Wikipedia talk:Pro and con lists

message: I agree that they are generally the result of POV conflicts. However, they are, also, often the best deal you are going to get on a page. This is particuarly true when there is a core of non-reality based POV ("George Bush orchestrated 911", "Creationism" etc.) has a critical mass on a page. When two sides don't even agree that the other is a reasonable point of view to hold, conflating the two is often a major victory for the non-reality POV, since it implies the POV is at least taken seriously. 
The present "Pro Con" proposal is, in itself, harmful. Instead Pro-Con lists should be taken as an article in certain phase of reaching consensus. Some articles will never move beyond it, because what is really going on is the assertion of talking points by various POVs. Instead, the proposal should be something along the line of an improvment tag or plate that says "This page has pro-con lists" and suggest ways of moving beyond them. Stirling Newberry 16:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Having worked on a number of articles with "Pro-Con" lists,

message: Colleagues, I'm concerned that the perspective pushed at the opening—that editors should avoid pro and con lists—morphs into a discussion of both the pros and the cons of pro and con lists. I see a prominent external link to a page without attribution or mention of publisher or author, and thus a highly questionable source. That link target appears to discuss the merits and disadvantages of thread-mode on talk pages, not in articles. What is it doing here?
I propose that this page be taken out of the MoS and made an essay, with links from another list-related MoS page. Tony (talk) 02:32, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm adding a small subsection at WP:LISTS (WP:LISTS#Pro and con lists that expresses in a more even-handed and useful way what I think this page is trying to convey. I will then change this page to an essay and add a link to it from the List styleguideline section. Tony (talk) 08:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  This page is more like an essay than a styleguide 

message: Added a link to Wikipedia:Content_forking, I'm not clear that this pro and con is such a evil, other than that Wikipedia articles typically aren't structured around advocacy of a certain position, hence there isn't a need to a take a 'pro' or 'con' position.  Most of the ones I've looked at are 'pro and con' of the article topic vs. some other alternative within the same space, hence they can be rewritten as 'Comparison with x' sections.Cander0000 (talk) 20:48, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Content forking 

message: Here's an example of one that, in my opinion, seriously impedes the neutrality of the article. Although this page presents the pro-and-con list as an alternative to thread mode in prose, it seems more oriented towards actual lists, so this example seems to stake out a middle ground between a "criticism" section (with accompanying section for positive content) and a "pro-and-con list" (except as prose instead of a list). Should I tag it as POV, a criticism section, a pro-and-con list, something else, or create my own essay and template for these situations (which would probably borrow heavily from this one and leave it suitable for adding back into the MoS if it even survives)? Morgan Wick (talk) 04:36, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are "arguments for" and "arguments against" sections pro-and-con lists? 

message: While it is certainly a good idea to discuss a topic feature-oriented, having a condensed list of advantages and disadvantages often is necessary for a comprehensive presentation. So it is wrong to generally remove such sections. Tomdo08 (talk) 13:56, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Central problem with this proposition 

message: I came here from Drip_irrigation#Advantages_and_disadvantages, currently tagged with the  template.  This subheading is what I was hoping to find.  It is a better summary, than a summary.
I was trained in naval nuclear power, steam plant, electrical generators & motors, batteries, etc.  Not only are Advantages & Disadvantages lists vital to the educational process in, really, a huge number & array of technological fields, but this relational-algebra-like knowledge format is also the base of a flexible & powerful analysis & modeling toolkit.
Not only will technical practitioners in hundreds of fields be dismayed to see Advantages & Disadvantages lists deprecated, but Wikipedia itself would stand to both lose content-value, and a potentially vast range of new content-creation opportunities.   As used widely in technology & Engineering, the educational role morphs into synthetic creation, based on analysis & modeling, constrained & informed by the Pro-Con list.  
The intellectual cornerstone of the Patent, and the innovation process itself, relies explicitly on inventories of Pro & Con features, of the new instance, compared with former instances.  These are usually bipolar assessments, but unipolar pros & cons are the core of the paradigm.  Mulipolar lists can be created, but they rapidly generate unwanted complexity, which the unipolar list tames so well.
Everything has advantages & disadvantages ... pluses & minuses, strengths & weaknesses, assets & liabilities.  Often, in the context of "things", these are the most important & crucial data, facts & relationships; the most interesting & valuable knowledge.
For sure, Wikipedia must address the misuse of articles to conduct interpersonal & intergroup conflicts, based on subjective valuations & biases.  But to also eliminate technical, factual Advantages & Disadvantages lists at the same time, would be an egregious case of the baby in the bathwater.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ted Clayton (talk • contribs) 23:58, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unipolar, technological, analysis & modeling 

message: Based on the discussion here, there don't seem to be any consensus for general removal of pro-and-con lists, so I think it's worth updating the pro-con template to include a suggestion that people simply remove the template in articles where they think such a list is appropriate.  The template is here, for convenience:  .  At some point someone may want to consider a general removal of the template from many of the articles in , since it seems to have been generally applied blindly and tends to just clutter up those articles due to a lack of any real consensus on the matter. (As I noted above, the essay seems to have been written as an argument against the use of the lists in primarily politically-oriented articles; but the lists themselves overwhelmingly appear on engineering-oriented articles, where they're much less controversial and seem generally accepted.) --Aquillion (talk) 19:37, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the problem is that this style of writing is terrible, and leads to crappy and amateurish prose. That it's present in technical articles is because the majority of our contributors to technical articles are lousy writers who need to have their work completely rewritten by people who actually have a degree of command of the language. The last community-wide discuission of the matter was at the template's TfD, where the only dissent was on whether this warranted its own tag: there was no suggestion that the style itself was appropriate. I've undone the addition of wording which allows the sort of editor that writes in this manner to unilaterally remove tags that allow others to fix it. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:38, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  I entirely disagree; I feel that pro and con lists can be useful ways of providing straightforward facts in certain articles, especially highly-technical ones.  The TfD likewise (while it got almost no response) contains at least two people indicating that they feel that TfDs can sometimes be effective -- and certainly, in any case, one TfD is not enough cause to blanket hundreds of articles with an official-looking template demanding that they conform to the opinions expressed in a random essay!  I also noted that you removed the neutrality tag at the same time as you reverted the template (and posted here); as it says, those are supposed to be removed when the dispute is resolved, which it clearly wasn't if you just made a major revert and responded to disagreement on the talk page -- certainly discussion on this essay has stalled (showing, I think, a broad lack of support for it), but you should at least make an attempt to gauge the waters and make sure people's issues have been resolved before removing a template like that.  Just glancing up this talk page itself shows that numerous people coming from articles that have been tagged with this template don't feel the opinions it suggests are useful there, and it's important that they understand that it's neither policy nor something that enjoys any sort of consensus. --Aquillion (talk) 00:08, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  A dispute is a formal process: dispute tags are not supposed to simply be slapped on any essay that Q. Random Wikipedian disagrees with and left there until Q is personally satisfied. People have been kvetching about this essay for nearly ten years, but it's still here and people still refer to it; it plainly isn't generally so controversial as to state that it's not fit for purpose. As per my other commends, your "technical articles need this" assertion is flat-out wrong and a big part of the problem that this template seeks to resolve. I haven't yet seen you engage with this rebuttal. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 20:18, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  I updated the template. 

message: Whilst agreeing with the basic premise that lists of opposing points of view don't make an article NPOV, I'm mystified by its appearance in a number of articles (box girder bridge? ducted fan?) which aren't exactly bitter battlegrounds between feuding authors.
In particular, pros-and-cons lists are a helpful tool for evaluating the suitability of a particular technology in a given set of circumstances. The engineer building a bridge may hold personal convictions about, say, Obamacare or the fur trade, but is unlikely to have deep prejudices favouring I-beams over a box girder. He or she will look at the project requirements and choose a structure whose pros and cons best meet their objective constraints.
Presenting a summary of the vices and virtues of the shape of a bar of metal isn't, in any way, taking a stance that compromises Wikipedia's impartiality on the major debates of the 21st century.
Secondly, when used in technical articles, a point-by-point list or comparison table may be more suitable for its intended audience. Take a page like SAE_steel_grades: it's a list of terse bullet points - "heat-resistant; poor corrosion resistance" - with no pretensions of English style. Rewriting it in flowing prose would only decrease the signal-to-noise ratio, making the page harder for its likely readers to use.
IanHarvey (talk) 13:28, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Pros-and-cons don't always conflict with NPOV

message: Having just come across an example of the  template, I had a look at the arguments. There seems to be some (not unanimous) consensus that lists are appropriate to many engineering-type articles, but not to social and political articles where pros and cons are less clearly defined and uncontroversial. A purpose of Wikipedia that I consider paramount (though I haven't seen a guideline) is where relevant, Wikipedia should be useful (without becoming an instruction manual, travel guide, etc.)  If I'm looking to buy a computer printer I would very much want to see something like
;Advantages of laser over inkjet printers
* Permanent ink
* Cheap to run
;Disadvantages of laser over inkjet printers
* Ink may fade or run if wet
* Expensive to buy
* Big
* Photo-quality inkjets are likely to have better colour [a mildly controversial point that would need to be explained in text]
This summarises important information without the need to read swathes of text looking for salient nuggets. So I'd suggest that when judging whether this template is appropriate, a couple of criteria to include p&c lists are useful:
* Is a pro and con list likely to be factually useful to a reader, rather than simply listing opposing opinions?
* Does the list concisely summarise brief specific and uncontroversial points?
I'm going to be WP:bold and edit the essay accordingly; feel free to RD.
Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 13:46, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  A practical criterion? 

message: I've looked through a few of the articles in , looking specifically for examples of undesirable lists. The category has an overwhelming majority of technical and factual articles (where the discussion here clearly supports the use of lists); and I was unable to find a single example of an undesirable list. In this discussion the only article explicitly mentioned are technical ones  considered to have been tagged unjustifiably. (In the process I untagged a handful of articles.)
Could I get away from all the abstract waffle and hot air and ask for some actual examples of articles that clearly should be tagged as having undesirable pro and con lists (whether currently tagged or not)? Please link to the specific revision, not the (ever-changing) article page. That will help to define the topic. If no, or vanishingly few, examples can be found, then this essay and the related template are manifestly undesirable.
Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 20:54, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Here is an example, technical rather than political, where a pro & con list is perhaps inappropriate, favouring a commercial product. The list is tagged as procon and also as WP:Peacock, which I think makes the procon tag unnecessary (though not inappropriate). An (unreferenced) entry from the list: Strong and supportive user community (especially Oracle APEX forum). [Added later] Actually the pro and con con list format is perfectly appropriate in this context, but the actual content, the entries, are too advert-like or POV. Pol098 (talk) 18:11, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some examples please