Wikipedia:WikiProject Colombia/COTM

Welcome to WikiProject Colombia's collaboration of the month. Each month, a Colombia-related article is selected on this page to become the Collaboration of the Month (COTM).

The aim is to take a Colombia-related article with potential and elevate it to good or featured status through cooperative editing. When the current COTM article's month long improvement period expires, a new article that has received support is selected for the next collaboration. Any editor, registered or not, can help the collaboration by contributing to the selected article.

Please read through it, and leave your comments on the appropriate section and don't forget to sign.

Goal
The goal of this collaboration is to improve the quality and comprehensiveness of List of Presidents of Colombia to make it useful to readers, and to serve as a guide to properly structure articles that relate to the Presidents of Colombia, about 150+ articles could be affected and improved based on the outcome of this list.

In improving the quality of the article we hope to raise it to Featured List status (see Featured list criteria); a similar article, List of Presidents of Venezuela has achieved this status and I believe this list has also potential.

Background
According to Revista Credencial Historia a Luís Ángel Arango Library publication, there have been 113 presidents in Colombia, many of whom have only served a few months or even just days and have been appointed ad hoc, and many of them were only "Charged with the Executive Power" i.e. "Vice President, in charge of the Executive Power", or "Designate, Charged with the Executive Power" which made them de facto presidents since there was no actual President, but not de jure as they were neither chosen, elected, appointed, or claimed to be President, many of them only served less than 6 months, these make up the majority of them. France has had a similar problem (see List of Presidents of the French Republic)

Congress has at various times avoided appointing any one person to be President of the country, rather choosing to create multiple heads of state like the triumvirates during the Foolish Fatherland, the Plural Executives of 1831 and 1863, or the Military Junta of 1957-1958.

Progress

 * Invite members to participate in collaboration.
 * Decide who to include and how.
 * Choose Party colours.
 * Choose table parameters.
 * Stablish which order(s) parameter to use.
 * Implement changes on names and dates as decided by group.
 * Cite sources and add footnotes.
 * Create an engaging lead as per Featured list criteria.
 * Improve structure by organizing sections and implementing table sorting features.
 * Submit article for Featured list candidacy.
 * Submit article for protection request.

Who to include
According to Revista Credencial Historia a Luís Ángel Arango Library publication, there have been 113 presidents in Colombia, many of whom have only served a few months or even just days and have been appointed ad hoc, and many of them were only "Charged with the Executive Power" i.e. "Vice President, Charged with the Executive Power", or "Designate, Charged with the Executive Power" which made them de facto presidents since there was no actual President, but not de jure as they were neither chosen, elected, appointed, or claimed to be President, many more have served less than 6 months, these make up the majority of them, but they are nonetheless considered de facto Presidents. The Colombian Constitution of 1886

The Website of the Office of the President of Colombia seems to include Bartolomé Calvo even though he was technically not elected president or took the oath of office, but do not include Juan de Dios who was also in charge of the Presidency but was not elected or took an oath. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, Joaquín Riascos and Santos Acosta, were all "presidents" at the same time independently of each other, who is who depends on where you live or what allegiance you have, I included all three because unlike Obando who declared himself President of the Cauca only, these three generals declared themselves presidents of the whole nation, and they all had they legitimate right to succeed to the presidency.

Order
Presidential order is not used in everyday Colombian historical context as opposed to presidential order in the US or Iran. The common practice of ordering head’s of state is common to established modern republics to identify a line of historical succession, but should they be used for Colombian purposes? With so many presidents and heads of state how can we possibly order them. There are lists out there, but they are all flawed, they either only count some, or count all, or don’t keep in mind interim presidencies, or more likely change their starting point from Gran Colombia to Colombia.

No order
Should we use Presidential order? List of Presidents of Mexico does not use ordering to avoid conflict. The Website of the Office of the President of Colombia does not use order. The section of the Foolish Fatherland has no order because during the persecution congress was barely able to convene let alone elect someone for a set period since everyone kept getting killed or arrested.

1 order setting
If we opt to use a certain ordering system we have to set on just one. Is there an order list somewhere that we can use as a reference and that it comes from a valid source?

3 order setting
This is my first proposal including a similar 3 order variant used in the List of Presidents of Venezuela. The first one is the order of the de facto presidency, each period served by one individual is considered an individual presidency. The second order is the de jure presidency order, so Bolívar was in fact elected president, Santander and Caycedo were not, they were Vice Presidents, Mosquera was in fact elected president so he is the 2nd de jure president, Urdaneta is not the 3rd because he was not elected but took power by coup. The third one uses a popularly used presidential order (see for a the list).

