Talk:Secretary of State (U.S. state government)

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Contents 1 MSOS vs. SOS of M 2 Redundant tables 3 Lt. Governors & SoS's 4 Capitalization

[edit] MSOS vs. SOS of M

EdwinHJ, I respect your attention to detail, but I'm reverting your edit. Please allow me to explain.

First of all, no one here is claiming that anyone has the title, "Secretary of State of Minnesota", as opposed to "Minnesota Secretary of State". The title held by all of these people is either "Secretary of State" or "Secretary of the Commonwealth". I mean, perhaps in some states the name of the state is included in the title, but I have lived in three states, and in none of them was there an official inclusion of the state's name. Same thing with Governor. If I refer to Janet Napolitano as the governor of Arizona, her title is still "Governor Napolitano", not "Governor of Arizona Napolitano". Yet if I listed all of the governors in a column, then I might list them as "Governor of Alabama, Governor of Alaska, Governor of Arizona, etc."

Of course, with the governors, with each state having the exact same title, I could get away with not listing the title at all—I could just have a table labeled "State Governors" and list the states in one column and the office holder in the next. That would solve your concerns with this table. Except that we can't do it for the SOSs. This is because three of the SOSs are called something different (Sec of the Commonwealth), so we do need to list the title.

Secondly, simple aesthetic considerations push us towards listing them all the same way. It's simply easier to read them if they all follow the same pattern. And ease of use is one thing we should strive for if our goal is to make information universally acceptable, right?

I will be happy to discuss this further with you, Edwin. Unschool 21:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redundant tables

We now have two tables in this article showing us the names of the 44/47 Secretaries of State. It looks redundant to me. Shouldn't we remove one of them? I think that the table which takes up less room is the better one to keep, but I'll not do anything for a while, and see what others might want to do. Unschool 17:07, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lt. Governors & SoS's

I think that the Lt. Governors of the three states that have no SoS should not be included in this list. It lends the impression that the two jobs are the same, but that they just have different titles. This of course is not true. If we look at at the list of Lieutenant Governors, we will not see the SoS listed in the place of those eight states that have no Lt. Governors. For the simple sake of accuracy, we need to exclude them from this list.

It is, however, important that the article continue to state that the Lt. Governor's often do some of the functions that would normally be done by an SoS. Unschool 02:30, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization

I have checked about a dozen of the official websites for state SoS's, and ALL of them capitalize the word "State". I know wiki rules are to not capitalize title after the first letter automatically, but we DO do it when that's how it's done out in the world. Moving back. Unschool 21:50, 26 May 2007 (UTC)