Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Electoral districts in Canada

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Electoral districts in Canada
This article is part of the Electoral districts in Canada WikiProject (Discuss/Join).

Contents

[edit] CanRiding template

Note the new CanRiding template I have added to the page, and the demonstration of its use (twice) at Cape Breton South. Any thoughts on how to improve this? I would like to see these added to all electoral district articles, but since it is probably best to use Subst for reasons of server efficiency, we should probably all agree on the language of the text before going ahead and adding it everywhere. BTW, I'm glad this page was finally created, it was long overdue. Fawcett5 02:41, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

  • I have made some suggested changes to the text by editing Cape Breton South directly here. Ground Zero | t 15:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
  • In Cape Breton South, shouldn't the proposed link template go under the External links sections? Should it replace the parent link: "Website of the Parliament of Canada" link, or fall under it? Also, I note that the parl. webpage at is titled "History of the Federal Electoral Ridings since 1867". As such, I am fine with the current wording. --maclean25 18:32, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
  • I agree with Maclean that the links should go under the External links header, replacing the old generic parliament link. Is everybody happy with the template itself? Fawcett5 03:38, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

Hello! I'm glad to join this project, and thanks to everyone for all your hard work. It's looking great! I've a few comments regarding this:

  • Should election tables appear in descending chronological order (i.e., more recent ones up top) for ridings, and perhaps to have them appear in two columns per page (so a user doesn't have to endlessly scroll down)?
  • Would it be more prudent to include numbers/identifiers for ridings (p. 13), etc. and or abbreviations sanctioned by Elections/Statistics Canada (or logical initialisms) for each party, (I recall seeing some discussion regarding this), with only abbreviations for subsequent appearances? Here's another useful search link at the Library of Parliament website. While clearer, full titles are potentially lengthy and parties (those with longevity) are usually repeated in subsequent tables.
  • Should we consider including brief statistical profiles (template?) with map for each riding (e.g., size, population, etc.), and list summative information regarding current representation (and also narratively, or when different)? While informative, this can also be a huge undertaking given periodic censuses (and changing data) every five years, differences among ridings between federal-provincial-municipal levels, and not throwing in a 'kitchen sink' of data.

Thoughts? Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 04:50, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

1. For discussion on chronological order go here: /Election results/Chronological order. I like the idea of parallel tables. It can fill a lot of white space. We just have to make the tables small enough so we can fit two side-by-side.

2. If these Federal riding codes are unique to every district perhaps they belong in an infobox.

3. For discussion on demographics and census data see: Wikipedia:WikiProject Electoral districts in Canada/Demographics

maclean25 05:00, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Hey; thanks for your reply ... and thanks for this! I noted these comments here in the hope of consolidating our fruitful actions with others. I'll also post elsewhere as you've suggested and as needed. Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 05:07, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Because there are so many issues to sort out, this has become an exercise in managing fragmented discussions on a single topic. Please keep some pages on your watchlist and don't be afraid to create a new section or a subpage to deal with a specific issue. --maclean25 05:55, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Great; done and done ... thanks again! :) E Pluribus Anthony 06:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Partial automation

I've had a look at some of the data sources and references available for this project, and I think I can automate some of the process. Specifically, I can:

  • automatically fetch, parse, edit and save data about election results sample
  • automatically fetch, parse, edit and save any of the demographic data available from StatCan sample 1 sample 2
  • possibly automate some of the work related to expenses, though that website has an awful interface (especially for querying with a bot)
  • the addition of any infoboxes, templates, or categories

In order to do this, I would need the following:

  • a new bot user account
  • permission from this group to run the bot
  • permission from WP:BOT to run the bot
  • a sample article with a complete set of data, templates etc., as we wish them to appear for all articles, that I will use as the bot's template
  • a group of people, which will include me, to track the activities of the bot

I propose that we select one article, and update it with all the information we want to present for all electoral districts. (This is a worthwhile idea whether or not the bot is created.) Note that there are a few caveats:

  • a lot of this information is under Crown Copyright - I will not do wholesale copying of data
  • I can only automate processes which follow a pattern - I will not automate anything which has any randomness in it
  • I'll write/run the bot only after we've resolved issues regarding data for demographics and electoral results
  • I'll need examples of the current state of articles with respect to content, so that I can program the bot to behave under different conditions
  • if this goes ahead, I'll run the bot on up to 10 articles, and wait for sufficient feedback about those edits before letting it run on all other articles

I propose this because a lot of this work is tedious, repetitive, and can be easily automated; I would rather have humans add interesting information to the articles instead of wasting time adding this stuff in. I welcome feedback, and I'll try to address any concerns you have. Let me be clear, though: I'll respect the community consensus, whatever it may be. Mindmatrix 02:48, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I have a bias towards Ottawa South as our example article. What do you all think? -- Earl Andrew - talk 03:48, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Well, nobody else has offered a suggestion, so Ottawa South it is! Mindmatrix 14:57, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
I would certainly support automation/botification, especially if it can format the tables as well. If it is just about importing the raw data on election results from the Parliamentary site, I don't know if it saves any effort. The real effort is in formatting. Ground Zero | t 14:38, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Data formatting will be a part of the process. This is why I want well-defined infoboxes etc. As part of that effort, I will program the bot to convert names to lowercase (MARTIN -> Martin, MCARTHUR -> McArthur, O'GRADY -> O'Grady), to create any necessary headers, and add relevant infoboxes, in addition to text and tables for demographics data. Mindmatrix 14:57, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
I entirely support the idea of a bot. However, could it do some simple calculations (e.g. calculating percentages) on the statistical data? Luigizanasi 16:41, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Yes, so long as the data to calculate the percentages is readily accessible and non-random. It appears that StatCan embeds data for the province and Canada in the riding tables, so I can also program the bot to do provincial and national comparisons. We can discuss the data requirements on the Demographics page; I'll use the results on that page as the basis for the bot's functionality. Mindmatrix 14:57, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
BTW: when I say non-random in that context, what I mean is that the data sources, and the way in which they are formatted, is predictable. The data itself will of course have variation. Mindmatrix 15:29, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
Note that for comparison to provincial averages, I would not include such comparisons for the territories since there is only one riding in each anyway. Mindmatrix 15:29, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I've written a small component of the bot. Right now, it does the following:

  • fetch a list of electoral districts to edit
  • for each district:
    • query the parl.gc.ca database for info
    • parse the text to find the province of the riding (just in case)
    • parse the text for each election (the parliament heading)
  • create a time-stamped transaction log

Problems I've encountered:

  • StatCan uses original riding names for 2003 Representation Order, but the list I have uses the most recent names
  • StatCan uses javascript for its search page; I'm not going to program a javascript interpreter for this project...

I don't think either problem should be difficult to solve. I can probably generate a sample page this weekend sometime. I'll put it in my user-space, and link to it from here. Mindmatrix 01:33, 3 November 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Provincial riding names question

Is there a preferred format for provincial electoral districts, i.e. other than "Lillooet (electoral district)". The case I've come across is the first historical/alphabetical listing of BC ridings, Cariboo; So there's Cariboo (electoral district) and I'm eyeballing it to Cariboo (provincial electoral district). Is that OK? I notice in some other ridings where there's more than one provincial riding (i.e. the same name occurs in more than one province) it's something like "Cariboo (British Columbia electoral district)". Clarification please. For the record, I've assigned myself BC constituencies, both federal and provincial, that aren't done yet, especially historical ones that tie into the career of noted politicians (Walkem, Premier Elliott, George Murray, Amor De Cosmos and so on. Next after Cariboo I'm gonna do Dewdney (electoral district), Yale (electoral district), and Victoria City (provincial electoral district) (vs. Victoria City (electoral district) which is federal) Skookum1. There may be a federal Yale electoral district - I haven't looked yet; I know there was a Yale-Cariboo, so the provincial entry may have to be Yale (provincial electoral district). Dewdney is going to turn out to be a disambiguation because of Edgar Dewdney, the Dewdney Trail and the town/locality of Dewdney, British Columbia, etc. [[Yale22:26, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vaguely-related drudgework

Now that we seem to be in election fever again, there're a couple of quasi-tedious jobs I've put off for a bit. I was working my way through Results of the Canadian federal election, 2004: All on one page, converting the older-format results tables to the newer-format tables (which are saved in template-format and then {{include}}d across several pages) in an east to west fashion and generally meandered off the job somewhere east of Peterborough. Anybody who's up for lending me a hand at thrilling conversion work will get my undying affection. The region-specific text needs to be moved to the appropriate regional page (like Canadian federal election results in Eastern Ontario), and then the template created and the other content dumped in. Aside from adding a whack of extra cells, there's also the need to update the footnoting and use of the dagger to match the standards used in the other updated versions. It will change your life. It changed mine.

Also, my pretty little automatically-generated histograms (for an example, see Canadian federal election results in New Brunswick) used to look delightful until some sort of change to the Wikipediawide CSS made the boxes autostack (rather than line up side by side) which makes things rather hideous. I mucked about with my code trying to update it so it meshed with the new order of things but, also gave up when it just hurt my head too much. Anyone technically-minded who wants to take a shot at it would be recieve even more love than the above persons. I fear we may need to go hunting outside our nerdy little political pond to find someone who enjoys wrestling CSS and templates enough to get things back to usefulness.

Merci beaucoup, all. The Tom 10:26, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nanaimo and other ridings re:...

In a few cases I'm running into - Nanaimo and Comox primarily - there are existing city pages. Normally for "such and so constituency click here" but in both of these cases there's seven or eight riding names; I gave up on Comox earlier for this reason but just did a Nanaimo (electoral districts) page and gave that a link at the top of Nanaimo, British Columbia. I've been doing the BC historical provincial districts and Nanaimo is one of them Nanaimo (provincial electoral district) - and it's also a current riding, with very different boundaries and population etc. What I've done in those cases is list them separately on a given page, but the links resolve to the same; but as a result the current-riding page has to make sure to carry the historical riding information and a writeup on its politics/geography etc as well; OR if it's felt to be a better way to do it, have one called Nanaimo (provincial electoral district) (long tag, huh? - less so with "historical" dropped from it, now that it's fixed).

Just trying to figure this all out and keep it organized. With the historic districts I try and make sure to do the lineage - the genealogy of the riding; in the Nanaimo area there's been a century and more of gerrymandering (hard core labour unions vs old money, coalmines and estates, big lumber, dairy) so the boundaries got mutated around a lot.

In a bunch of cases unless I hear not to I'm going to have to do this to other riding-name pages where an existing major city page is in place and there's not adequate room to properly list the electoral districts all at once; an intermediary page - a disambiguation, but exclusively on electoral districts - is necessary; or the main Nanaimo or Comox or Tsawwassen page has to get changed to Nanaimo, British Columbia; Comox, British Columbia etc and a new Nanaimo page becomes the redirect; or however that's done. Seemed simpler to do it all the way I'd seen it done, although usually to a wide-disambig, i.e. not limited to electoral districts.

If I'm doing something wrong please let me know.Skookum1 02:35, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Is there a page which lists all the names/colors in the Wikipedia table/box stylesheets? I've been improvising on obscure party names, instead of just using "Other" (e.g. using "Marijuana" for "Government" and "Natural Law" for "Opposition"); Many of the old party names are one-night shows or one-man bands, so they can just have Other; which is what I've used for Conservative Independents, Independent Liberals, Independent Labour and such; came across Soldier Farmer and BC Constructivist Party which were around for a while; on a province-wide election chart/pie they'd need a colour, though they won no seats; and others like them. Haven't been that consistent on the colours I've used on the historical ridings done so far, and am hoping on input as where to index and categorize them; info about them inserted onto current riding pages needs to be done at some point....oh yeah - shouldn't there be a bulletin-list where whomever's working on a riding can post their activity/completion so others can check it over? I think I've got all my numbers right but a fact-checker is a fact-checker; same with proofreading, and it'd be good to keep tabs on who's working where and, if in historical periods, which ones Skookum1 02:28, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


On your first question, I have been doing the current and former Ontario federal districts on the following basis: one name, one article; and one riding, one article. So where the same riding name has been used two or more times through history, there is only one article, and it identifies the various areas that the so-named riding covered. Also, where a riding has simply changed name Broadview—Greenwood became Toronto—Danforth for example, both are combined into one article with the other name (B-G) serving as a redirect to the main article (T-D). I guess if you gather enough information about both a historical riding and a current riding with the same name to necessitate separate articles, you may want to go with that, but I have not found that necessary. This is just the approach that I have taken, and is not, to my knowledge, established as a policy.
On the question of party colours, I created or revised all of the federal and most of the provincial general elections tables. I generally assigned colours only for parties that were around for a while, and left the others using grey, i.e., the same colour as independents. I also used grey for Independent Conservatives, Liberal Independents, etc. Check the BC elections articles to see if colours have already been assigned. If not, then it's up to you to decide whether to choose colours, or just to leave them grey. If you do choose new colours, I hope that you will adjust the BC general election tables as well for consistency.
Check out this page: Template:Canadian politics/party colours, which captures all of the party colours that I could find when I compiled it. Feel free to add any that you have assigned in your work. Regards, Ground Zero | t 03:32, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Candidate listings?

Here I thought I was going to be all useful today, instead of working over long-obsolete provincial ridings, by adding in declared candidates and bios for various federal ridings. I started in at it and noticed that someone else has already provided blank tables ready for inputting; should I go on by adding candidate-lists to the text area? Idea was to provide short bios; so far I've only done Abbotsford (electoral district)Skookum1 23:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New elections results/house seatings templates

Had a start on a simple version of what I was looking for; had to do colours by hand-coding as can't figure out how to get the colour templates to work without them taking up rows/cells. There's two templates Template:LegislatureSeats and Template:CanLeg1 and I've done up British Columbia general election, 1903 for a trial run. Think this could also be used for provincial caucuses at the federal level. Would like to make this look better, more functional; committees/cabinet posts, if any, maybe margins of victory, and ??? Suggestions? Skookum1 21:44, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] BC Elections 1871-1900 (new House template)

With GroundZero's help tweaking the finished product, I created a legislature-seats table Template:LegSeats3, the results of which you can see on any of the BC elections from 1871 to 1928 or so, and 1952 as well so far. I created it because I needed a way to represent divisions of the House, such as they were, in the pre-party period (ending '03); and it helps all around as a visual display, like the existing electoral tables. Having it also gave me a tool to do the outlines of the BC elections from 1872 to 1900, which hadn't been done (other than 1898 for some reason); so they're down now as well with some rough outline on the history of elections in the period. e.g. British Columbia general election, 1903, British Columbia general election, 1894, British Columbia general election, 1952 (scroll down on each page to get to tables).

