Template talk:Socialism

People
How does Doğu Perinçek get on the template but Lenin and Trotsky do not?--Duncan (talk) 23:43, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I sae a very good suggestion on the revision history, that we should be using the main article on socialism as guidance for this template. I think that's a good starting point. I have thus removed a few people from the list whose impact is primarily national or limited, and replaced them with Lenin and Trotsky, who seem to be the most mentioned people in the main article that are not in the list of people. My suggestion is that we should list the people who are most mentioned in the article. --Duncan (talk) 23:53, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

can someone add International League of Religious Socialists under organizations? --121.214.20.117 (talk) 09:58, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
 * the list is way out of control. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 23:31, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Regional Socialism
Socialism in one country should probably be included in this list. It is one of the first instances of regional socialism. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 20:54, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Bernie Sanders
Several anonymous IP users (generally without any other edits in their contribution history) have removed Bernie Sanders from the list. Given that socialism is a broad term that includes various degrees of reformism and gradualism (not just the revolutionary total nationalization of Marxist-Leninism), should Sanders be excluded from this template? The reasons given basically include the assertion that democratic socialism isn't a form of socialism and American definition of socialism doesn't count. These don't seem to be good reasons for the removal. He is the best known democratic socialist in the United States and is categorized as such on Wikipedia. These users are not active in removing statements on his article stating that he's a democratic socialist. Nor do they remove democratic socialism (or even social democracy) from the template when editing. Hopefully we can start a discussion and come to some reasonable consensus on the issue. I'm open to disagreement and ready to change my mind if given more than pure assertion. Thank you all in advance. Alexander Levian (talk) 22:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
 * ✅. Whatever his politics, he’s related to socialism within that word’s meaning in the United States. Inclusion on this long template should be a pretty low bar anyway. — LLarson &#160; (said&#8239;&#38;&#8239;done) 20:48, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
 * . The list is long and arbitrary.  It should be shortened down to key figures.  A list that includes Noam Chomsky, Muammar Gaddafi, Bernie Sanders, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx; amongst the many other of loosely related names attached to socialism does no one any good.  The list needs to be reinvented from the ground up, and we should be having a discussion about who should be included. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 05:11, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Remove A list of persons "associated" with the notion of socialism is useless in that it provides no useful information, it carries the potential for unending and inconclusive arguments, and it helps confuse the issue about what is "socialism" even more. Instead of arguing whether or not to include in the list this or that public figure, we should do away with the list altogether as soon as possible, and focus on getting every article on a specific public figure to be as informative as possible about his or her political ideology. The template is doing a very bad job, as it is. At best, we are guilty of pigeonholing. -The Gnome (talk) 10:48, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

People (cont)
Reopening the conversation about the people section. The list is long, ridiculous, and completely arbitrary. I advocated a removal of the people section for the American Socialism template, however I do not think that should be the case for this one, there are enough important figures that its worth keeping the section. However, as it is now, the list is not helpful. We should have a discussion on who should be included, who should not be included, and what criteria we would use to determine these things. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 23:47, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Creation of a standard for inclusion of persons related to socialism
Okay. So this list is too long (there seems to be little to no dispute about this). So we need a standard to determine who can be on this list. I'm going to reverse my previous position of including Bernie Sanders and propose something that maybe the rest of you can either agree with or at least improve. I think inclusion in this list should be restricted to those who meet one of two qualifications: 1. Said person is a political leader of a political party or state. We may want this to be further limited to one or two persons per country (that's just a starting point, I'm open to other ideas). 2. Said person is a academic figure that has published some work dealing with socialism itself (or some form of it). I'm not sure how many people this should be restricted to (please present suggestions). Going by these standards, Sanders doesn't qualify to be on this list. He's published no books on democratic socialism and he isn't head of any party (nor is he president as of right now). I have nothing against him and I'm the one that added him a while back, but we do need some standard to shorten this list. This is just a starting point, hopefully there will be other suggestions. Alexander Levian (talk) 06:22, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I think that is a good start. Regarding the second point, we should probably connect it to the article itself.  If the article mentions them as a major contributor to the theory, then they should be included.  Without that, the list of academics who have published works on socialism is endless. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 03:12, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I would also like to add, if the article of the individual is only a stub or just barely past a stub, they are likely not an important enough figure to be included on the list. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 06:58, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't thinks that being a leader of a party or state is a very good reason for inclusion, certainly not with a "1 per state" rule, at that might lead to people trying to add one per state, and there is a lot of states. It seems to me it needs to be somebody who has been influential on Socialism itself. Not sure how to judge that, though. --OpenFuture (talk) 03:10, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

