US Presidential Election

[Zachary Pruckowski]

Proposal for Articles concerning the United States Presidential Election:

I'm starting this thread to continue a discussion from the Exec mailing list.  We need (or at least could use) a general framework for articles about US Presidential candidates.  Obviously, they're contentious topics, and open to a lot of PoV and biased sources, so I propose the following:

1)  Each candidate's article will focus primarily on their biography, and not their campaign.  It should certainly mention that they're running for President, and probably their slogan and party.
2)  Articles covering the races themselves, which are limited to discussing primary results, upcoming primary dates, delegate counts, and maybe something like FEC contribution records.

The goal being to eliminate bias, which comes primarily from two sources:
(a)  Sourcing out of commentary articles or inaccurate pre-race polling.
(b)  Author/editor favoritism.

As I see it, this would allow for us to have factual articles that can help our readers, without having biased or uneven articles.

[Pat_Palmer]

I might as well introduce this here, as these articles (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, yada yada) are bound to be "busy" in the next few months.

I just did some work on the Clinton and Obama articles.  I consolidated the analysis of the presidential campaign tactics used so far in the section (that someone had already added) called "presidential campaign". I also replaced what I considered to be "spin" words (i.e., implying either positive or negative traits) with less hot button words.

I notice that the "presidential campaign" section in the Obama is almost an exact duplicate of the section by the same name on the Hillary Clinton article. Therefore, it makes sense, if this analysis must be in Citizendium at all, to move it all out to a separate article called something like "presidential primary (2008)". anybody want to tackle that?

Not that anyone has asked me, but my opinion is that we should not be quoting anyone's rhetoric about anyone else during this campaign. I'll admit I'm a Hillary supporter, but I'm not going around trying to attack Obama. If we go down that route, it would be madness. I would prefer to see Citizendium mainly stick to reporting on candidate backgrounds, and let the public press quote the rhetoric. Quoting rhetoric from years ago seems more justified, but anything that was spoken since the current presidential campaign began does not, in my opinion, belong in here.

I consider myself capable of writing neutrally, but when I feel strongly, it is very difficult to avoid using "hot button" words.  The press does not avoid these words, but I think we should.  I was reading a press report the other day, in which all the male candidates "emphasized" their credentials, but Hillary Clinton (according to the reporter) "boasted about her credentials".  That is spin.  Can we manage to avoid it here?

Thanks to all those who started these articles and have brought them as far as they have already come.

Regards,

Pat Palmer

[Stephen Ewen]

1)  Each candidate's article will focus primarily on their biography, and not their campaign.

The latter can be dealt with on a News Guides subpage http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Subpages#Planned_subpage_projects - we just need to add it to the subpages template.

[Pat_Palmer]

Zach,

I support the proposal as you wrote it.  Would like to hear others weigh in as well.  If people can come to an agreement, perhaps we could post the policy (whatever it turns out to be) on the Politics and Topic Informant pages.

Regards,

Pat

[RJensen]

Encyclopedias are where people turn to for information.  Let's not be afraid to give out information. 

The articles do not tell people how to vote.  They do give real information more useful than date of birth, all based on the consensus of election experts.  There is no more "bias" or "opinion" in the current articles than in the articles on Napoleon or Stalin or FDR.  (people outside history and politics seem to think in terms of an absolute bias-free "truth" out there that CZ should report. No such thing exists.)  (We're having discussions right now with Obama's old law firm that says there are mistakes in CZ's Obama article---but we copied that info straight from an Obama website.  They have yet to tell us what the mistakes are.)

The duplicated information is because how Obama interacts with Clinton, say, belongs in both articles and should be where people go to see it. If someone reads both articles they will not be badly inconvenienced by reading 150 words that are the same, but if a person reads only one article we want the info to be there.

