Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Connecticut/Archive 3

Merger/redirect/other issues for CT NRHP articles

There have been some disagreements about presentation of CT NRHP places in wikipedia, whether certain ones are to be covered in individual articles or covered in articles about towns or CDPs that include them. There are similar issues and sometimes the same editors who have taken differing judgements. Let's note and discuss items of possible disagreement here.

Various historic district articles with resolved or no issues

(there were several subsections here, moved to archive -- doncram (talk) 02:00, 22 July 2009 (UTC))

Discussions that are continuing

Pomfret Street Historic District

• Pomfret Street Historic District (some previous discussion at Talk:Connecticut Route 169, Talk:Pomfret, Connecticut) Currently a redirect to a section for this HD within Pomfret, Connecticut article. I previously stated i would be okay with that, but upon further thought I would prefer this to be broken out into a separate article. The Pomfret article can/should link to this separate article. I think it's better to start the historic district article, which will cover only a portion of Pomfret. Among other things, this would provide for its Talk page to have a reqphoto for the historic district. I requested the NRHP application for this district a long time ago but have not received it. doncram (talk) 23:07, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

A picture of the historic district would be the same as a picture of the town center. As I said, this is a town center historic district and is better treated as integrated with the town. It just makes for a better narrative. --Polaron | Talk 00:23, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm not too sure, but isn't Pomfret, like other CT towns, a large town encompassing several villages/hamlets? Also I would prefer to develop the HD article separately so that it can list contributing properties. Historic district articles can be developed well to attract photos and describe historic, contributing properties, if allowed to be separate. For models, see any of several historic district articles by User:Daniel Case such as New Bedford Historic District and Central Troy Historic District. I asked for but have not received a copy of the NRHP application document which would provide basis for a large expansion this way. It is fine for the Pomfret town article to describe the historic district too, but I do not agree that redirecting the HD to the town is best even now, and with more material the separation will be necessary, so I don't think it is fair to insist that the HD article cannot exist. doncram (talk) 22:00, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Umm, that's true of all towns (even cities). It's just that in more urban areas villages are more known as neighborhoods or sections. When it does come to a point that the description of the town center has sufficient distinctive content that makes it too big for the town article, then we can think about splitting it. As currently written, there is only boiler-plate content in the Pomfret article. --Polaron | Talk 22:10, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I have explained some other reasons, in other discussion sections, why having split out HD articles created upfront, and kept, helps in some ways. It is fine for you to have a different subjective opinion about what is best, though. I wonder, though, do you have a source you have not shared on the Pomfret NRHP district? You speak very confidently that "A picture of the historic district would be the same as a picture of the town center", where i don't see information supporting that in the Pomfret, Connecticut article. In fact, the article asserts "Pomfret has no formal town center"! before it later asserts "The main town center is listed as a historic district on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places." I would like to see some evidence of what is the town center, hopefully in a map that could be used to create a map for the article. doncram (talk) 00:22, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Pomfret actually two centers. One was the original settlement and the other was several miles away that developed as a result of the railroad. In modern times, these two have essentially merged and is now the densely settled part of town. The NRHP district encompasses the areas surrounding the main highway connecting the two traditional centers. What kind of information should a map show that would indicate a locality is the town center? --Polaron | Talk 01:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

For a map to document what is the village, what would be most relevant would be a map that showed the village and labelled its town center. For reference in interpreting a map of the historic district, which is obtainable. I don't know if your access to lists of polygon corner points is sufficient to enable you to actually make a map of this or any other district, without also having an actual map to work from.

It happens that today the National Register sent me the NRHP application document for Pomfret Street Historic District, which i had requested more than a month ago, but the request was lost apparently, and the application was sent in response to my followup. Indeed, it includes a map of the district, it lists the contributing structures in the district, it includes plenty of material to write an article about the district which would be fine as a wikipedia article, but in my judgment too detailed for the Pomfret, Connecticut town article. The map is reasonably complex, with well more than 100 polygon corners. If you just had the list of those points, and you guessed at connecting the dots, I think you would not get it exactly right, but you would not be too far off, because the shape is not as irregular as it could have turned out to be.

I would like to proceed now by splitting out the Pomfret Street Historic District article, and developing it over time. Would anyone object? The only other possibilities I can imagine would be for someone else to insist that I must develop the article in a sandbox and then pass through some review process before I should be allowed to recreate the article. Or to insist that I develop the material within the currently short section of the Pomfret article before I should be allowed to split it out. I would not want to do that as I prefer to work with some messy material at first, suited for an "Under Construction" tag, and I can already see that it will not be proper to keep it all in the Pomfret article. I assess that there is a lack of consensus for any extraordinary review process, and that it is correct for me to just restore the separate HD article. I'll pause for comments I guess. doncram (talk) 07:06, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

There is no map that explicitly says "town center". So that means nothing will probably convince you that a specific area of the town is the town center. It's usually easy because you will find several things in a town center: the town hall, the library, the green, the congregational church, and a town historical marker describing the history of the town - but I guess that's not good enough for you.

The only thing that might not fit in the town article for a town center district would be an expicit listing of properties and their details. But go ahead and give it a try and see what you get. --Polaron | Talk 11:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Much later, i am revisiting this as it is one of few CT NRHP HDs for which i have the NRHP document. Actually, there is a lot in the NRHP material that is worth writing in wikipedia, and which would not fit in the town article. In fact, contrary to some assertions above, the NRHP HD is not about the town center. It is strongly argued in the document that there never was a town center of Pomfret, early on and not later either. There were perhaps four small foci, each with a school, and there was a village-type area that emerged later, but then that was absorbed into another town (Putnam, i think). The NRHP HD district is about big summer estates and the social milieu and all, which existed around 1900; it is not about a town center as was originally asserted in this discussion. To clarify, Polaron, are you allowing me to, or are you requesting me not to, start an article at the NRHP HD name, Pomfret Street Historic District? doncram (talk) 22:28, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Uh, I believe I said "go ahead and give it a try and see what you get". As you may have noticed, I'm not against having separate articles for those that redirected to towns. It's with villages that we disagree I think. --Polaron | Talk 22:50, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Interesting this was one of the early disagreement ones. I don't recall exactly how I interpreted your last statement back in June, but it seemed a tad ambiguous when coming back to it, and the suggestion that you would allow a "try" and then possibly judge it wasn't good enough in your view, in which case you might enforce a merger anyhow, was always there, whether you meaant it that way or not. I do recall that giving me pause, back then. Anyhow, I will proceed somewhat with an article now, and I will assume that you are not in fact waiting to judge and to rename it somewhere else, and this one is then settled. There is a lot about Pomfret the town in the NRHP document by the way, that would be worth using in developing the town article if you are interested. doncram (talk) 00:48, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually, i am given pause again, by new redirects being set up, muddying the apparent situation. I notice that Polaron created new wikilinks for Pomfret (village) and Pomfret Center at the Pomfret, Connecticut article, and created those as redirects to Pomfret Street Historic District. I am willing to assume that this action is meant well, but in fact it is dismaying to me and raises new issues. Among other things, it suggests that an NRHP HD article will not be allowed to be just that, but rather that it must serve as the location for description of those two "villages". I don't know if there exists documentation that those two names are in fact villages, notable or not, but I don't want to have the burden of describing them in an NRHP HD article which is not about them. There is currently no description of those two in the Pomfret Street HD article, and I don't want to put in any. Polaron, I think that here as elsewhere a problem is created by your setting up a redirect to an article which is not clearly the topic of the redirect name. I believe it is wikipedia practice, and perhaps it is enshrined in policy and/or guideline statements, that if a name is redirected to another article, that the target article should provide to arriving readers some explanation or justification. This could be in form of a hatnote stating "____ redirects here" or in the form of bolded alternative names appearing in the lede. I don't want to accept that here, and the article does not in fact accomodate those. It is premature for you to prejudge, if you are doing so, that the Pomfret Street HD article must be a combo article merged with Pomfret Village and Pomfret Center. I don't want to edit war in the new Pomfret Street HD article about whether those should be covered. I worry that this is a warning shot, that there will be future warring to merge away the Pomfret Street HD article into a village article. This is seriously dismaying. Now, I think the right thing to do is to delete those redirects and to clarify that the NRHP HD article can be created as an article about the NRHP HD without other burdens thrust upon it. Upon this further consideration, Polaron, would you agree to that? doncram (talk) 17:20, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

All you would need to say is that the historic district encompasses the densely populated portions of those two villages. Whatever it is that you say about the historic district then applies to those places as they are identical. You seem to not understand that in all cases that I have argued with you, the place history is closely tied to why the historic district was defined in the first place. You are mostly getting what you want and still you refuse to allow any discussion of the relation with the place. --Polaron | Talk 01:22, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

You're prejudging what the Pomfret Street HD article will be developed to say, what is appropriate to say in that article, and you are not informed about the HD and why it was designated. I am not refusing to allow any discussion of the places, but wish to limit it to what is relevant in an article about the HD, which is not either or the sum of those two places. The article will certainly mention and link to Pomfret, Connecticut and it may or may not mention "Pomfret Center" and whatever you mean by "Pomfret (village)". If there are separate articles for those it could wikilink to those in the main text or at least in a "See also" section. But, the NRHP HD article is not about those: a) the area is different (it is obviously not the same as either one of them); and b) the historic district designation is about an era and what is preserved from that era, it is not about everything that ever happened in the area; and c) the HD document states pretty clearly that the HD is not about those or any other centers, per se, whether or not it includes some part or all of what you might mean by them. Reading the wp:redirect guidelines now somewhat, I think the right thing to do is to delete the redirects or to redirect them to the Pomfret, Connecticut article. Because the RFD process would take a month or more, I will now try doing the latter, and I will modify the Pomfret article somewhat to achieve some of what you want. Let me try that and then see and comment. doncram (talk) 20:03, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Are those revised redirects okay? Development of some description of those at Pomfret, Connecticut#Vlllages, where I redirected them to, is needed. But scanning the NRHP HD document, I see no mention whatsoever of Pomfret Center or of a Pomfret village, so I have nothing to add there. Some other source supporting the idea that those are villages, and describing where they are, is needed. I don't know how I can say this clearly enough for you: the NRHP HD is not about those as villages, and there is no notion of village identity whatsoever entering into the reason for the NRHP HD designation towards preserving the area. doncram (talk) 20:23, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

So tell me what is the stated period of significance for the district? If period of significance encompasses the time the place was settled (~1700) to the time of the railroads (beginning of the 20th century), then it is about those villages. Go look at where the village cores are and compare it to the historic district and tell me what you see. --Polaron | Talk 21:34, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I think i just have to write an article, and that it is not possible now to have an informed discussion here about whether the identities of the two centers you mention has anything to do with the NRHP HD. You are welcome to read the NRHP application yourself.

