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)