Talk:2008 New Zealand general election

message: is describing various seats as "considered vulnerable to (re)capture" weaseltalkin'? 'cause, some winner is going to come through and sow a bunch of those reference needed tags, where you have to go back and find out who considered it vulnerable, and why if it's "considered" vulnerable, why we can't say "is vulnerable". I was just wondering if people had any idea about the language of these paragraphs?  Rocklaw (talk) 20:54, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't like the term "capture" in this instance. A party doesn't "capture" a seat like some sort of animal, they win the support of voters. --Lholden (talk) 03:14, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

text: Is being considered vulnerable as simple as having less than x% majority, or n vote majority? If so, a single reference to someone saying that could be found, and then a paper majority for the changed seats also needs to be referenced.-gadfium 03:19, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I agree with all of this. "capture" is a misnomer; for instance, Nick Smith won Nelson, but Labour hosed his party down for party votes. Who won that? And Gadfium is right, because (1) nobody did the maths on the numbers for the new seats (and probably nobody will) and (2) I don't know, do we wait for an article in the Dom from Nigel Roberts called "seats to watch" or somesuch? Is that dubious use of referencing, when we reference opinion articles? I take from all of this that the paragraph needs to be rewritten. Any ideas how? Rocklaw (talk) 11:26, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I have got data calculating majorities on the new boundaries for all 70 seats if that would be helpful. It is based on reallocating polling places to the new boundaries and proportionally allocating special votes DPF (talk) 11:38, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: considered vulnerable?

message: Hi, I'm new here, and interested in helping make this page better. There are two things I want to talk about: 1. I would really like to have all 70 current electorates profiled (can we get maps?) before too long, maybe Easter? (of which I will gladly do a lot of the work) 2. that I would like to turn the 'marginal seats' section into a 'notable races' section, so as to avoid oversignifying electorate results (they're not super important any more)non-marginal seats. I guess, just nuts and bolts. So, yeah. hi. Rocklaw (talk) 00:08, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: last minute

message: what counts as a snap election? If 1984 was a snap then so was 2002, right? In which case, they aren't that rare any more. My point when I renovated the opening paragraph was to say off year snaps are ridiculously rare. I will follow it up by adding that we shouldn't get too hung up on presedence or convention, because those sorts of things are just made to be broken, especially while we're still feeling our way around the new(ish) electoral system. Kripto 21:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to be generally agreed that 1984 was a snap election, and our article calls it one. I'm not sure about the 2002 election; I looked at it before updating the page. It was certainly called months earlier than it legally had to be, and some people called it a snap election, but the government said it wasn't one. I see our article snap election says 2002 was one, so I would have no objection to the lead paragraph being updated to that.-gadfium 02:02, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Perhaps we should avoid discussion of snap elections in this article, since they aren't relevant here at present.-gadfium 08:51, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Heh, that's a good point actually - we don't have fixed election dates. Although, of course, I think we should... (rants about the constitution and lack thereof). However, the term "snap" implies an election called when no-one expects one. In which case only 1984 could be truly considered a snap election, as 1951 and 2002 were expected. --Lholden 02:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  "New Zealand parliaments traditionally run a full term" is either a contradiction in terms or an abuse of language, precisely because "we don't have fixed election dates". When talking of time, "term" <I>means</I> a defined span of time. It doesn't have to be precisely known in advance, e.g. a convict sentenced to imprisonment for "the term of his natural life", but it does have to be fixed in advance. In the Westminster System parliaments do not usually have terms at all, though they usually do have an upper limit on the interval between elections. It makes even less sense to talk of governments or ministers having terms of office, since they can span several parliaments without even a theoretical upper limit (apart from exception countries with variations to the Westminster System). 203.220.42.33 (talk) 08:55, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: snap election

message: John Key doesn't need to win 13 seats to govern. What bollocks. If whoever did that doesn't understand the New Zealand electoral syste and is still using FPP lingo to describe it, could they at least have the good grace not to edit pages about it? 121.73.11.43 (talk) 23:54, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In order to form the government, John Key will have to gain the support of 13 MPs in addition to the current 48 National MPs (assuming no overhang). That's not FPP lingo, that's fact. --Lholden (talk) 00:02, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

text: Ok, we'll remove it if you think it's such an issue. --Lholden (talk) 05:01, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  13 seats? 

