Wikipedia talk:WikiProject US State Legislatures/Archive 1

Political party strength in U.S. states
Nearly every article in this series mentions state legislatures and, except for a few states, is woefully incomplete in their record of historical compositions of state legislatures. As these articles are largely the only mention of these historical composition figures, they could definitely stand to be fleshed out. Further, these figures could probably be included in the articles about the respective legislative bodies themselves. Qqqqqq (talk) 05:30, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi!
I just noticed you guys started this WikiProject. I may join, though I haven't had a ton of time for Wikipedia recently, so I'll probably hold off a bit. But I wanted to point out, in Oregon we've done a ton of work on our state legislature. It would be great to work with folks from other states to bring up the quality on such articles overall!

Here are some highlights of what we've done:


 * Oregon State Capitol to Featured Article
 * Oregon Legislative Assembly
 * Oregon House of Representatives
 * Oregon State Senate
 * individual articles on every current member of the Senate, and most current members of the House (some stubs, some as high as B class I believe) See Category:Members of the Oregon Legislative Assembly.

and, perhaps my favorite: we've begun doing articles on each session which, unlike what I've seen of other states, are not merely lists of the members each body, but also an account of the kind of legislation passed. Best example is the 74th Oregon Legislative Assembly.

We have also done a lot of work on List of Oregon ballot measures, the system of direct legislation in Oregon. -Pete (talk) 18:45, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, one other thing:


 * That's amazing&mdash;easily the state legislature best covered here on Wikipedia! Thanks for the heads-up, and we'd love for you to join us! Qqqqqq (talk) 18:51, 12 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Gee, thanks :) I've gone ahead and joined..can't resist. I'll try to pitch in as much as I can. By the way, there are some WP:ORE people who are very good with automated tagging...that stuff is rather beyond me, but I bet if you asked User:Tedder or User:EncMstr, they might have some ideas for bot-assisted tagging drives.
 * Also, I went ahead and added Oregon State Capitol -- not entirely sure this should be included, so feel free to remove it. (There is already WP:WikiProject U.S. state capitols after all.) -Pete (talk) 19:32, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I will contact one of those guys&mdash;there's got to be an easier way of doing this :). And I was going to add the capitols, since they're obviously fundamental to the respective legislature, but I didn't once I noticed that more specific Wikiproject. Either way. Qqqqqq (talk) 20:00, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Importance levels
I've been tagging articles on the state legislature and its upper and lower houses as top importance. I tagged one state legislative district article as low importance, although that might not be the best importance level. Other types of articles I've been tagging have been articles on past and present sessions of legislative bodies, biographies of individual legislators, state legislative elections, positions within a particular legislature, and probably several others I'm forgetting. So what level of importance shall we assign these? Qqqqqq (talk) 18:51, 12 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Wow -- California has done a great job covering its legislative districts! For reference, here's a link to Category:State legislative districts of the United States. I think maybe mid-level for those, and low-level for individual members...maybe mid-level for presidents/speakers/majority and minority leaders? I'd probably put individual sessions and elections, and any articles on individual positions like Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, at mid-level. Of course, this is all pretty arbitrary :) -Pete (talk) 19:42, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Good idea. Seems like a good scheme to me. Qqqqqq (talk) 19:56, 12 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I have been putting mid for individual members and high for speakers and other leadership posts. But this seems fine. --ilamb94 (talk) 04:37, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hey guys, great project idea. I notice it has no assessment guideline of its own in order to assess importance. It just links to the main one instead. Which is expected because the project is new. But it doesn't hurt to hammer one out. To get an idea of how to gauge various topics, it might help to consult other projects' guidelines. I know WikiProject Oregon has a well fleshed-out set of guidelines.


 * There is no disagreement (yet, in this short discussion) on how two types of articles rank: legislatures and their chambers (Top), and legislative sessions and elections (Mid). The types with varying statements of importance are:
 * Legislative districts (Low/Mid)
 * Leadership posts and the people who hold them (Mid/High)
 * The common legislator (Low/Mid)
 * It is probably somewhat important to resolve the issue, so editors know how to handle it.


