Template talk:Infobox UK legislation

message: The current version of the template is bugged as it introduces random amounts of white space at the top of each article it is used on. The amount of white space generated appears to be linked to the use of the external link fields at the bottom of the template, though I have been unable to find a solution that doesn't break another part of the infobox code.
Rather than waste more time with debugging the current template, I have taken the opportunity to recreate the infobox based on the generic  template. This has the advantages of simplifying and standardising most of the code while at the same time removing the white space bug. The only draw back is that the template has had a marked change in style that some editors may not find appealing. I have prepared the replacement template in one of my sandboxes, and transcluded both the current and replacement version onto this other page for comparison.
I would welcome comments on this new proposal or assistance in making improvements (setting custom styles is not one of my strong points). Also, please note that the new template does not yet include the hCalendar Mark-up introduced to the current template a few hours ago. Road Wizard (talk) 21:30, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have taken the liberty of adding hCalendar to your sandbox version; it's working well. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 21:41, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  White space bug and proposal 

message: The coat of arms in this template is anachronistic for any Acts before the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837; see Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. I would put date switches in, but the earlier coats of arms are without supporters. Thoughts anyone? — OwenBlacker (Talk) 22:03, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If it is incorrect to use it on Acts before 1837 then it needs to be removed. As far as I can tell it is only there for decorative purposes, so I don't see any need to retain it. Unless someone has an objection I will remove it from the new proposal. We can always add it back in with an optional parameter if there are strong objections. Road Wizard (talk) 20:00, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have an image in there; we should just make sure it's the right one! Infoboxes without images look for less appealing and draw the eye less (which is a bad thing, given they're intended to be a brief summary of information for users new to the topic. We should definitely add the image back, just with date switches so we can make it the right image for the right Act  :o) — OwenBlacker (Talk) 08:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have replaced the active template but retained the previous image code. You are welcome to add in some code restriction to limit the appearance of the image if you wish. Regards. Road Wizard (talk) 17:05, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

text: I've added parameters to the infobox so that the displayed coat of arms reflects which parliament is named in the "parliament" parameter. For examples of how this affects articles, see Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004, Summary Jurisdiction Act (Northern Ireland) 1953 and NHS Redress (Wales) Measure 2008. Gabbe (talk) 09:28, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coat of arms 

message: Hello there; I don't know how, but can we change that long sentence about the active version of the legislation? "Text of current statute from statutelaw.gov" is sufficient, and will fit on two lines. Wikidea 11:19, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  statutelaw 

message: This infobox could make use of the new UK Government Legislation portal, perhaps via a sub template. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:28, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: See related comments at Template talk:UK-SLD#www.legislation.gov.uk (new website has different URL scheme and is not yet fully functional). — Richardguk (talk) 01:17, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  legislation.gov.uk 

message: I've just made a relatively major upgrade to the template, so it will now display an appropriate coat of arms for any of old Parliaments (of England, of Scotland, of Ireland and of Great Britain) and for the UK Parliament since its creation on 1 January 1801. A small handful of coats of arms don't have versions with supporters, so the unsupported armorial are displayed, but the right coat of arms is shown for any combination of  and . Limitations on parser functions available on en.wiki mean that the template assumes based on year, so acts passed at the start of any year where the armorial changed may show the armorial for later in the year, however.
To do this, I created a sandbox page and a suite of test cases, which should show every distinct combination of year and parliament, using the sandbox version of the template. — OwenBlacker (Talk) 00:31, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That's excellent, well done and thank you! Are we missing the Northern Ireland Assembly though? ninety:one   12:38, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  You're right; I'd failed to notice that Parliament of Northern Ireland is the pre-1970s body, not the new devolved assembly. Not Now rectified, using :File:Northern-ireland-assembly.png, as per the article Northern Ireland Assembly — OwenBlacker (Talk) 12:55, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coat of arms revisited 

