User talk:Anameofmyveryown/Archive 4

Yorkshire and the Humber (European Parliament constituency)
I thought at first that some vandal had deleted the map! I don't understand how the template works, but could you modify it so that it's shown, rather than hidden, by default? It looks as if there's the same problem at other Euroconstituencies. Thanks. PamD (talk) 21:05, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Aaargh! I spend hours trying to find out what the electoral method for allocating seats is in Greece (see this). I painstakingly try to find out what the English translation of the Polish constituency names are (see this). I try to resolve the differences between the European Parliament factsheets and the European Parliament election website regarding Finland (is it one constituency or several?). I'm still trying to work out whether the French constituencies existed before 2004 (the French law for 8 constituencies was in place in 1999, but were the constituencies themselves used?). I find a map for the Overseas Territories of France, an area which includes the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean and French Antarctica. I don't know whether to regard Germany as one constituency or several (yes, they can choose). I try to produce an infobox acceptable to all sides in Northern Ireland. I try hard not to get Slovenia and Slovakia mixed up. I could give lectures on the Polish electoral system (it's quite clever, by the way). I have pored over the politics of Italy. I work out that Finland and Austria had Euroelections in 1996 (not 1995 as the Wikipedia entry had for some years). I cross-reference against the German, Polish and French wikipedia entries to see if they have info not on en. I come up with coherent, consistent infoboxes for all sixty-six constituencies of the 2004-2009 term of the European Parliament, a geography stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals Carpathians, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle, a polity that includes all varieties of political thought from unreconstructed we-want-the-Soviet-Union back Communists to full-on actual no-shit-Sherlock Fascists, and an area of twenty seven countries, many of whom have been at war with one or more of the others in the past seventy years. I do all this, and you point out that I'd left the default option in the infobox as "collapsed"...(sobs and starts beating head on desk)


 * Default option reset to "uncollapsed". Problem solved. I will now recommence my nervous breakdown... Anameofmyveryown (talk) 22:20, 12 January 2008 (UTC)



Thank you for this and all the rest of your work! Now sit down quietly and have a nice cup of tea or whatever your chosen tipple..., and take a little rest! Cheers, PamD (talk) 22:47, 12 January 2008 (UTC) has given you a cookie! Cookies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a cookie, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy munching!

Spread the goodness of cookies by adding {{subst:Cookie}} to their talk page with a friendly message.


 * Pam, hi! Thanks for the cookie, but there's a problem with my talk page: it keeps saying I have new messages, even tho' I don't. I'm reverting to a previous version to see if that'll solve the problem. Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 23:54, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

New templates
Hi there, I appreciate it is a major effort but I would like to ask why you have created several hundred single-use templates with Infobox European Parliament constituency? Most of them seem to hard-coded and used on one article each which defeats the purpose of a template. It would be better to transfer the hard-coded information straight into the articles in the same manner as the vast majority of Wikipedia articles. Green Giant (talk) 03:47, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

My response to "New templates" above
Thank you for your entry above. Spinning the infoboxes off into their own templates has the following advantages.


 * It makes the underlying code simpler
 * I have noted that as Wikipedia progresses, it becomes harder and harder to edit the pages as people add things like infoboxes, inline citation, etc. (If you doubt this, compare the underlying code of pages in the early days with a Wikipage in the present. They are now much more complex and the trend is upwards). Pages now contain things like formatting information, citation information, all of which obfuscate the underlying text and make it difficult for newbie editors to edit. Spinning off the infoboxes into their own template is an attempt to address this problem.


 * Allows the templates to be referenced by >1 page
 * Adopting this approach allows the creation of galleries (see below for an example) or articles referencing the subarticles (see below for another example). They are not intended to be single-use templates.


 * Separation of functionality and information
 * Infoboxes split people: some consider them unexceptional or even required, some think they're obtrusive. (9 out of the January 1st-23rd 2008 featured articles do not have infoboxes). I like them myself, but I have to admit they do get in the way of the text and (particularly on the politics pages) when there's more than one on the page, it gets silly. In an attempt to work around this, I made the EP infoboxes collapsible, but this required adding more functionality information to a page. Spinning off the infoboxes into their own template minimised this problem.


