Template talk:Infobox American political party

Colors

I haven't been particularly interested in getting involved in the various template and infobox wars that go on around here, but this template's apparent requirement of a "colors" line for American political parties is no good, as neither the Democrats nor the Republican have official colors, or even consistently unofficial ones (the Red/Blue States thing is entirely a media creation which neither party has significant adopted in its campaigning). It either needs to be made option or taken out entirely. RadicalSubversiv E 30 June 2005 03:49 (UTC)

• If you want red, type in "Red" instead. If you want blue, type in "Blue". That's how I just made it, except I haven't done other colors yet. I don't think you should have to type in the party name to get the color, since red is more commonly associated with left-wing socialist parties. thus, making it so you have to type "republican" to get red is stupid. --Revolución (talk) 23:15, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

• • FWIW, the color system now in use on this template has been updated to match the system in use in this templates British, Irish etc. equivalents. The Tom 01:20, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

• • • In order for the infobox to display the colors of the political party the code must say colours.

Position

This really needs to be clarified some. It's clear that Left-wing works for Communist parties... but, what about other parties? What are the options, as well, Left, center-left, center-right, right? Or is centrism the ideology and position of Centrist Party (United States). Please explain. gren グレン 09:25, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

I would actually propose two separate criteria for political position: economic and social policy. The infobox should be modified to have two subheadings for political postion, "Economic policy" and "Social policy." This would be much more revealing, especially with parties like the Libertarian Party, whose politics do not fall into the left-right scale very easily. -- Cielomobile ^{talk / contribs} 17:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I've edited the template to divide position into fiscal policy and social policy, but I am not sure how to make it display properly, in two lines, so if someone with more template experience could help out, that'd be great. -- Cielomobile ^{talk / contribs} 20:22, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

You added a column, which threw the balance off. I cleaned that up, and made the default values for most parameters blank just in case some usage does not specify them. ⇔ ChristTrekker 21:48, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I'm not much of a wizard with templates. In fact, I know pretty much nothing about them. -- Cielomobile ^{talk / contribs} 01:52, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

NP. My own learning process here has been a long, slow accretion. You think you're trying to learn how to do "just this one thing" and that leads to something else, etc. ⇔ ChristTrekker 14:53, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm really wondering why position even needs to be on this template. What are you going to say here that ideology couldn't take care of? ⇔ ChristTrekker 15:08, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Position can specify the extent to which a party follows an ideology. For example, progressivism is a trait of the Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Socialist Party, but they all follow it to relative degrees, and position allows us to easily specify this. -- Cielomobile ^{talk / contribs} 18:41, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm concerned with (pejorative) terms like "far-right"/"far-left" being used. ⇔ ChristTrekker 21:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I find the inclusion of fiscal and social position is biased toward a particular frame of analysis. Why use left/right and not classic/modern or religious/secular or deep/shallow for position. What about ecological position or military position.

I think that ideology allows a more flexible and less biased way to express a party's values. Therefore i support dropping the fiscal and social positions. Bcharles (talk) 18:55, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Chair

I recommend dropping the sexually biased language "chairman" as a party title in the "american political party" infobox and replacing it with simply "chair". This is not only more socially appropriate, it is technically and semantically correct.

For similar reasons i recommend dropping the awkward use of "chairperson" in the "political party" infobox and replacing it with the common and correct term "chair". Bcharles (talk) 19:08, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Changing the template

User:Thumperward decided to change the template; I've reverted the changes, as they represent a significant break from standard political party infoboxes (even though they are much like other infoboxes). Here's the diff: [1]. I'm personally against changing this box, unless all other party boxes are similarly changed. That'll raise a stir in WP Politics...Lockesdonkey (talk) 00:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It's trivial to take the updated code (which is a clear improvement over the old wikitable layout) and apply the style of the old one using a couple of lines of CSS. I'll work on doing that when I get a chance, and then we can discuss the styling. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:38, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Done. Further changes to the template styling can be trivially added to the bodystyle parameter. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:23, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Need Foreign Policy line under Political Position

I haven't figured out how to do it. Will keep trying. But if anyone else does... CarolMooreDC (talk) 04:18, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Re: Position

Alright, I find this to be kind of an issue.

