Talk:Green party/Archive-01

Archived at 2003-11-29 by till we *)

We've only been through this 20 times.

This is now WRONG. The Marijuana Party or LNSGP is just as "Organized" as (the Global) Green Parties (plural).

The term "green" is *generic* no matter how much "Greens" want it not to be - the name is in common and widespread use generically, and there was a good example of that in Green Party.

restore the names please. I see no meaningful distinction between a "party" and a "Party", other than formal registration which is hopelessly tied to national political customs.

There is however a drastic difference between the many criteria and "(the Global) Green Parties" which already cooperate in a global community.

They do not, much as they might like to claim, have any monopoly on what constitutes an "Organized Green/green party".

The agreement between "(the Global) Green Parties" is an entirely bottom-up consensual agreement between themselves that cannot be forced on anyone else who calls themselves "green" or even "Green". That is critically important to the philosophy of "(the Global) Green Parties" and the terminology now in use confuses that distinction beyond sanity.

Please, understand the material, before you change the names of things:

NO ONE says that "(the Global) Green Parties" have or maintain any control of the term "green party" or "Green Party" - they are simply one of many groups attempting to control the public's mind-share re: what it means to organize such a party.

For instance, opponents of "(the Global) Green Parties" often try to characterize them as single-issue advocates, as top-down imposers of a particular value system, or (as you are doing) seeking to control the iconic use of a very common word.

The purpose of wikipedia is to make this distinction clear but NOT to take sides. The name "Organized Green Party" clearly takes a side... whether it has capitals in it or not.

I repeat, again for the record, that wikipedia *MUST NOT ADD SPURIOUS CAPITALS* in the user interface, and that we will keep having these arguments until it is fixed.

I'm tired of this. All of this was discussed in the talk, several times, and people who don't read it, and who also don't understand the material, keep changing the names.


 * Maybe part of the problem is that you keep writing pages and pages of material that make little sense. You keep saying "(the Global) Green Parties". Is that a fixed term in common use, or did you just make that up? In any event, what exactly does this term refer to? AxelBoldt


 * Please don't accuse people of not reading the talk pages. Honest people can disagree.


 * If most people don't understand the material, then it's important to word it so somebody not steeped in green v. Green debates can understand. One way of making the distinction is to simply say that there are many parties who call themselves green/Green, some of whom give a particular meaning to "Green" embodied in the four pillars/ten key values.  Others use other meanings.  Then there is "no monopoly" on "green", "Green", "Organized", "Global" or anything.


 * Also, these talk pages are not the place to discuss capitalization anymore, especially not by shouting. It's listed on bug reports, you can discuss the merits there.  We've lived with many different capitalization/namespace/subpage schemes here and learned to live with them or change the software.  Be creative, be bold.  Find new, exciting ways to get around the challenges posed.  But please don't shout.  It's loud enough in here already. DanKeshet


 * I repeat, again for the record, that wikipedia *MUST NOT ADD SPURIOUS CAPITALS* in the user interface, and that we will keep having these arguments until it is fixed.

(1) This is not ever going to be fixed, because it's not a bug. Get over it, and work with the medium like a resonsible writer. Wikipedia titles begin with uppercase. Always have, always will, period, end of story, forever and ever, amen.

(2) There is, without question, a single global organization that the mass media of most countries thinks of as "the green party", and that organization (loose as it may be) deserves to be covered in its own right. Pick a name for it--I called it "Organized Green Party", but maybe that's not a good name. OK, call it "Global Green Party" or "Consensus Green Party" or something, but give it a name, let it have its own article, and make the other parties links on the generic green party page.

--Lee Daniel Crocker

1. Sorry, Lee Daniel Crocker, but it is technically possible to get in and hack up the source code to fix the bug. At some point in human history the revolutionary pressure to do this will come to some breaking point, and that is obviously exactly what Karl Marx meant in his manifesto. ;-) Spurious wikipedia capitalization confusing proper and generic nouns enraged the proletariat to reclaim the source code, then their language, then the world.  <-- what future history will say.


 * As I argued elsewhere but will repeat here, even if--and I don't necessarily grant that this is the case, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument--even if this change in the software would be better for this article, that doesn't make a valid argument for changing the software to better suit the purpose of Wikipedia as a whole, which is far more important. Personally, I argued that the fact that the software uses the same string of letters for a page title and a page identifier is a bad thing; but there's a facility in the software to make them read better (the | thing), and the benefit of making ad-hoc links easier to create for writers outweighed that concern.  Likewise, the benefit of easy searches, and being able to make lowercase links inside sentences that link to properly capitalized article titles far outweigh the awkwardness of this one case.  --LDC

2. I agree completely. The term "Global Green Parties" is exactly the one these parties use for themselves, and it does deserve to be covered more or less as it defines itself. Members of these are specifically "GlobalGreens" (all one word) which is a subset of "Greens" (Four Pillar type) which is a subset of "greens" (anyone who claims that breathing and drinking clean water is a moral necessity and has some weird rationale of that...)

