Talk:Work

Category
I THINK ITS TIME FOR JACK TO LET ER RIP

Labour
The third definition of "Work" currently links to Labour. However, not only is this a disambiguation page, but also that page appears to have no further link for Labour in this context. Hello everybody thus be directed elsewhere and, if so, where? Will => talk 23:49, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wage labour
Could we add a link to Wage labour here? Sundiiiiii 15:52, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Categories of work
surely there should be a definition of the word work here linking off to the more detailed definitions of types of work that exist???

There should be a broader category of work as organizational work, which would include project management as well as other types of work.71.178.137.246 14:31, 28 May 2007 (UTC)parveson

Arbeit
I was directed here looking for 'Arbeit' which is a band. :P Why does Arbeit link here? Shouldn't there be some links to, say, Arbeit Macht Frei if it directs here?Avnas Ishtaroth (talk) 10:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC) "Arbeit is the German word for "Work" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.168.208.75 (talk) 13:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * EDIT: Added a redirect at top.Avnas Ishtaroth (talk) 10:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Types of work
I'd like to expand this article from other sources but not sure how these copyrights laws works. Please advice  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:24D5:84D9:46B:4155:BBE:2722 (talk) 12:15, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Ironically, the type of "work" that you are doing when you edit a Wikipedia article doesn't fall into any of the categories of work listed on this page.

It's not paid, so it doesn't fall under Employment, or Labor (economics), or Wage labor. It's obviously not House work, or Working the system, and it's not really appropriate to call it Manual labor either, even though it is technical physical in that it involves some typing. It wouldn't really be accurate to file it under Work (project management), because even though Wikipedia is a project, there are no managers.

I bring it up to point out a larger omission: it seems there should be some article covering the "work" you do on any hobby project where there is no expectation of selling the product, i.e. it's for your own personal enjoyment. For example:

building a train set for your kids

building a gingerbread house (believe me, this is a LOT of work)

painting a mural on the ceiling of your own home for your own enjoyment — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.86.191.119 (talk) 17:12, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Upgrade to Article?
After looking into it more (and in line with some of the comments here), I think the absence of a general Work article might be a large gap in the encyclopedia. This disambiguation page & the immediate links require some hopping to find topics like piece-work, the informal economy, the social aspects of unpaid domestic work, or the self-employed. And those are just immediate things that come to mind for the current US/UK context.

I can take care of prepping this page & all the redirects, then moving what's here to the explicit disambiguation title. I should also be able to start the stub article here with sections & maybe fill out some bits too (though I don't have access to a library with strong sources right now). I'll draft everything first so the actual move & replace is smooth, but I wanted to give a heads-up first. Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:39, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 19 July 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: no consensus. If reproposing, would suggest separate RMs for "work" and "labour", since the arguments differ. --  JHunterJ (talk) 18:11, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Drafted an article for human work/labor; move disabled on current page. Zar2gar1 (talk) 13:26, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Work (human activity) → Work
 * Work → Work (disambiguation)
 * Labour → Labour (disambiguation)


 * This is a contested technical request (permalink). --  Dane talk  16:21, 19 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I think we should stop automatically listing contested technical requests, they don't give the proposer the chance to update the rationale. Anyways, this request is about turning Work into a broad article about work as a human activity, Zar2gar1 has already written that page. Zar2gar1 also suggested that Labour should be a primary redirect to this suggested broad article on Work, I have merged these two requests into one since the move of the Labour disambiguation page wouldn't make sense unless the Work disambiguation page were also moved. – Thjarkur (talk) 16:36, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * My view is that it would be preferable to keep both Work and Labour as disambiguation pages. These disambiguation pages are quite popular (Work with 4,000 views/month and Labour 4,600 views/month) and both have several common meanings that a reader is likely to be looking for: Work (physics) has 30,000 views/month, Manual labour 6,000 views/month, Wage labour 6,000 views/month, Childbirth 35,000 views/month. The "general human productive activity" meaning is a good contender for the primary topic, though. – Thjarkur (talk) 16:55, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Thjarkur, it took me a little bit to adjust the talk-page so I just put in a manual link to this discussion.

For the moves themselves, I'm really not that picky; my main concern was just to fill the coverage gap with an article. But here's my thinking for giving it an unqualified title in line with WP:PLA:
 * Almost all the other meanings of work and labor seem to stem from analogies to this common, day-to-day meaning.
 * I imagine most people looking for those more specific meanings are aware of the analogy too.
 * Childbirth may be an exception (I don't know how far back the etymology goes), but even then, it's in a very specific context.
 * A lot of the other terms are also unique to a specialty (physics) or the English-speaking world (e.g. Labour Party)
 * Since this meaning is universal to human society though, you might say it's more in line with WP:NWFCTM too.
 * The French wiki already uses this convention for the primary article: Travail.
 * The German and Spanish ones do use a qualified title like "work (sociology)" though.
 * We can always give individual hatnotes for very popular meanings.

Now as you already mentioned, the physics versions of work may get a lot of traffic, even if they're derived terms. With that in mind, maybe we keep "Work" as a disambiguation page but move the article to "Labor/Labour"? AFAICT childbirth is the only meaning that isn't a clear reference to day-to-day work ("wage labour", "labor day", "labour party", etc.), plus "labour" is the go-to word for any economics context.

I've never fiddled around with traffic statistics here that much, but if we want to use clicks as a metric, does the data show the path people take to get to each article? I'm fine with leaving the article where it is if both disambiguation pages are funneling people to where they want to go. If we can check though and it turns out one of them is being bypassed for the most part, maybe that's the one to usurp? Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:31, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment – work could easily be referred to Work (physics). Is work, aka labor, the primary topic for work? cookie monster  (2020)  755  04:10, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I suppose that's what we're trying to come to consensus on. For the reasons above, I don't think it would be crazy to say it is. But honestly, after typing it out & thinking it through, I'm leaning towards keeping "Work" as a dab page and making the article primary for "Labor". I just mostly used "work" in the article as a stylistic choice. Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:27, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment – I'm just worried about the fact that Childbirth (labor) is a prominent meaning which "labo(u)r" could easily refer to as well — as well as Work (physics) for "work", but a bit less so. Not sure. Paintspot Infez (talk) 19:50, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, the childbirth meaning is important, plus I've never looked into it but wouldn't be surprised if it's actually the older one. Not that it would make a huge difference to the move request, but I guess it adds a little perspective. Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:49, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm inclined to oppose both, more strongly opposed to changing labo(u)r -- there are a number of very prominent uses of the term: organized labor (unions), political parties in several large English-speaking countries, childbirth, as well as physical effort. I think there is also enough ambiguity in the term "work" to not expect one sense to be primary. older ≠ wiser 20:18, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I can respect that, though as I mentioned above, I'm not sure how much labor unions and labor parties would need disambiguation by default. They derive from this meaning, plus their full names already qualify them. I don't know if this changes anyone's opinion, but I realized I forgot to give the full context for what led me to create the article to begin with: [RfC at Vital Articles].
 * Sorry about that; writing the article gave me a bit of tunnel-vision (plus it's sort of crazy IRL right now so my mind bounces around some). Anyways, I think it's an unwritten rule that vital articles have unqualified titles, but unless that changes things or someone comes with a new reason, I'd say the consensus is just to keep everything as is for now. Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:49, 21 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose both. There are multiple, popular articles for both words and no clear primary topics. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 16:39, 23 July 2020 (UTC)


 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Work (human activity) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 17:33, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Work (human activity) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:48, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Work (human activity) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 02:18, 16 October 2022 (UTC)