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Post by mick745 on Feb 23, 2020 11:10:20 GMT
Just putting this out there. It is something i have been think about for a while. How do people on this site feel about creating a collaborative website with 'definitive' information on candidates and election results? Often there is talk about various participants creating spreadsheets, maps on candidates, results, etc on GB elections. How about instead of creating our own work we all place our work in one place and avoid duplication? As some of you know i have a spreadsheet of all MPs elected to Parliament since 1885 (and i am working backwards for each parliament as far as i can get - currently plan to include all Parliamentary elections since the creation of the UK Parliament in 1801 but will probably go further). This includes DOB and Dates of Death, HoL and peerage titles, other hononary titles, Privy Council appts, taking of the oath, maiden speeches, reasons for leaving the house, full list of retreads and much more. A link to the thread i created on this is here: vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/5221/list-members-parliament-1945This can be "glued together" with links etc from a definitive source of election results, each election can include the list of members at dissolution (with their particular fate at the subsequent election (did they stand down, get defeated or reelected), a list of each of the main parties targets seats and how they got in in each of those, swings in each seat, and all other information that we would expect for such a site. We could link to each MPs maiden speeches, taking of oath and everything of relevance to a particular MP. In recent times there is lots of information on candidates and MPs but prior to WWII this information is patchy and prior to 1900 is very hard to find. It is therefore possible that we could create the leading resource on the web. If we were ambitious enough we could include all GB elections, local and national. For these sorts of things we could 'assign' work to particular people, or have a list of outstanding work needed that people could 'volunteer' for. Originally this Forum spoke about creating a 'Psephological Society'. This could be the way forward for this. What do people think? |
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Post by AdminSTB on Feb 23, 2020 13:01:56 GMT
Just putting this out there. It is something i have been think about for a while. How do people on this site feel about creating a collaborative website with 'definitive' information on candidates and election results? Often there is talk about various participants creating spreadsheets, maps on candidates, results, etc on GB elections. How about instead of creating our own work we all place our work in one place and avoid duplication? As some of you know i have a spreadsheet of all MPs elected to Parliament since 1885 (and i am working backwards for each parliament as far as i can get - currently plan to include all Parliamentary elections since the creation of the UK Parliament in 1801 but will probably go further). This includes DOB and Dates of Death, HoL and peerage titles, other hononary titles, Privy Council appts, taking of the oath, maiden speeches, reasons for leaving the house, full list of retreads and much more. A link to the thread i created on this is here: vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/5221/list-members-parliament-1945This can be "glued together" with links etc from a definitive source of election results, each election can include the list of members at dissolution (with their particular fate at the subsequent election (did they stand down, get defeated or reelected), a list of each of the main parties targets seats and how they got in in each of those, swings in each seat, and all other information that we would expect for such a site. We could link to each MPs maiden speeches, taking of oath and everything of relevance to a particular MP. In recent times there is lots of information on candidates and MPs but prior to WWII this information is patchy and prior to 1900 is very hard to find. It is therefore possible that we could create the leading resource on the web. If we were ambitious enough we could include all GB elections, local and national. For these sorts of things we could 'assign' work to particular people, or have a list of outstanding work needed that people could 'volunteer' for. Originally this Forum spoke about creating a 'Psephological Society'. This could be the way forward for this. What do people think? Any talk of setting up a Psephological Society always ends up running into the sand, but an editable website is a nice idea. Linking and crediting existing work is important. I did set up another ProBoards forum with threads with all the UDCs, RDCs, etc with a view to collating as much data as possible but ending up putting it into maintenance mode due to lack of activity. I could understand the reasons for this. Getting information on election results before 1973 does involve some personal expense, at the very least a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive or trips to local libraries and archives. I've re-opened my forum for now in response to this thread. |
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Post by mick745 on Feb 23, 2020 16:46:04 GMT
If it helps i am happy to set up a domain and cover the cost, for say the first couple of years, to get the site up and running, as long as that cost is a modest one.
However, i need advice on how to do this how do you register a website? And once it is registered how do you start populating it?
What is the approximate monthly cost?
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Post by greenchristian on Feb 23, 2020 18:35:17 GMT
If it helps i am happy to set up a domain and cover the cost, for say the first couple of years, to get the site up and running, as long as that cost is a modest one. However, i need advice on how to do this how do you register a website? And once it is registered how do you start populating it? What is the approximate monthly cost? Registering a site can be done in two ways. One is to buy the domain name alongside a web-hosting package. The other is to buy the domain from a domain registration company and have it redirect to hosting elsewhere.
