such as social welfare, welfare state because these things are about "social well-being" and a "state in which everyone enjoys wellbeing". I did say that welfare on its own does not mean "government aid" outside the U.S., meaning welfare is usually used as an attribute attached to another word such as "welfare assistance" with the meaning "assistance to achieve wellbeing". Clearly, in the U.S. terms such as "welfare to work" and "welfare fraud" emerged which shifted the meaning there (because "well-being to work" and "well-being fraud" are otherwise nonsensical". Churchill would never have meant "government payments to the poor not warfare" because he led the Conservative Party which opposed the Labour Party policy to implement a welfare state (and lost the 1945 election because of it). Churchill's usage is much more sensible when it is understood as "wellbeing not warfare" because welfare *(as well-being) is a good thing and warfare generally is best avoided. "Jaw jaw not war war" was the more famous Churchill quote on this subject.
  • A Welfare (disambiguation) page hatnoted from Welfare would be fine, if there are sufficient articles that could be confused with Welfare and otherwise meet the MOSDAB criteria.
    • You are simply burying your head in the sand by arguing that Welfare should be about its North American meaning. That is against WP policy against local use of that terminology in anything other than articles about the topic in that locality. What's wrong with Welfare (financial aid) with the Welfare page giving the main meaning and its local meaning as supported by dictionary references?
  • The ENGVAR point and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is that when there are multiple uses of a word, the first "style" used in an article, or the first use of the word as an article title, is preferred, unless there are strong reasons otherwise. In this case "welfare" describes means tested government assistance around the world and the article's been describing that since 2003. You're asking to shift the meaning of a highly read article (averages around 1,500 per day) dramatically.
    • WP:PRIMARYTOPIC tells us to focus on usage and long term significance and ENGVAR says we should NOT prefer one national variation over another. IMHO (and this is supported by the dictionaries) the main meaning usage of welfare is "wellbeing" and that has meant this for thousands of years, EXCEPT in the United States where another meaning has emerged in the last 70 years or so. How is changing the article title back to Welfare (financial aid) and making Welfare to a disambig page "shifting the meaning"? It is simply honoring the traditional meaning of "welfare" which it retains in most countries including the United States and allowing readers to easily find the topic as financial aid. You seem to be ignoring this suggestion which to me seems eminently sensible and compliant with policy.
  • As I said before, first, prove the word "welfare" is so unreasonably out of context for commonwealth speakers that they would be astounded when they find this usage, and not the one you prefer, then demonstrate that "welfare" as meaning general well-being, or whatever way you're using it, is sufficiently notable to warrant a standalone article. If all of those criteria are met, then we can go to WP:Requested Moves and consider rearranging the order of these articles.
    • Well I have suggested ways we can do this and I have tried and it proves my point. But all that happens is that I have had thrown back in my face accusations of WP:OR and WP:POV. Here is a suggestion. We need to get more opinions from other users whose English is not primarily North American. How about if we find articles about social welfare systems in other countries like for instance Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland and get opinions from editors that edit those articles? We can summarize our issues (we cannot ask them to read this whole section). I'd suggest we ask them to choose between two options. The first being Welfare article being about WELFARE AS FINANCIAL AID with a hatnote to Welfare (disambiguation) (i.e. Shadowjams suggestion) and the second being Welfare written as a disambig page with WELFARE AS FINANCIAL AID being written into an article Welfare (financial aid) (i.e. the IP 84 user's suggestion).

