Talk:List of strikes

Inclusion criteria

At the moment, this list is an indiscriminate collection of information. Every list on Wikipedia needs inclusion criteria.

While some lists can and should include every verifiable member (lists of mayors of cities and such), for many that is completely unworkable (e.g. List of people from New York City).

There are certainly thousands of strikes worldwide every year. A complete list is obviously impossible and would be worthless (who would read it?).

Most strikes are at least mentioned in local newspapers. Certainly my school districts four strikes (that I remember) over the past several decades would have been covered in the local papers, the nearest city's papers and would have been mentioned as part of a trend, movement, social issue, etc. in other sources throughout the country. As a result, a list of those discussed in reliable sources (often suggested, seldom workable) would still generate an unworkably long list.

One suggested set common selection selection criteria would limit limit the list to those with blue-link, non-redirect articles. In essence, those notable enough to have their own article. If there is a Wikipedia article on Jane's Homemade Widgets, Inc. strike of 2020, it would be included. If the link for the strike merely links to a small section in the article on Jane's Homemade Widgets, Inc., it would not.

Thoughts? - SummerPhD^v2.0 22:35, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

As I rather expected, there have been no comments in the two months this has been here.

I declare that I am a consensus of one. Actually, I'm going to go through a bit at a time, kicking the article onto a few watchlists to both move ahead with the improvements and generate some feedback -- for or against the changes. - SummerPhD^v2.0 22:18, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

I agree that there should be criteria for which strikes should be in this list, but I disagree that there needs to be a unique article on Wikipedia for it to be relevant. You removed the 2019 Indian General Strike, which had 150 million people on strike . Is that not relevant to this list? I think you removing 20k lines from this article is extreme. Realityfabric (talk) 22:01, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

I reverted all these changes which included strikes that had citations, but left the changesets where nothing about strikes was cited. I don't think those should be removed in the future without attempting to find a source to cite first. Realityfabric (talk) 22:29, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

I did not remove "20k lines". I removed ~20,000 characters. However, before I did that, I did something else.

On 20 August, I pointed out that every "list of" article on Wikipedia must have selection criteria which are "unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources", per Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists. Of the selection criteria commonly used, blue link notability is the only one which can be applied here. Additionally, I cannot find any other unambiguous, objective criteria to apply.

Then, I waited for two months for comments and suggestions. As there were none, I immediately pounced and deleted most of the article started small to draw attention to the issue, taking several weeks to implement.

Now, one month after that, you have decided to restore most of it, favoring your own criteria. At the moment, those criteria are rather mysterious. What "selection criteria which are unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources" have you decided now apply here? The only thing I can really find in your comments is that it's strikes that "have citations".

Searching the Philadelphia Inquirer, I find roughly 20 unique strikes mentioned in the past 2 weeks (none of them listed in this article). Being very generous, let's assume there are no other strikes in other sources anywhere in the world and that 20 is the number per month. That gives us 240 strikes per year that we can cite. Actually, 20,000 lines would get us back to about 1939. Frankly, I can't imagine "has a cite" generating anything other than a very long, woefully incomplete list that absolutely no one would ever read. Heck, try reading the whole thing now and see how far you get. - SummerPhD^v2.0 01:00, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

You removed strikes which involved millions of people, so I figured that you weren't being particularly careful with what you removed. I know you were removing everything that didn't have a link to a Wikipedia article, and I know that you did it block by block and not all at once. I think a 4 month period from proposing criteria to removing everything that doesn't meet your criteria (with no response from anyone) is too short. And also I apologize, I didn't realize that the diff is in filesize, I'm used to diffs being in lines. My mistake on that part.

And you make a good point. Every cite-able strike would be obnoxiously long. But I still think "Has a Wikipedia article" is too strict of criteria. There are other articles which are more specific, though, so maybe making it clear what the criteria for being in the list and also linking to those lists in this article would be a compromise. For instance, some of the nursing strikes I added are listed in the List of health and medical strikes. At least one of them is notable enough that even without a Wikipedia article I think it should be included (one spanned 4 states in the US, definitely not an insignificant strike).

I didn't revert the changes to match my own criteria, I reverted them because if you removed one massive strike then it is possible that you removed more, and I think that we need a better idea of how to proceed.

So, possible solutions here are: clearly linking specific list pages for strikes; moving strikes which aren't significant enough for this list to those pages; clearly stating the criteria for making this page's lists; and then removing anything that doesn't meet the criteria.

I'm not sure how large a strike should be before it makes the list. 1000+ people? What do you think? Realityfabric (talk) 16:59, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

An arbitrary number of people involved is exactly that: arbitrary. Wikipedia is composed of articles about notable topics. We would need some kind of sourced reason showing that strikes with over 1,000 people are somehow notable while strikes with 998 people are not. (Additionally, the number of people involved in a strike is not always known with any degree of precision.)

If there is a notable strike which does not have an article, the solution is not to contort the inclusion criteria here to allow that particular strike. Rather, we should write the article first. If there is a massive strike which does not have an article, find two sources, write two sentences and establish a stub. If it's notable, the article will grow. If it isn't, the stub will be deleted. Inclusion/exclusion here will follow.

To be encyclopedic, lists must have selection criteria which are "unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources". The only common option which applies here is blue link notable and I can find no other source for unambiguous, objective criteria.

Meanwhile, this list is an unencyclopedic jumble of strikes, would be strikes, labor actions and -- likely -- completely fictional strikes of no particular distinction. It's the equivalent of "List of fires" including the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the 9/11 attacks, my aunt's kitchen fire and the local sports team's recent bonfire (which certainly had more witnesses than the Triangle fire). For both this list and the fire list, blue link notability would make short work of it. - SummerPhD^v2.0 17:41, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Your claim that this list "likely" has completely fictional strikes is completely irrelevant. I 100% support removing strikes with no source provided, and I'm pretty sure I already said that. What makes a strike worthy of its own Wikipedia article? (That's a rhetorical question, you already linked to that information.) If you only want to include strikes that have a Wikipedia article then it seems fair that that criteria itself would suffice (regardless of whether the article itself already exists). Needing to create an article before adding something to this list seems like an unreasonable barrier.

Also, excuse me for not responding for 3 weeks. Despite subscribing to changes in the talk page I haven't been getting notifications, and have to manually check. I don't live on Wikipedia. 10 days with no response seems to me to be an extremely short wait time to decide that your consensus of one still stands.

Whether you take my recommendation (that Wikipedia standards for whether an article is allowed to exist should be used to determine whether an item should be allowed on this list regardless of whether the article exists) or not I don't plan to continue following this discussion.

Note that I disagree with deleting all of the items without an article, I support deleting items that don't have sources, I support moving less relevant items to pages specific to the kind of strike, and that I don't want to start an edit war. Realityfabric (talk) 19:50, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

References