Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon/archive3

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Sports figures

I'm going to try to add some articles on some of Oregon's lesser-known but still notable sports personalities. I've started with Bob Gilder and I'll add more (suggestions are welcome!). Anyone know if using images like this one: [1] qualify for fair use under a template such as Template:promophoto? -Big Smooth 17:41, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Down here in Southern Oregon, we can often feel left out from some of this kind of stuff. A few Southern Oregon sports figures? How about Dick Fosbury, Sonny Sixkiller, or Marshall Holman?--DaKine 18:42, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
These articles already exist--are you asking us to expand them? P.S. This is a really old thread--in the future it might be better to add new posts at the bottom where they are more likely to be seen. Also check out Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon/People as a place to suggest articles that are needed. Happy editing! Katr67 18:53, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Added Oregon City Municipal Elevator

Anyone know what the other three elevators of the same sort are in the world? --EngineerScotty 05:08, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I looked, but couldn't find any others. I did find one which said OC is the only one in the US. That was a catalyst for reworking the article a bit. Hope it's okay. — EncMstr 01:54, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Infobox for project page

WikiProject Oregon

This WikiProject is about the US state of Oregon
Shortcuts: WP:WPOR
Wikimedia
Commons:		 Commons:Category:Oregon Oregon
Parent project: U.S. states
Project notice
template:		 {{WikiProject Oregon}}
Participant
userbox:		 {{User WikiProject Oregon}}
Has goals Yes

For WikiProject Ski and WikiProject Wine I created a new infobox {{infobox WikiProject}} to clean up and format some of the usual metadata about a wikiproject. I was thinking of adding it here, but ran into some issues with formatting. I couldn't easily come up with a way to handle it that didn't harm the {{oregontasks}} box, or the main column content. Perhaps someone out there with a better head for CSS issues than mine could find a way to do it?

Here's the code for using the infobox, and if I included it right, what it would produce should be on the right (and yes, I "randomly" chose a pretty picture instead of something like the state flag - revise as you wish):

 {{Infobox WikiProject
 | name = Oregon
 | image = 031 wizard island.JPG
 | caption = This WikiProject is about the US state of [[Oregon]]
 | shortcuts = [[WP:WPOR]]
 | portal = 
 | portal_img = 
 | commons = Oregon
 | parent = U.S. states
 | notice = WikiProject Oregon
 | userbox = User WikiProject Oregon
 | footnotes = 
 }}
Figured out a way to do this, so I went a head and changed the project page. Let me know what you think. If y'all don't like it, just revert it. I won't be offended :). EvilSuggestions 07:43, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Invitation to new WikiProject

A new WikiProject has been started, and may be of interest to members here. It is WikiProject National Register of Historic Places. It covers all listings on the Register, in all states and territories. Should you be so inclined, please feel free to join. And spread the word to any other interested parties. -Ebyabe 19:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

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 19:16, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

First Portland WikiMeetup

Sorry for the late notice, but next week -- 1 November 2006 -- there will be a get-together of Wikipedians in Portland. The reason for this meeting? This guy named Jimbo Wales will be in town Wednesday & Thursday, & I thought some of you might like to meet him. (Please let me know if you're coming: we need a head-count.) -- llywrch 00:45, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Have fun everyone--maybe I'll see you at the next one. Katr67 22:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Climate

The article Oregon lacks a section on climate. Jcam 21:41, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder. I'm going to remove the template from here if that's OK with you. You can see it on Talk:Oregon. Katr67 22:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Legislature articles and the 2006 Election

Now that the elections are done, I've started to prepare the State Senate and State House of Reps pages for the 2007 session's make up and listings. I have everything ready to post in text files. Because the Sec State's numbers are unofficial, I am holding off on posting what I have edited until they release the official numbers. There are still a couple of really close legislative races.

As for officers of the both houses, I am also holding off on making a list, as the House changed hands, and the Senate may elect some new officers despite staying in Democratic hands.

I plan on keeping the lists for the last session up in a lower section on the respective pages, as California's House and Senate pages keep track of make up and member names going back at least one session.

Ajbenj 10:10, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Oregon Outback?

I ran across this article and thought perhaps "Oregon Outback" was just a tourist-marketing gimmick, however, The Oregonian refers to it in this article so I guess it is becoming a common usage, despite its origins. ODOT even has Outback Scenic Byway [2], so I guess it's official. Now after cleaning up the Outback article quite a bit, I'm thinking Harney Basin covers pretty much the same thing? My brain hurts so if anyone else wants to take a look at the two articles, that would be swell. As a side note, the Oregon High Desert might be a good related article to write, as this term gets used quite a bit in Oregon, and currently high desert just redirects to desert. Katr67 01:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Welcome our latest wikignomes!

I'm not sure who is paying attention, but I thought I would point out that a couple of our newest members, User:Jgilhousen and User:Aboutmovies, have each started up one of the subprojects of WikiProject Oregon, Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Government and Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/History respectively. We seem to have lost our fearless leader User:PDXblazers to teaching, but hopefully these new subprojects can breathe some new life into our project. I know several of us are quietly chipping away at the Oregon articles, but maybe we can continue to collaborate a bit too. Happy editing! Katr67 20:44, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Portland Hikers Wiki

Found your wiki project this evening. I wish I had found it a while ago. We have a non-commercial hiking forum (portlandhikers.com) that is three months away from going live with a wiki project we've been working on for the Portland hiking community. It's more of an online resource than an 'encyclopedia' but in many ways we will be redundant (or perhaps complementary) to your efforts here. I'd love it if a few of the folks working on Portland area outdoor pages could contact me so we could decide if we need to redirect some of our efforts. jeffstatt@portlandhikers.com. I understand if you find this inappropriate for this discussion thread. Edit or delete as you see fit.

Jeffstatt 08:38, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Some Oregon biotech

There are entries for AVI BioPharma and Gene Tools, both Oregon biotech companies, located in Corvallis and Philomath respectively.

JonMoulton 18:01, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've tagged 'em with the project tag, although I note that Katr67 has already reviewed them and not tagged them. I believe she has expressed an opinion that company articles don't belong in the project, but I haven't seen a discussion of that, and have no sense of consensus on the issue. I'm ambivalent. I have no background in economics, so my only interest in Oregon companies is when they have some historical or political significance. Bottom line, I think they should probably be tagged, but don't know when or if we will attract a project member with the expertise and/or inclination to work on them. I could also be swayed pretty easily by reasoned arguments on one side of the issue or the other. -- J-M Jgilhousen 18:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Though I don't understand the need to solicit tags from us (though it was nice of you to ask), I'm fine with them being part of the project. I just personally have little interest in companies, sports, high schools or random people who may have set foot in Oregon, so in the past I didn't tag things like that. But I think anything that's in an Oregon cat should probably be tagged, preferably by someone who is actually involved with the project so one of us has at least had a chance to see if the article has any glaring issues. That's all my personal bias/opinion though--I don't think there's ever been a real discussion about what is "tag-worthy". So far the only ones I've hesitated on are cross-regional articles and things that look like they might be about to be merged or deleted.
As far as the progress of the tagging project, I've got through Z-M on my watchlist and I see EncMstr has done a whole bunch as well. Katr67 19:05, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Yep. Got carried away following wikilinks in the Oregon county and river articles. It looks like there are a good number of town articles not yet created—perhaps as many as half mentioned in the eastern counties, and 20–40% in the western.
As for the company articles: Companies primarily operating, founded or based in Oregon should be included, but regional or bigger chains shouldn't be. I have interest in a few of the former, but natural features are my preference. I expect there are many people who would contribute to company articles if the right ingredients came together: knowledge, aptitude, sources, outline, and time. That likely could be bootstrapped by creating stub articles with a useful boilerplate structure: so a web search turns up the stub article in front of someone already interested. I went ahead and tagged those I could find. HP and Intel are also tagged, even though they don't follow my criteria. I think everyone would agree they are an important Oregon topic. — EncMstr 20:24, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like we're all pretty much in agreement on relevance/prominence issues as applied to including business entities in WikiProject Oregon. I like EncMstr's criteria, as a rule of thumb, and agree with his "exceptions." Companies based outside of Oregon become relevant to our project if they have major facilities here, seriously impact our economy, etc. I can also think of events that could trigger inclusion... for example, the Oregon AG filing civil suit or criminal charges against a company doing business here. I don't think the project is big enough to require codification of such things into anything resembling formal policy. -- J-M Jgilhousen 21:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

(unindent)Yep sounds good. In theory, Google might be included because of Project 02, the server farm in The Dalles (if it is verified). I'm just citing it as an example--the Google article has enough people looking after it without us meddling, I'm sure. Katr67 21:39, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

It's not only been verified, but officially announced; I have pictures of it, and friends working there. They had to lift the veil of secrecy when they started advertising for workers. -- J-M Jgilhousen 23:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello from Hermiston

Hi everybody, I've been working on the Hermiston page. You know, that place about 180 miles east of Portland where all of those delicious watermelons come from every summer. I added the wikiproject Oregon template to that page, hope that was ok. I didn't see any guidelines for making an Oregon city an "official" wikiproject, so let me know if there's something else I need to do. In the mean time, I'm continuing to edit and improve the page. EOBeav 22:22, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Howdy, EOBeav. Welcome to the project. I'm a relative newcomer to WikiProject Oregon, too, hailing from The Dalles. So far, my impression of the project members is that of a friendly bunch, ready to encourage anyone who is willing to roll up his or her sleeves to pitch in, and quick to provide help in learning the ropes. If your interest is simply making the Hermiston page the best it can be, go for it. I'm sure some of the Cities subgroup members will be checkin' your page to add their two bits worth, and you might want to check out that subgroup, if you haven't already. I'm focusing my attention right now on Oregon government and politics, but also am trying to make some minor contributions in other areas of interest. Feel free to let me know if you have a question... I ain't an expert, but I know several. Hmmm. And maybe it's time to post a picture of myself in my clericals, stetson and boots to my user page. Nah. Wouldn't wanna scare the children. -- J-M+ Jgilhousen 22:56, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Welcome both of you. So far there's little danger of running low on work. Glad to have some new faces...er...fingers helping out. It is especially nice to have folks outside the big population centers to mix things up a bit. — EncMstr 01:58, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Marked historic Oregon places not on national register

Okay, here's the scoop. There are a number of buildings and other landmarks here in The Dalles and environs with historic markers bearing the Oregon State Seal (white plaques with Blue lettering). Some are on the National Register of Historic places, but many are not.

I seem to remember there having been a section on the Oregon Parks Service about these markers, how to qualify for them, and even including the application forms and a list of all the buildings and places that had been qualified. Since the redesign of Oregon.gov, the applicable section appears to have been deleted. Perhaps my websearch skills are just deteriorating.

Anyway, some of these sites, I think, are sufficiently notable that they merit inclusion in Wikipedia, either as examples of a particular architectural style or because of historic significance. I believe that the current owners of many of them have opted for state rather than federal listing to avoid restrictions on future development of their property. Anyway, if any of you can point me toward where I can find more on this, or have ideas about why such sites should or should not be included, I'm all ears... well, eyes... whatever. -- J-M Jgilhousen 03:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Is this it? http://www.oregon.gov/OPRD/HCD/grants.shtml I didn't find a list of buildings yet. The SOS may have some stuff too... Forty million redlinks on the NRHP list and you want to add *more* stuff to work on? :P Katr67 04:48, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe. I'll do some digging from there. A small percentage ofthose forty million are within easy driving distance of here. I was thinking about some for which I already have photographs, and others I could easily take. I'l have to leave the other 39,999,980 or so to people who can more easily afford gas. -- J-M Jgilhousen 21:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

DYK

The project made DYK today with an item lifted from Charles Crookham.

...that U.S. judge Charles Crookham held a mock funeral for Roman numerals when they were retired from use in state pleadings?

-- "J-M" Jgilhousen 08:44, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Hee! Katr67 15:41, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Naming Conventions as applied to Oregon Government & Politics articles

Although it has some application to all articles within the scope of the Oregon project, I raised this subject with Katr67 in the user space, and we agreed that it was better to discuss it on the Government & Politics talkpage. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 23:09, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

No article on the December 2006 Windstorm?

I added a mention of it last Friday to Portal: Current events, where no one noticed I had put it under the wrong day. Are all of the people who would work on this article still without electricity? Best to strike while the newspaper links still work. -- llywrch 17:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

What are the criteria for the notability of a windstorm or other weather event? If the recent one is notable, then the 2002 "South Valley Surprise" rates one too. I see no mention of the recent storm anywhere, but that site is a great resource. So far, for storm articles, all I can find are Great Gale of 1880 and Columbus Day Storm of 1962. We also have Willamette Valley Flood of 1996. Katr67 18:29, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, it was noteable to me! Our power went out just long enough to screw up a bunch of work since I don't have a UPS (ahem... nor save my work as often as I should). Seriously, I haven't really had occasion to think much about notability at all, and certainly not as it relates to acts of nature. I should think that something along the lines of a 25-year (or maybe longer) frequency might apply. I still remember the "Columbus Day Storm of '64?" but given that tornadic activity is an annual event in much of the South and Midwest, I can't imagine our windstorm would warrant an article. Maybe I've just lived too long, and so have experienced so many. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 21:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this definitely deserves an article. Though I actually never much realized anything was going on. The power didn't go out (at least, for longer than a second at a time) and by the time I started walking home at 11:30 the winds had pretty much died down. Though one guy I know had a very large tree narrowly miss destroying his house. I don't think there are precise criteria for a weather event such as this (nor should there be) but as there were human casualties (at least 10) and 1.5 million homes were without power I think most would agree it is appropriate. Owen 21:44, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah, I was about to start an article but found out that it's been here all along. Owen 22:07, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict)That all makes sense, especially because this storm had an effect on the current events at Mount Hood. I believe things were worse up in Washington. (And having been through a nasty (ice, then snow, then wind) storm up there in December in 1996 when my power was off for 10 days, if this one was comparable, then the recent one is notable.) Didn't the recent storm result in some federal disaster declarations? (Here is a list of such things from Washington that mentions the "Major Winter Storm" of 1996.) That definitely adds to the notability. So what's the (cover your eyes, J-M) naming convention for such things? Katr67 22:09, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

...OK, never mind. :)Katr67 22:09, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Though that does bring up another storm we could use an article on: the Inauguration Day storm. Another article I've been thinking about lately is Climate of Oregon. Apparently three states have articles of this sort, and I think Oregon's climate is certainly diverse and interesting enough for it to make an informative article. Owen 22:22, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

I have subscriptions to two full-text newspaper article archives. If you don't have easy access to old press accounts elsewhere, I could run searches on their databases, and use "e-mail this user" to send you any articles that pop up (assuming you have registered your e-mail address with WP). -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 22:41, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Please do. I'm not sure I could get to work on them any time soon, but having information on-hand would be a good start. Owen 23:13, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay -- headin' to those sites now. Follow-up, if necessary, on your talk page. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 23:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Vanport's location

Wanted --an answer
This new user created an account, asked how to post a talk page at the help desk, then left the following message on the article. I was doing routine welcoming patroling and thought you folks might want to run this down in the spirit of public service or the holiday! Cheers! // FrankB 07:28, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm confused about how the location of Vanport is described in this article (and the Portland, OR article). It says Vanport was "located in Multnomah County, Oregon between the contemporary Portland city boundary and the Columbia River." Since I don't know where the contemporary Portland city boundary was, I still don't know where Vanport was. Was it at Delta Park? Or what?

Sylvia A 06:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I answered at user talk:Sylviaa, and pointed her(?) to this. The content should be included in Vanport, Oregon by clarifying the location. — EncMstr 08:21, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
I answered from the hip at the article's talk page, too. Katr67 15:26, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Judges, U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon

Anyone have ready access to a federal judiciary directory that could provide me a list of the current U.S. District Court judges for Oregon? The directory on the Court's website lists senior judges, judges, and magistrates having offices in the courthouse in Portland without distinction. I can puzzle it out by individually looking each one up in the federal judge biographical database, but it would give me a leg up if someone has a list they could scan and shoot me via the "e-mail this user" function on my user page. Thanks. -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 21:37, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Gray Sails the Columbia River

I was hoping some folks could weigh in on the debate about a propossed merger of the above page, if anyone has time.Thanks. Aboutmovies 18:00, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

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 22:18, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Recent Changes Camp

This will be meeting next month, Friday 2 Feb. thru Sunday 4 Feb. Cost is free anyone interested in assembling there for a Wikipedia Meetup/Birds-of-a-Feather gathering? -- llywrch 02:50, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Inconsistent "Mt. Hood" usage

I just initiated discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(abbreviations)#Mount_.2F_Mountain_.2F_Mt._.2F_Mt in case anyone wants to offer their two cents about when and if abbreviation should be used. --"J-M" (Jgilhousen) 20:20, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Good idea, I commented there. -Big Smooth 23:03, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Article in need of help

I noticed Gopher Valley Oregon after clicking through random pages, but am not sure what to do with it. Perhaps someone from the area can make heads or tails of what is worth keeping? --Klork 19:54, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Wow. That's one dense block of text. Thanks for the heads up. We'll see what we can do. Katr67 20:19, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

requesting feedback: List of Oregon ballot measures

Folks - I've been doing a lot of work on List of Oregon ballot measures, which I believe is a very important page - historical info about ballot measures can be hard to find. The Oregon Blue Book has a good list of every measure and votes for/against, but it lacks wikilinks or any detail on the more important measures.

If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that I've put more work into recent years - the lists are complete only since 2000, and I've made a table only for 2006. Please let me know if you think I'm on the right track with this table. There's another possibility at User:Peteforsyth/measurechart, which doesn't explicitly state "YES" or "NO" for whether a measure passed - the color coding and a percentage over 50% would indicate passage of a measure. If the table format is desirable, I'll go ahead and convert previous years.

Additionally, I'm not sure the best way to communicate how a measure passed. Is the percentage good, or would actual number of votes - for example, 142,332 "YES", 564,050 "NO" - be better? Or both? The raw number has the advantage of clearly illustrating how many more people vote in general elections than special elections, etc.

Might be worth looking at the List of California ballot propositions for comparison.

Any comment welcome - but probably best to discuss over there.

