Talk:Community/Archive 2

message: Please note that :Category:Community building has been proposed to be renamed into :Category:Community. Please also note that we don't even have an article on community building.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 18:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Very good point Piotrus. I'm hoping you and others will participate in Wikipedia:WikiProject_Community which is designed to be both a Community development project for the m:The Wikipedia Community and a project to unify all Wikipedia articles pertaining to community and the sociological context of it. A master category would be nice. Please take a look at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Community and we can discuss the prospects extensively and hopefully more comprehensively. Thanks in advance. CQ 13:04, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Renaming of the category 

message: My $0.02 worth:
Head
*Overview
*Sense of community
*Prevailing theories
**University studies
***Effects of technology
***Social capital
*Community development
**Community building (informal)
**Community organizing (local)
**Government and university-led efforts
Thanks for those links, Sunray and Maureen. Portal:Community tracks this article and links out to the various sub-topics, so anything relevant you want to throw onto there would be fine. I think I'm going to put a new section on the Portal just for the extensive acedemic treatment of the topic that I'm finding both here and outside. One problem I see cropping up though, is that most of the studies are US-centric. 
The sections and subsections I think can just summarize articles we already have like we've done for Sense of community and Community development. At any rate, I think it's shaping up, don't ya'll? CQ 17:51, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I like this approach, CQ.  It is simple and we can adjust/expand it as needed.  What I'm not yet sure of is how to organize the existing material in the article.  I need to think about it in light of your suggested approach. Sunray 18:12, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

text: If the "Community Development" section is going to be a brief summary with a link to the main article, I don't think we should have subsections there.  Sunray 18:59, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah me neither. I was kindof going by what I'm learning from the Better Together sites, Saguaro Seminar and the Oxford stuff. I haven't quite figured out what all we have yet, as far as main articles and such. ...And the way topically-related articles are categorized is a bit screwie, too. For example, there is no :Category:Community development and :Category:Community building seems way too big and :Category:Community is way too small.  Maybe we should look at that too. (As if we need more work - ha) CQ 19:12, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The categories seem backwards to me.  "Community," surely is the more general.  I think that much of what is currently in the "Community building" category should be in "Community." Sunray 00:01, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved "Sense of community" to the "Psychological perspective" section as it is a term primarily used in social and community psychology.  Likewise, I've moved the "Social capital" piece to "Social perspective" as it was Bordieu (sociologist) that first developed that concept.  I've also added a "Notes" section, so we can begin adding citations. Sunray 05:33, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Much better. That makes a lot more sense, Sunray. I see the etymology is fixed, too. I'm studying the infed.org article and tracking down some of their sources. I'm also looking at the Oxford CDJ. Lots of good stuff there, but most require subscriptions. I think we might also think about inserting a History section where it says "Over time, some cultures have progressed steadily toward ..." to cover the concepts of community through the eons beginning with the stone-age hunter-gatherer aspects and pull the effects of modern technology in through that. Then maybe end the article with a Future of Community section and the effects of the Internet and virtual communities, which seems to draw a lot of interest. I guess also we should touch on the various Types of communities which are listed on the Community (disambiguation) page and of course we'll have to somehow bring up spirituality, ceremony, ritual, religion, and other such things. Whew! Still a long way to go but we're getting there. And if it starts to bloat, we can always pull things out into the related specialty articles.  I'm going to be heading over to :Category:Community and its subcats to start straightening things up in there. I know that Maureen is a Category wiz. I left Sj and DoctorW notes and some of the WP:CBTF folk. Oh... have I mentioned Portal:Community? (hehe) CQ 08:35, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sections and subsections

message: I can't do the box, so here's a bullet list of points and ideas. Please feel free to edit it. Maurreen 03:01, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: To do box

message: Clarifying -- Do you mean I should move this to to Community development:
:"According to the book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," by Robert D. Putnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), Americans' social capital is declining.
:"For example, Putham's site for the book says that over the past 25 years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 33 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 45 percent." Maurreen 02:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Never mind, I was confused, I think I'm on track now. Maurreen 03:04, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it's OK.  I was refering to that external link you had. It seemed to be slanted towards community development.  However, I think that reference to social capital in this paragraph is fine — but it needs to be defined.  Sunray 06:10, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Social capital

message: Do you like any of these? Maurreen 06:04, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't see any pics with people in them.  Were there some? Sunray 06:17, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. I was hoping to show where people live. But I am not finding both housing and people together. Maurreen 07:08, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Neighborhood photo

message: I pieced this together. Please feel free to change it. I'm trying to integrate the comments, current article, etc., into the outline so that we might update the outline as everything evolves, so hopefully we can see at a glance where we're going. Maurreen 13:45, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved "History" to near the beginning.  Otherwise it is looking good.  The material currently in the "Psychological perspective" section needs some work.  It was formerly titled "Processes of community," and consists of a mix of Psychological and Sociological theory.  I will try to fix that.  Sunray 14:03, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Planned structure