To respond to your question though, looking up what NRHP.COM says, it gives "Period of Significance: 1700-1749, 1750-1799, 1800-1824, 1825-1849, 1850-1874, 1875-1899, 1900-1924, 1925-1949". Actually I don't in general understand what is recorded for dates in the National Register's NRIS database. I view the NRHP.COM's "Period of Significance" field information here to be unreliable, possibly an unjustified fabrication from there being one date in NRIS's date fields before 1749, and another date being after 1925. It is as if the NRHP.COM programmer was setting up wikipedia-like categories for date ranges of 25 years, and was without justification filling in that all the between ones are relevant. I do not understand the correspondence between any date information in an NRHP document vs. what is shown in the NRHP.COM. Unlike other fields like area and coordinates and name, there is no required field in NRHP applications for this information.

About what the Pomfret Street HD document says, it certainly does give context background on Pomfret's history, i see dates mentioned at least as far back as 1686. Perhaps there are some buildings in the HD which were built in 1700-1749, and some post 1925 ones. Or perhaps the NRIS data entry person could only find a date in the document as early as 1700 and one after 1925. The NRHP.COM's version of "Periods of significance" has no specific meaning to me. What is the actually significant period covered in the NRHP HD application is subject to some interpretation, but so far I read the NRHP HD document to be describing the 1872-1930 "Resort Era" period to be most significant.

I should perhaps further mention: the document describes the entire two-mile long HD as itself being the center of Pomfret the town. There is no mention as far as I can tell of a "Pomfret Center" or a Pomfret Village center, though there is mention of a former mills and industrial area, a different center which is no longer part of Pomfret at all and is not included in the HD. You ask me to look at where the village cores are, but I don't know what you mean. I have no idea what is your source that there even exists places named Pomfret Center and Pomfret Village, and given that I don't yet see any mention of them in the NRHP HD, I expect that I will not accept that salient treatment of them in an article about the NRHP HD is reasonable. I wonder, are they newly coined names, like what real estate agencies are always coming up with, which had no wide meaning before 1998, the date of the NRHP application? doncram (talk) 23:38, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I downloaded the main .dbf database, and its key-to-the-rest-of-the-files file notes that there's a "Period of Significance" column in one of the .dbf files. I don't have that .dbf for some reason (perhaps I deleted it by accident?), but at least I can tell you that the idea of "Period of Significance" is known by the NRIS. Nyttend (talk) 01:29, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I should say here that I have the NRHP application and will share it to anyone if they email a request to me. I had stated this offer at Talk:Pomfret Street Historic District earlier. Nyttend, thanks for sharing that. I don't have high expectations for that info being generally useful, but I'll ask anyhow if others think it would be useful to add anything about it to the standard infobox, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places#Period of Significance info. doncram (talk) 18:36, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Goshen Historic District, and West G H S

Goshen Historic District and West Goshen Historic District were redirects to Goshen, Connecticut. I have just made the first into a disambiguation page and created NRHP stub articles for the 2nd plus for Goshen Historic District (Goshen, Connecticut). I would prefer for these to be kept as separate articles rather than merged into the Goshen town article, so they can be expanded to list their contributing properties, etc. The town article, which currently does not mention them, could/should be revised to mention/summarize from them. Please discuss here. doncram (talk) 22:00, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

The Goshen one is the town center and is more appropriately discussed in the town article. West Goshen is a well-known village of the town and should indeed be discussed in a separate article. --Polaron | Talk 22:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) Okay, I see that you deleted the separate article by merging material from it into the Goshen article. I have just now reverted your redirection. As I have already indicated by my opening this discussion section, I believe there is merit in having the separate HD article started sooner, now, rather than later. I interpret your redirection in the face of my statements here already was a Bold step; I have now Reverted that. This time, per Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle process, let us please discuss it rather than edit war. I set up this area to discuss this and related cases centrally, and let's discuss here please. It is also your prerogative to open an AfD on the article, but please don't revert it to a redirect, PROD it, or speedy-delete it, as I am legitimate contesting for the notability of this article.

My reasons for creating and wanting to keep the separate article include:

• (1) It is part of building the wikipedia coverage of NRHP properties and districts in CT. The historic district is notable on its own, and there is extensive documentation available that would allow it to be grown to a size larger than can be reasonably kept in the town article. I don't have the NRHP documentation in hand, but if it is like all other NRHP HD documentation, it will include a list of contributing properties and considerable detail. Developing a historic district article with photos and sections on many of these properties is a reasonable goal. The article now, while short, is a legitimate wikipedia article already.
• (2) Keeping it separate makes it available to me and others to add material and grow it, free from others' legitimate editorial control over the Goshen town article which would tend to fight against some details that are appropriate for the HD article but not the town article.
• (3) Keeping it separate allows for a reqphoto to be included in the Talk page of the HD article and for the photo request to show up in CT-wide reqphoto lists, in proper conjunction with coordinates that are in the article. If the reqphoto is just left in a Talk page for a redirect, the coordinates are disconnected, and map-based views of photos needed in Connecticut will not show this district. If the reqphoto is put into the Goshen article, it will not naturally and clearly call for photos of the historic district, and/or it will compete unnecessarily with other Goshen photos needed. The most efficient and direct way to call for photos is by reqphoto in the Talk page of the separate HD article.
• (4) Keeping it separate keeps the disambiguation page Goshen Historic District in compliance with wp:MOSDAB style guidelines/policy. By guideline/policy, disambiguation pages are supposed to include only links to actual wikipedia articles (with exception under MOS:DABRL for certain articles that are redlinks and will be created), and they are supposed to show the actual article names without hiding article locations by pipelinks or redirects. In the current disambiguation page, Goshen Historic District (Goshen, Connecticut) is properly shown. If the article is redirected, then the disambiguation page could perhaps be updated to show a link to the town article instead, with explanation that there is a Goshen Historic District included in the town. However, this causes unnecessary work now which would only have to be reversed later when the HD article is re-separated. I would strongly prefer to complete the NRHP disambiguation nation-wide once, in intended-to-be-final form, rather than set up future work.
• (5) I want to avoid future disputes about when the HD article is sufficiently developed to stand on its own. I don't want to personalize this unduly, but there has been repeated tension between myself and User:Polaron about NRHP places in CT, and i think occasionally also between Polaron and others. Polaron, in June 2008 apparently, went through and made numerous HD and other links in the CT NRHP list-articles into redirects to towns. Since then, Polaron has repeatedly taken a position that separate NRHP articles should not yet be allowed and has been overriding my own efforts to begin to develop articles. Often in the course of my developing NRHP disambiguation pages nation-wide, I have created stub articles for CT NRHP districts to support disambiguation pages. My experience in 5-10 CT cases has been that Polaron notices these and immediately reacts to eliminate them. In most of these cases, when I start there is no mention of the NRHP in the town article to which a redirect points. For example, there was no mention of Goshen Historic District in the Goshen article's then-current version. I don't think anyone can argue that it is unreasonable for me to replace the redirect with a stub article that includes the NRHP infobox and a couple sentences. Polaron has intervened to eliminate the stub articles, which is, I believe, unnecessarily negative. Although I expect/hope Polaron does not mean it, I personally experience it as unfriendly and controlling, and I project that other would-be editors of CT NRHP articles can also experience it in that way. In the process, Polaron has built material content in various CT town and CDP articles, which is fine and good. However, that material could be added to the town articles anyhow, and a whole lot of repeated dispute could be avoided, if the separate NRHP articles are allowed to exist from the get-go. I would prefer not to set up standards and argue them, about when a HD article should be allowed to be separate and when it should not, and to have to repeatedly request the intervention of other editors to judge and so on. I would prefer not to set up a special tribunal for all these cases, etc.

On the other hand, Polaron, I don't see your authority for asserting that the Goshen Historic District "is more appropriately discussed in the town article". You are certainly free to mention the historic district in the town article, and use available information about it to enhance the town article, but that does not preclude growing a different article for the wikipedia-notable NRHP-listed historic district. In the town article, the emphasis has to be different. Actually I would argue that the assertion now in the town article that "The town center was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982" is even a little bit suspect, is not perfectly well supported. This is not a major complaint, and I would not strike it from the town article being worked on by a local wikipedian, and I would not bother to put a citation needed tag on it. But in fact there is no source given that the historic district is the town center. In other cases it is more true, but even here I think it is somewhat the case, that shoehorning the CT HD material into the town article and revising the town article to assert it is the proper place, is a bit argumentative. The argumentativeness is reflected in awkward writing in the town article which detracts from the town article. Instead of two, mutually supporting, perfectly well referenced wikipedia articles, you get instead one article with questionable assertions.

I do want to acknowledge there is subjectivity in judgment of whether, at the present time, it is better for wikipedia articles to have a short stub CT HD article separate from a town article that may be adapted to cover the limited material that is at first available. Polaron is entitled to have a different opinion about what looks best for wikipedia readers currently. However, I believe that it is better for the development of wikipedia to allow the stub articles to start and to be grown, and in this Goshen Historic District article case I argue, for all of the reasons above, to keep the separate article. If you don't like the current stub article, then wp:SOFIXIT please by obtaining the NRHP nomination documents and other materials, and develop it further so that it meets your personal criteria for being a good standalone article. And, also, I would like the opportunity to just work ahead on developing this and other NRHP articles. doncram (talk) 11:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Again, the historic district is the town center. What makes you believe it isn't? Where is the town green? Where is the central post office? Where are town offices? Where is the library? Where is the congregation church? Whatever made the historic district significant is a result of the history of the town. It's not that I don't like the stub article but there is nothing about the historic district that doesn't apply to the town center. --Polaron | Talk 12:03, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