message: Ten bucks says this: not one vote will be swayed by a year-old election funding scandal. In fact, if you were to ask a panel of experts what's going to be the major theme of a campaign that most likely won't be waged until next spring, they'd say they couldn't tell you, given that leaders don't like to play their policy hands too far out. In the light of that, I would suggest that we shouldn't talk about issues until closer to the time, and leave the article as a sort of skeletal look at the mechanics of not the campaign, but the electoral process itself. Kripto 22:48, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  the election funding scandal 

message: Taito Field is going to retire in 2006?  Since when?
:The article referenced states that he may possibly resign. --Lholden 21:57, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Resigning members

message: hey, I count 67 opinion polls taken since the 2005 election. That's a lot, and read as a continuous bunch of numbers, does have some semblence of validity as an indicator of trends. I don't mind updating the polling chart, that's not what bugs me, it's more...if I put all 67 polls up, and maybe a graph I don't really know how to make, (screencap?) would it be better to have this on a new page? 67 table rows is a bit big. Kripto 03:52, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We only have about 15 polls at the moment. If you have figures for others, by all means add them. A graph would be great, but I don't know a good way to create a graph as a .png file or similar.-gadfium 06:33, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been thinking about generating a graph in a Open Source spreadsheet program I have, but it's a fairly complex task - e.g. do we want an aggregated poll, or individual results of parties? --Lholden 21:27, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, I think a line graph will do the trick. I mean, you make a graph in openoffice, and then you take a screencap (I use kubuntu and it always saves them as as .png, so that's all sweet, nobody with a patent gets hurt) and post it as an image. I was just kinda hoping that there was a way to make wikipedia do it for me. Guess not. The second part of my question is do we want a separate page called Opinion Polling for the 2008 New Zealand General Election? Because once the election gets in full swing, (after the speculation of 2007, and the phony war that rages from February onwards) there'll be candidates, lists, results and stuff, and this can take up a lot of space. Also, I haven't been paying a lot of attention to preferred PM polls, so I don't have any. Kripto 02:37, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That seems okay to me - there's an article on the US presidential elections similar to what I think you're plugging at - Opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008 - with a fairly complex scatter graph (although, there's multiple candidates so it's a bit of a mind twister, innit). --Lholden 02:48, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Yeah, at least we know who's contesting our election. So if I come back in a few hours and start uploading data to a new page, then nobody is going slap a merge tag on it?  Also, I'm not going to upload a scatter graph. Kripto 04:51, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think a screen capture is probably not the optimal way of making a graph. Ask at WP:HD, someone there will be sure to know. I agree that splitting the polls out into a separate article is a good idea.-gadfium 05:15, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  polls 

message: I don't like the way this article appears to treat Opinion polling for the New Zealand general election, 2008. It should be discussed here as well, using the main article template rather than pointing to another article only. Does anyone disagree? With candidates, it's different of course, but we can certainly give a quick summary of opinion polling. Richard001 (talk) 00:38, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: yeah, that's fair. While we're at it, maybe we could move the non-returning candidates' names under the link for Candidates for the New Zealand general election, 2008? Rocklaw (talk) 01:05, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Summary of polls

message: Why do you have to go to a different article to get a summary of opinion polls? Anyone heard of summary style? Richard001 (talk) 06:52, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: How do you propose to summarise it? This seems to be a consistent way of handling opinion polling in other election articles; if it gets too long, it gets moved to a separate article. -Rrius (talk) 07:04, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added the newly updated graph of opinion polls as a summary.-gadfium 07:50, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Given the snarky "Anyone heard of summary style?", I assumed he meant he was looking for something textual rather than something he could quite easily have done himself by copying and pasting. -Rrius (talk) 09:21, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opinion polling 

message: I hope that New Zealanders (and other supporters) will demand that their 2008 general election candidates images are placed on the front page featured article, to offset any apparent American bias that has been made for the November 3 featured article. NorthernThunder (talk) 02:12, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The relevant articles are not featured. If we had featured articles for Helen Clark and John Key, then this would be a reasonable suggestion. Otherwise, it would appear to be trolling.-gadfium 07:34, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured article 

