Talk:Criticism of communism

This should be a disambiguation page
For many years, this page was a de facto disambiguation page. It had prominent links to the articles Criticism of communist party rule and Criticisms of Marxism, and a brief three-paragraph explanation of the difference between them. Here is a link to that stable form of this page (notice that this particular linked version remained unchanged from May 2016 to April 2017). Then, a series of edits in April 2017 expanded this page by copying the introductions of the two linked pages. At first I thought this was a good idea, but now I am seeing editors treating this page as a short article in need of expansion, and adding new information directly here instead of adding it to one of the two articles that are linked and summarized here. Thus, we seem to be heading in the direction of a content fork, with the same information listed twice, both here and in one of the two linked articles.

That got me thinking. The scope of this article overlaps completely with Criticism of communist party rule and Criticisms of Marxism. It doesn't make any sense to have an article that exists solely as a summary of two other pages. It should be used for disambiguation instead. Otherwise it will inevitably become a content fork, simply repeating information from those two other articles. Thus, I propose to turn this article into an official disambiguation page, as it should have been for all those years when it served a disambiguation purpose de facto. I want to leave some time for discussion first, however, and then I intend to go ahead and take care of this in about a week.

The only objection I can see to making this article a disambiguation page is the argument that criticisms of communist party rule and criticisms of Marxism are often related and should be on the same page. But that is not an argument for having three articles, that is an argument for having one article, by moving all the content from the two other pages here and then making those pages redirects. I could see the merits of such an argument, except that the two articles in question are already very long. Combining them into one would make the resulting article far too long by Wikipedia standards, and it would be recommended that we split it in two. Actually, I assume that's how we got two separate articles in the first place - a split was probably necessary because the combined article was too long.

So, if we're not going to combine them into one, because the result would be too long, then the other logical choice is to leave the two other articles as they are and make this a disambiguation page. -- KS79 (talk) 05:18, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * For now, I have temporarily restored the long-standing version of the page (the quasi-disambiguation version), because I intend to wait for a number of days before going ahead with the change to a proper disambig page, as I mentioned. -- KS79 (talk) 05:29, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Ok, seeing no comments, I went ahead and made this a proper disambiguation page. As I mentioned, all the content that was here a week ago was copied word for word from the introductions of the two linked articles (Criticism of communist party rule and Criticisms of Marxism), except for a very short bit of text that explained the difference between the two types of criticism. Therefore I do not believe that anything was lost by removing that text in order to make the page conform with the rules of disambiguation. -- KS79 (talk) 07:09, 9 May 2017 (UTC)


 * The problem is you're not following the norms of Wikipedia, in particular it's not a disambiguation page. A disambiguation page would link to multiple things that are completely distinct. There's a huge amount of overlap between marxism and communist states. You're short-circuiting the process. It also misses the point that there may be other criticisms of non marxist froms of communism. etc. etc.GliderMaven (talk) 22:09, 23 May 2017 (UTC)


 * But, again, that's not really an argument for having three separate pages (one for Marxism, one for Communist states, and one for communism-in-general). If we have three pages like that, the communism-in-general page is just going to be a content fork of the other two. It is true that there's a lot of overlap between Marxism and Communist states. So, right now, criticism that applies to both Marxism and to Communist states might be listed twice - in both of those articles. This situation isn't improved if we also list it a third time.


 * The logical conclusion of your argument isn't that we need three separate pages, but rather that we should combine the criticism of Marxism and the criticism of communist states into one single article. And if you want to do that, I would not oppose it, although I would not support it either. I'm mostly neutral towards that idea. I just think the resulting article would be too long, and I assume the whole reason we have those two separate articles now is because a long article was split in two at some point in the past. Also, it would be a much bigger change to try to combine those two articles into one, rather than just making this article an official disambiguation page (considering that it served as a de facto disambiguation page for such a long time).


 * As for the purpose of a disambiguation page, there are others on wikipedia that list related topics, rather than completely distinct topics. Take, for example, the disambiguation page Macedonia. There is literal, physical overlap between the things listed on that page (some of the different historical and present entities with the name "Macedonia" overlap the same territory, and some of them are part of the history of others). Likewise with the disambiguation page Georgia. It is true that Georgia (country) and Georgia (U.S. state) are completely distinct, but the page also lists a number of historical states that represent stages in the history of one of the present-day entities - for example the Kingdom of Georgia is not distinct from the history of Georgia (country).


 * Or another, even better example: Greek. Everything listed on this disambiguation page is very closely related and has a tremendous amount of overlap.


 * So, a disambiguation page doesn't have to list things that are completely unrelated. Often they list things that have a lot of overlap, but still exist as separate articles for various reasons. -- KS79 (talk) 22:33, 28 May 2017 (UTC)


 * No, and the relevant policy is WP:DABCONCEPT.GliderMaven (talk) 23:35, 2 June 2017 (UTC)


 * But "criticism of communism" is not a broad concept. The broad concept you are thinking about is anti-communism, which has its own separate article. "Criticism of communism", on the other hand, is a type of list - specifically, a list of arguments. These arguments may be listed on one page, or on several pages. Right now they are listed on two pages.


 * We should avoid a multiplication of articles that cover the same topic but with different titles. -- KS79 (talk) 02:40, 11 June 2017 (UTC)