The first issue we're going to have to work out with this WikiProject is what naming convention we're going to use for our electorate articles.
We currently have four states with at least one electorate article, and all four are using different conventions.
...as well as the federal convention, Division of Melbourne Ports.
I think it'd be nice if these could generally be standardised - any suggestions as to what? Ambi 08:02, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You're exactly right. I just went through and checked each state and territory electoral commission website -
and the ACT isn't clear; Elections ACT seems to just refer to them as "electorates" everywhere.
Which makes me lean towards just using [[Electoral district of ....]] and [[Electoral division of ....]] according to the appropriate local usage. Any thoughts about making that the convention? There's also the issues of what to do about disambiguation, as there's several electorates in different states that have the same names - as well as working out what to do about the ACT. Ambi 16:23, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The one other issue here is that of disambiguation. Should we just tack (South Australia) or (Victoria) onto the end of a non-unique electorate name, or should we pre-disambiguate all electorates (i.e. have [[South Australian electoral district of Mitchell]]. Ambi 08:17, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Do you think we'll eventually need an article like
Electoral district (Canada), possibly titled
Electorates of Australia? It could serve as a parent to federal divisions and state electoral districts.--
Cyberjunkie
TALK 10:31, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As noted above, Western Australia calls their lower house electorates districts, so I have adopted the convention Electoral district of..., e.g. Electoral district of Albany. Annoyingly, the Western Australian Electoral Commission have in their wisdom named one of the districts in adjectival form. Electoral district of North West Coastal sounds really stupid, but after talking it over with Adam I am reconciled to retaining consistency, even if the title sounds stupid in this case. We call our upper house electorates regions, although we used to call them provinces like Victoria still do. Our regions are all named adjectivally, so in the name of consistency they would all end up with strange names, e.g. Electoral region of Agricultural. Again I was planning on accepting the silly names as the price of consistency. For electorates that were provinces and were abolished before the adoption of the term region, I was planning on taking liberties with the terminology and using the Electoral region of... convention even though these electorates were never known as anything but provinces. Finally, I am very sad to say that before 1965 the upper house had both districts and provinces. I am not prepared to use Electoral district of... for both lower house districts and pre- 1965 upper house districts, as this would just cause confusion. But it seems inappropriate to call these regions, especially as in one case "District" is actually in the name. How bad does Electoral region of North District sound?! I will be very happy if we can all put our heads together and come up with a better solution to this mess. Hesperian 13:02, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think we've pretty much straightened out the lower houses - I've been going around fixing these up, and they seem to be looking quite a bit better.
There's two more issues remaining -
Firstly, the Tasmanian lower house uses the same divisions as the federal parliament. What do we do here? They used to have a list of state members as well, but Adam erased them a few months ago, and I'm not sure that was the way to go anyway.
Secondly, the Legislative Council issue remains. Any more thoughts there? Ambi 1 July 2005 09:32 (UTC)
I hope this is a good place to continue this discussion concerning lists of members on electorate pages:
Is it really necessary to have a new line in the members list when a member gains the title "honourable" at Electoral district of Marrickville?For one thing, other members on this list don't have their titles included. JPD ( talk) 09:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I would prefer not to include titles in the list at all. The lists are showing who was member when, and showing changes in title is a distraction. Apart from that, I don't think it is not normal Wikipedia style to include titles such as "The Honourable" in the text. JPD ( talk) 13:58, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I also would prefer no titles at all, but would like consistency across all states and nationally. -- Newhoggy | Talk 22:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree, don't split up because of titles. Tacked-on titles that nobody uses in common parlance ("Rt Hon" and so on) really shouldn't be included in links to that individual; there's a good case for *mentioning* the title on the pollie's article, but we don't need to do it in links, and we certainly don't need to disrupt the flow of a list so as to have one item for pre- and post-title. fuddlemark ( fuddle me!) 05:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
It would seem logical that if honourific prefixes — aside Sir and Dame — are not used in biography articles, neither should they be in lists. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies)#Honorific prefixes.-- cj | talk 07:03, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I say, don't split rows of any list just to include more than one title. I think it's okay to use a person's title in a list, but it should be either the most recent one or none at all. -- Susurrus 12:23, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be really nice if there were a set of guidelines somewhere and an easy way to get to them from each of the electorate pages. An easy way to get to this page would be nice too.
