Talk:Responses to the Venezuelan presidential crisis

St. Lucia and Jamaica

Why arent Saint Lucia and Jamaica listed in the list support for National Asembly? They are colored light blue, so they should be listed, or color should be deleted to light grey. Did their governments made any statements on the matter!?

Colombia and Bolivia

Colombia and Bolivia have had their colors changed recently due to official visits by their presidents to Venezuela. I have pointed out in the Spanish Wikipedia that the convention for countries that have supported Maduro in the crisis have been characterized for actively recognizing the 2018 presidential election results and vocally supporting Maduro, declaring among other things "against imperialist attacks" and the sort. As such, I have argued that official visits by Maduro and ambassador appointments cannot be compared to the original positions of support.

However, after a period of significant isolation, I could begin to be consider official visits to Venezuela not just a normalization of relations, but active support. This could be attributed partly to the proposing editor being annoyingly insistent, but i wanted to bring this point to this discussion since I believe this project has traditionally taken a lot of care with the verifiability of this article NoonIcarus (talk) 00:36, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

@David C. S.: You have added Algeria to the list of countries that support Maduro, but the references you have provided are only related to Maduro's visit to the country. They do not include official declarations, even less ones related to the presidential crisis or Maduro's recognition. This has already been told to you in several projects for months, including the Spanish Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and these changes have disrupted related pages since at least February (Talk:Responses to the Venezuelan presidential crisis#What?). Considering this, I suggest you to please self revert. --NoonIcarus (talk) 11:47, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

@David C. S.: Over several months, you have repeatedly attempted to make changes in both the map and the list regarding recognition during the presidential crisis. What makes this disruptive about this behavior is that you have insisted to apply these changes even when challenged and reasons have been provided to explain the opposition, without responding and ignoring any feedback, effectively engaging in a slow pace edit war to circumvent the three reverts rule. It should be noted that this pattern has not been limited to this article or to me, but also articles related to Bolivia and Peru, and with other editors as well. This is the reason why you have been blocked from editing in the article in the Spanish Wikipedia, as well as in Wikimedia Commons, and now you turn to make changes in English. It is incredibly frustrating for me to go over the reasons of why the recent changes are original research again, after explaining them to you countlessly and being ignored in return, but I feel that it is important to keep the community here on the loop:

The main problem with the changes that you have made is that they're unrelated to positions or statements of recognition, be them of Maduro or Guaidó, unlike recent changes that include the United States or Canada, that acknowledges the dissolution of the interim government but state that the National Assembly is the last remaining democratic body in the country. The sources that you have included only mention the appointment of Venezuelan ambassadors abroad, like in the case of Mexico ([1]) and Spain ([2]), or foreign ambassadors in Venezuela, like Portugal ([3][4]) and Uruguay ([5]), but the problem is that this is unrelated to presidential recognition or legitimacy, and trying to conclude that is a case of original research (WP:OR). Another issue with this is that some countries did not cut diplomatic ties with Maduro or removed diplomatic officials, meaning that they don't represent a change in position at all. You see the section Talk:Responses to the Venezuelan presidential crisis#United Nations, where I talk about this briefly. I should point out that even in the example of Uruguay, the article talks about an appointment that has not even been made official (WP:CRYSTAL), and that one of the outlets that you have included, VozPópuli, is a right-wing newspaper whose article has the objetive of attacking the socialist government of Pedro Sánchez, but its content only mentions that Maduro's ambassadors where invited for a holiday celebration ([6]): nothing new under the sun.

Even though it appears that JArthur1984 and I have differences in perspectives, we have been able to discuss through the disagreements and reach solutions. I believe that the discussion could probably benefit from you joining: maybe you could offer me your perspective on the issue, or perhaps we could work out an alternative that we can agree on. However, there must be a willingness to engage in discussion. Otherwise, I ask you to please stop insisting on the same changes. --NoonIcarus (talk) 12:44, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

State visits

Following this thread Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Responses to the Venezuelan presidential crisis, a proposal has emerged to consider state visits by heads of states (either in Venezuela, or by Maduro to other countries). This convention has already been applied in the case of Colombia and Bolivia (whose heads of state have visited Venezuela), but would include any other countries with similar conditions, such as Algeria. I mentioned that special consideration should be taken to international summits (for example, visits to the United Nations at the US, which doesn't recognize Maduro), but there shouldn't be a problem to comment on situations on a case to case basis if the need arrives. Pinging last participants, to know their thoughts: @JArthur1984, David C. S., ReyHahn, and Ostalgia:

Would you agree to implement this change? NoonIcarus (talk) 01:21, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

To begin, official presidential visits (bilateral meetings between the president of Venezuela and a head of state or government) are an indisputable sign of international diplomatic recognition. This category does not include unofficial and informal visits, without an official nature and without the protocol that this entails. That would resolve the issue with multiple countries whose update has been blocked. Anyone against? -- David C. S. (talk) 02:06, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea and I hope you guys can move forward with this page in an amicable manner from now on. Ostalgia (talk) 07:18, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

I have added Algeria to the list, per this discussion and assuming no other editors are opposed to the change. --NoonIcarus (talk) 11:21, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello @NoonIcarus, @David C. S., and @Ostalgia. It took me a day to come back to this discussion as my Wiki time yesterday was focused on other pages. I think Ostalgia framed the issues in a sensible way on the talk page. I believe it is important to "lower the bar" for changes to the recognition discussion, and state visits are a useful example of when recognition should be changed. Also I think it is important to discuss these issues, so I think it is good for David C.S. to have joined the talk page discussion.

