Portal Talk:Superdelegate Transparency Project/Help out/Chart cleanup and sourcing

Just a suggestion regarding the superdelegate/vote count portion of this project (part 2 on this page) -- "Done" probably is not the correct word to use since this information remains in flux. Two factors come into play here:

1. Some states are continuing to distribute pledged delegates at district and state conventions (Washington, for instance) so the numbers currently recorded at the most reliable sites are dramatically short of the total number of pledged delegates that will be sent to Denver.

2. Superdelegate pledges obviously continue to come in on a daily basis, and I don't know of any states that already have all of their SDs pledged to one delegate or the other.

Thus I propose that for this table rather than declaring a state "done" that we declare it "updated (as of DATE)", which will give people a better idea of if they should go back and update it further. For instance, it might make sense to check up on each state's tally once a week or something, to ensure that pledged delegates recorded here still match the "official" numbers at other reliable sources such as the USA Today tally, each state party's website tally, etc.

Steve Voght 19:43, 13 February 2008 (EST)

I agree with Steve, "done" should only be used once all superdelegates declare their intention. Can we also use this page as a running total of sorts? Maybe post numbers for each state such as (x/y/z) where x would be Clinton's delegate total, y is Obama's, and z is undecided. It also appears this page has gone wonky and there are two progress tables... can one be deleted? --Jameshands 12:17, 15 February 2008 (EST)

Sorry it has taken me so long to jump in here.

To address point 2 above. One item that we need to take care of is geting some wording on the talk page for each state about table maintenance. The idea would be that once the commitments are all updated, there should be a comment made on the talk page that gives the date that the status was initially set.

Then any time somebody actually checks status later on, they should note (again on the discussion page) that the status was checked/set, even if they didnt' change the status.

If anybody wants to take a run at this, it would be a huge boost.

As I've mentioned on the page, we are going to try to merge in the data from DemConWatch. So any efforta along the lines of status should be temporarily on hold anyway. But you do bring up a good point.

Also, with number, that is a good point. Perhaps we should limit the status tracked her to vote totals and delegate counts and if there are still delegate allotments pending conventions, then the status would be something like "Current through 5/1/2008" or something like that.

And for the running total, that's not a bad idea. Let's see where we are after the merge and we can look at how to do that.

Mark M. 14:20 15 February 2008 (EST)

What is the status of this merge? --Caffeinated 14:58, 17 February 2008 (EST)

Sorry it has taken me a few days to notice this. After a looooong weekend of programming the merge script, the merge started yesterday. Unfortunately, I only got through two states before I hit a fatal error on the third. This should be the last major bump in the road, I am working on the script this morning. Regarding the database question below. That's a good point but I don't think there is a way to do that. We are looking at ways to make the data available in spreadsheet form. Not the best solution, but possibly the best we can do. The challenge will be either stripping out or moving the reference links --Mark M. 09:30 19 February 2008 (EST)

Each state page has its own table, but what we really need is a script on each state page that draws numbers from a database that everyone has access to and can edit. Are there any webform plugins for wikis that could structure data entry?

SW: Formatting for donations column?

Any thoughts on how we should format entries into the 'accepted donation(s) from' and 'amount donated' columns? This could get messy since many members of Congress have received multiple donations (either due to multiple elections over the years, or primary and then general elections, etc...) so it's important we come up with a consistent format that shows this.

One thing worth considering as we decide this is that It's not just the amount of money that people receive, but also when that money was received that's important (e.g. $5000 donated in 2002 probably means a lot less than $5000 donated this election cycle.)

I took a crack at entering a few cells of data on the Maine page because I happened to stumble across it in a newspaper article about superdelegates, but now's the time to decide on these things before we get too far into the weeds on tracking stuff down and entering it into the tables.

--Steve Voght 16:46, 27 February 2008 (EST)