-- Newhoggy | Talk 05:01, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
The other problem is the dash character separating the start and end dates varies between pages and also whether or not duplicate members or parties in the same table should be linked. -- Newhoggy | Talk 08:03, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
–
), but often people will use a hyphen (-
) because they don't know how to use an actual dash.
fuddlemark (
befuddle me!) 10:46, 18 May 2006 (UTC)One more problem is that sometimes the link ALP is used and sometimes Australian Labor Party, or Labor. Which is the preferred method? -- Newhoggy | Talk 13:56, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I support using the abbreviations that the ABC and electoral authorities use so long as they're linked.-- cj | talk 15:07, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd rather use the full names. There are no space constraints in these tables, as they're typically rather small, and it makes them more comprehensible to non-Australian readers. Rebecca 08:33, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
How about we list our positions on these things in a table?
Decision | For | Against | Resolution |
---|---|---|---|
Always use titles in lists for all MPs that have them. |
Failed | ||
Remove all titles from lists |
Passed | ||
Always use duplicate links in lists | |||
Always use full party names | |||
Always use *space* ndash *space* to separate dates in list |
|
||
Use Wikipedia's most commonly used separator for dates in lists whatever that is. | |||
Always use abbreviations for party names used electoral authorities in lists |
|||
Always use four digit years rather than abbreviated two digit years. |
|
Passed | |
Always use tables for members lists rather than bullet points. |
Passed | ||
All electorate articles in Australia should use consistent style. |
Passed |
It seems like "Always use tables for members lists rather than bullet points" has the most support. If there are no objections, I'd like mark the resolution of this item as "passed" and start changing all electorate past members lists into tables while waiting for more feedback on the other items. -- Newhoggy | Talk 02:37, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
NSW uses "Member", "Party affiliation", "Period", SA uses "Member", "Party", "Term". I propose all NSW articles adopt the SA column headings because they are clearer and shorter. -- Newhoggy | Talk 05:47, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
SA uses an assortment custom table attributes resulting in a table with darker column headings. NSW uses the standard "wikitable" class giving tables with light column headings matching the colour scheme of Wikipedia. I propose that SA tables be styled using the NSW method, which is more concise, constitent and manageable. -- Newhoggy | Talk 05:49, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
The way the categories are organised is unsatisfactory -
Category:Electoral divisions of Australia refers to
Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives yet contains categories for state electorates. Perhaps
Category:Electoral divisions of Australia should exclusively list Australian federal electorates and, along with categories for state electorates, be placed in a more general category to be named
Australian electorates. Thus, the cats would be organised as follows:
Category:Politics of Australia
MH au 05:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I have been adding election tables to the federal electorate articles and have only just come across this page. I had also been adding shading (using the American templates) to the member lists but now see that it would be better to discuss it here first. Should shading be used in some way here? (I think that it adds clarity and provides an at-a-glance look for visual people of the party history.) The American articles (eg. Alabama's 7th congressional district) use plain shading while the British articles (eg. Cambridge (constituency)) use small blobs of party colour a la election boxes. Which should be used for Australian articles. Also, how to create Australian templates for shading if the decision is to use shading? Frickeg 07:27, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
![]() |
re: Infoboxes. I looked up my electorate page for a quick run down prior to going down to Australia house to vote (UK resident), and realised that unlike all other Commonwealth countries and the US, none of our electorates had infoboxes. I feel these provide a clear quick summary of the elctorate without the reader having to read the whole article if they do not feel the need to do so. As a result I devised a quick Australian oriented template for a nice clear infobox, which adds a visual element to the otherwise sometimes plain articles, as well as giving a quick summary a student or interested person can use to get a feel of the nature and makeup of the electorate without neccessarily reading all the history and previous members to try and find out about the current state of the electorate. However, Frickeg contacted me to inform me of this debate, and the fact that someone had decided they were redundant. Why?? They are an incredibly useful summerisation of articles, and I add them to any articles I find that don't have them. It makes browsing articles more functional, and less time consuming. I have so far done all the lectorates for SA, WA, TAS, NT, and ACT, and unless anyone can provide a more convincing arguement that a personal opinion that they are redundant, I will complete the task for VIC, NSW and QLD - hopefully in time for all federal divisions to be complete before the election. Rac fleming 11:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not really fussed either way. I'm not sure there's a great deal of point in standardising them - practically nothing else on Wikipedia with electorate articles is, from the naming conventions down, and nearly all countries don't even have past division-level results at all. However, if you want to try, be my guest. Rebecca ( talk) 01:31, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
