User talk:HistoricMN44/Archive 1

Hello, HistoricMN44, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  MifterBot I ^{(Talk • Contribs • Owner)} 20:49, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

hi, you might be interested in Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/DC History March 23, 2013. Farmbrough's revenge⇔ †@1₭ 14:36, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Bill format

Please see the changes I recently made to Stop Tobacco Smuggling in the Territories Act of 2013. Find the changes here. You should find it helpful as you work on H.R. 316, the Collinsville Renewable Energy Promotion Act. You're doing a great job adding these articles; keep up the good work!—GoldRingChip 20:55, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

again

Have you noticed the changes I've been making to the articles you've created?—GoldRingChip 17:19, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

I've noticed several common changes.

First, changing the formats of dates. I always use Month Day, Year as my format, which is what the guide seemed to say is okay. The automated cite tool (that allows filling in fields and then creates the citations for you) automatically uses day month year format in the citations (if you hit the "cite web" and then "access date" button). I'm not sure I see the point of changing the date in the citations. Is there some reason to do so?

Second, changing places where I referred to the bill by it's number as the subject of a sentence (H.R. # amends this other law...) so that they read (The bill amends this other law...). I don't think that is a good change to make. You've discussed putting more than one bill in the same article before (senate version and house version, versions from multiple years, etc). Switching to a generic "the bill" leaves open the possibility that someone will get confused about which bill is being discussed. Using the bill number is clearer and more precise (and usually faster than typing out the entire short title).

Third, changing the number of categories a bill is in. I'm a tad confused about this one. I put a bill in whatever categories it seems to fit in, the more the better. As a Wikipedia user, I use the category section on the bottom of pages to find other articles related - I'd prefer to have more options rather than fewer ones. I'm not sure I agree that "proposed United States legislation of the 113th Congress" and "proposed United States legislation" are redundant. As a user I may want legislation from a specific Congress, or I might just be interested in any proposed legislation at all. Why not have both category options there? It also means that the article shows up on more category pages and can be found more easily. So, I'm a bit confused about why you keep removing categories. Unless it is causing the article to show up three times in the same category, I can't see that it matters, whereas my version creates a richer selection of category links someone reading the page can look at. Am I missing something about this?

Fourth, changing some of the bill links to direct them to the LOC bill page. I found this page: Template:USBill yesterday, so hopefully I'll be able to do those myself now. Pretty cool. Is there any explanation anywhere to explain how the template knows to go to the THOMAS site?

Finally, article name changes, removing the bill number and the congress number. I think User:JimHarperDC and I have already explained several times why we think it is important to have the number and the congress in the titles. I'm not really sure where to go with this.

Did I miss anything? I have learned a lot already just from watching changes you make, so I appreciate that a lot. I am confused about some of the changes though, as you see above. Thanks. HistoricMN44 (talk) 17:45, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

DC WikiSalon on May 24

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We look forward to seeing you there! Kirill ^[talk] 18:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Sorry I couldn't make it - I was out of town. Maybe next time. HistoricMN44 (talk) 14:01, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

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We look forward to seeing you there! Kirill ^[talk] 11:47, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

A Barnstar for you!

		The Current Events Barnstar
		Thanks for all your work in adding congressional legislation to Wikipedia! I think it is very valuable. Surfer43 (talk) 21:18, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks so much! That made my day. I'm glad other people see the value in having a handy place to read and understand legislation. Wikipedia is a great tool because you can link to explanations about everything. HistoricMN44 (talk) 14:24, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Have time on Saturday?

I'm sorry for the last-minute notice, but on Saturday, June 8, from 3 to 6 PM, Wikimedia DC and the Cato Institute are hosting a Legislative Data Meetup. We will discuss the work done so far by WikiProject U.S. Federal Government Legislative Data to put data from Congress onto Wikipedia, as well as what more needs to be done. If you have ideas you'd like to contribute, or if you're just curious and feel like meeting up with other Wikipedians, you are welcome to come! Be sure to RSVP here if you're interested.

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Harej (talk) 04:19, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Legislative work and Saturday meetup

Hello there, I'm not sure if we met during the last Legislative Data Meetup, but I wont be able to attend the next one this Saturday because of Pride, however I am really interested in the scope of the project and went ahead and reviewed some of those articles and here is what I found should be discussed to improve the current list.

