Talk:Delta Phi Lambda

Coaching

Wikipedia is at its best when it provides an accurate, well-referenced summary of the history of these fraternal and sorority societies, factual: blending a balanced perspective of the many positive aspects of these societies with facts that are relevant, historical but may not be as positive as the spin that organizations put on their own websites. These articles sometimes merit fully negative facts; they're not meant to be promotional. I'm a veteran participant in the Fraternities and Sororities Project, and that only means I've been editing these pages for awhile, thousands of them, and have a sense of our standard layout, project formatting rules, and how to help new editors when they stumble. Many new editors run afoul of what can be rather blunt or terse, unhelpful responses from other editors who can at times hammer these pages with demands for references or better writing, or even attempt to delete your hours of good-faith efforts.

I was impressed in reading the Delta Phi Lambda national website by its clear presentation of the brand, and the balanced organizational program. Only 25 years old, still, you look well on your way. I hope the downturn of the pandemic doesn't hurt your momentum. With this in mind, and a respect for your organization, I did a round of edits to clean up the page and revise it to match the Project standard.

Delta chapter - Yesterday, I revisited, and made some adjustments to the list of chapters table, adding dates of installation. An anonymous editor then made further edits, moving what had been the Delta chapter listing at Illinois State to the bottom of the list, and stripping it of its historically valid chapter name. While a WP:BOLD change, nevertheless, unless Delta never existed, it should remain, and instead be shown as dormant. Before I made this reversion I wanted to share my rationale. Here are the salient points:

• Changes that are in dispute should be discussed on the Talk page, here.
• Anonymous edits are allowed, but editors naturally are mistrustful of them, and give anonymous changes much higher scrutiny.
• Chapter names, once awarded, cannot be 'un-made'. Sure, they can be taken away; and a chapter can be stripped of its charter in some public flogging for misdeeds. This group simply may have died, or been named too early, without ever thriving on its own. These all may reflect growing pains... But the fact that it once existed is a legitimate event in time. For a historian, a genealogist, a collegian seeking to restore a chapter, and for many other reasons, there is value in knowing an organization once had a chapter on a campus.
• Where a national has a tiered structure with some installed chapters earning "full" status, and others "provisional", we certainly can note that in the table. We do this for some NALFO or NAPA groups. But for clarity we do not simply delete a former chapter's name.

Hence, I am reverting the edit which removed Delta from its former place as the fourth named chapter. Along with that edit, I have discovered some bad references, either with malicious code or simply unhelpful, and will delete these. The references in this article remain an item that an interested editor could improve. Some of the names are cryptic, and the references themselves either aging or ill-formed.

If you, as an interested party, wish to challenge the Delta issue, please do so on this page, where all interested parties can hash it out and come to consensus, which is the operating principle of Wikipedia. With respect, Jax MN (talk) 17:44, 10 August 2021 (UTC)