Talk:List of former members of the United States House of Representatives

Completion progress
An update on my progress:


 * Complete: Letters A, D, E, F, G, I, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, T, U, V, Y, & Z (No X).
 * Complete: From the states of: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, & Wyoming.

Valadius 20:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Seeing the items missing from the above lists, I'm working on completing B, C, H, M, S, and W (as applicable) for Illinois, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia --Spiffy sperry (talk) 21:47, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅ --Spiffy sperry (talk) 15:48, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Chonological suggestion
Does anyone have an interest in organizing a chronological version of this list?


 * Not particularly, but I'll play along--chronological by what criteria? Also, keep in mind that this is a VERY small subset of all the representatives who have served. older &ne; wiser 22:29, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'd suggest chronological by date of first swearing-in. This would capture a general sense of the era of service. Not perfect, but probably the best of the alternatives.

Future of list
There is some value in having a full, alphabetic list. If we're going to develop this, we'll probably need to split it up, just because of size. My suggestion is to let the U.S. Congress project get a bit further along then look at the situation. It seems to be the we wind up with Chronologial covered by the State Delegation articles, alpha by state covered by a category for U.S. House members for StateX. The purpose of this list would then be to provide a single alphabetic list. If that's where it winds up, we could split it into pages by letter (e.g. List of U.S, House members(A) ). In other words, revisit the question later. Lou I 18:54, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: Split

 * Proposal / Support: Right now this page is the number 1 longest page on Wikipedia in terms of number of bytes. (That's how I found it on Special:Longpages.  I would recommend that it be split into several smaller articles.  For guidelines, see Article size. YechielMan 19:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose: Article_size states that list articles (such as this one) ought not be constrained by size limits. Thus, I think we should keep this list as it is and NOT split it.—Markles 20:16, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose: Since this is a list, size limits do not apply here. We should keep the list as is. Valadius 21:55, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. Good heavens, this page is borderline useless to many, many readers who can't get the page to load. Matt Yeager ♫ ( Talk? ) 22:35, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I dislike breaking up list pages because it defeats the very purpose and nature of a list: the ability to compare companents in context of the entire list. However, if this is so very "borderline usless" because it can't be read, then I would reluctantly and grudingly accept splitting. Before that happens however, I would want a large consensus that this is the case.—Markles 13:52, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong support. It's almost 500,000 bytes. That's 4Mbit not counting IP overhead, That in turn is a 40-second download on a 56K modem that is getting a 2-1 compression, or approximately an hour on a WAP. Of the 1.7 million pages on Wikipedia, this ine is at #2, and that's only because the first page is using truly horrible HTML for its table. -Arch dude 23:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I still oppose splitting. But I agree that it's getting very very big.  I've already cut out extra wikilinks which took up a lot.  So before we split this article (which, again, I oppose but understand), let's cut something out.—Markles 00:19, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong support: Some of the sections are over 32KB themselves.
 * A 34KB
 * B 35KB
 * C 38KB
 * D <32KB
 * E <32KB
 * F <32KB
 * G <32KB
 * H <32KB
 * I <32KB
 * J <32KB
 * K 33KB
 * L <32KB
 * M 32KB
 * N <32KB
 * O <32KB
 * P <32KB
 * Q <32KB
 * R <32KB
 * S 39KB
 * T <32KB
 * U <32KB
 * V <32KB
 * W <32KB
 * X 0KB
 * Y <32KB
 * Z <32KB
 * --Bobby D. DS. 03:08, 24 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Support Why not just split the article into each letter? Ex: List of former members of the United States House of Representatives - A and so on for each letter? Pbroks13 01:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Support see how its done on List of states in the Holy Roman Empire --Astrokey 44 00:38, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Support Even if WP:SIZE excepts lists from page size guidelines this article needs to be split for technical reasons. Go to the history and try and compare differences between revisions. I don't know about Internet Explorer but in Firefox it practically crashes the browser. -- Gudeldar 18:19, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Support Absolutely taking too long to load. No sense in keeping such a huge list in one piece. Tibordp 11:26, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Support Good Lord, yes. I thought my browser had crashed when I was loading this page. vlad§inger  tlk  03:07, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Proposal: eliminate Party column
Perhaps we could eliminate the "Party" column.—Markles 00:19, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Eliminate the "Party" column? It's an interesting idea, but I am very firmly against it.  There have been far too many people who have been in more than one party, and party labels have evolved so much over time that it would be a disservice not to list them.  We could do what was done before to the "State" column and remove the wikilinks from the major parties, but leave the wikilinks for the more obscure parties.  But eliminating the "Party" column would be a major disservice to this article and deprive people of a major piece of information about these people. Valadius 01:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the party column is nice, but frankly unnecessary for this article. This is merely a list.  Its purpose is just to say that so-and-so was a congressman.  We include years and state for the sake of differentiating all the people on the list.  Party, is important, but not really necessary for this list.  "Leo C. Zeferetti was a member of Congress?"  "Yes, he served New York in the 1970s and 80s."—Markles 10:29, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
 * If anything is to be done, I strongly recommend it being de-wikilinking the major parties in the Party column. We can determine exactly which parties to de-wikilink and which are so non-notable that they require a wikilink. Valadius 15:04, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Can you do that now? Let's then see how much space is saved.—Markles 15:12, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
 * This is a very time-consuming process, since I don't have the know-how to automate this, but on the A's alone, just de-wikilinking the Republican and Democratic parties cut out nearly 9,000 bytes, over 1/4 of the bytes for the A's. I would start with just those two parties for right now, since they constitute the vast majority of the party wikilinks, and revisit the other parties once those two are taken care of. Valadius 19:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I've de-wikilinked the Republican and Democratic parties in the party column, and it removed nearly 27% of its bytes, a total of 137,720 bytes from its peak size. Valadius 20:04, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Columns
The columns "Years" and "State" ought to be swapped. Can anyone do this?? --Mark Adler (Markles)  20:43, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

