[WikiEN-l] Stan Shebs (part two)

[Abe Sokolov]

I wrote earlier:

"Due to size constraints, I'll have to spit this message into two parts. The 
first is a discussion from [[Talk:History of the United States 
(1980-1988)]]. The other major discussion we've had this year is taken from 
[[Talk:Cold War/temp]]. I will add that to separate e-mail."

Well, here's the second part.

[[Talk:Cold War/temp]]
Taken 
from:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Cold_War/temp&action=edit

I added a couple example sentences that I think are plausible "lead 
sentences" for their respective sections. Also, as a way of forestalling 
partisan edits, I had the idea of addressing partisanship issues at the top, 
right after the normal lead content, and linking to a historiography 
article. I suspect a lot of people who have strong opinions on the Cold War 
don't know that all of the issues have already been debated intensely, many 
years ago in some cases, and so by putting historiography up close to the 
top we let them know that there is a body of scholarship that they ought to 
know about before scribbling on the article.

Another thing that I think we'll want to do is to address the distinction 
between objective facts (which tend not to be in dispute) and their presumed 
motives and causes, over which the historians call each other bad names. :-) 
A size limit of 20K or so will mean that the main article will have to stick 
mostly to facts and offer opinions on motivation less often, and the 
connected subarticles would then get the more in-depth analysis about cause 
and effect - they can also cite the more specialized books and literature 
for the benefit of the truly fascinated. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 04:46, 15 
Apr 2004 (UTC)

I like it and think it would be a great improvement. The one thing I do not 
like are the many purely date headings with some though I think most of them 
can be made into names like Détente or the [[Vietnam War]], or descriptions 
like "Interventions in the Third World" or "Renewed Tensions." A danger with 
articles like this is that they become nothing more than timelines and leave 
out the crucial links and interconnections between events. - 
[[User:SimonP|SimonP]] 05:17, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)

I also think we should eventually have a great number of topical spin-offs.  
Both because they are important topics that would not be adequately covered 
in 4000 words, and because we have much of the content already written. e.g:
*[[Historiography of the Cold War]] (your suggestion)
*[[Space Race]] (already exists)
*[[Cold War in the Third World]] (and perhaps [[Cold War in the Middle 
East]], [[Cold War in Latin America]], [[Cold War in South Asia]])
*[[Nuclear arms race]] (currently a poor redirect)
*[[Intelligence services in the Cold War]]
*[[American Cold War foreign policy]]
-[[User:SimonP|SimonP]] 05:17, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)


Right now, I lean in favor Stan's proposal. Organizing the article by region 
is a bad idea. I'm not aware of any survey text that does this either. I 
favor a roughly chronological organization, but with topics in the headings 
instead of dates. Below is my ''very rough'' (and unfinished) draft. 
[[User:172|172]] 10:42, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

* Origins
** Britain and the expansion of Tsarist Russia
** The U.S., Russia, and the development of Manchuria
** The Bolshevik Revolution and Allied intervention
** The First Red Scare in the U.S.
** Soviet-U.S. trade in the interwar years
** The Munich Conference and the Non-Aggression Pact
** Wartime mistrust
** Atlantic Charter
** Yalta
** The end of the Great Depression and international trade
** Potsdam
** Germany
** Atomic control
** United Nations
** Postwar reconstruction in Central and Eastern Europe
** The Iranian and Turkish crises of 1946

* Kennan and Containment
** George Kennan, Kennan's 'long telegram', and the "X" article in ''Foreign 
Affairs''
** The crisis in Greece
** The Truman Doctrine
** The Marshall Plan and the Molotov Plan

* Truman and NSC-68
** Chinese Revolution
** The Soviet atomic bomb
** NSC-68
** Korea
** McCarthyism

* Eishenhower-Dulles Cold War
** Rise of Khrushchev
** Eisenhower-Dulles "new look"
** Francis Gary Power's U2 mission and the Paris Summit
** Sputnik
** H-Bomb
** De-colonization
** Defense pacts in the Third World
** Covert action in the Third World
** Mossadegh
** The CIA in Latin America
** The Suez Crisis and rifts within the Western alliance
** Indochina (The Eisenhower administration, Dienbienphu, and the Geneva 
Conference)

*Cold War of Kennedy-Johnson
**Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis
**Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
**Vietnam and "flexible response"
**Vietnam War...