I'd like to make the colour-columns narrower, and the same size, but I'm not sure of how to code the template to accomplish that. I think it's useful for other provinces, and maybe also for provincial caucuses, i.e. of MPs, the BC caucus, the Alberta caucus, and so on; even committee composition if there's an article to that effect. With a tweak of the title it could be used for US states.Skookum1 01:17, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Note: the party is put in the riding-name column so that later additions to the Member boxes can be made, i.e. Cabinet positions, dates of resignation etc. Makes it a bit complicated when a multi-member riding has two or three Opposition members from different parties, but I've made those party name-lists, when they occur, hopefully visually correspond to the names in the fields next to them.Skookum1 07:21, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Federal Election Result Templates

I don't know why our own templates were made for the Canadian Federal Elections. Shouldn't there just be generic tables for any election results? Sort of a waste of space for storing those templates and confusing. It would be so much simpler if there was just one set of templates.--Kelownian 08:15, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

The templates are all of 1k large, if that. The British templates have a different visual look, and those for Aus and so on were developed independently. In my own experience the template-pages for the Canadian federal elections were different from those for the provincial ones; and the House-composition Results templates linked in the previous item are completely new, and have not been applied anywhere before other than in (so far) B.C.
The two main templates I've seen for riding results are Template:Election box and Template:FPTP. I made an adaption of the FPTP, Template:Pref because of the preferential ballot in BC in 1952-53, which required two new columns and column-titles. I don't use the ElectionBox template much, but it's common in federal ridings; the FPTP one I originally got from the Provencher federal riding, however.
Wikipedia is an open environment and you can create new templates, or not, as you see fit. In the case of the electoral information we're trying to develop Canadian standards; but the same templates and terminologies used in Canada can not, for instance, be applied directly to US state houses or those in Australia.Skookum1 07:19, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] All BC Provincial ridings now in system

I just finished North Peace River and South Peace River, which were the predecessor ridings for Peace River North and Peace River South. Near as I can tell that means that ALL historical provincial ridings are now in Wikipedia, although some of those still need historical data filled in - especially the current ridings whose data tends to only go back to 1991; in some cases, such as Vancouver-Point Grey, I "filled in the blanks" but others such as Vancouver-Burrard and any other current riding need doing; I think I did the Victoria (British Columbia electoral district) and new Westminster (provincial electoral district) historical data, but that's it; a couple of the old ridings, like the West Kootenay partition ridings from the 1890s, I don't think have data in them yet ....but I'm too burned out from all this electoral data now; a few more federal ridings notwithstanding.

Turned out I still had the defunct North Shore ridings, Surrey and a couple of its spinoffs, now Coquitlam; not quite done but very close.....many modern ridings still need back-data prior to 1991 though.

Comment: there are two Nanaimo and The Islands listings; one is with a capital "The" and the other isn't - Nanaimo and The Islands and Nanaimo and the Islands. I can't remember if the existence of the parallel entries is my fault; might have been; most of the links are geared around the latter one, but in retrospect and on reviewing the Elections BC website, the capital-The spelling is the normative one; because this riding was a combination of the Nanaimo riding and The Islands. I think the complete data is in the no-capital-the article; but one or the other of these should become a redirect to the other; I vote for the capital-T to be the main article.

Made a few colours in the last few days; sorry about the off-puce for the United Front (Workers and Farmers) Party; if someone can do better please do so.Skookum1 22:20, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] No. of BC federal districts

I just had a look at the BC federal electoral districts (cat); there are thirty-seven, and there are only supposed to be 36, n'est-ce pas? Anybody got any idea which one should be "defunct"?Skookum1 01:07, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] When does a riding become defunct?

Here's a problem I encountered tonight. Two ridings here in NB had minor tweakings to their boundaries in 1987 (we're talking maybe 2000 people affected combined) that happened to coincide with a name change. One of them (Miramichi) was divided into seperate articles, which I merged back together. Meanwhile, Fundy-Royal, which was totally reconfigured in the last redistribution, is untouched. What's the criteria for determining how much a change there should be before we split riding pages? Kirjtc2 02:41, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

  • I've been going by the Library of Parliament website, which is the source for everything that I've been doing on riding articles. It says, in its Northumberland—Miramichi article that "The electoral district was abolished in 1987." I don't know how they determine when a riding is abolished and when its name is changed,
    • it's when the enacting legislation for the boundary changes came into effect. That's why "abolished in 19xx" doesn't necessarily coincide with an election year. In the case of the BC provincial ridings I didn't have information on the dates of the redistribution legislation so did it by election years only, i.e. what year the riding first/last appeared in.

but I suspect that if the redistribution commission changes a riding's boundaries and its name as part of a general redistribution, the former riding is considered to be abolished. Otherwise, it's a name change. For Fundy-Royal and other ridings, if the name hasn't been changed, then it's all in one article.

