Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums
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Referencing problems
[edit]It seems like this project owns many articles which have referencing problems. At the moment, these articles have referencing errors:
- 1922 United States House of Representatives elections
- 1957 elections in India
- 1957 Madras State Legislative Assembly election
- 1964 Havering London Borough Council election
- 1992 Wyoming Senate election
- 2009 Queensland state election
- 2019 Maharashtra Legislative Assembly election
- 2023 Zamfara State gubernatorial election
- 2024 Fort Lauderdale mayoral election
- 2024 Portland, Oregon municipal elections
- 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in Michigan
- 2025 Delhi Legislative Assembly election
- Ballot access in the 2024 United States presidential election
- Candidates of the 2025 Ontario general election
- Elections in Croatia
- Elections in Nagaland
- List of candidates in the 2011 Dutch Senate election
- Statewide opinion polling for the 2024 United States presidential election
- Third-party and independent candidates for the 2024 United States presidential election
Does the project have a mechanism for finding and fixing errors in articles over which it claims interest? What's the best way to reduce the frequency with which election-related articles exhibit referencing issues? -- mikeblas (talk) 21:44, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
- Since my last post, these articles have developed referencing errors:
- 1816 United States presidential election
- 1954 United States Senate elections
- 1986 Manitoba general election
- 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina
- 2025 Ilocos Sur local elections
- 2029 Indonesian local elections
- 2029 Singaporean presidential election
- Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
- Looks like these were fixed by others:
- I fixed 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in Michigan and 1816 United States presidential election.
- This project develops broken references faster than I can fix them alone. Can anyone help? -- mikeblas (talk) 15:03, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
- I looked at several of the examples you give and they were all instances of someone invoking a reference but where the reference wasn't defined. In that case, is the fix to simply delete the instance of the invocation or should I do more work to try to figure out what the actual defined reference should have been? Novellasyes (talk) 19:30, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
- Usually an undefined reference is the result of text being copy-pasted from another article. If it is not clear where the text was copied from (WP:COPYWITHIN), then it's probably easiest to ask the editor where they copied it from. CMD (talk) 22:49, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
- Okay, good. That should have occurred to me! Novellasyes (talk) 22:58, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
- Broken references from copy pasta definitely happens a lot, but I'm not sure I'm ready to say "usually". There are typos, mistakes in anchoring, cases where the reference existed and thrown out with another deletion of text, and ...
- I've just noticed two articles recently edited by Gojetsgo55 which have quite significant problems with referencing and formatting. See 1986 Manitoba general election and Green Party of Canada candidates in the 2008 Canadian federal election. -- mikeblas (talk) 19:22, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
- Usually an undefined reference is the result of text being copy-pasted from another article. If it is not clear where the text was copied from (WP:COPYWITHIN), then it's probably easiest to ask the editor where they copied it from. CMD (talk) 22:49, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
- I looked at several of the examples you give and they were all instances of someone invoking a reference but where the reference wasn't defined. In that case, is the fix to simply delete the instance of the invocation or should I do more work to try to figure out what the actual defined reference should have been? Novellasyes (talk) 19:30, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
- Here is a cluster of articles claimed by this project which have newly-developed referencing issues:
- -- mikeblas (talk) 01:20, 9 March 2025 (UTC)
- Here are two articles in this project which have recently grown duplicate reference definitions:
- -- mikeblas (talk) 20:20, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
- I fixed the errors in 1957 elections in India, which were actually caused by problem with transclusion from 1957 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election. -- mikeblas (talk) 14:19, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
- I fixed 2025 Canadian federal election in Ontario, which had problems transcluding footnotes from Opinion polling for the 2025 Canadian federal election. -- mikeblas (talk) 15:07, 23 March 2025 (UTC)
- Is anyone else interested in helping fix the referencing problems in these articles? -- mikeblas (talk) 01:06, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
Here is a fresh list:
- 1974 United States gubernatorial elections
- 1992 Wyoming Senate election
- 2009 Queensland state election
- 2010 Rajya Sabha elections
- 2014 Rio de Janeiro gubernatorial election
- 2019 Maharashtra Legislative Assembly election
- 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in Utah
- 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina
- 2023 Zamfara State gubernatorial election
- 2024 Fort Lauderdale mayoral election
- 2025 Delhi Legislative Assembly election
- 2025 Italian local elections
- 2025 Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador leadership election
- 2025 New York City Public Advocate election
- 2025 United States House of Representatives elections
-- mikeblas (talk) 13:13, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
I fixed the referencing errors in these four articles today:
- 2024 Fort Lauderdale mayoral election
- 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in Utah
- 2026 United States Senate elections
- 1974 United States gubernatorial elections -- mikeblas (talk) 03:27, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
Bolding in Canada election infobox
[edit]There is a discussion on bolding in Canada's election infobox at Talk:2021 Canadian federal election#Bolding. Please give us your opinion. Thank you. Greenknight dv (talk) 05:07, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
Nonpartisan blanket primary infoboxes in California (and other articles)
[edit]I've been wondering this for a while, but should nonpartisan blanket primary elections, specifically the ones with parties attached, have multiple candidates in the infobox? Local elections in California, such as 2022 Los Angeles mayoral election, 2024 San Francisco mayoral election, and 2014 Oakland mayoral election, which are all nonpatisan in nature, have candidates that were eliminated in the primary but gained 5%, with the top two having a second part with the general election results. Louisiana, which had a similar system, had the infobox show the same thing, but had the parties attached (see 2014 United States Senate election in Louisiana or 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in Louisiana for example).
