TruthAboutIraq talk:Community Portal

From TruthAboutIraq

1 Neutrality
2 Getting started with Categories
3 Article Titles
4 Misc

[edit] Neutrality

We should try to be a little less biased by having 'reasons for the war in Iraq' but also an 'excuses for leaving Iraq'. What's good for the goose . . . it should probably be 'Reasons for leaving Iraq' in all fairness.

Also, um, should we reverse practice here and put the newest items at the top of discussion pages instead of at the bottom? Would be easier to get to and deal with the new stuff that comes up. Ken McCracken 03:01, 13 June 2007 (EDT)

Riding herd on people who may stumble in and not know that practice may get laborious, but I think it's a good idea.

As for Neutrality, when I created the suggested categories, I thought about doing that. But we're not neutral: the policy of the site is that we support the mission honestly, and encourage those who disagree to participate honestly. I was originally in favor of a more facts-only approach, but Dean never responded to my comment here, so I conformed a little. And when I got to creating the category list, I figured "excuses" was more appropriate given that stance. In defense of the policy, niggling over connotations of words that mean the same but have different motivation behind them is exactly what we'll end up doing most of the time, and it will be harder to police the site in general once the trolls start to arrive. But I'm in favor of finding some way to establish a neutral language policy without saying we don't have a neutral POV. - Chris 08:36, 13 June 2007 (EDT)

But I'm in favor of finding some way to establish a neutral language policy without saying we don't have a neutral POV.

Exactly right. I think the language, and actually the content also, should be neutral such that no one can accuse us of being just a partisan site. I see the site as neutral, but guarded against inflated claims of nefariousness about the Bush administration, and guarded against chicken little claims of imminent disaster in Iraq.

We can handle putting up honest info about Iraq that does not dwell unreasonably on things like Abu Ghraib.

[edit] Getting started with Categories

A few suggested categories are posted in the portal, but do you know how to tag an article with a category?

A: (I'm tired and too lazy to look it up right now)

A: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories but in short,

To add an article to a category put the following at the end of the page you are editing...
 [[Category:{Name}]]
where {Name} is the name of the category you want to add it to.

Do you have suggestions for more?

[edit] Article Titles

Okay, I asked this on Main:Talk, and we hadn't gotten very far. How should we be titling our articles? We seem to be observing no methodology at all, so let's hunker down and think this through. Obviously, the type of article will probably dictate some rules for title format, so should we be matching title format to specific categories? - Chris 02:27, 1 June 2007 (EDT)