As for populating it, there are several different options. You can do it the old-fashioned way and write your own html (or php if it's more than just static pages). You can install blogging, forum, wiki, or content management software. Finally, there are sites that already have that software set up, and their web hosting includes the backend stuff.
If we're talking about a collaborative website to store various different types of information, then it will need to be running one of the following on the backend: Customisable & extendable blogging software (probably Wordpress) Wiki software (probably Mediawiki) A content management system (likely Drupal or Joomla)
Before even starting to set it up there needs to be some thinking and planning about what kind of content the site is going to collate, how it's going to store it, and how that content is going to be presented/navigated.
I'm reasonably familiar with several of those backends (I've set up stuff in Wordpress, Mediawiki, and Drupal in the past), and am happy to be involved in setting it up.
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Post by mick745 on Feb 23, 2020 19:16:42 GMT
I would say on the front page list the diffetent types of election, e.g. parliamentary, click on that to find a list of years, each year would link to the content for that election, e.g. seats, candidates, electees, each seat name linking to a list of wards making up that seat, possibly with maps, each ward could then link to the local election result for that ward, as well as historic results for that seat.
Candidates names could link to all elections they've been involved in, and biographical details, election materials, leaflets, etc.
Individual seat results could include a link to the party they stood for which would give election totals, etc.
Any other election related materials could go on the site, boundary changes, notional results, candidates expenses, etc, links to videos.
Website could be kept up to date when there are defections, deaths, etc.
We could have as many charts, graphs, swings, percentages, analysis as we want.
Basically everything we'd want from an elections website.
The point is that all resources would be in one place.
With many people working together it should be possible.
Two questions.
1. Who's on board?
2. What content would you want the website to contain?
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Post by greenchristian on Feb 23, 2020 20:09:17 GMT
I would say on the front page list the diffetent types of election, e.g. parliamentary, click on that to find a list of years, each year would link to the content for that election, e.g. seats, candidates, electees, each seat name linking to a list of wards making up that seat, possibly with maps, each ward could then link to the local election result for that ward, as well as historic results for that seat. Candidates names could link to all elections they've been involved in, and biographical details, election materials, leaflets, etc. Individual seat results could include a link to the party they stood for which would give election totals, etc. Any other election related materials could go on the site, boundary changes, notional results, candidates expenses, etc, links to videos. Website could be kept up to date when there are defections, deaths, etc. We could have as many charts, graphs, swings, percentages, analysis as we want. Basically everything we'd want from an elections website. The point is that all resources would be in one place. With many people working together it should be possible. Two questions. 1. Who's on board? 2. What content would you want the website to contain? This is a very ambitious scope. There are two ways of achieving it.
1) via a wiki. The wiki would almost certainly require us to create some "bot" editors to keep everything working together (that's one thing I've never done). I don't think such a site could be constructed in a way that would allow spreadsheets of results to be uploaded as anything other than attachments/downloadable files. To put them into the website proper would require some dedicated people to manually copy the information across into the wiki's format (and manually add things like links to other relevant pages).
2) via a content management system, which will require quite a bit of planning and work before it could go live. I have played around with some stuff in Drupal regarding a potential site that simply collates election results (including automatically calculating totals, summaries, swings etc. from the raw numbers), but I've never quite got round to getting a working prototype. Setting it up this way will be a lot more work for the people doing the admin (at least in the creating the site phase), but allows the site to be customised for the particular kinds of content we want to include, and allows for a lot more things to be automated.
Of all the things you mention, tracking individual candidates is going to be really difficult. Especially when it comes to historical council election records. How do we know if the J Smith who stood for Labour in one ward in 1973 and lost is the same J Smith who stood for Labour in the ward next door in 1974? (and yes, for results that far back we do only have initials - and not full forenames - for the vast majority of candidates).
I think in order to make this actually happen we'll need a small group of people who are willing to put time in to plan exactly what to include, to do the work of properly planning the site (layout, format for different types of content, software, etc.), and doing whatever background work needs to happen in order for the site to go live. With either option the set-up and maintenance is going to be a lot of work.
Also, whatever option is chosen, there needs to be some kind of anti-spam measures. If it's possible to post content without an account then there will be attempts to add spam content. If anybody can sign up for an account some accounts will belong to spammers. If user accounts are invite-only then we might be able to avoid spam content, but there will be a very small user base.
