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Talk:Lists of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States/Archive 3

< Talk:Lists of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States
Latest comment: 2 years ago by 38.79.3.1 in topic Clerks for Retired Justices
Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3

Split

Latest comment: 5 years ago101 comments31 people in discussion
The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
A summary of the debate may be found at the bottom of the discussion.

I'm proposing that this page be split into Seat specfic pages in order to make it more browse-able and easier to use. I'll wait a week to see community conensus. Mbisanz (talk) 01:44, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Strong support - by seat is the most logical split, and it's simply too big not to be, at this point (and will only keep growing). bd2412 T 02:05, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Strong opposition - I am opposed to splitting this article. I realize that its size is growing, but I think a split would make it much more difficult to notice patterns and trends in general in clerk hiring. A split by seat might reveal patterns and trends for one particular justice, but not for the court as a whole over time. If a split should occur, which I am most certainly not recommending, logically I think it should be done by court (i.e. Warren Court clerks, Burger Court clerks, Rehnquist Court clerks, etc.). That would still allow more general trends and patterns in hiring to be ascertained. BoBo (talk) 11:44, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I second this way of splitting the page. I think it's much more relevant to see who were clerks around the same time, than to see who clerked for the Chief Justice throughout 150 years of history. Libertylaw (talk) 13:15, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not categoically opposed to a split of this format. But I wouldn't be able to do such a split. Right now the info is sorted by justice, and I don't know how to recreate the tables required of such a split. If there is a how-to page, I could take a look, but since this is the consensus of the community, we might need to bring in a more experienced editor. Mbisanz (talk) 22:55, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I would think a split by court would necessitate a division by term served. For example, all the clerks would still be arranged by seat but also now would be separated in different articles by the time duration of the court involved. For example, the Supreme Court clerks of the Burger Court would still be separated by seat but include only those clerks that had served from OT 1969 to OT 1986. The clerks of the Rehnquist Court would slightly overlap, beginning with OT 1986 and ending with OT 2005. Roberts Court clerks would start with OT 2005. The clerks of terms that end one court and begin a second court would be repeated in successive articles. BoBo (talk) 00:49, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Correct, that is what consensus seems to be. I'm looking at the code and am confident that I would screw it up trying to break it out like that. Mbisanz (talk) 01:11, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
There's no reason we couldn't have one set of articles on the split by seat, and another on the split by Court, so long as we maintain a single centralized clearinghouse for all of the information to go through. We are, of course, in the business of making an encyclopedia, which means dispensing as musch information as possible in ways that make it as accessible as possible, for whatever uses readers may have. I can see some people having an interest in the progression of clerks for a seat, with others having an interest in the progression of clerks for a Court. bd2412 T 22:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Well right now we have a consensus ot split it one way. So as far as splits go, that is the only way. On the other hand, I might take a stab at creating new articles by seat. Mbisanz (talk) 22:15, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
I don't see a consensus to go in any particular direction at the moment. Ergo we may as well go in all directions at once. bd2412 T 22:36, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Good point. I will being tackling the breaking out by seat in the near future. But I'd happily accept help breaking out by court. Mbisanz (talk) 22:39, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
