Talk:Rotary International

message: The  states:
: Clubs such as Rotary were predated by women's service organisations, which started in the United States as early as 1790.
(The previous revision describes these as "women's voluntary organizations" instead.)
The cited source (freely downloadable with email confirmation) states:
: The exclusion of women from the labor movement in the early part of the century led to American-style service clubs beginning as male-only organizations. It should be noted that women’s volunteer associations appeared in eastern U.S. cities as early as  1790,  long before similar men’s organizations.
It's unclear just what point the cited source is making, given that it first states that such organizations ("service clubs") were initially "male-only", but then indicates that "women's volunteer associations" appeared in the U.S. before "similar men's organizations" did.
The WP article seems to extrapolate from this "pre-dating" claim that it applies worldwide.
An additional problem is that there is no clear classification of different types of organizations.  Historically, there have been numerous women's charitable organizations, which are certainly service organizations, and there have been various men's fraternal organizations, which may not have started as service organizations but may have had certain "service" activities, which may have become a greater focus of the organization over time.
Suggestions? Fabrickator (talk) 21:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  dispute claim of women's organizations pre-dating men's organizations 

message: This is a pattern that seems to happen on WP from time to time:
# a claim is made, with a link to a valid supporting citation
# the link is observed to be broken, the citation is removed and "citation needed" is added
# the problem doesn't get fixed
# content is removed due to failure to rescue the (now missing) link
There are certainly variations on this, but the particularly egregious step here is the removal of the broken link without (evidently) having made exhaustive efforts to find a suitable replacement (such as an archive copy.
The case in point is , the majority done by a single editor.
So this is a work iem, to restore the original citations, and ultimately replace the original citations with suitable archive copies, assuming they're available. Fabrickator (talk) 07:02, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  rant against destructive editing practices 

message: I'm offering a couple of sources to support the text added in  on changes to the prevalence of Rotary clubs in Europe"
* Chicago Tribune (1990-04-15): https://archive.today/20210420222307/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-04-15-9001310437-story.html
* Deer Park Tribune (1998-12-02): http://dpt.stparchive.com/Archive/DPT/DPT12021998p12.php
I noticed that parts of the article in the Deer Park Tribune source is also repeated in https://www.clubrunner.ca/data/5050/html/1726/Rotary%20history.pdf ... this is a web site that supports "generic" clubs, but  evidently hosts some files from various Rotary sources under the "data" subdirectory, such as 
* https://clubrunner.ca/data/5050/
* https://clubrunner.ca/data/7080/
* https://clubrunner.ca/data/9465/
Learn how to use Wayback to view all the files on a web site (as traversed by Wayback, up to 100,000 files) or a specific subdirectory thereof.  Then you can quickly (nearly instantly) limit the view to files with a specific string in the path.  Fabrickator (talk) 06:50, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: *  - FYI, Clubrunner is a site/service that was originally created by Rotarians and today is used by thousands of Rotary clubs and districts to do much of their club administration and also in many cases to host the website for their local club or district. For example, I am currently the Secretary for my local Rotary Club and go into Clubrunner each week to enter in the attendance of members. Another member of our club goes in and updates our website. I believe what you are seeing with the /data/ subdirectory is PDFs and other files that various Rotary clubs have hosted on their individual club sites that have then been indexed by Google. - Dyork (talk) 01:50, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I just realized that I misstated the number of files that Wayback lets you view at one time as 100,000, the actual limit is 10,000. Fabrickator (talk) 21:31, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  sources for claims of changes in prevalence of clubs in Europe 

message: Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this looks like an almost textbook NPOV violation. Am I missing something? I feel like I'm reading promotional material directly from the Rotary International website. Nwebster84 (talk) 19:39, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: 65.79.133.172: I'm doing a second revert of your edit changing "its stated mission" to "its mission statement".  As written, your wording is simply "non-grammatical".  To make it grammatical, e.g. by changing it to read "its mission is ..." would give it more significance than it's due.  We avoid any a statement that could be construed as either an opinion of the "goodness" of their mission or whether they're effectively pursuing that mission.  It's just a factual "stated mission".  We should be particularly careful about neutrality, since we're just quoting Rotary's own statements.  In this introductory paragraph, based directly on Rotary's own statements, we don't need to make any statement evaluating their mission nor how effectively they are pursuing it. 
Please do not re-revert without following policy.  You are invited to pursue any of the dispute resolution mechanisms. Fabrickator (talk) 19:03, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  wording of Rotary mission 

message: I suggest that the 11 March 2024 edits are inappropriate. I would prefer to avoid invoking WP:COI, because my expectation is that Rotary members will be mature enough to edit in a manner that's compliant with Wikipedia policy.
I do not want to have to revert this edit myself.  I don't want to have to make the effort to explain the issue to the Rotary member who made this inappropriate edit, my feeling is that a Rotary member made the mess and a Rotary member should revert the edit to fix the mess.  (Note that Wikipedia articles do not have "owners", so there's no mechanism in place to have only designated owners of an article have permission to edit the article content.) 
I don't want to be in the position of having to explain to each person who attempts to "embellish" the Rotary article why Wikipedia may not always be the most appropriate place for the latest details about the Rotary organization. Fabrickator (talk) 20:48, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I reverted it. It was unsourced. Pyrrho the Skipper (talk) 22:36, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  inappropriate content addition March 11, 2024