If you are don't dislike the stub article, then we have no problem, but your adding a merger proposal to the stub just now suggests you don't like it. I'm confused, what do you want? To discuss the boundaries of the town center and the boundaries of the historic district requires time and research and maps. It is premature to argue that the town center and the historic district are so inextricable that they cannot be discussed in separate wikipedia articles, and there is no town center article, anyhow. Your merger proposal is to merge the HD with the town-wide article. Also, you do not have sources and maps to make a supported assertion in mainspace that the town center and the historic district are the same. I don't disagree with your intuition that it is quite possible that the boundaries of the town center may substantially be the same as the HD. (Or, do you actually have sources that you can share that show the town center on a map, and/or which show the historic district on a map?) But please see reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 above about why I wish to keep the HD article separate. doncram (talk) 12:28, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't dislike stub articles as a general rule. But in this particular case, the town center is better described in the town article. The histories are identical. --Polaron | Talk 13:24, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I've been meaning to say, in this and other cases, there is a difference between the NRHP historic district vs. a town center, in that the NRHP historic district is a modern, current thing. It usually contains some elements that are >= 50 years old, but it consists of only what is currently present. An article about an HD has to focus on what is still present, although it can mention prior history. Also, historic districts are usually irregular shapes which include parcels that have old buildings, while often skipping newer intrusions. From my experience seeing HD maps elsewhere, they often are sort of random in appearance, sometimes from the fact that owners of properties may be allowed to opt in or out from being included in the district. A village or town center for a CT town has a longer history, so an article about it is not focussed about the same history. And village or town clearly includes modern intrusions such as strip malls and 7-11s which the historic district hopefully avoids. So, I disagree, the histories are not identical, and nor are the current physical contents. doncram (talk) 14:47, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course the boundaries are not exactly the same but that doesn't mean we should discuss them as separate articles. It just makes more sense to have a unified historical narrative. Try expanding one and see if you find something that doesn't apply to the history of the town. Also, there are no strip malls in Goshen center and this particular historic district is significant for late 18th century architecture, which is when the town developed. --Polaron | Talk 14:55, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I have stated several reasons why it makes sense, from the general perspective of building the wikipedia, to have a separate article sooner rather han later. And I am trying, albeit slowly, to build these. I am hamstrung by lack of ready access to NRHP documents. Here also you speak as if with confidence about what are the historic district boundaries. Can you provide a map of the HD boundaries here, too; that would be extremely relevant to add to this dicussion. doncram (talk) 00:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Southport Historic District

In the course of disambiguation work on North Carolina NRHP articles, I find it necessary to create Southport Historic District disambiguation. It links naturally to Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut), which turns out to be a redirect set up in 2008 to link to Southport (Fairfield). Currently the Southport town article shows a map of the town within CT that is far larger than what I imagine is the historic district. The town article does not explicitly name or integrate discussion of the Southport HD. Its lede is: "Southport is a distinct section of the town of Fairfield, Connecticut. Settled in 1639, it has been designated as a historic district because of its harbor, churches, public buildings, and the homesteads of some of the first families in the area." Actually i expect that statement is inaccurate: I do not believe that the town as a whole has been designated as a historic district, or that it is even close. Currently I don't have a lot of info on the historic district, but I know it is notable on its own and that it merits an article. Neither article is well enough developed, actually, for a reader to know the boundaries of either, and it is not possible to judge the overlap; it is just my belief based on experience with other town and NRHP historic district pairings that there will be significant differences here. I choose to proceed to build structure by creating the CT NRHP HD article as a good short stub article with its implicit call for expansion. doncram (talk) 12:06, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Polaron redirected the article i created, which i experience as somewhat unfriendly, and I have REVERTED polaron's edit. Please discuss here. The reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 which I gave for another case, above, probably all apply. doncram (talk) 13:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

There is no need for duplication. The village article is a perfect vessel to describe the historic district. --Polaron | Talk 13:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Again, why do you need two separate articles discussing the same thing? --Polaron | Talk 13:26, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

(I reordered and reindented the sequence of comments above in the order they were posted.)

To others, there is some confusion here, because I relied upon the existing Southport article to assess that Southport was a huge area (I was misled by an unlabelled map in the article). And Polaron has revised the Southport article now to make it look largely the same as the HD article. What I did was fine. Polaron, it seems to me that you are taking work from NRHP articles to improve corresponding village/town/CDP articles, which is fine and good. However, you do not have to tear out the contribution of another editor (me) in the process. Also, your removal of the separate page puts other structure in wikipedia out of wack, namely the disambiguation page. Are you intending to fix that? I don't really believe this would be the case, but are you trying to claim credit for yourself in some way? I read what you write here, and I get that you don't like the separate HD article. Would you please do me the favor of reading what I write. Note I have stated legitimate reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, which you have not addressed. I may not be able to watch this and discuss here for much more today, but I will return and respond later. Sincerely, doncram (talk) 13:39, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

All your reasons do not require a separate village and historic district article. Your entire contribution is still in the village article. I have torn nothing out. --Polaron | Talk 13:45, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Polaron, it is clearly edit warring for you to again, just now, to remove the article which I had created. Please stop that. I have been trying to edit constructively in that article, in the Southport article (where you also reverted my work), in the Talk page of the Southport article, and here. I think i have been friendly and respectful enough of your views, but I experience what you are doing now as being wp:disruptive in a bad way. I will return the Southport Historic District article to how I developed it, and I ask you not to delete it again. doncram (talk) 13:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

It's not being deleted. Clearly you haven't been listening to me. Whatever you can say about the district applies to the village. Also, it takes two parties to edit war. --Polaron | Talk 14:10, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) As an objective outsider here, I agree with Polaron on this one.. we don't need two very short stubby two-sentence articles (which you, doncram, are known for creating) when we can combine the two using redirects. What "other structure" are you talking about, doncram, that this throws out of whack? If you're talking about the Southport Historic District dab page, what's wrong with it? Are you concerned that the two links on the page aren't going to look the same because one will have a City, State dab and the other won't? Well frankly, dab pages don't have to be uniform; they just have to disambiguate. Linking to the town page instead of the district page won't throw anything out of whack. --Dudemanfellabra (talk) 21:18, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I am entirely proud of having created thousands of stub NRHP articles in wikipedia, which for example helped build some perfectly good coverage of every U.S. National Historic Landmark. Thousands of the articles that I started as stubs have been further improved by myself and by many others. I continue to create stub articles where helpful and necessary for supporting the disambiguation of NRHPs nation-wide, so that a) readers will be more able to find NRHP places they look for, and b) more importantly so that editors creating NRHP articles, anywhere, will be able to start them confidently at a permanently feasible names to hold them, within the structure of a comprehensive system of list-articles and disambigation pages that is almost completely set up now. It is not meant or maintained as a rigid system; please note that I am very supportive of redirecting from initial NRHP names to existing or new articles about lighthouses and many other kinds of topics where it is established that the NRHP place is essentially the same as a place going by a different common name. I also make it a point to create stub NRHP articles to capture semi-complicated bits of information, like boundary increase situations or like NRIS error situations, so that editors will not have to struggle in the absence of clear information, later.

But Dudemanfellabra, you understand what is going on here entirely wrong if you think that i want for there to be two very short stubby two-sentence articles. Do you think what I did in List of RHPs in MS, where I am sure i created numerous stub articles, or anywhere else, is bad work? I certainly want for the CT historic district articles to be developed. And, in many cases that can and will eventually involve merger with a village, CDP, town or other community article. However, I object to merging them without having adequate information to know what is the historic district and what is the village. It happens that in CT we do not have online copies of NRHP documents which would help a lot.

In my experience with Polaron, he has edit warred to merge HDs with town articles about large towns having multiple village areas, where it almost certainly will not make sense to keep the HD article merged in, where in fact it will make sense to resplit them out if they have been merged. In some other cases I have concurred with mergers. But in too many cases for me to ignore, Polaron has argued by edit warring, by overriding my work, rather than by discussing and by adding sources that bring new information out into common knowledge. Here, in the Southport (Fairfield) article, for example, he has added in assertions that may well be correct but are without sources. Note that some editor tagged the Southport article with "unreferenced". The 3 sources now in the article include the generic NRIS reference which does not speak to overlap at all, and 2 other sources that seem to support minor points, such as some actor's association with the community. At this point, I don't care to have my work ripped out in favor of an unreferenced article, by Polaron's subjective decision. And it is not established to my satisfaction, anyhow, that eventually good wikipedia coverage of Southport HD and the Southport village will not best be as separate articles. So I don't now concur with the structure change that Polaron has edit warred towards implementing. I would prefer for both the town and HD articles to be kept open and to be developed with sources. If there are two articles for now, then it certainly would make sense for the village article to wikilink to the HD article, and for it not to carry highly overlapping information. I contributed to the village article, but Polaron reverted some of my edits, and I am not going to edit war on the village article to bring it into complementary, reader-appropriate status. Currently, I agree that the situation for these two articles looks bad to wikipedia readers. However it could be remedied for now by reducing the unsupported statements in the village article and editing it to coordinate with the HD article.

I don't currently know whether Southport village vs. Southport HD overlap is substantial enough to merit merger eventually. I do stand by the wikipedia-notability of the HD article that I created, and assert it was an advance for wikipedia for me to create it separately from the Southport village article at its then-current state. The Southport article then suggested, apparently incorrectly, by its inclusion of a misleading map, that it was a much larger area. At this point, I object to merging the HD article in without better information on the overlap, in part because the merger would invalidate some structure that I created. Yes, merely the disambiguation page which indeed could be revised. The disambiguation page is technically "out of whack" if it points to Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut), if there is not article at that name. I don't want to overstate that reason, i am just explaining it as one part of supporting structure which needs to be addressed when articles are moved to names not expected by the initially-NRIS-database-based naming system for NRHP places. I appreciate, Dudemanfellabra, that you at least asked about this contributing point. Thanks! doncram (talk) 00:06, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The official historic district is roughly the portion south of the railroad tracks (the mixed zoning area of the neighborhood). In all cases where a historic district has the same name as a village/neighborhood, you will find that the historic district is wholly contained in the village/neighborhood. Also, what edits to the Southport article that I reverted were you talking about? If it is the case that I did remove correct information, I will restore it. --Polaron | Talk 00:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting. By your statement about the location of the historic district, do you mean anything more than the location description text "Roughly bounded by Southport Harbor, RR, Old South Rd. and Rose Hill Rd." from the NRIS database? If you have different information than that about the HD, and about the village/neighborhood, I hope that you would share it. I must disagree with your unqualified statement that "In all cases....you will find that the historic district is wholly contained in the village/neighborhood." That is too much of an over-generalization.

About what edits did you revert, those would be your repeated edits that redirected the article to the Southport article. I am not finding it amusing that here and in other comments on this page you are playing with words to imply you have not been edit warring to delete separate articles about CT NRHP HDs that I have created. doncram (talk) 01:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The actual Southport historic district is triangular and is somewhat smaller than the listed description text. You said you "contributed to the village article" and that I "reverted some of your edits". What is this referring to? About edit warring, I believe you are too. --Polaron | Talk 02:08, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

At this point, I don't really care very much, but how do you know that about the triangular district. It is almost irrelevant that you "know" that, if you will not provide sources and show it for others to see.