I am a little new to do this, but who actually would have to do a split by court? Is there a pool of officially sanctioned Wikipedia editors capable of doing such alterations in rearranging templates? I would think the same basic template of this article could be used for each new article with the clerks of that particular court merely cut and pasted from this article into the new article. Am I oversimplifying the process? I would much prefer a division by court over a division by seat. BoBo (talk) 00:04, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Nope, anyone can do this. That's the beauty of Wikipedia! Libertylaw (talk) 00:08, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Correct anyone can do the split, I just don't know enough of how to format wiki-tables to do more than a simple split. Mbisanz (talk) 01:54, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
As the article is, splitting by seat would be very simple (it's already done that way on the page). bd2412 T 07:14, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
I do not mind a split by seat AS A BEGINNING, but I would be opposed to it without a guarantee of an ultimate split by court. I would assume that someone in the Wikipedia administration should know how to do a split by court. I have never done a template split and would feel awkward trying it. Can't the site recruit an internal expert to deal with this problem? I fear that once this main article is split by seat, nothing will be done to reconstitute articles of clerks by court. BoBo (talk) 12:08, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Can we have a separate page listing all current and forthcoming clerks? I think a lot of people use this page to find out new hiring news, and it would be more difficult to look at 9 different pages. Libertylaw (talk) 14:13, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Its a good idea Liberty, but I think its something more for Wikinews than Wikipedia. Current events and news things are generally covered in a more newspaper like format, with the encyclopedia articles more reserved for things of continuing historical record. However, I wouldn't be opposed to year by year pages for each set of clerks. That would permit there to be a "...clerks of 2007" that would be the current and incoming sets. Mbisanz (talk) 22:45, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
How about a page just showing clerks of the 9 current justices, so a justice who has been serving for 20 years would have 20 years worth of clerks listed, while a 2 year justice would just show two years worth. It would still make for a much smaller page and we would still have this big historical page to link to. NoSeptember 14:09, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
That would work very well going forward - at the end of that justice's term of service, we would have a complete list of their clerks. bd2412 T 19:14, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Are we ready to do this? --MZMcBride (talk) 05:19, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I have a plan. Use the method I used in the List of political and geographic subdivisions by total area - have individual pages, but also have a single page into which all the individual pages transclude. Then use this page as a directory of the subpages (including the transclusion page) with a size warning (see List of political and geographic subdivisions by total area (all) (Warning: large page, page loads very slowly). Each subpage uses a templated header and footer, to maintain consistency across the pages. bd2412 T 05:51, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Tested it out some, couldn't get it to work. bd2412 T 07:34, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Eh? What was the issue? I'm pretty good with MediaWiki. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 08:05, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Ha! I just realised what the issue is - the "includeonly" tags that I put on the subpages are inside the templates. They need to be outside so each template can transclude independently. bd2412 T 08:13, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Boom, done - no more long page. All transclusions, now. bd2412 T 08:27, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Support split - Article should be split, as the problem of length will only get worse over time, though I am not sure of the best way to split the article (except perhaps for both seat and decade). Although having the list in one place may be nice in theory, List of tambon in Thailand (N–O) was a reality of the number of tambon. --Jax 0677 (talk) 05:35, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Support Split – Because this list has become so long and only will become longer when new clerks are added yearly, perhaps the clerk list should be split by Courts like, for example, the Rehnquist Court, the Roberts Court, etc. TL (talk) 19:40, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

