Talk:Advocacy group

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Found page moved by cut and paste. Target page tagged and reported at WP:REPAIR  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 01:12, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Interest group → Advocacy group — Interest group is too general and easily confused with Special Interest Group. It it potentially contentious because there are some 350 direct links (and some 150 redirects via other titles) More details on Talk:Interest group below PeterEastern (talk) 14:37, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not comfortable with the current distinction in wikipedia between 'Interest Group' and 'Special Interest Group'. An Interest Group is currently defined as being about lobbying/pressuring/advocacy and pressure group and advocacy group redirect to it; a Special Interest Group is described as being non-advocacy and seems to be restricted to scientific interests (to quote In technical fields, a Special Interest Group (SIG) is a community with a particular interest in a specific technical area). So lets check some current usage of the terms.

• The US National Institute for Health lists some 100 'Interest Groups' (from the '14-3-3 Protein Interest Group' to the 'Zebrafish-Frog Interest Group')[1] and I really doubt that the Zebrafish-Frog Interest Group or any others are overtly political or advocating much except to left alone to learn more about Zebrafish-Frogs.
• One source defines both 'Interest Group' and 'Special interest Group' as advocacy groups: A group of individuals who share some common goals and try to influence public policy to meet these goals. Also called "special interest group". [2].
• However another definition of 'Interest Group' avoids any implication of advocacy: Voluntary associations of individuals sharing a common goal, for example to share information and learning. [3].
• On the other hand the Cambridge Dictionary defines both 'Interest Groups' and 'Special Interest Group' as being advocacy groups with a similar but slightly different wording. Interest group: A group or organization with particular aims and ideas which tries to influence the government [4]. Special Interest Group: A group of people who have particular demands and who try to influence political decisions involving them.[5]
• A UK educational site describes a pressure group or interest group as follows: a pressure group can be described as an organised group that does not put up candidates for election, but seeks to influence government policy or legislation. They can also be described as ‘interest groups’, ‘lobby groups’ or ‘protest groups’. Some people avoid using the term ‘pressure group’ as it can inadvertently be interpreted as meaning the groups use actual pressure to achieve their aims, which does not necessarily happen. In Britain, the number of political parties is very small, whereas the number of pressure groups runs into thousands; as the membership of political parties has fallen, that of pressure groups has increased.[6] They also have a more general discussion of pressure groups.
• The Internal Revenue Service in the US evidently defines Advocacy as any activity that a person or organization undertakes to influence policies. There is great latitude in this definition, and some people consider advocacy to be all activities that are not specifically lobbying, such as public demonstrations, or the filing of friend of the court briefs.[7]

I have just spotted the Special Interest Group describes a interest group focused on learning, but that Special interest group (lower case version) redirected here as did these verions special interest group and Special-interest group- I have changed the redirect for all of these to 'Special Interest Group' and have also sorted all the articles that used those titles to point them to the appropriate article.

My conclusion is that Interest group is too general for this article and that the IRS term of Advocacy group would be more appropriate (which also works well for us here in the UK). I therefore propose to make the following changes:-

1. Move this article to Advocacy group
2. Change Interest group into a disambiguation page and use the proposed text below as an introductory paragraph
3. Change the following redirect pages to links to link directly to Advocacy group: Pressure group, Lobby group, Pressure groups, Lobbying group, Lobby groups, Advocacy groups
4. Leaving the following redirects pointing to Interest group and then through the linked articles over time and redirect them appropriately: Special interest, Special interests, Interest groups, Special Interest
5. Delete the following redirect pages (unused or only referred to from use talk pages): Slogan 'special interest', Interest Group, Political pressure group

PeterEastern (talk) 20:47, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Does no-one have an opinion on the above? This is an important article with some 22,000 views a month so needs to be right. I will go ahead soon with a 'proposed move tag' on the article to see if that gets any more response. I have just been through all the articles that used the special interest group redirect and changed them to Advocacy group or Lobby group or left them alone as appropriate. I will work on the direct links now.PeterEastern (talk) 07:15, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The move is complicated by the fact that the Advocacy group article used to be a live article for this subject before the content was 'cut and pasted' into its current location and therefore has a history of its own. Given its history non-administrators can't do a simple move. I will request that an administrator does the move today. PeterEastern (talk) 07:58, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The instructions for requesting an admin-moves seems unclear and admin may pick it up automatically - as such I will just wait and see if someone does it and then do any necessary cleanup afterwards. PeterEastern (talk) 09:17, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, splitting off material into an article which is now a redirect is no problem; simply cut and paste that section or other text. Moving to a name that is now a redirect will require deleting the redirect, which is an Admin job. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:04, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, however Advocacy group is indeed currently a redirect so is this an admin task or can I do it? I believe that I can cut and paste content from this article into the Advocacy group article over the top of the redirect and then insert the new disambiguation text into this article. Given that both pages have histories then that might well be the best way to maintain the complete history for the article - indeed it is probably the only way to maintain the complete histories. I will wait for clearer guidance on the matter but suggest that this might be the appropriate course of action.PeterEastern (talk) 12:22, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, so I have now moved the content to the Advocacy group page using cut/paste and have changed a bunch of re-directs to point to it (including one from this article). I have created a link back to this talk page from the Advocacy group talk page for reference and have created a Interest group (disambiguation) page to tease out other uses of Interest group. I will now go through more of the links to this 'Interest Group' page and resolve them to the appropriate other page over the next week or so. Should I now change the 'move' tag at the start of this section or what to indicate that the 'move' has been completed.? PeterEastern (talk) 15:25, 9 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support the move in general. The term advocacy group seems more specific to me. "Interest Group" is a term I often see applied to entirely non-political groups (e.g., SIGs (special interest groups) of the IEEE). I realize this is a pervasive change, but as near as I can tell it's quite sensible. --Joe Decker (talk) 00:10, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, I have been giving this a lot of thought over the past few days and now see that interest group is much wider than advocacy group and that advocacy group is a type of interest groups but that interest group is also used as a euphemism for advocacy group and lobbying group but that it is more helpful to keep the concepts clearer. It may be appropriate at some point to move Special Interest group to fill the 'interest group' disambiguation page with a clear link to advocacy and lobbying in the lead. Personally I think that is probably the best long term position, but lets see if this move is successful first. I may do some work on the special interest group article now to make the relationship clearer. PeterEastern (talk) 07:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a proposed introductory paragraph for the replacement page:

An Interest Group (also Special interest group) is made up of individuals or organizations with a shared area interest, pastime, concern or cause. Interest groups can be found for virtually any field of endeavor to almost any levels of details. Some are large formalized legal entities and may be of national or international significance, other are small, informal, transient and local. Some Lobby groups and Advocacy groups are referred to as 'Interest groups' or 'Special interest groups'. Other example of interest groups include learned societies, university societies.Special Interest Group (SIG) often refers to an interest groups for a technical subject. In publishing 'Special Interest' is a category for books for a wide variety specific subjects (for example Nature & Wildlife, Travel, Sports, How-to, Cooking).^[1]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.