Talk:United States presidential election, 1920

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It's an objective fact that, due to a massive stroke in 1919, Wilson was an invalid for the second half of his final term. (You do know that "invalid" means "a person incapacitated by a chronic illness or physical condition", yes?) The "broken" probably does violate NPOV, though, worse luck. — DLJessup 13:20, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

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[edit] Electoral picture peculiarity

Why is the graphic depiction of electoral votes skewed? Rarely nowadays does one see democratic votes colored red and and republican votes blue. --maru (talk) Contribs 20:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

This post has been copied to Wikipedia talk:Style for U.S. presidential election, yyyy#Electoral picture peculiarity. Please direct your responses there.
— DLJessup (talk) 21:58, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cox “had started minimum wage”

An anonymous editor added the comment, “[Cox] had started minimum wage,” to the description of Cox under “Democratic Party nomination”. I have removed this comment. First of all, the meaning of this clause is somewhat unclear: by “started”, do we mean that he signed a law or shepherded a law through the state legislature or was the first to advocate for such a law? The scope is also unclear: are we talking about minimum wage for the United States? Ohio? Cox's home town of Dayton? Secondly, I can't verify it at this time: Cox's article in Wikipedia doesn't discuss it, nor does Wikipedia's article on the minimum wage, nor does the Dayton Daily News' biography of their founder.

— DLJessup (talk) 14:32, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References vs. Notes

In recent edits, I moved several notes into the Cite.php reference tags. I like the new reference tags because they have ease of navigability while maintain a small footnote in the article main text (as opposed to the appendices). In particular, I moved a citation to a book by Andrew Sinclair into the “Notes” section from the “References” section. Rjensen then restored the original citation in the “References” section, but left the citation in the “Notes” section. I went ahead and removed it, noting that we had duplicate references. Rjensen then yanked out the Cite.php reference tags with the edit summary “Sinclair was major source and has to be in refs; use Harvard referencing instead”. This floored me. You see, I agree that Sinclair was a major source, which was precisely why I moved it to the “Notes” section.

Let's take a step back here. One of the problems with the current standard appendix set-up on Wikipedia is that there is not a strong division between sources used to construct the articles, and suggested reading. The “Reference”/“External link” division makes the problem worse because (a) it blurs the distinction between web sites that are sources and ones that are merely suggested reading (some of which might become sources in the future) and (b) it tends to get suggested reading books mixed up with sources in the “Reference” section. Thus, in my parochial view, I actually wanted to get sources into the “Notes” section, where there's no question but that the item is a source and not merely suggested reading.

However, having given it some thought, I realize that Rjensen is probably more attuned to how the average reader will perceive the article: namely, that major sources should be in the “References” section, even though it will be mixed with lots of suggested reading. However, I still think that the Cite.php reference tags are to be preferred, so I will use the Cite.php reference tags with Harvard-style endnotes.

— DLJessup (talk) 00:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

P.S. “Harvard-style” in my final sentence is being used extremely loosely: all I mean is that the endnote consists only of the author, the year if there is more than one book by that author, and the page(s).

— DLJessup (talk) 01:01, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

DLJessup and I are not far apart. I prefer the Harvard system--even if it is cluttered--because it is much easier to make edits, additions and deletions. In a long article where the notes are a long way from the text this is a serious matter, but not here in this short article. I agree that users will go to the bibliography of additional books so they can find in a library (whatever we call it--References or Further Reading), and that major books like Sinclair have to be listed in it or else the user won't look for that important book. Rjensen 01:05, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stated cause for Republican win

This article seems to state that the main reason for the Republican win was Woodrow Wilson reneging on his promise to ask the British to give Ireland independence. Not to mention that it cannot possibly be true that this is the main cause, it states elsewhere (Warren G. Harding) was the desire to "return to normalcy" (i.e., an American public exhausted by constant reform followed by a war followed by even more attempts to reform): something which I have learned elsewhere as well. I may or may not change the text, but I certainly suggest a change even if I don't. The Evil Spartan (talk) 04:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)