U.S. Congress Template‑class

This template is within the scope of WikiProject U.S. Congress, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the United States Congress on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.U.S. CongressWikipedia:WikiProject U.S. CongressTemplate:WikiProject U.S. CongressU.S. Congress Template This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. This template is about one (or many) person(s).

Moved from User Talk:Markles

• I noticed your edits to Template:USRepSuccessionBox, and I think the concept was a good idea. However, I think the text in the succession box is a bit bulky. I tried to adjust it but the template is quite complicated, so I just thought I would suggest it to you instead and perhaps you could implement it. For example, instead of Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland's 8th congressional district, I was thinking of something that is more concise and flows better: Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Maryland. Thoughts? Thanks. --tomf688 (talk - email) 18:31, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• You're right: it is clunky. I don't know if there's a better title, though. It's a compromise between accurate and concise as well as I could imagine at the time I created the template. I suppose Representative of Maryland's 8th congressional district would work, but I'm not thrilled about it. There's been a bit of discussion already about calling someone a "Representative" or a "Member of the house of reps…" How about you move this discussion (and copy our bits too) to Template_talk:USRepSuccessionBox, and see if anyone else has any thoughts? After all, it's not up to me: Wikipedia is a consensus-run vehicle.—Markles 19:13, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New Jersey was constituted as a single at-large district for periods of time in the early to mid 1800s. What is the best way to use this template to show that multiple members preceded, succeeded and served alongside a particular member. See Charles C. Stratton for my attempts to address this. Stratton also has another twist, in that after his final term in the House, New Jersey switched over to separate districts. How would his successors be shown? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Alansohn 16:39, 6 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Agreed. Many states have adopted a "General Ticket" at different times; these are not true "At-Large" districts, as those are typically one Rep. from one state districts, not multiple Reps from one state. It would be helpful to have the option of at least noting someone as from a GT district instead of AL, as that can be confusing. --Mrfeek (talk) 07:05, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• • But in a sense, those ARE "At-large" districts. There's no reason that AL means single member. Some local governments use at-large elections of multiple people. The way Charles C. Stratton is formatted still shows a good way to do it.—Markles 14:06, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The present design of USRepSuccessionBox is unnecessarily wide, and contains many more words than are needed. The notes above call it "bulky" and "clunky," so let's fix it. It seems to me the box is really unnecessary, but if there must be one please consider having it simplified, perhaps more like what's below. stilltim 01:41, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's much better to have United States in the title than U.S. It makes it look more official. I personally like it. American Patriot 1776 14:01, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

• It's only as wide as {{start}} and its corresponding templates require.
• To make it less wide, you could remove unnecessary middle initials.
• A "U.S. Representative" is not the same as "Member of the U.S. House of Representatives." John Bolton is a U.S. Representative, Tom Carper is not.
• Adding "Political Offices" makes it more bulky/clunky.
• —Markles 16:22, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Someone just took this box off Sue Kelly [1] to make it look cleaner. I think it looks better, but the links are less than ideal. The current layout, with single words hanging on their own line, is not good either. Anyone have ideas for improvement? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 01:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't know what you meant about "single words hanging on their own line." I guess that it was how your browser presented the text. —Markles 20:54, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the US, I'm pretty sure we call them simply Representatives, and not Members of the House of Representatives, so it would make sense to shorten it up that way. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 01:29, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Sometimes we call them that, it's true. However, that's not actually what they are. They are not U.S. Representatives, they are members of the US House of Reps. Sadly, that means Wiki articles get a bit wordier, but accuracy is more important than brevity.—Markles 02:15, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Communicating accurately depends on understanding, and understanding sometimes prefers brevity. News organizations, members of the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives itself, refer to its members, simply as "Representatives." Perhaps they believe, as I do, that while the longer description is technically correct, it is so long as to distract, if not confuse, while the abbreviated one is more than sufficient for clear understanding. I believe it is WP policy to follow the common practice of the subject in its naming conventions, as documented in their publications, and certainly, in this case, that is to describe these people as "Representatives," nothing more. Just visit the House website. Please give these points serious consideration. stilltim 04:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't agree entirely, Stilltim, but I think I've been outvoted here. So I've changed "Member of the U.S. House of Representatives" to "U.S. Representative."—Markles 20:54, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We don't need to include "district_ord" as a parameter. I had used it in early versions of this template, but I have since constructed this template such that it is now superfluous. It's not harmful, but you don't need to include it any more.—Markles 11:34, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