That leaves room for all kinds of controversy and crap here in 'green party', and lets 'green' versus 'Green' live in the 'g/Green' def'n (where literally everyone on this planet can fight over it - this is no doubt where human society unifies itself, thank you for participating).

3. I apologize. It wasn't so much that you changed "Green Parties" to "organized Green Party", it was more that this came after a bunch of truly mindless hacks by someone else and was wasting my time at a moment when something else had to be done. I overstated my objections.

Now, would you like to do the honors, or should I?

Some people here think I'm really being a prig on this point, but since you came up with teh right solution, I'd like to let you settle it... an edit by me on this file is sometimes a target for someone's undoing.


 * I couldn't find the term "Global Green Parties" anywhere on the net. "Global Greens" is used, as is "Green Parties world wide". AxelBoldt

Then Global Greens refers to the members and supporters and vague fellow travellers of those parties and their Four Pillars, "Green Parties world wide" describes the general concept without committing to a specific idea of how they cooperate.

Also, as a side issue, GlobalGreens refers specifically to the conference and Charter from the 2001 Australia conference (which is treated in the article but is not given any exclusive status as defining the roles - it is a "Ten Key Values" rather than "Four Pillars" basis of unity, and not all Greens went...) - i.e. the GlobalGreens (all one word) are the very few people communicating at http://globalgreens.org

Whereas, the Global Greens are the very many people vaguely supporting the parties at http://greens.org

I believe those are the definitions they use themselves... which is fair in the longer article but not in this short one...

With all due respect to the 'gentleman' across the aisle, there is nothing wrong with putting an article topic in lower case. I do it frequently.

Remember to distinguish the article title from the URL, e.g., http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/greens

See sting for an example of an article about two uppercase Stings and two other lowercase stings.

Furthermore, when making a reference with double square brackets, you can use whatever capitalization you like: Sting is a British rocker, and a bee has a sting.

What's all the fuss about?

User:Ed Poor -- very good, always helps

- What's wrong with that approach is that like a dictionary, an encyclopedia must distinguish between Proper and generic names. It could do that with single or double quotes, in titles or URLs, but it must do it reliably.

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Greens and http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/greens must be able to be different things in the same sense that http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Sting and http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/sting are totally different and unrelated things. URLs are case-sensitive after the domain name, for this among other reasons.

Another solution is two different name spaces, one for proper names and acronyms and attributions only, the other for generic use of terms that are contested in the language-space as opposed to in the meat-space...

The server appears to be case-insensitive for the first word of article names, and case-sensitive for words after the first. Try these:
 * http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/robert_heinlein - fails
 * http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/robert_Heinlein - works (surprisingly)
 * http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Robert_heinlein - fails
 * http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Robert_Heinlein - works (as one would expect)

User:Ed Poor - I think we would agree that the server's convention is at best on crack.

Very dumb idea: add "the_" before proper names, so it's "the_Sting" (or as wiki presents it "The_Sting" umm oops well namespace problems again)... At least then "the_Green_Parties" is presented without a big problem, and "green_parties" can be given a neutral treatment. The wiki UI bug can be fixed later.

This is becoming important since there are distinctions made in [political economy] between generalized positions of [socialist parties], [capitalist parties], [libertarian parties] and [green parties] - which concepts should not be confused with current global associations of political parties that only *claim* to represent those points of view...

i.e. it's fairly clear that there is a difference between the dozens of [socialist parties] and the International Socialists, or the ILO, or etc., even though many groups would like to say that they represent all "Socialist parties", it just isn't true.

Likewise the U.S. Libertarian party isn't particularly libertarian about where deeds in land come from... straight from King George III.

This encyclopedia does distinugish between generic and proper names: by explaining, in plain text, the distinction (when needed) on a disambiguating page, which points to more specifically-named titles, all of which are capitalized, just as is done in every other encyclopedia in print (but not, as you point out, in Dictionaries--but Wikipedia is not a dictionary). That decision has already been discussed for months, ad nauseam, and that decision has already been made. We, as a community, had many long discussions about the various merits of doing it that way and 20 other ways, and we are all very smart people who came to our present decision on how the software works for many very good reasons, and your personal convenience wasn't one of them. If you want to participate here, you need to respect the conventions we have created, and work with the software we have produced, and stop whining about it.