The list looks great however I wasn't able to tell the status of anything, there should be a section to the right on the list indicating the status of the bill: if it has died, it's in committee, passed committee, etc; this way the reader can easily understand what is at stake at the present moment. It's hard to tell that An Act to award posthumously a Congressional Gold Medal award to victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing actually became a law, since it's listed here in the proposed legislation list, so having a extra column would visually help understand the status of legislation.

Some of the articles on the proposed legislation dont have an active discussion page, for example the Animal Drug and Animal Generic Drug User Fee Reauthorization Act of 2013 should have the Template:WikiProject Veterinary medicine and Template:WikiProject Law templates; and the Collinsville Renewable Energy Promotion Act should have the Template:WikiProject Law, Template:WikiProject Connecticut, and Template:WikiProject Dams templates; this would properly mark the articles and maybe hopefully increase attention to them.

Even though they are part of the template for a perfect article, empty sections should be removed until they can be filled so to avoid empty section templates which makes the article look shabby in my opinion, like in the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013.

I am a big believer of using images in articles, but I also understand that articles on legislation normally dont have them, in any case in some cases it's easy, and important to have some, like in the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act of 2013 a picture of a Federal Duck Stamp should be used in the background section.

Anyways hope this helps somehow.mijotoba (talk) 18:21, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi! Sorry this is so late - I did read your comments and bring them up at Saturday's meeting; I found them very helpful. I considered including a status in the list way back when, but the one person I talked to advised against it. Having one would require us to intermittently go through and check on all of the statuses to make sure it's correct. That'd be a good thing to do, but I really don't have time for it. Maybe it's something to add if we get more active project members???

I mentioned the Wikiprojects idea to the group and they agreed that it was a good one. I hadn't really considered it before. Do you have any thoughts about how I can avoid spamming these groups? I don't want to start adding stuff at random and upset them (for instance, if we do tons of legislation articles, does the Law project really want to know about all of them? I tried asking and got no response). Any thoughts on this?

Pictures would be nice and I certainly have no objection to adding some, I just don't have the time personally to dig around trying to find appropriate public domain images for the articles. I'm trying (and failing) to keep up with the laws Congress passes and with laws they are discussing on the floor. Hopefully other people will get involved and do things like add photos, update the status of bills I've already written about, and cover more of the debate about different items.

Thanks for all your comments - you've given me more to think about and I appreciate the support. HistoricMN44 (talk) 19:38, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

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Enacted Acts of Congress

I hope I wasn't being to pushy here, but I removed the bill/Congress number from the Freedom to Fish Act because it's an actually-enacted Act of Congress. (We wouldn't title the article about the Voting Right Act of 1965 by its Congress and bill number.) I'm not completely on board with using bill/Congress in the title of bills, but I think we can agree that they can be removed in Acts. What do you think?—GoldRingChip 21:09, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi! No, that doesn't seem pushy. It actually hadn't occurred to me to think of it that way. Henceforth, any articles I create on actual Public Laws I will just name with their popular name/short title and leave any bill numbers out of it. Do you have any thoughts on including the years of those? In a lot of bills the short title/popular name is explicitly stated in the actual text of the legislation (usually in section one). Sometimes it explicitly includes the year, other times it explicitly doesn't. Do you think it's best to proceed with using whichever way it is explicitly named and not add the year if it wasn't originally included? I think that'd be the most accurate way to do it. Thanks. HistoricMN44 (talk) 19:31, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

• Years is a tricky thing to decide. As you say, some have them some don't. I'm inclined, ceteris paribus, to copy exactly the statute's explicit short name, and create a redirect from the other version. If there is no short name, then I don't know. You?—GoldRingChip 23:55, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

That seems reasonable. Are there any rules governing redirects - how many of them to have or not have? Obviously we want people to be able to find things, but not go overboard. I hate it when Congress doesn't give a short name - it's such a pain (for many reasons outside Wikipedia). Honestly, who wants to refer to an act with an actual sentence? Still, I think those are probably rare and specific enough not to need a year added. HistoricMN44 (talk) 13:31, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

A short name carries political baggage and can win/lose votes for no good reason, so I can understand why drafters don't use them for minor bills. There are rules, or at least guidelines, for redirects I believe. Wikipedia:Redirect has more.—GoldRingChip 13:43, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

