Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. counties/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

On creating this page, it was named "WikiProject U.S. Counties" rather than "WikiProject Counties" because U.S. counties vary greatly from counties in other countries. Thus, I thought (right or wrong) that it would be better to separate the major differences. On the otherhand, I seek advice as to whether or not to create "WikiProject Cities" vs. "WikiProject U.S. Cities", since a city is a more general concept globally. The latter, however, would provide consistent naming, but of course it could always just be redirected. -- Ram-Man

Oh, great. So I've been working on counties for weeks now, and now all of a sudden, there's a new standard? I don't plan on going back and changing what I've done. -- Zoe, more than a little pissed off

This has been in WikiProject U.S. States for ages, but it was never really discussed (or paid attention to) much. Feel free to tweak it to fit your format. :) (And indeed, nothing you've done contravenes the recommendations here that I can think of. Since there's generally no more than a sentence or two for each "section", there's no need for headers and crap.) --Brion 21:58 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)
Really, i've just moved all the stuff from "U.S. States" into "U.S. Counties" to separate them. There shouldn't be much going back if any. Are counties important and informative enough to add a table like we have now in WikiProject Countries and WikiProject U.S. States? -- Ram-Man

(The following was copied from User talk:Ram-Man)
Hi, I wanted to call your attention to an error and an important omission that I just fixed in Wikipedia:WikiProject U. S. Counties.

  1. The markup for sections is ==, not ===. These header levels are hierarchical. You should always start with == and go down. (= is the article title). See Wikipedia:Manual of Style for more on markup.
  2. I added county seat to the geography section. Every county has one. In lots of cases, it's the only significant town in the county.
  3. And, for my taste, anyway, I'd like to know who the county was named after.

Good luck to you on your adventures in the Wikipedia, Ortolan88

About the various header sizes == vs. ===, *ALL* of the country, state, county, and city Wikiprojects use the latter. Even though the Wikipedia manual of style may say to use H2, the entire standard has been set up to use H3. Are we to change it now and go back and change all the others? -- Ram-Man
Well, they're all wrong. You aren't supposed to start in the middle, with H3, you're supposed to start at the beginning, with H2. The idea would be to change the standard and do the remaining 2000 counties correctly, and eventually to go back and fix the ones that are incorrectly coded. Perhaps this could be done with some kind of mechanized edit.
Keep in mind that Wikipedia page presentation is controlled by style sheets and browsers known and unknown and it is much better to follow correct standards of generic markup. For one thing, the default style sheet has a choice of numbering heads (see your preferences) and they won't number right if they aren't coded right. I think, by the way, that the H2 markup in the default style sheet is way too big, but the presentation isn't the issue, it's the correct use of hierarchical heads.
I know this sounds picky and it must really sound like a drag after all those entries you've done, but if you understand the value of standard presentation as you certainly seem to do, then you probably appreciate that an incorrectly coded template is really undesirable.
So, yes, I think *ALL* the country, county, state, and city Wikiproject templates are in error and should be changed. And, as the existing entries that uses those templates are edited, their markup should be corrected, from the old, boring, uptight generic markup enthusiast, Ortolan88
Ok, I just didn't want to have to do all of the stuff over, but I have no problem doing all the new ones that way. I'll change the WikiProjects to reflect the change. All the important ones are the U.S. States anyway, and those are only 50 and easy to change. I'll do those sometime in the future if not one beats me to it (when I add data similar to the county data I am adding now). -- Ram-Man
Isn't there a way to make a small php script that would correct crap like this and the superscript issue mentioned below much easier? This really shouldnt be hard to correct, its a simple reg exp replace, simple to any perl/php programmer... Massive edits like this should be done this way in my opinion. -- Lightning 04:17 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

For the ten millionth time, === is well established in usage by thousands of pages. If you think it's wrong, it should simply be redefined to pump out ideologically correct <h2> tags and the style sheet adjusted accordingly. Am I wrong? --Brion 20:39 Sep 25, 2002 (UTC)