* Rise and fall of Détente
** Threats within both blocs
** Oil shock of 1973
** Vietnam spending and "Vietnamization"
** Arms control
** Islamic Revolution
** Afghanistan

* End of the Cold War
** Reagan administration
** "Low intensity conflicts"
** Summits
** Perestrokia and Eastern Europe
** Collapse of the USSR
** Legacies

Cool, I'll merge all these in later today or tomorrow and we can see what it 
looks like then. A great many of these subjects have their own articles 
already, although they are, uh, "variable" :-) in their depth and quality... 
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 17:26, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
:Great! Our goals seem to be one-in-the-same. But perhaps we need a little 
more time before we start merging things. I sketched the above outline 
pretty hastily, so we'll probably need to play around with the arrangements 
a bit. Also, just to make sure, we're creating a NI-style series with 
daughter articles, right? If that's the case, the existing content in the 
series, for the most part, runs parallel to the above outline. So writing 
the summary on the main page will require the most work. [[User:172|172]] 
18:10, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::BTW, I'm making some changes the outline draft above in this posting. 
[[User:172|172]] 18:41, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've now merged the bits, tinkered with some section titles. Still need to 
get in list of 3rd world involvements by name. Interesting that some of the 
key terms apparently have no article... [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 06:09, 17 
Apr 2004 (UTC)

Jonah speaking, I don't know where a McCarthyism link fits in to your 
template, but I noticed it wasn't in the current Cold War section either. I 
guess someone was bound to bring it up eventually, but I'm just giving my 
two cents. 04 May 2004

==Kingturtle, Stan, 172 (moved here from Talk:Cold War (1947-1953) and its 
origins)==

This article is called ''Cold War (1947-1953) and its origins''. But the 
first 3/4s of the article deal with events before 1947. I think this article 
should be split up into ''Cold War origins'' and ''Cold War (1947-1953)''. I 
am going to take this bold step Friday night if no one objects. 
[[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]] 03:15, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
:I agree. Stan and I are working on a possible reorganization. I'm still 
drafting my proposals on MS Word at home. My idea is the following split: 
Origins of the Cold War (to 1941), Origins of the Cold War (1941-1947), Cold 
War (1947-1953), Cold War (1953-1957), Cold War (1957-1962), Cold War 
(1962-1973), and Cold War (since 1973). Before this is done, we need to 
expand on some aspects of the current content.

:And this article - [[Cold War (1947-1953) and its origins]] - is hardest to 
split out of the three articles that exist right now. The three articles 
that I'm proposing (Origins of the Cold War (to 1941), Origins of the Cold 
War (1941-1947), Cold War (1947-1953)) will need to expand a great deal on 
content already posted here.

:I'd favor different organization as opposed to the one in place right now. 
For example, here's my idea for the organization of the to 1941 origins 
article:
*Origins of the Cold War (to 1941)
**Tsarist Russia and the 'New' Imperialism (to the 1890s)
**Manchuria
**The Russo-Japanese War and the West
**Wartime alliance
**Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
**The First Red Scare
**"Socialism in One Country"
**U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union (1933)
**The Munich Pact and the Non-Aggression Pact

:For the next article in the series...

*Origins of the Cold War (1941-1947)
**Lend-lease payments and the second front
**The Atlantic Conference
**Breton Woods
**Yalta
**Potsdam
**Hiroshima and Nagasaki
**The Iran Crisis
**Germany and the Oder-Neisse boundary
*Reparations payments and the Berlin blockade
**Greece
**Domestic pressures on Soviet foreign policy
**Domestic pressures on U.S. foreign policy
**The Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act, and the proposal of the 
Marshall Plan

Just to reassure you, this is all very tentative. I appreciate advice while 
I'm drafting my proposals. [[User:172|172]] 06:00, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
*Ok, glad to hear this is already in the works. I won't make any bold moves. 
And I am happy to help figure things out. [[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]] 
06:04, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

