Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

I seem to be alone right now

Hello there. As most Americans should know, the Iowa Democratic caucuses, 2008, are a crucial event in the process of electing the president later this year. However, a lot of work needs to be done on the article before this evening to make sure that we are ready for the results tonight. Therefore, I'm asking for your help to make sure that this article gets done quickly.--Dem393 (talk) 18:27, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

For us, the race is not to the swift but to the accurate and useful (not just tonight or tomorrow, but ten or fifty years from now). Wasted Time R (talk) 02:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008 Request for Peer Review

I requested a peer review for the Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008 article. Thought some people here might be interested in it. Wikipedia:Peer review/Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008--RedShiftPA (talk) 04:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Who to include in {{Infobox Election}}

It is a general rule to only included nominees in the infobox who won electoral votes (not including votes by faithless electors). Otherwise you could have dozens of people in the infobox who only received fractions of one per cent in the popular vote. --Philip Stevens (talk) 18:09, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Is this a Wikipedia rule? If so, can you please provide a cite? Thanks. Jkp1187 (talk) 18:12, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

• Wikipedia does not have firm rules and I wouldn't like to put that rule in stone as one year a nominee might get 50 states, like what almost happened in 1984 and 1972. All I can say is, I created the infobox and User:Cardsplayer4life added it to the US election pages, neither of us added nominees who hadn't won electoral votes. For me, this was because only six people can fit into the infobox, often more than that run for president, and I didn't want to be biased against some of the smaller parties. Also, in order to avoid the infobox getting any bigger than it was already, some criteria had to be found to enable a nominee to go into the infobox and winning electoral votes seemed to be the best option. --Philip Stevens (talk) 18:31, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I understand your position, and definitely want to work with you on this. However, your suggested guideline is creates bad results. For instance, it would lead to exclusion of two third party candidates who received a substantial percentage of the vote (Perot in '92 and '96, Anderson in '80) despite having an impact on the race. Indeed, Perot in '92 and Anderson in '80 participated in televised debates against major candidates during the Fall election campaign (Anderson against Reagan, Perot against Bush and Clinton). At the same time, it means that candidates who received electoral votes, such as Hospers in '72 and Byrd in '60 despite receiving minimal votes (Hospers) or, really, none at all (Byrd) SHOULD be included.

I suggest instead that Third party/independent candidates should not be included in the infobox unless either (a) they receive a substantial percentage of votes, or otherwise significantly affected the race, or (b) received any electoral votes. I suggest that Nader in '00 had an impact in the race (certainly many believe, rightly or wrongly, that his presence 'threw' the election to Bush. Don't want to debate that issue, but the idea is out there and I think that his candidacy should be recognized.) I also suggest that Perot ('96 and '92) and Anderson ('80) either had an impact on the race, or received a significant portion of the popular vote (in all cases, more than 5%) to merit inclusion.

Of course, there are other candidates that could be discussed, but in essence I think that by not including any candidates that had an impact on the race (and the only case where there were more than 4 I think would be 1860,) a disservice is done to history. Jkp1187 (talk) 22:12, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

• Would like to work on consensus for this as well. So I'll put a copy of this discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections, and we'll get the views of other users. We should continue further discussions there. --Philip Stevens (talk) 08:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

• I understand the dilemma, since the infobox both attempts to represent the election as a whole but is also electoral-vote oriented. On balance, however, I think the third party candidates that have a significant perturbing effect on the election should be included. I would use per-election judgement rather than a hard-and-fast metric as to what "significant" means, and for the modern era I think the above list is correct: Wallace '68 (of course, he won electoral votes anyway), Anderson '80, Perot '92 and '96, Nader '00 (but not '04). Wasted Time R (talk) 15:31, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Mitt Romney

There is a discussion taking place at Talk:Mitt Romney#Material regarding subject's religious affiliation regarding where, if anywhere, content relating to the subject's religious affiliation should be placed, and how much weight to give such content. Any input would be welcome. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 18:45, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I recently requested a peer review

Hello there! Yesterday I requested a peer review for the article Iowa Democratic caucuses, 2008. Since this WikiProject seems to be the appropriate project for the article, I was wondering whether someone would be willing to leave some feedback.--Dem393 (talk) 03:41, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

New messages

What's with the Bill Richardson new message thing? Basketballoneten 03:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering about that myself. I'll go ahead and remove it, as it seems to be a mistake.--JayJasper (talk) 04:14, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I was hoping to increase attention to the article. --STX 04:47, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Useful FAQ model for articles with constantly revisited issues

This frequently asked questions page: Talk:Hillary Rodham Clinton/FAQ, created by User:Wasted Time R
appears on the talk page, Talk:Hillary_Rodham_Clinton using the template {{FAQ}}.

It's a great model for informing editors of past history on articles that are subject to editorial revisiting of issues, controversy, and so on.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 18:03, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Alan Keyes again

I can see this actually has been discussed here, this was a surprise, but "this time around he's just engaging in a minor vanity exercise" doesn't seem to be very formal: what is really the formal demands here? Could you decide whether or not he should be in Template:2008 Republican presidential candidates and United States Republican presidential candidates, 2008? I started reverting him back in when an IP removed him, but it would be nice to get a clear answer. Greswik (talk) 18:27, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

This dispute is a waste of time. We all agree he is a candidate so just leave it alone.--STX 18:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I have to go now. But the IP is not letting it alone. It needs attention, if I had time, I would have sorted out the right "admin-pages", but: I have to go now. Somebody, please look after this! Greswik (talk) 22:52, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Junk

I just noticed something very disturbing. The following articles exist (note the egregious spelling errors):

• Allen Keyes presidential campagin 2008
• John H. Cox presidential campaign, 2008
• Eugene McCarthy presidential campagin 1968

Someone ought to clean up this junk.--STX 04:33, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

McCarthy 1968 is one of the most famous presidential campaigns ever. What's the objection to having an article on it? If it's just the misspelled name, move it. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:31, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

All three "articles" were essentially duplicates of the campaign sections on the bio pages the three aforementioned candidates. They have now been redirected to the respective main articles, though the McCarthy and Keyes redirects should probably be deleted because of the spelling errors in the title (and because there are already properly spelled redirects for both).--JayJasper (talk) 23:21, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Did a bit more cleanup to account for the creation of Alan Keyes Presidential Campaign, 2008, a fourth duplicate. Moved an additional paragraph on Keyes' political positions to the campaign section of the main article, and redirected there. I am in favor of keeping misspelled redirects, either common misspellings, or even idiosyncrasies if already extant; can't hurt, and the more the merrier. John J. Bulten (talk) 15:59, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Good point. The main problem's been fixed, so I guess we'll leave well enough alone.--JayJasper (talk) 18:51, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Main article top xrefs to campaign article

User:DavidBailey is adding cross-references at the top of candidates' main articles, to the campaign articles, such as:

For Mike Huckabee's Presidential Campaign, see Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, 2008

He's done this for at least Huckabee, Romney, and McCain. Is this a good idea? Normally this space is used for disambiguation among other "main" articles, not for pointing to subarticles. On the other hand, it will clue readers in that the full description of an ongoing campaign is elsewhere. What do people think? Wasted Time R (talk) 13:35, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

This type of cross-reference is usually seen at the beginning of the campaign section of the main article, rather than the top of the page, which I think is sufficient. That being said, I have no major objection to it being placed at the top. As you suggested, it might be helpful, especially while the campaign season is in full swing.--JayJasper (talk) 21:40, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I think it creates clutter at the top. In the case of McCain, it would be easy enough to say in the first paragraph: "John Sidney McCain III (born August 29, 1936) is the senior United States Senator from Arizona and a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2008 presidential election. The John McCain presidential campaign officially began on February 28, 2007."Ferrylodge (talk) 04:09, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

The exact official starting date of a presidential campaign is not the kind of detail you want cluttering up the first paragraph of the main bio article. If you're trying to work in the campaign article wlink right away, "... a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2008 presidential election" would be better, although still not great. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Confusing infoboxes

I must say that I find the infoboxes used on the articles of presidential elections very confusing. The photographs use a red outline for Republican candidates and a blue outline for Democratic candidates, but the map showing the Electoral College votes uses blue for the Republican ticket and red for the Democratic ticket. Aecis^Brievenbus 00:20, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

1928 needs help

I was passing by the article on United States presidential election, 1928, and it needs significant help.

First, there's some horrible formatting problem that is overlapping the infobox with the republican candidates. Maybe this will go away if the article is filled out further, but if not, someone should look into it.

Second, this article has major problems with citations, including a couple of places that look like the author's personal assessment. I see a lot of sources at the bottom, but since most of them are books (and a bunch of journals with references too incomplete to find them quickly) there's not much I can do personally to clean it up. Mangoe (talk) 13:46, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Hillary Clinton at WP:GAR

Hillary Clinton has been at WP:GAR since Feb. 11.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:20, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Do Primaries and Caucuses count

Do individual primaries and caucuses count under this project? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bigvinu (talk • contribs) 00:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes. But they probably haven't been tagged or assessed yet.--STX 00:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

In that case, can someone assess "South Carolina Democratic primary, 2008" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.57.156.143 (talk) 23:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Democratic Party nomination/Republican Party nomination section of "United States presidential election, YEAR" pages

Why are these picture galleries? A simple table or list would be fine. In my opinion the pictures are purely decorative, if someone really wants to know what the candidate looks like they can see the individual article. However this isn't my main complaint - it's the mess it makes. On my widescreen display at home it's ok. But I was reading a couple of the article on a standard size screen elsewhere and the huge gallery of pics makes a mess of the formatting. Mark83 (talk) 21:08, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The galleries are junk. --STX 00:14, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Obviously I agree, a simple list would be much more encyclopedic. But I'll leave time for more opinions. Mark83 (talk) 02:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Tom Vilsack presidential campaign, 2008

The article appears to be a copy and paste of the campaign section of the main article. The rest appears to have been written by a child or somebody with English as a second language. Does anybody see any reason to keep this article? --STX 00:45, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

No reason whatsoever, so I have redirected it back to the Vilsack article.--JayJasper (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Split into two new articles

When a candidate becomes the official candidate of their party I suggest we split their campaign article into two new articles for size reasons. For example John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 should be split into John McCain presidential primary campaign, 2008 with information about the primary contests, and an article under the title John McCain general election presidential campaign, 2008 based on the general election. The article John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 should remain but should be very vague in its coverage and link to the two new more indepth articles. For whoever the Democratic nominee is, I suggest the same should be done to that particular candidate's campaign article. What is everybody else's opinion on this matter?--STX 04:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea considering how lengthy the campaign articles for John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are already. It's also a good way to distinguish a party's nominee from the many other candidates who ran, most of whom also have campaign articles.--JayJasper (talk) 22:10, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't we start focusing on primaries?

Although I haven't been able to edit frequently for a while, I noticed that some of the primary articles have very little content. I really think that this WikiProject should begin to work on those articles so that we have more comprehensive coverage of the presidential elections. Any thoughts?--Dem393 (talk) 23:53, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It definitely should be a priority, we could start by tagging and assessing these articles. --STX 04:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

James K. Polk

I have nominated this article for Featured Article Review. Please come and review it, and help it retain FA status! Judgesurreal777 (talk) 22:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

New "controversies" page has sprung up

2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks. Looks like a real bad idea in the making. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:51, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

After some talk page discussions, I've put it up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks. Wasted Time R (talk) 19:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

McCain peer review

A request has been made for Peer Review of the McCain article, in case anyone would like to join in.[1]Ferrylodge (talk) 07:58, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Another new 2008 campaign article sprung up

See Religion and politics in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, up for AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of 2008 presidential candidates' religious associations. Wasted Time R (talk) 19:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Controversies articles, continued

I had this item posted to my talk page. Perhaps folks here may be interested in transforming the conversations there. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 18:24, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

fwiw.....I'm canvassing for general expertise regarding a pair of re-titling proposals for 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign "Controversies" daughter-articles and would be delighted to get, if possible,

*INPUT----both here and here. — Justmeherenow (   ) 09:18, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

How much info on embarassing associates should be in a presidential candidate's biography?

The Barack Obama Featured Article, part of this project's scope, now has an important discussion on its talk page (at Talk:Barack Obama#Attempt to build consensus on the details) that could affect other articles on presidential candidates.

Some editors here think that when a U.S. presidential candidate is embarassed by someone associated with that candidate, no information about it should be mentioned in the WP biography article, even if the campaign (and therefore the person who is the subject of the article) was affected. Others think WP should only mention that this person was controversial and leave a link in the article to the WP article on that controversial associate. Still others (including me), think we should briefly explain just why that person was controversial in the candidate's life, which can be done in a phrase or at most a sentence or two. Examples:

• Hillary Clinton and Norman Hsu
• Barack Obama and Bill Ayers (and Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko)
• John McCain and John C. Hagee
• Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik

Whatever we do, we should have equal treatment, so anyone interested in NPOV-, WP:BLP-compliant articles should look at and participate in the discussion. We've started the discussion by focusing on how much to say about former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers in the Barack Obama article, but, again, this will likely affect many other articles.

If you click on the first link I give here, you'll find a comparison I did of negative information in the Clinton, McCain and Giuliani articles. I've also posted that information on the talk pages of those articles. Noroton (talk) 16:00, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

My comments appear at Talk:Ron Paul#How much info on embarassing associates should be in a presidential candidate's biography?. Incidentally, my apologies to the other editors of this page for my very light involvement of late; I do expect to return. Today is the last primary day, so it should be safe to reenter the water! JJB 17:25, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

United States presidential election, 2008

There's a dispute at this article, concerning candidates in the TopInfobox. It would be appreciated if this WikiProject's members could help end the disputes. GoodDay (talk) 14:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Formatting of election dates

It seems that most if not all of the U.S. presidential election articles use day month year formatting rather than month day, year. (4 November 2008 rather than November 4, 2008). Since these are U.S. elections, and the November 4, 2008 style is more common in the United States, it seems like it should be month day style. Theshibboleth (talk) 01:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 21:29, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Nobody for President?

Nobody for President is one of the "Articles to create." Anyone know anything about it? There's a pin here http://www.havelshouseofhistory.com/Nobody%2010001.jpg Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow says Wavy Gravy ran for president several times under that name. Should it just be redirected to him? There's also http://nobodyforpresident.net/ Шизомби (talk) 02:00, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Election page infobox size

I tried to impliment an improvement in the infoboxes for elections into this article, but was reverted on the grounds of "standardization" among the other election articles (what good is change if you can't start somewhere?) to the current version. I see no good reason for giant portraits which make the infobox so large on my fairly-standard resolution 1024x768 (fullscreen browser window) that the infobox encroaches on the table of contents. There is simply no good reason any reader needs the portraits to be this large. Maybe if there were only two candidates, I could at least imagine images that large causing only an elongation of the infobox in height, not width; but the very previous election demonstrates that the infobox template is poorly designed to the point that if there are only two candidates, there's just a massive gap where a third one would sit in the infobox.

I seriously reccomend a) an infobox redesign that checks if there's a third candidate before creating a blank third column, and b) an election-article-wide agreement that the image size ought to be reduced (images are perfectly enlargable by clicking, and certainly the candidates' articles themselves, which are linked, can house proper sized images. Understanding the election topic does not hinge in any meaningful way on seeing a picture of the candidates. It's not the crucial element. Besides which, if people just used a thumbnail that was cropped closer to the head (two of the images on the '68 article are cropped to around the belly, and the Nixon shot is below his waist. If you crop them to a face shot (I believe most if not all images used for these infoboxes are public domain; there even IS a Humphrey thumbnail linked from his image's page.) You can see the same size face with a far smaller image and infobox.

I'd like to note that my re-size did not change any other element of the infobox; the map and all info in the box remained the same size. I don't believe the lead should be compressed on every election article to read like this on a fullscreen browser:

The United States presidential election of 1968

was a wrenching national experience, and included

the assassination of Democratic candidate Robert

F. Kennedy, the assassination of civil rights leader

Martin Luther King, Jr. and subsequent race riots...

Thank you TheHYPO (talk) 05:53, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Self-reply to note that (for whatever code reasons), downsizing the map from 400px to 350px results in the elimination of the blank third column for 2-candidate elections, as is the case for United States presidential election, 1952. As a result, I'm going to go 350px some of the infoboxes that are wasting space with blank columns. In some articles, 380px seemed to work fine while in others it did not; I suspect it is related to the width of the two portrait images and therefore the two candidate columns used. Regardless, however, 350px seemed to work for every article I saw. TheHYPO (talk) 06:03, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 514 articles are assigned to this project, of which 163, or 31.7%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place the following template on your project page:

{{User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription|banner=WikiProject United States presidential elections}}

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:01, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Joe Biden wiki page corruption noted by Big News - are two sourced articles enough to warrant inclusion?

Getting so tired of a miniscule proportion of editors claiming the right to declare if and when 'consensus' is achieved; all further discussion ignored; and pages locked until non-'consensus' contributors give up and let their interest and activity on WP quietly expire without further 'discussion.' While mentioning no names, thus preserving 'NPOV' in my writing here, it is apparent that an almost literal handful of editors make the overwhelming percentage of 'consensus is now achieved' and/or 'page lock' decisions and declarations on the vast majority of articles. Before you tiny minority of editors referenced above tell me to 'get more involved', or to 'go ahead and be bold', or to 'do it yourself', let me say that in such a nearly wiki-universal practice lies the very core of why and how the assertion that 'consensus=factual' shuts down debate by closing out the vast mojority of those interested in any subject from even trying to enter the debate, is a valid, if not strong, claim. To Wit: The concept of 'consensus' is no more effective at producing useful information than is the notion that 'consensus' can produce effective results in oh, let's say, governance a la Bush or Pelosi? Or, say, news gathering and reporting by Big News? Or, shall we use 'consensus' to decide whether an article in re facts of physical science is deemed worthy of inclusion on WP? The very usage of the term 'consensus', in the context of being the central tool used for assessing any WP writing, is rather indicative of a distinctly non-N POV on the part of the creators and operators of WP. IOW, why is not the goal for assessing the factuality of any WP article not the inclusion of objective facts, but that of a 'consensus' made up of any editors who have money enough to spend time enough on WP to claim/earn a 'right' to shut down, lockout, and revise only as they decide? Simply put, it is my sad experience during nearly 40 adult years as a general newshound to find that claims of using 'consensus' to decide anything are more commonly made by those who want to control and revise facts/history to their own ends, than by those who openly declare their particular POV and openly argue from that POV. NPOV proponents in overall society and in WP appear far more often among those who desire to shut down real debate, which results in the inclusion of all relevant facts in articles about which readers themselves decide the factuality of any statement therein. (Much as the notion of 'Reportorial Objectivity', or 'NPOV', used by Big News and propounded by Big Academia since WWI, killed the formerly vibrant exchange of ideas and public debate on all issues which existed from before the Founding of this nation. Central to the success of that Founding was the fact that almost all towns of any size whatever had at least two newspapers, each declaring loudly and clearly their very partisan editorial and reportorial POVs. With each news source doing so, readers knew the POV of what they were reading regardless of source.) Casual observation seems to indicate that a very small percentage of editors make a very large percentage of all 'referee' decisions on WP as noted above. One must have enough time, thus must have enough money, to make the many thousands of edits and/or contributions to 'earn' the Barnstar Awards posted on some profile pages. Funny, but in my experience having that much time to spend on efforts with literally no return of material gain means the NPOV of such folks are suspect due to being independently wealthy, and/or retired, and/or corp/gov office workers, and/or subsidized political/party operatives, and/or union operatives, and/or NGOs and .orgs of any stripe. It would not surprise me at all if a thorough and deep background investigation of all WP editors showed a significant majority were full time operatives paid by Big News, and/or each of the two Major Parties, and/or universities run by liberal or conservative administrations, and/or unions, etc. in order to precisely manage given WP pages in supporting the agendae of such unions, orgs, govs, and/or corps. (Not questioning the integrity any person editing, just a general observation.) Thus, folks such as myself with much more interest in factuality than in 'consensus', but who have to work full time and more than full time to make a living of any sort, simply cannot overcome the inertia and power of the 'consensus' seeking editors on WP. All I am proposing is that WP abandon the false notion that 'Consensus=Factuality' and let all editors openly declare their POV in all discussions, thus making the ability to gather facts and to propound differing opinions in successfully in open debate the measure of whether a given page is considered factual, regardless of POV.

