Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Indiana/Archive 1

Archive 1

Bad links abound

I am concerned about putting link brackets [[ ]] around every single place on the list. I myself removed 2 out of the 3 links in the Steuben County section because they were just plain wrong and there was no existing article on the actual Steuben County Place.

Looking through the rest of the list, I found more bad links than good. For example, out of the 5 blue-links, in Allen County, 1 was a good link, 1 dumped me into a disambiguation page (from which I found the article), and 3 were just bad.

In other words, based on my sample, most of the blue links are wrong and misleading.

I strongly suggest that we remove at least the red-link brackets. If and when, someone writes an article, then they can create the link. MrHarman 21:38, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd be surprised if any of the links are to Registered Historic Places in Indiana. They just happen to go to some article with the same name. We might as well remove all the bad links until an applicable article is written. Rfrisbie^talk 22:27, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

We also could rename "bad" articles that really need a "disambiguation" by using naming conventions similar what's used for school names: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (schools). See List of high schools in Indiana for an example. That way, red links can stay red, "bad blue" links will go red, and "real blue" links will be obvious. It also sets up proper article names when the time comes for something to be written. Rfrisbie^talk 23:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I guess I voted for two different choices, so I'll break the tie and vote for the second, "renaming" option! >;-o) Rfrisbie^talk 23:33, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Two examples would be Masonic Temple as [[Masonic Temple (Fort Wayne, Indiana)|Masonic Temple]] and Masonic Temple as [[Masonic Temple (Muncie, Indiana)|Masonic Temple]]. Rfrisbie^talk 02:16, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, the problem with any naming convention will be that there are many good articles already written on many of these places. I would guesstimate perhaps a couple dozen for Indiana and hundreds throughout the nation. Would we change the name of each of these articles simply to fit the Historical Places naming convention? They may already have a separate naming convention or be so famous that a Historic Places naming convention would be the tail wagging the dog. Or would there be double-redirects??

I guess I was looking for a quick fix to the problem, perhaps by at least deleting the red-links to prevent further spurious links. That could be done within half-an-hour at most. Moreover, I think all the red-links just don't look good. Is there a rule about how much red there should be?? MrHarman 03:52, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi, MrHarmon. I don't know if you think I was suggesting changing the names of existing articles, but I'm not. I'm talking about disambiguation of the same name for different things, such as the Masonic Temple in Fort Wayne is not the same as the Masonic Temple in Muncie, or any other location. If articles ever are written about them, I'm sure they will reference general articles about Freemasonry and related topics.

As far as red links go, here's a quote from the project working on lots of them, "While it is perfectly valid to have a red link to a topic that will one day have an encyclopaedic article of its own, some articles may contain red links to topics that never will (or should!) exist. If any of the articles below do this, correct them then remove from the list."

My impression is that if an article should be written about something, especially in a list like this, then red links are fine. Considering the entire Category:National Register of Historic Places was created this way, others must think they are okay too.

If it's okay with you, I can go ahead and start working on disambiguating the "bad" blue links here. It won't take too long, and it will give me a chance to visit a few more historical articles. :-) Rfrisbie^talk 12:22, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I guess I'm still a bit confused. For example, how would you handle the Allen County Courthouse, which has a good blue-link? I would suggest leaving this alone. How about the Allen County Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception which sends you to a disambig page, which in turn has the correct link?? I would think that the link should send us directly to the correct article, rather than a disambiguation page.

Bottom line, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem and any Indiana solution should also be compatible with the other states (which I see have exactly the same problems with bad blue links).

Sorry, I guess I'm better at finding than fixing problems.  : )MrHarman 13:27, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Finding problems is a good thing! ;-) In this case, all the List of National Register of Historic Places entries, the "problem" (lots of red links), was created on purpose. I'll add one more "rule" to my suggestion - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." So, Allen County Courthouse stays put, it's fine. Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception for Fort Wayne already has the article, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Fort Wayne. For this list, I would just keep the display looking the same (as common usage) by changing the wikilink to a "pipe" that bypasses the disambiguation page and looks like this [[Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Fort Wayne|Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception]] and displays like this Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. For any "bad" blue links that don't have an article, I would use the naming conventions I suggested to make a new red link. Rfrisbie^talk 14:53, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me, Rfrisbie. Go get 'em! MrHarman 15:56, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

HoKay! ;-) Rfrisbie^talk 16:00, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Done! Rfrisbie^talk 17:30, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Useful

I have found this page useful. It gives me places to go check out. I did all the Jeffersonville ones, and plant to get to most of the Clark and Floyd ones by the end of the month. I did have to edit those that were wrong, and even created a few that were missed.--Bedford 04:58, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Standardization of state NRHP lists

A discussion (and a bit of action) has been started about standardizing the tables for all the state's NRHP lists. Discussion can be found here. Input is encouraged! Murderbike (talk) 10:03, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

grouping the Indiana counties into regional list-articles

a possibility for groupings, from Geography of Indiana article

There's been some reaction to an editor's splitting out of Indiana NRHP lists into a separate list-article for each county, even when the county list is very short. Some splitting is necessary and helpful. I believe Ebyabe and everyone concerned would be happy to move the split-out tables into bigger pages with geographically grouped sets of counties. How can Indiana be divided into groups of counties, in a way that allows us to chunk together NRHPs in the same area, in groups of 100 or so (and not more than 200 in a single group).

