Portal talk:Kentucky General Assembly

Shouldn't state legislatures and their works be sub-pages of their state portal page ( Portal:Kentucky ) now? George Orwell III (talk) 20:21, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

There wasn't a clear outcome to the discussion on Scriptorium, so I just picked the one that made the most sense to me. I look at these governmental bodies as authors because a) they are composed of specific, known people and b) they produce works. It might be argued that the state legislator or bureaucrat who drafted the legislation is the true "author"; this may be the case, but those people are rarely known and, most importantly, are not cited in our collections of laws and resolutions.

Portals to me are more general: simply collections of related materials. Portal:Kentucky is a natural place for all works related to Kentucky. Portal:Government of Kentucky might include works about the government, biographies of the key people in it, histories of its development, etc.—i.e., not restricted to the laws and resolutions it passed.

If a consensus disagrees with me, I won't object to moving these; in any case it's a discussion that should probably continue while the portal namespace is fleshed out. —Spangineer^wp (háblame) 22:06, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I frquently struggle with this designation myself but it seems the definition for the Author: namespace excludes such works fairly clearly

This namespace [Author] is for listings of all works by or about people, with links to the works in question, as well as links to sister projects (such as Commons or Wikipedia).

Anything other than works by or about an individual do not seem to fit there even though the point has been raised that a body of people (the Congress, an Assembly) qualifies as "people" using the above definition. I've since come to understand that "people" was meant to convey "person" (a singularity) not organizations or similar bodies.

At any rate I was asking more for my own clarification rather than to suggest improper placement or anything. I have no personal issue with the notion of what is or is not proper for the Author namespace but I came away with the impression that this view was in the minority and that something needed to be done resolve this. What to do specifically wasn't really given as you seem to believe as well. Additionally, I don't believe the Portal namespace will mimic the same use as it does on sister-sites on WS but that's just my opinion given the lack of a definative guide on those too.

The only thing that might help for that future refinement is adding these Authors to Category:Non-author author pages now so we can at least track them a bit easier later. George Orwell III (talk) 22:37, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I've added that category. I think the initial conception of the author namespace was that it be for individuals specifically, but even in 2007 there was pretty strong support for expanding it (and at the time I was on the other side of the fence). We'll see how the portals develop and hopefully things will get clearer in the future. —Spangineer^wp (háblame) 19:25, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and excuse the edit to your comment formatting; Chrome apparently doesn't like the blockquote. —Spangineer^wp (háblame) 19:26, 14 October 2010 (UTC)