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NationalRegisterBot

User:NationalRegisterBot has just been approved to tag articles with {{NRIS-only}}. I will operate this bot manually, probably about as often as I update the Progress page. It is able to find articles which are only sourced to NRIS and tag them, as well as remove tags on articles which have been expanded since tagging. The initial run will tag probably ~10,000 articles (this list will eventually be moved to the bot's userspace) and take several hours (days?). There may be extended pauses while I do other things off-wiki, but I'll post here when the initial run is complete. You can also check Special:Contributions/NationalRegisterBot to keep an eye on what the bot is doing. After the initial run, I expect the bot to run rather quickly each week since (hopefully) few to no new NRIS-only articles will be created, and I feel like most people will probably manually remove the tag if the articles are expanded. If someone removes the tag from an article without expanding it, the bot will simply re=add it on the next run and continue to do so until the article is expanded; there is no opting out.

Also after I finish the initial run, I'll update the Progress page with NRIS-only stats, so we can get a better view of exactly the state of our project. I'll probably create a new map as well. Keep in mind also that this bot is expandable, now that it has been initially approved. If there is some other task that people want the bot to do, I'll see if I can program it and ask for approval. Thanks for the patience with this over the past few months.. I wish it could have happened faster. Look for updates soon!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:31, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

and the first article Kenilworth Inn identified by the bot has been fixed. And by that I mean copyvio'd text removed, new reference and other fixes. Thanks for persevering. dm (talk) 20:40, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
The code is now running. It's still determining how long it will take (current estimate is ~14 hours), but it looks like it's tagging ~15 articles/min, so 10,000 should take about 11 hours. Like I said before I'll probably pause it because I don't want to sit here for half a day watching it haha. Let me know if any errors are found!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:34, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
I've paused for the night. I got partially through the F's, but my internet connection is freaking out right now. In total I just tagged 3472 articles. I'll tag the remaining ~7000 over the next day or two.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 03:05, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, in that 3472, you managed to hit my watchlist 8 times (and all are correct in having only the NRIS as a ref). Thankfully, I didn't write any of them ;). Anyway, good work getting this approved. Projects need kicks like this every once in a while. Chris857 (talk) 03:30, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
4 of the 3472 were on my Nebraska watchlist, and they all check out correctly: only NRIS as a reference. Looking good so far... Ammodramus (talk) 03:57, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

(I'm going to mention several usernames in this comment but won't link them until we figure out what, if anything, we want to do/say) I set the bot running again last night when I got home (~1 am central) and let it tag as I slept. I just woke up (~7 am central) and stopped it, but it got into the R's before that. I think the running tally now is 8212 articles tagged. One thing I have just noticed that I didn't think about before is that since the bot is tagging these articles, I will have a centralized location to keep up with changes to tagged articles, i.e. the bot's watchlist. In looking through edits to tagged articles, I've found some great ones and some... not so great ones.

  • User:Beyond My Ken has expanded First Houses, 19 Rector Street, and 51 Market Street. (Barnstar anyone? Should we make our own, or is there a fitting one?)
  • The same user, however, has been moving the tag down to the bottom of the page, which I'm fine with I guess, but I was under the impression that template messages should be at the top of the page. See, for example, [1][2]
  • User:Smallbones has also been expanding articles–Chase County Courthouse (Kansas) is an example
  • User:‎Nvvchar expanded Boca Chita Key Historic District by thousands of bytes. Another barnstar?
  • I was reverted once here by an IP (173.58.213.175). Though this edit can be manually reverted, the bot would re-tag articles like this on its next run as I said before.
  • This edit simply moved a reference into an inline cite and commented out (not removed) the tag. The bot will be confused with this and will still label the page as tagged, although I guess that won't hurt anything as far as categorization and untagging goes.

I'm sure I lit up several people's watchlists last night; my own was pegged 23 times. If anyone finds any articles that were tagged inappropriately, let me know. I'll tag the others hopefully later today/tonight, but I'm off to class now!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

  • Great... I think the next step is a quick check to see that the NRIS actually has an entry on the property. In my work on various Masonic buildings that are NRHP listed, I found a few cases where the NRIS website was cited, but the NRIS website did not actually have an entry for the property. This omission does not mean the property isn't on the NRHP ... it simply means that we need a different source to support the fact... It's a flaw with citation (the citation is flawed because it does not support the statement that the property is NRHP listed) not a flaw with the information. In such cases, we simply need to find another source. Blueboar (talk) 15:42, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Of the things pegged on my watchlist today, all of them had not an ounce of non-NRIS sourcing except two: Portage Point Inn Complex and Rieger Hotel. Granted, neither is a bug since both have only one set of <ref></ref> tags and cite templates, but the PPIC at least links to a http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/hso/sites/9675.htm decent source], so the article could easily be expanded and sourced inline. I will probably get into the swing of fixing up some of these articles once Wikipedia:Stub Contest starts (Dec 1). Chris857 (talk) 17:56, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

First run complete!

I've just completed the first run. There have been a few reversions, e.g. on Holy Cross Monastery and Church, Church San Blas de Illescas of Coamo, and Parroquia del Espiritu Santo y San Patricio, all of which claim the articles have other sources, but the other sources are external links or other templates. I believe these need to be turned into inline references.

Now that it's finished, I'm going to re-dump the list of to-be-tagged and to-be-untagged articles and see what's changed. More details coming!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:17, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Maryland Historic Marker location

I need to find out which county in Maryland this historic marker is in;

No websites connected to it are telling me anything.
Montgomery County. 39°4.876′N 77°22.383′W / 39.081267°N 77.373050°W / 39.081267; -77.373050 near Seneca, Maryland, about 15 miles NW of DC. See [3]. If you know anything about when it is proper to upload Maryland highway signs, please do let me know. Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:03, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. I should've known about this, although that site doesn't always have every marker.. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 21:23, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Bowery - is it a Stub, Start, or B class article?

The Bowery is a B class article itself, however the NRHP portion about the historic district is a few sentences buried in the middle of the much longer article about the street. Depending on how you count, it could be a stub or a B class. I split the difference and called it a start. Thoughts? dm (talk) 22:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I'd say it's still a B-class article, regardless of how long the NRHP-related portion of it is. IMO assessments should be for the entire article, not the small section of it that's relevant to the project doing the assessing. And in the case of this article, most of the article is about the historic district, even though the technical details of the listing are confined to a section. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 23:14, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
I disagree... If only a portion of an article relates to a particular project, the project should base its rating on just that portion. It is very helpful for editors to see how different projects rate the relevant portions of an article ... it tells them which portions of the article need improvement. In the case of the Bowery article, the difference in rating is a very good indication that, while other portions of the article are in decent shape, the portion of the article relating to NRHP listed buildings needs a lot more work. Blueboar (talk) 16:57, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
I definitely agree with TheCatalyst. For many of the more prominent NR-listed locations, the historic designation is a minor issue that shouldn't get much coverage per WP:BALASPS (sorry for the weird shortcut; I've never seen it before) because it's only a minor part of the story of the whole location. Why would we want to give detailed coverage in that specific section when we're already covering the area elsewhere in the article? Look at an article I just wrote today, Elmwood Hall (Ludlow, Kentucky). Virtually all of the article is about the house itself; only the infobox, part of one intro sentence, and half of one paragraph discuss the NR designation. Should we call it a stub because most of the article covers stuff that belongs to WP:ARCH? I say definitely not, and the same is true for the Bowery article. Nyttend (talk) 00:15, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! dm (talk) 09:06, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

A little boasting

Permit me to boast a little :-) Indiana's now up to fully illustrated for 88 of its 92 counties; only Allen, Jefferson, Jennings, and Ripley Counties are left, and 68 of the 94 sites in those counties are illustrated. I'll try to get the remaining Allen County locations, leaving only six sites in the restricted parts of Jefferson Proving Ground without images. Nyttend (talk) 03:24, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

impressive dm (talk) 09:05, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Awesome! I've seen it growing while updating the maps on the Progress page (I always do a comparison of the old map with the updated one to make sure there are no anomalies). I'm ready to see that whole state turn dark red!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:17, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
See Special:Contributions/Candleabracadabra; Indiana's quality is plummeting because of dozens of NRIS-only stubs. Nyttend (talk) 17:39, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
I need to rework the "who created these" script to be able to tell how many (s)he's created recently, but I think this might be our first case where the project decides to do or not do something to an editor creating NRIS-only stubs en masse.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:47, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
That sounds terrible, stub or not, Wikipedians should be content to grow the content instead of placing restrictions on page creators who do not have the time to expand them personally. Articles grow from stubs easier than they do from red links. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 19:45, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
This is someone who has time to create a pile of stubs, despite warnings, thinking this is an appropriate condition in which to leave an article. Without sources entirely, these weren't even NRIS-only until I came along! Nyttend (talk) 19:52, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Ideally, no, but Wikipedia is a volunteer project and you get what you pay for. I'm seeing good intent with bad execution. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 20:04, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Crittenden Farm

Could editors please weigh in on whether the opening paragraphs of this article should include the date the farmhouse was built, the township the farm is located in (in addition to a larger town nearby), and whether the opening paragraphs should note that the farmstead is listed on the NRHP? Thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 01:45, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Generally, yes. There is no reason not to mention its construction or its location in the lead let alone in the opening of the article's body. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 02:06, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
Candleabracadabra has repeatedly failed to observe that the introduction has always mentioned its location and its historic site status, and he also failed to let me know that he was bringing this here; I only found it because I was curious if any new discussions were happening here. Nyttend (talk) 05:20, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
It seems the issue is not whether to include the information, but how to phrase it. That isn't an issue for the project page. Try working together and discuss it at the article talk. Blueboar (talk) 14:08, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
Precisely. And all of this is coming from the person who's been creating tons of completely unsourced stubs; getting them to {{NRIS-only}} status is actually going to be an improvement. This is going to require a ton of work to repair. Nyttend (talk) 17:38, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Can we just get some input on the issues in dispute? Does the fact that it is NRHP listed belong in the opening paragraphs? Does the date of construction belong in the opening paragraphs? Does the township it is located in belong in the intro, along with notation of the more general area and a larger town nearby. Thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 21:18, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Ok, the answer to your question is yes. In general, the fact that a place is listed on NRHP belongs in the opening paragraph for many, if not most places listed. I won't say all. Is the date of construction valid, usually yes. Township? I guess if it helps put context, no if it doesn't. Does Crittenden Farm need these details in the opening paragraph when there's a fine paragraph on the NRHP below? Honestly, that should be taken to that articles Talk Page, which has nothing on the topic, or any topic at all. TLDR; If you're looking for a general answer, it's yes. If you're looking for a specific answer, talk page. Does that help answer your question? dm (talk) 23:45, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
I would agree... this is all information that would normally go in an article about an NRHP listed property ... but whether it goes in the lede paragraph, or somewhere else in the article is not something that we micro-manage at project level. It is something that should be discussed at the article level (ie on the article talk page). Blueboar (talk) 00:23, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
Considering that the article had onyl been edited by two people and they were in a dispute, this seems like a reasonable place to solicit outside input. Certainly the discussion could have been moved to the talk page, but I'm not sure how useful that would have been. Project pages would seem to me to be a good place to discuss disputes in articles covered by the project. If there is a better place to get outside input and expertise I'd be happy to consider alternatives in the future. Candleabracadabra (talk) 02:35, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
No harm, no foul. You asked and your questions were answered. dm (talk) 08:03, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Liberty County Courthouse

Is there a way to get the photo of the Liberty County Courthouse (Georgia) at the bottom of this page? It seems to have been copied over by another photo. Thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 04:02, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Weird, when trying to revert it, the image showed up as the original in the preview, but when saved, ended up being an oddly squished second image. Hopefully someone else can figure out what the problem is and correct it. Clearing the cache for that page seems to have fixed it showing as the second image. It appears to be back to the original, correct image now. Ultraviolet (talk) 04:16, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately, that is now causing the image in Bacon-Fraser House to appear as the courthouse photo again. What someone should do is download the original image of the courthouse and re-upload it under a different name, citing the original upload for the permissions. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 04:30, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
Ugh, I see now that the second one was pointing to the correct page, and the actual courthouse page has no image. Sorry about that. Ultraviolet (talk) 04:32, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
Best option may be to request admin assistance at Commons. History merges and splits are possible there too; a Commons admin could put the house at one filename and the courthouse at another. Both were uploaded by the same guy with a CC-0 tag, so they're both fine. Nyttend backup (talk) 20:40, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Historic tax credits

I've nominated historic tax credits for deletion; please see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 December 8 to add your opinion. Nyttend (talk) 22:01, 8 December 2013 (UTC)


Fall 2013 NHL meeting

The NPS will be holding its Fall 2013 meeting to consider NHL noms on Dec. 17–18, for anyone in DC interested in attending.

Here are the nominated properties, with links to the noms and what we have in the way of coverage:

  • Baltusrol Golf Club, Springfield, NJ (Nomination). One of the oldest golf courses in the country, still used for major PGA events, with two courses designed by A.W. Tillinghast. Already listed; we have quite a bit in the article. Would make me proud if it got NHL status since I grew up in that area.

Three covered bridges in different areas of the country, part of an MPS (you may want to peruse it, especially since as many as 30 other covered bridges around the country may also get NHL status eventually, it seems):

About the Calfornia Powder Works Bridge, it was documented in HAER, so would those photos be PD? Chris857 (talk) 15:52, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Yes. HABS/HAER photos are works of the federal government, which are PD. Magic♪piano 00:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
On Duck Creek, also see the Metamora HD (page 8), and the canal (nomination and maps). Turns out that the aqueduct was built in 1948, reconstructed from timbers used in a previous aqueduct. Nyttend backup (talk) 20:49, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
Also notable in this meeting agenda is the nomination for withdrawal of designation for Full-Scale Tunnel and Eight-Foot High Speed Tunnel, two NASA Langley properties that have been demolished. The PDF for the Eight-Foot tunnel has a picture of the demo (now in the article).
I also note that the nomination for the Pinkham House has (color) pictures taken of its interior by an NPS historian, thus PD; might be true of other forms. Magic♪piano 00:33, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

At WP:AN#More Nyttend, there is a discussion regarding articles on two NRHP-listed properties. I have no opinion that I'll express here on the matter, but I have a question for @Dudemanfellabra: how do the scripts behave on links that redirect to the county list? Chris857 (talk) 15:45, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Because of the way I check for quality, links that redirect to the county list will be counted as articled but untagged. This is because I only query for articles that are in the Stub-, Start-, C-, B-, A-, GA-, or FA-class categories, not List-class. This is not ideal behavior, as I would like to count these as unarticled; I'll see what I can do about that.
That said, I kind of agree with User:Nyttend here, although I probably wouldn't have deleted the page, especially since I would have been an involved admin at that point. Candleabracadabra has created many sub-standard articles (I believe mostly in Georgia, although that may have been a fluke in the latest Progress page update) that aren't even good enough to be tagged by the NRIS-only bot. These articles have no sources at all and so are actually worse than NRIS-only. The bot actually does output a list of all such unreferenced articles here. Would it be beneficial to tag these articles with {{unreferenced}}, {{no inline citations}}, or some NRHP-specific variation of these two? This has already been brought up on my talk page once (by Nyttend), and I think it's a good idea.. I would have to go through another bot request for approval (but use the same bot) since the bot is only authorized to add the NRIS-only tag. What do others think?
As far as how to handle the situation with this new editor, I think we need to do something, but I'm not sure what. Maybe putting a tag on all his/her articles via bot will incentivize him/her to clean them up/expand them?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:34, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

