Template talk:Infobox Australian electorate

Footnotes

Pilbara
Western Australia—Legislative Assembly
State or territory:	Western Australia
Dates current:	1894–present1
Namesake:	Pilbara region
1known as Central Kimberley-Pilbara 2005–2008

I'd like to request a new field for adding footnotes. e.g. —————————————>

Bush shep (talk) 15:56, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do - it seems sensible. Orderinchaos 16:19, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

have added it in testing capacity to Pilbara. Any comments/suggestions welcome. Orderinchaos 16:23, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Looks good. Thank you. Bush shep (talk) 16:51, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Nearby Electorates

I believe it would be beneficial for Australian electorates on Wikipedia to show bordering electorates in an easily navigable table similar to or identical to that used in Australian suburbs.

For example the division of Latrobe: | near-nw = Aston | near-n = Casey | near-ne = Casey | near-w = Aston | near-e = McMillan | near-sw = Holt | near-s = Flinders | near-se = McMillan — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adam Rayon (talk • contribs) 06:32, 13 April 2015‎ (UTC)

I have notified the relevant Wikiprojects for comment by other editors. --AussieLegend (✉) 08:31, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

It's not a huge change to the infobox. I've already made the change to the sandbox,[1] and added an example to the testcases page. --AussieLegend (✉) 08:45, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't really mind about this, as long as somewhere it is made clear that it represents electorates as they are currently, not as they were throughout their history (to use La Trobe, Aston didn't even exist when LT was created!). The maps could actually use clarification in this regard too. Frickeg (talk) 08:52, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I also have no strong objection, but I think maps would be more useful than semi-spatial lists. My example is Mayo:

| near-n = Barker

| near-ne = Barker

| near-e = Barker

| near-se = Barker

| near-s = Encounter Bay

| near-sw = <none>

| near-w = Kingston, Boothby, Sturt, Makin

| near-nw = Wakefield AEC map

Barker is not much better - the eastern boundary is Farrer, Mallee and Wannon, then there's coastline from the Victorian border to the Murray Mouth; Mayo and Wakefield to the west, and Grey to the northwest and north.AEC Barker map --Scott Davis ^Talk 11:48, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not much of a fan of this proposal. As ScottDavis points out, this is going to lead to a bunch of pretty unhelpful tables, and it's a function much better served by maps in this case. I also think it's a royal pain of a thing to keep up to date, and our state electorate articles in particular are shaky at being kept up to date as it is. The Drover's Wife (talk) 13:34, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree that keeping it up to date is going to be a problem. Borders change regularly every few years and sometimes the changes are fairly significant. --AussieLegend (✉) 13:47, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm all for having maps (I love maps!) but getting the maps is not so easy. Indeed, just reading the AEC's licensing suggests to me that we might have difficulty with their conditions (they appear to want "no derivatives"). I don't see it as particularly harmful though to add those "near" fields to the template. We have "near" fields on suburbs and localities and, Australia-wide, there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are electorates (state and federal). Against that, electoral boundaries might shift more radically than suburb/locality boundaries (although the latter are far from static). Maybe the template could offer the "near" fields or a map link, with the map link preferred when available. Kerry (talk) 23:18, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I must admit I'm not a fan of this idea either. It makes sense for localities, which are more or less static, but since electorates move about a lot and often have odd shapes, I don't really see it being as useful as a map, and it would add a fair bit of bloat to the infoboxes. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 11:03, 15 April 2015 (UTC).

I note the divided opinion about this. I'm going to copy the changes over from the sandbox so I can start testing with the SA electorates. They're so hard to visualise with all the changes so I think the feature (which remains optional) has a lot of value and despite the risk of not being kept up to date. After every electoral redistribution we need to update these articles anyway. Many are still quite out of date in SA in terms of the prose description for the present 2018 boundaries. At least the nearby params are quick to update! Donama (talk) 01:06, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Reviewing the comments (and noting I spoke against it a few years ago), I think the nearby electorates might be more useful for urban and state electorates that are smaller than the examples I used. Perhaps it works when the neighbours are similar geographic size. They will need to be reviewed for each new redistribution, along with lots of other things. I've found that lists of polling booths at different times give an idea of where electorates have moved, but can get messy if there's not much else to say except for walls of lists of places. --Scott Davis ^Talk 03:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

I still have concerns about this. While suburbs and towns are generally fixed in shape, size and location, electorates vary all 3 significantly at each redistribution. Every time there is a redistribution every infobox using the new fields is going to have to be thoroughly checked to make sure the directions are still valid. Hopefully this is not going to be a big issue for the smaller electorates but the many larger electorates are going to be a huge problem. I can see the nearby electorates being very wrong after the first redistribution. --AussieLegend (✉) 07:25, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

This is a good point. I think we should simply not use this on large electorates (e.g. Electoral district of Flinders). How to encourage consensus on not using optional parameter I don't know. Are there precedents? Donama (talk)

Generally, if a parameter is available, people will tend to use it regardless of any consensus. The only way to stop people using a parameter is not to include it. How do we determine what constitutes a large electorate and how do we manage electorates that vary wildly in size? The Division of Paterson has shrunk from nearly 10,000km² to 1,100km² over the years and may shrink more, but it's just as likely to expand again. We're going to have to add tracking to the infobox so that we can see what electorates use the fields if we want to manage them in any way but that's not going to stop people using the fields. --AussieLegend (✉) 01:46, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

I have added the code necessary to stop articles using the new fields from being added to the error category. Instead, articles using the fields are tracked in Category:Australian Electorate articles using near parameters. --AussieLegend (✉) 05:50, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Created from/Replaced by

I noticed the Template:Infobox UK constituency has fields that notate the electorates the preceded and succeed the respective electorate. This is something we should consider adding to this template. It would be especially useful for working on state electorates which have long histories and often multiple abolitions/redistributions.Siegfried Nugent (talk) 07:26, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Sounds useful to me. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:38, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, this would be useful. Certainly on former electorate articles. Donama (talk) 22:00, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Maps again

The AEC's licensing page that Kerry linked above appears to have been updated. It is now quite explicit in permitting derivative works. I have not looked yet at what data is available. It would be fancy to be able to show the changes over time of long-standing or historic electorates, instead of just listing the polling places in 1930-something. We have current maps on electorates, so maybe someone had already noticed that the licence changed. --Scott Davis ^Talk 02:42, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

It seems like it's just the 2011 data? There's that other dataset that's CC-by-licensed, and it's probably easier to use that than comply with their unique take on the same conditions. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:56, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

explanation for reverted edit

Jonesey95 I reverted your last edit on this template as the coordinate string was getting rendered as parameters instead of coordinates in articles, and I couldn't see the underlying problem. Thanks for all the work you have been doing on coordinates. --Scott Davis ^Talk 11:47, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that. It was sloppy of me. I'll figure it out in the sandbox and reimplement the fix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:17, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

ScottDavis: I think that I have fixed it. Can you please verify? Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:30, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Jonesey95 That looks better, thank you. A glance at your fix suggests that the error you fixed was not recently introduced, but something you had done suddenly made it matter. Well done for finding the problem. --Scott Davis ^Talk 23:03, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't know what fixed it. If you look at the diff, what I did should not have made a difference. The span tag was cosmetic code cleanup. The only thing I see is a difference in white space, which doesn't usually affect the templates and parser functions that are being used, as far as I know. It appears that I do not know far enough, however. Anyway, it works now. Moving on. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:24, 16 June 2017 (UTC)