Category talk:Orange County, New York

Reorganization proposal

In the wake of the recent creation by User:Noroton of Category:Education in Orange County, New York

, the first topic subcat of this category, and my own cluttering of this category with articles created for WP:NYSR and WP:NRHP (which led to the creation of the Cornwall and Goshen cats (and likely a Town of Montgomery and Port Jervis one in the near future), I have finally decided to put on pixel the subcategorization scheme I've been thinking about since before I even tagged this category as very large.

My basic philosophy is that as many of the top-level subcats should be topical. The only execption would be Category:United States Military Academy due to its singularity as an institution within Orange County — having historic, educational and military importance, the latter of which easily transcends the county it's located in, it really ought not to be put into the education subcat.

So, here they are:

• "Buildings and structures in ..." All houses, churches, hospitals and libraries covered in NRHP articles (probably in appropriate subcats, to be listed under the state-level category as well, as with the top-level cat), Orange County Government Center and any other structures that might be notable (Newburgh Free Library and Thrall Library, I think, would make the notability cut). Bridges should probably be here, but do we need a separate category, considering that we share two bridges (Mid-Delaware and Newburgh-Beacon) with adjacent counties? When those two counties have enough bridge articles to warrant their own bridge subcats, perhaps.

• "Communities in ..." For all the locality subcats: the existing Cornwall, Goshen and Newburgh cats, plus the ones I indicated would be likely to be created in the future. Mirroring the political structure, village-related articles are currently included in the category with the same name as the town, with the town and village articles taking the spaced sortkey. However, in a town with multiple villages (Orange County has two with three villages all or mostly within their limits), when it becomes necessary to split off a village subcat (and it will), these should take the form "Town of ..." with the individual villages as subcats and any village sharing the same name as the town taking the category "Village of ..." (see the Town of Montgomery category I created on Commons for an example of how this might look).

  City categories would be case-by-case. I have the town and city of Newburgh together because they share the same name and enough residents of the former use Newburgh as their mailing address, and the school district is pretty large. But I wouldn't include Town of Wallkill articles under a Middletown category because Wallkill is about so much more than Middletown, and not as large a portion of that town describes itself as being "Middletown", nor do they all go to the Middletown schools. Nor would large, sprawling Deerpark identify with Port Jervis, despite sharing the school district.

  I don't see a need at present to subdivide into city (we would only have three), town, village and CDP/hamlet cats. At least not now.

• "Economy of ..." Things like the shopping malls, Orange County Choppers, Ottaway Community Newspapers and any other companies achieving notability that are headquartered here could go here. And definitely USMA. It also occurs to me that some of the uncreated articles I proposed for the geography cat have economic importance and could be in here as well. If the GoOcean water park recently reported as proposed for Goshen becomes a reality and we have an article, that would go here. I might even include the prisons (major employers).

• "Education in ..." Already created, and filled as I would have done ... with all schools, public and private, regardless of grade level, as well as school districts. I would put the other two colleges in the county in here as well (Mt. St. Mary's and SUNY Orange) and Orange-Ulster BOCES. If and when it starts to get large, we can consider subcategorizing. But only then.

• "Geography of ..." All landforms and natural features: mountains (Schunemunk, Storm King) and lakes (none yet on any lake per se, but we have enough that could (Beaverdam, Orange and Tomahawk, for starters). Rivers and other watercourses would go here if a significant portion is located within the county (Moodna Creek is a no-brainer in this regard; Shawangunk Kill and even Wallkill River are likely, but the Hudson and the Delaware are not due to the county being just one of many along them. Regions of the county, like Black Dirt Region or a "Golden Triangle" article (not on the disambig page, but look at all the ones that are ... ours could certainly make it)

• "History of ..." This would be for historical topics of countywide significance. Right now this is only the Orange Blossoms and the New York-New Jersey Line War. Histories of individual communities could go here when created, too. If there are enough they could be diffused into a separate subcat. All the RHP articles could probably go into a separate subcat for them.

• "Media in ..." The Times-Herald Record, of course, and our little local radio stations. Probably all the community weeklies as well.

• "Parks in ..." All county parks and major local ones like Downing Park (Newburgh, New York). Could be a subcat of protected areas.

• "People from ..." Already exists, self-explanatory. Local subcats go in as a matter of course.

• "Protected areas in ..." All state parks (even Harriman, much of which is within the county, large privately administered PAs like Black Rock Forest and our one state forest.

• "Transportation in ..." Stewart Airport, state highways contained entirely within the county (already in top-level cat), all Metro-North stations and the main article about the Port Jervis Line. Bridges can go here to pending the eventual creation of a subcat as discussed above. County road articles if and when created. Maybe even Wallkill Valley Railroad (could go in history, too).

Any thoughts or comments should go below. Daniel Case 15:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Response

I only created subcategories to keep the category under one page (to make navigation easier for readers). I see nothing wrong with any of what's proposed if the Orange County category got too big, but I worry that creating more subcategories would make things more difficult for readers, defeating the purpose of categories. Some readers are interested in local communities and some articles are of interest only (or almost only) to people in a particular community, so I think community subcategories can make sense if there are enough articles to go in them. For me, "enough" is about 10 articles (although I sometimes make mistakes and create smaller subcategories). The only rule should be: "Does creating this category make navigation easier for readers." All else, including logic, is secondary. Noroton 00:45, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Another point: Why separate "Parks" as a category with "Protected areas" as another category? I don't think there are now (or will ever be) so many of these articles that they should be in separate subcategories. Not all readers searching for an article are going to know which subcategory to look into. Noroton 00:47, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, I like for categories to be pretty clearly defined, and obvious from the contents. If they're broad, we break them up after a while; if they're too narrow, we delete them.

My main experience in this department comes from creating many subcategories under Category:Fashion; we go five levels deep from there to something like Category:Modeling-themed reality television series (and thank God they are just under enough that I didn't have to break them down by nationality as well).

There is a difference between "parks" and "protected areas" IMO. Basically, my explanation is, if you go there to go hiking, it's a protected area; if you go there to play softball, it's a park. And Orange County has enough county parks and notable local parks to make about 10 articles. Ditto with protected areas. Daniel Case 19:31, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

A balance needs to be struck between being exact (which might create unnecesary hoops for the reader -- making the reader look through another list of subcategories and click on one again) and being general enough to be immediately understood (which might make the reader scan a long category list in search of a particular item). If readers wouldn't immediately understand the difference between park and nature preserve, I would think many would be frustrated. Noroton 19:38, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I think most do, given that we've had a protected areas project for some time. However, we do not have a corresponding WikiProject Parks, a rather glaring oversight IMO. You'll see the difference generally understood when you look at Category:Protected areas of New York and Category:Parks in New York and then click on the included articles in both categories. But given that Category:New York state parks is a subcat of both, there is some confusion, although I think that's because state parks can vary widely in the form they take ... the term embraces both some places heavily disturbed and used for a lot of intensive recreation like town and county parks, and large tracts of predominantly undisturbed land used mostly for passive recreation. So you occasionally have people using {{Infobox park}} for large state parks in the latter category, which are better served by {{infobox protected area}} or {{Geobox Protected Area}}. But that naming problem was created long before Wikipedia and so we're stuck with it.

All things considered, maybe parks and protected areas should be categorized at the same top level to lessen potential confusion. Daniel Case 03:22, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Progress

I have now partially begun to implement this by creating Black Dirt Region, which necessitated the geography and economy subcats. All other appropriate articles were placed in them.

I don't expect the rest of them to come flying afterwards but I do have AWB, thankfully. So it has begun. Daniel Case 02:53, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

The two biggest moves ("Communities in ..." and "RHPS in ...") are now done. Still, I realize that "Buildings and structures in ..." may need "Houses in ..." and "Churches in ..." as subcats. Also need to get Newburgh and Cornwall RHPs into the county cat if they weren't there already. Daniel Case 19:12, 30 August 2007 (UTC)