Talk:List of Canadian electoral districts

Aaaargh. Using emdashes for these names is very nice typographically, but screws up the "keep it simple" principle for Wikipedia page names. Note that these names are most commonly written with standard ASCII "-" on the Web.

Worse than that: — isn't even in ISO 8859-1; it's a Windows-1252 abomination.

Testing: Bad—Windows—hyphen—titled test article

The reason for using the long dash is because this is what Elections Canada uses. It is used to distinguish some Quebec names that use a short dash. Example: Louis-Saint-Laurent uses short dashes, because it is a name. The elongated dash is for joining two names esample Ottawa West--Nepean. I sugges if there is a problem we move them to two dashes instead of one or an elongated one. Good compromise?

Earl Andrew 21:55, 8 May 2004 (UTC) That's a good compromise. -- The Anome 22:37, 8 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

emdashes have a long typographical history. They only went out of fashion when typewriters became common. So it is not correct to call them an Windows-1252 abomination.

In point of fact, it is ISO-8859-1 that is the abomination because it continues the old artificial typewriter exclusion of permissible English language characters.

Now Wikipedia may want to choose to continue that abomination, and that is Wikpedia's choice.

But Wikipedia should be conscious that that it is ISO-8859-1, and it would be Wikipedia, that are deviating from proper English typography. Typewriter English is not proper English.

50.71.210.133 (talk) 09:39, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Copied from User talk:Earl Andrew

Hi Earl! Just one technical point: the names of your Canadian electoral district articles contain the Windows-1252 em-dash character with code hex 97: this is not in the ISO 8859-1 character set that the English Wikipedia currently uses. The result can be random breakage in the Wikipedia software and non-Windows browsers. I've moved some of these articles to titles with normal ASCII "-" in: could you fix the rest, please? -- The Anome 20:47, 8 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

I'm not Earl, but there's a problem with this: the electoral district names contain both hyphens and mdashes, and it's important to preserve the distinction. Hex 97 may not be standard, but it works under both Internet Explorer and Linux Mozilla.

If we go ahead and rename these, the mdashes should be converted to --, not to single hyphen.

-- P.T. Aufrette 18:42, 15 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

The below has been copied from User talk:The Anome

Re: your note on User_talk:Earl_Andrew, it's important to note that Canadian electoral district names contain both hyphens and mdashes, and it's important to maintain a distinction between the two. If the hex 97 in the names has to be converted, it should be changed to "--", not just "-".

You mentioned you had already renamed some pages... is there a log of renamed pages that we could check to see how this was done.

By the way, the hex 97 does work for both Internet Explorer and Linux Mozilla, so this might not really be an issue.

-- P.T. Aufrette 18:50, 15 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

Yes, hex 97 works for both browsers as a character in articles. However, it will give erratic/incosistent results as a character in article titles, as the English-language Wiki code only supports the ISO 8859-1 character set, in which hex 97 is not a printing character. The fact that it might work most of the time (thanks to the browsers being friendly to the Windows-1252 character set, where hex 97 is a printing character) makes these bugs even more difficult to track down. All these issues may go away soon when the English Wikipedia goes to UTF-8 encoding, but then we'll want to have Unicode-encoded emdashes (which won't work either at the moment) -- The Anome 19:32, 15 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

UTF-8 page titles would be good. Any timetable for this? If this is happening "soon" as you say, we should put off changing the hex 97 to double-hyphen, in favor of going directly to mdash, since the hex 97 "more or less" works for the time being.

Note the Canadian parliament website [1] uses double-hyphen, but printed material such as Hansard debate transcipts uses the mdash. And the Elections Canada website uses mdash [2]. So mdash is definitely the standard. If double-hyphen versions are needed, they could redirect to the mdash versions.

In any case, for the pages you said you moved, do you recall if you converted hex 97 to single-hyphen or double-hyphen? It would be good to go and fix this if necessary, but I couldn't find anything in your last 500 user contributions.