  • I have no objection to combining the Northumberland—Miramichi and Miramichi articles, but I think that we have to go by the Library of Parliament's description of N-H having been abolished unless we can find another official says (e.g., Elections Canada) that says otherwise. The article could read something like:
Northumberland-Miramichi was a federal electoral district in New Brunswick, Canada, that was represented in the Canadian House of Commons from 1968 to 1997. It was replaced by Miramichi riding, which has been represented in the House of Commons since 1997.
  • The article would then cover both ridings. Comments? Ground Zero | t 14:48, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Um, yeah. Rule of thumb I've used out in BC is, so long as it's the same riding name, it comes home to poppa and goes on the same page. Hyphenated or otherwisely combined-named ridings have their own entry. Boundary tweakings accompanied namechanges are totally different ridings (this is how I've treated them) such that provincial ridings Okanagan South and South Okanagan have two different pages. And the reality, at least here in BC, is that the boundary tweakings are usually shrinkings because of population growth; with the result that a same-name riding of 1980 might look a lot different (actually it WILL look a lot different) than its predecessor in 1950, such that Okanaqan South and South Okanagan include the same core cities (Kelowna and Penticton) but outer areas originally part of the riding get assigned to other ridings, or turned into new ones.

Splitting-and-recombining was really had to follow; I suggest you both look at Kootenay (electoral districts) and see the hierarchy tree - which was necessary in this region, which has more boundary changes and name-mutations than any other part of BC. You'll see some names that appear two or three times in some of the hierarchies; those all point at the same page, which when getting to the intermediary riding/year, has a note on the electoral history sending you to the other-named riding. Of BC's federal historical ridings I was really strict; if it was a different name, it was a different riding; so all the 1871 ridings, which were temporarily created until ratified by the provincial parliament in time for 1872, are all listed indepedently of the 1872-onwards ridings (all of which got subdvided in pretty short order as the province's population grew). So Victoria District and Victoria have separate pages, Vancouver Island and Vancouver have separate pages, New Westminster District and New Westminster have separate pages. Problem is just because, say with your Miramichi ridings, is that, say in the last case, there's also New Westminster City (provincial; the provincial New Westminster riding was all of the Lower Mainland except the City of New Westminster), New Westminster—Burnaby (federal defunct), New Westminster—Coquitlam (the current federal riding). And more. Confusing it further, for outsiders to BC, is that the New Westminster riding included all of modern-day Vancouver and the Fraser Valley (until the creation of the Burrard riding); while Vancouver riding was actually Vancouver Island (the city hadn't been founded/named at the time of its existence).

Also worth noting that Yale (electoral district) for several years didn't even include Yale itself (the name was grandfathered from the first set of federal ridings (Yale District in 1871), but the location of the town of Yale was remote from the growing population core of the riding (the Okanagan and Similkameen areas; Yale riding originally was everything to the Alberta border) and the town of Yale wound up in the same riding as Chilliwack (by various names).

I could go on; I just think it's simpler to keep the same-names all together, but if it's hyphenated or combined-name (e.g. Coast Chilcotin isn't hyphenated) it gets its own page, with a link out of the electoral history from the one page, then a link back, e.g. look at Lillooet, Lillooet West and Lillooet East; the latter two existed briefly - three elections I think (provincial) and then Lillooet West got the original Lillooet name back (it's got the town of Lillooet in it; but the Lillooet-only riding sequence is all on the same page, while actually it should be two different ridings (theoretically, if I'd used a different set of rules) with Lillooet West and the later Lillooet (now Yale-Lillooet provincially).

I gather that a lot of your riding-names and boundaries in older-settled parts of the country are a bit more stable? Out here it's complicated by mountains, and shifting populations; either because of immigration or the boom-and-bust nature of the provincial economy. The Kootenay list, for example, had a plethora of new ridings created during the heyday of the galena and copper booms of the late 1800s through to about the 1930s; as those towns (Sandon, Greenwood, Eholt, Rossland, Ymir either faded away or nearly disappeared (Eholt and Sandon) their ridings were combined into the region-spanning ones today.

I could go on; just laying out what I set up as standards out here in BC.Skookum1 17:24, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Just to comment on Ground Zero's comments, a name change only occurs between riding re-distributions. -- Earl Andrew - talk 05:01, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Which is why I made them all separate pages, except when the names are identical.Skookum1 06:23, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I understand the BC situation, but the Miramichi example was a minor tweaking at best...three rural communities that don't even have their own gas station changed ridings. Yes, they are fairly more stable, except for when the map is radically redrawn (like it was in the western half of NB in 1997). Ground Zero's idea of merging articles and saying "riding X replaced riding Y" is fair IMO. Kirjtc2 03:31, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

  • So long as there's only one riding at question; often in BC there aren't, or in a redistribution the same name might wind up having very different boundaries (esp. in the Kootenays or the Central Island, which are the main gerrymandering regions in BC).Skookum1 00:37, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Yves Séguin

Somebody should have a look at the article Yves Séguin. It is not clear to me whether he was minister of Canada or minister of Quebec or both or neither. Thanks, AxelBoldt 04:18, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

