This article is written in
Australian English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, realise, program, labour (but Labor Party)) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other
varieties of English. According to the
relevant style guide, this should not be changed without
broad consensus.
A news item involving 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was featured on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the In the news section on 14 October 2023.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Elections and Referendums, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to elections, electoral reform and other aspects of democratic decision-making. For more information, visit our project page.Elections and ReferendumsWikipedia:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsTemplate:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsElections and Referendums articles
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The following discussion is an archived record of a
request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
While the numerical majority here is in favour of merging, I believe this is one of those cases where it is necessary to close oppositely to that majority. Opposers of merging cite relevant policy and guidelines like
WP:NOTSTATS and
WP:LENGTH. Contrariwise, there is a noticeable paucity of such arguments in the comments of supporters. Some suggested including the statistical tables in collapsed form, but
MOS:COLLAPSE was cited as a counterargument to this. Considering all of the above, I find no consensus to merge. --
Maddy from Celeste (
WAVEDASH)11:26, 21 November 2023 (UTC)reply
Comment Per
#Results in each electorate, perhaps we should have the per-electorate breakdown in a separate article, and not in
2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum , where it adds unnecessary clutter. That would also be consistent with
WP:NOTSTATS: "Where statistics [per-electorate results, which individually do not affect the outcome] are so lengthy as to impede the readability of the article, the statistics can be split into a separate article and summarized [per-state, which has a material effect on the outcome, which requires a double majority] in the main article".
Mitch Ames (
talk)
11:51, 14 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Oppose per above, the in-depth breakdown of results would clutter this page; it's quite common to have separate results pages on Wikipedia and I'm not sure why this would be different.
Yeoutie (
talk)
16:43, 14 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Oppose, the article to be merged may meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion because it is holding up acceptance of a draft submitted to AFC. It furthermore does not cite any sources.
Creuzbourg (
talk)
16:56, 14 October 2023 (UTC)'reply
Support I don't see the purpose in having two seperate articles that deal with essentially the same issue. One simply is the end result of the other and it makes logical sense to have them in the same article.
Jurisdicta (
talk)
03:33, 15 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Comment - we are currently at 7 support and 5 oppose. I have added to this article a collapsed table of votes by electoral division, which I hope may address some of the objections raised by the oppose camp.
Riposte97 (
talk)
22:56, 15 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Oppose It'll be way too cluttered with every single electorate. A simple overview on here, and an in depth one over there is good. And it's common on Wikipedia to do this anyway.
Master1701 (
talk)
10:07, 17 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Weak oppose - too soon lets wait and see what happens over the following months it may be that both articles will need to be trimmed down, and then a merge makes sense. It's also possible that a lot more may come out of this that will cause a rethink in the approach.
Gnangarra10:14, 17 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Strongly oppose. The state and national results, which determined the outcome, are sufficient for the main article. The detailed results, however, should be expanded—to include breakdowns of the large differences (which are being intensively debated) between city and country and between areas with and without a substantial Indigenous population. All that does require a separate article.
Errantios (
talk)
21:52, 17 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Support Looking at the other article, it definitely isn't in a good enough shape to be distinctly notable from this article, and it doesn't seem like there's been substantial enough aftermath from the vote to justify splitting the results. As it stands, it should be merged into here and only split later if and only if enough notable events connected with the results occurs, to the point where the the results themselves meet general notability, which, forgive my mistake before, does not seem to be the case.
DarmaniLink (
talk)
02:24, 19 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Comment - The only thing that page has that this one doesn't is a table of results by electoral division. The only reason this page doesn't have that table is that someone removed it citing the existence of the results article.
Riposte97 (
talk)
00:46, 20 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Support. The two articles should be merged, with the large table on the "Breakdown of voting by electorate" being made collapsible. If the results for different electorates were expanded with visual guides to see voting trends, it may be beneficial to make it a separate article due to
TOOBIGFropFrop (
talk)
03:33, 20 October 2023 (UTC)reply
This discussion has now been open for well over a week. By my count, we have 18 in favour, and 12 opposed (one of whom wanted to just delete the results article). On top of this discussion, this page has naturally grown to include the aftermath of the results, whilst the Results page has no new information. I'm going to press ahead with the merger, as I'm yet to see an explanation as to why
WP:TOOBIG applies here.
