Wikipedia talk:Pro and con lists

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Video Wikipedia talk:Pro and con lists

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does not appear to have gotten much attention from the community. I'm puting it back to the "proposals" category pending some discussion. If it finds general support, it can be promoted back to "guideline".

I can start that discussion by saying that I think bulleted lists are a perfectly fine way to summarize arguments that clearly do have two or more sides. Certainly compare-and-contrast prose is also perfectly common, and is more useful in situations where it's not clear where something belongs, or if it is complicated. Lists avoid repetition of weasel words and other redundant phrases. -- Beland 03:56, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• This sounds more like a manual-of-style entry, than a guideline. I think it has some valid points though; suppose that an article has subdivisions (history, application, pricing) then I would expect historical issues to be found under history, and not under pro or con as appropriate. Radiant_* 07:34, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

• I agree with Radiant. I would also prefer us to present the argument as something to consider rather than opening with the assertion that Pro & con lists are harmful. --Theo (Talk) 16:46, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Is wikipedia the ultimate encyclopedia!?" - a page on that would be great.!

Maps Wikipedia talk:Pro and con lists

I wrote this draft guideline.

I'll admit it's a bit of a rant around the edges. The title "x considered harmful" is a traditional computer-science title form for essays against the use of a particular syntactic form or structure. The c2 Wiki page "Thread Mode Considered Harmful" (which is linked) was what I was directly referring to there.

The reason that I'm not sure it fits entirely under the style-guide rubric is that the problems I tried to address are not just stylistic ones, but social ones. I think pro & con lists harm the development of Wikipedia articles as much as they harm the style or readability of a specific version of an article. They show up in articles that have NPOV difficulties, and they then provide focal points for the worsening of those difficulties.

Indeed, part of what's harmful about pro & con lists is that they are (in a sense) too readable -- they oversimplify the subject. Not only does this mislead the reader, but it also makes it all too obvious where an editor with a particular POV should throw in their two cents. It's like a big pair of signs saying "Insert biased view X here" and "Insert biased view Y here".

So no, I really didn't mean simply to suggest alternatives to pro & con lists, but also to point out ways that the pro & con lists are, yes, harmful to the development of articles. --FOo 03:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thnak you for that explanation. I confess that I had neither made the mental link nor clicked the wiki link. As an extraordinarily small sample of our readership, I imagine that I will not be alone in my misreading of the intent here. If I, with my computer science background, missed the allusion then we can be fairly sure that many others will do the same. That aside, I think that we may agree vociferously. I see the pro & con lists as a style consequence of a general issue regarding polarisation of arguments. The policy might be "don't polarise arguments". P&C lists are a form of polarisation so the MoS would counsel against them. --Theo (Talk) 08:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I think this can safely be moved from a proposal to a manual-of-style entry. If there was any significant opposition after being listed on RFC, I'm sure it would have been mentioned here. As long as this doesn't claim to be official policy or anything thereabouts, it's mainly common sense. Radiant_>|< 12:54, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

• Concur.Theo (Talk) 13:57, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I most definitely oppose your misguided opinion on Pro-et-contra lists. While some proportion of pro-et-contra lists may be the result of unresolved factual disputes amongst editors, many are sane high quality easy to read descriptions of complex factual issues, and elevating you current text to anything more than a discussion page rant would be harmful. In fact your introduction of a Template:ProCon tag has already turned into another one of those article-defaming tags that some people blindly run around and graffiti onto pages that have only a formal relationship to your reasons for not liking that style of presentation.

As a minimum, I would strongly suggest that the ProCon template be deleted or disabled until a means is found to prevent overly prolific "contributors" sprinkling it all over Wikipedia.Jbohmdk (talk) 07:09, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

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Having worked on a number of articles with "Pro-Con" lists,

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)

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This page is more like an essay than a styleguide

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)

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)

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Content forking

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)

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Are "arguments for" and "arguments against" sections pro-and-con lists?

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)

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I don't agree with the reasoning here

I'm not a major wikipedia contributer, but I am an engineer and I seriously disagree with the anti pro-con list reasoning presented in this page.

Take for example the article on Lithium Ion Phosphate batteries. It is marked as containing a "pro-con list" which under these guidelines is evil. This "pro-con list" contains exactly a list of the tradeoffs that an engineer considering including this battery in his design would consider. It is presented succinctly and unambiguously whereas these guidelines seem to effectively say that the same content ought to be buried deep in the article, fluffed over or downright removed. In short this policy seems to want to remove the exact information I want to extract out of this article to make an informed decision.

Almost all (good) decisions people make are made by coming up with criteria, weighting them, and using them to judge the various options. This is widely taught as a good decision making in subject matters as diverse as Engineering, Public Policy and Economics.

