Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Human rights/Archive 2

Userbox
We need a userbox - does anyone know how to make one? I'll start searching for an icon to use. Nina Odell 18:21, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi, just signed up. I've made a start on a UserBox for the project. You can find it here User Human Rights Project (reproduced below). Obviously we need an icon. Any idea what colour you want it to be? WJBscribe (WJB talk) 00:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've used a set of scales as the temperory photo but its still pretty similar to the Wikiproject Law template. Any ideas for something new and distinctive? WJBscribe (WJB talk) 00:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've included a second version. Its different but maybe a bit overdramatic?WJBscribe (WJB talk) 01:45, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Happy King Day
"Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it in every generation. - Coretta Scott King (attributed)" Image:Martin Luther King Jr NYWTS 5.jpg|From | Commons. NinaOdell | Talk 13:13, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Slavery WikiProject
It would be great to have an organized wikiproject on slavery. A lot of these articles need expansion or contain errors and other problems. I don't have the time to lead the project myself, but I thought some of you here might be interested in forming a slavery subproject some day, so I thought I'd drop a suggestion on this page. Richard001 02:12, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm in! I can focus on the USA. We ought to try to make this international, though. How do we start a project? futurebird 02:15, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

I made this cute little infobox a week ago, but all of these pages need a lot of help. And I worry I might have left a few revolts out. Could we start with this?futurebird 02:21, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
 * The best thing to do would be to add a proposal on the WikiProject Council/Proposals page, and maybe put a note on a couple of the more important article talk pages and related project talk pages announcing the proposal. Then, if you get enough support, you'll know that the project has a decent hope of actually working. Badbilltucker 02:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Youth rights are human rights
Hello all. There is definitely a ton of info out there to justify this project, and I'm sure the users will come pouring in. I would like to join the WikiProject Human Rights, and in doing so, I want to usher in a formidible analysis that has been excluded from the Project so far: Youth rights. There are a large number of articles in Wikipedia that deal with the many angles of youth rights, and I will include them as well. - Freechild 04:48, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I somewhat agree, inasmuch as there could be justification for placing articles to do with Enforced Child Migration, Enforced institutionalisation of indigenous children, Child slavery, Child welfare and Child employment related articles into the scope of a project.
 * I think such a category has some wide scope to consider the following sort of articles for adoption into the project:


 * Stolen Generation
 * A.O. Neville
 * Katherine Mary Clutterbuck
 * Kingsley Fairbridge
 * Margaret_Humphreys


 * During the 20th century, many countries enacted various eugenics policies and programs, including:


 * Genetic screening
 * Birth control
 * Promoting differential birth rates
 * Marriage restrictions
 * Immigration control
 * Segregation (both racial segregation as well as segregation of the mentally ill from the normal)
 * Compulsory sterilization
 * Forced abortions, or, conversely, forced pregnancies
 * Genocide

petedavo 03:48, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

petetavo, I agree that there are the historical concerns about children's rights that you implore above, and those are central and valid. Those should definitely be included. However, the literature, particularly illustrated with Articles 5 and 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, that illustrates a growing tension between those historical concerns and more modern concerns. They include:
 * Intergenerational equity
 * Evolving Capacities
 * Youth-adult partnerships
 * Youth participation

In North America there is a consistently numbing interest in efforts to promote those interests. However, there has been a good deal of research done internationally, including work on the "tension" that I speak of:
 * Adultism
 * Adultcentrism
 * Fear of youth
 * Fear of children