What do you think about this idea? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:56, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Please be courteous and remember to sign your posts!!! Sinebot doesn't catch all missing signatures.
Duplicating large blocks of text to respond to them point by point is regarded as a discourteous here on WP - it makes all readers of this section in the future re-read, or at least take the added time to distinguish what they have already read from what is new. The courteous thing to do is to copy the signature at the bottom of the block to the end of each sub-block you wish to respond to. Then at the end of each point, indent and sign your response. I did this above with your response to Shadowjams two part approach. Could you be courteous and do this now? Lentower (talk) 15:20, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
Your responses here mostly repeat arguments you have already made, while not showing an increased understanding of WP's goals, policies, and guidelines.
The best solution to this dispute would be for you to find secondary and/or tertiary reliable sources, and use them to improve the current article. The article needs much work, much content development. Wouldn't our time as editors be better spent developing and improving content of all articles, than trying to find the perfect title for this article?
The canvassing you propose has a number of potential pitfalls. Why not use one of the established procedures for issues like this, as Shadowjams suggested above. WP:CANVASS shows some of the pitfalls. Making sure the editors contacted are not a biased sample is one of the pitfalls, and the way you suggest could introduce bias. It is customary when this is done your way, to also give notice of the canvass on the User Talk page of each editor who has edited the article. It is also customary to contact a wide variety of editors. Summaries aren't used. Something like this is used: There is a dispute about the proper title of Welfare. It would help build consensus, if you review and discuss the dispute to help generate consensus at Talk:Welfare#Wrong title. ~~~~
The dictionaries you have used in WP:OR as primary sources, are inherently biased for the assertion you are making. All three of them are edited in England, only one of the 50 plus countries where English is a major language. Mostly by college educated people, who are not even widely representative of all people using English in England.
The government web sites you have searched have these issues:
  • Governments often create titles for programs for political purposes, that are not the phrase their citizens would choose. That is, trying to use a government web site to prove what the usage is for those governed is not conclusive.
  • You have only checked a handful of the 50 plus countries. You need to do around half for your research to become credible, and get beyond personal knowledge.
  • Australia is one of the web sites you have claimed to check. Australia is a federation of states, where each state has significantly more power than they do in the USA. That is, perform a larger share of the governing. So to properly do this WP:OR you would have to check these state's web sites as well. This expands the websites that need to be checked to hundreds.
  • Many web site searches do not check affiliated web sites. That is, the main national web site might NOT search the web sites of the departments/agencies/etc. that actually provide welfare. So you have to find all of the relevant web sites for a governement and check then. This expands the websites that need to be checked to thousands.
On our user talk pages, you asked Shadowjams and me five questions. Shadowjams did you the courtesy of answering then one-by-one. I did you the courtesy of answering them in general. In the this section I have asked you several questions. In the next section, I have asked you three questions. In the spirit of co-operation and understanding,[1] could you please do us the courtesy of answering them? (This is one of the questions.) Lentower (talk) 15:20, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
There was also a discussion back in 2008 that ended with Social welfare provision being merged, and exactly the question of whether "welfare" was exclusively North American came up. Talk:Welfare (financial aid)#Merger proposal came up. Useful for reference. Shadowjams (talk) 19:31, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes I saw that. Social welfare provision is quite a good title because not all aid comes in monetary form. In the UK or Finland, an elderly couple, a man say, living with a wife in early stage dementia, might be assigned a social worker who would visit periodically and be a point of contact in the event of a crisis. This is a social welfare service provided by the community and funded by taxation. It would be put in place whether the man asked for help or not. Its hard to see how that could be called Welfare (financial aid as the aid given is not really financial. In the UK and Finland few people would know the cost - certainly not the beneficiary. Its just something that the community decides should be done and the cost is not the main issue. But in the USA, are services like this offered by civic society? And if so, would the elderly couple be said to be in receipt of Welfare? And as one of the early commenters says, health care is free of cost to everyone in the UK paid from taxes. So in this way the poor are really well helped (because they pay lower income taxes) but its not regarded as charity or poverty relief because the same service is available if you are a millionaire or a pauper. Again I don't think Americans would call this Welfare, though it is certainly the government taking responsibility for the welfare of the people. 84.250.230.158 (talk) 21:59, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
All of these rhetorical questions aren't pertinent to the issue. And that is, is the term "welfare" so distinct outside of North America that it needs to be separately indicated (previous discussions have suggested it is not), and if so, is the separate concept of "welfare as well being", sufficiently notable for a stand-alone article. As for the latter, I don't think there's much in terms of an article beyond a dictionary definition. Shadowjams (talk) 22:26, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
