Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. special districts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So say we have a municipal article, and we want to link in all of the special districts to which it is subject, which cover all of its territory. Should we use lists or categories? Personally, I'm partial to creating a list like this (imagine the appropriate links):

Kensington is subject to the following special districts:

Water: EBMUD
Transit: AC Transit ...
Fire: ...
School: ...
Parks: ... ...
...

Any thoughts?

-- Beland 05:03, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Contents 1 Ohio School Districts 2 Project directory 3 Wikipedia Day Awards 4 Recent policy changes limiting primary sources

[edit] Ohio School Districts

Before I create any articles on Ohio school districts, I wanted to ask for comments (or if we have a policy) concerning the names for the articles. The convention for cities is NAME, STATE (e.g. Cincinnati, Ohio) and for townships its NAME, COUNTY, STATE (e.g. Deerfield Township, Warren County, Ohio. But what to do with school districts? A solution such as Cincinnati City School District, Ohio is problematic because there are several districts that share their names with another (e.g. Lakota Local School District, Southwest Local S.D.) Using county names could work, but many districts cross county lines (see the list of districts at Warren County, Ohio#School districts for examples). The state assigns every district to one primary county, however, and we could say that, e.g. Mason City School District, Warren County, Ohio.
I'd appreciate some feedback on this subject and proposed we keep the discussion here for reference. PedanticallySpeaking 18:35, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I'd suggest using NAME, STATE and only where necessary include additional disambiguation such as NAME, COUNTY, STATE. If the districts are primarily associated with one county, then that should be enough, even if there are cases where the actual jurisdiction of the district might extend into adjacent counties. older≠wiser 19:04, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Do the school districts also have numbers associated with them? There must be some way that the State of Ohio systematically differentiates them. -- Beland 19:42, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the Ohio Department of Education has school district numbers, as do the Ohio Department of Taxation and U.S. Department of Education. The ODE and USED numbers are probably the most useful, as they allow access to info from both of the major agencies and comparison of an Ohio district to any other in the nation. Rkevins82 03:26, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I've proposed a standard form for naming articles on Ohio school districts: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ohio school districts), which could easily be extended to apply to districts in other states. I'd welcome some feedback on this. PedanticallySpeaking 16:37, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 18:40, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 22:03, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent policy changes limiting primary sources

There have been recent changes in the merging of WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:RS into WP:ATT, along with related changes at WP:N. One thing that may affect geographic projects is the tightening of the requirement for multiple secondary sources for all articles. Many geographic articles are created from a single primary source like census data or topo maps. Technically, this would subject these articles to deletion. If you have not checked these policies lately, you should. And be sure to check the supporting discussions. Remember WP policies and guidelines are supposed to incorporate a broad consensus. Dhaluza 20:32, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't see anything at Wikipedia:Attribution that prevents an article from referencing only primary sources. --NE2 21:35, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Also look at WT:ATT and WT:N and check the edit histories to see what people are trying to include, particularly the recent WP:N edit war prior to protection. Dhaluza 21:54, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not looking at notability, since that's not a policy, but attribution explicitly allows "descriptive claims that can be checked by anyone without specialist knowledge" from primary sources. --NE2 22:07, 3 March 2007 (UTC)