-Pete 20:26, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

And another "situation"

I would welcome some help at Talk:Bull Mountain, Oregon. Just wikislap me if I'm being out of line. Thanks! Katr67 18:23, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Anyone want to take on Friends of Bull Mountain? Katr67 02:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Category:People from Oregon and subcategories

How are we dealing with Category:People from Oregon and its subcategories? I see people like Jon Krakauer in both Category:People from Oregon and Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon. I'm assuming if someone is in a subcategory then they no longer need to be in the main category, so he can be removed from Category:People from Oregon, correct? This brings up another problem, however. Esera Tuaolo is in both Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon and Category:Oregon State Beavers football players. This might not seem like a problem at first, but Category:Oregon State Beavers football players is a subcategory of Category:Oregon State University alumni, which is in turn a subcategory of Category:Oregon State University people, which is a subcategory of Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon. So by him being in both categories he is essentially being categorized twice, bringing up the original problem of being in a parent and subcategory at the same time. For someone to be in Category:Oregon State University alumni or Category:Oregon State University faculty, they have to be considered "from" Corvallis (unless they commute...even then they would qualify for the category, per the "otherwise closely associated " clause in the category description) So If someone is in either of these categories should they also be categorized as being from Corvallis? If so there are about 150 people that need to be added to Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon, and if not there are a couple that need to be removed. Another idea would be to leave the people in both categories only if they lived in Corvallis outside of the time they were at OSU (i.e. Mike Riley), but that would be very hard to find out for each person, and it would have to be added to the category description. VegaDark 03:41, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Category dilemmas give me a headache, so I'm not long for this discussion. I will make one observation though: the following piece of the chain you describe seems wrong to me (for reasons that you allude to - basically, a OSU person is not necessarily - or even likely to be - "from" Corvallis.)
Category:Oregon State University people, which is a subcategory of Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon
-Pete 03:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I believe it was decided a while back that for people to be included in "from" categories, they can be born in, residents of at one time, currently reside in, or are "otherwise closely associated with" the city or surrounding area. So with this description then all people who go to or work at OSU would be "from Corvallis", hence Category:Oregon State University people being a subcategory of Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon would be accurate. VegaDark 03:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with the born, residents, etc. designation, though I have a problem with some of the places being too broad, like Category:People from Medford, Oregon including Ashland. But you're not asking about that. I'd say if you're going to recategorize anything, err on the side of less work. Of course using AWB would make it easier if you decide to go the other way. Frankly I think it would be silly to add all those people to the Corvallis cat. On the other hand, I've seen it discussed that being in both the parent and child cat isn't always a bad thing if it helps people find the article. You might ask User:Hmains. He(?) has done a lot of work sorting out the Oregon categories. I don't always agree with his changes but at least everything is consistent now. Katr67 04:05, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I still feel that the connection I highlighted above is a mistake. Even by the definition VegaDark cites. For instance, a quarterback, born and raised in PA, who played pretty well for Oregon State for 3 seasons and then went on to be an NFL star in Texas would be a notable OSU alum, but unless he had more of a connection with Corvallis than that, I'd hardly call him "closely associated" with it. OSU and Corvallis are distinct entities - in many contexts, one is not "of" the other. -Pete 06:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
If he was QB here for 3 years then he would have lived here for 3 years. So under the defnintion I provided the "residents of at one time" part would apply and he would be ellible to add to this category by that part, not just by close association to OSU (although I believe that would apply as well). VegaDark 07:44, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I suppose I "selectively overlooked" that phrase in your definition. Anyway - I don't agree with that part of the definition, but if that's a consensus that's been reached, I'll drop it. Since I don't pay much attention to categories, it doesn't make much sense for me to stand in the way! -Pete 18:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Couldn't we make a OSU category that is not a sub of People from Oregon? Just its own category. Then the other OSU cats could be subs, and leave the Corvallis as a sub of Oregon? Being someone who graduated from OSU 1) I don't consider myself from Corvallis to where if I ever became notable I would hope I am not catagorized as such and 2) I hope OSU alumni is not being used for people who just attended, they better have graduated (and in the case of football players there is a long history of both not being congruent). Aboutmovies 20:13, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
From Alumnus: An alumnus is a person who has attended or is a graduate of an educational institution. So yes, all people who are notable enough for a page who have attended OSU do qualify for this category, regardless of it they graduated or not. And we could make those category changes, but per the definition above it makes sense to keep it as a subcategory, which I agree with. VegaDark 03:05, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
One more crack at why I think the phrase "residents of at one time" is problematic. I don't know the discussion that led to that consensus, but it seems likely to me that there was a desire to be permissive when an editor wants to intentionally assert that a certain subject is "from" a town, based on his or her understanding of the subject's connection with the town. But to use that rule in assigning categories seems like a mistake. I'll drop my QB example, in favor of the more reality-based example of AboutMovies. He/she is an OSU student, and yet would find it inappropriate to be described as "from" Corvallis in the future. But if that's part of how categories work, there's no way for an editor to make that "correction." I think this scenario is all too common, especially for a college town like Corvallis. -Pete 04:50, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
First Pete, was a student, graduated a while back. And I agree with you, Corvallis does not equal OSU and vice versa. For one you don't have to go to Corvallis to attend classes. There are web classes and other distant learning programs. Plus OSU Cascades, the Portland center, and for those other definitions of alumni, those that work at the extension service offices around the state or the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. I know when I went to OSU I had a significant number of profs who communted in from Portland (and students from Albany or even Eugene), so again I don't think they would consider themselves from Corvallis. But more on the whole alumni thing. Aboutmovies 17:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem with including people who have not graduated, is that definition is not widely accepted. I know it is in some dictionaries that way, but not all. For instance here lists two different definitions, the one you quoted and: alumnus - a person who has received a degree from a school (high school or college or university) To illustrate, in common usage in academic journals such as High School Journal; Dec96/Jan97, Vol. 80 Issue 2, p103, we have the following quote: “Many of the student authors drew parallels between the school's current academic and social life and the school milieu recalled by alumni. The biographies also cited the graduates' personal role models.” Additionally from Education Week; 12/13/2000, Vol. 20 Issue 15, p12, “What began last year as a discreet inquiry by the alumni group into how the nation's richest orphanage spends its money has escalated into a pitched and very public war involving the state's top law-enforcement officer. It has become an emotional, symbolic struggle over intention and interpretation, a painful pull between the old and the new. At the heart of the dispute is some graduates' contention that the school's current administration...” As you can see the authors uses the term alumni as synonymous with graduate, not the all encompassing definition. Also, on Alumni association you will see that alumni is in parentheses next to graduate which indicates the author is using the term as synonymous to graduate the term it is next to and set off from the rest of the sentence by a comma. Furthermore, going off the talk page for Alumnus it seems to be more of a British use to include all former students. And if you really study the definition that wikipedia uses, it does not make sense. As graduate can be subsumed by attended, there is no need to include graduate. Anyone who graduated also attended. Therefore the definition should say: “Alumnus-a person who attended or worked for any entity.” Instead of extra words. But I don’t personally agree that alumni includes non-graduates, as that would degrade the term and I would be in the same category as some high school drop out who took rock climbing at OSU, we would both be OSU alumni. The OSU alumni association will even let them be a member, but then again they just want the revenue. As a graduate, and this is my opinion but I’m guessing other graduates share this opinion, is that using the term alumni so liberally degrades our accomplishments. We took the time and effort to persevere and complete the graduate requirements, our reward is being an alumnus. To lump us in with dropouts is ridiculous. Why even have the term? You could easily just say former students. And no matter what definition (graduates only or not) the definitions we use do not match up to the Latin, since according to the Latin definition I am the amunus of my mother, my father, my pre-school, my elementary school, my junior high school, my high school, my undergraduate school, PSU where I took one 4 week summer class, my law school, my wife, my brother, my dog, and so on. But I think we can both agree that this is not the commonly accepted definition for the term. Someone way back started using the term improperly to sound smart, and things just kept changing as many words in the English vocabulary do. But that’s really neither here nor there to this discussion. As to the categories, no that would not make sense. If we go with your definition, there is no need for “OSU Alumni” as they could all rightfully go into “OSU People,” or is there some other distinction keeping the two separate? I know when I created the Willamette University Alumni category I only added people that had graduated, and the same with the WU College of Law alumni category. I could have just created a “WU people” category and included both in there, but again that degrades both those who graduated and those who graduated from law school. Ultimately my point is that the common usage of alumni (whether correct or not by some dictionaries) is that of solely and un-inclusively graduates of a school, and schools only. Not where someone worked for three months during the summer or where they took a couple classes and dropped out. Aboutmovies 17:13, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, here are some things to keep in mind when making this decision. I think if you wanted to change it you would have to go higher up than this Wikiproject, because: 1) List of Dartmouth College alumni is a featured list, i.e. the standard all other lists of alumni pages should be held to, and that includes people who never graduated. 2) The naming conventions for lists of people by university affiliation would have to be redone throughout all Wikipedia. The "List of ___ People" categories are not named as such because they include non-graduates, they are named as such because they include both alumni and faculty, since they aren't big enough to break into two sections as I have done with List of Oregon State University alumni and List of Oregon State University faculty and staff. 3) Perhaps most importantly, the OSU Alumni Association inculdes people who never graduated on their list of famous alumni. "Years listed after each entry represent year of graduation or years of attendance". They list Swede Halbrook, who never graduated. The also list some other athletes who look like they went pro early. VegaDark 19:57, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
VegaDark, the only decision really being discussed is the whole Corvallis/OSU categorization topic. The definition of alumni is a side topic that is only about the definition. The only reason it was brought up is that you asserted the definition you bolded above as if it was the only definition. My point to that was, no, not the only definition. I realize it would have to be decided higher up, as obviously a decision elsewhere was made at some point in the past on this topic. And if I feel like it I may go raise the object, but even if I proved my point they would likely decline the change just do to the shear amount of work in making the changes that would be required.
As to the categorization, you asked for input, with the question:
So If someone is in either of these categories should they also be categorized as being from Corvallis?
And some of us have given suggestions, I think the consensus to the question is no, all of which you seem to disfavor. So I’m not even sure why you asked.
Part 2 still doesn’t make since if we are going by the Wiki definition, as it also includes people who have worked somewhere. Hence a professor, coach, custodian (like Beaver Joe) and the like could also be under the alumni category. Again, it becomes repetitive to have both.
As to part 3 of your reply, I’m a bit confused. If you look about half way through my alumnus definition debate you will find:
The OSU alumni association will even let them be a member...
Which refers to people who were just students. So I know they will let in people who did not graduate, in fact they will let in anyone in the world who pays the membership fee. So if we use their definition then everyone in the world is a alumni of everything, so I’m now a Harvard alumnus and a NASA alumnus too. No wait, I don’t think I want to be associated with the NASA drama. Aboutmovies 20:38, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps you didn't understand what I was saying in part 3. I said "OSU Alumni Association] inculdes people who never graduated on their list of famous alumni." I did not mention who is allowed to join the OSU Alumni Association or not. Being a member of an alumni assocation is different from being an alumni. Most any alumni association will probably let you become a member if you pay them enough. And as for this being a side discussion, I agree. I did not even intend for there to be a discussion as to if Category:Oregon State University people should be a subcategory of Category:People from Corvallis, Oregon or not. I made the original query with the assumption there would be no issue of that given the all-inclusive definition of "from" being used right now, which I didn't think would be under debate. My essential question was do we remove people associated with OSU out of the Corvallis category since they are already in an OSU category, or do we add the 200 or so people in the OSU category to the Corvallis category. Since there is obviously some disagreement here about as to what a "from" category should even include I can see now that bringing this here won't accomplish much. VegaDark 10:46, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I didn’t quite understand what you meant by the OSU Alumni Association item. But I still don’t. Was your point 1) their list should be used for what should go into the alumni category because that is the university being discussed, or 2) people who don’t graduate are allowed into this alumni association, or 3) something else? Aboutmovies 03:30, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
The point I was trying to make was that since the OSU Alumni Association classifies people that haven't graduated as alumni, that gives us justification to do the same in the category and the list for alumni. VegaDark 20:09, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
As we were editing at the same time, I’ll respond to your last OSU bit. Again, that was the point I was addressing to begin with, that they include non-graduates. But if you want go with the OSU Alumni definition, you need to include the whole world, you can’t pick and choose off their list who you want to add. You have to use their definition, which is admit people who pay us money. If you want to go by their list online, fine. But then there are a lot of alumni that need to be de-alumni categorized (Brent Barry and Corey Benjamin for instance) since they are not on that list. The thing is, the reasons/rules for putting people into categories needs to be standardized and work across the board with whatever definition is used. Otherwise it is not a reason or rule, it is an excuse. That is the whole theory around the rules of physics, where it has to apply universally and must explain everything, not just work in some cases.Aboutmovies 20:27, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
A little more food for thought. Harvard University, argueably the most prestigous and famous school in all the land has a Notable non-graduate alumni of Harvard list. What is that all about? I'm confused, what is a non-graduate alumni? Then, probably the most famous college dropout in the history of the world (and definitely the richest) Mr. Bill Gates is not categorized in any way shape or form with the school he would be an alumni of. Can you explain this to me, please? I'm really confused here. Aboutmovies 20:15, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
My explaination is that Wikipedia doesn't have an accepted standard for this, so people are essentially doing what they want on alumni lists until that happens. VegaDark 20:19, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Still confused, you quoted and bolded as if it was wikipolicy above that alumni includes both? Aboutmovies 20:27, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Never did I state it was Wikipedia policy. As far as I know there isn't one. I bolded it because I was showing you the definition of alumni according to Wikipedia, so it makes sense that that would be the "unofficial" policy. VegaDark 20:31, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I never said you did quote it as policy. I said “you quoted and bolded as if it was wikipolicy” and when you do bold and quote things, that is how it comes across. And if there was an "unofficial" policy then things would be more uniform accross wiki, and as anyone can see things are not uniform. But the bolding and quoting is really the entire reason I have been pushing you on your definition. You didn’t say, well “I have been putting non-grads in the alumni because one definition says it’s ok.” As I stated in my original post “I hope” the category only includes graduates. Clearly showing that was my personal feelings. And I have never bolded anything, which you seem to be quite fond of, as if it makes more of a point. In fact you are the only one here bolding more than a single word on this talk page. Bold is like typing in all caps, its rude. Additionally, you need to examine the issue from both sides to see the strengths and weaknesses of your own arguments, then play out what these definitions result in. And that is the problem here, you asserted one definition as if that was the end of the argument. And you didn’t even include the whole definition of the term. In fact you probably stopped looking for any other definition or common usage of the term. You must be able to see both sides of the argument. Debates are like chess matches, you need to be thinking about what the other side is thinking and planning four steps ahead. Now, I’m not saying the usage of the term the way I define it is correct. I’m saying that it needs to be decided one way or the other, and either way there are changes that need to be made. If alumni is graduates only, remove the non-grads. If it is a newer definition, get rid of either the OSU people cat or the OSU alumni cat as they are duplicative. The sub cats of these can move as needed. I’ll go with whatever the decision turns out to be, but right now the categories are in between definitions. Aboutmovies 21:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Are you kidding me? I'm not the one being rude here. You are being rude with your confrontational attitude that I have tried my best to reply calmly to. Please don't lecture me on how to conduct a discussion.
I can see this conversation is done. VegaDark 21:57, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Make Oregon govenment-generated resources public domain

Friends,

I have written a draft of a letter to members of the Oregon Legislative Assembly, which would encourage them to pass legislation making works of the government of Oregon public domain (like works of the Federal government.)

I believe such a law would allow resources like Wikipedia to blossom in their efforts to provide coverage of all things Oregon.

Please look at the letter, and feel free to improve it - especially any of you with a better understanding of the legal details than I have!

Thanks, -Pete 19:58, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Article I can't clean up

Could anyone take a look at ENR Program and tag it appropriately. I am trying to avoid it due to WP:COI issues, as I think it is a candidate for major clean-up if not for AFD. Thank you. Aboutmovies 05:30, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll try, but let me take this opportunity to state emphatically that I don't believe a conflict of interest disqualifies you from editing an article. I will also point out that the link you provide is a guideline, not a strict policy. I've seen enough of your work to know that you have good judgment, and enough of your discussions to know that you are reasonable when people disagree with you. So as far as I'm concerned, if you see a problem, you're probably the best-qualified to fix it - and so I hope you do. -Pete 06:39, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
The page had just been copied directly from the UofO website. I redirected it to University of Oregon School of Law. We really should be focusing on writing the school article before we get to programs within the school. Cacophony 07:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Pete, thanks for the vote of confidence. I know I could have edited it, but I just wanted to avoid any claims of bias as I would have removed just about everything from the article. Aboutmovies 16:53, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I see what you mean now. Probably a good call. -Pete 20:01, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Forest Grove, Oregon

Any WPOR members from FG? If so your city is painfully lacking much presence on Wikipedia. See the FG talk page for some suggestions on how to expand. Aboutmovies 08:47, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Peer review listing

Hey kids, just want to point out that Round barn was just listed for peer review. It's a pretty good article, and has two photos of Oregon's own Pete French Round Barn (one of them by yours truly ;) FWIW, the text does not address that barn very well - the comments about architecture and design seem to address a different style of barn altogether. I'll post that comment there, but any assistance on rectifying the issue would be appreciated…I'm no expert! -Pete 17:36, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Portland Aerial Tram

Portland Aerial Tram is currently a good article nominee. Katr67 16:39, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

It failed, but it looks like with a bit of rewriting it could pass... Katr67 22:43, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Cape Blanco Sat Image

Greetings from a Washingtonian. Your Oregon State article about Cape Blanco has an image that is either reversed/mirrored or upside down. The water should be on the left. Not sure how to change that but us Pacific Northwesterners ought to be accurate if nothing else. Cybirr 20:18, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

As you can see from this satellite image, the photo on Cape Blanco (Oregon) is not reversed or mirrored. Perhaps you are expecting that it be oriented with north at the top? There's no requirement for a satellite photo to do that. The current orientation might be more welcome for those from the southern hemisphere. Somewhere I have a map of the world with New Zealand at the top center. Guess where it was made... —EncMstr 20:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Hmm. We'll have to ask NASA to run the space shuttle the other direction next time. ;) I never thought about it being "upside down" but I guess you're right--there is potential for confusion. I'm not an image whiz but I bet someone on here could easily flip it over. In the meantime I'll tweak the caption. Thanks and happy editing! Katr67 20:35, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
P.S. Yeah, is insisting it be oriented north to south smack of "hemispherism"? Katr67 20:35, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Ahh, yes... hemispherism... I'll report to sensitivity training ASAP. But you do make a good point. I came to the Cape Blanco article with the idea of most western point in the lower 48 in mind. So it follows my thinking 'oriented' my expectation of how the image should be displayed. Classic example of preconception and bias.Cybirr 01:55, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Nice job fixing it, EncMstr. -Big Smooth 21:34, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
My pleasure. —EncMstr 22:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Do these articles qualify for WikiProject Oregon?

Before supporting nomination Aranas for deletion, some things to consider:
  • Is he a "mover and shaker" or "up and comer" in the Greens? I'm elbow deep in the major parties and their prominent figures, so it'll be awhile before I collect material on the minors beyond what would fit in stubs.
  • Should we consider merging his info into Pacific Green Party rather than nominating for deletion (do we really want to reflect a major party bias by treating their failed nominees differently than the biggies).
  • Notability is so subjective. While the deck is stacked so heavily toward the major parties that "third party" candidates seldom get elected, they more frequently have an impact, by forcing issues to be addressed and/or playing a "spoiler" role (especially true now that so many races are decided by razor thin margins).
  • I haven't really had time to think through the whole "vanity" and/or "promotional" vs. "comprehensiveness" thing. I sure don't want to spend a lot of time researching the chairman of the "blow up the Columbia River Dams" party while I have a couple of full days' work ahead of me to get a decent article on Jim Redden up. On the other hand, I don't want to neglect the little movements altogether... they are, after all, part of the strange and wonderful Oregon tapestry, and a picture of Politics in Oregon would be incomplete without them. So, I'll just shut up and think on this a bit, if that's okay. I guess I'm just not up to bold tonight. -- J-M Jgilhousen 06:49, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree we shouldn't be hasty. Merging sounds like a really good option. You're probably right about third party candidates, but judging by some of the candidate profiles I read in the Voters Pamphlet (hmm, there's an article idea...), where Joe or Jane Candidate say s/he has been Chair of the Podunk, Oregon PTA, been active in Podunk High School Soccer and Choir and is now running as the Blow Up the Dams Party (heh) candidate for the 5th congressional district, well... Does running for office make someone notable who otherwise isn't notable? People like that should definitely get mentioned in the Blow Up the Dams Party article, but do they need their own articles? Just more food for thought. Katr67 08:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
You don't wanna get me started on what the Voter's Pamphlet has become with the institution of a "buy a page, say what you want" policy. But, back to the point, there is a distinction to be made between those who pay a filing fee and declare themselves a candidate, and those who have received nomination from a party recognized by the Secretary of State. As I am sure Ralph Nader would attest, the latter isn't as easy as it might seem. -- J-M Jgilhousen 11:39, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

(Unindent) I just stumbled upon a proposed guideline that seeks to address these very issues at Wikipedia:Candidates and elections. I would suggest we hold off on deleting or merging these individuals until consensus is reached, and the result becomes "official." -- "J-M" (Jgilhousen) 09:47, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

By the way, articles on Joe Keating and Teresa Keane were recently deleted. (Keating info is still available in hist in case anybody wants to merge it into Pacific Green Party.) Prolly shoulda said something sooner...oh well. -Pete 18:06, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Featured Article collaboration?

