Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics/American politics

Requested move at Talk:Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis#Requested move 11 August 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis#Requested move 11 August 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 05:04, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

William Howard Taft has an RfC

William Howard Taft has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Emiya1980 (talk) 02:43, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Attempted assassination of Donald Trump#Requested move 15 September 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Attempted assassination of Donald Trump#Requested move 15 September 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 02:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Question: what is the policy for listing and citing committees?

I recently edited Chris Rabb and noted that there was a list of Committees without sourcing under the heading "Committees". When I searched for a source, I found the official website for the Pennsylvania General Assembly -- which I would expect to be the most up-to-date source for current committee positions. The committee information on the Wikipedia page was out of date, so I updated it and cited the PGA's committee pages.

• Agriculture & Rural Affairs
• Commerce, Majority Subcommittee Chair on Local Business
• Finance, Majority Subcommittee Chair on Tax Modernization and Reform
• Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Corrections

The entire section was removed, as being "primary sourced content", as was a sentence citing the Pennsylvania General Assembly's list of Bills by Sponsor. Since the PGA is aggregating and publishing this information, not Chris Rabb, and since it does so for the entire group of elected politicians, it seems reasonable to me to consider it authoritative and unbiased aggregated information and to cite it.

I've seen other pages where committee information is listed without citations and the unsourced information has been left on the page. Is there specific policy around how lists of committee positions are presented and sourced for politicians? I would appreciate clarification on what's considered acceptable inclusion and sourcing before I attempt to further update politicians' pages. Thank you, Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 15:40, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

That's utterly ridiculous. You are allowed to use primary sources. While they generally don't establish notability for a topic as a whole and you should take care that the source does not have some sort of POV and that you don't use OR to interpret it, that is certainly not an issue here. Is is relevant to include a representative's committee assignments? Yes. Citing that to the original source is also the most reliable source, and the information is perfectly verifiable. This is not the sort of thing that would need to be sourced to independent news articles to verify or establish relevance. As a comparison, it would not be particularly relevant to use the legislature's website to list every bill the member sponsored. That might be trivial and we should use independent sources to tell us which of those bills are significant and worth mentioning here. But I think committee assignments are a core part of the legislator's position that can be concisely listed in any member's article, and using the General Assembly's website to cite this is perfectly appropriate. Reywas92^Talk 17:30, 2 October 2024 (UTC)