 * This might be good to keep in mind: One dimension of notability, and thus importance, used by WikiProject Oregon is how regional a topic is. An example: Oregon governors are Mid by default, but tey are ranked High if they served in the federal government.


 * In my opinion, it makes sense to put legislative bodies and their chambers in Top, since that's pretty much the raison d'etre of this project. Capitol buildings should go here too, I think. It also appears logical to place sessions and elections in Mid. Remembering the "regionality" rule of thumb, maybe legislative districts and legislators who hold no special distinctions should be either Low or Mid. When legislators achieve a leadership post or some similar distinction, then they could rank as either Mid or High. Same goes for the posts themselves.


 * It's worth deciding if individual legislators should be "promoted" in importance if they are notable outside the context of the project, and if they are just "out of this world" from the project's perspective after some point. For example, how important should the project consider Franklin Roosevelt, who served in the New York Senate? Furthermore, by extension, how important are former legislators, especially ones who never achieved greater notability?


 * Hope these thoughts help. — Athelwulf [T]/[C] 07:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Creating templates
I created Template:Template for State Senate membership templates, to make it easier to make individual templates for each state. Useful? Or is there a better way to do this? -Pete (talk) 20:11, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Looks good, Kansas House of Representatives is one of the ones I made. --ilamb94 (talk) 04:35, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Project Process
I have the Kansas House and Senate and it look we have been getting a lot of articles tagged with WikiProject State Legislatures keep up the good work guys.--ilamb94 (talk) 05:27, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
 * By the way, there's a bot that will provide periodic updates to the chart you created of WP:STLEG articles -- there are instructions for getting it set up. Hope this is helpful! -Pete (talk) 23:28, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Peer review request
Hi, I just requested a peer review for 74th Oregon Legislative Assembly. I'd like to create more articles like this, and would love some input about how to make the best articles possible. Please weigh in at Peer review/74th Oregon Legislative Assembly/archive1! Thanks for any input :) -Pete (talk) 19:25, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Standardization
When creating templates/categories/etc., please be aware of the formatting/categorization used by the various state projects. See, for example, the format of Current Iowa Representatives and Members of the California State Assembly and the categories they are in. Also be aware of existing standardization schemes and useful common templates such as those listed at WP:IOWA/G. A good example of how infoboxes, categories, and succession boxes can be used (including in more difficult/unusual cases) can be found at Mary Lundby and Jack Kibbie. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 20:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Also note category schemes such as Category:United States political leader templates for template placement. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 20:24, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Philosopher, thanks for the links, but please help us understand what you're saying: have there been past efforts at standardization? If so, can you link WikiProjects or related discussions? I'm a little confused, because the Iowa and California templates you linked are not entirely consistent with one another...but to the degree they're similar, they are also very similar to the ones we've done for Kansas and Oregon. So, is there a problem? -Pete (talk) 21:08, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
 * No criticism was intended - I'm mainly just trying to provide useful links both for people interested in creating new articles/templates and because some of the above discussion suggested that standardization might be being considered. However, some things - such as the infoboxes and succession boxes - have already been standardized or can have tricky parameters if used in more "unusual" situations (see s-par and Infobox Politician) so I figured some examples of how they can be used on particular politicians' pages might be helpful.  --Philosopher Let us reason together. 11:29, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Exemplars
One of this project's first tasks probably should be to find the best articles of each "type", build them up, and use them as exemplars to help improve similar articles. Here are a few "types" to start with: — Athelwulf [T]/[C] 07:16, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Legislature
 * Chamber of a legislature
 * Legislator
 * Chamber leadership post
 * Legislative session
 * Legislative elections
 * Legislative district

My thoughts below (unfortunately, a heavy Oregon focus...as that's what I'm most familiar with)

Legislatures and chambers:
 * California State Legislature (and Senate/Assembly articles): looks pretty thorough, sections on many sub-topics. No citations, though.
 * Oregon Legislative Assembly (and Senate/House): similar, has a few citations.

Legislator:
 * Richard Devlin and Peter Courtney (both pretty long-term Senators of Oregon) are pretty good.

Chamber leadership post:
 * Do any articles exist? We've got lists of Speakers and Presidents in Oregon, but I haven't seen anything outside List class articles.