RFC: Length of article

Should this article be divided into smaller articles? 86.133.243.146 (talk) 01:13, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Now moot discussion as to whether an RFC was appropriate
  • Close The IP (no doubt a sock of someone) has opened numerous unnecessary RFCs. --NeilN talk to me 02:32, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
    • What makes this unnecessary? And why are you assuming bad faith? If you're gonna make accusations of someone, you better have some evidence to back it up. Ego White Tray (talk) 02:36, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I would suggest splitting by years of service, probably by when the clerk began service. Grouped by 25 years seems about right (2000-2024, 1975-1999, etc). Ego White Tray (talk) 02:34, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
Longest

This list is the longest page on Wikipedia, currently. Wow! Jwood (leave me a message) See what I'm up to 03:04, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

  • The utility is that I can search a single article for a given clerk without having to know the seat number (or decade, or justice, etc.). Splitting the article degrades its usefulness. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 11:25, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
  • @Padenton: Really? After 10k edits I though I would have spotted that. So, how would I go about searching for all of the clerks who graduated from Yale? If we keep article as-is, it's trivial to sort the table by university, scroll down and your information is right there. If Wikipedia had a semantic search engine, and if the article were tagged appropriately, and if users knew what the tags were and how to hand them to the search engine, then it doesn't matter so much if the article is split up. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 16:05, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
@Lesser Cartographies: FYI, the notification only works when the change inserting it also adds a signature, but anyways: I admit that the search feature could be better. Could you provide some information as to why filtering the list for a specific school is particularly useful and some information as to who is likely to use it? Really the problem is that the page is massive, near impossible to edit, and serves a very limited population, so some solution really needs to be found. ― Padenton|✉   16:18, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
  • @Padenton: Being massive is not a problem in and of itself. I just tried editing the article and, as opposed articles with thousands of templates, both the edit screen and the commit were quite quick. Using my browser's search function I was able to locate the Justice I was interested in and made my edit without any difficulty. And we don't usually evaluate articles based on the size of their audience (or the utility of the article for that matter).
But to answer your question about why this is important: a reporter recently asked Chief Justice Roberts if he was concerned that the court's membership was drawn from only two elite universities. He replied: "That's not true. Not all of us attended elite universities. Some of the justices went to Yale." (Roberts is a Harvard man, of course.) Joking aside, the path to a supreme court appointment usually requires clerking for the court, and with a handful of exceptions the justices have selected their clerks from a very small pool of universities. (I believe Sandra Day O'Connor was a significant exception.) Being able to sort through the university affiliations on one page allows a researcher (or interested student) the ability to see the historical trends of where clerks have come from. Was the court more diverse earlier in its history? Can this diversity be ascribed to a greater diversity in clerkships? Those questions are much easier to answer if the required information is in one place.
Finally, splitting the article makes it more difficult to edit, not less. Experienced editors would know that stylistic changes would need to be applied across several articles; newbie editors will tend to make the change in one article and not think to propagate the change. This will over time lead to the several articles diverging, thus requiring a more experienced editor to come in an clean up the mess. If there was a significant upside here, perhaps a cost-benefit analysis would be a rational approach. I honestly don't see the upside. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:14, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Alright, I see your point. Perhaps there are other ways that we can address the size. Right now we have a template that is used for each row. As there is a lot of duplication in the first 3 columns, what if we made an additional template for those columns, and pass the remainder of each row as arguments. For example, the template could be {{U.S. law clerk group|count=n|seat=blah|justice-number=blah|justice=blah|clerks=(insert several {{U.S. law clerk row}} here) }} and it could handle the rowspan. It may be a bit confusing to editors, but we could leave comments explaining it in the code and it should cut off a fair bit of the amount of code. This is also not an article that normal editors are going to be expanding often, more likely a very small handful will take up the job of updating. ― Padenton|✉   19:10, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
@Padenton: If you want to set that up in a sandbox, go for it. Based on my experience with large bibliographies, though, template processing time dominates download time. You might find that adding a second template actually worsens the time to render the page. But go ahead and try it in draft space or your sandbox and see what happens. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 23:25, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Re-split

A split was agreed upon here: Talk:List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Split. With no consensus, it was merged back together again into a nearly 800k page, with a table that grows by about 40 rows every year, and needs to be re-split. ― Padenton|✉   05:51, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

  • Support split - Article is over 800 kB, and should be split due to size. This is a reality of a page growing too large. --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:25, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose—The article loads quickly and is easy to edit. Given its slow growth, I'm not seeing any compelling reason to split the article up. As much of the utility of the article comes from the fact that all the data is in a single place, I can see several research questions that would be far more difficult to answer were the article to be split up. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:44, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
  • Comment. I imagined that I wanted to correct one name within the table and went on to edit this (without clicking "Save page", of course). To my great surprise, this was very easy. Maybe that's a function of the amount of RAM I had available, the OS I'm using, the particular browser (could some alternatives have crashed?), and perhaps even the CPU speed. It seems reasonable to constrain page sizes so that they can be loaded, read, and edited by those less fortunate than oneself; but putting any relevant policy or guideline aside, I wouldn't worry if the page weren't editable by cellphone. (Indeed, I tend to think that people using cellphones have such a restricted view that they shouldn't be attempting to edit anything like this. I rarely use a cellphone even for reading but I do often use a tablet; if an article is worth editing, I suppress the temptation and instead later edit it by computer.) -- Hoary (talk) 01:06, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

This discussion seems to be over, but I just want to comment that the page takes a long time to load, although my computer is relatively new and loads quite rapidly in general. Many people have much slower computers and certainly bigger problems with the article. It might load quickly for some computers, but certainly not for all. This is, in my opinion a good argument for a split. K9re11 (talk) 23:15, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

