Talk:List of Canadian federal general elections/Archive 1

Next steps
I agree with Kevintoronto. However since Option C in the choice, what is that going to look like??
 * MS123 21:35, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Since I created Option C, I should probably make a few comments.


 * First, I have to confess that my interest in this discussion has been limited from the start. I recognize that the current colour pattern is difficult to read on some browsers, and (for that reason) I don't have a problem with adjusting the current system in some manner.  Notwithstanding this, I don't have a strong emotional investment in the controversy and could live with any decision reached on this page.


 * I suggested "Option C" as a means of changing the current system, while also ensuring that an undue amount of editing would not be required (the option also follows Wikipedia's principles on using colour sparingly). It was, however, presented as a suggestion -- not as a full-fledged plan.  I haven't done much experimenting with images since coming to Wikipedia (until last month, I hadn't uploaded any images from the web), and I've not put much thought into what the end result will look like, or how to get to that stage.


 * Also ... while I still think the basic idea is sound, I'm not entirely comfortable with declaring it "the winning option" when only two people listed it as their first choice (even though I was one of these).


 * Perhaps it would be useful to take the following steps before going any further:


 * (i) Someone (other than me) should create a template for Option C, and give this page's contributors a visual demonstration of the same.


 * (ii) A second vote should be taken, posing the following question: Do you agree with Option C as a compromise choice?


 * If the majority vote is for "yes", we should proceed with it. If not, I recommend withdrawing the option and having a straight vote between Options B & D. CJCurrie 22:31, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

With all due respect, CJ, Options B and C were favoured over Option D, as Jord explained above. The point behind having a preferential ballot was to avoid having repeated run-off votes. C has the benefit of preserving readability for those who favoured B or A, and the colour selection preferred by those who preferred D. In fact, it expands the colour selection so that we can get even closer to the official party colours, which seems to be a priority for those in the D camp. D is not consistent with the Wikipedia Style guide.

Also, since someone went and peed in the Pool of Democracy by using sock puppets, I don't think having more votes would make much sense.

Consideration could also be given (see below) to putting the colourbox at the beginning and end of the line for greater clarity. (I have also shown some the colours that we could now use to get closer to the official colours.) Kevintoronto 23:33, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

How it might look
In response to MS123's question and CJCurrie's suggestion, here is an example of how it would look, using the 2004 results table as a template.


 * - Jord 22:37, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * - Kevintoronto 22:56, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Slight edit to your table Kevin which I think makes it look a bit better, hope you don't mind :) - Jord 23:24, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Pursuant to Kevin's comments (and the fact that the template he's presented looks fine, and would appear to resolve the entire problem), I withdraw my request for a further vote. My preference is for the first table, btw; having the colours on both sides makes it look a bit less professional.


 * Looks like I won without campaigning. ;) CJCurrie 23:46, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

MS123 01:22, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * The first table looks ok, but how about seperating the parties with lines so that the numbers don't float in white blob.

New attempt
Here is a new table, using the darker colours devised by Kevin and with separting lines as requested by MS.

- Jord 01:40, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Looks good to me. Thanks, Jord. Kevintoronto 12:51, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Templates
As discussed, I have created templates for all of the current parties. We'll need to add them for defunct parties as well and perhaps for provincial parties for which there is no federal equivilant. These templates are all linked from Template:Canadian_politics/party_colours and are all subpages thereof. I've replaced the hardcoding with template inserts for the most recent table above.

FYI, I assumed if we'd be using wiki tables across the board for these results and because the squares could also be used for the seat schematics for legislatures, I made the templates in the following format:


 * bgcolor="COLOR"|&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;

I hope that jives, if not, feel free to adjust. - Jord 02:43, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Since the table will establish the party colours, do we need to change the province by province or the riding by riding results?? MS123 03:47, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, I think the idea was to use the template everywhere so that we could have consistant colours across the board if we ever change them. - Jord 03:55, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I've got something on ice right now. It seems to work, but I'm trying to iron out a couple of bugs. Take a look at the following.

 The first Conservatives row, and the others with different heights, bug me. If you look at the template (you must edit the page to see the proper formatting), you'll see what I've been trying to do here. The 'height="1"' was my first attempt to fix the bug, which didn't seem to work. I also tried to add a 'nowrap' attribute, which didn't work either. If I cut and pasted the code into the table, it becomes the same height as everything else, but as soon as I use a template, all hell breaks loose. Let me know if you can figure out what's wrong. --Deathphoenix 04:35, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Problem solved by using the templates I created LOL ;)  - Jord 15:18, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

