Proposal talk:Polling station

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Election years

Yes I hadn't really thought about election years. I guess it's a good idea to record that information, except it presents a few problems. Are we going to encourage people to map things across multiple elections. So come the next election (say in 2015) we would add a value to make it 2010;2015 ? If so we need to explicitly mention that. But this would imply that we'll be recording such details for historical interest e.g. "There was a temporary polling station in this carpark in 2005"

I think that verges on all the complexities of mapping the 4th dimension. To be avoided (if only because people will never agree an approach)

So I'm going to add a rule: "Polling stations locations should only be kept in the database if they are expected to be used in a forthcoming election" What this means is ideally we map polling stations of a forthcoming election. If we don't know them (e.g. when an election is 5 years away) then it's fine to map locations as they were used in the last election, since we can reasonably expect most of these to stay in the same place. Any polling station location which we know to no longer be in use for forthcoming elections, should be removed (or moved to new location) The result will hopefully be a logical usable set of "current" polling station locations, without any dangerous attempt to map historical 4th dimensional data.

Trouble is I think there may still be questions like. "Do we keep a polling station which is not going to be used in a local election, because we think it will be used in the next general election?"

-- Harry Wood 17:52, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Temporary car park polling stations

In fact I had forgotten about temporary car park polling stations (and campsite polling stations?) These present a rather stark verifiability problem. There is nothing on the ground to look at between elections. Community centres are the same of course, except there we're just slipping in a wee property tag on the building. Not such a big deal.

-- Harry Wood 17:58, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Problem with =year

There is a small chance of more than one election per year. I believe the last general election was called to coincide with already scheduled elections, but the government didn't have to do so. --EdLoach 09:43, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Reply to self. If it happens we could always use 2010b or 2010/month or something. What it seems we are after is a way of indicating that a particular polling station has been checked as in use at a particular forthcoming election. If the value doesn't get updated it will indicate when it was last used as a polling station. So I've started using polling_station=2010 now I've persuaded myself it makes sense --EdLoach 10:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, we can add ref:polling_year with comma separated values.

-- User:Vanuan - 22:43, 23 October 2015

Ref number

Another problem I see is that I would not only like to add a polling year, but also ref number of the station. What about "polling_station=yes" and "ref:polling_station" along with "ref:polling_year"? ref:polling_year could be be comma separated values.

-- User:Vanuan - 22:41, 23 October 2015