Document talk:Exclusive: I Can Reveal the Legal Advice on Drone Strikes, and How the Establishment Works

Subject trim!

This could do with a lot less clutter in the subject line - see how it appears on the pages e.g. Craig Murray - with so many extraneous subjects. As a minimum, a person is hardly likely to be a legitimate 'subjects' of a document in which they are not even mentioned. Note that this the converse is not true - mere mentioning does not quality for subject status. Documents will clearly mention many people and events other than their main subjects - which is the purpose of the subjects parameter. Many documents have only a couple of subjects and that is fine. Robin (talk) 09:28, 16 June 2016 (IST)

It seems to me that SMW Subjects becomes an issue of clutter or unwieldiness only when the author is on Wikispooks and are listed in the subjects column of the article. This problem is particularly acute in the cases of Philip Giraldi#Philip Giraldi on Wikispooks and Craig Murray#Craig Murray on Wikispooks. To resolve this issue, I suggest we distinguish between the Topic and the Subjects of the article, perhaps by replacing the subjects with a topic column.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 11:56, 16 June 2016 (IST)

Note, by the way, that naming it as a subject is only one way to make a document appear at the foot of a page. As an example, see recent page stub I created for Clarence Thomas. For documents which mention or touch on a topic, without being really about them, it is generally more helpful to cite them as a reference, since this give you a chance to explain their relevance and use them to build page text for the article. Robin (talk) 04:58, 18 June 2016 (IST)