History and Politics in Geography Articles - Organization

[Brian P Long]

Hey all-

I have come up against a problem in trying to write and edit country articles, and in particular the parts concerning politics and history.

It's not a huge problem, but I think an article flows more naturally if you have the section dealing with current politics follow the section on a country's history. There tends to be a lot of redundancy if you explain a country's current political system in a section placed before the section about the country's history, and aesthetically the article tends to be less cohesive, more disjointed and, perhaps, more Wikipedia-like.

On the other hand, an obvious disadvantage of putting current politics later is that it comes later, and potentially much further down in a long article. I have also noticed that many CZ articles that are already developed put current politics first and history later. Though I am tempted to do the boldness thing and switch some of these articles around, I wanted to check and make sure there wasn't a thought-out rationale for ordering the article Current Politics-History.

I also thought it might be useful to check in a copy of Britannica to see how their articles are organized, and WP practices would also be relevant (if anyone knows them offhand).

Again, this is not a major problem, but a question on my mind nevertheless.

-Brian

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

My view has always been that hsitory should come first in the country articles. If you want to change some existing ones, on the grounds that they don't work well in the order they are arranged, you should feel free to do so. Similarly, when preparing a new article.

[Derek Harkness]

Current politics, or rather current affairs seems to be what you are talking about. I've change politics to affairs as there may be other things happening in a country that are not political. I can see the argument that current affairs should follow history as that gives a steady time line flow. However, not all politics is current affairs. Describing the structure and format of government, for example, need not follow history. Since you asked, Britannica puts politics before history.

We should be trying to make these articles cohesive, but just moving a section into a different order need not do this. The fact you can move a section implies a lack of cohesion anyway. Sections need to be written in such a way that they introduce each other. I think a simple measure can be like this: Take out all the headers then read the article. Does it read easily. If it does then that's fine, no need to change. If, however, the article reads awkwardly without the headers then something could be improved.

I find the country articles are quite hard to make total cohesive. You do have to jump between unrelated topics sometimes. However, within the bigger clumps the cohesion should be strong. Which section comes first is a judgement call that needs to be made on an article by article basis. If you say that all politics must follow history then you remove flexibility for the writer and thus encourage poor cohesion. Some articles will work one way and some another. I suggest you open debate with the authors of particular articles about how to arrange these things and not just change the whole wiki.

[Denis Cavanagh]

You might want to give Richard Jensen a shout about this.

[RJensen]

This is a good debate. Should we have a uniform format (if so, what order) for all countries? Maybe, I'm not sure. But keeping reader needs in mind, if a country is in the news that is a reason many people look at the article -- Kenya for example. The current crisis I think should get top billing in that case. Maybe China and Beijing should lead off with the 2008 Olympics.  (But dont use old Olymopics as lead paragraph for other cities).