Talk:List of technical standard organizations

ANSI

This page may benefit from a clearer demarcation between national and international organisations. ANSI was originally listed as national, which goes along with everything on its web site. However the user Jacobsatterfield (with no user page) wrote "National standards organizations: removed ANSI since it is a private international organisation. NIST is the government organisation in the US. ANSI is listed properly in the international sect."

This doesn't seem at all correct in my view. I propose we put it back as a national standards organisation, as it is listed in Standards organization. Otherwise there is inconsistency. Simon Grant (talk) 11:51, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

@Asimong: I agree this can be confusing, and could use some elaboration. ANSI is a private non-profit organization, which happens to be in headquartered in the US. It's not directly funded or endorsed by the US Government. NIST is a US-federal technology agency which is funded directly by one of the Departments of the US Government. It's the actual 'US national' standards body that sets what standards the government will comply with in implement (which might include references to other standards organizations [including ANSI, among others.]) Hence, recommend NIST be listed as the United States (e.g. government) organization. The .org and .gov domain suffixes for those organization's websites are also somewhat indicative of their respective roles. Jacobsatterfield (talk) 18:33, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@Jacobsatterfield: Surely ANSI is more than just "happens to be in headquartered in the US". Their main page, which you cite, at the very opening, calls it "the voice of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system". It is inherently and inextricably tied to a US-centric view, quite unlike, for example, the World Wide Web Consortium, headquartered at MIT, or the Internet Engineering Task Force, which started out as a US Government activity, and whose secretariat work in California, but clearly has no particular national bias. Portraying ANSI on the same footing as W3C or IETF does seem to me to be misleading, and the other pages referred to seem to go along with the idea that ANSI should be listed as a US body.

Furthermore, have you done your research to find out if other "national" bodies all have official support and sponsorship from their respective governments? I suspect they do not. Please check, as this seems to me the only potential case to make that ANSI should not be listed as a national body. Simon Grant (talk) 08:19, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

One more point, which to me is decisive. ISO states that "We are a network of national standards bodies." ANSI is clearly listed on the ISO site as the national standards body for the USA.

I request others, particularly those not in the USA, to give their opinion of this. For organisations that are American to portray themselves as "international" is not honest. Simon Grant (talk) 08:28, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

@Asimong: I believe the difference in opinion arises from whether you use the ISO definition for national standards body, or the country's legislation (USC Title 15, Chapter 7) as the point of reference. I concur that ANSI is not an international standards body, that was not my original point. Rather, it was to clarify that ANSI is not the standards body associated with that nation's Government. Since the current article section 'National Standards Body' is not necessarily in an ISO contextual frame, maybe the simple solution would be to revise the section header to 'ISO National Standards Body' (with your citation to the ISO member list), in order to further avoid this confusion? As you point out, other government-established standards bodies may not be the ISO representative for that same nation, so I suspect that additional context will be necessary.Jacobsatterfield (talk) 16:18, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

@Jacobsatterfield: The difficulty here is that each country's legislation is liable to differ. I don't imagine that anyone wants to impose US legislation as normative on Wikipedia? Just to compare with the UK, the BSI Group "now operates internationally in 172 countries", and is not a government department or agency. Yet it is recognised "the UK’s National Standards Body" by ISO, and also by the UK Government, with which it works in partnership (both quotes from that page). I am happy that we agree that ANSI is not "an international standards body", and agree also that some changes to the page itself are necessary to clarify the actual situation.

To move forward, I propose that the heading "National standards organizations" be changed to something like "Nationally-based standards organizations" (can anyone propose something better?); and that ANSI and NIST both appear as a sub-list under USA. A suitable note can be appended to both, and ANSI can be removed from the list under "International standards organizations", as (AFAIK) no other body recognised by ISO as a national standards body is included in this list. Would you like to make this change, or may I now do so? Simon Grant (talk) 09:31, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

@Asimong: Yes, I like the proposal and I think that would help clarify the article significantly. The ISO roster only defines one body per nation, but I think (per our discussion) the intent of the list in this article is to capture all national bodies, regardless of ISO membership status. [We could then add a note with the http://www.iso.org/iso/about/iso_members.htm reference to refer to the ISO Membership roster, which some readers might be looking for, but doesn't need to be duplicated here.] I'm OK if you'd want to make the edits now, or I'll make them in a few days if I don't see any updates. Jacobsatterfield (talk) 14:13, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

References