After User:Markles reverted my change to which articles the Template links to, I thought I should look at all of the states (where previously I had concentrated on my own). As the chart above shows, in all but two cases (MA & DE), the much more robust and complete article is the "Delegations" article. In many cases, the "List" article has only the current delegation, a very small number of historical representatives, or virtually no additional information about the people. In EVERY case, the "Delegations" articles are complete and up-to-date. They link to the reps' individual articles, denote party, list ordinal congress', list years of service, list district, and show graphically who they served along-side. They also show the con-current Senate delegations. I propose that the Template:USRepSuccessionBox link to the "Delegations" articles until such time as the "List" articles compete with respect to standardization, completeness, and substantial unique information. --Appraiser 15:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Excellent work on presenting the case and doing the analysis. In my opinion, this is the level of analysis that is required for making major changes to these articles and templates. With that said, I am reminded of the saying "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." The List articles are mostly not much better than stub quality. HOWEVER, if you go back not even a year ago, the Delegation articles as a whole were barely a little better than stub quality. In one year Delegation articles were populated, and by your observation, substantially completed. Now, Project Congress has quite a few more active members, and certainly the recent election sparked greater interest in the topic. So, if bringing the List articles to substantial completeness was made a project wide priority, how long do you think it will take to bring the List articles to substantial completion? 9 months? 6 months? Given my optimism for the abilties of the project members to make relentless progress on project goals, I see no reason to think that it's worth the trouble to go through these temporary redirections. If you want to talk about the utility of having all three articles for each state, Delegation, Rep List, Senator List then we should have a full blown discussion on the WikiList Workgroup Talk Page.--G1076 16:31, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. I see your point, Appraiser. But linking to an incomplete (or even a redlinked) article is not necessarily a bad thing. Just because there's an article with complete information, it isn't necessarily the right article.—Markles 16:52, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I was asked to comment here, so I won't weigh in with a !vote. My opinion is that as long as we have complete lists in article space the incomplete "List of" articles belong in project or userspace. Eventually the current versions should be replaced by sortable wikitables, and the formatting of the "List of" articles is much more amenable to accomplish this. There are currently two problems with sortable tables, and I'm not sure if anyone is working on resolving them: 1. Currently a name has to be encoded as [[Firstname Lastname|Lastname, Firstname]] to get the name sorting right, and 2. users need to set their date preferences to ISO format: 1999-12-31, to get the date sorting right (also, start and end dates should be split into separate columns). Also, I'm not sure if hand coding is the proper way to do this. A lot of the information is available as machine readable data from ICSPR or voteview.com, so importing them into Excel and converting them into wikicode seems to be a faster way to create complete tables. ~ trialsanderrors 19:28, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I reviewed the comments here, which seem sensible, and most of the pages linked in the above box. I thought carefully about what the best long-term approach might be. The delegations article are well formatted, and include the senate and house information. If at some point the "Lists" articles are better written, and sufficiently informative, they will still only contain the representatives, and will not be comprehensive. So, in my opinion, transitioning to using the "Delegates", and redirecting the lists. Regardless of how much work it might be, the best long-term solution is to use the comprehensive approach used in "delegates". The sortable tables issue, although important, is related to the chosen format, and not the comprehensive versus limited coverage issue. I think it is a non-issue in this case. As G1076 points out, indeed, as we are working on a long-term approach, rather than a patch, discussion on the we Project Talk Page makes sense. In the mean time, redirecting on a case by case basis to the delegate article makes sense to me. Atom 20:14, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • This discussion workgroup has been set up here:Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Congress/WikiList Workgroup--G1076 16:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Weighing in a little late... The Delegation articles are much more informative and up-to-date. The List articles definitely need improvement. That said, I think it makes more sense for the template to link to List articles. It seems likely they will be improved in the future and I think it's more logical in terms of usability. However, I would very much like to see a 'See also' link to the corresponding Delegation article on the List page. I checked Arkansas and it didn't have one. I think this would be valuable information to anyone hunting down information on a state's congressional delegation. -- Meersan 16:41, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Support It seems to me that this is something of a moot point; the articles for current U.S. Representatives already link to the articles for the other current representatives from their state due to their being listed in a separate navigation box. Articles for historical representatives, however, bear very little relation to the current delegation, either in terms of specific members or in terms of which district they represent. I don't think there's any purpose in having an article for a congressman from the 1830s link to a list of the state's current representatives. MisfitToys 21:01, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Support STILL - Someone has recently changed the link to the "List" articles again. I still maintain that the "Delegations" articles are much more complete (as stated in my original note above). All of the Delegations articles also link to the "daughter articles" (List of Senators and List of Representatives), so I see no reason to change this template to link to a set of articles which is still very incomplete.--Appraiser 21:18, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• OK. I've reverted my edit. It's just a matter of time, though.—Markles 12:55, 24 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• new: This was added to be a variant of before so that the "Preceded by" message in the s-bef box is not shown--i.e. for someone like James Madison. To use the feature, do not include the before parameter. Simply type new= and enter one of the parameters from Template:S-new.
• startrows: A good example of this would again be James Madison. Including the startrows parameter will change the heighth of ONLY the "Preceeded by" cell. The title and "After" cells will not be changed.
• reason: This was added to be a variant of the after parameter and will use an s-non code instead of an s-aft code--i.e. using it will remove the "Succeeded by" message. See Bob Dole's first congressional seat to see how I used it. Simply type reason= and enter the reason.
• endrows: This is just like startrows above. Including this will only change the heighth of the "Succeeded by" cell, so use it wisely.

