Template talk:Treaty of Waitangi

Currently messy. Reorganise?

This template is kind of a mess. Would anyone support a reorganisation of the first three (or maybe four) lists?

Notable signatories (list 2) currently lists four people, three of whom are re-listed in Important figures and groups (list 3). List 3 doesn’t list any groups, but does list Victoria, who (as far as I know) wasn’t terribly involved, but for her name being invoked; of course she is an important person, in some sense, but she isn’t a person divorced from the Crown in the context here. Important groups (list 4) does list groups, but only in the loosest sense of that word. It seems to want to say “Institutions”, but can’t because of the Māori protest movement. And honestly, the Waitangi Tribunal and Office of Treaty Settlements, don’t seem to really fit there in the same spirit as the first two (New Zealand Company and Colonial Office).

Working proposal:

We merge those first three lists into ideally one list, basically something like Important people (or “figures”)—maybe sub-listed to British and Māori. We put the British Crown into parentheses following Victoria (or vice versa?) and move Rangatira—who were never one cohesive group, as is currently implied—into Terminology.

For anyone thinking about keeping the line-up of signatories, it’s worth remembering we have plenty of other articles on signatories (see Category:Signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi), and it might be worth giving them their own separate navbox (eg, {{Signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi}}), rather than making too much of a point of them here.

I have other ideas too, but as we go through it becomes more and more obvious the disconnect between the Treaty-at-Signing, and the treaty as it has been an ongoing part of NZ history. Maybe the simplest way to see this is that we list zero of the people who have been instrumental in the treaty’s later influence on law and politics. It is almost tempting to draw a line after (or before) Terminology and call the rest “modern” (in some sense; probably more “consequences”). This would at least allow us to move Māori protest movement, Waitangi Tribunal and Office of Treaty Settlements to a separate section to the other institutions of list 4.

On the other (other) hand, we split the template off, and treat one as being about the historical event (as {{United States Declaration of Independence}} does), and another as being the “Political ramifications of the Treaty of Waitangi” or similar. This would allow us to include all signatories, and would be easier to manage as it would just be trying to “do less”; the template as it stands feels like it really wants to just tell us the whole history all the way through. For what it’s worth, I lean toward not-splitting, but I could see it both ways. — HTGS (talk) 05:23, 27 October 2024 (UTC)