What does anyone think of my proposal on splitting this article? RuneMan3 (talk) 16:35, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
I see what you're trying to do, but you lose a lot of usability to solve a problem that I'm not convinced exists. When I'm doing research I'd much rather have a single page load slowly than go through the bother of manually cross-referencing multiple pages. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 07:14, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
How would it be less usable? Should I construct or edit a template for this? I was waiting for a go-ahead before doing so. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RuneMan3 (talk • contribs) 20:32, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
@RuneMan3: Say I want to get a sense of how law school affiliation has changed over time. Your proposal requires I download multiple pages to do this. The current configuration gives me all of that data in one page. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 13:13, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Could one not do that by looking at one of the Seats? — Preceding unsigned comment added by RuneMan3 (talk • contribs) 03:04, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

  • @RuneMan3: Sure, it's possible. But you're having to look at multiple pages instead of one. If you wanted to, you might write a script that took this page as input and generated all of the pages you propose (perhaps even automatically). That would give us the best of both worlds. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 18:35, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
    • I'm not into script writing. How do I do that?RuneMan3 (talk) 20:26, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose split. There is tremendous value to keeping this information in a single page. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 05:46, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
    • How? RuneMan3 (talk) 12:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
      • By keeping all the information on a single page, readers can search for specific terms (e.g. a name, a school, etc.) without flipping between different pages. It also tells readers the total number of hits for a specific term when they run a search. There really sin't anything wrong with creating additional, more specific lists that are broken up according to seat, year, or justice, but we certainly shouldn't get rid of this comprehensive list. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 08:15, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
        • Are you suggesting removing columns? This list is huge. Perhaps we should remove all these red links as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RuneMan3 (talk • contribs) 11:24, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
          • Why is the list being "huge" a problem? The download time is negligible. Browsers aren't breaking. What's the problem you're trying to solve here? Lesser Cartographies (talk) 18:58, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
            • The download time may be negligible for you; but have you polled the rest of our users? The page is currently 802,375 bytes - the second-longest page on Wikipedia (and the longest page is about to be split). At such length, it's unusable for a number of our readers, uneditable for others. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:40, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
              • That is a non-substantive argument for 2 reasons: 1) Wikipedia will always have a 2nd longest page, so perpetually splitting whatever the 2nd longest page is would be an endless and worthless effort. 2) a number of our readers, uneditable for others is WP:Weasely. If there are relatively recent complaints (I wouldn't go back more than a year, arguably 2 at the most, due to Moore's law and all) that splitting the list would solve, please link to them.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  01:56, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
              • @Pigsonthewing: Interesting—because you think download times are a problem, it falls to me to poll users to see if that's the case. Ok, no problem, I'll start a new topic below. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 04:17, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
  • Split: There are already 10 other list articles and given size, I think it's appropriate. While I sympathize with the desire to be able to sort by Alma Mater and such, this may well be the only list on WP with over 1500 entries? I can't really think of any other reason not to split than the statistical analysis argument, and I think it, standing alone, is outweighed by the sheer klunkiness of the page. Montanabw(talk) 23:05, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

How is this page not redundant to List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 1) to List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 10)? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:42, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

  • @Pigsonthewing: I believe those pages were created recently to mitigate the downloading time problem. If you're looking for clerks who filled a particular seat, that's a good optimization. If you're looking for a particular clerk but don't know what seat they were on, your likely downloading multiple pages. And if you're a prospective law student and want to see what are good feeder schools for supreme court clerkships, or you're a journalist and want to understand how feeder schools have changed over time, you're now having to collate results from across pages (which is much, much slower than the time it would have taken to download a single article).
    I think the pages can co-exist. I would rather there be a database with this information that generates both the single-page and the split-page versions, as I think they're going to drift out of sync otherwise. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 08:26, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
    • "If you're looking for a particular clerk but don't know what seat they were on", then you're far more likely to be using our search function. This page is clearly redundant to the pages that were "created... to mitigate the downloading time problem". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:36, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
      • I had no idea our search function was so powerful. How do you search for "Starts with the letter C, vaguely Irish, probably started in the early 1980s"? We can let users download one page to find that answer, or we can waste a good deal more their time by having them download potentially just as much data over multiple pages and have them scroll through searching each one. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:39, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

So, how long does it take for you to download this page?

