Talk:Freedom of information in the United States

message: I've merged a few redundant stubs into this one: Open meetings law, open records law, government in the sunshine. If someone was inspired to merge again, combining this article with Freedom of Information Act (disambiguation), that'd be great - I didn't, because my understanding of sunshine law is that it's a little broader than just government records, but that may not be a useful distinction, and the FOIA (disambig) page has a great international scope that is lacking from this article. Cdc 01:44, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This article overwhelmingly deals with the USA; I've mentioned sunshine laws in the main FOI article, so what I'm going to do is move this to Freedom of information in the United States, redirect sunshine law to Freedom of information legislation, and then we have scope to write about the various national FOI/openness laws in the US as well as the individual states. Sunshine laws aren't FOI per se, but they're "spiritually" very similar, and it's probably worth discussing them alongside related legislation. Shimgray | talk | 14:33, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubs

message: I'm trying to track down the origin of the statement:
"The first open records law was passed in Wisconsin shortly after it became a state in 1848."
Mberigan 19:58, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Freedom of Information / open records 

message: It might be time to go back to a collection of articles on this instead of putting all of it in one place.  Each of the 50 states has its own unique open records law with attendant controversies, and these are all different from the federal FOIA.  
There are also emerging controversies that (I think) deserve their own page.
I'll check back in a bit to see if anyone else has a different opinion but for right now I'd propose writing a separate article called "Open Records" that primarily deals with the state-level laws and state-level controversies, and leaving this article to primarily cover the federal law and its controversies.Leslie Graves 14:12, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A few of the articles on individual state laws do make it clear how they differ from federal law.  Most are a paragraph long and basically say the same thing.  These are redundant and can be redirected to this article.--RadioFan (talk) 01:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creating more pages on Wikipedia to cover open records 

message: I am proposing that Barbara Schwarz be merged into this article. It is generally agreed that her notability stems exclusively from her extreme filings of FOIA requests. There are three good secondary sources in her bio (2 Salt Lake Trib, 1 Oregonian) that can support a short summary here as an example of abuses of FOIA. - Crockspot 03:10, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: *Oppose if the same amount of information that is currently in the Barbara Schwarz article were part of this one, we'd be discussing a spin off per WP:SS. Anynobody 03:27, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * It would not be the same amount. It would be a summary, using only the secondary sources I mentioned. - Crockspot 04:47, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge proposal

message: Not to change the topic but has anyone else noticed Freedom of Information Act (United States)? I'm wondering if before the Barbara Schwarz question is addressed if we should merge these two articles first? Anynobody 03:37, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redundant article to [[Freedom of Information Act (United States)]]?

message: There have been a number of articles created recently that are specific to states.  There is little information in there beyond the legislation numbering, nothing that would explain how that state's freedom of information laws are any different from any other.  Any objections to merging these to this article?  California seems to be the one exception that has more more material in it and may warrant a dedicated article.--RadioFan (talk) 17:43, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  state specific articles 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Freedom of information in the United States. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20070415102640/http://www.ire.org:80/foi/bga/ to http://www.ire.org/foi/bga/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 22:50, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified