[WikiEN-l] [Fwd: Re: The hard work of NPOV]

[David Gerard]

On 11/12/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/11/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > An important lesson of Wikipedia is that people will argue to death
> > over ANYTHING in the pursuit of Getting Things Right. See [[Talk:Prime
> > Minister of Australia]] for the now-moot dispute over what on Earth
> > the correct term for the leader of the party that won the last
> > election is before he's actually sworn in as the new Prime Minister
> > (there doesn't appear to be one), and whether the loser can still be

> Really? All the papers used the term "prime minister-elect".


I expect they'll make that into the standard term for it. (What did
they call Howard between the 1996 election and him being sworn in?)

The constitutional anoraks argue there's not actually any such thing -
there's just a party who have the majority of the seats in the lower
house; their leader is conventionally sworn in as Prime Minister, but
until the swearing in it could *theoretically* be anyone. (The job
"Prime Minister" isn't even named in the Constitution.) Even Rudd said
a few times he wasn't PM until he was actually sworn in. OTOH, there's
a heaping dose of "convention works so Nobody Cares (tm)," so this was
basically original research because there wasn't much if anything in
the way of referable resources by past constitutional anoraks who'd
worked this out already.

But don't let me take away from anyone the inestimable joy of tracking
through that talk page ...


- d.