Talk:Results of the 2005 United Kingdom general election

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Elections and Referendums, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to elections, electoral reform and other aspects of democratic decision-making. For more information, visit our project page.Elections and ReferendumsWikipedia:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsTemplate:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsElections and Referendums articles

Politics of the United Kingdom

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Politics of the United Kingdom 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.Politics of the United KingdomWikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomTemplate:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomPolitics of the United Kingdom articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Untitled

I know we should try to use the correct colours, but black text on a strong blue background isn't the prettiest arrangement. I suggest we wait for the results to be completed and then rearrange the table layouts to have the colour in a separate column. violet/riga (t) 17:41, 6 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Are the people working on this page aware of the almost identical in purpose wikinews page? wikinews:Results of 2005 United Kingdom General Election

The wikinews page has a better layout, and is more complete in most areas, but lacks the +- percentage information in many places. The use of foreground colours solves the problem violet/riga mentions above.

A merge seems sensible. WikianJim 18:37, 6 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely merge if this can be done.

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 14:34, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

How about putting the results tables as a template in commons, so that both could include it? Is this possible? WikianJim 18:58, 8 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, any objections to me setting foreground colours like on the wikinews page, and giving table columns widths by percentage? This is easy to do with search/replace, see here WikianJim 12:59, 7 May 2005 (UTC)#[reply]

Not here, but wouldn't it be better to merge?

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib

I've just updated the layout, since this page's results have overtaken the wikinews one. Merge is still best. WikianJim 18:58, 8 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

While I think the new colours are better I still think that it needs to be changed so that we don't have writing over the party colours. We now how red and blue links on blue backgrounds. violet/riga (t) 19:46, 8 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Simple - we just delete articles about Conservatives, turning their links red on blue, and make sure there are plenty for the Labour MPs, so their links show blue on red :) WikianJim 10:39, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Size

As this page is edging on 100kb - 3 times the 'preferable' value, surely we are going to have to split it up in the end - anyone agree?

A.K.A.47 21:58, 6 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In principle, I agree, but is there a logical way to split it 3 ways which will produce about equal bits (i.e.: not by nation) and that people will know where to look. Maybe it should stay as is, as it is one table, and people expect it to be a long list by its nature.

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 14:34, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

List articles are allowed to be long. john k 19:14, 8 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Needs actual names

We don't vote for parties in the UK, we vote for individuals. There's a lot of names to be added, but fortunately with a wiki system we can spread the load. Who's up for it? -- Bonalaw 12:16, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've done 10.2 West England. --Bonalaw 12:49, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Should the candidate names be wikilinked? WikianJim 12:59, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also, if we can find a detailed list of the election results as XML, text etc I could auto-generate the whole thing pretty quickly with a quick Perl script. Half-hour, tops - anyone know where I can get such a thing?

I suggest we keep the party background in the cells, and put the candidate name over it, but as the majority of people do actually vote for the party not the person and thus the majority of MPs remain anonymous, I would suggest that we split the page first.

A.K.A.47 13:11, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, ignore that comment - i can't even work out what I meant to say. So, yes, lets continue to get the MP names in with their party colour, and i also suggest we link these. This will be a problem for Tories (so we'll need to change their font colour) or Labour MPs without pages (red on red). In addition, should the data on swings per party per constituency be listed as (+7.9) or (+7.9%)?

A.K.A.47 13:56, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IMO % is clearer (esp. if the swing will not have its own column, and esp. as the table is so long so that field names are not usually visible).

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 15:05, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

With swings it needs always to be clear who the giver and receiver are (see Template talk: Election_box#Swing), but I don't think that is too much of a problem here as I assume swing figures will be from the 2nd place to 1st place (both of which are listed). We can just, therefore, put "swing from 2nd-place party to winning party" as the title of the relevant field of the table.

I assume that the figures already on the table (after party names in cells) are the change in proportion of vote from last time (see Template talk: Election_box#Change in Proportion of Vote for comment on that) as opposed to swings.