There's a perennial complaint that this page is too long, and that some users may be inconvenienced by excessive download times. I've been asked to poll users to see whether or not this is the case. If you care to, please let us know if you find the download time excessive, and if possible, please measure the actual time. Many thanks. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 04:21, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

  1. Download time is ok—Using wget I'm seeing 1.86M, 3.78MB/s, and 0.5s total time. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 04:21, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
  2. Download is fast— I'm not sure how fast my internet is, but the article downloads in about 1-2 seconds. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 05:13, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

This is farcical; the people who have problems downloading or editing the page are unlikely to ever end up here. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:20, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

  • Measuring something is usually better than measuring nothing. If you have a better way of determining if download speeds are an issue I'd love to hear it. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:13, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
    • No. Measuring something is not better than measuring nothing, when that something is irrelevant. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:36, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
      • The download time of the page for people who actually use this page is, I would argue, highly relevant. As someone who consults this page from time to time, I'd much rather have ten seconds of download and rendering with all of the information rather than have to go to the bother of multiple tabs open simultaneously. Given the fact that my underpowered chromebook can download and render in well under ten seconds, I'm just not seeing that there's a problem to solve here. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 17:39, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm in the United States and on a high-speed connection with a new laptop, so I'm not having issues, but when I've been on slower connections, I sometimes have trouble loading even normal wikipedia pages, so I can only imagine this one... Montanabw(talk)

splitting up this page

I propose keeping this page but sub-dividing the clerks by Court, such as the Rehnquist court or Roberts Court? This had wide support in the AfD --JumpLike23 (talk) 05:27, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

  • This has been discussed at some length on this talk page. Some editors (myself included) think there is utility to keeping all the information on a single page. I am pinging Bjhillis, who has done terrific work maintaining this page, to see what they think about this. Best, -- Notecardforfree (talk) 07:37, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree there is benefit from one large list. We have seat pages, and I see the reason for Court pages, if you want to create those sub-pages. If you feel the page takes too long to load we can remove the pic, that's a new feature.Bjhillis
    • Removing the pic isn't the problem, the sheer size of the page is making even fairly modern computers chug trying to load it. No Wikipedia page should be 686K! - The Bushranger One ping only 05:01, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
    • To provide some historical context to The Bushranger's observation, a year ago I added hundreds of clerks' names missing from the list, which increased the size of the page to its current roughly 2,270 names. At one point, this was one of the largest lists on Wikipedia. The list is still missing roughly 40 names from the pre-1980 era, most from pre-1920. In short, even if we completed filling in the 40 missing names, the list size has more or less stabilized. As shown just below, a few months ago the table code was re-cast, cutting the file size by about one-third, taking it down to the 686 size, and the list now ranks 20th in size on Wikipedia. Each year, the 9 justices each add 3 clerks, or 27 annually, so the list will continue to grow at a modest pace. Most of the interest in the list relates to recent clerks, or the last 20 years anyway. So you could approach a split by moving all pre-1990 clerks to a linked sub-page (cutting the page size in half). In 2017, the main page has a daily visit count of 309, with a daily high of 6,812 during the Gorsuch nomination, and the sub-page would typically receive one-tenth the number of visits as the main page, or here 30 a day (relegated to the dust bin of history, but maybe that simply reflects what interests most people). Another approach is to cut the main page bare bones to the narrative, pic, clerks since 2000, and the sources. The current, long list could be offered as a sub-page for use by those interested in the complete history. By the way, Jd22292 hung a "long page" flag the other day. We've had these before and taken them down because the page length debate is ongoing, and the thought was the discussion served the purpose in lieu of flagging.Bjhillis (talk) 16:28, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
    • One idea I have of reducing the size is to move the table to its own template and then transclude that template onto this article. Just don't forget the navlinks for editing the template. jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk • contribs) 01:18, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Redux: 2018