In the Southport Talk page and its article, as you are fully aware, i discussed and took steps to replace a misleading map that was in the article. I am not checking now, but for the moment i believe that the replacement map which i added is still in the article. That would be the part not reverted. Also, as you are fully aware, I edited the Southport article to wikilink to the separate Southport Historic District article, and to remove the duplicative NRHP infobox which you had copied in from the separate Southport HD article, and perhaps in other small ways i edited to make the Southport article complementary to the separate HD article. Those would be the contributing edits of mine that you reverted. I did not repeat those edits, i stated here that I was not doing that. doncram (talk) 02:38, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I replaced the map with a more accurate one based on the census tract boundary (seems to be good enough at small scale). As for the other edits, that presupposes a separate article. With regard to the triangular shape of the district, that's what the vertices of the polygon defining the district look like (with the caveat that I may be ignoring some minor corrections in the UTM to lat-long conversion). See the section somewhere above for more details. Do you really believe that part of the historic district is outside the area commonly known as Southport? --Polaron | Talk 02:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Fine, that establishes you have reverted all, not just some, of my edits there. I don't know what to believe, honestly. I know the policy of wikipedia is to value sourced statements above unsourced ones, and I see no sources or evidence other than Polaron's say-so, that the district is within or the same as the village, which as far as i can tell has no available definition anywhere.

I've restored the Southport HD article again, although with revision to drop the sentence, which I admit was awkward, attempting to characterize a relationship between the HD and the village. So, the current article is factual and entirely sourced. I suggest it be kept as is, unless and until someone does the work of getting the NRHP application document or other sources and adding sourced statements that describe the relationship of the HD and the village. doncram (talk) 05:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Doncram, let's not forget that the main purpose of an encyclopedia is to convey information to people. At this time, a person interested in obtaining information about the Southport Historic District would get more useful value from Southport (Fairfield) than from Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut). It's good that you have removed the sentence that I called "embarrassing" (thank you!), but in its absence the Southport Historic District article no longer even acknowledges the existence of the longer article about the Southport section of Fairfield. A separate HD article that does not even link back to the article that has information about the history of Southport -- and images of its historic area -- fails to convey information to people -- instead, it separates them from information. You make some worthwhile points regarding the need for additional sourcing in the Southport article, but you are not helping the situation. Your insistence on splitting the articles is the kind of distraction that gets in the way of making useful improvement's to an article's information quality.

I have trouble believing that there will ever be sufficient content to justify two separate articles about this place, but PLEASE let's not create a separate HD article until it has significantly more content than can be provided in an infobox, and PLEASE don't delink the two articles. --Orlady (talk) 12:07, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I think it undermines the discussion process here for the separate HD article to be deleted. As a matter of process, shouldn't the discussion be continued here until some kind of consensus is reached? It is illogical, I think, to halt the development of the HD article towards satisfying your concerns (for example, how it should link to the separate Southport article), and otherwise. I want to develop the article, focusing on what can be said supported by inline citations only. That is a different focus / editorial style than the style of the various CT town and other community articles, including the Southport article, which includes some unsourced statements among its sourced ones.

I am willing to abide by a consensus decision about a merger, a discussion process which I started here, but that has not been reached. It seems inappropriate for Polaron and now for you, Orlady, to halt the development of the HD article, which thereby appears to "win" the discussion/decision about whether the HD article can be allowed to be separate and be developed. Orlady, I appreciate that you are participating here and actually asking me to abide by your preference here. However, I don't see what is different, why you should not abide by my reciprocal request to you to keep the article (and allow it to be developed) while discussion is ongoing here. In terms of distractions, I perceive it to be the repeated deletion of the draft HD article, that is "the kind of distraction that gets in the way of making useful improvement's to an article's information quality." I mean no disrespect, but I am restoring the article now; please don't redirect it.

Obviously we disagree. I think it should be possible to have some third party come in and make a closing judgement that we can all agree to live with, as in closing of AfD processes, about whether a stub HD article can be allowed to exist and develop. In AfD processes, participants are prohibited from blanking the article while the process is underway. Could we all please agree to consider this discussion here an AfD-like process. Or, please suggest some other process. Perhaps this discussion here should in fact be replaced by an AfD, because we all (me included) do not seem to know how to run a decision process here that meets with sufficient agreement. doncram (talk) 18:14, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I am trumped by Orlady's protecting the page, so I cannot restore it. I don't disagree with Orlady's intent expressed in her edit summary "short-term protection to cool off the pointless edit warring over this page", but I respectfully think that is the wrong default. The page should be restored and I and others should be allowed to develop it, while the AfD-type discussion here, or a formal AfD goes on. doncram (talk) 18:20, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Would you have preferred to be blocked for edit-warring? (I don't think so. I thought it would be far better to stop the revert war by protecting the article for a little while.) --Orlady (talk) 19:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that your decision to protect the article for a time was helpful. It allowed time, for example, for Dudemanfellabra to comment below, challenging me to refine and/or clarify my position to you and others. Thank you. doncram (talk) 20:33, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

There is nothing that has been deleted. All the content is in the village article. If you want to completely rewrite the Southport article to the style you like, you are free to do so. Go ahead and put new content in the village article - no one is stopping you from adding content. My only concern is that there should be one unified article describing the topic of Southport in Connecticut. --Polaron | Talk 18:24, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

So, in order for Doncram, or me, or anyone to write about the Southport Historic District, we would ONLY be allowed to do so in the confines of a poorly sourced article about the town? Would you support stripping all unsourced statements out of the article, so that we would be contributing to a properly sourced article? Your statement that "no one is stopping you from adding content" is misleading, since Doncram is clearly being stopped from adding content in the way his process does it, by creating a separate, well-sourced article for a subset of information as opposed to including it in an otherwise poorly sourced article. I would also prefer to contribute in a way that fit my expertise, as opposed to being forced to add good information to what I saw as a poor article that I didn't have the expertise or the desire to repair. I don't think that you can separate the fact that the article is poorly sourced from the decision about where to build the properly sourced historic district information. Lvklock (talk) 18:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Further, there does seem to be quite a bit of "it's true because I know it's true" coming from Polaron, which seems to be in direct conflict with Wikipedia's policy on verifiability and the one on original research. The discussion of which includes the statement "Unsourced material obtained from a Wikipedian's personal experience, such as an unpublished eyewitness account, should not be added to articles. It would violate both this policy and Verifiability, and would cause Wikipedia to become a primary source for that material." Lvklock (talk) 19:10, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of place articles in Connecticut are unsourced. If you have good reason to believe something in the article is false, I suppose you could delete it. If you want to remove all existing content in the village article that you believe to be likely false, go ahead. But to me, it is evident that people who are interested in expanding the Southport Historic District article are also the same ones interested in Southport. Even if that is not the case, since the histories are virtually identical, expansion of the historic district information automatically means expansion of the village article. Historic districts based on colonial era villages and manufacturing villages are quite common here and locally there is no distinction between the historic district and the village identity. My point is go ahead and rewrite the village article to your liking. You can even write it as if it were the just the historic district. In the end, the story you get will be the same. --Polaron | Talk 19:17, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Currently, the only content about the historic district is what's in the infobox. The infobox (plus a couple of sentences of text that contain the same information) is in the Southport article, where it is supplemented by other information (some sourced, some not supported by references) about Southport's history and current status. If the energy that has gone into turf-fighting about article ownership were instead directed at researching the topic, there might be enough information for a second article about the historic district. However, until someone obtains and writes up some additional content, there is barely enough content for one article about Southport, much less two. --Orlady (talk) 19:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Orlady. I think this should be handled in a WP:Summary Style manner (specifically look at this section). Keep the articles together for the time being, having the district as a section in the article. If at some point after much research has been done, the section begins to grow large enough to warrant its own article (at least 5-7 good-sized paragraphs), it can be split out to Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut) and a short summary can be left behind on Southport (Fairfield), linking to the district's article using the "Main article" fashion. --Dudemanfellabra (talk) 02:27, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for referring to that section of the WP:Summary Style guideline. However, it states "Editors are cautioned to not immediately split articles if the new article would meet neither the general notability criterion nor the specific notability criteria for their topic." There is no doubt that the NRHP-listed HD is notable. It is clearly individually wikipedia-notable. So that guideline does not apply.

On the other hand, Polaron writes at the Southport Talk page: "Southport is not actually well-defined as one would hope" and goes on to suggest it could be mapped/defined as a previous "borough" or as a census tract in the area. I expect there are other alternative versions of Southport as well. It is not well-defined, and there is no fair reason that the focused, reliably-sourced historic district article, which I and others eventually would like to build cannot be started. I think this is coming down to personal preferences or style differences, subjective, about whether a wikipedia-notable topic can be developed in mainspace. This is not basis for blocking development of wikipedia on this topic. doncram (talk) 05:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

You can develop the district's information inside the town's article; there's nothing "blocking you from developing it". As of now, a reader would benefit more if the articles were combined. It makes no sense to click on the district's link if all he's going to get is two sentences. In fact, that would probably be more of an annoyance to him.

From Wikipedia:Merging: "If a page is very short and is unlikely to be expanded within a reasonable amount of time, it often makes sense to merge it with a page on a broader topic." More times than not, these stub articles that you create for NRHP listings stay that way for months and even years.. no one ever touches them. Yes, someone may come along later and expand them, but that time frame is far from "reasonable."

This is a personal story between doncram and me, but do you remember the historic districts in Meridian, Mississippi? I was working on expanding the section in the city's article about the districts when you abruptly began creating the district stubs with 2-3 sentences (which I later finished for uniformity because I'm OCD haha). I attempted to expand them after you had created them, but there is simply not much information out there about them. It seems they will forever (or at least for a long time) be limited to this stub state. Had you waited to create the stub articles until more research was done in the main city article, it probably would have become apparent that the individual articles were not needed. I don't want the same thing to happen here. I would advise researching first and adding to Southport's town article before working on the district article. You may find that, like Meridian's districts, there isn't enough information to justify an entirely new article. (In fact, I think I have an idea for those Meridian articles that I will pursue right now)--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 06:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

A big difference is that in Meridian, you did good work in clearly identifying the historic districts from another source and from NRHP documents, and as I recall you learned to make maps for wikipedia, in making these ones. AFTER information is developed, sure it can be appropriate to merge the material and there will often/usually be easy consensus to do so. In the Meridian case, I think I created those articles intending to be helpful, to place the NRHP infoboxes there, etc., for you to possibly use. At the time I was providing you encouragement and advice and information on how to proceed and getting others to chime in with info on how to create maps, etc., too. Having separate articles on the NRHP HD districts was effectively a suggestion. If i did argue about keeping them separate then, which I don't recall, at least i did not revert your edits and prevent you from working on what you wanted where you wanted to, in the Meridian article. Anyhow, if those stubs still exist, I expect they should be redirected to the nice sections of the Meridian article that you created for each one. Although i would also support you if you wanted to develop any of the HD ones further, and keep them separate.