E-Verify

I was actually mistaken. I thought they had removed the e-verify requirement, but that was incorrect so I put it back in the article. Or, more specifically, I put it back in one of the two articles. The article should be merged/redirected to the other one. JoelWhy?(talk) 13:31, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

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Veterans benefits for PTSD

Hi HistoricMN44 - Please see the Talk page for the Veterans Benefits for PTSD article. Short version: I took out a section you added about the Ruth Moore Act, but only for reasons related to the organization of the article and the need to match space and prominence with importance. If you are interested in building a new section of the article specifically addressing veterans PTSD due to MST claims, please join in! After reading your user page, I'm not sure if that is a specific interest of yours but I appreciated your edits to the article and I think it's a great idea to specifically address MST, including the Ruth Moore Act. Thanks! - Mark Mark D Worthen PsyD 08:26, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

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Notability

Hi. Unrelated to our discussion at Talk:PPACA, I noticed you've been creating articles for relatively obscure proposed legislation. While I applaud your efforts, many -- perhaps most -- of these articles appear not to satisfy the general notability guideline found at WP:GNG. Accordingly I went back a few weeks and tagged everything that had no reliable secondary sources with the {{notability}} template. You should try to find secondary sources for these, and if you cannot, speedy deletion is probably appropriate. Note that WP:GNG requires substantial coverage, i.e. more than a trivial mention, so some of the articles I didn't tag deserve similar treatment. And I also didn't do an exhaustive search through all of the articles you've created. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 21:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi back! You're right - several of those articles did lack secondary sources. A few of them were early articles I'd written back in April (that showed up recently due to minor edits), so I was still pretty new to all of this. I've gone back to two of them so far and added five or six more sources (including newspapers). I do have a few quibbles about what you consider to be notable - you tagged Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013. The article is messy and needs revisions (and more sources), but it is definitely not an obscure bill. In fact, it is public law 113-5, meaning that it has already passed both houses and was signed by President Obama. The law outlines and organizes the country's emergency responses to medical disasters (and potential terrorist attacks) - hardly an unimportant subject. It's also had 974 views in the last 90 days, so clearly there are people out there that are interested in the subject. I'll do some more work on it soon and add to the source list.

About these "notability" tags - what happens with those? Are they on a list now somewhere that will attract other editors to work on them? And will the other editors actually look for sources to try and improve the articles, or just eyeball it and make a snap judgment? So far, as both a reader and an editor, I haven't been too impressed with the tag system - I see a lot of really old tags announcing "problems" that no one ever comes around to fix. These sorts of notifications only seem useful if someone actually fixes the errors - otherwise why didn't the editor who noticed the issue fix it themselves? I guess that's an aspect of wikipedia culture that I'm still getting used to/learning about.

I'll go back to the rest of those articles and see how I can improve them, with an eye to making sure they are "notable." (I don't know if you know this, but Congress has already introduced over 4,000 bills since January. The articles I've been writing are solely about bills that have passed one or both chambers of Congress - currently less than 140 bills). I'll also try to be better about including more secondary sources in the future. Thanks.

(Oh, and on our project page, we've discussed notability some to work towards a consensus about how it applies to legislation... here). HistoricMN44 (talk) 21:22, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the constructive response and especially for the link to the discussion about bill notability. Unfortunately, to my knowledge the notability tag doesn't come with a mechanism for recruiting editors, although it can be a motivating factor, since (as you've just discovered) no one likes an ugly tag at the top of the articles they're working on. I think tags are important generally as every editor has a limited amount of time to spare and a different way of contributing to the encyclopedias; some are researchers, some are writers, and some prefer to engage in "quality assurance." For researchers, notability tags are inspiring; for writers, they can be frustrating; and for quality assurers, they can be invaluable time-savers.

In any case, please see these notability tags not as an attack on your hard work but as a way of flagging the articles that need a little more work. For example, Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 may be quite high-profile -- and if it is, finding secondary sources for it shouldn't be difficult. Other bills are likely lower-profile, and if you give up on finding sources for them then we can discuss deletion. But there's no rush. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

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Ways to improve An Act to amend Public Law 93-435 with respect to the Northern Mariana Islands

Hi, I'm Op47. HistoricMN44, thanks for creating An Act to amend Public Law 93-435 with respect to the Northern Mariana Islands!

I've just tagged the page, using our page curation tools, as having some issues to fix. All of the references are related to the subject (i.e. the govornment wrote them). To show notability, you need to show independent references.