NRHP names

What do we do when the NRHP listing name conflicts with the more common and established name as with the Albany Housefurnishing Company v. Nelson Tift Building. Can I change the name listed on the county listing page or does it have to include the name as lsited even if it isn't used with any frequency? I would think we should use the most appropriate name, but I want confirmation before being "bold". Candleabracadabra (talk) 15:32, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that, in the county list, we should keep the NRHP-listed name, but the link could pipe to the more common name (though we have a redirect, so that is less important). In the "summary" column, we could then mention its more common name. Anyone else have thoughts on the matter? Chris857 (talk) 15:43, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
See WP:NRHPMOS#Naming conventions.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 16:28, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Yes - piping from the county list is what I'd do. See this list, more specifically the Peter Francisco House, for an example. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 16:31, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 20:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
See WP:NRHPMOS#Naming conventions. Seriously. This is all there.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 05:52, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Note: When you change the name of an article about an NRHP-listed property, do try to remember to update the "article" entry for that property in the county, state, or city NRRP list(s) where that property appears. When the "article" name on those lists is a redirect (as happens after the article is renamed), the article is treated as untagged. --Orlady (talk) 15:24, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
@Orlady: That's incorrect. Redirects are just fine. They are counted as tagged, so long as the target of the redirect is tagged.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 15:55, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Argh! That means that some of the instances of untagged articles that I thought I had found and corrected weren't actually the ones counted on the Progress page. Is there a way to identify untagged articles without searching through the proverbial haystack, looking for needles? --Orlady (talk) 16:47, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Use the NRHPstats script. When you visit a county list, it will display a yellow box above the table with the stats found on the Progress page (except live-updating). If there are any untagged/unassessed/NRIS-only articles, the yellow box will include red text. If you scroll over that text, the offending articles are displayed in a tooltip.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:04, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. That's helpful. However, I was kind of hoping for a tool that would tell me which pages in a large county have issues. Any possibility of that? --Orlady (talk) 01:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Maybe we have a misunderstanding? I was under the impression that is what the NRHPstats script does. If there are any untagged/unassessed/NRIS-only articles in a county, no matter its size, the yellow box displayed at the top of the table will immediately find them and output which articles fall into which category as a tooltip. You can then visit those articles and correct the problem(s). If that isn't what you're asking for, I'm afraid I don't understand your request.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:34, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Aha! The script does identify which articles have issues, but only if you hover your mouse over the relevant entry in the yellow box. That mouse-over feature is something I didn't figure out on my own. Thanks for explaining it to me on my talk page! --Orlady (talk) 04:11, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Cleanup listing

Do we have a continued use for this page, or should it be deleted? Some months ago, one person removed some (but nowhere near all) of the cleaned-up entries in one section, and another user made some edits in 2012, but most of the page is three years out of date. It's a bot-generated cleanup page (the bot hasn't been active in years) with a history consisting solely of bot-generated dumps and people removing occasional fixed items; there's no substantial history that we'd need to save. Nyttend (talk) 13:47, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

It's still linked from our to-do list, but it can easily be removed. I think it could use a bit of updating (maybe another bot replaced it?), but I think in theory it's a good page to have...--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:16, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Category:Bungalow buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Uttar pradesh

So I was going through the Wanted Categories page and ran across this one. Odd, since Uttar Pradesh is in India and the only non-US state/territory NRHP is in Morocco. It appears to contain test stuff by a couple of users, who've not been active for months. Maybe no big deal, but thought other eyes should perhaps take a looksee. Thanks. --‖ Ebyabe talk - Inspector General ‖ 03:50, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

All were copyvios, so I've G12-deleted them. All were copies of Hotel Jerome with some modifications. Text such as "Some of them, such as the Pitkin County Courthouse two blocks to the east" made it clear that it was taken from some article about Aspen, Colorado, and since they said that the property was NR-listed in 1986, it was easy to check through the 1986 listings at the Pitkin County list until I found something with virtually identical wording. Nyttend (talk) 04:30, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 December 16#Karel Jonas House

If any has interest, there is an RFD open regarding Karel Jonas House, an NRHP property. Chris857 (talk) 03:39, 16 December 2013 (UTC)


Belmont (Charlottesville, Virginia)

This article was the subject of some slightly suspect edits earlier this month - most of the added info seems legitimate, but the editor removed all NRHP-related categories on the grounds that the house is not listed on the Register (this dif specifically, along with the ones following). I can find no evidence to substantiate that particular claim, so I've reverted those changes as best I could while keeping what seems to be a legitimate contribution. It's been stable since, but I'd appreciate another pair of eyes or two on it just to keep it under observation. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 01:42, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

As a guess, that particular editor may be working off documentation that was written before the property was placed on the NRHP. I've run into this before, where I find a historical property survey that's a very useful resource. Often the survey will explicitly call out properties that are NRHP-eligible but not currently listed. If it's not clear that the survey was written before the property was listed (or worse, the document was later updated without re-assessing the NRHP listings), it can be very confusing. Not saying that is necessarily the case here, but I can easily see an editor removing an NRHP listing mention in complete good faith. Andrew Jameson (talk) 12:33, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Hrmm. Hadn't occurred to me, but it makes sense. I think what really set the red flags flapping for me was the fact that he erased all of the categories and made no attempt to replace any of them, even the non-NRHP ones. Never mind - I'll keep watching it to see if anything changes for a while. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 15:26, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Category:Historic district contributing properties

A few months ago, I began reorganizing this category, as I feel it's too large. I've sorted out just about everything in there by state, now; I'm ready to go further and empty out the parent category. Will this be a problem? If not, I shall begin in a couple of days using AWB. Just wanted to check on consensus first. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 06:22, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

You've done really great work sorting out this category into state-level subcategories, and I would support clearing out this parent category. That said, I don't think you'll be able to do so since the categorization is mostly handled automatically by Infobox NRHP. Any article with |nrhp_type=cp or |nrhp_type=nhldcp is automatically placed in Category:Historic district contributing properties, so the only way to remove the categorization is through the infobox. I'm not trying to diminish all the time you put into this, but the existing system can easily be modified to handle state-level categorization via the |locmapin= parameter in the infobox. This is actually already done with historic district categories; any article with |nrhp_type=hd and |locmapin=STATE is automatically placed in Category:Historic districts in STATE rather than the parent Category:Historic districts in the United States. The same thing can be done with contributing property categories, especially since the naming convention you've chosen for the categories is conducive to that format. If you don't object, I'll make that change to the infobox shortly, and we can go through all the articles and make sure everything looks as it should. If the auto-categorization produces incorrect output, it can be suppressed and overridden manually by setting |nocat=yes in the infobox and adding a category manually.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 12:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
Well, I did a minimum amount of cleanup using AWB a few months ago - I don't remember the whole details of the situation, but it was something similar to this. So it's possible to clean up what we've already got using AWB. My computer's giving me some severe trouble, and I have another AWB project in the queue, but I'll take a look at this when I can and see what I can come up with. And I would support rewriting the infobox for future articles. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 18:49, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
OK, I was wrong - the issue I fixed a few months ago was somewhat different (that's what I get for trying to remember without checking first). Still, AWB's at your service if you'd ever like me to do anything with it. :-) --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 15:28, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
Does anyone oppose me editing the infobox to auto-categorize contributing properties in state-level categories and remove this broad category? If not, I'll do so by the end of the day.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:10, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Can't imagine anyone objecting. Nyttend (talk) 22:26, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I've just made the revision to the infobox (actually Template:Infobox NRHP/conv), and it appears to be working. The job queue is still updating, so the main cat still shows that it includes many articles. After a while the category should shrink as the servers catch up. After the category is mostly emptied, we can begin to go through the articles left over, set |nocat=yes, and manually fix their categorization to be state-level. One thing I did notice by checking the first few articles there now is that we probably need to create Category:Historic district contributing properties in New York City, as many of them will now automatically be included in this red-linked category since they use the NYC map. Any anomalies (i.e. inconsistent naming or unexpected results) should be brought up here, and I'll see what I can do.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 19:12, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Awesome. I can recat the New York City properties using AWB once the queue catches up...shouldn't take a lot of time. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 22:31, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
You shouldn't have to. That's the magic of the infobox. If it has |locmapin=New York City, the article will automatically be added to the city-level category. The only thing that would manually need to be done is removing them from the New York state category you've added.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:21, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
Which I can also do. (Be gentle with me - I know very little about things computational. I just mash the buttons and the words appear on screen and it's totally amazing :-) )--Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 01:38, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
@Ser Amantio di Nicolao: It appears the job queue has caught up, if not entirely then mostly. The category is down from about 1200 (I think?) to a little more than 400 now. I've just gone through all the articles starting with "A" and added |nocat=yes to the infobox when appropriate or just removed the manual inclusion of the top-level category. I'll do a bit more later, but I have some other things to tend to at the moment. Just letting you know! :)--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:40, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Awesome. I can do some of that, too, when I have a free moment (which looks like sometime between today and the 17th of never, the way things are going at the moment...) --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 19:02, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Sweetwater Inn

I am having trouble finding sources covering this building. Any suggestions? Candleabracadabra (talk) 18:22, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I suggest next time you try to find sources before creating the article.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
That's mighty WP:BITE-y.--GrapedApe (talk) 23:23, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
I second what Dudemanfellabra said; you should find sources, then create the article based on those sources. You can probably get a copy of the nomination form by following the instructions at WP:NRHPHELP#NRHP nomination forms, since Georgia's forms don't appear to be online. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 20:01, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
It does appear that Candleabracadabra created an article about a topic that s/he knows nothing about, with the only cited sources being two different versions of the basic NRIS data. It is not unusual to have difficulty finding information about specific NRHP-listed properties -- especially in states for which NPS hasn't posted electronic files. Many listed properties are rather obscure, they may be known by a name other than the NRHP listing, and conditions may have changed drastically in the years or decades since the original listing. Some of us contend that articles should not be created until there is some source other than the NRIS data. This article is a good example of an article that was created prematurely. --Orlady (talk) 05:57, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
This gets us back into the difficult question of what we mean when we require that "there is some source other than the NRIS data". Those who support creating NRIS only stubs will say: "but there is another source... the Nomination document... we just don't cite it (yet)". Those of us who object to NRIS only stubs reply with: "Then the burden is on you to go obtain the Nomination doc and write a properly sourced article." We are not the only project to face this... The issue of: "sources do exist... we just don't cite them (yet)" is one of the most contentious and frustrating issues in Wikipedia... It has never been clear just who is responsible for improving the article by actually going out, finding the sources, and adding what they say to the article. Blueboar (talk) 17:20, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
The presumed existence of a nomination document does create a presumption of WP:Notability for any property that is listed on the National Register, but a presumption of notability doesn't justify creating an article when there are no meaningful sources. In this instance, NRIS provided even less information than it typically includes. Candleabracadabra has now found and added a source that gives a date of construction (something that is typically in NRIS but wasn't included in the NRIS entry for this property), so the article now has a source independent of NRIS and almost as much information as the typical NRIS-only stub would have. --Orlady (talk) 18:38, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

NRIS-only, Net Quality Rating data now on Progress page

"Net Quality Rating" map, which is IMO a more accurate representation of progress in a county/state.

After the bot has run through and tagged all NRIS-only articles, I have added the data to the Progress page. One thing I would like to point out is that there are more NRIS-only articles (10,950) than there are Start+ (10,083); take from that what you will.

To account for these new statistics, I have also added a new measure of progress, which I call the "Net Quality Rating" of a county, described in a footnote as:

"The "net quality rating" of a county/state is a more accurate representation of the "completeness" of a county. It takes into account the percent illustrated, percent articled, and percent Start+, as well as the other statistics listed in these tables. A county in which every single article is illustrated and has a rating of Start or higher will have a 100% net quality rating. Images count for 25% of the net quality rating, and articles count for 75%. Deductions are given for NRIS-only, unassessed, and untagged articles; and partial credit is given for stubs."

I've also added a new map for this Net Quality Rating, shown to the right. As you can see, it takes into account a more broad definition of "progress" than the narrowly defined illustrated/articled/Start+ maps. States which are IMO over-represented in the articled map (e.g. Nevada, North Dakota, Florida, Massachusetts) are toned down in this new map since many of the articles in those states are stubs or even NRIS-only. States like Indiana and Nebraska which are almost fully illustrated but aren't very developed in the article map are somewhat accented in the New Quality Rating map as well.

The "state" with the highest quality rating is DC, with 66.1%. Though DC is both 90%+ illustrated and highly articled, most of the articles are stubs, and there are quite a few untagged/NRIS-only articles. The state for which article quality dropped the score the most is Massachusetts, which is 94.5% illustrated and 96.9% articled but only gets a 20.6% net quality rating since about 3 out of every 4 articles (~3000!!!) is only sourced to the NRIS. The state with the lowest quality rating is Arkansas, with 6.2%. This is pretty expected since it is only 20% illustrated and 23% articled, with also about 3/4 of the created articles being NRIS-only.

Feel free to discuss any desired changes to/weird quirks of the net quality rating, as well as the new stats about NRIS-only. Hopefully this update will serve to focus attention where it is needed most, which is kind of the whole point of the Progress page in general. Thanks for the patience while I was getting all this together. I'll continue trying to get this updated ~weekly. Cheers!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 07:29, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Awesome interesting useful and well done work. dm (talk) 09:47, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
This is a tremendous piece of work. A mere barnstar is too little—is there some kind of "Grand Cross of the WikiProject" that we can award Dudemanfellabra? Ammodramus (talk) 13:52, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Excellent work on the bot, map and overall comparisons. ~tiphat~ Thundersnow (talk) 16:13, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
Let me chime in with the praise; I can easily design simple analyses, but I can appreciate something like this partly because it's beyond what I can do. I'm guessing the problem with Arkansas is that it's far from us active photographers and that they don't have a good online presence; I've helped a little, but a return trip would require more than 700 miles of driving. Nyttend (talk) 03:32, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
This is so awesome. Thanks, and great work, Dudemanfellabra. --Another Believer (Talk) 01:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Calculation

Great work, Dudemanfellabra. My intermittent efforts toward resolving the various quality problems you have logged (e.g., tagging untagged articles and converting non-NRIS ELs to reference citations so the articles will no longer be NRIS-only) lead me to inquire about your algorithm for determining net quality ratings. Where is your algorithm documented? --Orlady (talk) 19:02, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
The algorithm is not explicitly documented anywhere, beyond what you see above. There was a question on my talk page earlier where I explained the formula in a little more detail. It is defined by
netQuality = 0.75*articlequality+0.25*imagequality

where

articlequality = (startorhigher+0.5*stubs-0.25*unassessed-0.5*untagged-0.75*NRISonly)/listings
imagequality = images/listings
Hopefully the variable names are self-explanatory.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 05:59, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! That helps to resolve my curiosity about philosophical conundrums like the treatment of an NRIS-only article being rated as start class. --Orlady (talk) 15:29, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Just to work out the consequences of the formula for article quality:

  • base case - say there are 100 listings in a county and only 3 tagged articles, 1 start, 1 stub, 1 unassessed, (all multiple sourced), plus 1 untagged unassessed article
    • the total AQ score would be 1+0.5+ -0.25 + -0.75 = 0.5 with articlequality=0.5/100=0.50%
  • if one additional unassessed article is created and tagged the score would be 1+0.5+-.25+-.75 -0.5 =0 or 0.00% (not sure this makes sense)
  • (starting from base case) if one additional stub is created and tagged the score is 1+.5+.5-.25-.75=1.00 or 1.00%
  • (sfbc) if one additional start is created and tagged, score=1+1+.5+-.25-.75=1.50 or 1.50%
  • (sfbc) if one additional NRIS-only stub is created and tagged, score= 1+.5+-.25+-.75-.25=0.25, or 0.25% (not sure this makes sense)

In short, I'm either confused (maybe on how "listings" is calculated) or there are a couple things that don't make sense to me. Just checking to be sure. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:37, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