He was a Quebec minister, not a federal one (Charest appointed him, and Charest has never been PM to the best of my knowledge, much as he wanted the job). I followed the Montmorency link but the one electoral district I spotted is a federal electoral district; maybe there's a provincial riding of the same name, as there often is in BC.Skookum1 20:17, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Succession box templates

Just curious, is there a standard box we should be using? Below is a sample of some I had viewed and placed here to show the different styles. HJKeats 19:16, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Norman Doyle

Preceded by
Bonnie Hickey, Liberal		 Member of Parliament for St. John's East
1997–present		 Succeeded by
incumbent

Wayne Easter

Preceded by
Catherine Callbeck, Liberal		 Member of Parliament from Malpeque
1993 – present		 Incumbent

Serge Ménard

Preceded by
District created in 2003. Please see Laval Centre and Laval East		 Member of Parliament for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin
2004-		 Succeeded by
Incumbent

Joe Volpe

Preceded by:
Roland de Corneille, Liberal		 Member of Parliament from Eglinton--Lawrence
(1988-)		 Succeeded by:
Incumbent

[edit] Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team cooperation

Hello. I'm a member of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing articles using these criteria, and we are are asking for your help. As you are most aware of the issues surrounding your focus area, we are wondering if you could provide us with a list of the articles that fall within the scope of your WikiProject, and that are either featured, A-class, B-class, or Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Do you have any recommendations? If you do, please post your suggestions at the listing of all active Places WikiProjects, and if you have any questions, ask me in the Work Via WikiProjects talk page or directly in my talk page. Thanks a lot! Titoxd(?!? - help us) 18:30, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Em-dash use

I noticed that the project is using em-dashes in riding names to differentiate from hyphens internally. I started making changes to en-dashes (which are not hyphens), as the em-dash is used for something else entirely—like brackets, actually—and should not be used in riding names. Someone mentioned that this issue was discussed, but I don't see where, and it is clear that the em-dash is the wrong thing to use here. Comments, please.  OZLAWYER  talk  19:53, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Osgoodelawyer and myself were discussing this on our user pages. There was previously some discussion of this a couple years ago at Talk:List of Canadian federal electoral districts. However, Wikipedia:WikiProject Electoral districts in Canada/Naming conventions says nothing about the issue. Personally I do think the em-dashes should be kept, as this seems to be the official typography as used in hansard. - SimonP 20:07, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
I found a page [1] that says that the en-dash is used in B.C. ridings, from 1997, though. Anyone know if there's a change in B.C.'s use today?  OZLAWYER  talk 
Hrm. You guys are using hyphens in the B.C. pages?  OZLAWYER  talk  20:16, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
I understand that BC does not follow Elections Canada's model in this regard, and uses only endashes in riding names. Ground Zero | t 21:21, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
MB, PE, NL, YK, NT, NU, MB, SK and AB use hyphens exclusively, while QC uses em-dashes exclusively. ON uses hyphens in the normal text and double hyphens (which could be understood as either en-dashes or em-dashes) in riding pages and pages about committees. NS uses hyphens with spaces on each side in some cases and simple hyphens in others, for no apparent reason for the differentiation, and BC uses hyphens in some cases and en-dashes in others, also for no apparent reason.  OZLAWYER  talk  21:53, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Provincial riding templates

This comment is blantantly copied from my own talk page:

It crossed my mind that instead of there being one catch-all {{Canada-constituency-stub}} that there ought to be constituency stubs by province. There is currently a discussion[2] for creating separate stubs for politicians by province. The same should go for constituencies by province. However, having recently gone through and flagged a zillion articles with their respective provincial-stub templates, I know that would be a huge undertaking, so I haven't made the proposal. It would certainly do away with having to use two stub templates on a constituency article when one would do.

If you look at Category:Canadian constituency stubs, there are a lot of stubs in the category. It might be more useful to have sub-stub categories, especially for those editors who wish to work on a specific province. The current {{Canada-constituency-stub}} could possibly be renamed {{Canada-fed-constituency-stub}} or something similar, unless it is considered more practical to tag federal ridings with the stub template for the appropriate province. Agent 86 01:20, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Follow-Up: There were many constituencies tagged with the {{Canada-gov-stub}} template. I've moved all of them into {{Canada-constituency-stub}}. That should give a better idea of how many riding stubs there are. Agent 86 02:59, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] By-elections

Should we have articles for every by-election that occurs? That's what is done for British by-elections and American Special elections. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to do the same. I know during the Labrador election, we decided against creating an article, by merging the content of one created into the Labrador (electoral district) article. Check out more here: List of United Kingdom by-elections -- Earl Andrew - talk 22:01, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