No party listed
I am running into a few Representatives who have no party listed. Or, they have a party noed as "ant-administration" or "pro-administration." At this point, I am leaving the party feild blank. Should I list them as independents? LarryQ 17:12, 4 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Please list as Anti-Administration or Pro-Administration.
 * If you can't find the party check http://bioguide.congress.gov.
 * In some cases, especially in early years, people will have no party at all. Then I would insert "no party."
 * &mdash;Markles 17:29, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Anibal Acevedo Vila
Technically, Anibal Acevedo Vila never was a United States Representative, but a Resident Commissioner. In defining who belongs on this list, we need to reach a consensus on whether or not non-voting members, such as Resident Commissioners or Delegates, should be in the same list as full United States Representatives. Should we include them? Or should there be a separate list? Valadius 01:46, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

As resident commissioners are treated as representatives for all matters (including committee assignments) except voting on the floor, I think they should be listed here. LarryQ 15:17, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Making Table Sortable
We should make this table sortable, but to do so, we would need to create a single table first. What do you think? user:mnw2000 00:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Honestly, there's no real point to doing that. The table is really as sorted as it is ever going to get. Sorting by name would likely sort by first name. Sorting by year wouldn't work. Sorting by state wouldn't work either because some Representatives served multiple states. And sorting by party would be impossible, considering the large amount of party-switchers in Congressional history. I'm sorry. Though admirable, it just simply would not work. Valadius 00:13, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

You could run the table through a simple PHP Script to grab the last name and sort it that way, then output a wikipedia-compatible result, then just paste it in.66.212.199.222 06:20, 18 March 2007 (UTC)Anon

Shorter
Is there any way to make this page shorter? I can't veiw it. It won't load. TheThingy Talk 23:43, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

I got an idea. We take this article and divide into 50. 1 for each state. So instead of having a list of people that formerly served in the US congress house of representatives, it would be like "former US congressmen representing Wyoming, or Alaska or whatever state it happens to be. Then the article will be 1/50th of it's size. The only thing I could think of is that some congressmen may have served in two different states, but that's no big deal, we'll just list em twice.  Whattaya think?


 * O, anoymous one, I think there is no reason to do that. There are already such articles called "List of United States Representatives from Foo."  See, e.g., List of United States Representatives from Massachusetts.—Markles 12:57, 27 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmmm interesting, perhaps I should have signed my comment eh, anyhow, if that's the case that these articles split on geography already exist, it begs the question why is this article here in the first place. TotallyTempo 18:50, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

This is the largest article on Wikipedia (Special:Longpages - 600k in size) and definitely needs splitting or deletion. Either of the two proposals seem fine. Can this discussion be linked to appropriate WikiProjects so that an agreeable consensus can be formed. → AA (talk) — 16:26, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Proposal 1: Make into category
After all, wouldn't it be still an alphabetic list that way? Morgan Wick 04:55, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. There's no "added value" here. We have lists of congressmen for each state; we have lists of congressmen for each congress. We don't need the combination that is offered here. The only list that could really come out of this is "list of congressmen who have represented more than one state", and that would be vastly shorter. --Golbez 16:38, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
 * This makes more sense than anything else, given the gargantuan size and guaranteed future growth of this article. Matter of fact, it seems really odd that the cats don't already exist. Checked the three ancient congressfolk linked to on Mount Carmel, Illinois and they all seem to be using the same cat as their current successors. Please be careful to create at least two cats for each politician, however: one for the party and one for the district and/or state (district preferred).  MrZaius  talk  16:48, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong oppose. More like vehemently oppose.  This would destroy the spirit and integrity of this article.  Look, I have been working on this article off and on for over two years, focusing on it entirely for the past six months.  We're approaching the endgame here in terms of this article's completion - see my user page for a fuller understanding of the progress here.  If anything is to be done to this article, I might consider a break-up by letter similar to one proposed above on this talk page, but I will not consent to it until the article is completed, which it is tantalizingly close to being.  This was destined to be a huge article, and there is PLENTY of value in having a single article, believe me.  But if it must be broken up, please, I beg of you, wait until it is completed, and NOT in this fashion. — Valadius 17:18, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
 * What can we expect from the completed article? More information? What in particular? --Golbez 22:24, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Proposal 2: Split by dates
Are there articles split by year/decade? That's be another way of spliting it into smaller articles Roadierch316 09:46, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

View in order of party?
Would it be possible to view in order of party You know like have a couple of buttons like Republican, Whig, Democratic, etc

See my answer to "Making Table Sortable". — Valadius 16:20, 31 July 2007 (UTC)