User talk:GPHemsley/Archive 16

Paul McCartney FAC
The Paul McCartney article has now been thoroughly copyedited top-to-bottom by numerous editors including User:Lfstevens, who is a member of the WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors. If you can find the time in your busy schedule, please consider stopping by and taking a look, and hopefully, !voting. ~ GabeMc  (talk 03:45, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Linguistics buff needed, if you're available
Hello, GP! I see you're a linguistics person. If you have a chance, could you take a look at the 7 languages with no articles in WikiProject Indigenous languages of California? Language buffs like me can add info from sites like Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity, but as I pitch in to help activate this Wikiproject, it's becoming clear that we need folks like you with academic background ... Djembayz (talk) 23:26, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Reminder: Wikipedia Loves Libraries Atlanta event - November 17
Hello GPHemsley: I wanted to give you a reminder for the Wikipedia Loves Libraries event that is scheduled for November 17. If you had signed up as tentative, please visit the meetup page and confirm your participation. I look forward to seeing you there. — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 04:58, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject U.S. Congress/Congressional districts/Boilerplate
Why did you change WikiProject U.S. Congress/Congressional districts/Boilerplate without any discussion?—GoldRingChip 12:40, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I was being bold. I have spent the last few days working on articles related to Georgia's congressional districts. I started with Georgia's 6th congressional district, because that's where I happen to live. When I started with it, it looked like this. I drew inspiration from List of Presidents of the United States (among other articles), adding portraits for each representative and placing each discrete piece of metadata in a separate table cell. I also thought that it was important and useful to specify which Congresses each representative served during, what their district looked like at the time, and what sources the information came from. It didn't seem to me that any discussion had taken place regarding what the old boilerplate looked like, so I didn't see any problem in updating it based on my experience. I note that you have reverted my changes to the boilerplate and to Georgia's 13th congressional district and Georgia's 14th congressional district (actions which I obviously disagree with, in part because of the amount of time and effort I put in to make those edits), but you have not actually raised any specific objections about my proposed new format. What is it that you would like to happen here? &mdash;Gordon P. Hemsley&rarr; &#x2709; 17:01, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Being bold is great — sorry I got in the way. I hate to revert anything; I tried to bring those two articles to a compromise position and not to hue too closely to the boilerplate.  The boilerplate is hardly the result of a consensus, it's just something I created years ago, and since then a lot of editors use it across the 500+ district articles.  But that doesn't mean it has to be consistent; by all means let's make improvements and allow variations where they are warranted.
 * Here are my counterpoints to your formatting. Compare your version with my changes:
 * There's no reason to have separate columns for the picture and the Rep. They fit nicely together in a single column, and when there is no picture (like in the 1800s) then the name takes up the entire space.
 * There's no reason to have separate columns for the beginning & end of Tenure. Just a nice " " will suffice and it saves on the excess horizontal space.
 * I like (love!) having the historic maps included in the constituencies. I put the counties above the maps, but now I think I like it better the way you did it (map above counties).
 * I merged the Congresses into a single row as long as they apply to a single constituency.
 * Ditto for the electoral history.
 * "Source" looks out of place as a column. I think the reference to the BioGuide is best in the Representative's article or possibly as an external link at the bottom of the page.
 * Finally, I moved the Rep to the first column (left side) because the Rep is the person the list is about. Maybe that's not a great idea.  What do you think?
 * Thanks for the dialogue.—GoldRingChip 17:49, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I am by no means suggesting that we should be inconsistent. My intent with updating the boilerplate was to help encourage consistency towards the new-and-improved (IMO) format. I think it's better to have a boilerplate created by a single bold person than to have no boilerplate at all, but if other people offer suggestions for improvement (preferably based on their experience with earlier incarnations), then that's even better, and that's what I was trying to do. And while I agree it's good to allow variations, I think we can (and should) set out basic parameters for variations to work within. (See, for example, how I handled the situation in Georgia's 6th congressional district around the time of the Civil War. First there was a long vacancy due to Georgia failing to claim its seats, and then there were further vacancies due to a failure to elect a representative once the seat was reclaimed. And then there are the situations regarding redistricting and other issues.)