In the United States specifically, there is an expressed interest in Youth rights. What I would propose is an effort - perhaps through templates, definitely through lists - to coalesce all of these topics into some collective interest. I do not want to do that alone though. - Freechild 14:15, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Personally, I am of the opinion that the articles your proposing are more for the wiki dictionary rather than the encylopedia. I think it best to make a category and add existing articles to it, and then work on creating any that are missing that either describe
 * (in a historical context) an institution, or a Government Policy etc. Describing changing opinions by the relevant changes in policy as in Eugenics or as in the Stolen Generation. Our own views are irrelevant, but just creating an article on say the enforced Child Migration from Britain to Canada, Australia et el, or what happenned to the Canadian Indians is initself expressing an opion, albeit subetly. Besides, I think expressing a view on youth issues as an adult is not the done thing is it, and expecially prone to accusations from the gutter, so I don't want to go there?
 * petedavo 15:17, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * If the goal of the Human Rights project is actually to build a comprehensive guide to human rights, these topics will be included in a proactive way. I think I understand your point regarding the political perspective inherent in many articles; I would argue that exists in any writing, encyclopedic or otherwise. However, my concern here is regarding the treatment of what already exists on WP, rather than debating the merit of any given article. Regarding the issue of expressing a view on youth issues as an adult, if we didn't have the interaction of generations and co-mingling of various age-related perspectives our societies would be even messier than they already are. Let's not pretend otherwise. - Freechild 16:14, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Categorization of Human Rights Organizations
Hello! I joined this project to promote better categorization of human rights related article, particularly as it pertains to human rights' organizations. Presently, human rights organizations can be found in: Has this topic been discussed elsewhere? Where to begin? Scarykitty 07:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Category:Charities and various subcategories such as Category:International charities and Category:Humanitarian aid
 * Category:Non-governmental organizations and various subcats such as Category:International non-governmental organizations
 * Category:Non-profit organizations which is mostly just broken out by country of origin
 * Category:Human rights bodies, which is confusingly a subset of Category:Civic and political organizations

Oh, and also Category:Civil rights and Category:Peace organizations Scarykitty 08:08, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Are proposing to create a category:human rights organizations? That sounds like a good idea to me. However, isn't that what Category:Human rights bodies already does? Maybe that category should be renamed? Once that is decided, it is easy to add the appropriate category tag to any HR orgs that are in the other categories you mention.


 * Why do you say "confusingly"? Category:Civil rights is also in Category:Human rights, so I see nothing wrong with its categorization. (I'm confused that you're confused. ;-) ) &mdash; Sebastian 16:06, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * After poking around the org categories a bit more last night, I realized my frustration is a larger one with the diffusion of all organizations into random categories. I found wikiproject:organization and posted my beefs there.  Human rights bodies is confusing, because to me "body" implies something official, so I do think a change is in order.  But the larger problem is with how NPOs/NGOs and charities are categorized as if they were quite different things, which they are not.  I guess it wouldn't be confusing for human rights bodies to be a subset of Civic and political organizations, if said category was a subset of non-profit organizations or non-governmental organizations or charities, which it was not until last night when I did it ;).  If time permits, I will poke through the other cats and see if there are human rights organizations that have not found the right home, and I will add them to human rights bodies.  And I'll take up my crusade elsewhere on the unnecessary diffusion of NGO/NPO and charity (i do note one user was able to abolish the "voluntary public organization" category last summer. Cheers!  Scarykitty 23:35, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Your points seem to make sense. I can't think of a reason to distinguish between NPOs/NGOs and charities, either, but that should of course be discussed on those categories. Your plan to change the structure of categories reminds me of when I proposed that two years ago on Category talk:Meteorology. It seems that while structure still is the same as it was before - I'm not sure what that means. Anyway, thanks for your commitment! &mdash; Sebastian 08:19, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

The Sustainable development Portal
I recently started The Sustainable development Portal and offered it up for portal peer review to help make it a feature portal down the road. Please feel free to to help improve the portal and/or offer your input at the portal peer review. Thanks. RichardF 02:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The Sustainable development Portal now is a Featured portal candidate. Please feel free to leave comments. RichardF 02:45, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Deletion of material on Ku Klux Klan in Connecticut
It is not widely known that the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a surge in popularity in much of the United States even outside the South in the 1920s. In Connecticut, there were 15,000 members 1925. I included a section on the Klan in a section of the Fairfield County, Connecticut article because I had sourced information on Fairfield County and because the information is a striking and important part of the history of the county. Numerous anonymous editors have tried to delete those paragraphs. Now, a non-anonymous editor would like to delete the section and we are discussing the matter on the talk page. We would both like more editors to comment on the matter. The other editor has posted a note at the talk page for Wikiproject:Connecticut, and I'm posting this request. There are a lot of local patriots, people who (properly) love their locality or region, who (improperly) think embarassing history about it should be deleted (although there are stronger arguments for deletion). Please help create a responsible consensus on this matter at Talk:Fairfield County, Connecticut. Noroton 02:24, 17 June 2007 (UTC) self edit Noroton 02:26, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Worldwide Situation Overview needed
This Human Rights project should succinctly inform readers about: how many people are currently lacking human rights (scope), what the nature of the repression is (severity), where it is occurring (location), how long various areas have been problematic (history), and briefly address cause (politics).

