Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom/Parties

This page is a guideline of how the Politics of the United Kingdom WikiProject should handle articles related to Political Parties within the United Kingdom.

Assessment

All Party articles should be tagged with the {{WP UK Politics}} banner and assessed on their quality and importance to the project.

Quality

Articles should be judged on the standard quality scale set out by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is replicated on this project's Assessment page.

Importance

The importance assessment is a judgement by each individual WikiProject on what they consider to be their priority articles. In theory the Top importance articles should be the first to reach a level of quality sufficient to be included in Version 1.0 (or a subsequent version) while Low importance articles will usually reach the same level of quality at a later stage.

The following table lists the importance criteria for political party articles within the WikiProject.

Label	Criteria
Top	Parties in UK government or devolved government and the largest opposition party Examples: Labour Party (UK), Conservative Party (UK)
High	All other parties represented in UK, devolved or European parliaments Examples: Scottish Green Party
Mid	Any party with an elected official Examples: Liberal Party (UK, 1989)
Low	Any unelected party Note: This includes parties that had an elected official in the past.

Exceptions

While the generic importance criteria above should apply to the majority of party articles, a small number of exceptions can be made if editors feel a particular party has a different level of importance. If you wish to make an exception to the criteria, please add a new section to the project talk page to explain why you think an exception is necessary. If there are no objections then you are free to make the exception.

The current exceptions are:

• British National Party - should be Mid-importance according to the criteria but has been regraded to High-importance to take account of their consistently high profile in the media.

Categories & Lists

• List of political parties in the United Kingdom
• Category:Political parties in the United Kingdom
• Category:United Kingdom political party stubs

Templates

Infobox

• {{Infobox Political party}}
• {{Infobox British Political Party}}

Navbox

• {{British political parties}}
• {{Scottish parliamentary parties}}
• {{Political parties in Northern Ireland}}

Issues

• Minor political parties appear to be under-represented on Wikipedia. The articles are often stubs with little substance, poorly sourced and subject to deletion on the grounds of insufficient notability (see deletion discussions for English Independence Party, British Public Party, SOS! Voters Against Overdevelopment of Northampton and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Money Reform Party). This WikiProject needs to decide how we will handle minor parties. Options for tackling this issue include:
  • Setting criteria for what we consider to be notable or non-notable parties. This can provide a limited defence against over-enthusiastic deletion of articles, though a consensus at AfD can still overrule or ignore any notability criteria we try to implement.
  • Parties that are considered non-notable can be included within a Minor political parties of the United Kingdom article. Criteria would need to be set on what should be included within the article and all entries will need to be properley sourced. If an entry gains enough length and has sufficient reliable sources to support its own separate article, then it should be able to sustain itself through most AfD discussions.
  • Parties that fall outside of our notability criteria can be totally ignored (I am wary of this one as I think any sourced party should have at least its name shown in a list of political parties even if it doesn't qualify for an article).
• There seems to be confusion about which infobox to use on party articles. Some parties (especially devolved/nationalist parties) use the generic {{Infobox Political party}} while others use the more specific {{Infobox British Political Party}}. This has gone one stage further on the Sinn Féin article where the British template has been used with the "subst:" command (possibly to remove reference to the "British" description within the template title. Options to resolve this issue include:
  • Decide which template should be used primarily and whether the second template is needed at all.
  • Consider whether it is worth renaming the British infobox to avoid problems with nationalist editors. One alternative name could be Template:Infobox Political Parties within the United Kingdom - this avoids reference to nationality, but still might not be acceptable to the Sinn Féin article, which is a cross-border party.

Policies and guidance

• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (political parties)

Proposed guidance

Proposed notability criteria for Political Party articles is being discussed at User talk:Doktorbuk/pp.

Sourcing

No matter their notability or lack of it, all party articles must comply with WP:V, WP:RS and avoid breaking WP:OR. This section attempts to set out some problems and solutions with sourcing party articles.

• Party websites and material - while the most common sources for a political party will be its own publicity material, sources like these cannot be considered very reliable. They can be useful for supporting campaign promises like "They promised to do..." and other minor quotes, but they cannot be relied on to support a whole article.
• The Electoral Commission keeps records of party registrations and funding, so it can be a good source for independent, reliable information.

Do you know any other sources for Political Party articles? If so, please list them here.

Open Tasks

• Tag party articles with the {{WP UK Politics}} banner and assess them based on the above criteria
• Reorganise the List of political parties in the United Kingdom with the option of splitting off minor parties into a separate article for easier management. One method of splitting could be by elected body, e.g. List of political parties in the United Kingdom Parliament or possibly List of elected political parties in the United Kingdom and List of unelected political parties in the United Kingdom
• Tidy the category structure within Category:Political parties in the United Kingdom - some sub-categories have very few articles (such as Category:Political parties in Cornwall), which would suggest a merging of some subcategories
• Identify good examples of party articles to base others on, or develop a list of factors that should be included within each article (a style guide similar to this constituency one would be good)