The biggest change about this, however, is that omitting all of the above features, and the before and after parameters will isolate the title box; or, including only the "before-box" will omit the end box, and vice versa. See James Madison, again! :p Another use of this is if you have a before and after box that are each two rows and need to squeeze one box inbetween. Cheers!! Foofighter20x (talk) 23:01, 18 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In a speedy delete request for a template that redirected here ({{USRep succession box}}, the author of the request stated, "All uses of this redirection have been migrated to target Template:USRepSuccessionBox in preparation for conversion to s-bef/s-ttl/s-aft style." What conversion is planned?—Markles 22:31, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As you know (going by the edit history) this template is based on the s-bef/s-ttl/s-aft templates. The WP:SBS project has been working toward a standardised, flexibile, and easy to use set of succession box templates. Most of the non-standard ones have been replaced over the last three years. The 15 which remain are s-bef/s-ttl/s-aft under-the-skin. Four of them are redirects to this template. (They're listed at WP:SBS/T)

As a step toward an eventual standardisation I've replaced all the calls to the redirect at {{USRep succession box}} with direct calls to {{USRepSuccessionBox}}. This should make things easier for a bot to handle when a way of bringing this template to the standard is agreed. This tidy-up has already been done in the past with Template:USRepSuccessionbox, Template:USRepsuccessionbox and Template:USrepsuccessionbox.

{{USRepSuccessionBox}}, {{U.S. Senator box}}, {{TXHouseSuccession box}}, {{TXSenateSuccession box}} are all doing pretty similar things with {{s-ttl}} and parameters such as district, state, and class. Adding a legislature parameter would allow all 4 to be merged into an enhanced s-ttl. That would be one way forward.

Anyway, nothing's going to happen to this template without discussion (pretty obviously, since it's editprotected). But there's no reason to protect all the "spelling variations".

Hope you feel a bit happier with my actions. Bazj (talk) 23:25, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Could somebody fix this template such that the date range is not spaced? According to the WP:MOS, this isn't necessary when the end date is "present", such as at Paul Ryan#External links. Thanks. –CWenger (talk) 01:46, 12 April 2011 (UTC) CWenger (talk) 01:46, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm happy to make the change. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Where is it in the MOS, so I can familiarize myself with it (as I edit other templates, too)?—Markles 01:51, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. It is mentioned in the spacing subsection of MOS:ENDASH. It is not explicitly stated but I would assume that since "present" is a single word the en dash should not be spaced on its account. –CWenger (talk) 03:03, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That seems inconsistent to use spaces when it's "1999-2005" but no spaces for "1999–Present." Do I misunderstand this?—Markles 11:06, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The en dash should only be spaced when one of the elements it is connecting has a space. So neither of your examples above should be spaced. In the template documentation, the only example that is incorrect is Mike Castle ("1993 – present"). –CWenger (talk) 21:31, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So, what you're saying is: Correct: January 3, 1999–present and January 3, 2003–January 3, 2007; Incorrect: January 3, 1999 – present and January 3, 2003 – January 3, 2007?—Markles 22:42, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly the opposite:

Correct

• 2003–2007
• 2003–present
• January 3, 2003 – January 3, 2007
• January 3, 1999 – present

Incorrect

• 2003 – 2007
• 2003 – present
• January 3, 2003–January 3, 2007
• January 3, 1999–present

Hopefully that clarifies it. –CWenger (talk) 23:06, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That does clarify it. But I don't know how to edit the template to use spaces sometimes and not other times.—Markles 15:13, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, yeah, it looks like Wikipedia lacks a string search or even string length function that could help us here. I guess we are out of luck until Wikipedia adds support for the StringFunctions extension. Thanks for looking at it though. –CWenger (talk) 16:21, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. Keep track of that extension… if it's added at some point in the future, I'd love to hear about it.
(Request answered and denied as not technically possible) —Markles 17:20, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again. I stumbled upon Template:Str find, which I think that would make this request possible. Do you know how to do this? Unfortunately since the page is under full protection I can't test any solutions...it's too bad you aren't allowed to preview changes without saving them on protected pages. I also tried copying the content to my user subpages to mess with at User:CWenger/USRepSuccessionBox, but I can't figure out how to get the examples to use that instead of the main Template page. –CWenger (^ • @) 19:35, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Interesting. I'll try to look at it soon, but I'm in the middle of a different project right now. Give me some time to look it over.—Markles 20:58, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]