Talk:Massachusetts

From Campaigns Wikia

Contents 1 page organization 1 2 deletions 3 page organization 2 4 cw links 5 Name Variations 6 Statistics? 7 Wine in Convenience Stores?

[edit] page organization 1

Dunno if anyone else from Massachusetts is really editing yet, but I don't know jack about districts and stuff. How should this kind of thing be organized so people can find info about their district best? -- Munchtipq 18:38, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] deletions

I feel like the original design on this was link-happy and unfocused. I'd like to get rid of the multitude of pages for each elected office and collect those pages here and have an elections page that collects the current candidates, but I don't know how to get rid of pages... do I have to request this somewhere? -- Munchtipq 01:24, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Probably go for {{cfd}}. I did notice quite a few pages for different Mass. offices that are now redirects. Jfingers88 12:47, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm still learning some of the wiki-editing conventions. Munchtipq 14:36, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] page organization 2

i like that there are these little quick boxes that can be filled up with links, but man, there are 200 members of the general court in massachusetts (40 senate, 160 house)! how the heck can all that information be represented nicely? put them all on the main page? might be too big. but giving them all their own page would almost surely be too small. -- Munchtipq 15:30, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

You think 200 people and links on a page is small?! Definitely make at least one new page (maybe one each for senate and house), especially if you're going to be filling in all the candidates. If you do get all the candidates, I suggest using a couple tables like the one at Pennsylvania United States House of Representatives election, 2006#Candidates to keep everything nicely organized by district and party and such, etc. Jfingers88 15:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

hehe, no, no, i meant that giving each of the 200 court seats their own page (so 200 separate pages) would be too small of a page. having a house and a senate page might be the way to go. the only negative point is that it might be nice to organize more by location, but i guess that's what anchors and links are for, so i think i'll try a page for house and a page for senate. thanks! -- Munchtipq 15:54, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh. Perhaps "giving them each their own page" would have been a bit clearer. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

And concerning organizing by location, isn't district part of the location? Also, if you have a couple million hours to waste, you could make voter guides too, as seen at Pennsylvania United States Senate election, 2006. (Yes, I know I keep plugging my own work. I may have an ego problem...) Jfingers88 16:07, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

yeah, district is what i meant, i was trying to think of a way for someone from, say, chelmsford, ma, to come in and get a page with their district's races on it, house, senate, etc, without having to wade through a page of other house and senate races that they can't vote on. that's where i was saying that it would be easy enough to set up anchors and links by district so you could quickly jump to the races you can vote on. but yeah, i hadn't used wikitables yet, so i definitely stole that from you already. -- Munchtipq 16:44, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Can we create a template that lists the counties, where each would have information about local races within that county? That's working for some other states. Look at Alaska. This creates redlinks, but that's fixable. Chadlupkes 18:20, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The template could work. Get me a list of counties in Massachusetts and I can do it pretty quickly.

However, there's another issue at stake here. Should we focus on the county elections of the states in which we have few editors, or should we get the state-wide elections for all of the states? It is a scant 83 days to the 2006 US elections. Maybe once we get everything set up and rolling and get more users, we can do elections for the counties. That probably won't happen in time for this election. Right now, I think we should stick to the state level. Jfingers88 18:41, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Census.gov should have the list, as should wikipedia. And local elections happen nearly every year, so I think putting a structure up would do us good. I'm working on Washington and King County because that's where I live. I think we can learn by doing, and lead by example. If we build it, others will come and help. I agree that it's probably too late for 2006, but let's look long-term as well. 2007 and 2008 are going to come fast. Chadlupkes 19:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] cw links

i like this, i feel like these little election template thingies should be really short and concise, with just a few really basic pieces of information about the candidates, basically their party affiliation and campaign website link. i was thinking about even indicating incumbency with a background color instead of an (I) or whatever is there now. maybe cw could even be shortened to just w, meaning official candidate website or whatever. -- Munchtipq 18:42, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

i tried background colors for incumbents before deciding that in an ideal world it shouldn't matter, so i ended up removing the little (I) anyway. what i'm thinking is that the fewer of these little codes there are the more accessible the whole thing will be, so at least on the summary page for elections, try not to have it end up being a baseball box score of abbreviations but rather pursue the "simplest tool that can work" philosophy. -- Munchtipq 22:30, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The cw thing comes from dKosopedia. They use cw for campaign websites and hw for House websites. I think we could use ow for office website for Incumbents. Thoughts? Chadlupkes 23:01, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I like "cw" -- I guessed right off what it stood for. (Would be good to have a "key to abbreviations" somewhere on the page.) I'd also like to see many links to the wikipedia page for candidates that have such pages -- maybe "ww"? "ow" for Official Website seems not so great; maybe "gov" instead, for Governmental? Color-coding things is fine, but remember that some of us see colors poorly or not at all, so please make sure that all important information also appears explicitly, not just via color! 69.87.204.107 23:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC) On second thought, "wp" seems a better abbreviation for WikiPedia than "ww". 69.87.203.188 14:03, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I like your "gov" idea. Good thinking! Wikipedia pages for each candidate should be at the top of their individual page, using the {{Also on Wikipedia}} template. Chadlupkes 23:46, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm fine with the wp pages being linked from an individual page, when there is one, but most of these candidates don't have one, and many do have wp pages, so there should be direct links to there from these summary-table pages in such cases. 69.87.203.188 14:03, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name Variations

Sorry Chadlupkes -- but you should not have removed the alternate name form. The candidate website uses "Phil Dunkelbarger" exclusively. But the official ballot term is "Philip Dunkelbarger". This is not the only case of this problem. And it is a very serious problem -- it means that anyone starting with the ballot and searching for info may not find it. This (wonderful) campaigns wiki is a tool for trying to solve these problems. So we need both terms to appear, in the complete and intact form, to facilitate search engine matches. That is why we cannot use a combined form like "Philip (Phil) Dunkelbarger". Which is all to say, please put back the multiple alternate names for Phil, using whatever format you think is best! 69.87.203.188 14:22, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

First, please sign in so I can address you by a proper name. Second, how do we prevent people from thinking that multiple names mean multiple people? Having different versions of a name listed separately is a problem that should be resolved on the candidate's page, which is easy to create.

I believe that the name on the ballot should be the name used on summary pages like this, then we can use combined forms on the individual pages, just like they already do on Wikipedia. It's a naming standard that we really don't need to reinvent from scratch. Chadlupkes 14:41, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Redirect pages are good for this purpose, once we get candidate pages. Jfingers88 14:57, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Statistics?

Do we have access to any meaningful statistics showing how much this page actually gets viewed? 69.87.203.188 14:22, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wine in Convenience Stores?

We need links to info from people opposed to Question One. And meaningful info about whether this really would end up with wine being sold at 7-11 and Quicky Mart -- seems like it would be easy for them to manipulate this new "food store" requirement? 69.87.204.26 00:09, 11 October 2006 (UTC)