User talk:C-Kobold/European Parliament national election systems

Article size

I did a roundabout calculation on the article size: currently, it is 104.048 bytes long. The currently largest wikipedia article according to Special:LongPages has a size of ‎491.249 bytes. I have finished approx. 8 out of 31 rows; so the article will have a size of approximately 31/8 x 104.048 bytes = 403.186 bytes in the end; which is still much lower than the 491.249 bytes. So technically, the size should not be a problem. C-Kobold (talk) 10:34, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Quotation overuse? Original Research? Please give your opinion & suggest improvements!

Hello everyone, I would like to hear your improvement suggestions and opinions about my law quotations in foreign languages (!) in this article. Is it WP:QUOTEFARM? Is it WP:NOR? Please also consider why I made these long quotations from foreign laws and did not just reference scientific/political research papers or newspaper articles:

• to make the statements in the table easily verifiable with e.g. Google Translate and
• to make the statements in the table easily updateable: if the laws change, the content behind the links changes as well and the table can get updated easily. Scientific/Political research papers or newspaper articles do not get updated however when laws change, so references to them are useless in the near future C-Kobold (talk) 14:23, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

To me the page looks like a synthesis of your original research and primary sources. If there's an actual secondary source in there discussing the election systems, preferably as a group, I haven't seen it. That makes the page violate one of our core content policies. Regarding quotes and updateability: We can assume that this is significant only once every five years, when a new European Parliament is elected. If the article correctly represents the state of the election systems as of the most recent election, that should be good enough. If there are significant changes regarding an upcoming election, secondary sources should cover those, too. There should be no need to rely on extensive quotes of the relevant laws. Conversely, if we do make use of law quotes and the laws change as often as you seem to expect, don't we then create a need for frequent page updates if we don't want to have outdated quotes? Are we even sure there are no copyright issues with these extensive quotes? I would assume that most EU countries allow free reproductions of their laws, but I am not at all sure that all of them do. Huon (talk) 16:25, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

1. I have another definition of "primary source". "Primary source" for me means: subjective view on an issue, from one specific author/newspaper/eyewitness/victim. Laws however are not subjective, but objective: they are existing without any connection to one specific person/view. So for me, law references are less primary research than newspaper/victim/eyewitness/author references.

2. Quoting laws is (in my logic: definitely) allowed and not a copyright issue. Otherwise implementing these rules could get difficult, if you are not allowed to say the rule. That would be absurd! How to implement a rule if you mustn't say the rule?!

3. The laws for EU elections do not change in a 5 year rhythm. They change in a very irregular rhythm. You can see that if you take a look in the reference links. So depending on some political research papers is not a good idea, IMHO, because political research papers are not made that often. Also: Nobody in the English Wikipedia speaks all ~27 languages of the EU, so nobody can keep an eye on the newspapers in all 27 member states to register election law changes when they happen. However, keeping an eye on the laws is very easy (just click the link and check if the quoted text has changed).

4. If you still think that my article is not suitable for Wikipedia: Do you think I could move it to Wikiversity? Do they have the same templates over there? Can I then quote the Wikiversity article as reference in a Wikipedia article? Thank you in advance for an answer!

C-Kobold (talk) 20:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

1. Whatever your personal definition is, Wikipedia's policy on primary, secondary and tertiary sources is rather unambiguous. For Wikipedia's purposes, laws are primary sources. Also, if laws were "objective" and not subject to interpretation, we'd have far fewer lawyers and judges would have easier jobs.
2. Whether or not using lengthy quotes of laws is OK or not is not an issue of logic but of (heh) law. There's no inherent reason why laws shouldn't be subject to copyright, unless they are explicitly excluded by law (e.g. for Germany here). That doesn't mean they cannot be quoted in any context, but it might mean that we cannot make use of them in this way. Are you familiar with Latvia's copyright law? Malta's? Spain's? The UK's? I'm not, certainly not to this extent. (I just checked the UK, and their laws are subject to Crown copyright, though since 2000 (!) they waive the licensing that would otherwise be required - two countries OK, how many more to check?)
3. The laws don't change in a five-year rhythm, but the law at a time when there's no election is not particularly relevant. We don't need research papers; newspaper articles would do. For major changes there will be "This is new for the 20XX EU parliament election!" news pieces. The "Nobocy speaks all languages" reasoning is equally true for laws as for news articles. How do you know that changes aren't made in some separate law that isn't included in the quote? For example, if you quoted the US constitution, you'd still think that Senators wouldn't need to be elected by the people since th US doesn't change the text of the constitution but rather adds amendments at the end.
4. I am not familiar with Wikiversity and with what templates they have. You can try to copy-paste, preview the page, and see whether you get lots of strange code or whether things look OK. That said, Wikiversity is not a reliable source by Wikipedia's standards (neither is Wikipedia itself); it cannot be used as a reference here. Huon (talk) 21:23, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

