Talk:List of U.S. state legislature websites

I am the author of the article. I expanded the intro to show why this is useful and belongs on Wikipedia.

Frankly, the reason I created the article is that I research the law of multiple states on a regular basis and I have links to a lot of the state legislatures on my computer. I get tired of having to search around every time I need to find a state's law. WestLaw costs us several hundred dollars per month and does not have a way to download entire chapters. FindLaw and all the other "sources" have the same problem.

After almost a decade of Internet research, I accidentally ran across the National Conference of State Legislatures, whose website has a Java application that pulls up legislature links (in far more detail). That is the only site I have ever found with a "central repository" of legislature links. (The "source" I listed is actually one of my websites. I added that page after creating the Wikipedia article in case somebody wanted to complain about "no sources identified".)

I was going to just add an URL shortcut link on my computer and I decided, "You know, it will be only a little more work to put a list of the sites on Wikipedia, and then everyone can use them."

Yes, users could use WikiPedia's Category: U.S. Legislatures to go to the WikiPedia article for each legislature and then search for a link to the legislature.

• But, a lot of Wiki users don't know that much about how to use it. I didn't.
• A lot of them won't get into it enough to figure that out. They just won't use it.
• Navigating around Categories often is pretty confusing and annoying. I have several articles for which I have been trying to find categories and I keep winding up in the wrong places.
• The Categories approach relies on 50 different authors maintaining the links on 50 different articles, with the link in a different location on each article.
• Instead of one central location, the Categories approach requires jumping through several steps—for each legislature's website. Pretty annoying.
• It's not like bandwidth isn't a problem with Wikipedia. With the List of Legislatures' Websites, the user pulls up one Wikipedia page and clicks on external links. With the Categories approach the user pulls up 51 articles and has to scour through each one to get to where he really wants to go.
• Other than my webpage added after the Wiki article was created, there is no place on the Web that conveniently lists both the name of the state and the URL of the legislature. I didn't just put links, I deliberately put the URLs too. Again, for researchers, because they might want to print that information without having to do massive reformatting manually. If the article is deleted from Wikipedia, I have no real reason to keep it on my site. Which means the info won't be available anywhere. (Try the Java app at National Conference of State Legislatures to see what a pain it is compared to the list in the article.)
• I deliberately broke up the article into sections with labels, to make it easier to find. Originally it was one large table but I found it more convenient for the user the other way--unlike the List of State Legislatures article.

This "could" be merged into the List of state legislatures in the United States article. I am ambivalent about that one for several reasons:

• People looking for "website" information probably won't care about any of the other information.
• The "Legislatures" article is already pretty long.
• Regarding adding an additional cell to each line of the table in the other article, the table is pretty wide already.
• The articles really have significantly different goals and content. The Legislatures article is about the legislatures--their composition, location, etc. The Websites article is strictly a convenient way to get to the legislature and a list of URLs, for those who want to publish the information (e.g., in a list of Sources consulted.)

RickReinckens 04:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)