User talk:Chaos5023/Why your entire way of thinking about the Abortion Article Titles RFC is wrong

A place to register support

I have created a section on the main RFC page where support for this statement can be registered. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 23:31, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Neat, thanks! —chaos5023 (talk) 23:37, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes. But...

I agree with a lot of this essay. However, I think that we need to think hard about point 3 of section 2:

Because Pro-choice and Pro-life are spectacularly poor titles, not even being nouns and otherwise failing to clearly identify a topic, there was immense and intractable confusion as to what these articles were about, with many people assuming they were about the issues surrounding abortion, not the movements that use the names involved.

It is going to be very hard to stop scope creep, even if the two articles have good, clear, topic-specifying titles. People will always want to add something that is relevant to the argument, rather than the movement. Furthermore, people may want to link to one of the articles from, say, an article about someone who opposes abortion. Yes, I know that raises BLP issues... but it will happen.

Therefore, there are two approaches:

1. Choose names that reflect the movements that the articles were originally supposed to be about. Have some kind of warning when people go to edit the articles and have some editors patrol them regularly for scope creep.
2. Give the articles titles that reflect what they will inevitably be about anyway.

Neither of these approaches is ideal... but I thought I should set that out.

Yaris678 (talk) 08:36, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't agree that scope creep (or drift) is inevitable at all. We manage it all over Wikipedia all the time, quite successfully. It wasn't manageable with Pro-choice and Pro-life simply because those are useless titles that fail to unambiguously set a scope. If you're trying to keep an article in-scope under those titles, well, when do you ever have a leg to stand on? To you, maybe the title means the article's about one thing, and to this other person it's another thing, and nobody is even right so what basis do you have for action? With Pro-choice movement and Pro-life movement, on the other hand (and, incidentally, Right-to-life movement which should be its own article independent of Pro-life movement), anybody working on the article has a clear and definite basis for trimming material unrelated to the defined scope of the article. All we need to do is give editors something they can work with. —chaos5023 (talk) 15:06, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Well I guess that is where we differ. Furthermore, I think that trying to keep Right-to-life movement and Pro-life movement as two separate articles is just going to cause endless pain because the two overlap so much. Yaris678 (talk) 12:04, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

The fact that it's work to do it right doesn't mean we shouldn't. (Or that doing it wrong will be an iota less work.) —chaos5023 (talk) 15:24, 24 April 2012 (UTC)