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Talk:List of Superfund sites in California

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Conversion of article to table format

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I have started converting this article to a table format similar to other state Superfund lists. If you have a chance, please select a county or two to add to the list. I have started the list in alpha order, but if it is easier, we could change to some other order. MissionInn.Jim (talk) 20:37, 28 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I propose deleting the county-by-county table of contents, since it only works if the table is sorted by county. The EPA sources are sorted alphabetically by site name, ignoring county location, and the table is much easier to populate if sorted the same way. Since the table is sortable, users can easily find all sites in a given county (except those which cross county boundaries) by sorting alphabetically by county and scrolling to the appropriate place. Dricherby (talk) 13:32, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, you are correct that the TOC only works if sorted by county. Since I am from California, and I created the template, I am obviously partial to it. I think that most users reading the article might first use the TOC rather than sort since they are probably interested in what sites are in their county (I also assume this for all the other superfund lists). I am of course just guessing as to the reason people want to read the article. My thought was that less people would first sort alphabetically or by date, and if they did, the TOC was "above them" on the page already. Part of the problem, as you may know, is that the EPA site used to organize the sites by county rather than alphabetically. Their new site is now alphabetical. I clearly liked the county format since I was more interested in location of sites rather than which one came first in the alphabet. Sort of the same logic as why we have a list for each state & territory, rather than 26 lists for sites that begin with A, B, C, etc. Cmcnicoll (talk) 22:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Dricherby, I am interested to know how the table is easier to input data into if the sites are organized alphabetically. Is there a trick that I am unaware of? I had just been clicking on the progress profile and site descriptions, reading the info, and summarizing it. This takes forever. Are you able to input the data quicker somehow, using a program or something? Cmcnicoll (talk) 22:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The key thing for doing it quickly is to fill in the table a column at a time, where possible, rather than a row at a time. Columns can be filled in by copy-pasting from the EPA site. You get into a rhythm, which means it's much faster to repeat task A ten times, then B ten times, then C ten times (i.e., work by column) than it is to do A then B then C, ten times (i.e., work by row).
CERCLIS IDs, site names and dates (apart from proposal date) can quickly be copy-pasted from the EPA website, using the lists of proposed, final and deleted sites, along with the lists of construction completions and partial deletions. This gets you to a table where every line looks like this, where things in capitals have been replaced by the appropriate values and some entries are blank and will be filled in later. (At this point, we don't know the final date of any deleted site; that will be filled in later, too.)
| CERCLIS-ID || SITE-NAME || [[ County, STATE-NAME|]] | <ref>{{cite web | title=SITE-NAME site summary | publisher=EPA | url= | accessdate=TODAY'S-DATE}}</ref> || || FINAL-DATE || {{center|CONST-COMP-DATE}} || {{center|PART-DEL-DATE}} || {{center|DELETION-DATE}}
All the EPA regions I've looked at have lists of sites within each state which, if you're lucky, can be used to copy-paste the "url=" part of the references, one after another, e.g., here, for Louisiana. (If you're unlucky, you have to click a link from the state page and then click another to get to the site summary, e.g., here, for Washington.) The key point about all this copy-pasting is that if the Wikipedia list and the EPA list are in the same order (i.e., alphabetical), it's just a matter of running down the two lists, copying the values across, without having to hunt around. That gives the basic framework of the table in ten or fifteen minutes for a state of twenty-odd entries — an example is here; you'd already filled in the ID's, site names and parishes, three of the "reason"s and the dates for those three entries. However, if the lists aren't in the same order, you have to go down the EPA list, copy a date, find the relevant entry in the Wikipedia page, paste the date, go back to the EPA page... and even this part takes forever.
Then the tedious bit starts — as you say, there's no way of doing the "reason" column apart from reading and summarizing the EPA site summaries, which also state the county (in the headers) and the NPL proposal and final listing dates. Some of the EPA regions are helpful and provide a very concise description under a heading such as "Threats and contaminants" that can almost be copy-pasted and Wikified; other regions require much more summarizing. Dricherby (talk) 00:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, that makes sense. I had been copying and pasting everything (dates, ID, name, county, etc.) one at a time from the EPA page to wikipedia. You can imagine how long it took to do states like CA, PA, and MI (which I haven't finished the dates yet). When I try to copy just the dates from the EPA website, all of the data is copied. That is to say, I can't just copy a column of data like the dates or IDs. I assume you are saying that you copy everything into the table at once, and then add the wikiformatting around the information, deleting the unneccessary or redundant info. Cmcnicoll (talk) 01:10, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I was copy-pasting one cell at a time from the tables but doing it systematically. At any one time, I was only working with the Wikipedia page and one EPA source page, copying all the data from one source page to the Wikipedia page before moving to the next source page. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot so copying each data item was: highlight text with mouse, Ctrl-C, Alt-Tab, click on place to insert, Ctrl-V, Alt-Tab, go to the next line, repeat. This means I don't spend time hunting for stuff and I don't spend time moving through different tabs/browser windows. It took me about an hour and a quarter to take Texas from here to here. Dricherby (talk) 12:07, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

B.F. Goodrich site name

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Has been changed to Rockets, Fireworks, and Flares Superfund site. Source--108.85.148.69 (talk) 01:30, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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The links to the documents at "http://cfpub.epa.gov/supercpad/......" don't work any more: the web server just provides a "this link is outdated message" => update of the page is required. --MichaelK-osm (talk) 22:17, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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