It appears in your calculations you've double-counted unassessed. In this calculation, unassessed and untagged are mutually exclusive. Unassessed articles are ones which are tagged but are not assessed, i.e. untagged articles are not included in the unassessed number.
For your examples, the base case (1 start, 1 stub, 1 unassessed, 1 untagged, all multiple sourced in a county with 100 total listings), the article quality would be (1+.5*1-.25*1-.5*1-.75*0)/100 = 0.75%. You didn't mention if the articles were illustrated or not, so I'll include both: If all four are illustrated, the image quality is 4/100=4%, making the total quality 0.75*.75%+0.25*4%=1.56%. If none are illustrated, the image quality is zero and total is 0.56%. For a mixture of illustrated and unillustrated, the county would fall somewhere in between those two.
  • Adding one completely untagged article to the base case would take the totals to articlequality=(1+.5*1-.25*1-.5*2-.75*0)/100 = 0.25%-->total=1.44%/0.19% if all are illustrated/unillustrated respectively. The overall quality is lowered because leaving articles untagged is a bad habit in my opinion; it only takes a second to tag a talk page after creating the article.
  • Adding one tagged but unassessed article to the base case would take the totals to articlequality=(1+.5*1-.25*2-.5*1-.75*0)/100 = 0.5%-->total=1.63%/0.38%. The overall quality is lowered, but not as much as the previous case because the creator has at least taken the time to tag the article and in theory we would be notified of its creation via a category.
  • If the new article added to the base case is tagged and assessed as a stub, the totals become articlequality=(1+.5*2-.25*1-.5*1-.75*0)/100 = 1.25%-->total=2.19%/0.98%. The quality is raised from the base case since a new article has been created and properly tagged/assessed.
  • If the new article is rated start, the totals are articlequality=(2+.5*1-.25*1-.5*1-.75*0)/100 = 1.75%-->total=2.31%/1.31%. The total here is higher than the stub case since obviously a start+ is better than a stub.
  • If the new article is NRIS-only, there are multiple cases. NRIS-only is not an "assessment", so an article can have any rating on top of being NRIS-only. The numbers for if the new article is NRIS-only and
    • untagged completely: articlequality=(1+.5*1-.25*1-.5*2-.75*1)/100 = -0.5%-->total=0.88%/-0.38%. Since the percentage with everything unillustrated turns out to be negative, it is replaced with zero overall quality.
    • tagged but unassessed: articlequality=(1+.5*1-.25*2-.5*1-.75*1)/100 = -0.25%-->total=1.06%/-.18%, where again the negative is replaced with zero. Again you can see that tagging an article but not assessing it is slightly better than leaving it untagged completely.
    • rated stub: articlequality=(1+.5*2-.25*1-.5*1-.75*1)/100 = 0.5%-->total=1.63%/0.38%.
    • rated start+: articlequality=(2+.5*1-.25*1-.5*1-.75*1)/100 = 1.0%-->total=2.00%/0.75%.
All of these numbers are markedly lower than the 4% that the base example would get on the %Articled map (which would move to 5% after the new article is added), which is a reflection of the poor quality of the articles. Only after expanding the articles to start+ level and tagging/assessing them where necessary would the county reach the 4/5% shown on the %Articled map. Does that clear up any confusion?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:56, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

OK, confusion gone, but I don't like the idea that adding something should cause the articlequality score to go down, e.g. with your calculations adding on untagged article caused the aqs to go down from 0.75% to 0.25%, or adding a tagged article caused the aqs to go down to 0.50%. Also rating stub article caused the aqs to go up to 1.25%, vs. adding it as unassessed causing it to go down to 0.50%. It seems to me that rating an unassessed article as a stub indicates no improvement since the worst the unassessed article could be is a stub. Also the negative scores (resulting from a high negative score on NRIS only) seem inaccurate. A NRIS only article probably adds something, but at worst adds 0.

When I have some time to work on it, I'll send you a note on your talk page, showing how I think this might work better, using only the data you've collected, so that the system works more naturally (as described above). Just to give you an idea (the exact numbers are iffy here).

  • Add a start+, non-NRISonly article ==> total articlequality score goes up by 1 (best case)
  • Add an untagged, NRISonly article ==> total aqs goes up by 0.1 (worst case for adding an article)
  • Add a tag ==> total aqs goes up by 0.2
  • Get rid of NRISonly status (i.e. find another source) ==> total aqs goes up by 0.3
  • Assess an unassessed article (or reassess a stub) as Start+ ==> total aqs goes up by 0.4

In other words adding something to the article adds something to the articlequality score. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:51, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Ok, it's pretty simple to translate what I have above to a formula. To keep it even simpler, I'll just consider your "article quality score" (not dividing by listings). The only variable I add is the number of blue links (articles) = A

your articlequality = (startorhigher+0.5*stubs-0.25*unassessed-0.5*untagged-0.75*NRISonly)

my articlequality =(0.6*A +0.4*startorhigher - 0.2*untagged - 0.3*NRISonly)

which has the nice property that whenever you do something good to the article, the score doesn't go down.
Give me a list of what taking a good action should add, and we can make an equation for it. Since it is just changing one equation it should be pretty easy to change. I have only a foggy idea whether this will raise of lower the average scores - probably on average a little higher since it can't go negative. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:37, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Though I see where you're coming from with the idea that some work is better than no work, and thus adding something, even be it untagged or NRIS-only or whatever, should be a net positive, I am still partial to the existing formula. In my opinion, the work required to add a tag to a talk page and assess the article, as well as that required to add at least one source besides NRIS is so trivial that not doing it should be a net negative.
With your formula, there is no incentive for other people to go behind new editors creating a large swath of NRIS-only, untagged articles since the quality rating is slowly going up, even though the new user's contributions are troublesome. With my formula, an editor who is working on expanding stubs in one county to Start+ level ("to turn a county red") will all of a sudden see his or her work completely erased because of some new editor creating sub-stubs en masse. That gives the start+ editor an incentive to go clean up behind the new editor and to alert him or her to the quality standards in the project. With your formula, the state of Massachusetts would look fairly good because it is almost fully articled (though yes, there would be some deduction for the NRIS-only articles). I feel as if my formula is a better representation of the quality of Massachusetts. Without the incentive to help out new editors, I feel as though much of the power of the statistics on the Progress page will be stripped.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
The formula isn't perfect, but I'm willing to live with it.
I spent some time slogging through Tennessee county lists in search of the elusive "untagged" articles (note that it's not particularly rewarding to search for about 5 untagged articles in a county list that has over 80 articles). I found that several of the untagged articles weren't actually about NRHP sites in the county -- instead, somebody had created a page with the same name about a totally unrelated topic. In those cases, the page shouldn't have counted toward the article count! Among the other untagged articles I found were a couple created at AFC (and tagged only for the AFC Wikiproject) and several articles created/maintained by editors with no particular awareness of the NRHP (for example, articles primarily about businesses and institutions that are located in or at an NRHP property). --Orlady (talk) 05:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
I feel like I'm arguing about some pretty minor stuff - the overall effect is quite good, but there are a few things that I don't think you anticipated correctly or know quite how they work. Examples:
  • I just created an article for Merrick Art Gallery, the last red link in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. It's got 2 sources over NRIS and it might be a "start". Before adding the article and tagging it, the county score was 88.8%. I've left it unassessed because I want somebody else to rate my work, so the score goes down to 87.8% after I add the article, but if I rate it "stub" the score increases to 90.6%. I just don't follow the logic.
  • If I put a tag on a NRISonly article, the score goes down. Somehow, I'm sure you didn't intend this.
There are some problem articles like Orlady mentions above, where I think adding a tag and leaving an article temporarily NRISonly sourced makes sense. In general a new article or a split-off is needed, and the NRISonly tag will keep my attention on it, but a lot of work will need to be done to create the new article, so it's not just a case of say, checking out an external link and moving it to an inline reference if it measures up (a common fix since older short articles often have multiple sources included more informally than an inline reference).Smallbones(smalltalk) 06:14, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
I wouldn't say it's minor; this is a worthwhile discussion. I think where we disagree on your first problem case is in the average intent of the author. I used to be (and hope to pick it up again when I get more time after the semester ends) quite active in going through Category:Unassessed National Register of Historic Places articles to assess new additions. I seem to remember quite a few articles in this category, when it was kept nearly empty, were new articles created by new members who didn't really expect anyone to rate their work.. they just created the article and moved on. Yes, there were several editors who tagged the article and expected others to rate it (I know because they would generally rate its importance but not its quality), as you point out that you did with this new article you created. The former, however, greatly outnumbered the latter, at least back then. That said, this is a common practice, so maybe as a compromise, I can just change the sign in my formula to add 0.25 for an unassessed article rather than subtract. That way the quality would go up as you think it should, but it wouldn't go up as much as it would if the article were properly assessed. I don't think the same case can be made for leaving an article untagged, though, so I think it should still be negative.
As for your second problem case, I genuinely think that the existence of an NRIS-only article is a net negative on a county. In practice, yes, adding a tag causes the county quality to appear to drop, but really you shouldn't have to add an NRIS-only tag manually. The bot should come along shortly (~every week) and tag the article even if you refrain from doing so. The article will be tagged, so I wouldn't think of your tagging of the article as reducing the quality of the county. Rather, I would think of the county's quality as already being lower, and you're making the Progress page reflect that instead of quoting an erroneously inflated number.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 11:53, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
Spurred by DMFB's mention of the backlog of unassessed articles, I've been going through and trying to reduce their number. In the course of that, I've discovered some unsourced NRHP stubs-- probably based on NRIS, but not saying so explicitly. (The two that I've found to date are Wright Hotel and Worth County Courthouse (Sylvester, Georgia), both created by the same editor; since I'm working my way backward through the alphabet, there are probably many more.) I assume that these are treated in the same way as sourced articles in the article-quality rating, which means that a completely unsourced article gets a higher rating than an article sourced to NRIS alone. Is there a way that we can address this without making DMFB do a great deal more work? Would it be appropriate to add the NRIS-only template to such articles, even without evidence that the NRIS had been used as source material? That, at least, would count unsourced articles in the same way as NRIS-only articles. Ammodramus (talk) 17:48, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
You're correct that completely unsourced articles are counted as higher quality than NRIS-only, which has also been brought up on my talk page and is something I don't like about the quality system. See the section about the ANI discussion below for more info, but there is a list of all unsourced NRHP articles here (both of the articles you found are included). I can easily re-work the code to also tag these articles with {{NRIS-only}}, and I somewhat suggested this further down on the page.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:42, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
Dudemanfellabra, please do continue to disincentivise the NRIS-only articles, and the totally unsourced if possible. I'm one of those going around expanding stubs to Start+ levels, only to see things get ruined by an NRIS dump: we need to have a clear way of saying "This is bad. Stop it now". This isn't purely a matter of our ratings: it's harmful for someone researching the site. When I'm putting together an article about a redlinked site, I'll turn to Google for information on it; I'll find some Archiplanet-type pages, but not too many, and I'll quickly know whether there are any useful pages out there. If I'm trying to expand an existing article, even putting -wikipedia into my search can't remove the tons of unattributed copies; it's far harder to find anything relevant, let alone to find whether anything relevant is even out there. This isn't a huge problem with Start+ articles, or even good stubs with solid non-NRIS sourcing, because such articles have links to good webpages and/or citations to good print sources about the articles: a reader will know where to turn for additional information. With an NRIS-only article, we've succeeded in making it harder to find sources without providing any such sources in return. Nyttend (talk) 23:51, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
I'll second Nyttend's request. During this year's WLM, I photographed an NRHP-listed church in Arizona about which Swampyank had generated a two-sentence NRIS-only stub. In researching the building for Commons categorization, I discovered that NRIS was wrong on the coordinates, the street address, and the construction date of the church.
In looking for a construction date, I found lots of websites that included the erroneous date. Fortunately, most of them were obvious echoes of the WP substub; and none of the URLs suggested that they'd be authoritative sources on churches in Arizona. However, there's a non-trivial possibility that a parishioner might construct a website for the church, relying on the WP article for the information without using the WP phrasing. Such a website would appear to provide independent corroboration of the NRIS's incorrect datum. Ammodramus (talk) 01:57, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
List-class articles are treated as untagged by the script. The idea behind this (I presume) is that all NRHP-listed properties should be written about in an article rather than a list, even if the article describes multiple properties. At the moment, though, it's causing some unfortunate side effects; for instance, San Jose Estates Thematic Resource Area is currently a list and the target for every listing within the area. So it's assessed correctly and none of the redirects are bad (they're individual listings in what's effectively a historic district), but it's being reported as an issue. (Though I'd argue that there should really be an article about the San Jose Estates rather than just a list of the properties in the TR.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 04:50, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Argh -- in fact that article is now treated as "untagged." Either way, that's unfortunate! I converted that article to list-class because it is a list -- and because the six individual lighthouses (located on several different islands) that were included in an omnibus NRHP listing called Apostle Islands Lighthouses are nicely documented in separate articles -- as are the other "Apostle Islands lighthouses" that are individually listed on the NRHP or aren't listed yet. National Register Reference #77000145(whhc includes 6 lighthouses) is not itself a notable topic; it's the lighthouses that are notable. --Orlady (talk) 05:38, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
The fact that list-class articles are counted as untagged was mentioned further down the page. It is technically a bug that hasn't been fixed yet, but I don't really know how to fix it (to clarify, I know how to code it, but I don't know what the final outcome should be). On the one hand, I would like list-class articles to be counted as unarticled all together. This would be to prevent someone from upping a county's quality by, say, creating self-redirects back to the county list page itself or to some list of items in an MPS/TR with little to no extra information about the site(s). Then on the other hand, that fails to give credit to articles like this one, which I believe is correctly assessed as list-class.
One thing that could be done to continue kicking the problem down the road (which I would prefer :P) would be to expand this list article to have a summary style explanation of each lighthouse rather than just a list of links. Maybe out of that (or likely from the nom itself) you can find some sort of overarching theme that ties them all together for a lead... Then the list can be rated a start/c/b/whatever instead of list-class since it will have a sizeable amount of text that covers one coherent topic. I envision something like (shameless plug) Hotels in Meridian, Mississippi, where each hotel on the NRHP falls into a certain era of the city's history and is covered in detail there.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:11, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Beware that some listings end pointing to legitimate list-class articles -- for example 1767 Milestones is arguably list-class, despite covering a single (extremely) discontiguous district (it is currently rated Start I believe), and there are a fair number of small sites that redirect to List of historic sites preserved along Rochambeau's route, that probably won't merit individual attention. You may want to filter the List=>unarticled assignment to things that redirect back to a NRHP list. Magic♪piano 21:51, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
That crossed my mind before. I could count a list-class article that has "National Register of Historic Places" in the title as unarticled, as that would more than likely be the target of a self-redirect on the county list. Even if I do that, though, what do I count regular list-class as? I would lean toward stub since most items on the list probably have very little written about them.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 00:55, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
It would make sense to treat redirects to list-class titles with "National Register of Historic Places" in them as unarticled, but provide some other type of treatment for pages like Apostle Islands Lighthouses. That particular page was created for a 1977 NRHP listing action that added 6 lighthouses to the NRHP under a single ID number. Since there are 5 separate start-class-or-higher articles about the lighthouses in that one listing (one article covers two lighthouses), it doesn't seem sensible or fair to rate the coverage of the NRHP listing as deficient. --Orlady (talk) 03:38, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
I just updated the code to count list-class articles as unarticled if "National Register of Historic Places" is in the title and as stub if not. This is not ideal treatment, but I think it's good enough for the time being.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 19:05, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Call for consensus

So what is the consensus here? Ideas mentioned have been

  1. To change the formula completely to what Ammodramus Smallbones suggested above
  2. To only change the formula to add for unassessed articles rather than subtract since many people leave their articles unassessed for other people to rate
  3. To leave everything as is
  4. Unrelated, but also tag completely unsourced articles as NRIS-only.