The portal page's news section gets readers started, but does not look far enough into history, or provide an index of issues. Existing Wikipedia categorization by location does index all countries, but does not ease navigation based on scope or severity. Lastly, encyclopedic authority on political complications is one of Wikipedia's weakest areas; even the Human rights in North Korea article is full of weasel words, belying the severity of its concentration camps (Hoeryong).

- Rgrant 01:51, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Request for contribution from editors with Human rights background
This pertains to two articles: (1) Sam Harris (author) and (2) Ethnic profiling/Racial Profiling. I figure that this is related to human rights issues in general and so I am posting this request here. Any contribution either to the talk pages or the articles would be appreciated.

Sam Harris (author)
Harris is a notable public intellectual because of criticism of religion, specifically Islam in the post 9/11 context. He has argued that Islam is the greatest threat to world peace of all religions and drawn specific conclusions from this in regard ethics, law and foreign policy.

A while back I came across an article by Sam Harris which advocated torture and "ethnic profiling" for Muslims in the context of the "war on terror". As I began to read more of Harris' work I went to his Wikipedia page to get a bit more background on him. I found that the page made no mention of his biography or controversial views on human rights issues and his support for torture and ethnic/racial profiling, which in my opinion are extremely relevant to any assessment of his ideas given that he has argued for differential/discriminatory treatment of Muslims and other groups based on their aleged moral inferiority and violent ideology.

I therefore edited the page to include more detail about the context for Harri's critical reception, his positions regarding Islam, the war on terror, torture and racial profiling with quotes from the articles where he takes positions on these matters.

Initially this brought me into a dispute with another contributor the self appointed editor of the page who deleted my additions. Rather than enter into an edit war I agreed to let the other editor incorporate my contributions into the article his way, but the resulting edit was very Weasel worded, de-emphasizing Harris' position on torture and ethnic/racial profiling and removing quotes that distinguished what were allegations made by Harris from more verifiable evidence. For instance, in the subsection on Islam, Lawrence's edit to my original contribution reads as follows: “Muslims must be prepared to accept ethnic profiling as a tool in the fight against terrorism, so long as adherence to Islam remains a statistical predictor of terrorist behavior.” However, by removing the quotations I contributed from the The Huffington Post article that is the source here, his edit implies that it is a fact, independent of Harris’ unsupported assertion, that adherence to Islam remains a statistical predictor of terrorist behaviour, and this is at the very least a matter of controversy. The whole article is similarly skewed and were I to attempt a rewrite on my own I would surely provoke an edit war.

Racial Profiling
Given that Harris is an advocate of profiling Muslims, I also noticed that the page on racial profiling is continually under assault by pro-racial profiling contributors and is of ever deteriorating quality due to POV bias in favor of profiling. I understand the basic issues but don't feel qualified to edit this extensively. I added a link to Harris page but that has been deleted. This page needs a lot of attention.

Thanks very much, --Betamod 08:42, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Help!
Hello everyone!, on behalf of WP:COL I cordially invite you to participate in the development of Human rights in Colombia. -- F3rn4nd0 (Roger - Out) 18:29, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

CfD nomination of Category:Human rights bodies
Category:Human rights bodies has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. – Cgingold 04:32, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Would anyone be interested in collaborating to bring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article to FA status in time to get it posted to the Main Page as TFA for December 10, 2008, which is Human Rights Day and the 60th anniversary of the Declaration? Sarsaparilla (talk) 14:41, 27 December 2007 (UTC)