Talk:2015 Spanish general election

Infobox: next steps

The RfC concluded we should switch to seat order. I have now made that change by removing IU-UP from the infobox, leaving the remaining 5 parties in seat order.

What do we do now? I'm happy to see the infobox stick with 6 parties, so that would mean adding in DiL.

Or we can take that infobox to 7, 8 or 9 parties, so that's adding EAJ-PNV, restoring IU-UP in 8th, and adding EH Bildu.

Or we can switch to another infobox format so that we can also have the only other party to win a seat, CC-PNC.

My preference would be for a different infobox format and including all parties that won seats. Bondegezou (talk) 10:53, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

As I proposed for UK, if we keep the same infobox format I would favor to keep in the infobox all parties obtaining 2% of the seats and above (which in the case of Spain is 7 and above). But I'm also happy to switch the infobox format as suggested in the RfC (several format proposals were made and this one I prefer but open to discuss). Wykx 11:26, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm all for changing infobox format too, but let's see what other people say. In the mean time, I've added DiL to the infobox, so the infobox is back up to 6 parties now. That's everyone with >2% of seats. If anyone has more details on since when the DiL leader has been leader, please fill in the blanks. Bondegezou (talk) 14:26, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

As stated before I think we should switch to a slightly simplified variant of the French infobox format minus the distracting colorful horozontal dividers. Of course this would only apply for multi-party systems, which are usually characterized by:

• parliamentary rather than (semi-)presidential system
• (semi-)proportional representation
• usually more than two parties win mandates
• "hung parliaments" and coalition governments are nothing unusual
• party leaders aren't automatically a (realistic) contender for the head of government post

In order to see how it would look like, I'm ready to create a Lua version of that modified French-style infobox ASAP, if you guys are interested, even if we don't have a consensus yet. A few encouragements obviously wouldn't do harm though, as it's going to be quite some hours of work… ;-) Cheers, PanchoS (talk) 18:07, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The current infobox design is just horrible for adding more than 6 parties. It has the main flaw that you're forced to keep on a three-slot-per-row design, so either you fill all 9 slots or you leave blank space. But that would result, at occasions, in parties with little relevance (both in votes and seats) being added to the infobox, which should be intended as a summary and not as a collection of all data (for that we already have the full-results table). A 9-fixed-slot infobox is also just unnecessarily long. I would support for a new infobox model in the style of the one that PanchoS proposes; either the French or the Spanish design look good.

• Those would allow for more flexibility in adding parties to infobox (no need to stick to a set number for the infobox to look good, solving my problem with it resulting in national parties being left out—but I think it's not just mine, as that would help solving the issues with UK and French elections too where UKIP and the FN can be potentially left out—as they could be added without issue at need. In such a case, the discussion on vote or seat-criteria would actually be non-relevant).
• The horizontal "colorful" dividers are good and useful, specially for two-round legislative (or even presidential) elections; makes them more visual (see here or here).
• I also wonder why seemingly we are the only Wikipedia not using an infobox model like that. xD

I'd gladly help in working out in such an infobox model, even if it's only a test design at first. It can allow for many possibilities the current one doesn't allow (a row for second round results, differencing between senators and deputies—the current infobox only allows for 1 set of seats to be added, which is problematic for elections like those in Spain or Italy where both chambers are elected at once—and so on).

PS. I think we should have started from here from the beginning. That would have saved us from the extremely long discussion we just had on an issue that it's actually just consequence of the infobox model. Impru20 (talk) 19:56, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Comment: the other avantage of this new infobox type is that this enables to group by coalitions when necessary (particularly true in France). Wykx 20:01, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, that too. For France it'd enormously help to reduce the number of parties shown in the infobox (coalitions can just be grouped together in the infobox, then the full results shown in the table). For Spain it'd also help to make it more visual which parties stood at coalition with others (example, Podemos' complex alliance system, or PSOE-NCa alliance, or PP-UPN, and so on) since those are quite frequent. Impru20 (talk) 20:08, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Pretty much agree with everyone above. Bondegezou (talk) 22:14, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow, this is so different from our previous discussion, and I'm really happy we managed to turn a deadlock into something constructive! ;-) However, I think that without going through all of this, we wouldn't have been ready to walk new paths, at least new ones for en. I guess, en has the "old" layout, because it fits the typical use-case of ideally two-party, first-past-the-post systems like the English-speaking US and UK.
Now, after you pointed me to it again, I actually slightly prefer the more compact es style. I'm however not so fond of the "colorful" dividers, even if they look nice. They're supposed to signal the party color, but – apart from the first entry – it is totally unclear if they refer to the party above or the party below. But this is just one of several details we'll still have to discuss. I'm just doing a test design.
I'm gonna start programming tomorrow, but will probably need most of the weekend, as I'm reimplementing it in Lua. The es and fr templates are horibly complex and intricate, so while it would be slightly faster to port them 1:1 to en, IMHO it's not worth the pain. Rather it would make sense to port back the Lua version afterwards.
At this point, I think we should discuss the question, in which cases we would want to use the vertical layout, and in which cases we would keep the three-in-a-row format. As getting consensus for a full switch seems impossible, we should be as precise as possible in determining the use-cases.
But maybe the first consensus we should find is whether we want to continue our discussion here. Strictly speaking, this is beyond the scope of an article's Talk page, but how about continuing our discussion on Module talk:Infobox election? Then we'd only return here at a later point to discuss the actual implementation of the infobox on this particular article. --PanchoS (talk) 03:11, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes that's better to switch on Module talk:Infobox election. Maybe it's also worth mentioning the link into Template_talk:Infobox_election and Template_talk:Infobox_legislative_election? Wykx 09:02, 14 January 2016 (UTC)