To clarify the original point by the way, there are electoral districts such as Rivière-du-Loup?Montmagny that contain both hyphens and mdashes, due to the French-language standard of using hyphens in place names (for instance, "St. Louis" in English is "St-Louis" in French). So in French, if you wanted to combine the equivalent of, say, "Dallas-Fort Worth", it would need to be "Dallas--Fort-Worth" to preserve the fact that "Fort Worth" is one entity.

-- P.T. Aufrette 20:56, 15 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

The below has been copied from User talk:Hephaestos and User talk:SimonP

Please stop moving Canada's electoral districts. This has been discussed before. It is very important to keep the m-dashes because they indicate different cities in riding names. N-dashes are used in Quebec for all cities with multi barreled names. For instance Pierre—Lac-Jean would be the towns of Pierre and Lac-Jean while Pierre-Lac-Jean would indicated could either mean the town of Pierre-Lac-Jean or three towns, Pierre, Lac, and Jean. - SimonP 21:59, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

In general I hate m-dashes and think that adding extra complications for a minor typographical concern is misguided. However, in this case the m-dash contains important semantic information and should not be ignored. I think it would be best to move them back. - SimonP 22:03, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

Not terribly usefully the discussions have taken place on User_talk:Earl_Andrew, User talk:The Anome, User_talk:RickK and Talk:List of Canadian federal electoral districts none of which contain the full conversation. - SimonP 22:10, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

Hi; I've moved quite a few of these. I can move them back if they need to be moved back but could we discuss it first? - Hephaestos|§ 21:58, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That's fine then, I can move them back. Can you point me to where it was discussed before? I've been looking around but couldn't find anything; asked on a couple of talk pages. Furthermore I don't see an em-dash used for these anywhere but Wikipedia, but of course I'll go along with what the majority here thinks in any case. - Hephaestos|§ 22:01, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've since looked at the Elections Canada website, which should be fairly authoritative, and they do use em-dashes. They just don't really work very well with the Wikipedia software as it currently stands. I mentioned possibly we could use a hyphen with a space, e.g. Rivière-du-Loup - Montmagny. I've also seen a forward slash used (Rivière-du-Loup/Montmagny) but this is also not so good as it creates a subdirectory at the machine level here. Since I've caused the problem I'm very willing to fix it, but I'm hoping for a permanent solution so it doesn't come up again, so any thoughts are most appreciated. - Hephaestos|§ 22:32, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

end moved discussion

According to Elections Canada, the Representation Order states that the electoral boundaries won't come into effect until August 2004 so why are these electoral districts being used in the June 28th election when it is before that date? SD6-Agent 05:30, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Working on past lists of MPs and ridings I am wondering when we should redirect a past riding name to a new one? What should the percent cut-off be? For instance 87% of Burin—St. George's was merged into Random—Burin—St. George's, should we redirect one to the other, or have an article on each? - SimonP 04:24, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure, actually. It's up to whoever is making the article I guess. Earl Andrew 19:11, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I think that a distinction is made between renaming/redefinition and outright abolition. When a riding is renamed it might be best to redirect it. When it is redefined, that means no name change took place. In the case of Burin—St. George's, it was abolished in 2003, and a new riding of Random—Burin—St. George's was created. Ridings are not usually renamed, but it does happen. You might want to see [3]. Also of note is that that site uses "--" instead of "—" in riding names. --Timc 17:46, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There are 12 Quebec federal ridings that share their names with provincial ridings, but have different borders (since the provincial ridings are smaller). These should probably be moved from, eg "Brome—Missisquoi" to "Brome—Missisquoi (federal electoral district)" or "Drummond (electoral district)" to "Drummond (federal electoral district)". Unfortunately there are a lot of pages the link to each article, so they will have to be fixed. These are:

• Brome—Missisquoi
• Drummond
• Gatineau
• Joliette
• Louis-Hébert
• Mount Royal
• Outremont
• Papineau
• Saint-Jean
• Shefford
• Sherbrooke
• Trois-Rivières

I'll get started on it, but if some one wants to help, please do. - Farquard 05:27, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

No! Don't! We've been through this before. Please see your talk page. -- Earl Andrew - talk 05:54, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Just a suggestion for this article, it could use a section explaining the number of seats per province and why those numbers? If you compare population with number of seats the correlation isn't always the same. HJKeats 23:49, 29 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Oops take it all back, just read the article Electoral district (Canada) which explains it. HJKeats 00:22, 30 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

At WP:MOSDASH is mentioned: Hyphens and dashes are generally rather avoided in page names (e.g., year of birth and death are generally not used in a page name to disambiguate two people with the same name). (...)If hyphens and dashes are needed to write a page name correctly (e.g., Piano-Rag-Music, Jack-in-the-box, Nineteen Eighty-Four), prefer simple hyphens, and avoid hair spaces, even in the odd case of a range forming part of the title, e.g., History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991). --213.155.224.232 20:56, 11 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

For further explanation: When saving a HTML page by default most browsers are saving the file under the name, which is included between the <title> name </title> tags. While the Wiki software can handle unicode the locally stored file includes the dash not as unicode character in the filename but as ASCII-150. As a result of the old DOS (ASCII) and Windows 3.11 based codepages' (ANSI) inconsistencies ASCII-150 isn't a legal character for urls. Therefore you can't open a file including a mdash in its name, the browser fails. This occurs at least at any Windows system which is using Latin-2 character settings. Therefore, for avoiding restrictions to users outside the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, it should be replaced. --213.155.224.232 10:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Image:Can-pol w.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot 05:40, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I think ordering the provinces from east to west and then then the territories from west to east is irrational and arbitrary (why not order everything west to east, for example, since English is read left to right?). Does anyone have any strong feelings about ordering the provinces and territories alphabetically, instead? fishhead64 (talk) 17:44, 17 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think East to West is the traditional ordering. It has something to do with time zones or something along that line, if I recall correctly. On election nights for example, the results don't come in alphabetically. Newfoundland is first, and then they go west until they reach British Columbia which is last. Unless there's a specific Wikipedia policy which says they HAVE to be listed alphabetically with no exceptions, this should probably be left alone. Sima Yi (talk) 11:21, 18 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think the onus is on those who would suggest an ordering other than alphabetical to provide justification. Canadian federal electoral districts occur quite independently of election night, and the federal election laws have been changed to regularize the closing of polls in all time zones, thus minimizing the difference. Absent a rational justification, it seems arbitrary and privileges the east. Unless there is a widely supported and rational objection presented over the next few days, I will alphabetize the list. fishhead64 (talk) 14:34, 25 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Does anyone know of any maps of the federal election ridings that we could include in this article? TastyCakes (talk) 18:16, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Wouldn't a better title be List of Canadian federal ridings rather than districts? It's much more proper. Outback the koala (talk) 06:48, 27 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

since it is the proper term and noone has posted, I am going to move the article. Outback the koala (talk) 05:23, 30 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

Sorry I missed the original question. Elections Canada uses the term "electoral district" exclusively. "Riding" is a colloquial term in Canadian English. It is not incorrect, but I think the official term should be used in the title, and the term "riding" explained in the intro paragraph, then either term can be used after that in the article.

"Electoral riding" is a term I've never heard. It sounds redundant. What other sense can "riding" have as a noun in Canadian English?

I vote for mving the article back to its previous title. Ground Zero | t 12:56, 7 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

The article lead contains the sentence

On October 27, 2011, the Conservative government tabled Bill C-20, a measure that would expand the House of Commons to 338 seats, with 15 new seats for Ontario, 6 new seats each for Alberta and British Columbia, and 3 for Quebec.

The parliamentary verb "table" has two contradictory meanings. In the UK it means "begin consideration of [a motion]", but in the US it means "permanently (though not irretrievably) remove from consideration". Which is it here? Canada is linguistically between those two countries. A note of clarification is required, at the least. --Thnidu (talk) 08:09, 16 March 2014 (UTC)Reply