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Non profits NGOs etc

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Orgs as currently organized are not organized (tongue twister!), that is clear, but this list seems to lose some of the positive complexity that has developed without ridding the negative complexity.

Take human rights organizations for example, they currently are listed in

and I'm sure myriad others.


I think non profit, non governmental organizations and charities should be collapsed into one category, with a clear reference to the various regional usages (e.g. non profit is generally U.S. term, NGO everywhere else). Divisions by issue should be standarized. e.g. see Category:Activism by issue and Category:Advocacy groups for the various approaches currently being taken. In dividing by geogrpahy, seems that cats like Category:International non-governmental organizations should be eliminated in favor of regional or country cats. Eek my head hurts. Look forward to engaging more on this issue. Scarykitty 08:36, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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We're discussing this issue here, but we may migrate that discussion to this Talk instead. Let me know what you'd prefer. I think this place is more central to the discussion, as we'll be building up our master list of organizations from this category. As I suggested, I think we should start first by distinguishing nonprofit and forprofit organizations. I suspect very few of these will be forprofit, so we can instead focus on categorizing the nonprofits. OptimistBen (talk) 12:01, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • That sounds good. Here's some thoughts:
    • Category:Companies is currently filed under Category:Organizations by activity, Category:Business organizations, Category:Organizations by legal status.
    • Criminal organizations are usually for profit, too. <g>
    • Vegaswikian had proposed, and I think it's a good idea, that Category:Organizations be primarily a parent category for children categories. What do people think of the existing children categories?
    • I've been focusing my efforts on Category:Non-profit organizations, which is a mess. I tend to think that Category:Non-profit organizations is the most generic form of this term.
      • I'd like to merge Category:Voluntary organisations into it (posted CFD 1/10).
      • Category:Non-governmental organizations is the next big one: It's a term that's largely used synonymously with "non-profits" and, in fact, sometimes the "NGOs" actually have formal relationships with governments. Professional associations that have regulatory responsibilities, for instance, or religious organizations that are official state religions. So it definitely needs to be weeded out, at the least. We should also consider the category itself -- I'm not convinced that "NGOs" is a very helpful term in terms of WP categories. It might be the case that it's easier to assign organizations as governing / governmental, and not try to determine whether they're "NGOs" or not.
      • Category:Charities is another big one. In some uses, charities means a particular tax status; in other uses, charities refers to certain charitable purposes, usually health, education & welfare. I think this is really confusing.
        1. I don't think tax status is the best way to categorize things on -- for one thing, it varies across jurisdictions, and for another, lots of organizations set up subsidiary organizations to be within different tax statuses. In the US, for instance, orgs often set up separate 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4) organizations; businesses often set up semi-non-profits for tax purposes; and so on. If we do keep it, we should probably specify "tax status" in the category name, e.g., "Organizations with charitable tax status", and have it be jurisdiction specific. But I think there's some risk to categorizing anything with a legal status like that.
        2. Charitable purposes is also confusing, because it can blur with the legal tax status, and because different people have different ideas about what that is. If someone adopts their local legal definition it might be different than a more generic "health education & welfare" concept. I think we should scrap so-called "charitable purposes" which is just incredibly vague, and instead specify exactly what purpose is involved. "Housing shelters", "Soup kitchens", "Medical clinics", and so on.
  • Other thoughts? --Lquilter (talk) 05:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

approach!

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oh, oh -- I think I figured it out: The "legal status" ("charities", "non-profit organizations") is usually country-specific legal terminology. So we should combine this with the country terms, which are usually in need of subdivision anyway. For instance, Category:Charities based in the United Kingdom, and Category:Non-profit organizations based in the United States. Then subject-oriented classifications can avoid being entangled with the legal structure/organization issues, which vary from place to place. --Lquilter (talk) 16:42, 19 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. Adding the country is OK, but I should also be able to look at a Category page for all of a certain type of organization. Then I should be able to expand that to look at only that type of organization ins a certain country. Also, it's best to use definite terms rather than vague terms, which is why I agree that we should avoid categorizing organizations by whether they are NGOs. Non-profit is a definite legal classification. OptimistBen (talk) 21:22, 19 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Moved from talk page of Category:Voluntary organisations that was merged to this one

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