Talk:Socialist Alternative (United States)

Improving citations
I've added a number of cites and cleaned up all references to follow the standard citation format. There should be additional sources detailing more of the article, but I think that this article should be able to remove the citations needed for verification tag sometime soon. Socialist Alternative has had a lot of coverage in small local press around Boston, Minneapolis and Seattle where they have moderate sized branches, and independent but not unbiased coverage from opposing left-wing organizations, so I think the article should clean up nicely. Cadriel (talk) 20:49, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Electoral Participation Table
I think it's about time for some kind of table, listing every SA candidate, the position they were running for, and their performance in the election, as PSL's page has here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Socialism_and_Liberation#Electoral_participation. What do you guys think?Liberal92 (talk) 03:09, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Serious issues with the references
Most of the provided references point to the organization's website. As such, they do not meet the requirement of being third-party sources. As it stands now, the article reads more like a promotional piece than like an encyclopedia entry. TechBear &#124; Talk &#124; Contributions 04:59, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Lot of puffery going on here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.60.131.249 (talk) 04:49, 12 July 2014 (UTC)


 * 2020 and things haven’t changed.  The lede is awful - basically it’s what the subject wants to say about itself.   This is never allowed for corporations!  What has it been like this for 7 years?   Boscaswell   talk  23:11, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Issues on page
I am addressing the issues related to the tags that i added to the article but until they are addressed I will leave the tags up. - SantiLak  (talk) 04:50, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

2016 general election candidate?
I do not see anything post-primary. Do they have a candidate or have they endorsed one? Perhaps Stein again? 84.10.116.167 (talk) 20:46, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

Membership numbers
I noticed that the membership statistic in the infobox was removed recently for being uncited, and then re-added by JesseRafe on the grounds that "there shouldn't be cites in infoboxes, anyway." I'm not sure of the exact rules on citations inside infoboxes, but since JesseRafe has been an editor for 13 years, I'll take his word on that.

However, I still think there are strong grounds for removing this number. Socialist Alternative, as far as I can tell, has never formally published its own membership numbers, and generally keeps them a secret. From my personal experience as a former member of the organization, I can say that as of 2017 they had about 1,100 members (this isn't publicly verifiable, though). They've likely lost some members to DSA recently, so 850 is probably in the general ballpark of being correct, but it can't possibly be verified, and there aren't any sources listed in this article that provide recent membership information. Shouldn't we be leaving out unsourced, publicly unverifiable data? Montgolfière (talk) 04:07, 19 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Removing it is fine. If a source gets cited, it should be inline in the body of the article. The infobox should reflect the cited information from the body of the article. So should the lede, both of these rules are rarely strictly followed. My rationale for leaving the figure, while uncited, was that it was profoundly reasonable. It was not hyperbolic or a joke number, in fact, quite modest, so I thought it was very likely accurate. JesseRafe (talk) 19:47, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Lede: self-description
In the all-important 1st para of the lede is a quote from Socialist Alternative itself. But the quote is very generic- it could be attributed to almost any politician. But SA is a Marxist Trotskyist organisation. Trotskyism: committed to permanent revolution. Marxism: very limited private ownership. This is a whole different ball game to merely “fighting against injustices”. Therefore, I’m going to delete the generic quote, even tho I have nothing substantive to replace it with, unless others disagree.

I wish I had did have something acceptable to all to replace it with, but there is very little written in conventional sources about SA. It was for that reason that I added the quote from Dori Monson to the end of the lede (not the opening para). It was all I could find! I’ve since moved that to the end of the Trotskyism para, as another editor queried it under undue.

Can I point out that filling the political positions section with mere campaign stuff could easily be said to be undue, as none of it gets down to brass tacks, meaning: what do Socialist Alternative actually want? Perhaps the quote I added to the lede and have since moved is the most accurate summing up there is in the whole article. So IMO it should still be in the lede. Boscaswell  talk  23:04, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

I added the quote from the Dori article to replace the generic quote. Trotskyism pre supposes Marxism so only one is neededVahvistus (talk) 12:52, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

I’ve removed the self-description from para 1 of the lede as wiki articles on political parties don’t include them, but left in the piece which Vahvistus wrote about socialism and it not being possible for capitalism to be made to work for the working class, as this is clearly correct. It doesn’t, however, distinguish it from other far-left parties, but the word Trotskyism does, to an extent. Another editor reinstated the Marxist description, so that must remain in. I was going to reinstate it anyway, on the basis that as we are writing this for laymen, it has to include both Marxist and Trotskyist, since most wont know that Trotskyism presupposes Marxism. There can be no reason to exclude this other than not wanting anyone looking up the article to be told that SA is Marxist. Further, the quote which Vahvistus edited in is not really a replacement for the one which I’d moved elsewhere, as its meaning is very very different. Boscaswell  talk  07:54, 16 July 2020 (UTC)