Template talk:Election box US auto

Can you please explan how this works? How does it get its data, for example? How can a user edit it, please? —GoldRingChip 16:37, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
 * It gets the data from Wikimedia Commons, c:Data:California Elections/2016/General/Candidates.tab for example. For 2012-2016 I imported California data from the spreadsheets the secretary of state provided online. I'm currently working on importing data for the rest of the states using data from MIT Election Lab.
 * It's extremely unlikely that the California data has any errors since I got it directly from the authoritative source. But it's possible the MIT data does, and for that we can just edit the table on Commons, and report it back to them so they can fix their data as well.
 * So far I've integrated the template into 8 articles, and doing so, I have found errors in the prior manually copied vote counts and totals, so I expect this to dramatically simplify and increase the accuracy of election tables going forwards. Let me know if anything still isn't clear. Legoktm (talk) 08:26, 16 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Fascinating. Good work.  I'm glad that it managed to fix bad data.  Since it appears to be quite automated, is there still a way for an editor to make changes/additions to individual elections? —GoldRingChip 16:57, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks :) I would generally like all of the data to come from the Commons dataset (fixing errors in it if necessary), but I can imagine that isn't always practical. What specifically are you thinking of wanting to modify? If you have some examples, I can figure out how to make sure the template can handle what you need. I've also really only looked at how California articles are set up, so it's totally possible I've missed some usecases. Legoktm (talk) 20:19, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not thinking of anything in particular to change, but Wikipedia works best when the most number of users can edit it. If it's too tangled up in code then some editors wouldn't be able to edit it.  What if someone wants to add run-off data, or ranked-choice voting, or change "votes" to "delegates," etc.?  I'm just reluctant to lock it all in with this nifty template. —GoldRingChip 01:22, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Gotcha. After thinking about this, I think my attempts to consolidate all years into one template were a step too far, since they effectively removed any ability to add anything else like prose, or (like you mentioned) additional run-off tables. So each year/election would have its own heading and template row, like they did previously. I think should give us enough freedom to add more things...we could add a parameter like  to allow injecting arbitrary stuff inside the template, but I'm skeptical it would be that useful (I'm happy to implement it and be proven wrong of course :)).
 * I think something like ranked-choice voting would need to be implemented in the template/module itself.
 * And we can probably add a link to the Commons dataset in the template to point people in the right direction in case they want to edit it, as well as creating a help page explaining how tabular data works, so it's more accessible.
 * I'm not sure if that satisfies your concerns, but I really appreciate it and do want to address them. Legoktm (talk) 19:59, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, it's a shame it can't be done but it's too large a task to standardize, I guess. —GoldRingChip 20:27, 20 November 2018 (UTC)