This has been discussed for over a decade. Yet the page is now 656,613 bytes long. When is it going to be fixed? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:27, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. This is outrageously long. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:16, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Can we get consensus (consistent with WP:CSC) that only notable (as demonstrated by their having a Wikipedia article of their own) law clerks should be on this list? Every other entry is non-encyclopedic content. Happy to open up an RfC if folks think that is the right approach. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:35, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
No on the suggestion of list "notable only." The clerks list's importance lies in its comprehensiveness, as do the other large lists on Wikipedia. The "notable only" approach might make sense for a US Court of Appeals clerks page. BTW, there are over 1,000 Wiki articles yet to create for the notable names on this list. As to breaking up the list, note there are already separate, smaller pages for Chief Justice, Seat 1, Seat 2, etc. Is this structure adequate, in your view? Is the suggestion to keep these existing Seat pages and simply eliminate the comprehensive page? An alternative is to have a small gateway page and treat the large, comprehensive list as a link off of that along with the Chief Justice page, Seat 1 page etc. More broadly, if this list is "too big," by logic we should post Split flags on all of the large lists on Wiki and initiate a high-level discussion. As you can see from the past discussions, there are a number of possible structures for the list, e.g., pages by "Court" instead of by Seat, but each has certain drawbacks that need discussion.Bjhillis (talk) 02:49, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
Can you give us an example of another such comprehensive large list on Wikipedia? UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:30, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles by size Bjhillis (talk) 12:38, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not an argument that is going to carry much weight in an RfC. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:49, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Are we talking about page structure here, or another issue? The thought is Wiki should consistently apply editorial decisions across pages, whether size of page or editorial content. So if we decide a certain size is too big we should post split flags on the top 10 lists and break up those pages, as well. BTW, a law clerk notables only page exists in the category: Category:Law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States. Bjhillis (talk) 17:24, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
It's been awhile since I've checked-in on this talk page. As this issue have arisen again, I propose that this page—List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States—be turned into a set index article (see List of Old Main buildings or Timeline of the presidency of Donald Trump for examples). Given the sheer size of the page, and given that "List of law clerk … SCOTUS" Seat 1, Seat 2, etc. already exist, it seems like the most sensible thing to do. Drdpw (talk) 19:27, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
In accord with your suggestion, I made the main page into a gateway to the lists. The main page is now very small. The long "all seats" list is helpful for certain research and so I placed it as a link off the gateway alongside the pages for each Seat. It's a huge change for the site. But it arguably enables access to the info through a smaller byte gateway. Thoughts? Other better architectures to suggest? Feel free to revert and start over but I thought showing what the gateway concept looks like would advance the conversation.Bjhillis (talk) 17:11, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for taking this step; however, keeping the "all seats" article under a different name defeats the purpose of turning this page into a set index article. I'm sure we can enhance this SIA page so that it points people in the right directions for their research. Cheers. Drdpw (talk) 18:19, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
It doesn't. Need the large page. The point of the gateway is to allow people with low bandwidth into the data, but to keep the long list for those who need it. Also, we need the Sources back...that's the reference for the list.Bjhillis (talk) 19:51, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
As long as all the information that was in the long list is contained in the appropriate "seat" articles, then, No, keeping the long list "for those who need it" is not necessary. If the long list is necessary and important to keep, then this page should have been left as it was. Drdpw (talk) 20:23, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
Reverting to original then until we have further discussion. BTW, there is detail on the long page that was not yet placed on the seat pages so we have to go back anyway. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bjhillis (talk • contribs) 09:07, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
Given the discussion so far, and my own agreement as well, this article should be a list of the lists of clerks by Supreme Court seat. The overwhelming consensus is to split the article, and this is the method that is most popular. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:36, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
Please update the seat pages with the detail on the long page prior to the switch. I will revert back one more time, you can update the Seat pages today, and post the completion of edits. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bjhillis (talk • contribs) 09:41, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
Seat pages—except for the 3 mentioned below—have been updated. Drdpw (talk) 00:10, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
Suggestion: Merge the rows together using (rowspan) to reduce the page size significantly as there are many rows with similar content in a column. Although it is tedious to do so, but it will reduce the page size significantly.
Split list into sections under names of the CJs, so we can skip a column that displays similar content.
‑‑V.S.(C)(T) 12:43, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Summary

Here by request – the initial proposal made in 2007 was to split this article "into Seat specific pages in order to make it more browse-able and easier to use," which has been done as of this edit on 1 January 2019. There have been other suggested splits as well as some objections to any split at all; however, it appears that the choice to make some kind of split has achieved consensus, and that by the conversion of this long, long article into a set index by Seat, the original request has been granted. This of course does not mean that the present consensus won't change in the future and that all discussion on this topic has stopped. Just like trying on a pair of shoes, it's always okay to try on another pair, if necessary, to achieve the best possible setup for readers and researchers. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  put'r there  17:55, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFC: Unsplit

Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments12 people in discussion
NO TO MERGE, YES TO RESPLIT
Noticeable opposition to just merge the various seat articles, just because of article size, even the proposer recognizes this issue. However, there seems to be consensus that the current split is not ideal, and for a resplit on a different basis, probably based on time period. Randy Schutt made a concrete suggestion that got some support, but enough people didn't comment on it that I can't say there is consensus for it specifically; but I'm guessing that if someone is willing to put in the work to make some draft articles with a time period resplit, and propose them, they will probably get consensus. --GRuban (talk) 21:09, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Should this article be restored to its unsplit version, listing clerks to all Justices? RfC relisted by Cunard (talk) at 01:07, 30 June 2019 (UTC). RfC relisted by Cunard (talk) at 00:02, 19 May 2019 (UTC). NullumTempus (talk) 05:05, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Splitting the article into seats makes exactly zero sense.

I understand that there are global policy concerns with the length of this article. That said, the current "solution" does a disservice to Wikipedia's audience in general and to the legal community in particular. Even assuming that it is appropriate to split the article along some line, "seats" is a ridiculous choice. Nobody outside Wikipedia thinks these "seats" (which are an arbitrary result of the statues that created the current composition of the Court and the historical accidents by which each seat was vacated) are meaningful; they are irrelevant to anyone researching the law, the Supreme Court, or law clerks. Dividing by Chief Justice would be much more useful (assuming that some division is required). For example, when FiveThirtyEight cited this article (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-conservative-and-most-liberal-elite-law-schools/), it did not discuss "seats" at all.

More fundamentally, though, editors ought to recognize that enforcing policies for policies' sake and reducing article size for size's sake are not always the best paths forward. This list used to be the one place on the internet where law clerks to the Supreme Court were gathered; readers and researchers could analyze trends in which law schools and lower-court judges sent clerks to the court. No more. Now, anyone looking to conduct such an analysis must take data from nine separate pages and combine it--only to wind up exactly where this article used to be.

True, it's probably unnecessary to list law clerks back to the beginning of the nation all in one place. But seats is not a coherent way to break the article out; rather, it seems to have been chosen solely to reduce the article size (what an achievement!). (Just Google it. Nobody except Wikipedia editors mindlessly following generally applicable but specifically irrelevant policies thinks this is a thing.) If it's killing you to have a large article (which, given that we're in the 21st century and this is all relative, takes little time to load), please break it out in a historically and legally meaningful way, not an arbitrary one.

