Ballotpedia:WikiProject Local Ballot Measures

From Ballotpedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

WikiProject Local Ballot Measures is about improving and organizing articles about local ballot measures.

This page will:

  • Establish and organize local ballot measure article components.
  • Establish preferred categories
  • A way to sort out local ballot measures by issue
  • A way to organize local ballot measures within their state.

Volunteers

Ballotpedia is looking for volunteers to cover local ballot measure elections in each of the 50 states.

Since 2009, we have covered all local ballot measures in 11 states. We're looking for volunteers:

  • In those 11 states, to provide even more detailed coverage.
  • In the other 39 states, to begin to develop this type of information in those states.

If you are interested in volunteering, you can either:

Read more about volunteering on this project here!

Writing guidelines: Articles

How to write about
local measures
Components
Title
Introduction
Aftermath
Election results
Text of measure
Background
Support
Opposition
Lawsuits
Path to the ballot
See also
External links
Additional reading
References
Categories
Templates
News desk
The project

Each article should have at least:

Order of components

We suggest the following order for the components in your article:

Ballotpedia: states covered

Below are a list of states covered by Ballotpedia:

  1. Arizona
  2. California
  3. Colorado
  4. Florida
  5. Illinois
  6. Michigan
  7. Missouri
  8. Ohio
  9. Oregon
  10. Washington
  11. Wisconsin

Needs fixing

Article improvement

See also: Articles to improve

As the project develops, some pages may be rapidly created and may need to be revisited at a later point. For more on articles that are missing components or may need improvement, click here.

Categories

See: Help:Categories for local ballot measures

State/year

Political topics

  • Each local ballot measure article should be put into a category that has to do with its political topic.
  • There is an entire page devoted to defining what categories to use: Help:Categories for local ballot measures

Images

See also: Uploading and categorizing images

If you plan to upload images that relate to the Local Ballot Measures project...

Ballotpedia:WikiProject Images

For example, images of:

  • campaign logos
  • maps
  • graphs
  • documents
  • ballot measure activists

... or if you need help identify appropriate categories for such images, go here for more details.

For specific guidelines on copyright or image permissions, visit the Images project page.

Organizing articles by county

In California, local ballot measures are organized according to their county. This seems to work well. There are 58 counties in California, and correspondingly, 58 articles, each called a variant of El Dorado County, California ballot measures. These articles are organized into a template: {{California counties}}. We also have {{California election dates}} because there are so many of them.

Any specific local ballot measure is then added to the page for the county. This anchors your work and gives you a reliable archive you'll build over time.

The preferred title for a county-based article is "Sample County, Name of state ballot measures." The county template for the state in question should be included at the end of the article.

County templates

Here's a list of all the county templates:

Election link added

Please remove templates from this list to signify that all county articles for the state in question have had an external link added that takes the reader to the elections office for that county, is in this example.

Completed

Existing articles added

See also: Help:How to add local ballot measure articles to county and election articles

Please remove templates from this list to signify that for the state in question, you've gone through all of BP's articles about local ballot measures in that state and added those links to the relevant "local ballot measures listed by county" and "local ballot measures listed by election date" articles that exist for that state.

Completed

Project templates

  • {{lbm}} should be typed on the "talk" page for articles that are about local ballot measures.
  • {{User WikiProject LBM}} can be added to your user page.

See also

Portal:Local ballot measures

Local ballot measure analysis

This page is part of WikiProject Local Ballot Measures, a WikiProject that exists in order to organize, expand and improve Ballotpedia's coverage of local ballot measures.


Personal tools