Talk:History of the United States (1964–present)

This article is huge - 50 kilobytes. There is no excuse for that. I've also read just a couple of sections and found that they are mostly copy and paste jobs of much of the material in the various main articles (such as the Vietnam War). I'm going to go through this article and cut out much of the detail and duplication in order to get this page under 30 kilobytes again. --mav 22:48 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Mav:

Can I suggest dividing the article into, say (1964-80) and (1980-present)?

In fact, that's what I'm going to do. 172 23:05 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That does not negate the fact that much of the material here is simply copied from other articles - very little summarizing has gone on and I am also working on this article right now. If you want to help build a textbook on American history then please do so on the textbook Wiki. In Wikipedia, however, we leave the detail on articles that deal with specific subjects - higher level articles like this are supposed to summarize events not largely regurgitate them. I also question the legality of your willy nilly habit of copying text from other Wikipedia articles and not stating that fact in the edit summaries. Per the GNU FDL attribution is an absolute requirement. --mav 23:14 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This is a huge work in progress and many measures taken along the way are going to be stop-gaps. Also, the vast majority of the 64-80 and 80-present articles consist of new material not on any other site. While the Vietnam and civil rights sections are largely borrowed, wouldn't you say that they're summarized? 172 23:21 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

No - they are not summarized when they are copied wholesale with all their tiny little facts. Just because you didn't copy the whole article doesn't mean that that makes it a summary. --mav

Come on. I never claimed that the section was finished. Second, it was a summary since I copied only the key points: the background, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, Vietnamization, and the withdrawal. I'm happy to see you editing this, but what's wrong with dividing it between 64-80 and 80-present. It would be a good idea to redirect this page again and post your changes to the 64-80 article. I say this because there should be an article on the last 23 years rather than the past 39 years since so much has to be ended on the past 12 years. The 1990s so far remains practically the only period in the past 70 years on which I haven't really worked. BTW, sorry for the horrific writing style of this message. I'm going need to freshen up with my coffee and cigarettes, which keeps my mind working. 172 23:50 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree with the 1980 split and and moved my summary accordingly. Let's continue our discussion there. --mav