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Writing:State legislative election overview stub articles

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How to write
overview articles about
state legislative elections
Ballotpedia:WikiProject State Legislatures#Lists of writing guidelines
Starting the article
IntroductionWhat's at stake?
Campaign finance
Qualifications
List of candidates
Party colors
Election results
Impact of term limits
"See also"External links
Library of tutorials
How to write candidate profiles
Writing about legislatures
State legislative project
This page is a content-and-style guide about how to create stub articles about state legislative elections.

To build a good stub article for a state legislative election, you'll need to:

  • Know what to call the article.
  • Add an introductory sentence to begin the article, and know where to find the information to use to write that sentence.
  • Be aware of any standard "See also" links to add.
  • Know what standard templates to install in the article.
  • Know what categories to use for the article.
See also: How to write state legislative election overview articles

What to call the article

Your best bet here is to go to State legislative elections, 2010. The article you plan to start may already be started there as a red link. If it isn't, you should add a red link there, following the naming conventions you see in action on that page.

Basically:

  • Begin the article with the name of the legislative chamber in question.
  • In general, you should say "California State Senate elections, 2010," rather than "California Senate elections, 2010," to avoid confusing the reader between California's U.S. Senate elections in 2010 (which your article will not be about) and the state senate elections (which your article will be about).
  • Followed by "elections, 2010"

Introductory sentence

The introductory sentence of the article should be in this form:

Elections for the office of Utah State Senator will be held in Utah on November 2, 2010. The signature-filing deadline for candidates wishing to run in these elections is (or was) _______ and the primary Election Day was (or was) _______.


Research note: The information you need to fill in the blanks in the suggested introductory sentence is available here: Primary election dates in 2010. Some states have more than one primary. Some states have more than one signature filing deadline. Those variations are shown in the chart in the primary election dates in 2010 article, and your introductory sentence/s should reflect whatever variations you find in that chart, for the state you are writing about.

If it is evident to you at the time you start your article how many seats are open in this particular legislative chamber, you should go ahead and include that information in your introductory sentence. If not, later on after you have developed the list of candidates or done more research, you can expand the opening sentence so it provides that information as well, as in this example.

Also, note that while you are including an introductory sentence or two in your stub article, the article itself will ultimately have a more fully-featured introduction. You're just not going to complete that full introduction at this time, when you are simply starting a stub article.

"See also" section

Your standard "see also" section can be built into the article when it is in the stub stage by adding these standard "see also" links:

Change the above links to reflect the particular state and legislative chamber you are writing about.

Templates

Talk page

On the article's talk page, you should type these three templates:

  • The template for the state in question, which is always in the form of the zip code for the state: {tl|ut}}, {{ca}}, etc. (except in the case of Tennessee, where the code is {{tenn}}).
  • {{slp}}
  • {{welec}}

Article

On the article itself, you should type one or more of these templates:

  1. The template that lists the names of all the current office-holders for the legislative chamber in question. For example, if your article is about the state house elections in Wisconsin, you should add to the end of the page the template that lists the current office holders. All those templates are located here.
  2. The template for the state in question. This is always in the form of the name of the state: {{utah}}, {{tennessee}}.
  3. Possibly a stub template. If you don't plan to write a fully-developed article at this point, you should indicate that the article is a stub article, which you can do using either the stub template for the state in question, or by using the stub template that is specific to the state legislative project. These look like:

Categories

At the end of the article, you should type these categories:

or

External links
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Writing:State_legislative_election_overview_stub_articles
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