Talk:Candidates of the 2022 South Australian state election

Lists of Candidate and Party Abbreviations

It stands to reason that the parties and candidates listed should follow the same order as the ballot draw. For the Legislative Council, that is found here and for each House of Assembly district, that is found here. This avoids any bias any author may show by listing in an order that is favourable to their political ideology or affiliation. Ballots are drawn randomly and this is how the an reproduction of the ballot looks like on official sources. Similarly, this will provide a more realistic representation to potential voters and is therefore more informative.

The party names or abbreviations appear to be very unusual. SA-BEST is not formatted correctly. Animal Justice Party is abbreviated to AJP while the Australian Labor Party appears as simply Labor. The Liberal Democrats - who are actually appearing on the ballot as Liberal Democrats less government more freedom - are put under LDP (an abbreviation not used by the party in many years). "Sustainable" will be appearing on the ballot as SA Party - Stop Overdevelopment & Corruption. Real Change SA is simply listed as "Real Change". Legalise Cannabis South Australia Party is unrecognisable as "LC". Perhaps the most egregious is listing the Aust Family Party as simply "Family", despite the fact Family First is also running - this is incredibly confusing. The party names should adhere to the way they are going to be listed on the ballot, which can be found here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TastySpeech (talk • contribs)

You have to consider the formatting, readability and usability of the data, and the suggestion to always use full party names and ballot paper order completely flies in the face of that in an attempt to address a (questionable) perception of bias. For example, the House of Assembly list could not feasibly be in a tabular format if you listed it in ballot paper order. The format is consistent with dozens of other elections, with the major parties and parties running in all or almost all seats are listed in columns and others are listed alphabetically in the last column. This is quite fair and shows no demonstrable bias (unless you want to argue the Labor before Liberal column convention). Listing them in a random order does not seem useful and makes quick reference difficult for readers.

You point to the list of full names as to how these should be shown, but most parties also have abbreviations on the ECSA register, and again, laid out in a table it looks ridiculous when you have full verbose party names like "SA Party – Stop Overdevelopment & Corruption" (actually demonstrated in this version) and "Liberal Democrats less government more freedom" (which is actually their "abbreviation"!). "Legalise Cannabis South Australia Party" has their registered abbreviation as LCSA, so it can't be that unrecognisable. You say the Liberal Democrats haven't gone by LDP for many years, but "LD" is their logo so again, it can't be that obscure and unrecognisable, and all it takes is a mouse hover to see the linked article. Good points though about the SA-BEST abbreviation; LC should probably be LCSA in line with the Queensland and WA variants which include the state abbreviation; and I think it should be "Aust Family candidates" to distinguish it from the extant Family First II. --Canley (talk) 03:59, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

For other things that would be a fair assessment but for elections that is not fair at all. I agree changing the House of Assembly order is probably too difficult and House of Assembly seats are almost always won by the major parties anyway, but for Legislative Council there would be absolutely no difference in terms of formatting. They should appear in ballot order as that would remove any doubt regarding bias and better inform voters. You say the perception of bias is questionable, but I was so motivated by it I created a Wikipedia account solely for this purpose.