Which of these do we want to end up doing?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:14, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm confused by your #1. What has Ammodramus suggested that you mention? I see a suggestion that we give you a Grand Cross and that we adopt your #4, but nothing otherwise that I can find. Nyttend (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Oops, wrong name. Meant smallbones. Fixed now.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:23, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm partial to #2. An unassessed article is a minor problem that simply requires a little housekeeping on our part. It warrants less benefit than something ranked "start" because we don't yet know what it is, but it doesn't indicate anything deficient (whether policy compliance or simply the lack of information), so it shouldn't subtract. Tagging an unassessed article as a stub should lower the rating, because it's recognising a negative situation that already exists. In the same way, tagging an untagged article as NRIS-only should lower the rating, precisely for the reason that you gave at 11:53, 10 December 2013. It would be best to count the completely unsourced articles like NRIS-only (or count them less), but I'm not quite sure how properly to do that. Nyttend (talk) 00:01, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Sorry about not getting back to you on this (I won't mention my root canal, but I may be a bit grouchy!) First I have to say that the overall system works fine, this is just fine tuning. 2nd #2 is fine, #4 should be a NRISonly equivalent tag (if that can be done). Third we should be open to more fine tuning later as conditions change, e.g. I think the NRIS-only problem will be almost resolved fairly soon and we might want to increase our standards sometime in the future - like full credit for C+ articles and 80% credit for Start+ articles. Fourth, I'd be very very careful with this not to use it to bite the newbies. Fifth, Pennsylvania is doing OK (thanks Pub et al). Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:25, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
[EC] Nyttend's comments make sense to me. I suggest treating unassessed articles as equal in value to stubs.
One concern I have about both NRIS-only and totally unsourced articles is that some of them are actually reasonably well supported by sources, but lack in-line citations. Two examples (neither of which is tagged at the moment): Boyd-Harvey House, Middlebrook. Those are actually in much better shape than the "classic" NRIS-only stubs. --Orlady (talk) 00:29, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Response to both of you. (1) Smallbones: why do you think that the NRIS-only problem will be almost resolved fairly soon? We've got thousands to improve in Massachusetts alone, and I'm able to spit out the Ohio expansions at a rate less than one per day, relying on a print source instead of an online thing that anyone else can check; and that ignores the continued issue of NRIS-only stub creation. (2) Orlady: I don't understand why those articles are problems for the purposes of this assessment system. One can check the page history to see when a print resource was added, and use it as an inline citation for stuff added at the same time; while a URL can be checked and used as a citation for things that it mentions. Nyttend (talk) 01:40, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
I don't want to insert inline citations in articles unless I have seen the source and can verify that the content is actually supported (at least in part) by the cited source. This is only partly due to my experiences tangling with a rogue user who routinely footnoted their content (often citing some difficult-to-get print source), but had copied that content verbatim from some other source that they conveniently didn't identify. --Orlady (talk) 03:30, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
I'd say: treat unassessed articles as stubs for scoring purposes. The point about editors not rating their new articles so that they'll be rated by independent editors strikes me as dispositive. It also gives positive strokes to editors who rate unassessed articles.
Unsourced articles and NRIS-only articles should be negatively scored. These are a problem for the WikiProject, and we should do everything within reason to discourage their creation. Ammodramus (talk) 13:46, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the unsourced articles, I have just edited the bot code to only untag an article if after having been tagged, the article has been expanded to include multiple sources. Before if someone simply removed the NRISref entirely and left the article completely unsourced, the bot would remove the tag since it technically didn't apply anymore. Because of this change, any of the unreferenced NRHP articles can be manually tagged with {{NRIS-only}}, and the bot will not remove the tag. This allows us to count these articles the same as NRIS-only for the purposes of the Progress page. I don't want the bot to tag these articles because, as I mentioned before, I would have to get secondary approval for that task. Also it is possible that some of the articles in that list include external links or some other section that is meant to function as a reference list, so adding the tag would be incorrect.

TL;DR: If we want to count completely unreferenced articles the same as NRIS-only, we need to manually tag them with {{NRIS-only}}.

Now for the formula, it seems many people think unassessed articles should be counted as stubs. That's not what I was proposing, but if everyone wants that, I guess that's ok... Let me explain what I was proposing a little more because I think it gives more incentive to rate articles. Stubs are currently counted as "half" a full article (i.e. Start+ gets a +1 and Stub gets +0.5), and unassessed are -0.25. What I was proposing is to change unassessed to +0.25, meaning it would be a positive, but it would be worth less than an assessed article, even a stub. Rating an unassessed article a stub would increase the county quality slightly in my proposal. If unassessed is counted exactly equal to a stub, there is no incentive IMO to rate articles since the quality won't go up at all. Would +0.25 not be better than +0.5 for unassessed?

Finally, as Smallbones says, this formula should be open to change later, though I don't share the same view that the NRIS-only problem will go away very soon. There are over 10,000 NRIS-only stubs out there, and that number isn't shrinking very fast (although I have seen User:Magicpiano chugging away.. we really need to honor him/her somehow; the quantity/quality of work I've seen is great!). I think later on it may be possible to increase standards for this quality rating to C+ or even higher, but looking at the entire country now, only about 12% of the country is even Start+, so I don't think we'd have to worry about any kind of adjustments to the formula until that's at at least 50% or something.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:54, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

As I see it, the number of unassessed articles is small relative to the number of NRIS-only articles and the number of untagged articles, and it's generally pretty easy to add an assessment to an article that is tagged, but not assessed. Most unassessed articles are isolated situations involving articles that were created by somebody who politely refrained from rating them -- and because those articles often deserve a rating higher than "stub," it's likely that if they are treated as stubs, the mere act of assessing them will still increase net quality scores. I am aware of problem situations like National Register of Historic Places listings in Racine County, Wisconsin, where a user recently created a large number of unsourced and NRIS-only stubs that are largely untagged or unassessed (actually it's not as bad as it was -- in the last few hours I added several tags, assessments, reference citations and content there), but it seems to me that those situations don't justify treating "normal" unassessed articles as serious problems. --Orlady (talk) 03:17, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm with Orlady on this: an unassessed article is a fairly minor problem for the WikiProject, since they're easily found and fixed. I've been trying to just that, going through Category:Unassessed National Register of Historic Places articles and rating articles. About half of what I've found has been stubs (some good, some otherwise); the rest are articles whose creators presumably thought should be rated by someone independent of their creator. We shouldn't discourage that kind of willingness to abide by the judgement of others, especially since this WikiProject's had trouble in the past with editors giving inflated ratings to their own articles. Ammodramus (talk) 13:10, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
As such, I'll change the formula to have a +0.5 for unassessed, exactly equal to stubs. The output of the NRHPstats script will update immediately, but the Progress page will not be updated until this weekend as normal.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:11, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
I've been working through the list of unassessed articles and rating them. Going through the past few days of my contribution history, I find 40 that I rated as Start or better, and 23 stubs. The former included some excellent articles, including a couple by Andrew Jameson that I thought were almost ready for GA nomination; the latter included a few quality stubs, and a lot of very minimal substubs (mostly in Georgia and Wisconsin), some of which had to be marked as unsourced and/or NRIS-only. This sample seems to support our decision to treat unassessed articles as stubs: it seems wrong to give them a less-than-stub ranking when well over half are at Start level or above; but the large minority of substubs, some of which will lose points for being unreferenced or NRIS-only, suggests that we shouldn't rank them any higher. Ammodramus (talk) 19:50, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

LandmarkHunter = NRIS-only?

Just rated the article Thomas Driver and Sons Manufacturing Company, a substub with a single source: this LandmarkHunter.com page. This appears to be based on the NRIS database, with room for user-added content. Should I add the NRIS-only tag to such articles, or will the bot remove them because there's a (single) source that's not the NRIS? Ammodramus (talk) 13:35, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree with tagging anything sourced to landmarkhunter as "NRIS only," since landmarkhunter is an NRIS mirror. Dudemanfellabra will have to tell us how the bot handles that kind of tag. --Orlady (talk) 14:12, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Tricky... I think it depends on exactly what information is being cited to landmarkhunter. If we are citing landmarkhunter to verify something that is mirrored from NRIS, then I would agree that "NRIS only" applies... but if we are citing it for information that is not on NRIS (such as the user added content), then it is a distinct, separate source... and "NRIS only" would not apply. Blueboar (talk) 15:24, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
As I remarked in the section above, the bot will now only untag an article if after having been tagged (by bot or manually), the article has been expanded to include multiple sources. This allows people to manually tag articles with only one source that is not NRIS if the tag is fitting, and the bot will not remove them. For the article in question, LandmarkHunter seems to be an exact mirror of the information NRIS would give, so I believe it can be tagged straight out. To remove any doubt, though, one could add an Elkman infobox with an NRISref citation that would cover the exact same information. This would expand the article and bring it up to our "sub-standard" standards if that makes sense haha.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:11, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Agreed. If you find anything else that's ultimately sourced to Landmarkhunter, it needs to be removed, since the website isn't a reliable source. Nyttend (talk) 00:31, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Assessment

I've been working to assign ratings to the articles in Category:Unassessed National Register of Historic Places articles. I'm trying to follow the WikiProject criteria closely on this; if someone else who's interested in the subject of article rating wants to check up on my assessents, I'd welcome comments. It should be easy to find the relevant edits in my contribution history: I've tried to include edit summaries that begin with something like "WikiProject NRHP assessment". Ammodramus (talk) 23:56, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Useful templates for generating links; maybe good in references?

I've created some templates, two of which have long existed though aren't used very often. These templates generate links to different sources which may be helpful in citations or just to make finding sources easier. The templates are:

  • {{NRHP nomination}} – generates a link to the NRHP/NHL nomination form for a property. Inputs are first unnammed parameter or |refnum=REFNUM, |name=NAME_ON_REGISTER, |nhl=non-blank if NHL
    • Example: "{{NRHP nomination|01001546|name=Churchill County Jail}}" yields ""National Register of Historic Places Nomination: Churchill County Jail (#01001546)" (PDF).

"

"

  • {{NRHP Focus}} – citation-style template to generate a link to the Focus search page for a property. Inputs are first unnamed parameter or |refnum=REFNUM, |name=NAME_ON_REGISTER, |accessdate=ACCESS_DATE (for citation), and the option |url=non-blank to only give the url for the search page, which can be used to customize the citation style if desired.
  • {{NRHP Weekly List}} – generates a link to the best guess for the location of the weekly list showing that the property was added to the register. Input is the listing date as the first unnamed parameter. Works only for listings after 1983. If left blank it shows the (likely) most recent weekly listings page available.

All of these links work correctly for the cases above, as you can check for yourselves. I think they should be added to WP:NRHPHELP, WP:NRHPMOS, or both, but I'm not sure where/how. Regardless, I wanted to make their existence known to the project. Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 02:23, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Nice contribution, Dudeman. When you announce it on the Resources page, be sure to point out that it shouldn't be used unless there is an actual document at the linked location. As you know, that's been an issue in the past. --Orlady (talk) 18:29, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

How many "NRIS only" articles are out there?

Out of curiosity (now that we have a relatively easy way to compile the information), lets get an idea of exactly how serious the problem of NRHP-only substubs actually is... how many articles are currently NRHP-only? Blueboar (talk) 20:24, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

NRIS-only, you mean? Well, Category:All articles sourced only to NRIS shows 10,351, or 0.23% of all the articles on en-wiki. On a side note, why does Category:NRIS-only sourced in North Dakota exist? Chris857 (talk) 20:29, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
For other statistics concerning the quality of articles created by this project, User:Blueboar, see WP:NRHPPROGRESS; that includes NRIS-only statistics broken down by county/area lists, and it also includes many more statistics. I'm not sure how you could have missed that page after all the discussion about it since its creation last year...
As for the state-level category, guess who created it]. When we were beginning the discussion about how to address the issue of NRIS-only articles, Doncram did his usual thing and just started making things out of nowhere, not waiting for consensus. Since all three articles in this category were eventually tagged by the bot, this category can and should be deleted.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 20:41, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
I emptied that North Dakota category and deleted it. --Orlady (talk) 23:30, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
Yikes... that's a lot of articles that we need to work on and improve. Thanks (I think) for the count. Blueboar (talk) 01:52, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
This topic reminded me of an idea I've been meaning to propose. This project has proposed having some kind of project-wide goal or collaboration a few times this year, and now that we know what articles are NRIS-only and how many there are, we can finally focus on improving them. With that in mind, I propose that the project establishes a goal for 2014 of reducing the number of NRIS-only articles to below a certain number (I'm thinking 5,000 since it's roughly half the size of the category, but if that seems too high or low I'm open to changing it). Every writer should be able to contribute to the goal since the NRIS-only articles are so widespread, and I feel like the only way we're going to make a serious dent in that category is through a group effort. (I'm borrowing this idea from WikiProject U.S. Roads, which cut their number of stubs in half through yearly collaborations in 2010 and 2011, since I think we're in a pretty similar situation to theirs.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 02:59, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
Back in mid-November I said that I wouldn't really be interested in a collaboration, but that was more of a formal thing, "let's work on ____ this week!" With this kind of thing I'm already working; I'll probably be doing just the Ohio articles for a long time yet, since I've been spending most of my on-wiki time on reducing Ohio's NRIS-only, and we still have more than 500 left to go — according to WP:NRHPPROGRESS, there were 540 at the end of November and 516 when I ran the last update, with another 9 done since then, but that's still only about 1 per day. Doing my best to keep up...Nyttend (talk) 06:21, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Ugh. How do I handle this? (Probably demolished structures)

There are two schools in St. Johns Michigan (both on the register, naturally) which have been almost certainly demolished: Union School (St. Johns, Michigan) and East Ward School (St. Johns, Michigan). However, I can't find any sources explicitly stating so. My evidence is the aerial views of the area: both the [Union School location] and the [East Ward School location] show infill housing. Houses at the Union School location have a 2000 date of construction, and the East Ward School houses have a 2003 date of construction (along with a new child care center whose location, plan, architectural style, roof style, and fenestration do not match the earlier school).

