Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom/Constituencies

This page is a guideline of how the Politics of the United Kingdom WikiProject should handle articles related to constituencies or electoral wards within the United Kingdom.

Assessment

All constituency articles should be tagged with the {{WP UK Politics}} banner and assessed on their quality and importance to the project.

Quality

Articles should be judged on the standard quality scale set out by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is replicated on this project's Assessment page.

Importance

The importance assessment is a judgement by each individual WikiProject on what they consider to be their priority articles. In theory the Top importance articles should be the first to reach a level of quality sufficient to be included in Version 1.0 (or a subsequent version) while Low importance articles will usually reach the same level of quality at a later stage.

While the work of maintaining constituency articles is very important to the WikiProject, the relative importance of a single constituency article is low. For example, as there are 650 UK Parliamentary constituencies the importance of just 1 of those constituencies is fairly minor.

Label	Criteria
Low	All constituencies and wards

Exceptions

There are to be no exceptions to the importance criteria. Possible arguments for higher importance are that the constituency was represented by an important individual (perhaps a Prime Minister) or that an important by-election was held there. However, it is the articles for the important individual and the important by-election that should be given higher importance, not the constituency.

Categories & Lists

• Category:United Kingdom Parliamentary constituencies
  • Category:Parliamentary constituencies in England
  • Category:Westminster Parliamentary constituencies in Northern Ireland
  • Category:Westminster Parliamentary constituencies in Scotland
  • Category:Westminster Parliamentary constituencies in Wales
• Category:Wards of the United Kingdom

• Category:Constituencies of the Northern Ireland Assembly
• Category:Senedd Cymru – Welsh Parliament constituencies
• Category:Constituencies of the Scottish Parliament
• Category:Scottish Parliamentary regions

Article guidelines

• UK Parliament constituency articles should follow the style guidelines produced by WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies.
• Other constituencies in the United Kingdom (such as Scottish Parliament constituencies) should follow the style guidelines set out above though some adaptation may be necessary to compensate for discrepancies in the electoral systems (such as alternative templates or categories). - Note: it may be useful to develop guidelines for the devolved legislatures based on the original guidelines.

Notability

• All constituency articles are currently considered notable
• The notability of electoral wards needs to be clarified by the WikiProject

Sourcing

Some useful sources for constituency articles are:

• BBC News election results - comprehensive data on recent elections, but lacks historic information from before 1997
• Ask Aristotle - Political resource from The Guardian. Contains MP and constituency data.
• Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources - claims to have complete election results for UK general elections since 1945 as well as other election results.
• David Boothroyd's United Kingdom Election Results - claims to have complete UK general election results since 1983 as well as other election results.
• Nicholas Whyte's Northern Ireland Elections - claims to have election data back to 1885.
• The Electoral Commission - responsible for constituency boundary changes and keeping other records related to elections.

Do you know any other sources for Political Party articles? If so, please list them here.

Issues

• All Scottish Parliament constituency and electoral region articles have now been assessed as C-class on the quality scale. The articles contain a good balance of information but are severely lacking in references.
• All Welsh Assembly constituency and electoral region articles have now been assessed. While there are some C-class articles, a large proportion are Start-class and a few are barely more than stubs. References are often non-existent and there are large gaps in the election results provided.
• Coverage of electoral wards appears to be patchy. Category:Wards of the United Kingdom contains links to a large number of ward articles, but these are a bare fraction of the total wards in the UK. How the situation is handled in areas not covered by ward articles still needs investigation. Once more detailed view has been established the WikiProject will need to agree a consistent method of handling electoral wards (perhaps with input from other interested projects).

Open Tasks

• Tag constituency articles with the {{WP UK Politics}} banner and assess them based on the above criteria
• Investigate the current status of electoral wards on Wikipedia. Do they have their own articles or are they merged with council articles? (partially answered with the discovery of Category:Wards of the United Kingdom)
• Improve and reference existing articles