Talk:List of presidents of Benin/Archive 1

message: *Heads of Government of Benin
*Colonial Heads of Benin (Dahomey)
*Lists of Incumbents
Benin, List of Presidents of
Well, thanks for finally bringing this to talk, halfway through your attempt to create a fait accompli. Your format is questionable in many respects:
#First of all, as others have already told you, it makes no sense to have separate  articles "Heads of state of X" and "Presidents of X" (or "Heads of government of X" and "Prime ministers of X"). The case can be made for using the "Heads of ..." format as being more precise in many cases, although I don't see much of a problem with using "Presidents of ..." when the country had only a few heads of state with different titles. In any case, there should be only one article, with the other title redirecting to it. One might consider that tons (literally, thousands) of links are pointing to the original "Presidents of ..." articles via the "List of state leaders in ..." pages.
#Your data is obviously taken directly from http://worldstatesmen.org, which is a crappy site. I can find errors on virtually every single page of that site. Just take your Benin example above, where you give the name of the former ruling party as "Parti du Revolutionare Popular du Benin". Googling this leads to the single result of worldstatesmen.org, proving what is already apparent to anyone with the slightest knowledge of French: almost every word there is wrong (the correct name is Parti de la Révolution Populaire du Bénin). This is just an example; if you want to dispute the crappiness of that source, just tell me how many examples of errors you want me to point out. So, for this reason alone, all your lists based on that source are better deleted - it is not worth going through this correcting just the errors. As a general lesson here, never take information from a single unauthoritative website. Information from the web is only valid if it either appears on multiple, mutually independent sites (i.e. sites which can be presumed not to have copied the information from each other), or if it is on a site that has proved reliable on careful scrutiny (of course that requires that one has minimal competence to judge that).
#As a consequence of the above, you are following the daft practice of that site of listing obscure full names without specifying what the common form is. Full names are only needed in the articles about the respective persons, in a list like this they are nothing but confusing. Example from Benin again: "Iropa Maurice Kouandété" (common name is Maurice Kouandété, but seeing just the full name people will more likely assume that the middle name is expendable and that the proper short form is Iropa Kouandété).
#You have a major misunderstanding of the word "term" as you are using it where the correct word is "time". A term in politics is a period for which one is appointed or elected, not a period one is continuously in office. For example, Clinton's continuous presidency from 1993 to 2001 was two terms, but in your format it would just figure as one, as you never differentiate consecutive terms, only non-consecutive periods in office. Using Benin again for example, Kérékou's period in office from 1972 to 1991 was of course more than one term!
#Your practice of listing the same person twice in succession, just because the person was knighted or the like, is not aiding readability, to say the least.
#Your use of bold/unbold text within one name (as in knights) and your use of different font sizes within one office title (as in "Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee" above) does not make any sense.
#The "Term" column wraps at least on some (probably most people's) window widths/font sizes - thanks to the generally unnecessary "Notes" column - making the whole thing even less readable.
#You are repeating the office title for each incumbent. There will be lists with 100 people in succession, all holding the same title - the standard title (such as president) should only be mentioned once, with only the exceptions noted individually.
So much for now; there are probably more problems on particular pages. Gzornenplatz 20:16, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)
::I am studying the comments above and will give a reply and/or justification to each point raised.  --JohnArmagh 20:32, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: See also:-