So I'm positive the Union School has been demolished, and 99.9% sure the East Ward School has, but my conclusion is based on something that is probably over the line into OR. On the other hand, having an article that baldly states that a school currently exists - it "is" a school building - based on decades-old references arguably contains just as much OR, as well as being flat-out wrong. So, suggestions on how to handle? Andrew Jameson (talk) 12:41, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

IMHO things that are readily observable (a building at an address) are trivially verifiable; I add uncited weaselly statements that the building has "probably" been demolished (moving it is sometimes possible but unlikely), since the documented building is not at the documented location. Magic♪piano 13:26, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
I've used "the building is missing and presumed demolished" before, but only when I had an actual photograph of the empty site. That seems on firm footing, because the wording simply reports what the photograph shows. This is the first time, though, that I'm sure a building is "missing" without having a photograph, and using the same technique seemed to be on slightly-less-firm footing. Andrew Jameson (talk) 13:32, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
Yuck... calling a building "missing" sounds like it simply got up and wandered off ("gee, it was there this morning... I wonder where it went"). Surely if there is no building at the location, we can say it was demolished. Blueboar (talk) 17:53, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
Actually, you can't, although it's highly likely for some types of buildings, like large brick/stone school buildings. Magic♪piano 18:51, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
(Composed as the above comment was being posted) Well, granted, "missing" may not be the best choice of words, but buildings are occasionally moved. I can think of three or four off the top of my head that were moved at some point after being listed on the Register. If the buildings are large or well-known, this makes something of a media splash, but that's not a guarantee. As an example, see the Forrest J. Stimpson House on Cheboygan County, Michigan. It's clearly gone from the old location and I could find no media coverage of demolition, so I emailed someone at the Mackinaw Area Historical Society. Turns out it was "removed from site and left in the woods at Trails End Road and changed dramatically." So although it's not exactly in good shape, it hasn't been demolished either. Something like this is more likely to occure with an obscure 1865 house than with a 50-room school (which is why I'm sure the Union School is demolished), but sometimes if there's no building at the location, it hasn't been demolished. Andrew Jameson (talk) 18:55, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
OK... I will grant that we can't assume "demolished"... but "missing" sounds like we should put its picture on a milk carton or something (Missing Building - Have you seen the Joe Blow House (also answers to the name "Blow Homestead") - Last seen on the corner of Elm and Maple Streets, clad in red brick with federalist style trim. - If you see this building, please contact: nps.gov).
What about "No longer exists at this location"? (or: "Moved to XYZ" assuming we know that information) Blueboar (talk) 19:10, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

We've had this conversation a couple of years ago (but without the question of not having a site-visit) - my practice has changed a bit since then. I've settled on something like "replaced by a parking lot" or similar when I have a pic, which leaves off whether the building might have been moved. I'd think if we have good coords and a good google view, then something like "apparently replaced by a housing development" with a cite to the Google view. Trivially verifiable? With the word "apparently" yes. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:15, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

It seems like, although the preferred wording is variable, the consensus is to acknowledge the fact that it's not where it's supposed to be. I think that's reasonable Thanks for the replies. Andrew Jameson (talk) 08:24, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad to see that you listed it on the state list of NRHP issues. Royalbroil 14:22, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

More nomination forms

I discovered that the Idaho State Historical Society has scanned and uploaded all of Idaho's nomination forms (including redacted versions for address-restricted sites) at this page. If anyone else is interested in writing about sites in Idaho, you now have some resources to work with, and File:NRHP nominations upload status.svg needs to be updated again. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 05:49, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

On a related topic, these forms let my confirm this CC-BY image for addition to a large-area county that had only one image before for its 14 properties. Chris857 (talk) 19:53, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
I just updated the image.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 00:50, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for updating it. While we're on the subject, whatever happened to the discussion about updating Minnesota and North Carolina? TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 02:09, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
I posted a while back after I found some free time, and no one responded. Probably because I posted about a week after the conversation had finished haha. If someone lays out exactly what needs to be updated, I'll be more than happy to do it.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:58, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Cleanup listing, again

Since I received very little input up above, I've gone ahead and MFD'ed this page; please go to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Cleanup listing to offer input. I'll happily withdraw (or if not possible, I'll change to a "keep" vote) if anyone can demonstrate any usefulness for this page. Nyttend (talk) 01:49, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Focus is down

Heads up that focus appears to be down temporarily. Chris857 (talk) 22:51, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

More than "appears" :-) They're really getting behind; they didn't post any recent listings last week, even though they got one up just two days after Christmas. Nyttend (talk) 03:47, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
Maybe they're about to put up a new version of NRIS?....--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 03:50, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Tourist needed

Anyone up for a trip to southeastern Indiana? With these edits, every site throughout Indiana is illustrated, except for six at Jefferson Proving Ground/Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge. Since JPG was a bombing range, access is restricted (they don't want you accidentally exploding some unexploded ordnance), and the only way to get in is a guided tour, which if I understand rightly requires a group. And don't worry about the cold weather or about having to make a hurried trip: they don't reopen until April, so you have plenty of time to plan for a springtime visit. Nyttend (talk) 02:45, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study

Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 12:50, 10 January 2014 (UTC).

Original research?

I first asked this question at the Village pump an was referred here.

The building in question

Just how strict is our original research policy these days? I recently went and took a photo of the historic former Methodist Episcopal Church of Port Hadlock, listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. In fact, it turns out to be at the corner of Matheson & Randolph Streets, and its geo-coordinates are 48° 2′ 2.93″ N, 122° 45′ 23.52″ W (48.034148 N, -122.756533 W). Neither of these accords with the article (and, in fact, the street address given in the article, "Randolph and Curtiss Sts.", does not match the coordinates given in the article which is over a kilometre away). I would like to correct this with an accurate street address and coordinates, but I don't have a citable source. - Jmabel | Talk 16:57, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

In my perception, original research coordinates unquestionably improve the encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia. As such, they seem an appropriate use of Ignore All Rules on the basis of common sense. In your specific example, I would check to see if there is any documentation of the building relocating. Usually, even though coordinates are inaccurate, buildings can be found by looking up the address. Because your address doesn't match, perhaps the building was moved. Here is the only related discussion of the topic that I could find. Teemu08 (talk) 17:16, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
If you have access to the NR nomination form, does it have a map? Is the building at the place marked on that map (regardless of address or claimed lat/lon)? Does it match the photos in the nomination? In my experience, maps are rarely wrong (generally excepting only moved buildings), and are invaluable provided they have sufficient context (alas not always the case).
I don't believe it is OR or a violation of verifiability to state "this building is at this location and address" if it is based on personal observation, so I just modify that info as needed, noting in the case of the address that the NR has something else. Addresses change when streets are renamed and/or renumbered and lots are subdivided, which is why maps in NR nomination forms are really handy. Addresses can also be wrong due to clerical errors, either at the state or NPS level (example, address conflated with this one, listed the same day). Lat/long values can change (by moving the building), and are sometimes just egregiously wrong (e.g. the middle of the ocean, or in the wrong town). The basic fact of a particular building's location is not hard to verify, as long as you have solid evidence you're looking at the correct building (something that trips me up from time to time, as my talk page attests). Magic♪piano 18:40, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
OK. I will edit based on what I've seen with my own two eyes. I'm quite sure I've got the correct building. - Jmabel | Talk 01:16, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Jmabel, please look at the third page of its NR nomination form — you definitely have the correct building. Presumably someone in the Washington SHPO misread a map, or something like that; the location given in the form is a surveyor's description of the location of the lot in the town plat. This is one of the lamest nominations I've seen in a while; it doesn't even appear on its own map, no street address is given, and they left blank the line where you're supposed to put in the coordinates! However, the surveyor's description is sufficient for using the Jefferson County GIS website — the property's profile confirms that 130 Randolph Street is Block 5, Lots 1-2. I'd suggest that you cite the nomination form for the block/lots, and then cite the GIS for the address for those lots. Nyttend (talk) 01:42, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Whoever entered that property into the NRIS really mucked up its entry, because they got the construction date wrong too. This property is turning into Exhibit A of why NRIS-only articles are a bad idea (though to be fair, the nomination form is pretty bad too, even by MPS standards). TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 02:03, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
And the nom is from 1983; I would expect that form from 1975 or earlier, abouts. On a question of coords, my standard is to go to Google Maps, find the location of the building/structure, and use that. Since coord standards have changed/improved, and typos are sometimes introduced, this way is often the most accurate. Chris857 (talk) 04:14, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Magicpiana suggested above making a note about the address being different, and to expand on that, I think this should be done entirely on the talk page and that no incorrect information should be on the article unless there is a dispute. People finding such errors should make a post on the article's talk page referencing the source with incorrect information, then stating that based on personal observation the Wikipedia article is reporting different data. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:58, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
It's not on the article talk pages, but there is a page set up to document these errors at Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRIS information issues. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 20:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

National Register Rap

Is the NRHP becoming hip? Or, indeed, hop? This could be evidence in that regard. Think this may be an... interesting year. :) --‖ Ebyabe talk - Border Town ‖ 03:33, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Don't give up your day job. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:46, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Well, that was about as cringeworthy as I expected. Though New York is trying to get 1520 Sedgwick Avenue listed, so maybe the NRHP and hip-hop have more in common than you'd think. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 05:17, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
A Stroll along Beach Avenue, Cape May, New Jersey (3:35)
Please tell me this isn't someone on here.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:44, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

No, it definitely is not me. I've shown folks here a couple of my experiments in "video" before, and you can tell me if the video on the right is any better. Now if somebody wants to get a list of PD photos (writing out credits is a real pain), and come up with a recording of your own rap lyrics, I'm sure we could do something better than the file Ebyabe linked to. FWIW, I've never understood rap, but here is a pre-rap song I could get into. Maybe we could call it "The Revolution was not televised." Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Start vs. Stub -- comments requested

After working on our guidelines for classifying NRHP articles by quality, I have found myself working on several articles that I believe may fall into the gray zone between stub and start. Greystone (Knoxville) is one that I upgraded from "stub" to "start" after editing it. However, the following 5 articles are currently classified as stubs. I think that's the right classification for at least 3 -- and probably all -- of them, but I'm curious to hear how others would rate them:

What say you? --Orlady (talk) 22:38, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Another borderline article to consider is J. B. Jones House. --Orlady (talk) 23:56, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
3, 5 and 6 are certainly stubs. I generally don't like giving Start-class to articles with less than 1500 characters (DYK cutoff), but if its over 1000 and comprehensive, I have no problems looking the other way. I know non-Focus counties are challenging. Teemu08 (talk) 02:32, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Greystone and Rose Center are at least Start IMHO, a couple of the others might possibly be. I think you've done a good job of finding the borderline. It would be nice if we had guidelines that gave "operational definitions" of ratings but as I read them, they are just fancy ways of saying "A Start is better than a stub and worse than a C" i.e. it's all pretty subjective. The one thing I look for is if it makes sense in dividing the article into sections: a basic no-section article is probably a stub, an intro plus 2 sections is probably a Start+, and an intro and 1 short section is borderline. Just my subjective way of looking at it. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:50, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
3 and 5 are both considerably under 1000 characters, so I'd definitely call those stubs. 1 and 4 rise beyond the standard of "minimal information" IMO (and 1 at least looks more like a structured article, which somewhat compensates for its length), so I'd assess them as start-class, though they're both pretty close to the border. 6 is a good 100 characters shorter than 1 and 2, which are already borderline, so I'd call that a stub. 2 is tricky, since it's about the same length as 1 (which is already borderline) but "looks" stubbier since all but one sentence is part of the same block paragraph. I'd probably lean stub for that one but wouldn't really dispute either assessment. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 03:38, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
1 is not even close to being a stub. The others are on the spectrum, but mostly closer to start I think. What I find interesting is that originally this was about real stubs. Barely one sentence per article and when derived only from the database, almost incomprehensible. Now we're trying to build up more formal definitions and make things just so, but in doing so, are also taking something away. Please, let's not see a campaign to get all NRHP articles to Good or they should be removed. dm (talk) 07:54, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Agree with Dmadeo; we ought not to worry very much about this. Remember WP:STUB's definition, "A stub is an article containing only one or a few sentences of text that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject". This fits 3 and 5, since they're just a few disjointed sentences, and seemingly 6 as well, but 1 and 2 are basically long enough to warrant start, and definitely 4 as well. Nyttend (talk) 15:17, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Just to be clear, I want all articles to eventually get to Good, I just know that most will not be able to, at least for now. dm (talk) 23:12, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
  • These perspectives are interesting. Article ratings aren't inherently important, but recent developments at WP:NRHPPROGRESS and a recent campaign by editors outside this project to upgrade "stubs" to "starts" have brought added attention to these ratings.
For what it's worth, Rose Center (#1) was the article in the group that I considered to have the strongest case for being a "start". I find it interesting that the existence of subheadings in that article appears to give readers a better impression of the article's content. I perceived several of the other articles as being somewhat deficient (#2-Tate Springs Springhouse, #4-Price Public Elementary, and #5-Big Spring Union Church) because they didn't hang together very well -- they consisted of a series of somewhat disconnected factual statements, leaving me with the overall impression that I didn't actually know very much of anything about the topic. I think that paucity of meaningful content (not just the amount of verbiage) should be a factor in article assessment. It's interesting that some of you had considered #6-J. B. Jones House to be a definite stub, since the article about the related property Luther Brannon House is shorter, but has been rated as a "start" since 2009 -- I suspect that the presence of an image in the Brannon House article significantly increases the reader's perception of the article's quality (that's not unreasonable -- isn't "a picture worth 1000 words"?).
Since starting this discussion, I've made substantial changes to Price Public Elementary School, which I think is now clearly a "start". I'm going to uprate that one and Rose Center, but I'm still curious about other people's impressions of the group. --Orlady (talk) 16:29, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Whether we classify these as as "Stub" or "Start"... all of them are mediocre and need to be improved and expanded beyond their current state. Don't settle for mediocrity... strive for excellence. Blueboar (talk) 16:33, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Unfortunately, mediocrity is the best we can do for much of the country. I wish I could do better with articles such as Henry Powell House or Hunting Lodge Farm, but I've mined out all the sources I have; sure, adding headers might momentarily make it look better, but a section header for every short paragraph is excessive in my opinion. Not trying to complain at you who disagree; I mean that I don't think it improves an article, so I don't use them that way when I'm putting together an article. Most of Ohio's sites, either small-town or big-city, have little coverage and can't get any farther than St. Mary's Catholic Church (Delaware, Ohio), so unfortunately I can't get past mediocrity. Nyttend (talk) 19:33, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Another factor is that many NRHP properties are not particularly interesting -- and may not warrant extensive articles. For example, the J. B. Jones House and Luther Brannon House are both fairly nondescript 20th-century houses that don't lend themselves to breathless architectural descriptions. They are on the Register mainly because they didn't get torn down, not because they are inherently interesting. It's likely that the current short articles about those houses contain almost everything that's known about them that might be of interest to readers. --Orlady (talk) 23:20, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
I'll just comment to agree with everything that's been said here; I agree with the current rating of all six articles. I see where you're coming from, Blueboar, and I agree that all these articles could be expanded, but they are much better than the 1-2 sentence sub-stubs this project is infamous for. With those in mind, these are gold (or at least not junk). While these may become more of a problem in the future, for now we need to focus on the worst of our articles; none of these is in that group.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
Exactly, none of these are where the problem is. dm (talk) 23:12, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
But three of these were problematic NRIS-only stubs that I recently "fixed up". I was curious about how other WikiProject members would judge the results of my efforts. --Orlady (talk) 23:25, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
I went back and looked at the carnegie library entry before you edited it. My first thought was "that photo can't be right". My second thought is "that's exactly where the problem lies" when I read the single sentence. dm (talk) 00:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
A stub with information is still much better than a stub with one or two NRIS-only sentences, even if we don't have a specific category for it. Teemu08 (talk) 19:06, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

New articles not showing up on county lists?

Has anyone else been noticing that county lists aren't updating to show newly created articles (or are updating very slowly)? Most recently, I created a stub for Claiborne County Jail over 21 hours ago, but the article name is still appearing as a redlink at National Register of Historic Places listings in Claiborne County, Tennessee. (And, yes, I've cleared the cache -- several times.) Is there something about the structure of the NRHP county lists that would explain this behavior? --Orlady (talk) 22:23, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

I purged the page, and it showed up blue for me. Since our lists use the {{NRHP row}} template, sometimes they need to be purged.. The job queue will catch up eventually, but it might take a few days. Purging forces the list page to the front of the queue.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:50, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
There have been plenty of articles on Wikipedia that have had this problem, not just NRHP County and City lists. I've had to purge numerous railroad related articles over the past month just to get the links to show up. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 14:19, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Emporia, VA and Fayetteville, NC

During my November 2013 drive to the "Great" State of New York, I had to stop in Emporia, Virginia to pick something up at a Wal-Mart. Along both US 301 and US 58, I found numerous historical markers and sites, and even snapped a few pictures, which I was glad about because I later found that the commons category for National Register of Historic Places listings in Emporia, Virginia was empty. I also drove by H. T. Klugel Architectural Sheet Metal Work Building, and thought it looked like a historic site, but I passed up a picture of this because I wasn't sure it was a separately listed site. I have been kicking myself for not doing so ever since. Would anybody be willing to snap some pictures of these sites themselves?