I get the concern that not all law clerks are historically notable. They aren't. But the list as a whole is notable because the Supreme Court is an impactful institution, and it matters who gets hired as a clerk--and thus who is positioned to influence that institution. We have the data needed to provide a useful list of all clerks in a single article--and we once did so--but instead we've chosen to pointlessly break the list up across nine articles, which helps nobody because it undercuts the research value of the previous format while failing to reduce the overall amount of data used to store the article. I cannot help but conclude that the reason this article has been split up is that a bunch of editors with little else to do but sort articles by length and crusade against the long ones without bothering to understand the justification for their length happened to win the day in the latest RFC. This decision to put policy over value should be corrected.NullumTempus (talk) 05:05, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Support - Just as an appearance thing and desire for better organization approach. I’d like a useful division but better to have none than a bad one. Avoid the distraction or confusion of having a division by seats. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 20:56, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Support trying something else. Organizing it by seat is cumbersome and confusing. Leviv ich 04:55, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose merge, support another splitting principle. There's much too much material for a re-merge. I would suggest doing this by time period, like we do with virtually everything else with a long timeline. As for the "research value" of dumping this all back into one page: a) if anyone really, really, really wants that, they can do it in their own userspace with sectional transcludes, and b) anyone incapable of understanding that a huge list has been broken into sublists, and then just going and looking at the sublists is incapable of any meaningful research.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:43, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
  • There is no explanation on the page as to what the seats mean, but it does give the impression they're somehow important. Given the seats don't even seem to be mentioned at Supreme Court of the United States, they don't seem to be. However, I note List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States by seat is also by seat, and that this article was actually already organized by seat prior to the split.
My impression is that it's quite confusing to organize by seats, as the timelines don't add up and justice's move between seats. Given that, I support undoing this split if this is carried out fully in a way that this page is also not split up by seat. I would oppose recombining everything if it's just going to be exactly the same but all on one page, as it was before. A reorganization here may also point to a way to more usefully divide the article. Not by every chief justice perhaps, but given the article says clerks serve for specific terms, some number of terms may be a useful criteria. CMD (talk) 07:37, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
  • When I put all the law clerks together onto one page in 2013, I added sorting by columns which made it possible to sort by Seat, Justice, Clerk Name, Clerk's Law School, Clerk's Start and Stop Year, and previous Justice the Clerk worked for. See how this page looked in December 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States&oldid=874901287 This made it easier for researchers to track clerks and their characteristics. It was also possible to download the whole table into a spreadsheet and sort in even more ways. Note that Justices do not move from seat to seat, but Clerks do move from one Justice to another. Justices also share some clerks (especially with retired Justices). Most clerks work for only one session, but some have worked for many years like Rufus Day who worked (for his father?) from 1907-1911 and then again from 1917-1919. And look at Hugh W. Baxter: he worked for Brennan, Blackmum, and Bader from 1991-1994.
It might make sense to split the table by years with overlapping years to make it easier to follow individual clerks over the decades. In December 2018, there were 2,482 rows in the table:
Starting Year of Clerks
1880-1949 - 249 clerks
1950-1959 - 169
1960-1969 - 198
1970-1979 - 320
1980-1989 - 341
1990-1999 - 394
2000-2009 - 372
2010-2019 - 393
2020-2029 - 4
They could, for example, be split up into overlapping tables with roughly 600-850 rows each like this:
Clerks who started from 1880-1969 (616 clerks)
Clerks who started from 1960-1989 (859 clerks)
Clerks who started from 1980-1999 (735 clerks)
Clerks who started from 1990-2009 (766 clerks)
Clerks who started from 2000-2019 (765 clerks)
Clerks who started from 2010-2029 (397 clerks so far)
Or maybe it would make sense to break them up some other way. But the goal should be to be able to sort by columns and to easily track individual clerks. Randy Schutt (talk) 18:33, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
However it is legally defined, for the purposes of the Wikipedia table and related articles I mentioned in my comment, some justices do move between numbered seats to the Chief Justice seat. CMD (talk) 05:01, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose recombining. The combined version was way, way, WAY too large an article: caused accessibility problems, and not just for the millions of users with narrow bandwidth connections to Wikipedia. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:08, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose recombining, Support different splitting system Agree that splitting by seat number is not the best way- no one goes around referring to justices by their seat number. The decade system proposed by Randy Schutt seems the best proposal. I would otherwise say splitting by court is the most logical system, but at 17 Chief Justices already, that's going to be too burdensome. Tchouppy (talk) 19:37, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Per Wikipedia:Article titles, revert split(the seats are not commonly mentioned by reliable sources)and per WP:SPLIT, re-split into time-related lists which is also consistent because both the category systems and splits seem to use them often and sorting things by time is established, common practice everywhere.Lurking shadow (talk) 09:55, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment, pardon me asking, but why do we even have these lists? The Supreme Court having clerks looks to be routine to me. The Supreme Court can't exist without these clerks and these are going to be endlessly existing. They'll keep having new ones over and over. I really don't see the point in the endless task of creating and maintaining these lists.Tvx1 11:34, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
    • Explain why your argument is invalid if you exchange "clerks" with "judges", but not if you use "clerks", Tvx1.Lurking shadow (talk) 15:08, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
      • I don’t understand your point here.Tvx1 15:41, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Clerks for Retired Justices

Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Retired justices often hire clerks, and the current format excludes them. If I recall correctly the previous version of this article included them. This is yet another reason to unspilt the page. It was both more useful and more complete before. Circumspect (talk) 06:46, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Not defending the new format but the retired justice clerks are still included, see Seat 1, retired Justice Kennedy.--38.79.3.1 (talk) 22:33, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

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