Last spring members of this group had talked about collaborating on either Oregon or Portland, Oregon and trying to get one of them to featured status. People agreed to work on Oregon, but this effort seems to have fizzled. Before I archive the posts relevant to that discussion, is anyone still in interested in this type of collaboration, or are we all happy working in our own little corners of the project? As has been discussed, Oregon will need a lot of work, including full articles on History, Geography, Government, etc. But we now have interested people working directly or indirectly on those subjects. Neither of articles is terrible, but definitely need a lot of work because of the kind of inconsistency that creeps in when many people are making additions and subtractions. Let me know what you think and we can decide what to do from there. I’d also like to make this an opportunity to see who still considers him or herself an active member of the WikiProject. Thanks! Katr67 00:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Leaving this mini-poll up for a while because of Winter break for those studenty types... Katr67 18:45, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Katr67 Active and daunted by the prospect of cleaning up the articles, but I’ll go if you go. :) Katr67 00:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
  • EncMstr Mildly interested, but put off by the late summer feverish pace—and major direction changing—of the Portland article. The Oregon article seems a more reasonable target, but the scope seems too big for our merry little band. Within the WikiProject Oregon scope, my more visible edits are often short-lived by the hand of those with a different style: that's discouraging. — EncMstr 02:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
  • JGilhousen I definitely consider myself an "active member" of the project. I'm feeling like I've bitten off about as much as I can chew by tackling the Government and Politics subproject, and want to leave myself some time to dabble in other subject areas within the project. A major collaboration on a single article doesn't appeal to me right now. -- J-M Jgilhousen 02:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
  • VegaDark I consider myself active, and would try to help on any collaboration if one were chosen. VegaDark 06:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Big Smooth I'd pitch in if we had a single article to focus on. I've been hanging around the fringes of the project lately but I've still tried to improve Oregon-related articles whenever possible. -Big Smooth 20:48, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Follow-up

Anybody care to chime in before I wrap up this moribund discussion? Katr67 20:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I would love to work on something like this. I feel that the thing that's lacking is someone asserting their vision for the project. Y'all are smart and motivated folks, and I think if anyone were to step up and commit to shepherding this process through, many of us would get in line and offer our services. Personally, I don't have much interest in doing that at the moment, but I would love it if somebody else did. I'd mildly prefer Oregon over Portland, but would gladly work on either. In the meantime, I'll continue hammering away at List of Oregon ballot measures and other politics-and-gummint type stuff. -Pete 21:06, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Maybe it would be a good idea to focus on a GA or FA, rather than the independent works each of us is doing, valuable as those may be. A high visibility article could bring more interested helpers to our project. —EncMstr 22:39, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I was going to say I have no interest in leading the effort, due to preferring a wikignomelike existence, but when you said "Helpers", I pricked up my ears. Helpers=good! My vote is for Oregon over Portland as well. I think whichever one of us wants to lead the charge to an FA, the rest of us will follow, no matter what we've said. :) Maybe...just maybe...I'll take a stab at starting the process for Oregon. Katr67 23:38, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
That's the spirit! What else might create even more spirit? —EncMstr 23:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
A round of Oregon microbrews? Katr67 00:08, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
No? Well, Aboutmovies created a cool new Oregon barnstar. Anyone up for making a (monthly?) newsletter? We have a ton of inactive members and that might help get them more involved. Katr67 22:55, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm late, but I'm kinda here. I'm interested in helping where I can, but I'm a little immersed in another project right now (trying to get all articles related to PNW Wrestling properly sourced and, as much as possible, up to a "B" level article. What would it take to do a newsletter? I might be able to help with this. Theophilus75 17:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

How should we do this?

There's about six of us who are the most active members of WPOR, and I know of a couple others who could be prodded into action, so how are we going to do this? I was poking around the Minnesota page (the only featured U.S. state article right now), and the main Minnesotan "cat herder" User:Ravedave's edits and it seems I got the impression that they split the project up into sections so as not be so overwhelming.

For starters, we will need subarticles. See my thoughts on Government and Politics and History.

Several of us each have our niches, so we should of course continue to work in the areas we love best. I haven't looked at the featured article criteria in depth, but at some point me (or someone else) can post a list of projects and we can take our pick... Katr67 22:55, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I'll volunteer for the history articles and a re-write of the current section. Plus I'll take care of the redlinks from the Econ section. But not till Spring Break. Redlinks are not a criteria, I just think it will look better without them.
For the gov't section might I suggest a table with the current main elected officials: Gov, SOS, AG, etc. from Executive branch; Chief Justice from Judicial branch; Speakers of the House/Senate.
As for climate, since it has been listed as deficent before, how about charts (plus a brief overview) like Portland has for say Burns, Bend, Hood River, Portland, Eugene, Medford, Astoria, Brookings, Pendelton. They would need to be smaller, or maybe some sort of code trick where you could mouseover a link to a city and the chart would magically appear. Anyway that would cover most of the main climate regions. Though if someone is good with graphics I might suggest a rain guage like what is in The Oregonian for the rainfall yearly total instead of just listing the number for a better visual representation of the differences between the coast, valley, and east/south. Aboutmovies 00:46, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I'll volunteer to update/cleanup/expand a "Health and education" section (like Minnesota's got), as that's more my area of expertise. -- Scientizzle 01:15, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm also a copy editor-type person...so I'll work on grammar, style & word-choice, too. -- Scientizzle 02:34, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Oh good, I'm off the hook then. :) BTW, welcome to the project! Katr67 05:32, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
You can never have too many copy editors! Oh, and thanks for the welcome. -- Scientizzle 05:59, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I'll keep plugging away at the politics and government stuff, and help out elsewhere when I can. I like AM's suggestion of a table. Site note- Wikipedia:WikiProject Arizona has FIVE featured articles. How's that for motivation? One of them's a porn star. We can do better. -Pete 01:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
If it's not too late to throw my hat in the ring (and if others are still striving to make Oregon a featured article), I'll take the Education section, including the somewhat-deficient see also to Oregon University System. This seems to have become my niche anyhow. Someone let me know if this is still an ongoing project? akendall 18:12, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It's never too late. :) We're just doing this on Oregon time, it seems, and no one wants to do the cat herding it will take to make it happen. I don't anyway. Thanks for your help. We'll pull this off eventually... Katr67 18:44, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd say this is very much an active initiative…we just haven't been talking about what we're doing so much. I've been working on the Geography section, and want to take a crack at History and Law/Govt at some point as well. I see there's been recent activity in Climate, somebody made a nice chart of monthly average highs and lows around the state. Some things that jump out at me are: there's a lot of detail about Native American political divisions, without much discussion of what that means or how it fits in with the rest of the article; the History section has too heavy an emphasis on pioneer history, and may not adequately describe the role of Hudson's Bay Company; eastern Oregon is not very well represented; Law & Gov't should describe Initiative system better, and the focus on Vote-By-Mail should be moved to another article and trimmed back. And improvements to Education would most certainly be welcome! None of these are "quick fixes" though, they will all take some time. Oh yeah, how could I forget: we have to settle once and for all how Oregon is pronounced. -Pete 20:16, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

a suggestion

How about we request a Good Article review, or a Peer Review, of Oregon, so we can get an outside perspective on what we need to do? I think we all have some ideas, but a perspective from somebody with no Oregon connection - and who doesn't look at the article every freakin' day or two - would probably be very valuable. -Pete 02:08, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea. I second the motion. =) akendall 04:38, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree. This would save us from using our energies in unproductive directions. Maybe we can get Stephen Colbert to weigh in... Katr67 04:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
I still think that getting a review and failing it, with a resulting list of "things to improve," would be very helpful. But I'm becoming less convinced that actually attaining FA status in the near future would be a good thing. It seems to me that people can be timid when editing FAs, and I think the Oregon article has a ways to go before it attains anything like perfection. Thoughts? -Pete 17:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Oh, it's definitely got a ways to go. We still need a bunch of sub-articles like History of Oregon, etc. But I still think it would be helpful to do a GA review to find out what areas are particularly weak. Latr, Katr 17:30, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

arbitrary semi-protection?

An administrator has semi-protected Oregon without explanation (and with a weird advertisement for a TV show in his edit history comments), set to last until May 31. I'm a bit surprised at the unexplained action to begin with, but I think it comes at an especially bad time for our Wikiproject. I have explained this to the administrator in question on his/her talk page; please take a look. -Pete 20:04, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I think its fine since semi-protection only keeps non-registered editors from making edits, so no anon-IP vandalism. We can still make changes. I think it also prevents newly registered editors (3 days or so) from editing, but again that doesn't stop us dedicated editors. Aboutmovies 20:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Jimbo is appearing on Colbert. I've explained it in more detail on the talk page. The protection will expire soon. alphachimp 20:18, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Take it from someone who's reverted a lot of vandalism--It's not arbitrary at all. I take it you missed the flurry of Colbert vandalism on the Oregon page back in...August I think it was? The whole California/Oregon/Washington/Idaho/Portugal thing? Believe me, Jimbo appearing on the Colbert Report will result in the resurgence of a bunch of anon vandalism on Oregon and several other articles. Let me know if you need further explanation. Katr67 20:20, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Semi-protection also prevents recently-registered accounts from editing, and I'm not sure where the cutoff is. We have very recently welcomed two highly productive editors to our team, and others are coming continually. Also, the current pushes to improve Oregon and to create a separate article for the name "Oregon" are perfect opportunities for newbies to get a feel for the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, rather than getting discouraged or becoming hostile by having an edit war be their first experience of the community. It's possible that Alphachimp has a good reason, but his/her failure to express it on the talk page, for such a prominent article, is irresponsible. -Pete 20:23, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
You are certainly welcome to that opinion. It's worth noting that nothing I've done is without precedent. I think you'll find that this actually helps your article. alphachimp 20:38, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I think the cutoff is 4 days? I guess s/he could have done a better job of explaining for those who don't know the history of Colbert thing. Maybe we can do a little "welcome new users" thing at the bottom of the talk page? I personally think the conserving of our vandal-reverting energy is well-worth the couple of people who may be put off by the semi-protection. Is that heartless? Anyway, here's a link to one of the previous discussions of the issue: Talk:Oregon/archive 1#Colbert report. There is also a tag about high traffic that usually gets added to an article's talk page when it is featured on television. Katr67 20:42, 24 May 2007 (UTC) P.S. Per alphachimp above--any publicity is good publicity. :) Katr67 20:42, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying Pete doesn't have a point about communication, buthere's a link showing our efforts to fend off the vandalism, even with different two semi-protects in place. Katr67 20:50, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm well aware that Oregon is Idaho's Portugal, and I know that fighting off vandalism can be tedious. But 5-10 reversions per day doesn't sound so bad to me. The Colbert report airs over what, an 4-hour period from east to west coast? If it made any difference, I'd volunteer to watch it closely for that period, and frequently during the next several days. There are lots of smart people who watch Colbert, and if Jimbo's appearance on Colbert is intended as a promotion, why shouldn't we focus on promoting Wikipedia's accessibility, among other things? -Pete 20:59, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Also, Alphachimp: (1) Thanks for the welcome, but I'm going to have my opinion no matter what; (2) a link to something establishing the precedent would be helpful; and Katr, the semi-protect is a week, not four days. -Pete 21:04, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

No, I meant I think an account has to be four days old to get around a semi-protect. Katr67 21:14, 24 May 2007 (UTC) P.S. In the link I provided above you can see there was was a pre-emptive block in July. Katr67 21:16, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Gotcha, thanks. -Pete 21:17, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
I've responded on my talk page. Show over, page unprotected, nothing to see here...get back to improving articles :). "Omegachimp" 07:42, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

reversing colors on Oregon_DEM_relief_map.gif

The Gomm requested, in 12/06, that somebody change the colors in a widely-used relief map of Oregon. The colors depicted regions known for lush vegetation in brown, and high desert regions in green. Katr67 pointed out that the image was produced by the USGS. Pete said that didn't mean the image couldn't be altered. Cacophony performed the requested conversion, also converting the background from black to transparent, but Katr67 noticed that his alteration was to a lesser-used version of the image (a GIF file.) Pete extended Cacophony's edits to the more commonly-used version of the image in 5/07 (the PNG file.)

Another overlooked but notable Portlander

Okay, I'm sure that everyone here has seen or heard about the guy in the SUV who played bumper cars on SW Salmon next to the MAC club (Youtube video clip here), but Did You Know that he was Broughton Bishop, executive and one of the family that owns Pendleton Woolen Mills, an Oregon business institution? This states that he is President & CEO, but the company website states that he is only a Vice-President. (The fact he is part of the family that owns Pendleton was mentioned in the 19 January 2007 Friday Oregonian front-page article, but very briefly & if you read the article too fast you might have missed the connection.)

I think this combination may just make him notable. -- llywrch 20:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Valsetz description

The description says the town was founded by the William Mitchell Co. This is not true. The founder was Cobbs & Mitchell, which owned the company until selling to its sales agent, Herbert Templeton, who ran the town and mill as the Valsetz Lumber Co. It was then sold to Boise Cascade. So only three owners in its history. (I am the author of Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press 2003, and there are several other sources documenting the establishment of the town and its ownership history.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.41.32.185 (talk • contribs) 5:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi Linda. I wrote the article using information from OGN, which I consider a fairly reliable source, but feel free to edit the article if it is inaccurate. I'd encourage you to sign up for an account--it's great to have real writers contributing. :) It's also usually a good idea to mention this sort of thing on the article's talkpage as well. Thanks for bringing it up. I've been wanting to check out your book. Katr67 06:22, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
P.S. Have you seen Category:Company towns? There are several Oregon towns in there. Katr67 06:26, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I've been to Valsetz (when it still existed) and know people that lived there. It was clearly a company town, but the list for oregon seems a bit short. The classification, however, gets a bit difficult. Sawmills often built and provided housing for their employees, so of which was better than others. Some were incorported as cities, many weren't and many disappeared.

Many weren't functionally different from the 'farm labor camps' of today,. but trailer houses hadn't been invented yet.

A couple examples of 'towns' that I can't classify include:

Item: Wilark: This was a major logging camp of the Clark and Wilson Logging company, and indeed the name is a contraction of WILson and clARK. In its heyday, it was served by 2 logging railroads, had daily bus service to town, and had a 2 room school. Married loggers were allowed to build shanties on company property, and others stayed in company provided bunk houses. and the town life extended over a period of 15-20 years. All evidence of it is long gone --- was it a company town or not????

Item: Vernonia: the community was established in 1885 and a town optimisticly platted, but it is doubtful if more than a few families lived in the immediate area. Around 1920, outsiders bought up most of the area nearby, built a giant sawmill, brought in a Railroad, and platted a subdivision of several hundred houses which were rented on the cheap to company employees. when the mill closed the mill gave the housing to the city who sold it off, and Vernonia lives on. Does this make it a company town????

Item: Bates: A saw mill town in Grant county. Mostly company owned housing, but some acquired worn out box cars from the Sumpter Valley RR and drug them up on a hill outside of town called Knutville, and lived in them prefering their 'own home' to the company housing. when the mill closed the town was vacated.

Item: Rashneeshpuram: A rather controversial town not associated with a mill, but rather with the Bhagwan, who is usually described as a religious cult leader, but it was like a company town in that it was a single purpose town, with all the land singularly owned? Is this a company town?

Rvannatta 04:50, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Opinions needed

Sunriver Resort and Sunriver, Oregon need to be looked at. Take a look at the edit history of the resort article and the article's talk page for the background. Basically, what "Sunriver" consists of is a mildly confusing mess, and I'd like some third opinions about the content of both articles, as discussed on the talk page. I've sort of taken on the role of mediator, I guess, but I don't feel real strongly about a piece of property I'll probably never set foot on. :) Thanks. Katr67 15:38, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Significance of Boones Ferry

My bias is warped by being raised living next to Boones Ferry Road. Should Boones Ferry go in {{Oregon Pioneer History}}, perhaps as a place? —EncMstr 08:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I would vote no, as we don't want the template to get too big like what happened to the Oregon Cities template. And though Boone's Ferry still has a name impact on the area, so do some others (Scholls Ferry for instance), and the shear number of ferries in the early days makes it hard to pick out which ones. I'm thinking maybe a Oregon Historic Ferries article that could go on the template. The article could have a brief synopsis of the varrious ferries, then a link to the individual articles. Aboutmovies 16:38, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Excellent suggestions. Thanks! —EncMstr 16:46, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Probably Historic ferries in Oregon, actually. Sounds like a great idea. Some of the individual ferries, like the ones I added on the transpo subproject, probably aren't notable enough to justify their own articles but redirects to the main article would solve that problem. Katr67 02:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Why not distinguish by whether or not there's actually a ferry still running? There aren't many left, and the mere continued use of a ferry these days is enough to be noteworthy -- the rest are just historical.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dismalscholar (talk • contribs) 2007-05-14T17:01:05 (UTC)

There hasn't been a ferry for over 50 years—see Boones Ferry. Even if it were still running, would that make the article important enough to put in one of the navigational templates? Seems like the reverse is usually more the case. I asked the question because living near the road for decades and all the local recognition it received, like Boones Ferry Days and old timers referring to the days before the bridge, etc. as a little kid may have distorted my perception of the importance of the ferry. —EncMstr 18:00, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

WPOR Manual of Style

I think we need to decide on the format of ORS citations. In ORS itself, the format is: ORS 221.333 (the year being implied as the most recent version--currently updated every two years, but with the annual sessions experiment, this may change). Meanwhile, Aboutmovies introduced this snazzy style: Or. Rev. Stat. § 222.125 (2005). Is that how they're cited in the court cases? I prefer the former, but that's the form I am used to using. Thoughts? Since this is kind of state-specific I thought maybe when we decide we can add a little WPORMOS section. I ♥ acronyms... Katr67 00:00, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

The style I introduced is the ALWD citation style. It's the legal, technical style, and probably more than what we need. I really introduced it to make a point on that page, namely cite the full statute plus they seem to be wanting to get legal in their description so I thought I might help them out. Aboutmovies 00:05, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I know of MLA, AP, APA and CMS but not ALWD. :) Shall we leave it that way on that page then? Or is that a case of WP:POINT? Otherwise, I was planning on doing some rewriting to improve the clarity of that article if it still needs it (because I was the one whining about it), and I can change it to the simpler style then if everyone agrees. Katr67 00:22, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I don't think it quite reaches WP:POINT, but feel free to change if you would like. Just no dashes from ORS, or parantheses around the chapter number, plus there needs to be a full six digit number. Aboutmovies 01:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Hells Canyon

I am a river runner and hydrology expert. I keep editing the article on Hell's Canyon on the Snake River because the flow rates are quite inaccurate. I remove the part that says "The Snake through Hell's Canyon generally carries more water than the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon". I have run both rivers and the Snake River IS NOT bigger than the Colorado River, according to USGS. Here is my source to the average flow of the Snake below Hell's Canyon Dam, which is about 11,000 cfs, compaired to a low average of about 14,000 of the Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam. User:Peckvet55 22:48, 13 Feb 2007 [source http://waterdata.usgs.gov/id/nwis/uv/?site_no=13290450&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060]

Thanks for explaining. I personally reverted many changes on that article by anon editors who blanked an entire paragraph without any explanation in the edit summary. Unexplained anon blanking looks like vandalism to me. Thanks for signing up for an account. This kind of discussion is better placed on the article's talk page. I'll copy this post there, and if you blank the material again, please fill in the edit summary. Thanks! Katr67 06:06, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Admin subpage

I added Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Admin as suggested awhile back. It was eyeopening to see the amazing variety of articles in existence! A few might not be enduring (Category:MAX, Category:Avifauna of Oregon).