On the same trip, I also stopped in Fayetteville, North Carolina both on the way up and the way back because I wanted a shot of an NRHP plaque that I hoped was at the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Station (Fayetteville, North Carolina). I didn't find one, and settled for taking some snapshots of the interior of the station, which turned out like utter crap. Nevertheless, I drove past some sites that I found out didn't have images on here either. Is there any way I could get a photographer's rampage going in the Fayetteville Metro Area as well? ---------User:DanTD (talk) 14:53, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Multiple articles, roughly same topic

In going through Category:Historic district contributing properties to sort everything into state-level categories, I came across three articles that cover basically the same thing: Old Chicago Water Tower District, Chicago Water Tower, and Chicago Avenue Pumping Station. Surely we don't need this much splitting out. Couldn't all three of these be covered in one article? I think the ideal situation would be merging all three into the district article, which would increase it to Start+ level. I would do it, but I'm going to continue going through this category. I figured bringing it up here may attract someone more interested than I am.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 00:41, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Contrary to what the article implies, Old Chicago Water Tower District isn't actually on the NRHP; it's a city landmark district that appears to include a fire station which isn't part of the NRHP listing. The actual title of the NRHP listing is "Chicago Avenue Water Tower and Pumping Station", which is currently a redirect to Chicago Water Tower; that district just includes the water tower and pumping station. It's also worth noting that the water tower is a major Chicago landmark, so merging it into a district article is just asking someone to split it out again later. Personally, I'd merge the pumping station article into the water tower article, move that article to "Chicago Avenue Water Tower and Pumping Station", and either leave the district article alone or merge it into that article. (As User:TonyTheTiger started two of the three articles, I'd like to have his input on the situation as well.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 01:12, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
I think moving Chicago Water Tower or Chicago Avenue Pumping Station would be wrong. They are distinct buildings. They are related because they are part of the city landmark district and the joint NRHP listing. List of Chicago Landmarks tries to have articles for each city landmark of which Old Chicago Water Tower District is one. I think we continue to need three articles.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 06:10, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree that, though seemingly redundant, three articles is the way to go. On a related note, would anyone mind if I merged White and Company's Goose Lake Stoneware Manufactury and White and Company's Goose Lake Tile Works? They're two archaeological sites from the same complex. Teemu08 (talk) 20:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
As the creator of both of those articles, I have no objection to merging them. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 21:31, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
Please pick a different title if you merge the White and Company articles; perhaps simply "White and Company"? As far as the Chicago sites, I'd advise a merger. All three of the locations are related, so let's pick the broadest topic (the Old Chicago Water Tower District, if I'm understanding rightly) and merge the other two into it. They're closely related and will have plenty of overlap; by putting them together we simplify things, and we can always say "The whole district is locally designated; the water tower and the pumping station would probably do better together with everything else, and we might as well leave them merged until/unless one component becomes large enough to warrant a re-split. Nyttend (talk) 00:41, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Images without reference numbers: The dilemma continues

A while back, I sorted the NRHP/Images without reference numbers list out in alphabetical chapters, but only for the commons images. I desperately had to divide the thing to make it easier to remove the images manually when necessary. I just damn near drove myself crazy to find an image I knew was in the commons, only to find out it was still in the non-commons section. I'm seriously considering alphabetizing that chapter too. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 20:38, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

UPDATE: I just started the process of alphabetizing the non-commons images, and I not only will keep doing it, but encourage everybody else here to join me in this procedure. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 05:14, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

New listing questions

So I've been doing some updates to various NRHP lists and run into two that I can't quite figure.

First is 'City Hall' in Vallejo in on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Solano County, California. There is already a 'Vallejo City Hall' listed, with a slightly different address. I added 'City Hall' as its own listing, but would appreciate others looking at this to determine if it is a duplicate.

The other is 'Elmwood Farm and Browning Store (Boundary Increase)' on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Culpeper County, Virginia. There is only an 'Elmwood' listed. The address is also different. Also, the farm is listed as in the Boston vicinity, and I can't find a Boston, Virginia in Culpeper County, or even near it.

Help appreciated on these, 'cause resolving those means all lists should be updated through last week. Cheers! --‖ Ebyabe talk - Repel All Boarders ‖ 15:05, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

  • The nomination form and NR description make it clear that the Virginia listing is indeed a boundary increase of "Elmwood". I guess we should move the article to its new name. The change in town is probably due to changes in municipal boundaries (or simply to be more accurate; I know that some other "vicinity" listings are nowhere near the listed town). Not sure about the CA listing, but more information should come out about it in the coming weeks. Teemu08 (talk) 16:15, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
I assume the new location of the Elmwood Farm refers to Boston, Culpeper County, Virginia. The coordinates of Elmwood are much closer to Boston than Culpeper, so it was probably changed to be more accurate. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 19:49, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
  • For the Vallejo listings, see this guidebook: The recent listing (715 Marin) is "Old City Hall," built in 1889. The previous listing (734 Marin) is "City Hall" (now actually the Naval ans Historical Museum), built in 1927. I'm not sure how that ought to shake out as far as article names, but they're definitely different buildings. Andrew Jameson (talk) 17:15, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
Just a quick corroboration of Andrew's post. I did a photo-taking tour of NRHP listings in Vallejo last year and the former city hall (now the Naval and Historical Museum) is across the street from the new city hall listing, as is the beautiful Masonic Hall which was listed the week before the old city hall. The current city hall is a couple of blocks away on Santa Clara St. It looks like another trip to Vallejo is in my future. --sanfranman59 (talk) 03:20, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm... I would suggest that the article title on the previous listing (734 Marin) should be Naval and Historical Museum (or something similar), as that is the modern name for building. The (historical) "City Hall" name should be made into a redirect. However, I would continue to use the (historical) "City Hall" name on our National Register of Historic Places listings in Solano County, California page (since that redirected name accurately reflects how it is listed on the NRHP). In other words... while our "by county" list would use the historical name for the building that accurately reflects what the NRHP uses, the actual article itself would be at a title that accurately reflects name of the building in a modern context... and the two names would be linked through redirects. Blueboar (talk) 14:35, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

NYSHPO site problems

It seems as though the many NY NRHP apps on the New York State Historic Preservation Office website will not be available due to some issues with Java security and the third-party document-viewing applet they use (NY began digitizing its apps before Adobe stopped enforcing the PDF patent; therefore they use this older method). Basically when you try to use it now you get an error message. According to the third-party vendor's tech-support email to me, they do have a new release that addresses the problem but it is (obviously) not up to them to install it for SHPO. I have not so far been able to get a hold of anyone at SHPO and find out where they are with this issue, which I first experienced last night.

Most of NY's apps are AFAIK are not mirrored on Focus yet either, so that workaround is unavailable. Daniel Case (talk) 21:50, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Call me dense, but I'm not seeing the issue? Nom doc for a church and the search system seem to be working (I do have to allow it because it complains about being out-of-date, XP Chrome). Chris857 (talk) 22:08, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
Yes. For those of us who have the latest Java build (51, I think, on Firefox and Chrome under Windows 7), all we get is first a message that this app will be blocked in the future (the viewing app, not the search one) and then an error trying to load. Apparently the .jar file needs some permissions information; this is related to the ongoing security issues with Java as a whole. I left a phone message with Michael Schifferli, the only IT person I could find a contact for on SHPO's site; however, as it's the Friday before a long holiday weekend I'm not expecting any response any time before Tuesday. Daniel Case (talk) 22:38, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
FWIW, I was having problems with the latest update to Java also this week. I've had success by opening the Java Control Panel, selecting the Security tab, clicking Edit Site List... and adding URLs that are giving me problems. So far, that's worked for me with the NY Times Crossword puzzle page and VPN access to my computer at the office. It's a real pain in the backside, but it's working (so far). --sanfranman59 (talk) 03:07, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
This didn't work for me because (so Java says) the applet and its .jar file are on different domains from the OPRHP site. Never mind ... I added the site the .jar file was on to the list and it's running again.

I still have not heard back from SHPO. Daniel Case (talk) 00:55, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Holiday Cheer
Smallbones is wishing you all Season's Greetings! Thanks, this is just to celebrate the holiday season and hopefully make your day a little better. Spread the seasonal good cheer by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone with whom you had disagreements in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Share the good feelings. Now back to the workshop, some NRISonly articles need to be fixed! - Smallbones(smalltalk)


inspired by this - you could do the same

Listing in Elkman but not Focus

I've been comparing the content of the Elkman database to our lists of Massachusetts NRHP listings, and cross-checking discrepant entries with Focus. I've found two missing entries (i.e. not on our lists) so far, but a third one has stumped me, and someone with better NRHP database chops might be able to shed light on this. Elkman has an entry called "Lee Lower Main Street Historic District", refnum 09000090. It does not appear in Focus, but it does appear in the omnibus list of listings through 1978 (which does not seem to include refnums), albeit with a different listing date (11-21-76 vs 3-26-76). The Massachusetts inventory also says it is listed, with the March date. Does this entry perhaps have an odd code, or is it an oversight that it is not in Focus? Magic♪piano 13:41, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

It's at least partially a problem with NPS. Any refnum beginning with 09 should be listed in 2009 or later, but refnums 09000083-09000104 are all for locations listed long before — one, the Deering Estate Barn, was listed in 1969! Here's the complete list, unformatted except for turning around the personal names:

I know that two of the Ohio sites — Western Female Seminary and the Pennsylvania Depot — weren't in the NRIS dump that we used to create our original lists; I discovered their omission while doing a similar project of comparing NRIS and the Ohio Historical Society's website, and by that time they'd been entered into NRIS. Perhaps it's the same situation with the Lee Lower Main Street HD? Like that district, the Pennsylvania Depot isn't in Focus, but it's definitely in NRIS. I'm guessing that someone discovered these sites' omission while doing some checking in 2009, so they gave the sites refnums because they didn't have any yet. On top of that, these sites probably haven't yet been included in everything that depends on NRIS, including Focus. Don't worry about it; treat it as a problem with Focus and add it to the relevant list. Nyttend (talk) 00:34, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. Can you edit the above list to include geographic locations for the blue links that are dabs? Magic♪piano 01:17, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Edited by adding refnum, city, county, and state to each location. Note that the last two, the Octagon and Weber Houses in Ohio, have been delisted, but the rest appear to be listed currently. Nyttend (talk) 01:32, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
And, they misspelled Western Female Seminary. Yeah, I can't think of any major reason why those old entries were given new reference numbers, other than the possibility that they were never included in the database. Someone must have discovered an oversight and fixed it. --Elkman (Elkspeak) 03:36, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
PS. The Niles listing is Niles (Amtrak station). Redirect? Also, I fixed the errant list year of 1993 to the correct date. Chris857 (talk) 04:29, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Same NRHP number, so yes. Better yet, I'll do it. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 05:18, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Also, besides "Octagon House," "Edgewood," and "Monroe County Courthouse" are dab's. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 05:28, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Correct - and that example was removed from Octagon House because there is no WP article and the house was demolished in the 1970s. ProfDEH (talk) 10:53, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Update on most recent batch of NHL noms: California Powder Works Bridge withdrawn

I just checked the NPS's NHL page for any news. While there isn't any announcement yet of the next meeting (and next batch of noms), there is an update to the last batch of noms: the nom for the California Powder Works Bridge has been "withdrawn for administrative reasons." A similar fate also befell the updated documentation pending for Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, but that's not going to affect the listing status. Daniel Case (talk) 18:50, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Delisting a boundary decrease?

Site 90000359 is a boundary decrease for the KYANG Site (no article, no image), an archaeological site in Louisville, KY. To my confusion, the decrease has been delisted. Does anyone have experience with a delisted boundary decrease? Any idea what this means? It sounds as if they un-decreased the boundary (i.e. put the boundaries back to their original place), but that seems rather silly for an archaeological site whose very location is critical to its integrity and NR status; it's not as if you can easily move the site or restore its original context. Nyttend (talk) 23:44, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

I searched "Boundary Decrease" in Elkman's infobox generator, and the majority of the entries came up as delistings. I'm guessing that boundary decreases are coded as delistings in the NRIS (though that doesn't explain why some of them aren't delistings - perhaps this is another case of the NRIS being inconsistent). TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 01:16, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Getting to 100% illustrated

I'm with Wikimedia DC, the Wikimedia chapter based in Washington, DC. We ran the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest for the United States in 2012 and 2013, and we are interested in planning another contest for 2014. In doing so, we are interested in reaching out to communities in states where the illustration rate is below a certain threshold; I am thinking 50%, which allows us to focus on 15 states (predominantly in the South and Mountain West) that are in greatest need of having their historic sites photographed for Wikipedia.

I am very happy to see the work WikiProject NRHP has done in keeping track our progress to full coverage, and I would be interested in learning what Wikimedia DC can do to support WikiProject NRHP in its efforts, potentially including providing financial support. One idea of mine is to hire a project manager for Wiki Loves Monuments whose job is to get in touch with local historical societies that may have a wealth of records they can contribute to Wikipedia, supplementing volunteer efforts already in place. Please let me know what your thoughts are on this idea, as well as any other visions you may have.

Thank you very much, and here's to improving Wikipedia!

Harej (talk) 19:36, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Look at the blue states
Just for reference I've included the map. Look in the lower right hand corner for the blue states. I'd also include Texas simply because they have so many unillustrated sites. Getting Historical Societies (probably county or city level, rather than the more bureaucratic state societies) sounds like a good idea. You might also try getting announcements on NPR radio stations (they cover a lot of low population areas that have very little other local media).
The international WikiLovesMonuments organization is in a confused mode right now, as countries like the Netherlands and Germany(?) are figuring out that they have most official monuments covered and the original organizers are getting tired and saying "been there, done that." I think this is a good time for WP:NRHP to get together to decide what we want to do - rather than just follow the International WLM - and also figuring how much effort and time we're willing to give to do it.
One thing to do would be to change the pre-jury selection process. Either get the general public involved via the jury tools that have been developed, or just have photographers nominate a few of their pix for consideration. Having a few people go through 10 or 20,000 photos just does not work.
Something that is probably not obvious to outsiders is the need to recruit just a few dedicated people in the blue areas. Nebraska would be blue if not for Ammodramus, and Indiana might be too if not for Nyttend. Many areas would be a shade or two bluer if not for User:Klotz. I figure finding a few good people in the right areas should be our main goal. This involves a lot of working with the newbies, explaining our sometimes-crazy systems, and is labor intensive. All ideas on "WLM-US" for the future are appreciated. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:14, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Creating articles on properties listed on the Register is a good way to generate interest, updates and photographs. Unfortunately there has been a stick in the mud approach to blocking progress on expedited article creation. Candleabracadabra (talk) 04:45, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

If you're interested in doing outreach to local groups for photos, also consider looking up some special interest groups that focus on particular types of things. For example, HistoricBridges.org has a ton of photos of bridges, mostly in the Midwest, but some from all over the country. Getting those photos on Wikipedia would be awesome. Railroad enthusiasts also tend to be well-organized, and I've seen multiple sites that have pictures of historic locomotives and train stations. Same for ships. I've also occasionally come across folks who really love getting pics of some specific type of building - county courthouses, for example, or fire stations, or whatever. Andrew Jameson (talk) 14:28, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Another specialist area is that of archeological sites, whose locations are often not disclosed (for obvious reasons), or readily accessible (or both). Developing relationships with suitable academic institutions (including the convenient-for-the-DC-group Smithsonian) to gain suitable images (of digs in progress, or of specimens recovered from sites, or of rock art, to name a few possibilities) might be fruitful. Magic♪piano 03:09, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you everyone for your ideas! @Smallbones: I've read the discussions about the international Wiki Loves Monuments. Despite their failure to organize, other countries seem fine with going ahead with Wiki Loves Monuments anyway, and I agree this is an opportunity for us to go in our own direction (maybe we could even change the name/scope of the contest). To this end, we're having an upcoming meeting on Wiki Loves Monuments USA on Tuesday at 7 PM EST. If people here are interested in participating over Skype, feel free to leave a message on my talk page or send an email to james.hare@wikimediadc.org. Harej (talk) 00:19, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Local historical societies would be a great way to go, I think - judging by the brochures and pamphlets they tend to put out, they have a wealth of contributable information. Another avenue is schools; researching and photographing a local topic might be a good project for middle- or high-schoolers, and putting the results on Wikipedia would be a tangible end product.
I've also found a couple of Flickr users who have usable images that are nearly-totally free, as well as some other individual images that would be useful, but I'm really no good at contacting people on Flickr to ask permission. If anybody here knows the procedure, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail and I'll provide you with the requisite links.
Regarding archaeological sites: I know of at least a couple of websites that cover two or three of the Virginia ones, with photographs better than we're likely to get anywhere else. (Specifically the two pictograph sites, in Tazewell and Nottoway Counties.) Those aren't on Flickr, but I can dig 'em up and suggest asking their owners for release. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 19:45, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

AFC submission

Hello there. There's an Articles for creation submission (Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Halfdan M. Hanson, Architect) that I'm having difficulty determining the feasability of promoting to article space on. Any chance I could get a second opinon from WPNRHP as to how worthy this architect is as they appear to have architected 2 buildings of NRHP quality. Hasteur (talk) 15:25, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

The article is weak, but the topic is amply notable. For example, I note this National Park Service travel item about a church he designed. The Historic New England archive of his work is another indication of his notability. His name appears in numerous books and articles about the famous buildings he designed. Interestingly, although he worked in the United States, the German Wikipedia has had an article since 2008: de:Halfdan M. Hanson. --Orlady (talk) 19:53, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Automatic tallying of duplications

I spent some time today trying to get one step closer to full automation of the Progress page. Currently everything is updated automatically via script except for the duplications across county/state lines, which are still manually tabulated (and probably need to be updated). Because my bot looks through all the articles individually already to tag them as NRIS-only, it was a very simple extension to see if I could make it find articles included on more than one list. It took a few runs to get right (each ~6 hours, so you can imagine my frustration when the first ones weren't satisfactory), but I'm mostly satisfied with the way the list has turned out. The output can be found at User:NationalRegisterBot/NRISOnly#Duplications. There is a section for articles already created as well as redlinks that are duplicated.

