Talk:Demographics of South Africa

Duplication and formatting in #Other demographic statistics

In early April of 2019, User:BrugesFR added, first as a subsection and then as its own section, #Other demographic statistics adding nearly 3,600 bytes to this article. This overlaps several sections elsewhere, in, e.g., Religion and Age Structure. I have several concerns, not all negative:

1. Some of the statistics (or projections) may be more current than those in the earlier sections and subsections above it, and some (I haven't checked) may add new data or topics not previously presented;
2. But these data are not integrated with the others, so while the earlier charts, tables and listings might well benefit from newer statistics, estimates or projections, this (so far as I can tell) hasn't been done; otherwise we wouldn't have two of so many topics;
3. The new data are generally not formatted, just given as strings of numbers, which makes them less-easily grasped by the non-expert reader than the tables and charts above (I say this as one, who — as a non-expert and non-African myself, but like many other editors here — spent countless hours assembling and formatting those earlier tables, charts and lists);
4. On the other hand (like the section's sources), this subsection does summarise a lot of different facts in one place, while it may not be easy for the general visitor to plough through all those many tables, charts and lists at one sitting. Perhaps this article might benefit from a summary lead paragraph or something like an information box for a hasty or casual reader.

I'd welcome others' comments or proposals.

—— Shakescene (talk) 03:50, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Good wishes to you too. This data is not official from the government, but rather it is data from the CIA World Factbook, excellent reference, all of them and only the first part is from another good page, I only saw before my edit it segmented like this and like that through the page and in all Demographic pages on Wikipedia and I added the amount of data that was missing, i would think there are people who might want to see everything summarized without reading the entire page with this data, and more importantly they can compare some years, they are just different ways of seeing data.--BrugesFR (talk) 03:54, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

If basic data such as infant mortality rates, % of each age group, birth and death rate etc. etc. need to be summarised for viewers to see quickly then it can be placed and updated in the infoboxes of each article (which is the whole point of them).

If you were updating these sections semi-regularly I might be inclined to say to have them at the bottom of the page however they are not and 9/10 on most pages across this project the data is years old and is unusable for the most part. Not only does that cause a headache for me (or anybody reading) because a large part of the article just becomes a mess of tables and data completely unorganised and extracted from each other, for which I have had to clean (or semi-clean) up before, which I can only assume to be that you have added it? Examples of me having to restructure stuff: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. You can judge the outcome by looking at the current version of the article. Apart from it looking messy which is a MASSIVE problem across this project as a whole, it also creates an additional structural problem (again another MASSIVE problem across this project as well) in the articles themselves;

Take for instance Demographics of the United States, a page completely unorganised on basic data is confusing layed out to people. Where do I find for instance the life expectancy of the country? Well I could find it in Life expectancy, Life tables, Vital statistics (for which there is two sections titled that). Or what about birth rates? In Birth rate, in the main Vital statistics area or at the bottom of the page in Demographic statistics. Point being people should not have to scroll all over the place to find data on a specific thing when it should be just layed out in one specific section dedicated to it, besides that it is not even visually appealing to look at, it's just a massive copy-dump of stuff. While you may not done all of stuff like this, I can say you have contributed to it.

To answer all of OP's points, yes, this problem of data being at large unorganised from the rest of the article (if not just duplicating parts of other sections) is not just a symptom of this article but across this project (Demographic articles) like described. These sections should be removed and re-amalgamated into a more structurally consistent framework like I have (tried to do) done on others. Tweedle (talk) 14:18, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Improperly formatted table

The Table under "1904-85 national census numbers" seems to have a couple errors in its formatting, notable some strangely superfluous columns and the bottom row thats just a repeat of the top row.

I'm not sure if this is intentional, which is why im bringing it up here.

Tauin (talk) 11:19, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

I did not create that table, but I did a lot of its formatting, so I'd like to know what concerns you.

I put in that bottom row to save the need to re-scroll upwards in order to understand what each column represents.

The superfluous (blank) columns are just separators included before I tinted the columns and made those separators less necessary. Wikipedia (and MediaWiki) do have ways of adding dark vertical column separators to a table, but I'm not adept or familiar enough to try using them. But those who know how and want to put in the effort are more than welcome to try.

And while I didn't create that table, I'd like to know what seems superfluous. There are two sets for the later years, when the apartheid government of South Africa started excluding statistics from the quasi-independent Bantustans (such as KwaZulu and the Transkei) from their national totals. This means that those who want to compare populations over the same geographic areas need to add, as best they can, the best Bantustan numbers numbers or estimates to those reported by the Republic of South Africa. The official (disaggregated) numbers also need to be listed because they're the hard base for the estimated tables.

And I appreciate your asking first (under recommended Wikipedia etiquette) before making changes that might be reverted and lead to unneeded contention.

—— Shakescene (talk) 15:49, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply, I suspected that the blank columns where there for separation but I was just making sure.

To clarify, I wasn't talking about any of the content being superfluous, just those extra blank columns and the bottom row. Tauin (talk) 18:49, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

After reading a couple help pages on table formatting I've reformatted it to use borders instead of blank cells, you can view it here, please tell me what you think! Tauin (talk) 23:47, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Looks fine to me, and a little bit cleaner.

So [while I can't speak for the table's original creator] I'd have no objection if you were to substitute it for what's there now. —— Shakescene (talk) 03:52, 24 January 2023 (UTC)