Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New Zealand/Election 2008 taskforce

Comment about predicting the future

Sorry to deface this page. I've noticed a lot of edits have been made that suggest that the Key Government is already in place. It isn't. To call him even the Prime Minister-designate may be premature. I doubt he's been officially designated the next Prime Minister and I've certainly not seen any sources that claim he has been.

I applaud the effort to get information up as quickly as possible, but please keep it factual. New Zealand still has a Labour Government, in a caretaker capacity. The Prime Minister is Helen Clark. The Parliamentary results will not be final until 28 November at the earliest. Parliament may not sit (and MPs be sworn in) until as late 8 January 2009. The Governor-General is legally allowed to appoint a Key Government before then and it looks likely that he will, but he hasn't yet.

So let's relax and let reality come to us.

Ben Arnold (talk) 08:54, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Fair point, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with acting as if the stuff we know will happen already has. Perhaps with the PM pages we do need to acknowledge the transitional period but with the others I would prefer prematurely updating the pages to leaving them un-updated for too long. I don't think this is really a big deal either way, as long as we don't get into edit-warring, people don't assume things will happen (a Maori Party coalition deal, for example) that might not, and people who would rather write 'X is caretaker Minister for Y' remember to update the page when a new Minister gets appointed.

On a related note, I've found a lot of pages which say something like 'X is currently the Minister for Y'. Personally I think wording like that is a bad idea even if it's true at the time, since often when a minister loses a portfolio no one gets round to updating their page. It would be better to write 'In 2006, X became Minister of Y', which will always be true. If they're not minister of Y anymore the page is misleading, but at least its not actually wrong, and if someone later adds that they left parliament without updating the rest of the page - and there's been a lot of this - the page doesn't contradict itself. --Helenalex (talk) 00:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)