Category talk:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of state

Heads of state vs government

@DB1729: This list currently contains lots of lists of diplomatic visits by heads of government, who are not heads of state, e.g.

• List of international prime ministerial trips made by Mario Draghi
• List of international trips made by prime ministers of India
• List of international prime ministerial trips made by Kyriakos Mitsotakis
• List of international prime ministerial trips made by Scott Morrison
• List of international prime ministerial trips made by Alexis Tsipras

Category:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of government was deleted under WP:G7 (request by one of the authors).

Currently this categorisation is wrong and contributes to mis-educating Wikipedia readers about the most common forms of government around the world, in which the head of state and head of government are, in general, different people. I see several options: either

1. A brief explanation should be added to this category page that 'heads of state' is intended loosely to also include 'heads of government'; or
2. This category gets renamed WP:CFR to the even longer Category:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of state or government; or
3. Category:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of government should be created and the HOGs should be separated from the HOSes in terms of categorisation.

Feel free to repost this at WP:CFR without waiting, if enough participants in a discussion are more likely to happen there. Boud (talk) 12:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Boud: Not sure why I was pinged. I believe this is my only contribution on the subject. Do I have some involvement I'm not aware? --DB1729^talk 13:00, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@DB1729: Only because of that edit - the other editor is currently indef-banned - and now I see that you only added a space :P (the edit description was longer). I don't do much in categories. You do seem to have more category experience than me - what do you recommend - leave the discussion on this talk page and wait to see if there are any reactions, or open up an item at WP:CFR? Boud (talk) 13:08, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Boud: Actually, now that I've looked into this further, it looks like I'm guilty of adding the category to the lists you've linked above. It was a couple years ago, but it is possible I was conflating the two. Sorry that caused a problem.

This talk page is likely not watched by many editors. In my opinion, option 3 might be the most straight forward solution. I don't see why you can't just re-create Category:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of government and populate it with all the lists that don't belong in the heads of state cat. I suppose another option is running this by the people at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion. DB1729^talk 13:34, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

...cont., if option 3 is used, there should be category explanations included to clarify the scopes of the categories to prevent future miscategorizations. If there had been any kind of explanation or note on the page about the different definitions, I would've thought twice before adding this cat to any lists and probably not added it all. And on that note, option 2 might then be best as that would eliminate entirely the possibility of someone like me confusing the two. DB1729^talk 13:47, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Boud: Or, another option, which can be done right away, is simply removing the heads of state category from the lists where it doesn't apply, and replace it with the broader category of Category:Lists of diplomatic trips. This would essentially revert my miscategorization and yet still be in a better state, as far as categorization, than before I touched those lists. Would do you think of that? DB1729^talk 14:23, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@DB1729: I'm happy to go for option 3, with brief explanatory notes linking to head of government and head of state, which are considered notable enough for Wikipedia entries, not just Wiktionary, and cross-links to avoid confusion. In most cases the distinction is well-sourced by WP:RS. What mainly varies between countries is what the distribution of real power is between the two positions/people, but that's not an issue for categories. I think that there could be a tiny number of cases that are unclear, but those can be debated individually. If you have no objections, I'll be happy to create Category:Lists of diplomatic visits by heads of government and do the re-categorisation. This doesn't seem controversial enough to need a big discussion. Boud (talk) 15:05, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good:) No objections. DB1729^talk 17:04, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

 Done, though I didn't check the subcategories. Thanks to my diplomatic prowess, several prime ministers have suddenly done a whole lot of international travel in the space of just a few minutes ;).

More seriously, looking through Template:Diplomatic visits by current heads of government, I checked the status of leaders as heads of state or government, and found out (rediscovered?) that because many countries have presidential systems, especially in Africa and at least some Latin American states (and the US), in those case the head of state and head of government are usually the same person. Just because a title is "president" does not mean that that person is not also the head of government. The cases where the HOG is not the HOS are typically the parliamentary systems.

Personally, it seems quite anachronistic in the XXIst century for systems of government that are so concentrated to still exist - after all, in Wikimedia, even if Jimbo sort of retains an honorary HOS status, he's long since lost his status as HOG. But pretending in Wikipedia that they don't exist wouldn't help to WP:RGW.

Anyway, feel free to double-check if what I've done is clear enough. If someone wants to, they could do a further split: visits by: HOS who are not HOG vs HOS who are HOG vs HOG who are not HOS. But at least now the descriptions are no longer misleading. Boud (talk) 20:29, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Great work! I will take a closer look later, but at first glance, everything looks good:) DB1729^talk 20:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)