Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Massachusetts/Archive 2

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.


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infobox trouble

Can someone help me fix the infobox on West Newbury, Massachusetts? There's a strange dead image link in the middle of it which doesn't show up when i edit the page. I mean you see it when you're viewing the article, but when you click edit this page, you can't see it anymore, so there's no way to remove it. Any help people could provide would be much appreciated.--Alhutch 00:43, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

it's been fixed.--Alhutch 08:41, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Infobox Town MA

  • Whoever did all of the towns beginning with "A", good job! Thanks. --AaronS 02:49, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I just put the Infobox Town MA into another 107 towns tonight, and I'll try to finish the rest off by tomorrow night (there's 170 left or so). There's some problems between the data I'm using to generate the infoboxes and data already in articles. For example, some of the "Year Settled" and "Year Incorporated" fields don't match between the article text and infoboxes I installed (I'm not sure which is correct; it might vary by town). Feel free to help out by taking a look through the articles and verifying that the data matches (and correcting it if it doesn't). Thanks, --CapitalR 10:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
  • (Done towns: Letter A).
What's the status on this miniproject? How can I help finish it? It seems like we're almost done. --AaronS 21:52, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
I've posted the table I used to generate the infoboxes at User:CapitalR/Mass Infobox Data. You can take a look at the table and help finish off the empty spaces. Thanks for the help, --CapitalR 22:29, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Another wiki you might be interested in

Since everyone here has professed some kind of interest in Massachusetts, I would like to invite you all to contribute to the Boston Wikicity, located at this link. It's still getting off the ground, and there is plenty of work to be done. We need all the help we can get. Please consider joining up and telling anyone else about it you know who might be interested. Thanks, --Alhutch 10:16, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Help with Brookline infobox

I added the town infobox to Brookline's page, but it seems to have an extra line, that I can't get rid of. Could someone fox this as I am unsure how? Thanks, Reuvenk 18:41, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I fixed it. There was a missing value called "image_town", which has also showed up missing on other town infoboxes. to fix that you just add "image_town = |" under the nickname value.--Alhutch 18:51, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Town Meeting capitalization

Does anyone know the proper capitalization for the types of town meetings? In the articles Town meeting, Open Town Meeting and Representative town meeting, there are a variety of capitalization schemes that I would like to standarize (including in the titles of those articles). For example, should it be "Open Town Meeting", "open Town Meeting", or "open town meeting" when referring to that phrase in an article? I checked on google and found lots of different schemes. Let me know if you have any thoughts on what it should be. --CapitalR 10:53, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

I have also struggled with this. I think it is important that we be consistent. It seems right to me to capitilize all of the words in the name of the type of government. For example, Open Town Meeting, Town Meeting, Representative Town Meeting. The entire phrase is the name of the form of government. Like House of Representatives. U.S. Senate. It would look wrong to have house of Representatives... --LWV Roadrunner 02:37, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team cooperation

Hello. I'm a member of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing articles using these criteria, and we are are asking for your help. As you are most aware of the issues surrounding your focus area, we are wondering if you could provide us with a list of the articles that fall within the scope of your WikiProject, and that are either featured, A-class, B-class, or Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Do you have any recommendations? If you do, please post your suggestions at the listing of all active Places WikiProjects, and if you have any questions, ask me in the Work Via WikiProjects talk page or directly in my talk page. Thanks a lot! Titoxd(?!? - help us) 18:46, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Massachusetts

Many articles covered by this WikiProject lack photographs. As part of a subcategorization of the requested photos category, there is now a category for Massachusetts articles needing photos - to use it, just add {{reqphotoin|Massachusetts}} to the article's talk page. I have only added a few articles to the category so far, but it would be an easy way to make an extensive list of Massachusetts-related articles lacking photos. I hope you find it useful! TheGrappler 08:03, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Best of

Can we get a few lists of the 'Best Of' pages that others can use for inspriation? For example, the best town pages, the best city pages, the best history pages, the best commercial pages, etc? Briancua 17:10, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, this is my work, and I think it's pretty good :) : The Skeleton in Armor--Caliga10 16:58, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Question about 'Notable Residents'