I'm not planning on doing much more with this, unless several WP Oregon editors feel it is of value. —EncMstr 19:48, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Day-um! That's really cool. I hadn't had a chance to look at it until now because it takes a minute to load. How did you do that? Katr67 05:14, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
(Sorry for the slow response: I hadn't noticed your message until now.) Yeah, it puts a real load on the browser. I made it by listing the category, pasting it into vim, and performing several transformations (remove "talk", put double square brackets around each entry, etc.) to produce the wikitable. Then I used many regular expressions to categorize. Alas, that might have produced many mistakes. —EncMstr 07:38, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Lat/Long Coordinates - Pine Mountain Observatory

I am brand new and all at sea, completely lost in how to do anything really, but I think I can figure most things out via cheatsheets and the sandbox but this one: How would I go about entering actual latitude and longitude for Pine Mountain Observatory? (I'm sure there's a way to link to that, erk) -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Mountain_Observatory I can't find anything anywhere about how to do that, but like I said - I'm new, and lost! Or if someone who knows how would like to do that ... N 43° 47.485 W 120° 56.542 Chamois-shimi 09:01, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello and welcome! I am no expert on this, but I just ran across something similar…basically what you want to do is use a "template." Wikipedia templates are used by putting their names between pairs of {{curly braces}}; by doing that, you make it pull in a bit of code or formatting that has already been set up. So, as I understand it, you will want to use {{Geolinks-US-mountain|xxxx|yyyy}} (where xxxx=latitude, and yyyy=longitude.) Just put that anywhere on the page (I think the top is traditional), and it should put a little standardized notice of the coordinates in the upper-right corner of the page. There are lots of these templates, for varying uses - see a list here: Category:Coordinates templates. Hope this helps! -Pete 09:37, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, wait - I just looked at the page, and I see it already has a different coordinates template. Please look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Geographical coordinates for instructions on using it. Looks a bit confusing - I'll help you puzzle it out if needed. -Pete 09:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Ohhh. I was going to say something else, but I just looked at the page. Hmm. I would ask the person who put the observatory template on there. Or if you can figure out the name of the template (I couldn't--I tried Template:Observatory), sometimes the talk page will have instructions for using it. Is there a WikiProject Astronomy? I'd take a look but I have to run off to work...
But for future reference, if you're going to fill out one of those geolinks templates (my favorite is {{Geolinks-US-cityscale|foo|-foo}}), I pull all my data from the Portland State geographic names list. Oh and the geolinks template goes in the external links. It will give you the little coordinates in the corner and a bunch of handy external links to maps. (Example). Welcome and happy editing! Katr67 15:35, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I just figured out how to add the coords, using the info at Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Implementation details and running the coords Chamois-shimi gave above through a Google Maps search, which gave me the converted seconds so I could fill out the template. Google, how do I love thee? Katr67 02:05, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

That's nice. But next time you can use the pure decimal lat/lon by using template {{coor d}} instead of {{coor dms}}. That is, {{coor d|43.791417|N|120.942367|W}} instead of {{coor dms|43|47|29.10|N|120|56|32.52|W}} which give 43.791417° N 120.942367° W and 43°47′29.10″N, 120°56′32.52″W. —EncMstr 02:48, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Nice? Nice?! The triumph of my Wikipedia career--a word geek figuring out a math thing--and you call it "nice"? And just where were you when we were trying to figure this out earlier? Good to know about the different tls. I figured I should stay with the one that was already on the page, I have no idea which format is appropriate in which circumstance. To me it's pretty much just a string of numbers that will lead you to a map. Katr67 17:00, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Sub Project Invitation/Blatant advertising

As I have seen those listed as members grow a lot over the last month or so I wanted to take a moment to invite all members to take a look at the project's subdivions. There is no requirement or even urging to join one, but I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of them and a bit about them.

  • You like cities, do population figures get you fired up? Then maybe Cities is just for you!
  • Perhaps you don't like other people, but you like mountains and rivers. Well we have Physical geography just for you.
  • Wait, there's more. Do you like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? Then we have Transportation so you can expand the world's knowledge about Oregon roads, highways and choo choo trains.
  • Perhaps your expertise is more in the art, music or sports scene. Then we have the Culture division to show Oregon is more than just rain and trees.
  • Maybe you love old people. OK that may sound wrong, so maybe do you love to write about old people? Then join People and write biographies about politicians (dead & alive), pioneers, or any other notable person related to Oregon.
  • Now, if you order in the next 10 minutes we'll throw in Government for free (OK, government is never free). Anyway, there you can spend hours upon hours writing about ballot measures, the Oregon Constitution, or the evolution and interaction of Oregon's different branches of government.
  • Do you like antiques? Well history is all about old stuff so join History today, because tomorrow its history (I know, lame).
  • Are you one of those people who is fascinated by the stock ticker at the bottom of CNBC? Well then don't just sit there staring, write something about those companies at the Companies subproject.
  • Lastly, if you just like to draw or take pictures, maybe Graphics is for you. Make maps, take pictures, conquer the world. It's all in a days work.

Aboutmovies 21:30, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

<applause> I think we should nominate you as the WPOR Marketing Director... Katr67 02:05, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Only if we can increase market share. Aboutmovies 04:21, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Oregon-bio-stub up for deletion

{{Oregon-bio-stub}} is being considered for deletion as it apparently was not created through the proper channels. See the discussion here. I like this stub and voted to keep it. Katr67 18:35, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Actually it wasn't up for deletion as it never was nominated. {{Washington-bio-stub}} was and while its creator did say during the discussion, if you delete mine the other State bio stubs should be deleted as well, the primary reason for considering {{Washington-bio-stub}} for deletion, that it's too small, doesn't pertain to {{Oregon-bio-stub}}. Caerwine Caer’s whines 00:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

That's good. I got nervous--some editors overseeing such discussions aren't as conscientious with the "might as well delete this one too" type things. See my response over there. Katr67 03:00, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

archiving some completed discussions

I'm moving some older discussions - only those that clearly came to some kind of conclusion - here. Hope that's OK, it just seemed things were getting unweildy. -Pete 22:36, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I see there's a process for this that I disregarded. I'll come back and clean up soon! -Pete 22:38, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Three lashes with the Oregon State Fish for you! Katr67 03:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Cacophony--see this post. Katr67 01:15, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Ah, I guess I beat Pete to it. The archive that he created fit chronologically at the end of archive3. Thanks, Cacophony 02:52, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

French Prairie

Rather than cross-post this to all the subgroups and folks who might be interested, I'll just say here that I just finished an article on French Prairie and though I'm sick of looking at it, it's an interesting place and the article could be expanded greatly if anyone is interested. I've stashed what look to be some helpful links as comments in the refs section. Happy editing! ...now go outside and play... Katr67 18:39, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Article for Deletion

The page on Oregon politician Michael Charles Smith is up for deletion. Worth a look. The article used to read like a campaign brochure, but I've edited it down considerably. My opinion: Smith is notable in Oregon (having two news stories cited, and many more as far-flung as Boston and NH), but is being improperly considered in the context of national presidential contenders. -Pete 15:37, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Oregon Institute of Technology motto - is that right?

Could some one pls confirm the motto for OIT? The wiki entry gives it as 'Magnus Frater te spectat', which is Latin for 'Big Brother is watching you'. I doubt that's right - sounds like a joker was at work. I didn't spot any motto on the OIT site, but some one must know. -Vince 68.6.39.9 22:13, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I took it out. It was a very sneaky joke edit mixed in with a bunch of legitimate editing. Now if someone could explain what the heck a "Hustlin' Owl" is... Katr67 22:43, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Free the Unfree Images!

One of the reasons our long-lost editor Jgilhousen quit Wikipedia is over stuff like this: Image talk:Ted kulongoski.jpg. Can someone please just go snap Ted's photo next time he's having a press conference or something? Our city flags and seals are slowly diappearing too. The editor who tracked most of those down doesn't appear to be active anymore, so if someone has any interest in trying to get those back, it would be mighty helpful. Thinking about copyright makes me twitch so I'm not gonna go there... Katr67 04:15, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Just in terms of NPOV, I would be happier with a Wikipedian's snap than with the Guv's Official Portrait. So, I agree with Katr67 about the next press conference or whatever other public op. Ipoellet 15:37, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with both of you, and believe both goals (i.e., getting proper permissions for "official" materials,and gathering more "non-official" materials) are worth pursuing. I have a call in to the Gov's office about this; are there other images I should ask about as well, when they call me back? As a would-be advocate for open-source software and a longtime attorney, the Governor should have a staff that understands the value of jumping through the hoops properly. Wikipedia's hoops need some work, too.
If we can get this thing sorted out, I vote we all chip in for a cake and a greeting card and launch an all-out campaign to get John Mark back on WP ;) -Pete 01:40, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

ps. Lemme plug my User:Peteforsyth/leg letter again, which aims to get the State government to join the Feds in making government-produced images, etc. public domain. I think this is doable, and would love any feedback or assistance in figuring out how to get it done. -Pete 01:47, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

New Carissa to be on main page

The New Carissa will be featured on the main page on Saturday March 31, 2007. Yay! Katr67 01:12, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Awesome! Just scanned the article to make sure it's still in good shape - it looks good, with a few minor updates I am researching. The only thing that bothers me is this image of the stern laying on the beach. It's not a terribly great shot, and you'd think in the last eight years someone would have taken a better picture - I just can't find one that's freely licensed like all the other images on the page. Does anyone else know a good place to look? -Big Smooth 17:31, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
Here we go! Let the vandal-fighting begin! Katr67 01:37, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

List of Oregon State University alumni up for featured list nomination

List of Oregon State University alumni has been removed as a good article, since lists no longer qualify as good articles, but it is now up for featured list status. You can contribute to the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Oregon State University alumni. Thanks, VegaDark 22:29, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Eugene Photo Op

I'll be in Eugene this weekend and I'm going try to get some photos if the weather cooperates and I can figure out my friend's digital camera. I'd like to get some NRHP buildings, especially Knight Library and the UO Art Museum, some of downtown Eugene, and a few train stations enroute. I'll be pedaling around the bike paths and venturing into the western edge of Springfield. Let me know if you have any photo requests and I'll see what I can do. Katr67 19:10, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

How about Eugene Saturday Market? (And an article? ;-) Portland Saturday Market is ready to link to it.) —EncMstr 19:19, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Alas, the market doesn't open until April 7, but next time I'm down there I'll make sure to get some photos. Hmm, I should scan some of my Oregon Country Fair images one of these days... Katr67 19:43, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank goodness for WP:NOT#CENSORED!  ;) -Big Smooth 22:58, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh don't be silly, it's not *all* naked people in the mud. Too bad too because I have some great shots of the Mud People parade. ;) Seriously though, in an informal poll, everyone I've asked says the first two words they think of when they recall hearing about the fair *before* they actually attended was "naked" and "mud". But I've got some very nice colorful shots of fully clothed jugglers and stilt walkers and such. I bet some of them are even sober, so there. Katr67 23:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Inactive

I will be moving some WPOR members to the inactive section tomorrow if an editor has not been editing on Wikipedia much over the last few months (somewhere around less than 5 edits total since Jan 31). Its nothing personal, and if someone wants to put themselves back into the regular part feel free to do so. Moving those not editing should free up some space on the main project page, and let other WPOR editors know who to contact for questions and/or collaberations. Plus if we ever start a newsletter, we know who not to bother. Aboutmovies 02:51, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Oregon Barnstar

I've made a proposal to the powers that be to make this official. Go express your opinion if you wish. Katr67 06:27, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

It was suggested we solicit more suggestions from project members. Please go make suggestions about the barnstar that don't involve an image of a forest. *yawn* :) Katr67 15:46, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

New articles

Dear Wikipedians, a list of possible Oregon-related articles found by bot is available at User:AlexNewArtBot/OregonSearchResult. Colchicum 15:05, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Hey, cool bot. Are you going to be doing this regularly? Katr67 15:46, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
It is automated (a subproject of User:AlexNewArtBot), so it will need no maintenance as the rules are elaborated. Colchicum 15:52, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Old articles

I had User:Alex Bakharev have his bot go through the Oregon category tree looking for articles that aren't tagged with {{WikiProject Oregon}} yet: User:AlexNewArtBot/OregonList. (Similar to when someone had the same done for California recently, though they had the bot actually tag the articles too.) As you can see, many of these aren't really about Oregon but about things that Oregon articles are also categorized as (train stations, for example). I asked whether we should delete the ones we've checked out or ??? Anyway, for now, I'm just going to volunteer to check out the first 100... Step right up! Step right up! What better way to spend a beautiful Easter morning than in service to your favorite WikiProject? (OK, don't answer that) Katr67 15:24, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

I glanced at the list and was surprised there could be so many. I'm wondering what the bot was thinking it when tagged many of them. The first one I looked at in depth was Joseph Scelsi Intermodal Transportation Center. Does anyone have an idea why it thinks this might be a WP:ORE candidate? —EncMstr 15:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
The California tagging bot had the same problem. Under the Category:Oregon umbrella are such broad categories as Amtrak, Oregon Trail, etc. Feel free to ask our friendly bot owner if he can rewrite his code to leave some of those sort of things out. I don't want to wear out my welcome... But that's why I wanted us to tag the articles by hand. The California tags were actually added to a bunch of unrelated articles and I bet there's some that are still there... Katr67 16:42, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi guys- It seems to me that Katr's concerns would be best made with a simple request that the results of the list not be used for an automated or wholesale addition of WP:ORE tags. I'm not sure I quite understand what you guys are doing - looking through every article, and determining if it should be added to WP:ORE? If so, why not simply delete those that you've reviewed, rather than leaving them there and recording your progress here? Seems that leaving that list untouched only leaves open the likelihood that it will be misused. -Pete 02:17, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
1) I never asked Alex to add the tags. You can see our talk pages for the relevant conversation. 2) Yes. 3) Because a) It's easier to say ahead of time which ones you're going to do, rather than run into an edit conflict/duplication of effort later. b) Camaraderie c) Alex's bot crashed and I wanted to make sure about how he was going to handle adding new entries before I change the page. Except now I see that he simply ran a new version of the list over the top of the old one... 4) Misused how? Katr67 05:02, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
Hm, OK. Think I'll just pass on this one, I'm still kinda confused. But to clear up a couple things: (1) by "misuse" I meant something along the lines of "create zillions of largely inaccurate tags." (2) I didn't understand that you were claiming articles "in advance," I thought you were reporting what you'd done. Anyway, carry on…I may just join in if I, you know, run out of things to do… -Pete 07:43, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Aw, you're just not masochistic enough. Well, if you get bored, pick a range of numbers, sign up, look at each article to see if it should be tagged for WPOR (and its also nice to note if it needs cleanup or deletion), tag it or not, and strike them from the list when you're done. (Don't delete them--that will cause renumbering.) Lather, rinse, repeat. You'll learn a lot. Promise! Katr67 08:09, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Cleaning new list

I cleaned the list of many railroad and Intel things, alphabetized it, and reposted in on Alex's original sub page. Enjoy. Katr67 08:09, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Sign me up!

The dregs

Hey, most of this list is done!! Who wants the rest?

--Sprkee 23:29, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Congratulations to this effort, and the work of several other editors. The WPOR article count is now 3901, up from 2945 on March 29. That's an increase of 956 articles in 67 days or 14.26 articles per day. —EncMstr 01:00, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Wow! Go us! And EncMstr, I hope you don't mind too much that you lost most of your classification tags in the effort. I guess I'll go finish G now... Katr67 01:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
All gone! Way to go! Now what will we do with our time...oh yeah, back to work. --Sprkee 17:26, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

So shall we ask Alex if it's OK to delete the list? Is there any reason to hang onto it for nostalgia or research purposes? Katr67 17:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I think it's fine to delete. I think we might consider running it again once a year or so, just in case some old articles not caught by the new article bot become relevant. Some already famous person could move to OR and become appropriately mossy. Who knows. Of course, next time, it should be 99.9% old Blazers, trivial trains, and British Columbia lakes and mountains. --Sprkee 18:01, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes, it should be run once in a while, but we should definitely ask Alex to leave out Category:Amtrak, Category:Cascade Range, Category:Hudson's Bay Company, etc. and perhaps a bunch of the sports folks too. I'm still wondering if there's any way to have it track down articles that say "Oregon" in them that haven't even been put in an Oregon category and make a list that wouldn't be ridiculous and tedious to check through. Probably not, but a girl can dream... Good job everyone! Katr67 18:21, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Definitely nix the fixed objects like mountains and trains, but let's leave all the people, including sports people, in. Though it's sorta tedious to go through so many Blazers (who knew there were so many?), clearer eyes in the future may realize the OR importance of some of these people as they move around and get famouser or infamouser. --Sprkee 18:28, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I think I'll ask Alex to simply run the bot again as a placeholder if no one objects in the next few days. Besides the above categories, besides railroads can those of you who helped out think of other cats to have the bot overlook (if that's possible)? And maybe have him run the sports and school alum people categories separately? Intel, Nike, Oregon Trail, Oregon Country, Modoc War, Religious Culture of the Pacific Northwest (which really needs a definition, BTW) and Columbia River pick up a lot of non-Oregon stuff, any others? Katr67 07:55, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Oregon Coast Range

I've been working on Oregon Coast Range items the last week or so and was hoping we might have a geologist among us? If so could you take a look at Northern Oregon Coast Range to make sure the geology info is correct? I'll tackle the Central Oregon Coast Range next along with Rogers Peak if anyone wanted to put together Southern Oregon Coast Range and Mount Bolivar (the highest peak in the coast range) then the main Oregon Coast Range article should be easy to put together with see: N/C/S parts and a summary of the articles. Thank you. Aboutmovies 21:48, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Kettle Foods

Someone prodded Kettle Foods. I contested the prod, but the content at the article is pretty thin, if someone wants to spruce it up a bit in case it gets taken to Afd. I found Kettle chips in France so surely they're somewhat notable. Katr67 05:04, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

List of ZIP Codes in Oregon

This article is up for deletion along with all the other states' articles. Some of us were working on revamping it, so it's kind of a mess right now, but I think it should be kept, probably renamed, judging by the consensus that is forming. Perhaps this can be incentive to improve the article? See the deletion discussion page. Katr67 19:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Sadly, the page was deleted. I tried looking for a saved version of it, but couldn't find it. Maybe someone save the last version as History of Oregon post offices or something like that? —EncMstr 23:40, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
If you like, I could restore it into your userspace. Just message me and I can access the deleted page to place at, say, User:EncMstr/List of ZIP Codes in Oregon for you to work with as you create a valid Oregon history article. — Scientizzle 01:04, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Scientizzle has generously restored the article in User:EncMstr/Oregon ZIPs. I don't have much free time now (girlfriend hit by a car), but anyone who desires to should edit it, or use it as a basis to create History of Oregon post offices, or something like that. —EncMstr 17:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Waldo Lake...

Hi! New guy here... never posted to Wikipedia before so don't know the protocol, etc. Just wanted to say Waldo Lake is one of the cleanest lakes in the world, and it might be worth mentioning something about this. If I remember correctly they have to use special testing methods to test the purity of the water there because it has virtually no pollution at all. Search Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Waldo+%2BLake%22%2C+water%2C+cleanest%2C+purity&btnG=Google+Search) for more info on this. Thanks!

Daniel (vagabondvet [at] gmail [dot] com) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.82.9.55 (talk) 19:34, 16 April 2007 (UTC).

Salem Monthly

This article is up for deletion. Yes, it's kind of a rag, but it seems like it just might be notable enough to have an article. Maybe not. I've done what I can to save it, if anybody else can dredge up some notability, please share. Katr67 04:38, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Stadium Infoboxes

I was adding stadium infoboxes to Oregon sporting venues that did not yet have them (Gill Coliseum, Memorial Coliseum, and Civic Stadium (Eugene)). If anyone else has more info, those articles are somewhat sparse. Also, the Autzen Stadium article doesn't even have a picture! If someone has a pic of Autzen to put on the infobox, it would make the article a lot nicer.Duckblazer 01:49, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Vanishing stories in The Oregonian

I'd like to make a push for people to make full citations (rather than just links) when citing The Oregonian, because so many links go "dead" at that paper's site, without any indication how to find the article.

Please take a look at my description of the problem at User:Peteforsyth/O-vanish. Feel free to edit. I'd like to start linking to that page when I "flesh out citations" on Oregon-related pages. -Pete 22:10, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Will do. My philosophy is "a sloppy citation is better than no citation at all" but I'll try to make sure the Oregonian articles are done properly at least. Is this a problem with any other sources? I've noticed some S-J articles are impossible to find in any form short of microfilm as well. Katr67 23:08, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I see you know that already... Katr67 23:09, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the input! I basically want to point out the big problem with the "sloppy better than none" approach, which is what I used to adhere to. It's fine for a Trib or Willy Week story, because there's effectively no time limit to fleshing it out; but with an Oregonian or SJ story, a sloppy citation is not even a tiny bit better then no citation at all, once a few months have gone by. -Pete 00:02, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Direct Legislation League

Hey fellas, (new to this, but) just wanted to point out that the Direct Legislation League was a national organization formed in New Jersey in 1893, with many "chapters" around the country. Just want to make sure people don't get derailed from that (I think incredible) history. Looks like yall have taken on a big project. Good luck! Ogbn 04:31, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Ogbn, thanks for the comment...can you expand a little, I'm intrigued. Sounds like the short article Direct Legislation League might be in error - was Willion S. U'Ren (in 1898) merely the founder of the Oregon chapter, not of the org. as a whole? Was the "Oregon System" actually conceived in NJ, and Oregon simply happened to be the first state where it was successfully passed? Do you know of a good online source for these questions? Much appreciate the input, I'm very interested in this bit of history, and would like it to be accurately reflected on Wikipedia. -Pete 05:13, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Right, U'Ren did not found the national org.

Initiative and referendum were actually first permitted in cities in Nebraska, and a year later in 1898 South Dakota was the first state to adopt statewide I&R. Utah also passed it before Oregon, but it was called the Oregon system by many because yall used it so much, and used it (placed a measure on the ballot) first. In Oregon recall, and other reforms, came in the years that followed. The American movement for direct democracy was inspired by the Swiss.

There is not much history online unfortunately. There are decent historical summaries at iandrinstitute.org most of them lifted from a book by San Franciscan David Schmidt. The histories on that site should be read with a grain of salt however. For one the organization has a tax reform agenda it doesn't entirely own up to that occasionally shapes its documentation. If you can get acces to JSTOR there are some decent treatments of the populist and progressive periods in the historical and political science academic press.

The Direct Legislation League national organization put out a journal for a few of decades called the Direct Legislation Record, eventually combined with the Proportional Representation Review and published in Philadelphia under the title Equity I think, that there are still a couple of crumbling runs of in research libraries. These are probably the best record of the period I've seen.

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me if i don't check in. Ogbn 07:57, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Pete, just a quick note w/o much research, so I'm going mainly off memory from high school. I think the Oregon System is more that just the what the Direct Legislation League was trying for. The Oregon system as you know is three parts: initiative, referendum, and recall. It appears the DLL was more just for the int and then later referendum, but not recall (though the article I found was from the 1930s so they could have later picked up on it). And in both cases it looks like Oregon was the 1st to adopt the intiative and referendum. I browsed through: The Constitutional Initiative in Operation, by Winston W. Crouch. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 33, No. 4. (Aug., 1939), pp. 634-645. Mainly about initiative and referendum, but some minor mention of the DLL. Aboutmovies 08:19, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Recall was won in Oregon by initiative in 1908. I don't know how to do it myself, but you should really rename the title of the article "Oregon Direct Legislation League" to distinguish it from the national league of which it was a chapter and which was coalesced, really, after a bit more research, in 1896 via the Populist convention that year through the work of Eltweed Pomeroy, publisher of the above mentioned record who was largely inspired by James W. Sullivan, author and publisher of Direct Legislation Through the Initiative and Referendum, the book that had inspired U'Ren and many others. Sullivan was founder of the People's Power League which was in large part responsible for I&R being placed into the 1892 platforms of both the Populist and Socialist Labor parties, and which quickly turned into the (original, but unsuccessful) Direct Legislation League of New Jersey in 1893. The Google books project has got a few decent historical sources available online now, like The Arena, a magazine edited by B.O. Flower. I'm reading this stuff in David Schmidt's Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution and elsewhere. Ogbn 02:45, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
Seems like there's more great stuff on Google books all the time.. check out the "Direct Legislation" entry in the 1908 NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL REFORM (pardon caps- pasting. url too long) i found it very informative. Ogbn 07:30, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Oregon Project Ratings

As I've been editing, I have come across some other projects project boxes on the talk pages. Many have a ratings part integrated into the template. I was thinking we could tweak the OR template for the same. Thoughts? Aboutmovies 07:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I too have noticed various rating on articles belonging to many other projects. It seems to me that two judgements are useful in any tagging scheme.
importance
the priority of including the article in an excerpted collection. If only X articles (or Y Mb of content) can be included, what is the succession of articles?
completion
the degree of breadth and depth covered by the article compared to an ideally completed article; it is also inversely related to the work still needed
These two dimensions could be useful in prioritizing work on WikiProject Oregon. I've noticed one project's members quibbling a bit over the criteria for low and medium importance articles.
It occurs to me that tagging each article is inherently disorganized. How about a table instead?
Article Importance
(0..10)		 Completion
(0..10)		 notes
Oregon 10 9 needs more climate information
Portland, Oregon 9 9 needs more proportionate balancing between sections
Bosley Butte 1 3 needs history, coordinates, notability, references
List of Oregon State Parks 3 1 only 7 of 200+ articles are written; still haven't completed article format
Joel Palmer 5 7 his journal has more information not yet included
Breitenbush Hot Springs 3 8 more editorial input needed; photos needed
Applegate River 2 1 stub article
Bill Sizemore 4 5 tagged for cleanup; needs notability in intro, etc.
(I populated it with a sampling of real project articles, but glossed over the values, though they might be close.) The wikiproject tag should addtionally link to an organizing article containing such a table. I used numbers (instead of the more usual low/medium/high) so a sortable table can help organize. —EncMstr 19:37, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Since no one else seems to care, I guess we can just drop this for another time, though I do like the above table for sorting. My goal was more of the rating "stub - FA" on the individual pages and not even worry about importance, I thought it could help us start rating some of our articles and move some towards FA status. Oh well. Aboutmovies 19:10, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm not particularly interested in ratings systems, but would go along if it were implemented. But as you can see from the discussion I started up above somewhere, people aren't even all that interested in making FA articles. Just bein' maverick Oregonians as usual I suppose. BTW, I'm probably going to do some more archiving of this page in the near future. And P.S. all you WPOR folk rock! Katr67 19:18, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this would be really cool, of it doesn't take much effort to implement. I saw one at Wikiproject Arizona that would be very useful, it's some kind of auto-generated chart: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Arizona#Arizona-related_articles_assessment

Also, I am definitely willing to participate on making Oregon or Portland into a feature article. Please count me "in" if that ever gets picked up again. -Pete 22:10, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

User:Theophilus75 is now busy setting up a ratings system. I'm wondering what to do with Category:WikiProject Oregon, since it's now redundant with Category:WikiProject Oregon articles. Katr67 19:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I've finished the Ratings/Assessment page and it can be found at Assessment. It is a comprehensive setup where we can rate the class and importance of an article. We can also look up a list of articles by class level or importance level. Any questions let me know and I'll try to answer them. We need to get a link to it on the main project page also...actually, I'll take care of that. Theophilus75 22:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm finding that nav box to be a little bright. Can we make it match the {{Oregon}} template or something? Katr67 23:13, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Outstanding job on the ratings! I had seen a lot of the work going on, but it wasn't until to day that I saw the [page]. I'm very impressed. Cacophony 03:42, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
You think it looks good now, just wait till tonight when the chart updates and it will be under 300 left to assess. Aboutmovies 03:48, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Are these numbers actually the same?

Is there a source for the "more than 104,000 votes" comment in the section regarding the 2004 Presidential campaign? It would be nice to have confirmation that the number was not arbitrarily selected to mirror the later reference to the "$104,000" of funding rejected by the libraries.207.250.133.36 22:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

To which article are you referring? This would probably be better on that article's talk page. Katr67 22:23, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Project changes

Project templates

Is the fact that all the articles are now in both Category:WikiProject Oregon and Category:WikiProject Oregon articles a transclusion thing that will work itself out or something in the coding? I'm no good at coding so if someone could fix that, that would be swell. Also, I'd like to keep the Template:WikiProject Oregon category and Template:WikiProject Oregon template templates because they don't say "article" in them. Can we keep these and change the non-article assessment criterion in the new rating system (unnecessary if the cats and tls are tagged properly)? If not, we need to add the new assessment coding to these or something. Katr67 02:21, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

  • I'm not sure I'm giving the right answer, but I'm going to take a stab at it. The Category:WikiProject Oregon list is not a list of every Oregon article, but rather a list of some articles as well as subcategories within the Oregon Project, and the rest of the articles are within the subcategories. The Category:WikiProject Oregon articles is a list of every article within the project (not bundled by subcategory). I think, but I'm not sure, that I can change up the coding so that we will not need (or have or see or something like that) the latter, but I'm not sure. If I do (and it works), I don't know if there will be a comprehensive non-subcategorized list of Oregon articles...nor do I know if it is really needed. By default though, that is how the assessment pages are set up. Let me know you all's preference and I'll do what I can. Theophilus75 05:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I see that the WPOR cat--which indeed had every WPOR tagged article in it (I know because I tagged a lot of them), even after you changed it--has settled down now, so it must have been a transclusion or browser cache thing. And it's good to keep a complete list of non-subcategorized articles, because I for one rely heavily on watching the Recent changes on the talk pages. Now what about the template template and category template? I'd like to keep them, thus eliminating the "NA" class from the assessment, and we'll need to set up Category:WikiProject Oregon categories and Category:WikiProject Oregon templates by changing the templates. Otherwise we need to replace the tag on those pages with the WPOR template (I can do that easily with AWB) and go with the Category:Non-article Oregon pages option. Which way should we go? Katr67 07:00, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Maybe it's cause it's early still...but you've pretty much lost me. I'll keep reading and see if I can figure it out, but right now I'm lost. Theophilus75 15:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
The project has three templates that mark things as related to WPOR: for articles, categories and templates. (See the templates section of the main project page) They all used to put WPOR articles in Category:WikiProject Oregon. The article template has been changed to include assessment criteria and default move the articles to Category:WikiProject Oregon articles, the other two haven't. Currently the assessment criteria includes an "NA" class, for non-article things (templates, categories). However we don't need this because all the non-article things are already tagged with one of the other two templates. So we can remove the NA class from the rating system (or maybe we can use it catch articles that need to be retagged?) I also think it would be nice to change the two other templates so that they automatically categorize their respective categories (categories, templates). But maybe other people want there to be only one template (I've seen different projects do it different ways), so I'm wondering if anybody cares how we do it? Does that makes sense? Katr67 15:28, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I think it is making sence now, then again maybe not...I don't see where you see the "NA" class. I see the "Unassessed" class which tells you which articles haven't been tagged for class and I see the "None" importance rating that tells you which articles haven't been tagged for importance, but I don't see an "NA." I might be able to fix the tags for templates and categories to be classified within the Oregon articles class/importance system, but I'm not sure if we would need to do that. All templates would be of top or low priority, depending on who you talk too...and they would never reach a FA/FL status (same with categories), so I don't think they would need to be rated. Am I making sense? Theophilus75 00:29, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Since no one seems to care or know what I'm talking about, went ahead and moved the non-article pages to their own categories. I tagged one NA page (search for "NA" on the assessment page to see what the heck I'm talking about--it's part of the standard assessment verbiage), which is an image, but the code is broken and I don't know how to fix it. See Category:Non-article Oregon pages to find the article. Thanks. Katr67 04:06, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, I decided to be bold and try to fix the template since I did sort of know what you were talking about and it looked like a simple cut and paste error. It seems to be OK now, but if I messed something else up, somebody please put it back the way it was... --Sprkee 04:54, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
Looks right now, but I'm coming back after it was all fixed I think. Now I understand better what you were talking about. I don't think the NA category is even need if those things will be tagged differently. Theophilus75 16:09, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Navbox

Maybe its because I grew up in Eugene and despite graduating from the UO I can barely tolerate yellow and green together, but I think that new navbox is too bright. Can we tone it down a bit? I'm not sure we even need it? Discuss. Katr67 02:21, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

  • I changed the color scheme to tone it down a bit (I think). I really don't care what color it is, so if someone has suggests I can change it, or they are welcome to do it themselves. With the new assessment page a link needed to be added to the project page...not being sure where to put it on the page and not wanting to change the page up too much I thought a nav box would be easiest (plus it allows for all the main links of the project to be at the top of any page). I personally think it's easier to get around from page to page in the project with it, but that's me. If others don't like it, I'm cool with that too. Theophilus75 05:19, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I made my attempt at toning it down. Zab 05:35, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Sorry, I read Katr67's recommendation above that was crossed out about trying to match the template box and did that after you did your change (didn't realize you changed it)...if you want to change it back go ahead. Theophilus75 05:39, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Well, whatever we choose should have very little red in it and primarily blue (to match the Wizard Island picture on the WikiProject home page). Red will just tint the thing purple. When choosing colors, keep blue at EE or FF and green should be only a few scales down. Red still needs at least 20% of blue though (33 or 44) to soften. Zab 05:49, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I like the blue--it does go much better with Crater Lake. Thanks for humoring me! Carry on. Katr67 06:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC) P.S. Now that the thing is not sitting there being loudly Oregon Duckish, I see that it is indeed very handy. Thanks for thinking of it. Katr67 17:53, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Henry Pittock

If anyone's looking for an easy article to bring up to GA, I suggest Henry Pittock, for which our long lost J-M Gilhousen recieved a positive peer review. Katr67 04:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

DYK FYI

As those dedicated editors who are around most days will have noticed, starting in March we have had a fair amount of Did You Knows. The first ones were by accident, many of the later ones are not. First, I think it is a good thing as it brings recognition to the project and brings it additional editors. Secondly, here are some tips:

  • Know the rules: Basically its easiest with a new article (massive expansion to a stub also works) and it has to be less than five days old. Then it needs to be more than just a stub. Think Start class size. Lastly, the "Hook" which is the line that shows on the main page has to be verifiable through references.
  • You can self nominate, just go to Template talk:Did you know add add your Hook under the correct day the article was created.
  • Let others nominate for you. This is how many of the articles last month became DYKs, they were first in the AlexGoodBot list. The AlexBot is a series of bots that searches new articles and classifies them (including one for Oregon). One is the "Good" article bot. This is not the same as GA good, it simply finds articles at a set length and sees if it has references (it may also look for sections). If it meets that criteria it is included in its list. That list is part of the DYK template talk page and any editor on that page can go nominate an article from that list. This happens fairly often. So if you write your article offline until you think you are pretty much done and properly cite things, then there is a good chance it will show up on the list and get nominated. About 80% of those nominated get listed in the template, with most of those not making the cut due to issues with the article (up for AfD, too short, too old, etc.).

That's my guide to getting WPOR more airtime on the main page, at least until we get more FA articles. Aboutmovies 07:03, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Hewlett-Packard

There is some question about our project's tag on the H-P article: Talk:Hewlett-Packard#Wikiproject Oregon??. I'm not much on the history of hi-tech in Oregon, but I know H-P is (was?) a significant presence in our state. Anyone care to add more about Oregon to that article or else should we remove the tag? EncMstr? Katr67 15:52, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Even if the article doesn't have a lot, if any, content about Oregon, it still should be tagged as an Oregon article that way someone on the Oregon project can come along and add content about Oregon on it later. - Theophilus75 22:14, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, it's iffy to me. I couldn't find "Oregon" on the page in a quick search. The company was not founded in Oregon, nor is it based there. If one of it's "holdings" were founded in Oregon, it may be worth a stub article with a link, but I don't think the whole thing falls under WikiProject Oregon. More appropriate: Category:Companies_With_Some_Obscure_Connection_To_Oregon. Zab 00:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't know how obscure it is when HP's largest campus is located in Corvallis, OR. <http://www.visitcorvallis.com/explore/about_corvallis.html> - Theophilus75 02:28, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
It is the 7th largest employer in of Oregon. I would say that alone justifies the tag. #6 is Intel, and it also contains the WP:Oregon tag. Cacophony 02:50, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Alright. Those are significant figures. Keep the WP tag. Zab 03:05, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Western Culinary Institute

Sanity check on aisle three...I keep reverting edits to the article by someone ostensibly associated with this Portland institution and have left the appropriate messages. I obviously need take a break from this now. If anyone else wants to take a look, help keep an eye on things, etc., it would be much appreciated. Thanks. Katr67 22:55, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Got it on my watchlist. - Theophilus75 00:36, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
I just reverted this article again as the same editor has added most of the info back (though slightly modified). If someone wants to look at what they did this time and determine if it should have stayed you are more than welcome. I'm too tired and been up too long to try and determine if it should stay...but looking through the article it seems pretty much the same as before. - T-75|talk|contribs 06:51, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. It would be very kind of someone to glean what information from Westerncul's contributions is usable and not advertising and add it to the article, but I'm not well-disposed toward someone who isn't communicating or heeding any our messages and whose edits stomp on the existing markup. YMMV. Katr67 07:07, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Non-existent articles

I just speedily deleted all the talk pages of the non-existing articles tagged with WPOR (per Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Admin), hopefully this will simplify the assessment project. If anyone is interested in knowing which ones they were for watch- or to-do-list purposes, you can check the link above and check for redlinks. Some of the redlinks are also from {{prod}}s and Afd's as well. Cheers! Katr67 20:53, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Possibly useful map

I made a locator map for Oregon. Similar ones are in use in infoboxes in state park articles (for example L.L. "Stub" Stewart Memorial State Park) or city articles (for example Elmwood, Louisiana). I hope this is useful, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 22:59, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

So very superior to the one we've been using! Thanks! -Pete 00:20, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I may be able to write a script that generates dot maps based off of input maps and DMS coordinates. If nobody wants to go through the trouble of manually recreating them all I could give it a shot. It would take a bit of startup time because of the WP bot rules, but I have already coded and tested a the bot framework. Zab 10:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Doing my best to make sense of how to use this, but I'm having trouble. Can you point us at any kind of instructions? Do the templates currently in use for Oregon cities etc. support this kind of map, or will they need to be upgraded? Could you possibly provide an example of how to use it for an Oregon city, for example at Salem, Oregon? -Pete 01:21, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Applegate Christian Fellowship

While working on Applegate, Oregon "see also" list, I came across the deletion of Applegate Christian Fellowship. The consensus was that the church is not notable enough for it's own article. Maybe not, but even though I am not religious, I know that to many Jackson County residents the church is notable. Anyways, it does not need it's own article, but I redirected it to Jon Courson, who founded ACF and is now quite famous. If it wasn't for the riveting success of ACF, he probably would still be in his two-bedroom house preaching to the neighborhood watch group. I will keep my eyes open for some other notoriety, though both articles are of quite little interest to me. Zab 10:17, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm the one who put that article up for Afd. As it was, it was pretty much an ad for the church and did not assert its notability. If it could be written in such a way as to reflect its importance to Courson, it would probably be OK. But the redirect is a good idea. I don't care either way as long as the article is not being used to advertise the church. Katr67 14:31, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Changing from OSU to OS

I bring this up as a current student of OS (formerly OSU), and I think it holds some significance, though not an incredibly large significance. Apparently there has been seemingly frequent confusion between OSU - Oregon State University, and OSU - Ohio State University. For causes which I personally have not investigated, OSU suddenly became OS instead to alleviate this confusion (that is, Oregon State University OSU became OS - simply Oregon State). If anyone thinks this is a semi-important topic to note about, or add to the page then follow up on the research for it since I myself have very little knowledge about the direct causes for the change (and I do not read the school newspaper, so I may have missed the cause entirely). However, last year there was an incident at Ohio State University where a student was killed in the dorms in an elevator accident, and there was a lot of concern from student parents from Oregon State University confusing the actual location of the death. Whether this is part of the contributing factors that lead to the change, I am not sure of, but further investigation by someone who is seasoned at this sort of thing is welcome to look into the matter.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.237.235.156 (talk • contribs) 2007-06-08T18:21:48 (UTC)

If the choice had been ORSU, it would have made so much more sense.... Why wouldn't Oklahoma and Ohio both claim OS as well? —EncMstr 03:05, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Western Culinary Institute

Hi Wikipedia Editors, We would like to add factual content to the Western Culinary Institue article. We have removed unnessecary words that make the entry seem advertorial and we have also included references. Unfortunately, we can't seem to get these updates approved and are willing to work on revised copy, but are stumped as to how to get the article accepted after making the revisions suggested. Any suggestions you would be willing to offer would be more than helpful! Thank you!

Westerncul 21:52, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for finally heeding our posts on the article's talk page, your talk page and the edit summaries. I trust you have read about the various guidelines we have posted on those pages. I have created a temp page: Talk:Western Culinary Institute/Temp where you can post your suggested article changes. That way we can collaborate on getting the article to its final form and then replace the current article if necessary, without continuing to lose the formatting of the current article. Please direct any other discussion of the article to Talk:Western Culinary Institute so the discussion is centralized. Thanks. Katr67 20:44, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Talk:Western Culinary Institute

Oregon Water Trust

Katr67, Thanks for taking the time to edit the Oregon Water Trust page & for making sure that our entry is certified Kosher and in keeping with Wiki Standards. Of course you're correct (in the page discussion) that this entry was a cut&paste special. I noticed initially that I had missed a "we" and an "us" or two, a dead giveaway. However, having removed them (and your tag) I got retagged & I'm not sure why. Anyway, we'll be happy to rewrite the page more appropriately when we can figure what's still wrong w/ it. -Michael Mintz 69.88.124.4 19:24, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

BTW, I noticed that your have a penchant for ghost towns. A couple of weeks ago, several of us were in the John Day Basin checking streamflow and meeting with water users and regulators. We traveled through several ghosttowns and got pix, so I'll add what I can to the list of USA ghost towns & maybe DL a photo or two. --Michael Mintz, Project Analyst, Oregon Water Trust 69.88.124.4 19:36, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

What a fine offer! You will find that you need to create an account in order to upload photos. If you need any help with things graphical, feel free to leave me a message. -Pete 19:55, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for contacting us, I believe Mr. Mintz already has an account and forgot to log in... Anyway, I retagged the article since even with changing the "we"s and "us"es, it's still pretty much a copyvio. It would be nice to see the article rewritten in such a way that it is not simply a copy of the website, and so that it tones down the promotional nature of the current wording. It also need some additional wikification, but I'll take care of that in a sec. Just a heads up, we do have conflict of interest guidelines, which don't preclude your editing the article, but will give you an idea of some areas of concern. Likewise, the guidelines about what Wikipedia is not will give you some idea about the use of Wikipedia for self-promotion. I believe, however, that our copyright guidelines state that if you clearly post on your organization's webpage that the content is freely licensed, it can be used as is. Maybe somebody with more experience with copyright can weigh in here? Personally I still prefer things be written in people's own words--I'll see what I can do later on today. And thanks for the offer of the ghost town pics! Which towns do you have? If we don't have articles on them I can certainly whip up a stub or two (seems I've promised to do Buncom and Golden at some point but I haven't gotten around to that yet, alas...) Katr67 20:12, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
BTW Michael, if you had logged in you could have seen my message to you on your talk page, which may have explained the issues I had with the article. Sorry I repeated myself, but we tend to do that a lot around here... Katr67 20:47, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Collapsable Headers on Main Page

Someone made them and asked for opinions....I like them, but I'm wondering if another color may be better. Possibly a shade of blue (to match the Navigation Head) or some type of tan)--T-75|talk|contribs 21:56, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes Pete, blue would be good. I admit they take a little getting used to, as I frequently check out the links in the categories section, and it's one more click I have to make, but that's just 'cos I'm lazy. I can deal. Latr, Katr 22:25, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Fine with whatever color changes you guys want to make. Do it yourself if you like, or I will. Katr, if certain sections are commonly used, we could make them non-collapsible, or maybe expanded by default...I just wanted mainly to get the really big sections, that are likely rarely used, "out of the way." -Pete 22:33, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Category:Oregon Pioneers?

Would such a sub-category to Category:American pioneers- be useful for applicable Oregon biographies? WBardwin 00:43, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

WBardwin, I think Aboutmovies (talk · contribs) and maybe Katr67 (talk · contribs) have the most experience editing articles on pioneers, so hopefully they will weigh in. Personally, I think such a category would be somewhat useful, but it would take a lot of work to add all the pioneers, so I'm not sure how it balances out. -Pete 17:26, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
I think it's a great idea. And I don't think it would take too long to do. What does our pioneer expert think? Latr, Katr 17:38, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
In theory I think it is a good idea as I've been try to figure out a way to make Category:History of Oregon more managable. The problem I see is in the application due to the ambiguity of the term pioneer (not to mention the racial issues with taking land from the natives). For instance Abigail Scott Duniway is a pioneer in women's rights, but not a pioneer in the sense of an Oregon pioneer. I'm wondering if Settler might work better or if there is a better term. However we proceed there needs to be an explicit categorization rule to keep it at what it is intended (time frame for instance), and be careful with the French & Canadians as those north of the border might not care for their folk being placed in an "American" category. Any thoughts? Aboutmovies 18:56, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Banner ad?

I'm sure a few of you have noticed these Wikipedia banner ads on people's userpages. Though I look upon them with horrifed fascination, I'm wondering if anyone is interested in submitting an ad for our WikiProject. Any press is good press... Latr, Katr 18:05, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

If you just want an ad created, it isn't necessary to submit one; ask me or Miranda or someone else who makes them and one will be made for you – Gurch 09:04, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Image:Qxz-ad63.gif
Done. Miranda 21:53, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
That's incredibly awesome! You used the state seal--very cool! Thank you! Katr67 21:59, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
And, barnstars are always welcome! Miranda 22:00, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Kip Kinkel

I stumbled across this article, which was previously not a part of WikiProject Oregon. The article is in need of some major cleanup. I did a little bit, but I think that the article probably needs the attention of multiple editors. Pablo Talk | Contributions 05:22, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I did some copyediting, but the article needs sources badly. Latr, Katr 06:09, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Portland, Oregon in popular culture

See also: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Portland, Oregon in popular culture

...is up for Afd. A couple of us had been discussing… Katr 20:50, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

…renaming and/or restructuring the article. Please continue this discussion over there, and/or at the Articles for deletion page. -Pete 00:50, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Oregon Historical Society Photos

A while ago I was at the Oregon Historical Society Museum and I was going to buy some older images to scan and add here, but there was a sticker on the back that said digitization and/or distribution was prohibited. The is a lot to copyright law, but the guidelines state explicitly: "In the U.S., any work published before January 1, 1923 anywhere in the world is in the public domain". Yesterday I was browsing around the OHS website and found that they want a $30 fee to use images they sell on the internet. I have yet to contact them to see why they feel that people should pay $30 to use an image that is in the public domain. The issue was a large reason that I decided not to renew my OHS membership. Has anyone contacted them to inquire about using some of their images here? I guess I would be willing to fork over the $30/image if they allowed high-resolution images published after January 1, 1923 to be displayed, but somehow I doubt they would agree to that. Any input/ideas? Cacophony 02:07, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I noticed the same copyright notice on a copy of a letter from 1850 I got from them. One thing to keep in mind with the 1923 thing is that published is not created. If there is a picture taken in 1888 but kept in someone's photo alblum at home it is not published. So 100 years later when the family donates the picture to OHS it is still unpublished and subject to copyright, with some other caveats/exceptions. This is good chart that sort of covers the unpublished part. I've found it easier to just find pre 1923 books and scan pictures from them knowing that the pictures were published prior to 1923 or find US Gov items (the WPA did lots of history work in the 1930s). You can even download some books from Google Books and then use the capture image tool in Adobe Reader to get a picture. I doubt we'd be able to convince them to allow uploads since that takes away a revenue source from them at a time when they are strapped for cash with the state no longer subsidizing them. Saddly this has also meant closing down OHS Press, but that's off topic. Aboutmovies 03:43, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
One more reason to start looking closer to home for material. Case in point is that I need to get off my butt & visit my Dad & go through all of the photos he's taken in the last 40-50 years: in all of that material, there has to be some worth uploading to commons! I know he has several sets taken in Sudan (there's a couple of the Sahara covered with grass that are keepers), Nigeria & Saudi Arabia -- but I bet he has a few on the 1961 Columbus Day Storm & the 1964 Willamette Flood (no article on that? I guess I'm the only one here who remembers that one). I even have a couple of pre-1900 photos of the Portland area, but I'm not uploading them because they have my relatives in them. -- llywrch 20:14, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Oregon invitation

You have been invited to join WikiProject Oregon, a WikiProject dedicated to improving articles related to the U.S. state of Oregon You received this invitation because of your interest in Oregon and/or your edits to Oregon articles. If you would like to join, please visit the project page, and add your name to the list of participants.


I made this. Shamelessly ripped off from another WikiProject. Like everything else, it's beige. Feel free to mess with it here: Template:WikiProject Oregon invite. It might be nice to do some sort of combo with a standard welcome template. Latr, Katr 05:39, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Very cool! Thanks for doing that, it will come in handy. -Pete 07:56, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

List of high schools in Oregon

Is up for deletion. Check out the deletion discussion if you wish. Latr, Katr 03:05, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon State Highways

I am proposing this be merged to our transportation subproject. See the article's talk page if you'd like to discuss my proposal. Latr, Katr 18:53, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

GA FYI

As I have been working on moving some articles towards Good Article class recently (3 have passed in the last two months) I wanted to encourage others to do the same. Nominate at least, as I know were all working on improving articles. And I wanted to share some insights from the process as I was confused to begin with, and judging by the GA review of Portland Aerial Tram I don't think I am alone. First, GA is not FA, but the quality is about the same. GA basically doesn't need to be as in-depth as FA (look at Waller Hall and you can see that even shorter articles can be GA). Otherwise it needs to abide by the MOS.

As to the review process, it is very different. For GA, it only takes one editor to pass an article. So after someone nominates an article at Wikipedia:Good article candidates, any single person can go in and then review and pass/fail the article based on the GA criteria (as opposed to say an AFD discussion). For conflicts of interest reasons you can't review an article you nominate or have done editing on (except for minor edits like adding a category or fixing spelling errors). Otherwise if a WPOR article is up, go ahead and look at the reviewing instructions and review the article. I've reviewed some the last few months, but no WPOR articles as none have been nominated. My personal goal is to get us to about 10 each of GA and FA by the end of the year for a total of 20 at GA and above. We're at 13 now, so it shouldn't be too hard. Though Oregon and Portland might be difficult, only because so many editors are involved as more editors, like committees make things difficult to agree on. Which is why the GA/FA items I've been focused on are less trafficted articles. But that's me. Aboutmovies 20:39, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your interests on what can be a rather arcane process. I like your goal of 10/20 - ambitious, but doable. I agree about Portland and Oregon, but I think that soliciting outside input would be very helpful. The Peer review process is another excellent option, which is outside of the article-rating world. I think at this point, it would be worth one of us making a list of our own perceptions of what needs to be done to Oregon, and then requesting a peer review of that article. That way, we'd end up with both an "Oregon-centric" and an "outsider" list of needed improvements. I'd also like to take this approach with the Columbia River article, which has come a long way recently. -Pete 22:32, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Snake River Valley AVA

I just created this article dealing with a wine growing region in SW ID and SE OR. It recently received official designation as an American Viticultural Area. I linked to the OR WikiProject, but did not assign an importance. Feel free to embrace (oh yeah) erase its stubbiness. --Robbie Giles 18:10, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

That's a nice start. The Oregon wine article should probably be updated, I'll take a quick crack at it. -Big Smooth 15:37, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Dante's

Is having some WP:COI and WP:OWN issues again if anyone wants to check it out. Apparently I'm a vandal, so I'm staying out of it. Katr67 17:30, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

I just reverted the WP:COI edits, and I'll try to keep an eye on the page. The editor with the COI issues is most likely co-owner Frank Faillace or perhaps some other close relative. Pablo Talk | Contributions 18:46, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Or how about an AFD? None of the sources on that page really assert notability per WP:CORP? Aboutmovies 22:11, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I think the article is (barely) notable, but the article isn't well written with quixotic references. I think we had previously agreed the building is plenty notable. —EncMstr 22:16, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I had thought about an Afd but that would be far too pointy coming from me. I think everyone should try to continue the communications process started by Pete on the talk page. My presence in the matter seems to be problematic so I'll defer to all y'all's good judgement. You can take out the bit about magazine ownership, however, because according to whichever WP:ALLCAPS thingy it is, subjects of articles are allowed to remove false information, and I did read something about the change in ownership somewhere. (but I'm no longer interested in finding the citation or risking checking the masthead of said publication while I'm at work). Katr67 22:42, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I entirely disagree about your involvement being problematic, unless it's becoming problematic for you - in which case, yeah, stepping away would probably be good. I think I'm most comfortable on this one trying to guide the discussion (since you guys seem to find that helpful) rather than take a position, and I don't really HAVE a position…I don't see a lot of harm in a poor article on Dante's, I see it as being a very different thing than a poor article on the moon, or folk dancing, or gay marriage…topics that are broad enough to actually attract a wide number of readers actually looking to learn something. To me the ability to collaborate is the biggest thing at stake in that article, and if I can help steer things in that direction I'm happy to do so… -Pete 22:57, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I know I'm not a frequent contributor to this project, but as I happen to have the Admin bit feel free to get a hold of me over disputes like this, & I'll be happy to contribute an informed -- but objective -- intervention. -- llywrch 21:34, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Idea/Proposal

I’ve noticed some editors on some of the Portland articles like the Portland page and Blazers that are not members of our little gang. Now normally in a gang environment we would want to go subjugate them and make them work for our crime family, but in this case it is a cyberworld and that won’t work.. Plus I think there may be Wiki policy against this type of action. Anyway, I am wondering if we should start a sub group for Portland and try to recruit some of those editors into that group. Make it sort of like the WPBio taskforces that even have their own userboxes. Then maybe they can take the lead in getting some of the high profile Portland area pages up to GA and FA and maybe some Vancouver people will feel more welcome. Thoughts, suggestions, points of interest? Aboutmovies 00:13, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I can think of one editor in particular who I'm surprised isn't part of the project, but when I see him edit the PDX-related articles I know all is well. It would be nice to have folks like that be part of the secret cabal our fine group of editors. Good idea. Katr67 15:53, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Indeed. By the way, have you guys seen this featured image candidate? I spent a good chunk of time gawking at this. Wow. Major kudos to Cacophony. -Pete 19:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Wow, thanks for pointing that out. That's a beautiful panorama. -Big Smooth 21:45, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the support of my PFC. I hope to keep them comming. To answer your question Pete, I took that Image from Marquam Hill at a classified location (hint...don't ask how I got up there). It is kinda funny, but I was not at all a photographer before I started contributing to Wikipedia. Here I am many thousands of dollars worth of gear later enjoying the heck out of myself. Cacophony 23:10, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, since no one is opposed I'll start making it happen. Any preference for a picture to use in the "I'm a Portland work group member" userbox? I was thinking Convention Center, Portlandia, or Pioneer Courthouse Square, any other ideas or pictures that would work good at the small userbox size? Aboutmovies 17:02, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
A rose? Or the Fremont Bridge? Ipoellet 18:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I like the rose idea. I would avoid Portlandia because of copyright issues. Cacophony 20:54, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Alrighty, the workgroup is now open. If you know anyone editing PDX related articles but is not a member here, let them know or let me know and I'll give them an invite. For now I went with the Made in Oregon sign in Old Town (the old White Stagg neon sign) for the user box just because of the pictures I went through it seemed to work well in the box. In theory I like the rose idea, but I don't think people would instantly see the rose and think of Portland as it could be used for Pasadena or a rose wikiproject. I'm not sold on the current pic, but it works for now. Aboutmovies 18:09, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Citations needed

Did someone from wikipedia land in a cartoon? http://xkcd.com/c285.html —EncMstr 21:23, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

WM Board Elections - 2 hours left!

Folks I just noticed there's only 2 hours left in the Wikimedia Board elections. Eek! I skimmed through the nominations and some discussion, and found in DragonFire1024 a candidate who seems to clearly share many of my values. If you've made 400 edits, you can vote. If you're making a last-minute decision, you might want to consider him. Things that stuck out to me: when asked about a controversial content dispute, he was quick to assert that the Board should not take a position, but let the community decide; he expressed what I think was an appropriately balanced view regarding non-free/fair use images, respecting both the value of free content and the need in some cases to use images that cannot be replaced by free images; and he is involved with WikiNews among other WM projects, which seems like a worthy cause.

Not having read all the candidate statements in detail, I can't say he is the "best," but I got the strong impression that he would make a positive impact on the Board.

For what it's worth… -Pete 22:22, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Adding External Link to HP page

I was going to add a link to the external link section on the HP page, but I saw the links shoudl be discussed in "talk" first. Anyone have a problem with me adding this link to a free company profiel page for HP? Here is the link: http://www.manta.com/coms2/dnbcompany_m6j2k

Deaksarm 13:34, 9 July 2007 (UTC) Deaksarm 7.9.07 9:33am EST

.....Disregard this link addition, it seems as though it is not permitted due to some information only being accesable through registration. Sorry.Deaksarm 16:01, 10 July 2007 (UTC)Deaksarm

Categories up for deletion

Category:Historic transportation in Oregon and Category:Oregon historic ships are up for deletion, here. Katr67 14:39, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Oregon Portal Started

I've taken the liberty of starting a portal for Oregon. I'm using the Featured Utah Portal as a blueprint and will fill the content sections as I can. Any help is appreciated. Colors are up for grabs, I chose a Duck green for the box headers, a water blue for the background and a Beaver orange for the border, but feel free to change. — Zaui (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

The colors seem good enough to me. I have a future List of lists about Oregon under development. Is that what goes in the "lists" pane of the portal? How about these "selected" entries for the time being?:

—EncMstr 18:31, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, someone needs to put together a list of lists for the Lists pane of the Portal. I was starting one using this list looking at articles starting with 'list', but I'll let you finish your project. I'll get the 'selected' sections started. — Zaui (talk) 19:23, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
I took the liberty of changing the shade of blue to something a little more harmonious with the orange. Despite being a Duck who hates yellow and green together (and certainly not "Thunder Green" and "Lightning Yellow"), and who is rather fond of orange, I found the whole color-combo a little distracting but otherwise a good compromise. Other options might be the official state colors of blue and gold ala the flag and our shiny new banner ad, in combo with our "Keep Oregon Green" green, though this might edge toward a Duckish bias... Katr67 21:28, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Californication

There is some discussion about whether this page should be about the Red Hot Chili Peppers album and not the portmanteau word that I believe originated in Oregon, if anyone wants to check out the discussion on the talk page. I think most Oregonians of a certain age ::cough::pushing 40 or older::cough:: will remember hearing the term or seeing the "Don't Californicate Oregon" bumper stickers long before the Chilis were a gleam in Anthony Kiedis' eye. Unfortunately, all I have is my own memory--we really need some reliable sources for the origin of this expression--perhaps someone is willing to do some library research? Remember that old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill... Just kidding. :) Katr67 17:59, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

There's no question that the term predates RHCP by a number of years. A quick scan of the Oregonian has the oldest available online reference in an article dated 9/2/90 titled "TUG OF WAR OVER LAND USE GOES ON". The term is thrown out casually in the article with no explanation which would indicate that it was a well-known term. However, I'm not sure that's a valid argument...just because the term came first here doesn't mean that it's the most expected usage for people using WP. (Full disclosure: I'm a self-loathing Californicator.) --Sprkee 18:12, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Some of my best friends are from California. Heck, my Mom was born in California, though arriving here in the 1940s surely predates Californication. Anyway, I'm not attached to which way the page is disambiguated--how about we make Californication a dab page and move the portmanteau word to Californication (portmanteau)? I think I'll just be bold and change it. I'm guess I'm just not comfortable with the assertion that "most people" will be looking for the Chili Peppers album because there's really no way to prove that, is there? But "most people" are probably younger and hipper than me... Any better suggestions for the renamed page are welcome... Katr67 18:34, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Nice. I think that was the right solution. --Sprkee 19:52, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

