Template talk:New Democrats

Semi-protected edit request on 15 June 2018

As Third Way (think tank) has been moved to Third Way (United States) as a result of the former title's ambiguity with Third Way (United Kingdom), can the link in this template be changed to the new title? Thanks, 142.160.89.97 (talk) 16:16, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Alexander Levian (talk) 16:27, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Issues with WP:SIDEBAR compliance

WP:SIDEBAR provides the following guidelines for navigation templates:

1. All articles within a template relate to a single, coherent subject.
2. The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article.
3. The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent.
4. There should be a Wikipedia article on the subject of the template.
5. If not for the navigation template, an editor would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See also sections of the articles.

Browsing some of the articles linked from this template, I get the impression that these are not well satisfied. Out of 6 randomly selected articles in the "People" section, only 2 used the phrase "New Democrat" in the article text (cf. criterion 2). I also checked a couple articles under "Ideology" (Economic liberalism and Radical centrism) and neither of them referred to New Democrats. I also don't see much interconnectedness in terms of the articles linked in the template referring or linking to the other linked subjects in the template (criteria 3 and 5).

There's also an issue with WP:BIDIRECTIONAL. The template currently links to 50 articles, but has 33 transclusions, so by the pigeonhole principle at least 1/3 of the articles linked in the template don't transclude it (possibly the template was added to some of these articles at some point, but there was consensus to remove it?). I think this is more a symptom of overall lack of coherence rather than a separate problem.

I guess there are 3 possible solutions:

1. Delete/deprecate the template
2. Pare down the set of links to a coherent core of highly inter-related articles
3. Modify the content of the linked articles to add references to the New Democrats and links/mentions of New Democrat-related articles

3 seems misguided to me. I find it unlikely that so many articles (including featured/good articles like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore) happen to have a blind spot regarding New Democrats in spite of that being a core part of the topic. I think it's more likely that many of these articles are only peripherally related to the 'New Democrat' label. Between options 1 and 2, I would lean a little more toward 1, just because I think the core set of articles you'd be left with under option 2 would be so small it might not be worth having a navigation template (rather than just using "See also" links). Thoughts? Colin M (talk) 19:20, 10 April 2019 (UTC)