Talk:2018 Vancouver municipal election

Random order of ballot

"For the first time, candidates will be listed in random order instead of alphabetical order" - believe this should be "for the first time in twenty-five years"; believe the City Charter allows for ballot order to be either alpha or random (<ref>http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/vanch_02#section79.</ref). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:569:780C:6800:FC94:9A4:2E64:6D8C (talk) 17:26, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Just because the charter allows it doesn't mean it was done. Do you have a citation indicating that 25 years ago, the ballot order was randomized? —Joeyconnick (talk) 20:26, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

format of results tables

Earl Andrew argues here and here that there is some kind of standardized format for municipal election results tables in Canada, but provides no indication of where this guideline/standard can be found. He also argues WP:STATUSQUO that this is the way this article was set up "originally".

As we know, STATUSQUO is not licence to freeze a page in time or to preserve an existing format simply because it was first or preceded a subsequent format. Meanwhile, Vancouver municipal election results going back at least as far as Vancouver municipal election, 2002 (and also in 2008, 2011, and in the most recent full election, in 2014) use the following format, which is superior because it is sortable (especially important for this latest election given the huge number of candidates who were in play) and does not rely solely on formatting to indicate that a candidate has been elected, which means this format better conforms to the project's WP:ACCESS policy:

Candidate Name		Party affiliation	Votes	% of votes	Elected
(I) Gregor Robertson		Vision Vancouver	83,529	45.97%	X
Kirk LaPointe		Non-Partisan Association	73,443	40.42%
Meena Wong		Coalition of Progressive Electors	16,791	9.24%
Bob Kasting		Independent	1,682	0.93%
Mike Hansen		Independent	714	0.39%
Jeff Hill		Independent	611	0.34%
Tim Ly		Independent	556	0.31%
Meynard Aubichon		Stop Party	508	0.28%
Cherryse Kaur Kaiser		Independent	492	0.27%
Colin Shandler		Independent	459	0.25%

For the sake of consistency with all recent Vancouver election pages but more importantly because the table format above is superior to the one currently in use for the 2018 results, I believe we should switch the results table in Vancouver municipal election, 2018 to the format above. I would like to hear from other editors if they feel this would be a useful change. —Joeyconnick (talk) 18:02, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

There is no policy set in stone, so it would be good to get one out of this discussion. The vast majority of municipal election articles in Canada are set up with similar formatting. Vancouver is different, for some reason. Why is Vancouver special enough to warrant using "(I)" to mark incumbents? Everywhere else we've been using "(X)". Now, if we decide as a community that (I) is better, that's fine, but for some reason you seem to only be concerned about this one article. You don't own the Vancouver articles, they should be consistent with the rest of the municipal election articles. As for the templates, we have standardized election templates, so we should use them. Having the candidate name on the left like you want goes against every single election template on Wikipedia, except for again, Vancouver. I understand Vancouver has a bizarre archaic voting system, but I don't think that alone is a reason to go against convention. -- Earl Andrew - talk 18:26, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Actually, attempting consistency across an entire country's worth of municipal elections is folly and there's certainly nothing in policy that requires this. I'm "only concerned" with the Vancouver-related articles because I generally only know about Vancouver municipal politics and their results. This isn't about Vancouver being "special"... it's actually tangentially related to your STATUSQUO argument above, in that the status quo of the Vancouver municipal elections is the table format I listed. As for accusations of ownership, well... that cuts both ways. You state Everywhere else we've been using "(X)"—an argument could be made you feel ownership for Canadian municipal (election) articles in general.

That being said, I don't care if the party column comes before the candidate name (and never said that I did, so yay for compromise). My concerns as stated are: sortability, not using "X" to mark incumbency (because "X" is often used to denote selection, especially in voting), and having a non-style way of showing a candidate was elected. That last point apparently can be addressed by the existing template, apparently, so that's great, although we would need to fill in |elected=no for all the people who weren't elected.