You two stages towards a renaming of the article were 1) to provide sources that show there are these divergent versions of the term "welfare" in contemporary use and 2) to say why that new usage should be preferred over the current one. Do you accept that 1) has been now shown? 84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:35, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
I'm sorry but I don't. I think that the term welfare is used in other countries outside of North America. It may not be as common as it is in the U.S. and Canada, but it is certainly used. Looking at the prior discussion on social welfare, or whatever talk page it was, the editors there seemed to reach the same conclusion. The only evidence presented to the contrary is dictionary definitions, and I think there was a website article you linked earlier. Welfare can mean "well being" in all varieties of english... that doesn't mean that the other, widespread use of the word needs to be pushed aside. Shadowjams (talk) 21:52, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Please don't distort what I said. I said that the main use is "wellbeing" and in conjunction with other words it has become associated with the aspects of government policy in terms such as "welfare state", "child welfare", and "welfare system" where it clearly means "wellbeing" but that it sometimes used outside the U.S. in circumstances in conjunction with other words where "welfare" is more or less used instead of "welfare system" as in "welfare fraud", "welfare dependency and "welfare reform". But I did say that welfare on its own (i.e. not in conjunction with other words as an attribute) never means "government aid" as it does in the United States. In the U.S. welfare used in this way can mean "money from the government to the poor" but in other countries it generally does not. Brits and Canadians even mostly use the word "benefits" to describe aid money in this way. We have had advice from other editors at WP:Reference_desk/Language#April_26 which says the word on its own is at most ambiguous because there are two meanings and it needs context in order to understand it. This is why I argue welfare as a title is needs to be a disambig page at best. Usage of the term in Canada is relatively minor. Here for example is a 139 page official government report on the subject of assistance to the poor. There are not many usages of the word "welfare" in the document and I'd say that those that are about 50/50 whether the term means "well-being" or "government aid". More to the point the word "benefits" is used liberally throughput in the context of "government payments" and "social assistance" and "income support" are used everywhere are synonyms for the general concept of lifting a person's or family's income to a decent level. To me, this demonstrates quite clearly that Welfare is not the generally used in Canada to mean either the payment or the general idea of assistance. It is the same in the UK where, as in Canada, "income support" is the last resort way to raise incomes to that needed to ensure the welfare of the individual or his/her dependents. It seems to me that you wish to ignore the clear indication in three dictionaries that the meaning is regional to North America (and I would say mostly the U.S). That seems unreasonable to me. I still do not see what is wrong with making the article Welfare a neutral disambiguation page along the lines of football and making the general article something really generic like social welfare which can then link off to various examples of provincial, regional, state, or national programs of the various types such as means tested income support and universal assistance such as certain health care programs (which fit the meaning of social assistance without being directed only at the poor, and which do not meet the definition of Welfare as it is understood in the narrow confines of the United States. "Social welfare" as a term is perfectly understandable to me as a Brit even though it is not much used in the UK. For most people it would be like the redirect that exists on Aeroplane and [Airplane]]. The meaning of the redirected article is understandable even if it is not instantly used as an article search term. How do you justify (a) ignoring the evidence and (b) your seeming refusal to agree to the idea of returning Welfare to the disambiguation article it used to be? 84.250.230.158 (talk) 20:07, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
One of the problems of having "welfare" as the title of the article is that tries in a cack-handed way to acknowledge that the term is used in both sense but then it goes on to pretty much ignore the main meaning and focus on its limited meaning in the US. For instance it begins by saying "Welfare refers to a broad discourse which may hold certain implications....".. Who amongst our readership thinks that Welfare refers to a broad discourse? Maybe certain right wing politicians in the US wants there to be a "broad discourse" but the simple fact is that Welfare had two meanings. A main meaning and a an associated and a common usage related to that meaning, and a distorted meaning which is has arisen in and still largely confined to, the United States. The lead continues "Welfare is largely provided by the government, in addition to charities, informal social groups, religious groups, and inter-governmental organizations". This is U.S. usage of the term (we cannot substitute "wellbeing" for "welfare" with it being meaningful, but the article makes no attempt to acknowlege this. It is a prelude to the next, even more political point. The lead continues "In the end, this term replaces "charity" as it was known for thousands of years, being the voluntary act of providing for those who temporarily or permanently could not provide for themselves." Again, this is using the minor meaning of "government aid" and in particular "aid to the underprivileged". In fact