This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject U.S. Congress, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the United States Congress on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.U.S. CongressWikipedia:WikiProject U.S. CongressTemplate:WikiProject U.S. CongressU.S. Congress articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Lists, an attempt to structure and organize all list pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.ListsWikipedia:WikiProject ListsTemplate:WikiProject ListsList articles
Complete: Letters A, D, E, F, G, I, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, T, U, V, Y, & Z (No X).
Complete: From the states of: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, & Wyoming.
Seeing the items missing from the above lists, I'm working on completing B, C, H, M, S, and W (as applicable) for Illinois, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia --Spiffy sperry (talk) 21:47, 6 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Does anyone have an interest in organizing a chronological version of this list?
Not particularly, but I'll play along--chronological by what criteria? Also, keep in mind that this is a VERY small subset of all the representatives who have served. older≠wiser 22:29, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'd suggest chronological by date of first swearing-in. This would capture a general sense of the era of service. Not perfect, but probably the best of the alternatives.
There is some value in having a full, alphabetic list. If we're going to develop this, we'll probably need to split it up, just because of size. My suggestion is to let the U.S. Congress project get a bit further along then look at the situation. It seems to be the we wind up with Chronologial covered by the State Delegation articles, alpha by state covered by a category for U.S. House members for StateX.
The purpose of this list would then be to provide a single alphabetic list. If that's where it winds up, we could split it into pages by letter (e.g. [[List of U.S, House members(A)]]). In other words, revisit the question later. Lou I18:54, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Proposal / Support: Right now this page is the number 1 longest page on Wikipedia in terms of number of bytes. (That's how I found it on Special:Longpages. I would recommend that it be split into several smaller articles. For guidelines, see Wikipedia:Article size. YechielMan 19:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I dislike breaking up list pages because it defeats the very purpose and nature of a list: the ability to compare companents in context of the entire list. However, if this is so very "borderline usless" because it can't be read, then I would reluctantly and grudingly accept splitting. Before that happens however, I would want a large consensus that this is the case.—Markles13:52, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support. It's almost 500,000 bytes. That's 4Mbit not counting IP overhead, That in turn is a 40-second download on a 56K modem that is getting a 2-1 compression, or approximately an hour on a WAP. Of the 1.7 million pages on Wikipedia, this ine is at #2, and that's only because the first page is using truly horrible HTML for its table. -Arch dude23:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I still oppose splitting. But I agree that it's getting very very big. I've already cut out extra wikilinks which took up a lot. So before we split this article (which, again, I oppose but understand), let's cut something out.—Markles00:19, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support: Some of the sections are over 32KB themselves.
Support Why not just split the article into each letter? Ex: List of former members of the United States House of Representatives - A and so on for each letter? Pbroks1301:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Support Even if WP:SIZE#Occasional_exceptions excepts lists from page size guidelines this article needs to be split for technical reasons. Go to the history and try and compare differences between revisions. I don't know about Internet Explorer but in Firefox it practically crashes the browser. -- Gudeldar18:19, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Eliminate the "Party" column? It's an interesting idea, but I am very firmly against it. There have been far too many people who have been in more than one party, and party labels have evolved so much over time that it would be a disservice not to list them. We could do what was done before to the "State" column and remove the wikilinks from the major parties, but leave the wikilinks for the more obscure parties. But eliminating the "Party" column would be a major disservice to this article and deprive people of a major piece of information about these people. Valadius01:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think the party column is nice, but frankly unnecessary for this article. This is merely a list. Its purpose is just to say that so-and-so was a congressman. We include years and state for the sake of differentiating all the people on the list. Party, is important, but not really necessary for this list. "Leo C. Zeferetti was a member of Congress?" "Yes, he served New York in the 1970s and 80s."