Template talk:Infobox Governor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As requested this note is to document my concern that this template has several easily corrected short-comings that limit its usefulness.

• There is no provision for multiple office holders. For example a person who is a Governor and was a Senator. This is particularly a problem for historical figures. Thomas McKean and J. Caleb Boggs are good examples. McKean was also the 2nd President of Delaware and Chief Justice of the Pa Supreme Court. The Governor template in use here forces a choice, along with its corresponding dates, predecessors and successors. Boggs was also a Senator and Representative. The modified Governor template in use there gives the option of leaving that information off the top and summarizing it at the bottom. In neither instance could anyone know which office to give precedence to, and listing all of them at the top with the dates and predecessors, etc. makes a jumble.

• There seems to be a strong argument for having the offices of current office holders displayed prominently, which makes sense to me, but for the reasons stated above, I think the use of the 2 column display is best limited to those current offices, along with their dates- also in two columns for cosmetic reasons. Once the person leaves office the information can just be blanked out without changing the template and the problem goes away.

• The addition of predecessors and successors in this box seems unnecessarily redundant, given that 1) there is no successor for current office holders, 2) there is no way to attractively provide it for historical multiple office holders, and 3) there is widespread use of succession boxes that do the same job much better anyway.

• Other information like residence, religion, and profession is typically found in summaries like this and the option to provide it would be a nice addition.

• On the positive side the rest of the design is nice and size of the picture looks great, although some poorer images get pretty grainy.

The Boggs article uses a one-off template of this, "Template: politician2" in an attempt to demonstrate, especially to myself, a possible way to solve these issues. I did not intend to give offense by creating a "fork template," but rather to be courteous to others using the Governor template. A standarized infobox template used throughout, at least for politicians, and maybe for others, is a goal well worth working towards, and I would very much like to be part of that discussion and concensus.

If this argument needs to be stated elsewhere, I would appreciate it if someone would so advise me.

stilltim 12:15, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Word switches

I went to the (harder than I thought it would be) trouble to add the aliases for the Democratic Party (United States) in the party affiliation section such as the Presidential template has. Settler 05:09, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Additional prior offices

Would it be difficult to implement an additional prior office (office3) and related fields? For statewide and national officeholders, sometimes their prior service in other positions is quite significant. For example, it is arguable that Ted Kulongoski had a greater impact as state attorney general than in his one term on the state's supreme court, but infobox data on the former does not display. A number of Oregon politicians served in less prominent roles in the latter years of their careers than earlier. -- J-M Jgilhousen 02:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)