Talk:List of Canadian federal 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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] (http://www.parl.gc.ca/) uses double-hyphen, but printed material such as Hansard debate transcipts uses the mdash. And the Elections Canada website uses mdash [2] (http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=cir&document=rep&dir=rep&lang=e&textonly=false). 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)

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] (http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/house/hfer/hfer.asp?Language=E). Also of note is that that site uses "--" instead of "—" in riding names. --Timc 17:46, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)