Legislative session
 * 74th Oregon Legislative Assembly, I am rather proud of this one...lots of work to do (as discussed in a peer review, see talk page); but I don't know of anything more thorough.

Legislative elections: In Oregon, I think we did the best job in Oregon legislative elections, 2008 and related articles. I built a monstrous article on the 2006 elections, tons of info all in one article, but not a very good article.

Legislative district:
 * California has an article for every one (!!) Here's a link to a randomly chosen one: California's 30th State Assembly district

I'd maybe add significant legislative committees (such as, in Oregon, Oregon Joint Ways and Means Committee) to the list of articles we might want to write.

-Pete (talk) 22:43, 26 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The article California State Legislature is more fleshed out than Oregon Legislative Assembly, so I'd say the former is a better example (lack of citations notwithstanding). Otherwise, I like your list. As for legislative committees, how notable are they? Can we find enough sources? — Athelwulf [T]/[C] 04:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Is this project still alive?
I haven't seen any activity since I posted a few comments. I hope I didn't scare people away. — Athelwulf [T]/[C] 21:06, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm still watching...I think it's always hit and miss when a new project starts up...sometimes it takes a while before that "second wind" hits, and we figure out how to approach it :) Your suggestions above are good, and it's probably a good idea to start pointing out some of the better articles and discussing them. I'll take a quick stab at it... -Pete (talk) 22:27, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Hello everybody, I'm sorry I have been less active in the project. I have been very busy lately and have not been able to do a lot of project work. This project is still alive and I encourage everyone to join and help out anyway you can. Thanks everyone for your continued support! --ilamb94 (talk) 23:36, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

bot
Can someone create a bot to add WikiProject State Legislatures to all the legislator pages? I think each state has a list, such as in Illinois Senate, and that would be easier than adding them manually. Same for General Assembly, Senate and House pages for each state. Also, the project should be renamed WikiProject US State Legislatures to be clear. Flatterworld (talk) 18:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Hey, i am not sure about anyone who creates bots but i can look around. I will also rename the project to WikiProject US State Legislatures like you suggested. --ilamb94 (talk) 20:01, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

State Legislature partisan trends
I thought it would be useful to have a table showing the trends of the partisan control of the various legislatures over a period of time. I have started to put this together at User:NoSeptember/statelegis. I previously did something similar with judicial appointments at Judicial appointment history for United States federal courts, which has been adopted by a bunch of people who surprisingly (to me) also had an interest in such data made easy to understand. Unfortunately I have limited time to work on the state legislature page and could also use good ideas for making it better. I invite anyone with an interest to help get this page live. I have no ownership issues with this page, change it, move it to main space whenever you think it is ready. I will continue to work on it myself slowly if no one else gets there first. Thanks to all who may help. NoSeptember 15:01, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds interesting - I'll take a look. :)  It would be a good idea to update/check for accuracy State legislature (United States) and List of United States state legislatures while we're at it.  --Philosopher Let us reason together. 06:21, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

I moved the page to United States state legislatures' partisan trend so that it would be live in article space for the upcoming election. Feel free to rename it if you have a better name. For pre 2004 data, I will have to go off wikipedia to gather (from each state's website - unless someone knows an easier source). Hopefully this page will eventually have several decades of data and be useful. NoSeptember 18:12, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

US State Legislatures articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release
Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the US State Legislatures articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 23:46, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

United States related Tag and Assess proposal
There is a proposal on WikiProject United States to task Xenobot with tagging and assessment of articles that fall into the scope of WikiProject United States. Please take a few moments to provide your comments about this proposal.