Here, there has been preemptive assertion that historic district articles cannot be developed, and it is only one editor's generally unsourced, educated guesses that a given HD must be the same as a given village, which he is enforcing by reverts and redirects. This is effectively making a contested AfD decision with no due process. His guesses have been wrong in some cases where at first he edit warred, and it is not cooperative building, it is tearing down and insisting on his way or the highway, with no legitimate authority. Also here the town/village/CDP articles are of vastly inferior quality to your Meridian article (which you really should nominate for FA, if you still have not).

There are many cases where creating the stub HD article has been helpful, allowing for facts such as area overlap to a village can be sorted out, maps and sources found, and so on, and then ultimately it may be decided easily by a regular merge proposal that the material can be merged. In some cases i have created HD articles and myself proposed merger, seeking input/decision by locals who could assess the degree of area overlap. Here in CT, there has been immediate edit warring to enforce arbitrary decisions by one judgmental editor, in the complete absence of public, common information about area overlaps. It is unbearable for me, as one would-be editor, for it to be pre-judged that I cannot create a well-sourced article on a wikipedia-notable topic, and that I shall only be allowed to work in a section in some crummy town article that may or may not correspond closely to the HD area. doncram (talk) 07:51, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

question about edit warring and process

What am i to do, with respect to Polaron's continued edit warring on the Southport Historic District and other articles? I see now that he has again today reverted the Southport HD article to redirect to the Southport (Fairfield) article. I have opened discussion here and invited others to comment, towards reaching a consensus decision. Polaron initially redirected (I think after I had already opened discussion here) in this first redirect, then repeated in this diff, then repeated today. Since the topic is under discussion, I am experiencing this as wp:disruptive. Could an administrator comment about process here, please? And, I am going to restore the HD article now. It undermines the discussion here to lose the article and I am personally experiencing Polaron's repeated edits as his trying to win an argument by edit warring, rather than developing and putting forward information towards creating a consensus. doncram (talk) 00:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I hit the rollback button, newly available to me, to implement that reversion. Since I opened and continue in this discussion, I think that is okay, but if it was technically incorrect for me to use that button here then I apologize, and I would simply appreciate advice.

Also glancing at Polaron's contributions I see just now that he has also today edited to create Southport Historic District (Connecticut) as a competing similar name to redirect to his preferred target, trying to bypass the Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut) article! I think this is disruptive and unhelpful! doncram (talk) 01:03, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I see also that Polaron has overridden, again, the Georgetown Historic District (Georgetown, Connecticut) article, to redirect to his preferred target, by this edit today. That in fact struck out the merger proposal request for discussion that had directed to here, properly. Polaron's previous edits to wipe out this article, all after discussion was clearly opened here, are this reversion, and this reversion. I am undoing Polaron's latest edit to wipe this out, now. doncram (talk) 01:14, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

There really should be a process for enforceable merges similar to AFD. Unless you somehow find content that applies to the historic district but not to the village, you have no basis for having two separate articles on the same thing. You can tell a better story by discussing the historic district in the village articles. You may have a better leg to stand on with respect to merging to the whole town article. But your inexplicable refusal to discuss the historic district in a village article is also disruptive. Oh, and use of rollback to edit war is a definite no-no. --Polaron | Talk 01:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The process should be to discuss these CT NRHP cases here, to involve and get other editors' consensus. And, unfortunately, to supplement that by requesting administrator intervention to stop your edit warring. I am discussing these issues in each case here and have not ruled out any topic for discussion. In the Southport Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut) and other cases where i am drawing the line and reverting your deletions, I had created these articles, and you are one step ahead in any count of reversions. In the context of my opening discussion here, and seeking input from other editors, that is just preposterous to assert, as you have on this page and elsewhere, that we are somehow equally at fault in edit warring. What on earth can you mean that my "inexplicable refusal" to discuss anything is disruptive? I am here and seeking discussion on the content matters, although distracted by the edit warring you are engaging in. doncram (talk) 02:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

That separate historic district article was an embarrassment (particularly "The district may include some or all of the historic center of the village of Southport, within Fairfield"). I restored Polaron's redirect. And Polaron is correct, Doncram -- use of rollback in an edit war is a definite "no-no." It's only supposed to be used for reverting vandalism. --Orlady (talk) 02:34, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Re the statement 'The process should be to discuss these CT NRHP cases here, to involve and get other editors' consensus," I'd edit that to say that discussion should occur (somewhere). It's not obvious that talk pages for National Register of Historic Places listings articles are the only place where articles about historic villages can be discussed.

And, yes, both of you are engaged in an edit war (please cease and desist, or you will find yourselves sanctioned), but it should be noted that belligerent statements on a talk page do not exactly promote "discussion to reach consensus." --Orlady (talk) 02:44, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

In advance of opening the discussion here, i consulted with Polaron at his talk page, in User talk:Polaron#CT NRHP errors and redirects, about where to hold a central discussion about the multiple, similar situations all involving NRHP listings in CT. I interpreted Polaron talking about "There really should be a process for enforceable merges similar to AFD" as perhaps suggesting he was saying this is not the appropriate place for discussion and/or that he would not abide by discussion here. Orlady, I hope you are not suggesting that this should be moved somewhere else, or that this is not a fair place to discuss these issues. Thanks also for noting that there has been edit warring, i guess, though I think you or anyone else could do better by noting some differential in behavior. Also, I don't appreciate your calling my work an embarrassment. I don't want to start an escalating insult war with you, too. But I certainly could likewise say the previous Southport article was an embarrassment, and my taking action to create an HD article was, at the first step, the best thing that could be done given NRIS information available plus what was in the Southport article. I was not in a position to know about overlap between the village and HD, and there still is no adequate sourcing for the statements about overlap in the Southport article. The significantly belligerent actions have been Polaron's overriding, presumptuous edits, in general giving no sources. Even if he is knowledgeable about Connecticut, the behavior is rude. In this separate discussion section about process, I think it is fair to call it that. doncram (talk) 04:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Georgetown Historic District

I note that the topic of some previous discussion, Georgetown Historic District (Georgetown, Connecticut) has been revisited. A short while ago, Polaron replaced the article there by redirect to merge it into Georgetown, Connecticut. I just reverted it to restore the separate article. I believe reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, including the ones about keeping the disambiguation page system in order, all apply for this case as well. Polaron, please discuss and seek consensus which will involve other editors. It is not necessary for you to try to get your way by repeated edits in a low-grade edit war. Anyhow, for here, what are the merits you see in eliminating this article? doncram (talk) 14:36, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Same issue as Southport. --Polaron | Talk 14:40, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Having not seen Southport, I can't remark that way — but let me ask, is it reasonable to assume that the district and the town or village (I didn't look at the Georgetown article, so I don't remember which one it is) are the same? NRHP.com says that there are 120 structures in the district, a total that's probably derived from the nomination form, so likely to be close to correct at least, and it's clear that the district boundaries are U.S. Route 7, Portland Ave., Connecticut Route 107, and the Norwalk River. Is all of Georgetown within these boundaries? Is this not more reasonably a specific part of Georgetown that could easily be covered in detail, especially if someone with local print sources were to expand it? Nyttend (talk) 12:58, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

And I should note — this isn't like the Rugby Historic District in Tennessee, which is clearly the entire community of Rugby. In my mind, it's altogether reasonable to make the Rugby HD and others like it into redirects to the community, since there's nothing that can be said of one but not the other; however, when an HD is a distinct part of a community, or (more rarely; see Butte-Anaconda Historic District) a community is a distinct part of an HD, it's much better to have separate articles. Nyttend (talk) 13:01, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Given that the historic district is the core of Georgetown (this is evident, for example, from the historic map and the Google satellite image) and in the absence of any information specific to the historic district beyond the basic statistics provided by the NRIS database, it seems to me that the information needs and interests of the encyclopedia reader are better served by a single article. If more information is obtained later, perhaps an additional article would be appropriate, but that is not currently the case. --Orlady (talk) 15:22, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The district and the village (and the CDP as well) are not all exactly the same. However, the historic district is not really a distinct section of the village -- it is in fact the core of the village. The district excludes newer residential areas built around the original manufacturing village but the entire historic district is contained within the boundaries of the modern village and includes most of the population. --Polaron | Talk 17:35, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I have again restored the article Georgetown Historic District (Georgetown, Connecticut) and revised it to include, now, three sources. All statements in this NRHP HD article are sourced, including a comment that it is hard to compare it to the unincorporated community of Georgetown. The page shows a merger proposal, with discussion to occur here. I would like to keep developing the NRHP HD article to cover the HD, a distinct part of the larger Georgetown area.

The Georgetown article, on the other hand, is an incomplete article which lacks inline citations and, in my view, fails to come to grips with defining what it is going to cover: what is currently "common parlance" for Georgetown, what is the CDP, what is the fire district, what is the historical Georgetown. It currently has a History section, consisting entirely of one sentence fragment with a red-link: "The village of Georgetown primarily existed Gilbert and Bennett Manufacturing Company, which manufactured products out of discarded horsehair in the 19th century." It currently states that the HD has 144 buildings, with no source, now in contrast to the HD article which now provides a NRHP.COM-sourced statement that the HD has 120 buildings, instead (thanks, Nyttend).

To respond to Nyttend's question, I think it is not reasonable to assume that the district and the town or village. Georgetown as an area is apparently large and apparently ill-defined: the current article describes the CDP as being in three CT towns; the New York Times external link in the town article states "Because Georgetown is a hamlet rather than an official town, however, its precise boundaries are a matter of opinion." Overall i interpret that NYT article to say however that in common usage it is in four CT towns, and four school districts (not mentioned in the current wikipedia article). The Georgetown article includes population data for the Georgetown CDP, which is different than the HD and apparently different than common usage. Thus it appears to me that the Georgetown article is a bit of a rambling mish-mash, and will remain that way, because of the ill-defined nature of Georgetown itself. To return to Nyttend's comment/question: there is definitely much which can be said of one but not the other.

I would prefer to develop the Georgetown HD article as a more coherent article, keeping it well-sourced and concentrated on the HD area and its contributing properties. I think this is a complementary role to play, which would support the improvement of the Georgetown town article. The NRHP application, once obtained, will provide extensive detail that is suitable for the HD article but not the Georgetown one. The disambiguation set up at Georgetown Historic District is consistent with this Georgetown HD being a separate article. For all these reasons, I would like for the decision here to be. I don't exactly know how consensus is to be determined here, but I value consensus and the input of multiple editors, or else I would not have opened this discussion and sought comments.

