Talk:Wobbly lingo
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Additional reference information for all of this material is coming... Richard Myers 05:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Importance, cites, layout, incomplete list, categories
This article suffers from a couple of problems. First, if all this article intends to do is provide a single-sentence definition of a term, then each term should be added to Wiktionary[1]. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Second, on a related issue, why doesn't each term get a separate Wiki page? Say a person was writing an article on the IWW and they wanted to refer to the term "4-3"; how could they create a Wiki link to it, if the term is part of a long list like this? And if more than one term appeared in an IWW article, the author would be Wiki-linking to the same page over and over and over. Third, the importance of this article is not established. Unless it is established, I would argue this article is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. Indeed, most organizations develop their own internal jargon. Why is the IWW's jargon particularly important? It may be culturally significant, but that should be established in the article. Fourth, only a few lingo terms have citations. I realize citations are coming. But Wikipedia advises authors to gather your citations ahead of time. That way, someone reading this article today can see the citations, and won't have to keep coming back to see if they've been added in the future. (This is sort of the "articles should spring from the head of the author fully formed, like Venus from Jupiter" guideline. I'm showin' off my class-ee-cul ed-jee-cay-shun here.) Fifth, is this a list? If it is, the page should be retitled and restructured according to Wikipedia's rules for lists. But if it is an article, it also needs to be restructured to be an article. An article on "Wobbly lingo" would, I think, address why the IWW created its own jargon and discuss its cultural, organizational, political, social, etc. importance. Instead, this is just a list. But terms are defined, it's not a list, either. For information on how an article should look, see Editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a number of guidelines and suggestions for creating, completing and categorizing lists. See the Wikipedia list-making guideline, and make sure to read the subpages and Talk page. Sixth, not all these terms are IWW terms. Industrial unionism, for example, predates the IWW by many years (although I'm not entirely clear on the etymology of the phrase, I suspect it was a creation of the Knights of Labor). Many other terms are general cultural words and phrases ("balloon" for bedroll, for examples), and are defined elsewhere in Wikipedia or Wiktionary. Some may not need definition at all. For example, if I were writing an article on railroad union organizing and wanted to use the term "bull," I could just add "bull (a railroad security guard)" in parentheses. It doesn't take (or warrant!) a whole Wiki page. This could be a very worthy article or list with some work. Good luck! - Tim1965 14:14, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Permission from the IWW
Steve O. from the Industrial Workers of the World has given permission for use of the official IWW jargon in the Wobbly Lingo article, as retrieved from the IWW website at: http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/dictionary February 2007. Richard Myers 12:49, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
- Presumably he's given permission for it to be used under the GFDL, and therefore in all GFDL-compatible texts? It's not nearly enough for us to have permission for Wikipedia alone. 81.158.2.225 15:01, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

