Talk:Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna

Election symbol

​I notice Sachith.sulakkhana has made an edit to the election symbol of the party, which he had uploaded earlier today and added to the infobox mistakenly as the logo of the party. The image has now been edited to include a cross, however, which isn't the case in any of the other political organization/front articles on Wikipedia, or even the Sri Lankan ones (see United National Party, Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna etc). A border/frame and caption has also been added on to the image, which then makes the infobox look even more different from other pages. My suggestion is that the image be reverted to its original format, where just the symbol was present with no cross, and the 'thumb' format be removed, essentially returning the page to where I last left it. - ක - (talk) 13:10, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

So I've gone ahead and undone the edit, seeing as there's been no reply to this. Do not revert this edit without discussing it here first, please @Sachith.sulakkhana:- ක - (talk) 14:32, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Good call. Clearly an attempt at getting a few more votes on 10 February. Pathetic.--Obi2canibe (talk) 22:04, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Ideology

This infobox field has been contentious throughout the article's existence, and I think it's a good idea to get this settled. @Slcobra:'s edits in particular are odd- since when has the SLPP or the SLFP/UPFA ever advocated economic liberalism? Their entire platform throughout their existence has been state ownership. The page on economic liberalism has this as its first sentence:

Economic liberalism is an economic system organized on individual lines, which means the greatest possible number of economic decisions are made by individuals or households than by collective institutions or organizations.

Could Slcobra, or anyone for that matter, reasonably relate this to the SLPP? In addition, I think it's unhelpful that "Sinhala nationalism" was replaced by "Nationalism". What does replacing one with the other do except lead a reader away from a relevant article to a generalized one? Knowing Lankan editors, one might very well argue this was a deliberate act to promote a personal ideology.- ක - (talk) 11:36, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Ideology revert wars

I have noticed constant editing of the ideology of this party without any sources or references backing them. I believe that the current ideologies reflect the reality since they are properly backed by two sources. Thank you. - CoolGin (talk) 09:08, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

front?

I'm not sure it's a front in the sense of Front organization. If it is we are not saying which party it is a front for. I think it is more of a popular front than a covert organisation. 90.252.180.178 (talk) 19:35, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

The SLPP's right-wing credentials

In spite of multiple sources being provided for the SLPP's right-wing credentials, these edits are being reversed by poorly informed Wikipedia account holders. Their logic appears spurious, inconsistent and inaccurate. For instance, the user User:BastianMAT claims that the sources "...does not mention the party as right-wing". However, the sourced article in The Hindu quotes Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda, a respected political scientist, as saying "The SLPP today is a right wing, neo-conservative party that favours authoritarianism". This directly contradicts the user's claims. Does the user consider The Hindu and Uyangoda to be 'unreliable sources'? The said user has also turned a convenient blind eye to inconsistencies in other links, for instance, the sourced article which is supposed to claim that the SLPP's political position is left-wing, but which, in fact, does not. On the contrary, it claims that the party has been "...pulled to or pushed by the neo-nationalist populist Right". While I wish to apologize to User:BastianMAT for referring to them as an 'inadequately informed European', the inconsistencies and discrepancies in their own standards, along with their threat to suspend me, are unhelpful, non-constructive, and requires further explanation from the user. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2402:D000:811C:E7ED:91C9:C7D5:78EA:7F6C (talk) 16:08, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I infact agree, some of the sources did not pass verification, and did break consistency, so I have removed them. The Hindu article is fine for describing the position, as well as EIAS. Sources now should be on bar, as per meeting sites guidelines. BastianMAT (talk) 19:22, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! 2402:D000:811C:2254:D10B:C2E4:CC0B:FB52 (talk) 03:25, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

For Western editors who might be unaware of Sri Lankan politics: calling the SLPP "right-wing"/"neo-conservative" is the Sri Lankan equivalent of an old Labour party member referring to Blair as "Tory-ite" or Bernie Sanders referring to the Clintons as "same as Republicans". It's a rhetorical device. It's not technically wrong when the speaker and his regular audience are both significantly to the left of the median voter, which is the case of most academics (I can attest to that as an academic; any party that moves away from the hard left, technically, is "right-wing" to us.)

This does not mean that every such flippant remark made by an ethnic studies expert should be cited literally on Wikipedia as evidence that a party is "right" of the median voter. SLPP led the left-wing coalition in the last election, against a right-wing coalition (NDF), and this two-party dynamic has held in Sri Lanka for several decades. Political science allows for a national election where one party briefly moves to the center or tries to outflank the other party; but political science lexicon does not allow for decades of national elections where *both* major parties are described as "right-wing", because the definition of "left" and "right" are always made in context of a nation's political history.