Riposte97 (
talk)
23:57, 23 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Per my previous comments on both pages, I still do not think the per-division results belong on the main page (
2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum) because the per-division results do not affect the outcome at all - only the aggregated per-state and national totals do. If they are sufficiently interesting to include at all,
WP:NOTSTATS suggests that they ought to be on a separate page. It has been suggested that the per-division table be included collapsed by default, but
MOS:COLLAPSE says "Collapsible templates should not conceal article content by default ... This includes ... tables".
Mitch Ames (
talk)
02:26, 24 October 2023 (UTC)reply
I've had a read of both policies, and I don't believe either truly apply here, for the following reasons:
WP:NOTSTATS: This policy seems to be designed to prevent reams of stats clogging paragraphs. It explicitly advises that this can be helped by putting stats into a table, as we have already done. There is no issue with readability if the table is collapsed.
MOS:COLLAPSE: This policy is designed to prevent collapsed tables causing glitches for some users. It explicitly allows for tables in supplementary sections to be collapsed by default. Granted, the table will not be auto-collapsed if a user does not have JavaScript enabled, but I don't think it's too laborious to scroll down the page in that case. We could further ameliorate this by putting the tables at the end of the page.
Finally, isn't it a little bit odd to argue that the stats in question are not important enough to include on the main page, but are important enough to retain on a different page that would otherwise add no additional information? NM has pointed out to me that I shouldn't close a contentious discussion myself, so I'm hoping to be able to convince you.
Riposte97 (
talk)
10:11, 24 October 2023 (UTC)reply
isn't it a little bit odd to argue that the stats in question are not important enough to include on the main page, but are important enough to retain on a different page — I'm not arguing that they are important enough to retain; I've said that I don't think they are relevant. I'm arguing that if someone else thinks they are important enough to retain, they should be on a separate page.
Mitch Ames (
talk)
12:35, 24 October 2023 (UTC)reply
You should only merge if 1) there is no further discussion for a while, which is normally a week or more, or 2) there is unanimous consensus. Neither applies here. I think it’s better you get an admin or an uninvolved third party to determine the appropriate next step. You can request it on
WP:ANC.
NM08:05, 24 October 2023 (UTC)reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Corporate funding
In the 'Campaign' section under No it is shown that "Advance has been funded by millionaires..." (naming some corporate principals). No similar revelations appear under the Yes Campaign which was funded to a much greater degree by major corporates including BHP, Rio Tinto, Qantas, banks, universities, etc. Perhaps an interested editor could restore some balance here.
Bjenks (
talk)
05:21, 1 November 2023 (UTC)reply
I agree with the
removal of the word "unsuccessful" (
reinstated by
Safes007) in particular with the reasoning that the referendum itself did not fail - only the proposal to change the Constitution failed. The referendum was successful in that it unambiguously determined that a majority did not support the change to the Constitution, eg the referendum process and results were not challenged by the High Court (or anyone else), and the results were accepted/believed by all, even if many were not happy with the results. Similar to
91.113.97.206's edit comment, I think that saying that the referendum failed is akin to presuming/implying that "Yes" was the correct (successful) answer, and that "No" was the wrong (unsuccessful) answer - which we Wikipedians ought not do.
Mitch Ames (
talk)
09:09, 27 February 2024 (UTC)reply
it is a simple statement of fact — I don't think it is that simple, because the word "unsuccessful" is being used to describe the process (referendum), not the outcome (changing the Constitution) - and the process was successful, in that it recorded the votes.
Referendums in Australia are "votes ... where the electorate may approve or reject a certain proposal" - ie rejecting a proposal is just as valid as approving it. An unsuccessful referendum would be one that did not produce a (clear, legally valid, accepted by the public) result. (Eg the WA part of the 2013 Australian Senate election was unsuccessful, in that the results were declared void and we had to have
another election in WA.)
this is consistent with other articles about referendums — and I think they should be reworded for the same reason.