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 14:34, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

I'm all for using candidate (not party) names for the reason above—maybe with appropriate background colour and followed by, e.g., (Con), (Lab); but MPs elected in the UK general election, 2005 already does it by candidate name (admitedly, in alphabetical as opposed to geographical constituency order, and, unfortunately, without party colours), so we really need to make sure that, if we have an article for parties and one specifically for MPs, they don't become dupes of each other.

Automagic/Database:

I actually think that, we should have a better system in place for dealing with elections generally. At least, we need to have a template for this article's tables.

Ideally, as suggested by WikianJim's (I think) nephew comment on XML and my comment on automagic stat calculation(Template talk: Election_box#Majority and Turnout Calculation), we need to have some kind of central WP database (e.g.: XML) that WPans (preferably who were at or heard the actual result, or have an on-line or dead-tree decleration) can add actual number-of-vote figures to.

The WP server-side (free) software should then deal with the calculation of percentages, turnout, swing, &c and the creation of (differently ordered, detailed and localised) tables for different articles on WP and WN; not only to reduce the otherwise massive duplication of effort (by WP and others), but, as I point out in [[Template talk: Election_box, to ensure the figures are:

accurate (as well as—and due to being—small in number—human-side—and easily verifiable)
not subject to human calculation error
most importantly, calculated using exactly the same method

assuming both the software, data and content are free (this is WP), independently verifiable and based on an independently verifiable calculation algorithm

Think of the reduction in effort long term,

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 15:05, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

In the UK, maybe we could work with these guys, although they are more about producing data (using free software) on voting by (not for) MPs. Anyway, if we have election data, we might want to share it with them and they might want to share their MPs' votes' data with us, or sthg...random thought...

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 15:22, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

Finding full results isn't difficult - the BBC Election 2005 website lists numbers of votes for every candidate, and several newspapers published complete lists today. I have The Independent's pull-out results supplement here; I know The Guardian published one as well. --Bonalaw 17:31, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I never said it was difficult (the results are plastered absolutely everywhere), although I suspect it probably would be to get them in the form I was talking about above (i.e.: machine readable) without us typing them in ourselves (but that isn't much work with lots of WPers on it--esp. as we all do exactly the same work many times over ATM--and it should help others projects). Also, as I said, it is preferable getting the official results, as the media can make mistakes.

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 17:58, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

I've been comparing the various media sources and, where there are differences in the number of votes, going to the official pages to resolve the differences. I've not been looking at differences in names or party labels though there certainly are some. I'll put the data on a new page shortly Results of the United Kingdom general election, 2005 (detail). There are still a couple where I've not found official numbers. I'll put those and links to the official pages I have used on the Talk: for the new page. --Cavrdg 16:06, 10 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

North & North East LIncolnshire

Yorkshire and Humberside includes a section North Yorkshire and East Riding, but this doesn't quite work as Scunthorpe, Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes were in Lincolnshire before the 1974 reorganisation. Brigg and Goole spans both pre-1974 Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Any ideas?

Send hate mail to the Boundary Commision? You could argue that as the Goole side of the seat has come out on top in the past three elections, it's sorta Yorkshire-ish or something. Damn county redoodling.

Al

Wikisource

I will say I understand little about all this data. There is a suggestion to move the data here to Wikisource. s:2005 UK general election already exits but it looks different from the data on this page to a layman. Could someone check it out and compare the two before moving information wholesale to Wiisource?--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 20:48, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New/ex-electors

Is there any source for the number of new people to the electoral roll, and the number of people who fall off it? Preferably for the individual constituencies?

I don't mean simply the net change of people on the roll, but the raw numbers of how many new electors? Or how many left the electoral roll? It would also be useful to find the number of people voting who didn't last time.

I think this would be very useful in analysing changing vote patterns: for example it would shed light on whether Labour voters are switching to Liberal or whether the Liberal voters are primarily new voters and the Labour voters are staying at home. BillMasen 18:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Motherwell and Wishaw

is missing.--Definitiv (talk) 10:51, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Results of the United Kingdom general election, 2015 by parliamentary constituency which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 09:47, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]