User:CapitalR/Test3
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I've spent a while compiling a giant database of information on US census division statistics, and I'm nearly ready to request permission to use a bot to add this template to all 41,903 articles that I have information on. However, a serious discussion will need to take place first to determine if this is the correct template to use, and what kind of modifications need to be made to it before its usage jumps from 4100 to 45000 articles. Thus, I will start that discussion here, so please add your comments. I haven't applied for a bot account yet, and will only do so when/if a consensus is reached here that adding this template to the articles is the right thing to do.
My database, which I compiled from many government databases, contains the following information. These are nearly all articles added by User:Ram-Man and User:rambot, but there are about 5000 that are missing (and which I will add in the style of the rambot). The percentage refers to the number of records, out of 41,903, that I have that information on:
- Name and type (city/town/township/CDP/borough/charter township/balance/etc.) (100%)
- State and all counties that the location is in, along with all corresponding FIPs codes (99.91%)
- Place ID, from national geography database (97.80%)
- Population year, total, density (100%)
- Area total, water, land, in both km and mi squared (100%)
- Latitude and Longitude (99.91%)
- Elevation (97.79%)
- Time zone, UTC offset, Daylight Savings use, DST offset (100%)
- Area codes (69.00%, mostly missing from CDPs and townships)
- ZIP codes (62.20%, mostly missing from CDPs and townships)
- I also plan on generating and uploading new, standard, and prettier maps for all 41,903 locations (based on a combination of St. Paul, MN, Concord, NH, and Miami, FL map designs).
Note that I will not overrite information in articles that already have an infobox, but I will add missing information (though I will record all information already in infoboxes, so I can later examine if it is accurate, and replace it later on if it is not accurate). Also, I do not plan on using the bot to edit the largest 200 cities or so, and these articles will be edited by hand to add the information. The new maps will only be used on articles that contain no map, or contain one of the simple red-dot maps. Articles with more sophisticated maps will not have their maps modified. However, the maps for all locations will be uploaded, even if it is not used in the infobox, so someone can manually add the new map to an article later on if they choose.
Certain states, such as Massachusetts and New Hampshire already have most of their cities/towns/etc. using this template; this project would just be a continuation of this process to extend the templates to all cities/towns in every state.
I have a few requests for changes to be made to the template before this huge-scale use:
- See Durham, Connecticut. Note that the "Government Type" field has a problem; the word "Type" in "Government Type" wraps to the second line, which is ok, but on the right hand side, the value "Selectmen-town meeting" starts on the same line with "Type" instead of the top line with "Government" (at least on my IE7). This should be examined and fixed.
- The five strangely named parameters for area, "TotalArea_sq_mi", "LandArea_sq_mi", "WaterArea_sq_mi", "MetroArea_sq_mi", and "UrbanArea_sq_mi" should be named with more standard names. It would be good if someone could make both the old names and five new names usable, until I can convert all instances of the old names to the new standard names with a bot. At that point the old names could be completely removed.
- It would be useful to have a way to include FIPS codes and a FeatureID in this template to help bots keep track of the exact record of the city in census and geographical databases. Perhaps we could add a few official fields at the end (something like id_type1, id_number1, id_type2, id_number2, etc) that don't actually display anything, but just exist for classification purposes only.
So, please add any questions and comments about this proposed use of the template below. --