I think this criticism may be true strictly speaking, however I think the "referendum failed" is colloquially used to mean "the proposed law that was voted on the referendum failed to achieve a double majority". I think the benefit of this sentence being concise and getting across the proposed change was unsuccessful outweighs a longer, more technically correct sentence. If someone formulates a sentence that gets these two points across in a concise way though, I'd support such a change.
Safes007 (
talk)
10:08, 27 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Why do you believe so strongly it refers only to the process? I don't take it to mean that. From a google search, the phrase "unsuccessful referendum" appears to be commonly used by both the media (
1,
2) and legal scholars (
1,
2) alike. At the very least, the world at large doesn't seem to share the same nitpick. I think it's fine.
Endwise (
talk)
10:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Endwise, I agree with you, although your references are a bit erratic. Your first "media" reference is to a newspaper article by two legal scholars, while the first "scholars" reference is to someone who denies any legal background. Nonetheless, you have cited three law professors expert in this area: Paula Gerber, Melissa Castan and Helen Irving. All of them speak of "success" or "failure" of a referendum as a short way of talking about success or failure of a referendum proposal. It is inexact, indeed, but it seems to be accepted.
Errantios (
talk)
22:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Why do you believe so strongly it refers only to the process? — because the adjective "unsuccessful" immediately precedes the noun "referendum", and the referendum is a process that "
may approve or reject a certain proposal".
If you are trying to be more accurate, I don't think this solves that problem, as if we define "referendum" as "public votes held on important issues", the voting process can't "reject" the proposed Voice to Parliament. It's the result of the process that led to the proposal being unsuccessful. To be accurate, this would have to have something like "The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held on 14 October 2023 in which the proposed constitutional amendment did not receive sufficient votes to be enacted." I think its simpler to stick with the current version.
Safes007 (
talk)
12:43, 28 February 2024 (UTC)reply
the voting process can't "reject" the proposed Voice to Parliament — the referendum question was "Do you approve this proposed alteration [to alter the Constitution to establish the Voice]?" Implicitly, "no" means "reject the alteration/Voice". While I admit that there could be a strict distinction between the "referendum/process" and the people voting Yes/No, I suggest that "referendum rejecting the Voice" is a still an improvement on "unsuccessful referendum".
A compromise might be "... was a ... referendum in which the voters rejected the ... Voice ...", but that's getting more verbose. (
talk)
13:19, 28 February 2024 (UTC)reply
How about this then: "The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held on 14 October 2023 in which the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament was rejected."
Safes007 (
talk)
00:32, 29 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Adding my voice to say that I don't think "unsuccessful referendum" should be used as it is both inexact and value-laden. The referendum was not unsuccessful it was actually carried out successfully - the proposal was unsuccessful. The ideas of it being successful or unsuccessful also indicates that success was a "yes" outcome and failure was a "no" outcome. From the perspective of the no campaign, the referendum was actually successful. I think this misconception of successful/unsuccessful stems from the referendum question being yes/no and the government bringing the referendum supporting the yes vote. When you look at the
Brexit vote, it would make no sense to call it successful as the vote was not yes/no and the government bringing it did not support it. I don't understand the need to pack everything into the first sentence. We can have a first sentence explaining the referendum and a second one giving the result - just like Brexit vote article.
Vladimir.copic (
talk)
23:08, 28 February 2024 (UTC)reply
I think we need a comprehensive first sentence, like
Mitch Ames's alternative:
Safes007, you have since proposed an alternative of your own, which I reproduce here so as to get the discussion back into sequence:
The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held on 14 October 2023 in which the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament was rejected.
I agree with this text, although would prefer "a proposed". Mitch Ames's alternative (in my previous post) still seems better to me and I hope we can all agree on it.Errantios (
talk) 12:56, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
Errantios (
talk)
23:25, 29 February 2024 (UTC)reply
I think “the” makes more sense if we use the exact name for the proposed body. I.e. “The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held on 14 October 2023 in which the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament was rejected.”
Safes007 (
talk)
07:25, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply