Talk:Reconstruction

Post-WWII reconstruction

Isn't the recovery of other countries than the US (eg in Europe) after WWII also called reconstruction? If not, it would make sense to give a link to the artcle on that here too. If there is such an article, that is. But there should be anyway. DirkvdM 12:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Also consider Post-WWI reconstruction if there is also a page for that —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.52.216.122 (talk) 00:09, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

• "Reconstruction (disambiguation)" → "Reconstruction"

Suggest "reconstruction" is a sufficiently context-dependent word that it needs disambiguation by default, so a "...(disambiguation)" page unnecessary. Sardanaphalus (talk) 13:13, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

• The original Reconstruction article was moved by User:Sardanaphalus without discussion to Reconstruction era of the United States. This move should be reverted and discussed first as part of this proposal. — AjaxSmack 15:43, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, the first move was this, a bit earlier. This was done 4 days ago, was never contested, and when I happened to notice it, I also thought it to be uncontroversial. IMHO, the following edits and the requested move mainly are consequences of this.

Anyhow, since by now the new page Reconstruction has a non-trivial history, I'm not sure that a complete reversal to the pre 20 May state could be achieved without the help of an administrator. Of course, the redirect of Reconstruction may be switched back to its 20 May state, if you think that is important.

Actually, I found the page by accident, when I tried to make proper links for some kinds of reconstruction in the surgical sense. I think that the former naming was rather non-globalised. I doubt very much that general public outside US associates the word "reconstruction" to a 19'th century period in the States, as the first choice. (Before encountering the article, I was not even aware of this period being called the reconstruction in the US.) Seemingly, it is not that unusual to talk about a reconstruction of a country after a devasting international or internal war; cf. the UK Ministry of Reconstruction, both after the first and the second world wars; and e.g. the periodical magazine China Reconstructs (1949-1990) issued by the government of the People's Republic of China (comitted to promoting their views internationally). (In 1990, the magazine was renamed China Today, which may be taken as an official indication that the reconstruction era after the devasting Chinese civil wars and war with Japan was considered over.)

IMHO, renaming the article about the reconstruction era in the United States Reconstruction would be more non-globalised than renaming American Civil War to Civil War. More, since the American civil war indeed is one of the most well-known civil wars, and well could be the first example many persons outside the States would associate to "civil war"; but I think that most non-Americans (like me) would not associate "reconstruction" with "reconstruction of the civil society in a country after a period of warfare" in the first place.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (fifth edition, 1964) does not list many senses at all of the word reconstruction. The word is referred to "re-, sense 8", and implicitly to construct and construction. A fortiori, there is no mention of the US reconstruction era. (As a comparison, the largest official Swedish dictionary, Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, does give three senses of the Swedish cognate "rekonstruktion"; however, it also does not mention the US era, until it gets to the compounds and explains "rekonstruktions-bill".) However, it is possible that newer dictionaries would recognise the US history sense. Actually, I looked in paper editions of the two Encyclopædiæ Britannica and Americana, and neither had "Reconstruction" or anything beginning on reconstruction as an entry or a freference to the US reconstruction era; but the more modern on line Encyclopædia Britannica does have an article named "Reconstruction" about this era. (The most modern Swedish encyclopædia, Nationalencyklopedin, both in paper and on line threat the senses "(economic) reconstruction (of a company)" and "(linguistic) reconstruction (of e.g. Protoindoeuropean)", but no other special sense.)

In brief, I find no strong factual reason to restore the article name "Reconstruction" to the US historic era. However, I did note that there were a large number of links to this article under that name; whence I suspected that others might think in a different manner. Especially Americans, of course. JoergenB (talk) 21:01, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Impressive arguments and I don't dispute them except to say that dictionary usage won't always match or even reflect encyclopedia usage. I wasn't opposing this move or the previous move of Reconstruction to Reconstruction era of the United States. I just thought that both should be discussed since the former hadn't been before. — AjaxSmack 21:50, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Suppport the US post-American Civil War era is not even the most common usage inside the US. This is very highly NNPOV in favor of a US historian's POV. What about the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans? 70.51.9.17 (talk) 05:44, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, when we talk about The Reconstruction in Australian history departments it's taken that this means the US post-Civil War reconstruction. Mind you when we say Civil War we also mean the US and use English Civil War (say) to differentiate. MartinSFSA (talk) 08:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Support. Mukadderat (talk) 01:00, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Memorial Reconstruction

"... theories regarding the 17th-century transcription of plays from memory by actors who had played parts in them." - To some people, this line could mean that the people who have memorised the play were born and/or lived in the 17th century. - Kytabu (talk) 00:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

signal reconstruction

I have added signal reconstruction under the Science and computing heading, however I think signal reconstruction could be a heading in itself. With a broad enough interpretation, many of the reconstruction topics listed under science and computing can be seen as specific instances of signal reconstruction. I would put vector field reconstruction, iterative reconstruction, single particle reconstruction, and cone beam reconstruction all in this category.

Anyway, one reason for bringing this up is that there is a potential name clash with "Surface reconstruction". The term is used for the problem of determining an unknown surface given some discrete sampling of it. This is quite distinct from the molecular surface chemistry topic that is linked here. There is apparently currently no entry in Wikipedia for this alternate meaning of surface reconstruction (which would be more closely aligned with signal reconstruction).

Yasmar (talk) 17:47, 2 September 2010 (UTC)