Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Electoral districts in Canada/Archive 3

message: I propose a different approach to the introductory paragraph. Instead of:
*Langley is a federal electoral district represented in the Canadian House of Commons. It is an xx km² riding with 111,045 people located in the suburbs of the Lower Mainland in the province of British Columbia.
I propose:
*Langley is a federal electoral district in British Columbia, Canada, that has been represented in the Canadian House of Commons since 2004. Its population in 2001 was 111,045.
My proposal is based on a number of factors, the most important of which is that this is the format that I've used for all of the Ontario ridings and scads of others in the west and Nfld that I've revised. (I don't want to suggest that I think it can't be improved, I just want to point out my bias in this.)
My reason for including the "since 2004" phrase is based on work that i have done on defunct districts. In the case of defunct district, when it was represented in the House of COmmons is important information for the reader. Including "since YYYY" in current ridings serves two purposes: (1) it provides a neat parallel with the defunct ridings, and (2) it makes it easy to convert the article to a defunct riding article after redistribution -- 95% of current ridings will probably become defunct ridings eventually. We just have to change "is a federal electoral district" to "was a federal electoral district" and "since 2004" to "from "2004 to 2010".
Putting the province of location into the first sentence avoids the awkwardness of "It is located in....", a phrase that I have used many times, but have been told by a couple of people now is redundant: something is in a place, so "located" is unnecessary. The location within the province can be dealt with in the more specific description later in the article. I don't really know if the area and population belong in the intro paragraph. If they are included in the infobox, the reader see the information in the better context of the comparison to the average riding -- it is bigger or smaller than the average?
I think that we also have to keep in mind that individual riding circumstances may warrant variations from the standard. For example, in Ontario, all federal ridings are also now provincial ridings. In some cases, separate articles have been created for the provincial ridings, but in most cases, because there is not enough information yet to warrant a separate article, one article covers bother the federal and provincial ridings.
Otherwise, I am pretty happy with the format and content of the prototype articles. Ground Zero | t 15:11, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Intro paragraph

message: The following is the list of parties 1903-1986 from BC Elections.  Only some of them I'll make colour templates on - the Provincial, the BC Constructivist, the Soldier/Soldier-Farmer/Soldier-Labour, the Oxford Group Movement and a handful of others; either because they're politically unique or interesting or epitomize the circumstances of their times - e.g. the Soldier-* Parties, which were an outgrowth of post-Great War discontent and unemployment.  Either that or just because they had a good showing and a relatively long run and deserve an article at some point; possibly the Christian Democrats.
===BC Party Abbreviations 1903-1986; colour templates created===
Some defunct ridings have already been applied/ these templates were made in prep for doing the pre-1991 elections on current ridings (some of which go back right to 1871, or near to it); these were either electorally significant or politically/historically significant.  Many are worth short articles eventually; after the federal election prepwork is done anyway.  Colours and tagname table follows; if someone has a better colour sense please fix the colours to suit taste; I basically threw darts at a colour-picker to get what's shown so far; would probably do better to have shades of pink/purple on left and blue 'n' yellow such on right; brownish has become centre-left (NDP) associated in BC colour-culture (NDP govt's colours, esp. 72-75).  Some colours currently aren't working - Coalition, Soldier; they're just ##XXXXXX tags so I don't know why not; other I don't like in comparison to others similar; too similar for different political orientations.  Had to do these so I didn't keep on improvising on the Gov/Opp tags and early 20th C elections, were variant parties are too common to use 'Other' in all cases (or throw in /Marijuana/, /Natural Law/ and /Rhino/ by whim or device).  (Redid colour scheme since original writing of previous; party colours below are slightly different in some cases than on Template:Canadian_politics/party_colours; left this table here for now because of Notes column and also to serve as working-out-bugs template for later entries; will build my own sandboxes soon and put all this in there):
Colour                  	Colour name	Links to templates	Links to templates	Party                                                           	Notes
Colour                  	Colour name	name              	Row               	Party                                                           	Notes
                        	#98CED6    	Provincial        	row               	Provincial Party of British Columbia                            	Mainstream Party early 20th C. important in its own right; different from Tories; ultimately a flop but got a lot of press; essentially rightist but largely regionalist IIRC;
                        	#A1C0DB    	BCCP              	row               	BC Constructivist Party                                         	- article stub written soon
                        	#32C5D6    	Coalition         	row               	Liberal-Conservative Coalition                                  	- article needs to be written; currently redrects to Coalition government but there should be a separate Liberal-Conservative Coalition article just dealing with BC; this was a horse of a different colour and also not a coalition in the usual parliamentary-gov sense; also represents a particular era in BC politics distinct from others.Skookum1 17:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Party colours - historic parties 