One thing I notice right off the bat is that the first entry, Montrose Historic District is included on a Pennsylvania list as well as an Alabama list.. clearly a mistake. A dab page needs to be set up there. Another drawback is that this list ignores the names that are in the lists themselves by resolving any redirects. This means I could miss some duplications and/or have extra ones for combined articles like Old Natchez Trace segments listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I still haven't figured out a way around this, but I will see what I can do. I need to resolve the redirects for the other parts of the bot to work, so I'm kind of in a catch 22.

This is the first step toward full automation, but it's a pretty big one IMO. Hopefully I will be able to further tweak this list to group the articles by state/county rather than bluelink/redlink and then edit them into the Progress page directly. As it stands, though, it is still useful to check the current duplicates we have manually entered on the Progress page and possibly add in the quality stats, which many of our duplicate rows are missing. I just wanted to bring the list-in-progress to the attention of the people here in case anyone was interested in manually updating the duplications while I continue to work on getting them automatically updated. Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 06:58, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Right off the bat I'm seeing a whole bunch of redlinks which need to be disambiguated, most of which appear to be fallout from new listings. (Then there's the Maysville Historic District, which refers to a district spanning two counties in Georgia and an entirely different district in Alabama.) I'm going through the list to fix the obvious problems, but if anyone else wants to help with that it'd be appreciated. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 11:27, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Update

As I've worked on this more, I have been able to sort the list by state to better facilitate comparison with our manually entered duplications on the Progress page. In doing so, several users have pointed out some shortcomings in the code that limit its functionality. The way the code works is it gathers all the links on the county lists and compares them to see which show up in more than one county. Problem is, unlike WP:NRHPMOS#Naming conventions says, many items in our lists don't point directly to the official NRHP listing name, even if it is a redirect. As a consequence, my code may be missing some duplications, and it also may be reporting some false positives due to changing of links.

My first thought to fix this problem was to go through all the county list and make sure every link pointed to the official name, creating redirects when necessary, but that has proven to be quite a daunting task, and I don't imagine it would be very popular with locals who wish to set up a different article structure (e.g. Nyttend has set up some redlinks to point to the same article in case someone later tries to create an article about an individual listing that would be better suited for a combined article covering several different listings). From conversation on my talk page, Nyttend has suggested that instead of using the link itself, I use the refnum, which we have added in thanks to WLM this past year. I think this is a great idea, and I'm pretty sure I could make the code work like that. Problem is, currently I have no way to extract this refnum because it doesn't show up on the page anywhere.. it is only in the wikitext and never shows up in the HTML source, which my bot uses to do its thing. I don't think, however, that many people would want the refnum to be shown in its own column or alongside the listing name or anything... but there is one way around this. I could edit {{NRHP row}} to output the refnum in a hidden span that would not be visible to a human but would be visible to the bot. Before editing the template, which appears on ~4000 pages, I wanted to make sure that would be okay with everyone here. The look of the county lists won't change, but they will be more conducive to my quest to automate the task of tallying duplications. Is anyone opposed to my adding this hidden span to all NRHP listing rows?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:01, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I made this suggestion because I thought the refnum was already being put out in some hidden manner. I would have supported this change even if this issue of duplicates hadn't come up. Nyttend (talk) 22:22, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
I hope this doesn't make things more complicated, but I've been thinking that we should make the refnum visible in the table. It would be useful there for putting in the NRHP template on Commons and likely for other things as well. The only problem is that I don't like tables that go off the side of the page, so it might mean taking something out of the tables, most likely listing date (which I almost never use). Perhaps the refnum and listing date could both be put into one column one on top of the other? Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:34, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
I use the listing dates for a few things, so I'd prefer if they were left in the table. (Among other things, seeing which sites were listed in the early years of the program can be useful when looking for the most-needed missing articles or the most important listings.) Since reference number and listing date are tied to each other in the majority of cases, putting them in the same column makes sense to me; I'm not sure if the column would still be sortable after that, though. Nothing else seems expendable, though, so if we added a new column for refnums we'd probably just have to accept that the summary column would be pretty narrow in the lists that utilize it. A hidden column still seems like the best idea to me. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 23:20, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
I like the idea of putting the refnum in a hidden field somewhere in the table. I don't like the idea of displaying it because it is a detail of no encyclopedic interest or relevance. --Orlady (talk) 23:37, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
What if we bridged the gap and used tooltips? The refnum wouldn't take up any additional space, and would still be quickly available to anyone that wanted to see it. I think the best place to put them would be the listing date column, so we could do something like July 25, 1997 (Mouseover to see). The only place we could definitely not use a tooltip is the listing name itself, mostly because I use that for the Progress page/NationalRegisterBot scripts.. but also because it probably goes against some policy for links (but mainly because I'm lazy and don't want to reprogram the bot haha :P).--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:48, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
That's the best idea I've seen yet, much better than anything I was thinking of. I'd be mildly in support of including the refnums in a small way, such as below the dates — for example:
June 22, 1988


88000827
It's useful to anyone who's using the NR database directly or finding a site through Focus with their advanced search, as well as demonstrating which sites were listed together. Note that related sites, and sites nominated at the same time, will generally get consecutive or almost-consecutive refnums; for example, the Indiana sites listed here form a complete numerical sequence. If the "determined eligible" site gets listed years from now, we'd be able to use the refnums to demonstrate to readers that it was nominated with the other sites. However, if we're not going to go that way, it would definitely be helpful to present refnums in a hidden manner with tooltips. Nyttend (talk) 00:13, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
I support whatever you want to do. The refnums are a unique identifier of NR properties. I've been supporting the use of refnums since the beginning of the project Einbierbitte (talk) 02:34, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
I think we're all more or less in agreement, and think Dude should do whatever he thinks is easiest/best (no need for a time-consuming committee) I personally like Nyttend's idea best. An invisible refnum is fine with me if I can copy it, but others may like a visible one better Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:40, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Well, if I use tooltips, you wouldn't be able to copy the text (unless you used an add-on or something like the "Inspect Element" feature in Firefox/Chrome). What does everyone think about what is at Template:NRHP row/testcases right now? I edited the sandbox to do kind of what Nyttend suggested. It's visible, but I don't think distracting. Yay or nay?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:30, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Looks reasonable to me. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 01:34, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Actually, saying that, I could even make use of the {{NRHP Focus}} template to point the reference number to a Focus search (e.g. 88000827). That, though, seems like a more disruptive change, and I'm not sure everyone would agree to it.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:37, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
I'm hesitant, simply because adding a link on every single line would greatly slow down the load time of a bigger page. It would be nice to have those links handy, both for editors and for non-editing readers, but I don't see how it could be done without slowing down everyone who visits the page. Nyttend (talk) 04:45, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
That's a good point, especially since load time is already pretty slow for some of the larger state lists. The sandbox example looks good to me, but I would like to see how that affects sortability (since the example in the sandbox isn't sortable at all). TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 05:03, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
I just copied the giant table from National Register of Historic Places listings in Los Angeles (the biggest list I could think of off the top of my head) to the test cases page. The examples are now sortable, and it appears the addition of the refnum does not affect anything. This is expected since the refnum is added to the end of the date in the HTML code, and the sort algorithm only cares about the beginning of the cell contents.
I also added the link to the Focus search to the sandbox and loaded the test cases page and the actual list page side by side, bypassing my cache for both to make it fair. The test cases page actually loaded more quickly for me haha, so take from that what you will. I'm not by any means suggesting that adding the link decreases load time, but I would say that at least the link didn't affect page load time measurably. Feel free to conduct your own side-by-side tests to verify. If we don't want the link, that's fine.. but don't let page load time keep you from wanting it.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 05:50, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Huh, the test cases page loaded more quickly for me, too, but in my case I think that's because one called the NRHPStats script and one didn't. The date column appears to sort the way it should, so I'm willing to support this. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 06:04, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Ah crap, I didn't think about the script running. I just take that as a given since I've had it for so long. I would disable the script and try again, but could someone else that doesn't have NRHPstats installed do that? I'm currently running the script to update the Progress page and don't want to mess with anything.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 06:13, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

So it seems no one tested without NRHPstats.. I just removed the script, re-ran the test, and reinstalled the script. Turns out the addition of the link did make the test cases page load more slowly than the LA list, but only marginally.. like half a second at most.. and especially since that's one of--if not the--largest lists we have, I don't think it would be that big of a deal. So if there are no objections, I'll add the link in by tonight.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 16:54, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Please add something to the dates column in {{NRHP header}} explaining what's going on, comparable to the "Numbers represent an ordering by significant words" bit in the numbers column. Perhaps something like "The eight-digit number below each date is the number assigned to each location in the National Register database, which can be viewed by clicking the number." I would do this myself, but last time I added a reference to NRHP header, Multichill told me I'd done something wrong. Nyttend (talk) 18:41, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
I've copied in your text above (with the slight modification that I linked to National Register Information System) to Template:NRHP header/sandbox, and I've updated my script to look for the refnum for duplicates instead of link titles. I'll now update both templates with their sandbox codes and let the job queue propagate the changes. Everything should be caught up in a few days at most; then I'll be able to run the script. Thanks for all the feedback, guys!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Forgot to say that I tested the load time on National Register of Historic Places listings in Cleveland, Ohio (one more listing than Los Angeles) and got the same speed both with and without the links. I'm surprised, since I thought external links were a big factor in slowing down load times, but I can't argue with the facts. Given the irrelevance of my original objection, as well as the extremely helpful ability to send readers directly to the location's spot in the NRIS, I strongly agree with the end result that you're about to implement. Thanks, too, for rewording my proposed note text. Nyttend (talk) 23:47, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Changes now live. It should take a while for everything to catch up, but if you want to see any page with the new format, just WP:PURGE it.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:55, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Problems

The 26th item on National Register of Historic Places listings in Southampton (town), New York raises a problem I didn't anticipate when making the above changes: what do we do if a site has more than one refnum via boundary increases/decreases? The output breaks in this case and doesn't generate a useful link. The only solution I can think of is to include a |refnum2=, |refnum3=, etc. parameter in {{NRHP row}} and display each one separately. Can anyone else think of a better solution?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 07:34, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

I imagine that having multiple refnums in that parameter breaks anything else that uses the refnum too, like the WLM upload button. Besides your idea, the only other thing I can think to do is to just move any additional refnums to the summary column; I like your idea a lot better though, so long as it's technically feasible. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 22:37, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
St. Charles Historic District has 4 refnums, are there any sites with more than that? Maybe just use the last refnum? A mere 2 refnums did prevent the WLM upload button from working 2 years ago - not sure about last year. Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
Not sure about solutions, but just noting that this might crop up on listings other than districts which have increase/decrease refnums: there are properties that have been listed more than once. Then ones I know about are under (slightly) different names, with at least one listing coming as part of an MPS/MRA group nomination. Magic♪piano 23:35, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
I like the original proposal. It would probably be unhelpful to display multiple refnums: most people using the table wouldn't know how to handle it (which one is "real"? how can they both be "real"?), and editors will know how to handle the situation without being told that there are multiple applicable refnums. Instead, have a refnum2 or refnumalt parameter, and put the alternate number(s) into it. This way we'd be able to track all of a property's refnums without distracting casual readers and without having to decide how else to make it available to editors. Deciding which number to provide in the refnum parameter would probably be best done on a case-by-case basis. Nyttend (talk) 02:30, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
Actually, I've just found {{First word}}, which uses WP:LUA code that can apparently edit strings. This is awesome, and I've wanted string capabilities for forever! I've been ignoring it, but I think I need to learn Lua now to increase my template programming ability. I'm not sure quite the limitations of it, but maybe I'll be able to replace some scripts with Lua code or something.
Anyway, that's all an aside. The relevant thing here is that {{First word|73001274, 94000400|sep=,}} yields 73001274.. so I can just apply this to any link/display that uses the refnum parameter and ignore anything but the first one. If a different number is chosen to be displayed, just move it to the front. That is, unless we want to display all of them. I'm kind of inclined to move towards Nyttend's logic on this one.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 03:49, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Project scope question

Trying to figure out the exact scope of this project: are articles on SHPOs and preliminary registers to be included/tagged for this project, given their legal/administrative role in the nomination process? Morgan Riley (talk) 16:57, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I would say it wouldn't hurt. Maybe give them a Related-importance rating like we do for many architects, contributing properties, and formerly listed buildings that aren't technically "associated" with the NRHP but are nonetheless connected in someway.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:30, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Including SHPOs makes a lot of sense, but do understand that some of them do other things as well, e.g. the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission puts up highways signs for historic places and runs a dozen or so museums. The part about "preliminary registers" caught my eye. If this is about lists of buildings that didn't quite make the NRHP, I'd be very cautious. There are likely several types of preliminary registers within many states, they differ across states and probably across time. So it could be a real mess making lists for these. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:24, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

NRHP navbox inclusion

This morning I added the VA NRHP navbox to the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It was subsequently removed by User:Imzadi1979. I readded it indicating that navbox is standard template on NRHP properties. It was removed again by Imzadi1979 referring me to BRD and indicating that the box "navigates between lists! not entries on those lists which means not useful here." Given that I've included an NRHP navbox on thousands of articles without issue, can someone provide guidance on how to handle this disagreement? Thanks in advance.--Pubdog (talk) 15:20, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

To be honest, I kind of agree with Imzadi.. I've always found it a bit strange that we link to all the lists rather than the properties. I think a resolution to this situation that would make both parties happy would be to simply expand the VA NRHP navbox to link to all properties. You could invoke something like {{National Register of Historic Places in Virginia|county=Arlington}} or the like to suppress the display of the other counties. That or make something akin to {{NRHP in Spotsylvania County, Virginia}} for each county in the state. This may be troublesome, though, since the GW Parkway is listed in multiple counties (and in fact multiple states). Either way, I don't think it would be that big of a deal to have one article lack that navbox, especially one as complicated (as far as multiple listings go) as this.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:27, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
It is quite useful to be able to access the list "one county over" from a specific site (e.g. in planning a trip), and to be able to quickly switch county lists within a state. In other words, I agree with Pub. I'm always amazed that new rules seem to pop up all the time on Wikipedia, that often are applied in quite different contexts than they were intended. The "navigates between lists! not entries on those lists which means not useful here" rule(?) struck me that way. I'll just say having a navbox that links to the 500+ sites in Philadelphia wouldn't help me much at all and would be so clumsy as to be unusable. The navboxes have been set up this way for a very long time, and this is the 1st complaint I've heard. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:18, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
It;s probably worth noting that there's a conflict between WikiProject standards here. WikiProject U.S. Roads generally discourages the use of navboxes in road articles; there used to be a series of navboxes for state highways, but they've all been deleted, and the same has been happening to by-county road navboxes. This makes sense to me as far as roads go, since there are usually 100+ routes in each state and some of the longer roads could end up with 20 different by-county navboxes. I feel like linking to every property in a county from the navbox would lead to the same situation here; while it's not a bad idea for smaller counties, it doesn't really work for multi-county listings like roads or for counties with 100+ listings. I find the state navboxes useful, but I can see how they might seem out of place in an article which is notable for reasons far beyond being a historic site. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 22:26, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Thanks to all for your input. I concur most with User:Dudemanfellabra's take that "I don't think it would be that big of a deal to have one article lack that navbox."--Pubdog (talk) 10:55, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Focus down?

