Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Congress/Ordinal congresses

message: Using  reduces the TOC to just the main sections without subsections.
This allows editors to use more subsections, such as:
==Members==
===Senate===
====Alambama===
. . . 
====Wyoming====
===House of Representatives===
====Alambama===
. . .
====Wyoming====
====Non-voting members====
Without overloading the TOC.—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Sub-sections / TOC limit

message: Italics for party designations or abbrevations aren't necessary.—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Italics

message: Middle names, nicknames, or initials are unnecessary in these articles unless necessary for disambiguation.  As a rule, therefore, don't make the piped links more elaborate that the live link.For example:
* Richard Nixon does not need the middle initial "M."
* Tip O'Neill is sufficient, not Thomas Phillip "Tip" O'Neill, Jr..
—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Middle Initials

message: === President of the United States Senate ===
President of the United States Senate should be listed and linked as such.  It redirects to Vice President of the United States, but future editors may find that avoiding this redirect is confusing.—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Titles

message: President of the United States Senate should be listed and linked as such.  It redirects to Vice President of the United States, but future editors may find that avoiding this redirect is confusing.—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  President of the United States Senate 

message: In these ordinal Congress articles, employees should be listed by their names only.  Do not include honorary or professional titles, which are better left in the person's article instead.  Otherwise, we'd have to put "Hon." in front of every Rep. and Senator and who knows what else. It's just easier this way.For example:
* The current Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives is Daniel P. Coughlin, not Father Daniel P. Coughlin or Monsignieur Daniel P. Coughlin.
* The current acting Architect of the Capitol is Stephen T. Ayers, not Stephen T. Ayers, AIA
—GoldRingChip 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Employees

message: The proposed guideline seems to follow the current established standard at 111th Congress. I have no real issues with that format, or the proposed guideline. If I have one criticism, it is the Party Summary charts (Version B). To me they are a nice graphic, but I prefer the text version A. Why do we need to know the party strength or that there were X number of senators of one party on January 15, Y number on January 20, and so on. Party strength is a very subjective thing. Did the Democrats party strength really increase after Specter's switch? His voting habits will be the same as a Democrat as if he had remained a Republican, so to imply that the Democrats somehow increased their standing in the Senate with his switch just by showing a incremental increase in the Democrats percentage verges on original research. I know there is the issue of 60 votes and breaking filibusters, but again there is no guarantee Specter will be the 60th vote now anymore than he was before. (Where it really impacts is party strength on the committees Specter served, where party line votes are more common and the real "magic" happens.)
Exceptions to the rule would likely be the 107th Congress, when Democrats took over mid session, or the current 111th congress, where we only have 99 Senate right now, and many non-US (and even some US) readers may not understand the details. But that could just as easily be handled textually in the Party Summary, and described in more detail in the lede as needed.
* The 107th Congress was, in fact, the first article to feature that chart.  Yes, strength is subjective, but it is relevant. 
**Good information, yes. And it kind of works in the more recent congresses where party changes and turn over did not happen all that frequently. But if you take the tables for the 4th Congress, the tables are rather long and on some screens take up so much room that you have to scroll to see the entire table. At some point, turnover becomes so great that these tables are unwieldily, so the table becomes the focal point, rather than the information it contains. Maybe we could limit information in these tables to major, notable changes (senator becomes president, congressman X switches parties, senator y resigns over criminal conduct), rather than for every death or resignation, and shorten the headers by generalizing (using the months that the switches took place, rather than a different line for each date).DCmacnut<> 12:48, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: You all seemed to work through Stilltim's issues quite well.  I especially like the comments that Wikipedia is fluid and no one person "owns" any article. This talk page is a great way to work through issues as they arise. On another note, a comment, and some questions.  
The comment:  I've left the pre 1935 ordinal congresses as ending March 3 rather than March 4.  There is some debate to the actual end date.  Martis and the Cong Bios end the 3rd.   Apparently there are some sources which list March 4 (see List of United States Senators from _____ ).  2 to 1 for March 3 which is how I'm leaving it, plus it's a lot of work to add a day.
The questions: 
1) For many congresspersons who have been successfully contested, especially those pre-1940, the congressman who lost the contest, even if he/she was seated for a number of months, and are referred to as rep-elect,  Should the loser of those contested elections be removed from the congressional term if they are listed since they are considered rep-elects from the Congbio?
2) There are also some congressman elected and seated, but failed to qualify and  then they resigned from their seats.    Should those congressman be listed as well or should they be removed?....Pvmoutside (talk) 22:55, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: A change of subject

