Talk:List of former United States senators

message: I was thinking... what if we make two lists: one with the more notable members and the other that just lists every single member of the Senate, past and present.  Why would the latter list be useful? I figure if at a later point we try to make an article for every senator, having one centralized list of each one will facilitate the process.  Now, I have a computer program that I used for compliing lists of senators for each congressional session that could easily develop the list for every senator. Should I go ahead and do this?
Cmdrbond 19:12, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should we perhaps make 2 lists? 

message: Once a person is dead, they are not a "former" anything. Bill Clinton is a former President, but George Washington is not. Adam 09:11, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Use of "former"

message: This article should be titled List of United States Senators 1789-2006 Adam 09:11, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rename article proposed

message: This is too long and needs to be split - to an A-M and N-Z arrangement, perhaps? Thoughts welcome.
Buckshot06 02:55, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Too long (split request)

message: This article is currently listed as the 3rd longest Wikipedia article (in terms of byte size) on Special:Longpages. When I removed redundant "List of United States Senators from State XYZ" type links from this article, I was able to reduce the article size by 70 KB, eliminating 1,408 redundant links.
This raises a question about how much redundant links we want in this article. As mentioned in Wikipedia:Article size, large pages can potentially cause technical problems.  WP:CONTEXT also has some mention on redundant links. I agree with what others have mentioned above, that splitting an article up can have drawbacks and I am not recommending that. —Tokek 01:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It should be split alphabetically - that's the most logical way, as splits by century or other chronology would necessitate excessive overlap. Cut into five or six pieces. bd2412 T 14:14, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Length reduction

message: Is there any reason why this article is in :Category:Lists of current office-holders, rather than [Category:Lists of former office-holders]? DH85868993 (talk) 11:11, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category 

message: Just a short question: when will the newly defeated or retired Senators (like Obama, Stevens or J. Warner) be listed? Cassandro (talk) 14:19, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  New former Senators 

message: If you look at the history, all of the scheduled outgoing senators have already been entered; if someone gets to this before I do after January 3 noon, please remove the cloak of invisibility from them; no need to delete Sen.(E) Coats, just hide the data. 75.202.98.159 (talk) 17:19, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  112th Congress changes 

message: I get that it makes the page look nicer, especially for such a long page.  However, it practically eliminates the sorting functionality?  If someone wants to sort the Senators chronologically, then it's pretty much useless to get a sorted list of only those Senators whose surname starts with, for example, A.  65.35.190.94 (talk) 05:32, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Alphabetical splitting from a data standpoint is a truly awful way to categorize these senators.  I assumed when I visited this page that it would be easy to get a chronological list, but no, I can only get a chronological list of the F's, which makes no sense at all in our data-driven world of today.  This approach is not a good one at all.  Wikipedia is getting better and better with data, and I know that it can do much better than this arbitrary and unhelpful approach that this page is currently using. --100.4.151.64 (talk) 13:37, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is alphabetical splitting worthwhile?