Talk:History of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe

False "split-off"

This annoys me. First of all, okay, I disagree with this splitting off from its beginning: *if* the European Constitution ends up getting ratified, then it'd be the time to put all the ratification in a "history" section. Not when the ratifications is the actual event currently taking place. And as for the main disputes during the drafting phase that you also relocated here: Ugh. These were debated strongly during the drafting phase, being important, significant issues, as opposed to the vague unsubstantiated and mostyl trivial criticisms that are now left in prominence to feature in the European Constitution article.

But anyway, those may be just matters of opinion. The most important issue is this: You claimed to be splitting off part of the European Constitution article, when in reality you were deleting, deleting, deleting information. I can see tons of information that you removed when you claimed to be merely "splitting off" the article. The number of eligible voters. Opinion polls in relation to the Netherlandic information.

Annoying. Ugly. And a narrow victory for the Hollande camp? A 59% victory is not a narrow victory. It means atleast 18% margin of victory. That's huge by many referenda margins.

The "future ratifications" are also not a part of the History of the European Constitution. It's also bad practice to have the same information put in triple, both here and in the European Constitution article.

Once I have the time, I will try to find and restore the information you erased. I will not restore it NOT here, since we're talking about the future and not the history of the European Constitution -- I will put it back in the individual articles about the referenda of each country.

But next time you remove information, please be very clear and specific that you are doing so.

Aris Katsaris 16:53, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Which information is this I am supposed to have deleted? Certainly if I have deleted anything useful it wasn't intentional. The whole point of splitting this article off was to avoid information having to be deleted because the main article was getting so long. On top of that, I actually intended to look at previous versions of the article in order to be absolutely sure that nothing had been removed before, since now articles have been created on each referendum there is much more room for detail.

Bear in mind also that a lot of your criticisms, which appear to be aimed at me as the creator of this article, are actually shared by me. For example the duplication of information that's resulted from the big table that's appeared on the main page, with links to pointless articles about parliamentary ratifications that will never be written. It would be good if you could read what I have said on Talk:Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe and User talk:Randywombat about all this.

The main article is being edited several times a day, particularly by anons, and people are adding new material, some of which may be valid and some of which isn't. We need to have some idea about how we intend to structure of our coverage of this topic so that we can deal with the rate of edits and expansion. If you're not happy with the name of this article that's fair enough, but I'd hope you'd agree that the main article on the constitution should focus on what's in it more than anything else, and some of the detailed information in, for example, the article on the Spanish referendum, does not belong in the main article.

Anything I have deleted has only been done after careful consideration, such as if poll results someone had put in appeared to be completely contradicted by poll data I've found and everything the analysts are saying. I certainly don't accept that splitting the article was in any way an excuse to delete anything whatsoever, when the whole point was to allow more detailed coverage of this important topic. Please be a bit more careful when making wild accusations.

— Trilobite (Talk) 22:51, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

All relevant discussion now at Talk:Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, hence the crossing out above. Also one thing I would like to say about the naming of this article is that (fairly obviously considering ratification is ongoing) I didn't mean history in the narrow sense of "events in the past", I meant history in the sense of the story, or the narrative, or the chronology, of the Cosntitution. As I said somewhere else I consider it important to distinguish between writing about the treaty as a timeless document in an effort to explain what it says, and writing about the ongoing 'news story' of its adoption (or not as may yet be the case). Clearly if consensus is that the title is misleading I'll accept that it should be moved. What I don't accept (and I still can't imagine why you thought I had a hidden agenda to do this) is that I set out to delete useful information from the article.

— Trilobite (Talk) 21:54, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)