Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Massachusetts/Archive 4

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Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Archive 6

Emily Dickinson is up for Peer Review

In preparation for nominating Emily Dickinson, which is currently a GA, for FAC, I have listed it for a Peer Review. All comments and suggestions from those involved with this Wikiproject would be very much appreciated here. Thanks! María (habla conmigo) 19:50, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Mitt Romney RfC

There is currently a discussion regarding how much weight to give the subject's religious affiliation at Talk:Mitt Romney#Material regarding subject's religious affiliation. Any input is welcome. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 20:58, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Inclusion of villages or named sections of town in county nav templates

There is a bit of a dispute about whether to include all or only some of these in these templates (listed at Category:Massachusetts county navigational boxes). If I understand correctly, User:Nyttend insists that villages located in cities should not be included while villages located in towns should. I do not believe there is a functional difference between the two as there isn't one between cities and towns. I think User:Nyttend is using the fact that U.S. Census Bureau does not classify towns as incorporated places as his basis. In any case, others more familiar with how locals view differences between a village in a city and a village in a town should probably weigh in. Thanks. --Polaron | Talk 13:25, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

It will differ by city or town, really, though I think the village names carry more weight in towns. Many of us who live in Assonet tend to chafe at being told we live in Freetown, even though we do. We also live next to both Berkley and Myricks, even though they're both Berkley. IMO, I'd say the villages belong in the template, but that's probably because I live in Assonet. ;) Sahasrahla (talk) 16:14, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree that it differs by city or town, but I wouldn't say it's a "town thing" or a "non-city thing" -- witness Boston and Springfield and their unincorporated but well defined "villages", like Jamaica Plain or Sixteen Acres. Where to draw the line is difficult; in the case of Boston or Barnstable, it's obvious the villages are important, but for a lot of places its less obvious. The best standard that leaps to mind for me is based on the Post Office -- whether a neighborhood has its own P.O. or ZIP Code. I find people tend to identify with their village more if it's the locality name on their incoming mail. _{``` W</sub> i k i <sub>W</sub> i s t a h <sub>```} 16:28, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I'll start off putting named post office areas in these navigation templates sometime tonight regardless of whether they're in a city or town. This will probably exclude a few well-known villages so someone should check this over in a few days to see if I missed any important villages. --Polaron | Talk 23:30, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Please see discussion at Talk:United States presidential election in Massachusetts, 2008#Merger proposal—Markles 00:19, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Requesting assessment of William Stacy

Submitting for review as WikiProject Massachusetts A-class. Please see the note in the to-do box above. Thank you, ColWilliam (talk) 19:49, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Requesting assessment of Joseph Wightman

Submitting for review 5 August 2009 User:Wmcewenjr

newspaper

is there a newspaper for this wikiproject? Electrical Experiment 00:38, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Category:Towns in Massachusetts

I've just finished looking through all of the sub-categories in Category:Towns in Massachusetts, and I found that 5 of them have only 1 or 2 articles, which is too few to justify their existence. (Several others have only 4 articles, but I'm not suggesting they be deleted.) However, I thought that before going to the trouble of taking them to CFD for deletion it would be worth asking here whether any of them can be quickly populated, either with existing articles or with new articles that are about to be created in the next week. If these categories are deleted, the articles will simply be upmerged to the applicable county parent categories. The categories at issue are:

• Category:Bolton, Massachusetts
• Category:Fairhaven, Massachusetts
• Category:Seekonk, Massachusetts
• Category:Westwood, Massachusetts
• Category:Westborough, Massachusetts  Done—Markles 13:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

It's worth noting that there are currently just 30 towns with sub-categories, out of some 300 towns listed in the category. Clearly, not every town requires its own sub-cat. Cgingold (talk) 11:21, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Markles -- Westborough will be spared the axe. What about the other four? Last chance... Cgingold (talk) 11:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Harvard Musical Association GA Sweeps Review: On Hold

As part of the WikiProject Good Articles, we're doing sweeps to go over all of the current GAs and see if they still meet the GA criteria and I'm specifically going over all of the "Culture and Society" articles. I have reviewed Harvard Musical Association and believe the article currently meets the majority of the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. I have left this message at this WikiProject's talk page so that any interested members can assist in helping the article keep its GA status. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed, and I'll leave the article on hold for seven days for them to be fixed. I have left messages on the talk pages of the main contributors of the article and another WikiProject. Please consider helping address the several points that I listed on the talk page of the article, which shouldn't take too long to fix if multiple editors assist in the workload. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 05:44, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

MassStar

Ive created a Barnstar for WP:MASS. So Here it is. {{SUBST:MassStar|Reason for giving The Barnstar.}} results in

		The Barnstar Of Wikiproject Massachusetts
		Reason for giving The Barnstar.

