Politics: Political parties Template‑class

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South Africa Template‑class

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What are the criteria for listing a party under "Other parties"? Currently it seems to be a mishmash between parties that contested the most recent elections, and others that are no longer active. What about limiting it to parties that contested the most recent elections, as well as notable recent formations? Greenman ( talk) 20:55, 20 April 2016 (UTC) reply

This conversation is open to everyone, but I'm pinging @ Greenman: specifically as they seem to be quite active in the arena of South African political articles, perhaps the most active.

So I hope this is alright with everyone but I've gone ahead and categorised both the current and defunct political parties by ideology. To me, the previous version of the navbox where all the parties were jumbled together was quite difficult to navigate and it was difficult to parse the individual party names as there was just so many different parties all in the same unsorted category. My categorisation of the different parties might not be perfect and could well need to be improved upon.

Another idea for the navbox might be to completely migrate out the defunct parties to a new navbox, in the same vein as Template:Historic Irish parties and Template:Defunct political parties in the Netherlands (It's worth noting that both those templates use the ideological breakdown format). However, this is not something I'm gung-ho on and if people are against it, I'm more than willing to pull back on that idea. CeltBrowne ( talk) 21:49, 28 September 2021 (UTC) reply

I wouldn't say I'm near the most active in South African politics - looking at you @ Lefcentreright: - but since I seem to enjoy creating stub articles for minor parties, perhaps I'm most active on this template at least. I tend to steer clear of classifying political parties (this is most notable in the article templates), as I find the topic very divisive, and not very constructive. Is a party left, far-left, centre-left? Perhaps the party sees itself one way, commentators another. I quite like the outcome of what you've done - it does make the template more pleasant to look at. However, the problem I mention is even worse when it comes to categorising a party in only way. I can see endless debate around the categories and the party's positions in them. At a quick glance, for example, the Herenigde Nasionale Party is labelled as conservative, but should it rather be Afrikaner nationalist? It had elements of both, and I can see it swinging between one category and the other endlessly. I may end up just putting most new entries in the Uncategorised and Miscellaneous categories. Still, I can see other Wikipedians happily tackling the problem, so am interested to hear what they have to say. Greenman ( talk) 22:16, 28 September 2021 (UTC) reply