hahaha... yeah, but I'll explain why I created the templates the way I did. What if someone down the road wanted to change back to have the entire row being shaded? Using the tablerow templates will allow them to switch back just by editing the wikicode. The reason I proposed using templates in the first place was so people could change the colours easily and have the changes apply to all the articles. But what if they didn't want to just change the colours? What if they wanted to change from proposal C back to A, B, or D? We'd have to edit the code for every single election article again. I'd like to make it so we spend a lot of time setting it up now, but have to do only minimal work down the road. --Deathphoenix 23:28, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmmm, I never thought of it that way. I was thinking have just the colours would allow us to use it in other instances, such as on candidate tables, seat schematics, etc.  Though my method would not work for that either as I have some table coding in it.  Perhaps we should do the tablerow templates with them in turn pointing to a colour template, then you would go one place to edit the format of the row and one place to edit the colour for the party.  Make sense? - Jord 23:37, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Not too bad an idea, but I think it makes it too unnecessarily complicated. Anyone wanting to change either the colour or the format would know enough wikicode not to be confused by the contents of a unified template. I'd rather have one place to change the format and colour. --Deathphoenix 05:32, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * The trick though is if we just have the table rows, there would be no way to do candidate tables without hardcoding in the colours to the page and thus making it logistically impossible to change the colours should we want to down the road... I am not sure if I am getting what I mean across, do you follow or should I do up an example? Jord 23:25, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * No, I get what you're saying. IMO, the template is easy enough to edit on its own, because the colour (and other row format attributes) is there and visible enough to be edited. --Deathphoenix 03:25, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Hehe, no you don't understand what I mean. Having just a tablerow template is fine for election results tables, but there are other tables where such a template would not work for instance:


 * If there were a seperate template housing just the colour, one could point to that template for the headers, etc in candidate tables. - Jord 16:11, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I hadn't really thought about the candidate tables. That sort of throws a spanner into the works, doesn't it? If the party colour is used in the incumbent box, we're bck to same problem that you can't really read the name of the candidate without hovering or opening the link, which just makes the tables less useful, rather than more. Kevintoronto 16:16, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Oh, I have a plan ;) I'll show you what I mean here in a bit.  I am in the office so I'll paste the code into notepad and work on it as time permits. - Jord 18:59, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Proposed Candidates table
Comments? - Jord 19:08, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * When I preview this it shows the party colours underneath the name of the party but it doesn't seem to be showing up in the article. I am confused.  Maybe it is just a problem with my browser. (I've had to put more than "&amp;nbsp" to get it to show it for some reason) You'll note I've also left a small column at the end of the candidates name to put the colour of the winning party in. - Jord 19:13, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Nice work, Jord. The only question I have is, why CPC instead of Conservative? Kevintoronto 19:22, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I was just wondering that myself - it is a cut and paste of the table on 39th Canadian federal election. - Jord 19:28, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ok, here it is again with some fictious ridings/candidates to show how it would work with results in it..

- The question is here, how do we show the victor? Presently bold denotes a leader/minister and italic denoted not nominated. So, how do we denote a winner more clearly if we can't shade in the square? Jord 19:34, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Template organisation
In these cases, it might not be a bad idea to have a separate colour and "table format" template, but I'm worried this means we have too many templates. What you propose would be something like the following:
 * (maybe)
 * (maybe)
 * (maybe)

Or we could nest the formats further, as follows:
 * (maybe)
 * (maybe)
 * (maybe)

This may be overnesting, but might be an ideal way of organising the different templates under one root template. Also, Kevin's point is highly relevant. Not being able to read the text is the very reason we proposed to lighten the colour (or separate the colour from the text). If we do the column formatting, we have to be very careful how we apply the formatting.

Also, while we're doing a fair bit of work, I don't think we should create too much work for ourselves. I sort of like the way the elections tables are done right now, to be honest. I don't think a complete overhaul is necessary. --Deathphoenix 20:10, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * The above candidate table, in my opinion, is not a complete overhaul it is simply adjusting in the spirt of getting text off of colours. If we leave the tables as they are, we have all of the incumbents and all of the winners printed on top of a square full of colour.  Thus they need to be adjusted as well or this will all have been for not.


 * With respect to the templates, I had nested my colour templates under Template:Canadian_politics as I don't want to hog space from other countries. If we take , what happens if some people working on Australian elections come along and want to use that space - we have no more right to it than they do.  We'll either have to further nest  or go elsewhere as I have above. - Jord 21:07, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I can't say that I've followed all of the technical stuff here, but I'm ready to get started, at least on the election summary tables. The candidate tables may have to wait. How should we proceed? Kevintoronto 14:02, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, I've done the templates and applied them to my table above for an example. The template for just the colour is at  and the code to start a row is at  .  I hope that meets everyone's wants/needs? - Jord 18:40, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Sounds good. In terms of organisation, each person should probably work on one article. We probably need a central repository page as a checklist of sorts so we know who's working on what, and whether it's completed. --Deathphoenix 20:10, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Untitled
For previous discussion, see Talk:Canadian federal elections since 1867/Archive and Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867/Archive2

A concensus has been developed to revise Canadian federal and provincial elections tables to adopt a consistent colouring scheme. For a record of that discussion, please see Talk:Canadian federal elections since 1867/Archive; a discussion also discussed the technical and logistical requirements there of, for a record of that discussion, please see Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867/Archive2. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kevintoronto (talk • contribs) 22:19, 22 March 2005 (UTC)