Anyway, here are the relevant facts about the Joe Biden page which I am offering for debate, and for their possible inclusion therein. Personal Note: I am sorry for any past comments deemed inappropriate or found offensive by any person or persons on WP. While I may disagree with WP policy, it is obvious that those persons I referred to above as 'unnamed' editors do work hard in trying to ensure the quality of WP writing. While I may question their judgement if not their motives, their civility is, (usually), an uplifting hallmark of any discussions in which they are participating. Such genteel restraint by such editors truly sets a fine example of civil discourse for all, and of doing so under conditions we all may 'concede', <g>, are often frustrating at best. ...Conditions which often seem so to this small business builder working an average of 29+, 12+ hour, days per month. <g> Cheers All! --Whraglyn (talk) 00:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/mccain-camp-touts-biden-praise-before-tonights-speech-2008-08-27.html

McCain camp touts Biden praise ahead of speech

By Susan Crabtree Posted: 08/27/08 06:28 PM [ET] The campaign of John McCain is highlighting positive comments Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) has made about the Arizona senator during the Democratic presidential primary and in previous years in an attempt to pre-emptively undermine his attacks. With Biden set to deliver his first major speech as Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) running mate Wednesday night, Republicans are sharpening their criticism of the veteran Delaware senator both publicly and privately. They also are pointing out the numerous times Biden has expressed great admiration for McCain, calling him “one of my heroes” on the Senate floor nearly a year ago and, at another point, telling Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” that he would be honored to run for president on the same ticket as McCain. Biden also has praised McCain’s willingness to challenge the Bush administration on foreign policy and his support for sending more troops into Iraq at the outset of the war. In contrast, Biden opposed last year’s troop surge, which McCain pushed. Obama chose Biden for his foreign policy experience, and the ticket gained more than 30 years of service in the Senate and on the Foreign Affairs Committee, which Biden chairs. Republicans point out that Biden has no military service and received an F in ROTC at the University of Delaware, a subject of furious discussion in the conservative blogosphere since Obama selected him to be his No. 2 late last week. No successful presidential ticket since 1940 has lacked military service; either the candidate for president or vice president has served in the military in some capacity. Two conservative blogs, newsbusters.org and bizzyblog.com, have run items about changes made to Biden’s Wikipedia entry Friday night as news of his veep selection was leaking out. The blogs point out that someone wiped out the year 2004 from the presidential campaigns section of the bio. That heading contained a reference to an MSNBC article about Biden urging then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to pick McCain over himself for the No. 2 spot on the ticket. MSNBC’s story, dated May 16, 2004, reported that Biden told the late NBC “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert that Kerry should select McCain as a way to help heal the “vicious rift” dividing the U.S. Newsbusters.org reported that the details of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys-ed and an F in ROTC) as well as other details about the plagiarism allegations that caused him to drop out of the 1988 Democratic presidential primary "strangely" disappeared from his Wikipedia entry between Friday and Saturday. Opponents on both sides of the aisle often alter Wikipedia entries of political figures, but the timing of the changes raises questions about whether anyone at the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had anything to do with it. Obama’s campaign and the DNC did not return several calls seeking comment about the changes to the Wikipedia entry as well as the positive comments Biden has made about McCain over the years.

McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said Biden has been far more critical of Obama’s credentials to be president during the primary than he has been of McCain’s.

“Joe Biden has only been clear on one issue during this election — that Barack Obama is not ready to be commander in chief,” Porritt said in a written response to an inquiry. “Voters are still awaiting many answers, including how their plans to raise taxes will grow the economy, how they plan to combat soaring energy prices, and apparently college transcripts.”

Biden’s garrulous nature has landed him in hot water on numerous occasions during his long Senate tenure. It also provides the McCain camp with volumes of material to mine.

During last year’s debate on the defense authorization bill, Biden extolled McCain’s virtues before going on to defend Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) concerns about the troop surge.

“Let me just say that one of my heroes is the senator from Arizona,” Biden said at the time. “I mean this sincerely. We use the phrase around here ‘my friend.’ I consider him my friend. I believe if neither he nor I were senators and I picked up a phone and called him and said, ‘I need you to show up at such-and-such a place, I can't tell you why,' he would be there.”

Nearly three years ago, during an appearance on Comedy Central, Biden even told host Jon Stewart that he would be honored to run for president on a McCain-Biden ticket.

“You may end up going against a Senate colleague, perhaps McCain, perhaps [then-Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist [R-Tenn.],” Stewart said in the interview.

“John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off — be well off no matter who ...”

Stewart was incredulous in his follow-up:“Did I hear, did I hear 'with'?” he sputtered. “You know, John McCain and I think —,” Biden attempted before Stewart directed him to speak plainly. “Don’t become cottage cheese, my friend. Say it,” Stewart warned. “The answer is yes,” Biden said. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/08/28/hill-notes-obama-biden-wiki-wackiness-dems-not-returning-calls 'The Hill' Notes Obama-Biden Wiki Wackiness; Dems 'Not Returning Calls' By Tom Blumer (Bio | Archive) August 28, 2008 - 14:49 ET In a "Leading the News" story primarily about Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden's prior praise of John McCain, Susan Crabtree at The Hill noted previous posts made by yours truly about the alterations made to Biden's Wikipedia entries shortly before and after he was named by Barack Obama. Those posts showed that at least these changes were made since I downloaded -- and kept -- Biden's main Wiki entry on Friday: • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The details of Biden's undergraduate grades went away, and other text in the related paragraph was worked over. • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The section relating to 2004 under "Presidential Campaigns" was deleted, and most of the text that had been contained there moved to a section before the 1988 campaign. It was if the idea that Biden campaigned for the presidency was true before Obama selected him, and not true after that. • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The footnote relating to the original entry's claim that Biden had only plagiarized British politican Neil Kinnock one time, which never related to that claim anyway, was removed. Further, no Wiki entries relating to Biden -- before or after -- adequately described the full extent of his 1987 plagiarism, which included Kinnock at least one and probably several other times, and other plagiarizing of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. What Ms. Crabtree wrote follows. It includes some follow-up she did, which is in bold: Two conservative blogs, newsbusters.org and bizzyblog.com, have run items about changes made to Biden’s Wikipedia entry Friday night as news of his veep selection was leaking out. The blogs point out that someone wiped out the year 2004 from the presidential campaigns section of the bio. That heading contained a reference to an MSNBC article about Biden urging then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to pick McCain over himself for the No. 2 spot on the ticket. MSNBC’s story, dated May 16, 2004, reported that Biden told the late NBC “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert that Kerry should select McCain as a way to help heal the “vicious rift” dividing the U.S. Newsbusters.org reported that the details of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys-ed and an F in ROTC) as well as other details about the plagiarism allegations that caused him to drop out of the 1988 Democratic presidential primary "strangely" disappeared from his Wikipedia entry between Friday and Saturday. Opponents on both sides of the aisle often alter Wikipedia entries of political figures, but the timing of the changes raises questions about whether anyone at the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had anything to do with it. Obama’s campaign and the DNC did not return several calls seeking comment about the changes to the Wikipedia entry as well as the positive comments Biden has made about McCain over the years. Ms. Crabtree didn't note that the posts are largely mirrored at the two blogs, but got the substance of what she did write correct. However, a little more detail on the full extent of the 1987 plagiarism would, in my opinion, have greatly benefited inquiring readers. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com. —Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters

Infobox?

I brought this up months ago and it was not responded to (see Election page infobox size). I believe the images of candidates in the elections articles are massively oversized. Especially when there are three candidates (or occasionally four!). On a fairly standard 1024x768 or 1280x960 fullscreen (some people don't even maximize their browsers), the infobox for United States presidential election, 1968 smooshes the article's lead to no wider than the Table of Contents (gave an example of the width in my previous post). This is extremely obtrusive.

To that end, I reccomended this alternative: United States presidential election, 1968/infobox proposal but no one replied (pro or con). The only thing that was reduced was the candidate photos - no info or other images were compressed or lost.

No one complained, so I made the change, and it was hastily reverted with a comment like "these are standard image sizes". My point is that the standard is too big. I think they should all be shrunk (at least three-or-more-candidate races). Even some 2-person races like United States presidential election, 1940 are very wide, due to wide images chosen. I think my proposal looks infinitely better and cleaner.

I think it's vital to note that this is an article on the ELECTION. If someone wants to see the candidate closer they can do two things: click on the image for a zoom, or goto the candidate's actual article. THAT is the place for large pictures. If you think that the image of Nixon in my proposal is too hard to see, it's far better to crop the image closer to the face than to make the image massive. In fact, I would also suggest that it would look much more format if images were cropped to a pre-determined proportion (eg: 3:4 proportions) so that every candidate infobox image can be cut to the exact same height and width (which will cause the colored bar underneath to be far easier to match to the image, which right now is often wider than the image in many boxes). I really think it would improve articles, but until I get some support, I'm likely to continue getting reverted. Yet noone opposes me when I actually suggest it on talk pages. It is getting very frustrating. TheHYPO (talk) 06:32, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I support it.--William Saturn (talk) 17:12, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for United States presidential elections

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:12, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Barack Obama FAR

Barack Obama has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:47, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Election day gameplan?

Election day is going to wreak havoc on the United States presidential election, 2008 article, just like it did on the United States presidential election, 2004 article. It would be good to have a gameplan for how all of that energy focused on that article can be harnessed appropriately. For example, it might be good to preemptively create a United States presidential election results, 2008 page, and put in a stub section in the main article pointing everyone to the results page. Thoughts? -- RobLa (talk) 03:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

AFD debate

Some of you may want to read and comment on this AFD debate: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Berg v. Obama. All opinions welcome.Nrswanson (talk) 02:53, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Breaking News: Attempted Obama Assassination

The AP is reporting a intercetion of two skinheads who had planned to assassinate Obama. Not sure if the porject is interested, but it could be a major article development point.

Joewurzelbacher2010

An article I created, Joewurzelbacher2010 was deleted while I was in the process of writing the article. Does anyone know where I may get a copy of the article, the copy that was deleted? Multiple reliable sources were added, but there were more to be added and expounded upon. I had placed an "underconstruction tag" on the article. I would like to be able to complete it (on a user page) and then resubmit it in the future if and/or when it is notable. Thanks. Ism schism (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

If you ask the admin who closed the delete, sometimes they'll relocate the article to your user space. But if you're working on an article that's subject to deletion, it's always best to be saving copies of the edit source off-Wikipedia as you go along. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:32, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I did ask the admin, but have yet to hear a response. Also, thank you for the advice concerning saving, I was under the impression that working on an article, with multiple reliable source, that it would not be deleted in the first few hours (while an underconstruction tag was on the article)... but, I am relatively new and still have a lot to learn. Thanks again. Ism schism (talk) 22:37, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

The deletionists are out in full force. In the old days, you could write a one-line stub and it could slowly grow over time with contributions from many editors. Nowadays, for certain topics, an article has to be practically GA-quality when it first hits the ground. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:47, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I feel that an Afd is always the best approach to a speedy delete - when multiple sources are provided for which the article is the subject. An Afd allows community consensus, and input. In this case, I feel that an Afd would at least show that the notability of the subject is arguable from both sides. Thanks again. Ism schism (talk) 23:16, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election

An article that you have been involved in editing, Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election. Thank you.

I believe this article falls under the scope of your project and that members' opinions would be valued. --Amwestover (talk|contrib) 21:07, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Straw poll redlink on multiple pages

Straw polls for the Republican Party (United States) presidential nomination, 2008 was deleted a week ago as R1: Redirect to a deleted, nonexistent, or invalid target. WhatLinksHere currently lists

• Republican Party (United States) presidential candidates, 2008#Withdrawn from seeking nomination: "Paul did well in Republican straw polls..."

• Statewide opinion polling for the Republican Party presidential primaries, 2008: Hatnote
• John McCain presidential campaign, 2008#Iowa Straw Poll: Hatnote
• Ames Straw Poll#See also
• Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, 2008#Straw polls: Link
• Duncan Hunter presidential campaign, 2008#Polls: One of the hatnotes
• Talk:Ron Paul/Archive 6#Template

Aha. Found links to 3 deleted redirects, one of which notes Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Straw polls for the 2008 United States presidential election (2nd nomination). I don't see any of this members of the Wikiproject who participated in that AfD, or a notification on this talk page, though they account for the 3 redlinks in the 2008 other section of Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections#Table of articles.