 * Minimised disturbance to other people
 * A particular aspect of EU articles is that they are spread over so many nationalities: UK people will be the majority contributors to UK EU articles, Irish ones for Irish articles, French for the French ones, Poles for the Polish ones, and so on. I didn't want to disturb so many article creators with major changes to pages they had spent so much time on. Spinning off the infoboxes into their own template minimised this problem.


 * All information in one place
 * The approx 195 constituency infoboxes have all been categorized (see Category:European_Parliament_constituency_infoboxes) and so are easy to access en masse. Spinning off the infoboxes into their own template made this possible.

So this approach made possible the creation of gallery and other pages, simplified the underlying code, separated out formatting and textual information, minimised disturbance, and centralised associated information. This approach solved so many problems and caused none in its turn.

I note from your talk page that you have a pattern of behavior involving the deletion of templates. As luck would have it, I will be away from my terminal until late Friday/early Saturday. Should you wish to nominate the templates for deletion/speedy deletion, I would appreciate it if you would wait until then so I may present the reasons above for the templates' retention. Please note that a lot of information is held on those templates (sources, maps and numbers of MEPs over time for all 195 constituencies of the European Parliament since 1979) and their speedy deletion will cause much inconvenience and lost information. I will leave a note on the Wikiproject:European Union & Elections in the European Union pages asking other users to maintain a watching brief on the templates and save the information contained therein should their deletion proceed in my absence. Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 00:41, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Example 2: Section on the Polish constituencies
Infobox Pomeranian (European Parliament constituency)
 * Main articles: Pomeranian, Kuyavian-Pomeranian, Podlachian and Warmian-Masurian, Warsaw, Masovian, Łódź, Greater Poland, Lublin, Subcarpathian, Lesser Poland and Świętokrzyskie, Silesian, Lower Silesian and Opole, Lubusz and West Pomeranian

Unlike all the other European Union member states, Poland does not allocate seats to its constituencies (see right for an example) until after the election. Lists are aggregated at the national level via the D'Hondt method to ensure they pass the 5% limit, but thereafter seats ('mandates') are assigned to constituencies via the Hare-Niemayer method - the more votes a constituency casts, the more seats a constituency gets. Candidates are then assigned to those constituencies depending on how many votes they got from that constituency. This combination of two assignment methods and open lists enables Poland to have geographically stable constituencies (compare other nations, who use borders based on NUTS divisions which must be changed periodically as populations shift), proportional representation, and MEPs tied to a specific constituency: a combination which other nations have yet to achieve. However, the complexities make it difficult to understand and administer. No other EU nation is planning to adopt this method.

Another difference concerns the constituencies' names. Unlike the other nations, Poland does not give its constituencies individual names: instead, the relevant legislation denotes each constituency with a number, description, and location of the Electoral Commission central office for that constituency. This leads to some ambiguity, with some commentators referring to the constituencies by their office location ("Gdansk"), and some by the voivodeship whose borders it matches ("Pomeranian"). European Parliament practice is to use the latter, and this usage is followed (although not exclusively) by the Polish media and public.

This in turn leads to another complexity. Although the description of the constituencies is well established in Polish, the English translation is not. This leads to some debate: for example, should a constituency be rendered as "Podlachian" (the formal and somewhat archaic term, approximately equivalent to rendering "Spain" as "Iberia") or "Podlasian" (the more modern but unofficial term, approximately equivalent to rendering "Florida" as "The Sunshine State")? The usage in these pages follows the official usage.

The impact on European politics with the accession of Poland in 2004 has yet to be fully evaluated. Given its political makeup, it has been hypothesised that it will arrest the long-term decline of national conservative votes in the Parliament caused by a three-way squeeze between the Christian Democrats from one side, the far-right from another, and the Eurosceptics from a third. Initial impressions bear this out, with commentators noting that its politics, whilst certainly right-wing by Western European standards, are not far-right (compare Bulgaria and Romania, whose accession allowed the formation of the first far-right group in the Parliament since the Technical Group of the European Right collapsed in the 1990's). Analogies have been drawn to the religious right in the United States.