If you are interested in joining WikiProject United States please add your name under the applicable section here. --Kumioko (talk) 17:08, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Invitation to help with WikiProject United States
--Kumioko (talk) 15:36, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

A consideration for cross project consolidation of talk page templates
I have started a conversation here about the possibility of combining some of the United States related WikiProject Banners into WikiProject United States. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please take a moment and let me know. --Kumioko (talk) 20:32, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Suggested policy change to the tagging of non article items
I have submitted a proposal at the Village pump regarding tagging non article items in Wikipedia. Please take a moment and let me know what you think. --Kumioko (talk) 02:14, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

US Collaboration reactivated & Portal:United States starting next
Casliber recently posted a suggestion on the talk page for WikiProject United States about getting the US Wikipedians Collaboration page going again in an effort to build up articles for GA through FA class. See U.S. Wikipedians' notice board/USCOTM. After several days of work from him the page is up and ready for action. A few candidates have already been added for you to vote on or you can submit one using the directions provided. If you are looking for inspiration here is a link to the most commonly viewed articles currently under the scope of Wikiproject United States. There are tons of good articles in the various US related projects as well so feel free to submit any article relating to US topics (not just those under the scope of WPUS). This noticeboard is intended for ‘’’All’’’ editors working on US subjects, not just those under WPUS.

The next item I intend to start updating is Portal:United States if anyone is interested in helping. Again this is not specific to WPUS and any help would be greatly appreciated to maximize visibility of US topics. The foundation has already been established its just a matter of updating the content with some new images, biographies and articles. Please let leave a comment on the Portals talk page or let me know if you have any questions or ideas. --Kumioko (talk) 23:37, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Featured portal candidate: United States
Portal:United States is a current featured portal candidate. Please feel free to leave comments. -- RichardF (talk) 14:29, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Adding "Popular pages" to U.S.-related projects
A very interesting tool of the Wikimedia Toolserver is called WikiProject Popular pages lists. These lists are similar to project-related article lists like U. S. article lists used for generating assessment statistics. The Popular pages lists include the rank, total views, average daily views, quality and importance ratings for the listed articles. Here is the full list of projects using popular pages lists. An FAQ also is available at User:Mr.Z-man/Popular pages FAQ.

I recently added links to lists of popular pages as shown below to the U.S. Portal - WikiProjects box and the nominations sections for each of the selected articles boxes.

Portal:United States/Projects/Popular pages

Because this project was not included, I am bringing up the popular pages tool here. This tool makes it very easy to track three of four balancing dimensions when selecting articles for showcasing at a portal - quality, importance and popularity. When tracking the fourth dimension, topic, the related article lists tool (such as for U.S. article lists tool) also might be useful by filtering on categories of interest.

If you do decide to use this tool, feel free to update Portal:United States/Projects/Popular pages as well.

Regards, RichardF (talk) 02:19, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

All legislatures and chambers now included
I've just finished adding to the talk pages of all 50 legislatures, all 49 senates, and all 49 lower houses. Hopefully this will help increase exposure for this WikiProject. OCNative (talk) 11:35, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion to pull this project under WikiProject United States
It was recently suggested that this project might be inactive or semiactive and it might be beneficial to include it in the list of projects supported by WikiProject United States. After reviewing the project it appears that there is active interest in getting the project going so being supported by a larger project might be beneficial. I also noticed by looking at the list of projects at the WikiProject Council that this project isn't listed. This discussion is intended to start the process of determining if the project is active or if members are interested in the project being added to the projects supported by WikiProject United States. --Kumioko (talk) 15:48, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Fine with me. I still think the real split in WikiProject United States is between those interested in focusing on the historical articles, and those mostly interested in current legislators, etc. There's overlap of course, but the collaborative projects, for instance, do not. Flatterworld (talk) 20:36, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why people are thinking that myself. The collaboration has been working almost exclusively on Historical related articles; this month is the United States Bill of Rights. It doesn't get much more historical than that. Many of the members work on historical stuff as well. My guess is that the reason folks think that is because up to this point the focus has been on building the infrastructure, setting up the automation and getting the word out. Now that we are getting that wrapped up I am going to be turning my focus more towards improving the content and setting up some drives (Right now I am shooting for the Septober timeframe). Hopefully the perception will change then. --Kumioko (talk) 21:08, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Hey guys, I would be fine with the collaboration. I believe the support of Wikiproject United States would give this project the left it needs to get back going again and so it can generate more interest. --ilamb94 (talk) 21:16, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I would support this too. It would get this project more attention and hopefully more members, so we can get this thing fully running. OCNative (talk) 00:29, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Since this disussion was opened 9 days ago it seems like there is sufficient agreement to add this project to the list of projects supported by WikiProject United States but not to merge it with the presidential elections project based on comments on that projects talk page. I am going to leave this open for a little longer to see if anyone else comments but I am going to start the process but it will take a few days to complete. If anyone has any questions please let me know. --Kumioko (talk) 15:30, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