*Not to be too negative, but we '''really''' don't want to do series - a 
series is just chapters in a book, and here we're supposed to be doing 
articles, not book chapters. So for instance to pick on the 1941-1947 
segment, there are thirteen topics. In a single-article design, each will 
get 1-2 sentences saying what it was and how it connects to the others. All 
in-depth stuff would go to the topics, for instance [[Yalta Conference]], 
which at present seems OK in terms of basic facts, but is sorely lacking the 
explanation of why anybody might think it was the beginning of the Cold War. 
Yalta's significance ''could'' be put in the main Cold War article, but 
that's how the main narrative becomes bloated. It also does the reader a 
disservice when they link to [[Yalta Conference]] from somewhere else, then 
can't learn about its significance without trudging through a long narrative 
about other things. To make the single-article goal, we have to be very 
disciplined. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 00:57, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

::We have to have place for weaving it all together in contexts that can be 
more specified than in a single article/summary page. Everything that I'm 
outlining could be a daughter article of an executive summary page, like on 
[[New Imperialism]]. Just to reassure you, I'm certain that the vast 
majority of the content in all the articles I'm proposing will come from the 
three existing articles.

::BTW, perhaps you're misunderstanding what I'm proposing in those outlines. 
I'm including, say "Yalta" and "Potsdam" in the headings, but the way 
everything's organized makes it a more or less chronological arrangement; 
really you can read the subheadings as milestones acting as stand-ins 
signifying place and time. Thus, we wouldn't be ''just'' giving an overview 
of Yalta under the "Yalta" heading - to use this as an example again - in 
the text of the daughter article I'm proposing, but rather staying focused 
on developments in the spring of '45 and how they relate to the course of 
the emerging Cold War. [[User:172|172]] 02:11, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

:::I think we have a misunderstanding here. My goal is to have a single 20K 
article that covers everything. An article entitled "Cold War (1947-1953)" 
is completely wrong for an encyclopedia, whether as an "article in a series" 
or as a "daughter article". The point is not to write more and more into a 
single narrative, but to be succinct. The "weaving it all together" happens 
in the single main article. Specific events have text that connects back to 
the main article and to related events - that's how most of Wikipedia is 
written, there's no reason for this to be different. I want to be clear on 
this, because it seems  like you generally have the urge to write single 
long narratives, to the point of duplicating material that is already 
present in existing articles. My whole point here is '''not''' to do the 
ever-expanding narrative; the single main article should be complete at 20K, 
and further expansion will occur in topical articles like [[Yalta 
Conference]], not in "Cold War (15 April 1950 - 23 May 1950)". [[User:Stan 
Shebs|Stan]] 05:30, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
::::Well, these articles don't even exist yet, and we might as well agree to 
disagree until then. I'll help you out with the 20K summary page, but 
there's no harm having additional daughter articles, which will be able to 
draw the vast majority of their content from the existing pages. 
[[User:172|172]] 11:41, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

== End of participation ==

I'm no longer going to work on this, it's going to be way too frustrating. 
Use, delete, whatever. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 16:47, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
:Okay, I'm not going to delete it - you had a number of good ideas that I'd 
like to adopt at some point. I hope that this isn't an overreaction to one 
disagreement on Vietnam War. I think that you are being a bit cranky about 
that article, but that doesn't taint my opinion of your contributions to 
other articles, the vast majority of which are supurb, IMHO. 
[[User:172|172]] 16:54, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
::This is an overall reaction to all your reverting and arguing on various 
articles; just looking at it makes me want to quit working on WP altogether, 
so I'm cutting loose instead, will spend time in areas where I find the 
people more enjoyable to work with. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 17:32, 21 May 
2004 (UTC)
:::Do you have disagreements of substance with any of my recent changes to 
other articles, aside from Vietnam War? Or are you just coming here to mouth 
off and insult me? [[User:172|172]] 17:43, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
::::I have a whole host of disagreements with your edits, but it would give 
me an ulcer to deal with all of them, and WP doesn't pay me enough for that. 
Your reference to "insult" here is a perfect example; I just gave you the 
straight facts about how I felt, anything else is in your own mind. 
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 12:11, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
:::::I have a whole host of disagreements with your edits as well, but you 
don't see me taking it personally and negative character judgments against 
you. Lighten up. [[User:172|172]] 21:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
::::::Now that we have that [[Vietnam War]] disagreement behind us, do you 
want to start work on this article again? [[User:172|172]] 04:46, 24 May 
2004 (UTC)

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