Were you not notified of this AfD? I have no opinion as I haven't seen the article(s). I also don't understand why it was deleted as a redirect, because it appears to have been an article in January 2008, as its talk is mentioned here and Image:Straw poll results2.jpg links to it in its summary. <Confused> MeekSaffron (talk) 08:49, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

No, I never saw the AfD. I don't remember exactly what the article looked like, so I can't comment on whether the deletion was reasonable. But I do know that straw polls were frequently mentioned by articles about candidates who weren't doing well in regular polls. This was especially true with the Ron Paul articles, where the pro-Paul editors were convinced that there was this hidden reservoir of Paul support that conventional polling wasn't reaching. That did not turn out to be the case. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Heh. Your argument in the first AfD is "Keep. The article performs a valuable public service in demonstrating how meaningless straw polls are. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:57, 9 January 2008 (UTC)" Looking over the 2 AfDs, some of the information and perhaps article history could have useful info, though I understand the COATRACK & SYNTH concerns, unless there are reliable sources which discuss these straw polls. I think Straw polls for the 2008 United States presidential election should be userfied to someone interested in addressing those concerns, with a link here so others can help and discuss.

Unless it was such a mess that it's useless or not worth resuscitating, but it's hard to know without seeing it, history and all. MeekSaffron (talk) 21:08, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 06:53, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections/A-class review

A new feature of the wikiproject is the A-class review, please read about it here and review the current nominations.--STX 22:27, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Status of "controversies" pages

There is ongoing discussion across all of Wikipedia about whether political figures should have separate "controversies" or "criticisms" subarticles or main article sections. At the risk of oversimplification, proponents say such material satisfies a reader need, while opponents say such material violates WP:NPOV, WP:Content forking, and WP:Criticism. Although sometimes hotly debated, consensus decisions have been reached in several cases to dismantle such articles or sections, and disburse and integrate legitimate material within them into appropriate contexts within the normal biographical sections of the main and subarticles for that political figure.

Of the 16 Democratic and Republican candidates still running for president as of December 2007, the status in this regard is:

• Never had such articles/sections: Edwards, Kucinich, Gravel, Romney
• Had them, but have since been dismantled/disbursed/integrated: Obama, Clinton, Richardson, Biden, Paul, Giuliani, McCain, Hunter, F. Thompson, Dodd, Governorship of Mitt Romney‎
• Still have them: Dodd (Chris_Dodd#Criticism), Governorship of Mitt Romney‎ (Governorship of Mitt Romney‎#Controversies while governor), F. Thompson (Fred Thompson controversies), Huckabee (Mike_Huckabee#Criticism_and_controversies), Tancredo (Tom_Tancredo#Controversies)

Could you provide links to these pages, I am having trouble finding them.--STX 20:13, 8 December 2007 (UTC) Done. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Where is the discussion?--STX 20:55, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• Talk:Barack_Obama/Archive_2#Controversies_controversy
• Talk:Hillary_Rodham_Clinton_controversies#Proposal_to_dismantle_this_article ff.
• Talk:List of Hillary Rodham Clinton Controversies
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fred Thompson controversies
• Talk:Fred_Thompson_controversies#Proposal_to_dismantle_this_article
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ron Paul controversies
• Talk:Controversies_of_Rudy_Giuliani#Time_To_Hillarize_this_article_and_dismantle_it ff.
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Controversies of Rudy Giuliani
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Al Gore controversies (not a 2008 candidate but discussion went on in parallel)

The Biden, McCain, and Hunter dismantlings were done without any reaction. The Richardson one had a little; I think a lot had already been done before I looked at it. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually the Governorship of Mitt Romney has such a section, and in my view, is appropriately a part of that article, and I think controversies related to a particular office go well with an article on a particular office. Perhaps the above listing by Wasted Time R, ' on "never had section/article" should be re-reviewed for only "separate page" instances.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 15:50, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that once but forgot about it when I did my summary. Yes, material about controversies in a particular office go well in the article about holding that office, but I still think they can be better integrated than lumping them into a "Controversies" section. In this case, the bit about the budget surplus belongs in the Fiscal policy section, the bit about the landscapers belongs in the Illegal immigration section, the bit about tar baby belongs as a footnote in the Big Dig section, and the bit about Khatami visit could go in the Education section perhaps. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:07, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough, a sensible means for taking that section apart. I'll amend the listing above for accuracy. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 19:19, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Update - Fred Thompson controversies has now been dismantled/disbursed/integrated. See Talk:Fred_Thompson_controversies#Proposal_to_dismantle_this_article — everyone was in agreement. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:13, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Another update - Chris Dodd#Criticism is gone too, courtesy of another editor. Wasted Time R (talk) 19:10, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

And another — Governorship of Mitt Romney‎#Controversies while governor is now merged into context in the right parts of that article, more or less along the lines that I outlined above. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:51, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Here's an Obama controversy article, in case anyone wishes to merge into another article. It was created on November 21 of last year.Ferrylodge (talk) 19:50, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with having an article on a specific controversial event, if the event topic is too big to contain within another article. Thus, 1996 United States campaign finance controversy, White House FBI files controversy, Whitewater (controversy), Watergate scandal, etc. The problem was with articles that were collection points of all controversial aspects of a subject, without regard for proper biographical or historical context. Despite this article's vague title (due to a tortured history of renamings), it's actually about one specific topic (the moronic 'Obama is a secret Muslim' rumor), and thus is okay on these grounds. Wasted Time R (talk) 21:43, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. The reason I brought this up is because the Obama article was mentioned here, by an editor who suggested renaming the current article Mitt_Romney's "Faith in America" speech to more broadly cover Controversy regarding Mitt Romney's Mormonism. What do you think about such a renaming? Personally, I would prefer simply Mitt Romney and Religion.

I know you're probably cringing at the thought of getting even slightly and tangentially involved with the Mitt Romney article. However, I would like to mention that when good, responsible editors such as yourself completely abandon the field, it leaves the field completely to less responsible elements. There's currently an RFC going on at the Mitt Romney article, by the way.Ferrylodge (talk) 21:57, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Adding Delegate Endorsement pages

I am trying to locate information on "superdelegate" endorsements for both the Republican & Democratic Nominations and I can't find it. The Congressional Endorsement pages are a good start but it only covers a small subset. Is the information out there? Do other people think it is worth two more pages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.233.99.136 (talk) 19:51, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality of Romney article

Just wanted to bring to folks' attention that there is a huge ongoing neutrality discussion at the Mitt Romney article, regarding the polygamy of his four paternal great-grandparents.Ferrylodge (talk) 02:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd rather beat my head into this keyboard than get in the middle of that :-) Wasted Time R (talk) 03:23, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure if you got involved, it would not be the middle. It would be the end.  :-)

Seriously, there's a big problem there, IMHO.Ferrylodge (talk) 03:27, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I go back to when George Romney and Mo Udall ran for prez. Nobody paid much attention to their being Mormons. Life was good. I wrote almost all of the current Ann Romney article. That's my contribution to Romneypedia for now. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:38, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Mo Udall once attended a caucus meeting on Capitol Hill. Upon leaving, he announced the difference between a cactus and a caucus. Udall would have loved Wikipedia talk pages.Ferrylodge (talk) 03:41, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

FYI, this controversy was finally settled yesterday, though it could flare up again. The article is now unfrozen, after ten days' of protection.Ferrylodge (talk) 19:40, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

2008 presidential election template

Another high-visibility thing related to this project that's been under constant editorial debate and frequent changes over the past year is Template:United States presidential election, 2008, which is included into all the articles and which lists out all the candidates running currently and those who were running but have withdrawn. Friction over how serious or major a candidate has to be to gain inclusion, definition of "were running", deep research into FEC processes, etc. See Template talk:United States presidential election, 2008 for the full story. Wasted Time R (talk) 14:49, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Section heading question

User:Rtr10 is changing candidate main article section titles that used to say "2008 presidential [election] campaign" to say "Campaign for United States President, 2008 election", with the edit comment "change in section title to align with other candidates pages and remove bias tones". The new form seems a little clunky to me. Also, I'm not sure there is any current standard in this section title (or any other) to align to. Finally, I'm mystified by what "bias tones" were in the old form. Wasted Time R (talk) 15:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Most pages had separate titles and in my opinion some were trying to spin a campaign up and some were trying to spin another campaign down. I thought it would be more beneficial to the Project to apply the same Section Title to every candidate to remove any possible bias. Do you not find that acceptable? I did not see any problems with it. Rtr10 (talk) 00:17, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Candidate Infoboxes

I have went through today and applied the same Candidate Info Box to every Presidential Campaign Wikipedia article. Any articles that had logos in the Infobox were moved into the article in the articles respective "Campaign Developments" section and pictures of the candidates were placed in the Infobox. Rtr10 (talk) 00:22, 10 December 2007 (UTC) Any other suggestions for these?

Campaign article infobox image

What image should go into the infobox in the campaign articles? Possibilities are: campaign logo, campaign photo of candidate, non-campaign photo of candidate (such as current or past senator or governor photo). Currently most of the campaign articles have the same non-campaign photo as the main article (Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, 2008, John McCain presidential campaign, 2008, Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign, 2008, Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008, etc.), which strikes me as repetitive and unimaginative and ill-considered (an old photo intended for senate use does not necessarily correspond to a presidential campaign).

I would like to see the campaign logo in the infobox; political campaigns are somewhat similar to businesses or to sports teams, and we use logos in the infobox for both of those. It also provides variety compared to the main article. Photos taken on the campaign trail can then appear later in the article. As it happens, some of the campaign articles did use logos in the infoboxes, until User:Rtr10 began changing them today for an attempt at uniformity. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Just want to make it clear that the Campaign Logos were still kept on the respective pages, just moved outside the Info Box. (most of them are in the first section of the article and are still very visible) Rtr10 (talk) 00:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I favor an image of the candidate (whether new or old) over an image of the campaign's logo because it shows the reader who the article is about. A logo really doesn't add anything of any encyclopedic value to the article especially in the lead where an image of the candidate is more appropriate.--STX 02:00, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I Agree with STX, I think the picture is much more appropriate. The page still centers around the candidate. With the examples you used (corporations and sports teams) both of those do not center around one person. There is very little on every page about the campaign staff or political strategies, almost everything is on the candidate. I do think we should aim toward trying to use official Gubernatorial, Senate or Congress photos, if available and only if they are current photos. If there is only one and it is like three years old and the candidate looks differently today, I think we should try and find a current photo. Rtr10 (talk) 00:03, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Agree with WTR for the reasons he stated (similar to businesses or to sports teams). Let's have the logos back at the top of the campaign page, or at least not force uniformity on this issue where views apparently differ. Restored at Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008 --HailFire (talk) 19:47, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

HailFire, I appreciate your dedication to helping with Barack Obama's page, however there has been no sort of consensus on this discussion. Currently Candidate Photographs are being used in each candidates Info Box. Please refrain from changing the info box photo until that discussion reaches some type of consensus. This is nothing special to Barack Obama, it is applied to every 2008 presidential campaign page. Some of us have worked very hard on making the entire Presidential Elections project the best it can be. I know you wouldn't want someone going around and screwing up something you put a lot of time in. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation! Rtr10 (talk) 20:55, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008 has been reverted to candidate photo in the Info Box and logo in the article.