I have been working on the Acton, MA article and have had some discussion with another editor about the 'notable residents' section. Do we have any consistent guidelines (or do we want to create any ?) for what should be in this type of section? Some towns have long lists of names - some of which don't seem very notable. Others have very few. I can see a couple of different approaches: one is to put only historically significant people in the list; another is to include only people who made a significant impact on the town - regardless of their contributions or fame outside of the town. The approach I have been taking is to use Wikipedia itself as the acid test. If a person is significant enough to have a Wikipedia article then they are significant enough to list as a 'notable resident'. But I am willing to be over-ruled on this. I would just like to see some consistency across the town articles. --LWV Roadrunner 02:49, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree with your assessment. If someone already has an article, by all means, link it to the town's notable resident list. But we should not create articles for this purpose, and if there is a non-notable person who happens to be already linked as a resident, chances are their articles will eventually be deleted anyway (someone would just need to clean up the dead link). I find these alot, and they're almost always people who created an article about themselves in a pathetic attempt at self-promotion.--Caliga10 16:35, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
I first spent hours reading Wikipedia a few days ago, for causes related to geographical units like counties and cities. I can't seem to get out of the wikipedia, categories, and talk namespaces and stay out! But I have visited the Pittsfield and Acton articles as well as this WikiProject Massachusetts. Acton is listed here and Pittsfield is not. Does that mean someone has (perhaps nominally or incompletely) converted Acton to a standard but no one has done that for Pittsfield?
Connecticut (the state article) includes the listing "Tebucky Jones, who currently plays for the New England Patriots of the NFL, lives in Farmington, Connecticut." Here such listings are limited to the county and city articles. For example, the Pittsfield article names two of the ten major league baseball players born there in 150 years. The Massachusetts state list is roughly limited to public office holders, although the heading includes public figures.
Here and elsewhere there is a lot of discussion of vanity and celebrity listings of people on the pages for locales, and also vanity/celebrity articles on people. Beside the work withthose motives, I suppose some lists and pages will be generated simply because the data is readily available and it feels good to complete somsething. See Players Born in Massachusetts for example of what is available.64.48.73.24 22:13, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Question about 'Geography'

Many of the Town Articles in Massachusetts include a section called 'Geography'. This is largely a verbal re-stating of the material in the Geography Section on the Town Info Box. I am hesitant to delete this material (I know - Be Bold) without checking with others on this project. What do you think ? Should we delete the 'Geography' section from Town Articles if it doesn't add much to the info that is in the Info Box ?? --LWV Roadrunner 19:05, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I would say leave it. It's a good spot for locals to expand on geographic information that the census bureau doesn't gather. Sahasrahla 23:26, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • I agree with leaving it. This section is standard across town articles in many different states, and it is a good place for others to expand. --CapitalR 06:56, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Agree--leave it. I've used this section to link towns to their neighboring towns, which is useful info that isn't replicated in the geography box.--Caliga10 16:36, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Request for feedback on Acton, MA article

I have done some extensive work on this article over the last month and would appreciate feedback on it. I would like this article to be a 'recommended article' for Wikiproject Massachusetts. Please put feedback on the Acton talk page so others can comment, too. Thank-you.

--LWV Roadrunner 12:58, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

History buff needed

Please check out List of current and former capital cities in the United States and make sure that Massachusetts's capital cities are listed accurately. A word of warning: the page does contain quite a bit of complicated wiki formatting, so if you're not comfortable editing it, just post your changes on the talk page and someone more experienced will apply them to the article.   JEK   19:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Nominate articles for Portal:United States

I've worked for the past month to update Portal:United States and keep it better maintained. Though, I think the Portal:United States would be even better with broader participation. One way to do that is instead of choosing the "selected article" myself each week, if others would nominate articles and help make decisions. (same goes for pictures, though these are stocked up through July 29) If there is anything related to Massachusetts (or anything else related to the U.S. - culture, music, literature, geography, history, politics, ...), please nominate. I'd also like people to weigh in on the nominations and help select what should be featured. Thanks. --Aude (talk contribs) 23:26, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

New "People from [city]" Categories

Hello, everybody. I am the bozo who just recently created the new subcategories in the "People from Massachusetts" category. I thought that some of you might want to know why they were created, and why they often have so few pages in them.

The majority of the states have "People from [state]" categories which have at least 200 entries, sometimes over 1,000. This is clearly an unworkably large number for anyone wishing to use the category for research purposes. In 8th grade in Rapid City, South Dakota, the social studies class asked us to write, over the course of the year, reports on two or three people who were or had been residents of the city. Because of that, I have reason to believe that they could be used and probably are used for research purposes. To make such research easier, I looked at the list of metropolitan statistical areas and basically entered in one new category for each metropolitan statistical area.

I know that many of these categories might well be, in the eyes of you who know more about the cities in question much better than I do, misnamed or otherwise faulty. I apologize for any mistakes I may have made along those lines, and I would welcome any corrections, including deletion, that any of the rest of you might choose to make. With that in mind, I have also generally populated the categories with only one or two names, to ease in the process of deletion or renaming.

I thought you all should know why these categories were created, and felt some degree of responsibility for letting your know. I wish you all the greatest good fortune in making the coverage of your state in Wikipedia of the greatest scope and quality possible, and I hope that I haven't annoyed too many of you by my recent actions. Badbilltucker 13:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)