Talk:Texas/Senator

Formatting

With US Representatives and Senators, what is the best way to sort them? We have a lot of people with employment "Representative of the 101. district of Maryland" etc, that need to be merged into bigger employments. I like it by state like this. Another option is redirecting all Representatives to a common employment "Member of the United States House of Representatives".

The same goes for especially British parliamentarians, where we have "Member of Parliament for Islington North" etc. I suggest merging all to "Member of Parliament (United Kingdom)", as doing employment by electoral district mostly isn't that interesting + electoral borders change all the time. Terje (talk) 22:26, 22 June 2021 (UTC)---

As a lot of MPs throughout the world won't ever be of importance of this site (may god bless their uncorrupted souls), I have resorted to just formatting MPs with "country/function" (eg. US/President), reasoning being it centralises more lists with SWMdocs, like the Bilderberg list I've just added as an example to https://wikispooks.com/wiki/President_of_the_United_States_of_America. If by chance some do become popular visited pages here, we can always include that in the lede. Helps to unstub them. So, your suggesting sounds fine, however, may I add a slight request? It would be better to format to country/function (eg: UK/Prime Minister & US/President, and not like recently slapped Mr. Macron has "President of France in his Hcard which needs a redirect to the actual page France/President). I suggest "country/function" as if i recall right, is better for the site readability, reduced the growth of the site-backup file and the server costs. --Jun (talk) 01:56, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

There are 50 US states, each of which already has a page. There are hundreds of UK constituencies, very few, if any, of which have pages. So I suggest we ignore the UK for now. As for how to structure the US, the choices are Texas/Senator or Senator/Texas. How about the former, with |constitutes=US/Senator , so that all senator jobs will be listed at US/Senator? -- Robin (talk) 18:08, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Also fine with me. I thought let's set a general rule for all countries, as many states and departments don't have a page (yet), but this suggestion also sounds good for the US specifically. US Senator needs a re-direct then btw, as it currently lands at the US Senate itself. State/Function it is then. Terje? --Jun (talk) 21:45, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Agreed on "Texas/Senator" which "|constitutes=US/Senator". The US and UK are special cases as they are the main focus of this site. I will start redirecting other countries' employments to a joint listing - Senator/Istanbul redirected to Turkey/Senator.

Jun, in my opinion the employments sound better and more natural when using the full title, especially for the major ones. "President of the United States" in stead of "US/President" etc., and to use "Netherlands/Undersecretary of Mountain Affairs" for the smaller jobs. Terje (talk) 01:03, 24 June 2021 (UTC)---

For now, please go ahead, I do request a verifying standpoint from Robin on this (with this in mind https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikispooks:Standardisation#Page_Names) on what is the standard moving forward for then, as I've seen Robin correcting pages to Country/function, Country/President or nameofinfluencalgroup/Director before (see https://wikispooks.com/w/index.php?title=George_H._W._Bush&type=revision&diff=163296&oldid=163023. --Jun (talk) 07:44, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

There are lots of inter-related concerns here. I agree with Jun that "President of the United States" does sound more natural than "US/President". It might also score more highly in terms of SEO, although Google is heavily downranking this site anyway (yesterday's referrals: Google 365, DuckDuckGo 321). "US/President" is shorter and easier to type and remember, which is helpful when linking in from other pages, or with other templates such as template:SMWQ or template:Document. The use of '/' to mean "subpage" embeds some meaning into the name, so it would be easier to analyse with SMW, e.g. to compare metadata of pages of the form CountryName/President. That is a future possibility which may never happen; in the short run, the only SMW benefit of using "/" is that US/President appears as a subpage of US. The well documented countries, e.g. UK, have a huge number of subpages listed in the infobox on the right, making it unwieldy. I am planning to rename "X/Minister of Y" as "X/Minister/Y", which will alleviate this somewhat. Similarly for other pages, when there are enough to justify it, e.g. "Netherlands/Undersecretary/Mountain Affairs" if we get lots of Dutch Undersecretaries, since they will appear in the infobox of Netherlands/Undersecretary. The redirect system allows us to present this as, for example,

Dutch Undersecretary of Mountain Affairs

Dates unknown

which is a little more human readable, and doesn't upset the SMW if that page is a redirect to "Netherlands/Undersecretary/Mountain Affairs". Have the pagename with "/" sign is a bit unusual, and does potentially put new people off. However, for old timers, it's pretty clear, and this site has a tradition of prioritising low maintenance designs (e.g. issue-specific templates deprecated, tendency to work wihtin the existing framework) which are amenable to automation. What do you think? -- Robin (talk) 16:46, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. If (mobile) and SWMQ readability isn't hampered in ways hindering circular traffic or SEO, this plan sounds satisfying. If I read this correctly, one question remains then; what defines the smaller roles that get the X/minister/Y formatting, and what defines bigger roles? Assuming we're only conversing about the titles of individuals on their hcards. The bigger roles are CEO's, presidents, directors, founders, chairmen, "executive leaders", etc. Is this correctly defined then Robin? So that we can define it in the style guide. --Jun (talk) 05:32, 26 June 2021 (UTC)