I, like several other people here, am a professional writer, and I think the conventions we have here are very good. And as I point out, encyclopedias also capitalize article titles, and explain the distinction between generic and proper terms when necessary. The time for your arguments is past--now it's time for you to help us choose an appropriate title for the content which is now "Organized Green Party", but which you point out is not good. "Global Greens" is my preference, because that's what the actual greens.org web site uses. But if that particular organization is really a subset or superset of what the article describes (I don't know--you're the green fellow, my expertise is writing), then we'll have to use something different. So please, give us some suggestions that follow our conventions. Help us out. Work with us. --LDC

Sorry, but no matter how often you have this argument, or how many times you get it wrong, someone will always show up to point out that you've chosen a bad convention that defies the English language's dictionary conventions...

An offline encyclopedia can assume certain things about readers that an online one can't... the analogy is wrong. But whatever. A meta argument.

Let's take this entire issue to meta, where I presume a substantial debate already exists, and where a vast number of cases of confusion and reasons why an online and offline resource might need different conventions can be placed.

regarding this entry only:

Yes, the GlobalGreens claim to be the only representative of Global Greens. That is fine for them to claim, but not fine for us to accept. For one thing their Ten Key Values agreed in Canberra go further than the almost-universal Four Pillars (which almost any big-G Green would say depend on each other and define a consensus process as per Gandhi).

For another, there are very specific and I think reasonable objections to any system of sending representives to Australia to discuss and decide in English what a Green is, set up Global Green Coordination, Global Green Network, etc. http://www.globalgreens.org/story.php?id=6

There is an extremely eloquent statement of the objection here: http://www.globalgreens.org/story.php?id=6&cid=10#10

from which I quote:

"The appalling lack of grassroots democratic process in this virtual organization&#8217;s origin and ongoing existence is the most shocking development of the global green conference and egregious violation of Green principle. The total absence of a healthy debate or even one real conversation on this site is a more telling accusation than any solitary unread polemic I could post in this empty discussion.

It violates Peace & Nonviolence.

This proposal has done a terrible violence to our community&#8217;s fundamental beliefs in cooperation, collaboration and consensus. This unilateral global action by a consortium of state and national parties has, with terrifying lack of global thought, resulted in a forceful usurpation of our rights as local actors.

&#8220;Think Global, Act Local&#8221; is not a slogan. It is a binding oath, a solemn pact, a sacred bond, and a necessary separation of powers. Globalgreens.org was an opportunity to peacefully engage the locals, the very grass-roots of democracy, and provide them with sorely-needed technology for communication with each other. "

Talk about stepping in it! I don't think we should settle this debate for the Green Parties. I think we should basically relate that there is some valid difference of opinion about the role of representatives, meetings and former-colonial languages and new technologies in defining "Global Greens".

And that "GlobalGreens" i.e. .org, take one clear position on this, and that dissenters take another.

Fair enough? - As to your last few paragraphs, yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to do here, and you still haven't given me any suggested article titles. Of course we shouldn't get involved in the controversy--that's none of our business. But we should report on it, and cover the issue, and describe the parties involved, under some appropriate title, which we can choose as soon as you offer us some actual suggestions--and make several suggestions, because we simply won't be bullied into taking your first one at face value. We're a community here, and you will work with us as part of that community.

As to your first paragraph, I hate to pull out credentials, but this case merits it. I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt about your knowledge of green politics--something in which I freely admit I have no expertise--but I am not willing to accept that you know how to write English prose, because every example I have seen tells me otherwise. I can write--that is my area of expertise, and unless you can demonstrate some credentials in that area, I ask that you acknowledge that that's my field, not yours. I identify myself clearly, and show my credentials up front on my pages. No other Wikipedians come anywhwere close to having as many pages selected for the "Brilliant Prose" page than me (maybe Magnus, I think, as he deserves to), and many of the editors I have written for have told me I should write more because I know what I'm doing (unfortunately I like money, so I write more software than prose), including the late lamented editor in chief and co-founder of this project. I'm an arrogant bastard myself sometimes, so I don't hold that against you, but please acknowledge that your word is not the final one on the subject of how to write a good encyclopedia article, and work within the guidelines established by those of us who really have put a lot of thought and effort into this project. --Lee Daniel Crocker

ROTFL. Well, now that everyone is standing on their dignity, we must be there!

Fair enough. I chose anonymity for a reason, and I can't simply throw in my own credentials for that same reason. You may well be the editor in chief by a sort of beta consensus, plus your sheer tenacity... but it's wonderful to keep a rolling consensus going... we learn so much more about ourselves...