much of welfare assistance coming from government is not "aid to the underprivileged" but is in the form of social insurance, as it is in other countries. In America through payroll taxes you pay into the system and you get the benefit back when you retire or get ill in retirement. Charity is not like this. So, No No No No!!!! Welfare is not charity. The UK's National health Service was born out the idea of welfare state. It is a universal service, and millionaires like H.M. the Queen use it as well the poorest of the poor. It is NOT charity any more than the Fire Service in America is a charity. But it is, undoubtedly, part of the governments Welfare responsibilities because it ensures the welfare of its citizens. But I suspect that U.S. based editors would strongly object to the Fire Department services being regarded as "welfare" because the usage is not normative. This is why the article has to be turned into a Disambig page to show the variety of usages of the term and then link off to articles such as child welfare, animal welfare, Welfare State and social welfare because this would simply avoid the huge cultural-linguistic clash that otherwise is created when an article has an ambiguous title such as football or faggott.84.250.230.158 (talk) 11:40, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
I again concur with what Shadowjams has written above. I apologize for any repetition in the rest of this post.
The only Wikipedian evidence to support the changes IP 84 want to make are the three dictionary cites, we have discuss throughout this section and it's sub-sections. The comments, to date, on IP 84's canvasses are all personal knowledge, and are not evidence that can be used to edit articles. They have muddied the waters though, on exactly which English speakers use the term for, and what the differences are between countries, ancestries, dialects, classes, etc.
Those three cites are not sufficient for a separate article here. Such articles belong in Wikitionary. So going back to a disambig page here is not possible at this time.
Why? You seem to be ignoring (a) perfectly valid published academic sources (dictionary compilers are academics and two are indeed oublished by university presses) and (b) advice taken not from me but coming from other wikipedia editors from different countries http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language#April_26 (including the U.S.) who all basically agreed that one cannot determine what "welfare" means without some context and (c) the comments of other editors that the source is OK and I am not engaging in OR by using these sources. And just today I have shown that a number of randomly chose articles which link here are linking here rather spuriously when the original article is using welfare to mean "wellbeing". And why do you say separate article?If the article is about social welfare why not just rename it social welfare and tidy up the lead paragraphs. People looking for welfare as social welfare can find it when once again when Welfare is made a general disambig page much as faggot or football are.84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:44, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
Those three cites are not sufficient to change this article's title. As I have pointed out before.
Before? Show me diffs. I only see your claim here(which I think is not proper) that sources published by University Academic presses and another British publisher have got it all wrong and are inherently biased. You can look at government websites in Australia which refer to this kind of support as "Income support" or "benefits" (terms which are also used in the UK), but not "welfare" except in proper terms such as "welfare assistance" and "welfare benefits" which give the word context and its original meaning of "well-being". Your claim that "Governments often create titles for programs for political purposes, that are not the phrase their citizens would choose" is curious? Which part of WP policy tells us to ignore academic sources and reject any terms used by government? Are you saying that what the government in the UK calls "welfare benefits", the people there call it "welfare"? Where is your evidence? Which part of WP policy tells us to ignore the official names for things? Frankly it seems slightly cranky to me.84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:44, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
As I have said above, what are needed are more Wikipedian quality references from a variety of source types (not just dictionaries) to support this change.
84.250.230.158: Please go and find them, and then come back here. Lentower (talk) 16:34, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
OK. Here goes with two more from published books I have in my home library
Source number 4 is Roget's Thesaurus (published by Penguin) with (ISBN 0 14 051.007 9) and copyrighted to Longmans Green & Co. Its index entry listings are as follows
weld
join 45 vb.
agglutinate 48 vb.
welfare
good 615 n.
prosperity 730 n.
welfare state
sociology' 901 n.
welfare work
sociology' 901 n.
well
greatly 32 adv
and so on
Neither good nor prosperity relates to what you seem to claim is the general meaning of "welfare".
Source number 5 is Chambers Everyday dictionary (ISBN 0 550 18000 X Parameter error in {{ISBN}}: checksum) Its entry is as follows:
welfare,wel'fãr, n. state of faring or doing well: satisfactory standard of living. -welfare state a country with a public health service, pensions, insurance against unemployment, &c; welfare work, efforts to improve conditions of living for a class (e.g. the very poor) or group (e.g. employers or workers).[well, fare]
Yes these two books were published in the UK but the Thesaurus I guess was also available in Canada as it has a price on the back in Canadian dollars as well as British pounds. User:Lentower is quick to dismiss British sources but they do indicate that the claims that he and User:Shadowjams make that the usage of welfare as "government aid" being universal English is not actually true.84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:22, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

