Talk:Nanaimo—Alberni

Election percentages
Why are the percentages for valid votes all %100.00, when there are always some rejected votes? Jfing e  r s  88  02:10, 5 March 2006 (UTC) because "rejected" votes aren't "valid" votes.

Weird em dash in title
Yes, well at the MoS talk page they did warn people connected with these Canadian riding articles that unless an editors' note in caps is placed at the top of the article, others will come in periodically and move the title to a MoS-compliant form. It's happened how many times now? I do not believe WP should repeat this odd-ball punctuation just because some geek at some Canadian institute decided to do it. Tony  (talk)  09:38, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The em dash is not weird. Every Canadian riding has use an em dash and so does Elections Canada. Elections Canada did use em dashes on every riding name officially. Steam5 (talk) 21:52, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * It is weird, and breaches WP's style guidelines.  Do not remove posts at this talk page. 
 * Please note that this discussion has been held before. The spelling with the em-dash is the proper name of a Canadian electoral district, as per the rule established by the only organization that has the legal authority to decide what the proper names of Canadian electoral districts are — and as such Wikipedia is bound by the proper name of the thing whether we think it should be the proper name or not. Whether the em-dash is "weird" or not, whether you agree with the reasoning behind Elections Canada's use of em-dashes or not, is entirely a moot point — like it or not, the name is what it is, which is what Elections Canada says it is, and no amount of whinging about it is going to magically change the proper name to something else instead.
 * Breaching WP's style guidelines is very much a secondary issue at best to the fact that using an en-dash instead would breach the far more binding and far more important naming policy. We can't arbitrarily decide to give a Canadian electoral district some alternative non-proper name any more than we could decide that we don't like ordinal numbers in titles and therefore will rename California's 2nd congressional district to "Aloysius Marvin Jackson McGillicuddy-Humpstein" instead. The name is what it is what it is what it is what it is, and it's not up to anyone here to decide that a style guide trumps "some geek at some Canadian institute" — especially not when that description betrays such a profound misunderstanding of what Elections Canada's role is in the first place.
 * They're not some "random institute" that makes arbitrary pronouncements about things that don't actually have anything to do with them; they're an official government agency whose job it is to maintain and run the basic operational infrastructure of Canadian federal elections. The name of an electoral district is whatever they say the name is, whether you agree with their naming conventions or not, because they're the only people who have the fundamental authority to decide what the name is going to be in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 01:18, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, so if they choose to use some symbol in their naming that we don't have, or that is not easily accessible, that's fine too? Concerning your post: we don't use spaced em dashes on WP, as you have done. You have the choice: spaced en or unspaced em. Tony   (talk)  01:55, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Wow. It's even remotely germane to this discussion to digress into whether another editor's use of dashes in a comment on a talk page is consistent with article style or not? Really? Bearcat (talk) 05:03, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I commented only because there seems to be a thing about em dashes around these topics, whether they are used in standard, accepted ways or not. No, in this case. Tony   (talk)  06:46, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

It's very weird every time I see it. And some of the Canada Parliament docs online, like this one, do it with both hyphen and double hyphen. I wonder what the origin of the em dash is. Probably they had Microsoft Word helping to interpret their double hyphens, or something weird like that. I know of no other plausible explanation for this weird punctuation. Dicklyon (talk) 00:05, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

The em dash is uncommon in books, suggesting that it is not recoginized, not official, or not consistent with the editorial style of various publishers. Both hyphen and en dash seems to be more common, as here. One that does use the em dash puts spaces around it! That's further evidence for lack of officialness or any typographical attention to this weirdness of the Canadians. Dicklyon (talk) 00:15, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

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