Talk:Washington's 42nd legislative district

Undo merge into the list of Washington State districts

Why was this page turned into a redirect to Washington state legislative districts? Reywas92 can you explain why this was necessary? I'd like to keep trying to expand this page, particularly including more history of the district, rather than have it removed. Can we undo that merge please? --Almccon (talk) 20:54, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

@Almccon:. Ah, I see the content you added had been removed by an IP user. I think that info would be better suited for 2018 Washington State Senate election, where more prose content is certainly welcome; what exactly do you want to add? Since we do have articles for the state State Senate and State House elections I'm not sure what the LDs articles would have that's not duplicative. The LD articles did not have any information that was not already elsewhere so I merged them. You mentioned a vacancy in the 40th district, but that is mentioned at Washington State Senate already, which is better as a centralized resource.

I think the biggest problem with articles for districts is that they are redraw and often renumbered after each census so a continuous history doesn't really work.

I'd actually like to create a list similar to List of Representatives and Senators of Arizona Legislature by Districts (2013–2023) (AZ uses the same method of one senator and two representatives as Washington). This can be a good collaboration by keeping related content together rather than split into pages that receive very few views and can incorporate both text and tables without excessive duplication. What are your thoughts on that? Reywas92^Talk 21:13, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I can understand the efficiency of condensing things into pages that are mainly tables, but then we're just reproducing information which is already available on the Secretary of State's website. For me personally, I think that gathering information into pages for each electoral district is the most logical way to group information, and in particular to support more historical narrative. From my point of view I'm interested in the history of the legislative districts near where I live, and I usually don't care about any other districts elsewhere in the state. So it's less convenient for me as a reader to have all the results grouped together.

My aspiration would be for the state district pages to get fleshed out more like congressional district pages, for example Washington's 2nd congressional district. Being able to write a narrative about how the electoral history of a district has changed over recent years seems valuable. And yes, I know that some content got deleted from this page, but I haven't had time to reinstate it.

It's true that districts do get renumbered and redrawn periodically, but the same is true for congressional districts just as much as it is for state legislative districts. --Almccon (talk) 21:41, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

To be honest I don't think it's a realistic ambition to have fleshed out articles for each of the 49 state districts with tables and narratives and then stay up to date, and even once you wrote it, the readership on these quite low... The 'narrative' is frankly not very interesting for most districts, with long-serving representatives and routine elections (not to mention handling redistricting again). What exactly would these narratives include beyond putting material from tables into prose form? Go ahead and expand the ones you are interested in, but I do not believe the presumption should be that there should be an article for every district just because it exists, especially when the same content is already elsewhere. Reywas92^Talk 22:39, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

You may be right that it's not a realistic ambition for all districts, and personally I'm not a very active Wikipedian so I have no delusions of doing it alone, even for the few districts near where I live. I'm fine to defer to your guidance as a more experienced editor, and to leave these redirects in place for now, especially if nobody else complains. --Almccon (talk) 00:59, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Well I don't want your less experience get in the way of contributing! If you do want to expand something that's certainly welcome, just not leaving them in their current state. Also, I see from your linked Twitter, you're in FairVote Whatcom – I'm in the King chapter! Looking forward to the LOB. Reywas92^Talk 03:32, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Ongoing deletions of new content

An anonymous editor keeps deleting new content regarding the November 2018 election results. All of the new content is backed up by reliable sources. Would that anonymous editor please explain their rationale for deleting that content? --Almccon (talk) 02:27, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Anonymous user at 67.161.117.30, please participate in discussion on this talk page instead of repeatedly deleting content. --Almccon (talk) 16:21, 16 November 2018 (UTC)