User talk:The Tom/Archive 1

Riding Names
em-dashes are impossible to search for. Let's only have article names that use valid characters. RickK 23:32, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

I apologize. I wasn't aware of the distinction. I will ungracefully back out. RickK 00:13, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

Canadian federal election, 2000 (candidates)
Nice work on this Canadian federal election, 2000 (candidates) page. I really like the listing of the the provinces, and the dots denoting seats. Burgundavia 02:58, May 28, 2004 (UTC)

Hello, I certainly hope for the "mass mucking" you did with Montreal, you plan on going back to 1979 with the bullets! I know I spent a lot of time working on completing the bullets the other day, and now I notice I have to do some more!? Also notice, I have been working on the 1979 election results. (see discussion page of said election). Ok, thanks, good work on the election! Earl Andrew 14:19, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Party formatting
Hey The Tom, I noticed that you've been changing the party names in the election results pages from the short forms to longer forms, and in some cases the full names. I don't really see what adding 'Party' or 'Party of Canada' to each party name adds in the way of information. Using the short forms, the information is just a click away since they are all lionked to the Party articles, and it makes for a less cluttered table. As well, there are election results tables going back to 1935, and summary tables going back to Confederation. If there are going to be style changes, they should be made all the way through. But we should have a discussion about the format before further changes are made, and one, consistent approach should be taken, i.e., use just the party label (Liberal), or 'Liberal Party', or the full name (Liberal Party of Canada), rather than using a mixture of different styles.

On the question of colours, I had posted a question about party colours when I changed the PC and BQ colours, and got no negative reponses, so I went ahead and did it. My aim was to use more readable colours by lightening the PC colour, and changing the BQ colour so that it wasn't so close. The indianred for the Communist Party is particualrly hard to read. Your thoughts? Kevintoronto 12:47, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
 * Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
 * Multi-Licensing Guide
 * Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the " " template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:


 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace " " with "  ". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

DRBC / MDM
According to the news release on DRBCs website "We have the All Nations Party, the BC Democratic Coalition and delegates from Reform BC and the Moderate Democratic Movement all coming together to create a new political party". I take that to mean that it is an outright merger of the ANP and the BCDC but Reform BC and MDM carry on. Agreed/disagree? - Jord 00:41, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Yup, been wondering about that myself. Your take is probably the most logical based on the press release, but a few things don't quite jibe:  MDM is a member party of BCDC,  and had been from the start--its leader Matthew Laird was BCDC's president and he is now listed as the DRBC's president.   Also, as per the announcement on the Reform BC website, Reform was to be voting to deregister and merge as part of the January 15 events in White Rock.  The final question mark it whatever became of the British Columbia Labour Party--they were in BCDC, and then they seemed to vanish.    I suppose it might be worth firing off an email to get the final word from someone who ought to know. -The Tom 00:59, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Good point on the email. Let me know if you've done this, and if not I will.  - Jord 14:26, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * So I'm quite confused. It sounds to me like a bunch of parties formed BCDC, then a couple left, then BCDC joined with other parties to form DRBC. Is DRBC a coalition fo parties, or a new party that supercedes the memebr parties? I don't think that the various articles make this clear. Have you figured it out? Thanks for your work on this. Kevintoronto 20:48, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * It is my understanding that the four parties in question formed an informal coalition called the "BC Democratic Coalition". Their aim was to eventually merge.  At least Reform BC opted to not merge - as I have discovered in email correspondence with them which I am about to post on the Reform Party of British Columbia and British Columbia general election, 2005 pages. - Jord 20:54, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Head's up
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I posted a question on some name changes you've done. Didn't want you to think I was sneaking around behind your back!! It is here: Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions - Jord 14:27, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Danke. I've replied over there.

BC Liberal Party move
Usually when I move pages, they work- but this time it didn't. I apologize, maybe try another administrator? Earl Andrew 20:34, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Consistency
Since "lightgreen" is the colour used for Social Credit on all of the other provincial pages and on the federal elections pages, it would make sense to use that for BC as well. While it can be argued that BC SC was different in that they did not embrace social credit monetary theories, that is true for Alberta Social Credit post-Aberhart. Furthermore, pre-Bennett BC SC was a social credit party. Please change the colour back to the standard colour. Thanks. Kevintoronto 21:29, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I respectfully disagree. There's no reason that assorted utterly separate organizations should conform to some overarching colour unity simply because of a shared word in their name and some distant shared political ancestor.   The BC Socreds used blue as their colour exclusively--"the baby blue machine" was the commonly-known name for their political organization that had imported help from Bill Davis' Ontario Tories.  I honestly don't know if the pale green used for the assorted other social credit movements even has a basis in broader identification, although I recall spotting a new report that showed the Quebec wing in the dying days of the 70s using a sort of chartreusy sign.  Anyway, colour standardization only serves a role if it links interlined parties and ideological successors, and that simply isn't the case with the BC Socreds.
 * This is one big slippery slope. We use "lightcoral" for the BC Liberal Party because.... And what colour should we use for Harris Tories or Klein Tories? Not the same one as the Clark Tories, I hope. For that matter, when was there ever really a connection between the BC Conservatives and the federal PC Party? Not in my memory. I think the origin of parties is a reasonable basis for adopting consistent colouring. (The lightgreen does come from the colour used by the federal party in the 1970s, but that is not really that important.) Kevintoronto 22:15, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Not really all that slippery. We match if there's a federal-provincial relationship (as existed between the Federal PC Party and and the BC PC Party and the Federal Liberal Party and the BC Liberal Party all the way up until the early 90s), otherwise we stick with what each party uses IRL.  Even though Joe Clark didn't see eye to eye with Harris and Klein, during their cohabitation of their respective party leaderships, all three remained formally allied to one another and all three continued to identify with the colour blue.  And FWIW, I've actually advocated switching the BC Liberal colour post-Campbell away from lightcoral for those very