Specifically, is there any tourist region partition of Indiana into 5 or 10 regions, or any other partition, available? Note, for comparison, National Register of Historic Places listings in Puerto Rico, which i recently helped divide up into 6 tourist region-based areas, based on input from a discussion at its Talk page. doncram (talk) 16:56, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

At right is one map showing regions of Indiana from the Geography of Indiana article. But i don't know what counties are in each, and whether that partition is fine enough. This will be easier to sort out once the state-wide tabulation is completed so we know how many NRHPs are in each county. doncram (talk) 17:08, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

The editor would be me. Ironically, I feel silly making the short-short list-articles, but I don't think there should be tables on the main page. The mix of links to other pages and tables looks haphazard to me. Another methodology for splitting them out would be fine. Would they have to be split out regionally? There are only 6 of the counties with 1 or 2 listings, could a page be made just for those? Whatever works best, that's the ticket. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 17:15, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

That's okay, your splitting them out and table-izing is advancing this along fine. I think they should be regrouped into geographical regions, so that the accompanying Google map / Bing map links work well. Rather than in alphabetical chunks, and rather than having all the smallest counties in one state-wide mish-mash.

Northwest Indiana apparently consists of Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, and Jasper counties, which have ~43, ~25, 15, 5, and 6 NRHP listings, respectively. That probably makes one good grouping as National Register of Historic Places listings in Northwest Indiana, and the separate county list-articles can be converted to redirect to that. Regrouping this way can wait until all the individual, one at a time county articles are table-ized. doncram (talk) 17:20, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Filled in those tallies, so it totals to about 94, as someone else already pointed out. Which works for one list-article for Northwest Indiana, in my view. doncram (talk) 21:54, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I would really rather just have one large statewide list with only the largest counties split out. I see nothing wrong with reasonably large lists, and a mix of tables and links seems fine. Otherwise, I'd go with Nothern, Central, and Southern (see Geography of Indiana). How many does the state even have total? That would help me with an opinion. From the incomplete table it appears that almost every county has fewer than 25 except Vigo (45), Allen (54), and Marion county, which already has over 200. I don't think a large number is a problem at all, and counties will be separated from each other with headings anyway. Ebyabe, I guess you can continue to tableize by county, but we will have to follow through on combining all of them. Reywas92^Talk 17:24, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Northwest Indiana would have 85 listings. I really think it would be okay to be bigger than that, having all of Northern Indiana. Reywas92^Talk 17:31, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

85 sounds okay to me. My understanding is that there will be about 1500 NRHPs state-wide. We'll have to see about whether a complete partition into sensible regions can be sorted out. Indianapolis's county, Marion, can be separate, certainly, from rest of Indianapolis metro region.

Southwestern Indiana apparently includes "the five southwesternmost counties"—Gibson, Posey, Spencer, Vanderbergh, and Warrick. The Southwestern region's six northern and eastern counties are Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, Perry and Pike. These have: 8, 20, 8, ~96, 7; and 11, 11, 14, ~1, 8, and 3 NRHPs, respectively. doncram (talk) 17:37, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Filled in tallies, that makes total of approximately 187 which is okay for Southwestern to be one chunk. Dividing the state into just 3 big swathes won't work, the chunks have to be smaller. doncram (talk) 20:46, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

There's also the consideration of additions. For instance, what if a county with 2 listings had 5 or 6 new ones added in a week? Or more? Would there have to be rearranging then? One week here in Florida, there were 12 new listings in a county in one week! Mind you, it was in Volusia County, which already had over 80 listings, but you see my point. Also consider the computer memory issue. I believe it's recommended that articles not go over 40k, to make them easier for users to load and edit. Each of the color templates takes up memory, as well as each photo thumbnail. Eventually, there should be a photo for every site. That can suck up a bunch of memory. I guess I'm taking the long view, and playing devil's advocate. Back to y'all. --Ebyabe (talk) 17:39, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Hm, take that back a bit. Volusia County has about 100 listings, with photos for most of them, and it's only 37k. So 100 per page or less is prolly a good benchmark. Back to table-izing. --Ebyabe (talk) 17:45, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, per WP:SIZE, there's not really a limit on size; a huge number of articles go beyond 40kb. The main limit is not to have too much prose, but lists are usually fine. Most of that size is the table. With your estimate of 1500 total and thinking 85 is a good size, then there would be 17 articles altogether, which is still too many. Lots of subarticles dilute the quality. At maximum, I'd go with the six regions and Indy, though I'm not against that still being together. There are 118 NRHPs in the counties surrounding Indianapolis. That plus the 200 of Marion county would make an article about 80kb, which is not too long, especially when the whole page is tables. Your 37kb could be a good benchmark, but there's nothing wrong with being bigger. Reywas92^Talk 18:58, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