[RJensen]

In setting policy we should follow the CZ guidelines: they tell us to report on controversies, not ignore them:

"Articles are to be held up to a high standard of accuracy. Editors should review every substantive claim made by an article, and be of the opinion that the claim is well justified by the relevant evidence, before approving the article.

"Neutral. Articles must not take a stand on controversial issues. They should report on controversies rather than engaging in them, reporting every side as sympathetically as possible consistent with the sympathetic representation of competing sides, and doling out limited space, where necessary, according to (in the case of mainly academic controversies) the proportion of opinion among experts or, in some broader controversies, the general public whose native language is the language of the compendium. See the neutrality policy.

"Comprehensive. Articles should cover all or most significant aspects of a topic."
from  http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Approval_Standards

[Zachary Pruckowski]

I think a lot of the problem is that some of the sections covering the race (section 6 in the Obama article and 2 in the 2008 presidential article) are mostly talking about punditry.  Pundits and 500-person polls aren't events.  Primaries and caucuses are.  Major scandals are.

I also think we should look into first and second tier designations.  Ron Paul (not that I'm a fan - we couldn't be further apart politically) outscored Giuliani in 2 of the 3 primaries, and if we're talking polls, he's not even on track to win Florida.  Given the total lack of success with predicting the races to date, we shouldn't call someone a front runner or second tier or anything unless the advantage is practically decisive.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

There is a very good case for putting ephemeral information on the presidential campaign into a News article on such, and confining the articles on individual candidates to clear, factually strong information that will survive. For example, the results of the Iowa Caucus will be mostly forgotten by the time you elect a president -- so that information should be in the presidential campaign article and not in the articles on Obama, or Clinton, etc.

This would also save all the effort of changing the individual contenders; articles all the time: you just update one article.

[Pat_Palmer]

(We're having discussions right now with Obama's old law firm that says there are mistakes in CZ's Obama article---but we copied that info straight from an Obama website.

That's the problem.  The stuff on Obama's website right now is "spin"; it's got wordings in it to his advantage. 

The articles as they currently stand have had several "spin" wordings edited out by me (see the recent history).  For example, Obama's caucus win was termed "sensational"; I changed that "unexpected".  Big difference.  Obama's campaign people likely would prefer the first word.  Those trying not to take a stand might well prefer to avoid emotionally charged verbiage.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The "sensational" word was taken from a British newspaper "The Times", and reflects the impact that the result had globally. This is the problem with covering news events, as I have stated above. What was sensational on the day after the Iowa Caucus looks less so now, and will be a blip in history in a year. There needs to be a clear separation of news from articles on individual candidates.

[RJensen]

We can expect this presidential campaign to generate a lot of news between now and November. By keeping a daily/weekly update we are writing the history of the campaign that would be difficult to reconstruct later.  We also want to report the mood of the country--which certainly has gone through ups and downs.  When an event is spectacular CZ should say so--tell the truth--even if the facts pain some losers.

[Denis Cavanagh]

By keeping a daily/weekly update we are writing the history of the campaign that would be difficult to reconstruct later.

I certainly agree with that. We are effectively writing history! (Or at least, copying it)

[Zachary Pruckowski]

We can expect this presidential campaign to generate a lot of news between now and November. By keeping a daily/weekly update we are writing the history of the campaign that would be difficult to reconstruct later.  We also want to report the mood of the country--which certainly has gone through ups and downs.  When an event is spectacular CZ should say so--tell the truth--even if the facts pain some losers.

The mood of the country is not discernible from TV pundits and newspaper editorials.  It's also not discernible from 600 person polls with 6% margins of error.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

See the Talk page of Obama, for a proposal on how CZ should manage the reporting of the campaign.

[Zachary Pruckowski]

See the Talk page of Obama, for a proposal on how CZ should manage the reporting of the campaign.

That (Dr. Leng's referee decision) seems more or less in line with this discussion (centralized articles about races, candidate articles primarily biographical).  I think someone should start an official wiki policy page along that decision's lines (ideally incorporating discussion here).