The couple of editors who are edit warring to insert this flippant characterization as a factual description are either clueless or dishonest, possibly both. Ceconhistorian (talk) 23:59, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

The IP above is correct, and do you have any RS to back this up? The bottom line is we have a political scientist contradicting the WP:OR of syncretic position, and that of an op-ed. Did you miss https://eias.org/publications/op-ed/eu-election-observation-mission-to-sri-lanka-2019/ and also "EU Election Observation Mission to Sri Lanka 2019 November 4, 2019 Op-ed"? So you either lied, or clearly missed that, and came here to make personal attacks to other users who follow RS and disagree with your own OR and personal opinions. You have no right to edit war, as you have also been reverted by another users, unless you can get an equally reliable political scientist contradicting or disagreeing with Uyangoda and more importantly that is not an op-ed, rather than just make your own OR without providing any RS for why a political scientist quoted in a RS is wrong. See also WP:PRESERVE. Why remove Ideology? It is well-sourced and properly attributed. Feel free to expand rather than remove it ouright. Davide King (talk) 10:28, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

The IP also provided further RS that support Uyangoda, e.g. The Wire and East Asia Forum, which are clearly not op-eds. Do you still think Sri Lankan and Asian political scientist are leftists who consider the centre-left to be right-wing? Pre-2019, the party may have been centre-left and more similar to the SLFP, but things have clearly changed, and the infobox must reflect that, as much as in the past I loved to reflect the whole party history and evolution; there is the body for that. If you actually read Uyangoda and "Ideology" you removed with no reason whatsoever, you would have seen that it addressed several ponts you raised, including the JVP and UNP moving closer to the centre. Davide King (talk) 10:41, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

My proposed version of the infobox also does not include [[Neo-conservatism]], which is mainly about the American understanding of the term, but rather [[Modern conservatism|Conservatism]], linking to the section stating: "Many sources refer to any political parties on the right of the political spectrum as conservative despite having no connection with historical conservatism. In most cases, these parties do not use the term conservative in their name or self-identify as conservative." This seems to be a much better link, if "Neoconservatism" was the issue. Davide King (talk) 11:37, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

You're obfuscating two things. The state of the article that you wish to revert to consists of an intentionally misleading infobox with a long and unusual ideology section (that rarely exist in other articles) that you cite to whitewash the infobox. The state of the article that other serious editors wish to revert to consist of what is both necessary and sufficient: a well-sourced, comprehensive infobox that accurately and clearly describes the established ideology of the party, not whatever ideology that an ethnic studies scholar thinks it's *trending* towards. I'm not the editor who initially removed the "Ideology" section - I suspect it was seen as WP:UNDUE - but I'm wholly in favor of removing it if its sole reason for existence is to cover up for a misleading infobox.

Political scientists exist of all stripes and colors. Professor Uyangoda does not have a single publication on party politics and is thus not a credible source when it comes to the identification of a party on the political spectrum. Academics speak to media organizations all the time on subjects that they don't specialize in, but they are to be discounted when better sources - from scholars that actually do research in those narrower areas - contradict them directly.

The only source presently in the article which discusses the party's economic positions - historical or current - is the EIAS source, which is published by a research organization that regularly publishes academic papers which discuss, among other things, a party's economic positions; see for instance this recent paper on economic policy in Japan 1. If you dig up their credentials, the authors of both the paper and the article held a junior researcher position with a master's degree in a relevant area; it's clear that these researchers are involved with both types of publications. An "op-ed" designation by this research organization (and some others) simply indicate that it's not written as comprehensively as a policy paper. This is not meant to indicate that it's comparable with a journalistic op-ed. (Technically speaking, the "op-ed" description is incongruous; EIAS does not have an editorial board, only an advisory board). The main determinant of credibility is its publisher and extent of of peer review, not its self description; "comment"s or "briefing"s published by scientific/research organizations, for instance, are highly credible and regularly cited in academic papers; whereas a self-described "academic analysis" by an undergrad published on Vox would not even meet the lower credibility standards on Wikipedia.

In comparison: the sources you're citing are from the EAF, a think tank that's comparable with, but less established than the EIAS, and written by an IR scholar; and a The Wire source written by a certain Devaka Gunawardena who's currently listed as a grad student in cultural anthropology but would have had only an undergrad degree at the time of the article's 2019 appearance. These two sources are somewhat credible in discussing the nationalist and right-wing populist tendencies of the SLPP, which is adequately described in the original infobox. But neither source disputed that the party is economically left-wing; in fact, neither source mentioned a single thing about economic ideology (because, in good academic practice, they chose not to speak on an area that they aren't qualified in discussing).

Your edits thus sought to remove the only credible source on the party's economic position, and then to extrapolate its economic position from several sources of comparable academic standing that did not attempt to describe its economic position, on account of a misreading of WP:RS and intellectual laziness. A short search on Google returns numerous articles that discuss SLPP's economic policies, all of which concur with them being generally left-wing: see for instance 23("against privatization"; "dirigisme"; "state-controlled economy"). The latter is a The Hindu article which you seems to judge as a more reliable source than EIAS; you're welcome to add that as a source for the SLPP's left-wing economic position if you wish to, though it's pretty clear to me that the EIAS is the more authoritative source of the two.

I'm technically in agreement of your decision to replace Uyangoda's "neo-conservative" charge with a link to modern conservatism, but the fact that we'd even have to do this pick-and-mix (WP:SYNTH) of his description is a clear indication that Uyangoda was never a credible source in this academic subfield. "Neo-conservatism" is simply not used as an academic term to substitute for right-wing populism - not in America, not in Sri Lanka, not anywhere.Ceconhistorian (talk) 20:15, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

It is not at all unusual, and is explained in the body. How am I whitewashing? It is you who is doing so by pretending the party is left-wing, when it is an authoritarian populist party per sources. I do not understand your issues with Uyangoda, which borders on "I don't like him". Unlike the other sources, he actually is a political scientist, which is the kind of source we should look at in relation to ideology and political position; he does not need to be an economist to do so, and most articles do not list 'Social' and 'Economic' positions. If the only "credible source on the party's economic position" is an op-ed, we have a problem, and it is not Uyangoda.

Second, even if we accept EIAS as not an opinion piece, it is contradicted by Uyangoda, whether you like it or not, and I argue is more reliable because it is an "Analysis" article, not an "Op-ed", in a RS and cites a political scientist, which is the kind of source we should look for a party's position on the political spectrum. As an expert of Sri Lanka, Uyangoda is good for the infobox, and EIAS is good for the body. Ultimately, it does not matter that the party may use left-wing or state-capitalist rethoric, what matters is what they actually do; the party may be de jure social-democratic but de-facto may be (right-wing authoritarian) populist per sources. If the issue is the "trending towards", then please let us work together to look at more recent reliable sources and see what they say.

I do not understand how you think 'Conservatism' is SYNTH but all the rest is not, in particular 'Syncretism', which none of the sources actually mention at all (the EIAS pieace saying it is left-wing on economy and right-wing on social issues does not automatically entails support for syncretism in the infobox; if you think sourcing is not strong enough for 'Right-wing', then I would support a compromise of not putting any political position at all until we get consensus among academic sources). In fact, several European right-wing populist parties are left-wing on the economy and right-wing on social issues, so it is not at all unusual.

As it is not used in an American context, it must be referring to modern conservatism, so there should be no issue, and I am using Uyangoda to support the claim the party is right-wing; for right-wing populism, there are the other sources, which also support the 'Right-wing' political position. None of them are opinion pieces, one is published by a RS, and the other is similar to EIAS; both of them are further supported by The Hindu "Analysis" article and Uyagonda. In fact, we agree that they are fine, what we apparently disagree is that you think being left-wing on something and right-wing on something must automatically mean we must engage in OR by putting 'Syncretic', even though none of the sources actually contain that wording, and do not contradict that the party is overall right-wing in this case, or left-wing in another case.

Second of all, neither of the two sources you cited actually support a left-wing position on economics, as there is no mention of 'left-wing' or similiar wording in both refs. That you think being "against privatization" and supporting "dirigisme" is automatically left-wing, without any of the two cited refs explicitily saying so, is WP:OR and WP:SYNTH; several conservatives and right-wing parties have been opposed to privatization and support state interventionism, so nothing unusual, and perhaps you are being "either clueless or dishonest", not me or the IP. Ultimately, it is political science that studies a party's position on the political spectrum, not economists, and we should rely on the former for a party's political position. The latter can be used in the body to explain the party's economic views, which do not contradict the position on the political spectrum. Davide King (talk) 17:40, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

I've removed "syncretic". I agree it's a step towards WP:OR. It's sufficient to describe the party as socially right-wing and economically left-wing, both of which are adequately sourced. I see no merit in the rest of what your comment. A self-titled "analysis" by a journalist is not more reliable than a publication by a research organization. That is the standard we use in academia. I'll be happy to join you in a discussion at WP:RSN or some dispute resolution process if you wish to continue this discussion. Ceconhistorian (talk) 02:02, 16 July 2022 (UTC)