You're not absorbing or not accepting the idea that keeping less than 200 is good. Perhaps you haven't yet browsed the linked Google or Bing maps for other state lists. For example, New York State's list is in fact broken up into individual counties or even smaller, and the associated map links within those articles work well. There is a hard limit of 200 coordinates that are displayed in Bing maps, although it gives you no indication, it just does not show anything for items past 200th (or at least this was the case recently when someone analysed this about LiveSearch maps, now renamed to be Bing maps). Google maps can display many more sites, but are not generated on the spot for any reader arriving; sometimes to get the Google map to display you have to click on the Google map for a big county, and then come back again hours later, and then maybe it will work, or maybe you have to keep coming back several times so that Google's system will decide to cache it. So I am inclined to set these up so that the Bing maps work well now. doncram (talk) 21:04, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I did not know that there was a limit for the maps. I would think that there would be a way to customize the map template to only include a certain section and have one for each section. If you still insist on 200, then the lists should be as close to that as possible. Reywas92^Talk 21:46, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Most logical subdivisions of Indiana I see are typical Northern, Southern, and Central. Divisions beyond that are usually based on metro areas. Indianapolis, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Louisville, Terre Haute, Chicago, South Bend, Lafayette. I agree with Reywas, that a large list would probably be preferable and then have counties split out to their own list, maybe somewhere around the 50 items mark. Per WP:SIZE, what counts is the visible content, with tables there is a great deal of code that is not visible.

In regards to your original question, I don't beleive there is any tourist split-up beyond northern, southern, and central. In the north tourism is mainly around the great lakes and the dunes. In the south around the Amish villages and historical site seeing, in the central is all the museums, ball parks, etc in Indy. Indiana's not a significant tourist destination. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 19:59, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for responding! Okay, well, I think every state has a tourism department and at least sometimes they divvie the state up into regions. Hmm, Indiana's tourism office doesn't give separate maps as far as I can tell, but the drop-down menu at the bottom of this official Indiana tourism page gives 6 regions (north, west, east, central, south, south-central) for you to search within, when looking for "deals and discounts". Any partition, official or unofficial, could possibly work, but it seems to be best in wikipedia to use someone else's partition, not to invent a new one. Note, it will probably also make sense to identify neighborhoods within Indianapolis according to some partition, too. doncram (talk) 21:04, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, u can see the tourism office's partition of the state into 6 regions in map here. Not same as partition into 6 regions in the map on this page. doncram (talk) 22:22, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

There are lots and lots of neighborhoods, and the cultural districts only apply to downtown. Nothing is county-wide. I really don't think Indianapolis needs to be split up though. Reywas92^Talk 21:46, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that Indianapolis does not have to be split. You might want to find a partition of it into neighborhoods, anyhow, and use that to make a sortable Neighborhoods column in its one list-article. Like List of RHPs in Boston is developing. So that a reader can sort it into an order where places close by are together. But that is not an issue for here, it could perhaps be discussed at Talk of the Marion county page, later, if there's interest. I'm done on the Indy split subject, anyhow. :) doncram (talk) 22:22, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

a proposal

Okay, how about this: Keep the alphabetical list of counties on the state-wide page. However, the counties link to different places: Put the Southwest counties into one list-article, put the Northwest counties into another. Group the smaller counties that remain in the South, Central, and North regions (besides the ones in Southwest and in Northwest) into three pages, one for each. And, split out the bigger individual counties as necessary so that the South, Central, and North pages aren't too big. Marion gets its own page, but Marion could perhaps be further divided, later into Indianapolis vs. other (but there are only about 7 non-Indianapolis NRHPs in the county) and then Indianapolis might be divided into north vs. south or east vs. west, if there is a natural way to divide the city. I added a tentative division assignment column to the state-wide tally table. We can use the column until the division is done, then possibly delete it or possibly keep it. doncram (talk) 21:40, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I think that work. Adhering to North, South, and Central would keep with overall cultural and georgraphical divisions. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 22:49, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Reywas92^Talk 22:51, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

It would be easier to implement this if one of you would identify North vs. South vs. Central in the table of counties in the state-wide article here, then. I or some other non-Indianitarian could look them up individually but it would take a lot longer. And possibly within Central, identify which are in the Indy metro area. doncram (talk) 07:33, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

thumb. I added all the regions. I also found a grand total of 1687 sites in the state, but my math needs to be checked. And does a boundary increase count separately? Reywas92^Talk 17:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! About any boundary increases, no those should not contribute to the total. There should not be separate rows in the NRHP list-tables for the original and also for the boundary increase items, although there exists a separate NRHP listing number for the boundary increases and sometimes the NRIS-based tables come in with separate rows for them (often when there has been a rename of a historic district due to the boundary increase). Can you list any such instances you are aware of, here, so that we/I could address them systematically? For boundary increases in other list-articles I have worked on, I have created the corresponding one article needed, recorded both the original and boundary increase info into that article, and also revised the list-table entry to cover both original and increase location descriptions and to cover both dates of original listing and increase. I would be willing to do some examples (or perhaps all of such cases) here in Indiana, too. doncram (talk) 08:51, 11 June 2009 (UTC)