Talk:June 1946 French legislative election

Parliament diagram template

@Number 57: You do not have exclusive choice over which style is used on this wiki. Here are a few arguments in favor of keeping Template:Parliament diagram (which, at the time of writing this, redirects to Template:Seats diagram):

1. This template is only a temporary redirection while waiting for the main graph template to be fixed. It will be redirected back once fixed.
2. Several other wikis and most medias use continuous (rather than dotted) diagrams
3. A wiki's style is not fixed in time
4. The diagrams are mostly immune to changes in party colors (which have happened quite a few times, especially about german election articles which for a couple years had diagrams with extremely misleading colors)
5. Even if the parties colors are fixed within a wiki, image files are shared between all wikis, aka the diagrams will have been generated with the french wiki colors and thus may have misleading colors here
6. Continuous diagrams provides more information, as it allows not only to see the number of seats at a glance but also to use it to look up the rough weights of parties quickly, compared to just having a cloud of colored unlabeled dots
7. I may understand your point to keep the image version on this article but please do not remove the template on articles without diagrams at all (such as the articles for 1945, november 1946, and 1951)

Julio974◆ (Talk-Contribs) 11:23, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Of course I don't have exclusive choice, and never claimed I did. Responding to your points one-by-one:

1. I would question whether this is really temporary. The graphs module has been broken for months and I don't see any certainty that anyone will fix it.
2. What other wikis do isn't relevant. Each wiki has their own style – other wikis' infoboxes and results tables are quite different to en.wiki's. Also, while de.wiki does use pie charts, as far as I know, they are used in the infobox, not added to the results table
3. No disagreement with this, but this is quite a significant change
4. No disagreement with this (the parliament diagram module was a great invention by yourself as a way of ensuring consistent colours), but not sure how it's relevant for this specific article as we don't have a fixed diagram either
5. No disagreement with this, but not sure how it's relevant here. We don't have a fixed diagram either
6. I do disagree with this – parliament diagrams show pretty much the same thing – if anything they convey it better as you can see the actual number of seats (via the dots), which IMO is clearer than a pie chart.
7. I think you might have posted this on the wrong talk page? This one doesn't have a fixed image (the 1945 one does).

I would have no problem doing that you did on the 1956 article – i.e. adding the pie chart as a standalone image rather than it being part of the results table. I just don't think this form of image is appropriate for the actual results table itself. Perhaps we can do that as a compromise for now? Cheers, Number 57 11:33, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

1. It is. The problem has taken a while to fix since it is a software issue but it is being solved right now — see phabricator:T334940 and mw:Extension talk:Graph/Plans#Update: 15 September. If it really becomes long-term I've considered converting the template to a strictly div-&-CSS one (which would also make it accessible on mobile), it would take a lot of work but seems doable.
2. It isn't determining, but it shows that the continuous diagrams are commonly used and do work to convey this information
3. Not really, just a temporary change in style for one type of diagram
4. (note— the original template was not created by me, all I did was porting to this wiki a module by User:M.casanova)
5. Here is an example of it being relevant: the diagram on 1945 French legislative election. None of the colors match—in fact the MRP matches more with the AD's color, the AD's color matches more with the PR color, and the radicals are barely distinguishable from the socialists. It leads to a clear misunderstanding of the weights or positions of the parties, which is to be avoided.
6. The total number of seats is actually a pretty insignificant information compared to the relative weights of the parties. The only place where the strict number of seats is needed is for some minor motions or for parliamentary group requirements—both where the continuous template is actually more performant since the number of seats is clearly written—and fluctuating-size parliaments (such as in the Weimar republic), where the information is fairly minor (only characteristic of turnout), present in the tables, and hard to eyeball for the parties anyway. The dotted diagram is actually worse on that regard, since similarly-colored parties (see 1945 as above) are very hard to distinguish given that the colors are not directly next to each other.
7. My bad, it's hard to keep track of a dozen articles with similar names, but my point still stands (about the problems of image diagrams such as for the 1945 article, and absence of diagrams altogether here).
8. The 1956 chart being made as a thumbnail was mostly a choice of me wanting to finish the 4th republic diagrams while not wanting to remake the entire results table (in a pretty poor state). It does sound like a decent compromise, although putting parliament diagrams in the results table has been an established practice on this wiki for a while, so why do “quite a significant change” or give ourselves more work down the line for when the graph extension is solved? Julio974◆ (Talk-Contribs) 12:16, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Julio974: the diagrams seem to work and convey information properly, even if in a style we don't use that often. Apart from that the advantages on it being easier to edit and to make sure the colours are consistent for English Wikipedia colours are quite good imo and thus justify normalising the use of this template (until Wikipedia manages to fix the graphs error).

Putting it on the side instead of the table seems more like a "significant change" that will not convey information *as well* as putting it directly on a table. Tidjani Saleh (talk) 12:26, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the compromise suggested would be a "significant change" as its not uncommon for articles to have a range of bar/pie/donut charts in them to convey results-related info. Cheers, Number 57 12:35, 22 September 2023 (UTC)