Talk:Massachusetts General Court
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[edit] List of officeholders
Any reason the officeholders couldn't be added here like at DKosopedia's MGC page? PhilipR 03:17, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
- OK, I added them. But I'm not sure if the one vacancy mentioned in this article predates or postdates DKos' tally (7 GOP, no vacancies). Looks like Wikipedia's version was changed more recently. Will research this. And my addition of DKos as a link in no way is intended to endorse their political take -- if there are other good active US political wikis with pages for MA government, I'll add them too. -- PhilipR 14:14, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Middle Initials
In hacking the names in from DKosopedia and updating them from the official page, my new policy is to remove middle initials except for common or known-ambiguous names (Scott P. Brown or Richard T. Moore, not to be confused with other Scott Browns or a specific Richard Moore). My assumption is, the simplest unambiguous name for a future Wiki page, the better. I'm not too adamant about that though so feel free to dispute the issue here.
PhilipR 14:21, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Counties (edit of 26 May 2007)
It's a small change but it gets a long explanation: First off, there are no "former counties" in Massachusetts (at least not in the sense meant by this article -- the only one I can think of is "York County," i.e., the territory that now forms Maine, although I think there may have also been some colonial-era counties that have since been wiped off the map). There are "former county governments," but the fact that county government functions have been absorbed by the state does not mean the geographic division is now meaningless. There is no Worcester County government, but there sure as heck is a Worcester County Jail. If Worcester is a "former county," then what county is Sturbridge in?
Second change: Senators (and reps, for that matter) are not elected on a county-wide ballot. Therefore the districts are named for the counties in which they lie, not the counties they represent. The previous phrasing gave the mistaken impression that the Worcester-Norfolk senator represents all of Worcester and all of Norfolk counties. ``` W i k i W i s t a h W a s s a p ``` 04:44, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