My take is that there are some things that don't deserve a page and this is one.... Rvannatta 02:17, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, feel free to take it to articles for deletion. Katr67 16:57, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

My take, as a third-generation Portlander, is that it is a notable subject. There has been a long love/hate relationship of Oregon towards California: on one hand, California provided the markets for Oregon goods, beginning with wheat and lumber during the California Gold Rush; on the other, there has been a fear -- to some degree justified -- that California will smother the Oregon "way of life" with its fads & preferences. And to make the entire matter even more complex, most people with multi-generational roots in Oregon have numerous close relatives living in California! I'd say this is not a serious prejudice -- however, several years back the defunct Nothwest Magazine section of the Sunday Oregonian ran a piece about Californians facing hostility in Oregon, & some of the interviewies were intemperate with their language (one was quoted as saying "If you don't like what's happening to Portland, then why don't you move to a small town like Bend?") found themselves treated with hostility until they left! -- llywrch 23:59, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't agree with your thesis that multi-generational Oregon residents have lots of california relatives. The Oregon trail didn't come from California. Rather California was a fork in the trail heading west. The north-south interaction is a fairly recent event associated with theh completion of I-5, but then my family started showing up here in the latter part of the 19th century, but indeed the current trend of California retiree's to head north is the first identifable wave of Californians coming here. The previoius big wave of immigration to Oregon was in the 1930's as vast numbers of mid westerner's starved off the farm and made their way to Oregon with the Dakota's, and Oklahoma and Arkansas being the best represented.Rvannatta 04:04, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I guess the history books say that, but the history of my family varies a little from that. One branch of my mother's family arrived from Back East by way of clipper ship: around the Horn, first to the Sandwich Islands, then to the California goldfields, then arrived in Portland at some point before the 1870s. In another branch of her family, after my great-grandfather separated from my great-grandmother, he moved to Alameda, where my grandmother spent at least one summer living with him growing up. (My father's family came to Oregon much later, and his siblings scattered up & down the west coast to where they or their spouses could find work.) In short, people had used the train or ship to travel between Portland & the Californian ports since the 1850s if not before -- as well as north to Seattle and Vancouver; & before I-5 there was Highway 99. I-5 was simply a more recent development of an old migration pattern; Oregon's never been that hard to get to from the south. -- llywrch 17:08, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I would say getting here by clipper ship is very much the exception. Both the Bandon Creamery and the Tillamook Creamery got their starts shipping fresh milk to San Francisco by frequent coastal schooners. None of my family was attracted to the california gold fields. --- but I can't say as much about the Alaska gold fields, but it was a round trip. My grandfather let a job as a motorman on a Portland street car to hike into the Kondike and when he returned he settled first at Kalama, and later St. Helens where he married a nominally local girl who was actually born in Kansas. He was born in Indiana. IT is very unlikely that either migrated west from those locations by ship. My mothers family was farming in the Palouse country of SE Washington before finally making it to the west coast and there is no indication that the folks got to Walla Walla any way other than by rail, though in fairness to California, the Palouse wheat growers did get their combines from San Leandro. Though not invented there, the massive horse drawn, ground powered combine was developed by the predecessors companies of Caterpillar for harvesting wheat in the Sacramento valley, because traditional harvesting methods of the mid-west didn't work in the low humidity condition of the valley. Low humidity was of course the order of the day in the Palouse as well, and there was plenty enough interaction between the Palouse farmers and the sacramento vally farmers to learn of the development of the combines, and quickly import them from where they were made in San Leandro into the Palouse. At least the pattern within my family is that they did not come west all at once. They lived for a time in multiple places along the way west. My wife's family followed a similar pattern--- Norway, to Michigan, to idaho to Oregon. -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rvannatta (talk • contribs) 03:40, 28 July 2007

Okay, why do I feel that we're reinventing the Three Scotsmen sketch from Monty Python? Was it something that I wrote? My point was that there was an awful lot of interaction between the two states prior to the creation of I-5, & tried to offer some examples. I didn't mean to sound as if I were boasting. And the reason that branch of the family came by ship was that they were Yankee merchant traders -- my branch got as far as California before they ran out of money (to give the short version), & they ended up in Portland soon afterwards. -- llywrch 05:30, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
Way off topic comment Link to Youtube video of tribute to Four Yorkshiremen sketch with Alan Rickman, for context. </offtopic> </humor> Katr67 20:10, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
Four Yorkshiremen? Why, in my day we only had two Yorkshiremen, & we were lucky if one of them weren't a Californian is disguise! -- llywrch 21:08, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Speaking of Californication...

The project ad banner (see here) uses Cal colors - blue and gold. — Zaui (talk) 22:18, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

While I am sworn to hate that color combination myself, it does accurate reflect the colors of the flag of Oregon.--Sprkee 22:43, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
I think it should have the The Oregon Trail (computer game) wagon on it... — Scientizzle 23:21, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

historic school districts

I think an item that would be interesting would be a list of all the school districts in Oregon that ever existed. Many would jibe with existing communities, but many others are completely or almost forgotten ghost communities.----as they tended to be every 5 miles down the road beause that is how far kids could walk to school. It would be the 'other shoe' to McArthurs post office list.... Rvannatta 02:26, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, we barely have consensus that the current school districts should have articles but it would indeed be interesting (though judging by how some recent Oregon-related Categories for discussion have gone, some might not agree that it's encyclopedic?) I think we should concentrate on getting articles written on the redlinked current school districts and communities first (there are hundreds), but if someone is willing to do the research it couldn't hurt to start a list of historic school districts too, though I would imagine it would almost number in the thousands! Katr67 17:10, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
I think it would be good to maybe create a History of education in Oregon that could also cover the time even before school districts when much education was through academies, move into the early colleges (which often were equivelent to a HS ed), and then into the more modern structure, and the forced school district unifications by the legislature in the early 1990s. Then the defunct school districts could be listed there and no problems with notability. But, this would be low on the priority list, so unless someone is really intereset it doing it themselves, it would sit on the back burner. If someone is interested, this book available for free download from Google books has a lot of info on early schools and colleges. Aboutmovies 17:52, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Oregon State Capitol FAC

Just an FYI, our capitol in Salem is now up for Featured Article status. If you would like to be involved in the process, go the FA page and read about the process if you are not familiar with it, otherwise click on the "leave comments" link in the FAC banner on the capitol talk page to participate. Aboutmovies 17:45, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Lars Larson

Lars Larson has been the target of several types of attack. The current is a low key, but persistent effort to add point of view material. I would greatly appreciate if there were several additional eyes on this. (Maybe beginning with the last edit?) —EncMstr 21:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

You probably noticed that I'm on it. (I got weary of having the thing on my watchlist but your request brought me back.) Attempts at getting the latest attacker to communicate seem to be just as futile as those directed toward the previous and apparently oppositely aligned attacker... *sigh* The article could use a rewrite, however. Katr67 17:59, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Portland International Airport

Anyone have a good picture of the PDX terminal or from inside (something similar to SEATAC) to put in the PDX infobox so the current washed out photo can be moved to later in the article? Nighttime and the glass canopy I think would look good. Aboutmovies 20:48, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

More WPOR awards

We currently only have the WPOR barnstar, and I was thinking we could roll out a few more. My ideas were an Featured WPOR award that incorporates the Featured Class star to be given to any editors who help get an article to FA, a list to FL, a portal to FP, or submit a Featured Picture. Then a DYK award for say every three Oregon DYK's (that is if you do one that has nothing to do with Oregon then it doesn't count), this would incorporate the DYK "?" into the award. Then a GA award just like the FA, but incorporate the GA symbol. I was thinking of making them user box size and editors could collect them like merit badges. Maybe even something like Bronze for a single one (i.e. the first one), then silver for double (e.g. after 6 DYKs), Gold for triple, and Platinum for quadruple. After that you start again, so you could have a Platinum GA and a Bronze GA. What are others thoughts and any ideas for other contributions that I may be overlooking? Aboutmovies 16:53, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

FYI, User:Durova has a triple crown award along similar lines. I like the idea of incorporating the FA star into the current gold guy design (hmmmm, bronze, silver and gold guy awards? Or does that make him too much like a bowling trophy?), and if we could get him to fit in a userbox, that would be cool. People do like to collect badges... Katr67 17:39, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Sort of, but the triple crown requires one of each of three parts. This would be three seperate awards, but we could then make a WPOR trifecta too. Aboutmovies 17:47, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Censorship of name in Kip Kinkel

An anon has removed the name of one of the students involved in the Thurston High School shooting three times in the past few weeks.[3] [4] [5] All three of these edits have come from Eugene (which of course neighbors Springfield, the town Thurston is in). I'm fairly certain that the person removing the name is someone close to the student. The third edit made by the anon is far more acceptable than the first two and is the current version. Should I leave the name out or should I include it? Does anyone have any thoughts? Pablo Talk | Contributions 21:21, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

On one hand, (DELETED) was nearly a victim. On the other, he chose to act heroically. I wouldn't think it would be a problem for him to be named as he is presented quite positively. The only thing that makes me wonder why someone would delete it would be if it weren't accurate, or such publicity being against some belief. If it's well cited, I'd favor leaving it in. —EncMstr 21:43, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The name of that student was widely reported in the news and can be easily sourced, so I don't think the inclusion of the name is a matter of invasion of privacy. I don't see any reason the name should be left out, but on the other hand, does knowing the name of the student (who I would assume is not notable on his own) enhance the knowledge of the subject? He was hailed as a hero at the time, and his actions probably saved many lives. (Perhaps the anon does not want his name forever connected with Kinkel's? Understandable, but unavoidable, I think.) Does WP:BIO have any guidelines on the matter? Reading further, there is some controversy about claims the student's National Rifle Association training is what allowed him to take quick action. So maybe the anon has an anti-NRA bias? Ultimately unless the inclusion of the name violates some policy, or someone can produce a logical argument for the removal of the name, I think the article should be reverted. But I don't like like letting unexplained anon deletions stand, personally. Katr67 21:46, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

WP:BIO doesn't have anything, but WP:BLP#Privacy of names is relevant. Per this guideline, "Editors should take particular care when considering whether inclusion of the names of private, living individuals who are not directly involved in an article's topic adds significant value." So, the relevant question is: Is it valuable to include the name? I'm having a tough time deciding whether it does or not. Pablo Talk | Contributions 01:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Note: I am copying this thread to the article's talk page. Pablo Talk | Contributions 01:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

certainly an anon deletion can get one to wondering, but on the other hand there are a lot of young survivors who likely would like to get on with their lives and become known for somethingother than being surviors, just as many have come home from wars and never spoken of what they did, even though they performed many heroic acts. I don't see the names of survivors as necessary to an article. I wouldn't make an issue of itRvannatta 03:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Copying another comment to the Talk:Kip Kinkel page, let's keep the discussion in one place. -Pete 19:04, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Portal:Oregon

There's been remarkably little discussion about our new "portal." What do people think? Do some of the things we've been keeping track of here, now belong on the Portal page instead? How do we avoid redundancy (multiple "to-do" lists, multiple lists of "Did You Know" entries, etc.?) -Pete 18:45, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I think it looks slick. I like the color change Katr67 did. The to-do section of the portal is simply Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/to do pasted in as a template, so there's no overlap - as it changes, it will change on the portal also. I don't see a problem with the DYKs in multiple places - usually DYKs are used in portals to draw attention to articles that are not quite meaty enough to be part of the selected article rotation.
Anyway, if we populate the photo, article, bio and DYK sections with about 15 entries each (8 for DYK - with at least 3 items per entry) and send it to Portal peer review, it could probably pass a Featured portal review. — Zaui (talk) 20:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

WikiWednesdays

A group of us are trying to promote the idea of a Portland WikiWednesday. Unfortunately, I'm the only one in the group not attending Wikimania, so it falls on me to try to organize this for this Wednesday (1 August 2007). So far there are two of us -- anyone else interested? Contact me on/off Wiki. -- llywrch 17:28, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Depends on what time and where... —EncMstr 19:03, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
I have Wednesday free - I'm down. I vote for the east side! Now can an admin from maybe France or Taiwan drop in and determine consensus for an east side meeting please? -Pete 19:47, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Since no one else has responded to this thread, I propose Lucky Lab at 6:00pm. (That gives me enough time to get there from work. Unless someone comes up with a better suggestion (& I'm quite happy to change the locale -- I only picked it because I always seem to end up there), does that work? -- llywrch 20:45, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

external reference spider

A new tool which checks the validity of external links from a HTTP perspective is now chunking through the WikiProject Oregon articles. There are dozens of things it has found which could use attention, especially the "moved permanently" and "not found" (pink and orange). For anyone with a particular fetish/appetite for dealing with external links, look here. At its current rate of progress, I wouldn't expect it to be done until early tomorrow (PDT). —EncMstr 01:07, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Uh oh! Something is amiss with the tool. It gave up after finding 162 links—some sort of misunderstanding of the article limit. I'll give an update when/if it finishes correctly. —EncMstr 01:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
It seems I discovered a bug and is now running with an appropriate limit. View the results here. —EncMstr 01:52, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

That's right, just torture the obsessives... So do we have any way to track who's taking care of what yet? Katr67 04:04, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Well....what else does one appropriately do with obsessives? The spider just finished. It found 1795 unusual conditions. As for organizing any effort to fix them, there are so many articles and so few fixers, what is the chance of a collision really? —EncMstr 14:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
We should note that while this is useful, it doesn't catch all the Oregonian articles that have gone dead. Those just go to a blank OregonLive page with no redirect. So if you happen to see some links to Oregonian articles while fixing other broken links, those should probably be turned into standard news citations. --Sprkee 17:38, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
This particular obsessive volunteers to look at any articles about settlements; I'm skipping the PDX neighborhoods for now. I'll also be sure to check for O-vanish. Katr67 17:45, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I've add oregonlive.com to the list of expiring news sources. I'm trying to make this as automated as possible, so if you have any idea tell me. —Dispenser 20:16, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm re-running the scan[6]. I figured out yesterday a way have a signal to noise ratio. It is effectly composed of the number of word that are not link divided by total words number of words, and since a site's navigation is effectively links those with really low scores are pages with content. blanking. However, this is only enabled for oregonlive.com domain and pages that return 4xx code, since it requires using more bandwidth. —Dispenser 20:10, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

A good source

The following article has lots of good info on Vic Atiyeh, Glenn Jackson, Larry Campbell etc. Could be used to beef up these articles, and the forthcoming History of Oregon article too! -Pete 17:46, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

"Influential citizens", The Bend Bulletin, September 28, 2006. 

Collaboration?

As we have a lot of new members this month, and plenty of editors that are not so active, I was wondering if we should start a “Collaboration of the Week” type of thingy? No pressure on people to contribute, but a way for a message to be sent to each member saying “hey we are working on this if you would like to join in” to attempt to get people more connected to the project. If there are no objections, I would recommend we start with articles in the Top importance section that are stubs, working to bring them up to Start or B. The first three I found with this are: Alis volat propriis, Fusitriton oregonensis, and Government of Oregon. Thoughts? Suggestions? Aboutmovies 21:09, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

  • Sounds like a good idea to me. : ) -Fcb981 15:30, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Neahkahnie Mountain

Looking at the page Neahkahnie Mountain today, I noticed right off that there are no photos. This spring / summer, I've spared about as many freebies for Wikipedia as I care to for now. Anyone have an image? I shouldn't add my own page myself, as an external link, but it does have one good size image, and a hyperlink to a Video of the trail / views of the mountain Neahkahnie Mountain page with photo / video link.

One external link looks rather odd - it's the one referring to the Legend from "yougoonie" - it looks like the linked page has nothing on it but advertising. Candidate for deletion? Just didn't see any relevant material when I visit the link.Mdvaden 00:34, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

There's a decent site page with info on the treasure legend. I'll see if I can find it this week. From an Oregon author with several books, if that rings a bell for anyone else.Mdvaden 00:42, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I think I may have a picture. Let me check. -Fcb981(talk:contribs) 19:25, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
yeah, I had a few, not my best pictures but im happy to help. -Fcb981(talk:contribs) 22:21, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
A good contribution, nonetheless! Neahkahnie is a difficult mountain to photograph, due to the terrain and frequent cloud cover...kudos to you, and thanks for contributing to the commons! (Any idea what the "deletion" tag on the photo is all about? I couldn't figure out where that came from, or why.) -Pete 00:33, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I had spent a week in manzanita, end of july and came home with 250 digital pictures and 3 rolls of film but the only time I really framed up Neahkahnie was on a hike when the lighting was very hard and flat. I have probably 40 pictures of sun-sets with just the cliff going down to the sea. Too bad I didn't know that the artical needed a picture, I could have made a better effort. The delete tag is just for my copyright template which some commons person doesn't like. The tag is on all my commons pictures. It's pretty interesting if you take a look at the nom. Feel free to vote "keep" on the nomination. ; ) and I dont think any of my pictures are in real danger. -Fcb981(talk:contribs) 03:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Oregon protected areas nav box

I have begun a nav box at Template:Protected Areas of Oregon that will bring us up to speed with quite a few other states that have similar nav boxes. It's kind of long, but I'm having trouble thinking what to cut - too close to it probably. I've also begun adding it to a handful of articles, but it belongs on a bunch more.

Anyone who is interested, please have a look and make any edits. One thing that's needed is a logo for ODFW, since I have been unable to find a good one to upload. (Image:ODFW logo.gif doesn't scale down at all well.)

-Ipoellet 22:00, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Wow, what an effort! This looks like a great start. Lots of redlinks to attend to…Katr, I hope you weren't planning on doing anything in the big blue room this weekend! (…said the cheerleader to the gnome…) -Pete 00:38, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Thbbbt!. :D Katr67 02:40, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Bloom County? And I laughed. I think we're both dating ourselves.  :-) Ipoellet 17:07, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
(PS Meadow Party '08!!!)

Orenco, Oregon

This is a very unique area, an area that once was the Oregon Nursery Company - Orenco Town. After researching for real information at Washington County Historical Society and Museum [7], Washington County Tax Assessment [8], Hillsboro Argus [9], interviews with Mr. Lou Hanberg local historian, published the book Orenco Heritage Series – 1905 – 1938, would be possible to make the history of Orenco be part of Oregon History?

The material and supportive documents are from reliable entities. Can someone help?