I was wondering if California articles, such as the 2022 California gubernatorial election, 2024 United States Senate elections in California, and 2024 California State Senate election, as well as other articles such as for Washington, should be doing the same thing by including the candidates with more than 5% in the primary in the infobox like how Louisiana articles did it. Or if it should be kept as only the top two in these types of article while keeping all candidates with 5% or more in purely nonpartisan elections. Currently, special elections (2024 California's 20th congressional district special election, 2022 California's 22nd congressional district special election, 2020 California's 25th congressional district special election) have this system already in place.
A problem that I could see (from trying to test it out on my own) are how it interferes with the datasets used in some U.S. Senate special elections (like the 2022 United States Senate elections in California) and having a lot of candidates that had the 5% threshold (like the 2024 California's 16th congressional district election). reppoptalk 21:05, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
Article move
[edit]As per @VUOP could someone people move 2025 Hamilton, Larkhill and Stonehouse by-election to ....Larkhall...... I've tried and it won't allow me. Thanks doktorb wordsdeeds 02:54, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
Done —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 12:55, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you doktorb wordsdeeds 14:20, 10 April 2025 (UTC)
When listing incumbent candidates…
[edit]When listing incumbent candidates, should the year be put if they are currently incumbent, see 2026 Alabama Secretary of State election, and then later change the —present to —2027, for example, once they leave office, should it be kept as present, or should it not be included at all, and only incumbent be listed? Yoblyblob (Talk) :) 19:50, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
- For a future election, I list incumbents as "Incumbent <position> since <year>. When the person is no longer an incumbent, I list it as "<position> (<duration>)". When the person is an incumbent of another office (a governor running for senator on an article about a Senate election), I list it as "<position>" (<year>–present)". For an example, see Candidates in the 2025 Philippine Senate election. Howard the Duck (talk) 11:53, 25 April 2025 (UTC)
Requested changes at Template Talk:Infobox official post#Template-protected edit request on 16 April 2025
[edit]
I have started a discussion at Template Talk:Infobox official post#Template-protected edit request on 16 April 2025 to add parameters to this infobox so elected positions can show their first, most recent, and next elections (and last election for former positions). This could be only used for directly elected positions or also apply to the leaders of parliamentary/other elected bodies. Thought it might be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ~Malvoliox (talk | contribs) 16:26, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Do US statewide elections have presumed notability in the majority of cases
[edit]Should all US statewide elections have presumed notability, especially past ones? They likely got decent amounts of coverage in various newspapers. There are no guidelines on these types of elections, with the closest being NPOL which covers the individual politicians specifically. Yoblyblob (Talk) :) 02:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
- No. A lot of elections should be covered in the "[Year] [State] elections" article rather than in a separate page. Reywas92Talk 03:14, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
- I would agree with @Reywas92. Merely being a statewide election does not make an election notable. The reason being that there can be a lot of very obscure positions, that although are elected statewide, receive very very limited coverage by reliable sources. Gust Justice (talk) 12:10, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Election results sections in political party articles
[edit]We should have standardized templates in these sections. Of course, due to differences in electoral systems, there should be differences, but not a lot. Also, Americans have their own thing going on and they should probably figure out what to do, as Democratic Party (United States)#Recent electoral history and Republican Party (United States)#Recent electoral history try to combine legislative and presidential results in one table, then another presidential table. Ideally these should be three tables.
Also, these should abide by MOS:COLOR and MOS:COLHEAD. This means color should probably be restricted just to one column with minimal text (the "Results" column with won/lost/coalition), and to the composition bar, and should not be on cells where the text is extensive enough (i.e., like a name of a person or a party), more so if there are links.
We should also standardize if section titles are "President" or "Presidential" or "Presidential elections" or something else.
Single winner elections/presidential
[edit]FPTP elections:
- Institutional Revolutionary Party#Presidential elections 1929–2024 is a good starting point, but there's a notes column where notes are quite long and should be on the prose or be abandoned altogether.
- Liberal Party (Philippines)#Presidential elections has an outcome column that is probably not needed as there is already a results column.
- There's also an ugly post-1987 section if you scroll all the way down LOL.
- Democratic Party (South Korea, 2015)#President looks best and should be the standard.
Runoff elections or more:
- Workers' Party (Brazil)#Presidential elections has a coalition column which may be necessary but can be distracting.
- The Republicans (France)#Presidential looks best and should be the standard.
Legislative elections
[edit]FPTP elections:
- Labour Party (UK)#UK general election results also has a position column (which may not be needed), the result section has more words (rather than just won/lost/coalition, etc.)
- Liberal Party of Canada#House of Commons looks best and should be the standard.
Runoff elections or more:
- The Republicans (France)#National Assembly has probably an unneeded rank column (ranks are important per constitutency, but for national results this doesn't mean anything) but should otherwise be the standard.
STV elections:
- Sinn Féin#Dáil Éireann elections has probably an unneeded rank column (ranks are important per constitutency, but for national results this doesn't mean anything) but should otherwise be the standard.
Mixed-member proportional representation/parallel voting:
- Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)#Legislative results has probably an unneeded "No. of candidates" column, and the seats columns are to the left of the votes column. Otherwise this should be okay.
- Institutional Revolutionary Party#Congressional elections has columns for who is holding the presidency (head of state), which may not be needed, and may be confusing as it can refer to the person presiding the chamber. Again, this seems to be emulating the U.S. tables.
- Christian Democratic Union of Germany#Federal parliament (Bundestag) looks best and should be the standard.
Howard the Duck (talk) 15:10, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
- For staggered elections, aside from a "Seats won" column, there should also be a "Seats after" column. See for example Liberal Party (Philippines)#1946–1972 (just ignore the ugly mess that's post-1987; this is how it looked like before that). Howard the Duck (talk) 15:46, 28 April 2025 (UTC)