Talk:2008 United States presidential election

separate article?

Should (most of) the contents of this article not go to a separate page like "2008 United States presidential primaries" or something along those lines? The article (needs cleaning up by the way with statements like "stunning victory" and the like)is huge now and with the "real" campaign only now beginning it will get beyond manageable soon I fear.--Michael Geldorp 09:03, 5 June 2008 (CDT)

Michael has a good point. The preliminaries, however, will continue until the conventions produce genuine candidates. So we can't start another article till september. Richard Jensen 09:07, 5 June 2008 (CDT)

September sound like a good point to do so. --Michael Geldorp 09:14, 5 June 2008 (CDT)

Changes

This article needs significant cleanup if it is to be useful at the current time. I've done a little bit of cleanup, and I'm jolly unhappy about these giant colored boxes - they look a bit like someone has spilled a box of pre-school poster paint across the article. There's also too much in the article about the primaries (which should be spun off into a separate article), and nothing about the campaign since the primaries. The whole thing also looks like a giant advert for RealClearPolitics. I've made a few preliminary edits, but in a second I'm going to print the whole thing out and work out how to restructure it. I'll declare my biases up front: I hope Barack Obama wins, I think Sarah Palin is a nutjob, and I'm not voting because I'm not an American. Feel free to judge my editing on that basis. —Tom Morris 13:02, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I've pulled out the colored boxes and replaced them with a proper article structure. It's not perfect, but it's a bit better. —Tom Morris 14:14, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Part of the problem here is that this article is effectively acting as NEWS. To work it would need regular updating. I'm not sure we should be attempting to run a NEWS agency. Wikipedia suffers from this problem too, in that many there love to break news rather than document information. Possibly that is a good role for wikipedia but i think it is a terrible idea for citizendium to try and compete in that sphere. Chris Day 15:46, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, we should do it if we can. I think having up-to-date, timely articles is fine. I don't consider Wikipedia having up-to-date information a failing. But, the article as it was standing was unmaintainable (all the silly box-outs tends to make the page unchangeable - another problem I have with DIY page design like that on Theoretical biology!). We should be able to rapidly refactor articles as new information becomes available. Not every twist and turn of every subject, but we should be able to cope with, say, the nomination of the candidates for the top job in the most powerful candidates in the world. --Tom Morris 15:53, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I was not thinking of it as a failing but more mission creep. I guess my main idea is that there is a massive amount of NEWS available on the internet so we need to present something a little different. But what, possibly go for concise rather than full coverage? I was drawn to a comment from Nick Gardner when he said "I write for busy people", he used that as an explanation for brevity. Similarly I often go to the BBC web site for coverage since there is far less to wade through. Actually, I think we are in agreement here. Chris Day 16:16, 2 November 2008 (UTC)