 * With all that being said, let me address your specific points:
 * Regarding points (1) and (2): As I mentioned earlier, I think it's important to have separate table cells for separate pieces of metadata. The tenure end date is a separate piece of metadata from the tenure begin date, and the representative's portrait is a separate piece of metadata from the representative's name. Using separate cells also helps to maintain independent formatting and allow everything to remain perfectly centered, independent of other cells. In addition, I think it is good to encourage editors to search out portraits for representatives, as most of them will have had something done during their lifetime. (In the case of GA-06, there were a handful of representatives who had their portraits already on their personal pages; others I had to track down on Commons, where they were stored but not linked to by any pages. In all, there were only 3 representatives for whom I couldn't find an existing portrait, and I didn't search outside the Wikimediaverse; for those, I simply used File:Image of none.svg.)
 * Regarding point (3): I tried it both ways, and having the text below the map made it look squished. So I think we're in agreement on this point.
 * Regarding points (4) and (7): Although I admit that duplicating the information on a page like List of representatives from Georgia's 6th congressional district would be silly, given that the article is actually ostensibly about the district (not the representative), I think it would be better to have the first column be the Congress, as that is the primary index—indeed, the primary constant—for the rest of the data. Following that should be the dates of the tenure, as those are the next useful index, IMO. Given my propensity for one cell per piece of data, I don't think it's a good idea to merge Congress cells. I also think it would be bad to be inconsistent with such an action, which we would probably have to be in the case of, e.g., vacancies during a Congress. I could possibly be persuaded on this point, depending on where the other points fall, but I don't think that we gain more than we lose by merging the cells as opposed to keeping them distinct.
 * Regarding point (5): I view the electoral history as applying to the representative, not the district, so I would prefer to keep it the same number of cells as the representative. (I had previously had a separate cell for each Congress, but that turned out to be untenable when, e.g., the representative was elected to a Congress but resigned or died before it began.)
 * Regarding point (6): There are actually two separate issues here, one being the Sources column and one being the CongBio link. I'll address them separately:
 * Regarding the Source column: I am not the first to use a separate Source column in a table such as this, and I will admit that I thought it was strange when I first saw it, too. But if you don't have a separate Sources column, then you wind up having a bunch of inline citations that cloud up cells that should really only contain discrete pieces of data, or else you lack sources altogether (which is probably even worse).
 * Regarding the CongBio links: I think it is indeed important to include CongBio links on the representative's individual page, but that is in addition to, not instead of, on the district page, so I'll leave that aside. Having a single external link to the generic BioGuide homepage, which is what most of the district pages do now, doesn't do much good for the reader or verifier, as the need to search out each individual in the BioGuide will grow as the number of representatives of a district grows; I think it would be better to do that work once beforehand, allowing the reader/verifier to get directly to the information they want more quickly. Plus, the BioGuide entries themselves are often usefully detailed about almost all the information that is listed in the table (excepting district boundaries), so they are generally the primary source of the information used in each row of the table.
 * As I'm afraid you haven't convinced me that my changes were not for the better, I hope that my further explanations for them have helped to convince you. (See also the edit summaries for my many edits to the GA-06 article.) Regards. &mdash;Gordon P. Hemsley&rarr; &#x2709; 19:47, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm not thrilled about the separate columns for each piece of metadata. It just makes the table look more rigid.  Combining beginning & end dates into one column saves horizontal space and provides a better visual flow.  You're right that it allows independent formatting, but it still remains perfectly centered with both dates together.  I think we need to allow flexibility so the table doesn't become cumbersome.  I've noticed other lists of elected folks also have extraneous information, such as birth, death, religion, and so forth.  I think we both agree that it would be overkill here; if the reader wants to learn more, she can read the linked articles.  I think of this table as trying to answer questions about the article: "what happened in this district?"  That's why it's ok to have the Congress as the first column.—GoldRingChip  02:34, 14 December 2012 (UTC)


 * OK, I think we're in agreement on what question the page is intended to answer—which is good, because it's fundamental to having a productive discussion. We're also mostly in agreement as to what information is needed to answer that question and, more importantly, what information is not. So it seems to me that we're really only disagreeing on the style to present it in. While I now understand your point of view and where you're coming from, I still hold my view just as steadfast. So perhaps it's time to move this discussion to a more general forum and get input from others. A good comparison would probably be these two snapshots: mine and yours. (Incidentally, though it hasn't come up in this discussion, I've come around to your position that redistricting should be represented alongside the representative, not as a fact about the district itself, since the district itself is redistricted every five years.)
 * The three main points of contest are:
 * Whether to present tenure in one or two cells
 * Whether to present the portrait in the same cell as the name or not
 * Whether to maintain a Sources column or not
 * Where do you think would be a good place to post a request for feedback on this issue? &mdash;Gordon P. Hemsley&rarr; &#x2709; 21:17, 14 December 2012 (UTC)