Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australian politics

NSW Election Archive

I'm just wondering if anyone knows what happened to the New South Wales Electoral History Archive that had all NSW election results online from 1856-2003? It seems to have been taken down, along with the NSW Electoral Atlas. I'd be very disappointed if it was a deliberate move and not a mistake. Those were vital pieces of Australian electoral history. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 08:09, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Yikes, you're right! Let us be optimistic, however: Antony may have taken the recent website redesign as an opportunity to update the archive to include 2011 and 2015 (it already had 2007). I know there were plans to include the LC some time ago, but who knows about that. It might be worth shooting Antony an email to see what the situation is? Frickeg (talk) 08:14, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Okay, hopefully it's only a temporary thing and not some ridiculous cost-cutting measure or something of the like. Also I seem to be able to access it through the Internet Archive, so that should be able to provide the results for now (I'll move on to NSW results along with Qld and WA just in case). I also have access to Colin Hughes' book on the matter for results back to 1890. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 08:19, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Australian Liberty Alliance

Anyone willing to take a stab at creating a full article for the Australian Liberty Alliance? I was semi-surprised to see that at the moment it's just a redirect to the Q Society of Australia article, which doesn't even mention the party. (I'll probably chip in at some point.) IgnorantArmies (talk) 14:33, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

I did this a few days ago. I was getting into a bit of an edit war with someone who was adding external links to the ALA candidates on the candidate list, but I was reverting them in favour of the wikilink, which I hadn't realised was just a redirect to Q Society. --Canley (talk) 13:48, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Cheers, I'd completely forgotten about this. IgnorantArmies (talk) 15:46, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Nickolas Varvaris being whitewashed, WP:COI, attention appreciated

Please see here for msg I left at Talk:202.14.81.51 (Australian Parliamentary Library). Eyes at Nickolas Varvaris needed. Thanks. Timeshift (talk) 07:40, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Good catch. Added to watchlist. Many contributions by same IP address, including some sparring with Drovers Wife. Is there a pattern in the contributions? --Pete (talk) 07:48, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, it's used to whitewash MP articles! Timeshift (talk) 08:06, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

I've just blocked this account, and I'd suggest that similar issues be reported at WP:AIV, WP:AN3 or an admin who you believe is online for a quick and controversy-minimising response. Nick-D (talk) 08:27, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

202.14.81.51 has been blocked for two weeks. If we're going down the block route already, i'd go the whole way and along with 202.14.81.49 (the other APH IP) block them until July 3... I don't see any reason against such a temporary block apart from it being sorta-kinda-but-not-really preemptive. Timeshift (talk) 08:28, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't see any problematic editing in 202.14.81.49 (talk · contribs)'s recent history, so there are no grounds to block it. Admins are strongly discouraged from making pre-emptive blocks. Nick-D (talk) 08:32, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

202.14.81.49 is edit warring at the Nickolas Varvaris article now. Timeshift (talk) 23:46, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Continued IP attempts to remove content from Nickolas Varvaris are still occurring. Can we get an article semiprot please? Anyone? Timeshift (talk) 12:44, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Salim Mehajer

Can we please have some more eyes on the Selim Mehajer article? There is an anon editor who insists on reverting in obsessive detail about past traffic accidents and every random shell company he's a director of. The Drover's Wife (talk) 08:56, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

I just reverted for an entirely different reason, WP:WEIGHT - the first thing that I noticed was the expansion of this article from 14,987 characters to 34,195 characters on something that doesn't deserve anywhere near over half the total content. Timeshift (talk) 09:03, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Division of Fenner

I see that this the Division of Fraser has been moved to this title. My understanding is that it is generally preferred to have separate articles. In due course a Division of Fraser in Victoria may also need to be created as well.--Grahame (talk) 02:32, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, I have restored the content from Division of Fenner to the redirect at Division of Fraser. --Canley (talk) 02:57, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata

I have been working on Wikidata a lot recently, and while I don't think it's at a point where it can be an election results archive yet, I have been doing what I can to set up as much information and consistency as possible on federal and state electorates, and will move on to putting in MP lists and so on. I am working on cleaning up all Australian locality data as well, with a view to being able to query the suburbs/localities/postcodes in a division, district, or LGA eventually.

