User talk:Exemplar sententia

It seems to me that this discussion has become more an issue of cultural identity than of objective information accumulation. I have to admit, somebody making the proposition that an item of my own cultural or heritage, or national identity, was not so special after all would not be met with great enthusiasm.

Wikipedia, however, if I may have such presumption to make a sweeping statement, is not a place for this. Can you imagine, in a few years time, fifty or sixty different articles talking about slight variations of the exact same phenomenon, just because it was felt by some that the U.S experience was somehow massively different from that of others? Does this concept sound feasible, in regard to your experience of other international concepts?

It is difficult to make an argument that will not offend some of you, simply because this issue is so close to something you consider to be your own property. I must ask, however, that you forget this. Is it possible that, even if you saw reason, you would be disinclined to accept it after having "defended" you own position for so long? I ask this with full respect, simply as something to think about.

These are the arguments I have been hearing in opposition to an article generalization, and their responses.

1) The article concerns a completely unique subject, with accordingly unique research, and any standardization would severely reduce the detail of the article.

Why? I, for one, have no interest in removing U.S specific information, and can see easily how the article can be standardized without doing so, and with full recognition of the significantly advanced development of the U.S subculture. It is a question of effort, not a question of possibility.

2) “Many country's have the Boy Scouts, but a single article on Boy Scouts would not do the subject justice.”

The Boy Scouts is an organization. It has its own infrastructure, official financiers, membership demographics, and formative history after an intentional formation. The “NECESSITY” for other pages is a direct result of the fact that the organisation is not a global one; there are many, and they are all stand-alone structures.

The population of military brats, however, has none of these qualities, because it is not an intentionally formed group, nor is it an officially recognized organisation. They are a phenomenon - a societal occurrence, one that is echoed in most respects by many militaries around the world.

3) The argument has been going on for months and the verdict has always been to keep it the same.

The day that humanity stops making new arguments will be the day the sun becomes too hot to live under.

___________

The change itself would simply be the following:

- The title, from “U.S subculture” to something to the effect of “sub cultural occurrence” or “phenomenon”

- Simple modifications of some of the sentences so that anything that doesn’t strictly need to apply specifically to the U.S sub culture applies to all nations

- Elaboration in the introduction to explain the situation within the article concerning the research being made of the U.S phenomenon

Therefore, the change would not be made of the subject of the article, merely its inclusiveness for the rest of the many thousands of military brats around the world.

Espionage

Please see some past discussion on the talk page, and note that this article has had incomplete citation and other tags for months. As you may see from the talk page, the reason for referring to those other articles is that the intention had been to merge most of the non-fictional content here into the more technical and better sourced HUMINT articles.

I would agree that under ideal circumstances, that would involve having mergeto and mergefrom tags, but the problem -- and I'm open to suggestion -- is that espionage doesn't cleanly map to the hierarchy of HUMINT articles. Espionage splits into several of those articles so it's hard to show, with a basic tag, how to merge it. Still, I don't consider a single sentence referring to other articles as "enormous"; many articles have pointers to related articles in their introductions.

There is material about fictional espionage here that should be preserved, but most, if not all of the other detail is covered and sourced in more detail elsewhere.

The reason for saying that espionage is done by a human, rather than as an "act", is that too many comments are made about satellites, other means of technical collection, etc., saying they are "spy" material. They are not; "spy" and "espionage" are not synonyms for "clandestine". Even intelligence analysis is sometimes called "spy" craft. If you want to change it away from a human-oriented definition, please source that. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 09:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 09:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

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