I am not married to "(I)" to mark incumbency but I am married to not using X. How about "*"? Hmmn... not as visible as I would like. Well, something other than "X" would still be an improvement.

I'm also not a fan of listing party "colours" for municipal elections especially. In Vancouver, we had a lot of new parties (e.g. Yes Vancouver) and parties with new colours (e.g. COPE). There's no sourcing for what the "official" party colour is (pretty sure it's all OR based on the parties' signs and websites) and even if there were, we would need to account for party colour changes over time, something that is probably much less likely to happen at the provincial and certainly the federal level, which it is clear is what the {{Canadian election result}} template was designed to handle. So we shouldn't be doing municipal party colours with templates but probably with explicit calls to colours that won't change when templates are updated (if colours are even required), unless we update the templates to account for colours based on years/time periods (i.e. COPE1968, COPE2018, etc.). My understanding is that many Canadian municipalities don't have parties for municipal elections per se, so getting rid of party colours at the municipal level seems like an easy and sensible decision.

But again... these tables need to be sortable. Using |data-sort-value= and not the deprecated {{sortname}}. This would mean the {{CANelec}} template would need to allow for defining candidates' last and first names separately, and include something like a |candidate-link= parameter so candidates' names can be wikilinked. And if there's no will or ability to change the {{Canadian election result}} template you prefer be used, then that template doesn't seem like it's suitable to be used here (or at the various other Vancouver municipal election result pages) nor, I would argue, at other municipal election pages in general. —Joeyconnick (talk) 19:28, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

If we decided as a community to move away from "(X)", then I can go along with it. I agree there has been some confusion as some people think it means elected. I'm not sure what the best symbol would be, though. But, many newspapers use some derivation of it. Anyway, it hasn't just been me using it for incumbents. At the Toronto municipal election, 2018 page, they're using it in front of the candidate, and I've seen it in other articles too. My big issue with changing the standard is the vast amount of articles that would have to be changed, though I suppose we could get a bot to handle that. As for colours, their frequent changing is a concern, but colours can change on the provincial and federal level as well. The Libertarians just changed their colour to yellow, while the NDP has been purple and green on the provincial level in other provinces in the past. However, it would be confusing to use those colours for past election articles. Anyway, I think having colours on election result tables is visually appealing, and oppose their removal. It is usually quite obvious what colours to use for parties, but when there is controvery, we usually have a discussion over it. Template talk:Canadian party colour is a good place to start for that. -- Earl Andrew - talk 19:59, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Gregor Robertson Pic?

Should we really have a picture of Gregor Robertson as the standard bearer for Vision Vancouver? I am not sure that is needed in the info box. He of course was not running for any office this time around. I know the graphic notes this, but it still seems odd. I am not sure he even really campaigned for his party. Should he be featured so prominently?--Darryl Kerrigan (talk) 19:59, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Well, I guess that depends on whether or not he is the party's leader.-- Earl Andrew - talk 20:03, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

I was going to say it's okay to leave but I realized this was the election page, not the Vision page. He's certainly the face of Vision and that will likely remain so for the foreseeable future but in terms of this election, yes, the photo and all reference to him as associated with the party in terms of contending this election should go as he did not run and did not serve as any kind of "leader". —Joeyconnick (talk) 20:04, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it is an odd case because Ian Campbell was supposed to lead the ticket as the mayoral candidate, but dropped out at the last moment. As such, there was no obvious Vision leader going into the election.--Darryl Kerrigan (talk) 00:39, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

The infobox is a mess

What are we trying to communicate with the infobox? Whatever it is we are not doing it. Infoboxes are usually used to display the result of one election. Here we seem to be trying to combine information about multiple different elections: mayoral, council, and we could just as easily add information about parks board. Perhaps to simplify we could have one listing the main mayoral candidates that received over 5% of the vote and a separate one for the slates for council. Am I the only one that thinks this is extremely confusing?--Darryl Kerrigan (talk) 23:37, 22 March 2020 (UTC)