Talk:National Register of Historic Places

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This list is within the scope of the National Register of Historic Places WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of listings on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

[edit] Where are we going with this?

The list of places is getting large, and most of them aren't all that notable. Are we going to expand the list to include all 78K+ places, or perhaps excise them all and focus again on what is a historic place? Bollar 16:06, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

The fact that they are listed as a historical place says they are notable. There is something about it that makes it historically important.

About the large size, I wouldn't object to breaking it up by state. Either National Register of Historic Places in Iowa or National Register of Historic Places/Iowa. I'll pre-counter the "no sub pages" argument with that the purpose of not using sub pages is to impose a hierarchy of page (clearly, this could also be Iowa/National Register of Historic Places and be a valid place) however this usage is to quell the size of National Register of Historic Places, which is not imposing a hierarchy. Cburnett 17:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

I think we'd have to break it up by much more than state to fit all 78K+ entries at 32K a page. This list is added to weekly by the NPS and IMO it is unmaintainable. But even if we do decide to keep it, this current format of people adding to this list as they wish isn't creating a list that will ever become encyclopedic.

As it is, we appear to have a complete list of sites from American Samoa, but not one of the 1,196 sites in South Dakota (not even Mount Rushmore.

The entire list is available in a database format, and if it's truly the desire to make the list complete, I would propose that someone download it and have a bot enter it all into Wikipedia. Bollar 19:30, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

For the last week or so I have been adding lists of the NRHP sites to each of the county articles for Oklahoma. (See Washington County, Oklahoma for an example.) One exception was for Oklahoma county, which has well over a hundred sites. In that case I created the article List of Oklahoma County, Oklahoma sites on the National Register of Historic Places, and linked to it from the Oklahoma County article. I think that this, combined with Category:National Register of Historic Places is the way to go. As articles get written on each site and the category becomes unwieldy, we can create subcategories for each state. Dsmdgold 20:11, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

That's a nice solution. Too bad it isn't easy, but I can work on some States myself if there's concensus. Bollar 22:09, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

32 KB is a rough guideline. Don't over-optimize a problem before it's a problem. Most states probably won't have any problem being under 32 KB, but if they aren't then that can be addressed then.

If you have a problem with the rate it's being entered, then you need to do it yourself. But the lack of a rate to your snuff is not reason to delete the article and I'll fight it tooth-and-nail because that's probably one of the worst reasons to delete an article. Even incomplete, the article is definitely encyclopedic. Definitely. It is entirely expected to have incomplete articles on wikipedia. Cburnett 20:40, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

If you thought I wanted to delete the article, then you've misunderstood me. I wanted to get rid of the list, which is in need of cleanup and which I think detracts from the important part of the article, which IMO is about the National Register of Historic Places, its history, what constitutes a NRHP, etc.

Can we agree to move the part of the article entitled Places in the registry to its own article, called List of National Historic Places, or something like that? And then break that article up as size requires? Bollar 22:09, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Sure. Cburnett 15:43, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikiproject?

Does anyone think there is enough interest to start "Wikiproject NRHP" Goals for the project could be:

• Insert lists of NRHP sites in every appropriate county, city, and town article.
• Create articles that are "Lists of NRHP sites in X" where X is a state name, or some sub-unit of a state, such that all the sites are contained on at least one list.
• Create a "List of NRHP Lists" to contain all of the above lists.
• And finally, the big one, create non-stub articles with images for every site on the above lists.

Dsmdgold 04:18, July 26, 2005 (UTC)