Rtr, please point me to where the consensus on which you based these recent changes[2][3][4][5] to four different campaign articles has been documented. Also, seems you might want to pause before setting standards for others with less than 250 edits in your user contributions history. --HailFire (talk) 21:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

There is no need to have that kind of attitude and I can promise you, you will not gain my respect with that. I put in a lot of time on the Info Boxes of every single presidential campaign page, it was not just Obama or Clinton or the ones with logos, it was every single box, on every single page. If you would have cared to look at the topic above this, I posted exactly what I was doing and why I was doing. You went and changed something as if the discussion had been settled knowing good and well it had not. If you want to act like a five year old, that is fine, but I will not engage in that type of bickering with you. You are free to think what ever you want, but unless there is a decision made here, you should not go around and undermine other editors work. Rtr10 (talk) 21:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Rtr, some free advice: when you're new in a place, walkly softly and listen to others more than you speak. The question of what image goes into the infobox hasn't been posed here long enough to have formed consensus. Also, there are many variations in section structure, contents, balance, etc. across the bodies of the different campaign articles, so it's not like this one difference is going to spoil perfect commonality. In other words, it's not worth having a cow over. Wasted Time R (talk) 21:51, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I am not the one "having a cow over it". However, when I spend a lot of time working on something and then someone comes in and undermines my work, I am not the kind of person who takes that very lightly. I know the discussion has not been here long enough to form a consensus and that is my point exactly, I thought I had made that clear. Until there is a clear consensus the images should not be changed. Do you find something flawed with that? I will accept what ever consensus forms, but until then the Info Boxes should be left the way they are with the Photographs. Rtr10 (talk) 22:33, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The point is that the status quo prior to you was, each campaign article can decide for itself whether a photo or a logo goes up top. Since then, there is a 2-2 split on whether there should be logos or photos. Since there is no consensus, we go back to the old state of each article decides. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:36, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree, because that makes no sense to me, what so ever. I didn't know this was one campaign versus another. I thought Wikipedia was suppose to be one encyclopedic website and that users and editors in this project should be working with each other, not against each other. Am I wrong? I just see your logic to be very flawed. Rtr10 (talk) 22:43, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Just saw this discussion - I agree with HailFire and Wasted Time R that logos are preferable in the infobox. But more than that, I object to the attempt to force all candidates' articles to be the same. We can have general suggested guidelines, but if the editors of one or another article decide they'd rather go a different route, I don't think they should be prevented from doing so by fiat. So I think that the status quo was just fine - let the editors decide. Tvoz |talk 05:56, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. No standard needed.--STX 22:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Theodore Roosevelt image

I kind of unilaterally picked an image to represent our WikiProject, I am wondering if anybody has another image in mind or if everybody is alright with the current one.--STX 22:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Safely back in time, his political philosophy doesn't easily match to current ideologies, Theodore Roosevelt the article is FA. Seems good to me. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

For the reasons mentioned by Wasted Time R, it might be a good idea to keep the image of TR but remove the images of RFK and McCain.Ferrylodge (talk) 23:44, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I love Teddy! The image is fine with me and a great image on the topic in my opinion. If anyone would like, I could make a project logo or image or what ever you want to call it. I have no problem doing that, but I have no problems with the current one. Rtr10 (talk) 00:08, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Does anyone know?? (Image question)

Are images from candidates on the photo site Flickr fair use? Or are there any Copyright restrictions on them? It isn't real clear to me sense it is a social picture site and I know tons of blogs and other websites use photos of candidates from Flickr. I think we could probably find some really good profile type pictures in there that are actually current and are taken from the campaign trail. Any help on this or other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Rtr10 (talk) 00:17, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Never mind I found my own answer on the Wikipedia Commons upload page. Rtr10 (talk) 05:35, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Creation of Bill Richardson presidential campaign, 2008

I am proud to announce that I have created the Bill Richardson presidential campaign, 2008! If you have time, pleas go and give it a look over and if you see a mistake please either correct it or come back here and tell me and I will fix it. Also if you have any information to add on Bill Richardson's campaign, please add it. It is more than a stub, but it is not A-Class yet. I will try to do some more work on it in the next few days. Rtr10 (talk) 05:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I've done some work on this. It still needs material covering the second half of 2007. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:56, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Pictures from Oprah/Obama rally in Des Moines

I just uploaded some photographs that my wife took at the recient campaign rally with Oprah and Obama in Des Moines on saturday, Dec 8. Just figured that I'd let folks here in this wikiproject know, in case any such images are needed. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] --Ramsey2006 (talk) 06:11, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I've included the last one of Obama in Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008, it's a great 'end shot' of the campaign trail. I'll include one of the Oprah ones too once I do some cropping and exposure work on it. Wasted Time R (talk) 18:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I couldn't see how to get an edited version back in under your license, so I just used one of the Oprah ones as is. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:57, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not really experienced in uploading photos. I just picked one of the standard licenses, without reading the details. Do some of them not allow for making alterations? I'm not sure how to change the license after the fact. I could upload it again under a different license if it would be more convenient --Ramsey2006 (talk) 04:11, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Please peer review and improve a list

Hello, I created List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin and I was wanted it peer reviewed. First, I wanted to know if this is a worthwhile list, if not then I can speedy it. Second, it has no intro or any other paragraphs explaining the list and I was hoping someone with writing skills could expand on that. Any feedback is appreciated. Regards.--Old Hoss (talk) 17:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Nice job on the list Old Hoss! I thought it looked good. I wrote a brief introduction to the national popular vote and the difference in between it and the electoral college since that had not been stated and how the national popular vote is calculated since we do not hold a national election. Rtr10 (talk) 18:08, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Alan Keyes campaign article?

Alan Keyes presidential campaign, 2008 is on the to-do list. I would say, don't do it. He has been a legitimate second-tier candidate in the past, but this time around he's just engaging in a minor vanity exercise, his puzzling inclusion in today's Des Moines debate notwithstanding. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:06, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I will remove it.--STX 22:18, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Campaign infobox?

Following up on WTR's thought that campaigns are similar to businesses or sports teams, here's something I put together with code copied from Template:Infobox Company:

Mike Gravel for President 2008
File:Gravel2008 724x220.jpg
Campaign	U.S. presidential election, 2008
Candidate	Mike Gravel
Affiliation	Democratic Party
Headquarters	Arlington, Virginia
Key people	Mike Gravel (Manager) Mike Gravel (Treasurer)
Receipts	US$0.4 (2007-12-31)
Slogan	Let The People Decide!
Website
www.gravel2008.us

{{Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections/Template:Infobox Campaign
 | committee        = Mike Gravel for President 2008
 | logo             = [[Image:Gravel2008_724x220.jpg|200px]]
 | campaign         = [[U.S. presidential election, 2008]]
 | candidate        = [[Mike Gravel]]
 | cand_id          = P60004751
 | fec_date         = 2007-12-31
 | affiliation      = [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] 
 | headquarters     = [[Arlington, Virginia]]
 | key_people       = [[Mike Gravel]] <small>(Manager)</small> <br /> [[Mike Gravel]] <small> (Treasurer)</small>
 | receipts         = 0.4
 | slogan           = Let The People Decide!
 | homepage         = [http://www.gravel2008.us/ www.gravel2008.us]
}}

Needs a lot more work, but I wanted to see what folks here think of this as an alternative to Template:Infobox Candidate. --HailFire (talk) 23:36, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• I can't say that I find any value in displaying the logo of a campaign. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 02:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I must say HailFire, I was not in agreement with putting the logo in the candidate info box, but with that new Campaign info box it makes a lot more sense and I would definitely be willing to help out in improving that format and trying to get more campaign information on the campaign pages. That is what they are afterall. I think that is a great idea and I'm on board! Rtr10 (talk) 03:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think the new box has potential also. Wasted Time R (talk) 04:08, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

So what categories should be included? I would suggest Campaign(or maybe Election might be the better term), Candidate, Political Party, Headquarters, Campaign Manager, Other Key Staff, Money Raised, Money Spent, Cash on Hand, Slogan, Website only changes to what is up already are Campaign Manager and the three main Financial figures for campaigns (raised, spent, and cash on hand). Does anyone else know anything else that should be included? Rtr10 (talk) 05:06, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I just used the infobox in the article George Romney presidential campaign, 1968. I think it looks good but I still think that all articles shouldn't have to conform to this infobox. It should be a choice of the editors of that particular page.--STX 05:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Trying this. --HailFire (talk) 16:58, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I've applied this new template at Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008. It has includes a template-defined link referencing a campaign's quarterly filings with the FEC, which may help to ensure that campaign articles using the template report identically sourced and formatted official statistics. What do editors here think about replacing the earlier Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections/Template:Infobox Campaign template with this one? I noticed there are a number of campaign pages using that experimental one, so wanted to check here first. --HailFire (talk) 22:16, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Fyi. --HailFire (talk) 23:34, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

United States presidential election, 1804

I am not familiar with the templates used in these articles, but I'm reasonably sure that the one used in United States presidential election, 1804 is fouled up. In my Firefox browser it is overlain by the table of results. It seems that the infobox template is much larger than in other articles. Can someone fix this please? Thanks! Sheep81 (talk) 07:23, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

For some reason editors think it is encyclopedic to put two large images of the candidates in the lead. This is the root of the problem.--STX 22:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008‎

Some editors, including some involved in this wikiproject want to delete all the polling articles. The AFD is located here. --STX 02:19, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

xxx presidential campaign, xxxx

Tom Tancredo presidential campaign, 2008 is now a GA article. I nominated it because Tancredo dropped out and the article was complete in its coverage. After a candidate drops out we should fix up and complete their article and then nominate it for GA status. Hopefully we can get all of the xxx presidential campaign, 2008 articles to GA and then possibly FA status.--STX 04:14, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I seem to be alone right now

Hello there. As most Americans should know, the Iowa Democratic caucuses, 2008, are a crucial event in the process of electing the president later this year. However, a lot of work needs to be done on the article before this evening to make sure that we are ready for the results tonight. Therefore, I'm asking for your help to make sure that this article gets done quickly.--Dem393 (talk) 18:27, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

For us, the race is not to the swift but to the accurate and useful (not just tonight or tomorrow, but ten or fifty years from now). Wasted Time R (talk) 02:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008 Request for Peer Review

I requested a peer review for the Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008 article. Thought some people here might be interested in it. Wikipedia:Peer review/Chris Dodd presidential campaign, 2008--RedShiftPA (talk) 04:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Who to include in {{Infobox Election}}

It is a general rule to only included nominees in the infobox who won electoral votes (not including votes by faithless electors). Otherwise you could have dozens of people in the infobox who only received fractions of one per cent in the popular vote. --Philip Stevens (talk) 18:09, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Is this a Wikipedia rule? If so, can you please provide a cite? Thanks. Jkp1187 (talk) 18:12, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

• Wikipedia does not have firm rules and I wouldn't like to put that rule in stone as one year a nominee might get 50 states, like what almost happened in 1984 and 1972. All I can say is, I created the infobox and User:Cardsplayer4life added it to the US election pages, neither of us added nominees who hadn't won electoral votes. For me, this was because only six people can fit into the infobox, often more than that run for president, and I didn't want to be biased against some of the smaller parties. Also, in order to avoid the infobox getting any bigger than it was already, some criteria had to be found to enable a nominee to go into the infobox and winning electoral votes seemed to be the best option. --Philip Stevens (talk) 18:31, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I understand your position, and definitely want to work with you on this. However, your suggested guideline is creates bad results. For instance, it would lead to exclusion of two third party candidates who received a substantial percentage of the vote (Perot in '92 and '96, Anderson in '80) despite having an impact on the race. Indeed, Perot in '92 and Anderson in '80 participated in televised debates against major candidates during the Fall election campaign (Anderson against Reagan, Perot against Bush and Clinton). At the same time, it means that candidates who received electoral votes, such as Hospers in '72 and Byrd in '60 despite receiving minimal votes (Hospers) or, really, none at all (Byrd) SHOULD be included.

