Talk:Wellington (New Zealand electorate)

Order of election results

Other electorate articles have the election results listed in descending order. Should we treat historic electorates differently? Schwede66 17:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

My rationale was not in regards to their historical status (otherwise articles on electorates with recycled names would continually be reformatted any time the Representation Commission loses or reuses an historic name), but more to do with their multi-member status - and changes from three-member to two-member and back again. Since this created a level of complexity not found in standard single-member electorates I felt it advisable that the full results were ordered similarly to the summary charts listing Members of Parliament.

If I'd expanded the article, as intended, by adding the two earlier periods (1853-1871) & (1871-1881) I'd've considered reordering headings as:

3 Three-member electorate (1853-1871)
3.1 Members of Parliament
3.2 Election results
3.2.1 1853 election
3.2.2 1855 election
3.2.3 1858 by-election
etc
4 Two-member electorate (1871-1881)
4.1 Members of Parliament
4.2 Election results
4.2.1 1871 election
4.2.2 1875 election
etc etc

... but that is another topic of conversation :) FanN | talk | 21:49, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, we should have that conversation. I saw the other day that the Victorians are dealing with changes from single to multi-member electorates in a different way; they produce one big table. See, for example, Electoral district of East Bourke Boroughs. What do you think of that? Schwede66 00:13, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm not in favour of that Victorian model - there's no correlation between elections and members (nor with by-elections or parliamentary terms either) so I think it is less than useful. British usage is similar to ours, although they push both party colours to the left and have party names placed further right - with a longer history (many constituencies like Bedfordshire existed almost 600 years) party names are probably useful, although there's plenty of inconsistencies in how they format these articles. More recent, and current, UK articles list similarly to our model (understandably, as my redesign of NZ electorate tables was based on UK articles), although they only highlight elections where a change of member occurred. I prefer our form of listing all elections and by-elections as it gives a better indication of terms served and in the case of by-elections, a further understanding of the electorate's political history. FanN | talk | 01:51, 11 January 2014 (UTC)