Talk:Glass–Steagall: legislation, limits and loopholes

Naming of the series of articles on the Glass-Steagall legislation

Dovid (talk) 01:40, 4 October 2013 (UTC)
This section is transcluded from Talk:Glass–Steagall_Legislation/Series_name. If you wish to comment on this section, please do your edits there.

Transcluded discussion

This article is part of a series on the Glass-Steagall Legislation. The context of the series of articles is not the Glass-Steagall Act (i.e., the full Banking Act of 1933). Instead, it focuses on the most well-known portions of the Act, which served to split the financial industry into two worlds, deposits ("banks") and investment.

The series includes:

• Glass-Steagall Legislation (the main article)
• Glass–Steagall: legislation, limits and loopholes on the ways financial firms and regulators bypassed the intent of the law
• Glass–Steagall: decline on the attempts to water down and repeal the law
• Glass–Steagall: Aftermath of repeal
• Glass-Steagall: worldwide response -- an article, not yet written, about attempts to copy the intent of the act in other countries. It follows the path of the others (see below).

Originally, these appeared in a single article. The article was very long -- I think it printed at about 70 pages -- and I split it up. To help make the articles easy to find and stylistically hang together, I chose a naming scheme that puts Glass-Steagall at the beginning, followed by a colon and the more specific scope of the individual article. This allowed the main article to become much shorter, when specific areas of it were broken out into separate articles, and only a summary left in the main article.

At the same time, thee naming makes the group of articles easy to spot together in the search box, and easy to differentiate there and in the body of text of the main article, since they are short (after the colon) and the reader's eye easily skips over the common prefix. The shortness also meets WP:CRITERIA's conciseness rule. The consistency in naming also matches WP:CRITERIA's consistency rule.

(The last article in the series is intended to pull several more sections out of the main article. They are the ones that focus outside the US. The original author of the material has agreed to try to help out here, since it is complex and beyond my subject knowledge.)

However, some editors, I'm sure with the best intentions, saw the article names and thought they needed changing, perhaps to be more prose-like. We thus got:

• Legislation, limits and loopholes related to the Glass–Steagall Act
• The decline of the Glass–Steagall Act
• Decline of the Glass–Steagall Act
• The decline of the Glass–Steagall Act
• The aftermath of the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act

There are several problems with this approach.

1. The titles of the new names all incorrectly refer to the articles as Glass-Steagall Act. In fact, none of them has to do with the act as a whole, they are al about the four famous sections and activity following their passage or repeal. The rest of the Act is unrelated!
2. It makes the individual articles difficult to find (a search will probably land on the main article, but the coverage there of the subarticles is somewhat buried in the still very long article)
3. The names are inconsistent with each other
4. Some of the names are very long, which is not in keeping with article naming guidance
5. It is inconsistent with the main article usage

I have therefore reverted two of the articles to their earlier, established names. I could not revert one of the others, due to multiple previous moves, and will be asking for administrator assistance in this.

I ask that no further name changes (moves) be made without prior discussion. Dovid (talk) 01:30, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Why is "Legislation" capitalised? It is not part of the name or a proper noun, right?–Totie (talk) 11:14, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Essay tag

@Ironholds: I'm not sure why you tagged this as essay-like. It doesn't meet the definition of WP:NOT#ESSAY form what I cna see. It is well-sourced from multiple points of view. Although beyond WP:NOT, I also think it does not delve into exposition, which is a critical foundation for essays. Note that while I created the article, I am not the author of the material; I split a huge article following summary style. You would have to go through the history of the "parent" article to find the construction of the text. Dovid (talk) 19:33, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Good points; mostly I wanted to indicate my issue with...a couple of things; first, the title ("Glass–Steagall: legislation, limits and loopholes") which feels like an essay-like thing; nobody is going to plug that into the search function. Second, the contextless nature of a lot of the content here. If the intention is for it to be a narrower, primary article about "The Glass–Steagall provisions separating commercial and investment banking" it needs to be set up with an appropriate background section and treated as an article in its own right rather than simply a fork of another page. Ironholds (talk) 21:55, 6 January 2014 (UTC)