Parties have both official names and official abbreviations and are entitled to decide which one they run under, if you are not willing to engage with the idea that they should be listed under the name they officially will appear on the ballot - which is the most logical option - then you should choose their official name or abbreviation. "LDP" is neither their official name or abbreviation - similar for AJP and many others. The best way to avoid bias, or even the perception thereof, is to use official resources. That way if anyone questions it you can simply say "I followed the party's official abbreviation/name". TastySpeech (talk) 04:40, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Happy with Canley's points here. The point of the "official abbreviation" is "What do you want it to say on the ballot paper?" (which is why some of them are even longer), but we are not attempting to recreate ballot papers here, we are trying to list candidates. We need abbreviations that are actually abbreviations, and "LDP" is an entirely reasonable abbreviation for "Liberal Democratic Party". As for accusations of bias, this applies to all parties. Also, to be very clear - we are not a voter information service, and our purpose is not to inform voters, it is to inform readers, now and in the future. LegCo order reflects longstanding consensus that it is more useful to present candidates consistently across many elections, and in an order roughly reflecting their significance (governing -> significant minor parties -> microparties). Frickeg (talk) 06:40, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Well there is an immediate contradiction there. The Liberals are currently the governing party in South Australia yet they are listed second. "Significant minor parties" requires a subjective assessment on the part of the author of what "significant" means which is fraught with potential biases - this could also very well apply to "microparties". For example, the Liberal Democrats have two parliamentarians across Australia yet they fall behind both Advance SA (which has one) and Family First (which have zero). The Legalise Cannabis party also has two parliamentarians across Australia yet they fall behind many with less. Similar points can be made about party membership. So it is difficult to ascertain what metrics are actually being used to determine what minor parties are "significant" and what a "microparty" is. TastySpeech (talk) 07:41, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a decision was made many years ago about Labor being to the left of the Liberals across candidate pages generally, because we felt a consistent style was worthwhile, and Labor was (a) older, (b) first alphabetically, and (c) "left", so it made sense to have them left. As for the order within microparties, that's always tricky and happy to discuss, but certainly better than giving undue priority to whoever happened to draw first on the ballot. Here's the logic for the order they're in right now (assuming Labor-Liberal-Greens pretty obvious), and very happy to discuss this order. SA Best won two seats last time, the Nats are the Nats (but definitely an argument for them being lower), One Nation has national significance, Family First is running the most lower house candidates (and has some continuity from a party with a long SA history), Advance SA has a sitting MLC (but no history of electoral success), AJP/LDP/Sustainable all have representation in other states but no history of success in SA, the rest are all new. (We do sometimes change the order post-election when these factors may change - anyone winning a seat would be bumped up the order, most likely.) To be clear, this is all a consistent style reflected across hundreds and hundreds of these pages. This is not to say you don't have a right to challenge it - you do! - but bear in mind it affects a very large number of pages and would take a very great amount of work to change, so there'll need to be a really good reason - and also probably a more central discussion, given the number of pages this would affect. Frickeg (talk) 11:01, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Inclusion of candidates in results pages

After seeing the SA Electoral Commission of SA two page advertisement of candidates in todays Advertiser, I'm wondering whether to include candidates in the list of Electoral Results pages by seat. My reasoning is that yes, the results are unknown, but the candidates are known. The construction of tables needs to be done at some point after election day (2 weeks away) but may as well be done now. For now I'll do the seat of Adelaide, feel free to revert that or discuss here. Alex Sims (talk) 01:30, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

There seems to be a bug in the Electoral box as it doesn't seem to support The Australian Family Party, so for me I think a worthwhile exercise. I've left off two candidate preferred as the candidates for that are determined by the returning officer for the district and not revealed until the polls have closed. Alex Sims (talk) 01:44, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@Alex Sims: I will do all the result tables as an output from the ECSA electoral feed, so I recommend you don't put too much effort into producing them now as it's a scripted output and it won't save any time or effort if you set up blank tables now. The most efficient way to do them is to generate a single results page (such as Results of the 2018 South Australian state election (House of Assembly)), then use Template:Excerpt to display the table on each electoral district page and the results list (see how Electoral district of Adelaide is done now). This means that all the tables can be updated at once at whatever interval is most suitable, and they will update in all three places consistently. I will also set up all the names and colours needed but I see you have done some already. --Canley (talk) 04:50, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Fair enough. Everyday is a school day, never knew about Template:Excerpt. Maybe one day it will be scripted into Wikidata and then derived from there. :) Is your script exposed somewhere? I can see some numbers that don't appear on the ECSA web page that maybe should be calculated e.g. Turnout for Adelaide 2018 as {{Percentage|22148|24928|1}} rather than just stated as 88.8% as the calculated number is not in the source. Alex Sims (talk) 05:39, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Noting a discussion relevant to this article

Please see Talk:Candidates of the 2023 New South Wales state election#Having a solid quota for a column in Candidates article tables for a discussion relevant to the formatting of SA candidate list articles. J2m5 (talk) 07:38, 17 March 2023 (UTC)