reasons. :-)
 * I'm going to concede defeat on the SC issue, only because I have no interest in or time for an edit war. I do have a problem with (a) using blue for the Conservatives, Reform and SC - I don't think that that helps clarify things, and (b) the blue you've used for the Conservatives and Reform is too close to the linked text colour and therefore it is hard to read - adding colours to the tables should make them easier to interpret, not harder. Thanks for adding in the party leaders, by the way. I was going to get to that eventually, but it seems that you have better sources on that. Regards, Kevintoronto 14:26, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

BC Unity
Just curious as to why you made the colour change on British Columbia general election, 2005? - Jord 21:34, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * No prob... I was going about colourizing the Family Coalition party with Unity colours in past elections, and I realized that there was a pretty tight glut of parties with light blue colouration in the 80s/90s--Reform BC was an ugly turquoise and Unity/FCP was that very pale steel blue, with the Socreds being baby blue and the Conservatives kicking around in that purplish Tory blue we use.  I figured Unity uses light blue and light green in their logo and signage and it made the most sense to shift their colour to turquoise (similar logic to the Canadian Alliance getting cadet blue from summing their blue and Reform green), and then move Reform out of turquoises into a richer blue that couldn't be confused with any of the others (the party was never aligned with feds and never used green, only blue).

Federal elections charts
I’d like to get some consensus on what to do about colours in the elections charts, but I don’t want to get into a revert war, so I’m asking people to express their opinions here before any changes are made. Since you have contributed to these pages, I’m inviting your comments. I am initiating this discussion because some of the colours that are currently being used are too dark for some monitors so that it is difficult to read the text. The point of adding colours to the charts is to make it easier for readers to derive information from the charts. This goal is foiled by using colours dark enough to obscure the text. The Wikipedia style guide is clear on the issue:
 * Use colour sparingly. Computers and browsers vary: you cannot know how much colour is presented on the recipient's machine if any. Wikipedia is international: colours have different meaning in different cultures. Too many colours on one page make them look cluttered and unencyclopedic. Use the colour red only for alerts and warnings.

So let’s choose some colours that are light enough that red Wilkilinked text and blue Wikilinked text are both easy to read through.

Please join the discussion at: Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867. Thanks. Kevintoronto 17:19, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have set up a voting scheme at Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867, and would like your views. Regards, Kevintoronto 22:33, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

PC Party
Thanks for backing me on the revert. Ground Zero 18:56, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Templates
I can't seem to figure out all those templates in the various regions. Like this one: "Canadian_politics/candlist_header_4plus|Liberal|Conservative|NDP|Green" I want to edit it, but I don't know how. I want to make it look like the 2004 results page, and I also want to put an "edit this template" link to make things easier. Thanks. -- Earl Andrew - talk 20:16, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, I figured it all out. -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 21:28, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * You must be writing a rather long piece, because I dont see anything on my talk page yet. Why the reverts? -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 22:57, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * I am very happy that you aren't anti-visual. I took the liberty of making logos for the Yukon election and saskatchewan pages, as I did notice that it had carried over. I think it would be neat to use old logos for older elections, so I say we create new templates for those as well. As for it being complicated, I found trying to figure out how to edit the thing in the first place to be extremely complicated, but I managed to figure it out. So, we've already dug ourselves into a hole we can't get out of, what's the harm of digging further? I hope this resolves the problem, please let me know if I can put the logos back. -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 00:45, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Hrmm, I think someone I knew was able to find some old logos, I will ask him. Once we get to a certain era, getting logos will not be neccesary, we can just leave them blank. But we can use the current logos we have for the current election pages we have. Just something to think about. -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 01:09, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * I opened a vote on it here: Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867 -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 03:42, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Here are the logos the Turner logo doesnt look like the one you described, and the 1993 Tory logo is wrong. -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 06:41, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Bloc targets
I see you removed the ones with the astronomical figures for the Bloc to gain, but it is worth while to note that the Liberal vote is down ~ 20% in 2004 from most polls, with the Bloc up from zero to 5%, meaning virtually every seat is in play. In fact, I've been running projections with the polling numbers and, if there was a uniform swing in each riding in Quebec, the Bloc would win 71 (meaning +17) with current polling numbers. - Jord 21:56, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * But the swing isn't to the Bloc. The polls show the Bloc up between 0 and 5% while the Liberals are down 20%.  Yes these ridings are federalist but the federalist vote is getting split 4 ways - Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and stay home - thus it is quite possible to see the Bloc slip up the middle. - Jord 01:33, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