Ironically, given the fact the Poland is among the more Europhile of nations, turnout in the last European Parliament elections in 2004 was low, as was the case in the other former Warsaw Pact members, although in Poland's specific case there were additional complications regarding the formation of a national government following domestic elections the same year. This pattern has its obverse with the more Eurosceptic nations (UK, Denmark, Austria, Finland) experincing higher turnout (although still low by domestic standards).

The next Polish European Parliament election is scheduled for 2009.


 * Thank you for your prompt and detailed response. Before I go any further please note that although I have a history involving the deletion of templates, almost every single one of those templates was either abandoned, unused on articles or just plain nonsense. Other editors only raised objections to the deletion of three templates - two on technicalities so I have instead initiated a TfD debate for one and intend to leave the other one alone. The only template that anyone argued for on content grounds has seen the editor withdraw objections after a thorough debate.
 * Let me reassure you that I have no intention of initiating a mass deletion immediately - I felt it would be polite and considerate to initiate a discussion first. Indeed if the templates were to be deleted I would insist on them being moved to the userspace to preserve history and content. I am certainly not in the business of deleting hard work altogether.
 * My initial thoughts on your templates were as follows:
 * WP:Template namespace states that "templates duplicate the same content across more than one page" which is not the case with most of your templates as their usefulness extends only to being transcluded on one article each. By contrast the Infobox European Parliament constituency template is usable across literally hundreds of articles.
 * The Manual of Style section (WP:Infobox templates) states that "we should aim to minimize the number of different templates (editors) must be familiar with; creating multiple forks of templates is therefore undesirable" - I feel that this quite likely to take place with so many templates and it would be better to focus on the generic template than on numerous gardcoded templates.
 * In response to your points above:
 * It makes the underlying code simpler - I believe that having the hardcoded infobox within the relevant articles only complicates the editing o the lead section as all the other sections can be edited separately and directly without having to scan the entire article code.
 * Allows the templates to be referenced by >1 page - I am not sure what you mean by "referenced", whether you mean tranclusion or simply a link. I also don't see why you would create a gallery of templates when a table of the information would be much clearer.
 * Separation of functionality and information - I agree that more than one infobox can create crowding but you could just make the Infobox European Parliament constituency template collapsible in the first place.
 * Minimised disturbance to other people _ I have to disagree on this point because all editors are encouraged to be bold in their editing. Just because one nationality or group predominates in editing a particular article does not mean they own the article. If editors exhibit hositility on this basis then it is matter to refer to the Administrators' noticeboard.
 * All information in one place - I would have to disagree because there is no better way of keeping information in one place than by putting the hardcoded information from the templates directly into the articles themselves. You could also quite easily categorise the articles themselves and achieve the same result.
 * I hope this clarifies my reasoning. Green Giant (talk) 01:56, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment from PamD Although I sent you a "cookie" above, that was in response to your huge amount of work and stress level rather than being a considered response to the merits of the project of creating the templates! Reading GG's comments above, I must say I agree with GG in being unhappy about the templates. I can see you've put a lot of work into creating the templates, but I'm afraid I agree with GG that the information would be better left in the articles rather than taken out into constituency-specific templates. PamD (talk) 09:14, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It makes the underlying code simpler  - No, I think it makes it more complicated by hiding access to part of what's visible in the article. Infoboxes are so common that anyone who edits is likely to come across them pretty soon and learn how they work, and how to scroll past them to get at the section they want to edit.
 * Minimised disturbance to other people and All information in one place - No, removing some of the actual content of the page into a template means that anyone who has a page on their watchlist will not be alerted to changes in that information unless they also know to watchlist the template. This seems a bad idea. The "disturbance" to other people which is minimised is that they may miss seeing changes to an article on their watchlist because the information is being changed in another place, the template.  That's information, not disturbance.


 * Afraid I have to agree, it is only a very small amount of code involved here and I don't see much use for them on any other pages (at least being presented in the manner above or any other form of infobox) but rather a specific box should be developed for comparisons. However do please hold back from deleting these right away and ensure the code is transferred to the pages prior to that regardless so nothing is lost. The work in itself though is great, it just isn't needed as a template (like I say, it is only a very small amount of data).- J Logan t: 18:51, 23 January 2008 (UTC)