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Post by mick745 on Feb 23, 2020 20:34:30 GMT
If we don't have any information on a particular candidate it wouldnt link to anywhere but would be a source of further research and hopfully the site's users can get in touch with any further information. Instead of all content being available straight away, information could be added gradually. A website where spreadsheets could be added/uploaded would be preferable - if there is one thing psephologists seem to like more than anything else it would be a spreadsheet. A couple of example sites i have found are as follows (they are not politics based but snooker and football but everything is interactive with the sort of click through information i envisage). cuetracker.net/gillinghamfcscrapbook.co.uk/ |
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Post by greenchristian on Feb 23, 2020 21:25:26 GMT
If we don't have any information on a particular candidate it wouldnt link to anywhere but would be a source of further research and hopfully the site's users can get in touch with any further information. Instead of all content being available straight away, information could be added gradually. A website where spreadsheets could be added/uploaded would be preferable - if there is one thing psephologists seem to like more than anything else it would be a spreadsheet. A couple of example sites i have found are as follows (they are not politics based but snooker and football but everything is interactive with the sort of click through information i envisage). cuetracker.net/gillinghamfcscrapbook.co.uk/OK, that sort of thing requires the Content Management System approach, and quite a lot of development work on the backend before you can go live. It's likely to need quite a complex backend, so is probably best built in Drupal (the most flexible of the widely-used CMSes). But Drupal does have a fairly steep learning curve from the point of view of the site developer who's never used it before.
On spreadsheets, it is definitely possible to create a site where they are uploaded and, if they are in the right format, added onto the site's native content. And also to allow the site's content to be downloaded in a spreadsheet format, where relevant. But, again, this requires development work to get right.
Because of the sheer scope of this proposed site (which will need to be quite carefully defined before any work happens on actually building the thing), the content would necessarily be added gradually anyway. But if you want it to link all the different types of content together, then it probably needs to be designed to do everything from the off (otherwise you're going to have to go back and change large chunks of the content every time you add the ability to handle something new).
With the candidates the fundamental problem isn't whether we have information about a candidate or not. The fundamental problem is identifying which candidates are the same person. Barring by-elections we have complete local election results going back to the great reorganisation in the early 1970s in at least pdf format (and so all that information can be put onto the site). The number of different individual candidates runs into at least six figures, and there will likely be thousands of instances of candidates who have the same name but are different people. I'm not saying that candidate tracking can't be done, it's just that it's something that's likely to add a lot of complexity (and, hence, work) to both building the backend and the data entry / contribution side of things. And it would almost certainly have to be built in from the start, rather than added later.
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Post by andrewteale on Feb 23, 2020 22:45:05 GMT
If we don't have any information on a particular candidate it wouldnt link to anywhere but would be a source of further research and hopfully the site's users can get in touch with any further information. Instead of all content being available straight away, information could be added gradually. A website where spreadsheets could be added/uploaded would be preferable - if there is one thing psephologists seem to like more than anything else it would be a spreadsheet. A couple of example sites i have found are as follows (they are not politics based but snooker and football but everything is interactive with the sort of click through information i envisage). cuetracker.net/gillinghamfcscrapbook.co.uk/OK, that sort of thing requires the Content Management System approach, and quite a lot of development work on the backend before you can go live. It's likely to need quite a complex backend, so is probably best built in Drupal (the most flexible of the widely-used CMSes). But Drupal does have a fairly steep learning curve from the point of view of the site developer who's never used it before.
On spreadsheets, it is definitely possible to create a site where they are uploaded and, if they are in the right format, added onto the site's native content. And also to allow the site's content to be downloaded in a spreadsheet format, where relevant. But, again, this requires development work to get right. Because of the sheer scope of this proposed site (which will need to be quite carefully defined before any work happens on actually building the thing), the content would necessarily be added gradually anyway. But if you want it to link all the different types of content together, then it probably needs to be designed to do everything from the off (otherwise you're going to have to go back and change large chunks of the content every time you add the ability to handle something new). With the candidates the fundamental problem isn't whether we have information about a candidate or not. The fundamental problem is identifying which candidates are the same person. Barring by-elections we have complete local election results going back to the great reorganisation in the early 1970s in at least pdf format (and so all that information can be put onto the site). The number of different individual candidates runs into at least six figures, and there will likely be thousands of instances of candidates who have the same name but are different people. I'm not saying that candidate tracking can't be done, it's just that it's something that's likely to add a lot of complexity (and, hence, work) to both building the backend and the data entry / contribution side of things. And it would almost certainly have to be built in from the start, rather than added later.
I'd be wary about stealing republishing Elections Centre data just like that. Make sure you have a good understanding of any potential copyright issues before you go down that road. And as the person who built the Local Elections Archive Project, take it from me. This is a heck of a lot of work to take on and do you really want to do this? |
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