And a further reminder, nobody has answered my question as to why we should not make welfare the disambiguation page it once was. If you think you have already done so, please repeat it below in summary ('cos it is now hard to track all the comments above); and please give reasons why that should override the other evidence I have presented. At some stage we will have to agree a summary of the argument to be presented in another forum with more editors. 84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:22, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

User 84.250.230.158 is a new editor

Special:Contributions/84.250.230.158 and http://toolserver.org/~luxo/contributions/contributions.php?user=84.250.230.158&blocks=true show that the editor(s?) using that IP have done just over 200 edits in less than five months. Inexperienced compared to the many years and thousands of edits of Shadowjams, me, and many other editors commenting here. Lentower (talk) 16:07, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

But I do know that WELFARE means in most contexts and it means WELL BEING. Its the origin of the term Welfare State from which we get Welfare payments etc. It is only in America where Welfare on its own means the same as Welfare System. And it actually offends my ear to hear its meaning turned upside down in this way. What is wrong with titling the present article as Welfare (financial aid) as it used to be and making Welfare a disambiguation page? --84.250.230.158 (talk) 17:48, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Personal knowledge, by itself, can NOT be used to create or modify a Wikipedia article.
You have yet to meet Wikipeida's policies in proving your assertions.
Have you read WP:V? If yes, please show us how that allows what you did and are trying to do.
Have you read WP:OR? If yes, please show us how that allows what you did and are trying to do.
Have you read WP:NPOV? If yes, please show us how that allows what you did and are trying to do. Lentower (talk) 06:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
I could answer your questions but before doing so will ask you the courtesy of answering mine that I posed above "what is wrong with titling...etc." and those I posed at your talk page. What you are trying to say is that I am wrong but you are right, but your answers are just nebulous. Yes I have read V and have given you dictionary definitions that show the meaning is secondary and particular to the U.S. That is not OR but V compliant. And in my opinion the article name breaches POV. Calling the social safety net WELFARE is an American POV. I am trying to understand why you are so strongly opposed to re-titling the present article to Welfare (financial aid). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.250.230.158 (talk) 08:15, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

"Concentrate on the issues, not the people/editors." is a maxin here on WP. Another is to "Keep your langauge neutral." (which IP 84 hasn't. e,g, their use of the word terrible above--there are others above and perhaps elsewhere). Many new editors do not. It be refreshing if IP 84 understood and used both.There is probably a quideline or essay on both, but I'll let others chase them down. Lentower (talk) 14:38, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Editor Assistance comments

I intend to begin asking editors from other articles about the topic of "government aid to the poor" whose native language is English but NOT American English interest to come to this page and contribute their thoughts. This is because there appears to be some contention about English usage outside North America. Please leave the rest of this section free to receive the comments from the editors of those other articles.--84.250.230.158 (talk) 18:57, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Please see our WP:CANVASSING policy. Shadowjams (talk) 23:51, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
I already have pointed this out above via the redirect WP:CANVASS. Lentower (talk) 03:27, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Pot calling the kettle black seems to apply here. See this diff for which Lentower got a genuine warning over last year. I wouldn't mind but he is actually the topic of the very article he was trying to influence! At least I have followed policy as far as bringing in a wider audience and not picking off individual editors to swing a decision in a particular way.84.250.230.158 (talk) 11:27, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
That was a request by me to an editor to come work on the article, as he saw fit. I had intended to invite more editors to do that. If I had WP:CANVASSING would not have applied at all. But the editor who issued that warning was impatient and acted much too quickly, so I let it go.
Neither Shadowjams nor I were accusing you of anything. Just granted the WP editing mistakes you have made (common mistakes for new editors), we wanted to help you become a better WP editor. Lentower (talk) 14:52, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