message: Some defunct ridings have already been applied/ these templates were made in prep for doing the pre-1991 elections on current ridings (some of which go back right to 1871, or near to it); these were either electorally significant or politically/historically significant.  Many are worth short articles eventually; after the federal election prepwork is done anyway.  Colours and tagname table follows; if someone has a better colour sense please fix the colours to suit taste; I basically threw darts at a colour-picker to get what's shown so far; would probably do better to have shades of pink/purple on left and blue 'n' yellow such on right; brownish has become centre-left (NDP) associated in BC colour-culture (NDP govt's colours, esp. 72-75).  Some colours currently aren't working - Coalition, Soldier; they're just ##XXXXXX tags so I don't know why not; other I don't like in comparison to others similar; too similar for different political orientations.  Had to do these so I didn't keep on improvising on the Gov/Opp tags and early 20th C elections, were variant parties are too common to use 'Other' in all cases (or throw in /Marijuana/, /Natural Law/ and /Rhino/ by whim or device).  (Redid colour scheme since original writing of previous; party colours below are slightly different in some cases than on Template:Canadian_politics/party_colours; left this table here for now because of Notes column and also to serve as working-out-bugs template for later entries; will build my own sandboxes soon and put all this in there):
Colour                  	Colour name	Links to templates	Links to templates	Party                                                           	Notes
Colour                  	Colour name	name              	Row               	Party                                                           	Notes
                        	#98CED6    	Provincial        	row               	Provincial Party of British Columbia                            	Mainstream Party early 20th C. important in its own right; different from Tories; ultimately a flop but got a lot of press; essentially rightist but largely regionalist IIRC;
                        	#A1C0DB    	BCCP              	row               	BC Constructivist Party                                         	- article stub written soon
                        	#32C5D6    	Coalition         	row               	Liberal-Conservative Coalition                                  	- article needs to be written; currently redrects to Coalition government but there should be a separate Liberal-Conservative Coalition article just dealing with BC; this was a horse of a different colour and also not a coalition in the usual parliamentary-gov sense; also represents a particular era in BC politics distinct from others.Skookum1 17:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: BC Party Abbreviations 1903-1986; colour templates created

message: Didn't get a direct answer so went ahead and made a Preferential Ballot Template because of the 1952 and 1953 elections in BC; only applied it to Lillooet (electoral district) so far, pending comments and improvements (?).  The 1953 election data on the Elections BC website had a breakdown of all three ballots instead of only the first and last as is usual; I think it's because of the close near-tie in the 2nd ballot (3 votes).  What's interesting here, and somewhat typical, is the Social Credit vote, disqualified because of the 2nd ballot, broke about in half to go the CCF or the Liberals; idea is not surprising in BC politics, esp. in those days where Social Credit was seen as a right-wing version of a labour/populist party; in this particular riding the personalities and popularity of individual candidates was also a major factor.  James Gordon Gibson, BTW, is I think the father of Gordon Gibson Jr., ongoing Fraser Institute politico/columnist and erstwhile provincial leadership candidate.
I changed the CCF label back to CCF from "Co-operative Commonwealth" because of recognition issues; CCF has better brand-recognition and if you asked people who knew what it was they'd probably screw up on the actual full-word title; I think it's best as CCF.  Didn't notice if you'd done the same thing on NDP vs. New Democrat; I know for the earlier Social Democratic Party I abbreviated it to Social Democrat, but in terms of the syntax used for other parties (i.e. the party name, sans "Party", except for obscure/fringe parties where I've sometimes included the whole name) it doesn't scan the same way.  NDP and CCF and brandnames in BC; for that matter we could just as easily use "Socred" as an abbreviation for Social Credit; but these pages  aren't just for British Columbians, of course.Skookum1 23:13, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Preferential Ballot Template made 

message: I think there is a small issue with the election results table... The Wiki Syntax page keeps reporting "Unopened or unclosed |}" problem on the pages what use that template. 
I think this is because the begin table tag {| is "absorbed" into the template, and the syntax checker got confused.
Can someone confirm/comment on that? p_b1999 (Talk|Contribution) 19:04, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Syntax