How about for one of the requirements (note: ONE of the requirements, meaning that having this requirement does not equate automatic inclusion, but not having this requirement does mean automatic noninclusion). The list should only include Class B and up articles and must be tagged by Wikiproject socialism as "high importance". This requirement should at least help us thin out the list quite a bit with many names listed have incredibly underdeveloped articles. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 17:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Creation of a standard for inclusion of persons related to socialism
I am doing a RfC for the conversation located above. This section is just a continuation of what has already been started and an attempt to get other voices in the conversation. But what we are looking for is help creating standards to determine what names are appropriate and not appropriate for inclusion on the list. Without a guideline or standard, the list gets a lot of arbitrary and unhelpful inclusions. We want to have the list focus on important figures only. -Xcuref1endx (talk) 23:43, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Perhaps starting with the WP:RS from political scientists who write about socialism is a good place to start? Find some good WP:RS and let us see what we can learn from it.  --David Tornheim (talk) 14:40, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes. I would argue that the list should be limited to figures who are primarily notable for influencing and shaping Socialism -- famous academics and philosophers who shaped it.  This is, I think, comparable to how we handle most other philosophies, and seems the most generally useful. Compare to eg. Template:Anarchism; it's not a list of every single important person who called themselves Anarchists, just the ones who contributed to Anarchism as a philosophy.  (If someone wants a list of every single noteworthy socialist, that's handled better via categories rather than a list in the template.)  A good rule of thumb:  Any figure listed on the template must have the Template:Socialism_sidebar visible on their article.  If their socialism isn't significant enough to get them that sidebar, it's not significant enough to get them listed here.  This seems to be how the Anarchism template works, and it's kept it from getting bloated like this one.  (My reading, looking over it, is that the reason the Socialism list is so huge is because people have used it to try and wage arguments back and forth by including people they view as "good" or "bad" in it simply because they're socialists.  But that's not very useful to readers; it ought to be a list of people whose relevance is primarily about socialism, and who have contributed intellectually to socialism in some form, rather than everyone important who described themselves as a socialist.) Anyway, tl;dr:  I think the basic standard should be "their article must have the Socialism sidebar visible or they get removed from the list."  --Aquillion (talk) 22:31, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Authoritarian
Hi,, I was wandering if religious types of socialism couldn't be considered as authoritarians, since every religion is a human institution that monopolizes the freedom of thinking and imposes it's own worldview to their followers, bounding them no tonly to the cleric but also to the "ultimate authority" of God, for whom people sometimes even fell fear. To summarize, if the religious socialism are bounded to a given religion, wich is intrinsically authoritarian in its modus operandi, shouldn't we consider them as authoritarian? Ogat  16:36, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , perhaps you are right. But Wikipedia has a rule No original research. Sincerely Yours, Гармонический Мир (talk) 08:39, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Libertarianism
, there is no direct link to libertarianism in this navbox, only for it´s derivates "libertarin socialism", "left libertarianism" and "libertarian marxism", so wouldn´t it be better to list the main topic too? Ogat 13:59, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , it's unnecessary here. (The article Socialism also has no link to Libertarianism.) Yours sincerely, Гармонический Мир (talk) 16:54, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Actualy there is a link to libertarianism inside the main article Socialism under the economics section. I think it´s important to list since its derivates are releevant in the schools of though group. Should we ask more people their opinions on that matter? Ogat (talk) 17:51, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Removal of custom colors
I've removed the use of custom colors from this template, as I have also done with the navboxes for Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and Communism. None of these serve any encyclopedic purpose except decoration. -- The Anome (talk) 10:28, 31 August 2019 (UTC)


 * I have also removed these custom colors, for the same reason. Grayfell (talk) 19:45, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

National Bolshevism removed?
Why was National Bolshevism removed from the list of variants of authoritarian socialism? The ideology is described as a variant of Bolshevism, which is included in the list alongside plenty of subvariants. There was no consensus to be removed. Alejandro Basombrio (talk) 02:55, 17 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Consensus is not required for removal of disputed content. It appears that National Bolshevism was first added to the template by you, in an edit which you misleading labeled "minor": . Since then you have been reverted twice. Per WP:ONUS, The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. Feel free to persuade the community that National Bolshevism belongs in this category, but until you do, the item stays out of the template. My understanding of mainstream scholarship on the topic is that historians do not consider National Bolshevism to be in any way an authentically socialist movement or ideology. But I am open to being persuaded by reliable sources. Generalrelative (talk) 03:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Agree with removal. Not generally considered part of the story of socialism. BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:23, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
 * @Bobfrombrockley: National Bolshevism is as legitimate as National-anarchism and other (neo-)fascist movements masquerading as national adaptations of whatever socialist ideology. i.e. never considered part of socialism by any qualified expert on the topic. They're all just rehashing Nazism ("National Socialism"). –Vipz (talk) 04:01, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Standard of inclusion for people
Revisiting the sensible criteria proposed by above (back in 2016!), the list of names is too long and several, while obviously important in themselves, are not important characters in the story of socialism. I've removed some of the most obvious, but would like to propose to remove the following: A good way of assessing this might be something like: should they merit a sentence in the History of socialism article? On the other hand, our current list is extremely male, and some world regions are under-represented (e.g. France and India are well-represented; most of Africa isn't), so I think there are some names to be added as well.
 * John Goodwyn Barmby
 * Enrico Barone
 * Philippe Buchez
 * Georg Büchner
 * Philippe Buonarroti
 * Théodore Dézamy
 * Prosper Enfantin
 * William Batchelder Greene
 * Charles Hall
 * Thomas Hodgskin
 * Pierre Leroux
 * Nikolay Mikhaylovsky
 * Giovanni Pascoli
 * Constantin Pecqueur
 * Luis Emilio Recabarren
 * Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz
 * Fred M. Taylor
 * William Thompson
 * Pyotr Tkachev
 * Alfred Russel Wallace
 * Walter Benjamin (one of my favourite thinkers, but really not that major a figure in socialist history)
 * James Larkin
 * Cornel West
 * Howard Zinn
 * Bob Crow (cool guy, but really not that important in a global context)
 * Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (currently head of the SI, and may become president at the weekend, so might be a case)

Thoughts? BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:37, 26 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Support everything proposed to rebalance the list. I think it is also worthwhile to check, while removing and adding, whether they're also contained within appropriate pages in Category:Lists of people by ideology. –Vipz (talk) 05:19, 27 May 2023 (UTC)