What I did was quite in line with policy. The situation here at Talk:Welfare is that we have two U.S. based editors who seem to be arguing with an editor outside the U.S. about what "welfare" means outside the U.S. and who seem to wish to ignore published WP:RS (dictionaries no less) which say that the meaning of the word as "financial aid" is primarily regional to the North America. If ever there was a case for broadening out the discussion, this is it. As WP:CANVASSING says "In general, it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it is done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus." If you guys are right, then you would expect that the responses from Wikipedians outside the U.S. would support you. I presented the case there very neutrally just to see what would happen. So far the responses, left at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language rather than here, seem to be mixed. Editors in the U.S. say the meaning of "well-being" is fully understood in the U.S. (contrary to my thoughts) but equally the consensus seems to be both meanings are known outside the U.S. but that it needs context to know which meaning is being applied. I personally would a´say that is true inside and outside the U.S. One person said it sounds like "right wing talk radio" and another has said that "welfare" as a term for government assistance " it's not used that much even in the States anymore". Taken together, to me this would make the approach of renaming the article Welfare (financial aid) eminently sensible because it address which of the two meanings is being applied. It will also enable an article Welfare (State of well-being) to be written to discuss the use of the term in the U.S. constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its definition in government programs to ensure the welfare of the the population. Could Users Lentower and Shadowjams please explain their objections (if they have any now) to renaming the present article Welfare (financial aid) and making the Welfare article a disambig page? This I think will enable us to move forward a bit towards consensus if I can understand the objections (if there are any).84.250.230.158 (talk) 08:51, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

You're mostly repeating yourself again. You're again engaged in narrowly quoting WP: and other sources to support your narrow POV. Shadowjams and I obviously disagree with your analysis here. I'll let him comment further. Lentower (talk) 14:22, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

IP 84's Canvass at WP:Reference_desk/Language

IP 84's canvass is at WP:Reference_desk/Language#Is_.22welfare.22_aspirational_or_non-aspirational_in_your_country.3F. Perhaps someone else can point out the bias, lack of neutrallity, POV, etc. in her text, and her approach. Lentower (talk) 15:13, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I really would be interested to see whether other experienced editors see my raising the issue as approriate or as [[Wikipedia:Canvassing#Appropriate_notification]|inappropriate]. Personally I thought my approach was fully within the rules and certainly not deserving of the an ip block as Lentower has threatened. It was limited, presented neutrally, and to a non-partisan audience and was fully open (I gave the link to this page). I notified other editors in a neutral way at a few national (Non-UK and Non-US) based government related articles in the hope that we could get some input from editors not in the UK or the US to as for them to assist. This is hardly mass posting with a biased message to a partisan audience without being transparent (which is how canvassing is characterized. Please desist from your attempts to bully me into submission. I still want to to know what is wrong with renaming the article Welfare (financial aid) as suggested. You have not answered this as far as I can tell. If I am wrong, please repeat your reasons below because I genuinely cannot see where you have addressed the point.84.250.230.158 (talk) 16:32, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Again repetitive of prior posts above. Again mis-representing what has been posted above. Again, over-reaction to an informational post for other editors. Perhaps Shadowjams or someone else will comment further. Lentower (talk) 18:45, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
This is getting silly. The reference desk question is probably ok because it's not aimed at a particular group. This edit, however seems very close to canvassing. There's other examples of seeking opinions from tangentially related forums, including: Wikipedia:Editor assistance/Requests#English variation dispute over the article, Wikipedia talk:No original research#Dictionary as a source, Talk:Social programs in the United States, Talk:Demographics of New Zealand, Talk:Social Security (Australia), and Talk:Economy of South Africa. Shadowjams (talk) 19:22, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I agree with you about sillyness. I don't see why you think the other places where I went to for editor assistance was close to canvassing. I have no way of knowing how the editors would respond and the question was posed neutrally and openly in accordance with the guidance at WP:CANVAS. I just went to the closest pages I could get to the subject in several English speaking countries that are not my own or yours. But I'll let that drop (meaning that I don't expect you to answer provided we leave this as just a difference of opinion not to be taken a step further).84.250.230.158 (talk) 21:14, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
The problem is you're going to a select group of discussion places where people are inclined to agree with you. That's the problem. It's like if I was having a political dispute then went to the respective political party's talk page to tell them, "oh by the way... there's this argument tangentially related over here, check it out." Shadowjams (talk) 22:18, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
How could I predict the answer? I don't get it. All I was doing was to get editors from other countries with an interest and knowledge to help us to resolve the differences. They might all agree with you. As it happened, the only answers we have had back seem to show that everyone "sees" the "aid" connection but they also see the "well-being" connection regardless of being in the US or outside. The answer I got at talk WP:OR seems to indicate (I think) that if the title is ambiguous in two directions there should be two articles. I guess something like Welfare (social assistance) and [[Welfare [social well-being)]]. Judging by the variety of social aid programs I think that even the social assistance version ought probably be a list of national programs and a list of types of assistance (financial, in kind, charitable, governmental, universal, means-tested, etc) with links if needed to more in-depth articles. I fail to see how we can produce a meaningful article when there is so much variation around the world. The Australian system of welfare support had a name very unfamiliar to me and so unmemorable that I have forgotten what it is. Even Britain now, it seems is really motoring ahead with plans that have been afoot for many years to merge the tax and benefits systems. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.250.230.158 (talk) 22:52, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I again concur with what Shadowjams has added. Lentower (talk) 15:57, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