—Markles10:29, 7 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If anything is to be done, I strongly recommend it being de-wikilinking the major parties in the Party column. We can determine exactly which parties to de-wikilink and which are so non-notable that they require a wikilink. Valadius15:04, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is a very time-consuming process, since I don't have the know-how to automate this, but on the A's alone, just de-wikilinking the Republican and Democratic parties cut out nearly 9,000 bytes, over 1/4 of the bytes for the A's. I would start with just those two parties for right now, since they constitute the vast majority of the party wikilinks, and revisit the other parties once those two are taken care of. Valadius19:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've de-wikilinked the Republican and Democratic parties in the party column, and it removed nearly 27% of its bytes, a total of 137,720 bytes from its peak size. Valadius20:04, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I am running into a few Representatives who have no party listed. Or, they have a party noed as "ant-administration" or "pro-administration." At this point, I am leaving the party feild blank. Should I list them as independents? LarryQ17:12, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Technically, Anibal Acevedo Vila never was a United States Representative, but a Resident Commissioner. In defining who belongs on this list, we need to reach a consensus on whether or not non-voting members, such as Resident Commissioners or Delegates, should be in the same list as full United States Representatives. Should we include them? Or should there be a separate list? Valadius01:46, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As resident commissioners are treated as representatives for all matters (including committee assignments) except voting on the floor, I think they should be listed here. LarryQ15:17, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly, there's no real point to doing that. The table is really as sorted as it is ever going to get. Sorting by name would likely sort by first name. Sorting by year wouldn't work. Sorting by state wouldn't work either because some Representatives served multiple states. And sorting by party would be impossible, considering the large amount of party-switchers in Congressional history. I'm sorry. Though admirable, it just simply would not work. Valadius00:13, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You could run the table through a simple PHP Script to grab the last name and sort it that way, then output a wikipedia-compatible result, then just paste it in.66.212.199.222 06:20, 18 March 2007 (UTC)Anon[reply]
I got an idea. We take this article and divide into 50. 1 for each state. So instead of having a list of people that formerly served in the US congress house of representatives, it would be like "former US congressmen representing Wyoming, or Alaska or whatever state it happens to be. Then the article will be 1/50th of it's size. The only thing I could think of is that some congressmen may have served in two different states, but that's no big deal, we'll just list em twice. Whattaya think?
Hmmm interesting, perhaps I should have signed my comment eh, anyhow, if that's the case that these articles split on geography already exist, it begs the question why is this article here in the first place. TotallyTempo18:50, 27 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is the largest article on Wikipedia (Special:Longpages - 600k in size) and definitely needs splitting or deletion. Either of the two proposals seem fine. Can this discussion be linked to appropriate WikiProjects so that an agreeable consensus can be formed. → AA(talk) — 16:26, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Support. There's no "added value" here. We have lists of congressmen for each state; we have lists of congressmen for each congress. We don't need the combination that is offered here. The only list that could really come out of this is "list of congressmen who have represented more than one state", and that would be vastly shorter. --Golbez16:38, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This makes more sense than anything else, given the gargantuan size and guaranteed future growth of this article. Matter of fact, it seems really odd that the cats don't already exist. Checked the three ancient congressfolk linked to on Mount Carmel, Illinois and they all seem to be using the same cat as their current successors. Please be careful to create at least two cats for each politician, however: one for the party and one for the district and/or state (district preferred). MrZaiustalk16:48, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong oppose. More like vehemently oppose. This would destroy the spirit and integrity of this article. Look, I have been working on this article off and on for over two years, focusing on it entirely for the past six months. We're approaching the endgame here in terms of this article's completion - see my user page for a fuller understanding of the progress here. If anything is to be done to this article, I might consider a break-up by letter similar to one proposed above on this talk page, but I will not consent to it until the article is completed, which it is tantalizingly close to being. This was destined to be a huge article, and there is PLENTY of value in having a single article, believe me. But if it must be broken up, please, I beg of you, wait until it is completed, and NOT in this fashion. — Valadius17:18, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]