User talk:Nghtownclerk

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Welcome!

Hello, Nghtownclerk, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! Daniel Case (talk) 02:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] More personal welcome

Hi, I live in Walden, not too far away, and did most of the writing and photography for a lot of the articles about places and things around here (and still do). Almost a decade ago I was the Mid-Hudson Times town and city of Newburgh beat reporter ... I remember covering one of your predecessors in the job, Alisa Williams, quite well (wild times, wild times). I'm glad to see you are here and concerned with the accuracy of the information.

We organize ourselves into little groups called WikiProjects to coordinate efforts on articles about particular subjects. Some of us are trying to get a Hudson Valley subproject going within the mostly dormant WikiProject New York State. You're welcome to join.

Just some comments on your edits so far:

  • [1]: The Gomez Mill House stuff is best left in the article on the house itself. Maybe one sentence or two in the town article about how it's the oldest Jewish residence (that tricky phrasing that the Gomez Foundation came up with to accurately describe the house's historic status). Anyone wanting further information can click the link.
  • Newburgh Bay: There should be a reliable source somewhere online for the bay's depth we can add. I assume creating the table graphics was unintentional? (accidentally hitting one of the top toolbar buttons? I do it too). I'll be undoing that.
  • Route 747. I wrote this early last year right after the Record reported on the new designation. As such there have remained a great deal of uses of the future and present tense that had not yet been changed to the present and past. You may have taken care of the last one. As for the buildings on the remaining stub of Drury, we don't need to go into the detail of saying exactly how many there are. I think I'll take the stuff about the ramp and the wetlands issues out entirely, since as it's written it sounds too speculative, and we don't allow that. I had been told that by some guy at the site I was talking with during construction, but as you noted that's apparently not the case. Best not to mention it all then.

Any questions you have about anything, please feel free to ask me. I've been editing here since early 2005 (three years now .... AAAAAGHH!) and I got made (:-)) an administrator last summer, so I know a lot about how to do things around here. Daniel Case (talk) 03:15, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


Thanks for writing back (I prefer new messages to be at the bottom of my talk page, just to let you know) and for the compliments and the memories. I'm glad we understand each other.

You will be interested to know that I recently created Powelton Club and have submitted a hook for the "Did you know?" section on the Main Page, which I contribute to a lot (in this case it concludes "...that three of the 18 holes on the Powelton Club's golf course had to be redesigned a year after they were built when the land they were on was taken to build U.S. 9W"?) It had a very rich and well-written NRHP application ... I never thought I would be writing so much on it (and I had always thought the listing was for the clubhouse itself, not the entire property).

I also have some pictures I'm waiting to process and upload — one of where you work, and another of Chadwick Lake, which I'll be starting an article on. Speaking of which, you had mentioned the belief that Orange Lake is the largest in the county ... I think that if you rephrase as "entirely within Orange County", that's correct. I have found sources old and new that give its surface area at 400 acres (1.6 km²), which seems pretty large compared to what might be other contenders (Tomahawk, Washington and Beaverdam. All of which also have some artificial expansion to boot. Daniel Case (talk) 06:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sockpuppet explanation

"Sockpuppetry" is the all-too-common Internet phenomenon of one person using separate accounts on a forum or website for whatever purpose (usually to create the impression of greater agreement with their position) and pretending they're different people. See Internet sockpuppetry.

Wikipedia takes a very dim view of the practice, and anyone doing it gets blocked. It keeps us admins very busy. Daniel Case (talk) 15:40, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Maragaret Truman

I have never yet seen a situation where a celebrity death wasn't announced where the page had not already been updated. I wonder if some people just troll the AP wire for these stories? It's a little weird. Daniel Case (talk) 20:57, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] references problem

OK. Another user, my good wikifriend Ruhrfisch, took care of it. What you need to do is create a "references" section with either {{reflist}} or<references />. I like to use the latter at first, since it generates normal-size text, until there are about 20 notes or so then switch to the former, which produces small text. A lot of other people prefer using {{reflist}} first; I guess because it's a template rather than some HTML tag.

Speaking of refs, I love what you've done with the town article, especially since you kept it very encylopedic, but could your citations be to something a bit more specific than "clerk's office"? That bit about the 12550 ZIP Code is interesting, and I'd like to see a newspaper article or some other document cited as the source. Something verifiable, even if not necessarily by me.

That works two ways, too. Once our then-car insurer's website sent us to a place up in the Rossville area to get our car photos taken since it was in the Wallkill ZIP Code, supposedly not too far from us in Walden. Only a computer ... And you didn't even get into the school district confusion that, thankfully, doesn't occur too much in Newburgh (but more here in Montgomery, where Pine Bush and Wallkill claim some of the town. I know some people who live in the Orange Lake area (thus paying taxes to your colleague the receiver), send their children to Wallkill schools yet have a Walden telephone number.

I have some old pics (as in, a couple of summers back) taken from the Cronomer Hill observation tower that might make a nice panorama of the town for the geography section (it goes nicely with the panorama of the city taken from the bridge. Something like this, but from multiple photos stitched together in Photoshop. The expanded article offers great possibilities for illustration with existing photos. But one problem with the Town of Newburgh is that, IME, there's no one picture you can take of something or somewhere that really represents the whole town (In fairness, this is a problem with many towns — particularly those with neighboring cities or villages of the same name — in New York. I have a great "skyline" infobox image for the Village of Goshen, as well as an "overview from high place" pic, but nothing that would do for the town of Goshen). So Town Hall is as good as that gets, I think. I wish there was less shadow; maybe I'll take another one in the spring. (Oh, an exception to this lack of a town signature image problem: Denning, in western Ulster County. But that's a special case. Only the Catskill towns have those natural skylines and almost no habitation. Around here, anyway).

The Kings Hill I was thinking of is probably better referred to as USGS BM Garrison, here. At 820 feet, I have never found a higher point in the Town of Newburgh, and this is also the Town of Montgomery's highest elevation (I'm into hiking and climbing to highest points of counties, among other forms of peak bagging, and I even drew up a list of the highest points of the towns of Orange and Ulster (as well as cities within them)). I looked over the maps closely and I have no doubt. Marlboro Mountain seems to get no higher than 700 feet. And yes, I've actually been to that benchmark. It's on private property but some guy's building a house nearby and you can drive almost to it. Daniel Case (talk) 05:27, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Two new town-related articles for your perusal

Quassaick Creek and Chadwick Lake. Sort of a related subject. Daniel Case (talk) 04:14, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Short reply to a long post

Sorry to have not been able to write back for a while; I have been busy working on some articles about Supreme Court cases, mainly having to do with pro sports and antitrust. Started with Flood v. Kuhn and just snowballed.

I do recall having read about the consolidation of the school districts at some point ... at least about how Roseton didn't want to be part of it because they knew how much they were coveted for the power plants. And that's why they're part of Marlboro instead. It will be interesting whenever I finally get around to writing an article on the NECSD.

As for that jury summons problem, like I said it's going to take a computer system with very adroit layered GIS information.

Thanks for Gedneytown Creek; I think it is used on the map but I missed it. I hadn't realized that about Chadwick Lake; it makes sense.

I have to go make dinner now. Daniel Case (talk) 23:25, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Book recommendation

Don't know if you've read about it here but I'll recommend it to you: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, by John Broughton. There's an excellent review (with a link to ordering info, unless you want to go down Route 300 to Barnes & Noble and plunk down the 30 bucks). For once all this stuff is available between two covers offline. I can quibble with some things in it but I'm learning a few things I didn't know. Daniel Case (talk) 22:38, 22 March 2008 (UTC)