Talk:House of Commons of the 41st Canadian Parliament standings

Discussing changes

After attempting to consult this table and finding it rather difficult to do so, not to mention fiendishly difficult to edit because of having to make sure all the rowspan= figures were correct when you were done, I decided to modify it and make three improvements:

1. Replace the previous horizontal format with a vertical format which is more adaptable to an arbitrary number of entries.
2. Combine the party standings figures with information on the changes themselves, making the table easier to consult and more informative.
3. Add alternate shading to rows to make it easier to find the figures modified by each change.
4. Make the table easier to update and less prone to errors, by eliminating the need to manually change the rowspan of existing entries. The previous format used cells spanning multiple rows to create the effect of showing a party's standing being maintained or changing over time. In this version, cells containing a (new) number simply have borders on the top, producing the same effect without having to worry about finding and correctly modifying rowspan= figures.

For editing instructions, see Template:Canada House standings/row

Any tweaks to make the table more attractive would be welcome, as it would be if some brave person wanted to fiddle with the /row template to adapt it for an arbitrary number and selection of parties.

- Montréalais (talk) 06:41, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

That makes it way too hard to follow. It isn't that difficult to edit, if you know how to edit a table. 117Avenue (talk) 02:13, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

How does it make it hard to follow? It's the same table, rotated 90 degrees, with explanations added. Frankly, the original format was hard to follow in that it was hard to trace which dates belonged to which events, especially when the chart started to get wide. And although I'm familiar with how to edit tables, trying to add a layer was intensely irritating.

Can you suggest some ideas that would improve upon the changes I tried to make? - Montréalais (talk) 02:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank-you for allowing me a day to cool down. At first, when I saw the table, I expected to read it from left to right, like I usually do. When I saw a really tall table, I thought the syntax was broken somewhere, and then learned it was a complete re-write, and reverted what I thought was a massive undiscussed change. Now that I see it is was rotated 90, I can understand the table, sorry. I still have some issues though. This table is one in a series, it is like the tables in the other current assemblies, and senate. Did you plan on changing those over as well, or did you feel this table was different? Your table is bigger, and requires scrolling to see the whole picture. This template is on two articles, List of House members of the 41st Parliament of Canada and 41st Canadian Parliament. I can understand merging the two tables on List of House members, but I think the table on 41st Canadian Parliament should only be a summary of the membership changes, and be small and easy to read, what are your thoughts? I don't want to sound harsh, but if we are going to implement these changes there are a number of other improvements I would like to see. Let's do it right from the start. 117Avenue (talk) 02:09, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the feedback! Some notes:

"This table is one in a series, it is like the tables in the other current assemblies, and senate. Did you plan on changing those over as well, or did you feel this table was different?"

• I'd love to be able to make a table and/or table components that suited an arbitrary number of party standing slots, or at least a series (for 3, 4, 5, 6... parties) in which the party names and colours could be arbitrary. As an example, check out 39th_Quebec_Legislature -- I think it would be great to be able to boil down that bewildering array of representation changes into a single, nice, clear table.

"Your table is bigger, and requires scrolling to see the whole picture."

• Granted. However, the previous table was wide, and could only get wider over the duration of the parliament. Given a choice between having to scroll down and having to scroll sideways, I think down would be better. Naturally, there are no doubt ways that I didn't think of or don't know about to be able to tighten up the screen size and improve the readability of the table as I created it. Help with that would be very welcome.

"but I think the table on 41st Canadian Parliament should only be a summary of the membership changes, and be small and easy to read, what are your thoughts?"

• I really do think that if someone is interested in the changes in party standings over time, they are most likely interested in what caused the standing changes as well, and therefore it seems natural to accompany the standing changes with the causes thereof. This is all the more so because of the nature of the current chart: each entry consists of an individual date (rather than being on a monotonic timeline) that is only directly accompanied, visually, by those standings that changed (with the other standings on that date being visually scattered throughout the earlier portion of the chart, on the dates they last changed).

To put it another way, the first and most obvious piece of information the current table gives is not "At an arbitrary date I'm interested in, the party standings were x, y, z, a, and b." It is, "At a listed date, party Foo's representation changed." At that rate, I think it is quite natural to ask, "Well, what happened?", and it's helpful not to have to cross-reference it each time with another chart in a different format.

It occurs to me that if you wanted to answer the question, "At an arbitrary date, what were the party standings?", as well as, "How did the standings vary over the length of the parliament?", I think what we would need instead would be a timeline, i.e. with an axis with intervals of fixed widths. That way, say, five changes occuring over the span of a year would have less visual impact than five changes occurring over the span of a month; and it would be simple both to track the changes over time and to locate a date and determine the standings at that time. (Even there, it would be useful to indicate -- with different icons, say -- which points on the timeline are floor-crossings, deaths, by-elections, and so forth, both to improve ease of cross-referencing and to give an immediate picture of the reasons for the shifts, e.g. mass floor crossings and so forth.) I really don't know how to code such a thing, but it might very well be quite useful. - Montréalais (talk) 17:01, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes it sucks having an article with side scrolling, but it also sucks not being able to see the whole thing, so down scrolling it is. Instead of a summary table, we could make a summary chart, like you say, it would be proportional to time. It would be nice to have templates that work for all circumstances, but then the parameter names would be generic, and we would lose the ease of editability that you were hoping to have. Now for the nitpicky. The template seems to be working fine on the documentation, but in your revision the rows are tall, with white space, I don't know where that is in the template code. The beginning of the year is not an event, and shouldn't have its own row, but I do like having column reminders, can these be incorporated into each other? All the numbers should be center aligned. How should party names be abbreviated, is there a max width? The short command on Template:Canadian party colour limits names to 15 characters, but that's probably too long for this. References should be used. I haven't seen a discussion on how majority should be calculated, we've used Government minus everyone else, but some believe it should be Government minus half the members (or half plus one), or maybe it should be half the members. 117Avenue (talk) 03:58, 3 September 2014 (UTC)