In short, life is about tradeoffs, and listing the tradeoffs is a tool that helps Wikipedia's readers make informed decisions. It's not only downright stupid to deny them this, but it weakens Wikipedia's value as a source of information. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.22.55.47 (talk) 03:09, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I completely agree with the above anon. If I make the statements

1. Cars are suitable on land more than on the water
2. Boats are suitable on the water more than on land

I am delineating characteristics of cars and boats. Nothing more nothing less. So somehow construe that into partisan bickering is just atrociously bad logic. And yes the procon template is being used to obfuscate perfectly neutral delineations on technical pages, such as Powder diffraction. Bad logic is harmful to Wikipedia

Jcwf (talk) 19:10, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

I have encountered a similar abuse of the ProCon template on an article I care a bit about and where (long ago) I put in what I consider a clear and short NPOV section about the practical merits of something. In my case this was slapped onto the article without comment or reason, not even a non-blank edit summary, by someone who seem to be editing non-stop and often focusing on such practices. It is interesting that abuse of this template has hit us both (by apparently different editors) in the past 12 months, even though the article is 8 years old. As I said above, the Procon template needs to be removed or blanked out, so it becomes clear to the vandals that this rant against pro/con lists is not a valid reason to blight articles with ugly warning banners. Jbohmdk (talk) 07:33, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

I came here from Direct-Shift Gearbox#Advantages and disadvantages, currently tagged with the {{Pro and con list}} template. I don't think there's anything wrong with that section's presentation. The argument against pro and con lists given here is definitely too broad. At the same time, I'd agree that these are not good for presenting matters of opinion, as well as controversial issues. I wish the template actually said that, so that it wouldn't be misused. GregorB (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

• I think it might be better for this essay to focus on when pro and con lists are bad, and when they're potentially helpful. For instance, in engineering-based articles focused on an application or a possible approach, pro and con lists are generally a good idea, because most of the time, any option available to an engineer are going to have clearly-documented and relatively objective advantages and disadvantages that need to be weighed against alternatives. On the other hand, in political-science, economics, or sociology articles (which is, I suspect, what this essay was written for), pro and con lists are a bad idea because different commentators and schools of thought are going to legitimately disagree on what they are -- eg. a pro-and-con lists that says "pro: economists of this school think it helps (like this)" and "con: economists of that school think it hurts (like that)" is not really useful because the different approaches, philosophies, and credibility between different commentators means those two things are probably not comparable. --Aquillion (talk) 19:20, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
  • It's this sort of reply which gets to the heart of the problem here: a failure to understand the distinction between style and content problems. Engineers, as an editing group on Wikipedia, have next to no grasp of how to write compelling or interesting prose: they are practically incapable of even recognising it. This is why our technical articles largely consist of dry clumps of facts laid out in a semi-random order. It is entirely possible to present both the positive and negative aspects of a subject through the course of a general article, rather than hiving off all such material into dedicated sections, just like with criticism. As first I thought the problem might be that the essay simply doesn't make a compelling enough case, but having re-read the rationale section is does a perfectly good job of doing so. My hypothesis is therefore that like most of the rest of the Internet, the majority of those disagreeing above have passed comment on the essay without having bothered to read it first. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:50, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
    • It's also entirely possible to present the universally-accepted pros and cons of a technical approach (or a material, or another straightforward topic) in a pro-and-con list; stylistically-speaking, this is one of the oldest and most easily-legible ways of doing it. In the right article (if it is properly-framed by a deeper discussion, and not the entire article), it can be a good idea, allowing readers to grasp the broad significance of the topic at a glance. The problem is that this essay (which, I'll note, is actually very poorly-written and badly-composed itself) doesn't recognize that. Look at that ugly list of reasons -- oversimplify controversies, invite spurious correspondences between "sides", thus invite biased contributions, encourage forbidden primary research -- these are the concerns of people who have seen pro and con lists cause specific problems on specific sorts of articles; none of them suggest a general problem. This essay admirably expresses the emotional distress that a few people have felt in those articles, but it is basically useless as a broader guideline for the wiki as a whole. This is a problem of a few people determining a problem local to their article, and trying to apply it universally without considering the local context or layout of the affected articles. --Aquillion (talk) 00:24, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
      • No, it's the laziest and quickest way of doing it. Show me an article with a pro and con list that couldn't be reformulated to better present the subject: I suspect that either you can't, or the example you pick will indicate your blind spot. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 20:06, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

I also do not see any point to this essay. If there are NPOV problems, there are NPOV problems whether there's a section formatted as a list or not. But it's hard to see how pro-and-con lists would ever have anything to do with POV. No one (or at least no reliable source) thinks nuts and bolts are faster to use than a nail gun; no one thinks nails hold better than screws; everyone has nails, bolts, and screws in their toolbox. So all the stuff about sides and controversies is irrelevant. There's no burning reason to include a section on the pros and cons of nails (and in fact the nail article doesn't have one), but then again there's no burning reason not to. Likewise with the pros and cons of pretty much anything. --Dan Wylie-Sears 2 (talk) 05:57, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

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Central problem with this proposition

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)

Unipolar, technological, analysis & modeling

I came here from Drip_irrigation#Advantages_and_disadvantages, currently tagged with the {{Pro and con list}} 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 o contribs) 23:58, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I updated the template.

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: {{Pro and con list}}. At some point someone may want to consider a general removal of the template from many of the articles in Category:articles containing pro and con lists, 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)

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)

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)

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)

Pros-and-cons don't always conflict with NPOV

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)

A practical criterion?

Having just come across an example of the {{pro and con list}} 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)

Some examples please

I've looked through a few of the articles in Category:articles containing pro and con lists, 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)

I've checked through a lot of the articles in Category:articles containing pro and con lists, and still haven't found an unambiguously inappropriate list. I've removed the template from a lot of articles, and (so far, a week after starting) nobody has objected or reinstated it. Pol098 (talk) 20:30, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

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)

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