I suggest instead that Third party/independent candidates should not be included in the infobox unless either (a) they receive a substantial percentage of votes, or otherwise significantly affected the race, or (b) received any electoral votes. I suggest that Nader in '00 had an impact in the race (certainly many believe, rightly or wrongly, that his presence 'threw' the election to Bush. Don't want to debate that issue, but the idea is out there and I think that his candidacy should be recognized.) I also suggest that Perot ('96 and '92) and Anderson ('80) either had an impact on the race, or received a significant portion of the popular vote (in all cases, more than 5%) to merit inclusion.

Of course, there are other candidates that could be discussed, but in essence I think that by not including any candidates that had an impact on the race (and the only case where there were more than 4 I think would be 1860,) a disservice is done to history. Jkp1187 (talk) 22:12, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

• Would like to work on consensus for this as well. So I'll put a copy of this discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections, and we'll get the views of other users. We should continue further discussions there. --Philip Stevens (talk) 08:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

• I understand the dilemma, since the infobox both attempts to represent the election as a whole but is also electoral-vote oriented. On balance, however, I think the third party candidates that have a significant perturbing effect on the election should be included. I would use per-election judgement rather than a hard-and-fast metric as to what "significant" means, and for the modern era I think the above list is correct: Wallace '68 (of course, he won electoral votes anyway), Anderson '80, Perot '92 and '96, Nader '00 (but not '04). Wasted Time R (talk) 15:31, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Mitt Romney

There is a discussion taking place at Talk:Mitt Romney#Material regarding subject's religious affiliation regarding where, if anywhere, content relating to the subject's religious affiliation should be placed, and how much weight to give such content. Any input would be welcome. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 18:45, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I recently requested a peer review

Hello there! Yesterday I requested a peer review for the article Iowa Democratic caucuses, 2008. Since this WikiProject seems to be the appropriate project for the article, I was wondering whether someone would be willing to leave some feedback.--Dem393 (talk) 03:41, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

New messages

What's with the Bill Richardson new message thing? Basketballoneten 03:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering about that myself. I'll go ahead and remove it, as it seems to be a mistake.--JayJasper (talk) 04:14, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I was hoping to increase attention to the article. --STX 04:47, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Useful FAQ model for articles with constantly revisited issues

This frequently asked questions page: Talk:Hillary Rodham Clinton/FAQ, created by User:Wasted Time R
appears on the talk page, Talk:Hillary_Rodham_Clinton using the template {{FAQ}}.

It's a great model for informing editors of past history on articles that are subject to editorial revisiting of issues, controversy, and so on.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 18:03, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Alan Keyes again

I can see this actually has been discussed here, this was a surprise, but "this time around he's just engaging in a minor vanity exercise" doesn't seem to be very formal: what is really the formal demands here? Could you decide whether or not he should be in Template:2008 Republican presidential candidates and United States Republican presidential candidates, 2008? I started reverting him back in when an IP removed him, but it would be nice to get a clear answer. Greswik (talk) 18:27, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

This dispute is a waste of time. We all agree he is a candidate so just leave it alone.--STX 18:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I have to go now. But the IP is not letting it alone. It needs attention, if I had time, I would have sorted out the right "admin-pages", but: I have to go now. Somebody, please look after this! Greswik (talk) 22:52, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Junk

I just noticed something very disturbing. The following articles exist (note the egregious spelling errors):

• Allen Keyes presidential campagin 2008
• John H. Cox presidential campaign, 2008
• Eugene McCarthy presidential campagin 1968

Someone ought to clean up this junk.--STX 04:33, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

McCarthy 1968 is one of the most famous presidential campaigns ever. What's the objection to having an article on it? If it's just the misspelled name, move it. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:31, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

All three "articles" were essentially duplicates of the campaign sections on the bio pages the three aforementioned candidates. They have now been redirected to the respective main articles, though the McCarthy and Keyes redirects should probably be deleted because of the spelling errors in the title (and because there are already properly spelled redirects for both).--JayJasper (talk) 23:21, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Did a bit more cleanup to account for the creation of Alan Keyes Presidential Campaign, 2008, a fourth duplicate. Moved an additional paragraph on Keyes' political positions to the campaign section of the main article, and redirected there. I am in favor of keeping misspelled redirects, either common misspellings, or even idiosyncrasies if already extant; can't hurt, and the more the merrier. John J. Bulten (talk) 15:59, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Good point. The main problem's been fixed, so I guess we'll leave well enough alone.--JayJasper (talk) 18:51, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Main article top xrefs to campaign article

User:DavidBailey is adding cross-references at the top of candidates' main articles, to the campaign articles, such as:

For Mike Huckabee's Presidential Campaign, see Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, 2008

He's done this for at least Huckabee, Romney, and McCain. Is this a good idea? Normally this space is used for disambiguation among other "main" articles, not for pointing to subarticles. On the other hand, it will clue readers in that the full description of an ongoing campaign is elsewhere. What do people think? Wasted Time R (talk) 13:35, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

This type of cross-reference is usually seen at the beginning of the campaign section of the main article, rather than the top of the page, which I think is sufficient. That being said, I have no major objection to it being placed at the top. As you suggested, it might be helpful, especially while the campaign season is in full swing.--JayJasper (talk) 21:40, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I think it creates clutter at the top. In the case of McCain, it would be easy enough to say in the first paragraph: "John Sidney McCain III (born August 29, 1936) is the senior United States Senator from Arizona and a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2008 presidential election. The John McCain presidential campaign officially began on February 28, 2007."Ferrylodge (talk) 04:09, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

The exact official starting date of a presidential campaign is not the kind of detail you want cluttering up the first paragraph of the main bio article. If you're trying to work in the campaign article wlink right away, "... a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2008 presidential election" would be better, although still not great. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Confusing infoboxes

I must say that I find the infoboxes used on the articles of presidential elections very confusing. The photographs use a red outline for Republican candidates and a blue outline for Democratic candidates, but the map showing the Electoral College votes uses blue for the Republican ticket and red for the Democratic ticket. Aecis^Brievenbus 00:20, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

1928 needs help

I was passing by the article on United States presidential election, 1928, and it needs significant help.

First, there's some horrible formatting problem that is overlapping the infobox with the republican candidates. Maybe this will go away if the article is filled out further, but if not, someone should look into it.

Second, this article has major problems with citations, including a couple of places that look like the author's personal assessment. I see a lot of sources at the bottom, but since most of them are books (and a bunch of journals with references too incomplete to find them quickly) there's not much I can do personally to clean it up. Mangoe (talk) 13:46, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Hillary Clinton at WP:GAR

Hillary Clinton has been at WP:GAR since Feb. 11.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:20, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Do Primaries and Caucuses count

Do individual primaries and caucuses count under this project? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bigvinu (talk • contribs) 00:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes. But they probably haven't been tagged or assessed yet.--STX 00:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

In that case, can someone assess "South Carolina Democratic primary, 2008" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.57.156.143 (talk) 23:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Democratic Party nomination/Republican Party nomination section of "United States presidential election, YEAR" pages

Why are these picture galleries? A simple table or list would be fine. In my opinion the pictures are purely decorative, if someone really wants to know what the candidate looks like they can see the individual article. However this isn't my main complaint - it's the mess it makes. On my widescreen display at home it's ok. But I was reading a couple of the article on a standard size screen elsewhere and the huge gallery of pics makes a mess of the formatting. Mark83 (talk) 21:08, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The galleries are junk. --STX 00:14, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Obviously I agree, a simple list would be much more encyclopedic. But I'll leave time for more opinions. Mark83 (talk) 02:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Tom Vilsack presidential campaign, 2008

The article appears to be a copy and paste of the campaign section of the main article. The rest appears to have been written by a child or somebody with English as a second language. Does anybody see any reason to keep this article? --STX 00:45, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

No reason whatsoever, so I have redirected it back to the Vilsack article.--JayJasper (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Split into two new articles

When a candidate becomes the official candidate of their party I suggest we split their campaign article into two new articles for size reasons. For example John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 should be split into John McCain presidential primary campaign, 2008 with information about the primary contests, and an article under the title John McCain general election presidential campaign, 2008 based on the general election. The article John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 should remain but should be very vague in its coverage and link to the two new more indepth articles. For whoever the Democratic nominee is, I suggest the same should be done to that particular candidate's campaign article. What is everybody else's opinion on this matter?--STX 04:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea considering how lengthy the campaign articles for John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are already. It's also a good way to distinguish a party's nominee from the many other candidates who ran, most of whom also have campaign articles.--JayJasper (talk) 22:10, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't we start focusing on primaries?

Although I haven't been able to edit frequently for a while, I noticed that some of the primary articles have very little content. I really think that this WikiProject should begin to work on those articles so that we have more comprehensive coverage of the presidential elections. Any thoughts?--Dem393 (talk) 23:53, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It definitely should be a priority, we could start by tagging and assessing these articles. --STX 04:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

James K. Polk

I have nominated this article for Featured Article Review. Please come and review it, and help it retain FA status! Judgesurreal777 (talk) 22:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

New "controversies" page has sprung up

2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks. Looks like a real bad idea in the making. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:51, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

After some talk page discussions, I've put it up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks. Wasted Time R (talk) 19:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

McCain peer review

A request has been made for Peer Review of the McCain article, in case anyone would like to join in.[15]Ferrylodge (talk) 07:58, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Another new 2008 campaign article sprung up

See Religion and politics in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, up for AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of 2008 presidential candidates' religious associations. Wasted Time R (talk) 19:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Controversies articles, continued

I had this item posted to my talk page. Perhaps folks here may be interested in transforming the conversations there. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 18:24, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

fwiw.....I'm canvassing for general expertise regarding a pair of re-titling proposals for 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign "Controversies" daughter-articles and would be delighted to get, if possible,

*INPUT----both here and here. — Justmeherenow (   ) 09:18, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

How much info on embarassing associates should be in a presidential candidate's biography?

The Barack Obama Featured Article, part of this project's scope, now has an important discussion on its talk page (at Talk:Barack Obama#Attempt to build consensus on the details) that could affect other articles on presidential candidates.

Some editors here think that when a U.S. presidential candidate is embarassed by someone associated with that candidate, no information about it should be mentioned in the WP biography article, even if the campaign (and therefore the person who is the subject of the article) was affected. Others think WP should only mention that this person was controversial and leave a link in the article to the WP article on that controversial associate. Still others (including me), think we should briefly explain just why that person was controversial in the candidate's life, which can be done in a phrase or at most a sentence or two. Examples:

• Hillary Clinton and Norman Hsu
• Barack Obama and Bill Ayers (and Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko)
• John McCain and John C. Hagee
• Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik

Whatever we do, we should have equal treatment, so anyone interested in NPOV-, WP:BLP-compliant articles should look at and participate in the discussion. We've started the discussion by focusing on how much to say about former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers in the Barack Obama article, but, again, this will likely affect many other articles.

If you click on the first link I give here, you'll find a comparison I did of negative information in the Clinton, McCain and Giuliani articles. I've also posted that information on the talk pages of those articles. Noroton (talk) 16:00, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

My comments appear at Talk:Ron Paul#How much info on embarassing associates should be in a presidential candidate's biography?. Incidentally, my apologies to the other editors of this page for my very light involvement of late; I do expect to return. Today is the last primary day, so it should be safe to reenter the water! JJB 17:25, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

United States presidential election, 2008

There's a dispute at this article, concerning candidates in the TopInfobox. It would be appreciated if this WikiProject's members could help end the disputes. GoodDay (talk) 14:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Formatting of election dates

It seems that most if not all of the U.S. presidential election articles use day month year formatting rather than month day, year. (4 November 2008 rather than November 4, 2008). Since these are U.S. elections, and the November 4, 2008 style is more common in the United States, it seems like it should be month day style. Theshibboleth (talk) 01:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 21:29, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Nobody for President?

Nobody for President is one of the "Articles to create." Anyone know anything about it? There's a pin here http://www.havelshouseofhistory.com/Nobody%2010001.jpg Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow says Wavy Gravy ran for president several times under that name. Should it just be redirected to him? There's also http://nobodyforpresident.net/ Шизомби (talk) 02:00, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Election page infobox size

I tried to impliment an improvement in the infoboxes for elections into this article, but was reverted on the grounds of "standardization" among the other election articles (what good is change if you can't start somewhere?) to the current version. I see no good reason for giant portraits which make the infobox so large on my fairly-standard resolution 1024x768 (fullscreen browser window) that the infobox encroaches on the table of contents. There is simply no good reason any reader needs the portraits to be this large. Maybe if there were only two candidates, I could at least imagine images that large causing only an elongation of the infobox in height, not width; but the very previous election demonstrates that the infobox template is poorly designed to the point that if there are only two candidates, there's just a massive gap where a third one would sit in the infobox.

I seriously reccomend a) an infobox redesign that checks if there's a third candidate before creating a blank third column, and b) an election-article-wide agreement that the image size ought to be reduced (images are perfectly enlargable by clicking, and certainly the candidates' articles themselves, which are linked, can house proper sized images. Understanding the election topic does not hinge in any meaningful way on seeing a picture of the candidates. It's not the crucial element. Besides which, if people just used a thumbnail that was cropped closer to the head (two of the images on the '68 article are cropped to around the belly, and the Nixon shot is below his waist. If you crop them to a face shot (I believe most if not all images used for these infoboxes are public domain; there even IS a Humphrey thumbnail linked from his image's page.) You can see the same size face with a far smaller image and infobox.

I'd like to note that my re-size did not change any other element of the infobox; the map and all info in the box remained the same size. I don't believe the lead should be compressed on every election article to read like this on a fullscreen browser:

The United States presidential election of 1968

was a wrenching national experience, and included

the assassination of Democratic candidate Robert

F. Kennedy, the assassination of civil rights leader

Martin Luther King, Jr. and subsequent race riots...

Thank you TheHYPO (talk) 05:53, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Self-reply to note that (for whatever code reasons), downsizing the map from 400px to 350px results in the elimination of the blank third column for 2-candidate elections, as is the case for United States presidential election, 1952. As a result, I'm going to go 350px some of the infoboxes that are wasting space with blank columns. In some articles, 380px seemed to work fine while in others it did not; I suspect it is related to the width of the two portrait images and therefore the two candidate columns used. Regardless, however, 350px seemed to work for every article I saw. TheHYPO (talk) 06:03, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 514 articles are assigned to this project, of which 163, or 31.7%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place the following template on your project page:

{{User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription|banner=WikiProject United States presidential elections}}

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:01, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Joe Biden wiki page corruption noted by Big News - are two sourced articles enough to warrant inclusion?

Getting so tired of a miniscule proportion of editors claiming the right to declare if and when 'consensus' is achieved; all further discussion ignored; and pages locked until non-'consensus' contributors give up and let their interest and activity on WP quietly expire without further 'discussion.' While mentioning no names, thus preserving 'NPOV' in my writing here, it is apparent that an almost literal handful of editors make the overwhelming percentage of 'consensus is now achieved' and/or 'page lock' decisions and declarations on the vast majority of articles. Before you tiny minority of editors referenced above tell me to 'get more involved', or to 'go ahead and be bold', or to 'do it yourself', let me say that in such a nearly wiki-universal practice lies the very core of why and how the assertion that 'consensus=factual' shuts down debate by closing out the vast mojority of those interested in any subject from even trying to enter the debate, is a valid, if not strong, claim. To Wit: The concept of 'consensus' is no more effective at producing useful information than is the notion that 'consensus' can produce effective results in oh, let's say, governance a la Bush or Pelosi? Or, say, news gathering and reporting by Big News? Or, shall we use 'consensus' to decide whether an article in re facts of physical science is deemed worthy of inclusion on WP? The very usage of the term 'consensus', in the context of being the central tool used for assessing any WP writing, is rather indicative of a distinctly non-N POV on the part of the creators and operators of WP. IOW, why is not the goal for assessing the factuality of any WP article not the inclusion of objective facts, but that of a 'consensus' made up of any editors who have money enough to spend time enough on WP to claim/earn a 'right' to shut down, lockout, and revise only as they decide? Simply put, it is my sad experience during nearly 40 adult years as a general newshound to find that claims of using 'consensus' to decide anything are more commonly made by those who want to control and revise facts/history to their own ends, than by those who openly declare their particular POV and openly argue from that POV. NPOV proponents in overall society and in WP appear far more often among those who desire to shut down real debate, which results in the inclusion of all relevant facts in articles about which readers themselves decide the factuality of any statement therein. (Much as the notion of 'Reportorial Objectivity', or 'NPOV', used by Big News and propounded by Big Academia since WWI, killed the formerly vibrant exchange of ideas and public debate on all issues which existed from before the Founding of this nation. Central to the success of that Founding was the fact that almost all towns of any size whatever had at least two newspapers, each declaring loudly and clearly their very partisan editorial and reportorial POVs. With each news source doing so, readers knew the POV of what they were reading regardless of source.) Casual observation seems to indicate that a very small percentage of editors make a very large percentage of all 'referee' decisions on WP as noted above. One must have enough time, thus must have enough money, to make the many thousands of edits and/or contributions to 'earn' the Barnstar Awards posted on some profile pages. Funny, but in my experience having that much time to spend on efforts with literally no return of material gain means the NPOV of such folks are suspect due to being independently wealthy, and/or retired, and/or corp/gov office workers, and/or subsidized political/party operatives, and/or union operatives, and/or NGOs and .orgs of any stripe. It would not surprise me at all if a thorough and deep background investigation of all WP editors showed a significant majority were full time operatives paid by Big News, and/or each of the two Major Parties, and/or universities run by liberal or conservative administrations, and/or unions, etc. in order to precisely manage given WP pages in supporting the agendae of such unions, orgs, govs, and/or corps. (Not questioning the integrity any person editing, just a general observation.) Thus, folks such as myself with much more interest in factuality than in 'consensus', but who have to work full time and more than full time to make a living of any sort, simply cannot overcome the inertia and power of the 'consensus' seeking editors on WP. All I am proposing is that WP abandon the false notion that 'Consensus=Factuality' and let all editors openly declare their POV in all discussions, thus making the ability to gather facts and to propound differing opinions in successfully in open debate the measure of whether a given page is considered factual, regardless of POV.

Anyway, here are the relevant facts about the Joe Biden page which I am offering for debate, and for their possible inclusion therein. Personal Note: I am sorry for any past comments deemed inappropriate or found offensive by any person or persons on WP. While I may disagree with WP policy, it is obvious that those persons I referred to above as 'unnamed' editors do work hard in trying to ensure the quality of WP writing. While I may question their judgement if not their motives, their civility is, (usually), an uplifting hallmark of any discussions in which they are participating. Such genteel restraint by such editors truly sets a fine example of civil discourse for all, and of doing so under conditions we all may 'concede', <g>, are often frustrating at best. ...Conditions which often seem so to this small business builder working an average of 29+, 12+ hour, days per month. <g> Cheers All! --Whraglyn (talk) 00:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/mccain-camp-touts-biden-praise-before-tonights-speech-2008-08-27.html

McCain camp touts Biden praise ahead of speech

By Susan Crabtree Posted: 08/27/08 06:28 PM [ET] The campaign of John McCain is highlighting positive comments Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) has made about the Arizona senator during the Democratic presidential primary and in previous years in an attempt to pre-emptively undermine his attacks. With Biden set to deliver his first major speech as Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) running mate Wednesday night, Republicans are sharpening their criticism of the veteran Delaware senator both publicly and privately. They also are pointing out the numerous times Biden has expressed great admiration for McCain, calling him “one of my heroes” on the Senate floor nearly a year ago and, at another point, telling Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” that he would be honored to run for president on the same ticket as McCain. Biden also has praised McCain’s willingness to challenge the Bush administration on foreign policy and his support for sending more troops into Iraq at the outset of the war. In contrast, Biden opposed last year’s troop surge, which McCain pushed. Obama chose Biden for his foreign policy experience, and the ticket gained more than 30 years of service in the Senate and on the Foreign Affairs Committee, which Biden chairs. Republicans point out that Biden has no military service and received an F in ROTC at the University of Delaware, a subject of furious discussion in the conservative blogosphere since Obama selected him to be his No. 2 late last week. No successful presidential ticket since 1940 has lacked military service; either the candidate for president or vice president has served in the military in some capacity. Two conservative blogs, newsbusters.org and bizzyblog.com, have run items about changes made to Biden’s Wikipedia entry Friday night as news of his veep selection was leaking out. The blogs point out that someone wiped out the year 2004 from the presidential campaigns section of the bio. That heading contained a reference to an MSNBC article about Biden urging then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to pick McCain over himself for the No. 2 spot on the ticket. MSNBC’s story, dated May 16, 2004, reported that Biden told the late NBC “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert that Kerry should select McCain as a way to help heal the “vicious rift” dividing the U.S. Newsbusters.org reported that the details of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys-ed and an F in ROTC) as well as other details about the plagiarism allegations that caused him to drop out of the 1988 Democratic presidential primary "strangely" disappeared from his Wikipedia entry between Friday and Saturday. Opponents on both sides of the aisle often alter Wikipedia entries of political figures, but the timing of the changes raises questions about whether anyone at the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had anything to do with it. Obama’s campaign and the DNC did not return several calls seeking comment about the changes to the Wikipedia entry as well as the positive comments Biden has made about McCain over the years.

McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said Biden has been far more critical of Obama’s credentials to be president during the primary than he has been of McCain’s.

“Joe Biden has only been clear on one issue during this election — that Barack Obama is not ready to be commander in chief,” Porritt said in a written response to an inquiry. “Voters are still awaiting many answers, including how their plans to raise taxes will grow the economy, how they plan to combat soaring energy prices, and apparently college transcripts.”

Biden’s garrulous nature has landed him in hot water on numerous occasions during his long Senate tenure. It also provides the McCain camp with volumes of material to mine.

During last year’s debate on the defense authorization bill, Biden extolled McCain’s virtues before going on to defend Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) concerns about the troop surge.

“Let me just say that one of my heroes is the senator from Arizona,” Biden said at the time. “I mean this sincerely. We use the phrase around here ‘my friend.’ I consider him my friend. I believe if neither he nor I were senators and I picked up a phone and called him and said, ‘I need you to show up at such-and-such a place, I can't tell you why,' he would be there.”

Nearly three years ago, during an appearance on Comedy Central, Biden even told host Jon Stewart that he would be honored to run for president on a McCain-Biden ticket.

“You may end up going against a Senate colleague, perhaps McCain, perhaps [then-Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist [R-Tenn.],” Stewart said in the interview.

“John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off — be well off no matter who ...”

Stewart was incredulous in his follow-up:“Did I hear, did I hear 'with'?” he sputtered. “You know, John McCain and I think —,” Biden attempted before Stewart directed him to speak plainly. “Don’t become cottage cheese, my friend. Say it,” Stewart warned. “The answer is yes,” Biden said. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/08/28/hill-notes-obama-biden-wiki-wackiness-dems-not-returning-calls 'The Hill' Notes Obama-Biden Wiki Wackiness; Dems 'Not Returning Calls' By Tom Blumer (Bio | Archive) August 28, 2008 - 14:49 ET In a "Leading the News" story primarily about Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden's prior praise of John McCain, Susan Crabtree at The Hill noted previous posts made by yours truly about the alterations made to Biden's Wikipedia entries shortly before and after he was named by Barack Obama. Those posts showed that at least these changes were made since I downloaded -- and kept -- Biden's main Wiki entry on Friday: • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The details of Biden's undergraduate grades went away, and other text in the related paragraph was worked over. • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The section relating to 2004 under "Presidential Campaigns" was deleted, and most of the text that had been contained there moved to a section before the 1988 campaign. It was if the idea that Biden campaigned for the presidency was true before Obama selected him, and not true after that. • (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The footnote relating to the original entry's claim that Biden had only plagiarized British politican Neil Kinnock one time, which never related to that claim anyway, was removed. Further, no Wiki entries relating to Biden -- before or after -- adequately described the full extent of his 1987 plagiarism, which included Kinnock at least one and probably several other times, and other plagiarizing of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. What Ms. Crabtree wrote follows. It includes some follow-up she did, which is in bold: Two conservative blogs, newsbusters.org and bizzyblog.com, have run items about changes made to Biden’s Wikipedia entry Friday night as news of his veep selection was leaking out. The blogs point out that someone wiped out the year 2004 from the presidential campaigns section of the bio. That heading contained a reference to an MSNBC article about Biden urging then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to pick McCain over himself for the No. 2 spot on the ticket. MSNBC’s story, dated May 16, 2004, reported that Biden told the late NBC “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert that Kerry should select McCain as a way to help heal the “vicious rift” dividing the U.S. Newsbusters.org reported that the details of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys-ed and an F in ROTC) as well as other details about the plagiarism allegations that caused him to drop out of the 1988 Democratic presidential primary "strangely" disappeared from his Wikipedia entry between Friday and Saturday. Opponents on both sides of the aisle often alter Wikipedia entries of political figures, but the timing of the changes raises questions about whether anyone at the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had anything to do with it. Obama’s campaign and the DNC did not return several calls seeking comment about the changes to the Wikipedia entry as well as the positive comments Biden has made about McCain over the years. Ms. Crabtree didn't note that the posts are largely mirrored at the two blogs, but got the substance of what she did write correct. However, a little more detail on the full extent of the 1987 plagiarism would, in my opinion, have greatly benefited inquiring readers. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com. —Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters

Infobox?

I brought this up months ago and it was not responded to (see Election page infobox size). I believe the images of candidates in the elections articles are massively oversized. Especially when there are three candidates (or occasionally four!). On a fairly standard 1024x768 or 1280x960 fullscreen (some people don't even maximize their browsers), the infobox for United States presidential election, 1968 smooshes the article's lead to no wider than the Table of Contents (gave an example of the width in my previous post). This is extremely obtrusive.

To that end, I reccomended this alternative: United States presidential election, 1968/infobox proposal but no one replied (pro or con). The only thing that was reduced was the candidate photos - no info or other images were compressed or lost.

No one complained, so I made the change, and it was hastily reverted with a comment like "these are standard image sizes". My point is that the standard is too big. I think they should all be shrunk (at least three-or-more-candidate races). Even some 2-person races like United States presidential election, 1940 are very wide, due to wide images chosen. I think my proposal looks infinitely better and cleaner.

I think it's vital to note that this is an article on the ELECTION. If someone wants to see the candidate closer they can do two things: click on the image for a zoom, or goto the candidate's actual article. THAT is the place for large pictures. If you think that the image of Nixon in my proposal is too hard to see, it's far better to crop the image closer to the face than to make the image massive. In fact, I would also suggest that it would look much more format if images were cropped to a pre-determined proportion (eg: 3:4 proportions) so that every candidate infobox image can be cut to the exact same height and width (which will cause the colored bar underneath to be far easier to match to the image, which right now is often wider than the image in many boxes). I really think it would improve articles, but until I get some support, I'm likely to continue getting reverted. Yet noone opposes me when I actually suggest it on talk pages. It is getting very frustrating. TheHYPO (talk) 06:32, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I support it.--William Saturn (talk) 17:12, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for United States presidential elections

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:12, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Barack Obama FAR

Barack Obama has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:47, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Election day gameplan?

Election day is going to wreak havoc on the United States presidential election, 2008 article, just like it did on the United States presidential election, 2004 article. It would be good to have a gameplan for how all of that energy focused on that article can be harnessed appropriately. For example, it might be good to preemptively create a United States presidential election results, 2008 page, and put in a stub section in the main article pointing everyone to the results page. Thoughts? -- RobLa (talk) 03:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

AFD debate

Some of you may want to read and comment on this AFD debate: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Berg v. Obama. All opinions welcome.Nrswanson (talk) 02:53, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Breaking News: Attempted Obama Assassination

The AP is reporting a intercetion of two skinheads who had planned to assassinate Obama. Not sure if the porject is interested, but it could be a major article development point.

Joewurzelbacher2010

An article I created, Joewurzelbacher2010 was deleted while I was in the process of writing the article. Does anyone know where I may get a copy of the article, the copy that was deleted? Multiple reliable sources were added, but there were more to be added and expounded upon. I had placed an "underconstruction tag" on the article. I would like to be able to complete it (on a user page) and then resubmit it in the future if and/or when it is notable. Thanks. Ism schism (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

If you ask the admin who closed the delete, sometimes they'll relocate the article to your user space. But if you're working on an article that's subject to deletion, it's always best to be saving copies of the edit source off-Wikipedia as you go along. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:32, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I did ask the admin, but have yet to hear a response. Also, thank you for the advice concerning saving, I was under the impression that working on an article, with multiple reliable source, that it would not be deleted in the first few hours (while an underconstruction tag was on the article)... but, I am relatively new and still have a lot to learn. Thanks again. Ism schism (talk) 22:37, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

The deletionists are out in full force. In the old days, you could write a one-line stub and it could slowly grow over time with contributions from many editors. Nowadays, for certain topics, an article has to be practically GA-quality when it first hits the ground. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:47, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I feel that an Afd is always the best approach to a speedy delete - when multiple sources are provided for which the article is the subject. An Afd allows community consensus, and input. In this case, I feel that an Afd would at least show that the notability of the subject is arguable from both sides. Thanks again. Ism schism (talk) 23:16, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election

An article that you have been involved in editing, Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canada and the 2008 United States presidential election. Thank you.

I believe this article falls under the scope of your project and that members' opinions would be valued. --Amwestover (talk|contrib) 21:07, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Straw poll redlink on multiple pages

Straw polls for the Republican Party (United States) presidential nomination, 2008 was deleted a week ago as R1: Redirect to a deleted, nonexistent, or invalid target. WhatLinksHere currently lists

• Republican Party (United States) presidential candidates, 2008#Withdrawn from seeking nomination: "Paul did well in Republican straw polls..."

• Statewide opinion polling for the Republican Party presidential primaries, 2008: Hatnote
• John McCain presidential campaign, 2008#Iowa Straw Poll: Hatnote
• Ames Straw Poll#See also
• Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, 2008#Straw polls: Link
• Duncan Hunter presidential campaign, 2008#Polls: One of the hatnotes
• Talk:Ron Paul/Archive 6#Template

Aha. Found links to 3 deleted redirects, one of which notes Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Straw polls for the 2008 United States presidential election (2nd nomination). I don't see any of this members of the Wikiproject who participated in that AfD, or a notification on this talk page, though they account for the 3 redlinks in the 2008 other section of Wikipedia:WikiProject United States presidential elections#Table of articles.

Were you not notified of this AfD? I have no opinion as I haven't seen the article(s). I also don't understand why it was deleted as a redirect, because it appears to have been an article in January 2008, as its talk is mentioned here and Image:Straw poll results2.jpg links to it in its summary. <Confused> MeekSaffron (talk) 08:49, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

No, I never saw the AfD. I don't remember exactly what the article looked like, so I can't comment on whether the deletion was reasonable. But I do know that straw polls were frequently mentioned by articles about candidates who weren't doing well in regular polls. This was especially true with the Ron Paul articles, where the pro-Paul editors were convinced that there was this hidden reservoir of Paul support that conventional polling wasn't reaching. That did not turn out to be the case. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Heh. Your argument in the first AfD is "Keep. The article performs a valuable public service in demonstrating how meaningless straw polls are. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:57, 9 January 2008 (UTC)" Looking over the 2 AfDs, some of the information and perhaps article history could have useful info, though I understand the COATRACK & SYNTH concerns, unless there are reliable sources which discuss these straw polls. I think Straw polls for the 2008 United States presidential election should be userfied to someone interested in addressing those concerns, with a link here so others can help and discuss.

Unless it was such a mess that it's useless or not worth resuscitating, but it's hard to know without seeing it, history and all. MeekSaffron (talk) 21:08, 24 November 2008 (UTC)