I just imported the AEC enrolment figures released yesterday, here is a query which lists all current divisions, their state/territory, and the enrolment as of the close of rolls on 23 May 2016:

• Enrolment figures by division for the 2016 Federal election

Some other queries:

• Current federal electoral divisions named after women
• Current federal electoral divisions named after an Australian Prime Minister

--Canley (talk) 12:58, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Neat! I had been trying to work out what Wikidata is useful for :-) I've also seen discussion somewhere about being able to populate the Wikidata, then have the infobox largely generated from it, but it seemed to only be meaningful for two or three fields, which seemed like more bother than help. Well done. --Scott Davis ^Talk 07:34, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! I haven't yet tackled calling Wikidata items in infoboxes, but will try and work it out soon. I think my main driver behind this initiative is the upcoming 2016 census, and the thought of updating ~8,000 Australian place articles with the population field (and there are still many 2006 census references)—if the inbox can just pull the latest population figure, be it census or estimate, from Wikidata then these wouldn't have to be updated every five years, as long as the dataset is imported when released. Same with electoral redistributions, basic election info, and recent local council mergers in NSW—probably not possible to have a fully automatic system yet, but having the data in a structured format that can be queried to produce worklists and so on should save a lot of time and effort. I have seen a lot of requests around the web and on Wikipedia for electorate/suburb or LGA/postcode lookups, and while querying Wikidata is quite difficult at the moment, templates of this sort of query can be worked out and saved or adapted. You can also work out interesting trivia like youngest Australian Senator, or things named after someone and so on. --Canley (talk) 03:05, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I would be very reluctant to use Wikidata for ABS population data because of the "state suburb" messes. I think the 2016 census would be a great opportunity to go back and do what we should have done back in the day (and which Cowdy001 has been doing fabulous work on in South Australia) and actually footnoting each population figure to explain the difference between the place-the-ABS-is-getting-population-figures-from and the place-that-actually-exists. I know this would be a hideous amount of work but our articles would be enormously more accurate for it. I can see the benefit for things like postcodes and electoral boundaries though, since these are heinous to keep updated and don't need further explanation. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:27, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that "State Suburb" saga did cause me to rethink that aspect of using the ABS data, but I thought what was coming out of that discussion was that the population census data was fine (or close enough given the distribution of people outside the main urban centre)—the issue was the nomenclature of the locality type (as suburb or otherwise) and more importantly the area using the ABS SSC boundaries. I would suggest with Wikidata we could probably use qualifiers to distinguish between bounded locality population/State Suburb (SSC) and the Urban Centre/Locality (UC/L) population for the same location entity, and footnote them accordingly? It's a lot of work one way or another, and the data won't be released for many months yet, so it's a discussion for another time and place. --Canley (talk) 05:49, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

2016 election candidates of questionable notability

Alexandra Kaur Bhathal in Division of Batman has been created... noteable or not? Timeshift (talk) 20:27, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't think so... it's been nominated for deletion. StAnselm (talk) 23:50, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Julian Leeser, Jason Falinski, and particularly Duncan McGauchie for AfD? All recently created with a clear orientation to their election candidacies. Timeshift (talk) 08:25, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Also I just came across Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jason Falinski, and I found the keep result rationale of 'almost certain to be elected, see recent UK examples' rather disturbing and a dangerous new precedent. Anyone up for challenging it? Timeshift (talk) 08:34, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Falinski, in my opinion, probably passes regardless of his candidacy. McGauchie and Leeser almost certainly don't, but I would urge against AfDs at this stage. I have come to the firm view (after many years on the opposite side) that AfDs for shoo-ins are a waste of everyone's time. I would probably still !vote delete on them, and certainly wouldn't encourage the creation of articles on candidates, but I think having big worked-up discussions about these things when the whole thing will be cut-and-dried in less than a month now (very possibly the AfD could run almost that long anyway!) is a less-than-ideal use of our time. Frickeg (talk) 11:29, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

The use of single purpose throw-away accounts to create the similar-looking Leeser, Falinski and McGauchie articles is worrying. The edit pattern of the accounts used to create the Leeser and Falinski articles is basically identical, and I've blocked both accounts in the hope of stopping this by catching a common underlying IP. Nick-D (talk) 11:45, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Falinski was a rare case where he was at least borderline notable in his own right and absolutely certain of election. I wouldn't have created it until afterwards to save the predictable drama, but there was no point deleting it. As Frickeg says, deleting shoo-in candidates is a waste of everybody's time in insisting on having a big fight to delete an article on someone there is absolutely zero doubt you're going to have to undelete in a month. Leeser is a similar case to Falinski - he's been a conservative intellectual in public life forever and is absolutely guaranteed of election. McGauchie, on the other hand, is absolutely not, and should be nominated for deletion like Alex Bhathal was - he's a 50-50 case, and we can undelete if he actually beats Damian Drum.

This said, there has definitely been an upshot in vanity articles this election, especially from (but not limited to) the Greens, and I am all for deleting any and all articles on people that are a) only notable for running for office, and b) are in unwinnable or marginal seats. I've nominated quite a few for deletion myself, and they've all basically been WP:SNOW cases - I think McGauchie would fall into that category as well (although it's starting to cut it a bit fine to bother). The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:51, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Auto-assessment of article classes

Following a recent discussion at WP:VPR, there is consensus for an opt-in bot task that automatically assesses the class of articles based on classes listed for other project templates on the same page. In other words, if WikiProject A has evaluated an article to be C-class and WikiProject B hasn't evaluated the article at all, such a bot task would automatically evaluate the article as C-class for WikiProject B.