message: I have written  to replace . UK-LEG uses the new legislation.gov.uk interface, which allows an Act to be linked to using the short title as a parameter (which can be automatically passed most of the time). However, this isn't perfect, because commencement orders made in the same year seem to also be returned (such as if you pass "Fraud Act 2006", it returns "", but the link is to a choice page - or at least it is some of the time, I don't seem to be able to get it now, which is very weird!). Anyway, I have written an automatic link to exact items of legislation which uses parliament, statute_book_chapter and year (you can see it in Template:Infobox UK Legislation/sandbox, where it's line 21). This works for items with regnal years as well, because the leg.gov.uk interface will translate them to calendar years automatically. The only problem is where there are two items with the same chapter number and calendar year, but different regnal years. I can't think of an easy way around this right now, except to have a manual override (the URI scheme says this will happen "on a few occasions").
So, we now have two ways of providing links. We can either use , which will work for any Act whenever passed, but it won't return a direct link where there are two conflictingly-named items, or we can use the automatic link building as in the sandbox, which won't return a direct link where two items have the same chapter number and calendar year, but different regnal years. Is one the lesser of two evils? ninety:one   13:15, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom#Legislation linking: new/updated templates for a general discussion on all of these changes. ninety:one   22:09, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

text: Good point, possibly got carried away, now working on much better version that can take full URLs in the same parameter. ninety:one   18:02, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using the new legislation.gov.uk interface 

message: ===Terriotorial extent===
I think that this should be replaced with three separate fields (or these should be added as alternatives to that field, if that causes less disruption):
#Original extent
#Where in force now?
#Where repealed now?
The extent of Acts changes. They get extended to jurisdictions to which they did not originally apply. They get repealed in some of the jurisdictions to which they apply, but not others. Also a lot of UK legislation has been extended to and repealed in various Commonwealth countries.
At the moment it is impossible to explain this using the infobox. James500 (talk) 00:53, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Would it not be easier to provide mini-commentary instead? So something like  |repealing_legislation=  perhaps? — OwenBlacker (Talk) 22:18, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Extent

message: I think that this should be replaced with three separate fields (or these should be added as alternatives to that field, if that causes less disruption):
#Original extent
#Where in force now?
#Where repealed now?
The extent of Acts changes. They get extended to jurisdictions to which they did not originally apply. They get repealed in some of the jurisdictions to which they apply, but not others. Also a lot of UK legislation has been extended to and repealed in various Commonwealth countries.
At the moment it is impossible to explain this using the infobox. James500 (talk) 00:53, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Terriotorial extent

message: A recent edit to the article on the Supreme Court of Judicature Act (Ireland) 1877 has made me realise that perhaps the template needs tweaking in relation to Acts that are in force to different extents in different jurisdictions.  This particular Act has been repealed in relation to Northern Ireland, but is apparently still in force within the Republic.  There have also been Acts which have been repealed for different parts of the UK at different times.  However, the template assumes that an Act has either been repealed, or that it has not.  Should the template perhaps be altered to provide different values to be entered for England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (to 1922), Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland?  I'm thinking that the existing "repealing_legislation" field should be retained as the default, but that (say) "repealing_legislation_England", "repealing_legislation_NI", and (so on) fields could be made available as well for when they're needed; similarly additional "status" fields would be needed (displaying as "Status in England" and so on).  Andrew Gwilliam (talk) 22:17, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Would it not be easier to provide mini-commentary instead? So something like  |repealing_legislation=  perhaps? — OwenBlacker (Talk) 22:18, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Parallel jurisdictions

message: I am going to change the value "substantially amended" to "amended", because "substantially" is not an objective expression. James500 (talk) 05:02, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: added Spent. feel free to revert if I got it wrong. Frietjes (talk) 20:24, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

text: I too find the expression "Not passed" rather ambiguous and confusing in this context. One possibility would be to use "Before parliament" for bills currently being debated and "Rejected" for bills which don't get through. These seem to be the terms that journalists use, though I'm not sure whether they're legally correct. Polly Tunnel (talk) 18:24, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status 

message: The current parameters lack a clear option for bills currently being debated. 'Not passed' could be used for this, but it also (and maybe usually) means that Parliament declined to pass it. For examples see European Union Referendum Bill 2015–16 and European Union (Referendum) Bill 2013-14. ('Not yet in force' is surely for Acts that have been enacted but their date of coming into force is in the future). Do we need an 'In_progress' parameter? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:03, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I too find the expression "Not passed" rather ambiguous and confusing in this context. One possibility would be to use "Before parliament" for bills currently being debated and "Rejected" for bills which don't get through. These seem to be the terms that journalists use, though I'm not sure whether they're legally correct. Polly Tunnel (talk) 18:24, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Status again: do we need an 'In_progress' parameter?