New Politics stub
Love the new Cdn politics stub you created, but please don't put government related articles like City of Ottawa under it. Thanks. --Spinboy 21:30, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

CoR
It really doesn't matter to me - the federal party was pretty minor and only contested a couple of elections. I wonder if they had enough money to produce any signs or coloured documents? If not it may be impossible to tell!! I'd say leave well enough alone for now as we only know that CoR was green in NB. - Jord 00:36, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Party colours
I've put together a table of party colours at Template:Canadian politics/party colours to make it easier to determine which colours go with which parties and to avoid the likelhood of the same colours being used for parties that were around at the same times. When you change party colours, would you mind updating this table so that everyone cn see what changes have been made? Thanks. Ground Zero 19:40, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

New pages
You seem to be adding a large number of pages such as Socialist Party of Ireland/meta/shortname. I'm not sure what they are for, but they certainly do not belong in the article namespace. On the next update they will all appear on Special:Dead-end pages and Special:Short pages and there is a real risk that someone clearing out those pages will simply speedy delete them since they meet the "Very short articles with little or no context " criteria. - SimonP 04:20, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Canadian election template
Thanks for the heads-up on Canadian election templates. I presume you are speaking of the stuff discussed at Talk:Canadian federal election results since 1867. I find it rather more difficult to get my head around than the Election box template but I'll give it a try. What I'm trying to do is make riding articles such as Barrow and Furness (UK Parliament constituency). My rough work on the format is at User:DoubleBlue/Sandbox. If you're game to helping me fix it up, I'd appreciate it. Double Blue (Talk) 22:29, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Image:Churchillsmall.png
Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 10:28, May 22, 2005 (UTC)
 * Would you mind placing a link to the uncropped version on the image page? Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 06:17, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Image:Lauriersmall.png
Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 10:38, May 22, 2005 (UTC)
 * Would you mind placing a link to the uncropped version on the image page? Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 06:17, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Image:BCMap-doton-Fernie.png
Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 00:09, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for tagging this image. Burgundavia (&#9992; take a flight?) 06:16, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

National Party of Canada
Can I pick your brains for a moment -- do you remember what colours this party used in the 1993 election? SimonP have different recollections of this. See Talk:National Party of Canada.

OUSA
According to their site, Ottawa's still a member. -- Spinboy 03:56, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
 * In that case, they're out. It's too bad really, I'd hate to see them join CFS. *shudders* --[[Image:Ottawa flag.png|20px]] Spinboy 16:55, 31 May 2005 (UTC)


 * This whole bilingualism thing is overrated, I gotta say. --[[Image:Ottawa flag.png|20px]] Spinboy 17:19, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Senate division articles
I think they are very interesting. They serve the purpose of showing which senators have gone under what division. Plus, Quebec has its own Senate divisions, which I would love to see some information about. I haven't been able to find anything on the net about them though. -- Earl Andrew - talk 05:09, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

George Baker
Not sure why it wont let me move it. Perhaps a manual move is in store? I had been moving a few pages myself earlier based on this. -- Earl Andrew - talk 08:35, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Why would that make it worse? If anything it helps to solve the problem. -- [[Image:Flag of Canada.svg|20px]] Earl Andrew - talk 02:11, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Randy Jackson
When I created Randy Jackson, the baseball player, I thought about naming it "Randy_Jackson_baseball_player", but I didn't because I thought it was a fairly common name, and that there was a good chance another Randy Jackson would emerge. So, if there is a Randy Jackson, basketball player, soccer player, golfer, tennis, etc. "athlete" is not a good choice. There is a Randy Jackson football player at North Carolina State right now. I though that "Randy_Jackson_Ransom" was a choice that at very good odds not to be duplicated. "Randy_Jackson_Cubs_Baseball" might be a good one, or a variation of such. Why change it anyway? Busy work? WikiDon 09:21, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Dawson City name
I have changed the name and am writing this note so you don't think I am starting a revert war. Dawson City's official name is, oddly enough, the "Town of the City of Dawson". That's what it says on the sign when you enter the town. See for the history,  for legislation referring to legislation, and a CBC news story  which all use "the Town of the City of Dawson"
 * Oops, forgot to sign my note. Luigizanasi 20:18, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Conservatives
Yes, 1988 was the last time the Liberals faced a united opponent on the right, but that's not what the article says. The article says it was the last time a Liberal government faced a united right opposition, which clearly was not the case. Does this clarify my position? HistoryBA 02:50, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Canadian senate divisions
I'd like your comments at Talk:Canadian Senate Divisions. I'm attempting to re-write the article. See Talk:Canadian Senate Division/Temp. Thanks. Ground Zero 13:55, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)