If you think auto-assessment might benefit this project, consider discussing it with other members here. For more information or to request an auto-assessment run, please visit User:BU RoBOT/autoassess. This is a one-time message to alert projects with over 1,000 unassessed articles to this possibility. ~ Rob^Talk 22:18, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Electorate maps

I've been thinking for a while now about the locator maps of federal electoral divisions (and state/territory districts). We currently have four generations of maps in the federal division articles:

• Barrylb (talk · contribs) produced maps for every federal division in 2010
• Canley (talk · contribs) (me) produced maps of the redistributions in South Australia and Victoria in 2013
• PhilipTerryGraham (talk · contribs) has just produced maps of the redistribution in New South Wales, and redone Tasmania
• Adam Carr's freely-licenced maps from Psephos are used in some of the summary lists

• 
  Barrylb map of Perth (2010)
• 
  Canley map of Melbourne (2013)
• 
  PhilipTerryGraham map of Bennelong, NSW (2016)
• 
  Adam Carr map of seat outcome in NSW (2013)

Without any prejudice or preference, I'm sure we would all agree it would be ideal if the maps were consistent in terms of style, colours, typography, resolution and image format. All boundary data is now easily available and has an open licence which makes things a lot easier. Philip's maps are quite different in colour scheme to the previous ones, but I quite like it. Note that Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps has a suggested map style template which we should consider for consistency over the whole project.

I know it's a big ask to change the style and reproduce dozens of these maps, so I would be interested to know what GIS software/setup Barry and Philip used for their maps, so that myself and others can reproduce the maps if needed and can share data and style sheets if required. The maps I did were made using Mapbox's TileMill software, in which you could import a Shapefile and use CartoCSS to style the map. Mapbox recently deprecated TileMill, and replaced it with Mapbox Studio, which should be able to do the same thing but I am having some difficulties getting my head around it.

The other matter I was thinking of was the possibility of adding richer detail to the maps using freely-licenced PSMA, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap data—depending on the size/zoom level, these could potentially contain street- or major road-level detail as well as names of towns/suburbs in the electorate.

Anyway, I just wanted to start a discussion and get some consensus on a consistent style and approach so please comment below on what you would like for electorate maps going forward.

--Canley (talk) 04:41, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

You might be incredibly surprised at this, but I literally just used MS paint to create my maps. I took each map of the electoral boundaries from the Australian Electoral Commission website, stitched them together in a single image, and just drew over them. Probably the most inefficient and annoying way to make a map, but hey, i made it work! XD Sorry about the delay on making maps for Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland, though. I promise I'll have them done before the election! I generally oppose the idea of adding detalis such as roads or city names to political maps; if any sensible voter wanted to see the details, they'd go to the AEC website, not Wikipedia. It's important for political maps on Wikipedia to locate the electorate/county/riding/district, but not so important to locate landmarks or details within those political boundaries. My maps were based on the same attitudes and graphical style of political maps of counties and states in the United States - solid colours, with white or transparent backgrounds and lines; the only details are the boundaries themselves. That's my opinion on the core style; other things like what colors we should use is something I'll let you guys discuss. Philip Terry Graham 05:09, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Ha ha, MS Paint, no way! I would never have guessed that! I'm even more impressed! If you need any help I can reproduce the style for other states, let me know if there's some you want me to do. We can redo them later depending on what the consensus is for the style/detail here. --Canley (talk) 05:14, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

I think the first three are all pretty good: Philip's colour scheme is a bit garish but otherwise looks very smart, Canley's is great as well (although the dot on Melbourne at a spot within the electorate is a bit odd?), and I kind of like having the names of the surrounding electorates for context [I would struggle to pick that as a map of Melbourne] but think it looks a little bit ugly as done in the first one. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:59, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

I used some custom PHP scripts (and a Postgres database if I recall correctly) that I wrote to generate the maps somewhat automatically. I didn't produce any more maps after the 2010 because the map data was not available with suitable licenses (due to some quirk they were available in 2010 on data.gov.au with a suitable license) but if I can confirm that licenses are now compatible with Wikipedia I could see if I could dig out my old scripts, and make them publicly available. Barrylb (talk) 04:51, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Cool, that would be great! I have a Postgres/PHP setup as well so I could probably duplicate the set up. The geodata on the AEC site looks to be under a fairly restrictive NC licence, but the PSMA Administrative Boundaries dataset contains all federal and state electoral divisions and is under a CCBY 4.0 licence. --Canley (talk) 06:56, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

I've just about finished regenerating all the federal maps. I am intending to upload all 150 maps shortly. It will take me a few more days to document the process and setup and make everything available. Barrylb (talk) 09:49, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Wow, thank you so much, I see you have started rolling them out. I look forward to seeing your process, but take your time... --Canley (talk) 13:58, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

No worries. You can follow along at https://github.com/barrylb/mapping where I've started with the setup instructions. Barrylb (talk) 02:42, 22 June 2016 (UTC)