Talk:United Federation of Planets

Overhaul and In-universe

This article is listed on the Star Trek projects page as being too in-universe, and after a first read, it is. What is worse is that, as Trek fans, we all know what the Federation is, but no one has ever really said it in an episode. What has happened to this article is that it is now full of statements by people trying to explain what the federation is based on a lot of those feelings and not so much on cited references. This amounts to speculation, conjecture, and at its worse - original research. I'm going to take a jab at making the article less in-universe and trimming all of this un-cited conjecture out too. I feel there may not be much article left afterwards. Luckily, our purpose here is as an encyclopedia to let lay people know what the federation is, not what we think it is based on years of bits and pieces and trivia. StarHOG (Talk) 22:05, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh, and most of the citations are for articles and blogs that people have written about the federation, where they write their feelings, conjecture, and original research about what the federation is without citing any canonical information from the series itself. One author insists the federation can't exist without slavery. Another author insists that Roddenberry based the federation off of alien governments he was made aware of by friends in the Swedish military working with aliens or something like that. StarHOG (Talk) 22:15, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

That sounds like a ridiculous yet interesting theory. Cvkoning (talk) 22:48, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Cloaking

They developed a cloaking device but never really used it and aren’t allowed to so should it count? Kuttispielt (talk) 14:06, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Are you talking about the phasing device experimentally used on the Pegasus? That had a cloaking effect, in that it was phased out and couldn't be detected, but wasn't really a cloaking device. StarHOG (Talk) 21:25, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Placement of "fictional" in lede

Hi, I felt it was odd that the first sentence currently reads as follows: "In the Star Trek universe, the United Federation of Planets (UFP) is the fictional interstellar government that sent Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the crew ..." etc.

This feels like a strange place for the qualifier "fictional." The Federation isn't a fictional within the Star Trek universe; within the fictional Star Trek universe, the Federation is a very real government. I went looking for similar articles to see if this was a normal placement. The Starfleet article is similarly worded ("Starfleet is a fictional organization in the Star Trek media franchise."). Still, I suspect that the Section_31_(Star_Trek) page ("Section 31, in the fictional universe of Star Trek, is an autonomous intelligence and defense organization"), provides the least ambiguity.

I know it's not likely to cause anyone any serious confusion, even if English isn't their native language. Still, I'm making the change so that people can see how it looks and consider how they feel about it. I'm sure it's ultimately fine either way. Emoprog (talk) 21:08, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Flag in infobox

Should we note in the infobox that the image there is only the UFP's flag from a specific time period and/or should we change the image to the new UFP flag shown in Discovery Season 3? Prcc27 (talk) 21:58, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

The Federation flag

So,The Federation itself has it's own flag according to the films and series. But the article here doesn't have the flag added. The question I would like to ask is why? KirkTGM (talk) 11:46, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to change it. We encourage you to be bold in updating pages, since wikis like ours develop faster when everybody edits. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. You can always preview your edits before you publish them or test them out in the sandbox. If you need additional help, check out our getting started page or ask the friendly folks at the Teahouse.

In this case it's probably just because no one has got around to making a copyright free image of the Federation flag and uploading it. So, if you want to help then go ahead and make one. You'll need to make it yourself, not find it on Google and paste it in, to make sure the image is copyright free. --Shimbo (talk) 12:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Just to add to this: the image of the Federation flag that you added before was from Memory Alpha and on a CC-BY-SA-NC (Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial) licence. Images on CC-BY-SA-NC licences can't be used by Wikipedia (See Image_use_policy#Free_licenses) which was why your edit was reverted.--Shimbo (talk) 12:19, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• UFP Flag.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 20:37, 27 March 2022 (UTC)