Thanks, Ermdee 17:28, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

First, welcome to the Oregon wikiproject! I'm from the general Orenco area and have a copy of book one of the Heritage series (which I've used in the Orenco, Oregon article). I lived in and next to Orenco for the first 18 years of my life, and though it is an intresting story, it does not really belong in the Oregon History section of the Oregon article if that was your aim. Nor should it be in the sub-articles that are being developed to cover the history of the state in more detail. All the history can go into the Orenco article. Not to be too blunt, but there is nothing that special about Orenco's history versus the other 100+ former towns in the state, each with their own intersting and unique stories. See Copperfield, Oregon, Shaniko, Oregon, Champoeg, Oregon, and in general Category:Ghost towns in Oregon for other examples. We may be able to work in a small section titled "former towns" or the like in a History of Oregon article which simply mentions some towns of note, but going into details would be beyond what an encylopedia would do, even Wikipedia with its virtually unlimited space. Some brief info on the history of major/important settlements that are in the history books belong in the main articles, but thoseare only brief looks. Histories of individual towns or people or things belong in articles about those subjects. A better way to increase the coverage of Orenco history would be to start articles about items related to Orenco that are notable and add info about Orenco here and there in related articles. For instance the in Oregon Electric Railway article you could add a sentence about where the station in Orenco was and the years of operation. You could find info to start an article on the Orenco Herald, the Oregon Nursery Company, some of the company officers, and probably even the old Presbyterian Church building that is nearly 100 years old. I hope that helps Aboutmovies 16:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

attention is needed

at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival article, where serious copyediting, WP:MOS work, and referencing is needed. There may also be WP:COI and WP:OWN issues going on. The expertise of the good editors at Wikiproject Oregon would be greatly appreciated. VanTucky (talk) 23:37, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Cross referencing categories

Is there an easy way to make a list of articles thart are in two categories, specifically Category:Wikipedia requested photographs, and Category:WikiProject Oregon articles? Thanks, Cacophony 08:37, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Applegate Valley Inclusion

I'm fairly lame at starting an article, otherwise I'd initiate "Applegate Valley". It would be a good Oregon article to add. Already, Wikipedia has Applegate Lake and Applegate Valley AVA which are within it or at its south end. The Valley stretches between Jacksonville, Oregon and Grants Pass, Oregon. In it is Applegate, Oregon. Merely a 1/2 mile from Applegate Lake is Oregon's only Bigfoot trap. The Valley contains communities of Ruch, Williams, Murphy, Provolt. Anyone handy at beginning on like this?Mdvaden 05:26, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

There are at least two reasonable strategies for starting an article, such as Applegate Valley (Oregon):
  1. Create a one or two sentence article and label it as a stub with {{Oregon-geo-stub}}. Be sure to provide enough context what the article is about so the next editor can confidently continue your work.
  2. Find a good similar article, copy its wiki text, paste it into the new article, then change (most) everything to make it right. Be sure to press "Show preview" a lot to see how you're doing.
Don't worry about mistakes: someone will be along shortly to fix them.  :-) —EncMstr 06:12, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Category:Oregon state routes...

Is up for rename to something that I believe is inaccurate, though I don't quite understand the whole highways vs. routes thing in Oregon. If someone who is knowledgeable about the subject can comment on the rename discussion, please do. Katr67 09:22, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Diane Linn

FYI, I have prodded the article on Diane Linn. It has had a notability tag in place for two months, and I do not feel that she is notable enough to merit an article. Pablo Talk | Contributions 21:03, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Category:Portland artists

This category is up for discussion. It seems to have been part of an abandoned effort to promote/improve coverage of Portland art and artists that is slowly being dismantled. If anybody involved in that effort is still around, you might want to check into this. Katr67 20:22, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Portal Anniversaries

I'm trying to finish up the "Selected Anniversaries" part of the portal. My goal is to have 5 dates per month. All I have missing is one date for both April and August. Does anyone know of a good one for April, preferably from west of the Cascades, and from Salem south, and between about 1900 and 1960? For August, anywhere but NW Oregon and between 1890 and 1950, or 1975 to current? Thanks. Aboutmovies 23:42, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Schoolkid vandals

Hey folks, I don't know how many members check out the link on the front page that shows changes to all the articles in WPORE, but if you're interested in helping fight vandalism, be sure to check the page once in a while. Now that school's back in session and half the schoolkids in the U.S. are doing history units on the American West and things like that, articles on Oregon subjects get vandalized quite regularly. Today's popular targets were Oregon Trail, Hudson's Bay Company, and Manifest Destiny. So if you see any anon edits to likely articles, be sure to take a look. You'll learn a lot about what words still make kids giggle and improve the project at the same time. There's lots of activity on the articles about high schools as well--I tend to feel keeping those up to standard is hopeless, but there's lots of fun with the delete key there as well. Have fun! Katr67 20:49, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Can we add a new secret page to the project to save all the funny edits? I liked the one about the penguin. --Sprkee 21:58, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
'Fraid not. See: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense (6th Nomination). Maybe if we figure out a way to make a double secret page. Katr67 22:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
OK fine, if I see another penguin joke, I'm leaving it in. --Sprkee 22:09, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
What if various members of WPOR "adopted" various of these "at-risk" articles and added them to their watchlists to take particular responsibility for monitoring for vandalism? Would there be interest in this? Could this run afoul of WP:OWN? Ipoellet 22:44, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
I doubt it. Removing vandalism doesn't count toward WP:3RR, nor toward preserving talk pages. I already watch 2000-2500 WPOR articles, and—except for the schools—usually stomp out vandalism on sight. —EncMstr 22:53, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Yep, I think that's good practice. And I was just kidding about the penguin. Didn't mean to create a controversy. --Sprkee 23:02, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, you're not allowed to comment on penguins--that's conflict of interest. FWIW, I watch Oregon Trail and Lewis and Clark Expedition, but so does everybody else. Katr67 23:10, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
I watch Franklin High, it's near my house. I'd be happy to add a few other Portland schools…say, Cleveland, Marshall, and Grant? I will stomp the penguins on sight. -Pete 01:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Portland WikiWednesdays

So we had our first meeting of Portland WikiWednesdays last week, at the offices of Aboutus.org]. It was lots of fun, and it looks like we'll be meeting monthly. We've set up a mailing list via Google Groups to coordinate, so please sign up if you're interested! PDXwiki

There were roughly a dozen of us, with experience and interests in various Wiki projects - not just Wikipedia by any means. We generally agreed that it would be good to reach out to the public and non-techy folks to promote the concept of wiki collaboration, that we should have some hands-on "work sessions" where we collaborate on a certain wiki or a certain article as a group, and that presentations by people with specific projects to share would be fun. I'm pretty sure we'll continue to meet the first Wednesday of the month, at AboutUs, for the foreseeable future.

So, come on down if you can! Feel free to sign up for the email list even if you're not in Portland…we may get to the point of streaming meetings over the web, or some such fanciness. -Pete 01:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

llywrch posted a summary of the event on socialtext, as well. -Pete 18:56, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks Pete! VanTucky (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Assessment proposals

I have added two proposals for additions to the current instructions here for our assessment process out of concern for bias/conflicts of interest. Before being bold and adding them I waned to check at the larger forum to see if the wording sounds good, as well as the proposal in concept. Thanks. Aboutmovies 18:55, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

{{GeoGroupTemplate}}

Why should I have all the fun? {{GeoGroupTemplate}} is a nifty thing you can add to a category page and it will show you where everything in that category is on Google Maps (if there's coordinates listed in the article, of course). It's super keen! Katr67 22:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Summit High School (Bend, Oregon) up for deletion

A dismal stub, needs justification for its existence. I tend toward "all high schools are notable", but this one? If you feel like saving it, please add some content and cites. Katr67 23:59, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Oregon State Capitol to FA

As some of you may have noticed since the above was listed at FA and failed, it has gone through additional work with copy editing, and now passing GA. It flew through GA without a single comment or change, and I think that's because it is FA quality. It is structured much as the Michigan State Capitol which is FA class, and has the depth and quality needed for FA. However, FA comes down to support more than anything else. Unless people go and support an nomination it will not pass even if it meets the requirements. In that way it is much more like an AFD. So if we want to get it through FA, we need to coordinate. So first, I want to see if there is interest in getting it through FA. Then if those who are interested in supporting it need to look at it before we put it up and suggest changes before we nominate it. That way it will pass, otherwise stylistic differences will prevent it from going through. If you are not interested, or nobody is inerested that's fine, we can just leave it a GA, I'm just hoping to avoid a wasted effort. Thanks. Aboutmovies 17:42, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I will be happy to work on this, and will not wait till the last minute like last time. The extensive efforts you guys have put into this most definitely deserve the support of the community, and I'm pretty sure an FA designation as well. -Pete 17:48, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I missed the FA nomination the first time, must have been on a Wikibreak. I just took a crack at tightening up one section slightly but overall it's well written and referenced, so I think it's certainly a good FA candidate. -Big Smooth 19:19, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
The article is again listed at FA for those who would like to participate. Aboutmovies 18:34, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Just an FYI, it will fail again if no one Supports the nomination, which seems likely at this point. Aboutmovies 19:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Yippy! It finally made it to FA! Congrats and thanks to all who helped out. Aboutmovies 04:27, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
And congrats to you, who put so much of the work in! That's great news. -Pete 04:46, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiWednesday meetup

Hey all,

Portland's WikiWednesday group is meeting up again this week! Come on down and share some wikilove…or just drink some beer and run your mouth, it's a pretty loose group. Whatever works.

Yes, this Wednesday (Oct. 3), 6:30 p.m. at the AboutUs space (107 SE Washington St., Suite 520, Portland, OR 97214). If you have any trouble getting into the building, call the offices at (503) 488-5763.

  • MarkDilley has volunteered to come up with an intro to wiki discussion/activity
  • We'll have refreshments, it's also been suggested that at around 9/9:30 the event might adjourn to the Produce Row Cafe down the street for beers and the more informal pub-related chats.

If there's time/interest, I'm hoping to do a quick presentation on WikiProject Oregon and the new Collaboration of the Week that AboutMovies has got going. As for the rest, we've adopted an open system where basically, whoever has something cool to share, shares it, and if nobody's sharing, we split off into smaller groups to work on wiki sites.

It's great fun, you should come -- and invite that family member/co-worker/hottie from the coffee shop that doesn't quite get what wikis are about yet. -Pete 06:39, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

New stub added to project

I didn't look to see when it was created, but I just now added Great Cats World Park in Cave Junction, Oregon to the project. I'm about to review the Cave Junction article for GA nominations, and any help in that article once I finish my recommendations would also be appreciated. VanTucky Talk 00:12, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Failed project GA nomination

I have quick-failed the Cave Junction, Oregon GA nomination per major MoS issues and a clearly non-neutral section on "hippies". The attention of experienced WikiProject Oregon editors is probably in order. VanTucky Talk 21:13, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

'One flew over the Cukoo's nest'

I would desperatley like to know why the book/film 'One flew over the Cukoo's nest' why does it have this title what does it mean and represent??? I know it has something to do with an old American rhyme but what does the rhyme mean? Or is it something to do with the behaviour of the cukoo bird, for laying its eggs in other birds nests, therefore them being in the wrong place? Or is it that when we use the word cukoo we associate it with someone being crazy? cukoo's nest being the Institute/hospital? This really has been bugging me for some time I've seen the film several times and read the book I even saw the stage production at the Alexander Theatre in Birmingham, England thsi year. Please help if you know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.46.145.166 (talk) 00:54, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

You might be better off asking this question at the Reference Desk. Good luck! Katr67 00:57, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Geolinks changes

For those of you who use Geolinks templates in your location articles, note that there is a WikiProject that has decided to change the template so it doesn't show any external links to maps. Some people think this is a good thing. Whatever you think, it's kind of left a mess behind. I'm talking to a few other people about whether this change should be brought up to the larger wiki community. You can find the link to the discussion at Template talk:Geolinks-US-cityscale. In the meantime, be aware that right now if the Geolinks are the only thing you put in an External links section, the section is going to look like it's empty. Katr67 03:02, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

If it ain't too hard to do, can you post an example here that shows the difference between the "old" and "new" things? I think it would make it easier to understand what this is about. -Pete 03:14, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
I can't really do an "old" because the template changed (and it's edit protected). Basically, formerly if you put {{Geolinks-US-cityscale}} in the external links section of an article and add the location's coordinates to the template, it would show a variety of about 6 map site links you could click on to see road maps, satellite images, etc. Now, it looks like this example: Bull Run, Oregon, where the external links section appears empty, though the template is there if you look at the page in edit mode. You can still click on the coords in the upper right corner of the article and choose from lots of kinds of maps. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, I wouldn't worry about it, I'm just trying to give a heads up to the people who already use the template. Katr67 03:48, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Where you used to write this:
  == External links ==
  {{Geolinks-US-cityscale|45.43056|-122.23056}}
instead, write this:
   {{coord|45.43056|-122.23056|display=title}}
{{coord}} is the new, improved, all-purpose geographic location template, and obsoletes all others. The display=title parameter automagically places metadata in the article for automatic extraction associated with the article name—Google Earth uses it (see this). Therefore, up to one {{coord|...|display=title}} should be in a particular article. It the article has an infobox which takes a coordinate parameter, then use
   | coordinate = {{coord|45.43056|-122.23056|display=title,inline}}
which makes a fancy geolink where the template appears, plus places it at the article's top-right—and includes the magic metadata for automatic extraction. If an article contains more than one coordinate (for example, List of crossings of the Willamette River), then use either {{coord|lat|long|display=inline}} or {{coord|lat|long}}. (That is, display=inline is a no op.) All the standard region:US_type:landmark, etc. options are accepted by {{coord}}. —EncMstr 06:55, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
EncMstr, you make it sound good, thanks for elaborating, since I'm sure not all of us want to wade through the history of this decision. (I don't) Still, the change is affecting a lot of articles, and if this change is irreversible, then someone needs to make a bot to clean up all those empty section headers. If you'd care to check out the discussion on the Coords Wikiproject page and weigh in, please do. So far all I've heard is, basically, "that's just the way it's gonna be" and no one has tried to sell us on the benefits. Thanks again for explaining to us non-coords gurus--maybe you could write a short summary, like a column or a "Coords for Dummies", of the changes in the coords realm that you know of so they won't take us who use the tools by surprise next time! Can we make WPORE-specific coords help page as a subpage and link it from our templates section on the front page? Katr67 14:13, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
I second everything Katr said. Thank you both for clarifying what's going on here. I've been noticing changes, but not sure enough how things were to be sure what was happening. Anyway, having something like what EncMstr wrote above widely available for public consumption (signpost?) would be a great idea. -Pete 16:49, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

The debate about the changes to the template is continuing (well, currently it seems to be stalled). I've requested an admin rollback on the edit-protected template until everything gets worked out. Feel free to add your two cents. Personally I'm not real invested in how the debate turns out, except I want those empty headers gone and I want some decision to be made... Katr67 18:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll try to chip in. Thanks for bringing this up. -Pete 18:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

New articles

Just wrote Frank Ivancie and Michael Francke. The latter, especially, should be controversial. Have fun! --EngineerScotty 21:16, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Talk:Great Cats World Park

I need help fielding a question that was posted on my talk page by an anon I warned for removing content from the Great Cats article. I suspected the anon was connected to the place and warned him about COI and such. Since he is willing to communicate with us, please be civil. Thanks. Katr67 22:03, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Tillamook Burn restoration

I just read the article stating that it is BELIEVED by local Oregonians that school children helped restore the Tillamook Burn by planting trees. It is not just a BELIEF, it is a FACT, because I was one of those children.71.214.108.172 02:16, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Renom of Portland Aerial Tram for GA

In February or so, Portland Aerial Tram was nominated for GA status, and failed. I've addressed the main problems; re-organizing the text quite a bit, adding new material to make it more complete, and removing all [citation needed] and [citation needed] tags (by providing refs, not just by deleting the tags :) ).

Currently, the article is eval'd at B-class by this WP; could an uninvolved editor take a look and see if the article merits moving up to A-class? (And if not, go ahead and fail the GA nomination--something that isn't A class probably shouldn't be at GA).

Thanks,

--EngineerScotty 00:55, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Good job getting this up to GA, everyone who worked on it! Katr67 21:28, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

About to lose a bunch of Oregon government logos

Per User talk:Jgilhousen. Since John-Mark isn't around to provide fair use rationales for all those images, it would be great if anybody on the project wants to help out with this. It should be a matter of writing one up for one, and then changing the relevant links and pasting it to the others. If you know a state logo image with a well-written rationale, please link to it here so it can be used for copying purposes. Thanks. Katr67 22:27, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

You beat me to the post, Katr :) I'll take care of a few. But, there's about 20 of them, so more help would be great. -Pete 00:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for taking care of these, Aboutmovies! Don't be such a WikiGnome next time! Katr67 21:49, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Columbia River nominated for Good Article status

Folks, I just nominated Columbia River for consideration as a "Good Article." If you have time, please consider evaluating it according to the criteria and posting your evaluation on the Talk:Columbia River page, or just follow the discussion there and weigh in as appropriate. Thanks! -Pete 23:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Rose Garden Arena nominated for GA status

Extensively expanded, and managed to spawn two other articles in the process (Rose Quarter and Rose Garden arena bankruptcy). Rose Garden Arena is a top-importance article for this WP; maybe it will be our first top-importance FA in the near future. --EngineerScotty 19:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

New University of Oregon Arena

I'd like to create an article for the new University of Oregon arena, but, given that there is no name for the facility, don't know how to name the article. Should I simply go with 'New University of Oregon Arena'? Any other suggestions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Duckblazer (talk • contribs) 21:33, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Is this the one that's going to be the successor to Mac Court? Until it is named, I think perhaps write about it in the Mac Court article and move it to its own article once it is named. Who's donated money to it so far? That's a sure predictor what they will name it. Knight? Katr67 21:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't think "New U of O Arena" is a very good idea either. It's certain to be renamed, and the lingering redirect to the new name would be meaningless clutter. Katr67's suggestion is a good one. —EncMstr 21:56, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
If that's the consensus, I'll hold off.Duckblazer 04:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
How about adding a new section to McArthur Court? That's a natural place for one to look. Probably a lot of details will not be available for awhile, but it's a good gathering point for what you can scrounge up. —EncMstr 05:04, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree, I did some Googling since I don't follow sports, live in Eugene or do my alma mater proud in any way whatsoever, and I learned there's all kinds of controversy about the siting of the arena (actually I know that was happening for years), the Phil Knight donation money, the state bonds the UO is going to take out to pay for it, and the $64,000 question--what are they going to do with Mac Court? Lots of great material in there for expansion. Then when the thing is actually being built, you should be able to gather building specs, seating capacity and all that kind of stuff to move into the new article. Katr67 05:13, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Train articles within scope of project?

Some of the national rail line articles are being tagged with every state WikiProject that has lines for that RR. I chose to opt us out of these. These RR's are:

I don't want this to be a unilateral decision, so I'm bringing it up here. So the proposal is "Do not add {{WikiProject Oregon}} to these railroad talk pages."

  • Support It's important that the regional lines within our scope are part of the project and since smaller, will benefit from being watched over by our members. I liken being part of these national RR articles as tagging the Burger King article with every state that has a BK. The trains WP will adequately monitor these articles without our help. Katr67 01:52, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Support exclusion - Unless a non-Oregon company has a large base of operation here (Intel, HP) I don't think they should be part of the project. Aboutmovies 02:07, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Support exclusion, in general. If an Oregon rail wikiproject ever gets started, then maybe; but right now, no. If any current or former railroad deserves mention in WP Oregon, it's the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had a significant history in the development of rail transport in Oregon, prior to being bought by the UP in 1996. --EngineerScotty 03:20, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Support—we discussed this awhile back: a remnant remains here. A railroad would have to be headquartered in or have some very significant effect on Oregon to qualify. (Where'd the rest of that discussion go? I looked through the archives...) —EncMstr 03:53, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Amtrak

I took the liberty of removing WPORE from Talk:Amtrak as well. Katr67 14:22, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Ditto Talk:Union Pacific Railroad. Since we seem to have consensus, I'll continue to remove these tags as I see them and not mention it here, unless someone objects. I can see leaving one on Southern Pacific, as mentioned above, as it appears inevitable it will get tagged eventually. Katr67 20:38, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Other articles

This isn't part of the train series, but I opted us out of Talk:Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Please give that decision a sanity check for me, thanks. Katr67 20:25, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I opted us out of Talk:Tuya (a geographic feature, some of which are in Oregon). The user who tagged it put it back. Rather than revert again, can someone check it out and give a second opinion? Thanks. Katr67 04:59, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Forest Grove High School up for deletion

I've avocated a merge with the school district article, but my suggestion is lost within the usual, neverending, school deletionist/inclusionist debate. Some have suggested that The Oregonian is too "local" to be a good source for notability. Anyways, if anyone wants to help clean up the article or take part in the deletion discussion, please do. An infobox would be nice--I don't have the patience to deal with those things, but I may get around to it if nobody else does. Katr67 19:16, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Ted Pike up for deletion

I've nominated Ted Pike for deletion. He's a local anti-Semite; doesn't seem to be notable however--more than a few hits, but mostly his own website and/or his fellow-travelers, or anti-bigotry websites who like to catalogue every known nutjob in existence. --EngineerScotty 20:59, 30 October 2007 (UTC)