message: Wouldn't it make sense to fork the long lists of members into separate articles? They are awfully long, and we could do more with the information in a separate article. -Rrius (talk) 19:10, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Members section 

message: I have put a new proposed format in at WP:WikiProject U.S. Congress/Ordinal congresses/Sandbox. The differences between what I have proposed and the existing format are integration of the "Changes in membership" sections into the "Party summary" sections and the rewording of section headings to the numerous repetitions of sections called "Senate" and "House of Representatives". The renamed section headings would increase their utility for section linking, especially from other articles. Take a look and tell me what you think. -Rrius (talk) 06:55, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Soooo. Is this unobjectionable? -Rrius (talk) 11:32, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I like the changes you made to the index. I makes for a more navigable page.  The only suggested small modification is to keep location of the "Changes in membership" section where it is now after the members roster.  You could move the Changes in membership/senate and representatives index identifiers into section 8 after the members list.  I think it flows better with the roster first and changes after. A nice job reorganizing in general Rrius!  Pvmoutside (talk) 13:39, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a big problem with the current placement of the Changes in membership section. Changes sections are at least as relevant to the party summary section as to the member lists. What's more, they are currently hundreds of lines and more than three screen pages from the party summary. On the other hand, if they were moved as I propose, they would be near to both the party summaries and membership lists. I'm not sure I see how the Changes, but not the Party summary, upset the flow by being ahead of the lists. Could you explain that? -Rrius (talk) 17:11, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure. To me, I'd rather see the entire list first, then see which members have changed, rather than seeing which offices have changed before seeing the officeholders.  It's like reading an appendix before you read the main information.   I don't feel as strongly as you, so if you do change the order, I can live with it.  Your way as some relevance if someone looks at more than 1 ordinal, but ideally the ordinals should stand as articles unto themselves.  If one looks only at one ordinal, they see the change before the actual list, and that seems to me backward.Pvmoutside (talk) 18:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I still don't see the point. Under that logic, why not put the leaders among the members until after the members. Why not put the party summary and its ticking off of changes in party standings after the lists. More importantly, the lists themselves already contain the membership changes, so I don't understand why listing the changes together needs to wait. I don't at all understand how viewing the articles as individual or part of series comes into it. For me the change is needed because the three or so pages of lists separate bits of related information. I oppose having those lists at the articles, but GoldRingChip and, to a lesser extent, DCmacnut opposed that change, and no one else cared. The problem of having 30,000 kb of data in the middle of the article can at least be alleviated by putting related information together. -Rrius (talk) 19:35, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reworking the sections 

message: I sort of like Version B, but I'm not really sure. —GoldRingChip  15:28, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discuss here 

message: I've created templates for both the US Senate and US House for the changes in membership outline in the ordinal congresses.   I noticed that there are a various iterations under different ordinals, this will make them all consistent when the template is applied.  Then if anyone would like to make changes to the outline, all they would need to do is change the template, then all would be changed simultaneously and consistently for all congresses.   Templates are:  Template:Ordinal US Congress Senate and Template:Ordinal US Congress Rep.  Let me know what you think........Pvmoutside (talk) 21:36, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Templates for membership changes in Ordinal Congresses

message: You brought up a good point about the order of Senators.  Therefore, I've changed a couple articles to list the Senators explicitly by seniority.  —GoldRingChip  15:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Order of Senators 

message: Hi all, I've experimented with a new template I created that inserts a colored stripe before a politician's name based on their party, and implemented it at 117th United States Congress. Let me know if you think this is a useful addition. WMSR (talk) 12:25, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Party stripe template 

message: See Talk:117th_United_States_Congress#Titles need to be changed across several articles. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:39, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section titles must be changed