Hope you like it. ElectricalExperiment 17:57, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 515 of the articles assigned to this project, or 18.0%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 18 June 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. Subsribing is easy - just add a template to your project page. If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:06, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 20:56, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

MIT

MIT is currently undergoing a peer-review in connection with a future FAC nomination. Your feedback would be welcome at the peer review here. Madcoverboy (talk) 05:45, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

feedback on mass-editing of Talk pages

I've started using wp:AWB to fix up talk pages of Massachusetts stub articles that were recently started by another editor or two on all of the NRHP properties and districts in Massachusetts. Just now I worked through 170 or so articles in "Category:Barnstable County, Massachusetts Registered Historic Place stubs", such as Talk:Adams-Crocker-Fish House to add them to wp:NRHP, to request photos, to add WikiProject Massachusetts and to add to WikiProject Cape Cod and the Islands. There could be 1,000-3,000 more to address in other counties. Questions:

• Am i doing okay?
• Is it redundant to add to WikiProject Massachusetts, if already added to WikiProject Cape Cod and the Islands? (If so i will be happy to go back and remove WikiProject Massachusetts from these Barnstable County ones. Same issue will apply for Nantucket County and Dukes County. Are there any other subprojects like Cape Cod one that apply for other counties?)
• I was inconsistent about using nesting to compactify the wikiproject boxes (Talk:Adams-Crocker-Fish House and about 1/3 of the rest are nested; Talk:Avant House and 2/3+ are not). Does this matter enough to go back and add nesting to those not having it?
• Using AWB, it is not easy to check to see if there is a photo in the article, and most do not have them, so i am putting in reqphoto in all. Hope this is ok.

I'll pause for any feedback then continue with other counties. Thanks for considering! doncram (talk) 21:35, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

• It sounds like an excellent plan to me although I'm somewhat unfamilar with many technical aspects of wikipedia such as "nesting," "AWB," etc. In my opinion, some redundancies are a small price to pay for fairly efficient categorization. The more information and categories, the better. Sorry I haven't had as much time to devote to editing and categorizing recently as I'd like. Thanks for all of your consistent contributions. Swampyank (talk) 03:54, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Followup: I edited all the NRHP articles in the Cape Cod and islands counties (adding 3 wikiprojects), and am most of the way through the rest of them (adding NRHP and MA wikiprojects). I am using wp:AWB, which is an editing tool that helps with repetitive editing. There are about 3,000 NRHP articles in MA, but AWB helps open each new article as I finish pasting in the necessary text into each one, working off a category list of the articles. Thanks for listening! doncram (talk) 02:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Massachusetts

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:26, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I've done some work on Mayflower, the only Start-class article on this list. Can someone do an assessment (or at least provide a different critical eye)? Magicpiano (talk) 21:51, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Reassessment request: USS Constitution

User Brad101 (talk · contribs) has substantially expanded and improved the USS Constitution article. It was assessed as B-class prior to his efforts along with assistance from several others and is now rated GA by some of the other projects. The article deserves a reassessment, thanks in advance for your help. Sswonk (talk) 01:28, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Reassessment request: William Stacy

An assessment request was submitted in the to-do list back in March-2008, but there has been no action to-date. Would appreciate an assessment of this article, William Stacy, which is submitted for review as WikiProject Massachusetts A-class. The article has received A-class ratings via a military history assessment here, via a biography assessment here, and also via WikiProject Ohio. The article has also undergone a biography peer review here. The article is currently rated as GA-class under WikiProject Massachusetts. Thank you in advance for your time and effort in reviewing this article. Best Regards, ColWilliam (talk) 00:32, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Black Dog

The article for The Black Dog restaurant and tavern in Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard is up for deletion, see The Black Dog at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Black Dog--Captain-tucker (talk) 14:30, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Henry French of Concord

Anyone interested in Concord's history? While reading French drain, I just came across this nice article, and I thought he sounds like an interesting person, so it would be nice if we had an article about him. — Sebastian 00:46, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Changing to 53 cities and 298 towns

Per the discussion at Template_talk:Massachusetts#List_of_cities_by_official_name, I am changing occurrences of the numbers of cities and towns in the state to reflect the fact that Braintree, Palmer and Winthrop have adopted the city form of government as approved by the General Court and voters. There is a table at the discussion page linked above which shows that Agawam, Amesbury, Barnstable, Braintree, Franklin, Palmer, Southbridge, Watertown, West Springfield, Weymouth and Winthrop are legally cities even though they use the prefix "Town of" to describe themselves. Greenfield actually uses both terms on its website but the title bar of every page states "City of Greenfield". Some of the articles about these places mention these differences; editors may want to add explanatory information to the others. I plan to update the article Administrative divisions of Massachusetts as well. The information on these changes available at http://www.sec.state.ma.us is unfortunately a minimum of 3 years old and not a currently reliable source. Sswonk (talk) 00:53, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Massachusetts articles needing geographic coordinates

0 articles in Category:Massachusetts articles missing geocoordinate data do not have geographic coordinates. Coords are useful for making the article appear on Google Maps & many other mapping services; and they allow our users to click through to see the article subject location on a map. There's a short guide to on how to add geocodes to articles ... it really is very easy to do. I hope you'll take some time to ensure that Massachusetts is as well represented as it can be on wikipedia by fixing up the listed articles. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:15, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

FYI, this category is populated by a bot, User:The_Anomebot2. At this writing the list has grown to 541 articles as the bot crawls around the encyclopedia adding ""{{coord missing|Massachusetts}}" (Massachusetts substituted with whatever other locations it finds) to articles it thinks need coordinates. The bot is pretty good but does make assumptions that occassionally cross the boundaries of common sense. If you find a "location", such as articles about Bickford's (restaurant), Area code 413 or Jordan's_IMAX which are not defined by a single geographic coordinate or labels/borders normally found on maps, I suggest not adding coordinates and deleting the "coord missing" template to remove it from the category. If you do add coordinates to other places which really need them, remember that the category, unlike articles, will not automatically update after a change, but will eventually when the category page is updated by the server or its cache is purged. Sswonk (talk) 16:06, 26 November 2008 (UTC)