The tags can be removed by you or another editor once the issues they mention are addressed. If you have questions, you can leave a comment on my talk page. Or, for more editing help, talk to the volunteers at the Teahouse. Op47 (talk) 22:12, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

A page you started (SEC Regulatory Accountability Act) has been reviewed!

Thanks for creating SEC Regulatory Accountability Act, HistoricMN44!

Wikipedia editor John Broughton just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:

The only reason I'm not questioning then notability of this article is that the bill *did* pass the House. (Bills that get no news coverage, are, in my opinion, *not* notable.) Unfortunately, the article doesn't cover the passage of the bill.

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DYK for Pay Our Military Act

The DYK project (nominate) 00:03, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Bill titles

The general rule is not to include a parenthetical in the title unless there is an ambiguity that needs clarification.

Most bills introduced will not need a parenthetical. Where there are different House and Senate versions, the provisions and procedure related to each can usually can be discussed in the same article, unless the bills are completely different. (The only real example I can think of is a bill used as as a legislative vehicle for a totally different bill through a strike-all-and-insert, but this is rare).

It is also true that several bills with the same title may be introduced in successive congresses. Here, we can use dates to disambiguate, particularly for common titles, but that is only necessary for some articles. (If the same or substantially similar bill is introduced in successive congresses, one article can deal with every version of it).

Thanks, Neutrality^talk 04:19, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

This seems to be an argument that the general rule should be followed because it's the general rule. Congress over Congresss and between houses in the same year, there are identical bill names. The general rule in this area, where confusion is likely to be common, should be to include disambiguating identifiers. Shouldn't it? JimHarperDC (talk) 14:30, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

A page you started (To establish a commission or task force to evaluate the backlog of disability claims of the Department of Veterans Affairs (H.R. 2189; 113th Congress)) has been reviewed!

Thanks for creating To establish a commission or task force to evaluate the backlog of disability claims of the Department of Veterans Affairs (H.R. 2189; 113th Congress), HistoricMN44!

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great work

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A barnstar for you!

	The Editor's Barnstar
	For creating Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014. Bearian (talk) 17:04, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Ways to improve Veterans' Advisory Committee on Education Improvement Act of 2013 (H.R. 2011; 113th Congress)

Hi, I'm Sulfurboy. HistoricMN44, thanks for creating Veterans' Advisory Committee on Education Improvement Act of 2013 (H.R. 2011; 113th Congress)!

I've just tagged the page, using our page curation tools, as having some issues to fix. 1

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DYK for Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014

The DYK project (nominate) 09:35, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

November 2013

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• Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2013 (H.R. 2655; 113th Congress)|Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2013]]

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December 2013

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Ryan Budget

Thanks for reaching out. I'm glad my edits didn't irritate you. CFredkin (talk) 22:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Greetings. After reading the Paul Ryan article again, I don't believe a reference to the Bipartisan Budget Act belongs in the lead. Would you object to removing it? Or would you prefer to discuss on the article Talk page? Thanks. CFredkin (talk) 20:38, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure "object" is the right word. Why do you think it should be taken out? I'm not familiar with what the requirements of the lead are, per se. Compared to other leads I've read, Ryan's is actually pretty short, so I can't imagine it's a length issue. Negotiating the first budget deal in four years is a pretty big deal. It may not be appropriate to keep it in the lead forever, but based on the current news cycle, don't you think it's a key reason why people are looking up Ryan at the moment? We can discuss this at the talk page if you want other opinions, but I am curious why you think it should be removed. Thanks. HistoricMN44 (talk) 22:15, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps we should edit to reflect the significance: first budget deal in x years? I've started a discussion on the intro at Talk:Paul Ryan CFredkin (talk) 20:14, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013

		The Writer's Barnstar
		For doing a great job writing on the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 in a timely manner. Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 00:29, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

You're invited: Art & Feminism Edit-a-thon

Art & Feminism Edit-a-Thon - You are invited!

File:Csaky madonna.jpg

Hi HistoricMN44! The first ever Art and Feminism Edit-a-thon will be held on Saturday, February 1, 2014 across the United States and Canada - including Washington, D.C.! Wikipedians of all experience levels are welcome to join! Any editors interested in the intersection of feminism and art are welcome. Experienced editors will be on hand to help new editors. Bring a friend and a laptop! Come one, come all! Learn more here! SarahStierch (talk) 06:07, 21 December 2013 (UTC)