" 

 ==US== 
 I'm trying not to just be a whinger and a hand waver here, but it annoys me that there's an entire section devoted to left vs. right politics in the US, yet there's nothing similar regarding the rest of the world. The US bias of wikipedia is very irritating sometimes, though it shouldn't be, as most Internet users are in the U.S. In other words, i'm a whiny European who is too lazy to write a non US section. 

 From the US>  That's easy to fix.  Start writing more about non-US views on topics, creating topics, and  getting your friends to help.  Something that is created by users being called biased only reflects the predominant users posting and thus can easily be remedied. 

 Also from the US> No, it's NOT so easy to fix. Throughout Wikipedia you will see entries from (obviously) American authors who have no concept of a world view and automatically write from a US perspective without any attempt to qualify their language. What, therefore, tends to happen is that the US view becomes a default with international views living in ghetto-ized paragraphs.     

 Also from the US> That is actually kind of the problem with Wikipedia all around in the first place, and that is that popular ideas are not necessarily correct. You can have people posting information about the corruptibility of whatever organization, but then the organization can have its people change the entry the next day.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by     

  
 This entire dicussion lends a great deal of credibilty to the idea that the left-right spectrum poorly represents political and economic views.  It seems to me that most of the debate below is equivalent to attempting to define the square root of negative 1 with only real numbers at our disposal.  It is painfully obvious that politics is muli-dimensional.  The most that can be hoped for here is to describe how the left-right spectrum is used and leave it at that.  This should probably be a very short article.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by     

 == Better Chart == 

 I think that this page needs a metter chart. Like this one http://studentnewsdaily.com/conservative_vs_liberal_beliefs.shtml    

  
 Edit  

 I actually think that the article, in fact the whole political movement, needs a better definition of ""left-right"". Most political parties cannot adhere to a single category, including revolutionnary movements and far-right groups, as described somewhere else in the discussion. 

 I suggest a new use of the ""left-right"" compass. 

 The political compass uses the ""square"" system with two axis  x and y (social and économic), which is not very accurate because I know my political ideas, and they tend to be pretty nearer to Mussolini than to Gandhi. Whatever. 

 What I suggest is a cube! 

 3 axis  x, y and z 

 Économic 
 Social 
 Politic 

 The first one defines the market system (if any) of a political group. 
 The second defines the social standing of a political group about the welfare of the people (welfare checks/charity, private/public school/medical system, etc) 
 The thirds one is, basically, the way a society treats it's people (rehabilitation/punishment, democracy/totaliratism (in which I include Soviet Communism!) etc) 

 What do you think?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by     

 == Interesting book == 

 I came across this book: Left and Right in Global Politics 
 by Alain Noël and Jean-Philippe Thérien.  I haven't read it yet but it seems to be of great interest.    

 == Removing unneccessary detail == 

 I am removing several paragraphs that are unhelpful to the article: 
 * Edmund Burke - terms left and right not used in UK then 
 * Adam Smith - terms left and r