#Whatever your personal definition is, Wikipedia's policy on primary, secondary and tertiary sources is rather unambiguous. For Wikipedia's purposes, laws are primary sources. Also, if laws were "objective" and not subject to interpretation, we'd have far fewer lawyers and judges would have easier jobs.
— User:Huon

- Did you really read and understand this wikipedia policy article ? Because laws/acts/legal texts are not mentioned anywhere in this wikipedia policy article.... C-Kobold (talk) 22:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Let's see if the definition for "primary sources" under WP:PST applies for laws/acts/legal texts:

Primary sources are original materials that are close to an event, and are often accounts written by people who are directly involved. They offer an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. Primary sources may or may not be independent sources. An account of a traffic incident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the event; similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources.

— WP:PST

- If we only apply this definition, I would say: laws/acts/legal texts are not primary sources. Laws are not personal: not a diary, not the view from a witness, not written from somebody directly involved (well, we are all directly involved - we are all allowed to vote...), not something new. C-Kobold (talk) 22:17, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

You haven't read the footnote c:

Duke University Libraries offers this definition: "A primary source is a first-hand account of an event. Primary sources may include newspaper articles, letters, diaries, interviews, laws, reports of government commissions, and many other types of documents."

Of course it's also clear that laws are not secondary or tertiary sources by any stretch of the imagination. So yes, primary sources they are. Huon (talk) 13:37, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

If we apply this definition, almost every reference in Wikipedia articles about elections would be a primary source. C-Kobold (talk) 15:13, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Nice initiative! Kaihsu (talk) 04:56, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

WP:PRIMARY allows using primary sources for statements of undisputed fact ("A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge."). I don't know the details, but if the law clearly says that representatives are elected using method x, then it is an appropriate source for that. In fact, since it is the official source (a government publication!), it probably is the most reliable source on the subject, since it is "free of any errors or misquotations introduced by subsequent sources" (WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD). Edit: the only thing lacking in fact would be a secondary source which establishes the relevance of such a comparison - which probably is not that hard to find, and the topic is obviously notable enough that I don't see why we would not have an article about national election systems (possibly as a sub-article of European Parliament elections#Voting_system?). 107.190.33.254 (talk) 16:40, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer! I already found some secondary sources, which could be useful:

• European electoral law
• 2019 European election: national rules

C-Kobold (talk) 15:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Ideas about which columns to start with

This is a cool idea. As I understand it, this article is intended as a list or table of the basic rules of European Parliament elections in each country. I think that's definitely needed. In my view, a major challenge is to keep it simple, or at least to have a simple version available to begin with. How about if we make a draft with only about 5 columns? This can also help with sourcing. My view is that laws are primary sources which can be used with care, but if we can find secondary sources (news articles, other published comparisons, etc), that's better. I suspect it's going to be much easier to find secondary sources on basic-information columns like "voting age" and trickier for less obvious columns like "candidate list registration criteria". I think the Election Threshold algorithms and results are OR and can't be used here.

I would suggest starting with: 1. EU member state; 2. # electoral districts or colleges; 3. # seats; 4. election day; 5. active voting age; 6. compulsory voting. Krubo (talk) 20:31, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Because Wikipedia does not allow primary research, but I need primary research for this table, I will not continue my project on Wikipedia. Instead, I would like to collaborate with https://europeelects.eu, who will publish the table as html website. I am currently working on and saving the data for the table as json file, here: https://github.com/europarl-data/europarl-national-election-systems . Please help me there. C-Kobold (talk) 21:54, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I think that makes sense. When it gets published on europeelects.eu, that will constitute a secondary source which can be a reference for Wikipedia. Hopefully we can achieve a situation where Wikipedia has the accurate information summarized, with reference links to one or more secondary sources (such as your site) that provide more complete details. Krubo (talk) 22:50, 17 April 2019 (UTC)