  • Despite the precedence in the UK and US, I don't think it's necessary, unless the article gets crazy long, then it should be branched. Ground Zero | t 22:14, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
    • Mh. Believing that it would be handled the same way in Canadian electoral articles, I created links to Repentigny by-election, 2006 and London North Centre by-election, 2006 from the respective electoral district articles... Is that a problem? I'd prefer to have separate articles about the by-elections, as that makes categorising and finding information about those by-elections easier... —Nightstallion (?) 14:07, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
      • In the BC provincial election series, including the historical ones, I included byelections on the ends of pages for the previous general election; I think I did this for some historical federal ones as well. But maybe they should have their own articles, as many have political contexts which should have explanations, i.e. as to their circumstances and consequences and issues; this would seem to make sense, and keep by-elections off general elections pages.Skookum1 02:28, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
        • I think they should have their own pages, yes. —Nightstallion (?) 19:33, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
          • My view is that the by-election information belongs on the electoral district page which has electoral history anyway. To be helpful to readers, it makes sense to have a by-election page redirect to the electoral district page as is the current practice. - Jord 21:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)*
            • My view is that it is necessary, especially when there is more than one riding having a by-election, like Ontario 2007. A by-election page is a good starting point, and should include all candidates and results, along with a brief description of why the election is occurring. With links to the main riding pages and the candidates for full details. It also aids research when people are trying to look up by-elections. I mostly agree with Skookum1 and Nightstallion (?)'s views. Abebenjoe 23:11, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Standardization

I've been going though and updating many of the Federal Ridings to be in line with the latest election results, and I've noticed something. Many of the pages have different set-ups both in how the information is presented, and the tables that contain the election results. I think we need to go through, and I know, all 308 pages and standardize them so they all appear with the same form of presenting information. I'm doing the best I can on making the tables all the same, with candidate, party, votes recieved, percentage, percentage change, and expenditures, but I don't want to change the pages beyond that incase there was a reason that certain pages were different. (Grizzwald 03:03, 20 September 2006 (UTC))

The Format in use on Leeds—Grenville, which I plucked at random, is one I had applied to all BC ridings, historical ones anyway, based on a UK model which is slightly different (I couldn't make the colour bar really narrow like theirs is; don't understand Wikicode enough); so if that's the model you're spreading around, that's nice to know; and it's also modelled on a standard evolved for parliamentary elections in the UK and elsewhere. On a separate but related account, there's varying layouts for showing elections results, both provincially and federally, although I think most federal pages are matching.Skookum1 02:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 18:30, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Riding of the month?

Should we have a collaboration for riding of the month? This would be a good idea to help improve some of our articles. Perhaps a riding of the fortnight would be better? I'm thinking we can get going on this after the by-elections. -- Earl Andrew - talk 01:19, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Which is, by way of suggestion, a reminder that we probably have a federal election upcoming in April, so we should have a look around to see what can yet be improved etc etc; I was thinking about this during the last week so I guess we're on the same page. Integration/formats, maps/data, whatever else, standardized formatting or whatever. Maybe time to start a Election Prep To-Do List here, huh?Skookum1 02:09, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
That's also something we should look into. -- Earl Andrew - talk 02:47, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merger of successor ridings

(Discussion moved from Talk:Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou subsequent to merger of "Abitibi" article into A-BJ-N-E article)

According to the Library of parliament website, "Abitibi" was created in 1966, and renamed "Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik". It was abolished in 2003, and most of its territory was incorporated into "Nunavik—Eeyou", which was renamed "Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou" in 2004.

I don't object to merging the two articles -- we do not have a consistent policy on this. It seemed to make sense to me to keep the two articles separate and link them in order to avoid having a humungaloid article, but I don't care that much about it.

I do care that we not portray Nunavik—Eeyou/Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou as being a renaming of Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik. I understand that they represent substantially the same area, but the Library of Parliament site says that Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik was abolished. For us to say otherwise is original research, and I'm sure that we can all agree that that would be non-good.

I have tried to restructure the article to avoid the implication, but welcome further changes to improve readability as long as this key point is not lost. Ground Zero | t 19:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I've been thinking in my head that we should set a policy of merging similar ridings together. It makes following their histories a lot easier. To avoid original research, there are books out there on riding histories that have done similar history merging. -- Earl Andrew - talk 20:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that the Library of Parliament website should be viewed as the authority on the matter. If it says a riding was abolished, who is the author of a book (or us) to say otherwise? Ground Zero | t 20:29, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

The thing is though, there are instances of ridings having the same borders but changing names after a re-distribution. Under your beliefs, this would mean having two articles for the same geographical district. My reasoning for the merger was because if a riding has similar boundaries, it would be nice to have its political geographical history on one page. -- Earl Andrew - talk 21:20, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

There are two separate issues here:

  1. Should we accept the Library of Parliament's classification of a riding being abolished and a new riding being created, or should we use some other source and determine that Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik was renamed Nunavik—Eeyou despite what the LofP says?
  2. If we accept the LofP's classification, should the two ridings be in separate articles or combined into one article as you suggest?

One the first question, I am adamant: the LofP should be accepted as authoritative unless it is proven clearly to be wrong. That does not mean, in my opinion, that there have to be two separate articles (the second question). I can live with merging the articles on two ridings into one article as we now have at Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou. There are other examples of this being done (see discussion further up the page.) My concern with doing this as a matter of policy is that we can end up with some very long articles, but I don't think that we have to have a policy that says "never merge articles on two separate ridings even though their boundaries are more or less the same". Ground Zero | t 11:57, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 21:48, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Defunct Ontario Ridings?

Does anyone have a source for information for defunct Ontario ridings? I'm looking to find out which riding preceeded Durham Centre. Morgan695 21:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] templates for defunct BC provincial ridings

Come to think of it the templates may not be on the defunct BC federal ridings either; I've just added it to those in "A" of Category:Defunct British Columbia provincial electoral districts but I don't have the stomach tonight, or anytime soon, to go through them all and add this to the talkpage:

{{WikiProject Canada|cangov=yes|riding=yes|bc=yes|class=Start|importance=Low}}

If someone else is looking for something mechanical to do, or can bot or parse that, please do; i created all those ridings, didn't occur to me to templatize them at the time....Skookum1 (talk) 05:22, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possible article deletions while away?

Hi; I'm sort of back from my wikibreak and just caught a "notability" template on Yale-West, which if left unattended would have led to the article's deletion. I'm wondering/worrying if a lot of other similar articles I created got deleted when I wasn't patrolling my watchlist; there's no List of defunct provincial ridings in British Columbia to check for redlinks....some/most are on pages like Vancouver (electoral districts) but just in case, is there any admin log of deletions? I guess I'd have to know the name of what was deleted; it would help if you could know what category things that were delted were in, so that you'd know if a category's membership had changed and what had disappeared. Can anyone here check this? I'd hate to have to go through the election archives again figuring out if anything's missing....I know I rescued one or two others from deletion over the course of my intermittent visits during the wikibreak, makes me think it's likely a few things have slipped under the radar.....Skookum1 (talk) 00:15, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Check your deleted contributions (this link is found in your "user contributions"). It contains a list of all edits you've made that have since been deleted. You can also load your watchlist and find redlinks there. These two should catch most of the deleted articles you're looking for. However, it will those that were not on your watchlist and that you didn't edit - for that, you'll need the name of the article or the name of the admin who deleted it. Mindmatrix 16:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] robo-deletion of articlers while I was away

I've just been adding the WPCan w. riding switch template to the Category:Defunct British Columbia provincial electoral districts over my morning coffee...so far A-N, gonna take a break. But in the process I've discovered that Prince George South apparently has been deleted (I know I made it, I was very thorough) and recently I prevented a speedy delete on The Islands, I think it was. I also remember preventing some trigger-happy deletion-template-placing admin from throwing away a few election results, period. Is there any way to review what's been deleted or is it just hit and miss, i.e. by finding redlinks where there used to be links? It troubles me especially that elections may have been deleted, or that it's up to someone from outside of BC and unconcerned with its history to decide if our electoral history articles are not notable enough to remain standing. Luckily there's various disambig pages e.g. Kootenay (electoral districts) where most ridings wind up listed, and I'll bounce through the old-elections articles to see what else may have been deleted, ridings or elections. If I find any I'll be back to list them; there's no way to recover the contents of deleted articles I guess, huh? Have to rebuild all those results tables, grrrrr....Skookum1 (talk) 15:34, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, here's the list:
    • Prince George South
    • Okanagan-Penticton
    • South Okanagan (electoral district)
    • Vancouver South (electoral district)

From the 1969 election onwards there's no riding-by-riding breakdown so that's all I've found at this point; NB most of the elections articles do not have the WPCan template yet.....Skookum1 (talk) 15:53, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Almost all deleted edits can be recovered. However, it appears that none of the articles in your list above were ever created - there's no history of these articles in the logs. Are you sure you have the right titles? Mindmatrix 16:20, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Thought so, I was pretty thorough when I created the series; I seem to recall Vancouver South and South Okanagan both; Prince George South was short-lived as a riding, maybe I missed it. But like I said I narrowly averted getting The Islands deleted a few weeks ago where someone had placed an sd template on it. I'll check the BC Elections database again.....but, er, I was really thorough in creating the historical ridings; surprised me I missed any......Skookum1 (talk) 16:57, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, I was thorough, but glitched the names, as you surmised must be the case; it was the presence or absence of "(electoral district)" in the link; except for Okanagan-Penticton, which does seem to have been deleted; I wouldn't not have made it, I'm that finicky; you sure it at least isn't in the log; The others are notable especially South Okanagan which was WAC Bennett's longtime riding; the Vancouver South link I just made into a redirect to Vancouver South (electoral district), an extant article, likewise South Vancouver which gets complicated because it's one of two municipalities (with Point Grey) which got rolled into the City of VAncouver in its expansion/amalgamation.; but also a riding name, ans well as a contemopary name for part o the city, sort of a macroneighbourhood.Skookum1 (talk) 06:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

No waitaminit my mistake, it was South Vancouver to [[South Vancouver (electoral district) I created. South Vancouver should almost be its own disambig page....; I'll source the elections pages where the redlinks above were and go to the Elections BC source and check the names over again, then.....might have been a dyslexical error....Skookum1 (talk)