IP 84's Canvass at WP:Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research

IP 84's canvass is at WP:Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research#Dictionary_as_a_source. Perhaps someone else can point out the bias, lack of neutrallity, POV, etc. in her text, and her approach. Lentower (talk) 18:45, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

You really are hell bent on trying to down my reputation and I have hardly started out as an editor. You told me that I am engaging in OR by producing a dictionary source and you said its not acceptable because it is either OR or it is a primary source and therefore not a valid source as far as WP is concerned. I don't see it that way and I don't see how it is SYN either, which you also said it could be. I went to the OR talk page to ask if what you are saying is right and you then begin this tirade again claiming that my going to that page is canvassing! I am just trying to validate whether what you are saying is true. Is that a WP crime? As far as I read policy, if you produce a citation from a RS, which is not a Primary Source but a secondary one, that ought to be enough. I really don't see how you can think a dictionary is a primary source because professional dictionary compilers are language experts who use lots of independent sources before determining whether they warrant an entry and whether the entry details are accurate. I don't see how it can be otherwise. If I have this wrong, please tell me PRECISELY where I have gone wrong. 84.250.230.158 (talk) 19:04, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
The place to discuss your reputation is your User Talk page, not here.
Editors who actually read all of this section with it's sub-sections, will see that my first post in this sub-section is true. An example is that I pointed out above that: your three dictionary sources above all from publishers in England, and all from the same educated class, which makes them biased for the change you are trying to make. You did not add that or other things pointed out above to your inquiries elsewhere. Lentower (talk) 15:13, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Confusing discussion to follow

At the risk of making this more complicated, this discussion so far has been really difficult to follow, partly because of inconsistent indenting, lack of sigs, and other formatting things, plus that some of this has gone on on separate talk pages. I don't think any real progress has been made in convincing 84 that this proposed overhaul of article names is not necessary or appropriate. However, I'm willing to wait before we do something like RfC, which seems like overkill. In the meantime, it'd be nice if future comments were indented in response to the one before them, and didn't skip around too much. Shadowjams (talk) 00:13, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I yet again concur with Shadowjams. Though I hope the discussion that follows is less confusing to follow than what has preceded. : - )
I've given up on re-formatting IP 84's confusing and uncustomary style. I tried to show by edit and example, what we do to be courteous to one another. For whatever reason, IP 84 has yet to get it.
But one more try: WP:Talk page formatting shows how to indent Talk pages to assist Editors in reading them easily.
WP:Etiquette would be useful to understand, if anyone hasn't already done so.
Hopefully, we won't have to go to RfC, though IP protection might be less overkill. Lentower (talk) 03:25, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Hmm. Banning my contributions (and by default I suspect, my husband's though he uses a proper account) sounds quite dramatic. I was not aware of talk page rules that don't allow copying text to answer points raised higher up but separated from the response by later comments by other users but now I am. I thought the User talk pages were meant to ask questions directed specifically at that user, but you seemed to object to that. I am sorry if my doing that offended you. I think your apparent objections to my trying to widen the discussion to other users as being WP:CANVASSING are wide of the mark. What I did was quite neutrally attempt to bring in editors with a wider geo-linguistic perspective. If you contentions were right, you might have expected the responses from to support you. I was not picking and choosing editors to bring in to the discussion which really would have been canvassing. 84.250.230.158 (talk) 09:25, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
You obviously don't understand how to use Article Talk vs User Talk pages. Often the case for new editors like yourself. Please find and read the relevant WP: articles. If you have already, please go back, re-read them, and understand them.
Neither Shadowjams nor I were accusing you of anything. Just granted the WP editing mistakes you have made (common mistakes for new editors), we wanted to help you become a better WP editor.
I'll let Shadowjams comment on the rest of your paragraph, if and as he chooses. Lentower (talk) 14:29, 27 April 2012 (UTC)