July 2011 Newsletter for WikiProject United States
--Kumioko (talk) 03:31, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

September 2011 Newsletter for WikiProject United States
--Kumioko (talk) 03:23, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

State Legislative Leadership and Membership Templates
After viewing several state legislature articles it looks like there is not a lot of consistency in how the current membership is shown from state to state. Some of them can be kind of a mess or hard to edit. I'm not talking about the transcluded show/hide box that lists the members which are put on other pages (those are ok), but the lists or tables of the current or past members on some of the state legislature pages themselves. Many use wikitables, some just use a list. Some show home city, some representation, some show party colors, terms in office, others don't. I just think there needs to be some consistency to make it easier for new updates to be made. Especially with redistricting happening.

I created two sets of templates, Chamber officers box and Chamber members box, to be used to show legislative chamber leadership posts and legislative membership posts. These possibly could, however, be used for listing other organization leadership/membership positions as well. Just something to standardize things a little more.

You can see both on the NCGA 2003-2004 article (House is done on this, not Senate members, yet). Another article with just the leadership positions done is NCGA 2005-2006. Some may object to what was not included in my templates, but these could be forked, if necessary. However, to keep it more standard, it shouldn't be forked too much. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of the templates. We don't need to get too detailed on these tables as all of that info is really gone into detail on the representatives' own pages.

Let me know what you think. I have left them uncategorized for now because I wasn't sure exactly where to place them. If you know where they should go, feel free to suggest the correct category. I'm not going to do more states' legislatures, except N & S Carolina, until I get some feedback. Thank you -- JoannaSerah (talk) 18:02, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Your absolutely right. Mnay of the articles are a mess, many still need to be created and there are a lot that have yet to be tagged for the project. I think both of those templates look very good and I think its a great idea. --Kumioko (talk) 18:09, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Alert
If anyone is still paying attention over here, apparently, there is an SD war going on over state legislator articles created by a banned user (OSUHEY) and associated sockpuppets. The politics of that is really beyond my scope of interest. Of interest to this project, I would think, is that new articles are being created for state legislators (part of the short term goals I've read of on this project's page) and are being deleted for reasons peripheral to the subject's notability or the likelihood that the article can be expanded. I've twice found myself having to point this out in the case of Fred Dyson, which was deleted and quickly restored the second time an SD request came about. In the most recent instance, the admin in question repeatedly pointed to G5 in spite of other admins pointing out that the subject's notability trumps that consideration. From browsing around, it appears that this same scenario is occurring with other state legislator articles.RadioKAOS (talk) 07:06, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
 * After having posted this, I am going back and reading through this issue in a little greater detail than I did before. Apparently, this all began with OSUHEY posting material in serial fashion which may have been copied and pasted from the Ohio Legislature website in violation of copyright.  From my perspective, how a state legislator in Alaska has managed to become involved with this issue is something I find totally bizarre.  The only possible connection I see is that in the discussion, OSUHEY is suspected to be a GOP operative.  I would have never found myself involved in this issue if not for the fact that I was already working on Alaska legislator articles.  Most of the work I've done so has been offline, and in many cases it may not be ready for prime time.  As it specifically concerns the Dyson article, my question is this: is there a specific problem with copyright violations in this article, or has it just not been expanded quickly enough to suit the tastes of one or more admins?RadioKAOS (talk) 07:50, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Project Vote Smart Question
I posted a question about use of Project Vote Smart as a source on the WikiProject Politics talk page. Please view and comment as this is relevant to our state legislative members' articles. Thank you -- JoannaSerah (talk) 03:42, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Nomination as a United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month candidate
One or more articles relating to this project have been nominated to be a future United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month. All editors interested in improving these articles or voting for next months collaboration are encouraged to participate here. --Kumioko (talk) 19:53, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

December 2011 Newsletter for WikiProject United States
--Kumioko (talk) 01:52, 12 December 2011 (UTC)