Talk:Presidency of William McKinley

Contested deletion

This article should not be speedy deleted as being recently created, having no relevant page history and duplicating an existing English Wikipedia topic, because... (your reason here) --Rjensen (talk) 04:18, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Keep the new policy regarding American presidents (and British prime ministers) is to spin off new articles on the presidency as opposed to the personal biography. This allows much more detail and allows much better coverage of important items that are important for the office but which the president himself was not much engaged in. It also allows for the biographical article to be shortened and be much more focused on the person--McKinley himself--rather than issues his cabinet mostly handled. We now have "presidency of" for Obama, Bush, Clinton, Grant, Lincoln, etc etc" This article for example now has new bibliography items that are more appropriatewhile dropping many old ones that deal with non-presidential aspects of McKinley's life. Rjensen (talk) 04:18, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

I removed it, based upon your explanation. It looked to be pretty much a duplicate. So, how does the reader know which to read? Will the presidency section be removed from the main article?--CaroleHenson (talk) 04:21, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

I'd argue that the William McKinley article is basically perfect as it is (being a featured article and all). My hope is that these new presidency articles will allow editors to flesh out the presidential sections while largely leaving the original articles alone. For example, I think that we could at least double the size of the domestic policy section in this article, but the size of that section is probably appropriate on McKinley's page. I plan to add some information myself but I am also a strong believer in Wikipedia:There is no deadline. Also, Rjensen, thank you for massively improving this and other pages. Orser67 (talk) 05:05, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks to Carole and Orser for caring! In my opinion a biography article should not be a mini political history of the U.S. --the old system suggested that presidents did all the work and had all the ideas and managed all those policies & agencies all at once. What should the reader read? depends on how much they want to learn. In McKinley's case we have many articles on the 1898 war that will keep all our military readers very busy with good material. we need more on gold and economics. Rjensen (talk) 05:54, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like you two have a plan and great interest in this article, which is good.--CaroleHenson (talk) 12:50, 4 December 2016 (UTC)