It's required that fiscal and social policy be listed seperately. Should this not be changed? JPuglisi (talk) 10:17, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Chairman

I suggest that "Chairman" be changed to "Chair" or "Chairperson" to avoid unneedly genderd language. Any objections? DES ^(talk) 20:17, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• If it was just a text change, I would care much less. However, it is the name of the actual parameter which is in use in 86 pages at the moment. So, my counter proposal is this: To do the least damage and make this go as quickly and easily as possible:

• Change {{{chairman}}} to {{{chair|{{{chairman}}}}}} as phase one.
• Then, go through with AWB (I'm volunteering if there's any question there) and change all of the uses in those 86 pages to use {{{chair}}}.
• Remove the {{{chairman}}} and change the label 7 stuff in {{Infobox political party}} to something like {{#ifeq:{{{disbanded|no}}}|no|Chair{{lc:{{{chair_suffix|}}}}}|Former chair{{lc:{{{chair_suffix|}}}}}}} so that it is still an option if "man", "woman", or "person" are wanted there (it can even be a #switch: restricting it to those options for all I care).

I don't mind carrying this out (as I'm sure I've left out some steps or haven't clarified my thoughts very well here), but I basically think that the options for the different suffixes should be available. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 20:51, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Technical 13, I was just going to change the text and do more or less your phase 1. However I think putting in a switch or other template coding to change the label based on the parameter merely complicates usage for little gain. Let the parameters chair, chairman and chairwoman all be aliases, all leading to the label "chair", no matter what. This increases uniformity and saves space at no cost that I can see, the gender will already be indicated elsewhere in the article about the chairman or woman. DES ^(talk) 20:58, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

BTW I note this was proposed back in 2008n but apparently not acted on or responded to. DES ^(talk) 20:58, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

@Technical 13 Ping. DES ^(talk) 20:58, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• DES, you just want a {{{chair|{{{chairperson|{{{chair person|{{{chairman|{{{chairwoman}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} parameter, and you want it to always be labelled "chair"? I see conflict there. Someone is going to come along and say "John chairman is a man and the label should reflect that." and everyone knows it because that is how this dramatic world is. It's going to end up at AN(/I) and someone is going to get bum-hurt about it. I don't mind making the changes so that everyone can be happy (it's really not that much more of a load, if any). — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 21:08, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• If you really think that outcome is likely, Technical 13, then I would make just a single parameter {{{chair}}} with no options. I will be happy to make that change if no one objects strongly. But if you really want to make the change to variable label output, I won't revert. I don't think the label should alter in such a case, but it isn't a huge issue. DES ^(talk) 21:16, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• I really think it is a likely scenario. I've completed bullet #1 and as a part of bullet two I've added Category:Pages using superseded chairman parameter in Infobox American political party for all pages still using {{{chairman}}} to make sure I didn't miss any while going through with AWB and updating. I've also updated the doc on the template so that there should be no new uses of {{{chairman}}}. Give it a little bit to make sure there are no pages in the category and I'll do the final step of updating the meta template {{Infobox political party}} to just show "Chair" and an optional suffix. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 21:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Color/colour-code

There seems to be no parameters for colour-coding in this template! Vif12vf/Tiberius (talk) 00:36, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Needs more parameters

Just looking at the infoboxes for the two major parties (Democratic Party, Republican Party) and the three largest third parties (Constitution Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party) shows you how insufficient the parameters are for this infobox template. This template is barely used because of it. Charles Essie (talk) 21:10, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Personally i think nation-specific political party infobox templates are rather unnecessary, since it seems the regular template have practically all the parameters we could possibly want and more! Vif12vf/Tiberius (talk) 01:51, 16 August 2020 (UTC)