message: I think this might be a neologism or misnomer. If I recall correctly, O. Hood Phillips said in a book called "A First Book of English Law" that "there is no statute book". I suggest that this field should actually read "session and chapter" for pre-1962 Acts and "year and chapter" post-1962 Acts. These expressions are used in the Schedules of Acts of Parliament. James500 (talk) 12:22, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The Irish statutes use the expression "session and chapter" for pre-1962 statutes as well. — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 18:00, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

text: Although in reality it would have been better if there were separate ,  and  parameters. — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 19:37, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Statute book chapter" 

message: Hello. Instantiations of this template such as here (where almost half the template space is left unused) prompts me to think that it might better be a "sidebar" template that uses headings rather than a two-column infobox. Yes, no? 213.246.94.204 (talk) 07:57, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  A sidebar rather than infobox? 

message: I've added a bunch of error handling and maintenance categorisation to the sandbox version of this template — as can be seen from the test cases — having swung past a couple of instances of this template with incorrect year values recently. I would have thrown it straight into the live template, except that Template:Error messages are displayed to all users, not just logged-in users (as I previously thought) and that seems rather inyerface.
Is it worth putting live a version of the sandbox without the  calls, so that the maintenance categorisation takes effect and bots can help correct the faulty articles? Given templatecount indicates there are "only" 1440 transclusions, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to correct any faulty ones before activating error messaging in the live template.
Thoughts anyone? — OwenBlacker (Talk) 22:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error handling 

message: Is it possible to add parameters in this template for the various stages that a Bill goes through Parliament (e.g. First Reading)? The template "Infobox Legislation" does include those items like "1st_reading 
2nd_reading, 3rd_reading, committee_report". I think it's quite useful information in the infobox. (I don't know how to edit a template or what the correct procedure is.) Seaweed (talk) 13:08, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inclusion of stages through Parliament 

message: As the General Synod of the Church of England have the legal rights to pass Measures which have the same effect as an Act of Parliament, would it be more appropriate if we could include the logo of the Church of England (as there isn't a General Synod arms) in place of the coat of arms in the template for Church of England measures?  The C of E   God Save the Queen! (talk) 11:31, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Church of England general synod 

message: Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly are not Acts of Parliament. The latter is showing up in e.g. Assembly Members (Reduction of Numbers) Act (Northern Ireland) 2016. – Kaihsu (talk) 16:31, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Act of the Northern Ireland Assembly 

message: What happens for legislation during the Commonwealth/Protectorate. Is the "Royal Assent" field to be left blank? GraemeLeggett (talk) 11:07, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lack of Royal Assent 

message: Should we make the WP:Short description of pages with this template default to "United Kingdom Law"? Daviddwd (talk) 19:16, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Short descriptions? 

message: Looking at An Act for prohibiting Trade with the Barbadoes, Virginia, Bermuda and Antego from 1650, the coat of arms shown is that of 1801-1816, so Hanoverian rather than English Commonwealth.2A00:23C7:7B18:9600:89F8:8062:5F2F:B75A (talk)
:It's because  is not a valid value, so it's assuming Parliament of the United Kingdom. For that parliament, when the value specified by  is less than 1816 (in this case 1650), it uses :File:Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (1801-1816).svg. To get :File:Coat of Arms of the Protectorate (1653–1659).svg to show, you need  together with . --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:28, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coats of Arms again 

message: Could the status= parameter please be amended to accept status=Revoked? This is the natural wording to use for for Statutory Instruments, which are revoked rather than repealed. There are a lot of articles covering now-revoked English COVID regulations that I would like to update. Strictly speaking the repeal_date= parameter isn't quite right either for SIs, but I wouldn't bother changing that as the template instructions already note that that is intended to cover both repealed and revoked. MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:43, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: @MichaelMaggs, apologies for the five month delay but I've fixed this oversight. Any more suggestions or needed features let me know. - Thunderstorm008 (talk · contributions) 05:18, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: @Thunderstorm008 Many thanks! MichaelMaggs (talk) 08:08, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status=Revoked 

message: I propose making some small heading changes so that this infobox more closely matches Infobox: legislation. I have made some changes on the sandbox if anyone would like to comment on it. Bluealbion (talk) 02:12, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Small format change