While I don't know if you are right or wrong, I do know what the Wikipedia:Manual of Style says. So is it wrong or right? Either this is an established *mistake* by thousands of pages or the manual of style is wrong and should be changed to reflect that. Just my two cents. -- Ram-Man

This is just a minor issue, but wouldn't it be better to use ² rather than <sup>2</sup> for the square kilometers and miles? At least on my browser, the latter method creates a significant whitespace when used 2 in between lines in a paragraph,
whereas the former method does not ² (text broken up as an example) Scipius 16:26 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Sounds good. Make the change! -- Ram-Man
I'm certainly willing to do it (should help my edit-count ;)), but could you start adding the change in the new county pages you're creating? Also, is there a complete list of counties done so far? Scipius 17:02 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)
Oh sorry. I'll change to the new format now. Almost all the counties are done. I have a TODO list on User:Ram-Man which lists all the ones that are *NOT* done. That should list the status of the work on counties (at least the work I am doing). Oh, make sure you update the WikiProject States, Counties, and Cities pages. The templates there need updated. Oh personally I don't think you need to go through all the pages and change that. It is really minor and changing it is a lot of work. But it is up to you as it would make it slightly better ;-) -- Ram-Man

Should there be a duplication of population in the entries? See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities -- Ram-Man

I took the liberty of adding "Adjacent Counties" to the guidelines. I've started adding this to Washington state, and it makes it a lot more fun to navigate around the counties. I only plan to slowly pick at this, and I'm going at it rather randomly. I can't think of how to automate this, since I don't know where this data exists in easily parsed digital form. -- RobLa

It may be on the U.S. Gazeeter, but I'm not sure. I'm planning sometime in the future (who knows when!) to harvest all sorts of new data. I have a number of ideas on User:Ram-Man, but this is another interesting idea. If I find that information, I'll be sure to include it.
Found it! I've coded up a Perl script which takes the Census Bureau Cartographic Boundary Files and figures it out. The script is here . Thanks for the tip! -- RobLa
I've done a bunch of work on the script, and I've put the output here: adjacentcounty.txt. I've filled in Washington state, but taht's it. The data needs a little cleaning up, but it's mostly good to go. I'm not planning on making a concerted effort to enter this, so feel free to start entering/automating entry. -- RobLa, 9 Nov 2002

I've created a script that can fetch automatically-generated, small county maps from the U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger Service for inclusion on the county page. Here's all of the counties in Washington state.

In case you were wondering, yes, I've got a 15 second sleep interval between generations so as not to hammer their server (and I plan to bump that up to 30-60 seconds if/when I do the whole country). I'm also planning on converting all of these to PNG format.

I'd like to include these in the county entries for all U.S. counties. I've got several questions:

  • Are these the appropriate size? I've limited them to 250 pixels wide per the image guidelines, and then have them of varying heights depending on the geometry of the county itself. The bigger the image, the better it looks, though.
  • What is the best way to get all of this uploaded? Would it be to write a bot, or to coordinate with a sysadmin on some sort of tarball solution?
  • What's the best way to integrate? Ram-Man, I know you have been talking about another pass on the counties. Should I wait for the next round of scripts, and coordinate with you on making these part of it?
  • Is there going to be any objection based on disk usage? All of Washington state at the current size is about 284k, which is using GIF, not PNG. With PNG, that should be smaller. Doing the math, since Washington is pretty average, I would imagine, we're talking about roughly 10Mb of images.

Check out Clallam County, Washington for an example of what these would look like in context. Note that I've done a few other counties, but this is the only one that (currently) has the image size that I'm planning to bulk generate. -- RobLa 9 Nov 2002

Dito for me, except I am generating images of a different style for Maine. An example can be found at Cumberland County, Maine. It might be a little too large though. And I have images like with for every state in identical style with county outlines. Robert Lee