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Ballotpedia:WikiProject State Legislatures

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Contents

The State Legislature Project is a Ballotpedia work project designed to improve, expand and organize articles about state legislators and state legislatures.

There are five main types of articles:

  1. Articles about the 99 state legislative chambers.
  2. Profiles of the approximately 7,300 incumbent state legislators.
  3. Profiles of candidates for state legislature.
  4. Articles that are overviews of state legislative elections and special elections.
  5. Overview articles that compare various features of state legislatures, such as States with a full-time legislature.

The sections below discuss each type of article, and direct the reader to additional resources for researching and writing each type of article, as well as outlining the templates most frequently used in this project.

If you expect to be working on articles related to state legislatures or state legislators, we strongly recommend that you type {{User state legislature project}} at the beginning of your user page. Doing so will enable you to immediately access this page from your user page, as well as other key pages in the state legislative project.

When you see the symbol Approveda in the lists below, it is an indicator that a particular set of guidelines is developed to the extent that you can generally rely on it for your work, although there are always anomalies that will require you to be a resourceful problem-solver...or to ask someone who can answer any questions you may have, if you get stuck.

{{state legislatures}}, Portal:State legislatures

Profiles of legislators and candidates

See also: Writing:Profiles of state legislators, {{legislative profiles}}
When you see this symbol, you are on a page that includes writing guidelines that apply to the state legislative project

Approveda Starting the article
Approveda Infobox and photo
Approveda Introductory section
Approveda District details
Approveda Committee assignments
Approveda Policy positions
Approveda Election history
Approveda Donors

  • Recent news
  • Legislative scorecards

Approveda Personal
Approveda Links and references
Approveda Succession box

  • Navigation templates

Approveda Categories

State legislatures

See also: Writing:Profiles of state legislatures, {{State legislative chamber profiles}}

All 148 articles already exist, with standard categories, so the main purpose of these writing guidelines is to allow further development of the articles and to ensure that, as far as possible given the individual variances between legislative chambers, the articles follow a standard flow.

Approveda Introductory (lead) section
Approveda Leadership
Approveda Partisan breakdown
Approveda Election histories
Approveda Lists of members
Approveda Standing committees
Approveda Districts
Approveda Histories
Approveda Notable features
Approveda External links
Approveda Graphics
Approveda Categories

State legislative elections

How to write
overview articles about
state legislative elections
Ballotpedia:WikiProject State Legislatures#Lists of writing guidelines
Starting the article
Introduction • What's at stake?
Campaign finance
Qualifications
List of candidates
Party colors
Election results
Impact of term limits
"See also" • External links
Library of tutorials
How to write candidate profiles
Writing about legislatures
State legislative project

Writing about

For more detail, see Writing:Overview articles about state legislative elections

The main components of an article about a state's state senate or state house elections in 2010, and the order in which they should appear, are:

Approveda An introductory section.
Approveda A section about what's at stake.
Approveda A section about campaign finance.
Approveda A section about qualifications.
Approveda A list of the candidates.
Approveda A "see also" section.
Approveda External links.

Key articles

State legislative committees

State legislative comparisons

Articles that give broad overviews of features of state legislatures include:

State legislative news

Writing guidelines
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Ballot measures
Law • Recall
State legislatures
Legislators
Chambers
Elections
State executives
Elections
Congress
Elections
Congressional districts
News articles
See also: Ballotpedia:WikiProject News

State legislative news is a section of short news stories about state legislatures and state legislators/candidates. The format for writing news in this section follows the same general format for news described in Ballotpedia:WikiProject News. What is different about state legislative news is the topic, and the categories that are used.

The state legislative news area has its own assignment desk. The state legislative news assignment desk is where staff, editors, writers, etc., should place links to information about state legislatures/legislators/candidates that they hope someone else will write a story about, or that they expect to eventually get to themselves.

Assignment desk

Adding {{User WikiProject News}} to your user page will enable you to quickly access the legislative assignment desk whenever you want to work on state legislative news.

News categories

Any news stories written about state legislatures should be added to this category, in addition to the standard categories used for news:

Category:State legislative news

Lists of writing guidelines

Ballotpedia:WikiProject State Legislatures#Lists of writing guidelines

Project templates

The main templates most people use as they work in this project are:

State senators

State reps

Writing templates

Research links

Tips

Article improvement

See also: Articles to improve

As the project develops, some pages may be rapidly created and may need to be revisited at a later point. For more on articles that are missing components or may need improvement, click here.

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State legislatures
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