mForgive me if I don't see it, but in the tables with the results for each electoral district, how are the candidates ordered. For example, I would think the top candidate would be the one with the most votes. Can someone explain the pattern to me? Joe 09:24 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I was actually just about to ask about this too. I put the ones in the federal divisions, but I'm wondering whether they should be in ballot paper order or in order of who got the most votes. I'd be interested in other people's opinions. Frickeg 00:07, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Michael. Listing them in ballot paper, especially in cases where there are a large amount of candidates, makes finding the actually relevant information all the more difficult. While electoral commissions are required to report the data "as it happened", as such, we should be presenting it in the most useful and informative manner possible - and that, IMHO, is to present it in order of votes gained. Rebecca 01:22, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm very much in favour of listing them in the order of votes received -- it simply doesn't make sense to me to have it any other way, and the information loss is not really terrible; frankly, who cares what the ballot order was? Enlighten me if I'm missing something, but is it really so important what the randomly decided ballot order actually looked like? — Nightstallion 10:07, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums#Electoral district disambiguation jnestorius( talk) 20:08, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
The first issue we're going to have to work out with this WikiProject is what naming convention we're going to use for our electorate articles.
We currently have four states with at least one electorate article, and all four are using different conventions.
...as well as the federal convention, Division of Melbourne Ports.
I think it'd be nice if these could generally be standardised - any suggestions as to what? Ambi 08:02, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You're exactly right. I just went through and checked each state and territory electoral commission website -
and the ACT isn't clear; Elections ACT seems to just refer to them as "electorates" everywhere.
Which makes me lean towards just using [[Electoral district of ....]] and [[Electoral division of ....]] according to the appropriate local usage. Any thoughts about making that the convention? There's also the issues of what to do about disambiguation, as there's several electorates in different states that have the same names - as well as working out what to do about the ACT. Ambi 16:23, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The one other issue here is that of disambiguation. Should we just tack (South Australia) or (Victoria) onto the end of a non-unique electorate name, or should we pre-disambiguate all electorates (i.e. have [[South Australian electoral district of Mitchell]]. Ambi 08:17, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Do you think we'll eventually need an article like
Electoral district (Canada), possibly titled
Electorates of Australia? It could serve as a parent to federal divisions and state electoral districts.--
Cyberjunkie
TALK 10:31, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As noted above, Western Australia calls their lower house electorates districts, so I have adopted the convention Electoral district of..., e.g. Electoral district of Albany. Annoyingly, the Western Australian Electoral Commission have in their wisdom named one of the districts in adjectival form. Electoral district of North West Coastal sounds really stupid, but after talking it over with Adam I am reconciled to retaining consistency, even if the title sounds stupid in this case. We call our upper house electorates regions, although we used to call them provinces like Victoria still do. Our regions are all named adjectivally, so in the name of consistency they would all end up with strange names, e.g. Electoral region of Agricultural. Again I was planning on accepting the silly names as the price of consistency. For electorates that were provinces and were abolished before the adoption of the term region, I was planning on taking liberties with the terminology and using the Electoral region of... convention even though these electorates were never known as anything but provinces. Finally, I am very sad to say that before 1965 the upper house had both districts and provinces. I am not prepared to use Electoral district of... for both lower house districts and pre- 1965 upper house districts, as this would just cause confusion. But it seems inappropriate to call these regions, especially as in one case "District" is actually in the name. How bad does Electoral region of North District sound?! I will be very happy if we can all put our heads together and come up with a better solution to this mess. Hesperian 13:02, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think we've pretty much straightened out the lower houses - I've been going around fixing these up, and they seem to be looking quite a bit better.
There's two more issues remaining -
Firstly, the Tasmanian lower house uses the same divisions as the federal parliament. What do we do here? They used to have a list of state members as well, but Adam erased them a few months ago, and I'm not sure that was the way to go anyway.
Secondly, the Legislative Council issue remains. Any more thoughts there? Ambi 1 July 2005 09:32 (UTC)
I hope this is a good place to continue this discussion concerning lists of members on electorate pages:
Is it really necessary to have a new line in the members list when a member gains the title "honourable" at Electoral district of Marrickville?For one thing, other members on this list don't have their titles included. JPD ( talk) 09:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I would prefer not to include titles in the list at all. The lists are showing who was member when, and showing changes in title is a distraction. Apart from that, I don't think it is not normal Wikipedia style to include titles such as "The Honourable" in the text. JPD ( talk) 13:58, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I also would prefer no titles at all, but would like consistency across all states and nationally. -- Newhoggy | Talk 22:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree, don't split up because of titles. Tacked-on titles that nobody uses in common parlance ("Rt Hon" and so on) really shouldn't be included in links to that individual; there's a good case for *mentioning* the title on the pollie's article, but we don't need to do it in links, and we certainly don't need to disrupt the flow of a list so as to have one item for pre- and post-title. fuddlemark ( fuddle me!) 05:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
It would seem logical that if honourific prefixes — aside Sir and Dame — are not used in biography articles, neither should they be in lists. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies)#Honorific prefixes.-- cj | talk 07:03, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I say, don't split rows of any list just to include more than one title. I think it's okay to use a person's title in a list, but it should be either the most recent one or none at all. -- Susurrus 12:23, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be really nice if there were a set of guidelines somewhere and an easy way to get to them from each of the electorate pages. An easy way to get to this page would be nice too.
-- Newhoggy | Talk 05:01, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
The other problem is the dash character separating the start and end dates varies between pages and also whether or not duplicate members or parties in the same table should be linked. -- Newhoggy | Talk 08:03, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
–
), but often people will use a hyphen (-
) because they don't know how to use an actual dash.
fuddlemark (
befuddle me!) 10:46, 18 May 2006 (UTC)One more problem is that sometimes the link ALP is used and sometimes Australian Labor Party, or Labor. Which is the preferred method? -- Newhoggy | Talk 13:56, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I support using the abbreviations that the ABC and electoral authorities use so long as they're linked.-- cj | talk 15:07, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd rather use the full names. There are no space constraints in these tables, as they're typically rather small, and it makes them more comprehensible to non-Australian readers. Rebecca 08:33, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
How about we list our positions on these things in a table?