message: The infobox stats given in some kiwi MPs articles are misleading. Take Rodney Hide and Pita Sharples for examples. In the "Majority" line, Hide is given  15,251 and  42.62%. Hide's majority over Richard Worth was actually a shade over 3000. The percentage figure of course is his share of the total number of electorate votes and is nothing to do with a majority figure. Similar situation over at Sharples. He got fractionally over 2000 more electorate votes than Tamihere. Maybe if the word "Majority" was changed to "Votes" it would fix the problem. As the box is probably a template I'd ask someone with more expertise than me to do it. That would be less laborious than going to each electorate's returns, assessing the individual  majorities, and then amending the infobpxes. Kaiwhakahaere (talk) 01:14, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Your assumption that they are templates is correct - they are used in many countries and are also locked from editing so no change to Votes is possible. I have corrected the majorities to that shown on their electorate pages, thanks for pointing this error out. Fanx (talk) 04:09, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Huh?

message: This new para points out (briefly) that you neet to think about first the size of parliament (overhang) and then the number of seats needed to get a majority with MMP Hugo999 (talk) 13:54, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Election Results

message: I've just added a few images from voting today to the commons . I also took a few others today and can upload any of these if anyone wants them - SimonLyall (talk) 02:53, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images 

message: From a non-New Zealander perspective, is there a reason for the Labour and Maori Party colours to be so similar? They are clearly different parties, yet the colours used to identify them are close to identical. Perhaps different colours could be used. Thanks, Sarsaparilla39 (talk) 09:56, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You'd have to ask the parties themselves about that - we're using official party colours from party logos, websites etc. - at least for major or modern parties. Fanx (talk) 10:08, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Having a quick gawk at the parties' websites, perhaps black could be used in place of red for the Maori Party. It's still one of their major colours. Just a suggestion. Sarsaparilla39 (talk) 11:19, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Black is taken by New Zealand First already, and NZF doesn't have any alternate colours. Kelvinc (talk) 11:48, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

text: I have changed the Māori Party/meta/color from an old website colour,   #D9001D  , to the colour used on the logo,   #EF4A42  . Fanx (talk) 19:09, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There are several conflicts of colours between parties in parliament and those out side (e.g. Bill & Ben & Greens, Family Party & Act). I would suggest that now NZ First is outside of parliament the Maori Party should now take precedence and have their dominant colour of Black assigned to them. This would certainly show better distinction between the parliamentary parties which I believe would go back to addressing the original concern of Sarsaparilla93 Rgiltrap (talk) 19:57, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Just noticed something re. colours 

message: Infobox and result templates updated with 100% counted provisional results.  [Yawn]  Too tired to change the text, but need to update:
#Clark stepping down as LAB leader.
#Key says in speech ACT and UF ready to work with NAT to form government (sufficient grounds to show Key as next PM in infobox).
#NZF out of parliament.
-Kelvinc (talk) 11:48, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I added those items to the introduction. Teemu Leisti (talk) 10:37, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Results 

message: The Maori party did not win all of the maori seats, labour won two! This needs to be reexamined and changed!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.65.35.18 (talk) 22:47, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: What it said was that all the seats won by the Māori Party were Māori seats, but I appreciate that it wasn't clear and your edit is an improvement.-gadfium 01:18, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Māori Party

message: The picture of ACT leader Rodney hide is rather low quality (looks like it's taken from a camera phone in a pub!). I suggest changing it to the one used on his personal profile... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rodney_Hide_at_parliament.JPG ... which is of a much higher picture quality.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rgiltrap (talk • contribs) 10:26, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree and have replaced the picture. We didn't have the better picture available to us at the time this article was started.-gadfium 20:53, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Picture quality

message: The other should be 6.54% to make it add to 100%. The correct figure is (153,461 / 2,344,566 = 6.545). Rounded to 6.55 for 2dp but rounded to 6.54 to add to 100.00. I'm not sure how to easily fix this table to amend this error.202.139.104.226 (talk) 01:21, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  2008 Election Results Table 

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