message: For the outline, I put "Effects of technology" between "History" and "Future"  because that's where the effects might be most relevant. Maurreen 13:45, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved "History" to near the beginning.  Otherwise it is looking good.  The material currently in the "Psychological perspective" section needs some work.  It was formerly titled "Processes of community," and consists of a mix of Psychological and Sociological theory.  I will try to fix that.  Sunray 14:03, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: The phrasing on the "Community development" section troubles me somewhat. It seems to imply community development tends to be done by external organizations and seems to slight people improving their own communities. I don't have a solution at the moment. Maurreen 21:52, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I think that communities often do have to rely on an external resource in order to develop — just like people.  There are many examples of internal community development, but these are often hard to measure (due to lack of baseline data or external reference points).  We could add something on Asset Based Community Development which focuses on the skills and resources of the community members.  Although it is a model developed by the ABCD Institute, it is often applied by the communties themselves.  Sunray 21:59, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: To me, the more formal studies and programs would be classed as "community development" where work done within and by communities themselves would be classed as "community building" or "organizing". I don't know if that's a viable classification or not. If it is, I'd like to suggest :Category:Community development for the more formal university-led and government-connected stuff. I'm working on that List of community topics and finding all sorts of stuff we can merge in or reference to in this article, but it's like you said earlier - forrest/trees. CQ 18:24, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with your demarcation of the difference between "community development" and "community building." I'm not sure that Community Development needs to be a category, though.  It seems to me to make more sense as a subcategory of "Category:Community." Sunray 20:13, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Duh, never mind we already answered that question further up. Maurreen 12:37, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I'm looking at Community development — the article and created :Category:Community development. I also made a single section "Community building and organizing" both here and there. Starting to get hairy! CQ 15:38, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Community development

message: I'm not sure this is good in the context, because I don't see any people. Maurreen 16:47, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I chose it because it was a striking image, put in some international flavor and is listed on the gallery at Town square. I thought it tied in with the "public spaces" theme in the text. CQ 16:59, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is striking and it does tie in with the theme. Sunray 18:06, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Iran photo

message: Sunray, your conclusion is well done. Maurreen 18:13, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article end

message: After all that work! Only B class?  How about we nominate it for GA or FA?  Sunray 08:01, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I nominated it for GA. Should we delete the "to do" box? Maurreen 08:58, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Heh, I just wanted to bump it up one step at a time. From my point of view, the article has come a long way in a short time! The GA nomination has us under the microscope, now! We finally got a comment at Wikipedia:Peer review/Community/archive1. The automated peer review refered to was run well before the re-write, so isn't particularly helpful at this time, but 4u1e has made some good points. • CQ 11:34, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Many of the comments apply to fairly recent versions, though, so perhaps we should consider them carefully. For example the remarks about the lead and the "Overview" section suggest we take another look at the front end. I've tried a different way of organizing the lead, eliminating one-sentence paragraphs and shifting things around.  See what you think. Don't be afraid to revert if it offends your sensibilities.   I also agree with comments about the last two sections. More work is needed, I think.  Sunray 17:53, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

text: We also need more references. Working on that. 17:57, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I like the opening statement a lot better now. I also like the "Overview" section namechange to "Significance of community". Additionally, I'm not sure where to put it, but in the news these days, we hear a lot of mention of some sort of nebulus "international community". Now that we have shooting wars all over the globe, especially in the Middle East, I'm wondering if we could craft a well-sourced NPOV message somewhere in the text that highlights the global aspects of the sense of community (or lack thereof) and how the term is being used (and abused). I'm thinking it would fit well into the "Challenge of community" section.    • CQ 18:49, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, I like that! Sunray 19:21, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Good work, guys. Thank you. I might have jumped the gun, but I'm getting "communitied" out. I have a short attention span. Maurreen 07:21, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hehe. Quite understandable Maurreen! I never get "communitied" out, as you might have guessed. While keeping a close watch on Community, I'm moving over toward Portal:United States trying to use my community building skills to help boost it toward WP:FPORT status. I fell much better about this article than I have since I started WP:CBTF in September of '04. But behold! I'm following you! • CQ 13:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: B Class

message: I agree with CQ that this article has come a long way in a short time. When I first saw it, I have to say that it was simply dreadful, just not up to encyclopedic standards. I was tempted to delete the whole thing and provide an outline for a requested article in its place. I would still like to throw out my idea now for that proposed structure, with apologies for its lateness.
When I wrote the Sense of community article last year, I envisioned that when more articles were written from other perspectives such as Anthropology (and especially Sociology) that the "Sense of community" article could become one having a brief summary of those various perspectives and the psychological perspective represented there could be moved to "Psychological sense of community," and "Sense of community (Psychology)" could forward to it. (The same could be done with main articles on "Sense of community" from other perspectives.) Some incorporation of a similar approach might be beneficial for Community: perhaps a section with subsections summarizing the various perspectives on community, such as Sociological, Anthropological, Psychological, Biological, etc. It would be a way to give the article additional logical structure (reflecting realities of how research and writing is carried out) and avoid potential conflicts over subtopics that are due to nothing more than variations in approach. -DoctorW 19:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This makes sense. In fact, it might push the article all the way to featured article status. Would you be up for writing some of that?  I can contribute to the sociological and anthropological perspectives and I'm sure CQ will have lots to contribute — he's never been shy before now. :-)  Sunray 22:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's very good to see you back around, DoctorW! Our biggest problem here has been the scarcity of academic references. We've tried to structure this article toward a "general audience" but provide links to more terse treatments on other articles. Topics like "Sense of community" and "community development" should also be directed (in my opinion) toward the layman. Community psychology though, should be chocked full of jargon and cryptic pedantry that would make an underclassman's eyeballs pop out. It can thus contain a section about the sense of community from the psycholological perspective.  Social anthropology might contain a section about the sense of community from the anthropological perspective and so on. Subfields of sociology and philosophy probably have numerous examples of articles that might deal with various ideas of community that can link to and from the "general" articles. The main thing though, is to build up the reference materials in an acceptable and navigable way. That's what the WikiProject's primary goal is. What's neat is that we're working as a community! Again, thanks for your help and welcome back! • CQ 23:52, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Lol, at CQ's "chocked full of jargon and cryptic pedantry..." Readability is the sine qua non around here.  So we musn't give too much license to psychologists and sociologists, :-) and bear in mind who we are writing for (a general audience).  So it's "full of jargon and cryptic pedantry that would make an undergraduate's eyballs pop out with the elegant turning of phrases, but he would have understood every word! Sunray 06:26, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Structure of the article