I'm consistently getting "This page cannot be displayed" whenever I try to load something from Focus, whether it be PDFs or ordinary pages, even their homepage. Are others getting the same results? I'm asking because I've just installed a different antivirus, and I'm not sure whether it's a website problem or an antivirus problem. Nyttend (talk) 13:11, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

It's all working correctly for me. Ntsimp (talk) 15:04, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
Well, now it's coming up without problems. Thanks for the response. Wondering if they were doing maintenance earlier today that's now done...Nyttend (talk) 22:32, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Baltimore City College

I have nominated Baltimore City College for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. DrKiernan (talk) 19:27, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

NRHP in Connecticut categories

When I was trying to move an article about an NRHP site in Middlesex County, Connecticut to a specific NRHP category, I found out there was no such category. Instead I looked up the Category:National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut by county, and found the only items in that category are county lists! Why hasn't anybody made county-specific categories, and will any be made in the future? ---------User:DanTD (talk) 16:46, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Probably because nobody got around to it, so you can be BOLD. There were only scattershot county categories for Massachusetts before I got going there. Magic♪piano 17:21, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
For most states, we do not have county-specific categories, but it is certainly a good idea to create and populate them.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:51, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Well, I just created seven county categories, and moved one to the CT-by county category. Whoever can move sites to the proper category, go and do it. ---------User:DanTD (talk) 02:34, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
Ohio, for example, is very spotty; Franklin County, with the third-highest number of sites statewide, has none, but Meigs County with nine has a category. This is basically the result of my article-writing styles and preferences: when I'm writing a bunch of articles on places in the same county, I'll create a category for them, but I won't do it otherwise. Nyttend (talk) 07:04, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Incorrect refnums in county lists

I've just run my bot to produce output for duplications based on refnums rather than titles. While the job queue still hasn't completely caught up (and thus the giant 11k member list showing missing refnums; consider yourself warned), I did get some kind of reasonable result. I'll run through once more now that it appears (by spot checking) that all the counties that hadn't caught up when I started the bot are caught up now.. or at least a good portion of them. Just looking through the results, I found a few odd circumstances:

  1. My code showed Augusta Electrical Generating Plant as duplicated in Woodruff County, Arkansas. This is because the row for McCrory Commercial Historic District mistakenly had the same refnum as the electrical plant. I fixed the error, so next time this should not show up.
  2. There is also the case of Druid Hills Historic District (Atlanta, Georgia). This listing shows up as duplicated in DeKalb County, Georgia, which is kind of weird. That list shows a "Druid Hills Historic District" and a "Druid Hills Parks and Parkways". They are both technically different listings, but the article itself says the former is a boundary increase/renaming of the latter. As such, should there really be two separate rows in the county list? I think usually we handle boundary increases by merging them to one row.
  3. Sunken barges of Bridgeport, which covers three shipwrecks in Bridgeport, Connecticut, shows up as duplicated three times on the county list. All three shipwrecks, though different listings, have the same refnum in the county list.
  4. The Avery Homestead and Avery House are listed under the same refnum on New London County, Connecticut.

The list may go on (I'm pressed for time now), and these are quick fixes, but I just wanted to bring them to everyone's attention. Now that the refnums have taken on a more visible role in the county lists, it may make sense to do a once-over of all of them to find any errors. For sites with more than one refnum like boundary increases/decreases (which unfortunately currently output URL text), I will soon edit the NRHP row template to only pick out the first refnum listed, so a list of refnums in a single parameter is fine; don't worry about fixing those.. the main thing to check is if the refnum attached to a site is legitimately attached to that site in NRIS. Anyone want to volunteer to help me go through the lists? Although the bot has been helpful in finding these erroneous duplications, it can only go so far, meaning it won't be able to find flat-out wrong refnums. This is something that needs to be manually checked. Thanks for the patience with me as I work toward automating this process!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 00:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I've been looking through the list, and it looks like there are a whole lot of issues with mistakenly repeated refnums. I'm seeing a lot of duplicates within single counties, and that's almost never a legitimate duplication. I'm also seeing a bunch of different (and hopefully unusual) problems in the usable bits of the "missing refnum" section. I had to fix a hardcoded listing in Laramie County, Wyoming, and I thought we had gotten rid of those a while ago. There are also a number of flat-out missing refnums and typos in refnums (at least one of which was my fault, embarrassingly enough). Once the job queue catches up, it's probably going to take a group effort to straighten this mess out. As for the listing in Georgia, it probably shouldn't be two separate rows, but regardless of what we do the boundary increase should have a different refnum anyway.
On a related note, what's going on with the lists that are subsections of large cities? Some of them are showing up as additional "Illinois" sections under whatever state they're supposed to be in, some of them are in the multi-state section, and some (including Chicago, ironically) aren't showing up as having any duplicates when they should be. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 01:55, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
I re-ran the bot overnight, and I am now mostly satisfied with the output. Just spot checking the missing refnums list, it seems that a majority of the articles listed there now legitimately have something wrong with the refnums--i.e. they're either missing or not the standard 8 number format. I also was able to fix the multiple "Illinois" sections, which was due to a dumb coding mistake on my part. I'll begin working on trying to clean refnums up later today and am thankful for any help volunteered.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:16, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Also, with regards to the boundary increases being in a second row, I found Moraine Park Museum and Amphitheater in Larimer County, Colorado. Can we get a general rule for these cases? According to WP:NRHPMOS#Naming conventions:

Though the boundary increase receives its own official name and reference number and Elkman's tool outputs two separate infoboxes, it is common practice to [...] simply combine the boundary increase listing in the state, county, or other list with the original listing.

So IMO these two rows should be combined. Agree or disagree?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:01, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Combined the two Moraine Park listings. The problem is that it didn't look like a boundary increase from the name alone; unless I missed something, the only way to notice this was a careful check of the nomination form or other documentation, and it's not something that we would have caught easily. Nyttend (talk) 20:32, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

This may (or may not) be a good time to review how we deal with NRHP inconsistencies in general. Most of us run into NRHP classifications that just don't seem to make sense, or are done in 2 or 3 different ways, e.g.

  • names for the same site that are different for the NRHP and NHL
  • HDs that contain other HDs, or other sites sometimes, but other HDs have different HDs inside them
  • A new HD formed out of 2 other HDs (all 3 listed)
  • Buildings on the list 20 years after they were destroyed (and variations)

Maybe it's time to review our general response to the NRHPs inconsistencies.

Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:47, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Differing NR/NHL names aren't a problem: we can use the NR name in the NR lists and the NHL name in the NHL lists, and in the infobox, we use the NHL name because it's a higher designation. When an HD is contained in another HD, or when it's formed out of other designations, or when it contains one or more individually-listed sites, we shouldn't have a problem: unless it's specifically marked as being a boundary increase (whether in the name, or the documentation says so), we shouldn't assume that it is. After all, properties inside HDs sometimes get listed individually later; for example, the Crawford-Whitehead-Ross House is a CP to the Madison Historic District (NHLD), but it got individually listed 19 years after the district was declared, because the nominators and the Indiana SHPO decided that it warranted additional designation by itself. And as far as destroyed-and-still-listed, it's not a problem for our listings, as they've just not caught up. Nothing wrong with saying that a property is still listed on the Register 40 years after its destruction if we can verify that it was destroyed and that it's still in NRIS. Nyttend (talk) 20:32, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

In going through the duplicates, I've come across a few that I'd like to get some more eyes on:

  1. Unnamed Battery #2 in Charleston Co., SC: I think this may not actually be listed. The site not in Focus/Elkman, only Unnamed Battery No. 1 appears in the 1982 listings, and the MPS form shows "Substantive Review" but no signature like the other SRs.
  2. Lehigh Canal in various counties in Pennsylvania: there's at least 5 refnums for this site, and not being familiar with the area, I'm not sure what corresponds to what. Also, should each listing have all of the refnums, or only the one for its section?
  3. Martha's Vineyard Campground / Wesleyan Grove in Dukes Co., MA: These are noted on the list as duplicates and point to the same article, so it may just be a renaming and NHL-designating, but since I'm not sure, I didn't combine them.
  4. Boston Common and Public Garden in northern Boston, MA: these were listed together, and then separately designated NHLs; should the original listing be deleted?
  5. Also, the aforementioned Druid Hills Historic District in Atlanta.

Spyder_Monkey (Talk) 05:11, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

I looked into the Unnamed Battery #2 listing, and it gets even more confusing. The South Carolina SHPO lists all three as being on the NR, though, which complicates things. My guess would be that Unnamed Battery #2 isn't actually listed, but got put in the state database along with the rest of the MPS by mistake, in which case it should probably be removed from the list. I know Illinois' state database says that a few properties with owner objections are listed, so I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in other states too. (It doesn't help that "Unnamed Battery" is distinct from "Unnamed Battery #1" and "Unnamed Battery #2"; there had to have been a better way to name those.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 05:32, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
As far as Boston, no: the HD was listed on the Register, and it's not been removed, so we shouldn't say that it has been. Perhaps NPS should remove it, but that's not our job. Probably best just to redirect it to Boston Common, since that's the first name in the title. Nyttend (talk) 07:11, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
The Martha's Vineyard Campground/Wesleyan Grove pair highlight a question I posed a while back here: are the lists we create of listings, or of listed entities, since these are not quite the same thing? There's probably a small argument to be made that what we actually provide are lists of listed entities, since we routinely fold things like boundary increases out of the lists. Under that idea, duplicated listings should also be folded together. On the other hand, boundary changes are arguably administrative entries (we don't record documentation changes and other administrivia from the weekly lists), and aren't really "listings". (I think what happened with this specific pair is that it was first NRHP-listed under one name; then when the NHL listing was processed, a second NRHP listing and the NHL listing were added. There are three entries in Focus for this place, two NRIS, one NHL.) Magic♪piano 08:32, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
We're providing cleaned-up lists of listings. This is why we retain entries for sites that have been destroyed but haven't been delisted, and why we use the sometimes-funky NRIS names in the lists, even when we'd never use those names for article titles. I say "cleaned-up" because we're implementing changes that have been made after listing (the boundary increases), since the nature of the listing has changed, and because we're fixing errors that we find: places listed in the wrong town (e.g. a recent new listing in Dayton, Ohio isn't on the Dayton list, because it's in the adjacent city of Oakwood), typos or outright errors in addresses, and duplications. We've started with NRIS, modified it with changes that announced by NPS, and fixed all sorts of errors that we've found. Resolving duplications is just another kind of error-fixing. Nyttend (talk) 04:19, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I just found another repeated listing while trying to fix the refnums in image tags. In the list for Albany County, New York, there are separate entries for Verdoy School and Verdoy Schoolhouse; however, the article says these are the same building, which was apparently delisted and relisted after a move. I'm assuming those two entries should be combined, but what listing date (and refnum) should we use in the list? TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 09:18, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I've seen this in three other places: see the Gramelspacher-Gutzweiler House (Dubois County, Indiana), the Kent Jail (Portage County, Ohio), and the John Marshall House Site (Gallatin County, Illinois). All three lists provide the refnum and date for the second listing; further notes:
  • The Portage County list gives details about listing/delisting/listing, based on stuff that's in the Kent Jail article.
  • The Dubois County list doesn't mention a thing about delisting, perhaps because we don't have an article on the G-G House. NRIS doesn't mention the delisting, probably because it happened before they started assigning refnums, and there really wouldn't be a point to giving a first-listing refnum to a delisted property after it got relisted. I wouldn't know about the delisting if it weren't mentioned on the third page of its nomination.
  • The Gallatin County list doesn't mention delisting, although the Marshall House article does. Basically, they listed the house, it got destroyed, and the site was relisted as a site. Again, there's no refnum for the original listing, probably since it's pointless.
Since the Verdoy listings are seemingly both the same building, I'd suggest merging them and using the current name, refnum, and date. Nyttend (talk) 23:15, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

As of January, the popular pages tool has moved from the Toolserver to Wikimedia Tool Labs. The code has changed significantly from the Toolserver version, but users should notice few differences. Please take a moment to look over your project's list for any anomalies, such as pages that you expect to see that are missing or pages that seem to have more views than expected. Note that unlike other tools, this tool aggregates all views from redirects, which means it will typically have higher numbers. (For January 2014 specifically, 35 hours of data is missing from the WMF data, which was approximated from other dates. For most articles, this should yield a more accurate number. However, a few articles, like ones featured on the Main Page, may be off).

Web tools, to replace the ones at tools:~alexz/pop, will become available over the next few weeks at toollabs:popularpages. All of the historical data (back to July 2009 for some projects) has been copied over. The tool to view historical data is currently partially available (assessment data and a few projects may not be available at the moment). The tool to add new projects to the bot's list is also available now (editing the configuration of current projects coming soon). Unlike the previous tool, all changes will be effective immediately. OAuth is used to authenticate users, allowing only regular users to make changes to prevent abuse. A visible history of configuration additions and changes is coming soon. Once tools become fully available, their toolserver versions will redirect to Labs.

If you have any questions, want to report any bugs, or there are any features you would like to see that aren't currently available on the Toolserver tools, see the updated FAQ or contact me on my talk page. Mr.Z-bot (talk) (for Mr.Z-man) 05:18, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

NYSHPO site problems (again)

Can someone explain to me in simple terms how to get the ji.jar file to work? I've downloaded it, but I cannot get the PDF files to render. Thanks in advance (see Archives p. 58 for background on same topic)--Pubdog (talk) 01:34, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to Participate in a User Study - Final Reminder

Would you be interested in participating in a user study of a new tool to support editor involvement in WikiProjects? We are a team at the University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within WikiProjects, and we are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visual exploration tool for Wikipedia. Given your interest in this Wikiproject, we would welcome your participation in our study. To participate, you will be given access to our new visualization tool and will interact with us via Google Hangout so that we can solicit your thoughts about the tool. To use Google Hangout, you will need a laptop/desktop, a web camera, and a speaker for video communication during the study. We will provide you with an Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 16:40, 5 March 2014 (UTC).

Collaboration? Kenton Commercial Historic District (or East Skinner Butte Historic District)

Would any project members be interested in contributing to this project? WikiProject Oregon hosts monthly photography campaigns. For February, the subject of focus is Portland's Kenton Commercial Historic District. As you can see, many of the contributing sites have been photographed, and new categories have been created at Wikimedia Commons. There are just a few days left for the campaign, but any assistance with creating an article for the district would be much appreciated. Consider my request one WikiProject member attempting to leverage collaboration with another WikiProject. :) Content creators/writers are especially welcome; help with district maps is also great. Please feel free to use newly-uploaded images from this district, and to add your name to the list of participants on the project page.

If it is too late for this particular project, please consider doing the same for our March project, which focuses on Eugene's East Skinner Butte Historic District. Similarly, we hope to create a new Wikipedia article and photograph contributing properties to the district.

Again, any assistance would be much appreciated! --Another Believer (Talk) 23:36, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

@Another Believer: I made this map of the Kenton district if it's of any use. I included the boundaries of the larger Kenton Conservation District as well.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:46, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
Thank you so much, Dudemanfellabra! Your assistance is much appreciated. I added your contribution to the project page as well. --Another Believer (Talk) 22:57, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

For those who may be interested you can view photos uploaded so far at this link. Thanks! --Another Believer (Talk) 16:34, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

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