Talk:74th Oregon Legislative Assembly

74th Oregon Legislative Assembly received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

A fact from 74th Oregon Legislative Assembly appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 1 August 2008, and was viewed approximately 337 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Seventy-fourth Oregon Legislative Assembly, convening from 2007 to 2008, was the first since 1989 in which the Democratic party controlled both houses of the state's legislature?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/August.

Wikipedia

Oregon Low‑importance

	Oregon portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Oregon, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of Oregon on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.OregonWikipedia:WikiProject OregonTemplate:WikiProject OregonOregon articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
The current collaborations of the month are Women's History Month: Create or improve articles for women listed at Oregon Women of Achievement (modern) or Women of the West, Oregon chapter (historical).

United States: State Legislatures Low‑importance

	United States portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. Template Usage Articles Requested! Become a Member Project Talk Alerts United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject U.S. State Legislatures (assessed as Low-importance).

Assessment

Very close to C class. The WP:LEAD reads too much as if for people who already know what this was. Relatedly, the second paragraph should really be moved from the lead. Then the "Bills" section needs some organization. Maybe a paragraph on laws pertaining to minors as it looks like there were several or maybe health or maybe education or maybe "government" for the state cap item/ethics commission/legislative staffing. Address either of these areas and its C class. Address both and expand some (info on the organizing, such as any leadership voting issues, and committee assignments) then you are looking at B class. For GA, ref work. Aboutmovies (talk) 10:39, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

All good observations, thanks for the feedback. I'd like to make this a fairly good model, and then start making some other articles for recent sessions. -Pete (talk) 16:55, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Name

A quick look, and the other two I found for state sessions went with the session number and not the year, see Eighty-third Minnesota Legislature. Also Congressional sessions go that way too, 109th United States Congress. Plus for future session articles, this would allow for the special sessions held in off years to be combined. Aboutmovies (talk) 10:48, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Very good point, thanks. -Pete (talk) 16:53, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sources for expansion

Overview of laws passed in the 2007 session

Senate and House tables

I updated the Senate table to put each senator on its own line when more than more senator served in that post for the term, or changed parties. I think this looks better than the text "senator X, then senator Y", and matches similar political tables on Wikipedia, but it created a problem with the color of the tables, so I restricted the party color to that of the party column. After all, the district itself isn't red or blue, it's the politician who represents it. But then this creates an issue where it's harder to see at a glance the red/blue balance, since several people actually served as Democrats and that makes them look better represented than they actually are. Any thoughts how how to improve this? Maybe the district column should have the color instead? Whatever we decide should be applied to the House table as well. --Esprqii (talk) 18:31, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, one more thing, for the districts with more than one senator (eg the 14th), it would be good to provide the dates of service. I didn't see where the session started, so I didn't just do it my own self... --Esprqii (talk) 18:39, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think I'm pretty happy with how you did it, that looks good. The raw numbers exist in the prose, so I don't think that "seeing" the balance of power is all that important (the table is too big for a lot of computer screens anyway, so you'd have to scroll through). I'd rather not clutter up the table with dates of service, since there are so few legislators it would apply to; if the info exists in the bio of the legislator, that's only a click away, and I think that would be sufficient.

I'll await additional comments for a bit, and assuming there's no objection, apply the same changes to the House table. Then, let's knock off those last 3 senators, and another rep or two! Do you still think a stub for every rep is reasonable before the election? Complete Senate coverage is definitely within reach, and would be pretty satisfying too. -Pete (talk) 19:14, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good...I'll try to do my part on the new articles/stubs. I do think we need notes/refs explaining the party switches for Gordly and Westlund as it's a bit confusing as is. --Esprqii (talk) 19:20, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

yeah..on second thought, without the word "then", the dates really do become important. What do you think of how I did it on the Beyer/Girod entry? -Pete (talk) 19:26, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's OK. You could even do "Beyer (resigned Jan 08)" and "Girod (Jan 08 - Jan 09)"

Also, given the establishment of the Oregon Independent Party, shall we change the word "Independent" to "non-affiliated"? Or, at the least, de-capitalize independent? -Pete (talk) 19:28, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that link goes to Independent (politician), so I think it's OK. If we get an IPO candidate, the link would have the same color and then go to the Independent Party of Oregon page. --Esprqii (talk) 20:29, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the issue is confusing enough to merit more of an explanation here than just the destination of the link. Not sure exactly what the best approach is, though. -Pete (talk) 23:05, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another source

http://blog.oregonlive.com/politics/2007/06/major_actions_by_2007_oregon_l.html

Infobox

{{Infobox Legislative Session
 | name                   = 
 | image                  = 
 | imagesize              = 
 | caption                =
 | body                   = 
 | country                = 
 | state                  = 
 | meeting_place          = 
 | term                   = 
 | before                 = 
 | after                  = 
 | website                = 
 | chamber1               = 
 | membership1            = 
 | control1               = 
 | chamber1_leader1_type  = 
 | chamber1_leader1       = 
 | chamber1_leader2_type  = 
 | chamber1_leader2       = 
 | chamber1_leader3_type  = 
 | chamber1_leader3       = 
 | chamber2               = 
 | membership2            = 
 | control2               = 
 | chamber2_leader1_type  = 
 | chamber2_leader1       = 
 | chamber2_leader2_type  = 
 | chamber2_leader2       = 
 | chamber2_leader3_type  = 
 | chamber2_leader3       = 
}}

I just made this if you would like to use, see Eighty-third Minnesota Legislature for example use. Aboutmovies (talk) 00:33, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

MOST EXCELLENT!! Thank you. I was coming back to add it in, and see that you already did. Excellent work! -Pete (talk) 08:42, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, I would have early but I was updating all the golf course infoboxes after making improvments to the image function. Also added to the earlier session. If you see any errors/imporvments for the template, let me know. Aboutmovies (talk) 08:47, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Will do. Looks great though, if there are any adjustments to make they won't be big ones. -Pete (talk) 08:51, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Whoa, very nice. Funny thing is I was making one by hand last night and didn't like the results so I dumped it. This is much better. Maybe one addition would be to add the pictures of the leaders that Pete has already collected below. --Esprqii (talk) 17:48, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on 74th Oregon Legislative Assembly. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:05, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]