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@Res0xEg3: Hey there. Having gone through this list and trimmed down some entries that I thought didn't clearly fit the list, I'm left wondering what the scope of this list is exactly. How are we defining what a "contributor to anarchist theory" is? What makes a person a "contributor" or a work a "contribution"? Are there any reliable, secondary sources that discuss contributors/contributions to anarchist theory that we could be citing? --Grnrchst (talk) 21:17, 17 May 2026 (UTC)
@E mln e: Pinging you, as you accepted the AfC submission. Needless to say, I don't think this was ready to leave draft space. --Grnrchst (talk) 21:49, 17 May 2026 (UTC)
Thank you for pinging me! My rationale for accepting this page was that it is a useful page for navigation; we have a lot of list pages of theorists, with various types of formatting, of the sort. Using that type of tables is something I've seen mainly in music theory (see e.g. List of medieval music theorists), which I have found quite useful to compare and sort through biographies that are already in mainspace. I think of this type of list as complementing categories.
Where I should have been more thorough is that I checked a subset of the pages linked, to see if the information included in the table was sourced in the original article, but should have brought the citations on the list pages and checked all pages.
I could bring it back to draft space until we figure this out?
Thank you for patrolling E mln e (talk) 05:36, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
@E mln e: I understand the rationale and do think there could be a space for something like this. Unfortunately, the list of medieval music theorists demonstrates rather well the issues with this list; the medieval music theorists list is fully verified by tertiary sources, where this doesn't actually cite any sources other than the primary sources listed (several of which don't appear to have anything to do with anarchism). I'll leave the decision on re-draftifying up to you, just wanted to make my opinion on this clear. --Grnrchst (talk) 07:59, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
You are the domain expert! I'll move it back to draft.
One thing I want to investigate is that these lists of theorists exist in many different formats and levels of citations - some don't have any citations to published lists and function more like categories, and the type citations used vary a lot. But that goes way beyond this particular case. Thank you for pointing out the issues with this! E mln e (talk) 19:16, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
Hey, sorry for the late reply. Initially I thought it as the simile of the List of contributors to Marxist theory but for Anarchism. A contributor as I tried to conceive it, was a person with written works (books, articles, pamphlets, manifestos...) which allowed to theoretically advance (new ideas or analysis) in any school of thought, organizational form or history of anarchism. I had not checked for secondary sources to validate an anarchist author/contributor, as the majority are accepted as a consensus. However, I gladly accept your suggestions and the decision to move it back as a Draft. So any sources, repositories, or search engines that you may recommend to me, I would greatly appreciate it. Res0xEg3 (talk) 21:53, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
@Res0xEg3: That list is also mostly unsourced, so I don't think it's a good example to be basing your own work off. Right now, this list still has me regularly questioning "how has this person contributed to anarchist theory?" (i.e. for people not identified as anarchists anywhere on Wikipedia or whose main work was unrelated to anarchist theory) and "how is this a work of anarchist theory?" (i.e. for works of history, memoirs, essays and letters, some of which never mention anarchism). This would be helped a lot by citing reliable sources that clearly show how they relate to the subject of anarchist theory. I can definitely recommend using Google Scholar as a search engine to look for secondary sources; the best for a list like this would be sources that clearly describe an author as an "anarchist theorist" or a literary work as a work of "anarchist theory". The more explicit the source about the connection, the better, as it makes it easier to verify that an entry belongs in the list and that its inclusion is not just down to the personal interpretation of the list compilers. I'd be more than happy to support the list being moved back to main space once it has a more solidly-sourced basis for inclusion. --Grnrchst (talk) 07:38, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
Also, I've noticed this list appears to more or less duplicate the scope of the List of books about anarchism, just with the fields rearranged so the authors are first. Do these two lists need to exist separately from each other? What would set this list apart from the other one? --Grnrchst (talk) 08:11, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
