Talk:Scouting in Connecticut

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	Scouting in Connecticut is part of the Scouting WikiProject, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Scouting and Guiding on the Wikipedia. This includes but is not limited to boy and girl organizations, WAGGGS and WOSM organizations as well as those not so affiliated, country and region-specific topics, and anything else related to Scouting. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
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	This article is part of WikiProject Connecticut, a WikiProject related to the U.S. state of Connecticut.
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Would Wikipedians entertain the idea of having the Councils-by-state sections recategorized to "Scouting in Arizona", "Scouting in Washington", and so on, rather than a list of every council and district? The reason I would like this considered is

1) no other country's Scouting articles are divided into such minute details (except for The Scout Association of Hong Kong, and really, is that much minutiae important or interesting to the reader?)

2) many councils that a reader may choose to look up, like the Fitchburg Area Council of Massachusetts or the Vigilante Area Council of Montana, went extinct 30+ years ago, yet may be of interest in a more state-based article

3) many states like Alaska share a communal Scout history, only fairly recently being broken into smaller councils, others like North Dakota had several merged into one, and some Scouting histories are better told encompassing an entire state. The fact that Scouts in California prior to the charter of the BSA were the youth arm of the California Highway Patrol, or the fact that Connecticut, while having only eight counties, has had 22 councils over the course of its history, would be well-included in a statewide article

Chris 01:24, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Size

What have the other people who wrote the other Connecticut Council articles agree with this? It make sense, however, how large would the article get?

This article received a warning on its size. How should this be handled. As each council history is expanded, as well as Order of the Arrow Lodges, Scout Camps, etc., the article will grow larger and larger. Should the topic "Scouting in Connecticut" be the lead article and then have links to Girl Scouting in CT, Boy Scouting in CT, Order of the Arrow in CT. dep369 13:50, 11 May 2006 (UTC)Dep369

When any particular section grows past a couple of paragraphs, that would warrant splitting into its own article. For instance, there is Scouting in Rhode Island (using a neighbor), as well as Rhode Island Boy Scouts, because that section was full enough to make a good standalone article. Each article that was previously merged into this one was done because either the article was a tiny stub or a list, there were no really good articles on Conn Scouting before. It looks like before long, there will be.

[edit] Great work by dep369

I really like what you've done with the page, it's great, with three caveats.

1 Like the rest of the Internet, Wikipedia abhors large strings of capital letters. Perhaps the way to get around this is to italicize what you now have in caps, or perhaps change the font color.

2 Wikipedia also dislikes "List of..." anything. You can take that out anywhere it appears in the article, and it will sound much better. We changed all these from "List of councils in x state" to "Scouting in x state" specifically so that Wikipedia would not delete them, as it had done to the lists of OA lodges. That was a pity, as the fellow had put a lot of work into it, but lists are bad, m'kay?

2a Wikipedia dislikes the use of postal abbreviations. If you don't want to spell out "Connecticut" for sheer volume, consider leaving out the state name in each instance, like Hartford instead of Hartford, Connecticut.

3 I don't understand the addition of [[Order of the Arrow|Honor societies]] where it is, can you explain?

I really like how you included the Girl Scout information, I believe this article should be held up as a model of how to do that. I don't know enough about the Girl Scouts, where did you obtain all that, and would you willing to add such info to each of the other states in like fashion?

Brother, this is a load of great work, thank you! Chris 01:01, 25 May 2006 (UTC)