What parties
The Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party were formed in 1849 and 1948 respectively; the presidents after this period can be categorized in either one. What about the ones before? The political views were to be either Centralist or Federalist, also associated with their heroes, Santanderismo or Bolívarianismo.

The problem I find is that for those Centralist or Federalist, little sources exist, like for example Juan de Dios Aranzazu eventually became a Liberal and sources talk about him like he was, but because his time in office precedes the manifestation of liberalism as a party he should be something else, however sources don´t mention whether he was centralist or federalist (at least the ones I found). Because they were not parties, the principles were not set in stone, so some people were Federalist Bolivarianistas, or Centralist Santanderistas (which is oxymoronic). Should we state their “political affiliation” even though they were not concrete?

The other problem was that early on, the parties were divided, so during the period from 1849-1887 the Liberals were divided in really distinct groups “Radicals” (radicals), “Golgothas” (gólgotas), and the “Draconians” (draconianos) each sector acted like a different party and nominated different candidates for office and there were presidents associated with each of those liberal groups, who would now be considered very different political ideologies. Should there be a distinctive party colour/affiliation for these cases?

Party colour
What colour shading should we use for parties? This we know: Liberals are Red and Conservatives are Blue, everything else is up for grabs. There should be a colour for at least: Liberals, Conservatives, National Party (defuct), and Military government (juntas).
 * 1) FFB6B6
 * 2) CCEEFF
 * 3) AACC99
 * 4) FFCCCC
 * 5) FFF000
 * 6) CCCCFF
 * 7) FFFFCC
 * 8) CCFF66
 * 9) FFE6B0
 * 10) FFFF99
 * 11) A356DE
 * 12) B0CEFF
 * 13) 66FF99
 * 14) FFB616
 * 15) 79CDCD
 * 16) 0BDA51
 * 17) cccccc
 * 18) D99FE8
 * 19) ffff66
 * 20) FF6060
 * 21) 0EBFE9
 * 22) EEEEEE
 * 23) FFE8E8
 * 24) CCFFCC
 * 25) CE1126
 * 26) 003893
 * 27) FCD116

Party template format
Some Presidential lists use a background colour, this colour tends to be more opaque or base to not overshadow the text, bright colours would be too bright for background: Other Presidential lists have a sectional with colour, here the brightness of the colour wont overshadow the text or images (see List of Presidents of Pakistan):

Other lists don’t use any colour and rather just write out the party name (see List of Presidents of Egypt):

Dates in office
Regardless of whether they are accurate or not, should there be one or two fields? Should it be American standard date or most of the world date? i.e. March 10, 2010 or 10 March 2010

Miscellaneous
Add other things we should discuss.

Sections
As it currently is, there are just sections, the Foolish Fatherland and the Presidents since full independence, this is because there was an interruption between these two, otherwise I would have left them as one. I did this mainly to maintain the flow of the list instead of having it interrupted several times, each new section has a header to make it clear that the country changed, the List of Presidents of the People's Republic of China has a list like this, as opposed to the List of Prime Ministers of Spain that separates the list in sections for each country period.

Should it be broken down to specific country lists?

Parameters
Per the List of Presidents of the Italian Republic we could include date of birth, or place of birth, in Colombian politics this often matters as regionalism persists, and some presidents were pretty much dead by the time they took office.

Per the List of Presidents of the Philippines we could include Vice President and Era, the office of the vice president however was abolished for long periods, and for many years we had none, plus there is another List of Vice Presidents of Colombia. Era could be used for periods of time like the “Radical Olympus” “National Front” “Conservative Hegemony” “Thousand Days War” “Foolish Fatherland” and so forth.

Per the List of Presidents of Peru we could include Form of Entry and Title, since it would be helpful to clarify if they came to power by coup, election, succession or appointment, and whether they were Vice Presidents, or Dictators, or Plural Executive, President Chief or other title. However, I think the Notes parameter that it currently has serves both purposes.

Naming conventions
The way I changed it now has the First name (or if known by both) on top and the last names at the bottom, this way we keep Colombian naming protocol (using both last names) without confusing the non-Colombian reader. Is there any comments on how to name them better?

Referencing
Some lists provide a specific box for references, other just reference away. Which way is better (see List of Presidents of the United States and List of Vice Presidents of the United States to see what I’m talking about)

Images
What size should the images be? Based on the List of Presidents of Venezuela is 50px, but the List of Presidents of the French Republic has them in 80px. Some of the images are horrible, but they are the only ones we have so the bigger the uglier.