I freely acknowledge myself a master baker er and ah a not bad ontologist. If there are horrible topics from hell that are defying neutrality itself, let me at 'em... although don't be surprised if the first try is 2/3 baked only...

It's a bit cheesy though to tell me that "every example I have seen tells me otherwise." C'mon. I must have written *one* article that does a masterful job of nailing the topic? One? OK, maybe not on the first try...

Umm... after acknowledging your writer guru-dom, I feel too humble to suggest a name for the "Green Parties" article... although you imply that the only one you would accept is "Green Parties world wide" since that is the strictest and least interpretive way to convey what you got from Google... and still in line with how greens are presented on greens.org - if not in line with the way they are presented on globalgreens.org (one of many such integrations of their purpose). The phrase "world wide" seems not to unify them conceptually more than the word Green or Parties does, although the term Global as in "Global Greens" or "GlobalGreens" does seem to make such a claim.

So leaving this article as "green party" and that one as "Green Parties world wide" is fine, leaving the door wide open to discussing the cooperation or an international party in another article called "GlobalGreens" or "Global Green Party" later on.

BTW there is a rather vast compendium of Green Theory over at Greenpeace... most of it kinda postmodern and weird... but if you enter "Greenpeace XXXX" on google where XXXX is a political, ethical, or anthropological term (like "moral", "ape", "mother", "primate", "ethic", "Gaia", "ark", "Elder", "Tribe") you find some quite amazing stuff... there are like 4600 anonymous posts over there... we have come nowhere near grasping the full depth of this subject, in the short exchanges we've had here.

You're confusing me with both Alex and Larry--you're reading seems to be as sloppy as your writing--but no matter. Alex is a reasonable person and I take his suggestions seriously. Hell, even Ed Poor has some good ideas now and then and I still listen to what he has to say (though I nearly always disagree).

As for all the stuff on the Greenpeace site, let's leave it there. This is an encyclopedia, not a place for philosophical debate. Except, of course, to report on philosophical debates that are deemed important in academic circles, covered as they would be in a traditional academic setting. Likewise, this isn't the place to create new green theories, only to report major existing ones (and both of those are important).

Yes, yet another page specifically for Global Greens is fine, so long as it does in fact accurately describe the single organization that calls itself that, and provides a link to that website for the non-encyclopedic details. I'd prefer "Worldwide green parties" to better fit our conventions for the present article, but I'm flexible on that score--I'm just not flexible on the naming conventions of the encyclopedia in general (and actually I'm reasonably flexible there as well to a good argument). --LDC - I can tell you and Ed apart, but not always you and Alex... based on text alone.

I'm not suggesting importing any of this Greenpeace debate, just noting that if Google is your standard for whether a distinction or a concept exists as a term of art, well... it's relatively easy to satisfy with things that might be comprehensible only to Greens... or only to Gaians... or only to greens on crack. 6.1 billion people have bodies and live in ecologies on this planet, and no one of them has a monopoly on defining the political meaning of body, ecology, or planet. That's it that's all. "Natural point of view" for those people is irreconcilable. "Neutral point of view" is hard to establish at best, and frankly the "worldwide Green Parties", such as they are, do a more rigorous and patient job of that "Many Natural --> One Neutral" integration than either of us, so the problem of establishing neutral point of view on *them* is one of the more complex problems imaginable...

Believe me, creating new theory is the last thing on my mind. I note for the record that I have probably read more than 2/3 of those 4600 anonymous posts at Greenpeace, and I probably understand about half of them... including the weird tone they sometimes take. So I consider myself a relatively reliable reporter of the "terms of art" in these debates.

If you ever doubt it, merely go there yourself to greenpeace.org and post (anonymously if you wish) a request for someone else to "come look at this".

BUt this is about the Parties and the ways they cooperate, not about theory.

Whatever convention we choose, we'd be best off with one that also applied to the libertarian, conservative, socialist parties...

As to "GlobalGreens" versus "Global_Greens", I can keep those terse and to the linguistic point. But since I am not allowed to differentiate "global_Greens" as well, to describe those who believe in the Green principles but not the specific Global_Greens conferences or GlobalGreens infrastructure, there may be a couple more entries here.

I am concerned that, as with Mutual_Assured_Destruction versus mutually_assured_destruction, people who know literally nothing about the underlying theory and strategy will jam together pointless mass media confusions from propaganda-addled military science textbooks that went obsolete in 1990... renaming stuff they don't understand, and making the whole matter, in their presentation, of only historical interest... not useful to actually understandt he topic in its current context...