Decision | For | Against | Resolution |
---|---|---|---|
Always use titles in lists for all MPs that have them. |
Failed | ||
Remove all titles from lists |
Passed | ||
Always use duplicate links in lists | |||
Always use full party names | |||
Always use *space* ndash *space* to separate dates in list |
|
||
Use Wikipedia's most commonly used separator for dates in lists whatever that is. | |||
Always use abbreviations for party names used electoral authorities in lists |
|||
Always use four digit years rather than abbreviated two digit years. |
|
Passed | |
Always use tables for members lists rather than bullet points. |
Passed | ||
All electorate articles in Australia should use consistent style. |
Passed |
It seems like "Always use tables for members lists rather than bullet points" has the most support. If there are no objections, I'd like mark the resolution of this item as "passed" and start changing all electorate past members lists into tables while waiting for more feedback on the other items. -- Newhoggy | Talk 02:37, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
NSW uses "Member", "Party affiliation", "Period", SA uses "Member", "Party", "Term". I propose all NSW articles adopt the SA column headings because they are clearer and shorter. -- Newhoggy | Talk 05:47, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
SA uses an assortment custom table attributes resulting in a table with darker column headings. NSW uses the standard "wikitable" class giving tables with light column headings matching the colour scheme of Wikipedia. I propose that SA tables be styled using the NSW method, which is more concise, constitent and manageable. -- Newhoggy | Talk 05:49, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
The way the categories are organised is unsatisfactory -
Category:Electoral divisions of Australia refers to
Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives yet contains categories for state electorates. Perhaps
Category:Electoral divisions of Australia should exclusively list Australian federal electorates and, along with categories for state electorates, be placed in a more general category to be named
Australian electorates. Thus, the cats would be organised as follows:
Category:Politics of Australia
MH au 05:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I have been adding election tables to the federal electorate articles and have only just come across this page. I had also been adding shading (using the American templates) to the member lists but now see that it would be better to discuss it here first. Should shading be used in some way here? (I think that it adds clarity and provides an at-a-glance look for visual people of the party history.) The American articles (eg. Alabama's 7th congressional district) use plain shading while the British articles (eg. Cambridge (constituency)) use small blobs of party colour a la election boxes. Which should be used for Australian articles. Also, how to create Australian templates for shading if the decision is to use shading? Frickeg 07:27, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
![]() |
re: Infoboxes. I looked up my electorate page for a quick run down prior to going down to Australia house to vote (UK resident), and realised that unlike all other Commonwealth countries and the US, none of our electorates had infoboxes. I feel these provide a clear quick summary of the elctorate without the reader having to read the whole article if they do not feel the need to do so. As a result I devised a quick Australian oriented template for a nice clear infobox, which adds a visual element to the otherwise sometimes plain articles, as well as giving a quick summary a student or interested person can use to get a feel of the nature and makeup of the electorate without neccessarily reading all the history and previous members to try and find out about the current state of the electorate. However, Frickeg contacted me to inform me of this debate, and the fact that someone had decided they were redundant. Why?? They are an incredibly useful summerisation of articles, and I add them to any articles I find that don't have them. It makes browsing articles more functional, and less time consuming. I have so far done all the lectorates for SA, WA, TAS, NT, and ACT, and unless anyone can provide a more convincing arguement that a personal opinion that they are redundant, I will complete the task for VIC, NSW and QLD - hopefully in time for all federal divisions to be complete before the election. Rac fleming 11:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not really fussed either way. I'm not sure there's a great deal of point in standardising them - practically nothing else on Wikipedia with electorate articles is, from the naming conventions down, and nearly all countries don't even have past division-level results at all. However, if you want to try, be my guest. Rebecca ( talk) 01:31, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
mForgive me if I don't see it, but in the tables with the results for each electoral district, how are the candidates ordered. For example, I would think the top candidate would be the one with the most votes. Can someone explain the pattern to me? Joe 09:24 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I was actually just about to ask about this too. I put the ones in the federal divisions, but I'm wondering whether they should be in ballot paper order or in order of who got the most votes. I'd be interested in other people's opinions. Frickeg 00:07, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Michael. Listing them in ballot paper, especially in cases where there are a large amount of candidates, makes finding the actually relevant information all the more difficult. While electoral commissions are required to report the data "as it happened", as such, we should be presenting it in the most useful and informative manner possible - and that, IMHO, is to present it in order of votes gained. Rebecca 01:22, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm very much in favour of listing them in the order of votes received -- it simply doesn't make sense to me to have it any other way, and the information loss is not really terrible; frankly, who cares what the ballot order was? Enlighten me if I'm missing something, but is it really so important what the randomly decided ballot order actually looked like? — Nightstallion 10:07, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums#Electoral district disambiguation jnestorius( talk) 20:08, 9 February 2022 (UTC)