On a conceptual level, I believe the content difficulties result from the changing circumstances. In 2019, it was perhaps easier to groups lists according to Maduro recognition or Guaidó recognition, and there were a variety of statements by countries in this regard. The EU in January 2021 in my mind, call into doubt any 2019 EU member recognition of Guaidó that has not been updated since. A second difficulty occurs with respect to the the dissolution of the Guaidó interim administration by vote of the 2015 National Assembly. There have been some widely reported effects that are easy to research and verify (for example, the United States takes a clear stance that it no longer recognizes a Guaidó presidency, but continues to view the 2015 National Assembly as legitimate). But for me, the effects of 5 January 2023 call into question the Guaidó recognition of any country for which we have not had an updated since 5 January or at least since the December 2022 vote.

There is also a question of how to present the information. I liked the resolution of our UN question, where we relied on presenting the information in narrative form earlier in the article. This allows nuance to be presented. A list format is less useful now, I think. If I was the only one interested in the page, I would delete the list and focus on building up a short narrative of each foreign country's reaction over time. However, I recognize that this would be a major change to the article and other editors are probably not interested in such a drastic action.

I think "lowering the bar" for our list format section is important, and revising the article to reflect official visits by a head of state represent a good example. I support it. And it will be important to use the talk page when differing views arise. JArthur1984 (talk) 14:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

It is not sensible to want to touch on several points at the same time, because the discussion is going to get tangled up and it is going to reach a dead end, favoring the current status quo. Given that there is no opposition to the issue of state visits, I will proceed to update Azerbaijan, Kuwait and Qatar, countries where Maduro made state visits a few months ago. -- David C. S. (talk) 16:56, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Please remember to add other information about the reference, including title, publisher and publication date. Bare URLs are prone to link rot, and this can affect verifiability in the future. You can use the reFill tool for this purpose. --NoonIcarus (talk) 19:41, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

@JArthur1984: I agree with you on a good part regarding the issues with the circumstances; after all, it's been four years since the crisis first started. As presenting information is one of the main purposes of the map, I've thought that a timelapse could be a good alternative to show the evolution of the crisis, and maybe somebody in Commons could be asked for help to elaborate a gif. I have already included a map that dates back to 2019, .

One of the changes I've taken to represent new changes, after lowering this bar, has been to remove some of the countries, particularly those that have restored diplomatic ties with Venezuela; some of these are hidden in comments, and should be able to be read in the article's source version. In this regard, I think that your suggestion to focus more on text would be beneficial to the article; this is something that has started to be implemented with footnotes, but full sentences should provide a full picture, specially with those countries whose stance on the situation has changed often, and I don't think the article's size will be a concern soon. Maybe we could even consider a table for this. --NoonIcarus (talk) 19:37, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Embassies

The issue of embassies is very useful to verify diplomatic recognition towards a government, since there are agreements, protocols and other rules in this regard. It is very simple (despite wanting to misrepresent): there are diplomatic relations and non-diplomatic official relations. Diplomatic relations are used in two governments that recognize each other, therefore, they can have diplomatic missions through embassies, headed by an ambassador, or at a lower level, a head of diplomatic mission. For non-diplomatic official relations, other figures are handled, as is the case of Taiwan, which is not recognized by the vast majority of countries, so it does not have embassies nor can it host them (referring to countries that do not officially recognize Taiwan). For this reason, all the countries that have diplomatic representation before the Maduro government officially recognize him as president, and for this reason they must be included in the list of recognition of the Maduro presidency. -- David C. S. (talk) 03:26, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

This is one of the points where Ostalgia, who has served as mediator, has expressed disagreement with and expressed a good reason for it: "Ambassadors are kinda debatable as some countries (Spain, for instance) have actually had Maduro and Guaidó ambassadors at the same time." There are countries whose relations with Venezuela have deteriorated or even downgraded, with actions such as the recall of ambassadors, but still did not sever them completely and still recognized Guaidó as interim president.

I should also point out that this was a common point for Maduro supporters to essentially paint the whole map red, confounding the status quo or neutrality with recognition. This was an argument that was even rebutted by fact checkers at the time. --NoonIcarus (talk) 00:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Brazil

Hi NoonIcarus (a pleasure as always) and David C. S. (nice to meet you).

I've found this regarding Brazil This is in Spanish but I can make a full translation in case you ask me to. It basically says that Brazil will restart relations with Venezuela. Regards. -- CoryGlee (talk) 09:48, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi @CoryGlee:! Many thanks! From what I'm reading, the article is about the restoration of diplomatic relations. Looking through it, I think there aren't many other new developments besides that. Some days ago I changed the color of Brazil in the map to light grey to reflect this change, as it has been done with other countries. However, if Lula visits Venezuela (or Maduro visits Brazil), which I don't think is unlikely, I'm looking forward another update. Best regards! --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:55, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Why do we continue to update the map?

As Guaidó is no longer "in office", shouldn't this map remains as it was on 5 January 2023? Did I miss something? If any other representative of Venezuelan opposition takes the place we will need a new "crisis article" and we could have another map if necessary. ReyHahn (talk) 18:38, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

@ReyHahn: This is one of my main concerns with updating the map after 5 January 2023, it would lose its purpose to illustrate the international stances during the crisis and before the interim government's dissolution. I have requested in Commons to create a gif of the map to show its evolution over the years, but I have left only changes up to that date for these reasons. Any changes after 5 January 2023 can be included in text, regardless. --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:34, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

The gif idea is probably the best way to present the information in map form. JArthur1984 (talk) 14:08, 17 January 2023 (UTC)