I never suggested Google...that was Alex. Anyway, as I said, I totally agree that you're the green fellow, not me. How you choose to describe a group of people who hold certain beliefs but who are not specifically affiliated with an organization is one place where there is definite flexibility in the naming conventions--and also the question of whether they should be covered at all. Clearly, an encyclopedia must cover the organized groups under their official names (possibly with context modifiers to disambiguate where needed). Also clearly, we need to cover expansive terms like "environmentalist" and "green" that have entered the language and the common mindset, and define them inclusively. But as to the in-between groups, that's up in the air. I have no problem including them, but since they are so context-specific and narrowly defined, I think the good of the encyclopedia as a whole demands that they have long, accurate, descriptive, context-specific titles unlikely to clash with anything of more public currency. Minor typographical conventions aren't nearly enough; you need words, lots of words. I have no problem with a title like "Non-party-affiliated political groups emphasizing green goals", or whatever. That's not confusing, and specifically addresses your concern about people making confusing associations--the more specifically the article is titled, the less likely that is to happen. Simple titles like "green party" should be inclusive, and link to all the articles with other possible interpretations of that term. Likewise, articles named for a specific association are free to point out that the association's name might have other meanings, which also have links. --LDC

A seemingly reasonable method of deriving naming conventions is sheer numbers of adherents. Strange obscure groups like the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party can be referred to as, well, "green Nazis". Why not? That's what they say they are. But you can see the issue vs. "Green Nazis" since according to the Four Pillars vs. Uncle Adolf's ideas there can be no such reconciliation... messy. Easiest, since they are tiny, to just refer to them by their whole proper name.

Also employing that "numbers" argument, tens of millions of Europeans vote for the big-G Green Parties in the EU... and 2.7 million or whatever voted for Nader/Green Party of the US in 2000. And 2.4 million donate to Greenpeace. So assuming overlap and varying levels of commitment and inhibition, there might be 5-10 million bona fide Greens in the world who buy into some organized Green NGO or party.

That doesn't give them a monopoly on "green", since one could argue that there are 6.1 billion who must pay at least some attention to "green" issues like not getting cancer or avoiding radiation... but it might put them first in line as "people who got this first and had the deepest debates about it."

Not that I buy into a wholly-social notion of reality, but face it, I'd rather face a few dozen "green Nazis" trying to embed their stuff in the wiki than a few million "Greens" trying to take down the wiki for failing to differentiate them from Nazis strongly enough. You see the problem I hope...!

Where the hell did the stuff above come from? Is that even remotely on topic to what we're trying to work out here, or related to anything I've said? You seem to be a reasonably educated, well-informed guy; but you know, sometimes I really start to doubt your basic sanity. The Libertarian National Socialist Green Party should be called--surprize--the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, and is. That's exactly the way I want it, exactly as I said above. Likewise, I said that aritlces "green" and "green party" should be inclusive, just as you seem to be saying. Do you think I'm disagreeing with you about that? Did you read what I actually wrote, or are you interpolating from what you assume I mean because I'm a capitalist pig or something? Please, give me some understanding of what it is the present "Organized Green Party" article is describing and how that relates to existing formal organizations, so that I can come up with a decent title for it. I don't want to muck with the content, because frankly I don't understand what half of it means, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that it actually does mean something

-

No, there's no disagreement, the "green Nazis" thing is only by way of example, maybe it's a bad example and I should have said "green Buddhists". BTW I consider the LNSGP analysis quite straightforward and have defended it - hell I've discussed it in depth with Jewish vegans. But socially there are lots of people offended by swastikas, and we're trying to get something done here on wiki, and few Nazis would say they have much to do with any peace movement, and few Greens would say they have much to do with Nazis, and the Four Pillars is the only citable difference. IT's not wrong to cite the LNSGP in the "Green Parties" article but it's misleading without identifying it as distinct from the Four Pillar parties which that article is about.

The generic term "green" lets both make their claims - and I still regret I can't keep it lower case to avoid any future combat over "Green vs. green". That's all I meant.

I said several times over, that the existing article at "Organized Green Party" should get back its original name "Green Parties", or the more formally correct "Global Green Parties" or the easily-justified "Green Parties world wide", either of which relate the way that the "Green Parties" who are "of global reach" cooperate or don't. I answered that question.

If you're waiting for *me* to change it's name, just say so, it'll be done.

We aren't disagreeing here at all, as far as I can see.

Done, thanks. In the heat of discussion, I too sometimes forget that the purpose of talk pages on Wikipedia is to discuss how to make better encyclopeia articles, and I am as guilty of digressing from that as anyone. --LDC