Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Ancestry by County

Ancestry by County

A map from the US Census department indicating the most common country of origin of people in each county.

Came across this while reading about Yooper dialect english. It's an attractive and highly informative map. I found it was one of those maps that has lots of surprising information (like Irish people in Oregon - huh!). It's a vector JPG (sadly) but has few compression artifacts, and very high resolution. It appears in Racial demographics of the United States and was created by Uncle Sam and is therefore in the public domain.

Nominate and support. - Debivort 03:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose — Saved as a compressed JPEG when maps MUST always be saved lossless, preferably as PNG images or, if it has a vector source, SVG. That is my only reason for opposing this image; find the original map and resave it, then I'll support this nom. ♠ SG →Talk 04:57, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you think this version is lossy? If not, does it matter? Debivort 14:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes, it is lossy; you can clearly see the JPEG artifacts. ♠ SG →Talk 06:19, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

~~Neutral~~ - This is a nicely done map. The only thing preventing me from supporting it is the lack of a precise explanation of its meaning. What is the "country of origin" of people: the country where their parents were born? or their grand parents? - Alvesgaspar 13:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's a good question - My guess is that it reflects what people indicate (on the census survey) as their own national ancestry. I don't know what's going on with the people who say their ancestry is "American" but not "American Indian" Debivort 14:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

An explanation is at http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/sf3.pdf but that's for the entire census. Anyway my understanding is that this map is based on the question "What is your ethnic background?" Personally I think the people who say "American" are generally of English or Scots-Irish descent for the most part, they either don't know or don't think it's relevent, as their great-grandparents were probably born in America, so they have little connection to the country their family is from, as opposed to second- and third- generation Americans, whose parents/grandparents spoke the language, remembered the country directly, were still in touch with relatives there, etc. If your family moved to America in the 1760s it's kind of unlikely you know the cousins back in England or wherever.

So ideally people are answering the question "Before they came to America, members of my family lived where?" Which in some cases can require tracing 200-300 years back, and obviously for Native Americans it's impossible to do. I think this is a great image and will try to expand on the information included for it. --W.marsh 14:56, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(Edit conflict with last two replies). These problems worries me. It could well be that the answer will depend on exactly what choices were available. (For example, some people might say they were Hispanic, but a more specific nationality if offered, and then it depends what choices were available and how you add them up whether combined-Hispanic wins). And then you have the usual problems of first past the post voting systems when showing just the "winner". And some ethnicities may hold on to their nationality for longer than others. (Is most of the country really dominated by Germans? Or do they just think of themselves as "Germans" long after other groups have become "Americans"?). And I bet most people are really "bits of this and bits of that" whatever they reply. :-) Stephen Turner (Talk) 14:58, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm one of those bits and bits people - one branch of my family is 8 generations American, the other is 1 generation American. I don't know how I would answer this question - probably leave it blank. Maybe the best thing to do is describe the map as "the nationalities with which people identify their ancestry." Debivort 15:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Support I have tried to clarify that this map represents sample data from the 2000 Census showing the plurality of each county's residents when asked what their ancestry is. I think this is a very interesting map, and while it's true that most people report multiple ancestries, it's still interesting to see what the most common ones in a given part of America are, and it shows the viewer things they might not have realized before, like the large Finish-American population in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for example, and just gives people a bit more context in understanding America (which is, as the cliche goes, a nation of immigrants). Really interesting and informative stuff. --W.marsh 19:14, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose (replaces my previous vote) I went to the web page of the US Census Bureau, whose address is given in the map, and tried to get addicional information about the way it was made. I cannot guarantee that the information is not there but I couldn't find it. This way, without knowing the exact meaning of the data represented, the map is almost useless. Apparentely, and because of its caption(Figure 3), it's part of some report where the origin and meaning of the information should be fully explained. But none of it is depicted in the map. - Alvesgaspar 20:49, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Weak oppose. Assuming the Census people knew what they were doing, this is a nice map. But since we don't know exactly what it means, I can't support this and bring it to FP status. Potentially false data should not be made featured. But the biggest problem is the file format. SVG or at least PNG is highly recommended for maps, and this one is in JPEG. Normally the large size would gain a weak support from me, but combined with the conflict in accuracy, I can only give a weak oppose. --Tewy 23:46, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. As stated in the image upload instructions the peferred (and technologically superior) format for this kind of illustration is SVG. Benefits of SVG include easier editing, including translations of text labels (there are more Wikipedias than just the English one), and high quality printing (SVG provides infinite resolution). --Dschwen 06:14, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While I agree that SVG offers advantages over other formats, I'm not sure not this "rant" (as your template calls it) is appropriate in this situation because this is not a map created for Wikipedia. If this map met all the FP criteria (which I believe it does not), would you vote against it just because somebody in the U.S. Government created it in JPG? MapMaster 16:53, 26 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hypothetical question! My comment is directed at this map. Full stop. There are more problems with this nomination which I'm too lazy to point out. Also: loosen up, rant is obviously self-deprecating. --Dschwen 13:47, 28 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Image should be in SVG format, or at least PNG. Also, trying to keep an open mind about the quality of the data, I followed the link to sf3.pdf to find out what the Census Bureau think it means, but I ended up at a 1200-page document which may or may not have had the information I wanted. Finally, the kerning between sf3.pdf and the closing parenthesis is terrible! So, sorry, it looks as if there's some interesting information here, but at the moment there are both technical faults in the drawing, and a lack of explanation about the meaning. Stephen Turner (Talk) 09:44, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. The map itself is too cluttered by sideboxes, mini-maps, various blocks of text to be a compelling image. The data itself is much too suspect to deserve FP respect (e.g., to the casual reader, "Americans" apparently only live in the upper South and most of the U.S. is occupied by those of German extraction). MapMaster 05:42, 26 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted --NauticaShad e s 13:42, 30 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]