User:Polaron has 4 times redirected the HD page to the Georgetown article. I don't know how to interpret his actions in any way other than they are disrespectful of me personally. And disruptive to the discussion process which I started, first by asking him at his Talk page whether this would be an okay place to have the discussion, and which I continue in here. He posted a merger proposal in the Georgetown HD article, but then deleted the article by redirecting it. I have restored the merger proposal, with discussion now directed to here. I would be interested to hear Polaron's view on whether he would abide by a consensus decision here in this case and others. doncram (talk) 17:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Whatever the definition of Georgetown you use, the district will always be at its core. All the surrounding areas not in the district are low density newer housing. Again, the history of Georgetown is the history of the area encomapassed by the historic district. Go ahead and look at the NRHP document for Georgetown, you'll find it is almost all about the Gilbert and Bennett Company. --Polaron | Talk 17:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you implying now that you have the NRHP document yourself? I take it that you do. I asked you previously to obtain them, but you have never responded fully in our discussions, and have not disclosed that you would seek to obtain them. Do you in fact have all the NRHP documents, for the other NRHP HDs under discussion elsewhere on this page? If so, that would be great, yes, that you would be sitting on sources that would obviously help to resolve these discussions, and yet deliberately withholding that information, and participating instead by low-grade edit warring and goading me, personally. Great. doncram (talk) 18:27, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Please assume good faith, Doncram. Among other things, that means not attributing negative motives to other Wikipedians. Now that you've seen Polaron's response to your question (below), could you considering taking back some of the things you said? --Orlady (talk) 18:41, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate your effort to invoke good faith. I can't take back anything about being irritated by Polaron's behavior with respect to having but not sharing information. This is not the first instance; I only know to enough to challenge him and ask a direct question whether he has that document in hand, because he has acted peremptorily and only later revealed information that would have allowed a consensus decision, in other cases before. If it helps, though, I could clarify that I should not imply that Polaron has goaded me in any additional, separate way (like by any personal insults, not present here), besides by the edit warring, by sometimes peremptorily and unnecessarily (in my view) deleting my contributions in various related articles, and by what I perceive to be grudging, terse participation in discussion (including in coming forward only very slowly with information that would help). I am willing also to assume that Polaron is applying his best judgement about CT places in informing his enforcement-type reversions and other actions (although those are still unjustifiable in my view) and that he knows a lot about the CT places, although he has sometimes also reversed himself, and that he would not continue to enforce a redirect if he realizes his initial factual assumptions were incorrect. I don't know how much that helps. doncram (talk) 08:24, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't have them at hand but can look at them in the state library (our town library doesn't have them unfortunately). The only ones I actually looked at in the last few weeks are Georgetown and Quebec Square but I only quickly looked through them. I can look up specific ones if needed but I can only do that on Saturdays and even then on Saturdays that I don't have anywhere else to be. There is a Wikipedia Meetup in Hartford this Saturday that I will hopefully be able to attend and I might be able to quickly look again if you need some specific information. --Polaron | Talk 18:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

[outdent] - I just looked at Doncram's most recent version of Georgetown Historic District (Georgetown, Connecticut), and I support Polaron's decision to redirect it to the article about the village. The HD article was as much about the village as it was about the HD, and much of the content that was not about the village was more speculative discussion than it was verifiable content. (In particular, I refer to this passage: "The district's area cannot precisely be compared to the modern day community of Georgetown, Connecticut, because the latter area is not well defined. Georgetown is an unincorporated area which has no specific borders. According to one source Georgetown includes parts of the incorporated towns of Ridgefield and Weston as well as parts of Redding and Wilcox." Not only is that little more than uninformed speculation, but it contains an obvious error: There is no town of Wilcox in Connecticut.)

Doncram, if you are impatient to improve the overall quality of entries about this topic, could you take the time to insert inline citations in the Georgetown article? --Orlady (talk) 18:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Polaron has again redirected the Georgetown Historic District article, so I am confounded from correcting the apparent error in my statement in the article. The redirect undermines the discussion here, in particular it vacates Orlady's link to the article. The error is mine, but it was a sourced statement though, so anyone could check the source and correct the statement in the article. I should have said Wilton rather than Wilcox.

I prefer to develop a well-sourced article about the well-defined historic district, which is clearly wikipedia-notable, rather than participating in development of a community article. I expect that editing in the Georgetown article would be an unpleasant experience, because I expect there would be contention about unsourced statements in the article. Akin to Lvklock's note about Southport, would I be allowed to strip out the unsourced statements there? I would be inclined to remove them or to tag them all, and I anticipate that Polaron would revert my edits if went in that direction, and we would have a low-grade edit war going on there, instead of in my interest area of articles on historic sites. Just one area of dispute for the Georgetown and Southport articles would be the relationship of the communities to the HDs, for which there is a dearth of sources.

I think the right thing to do, process-wise, is for Polaron to be enjoined not to redirect this article, and for me to be allowed to develop it while AfD-like discussion is going on here, and for Polaron to be blocked if he again redirects the article. I am completely confounded by all this disruption, while I have been legitimately trying to open and continue discussion here and development in the article. doncram (talk) 19:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

If you can write a good, comprehensive article about the historic district, you can pretty much strip the entire article about the village. It might be useful to copy the existing article to a Talk page subpage for reference but go ahead and remove any dubious statements and/or tag any possibly true but unsourced statements. I would welcome someone working on the village article. If the way to do it is to write as if it were just the historic district, be my guest. Aside from a differing boundary, any cultural and historical information would be equally applicable. So, please go ahead and do a complete rewrite. --Polaron | Talk 19:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

My notion is that when content about the HD is obtained, it could be added to the Georgetown article and split off later into a separate article about the HD (if it turns out that the village and HD are sufficiently distinct to be discussed separately). Note that much of the existing Georgetown article consists of Census-derived geographic and demographic information about the Georgetown CDP (this content is sourced but often is not be clearly referenced). It would not be advisable to strip that non-HD content from the article. Also, because it appears that much of the remainder of this sparse article is actually sourced to the items listed as external links, it should not be terribly difficult to improve the article by adding inline citations. --Orlady (talk) 20:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I see no practical reason why the historic district article cannot be started as a stub and allowed to develop. Writing a standalone historic district article is a different kind of task than writing a summary blurb about the historic district to include in a town/village/whatever article, which has to integrate in with other history and other concerns in that article. As a standalone article, the experience of editing is different: there can be a Talk page devoted to discussing appropriate other model examples, and questions of sourcing, and so on. If the article has not been developed very far, it is possible to achieve a 5-fold expansion and put the article up for DYK. While the article is a stub, the presence of the article and its stub tag is an advertisement that this is a safe place to edit, this has been established as wikipedia notable, and it would usually be safe to assume that there will not be edit warring, you can go take pictures of all the listed contributing buildings and include them in the article and no one will delete them, etc. An explicit reqphoto on the Talk page calls for those who use the reqphoto system, who might use the Google Earth tools to browse in all the reqphotos in Connecticut that have coordinates associated with them. The focus of a historic district article is how the buildings, structures, etc. are historical artifacts that, with interpretation, speak to the past history of events and people associated with them. How the architecture expresses the ideals and aspirations of the time, etc. The district is a museum, which consists of individual artifacts. The focus is on these artifacts. Other history that is not represented in any artifacts can perhaps be mentioned in passing, but is not germane.

As a section in a village/town article, the experience of editing is likely to be different. You cannot bring the article to DYK, because there already is other material, like lists of people with any association to the town, which prevents you from achieving a 5 fold expansion. If you edit in the town article and develop it, you may possibly be permitted by some process, yet-to-be-decided, to split it out. But then your edit history and the Talk page history will be left behind. Or some other person will be the one to split it out, and you won't get the satisfaction yourself of getting to create or complete a nice standalone article. And up to that point, your experience will be more contentious, more subject to edit warring, as various parties contend for the importance of school districts, for the placement of a high school sports team's victory, etc. Even if your section on the historic district is good, it will be one good part in an article that you might view as bad otherwise, as an article with multiple unsourced statements and different writing styles and standards than your own. You cannot possibly develop a suitable lede for the standalone article that could ultimately be split out, while it is still a section. There will be rearrangements and mergers of material, as you and others seek to integrate modern history and older-than-the-artifacts-history and history of people and events associated with other areas of the town, or not associated with any specific area. You will be bogged down in characterizing the district vs. the other parts of the town. As a town article, it will attract many kinds of editors, who have differing opinions about what is important. And if you do develop the historic district article to describe a significant portion of the 120 contributing properties, it will surely have to be split out eventually.

So why not split it out to start with? There is no wikipedia policy prohibiting it. There is no question that the HD is notable, and that extensive sources are available to use in developing it (the NRHP application document for a start, and all the sources in its bibliography). Taking a long view, there is certainty that the article eventually will be split out. There are some (perhaps minor) upfront economies for supporting structure, to get the article split out to the finally intended location for it, sooner rather than later (structure in disambiguation pages, in the town article itself, in the county NRHP list-article, and in other articles that might link to the HD article). It is the opinion of some editors that the early-on material in a stub article, can be swept into the town article, which is fine, and there is, early-on, not an obvious need for wikipedia readers for there to have a separate article. But I don't think it is right for these editors to be allowed to judge that there cannot be a separate article sooner rather than later. And I argue that it is better for wikipedia to allow them to be started sooner, that the will be developed.

That's my schpiel (sp?) for now. If there is not some movement on this question for Georgetown and other CT NRHP articles in the discussion here, then perhaps it is getting to be time to seek other input. I could make a proposal for an RfC for example. However, I think it is absurd that one would have to seek the input of the wikipedia community world-wide, on the stupid point of whether a wikipedia-notable article (or about 50 of them in CT) can be created. doncram (talk) 02:22, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Fairfield county HDs

I am disappointed to find that Polaron has, despite of or because of discussion about these very issues going on here on this page, gone on to create numerous more redirects and/or to paste in NRHP infoboxes, categories, etc into town / village / neighborhood articles, in a series of edits on June 16. Following are the main Fairfield HD NRHP items not yet discussed separately.

In most of the cases here where Polaron has acted in a series of edits on 16 June in ways that I think detract from the town articles, make it harder for others to get started and create good HD articles, and sets up either total control by himself or continuing conflict. In none of the following cases which I review do I see any evidence of boundaries of NRHP districts vs. boundaries of towns/villages/neighborhoods. In no case do I see any substantial contribution, it is just cutting and pasting in the Elkman output. I think this sets up continuing disagreement which would be avoided if HD articles were left as redlinks to be created as new people come by, or left as minimal stubs, to grow until there is clear information. Then, in the few cases where there truly is high overlap so that there is little to be discussed in one rather than the other article, it would be easy to implement a merger by consensus.

I am kind of afraid to look at Polaron's contribution history over the days since June 16, and to look at the HDs in the other 7 counties. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

It might be worth separating the town center districts from the town as a whole for ease of organization. However, village that are or have most of their area included in a historic district should not become separate articles. Specifically, the town center ones are: Wilton Center, Brookfield Center, Fairfield, Monroe Center, Redding Center, Ridgefield Center, Sherman, and Stratford Center. These will probably be in the end better as separate articles for organization purposes although the history will be identical to the town. The village/neighborhood ones are: Aspectuck, Downtown Stamford, Glenville, Greenfield Hill, Hattertown, Huntington Center, Long Ridge Village, Newtown Borough, Nichols Farms, Main Street (Danbury) and Round Hill. It does not make sense to separate the community article from the historic district. Note that in cases where a separate historic district article exist, the neighborhood/village article doesn't exist (i.e. there is no separate article for Nichols village or Downtown Danbury). The rest are neither town centers nor prinicipal communities (Norfield, Putnam Hill). So basically, villages/neighborhoods and historic districts ar better off merged. Town centers should probably be split out for easier presentation. --Polaron | Talk 23:00, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Various historic district articles with resolved or no issues

Wilton Center Historic District

Wilton Center Historic District currently redirects to Wilton, Connecticut. Polaron added the infobox into the Wilton town article in this recent diff. As for other cases, i think the town is far different than this historic district. It seems inappropriate to tag the town article with colonial architecture and other categories that apply to the historic district. The town is not in the National Register of Historic Places, so the NRHP template should be removed from the article and so should the wikiproject NRHP banner be removed from the Talk page, in my view. To discuss here, first, what evidence is there of overlap, or can it be acknowledged that the HD is smaller/different and removed? doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Given no discussion, and apparent-to-me appropriateness of separating this out, I went ahead and started the separate HD article. I revised the town article to link to it and otherwise to conform. doncram (talk) 05:07, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

As I said, I have no strong objection to splitting out town centers as these are essentially neighborhoods. I think we're good to go on this one. --Polaron | Talk 05:13, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Good. I am somewhat surprised, as the timing of your edits on June 16 to put the NRHP infobox into the town article, given dicussion opened to proceed otherwise, seemed to set up combat over this HD. If that is now your reasoning, would you please assist in splitting out the HDs to separate articles, to narrow what is the apparent zone of conflict? doncram (talk) 05:23, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Read what I wrote in the top of the main section to understand where I'm coming from. As I said, I have no strong objection about splitting out town centers. I listed above which ones are town centers. Basically, if it redirects to a town article, it is most likely a town center. --Polaron | Talk 05:25, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Aspetuck Historic District

Redirected, i presume by Polaron, to Aspetuck. NRHP infobox etc added by Polaron there in [this edit on June 16].

I moved article to Aspetuck Historic District and removed all but the NRHP infobox and NRIS-supported statements. No other information was sourced. doncram (talk) 05:16, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Brookfield Center Historic District

Brookfield Center Historic District currently redirects to town of Brookfield, Connecticut. It is so far only mentioned in the article that the HD is within the town. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Downtown Stamford Historic District

Downtown Stamford Historic District currently redirects to Downtown Stamford, to which on June 16 by this edit Polaron added NRHP infobox stuff. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I deleted the NRHP HD infobox from the Town article, where it seems inappropriate to me. There was no real integration in the town article, so this just amounts to undoing the June 16 edits.

Here, rather than starting a stub article with only the NRHP infobox and NRIS source, could an administrator please just delete the redirect? The redirect seems unhelpful, with or without the infobox being in the town article, because it suggests the NRHP HD could not be created at that name. doncram (talk) 05:37, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

These substantially overlap. The Downtown article already describes buildings and what not. It will end up being the same so a single article is preferable. Just restructure the current article to fit the historic district information. Note this is not a redirect to a town article but to a neighborhood article and we shoudl avoid duplication. --Polaron | Talk 05:40, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay, i encounter Polaron reversing my edits in the town article. To clarify that a separate HD article can be created, and provide a location for a possible merger discussion, I will create a stub now. doncram (talk) 05:40, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Edit warring? I reverted because a duplicate article does not make sense. Now that you've been reverted, you need to make a case that the articles won't end up with substantial overlap. --Polaron | Talk 05:43, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

And i encounter Polaron deleting the article-in-progress. I started a stub from one NRHP infobox report, indicating that there was other information to add from other NRHP infobox data. In the process I notice that the infobox that Polaron is warring to include in the town article is an incomplete one. He is unaware of how the NRHP infobox system data works, or otherwise chooses not to compose an infobox that conveys the boundary increase information. I save the stub in progress to go get other reports; Polaron reverts to a redirect, judging that there will not / cannot be enough information for a separate article, I suppose. His edit summary is reasonably nice: "please be reasonable, I'm trying to consolidate articles for better presentation". Anyhow, by the time i encounter the edit conflict, I have developed the article to include dates, areas, and architecture information from the 3 separate NRHP listings that developed this historic district.

This example is a perfect example of Polaron warring to prevent another editor from creating an NRHP article, with unjustified pre-judgment that there could not possibly be enough information about Downtown Stamford Historic District that should be in a separate article. Actually, I think just the starter information I provided is probably more than is appropriate to edit into village/town article, and i haven't even started listing all the 1,000 buildings in the district! doncram (talk) 06:05, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

It also is an example of where inappropriate NRHP-related factoids detract from a town article. The town article now is "1910 architecture" and no other architecture categories although the town, from the pictures and other knowledge even I have, looks like it is rather more modern, on average.  :) That is a stray category from one of the 3 NRHP listings that make up the HD, which include Modern Movement and other architecture, too. And it is categorized in "National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut", while the town is not an NRHP, only some fraction of it is NRHP-listed. The town article includes numerous unsourced statements. I, and I think many would-be NRHP editors, would not enjoy working on the town article, but some would be happy to develop a focussed, all-sourced HD article which could provide support for a better town article. I'll stop now. doncram (talk) 07:20, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Main Street Historic District (Danbury, Connecticut)

Main Street Historic District (Danbury, Connecticut)] article was created by Daniel Case back in March, seems fine to me. No issues of definition of overlap, etc., this is a clean, clear short article about the HD. As many/most other HD articles could/should be done in my view. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Nichols Farms Historic District

Nice article by Tomticker, not redirected

Norfield Historic District

Currently redlink, not redirected anywhere

Putnam Hill Historic District

Currently redlink, not redirected anywhere

Fairfield Historic District

Fairfield Historic District (Fairfield, Connecticut) redirects to Fairfield, Connecticut town article. By this edit on 16 June, Polaron adds NRHP material.

Can we revisit this one? Fairfield is a large town including at least three historic districts and a number of other NRHP-listed places. I believe it is fairly obviously appropriate, and it would be consistent with decisions taken on other places, to split out the Fairfield Historic District from the article about the much-larger town. Polaron, would you agree about this, now? I'd like to X off this open item. doncram (talk) 20:15, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I split out separate Fairfield H D article, and revised the town article to wikilink to the several HDs and numerous non-HD NRHP places included in the town. This is done for now, I believe. doncram (talk) 19:10, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Glenville Historic District

Glenville Historic District redirects to Glenville, Connecticut. By this edit on 16 June, Polaron adds NRHP material there.

There is no sourced information in the Glenville article, other than the NRHP info, which may be inappropriate to include because there is no description of the relationship between the two. The article omits to include Glenville Historic District in bold in the lede text to communicate to readers that this is the article they meant to get to. I would prefer to have the Glenville article deleted and to have the redirect to it also deleted. Polaron, could you discuss here? Given ongoing discussion, I'd rather discuss than open a PROD or AFD, but perhaps the PROD would be the technically right way to go. But, maybe it is necessary to start the stub article to establish that it can be separate, if there is not agreement that future NRHP editors can create and develop it separately from the burden of explaining about a village that may or may not be the same area. doncram (talk) 06:39, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Greenfield Hill Historict District

Greenfield Hill Historic District redirects to Greenfield Hill neighborhood article. [Polaron's 16 June edit]

Hattertown Historic District

Hattertown Historic District redirects to Hattertown to which NRHP stuff added by [this edit on 16 June]. Note, the address description in the NRHP list-article doesn't make proper sense, i think Hattertown, CT was previously given as the town name, changed to Shelton. Hattertown needs to be mentioned, else the street address description is not clear. The streets are in Hattertown, I assume.

Hattertown is a village of Newtown. --Polaron | Talk 23:00, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Shelton / Newtown, whatever you changed it to. Does it make sense to give the house number and street address, followed by a different town name now than as provided originally by the National Register database, or not? You are the one who changed all these. I am just suggesting that they bear some review.

And the stub article, here in the current version has no sources, no information, no support for the implied assertion that the neighborhood is the same as the historic district, which is possibly false. It is worse than having just a redlink for the historic district, no article whatsoever. It even fails to show the historic district name in the text, in bold, to explain to some readers why they arrived here. The article appears to exist only to subvert the creation of an all-sourced NRHP HD article by any other editor. In this case, the article did exist before, you did not just create it. But there is nothing there, while i am being raked over the coals in other discussions for not putting more into fully sourced, perfectly accurate starter articles. doncram (talk) 23:42, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

"Hattertown" is not used as an address. One always uses "Newtown". It doesn't matter if the boundaries of the neighborhood and district are not exactly the same. The significane of Hattertown will be the same as for the precisely defined district. Since the article currently has no content other stating what it is. You are free to write it the way you want. It would have made no difference if you yourself wrote a new article. The article exists because a historic village by the name of Hattertown exists. --Polaron | Talk 01:12, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

When you say "You are free to write it the way you want" do you mean you will not edit war if I move it to Hattertown Historic District? There is no information in the article about Hattertown, separate from the Hattertown Historic District, besides the google map link to a point, not showing an area for Hattertown, which adds nothing relative to the NRHP infobox that has a point location within it, too. So far, it appears there is no need for a town article. I would prefer to start the Hattertown Historic District article and would not care if you wanted to have a redirect from Hattertown to it. Is that okay. doncram (talk) 06:56, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Huntington Center Historic District

Huntington Center Historic District redirects to Shelton, Connecticut, not yet having NRHP infobox.

Long Ridge Village Historic District

Long Ridge Village Historic District now redirects to brand new article Long Ridge (Stamford) created by Polaron on 16 June. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

No sources other than the NRHP infobox and its source, but it is unsourced that the HD is the same as Long Ridge (Stamford), which is a poorly formed name in my view anyhow. I expect that it would be hard for any NRHP editor or anyone else to get a DYK, for example, for an article at that name, while it would be relatively easy for a person who visited, took a few pics, and got the NRHP application, to write a DYK article. If Polaron would agree not to combat any future NRHP HD editor, I would prefer to delete the article and the redirect, now. Otherwise, start the article at the NRHP HD name, where the NRIS source will support the article directly. doncram (talk) 07:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Monroe Center Historic District

Monroe Center Historic District redirects to Monroe, Connecticut. NRHP infobox not present.

Tagged redirect for {{NRHP redirect cleanup needed}}, asking for it to be deleted. doncram (talk) 01:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Newtown Borough Historic District

Newtown Borough Historic District redirects to Newtown (borough), Connecticut

Redding Center Historic District

Redding Center Historic District redirects to Redding, Connecticut. NRHP infobox not present.

Ridgefield Center Historic District

Ridgefield Center Historic District redirects to Ridgefield, Connecticut to which NRHP stuff added by Polaron's 16 June edit

Round Hill Historic District

Round Hill Historic District redirected to new article Round Hill (Greenwich) on 16 June by Polaron. There is no information in the article about the neighborhood, it is just the NRHP infobox.

Sherman Historic District

Currently redirects to town of Sherman, Connecticut, which I believe is far larger than the historic district. Polaron on 16 June added the NRHP infobox, etc. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Stratford Center Historic District

Currently redirects to Stratford, Connecticut which currently does not mention the district. Please don't react by adding the NRHP infobox and other stuff, please discuss evidence of overlap or whatever. doncram (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Bridgeport city HDs

Bridgeport is in Fairfield County but has a separate list-article, National Register of Historic Places listings in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Reviewing that list, it appears that there are few issues. However, two NRHP HD names have been redirected to one neighborhood article, Black Rock (Bridgeport). The neighborhood article currently includes mention, and infobox, of just one of the HDs. To me, it appears that creating two separate NRHP HD articles for Black Rock Historic District and Black Rock Gardens Historic District would be appropriate. I would drop the infobox and add links from the neighborhood article to these two HD articles. It would also be appropriate to add links to any non-HD NRHPs in the neighborhood, but glancing at the Bing map linked from the Bridgeport list does not suggest to me that there are any. Unless there are other opinions expressed here within a few days, i'll proceed that way. doncram (talk) 22:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Black Rock Gardens is a newer development whose significance is not tightly bound to the original area known as "Black Rock" and is better separated. However, Black Rock Historic District is the original ship-building area and should be discussed as part of the overall Black Rock neighborhood. --Polaron | Talk 00:04, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Hartford County HDs

I went through many of the HDs on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Hartford County, Connecticut list to review them, found many/most to have been redirected to town articles. I redirected many, and also invested time in splitting out proper stub NRHP HD articles in some cases. Now, I find that Polaron is going through his watchlist and/or my contribution list using Twinkle, a vandalism-fighting tool, to reverse my edits.

For example, on Tariffville article, from which I split out Tariffville Historic District, there are edit summaries now:

# ) (Reverted to revision 298031617 by Polaron; how do you know it doesn't. (TW)) (rollback | undo)
# (cur) (prev) 03:47, 23 June 2009 Doncram (talk | contribs) (2,983 bytes) (strip out NRHP stuff, just link to separate article about HD which may or may not have much overlap with this CDP)

I can't fight against someone using automated tools to reverse my legitimate work. doncram (talk) 11:56, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Let's discuss each item individually but please don't make changes like this while discussion is ongoing? I have met you halfway by saying I will support not redirecting to a town article. However, we should carefully look at village-HD mergers and I would appreciate the courtesy of not undoing eveything I do while we're discussing. If there are any specific issues about each item, please bring them to my attention. --Polaron | Talk 12:03, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't know the rules about this, but I hope that mass reversions using Twinkle in a legitimate content dispute is a blockable offense.

It is nowhere near halfway. I have invested hours in detailing all of these out in Talk pages, and you have gone on mass change sprees. Only when i start to use simple Undo on your edits, to remove unsourced statements and otherwise, do you start to respond. However, I don't mind discussing, if you do the work. Could you list out the article pairings where you disagree with my edits, here, and make your arguments about why the NRHP HD should not be a separate article? doncram (talk) 12:23, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 August 25#various Hartford County, CT redirects, where I have proposed deletion of about 16 redirects. doncram (talk) 20:50, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Hazardville Historic District

Resolved

At this moment, Hazardville Historic District is this version. Note its NRIS-sourced statement that the HD is not the same as Hazardville; the HD apparently extends outside. Polaron has twice redirected the article twice to Hazardville (Enfield), once reverting my temporary redirect, which i was going to ask to have deleted. There is no source available yet about the bounds of either the HD or of Hazardville. I would prefer to have the article deleted and exist as a redlink, or to exist as a stub NRHP HD. doncram (talk) 13:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Already deleted by Polaron! Dude, didn't you just ask to discuss things one by one? doncram (talk) 13:14, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Dude, didn't I ask you to discuss first before making changes? I'm just restoring the way it was prior to you bringing this up per WP:STATUSQUO. I'm willing to listen to your case for specific splits. --Polaron

Glastonbury-Rocky Hill Ferry Historic District

Resolved

Please discuss merger vs. split of Rocky Hill – Glastonbury Ferry vs. Glastonbury-Rocky Hill Ferry Historic District article here. Please respect my request that an HD article can be created and developed while a merger discussion is ongoing. Please do not remove merger proposal tags, and please do not redirect the HD article, during discussion. doncram (talk) 21:57, 24 June 2009 (UTC) (discussion moved from section about process within #Moving forward, cleanup tasks, below)) Comment by Orlady that started the discussion of the ferry, with italicized annotation for clarity: While not a village, the Rocky Hill – Glastonbury Ferry article that I ran across yesterday is another example (of a case where the historic district page should be a redirect to article about the feature commemorated by the HD) -- the historic district designation was sought to recognize/preserve the historic ferry, and the article focus should be the ferry, not the metes and bounds of the historic district that was designated in order to protect the ferry.) --Orlady (talk) 16:15, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

About the Ferry article, I think i had found the Ferry HD redirected to it, and I split it out tried to have the redirect deleted. There was no indication that the Ferry HD was listed to primarily preserve the ferry. (Speaking to Orlady) I see you did a nice job adding the NRHP infobox stuff into the ferry infobox, and now the article asserts the HD is about the ferry. That's possible, I didn't check your reference saying that the HD is about the ferry, rather than being an HD preserving architecture in a neighborhood nearby. Note there are dozens or hundreds of NRHP HD districts named "Washington Park Historic District" or similarly, where the HD is primarily/largely the buildings surrounding a park or perhaps a multi-block area in the general area, and where the HD may or may not include the park itself. It is wrong to force mergers of the HD with the ferry/park whatever, if it is not known what the NRHP HD covers. To resolve the dispute that is the subject of this RFC, can we agree not to merge NRHP HDs without a merger discussion? To set an example if you agree with this approach to settling the dispute, could you possibly please open a merger discussion section for the ferry case? doncram (talk) 19:37, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

The Ferry HD has "Colonial, Federal" architecture styles, suggesting the HD includes more than the ferry itself. The footnote 4 in the article, a Hartford Courant article, is not accessible to me without registration. I think the right thing to do here, consistent with a general solution to the RFC issue, is to split out the Ferry HD and allow information to accumulate at its separate article, until a merger proposal can be made by consensus. doncram (talk) 19:49, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

You can read the Hartford Courant article in the Google cache without registering (anyway, registration is free) -- just search Google for the article name and click on the "cached" link. The newspaper article makes it clear that the NRHP designation was sought to preserve the historic ferry (oldest continuously operating in the U.S.) and associated features on the two shores. The fact that the structures on the two shores are identified as to architectural style appears to be a detail; their architectural style is not the main reason for the existence of the historic district. (As you should know by now, I get my back up when I am confronted by the attitude that an entity's being listed on the National Register is more noteworthy than the entity itself.) --Orlady (talk) 20:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

The combination of (1) the NRHP data saying that transportation was a major function of the district, (2) the various references that are on the ferry article discussing its listing status, and (3) the title of the Courant article led me to believe that this was essentially the ferry with a few other buildings tossed in, rather than the ferry being only a small part of the district or (obviously incorrectly) the district being only a small part of the ferry. Nyttend (talk) 20:36, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't have that attitude. I go out of my way to help create combination infoboxes so that NRHP listing mention can be secondarily included in articles about lighthouses, etc., and I am very clear that the NRHP listing is secondary. However, in a combo article, there should be notice to arriving readers looking for the NRHP, that this is the correct article, e.g. by stating the NRHP name in bold in the lede. Or by a hatnote (is that what it is called), saying the NRHP name redirects to here.

About the process, not the ferry article itself, I am afraid disagreement discussion about an exception here is unraveling a potential solution to a Connecticut-wide problem. Are you agreeing or not to a process of not forcing mergers of NRHP HDs to town/ferry/park/whatever articles, except where there is a merger proposal? Are you agreeing or not to a cleanup program to undo the recent and previous additions of NRHP stuff to hamlet/village/town articles? I believe most of these cases are where there is no evidence of extent of NRHP overlap. I am afraid this subject is going to be incredibly time-consuming, still, if there is not an agreement. Please state what process you would agree to. doncram (talk) 20:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you talking to me? I'll respond, assuming that you are. In short — overall, I oppose the redirection of titles in general; the Marion HD is a good example. However, as I've said before, if the areas are functionally identical, I think that it would be silly. Take the Eureka Historic District in Utah as an example: it's "Roughly bounded by the city limits", so a redirect to Eureka, Utah is a good idea. As far as something like this: it's apparent to me that the truly significant part of the district is the ferry itself, with some buildings on one or both sides tossed in. Moreover, unlike in Marion, we have similar names: it's obvious that what the NRIS gives as "Glastonbury-Rock Hill Ferry Historic District" is concentrated on the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry and those buildings associated with the facility. Articles on other water-transportation-related places (not necessarily NRHP) commonly include information about the buildings around the water: see Port of Cleveland for an example. Take this as an example of what I think of districts that are (1) concentrated on a specific site or thing, and (2) include areas around that are connected with the central site or thing. For example, isn't it reasonable to have "Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church Complex" in Detroit be a part of (and perhaps a redirect to) Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, or "Catoctin Furnace Historic District" go to Catoctin Furnace, even though there are 12 buildings at the site and only one furnace? Neighborhood districts are different: because the neighborhood itself is a wide area, merging/redirecting the title there makes it seem as if the entire neighborhood and the entire district are the same; the only situation where I think that this would be good is if the entire neighborhood really were listed. Nyttend (talk) 21:42, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

(end of moved discussion, please continue here) I put the NRHP infobox into the ferry article yesterday, merged with the ferry infobox. It looks better that way. I didn't intend to imply anything. From what I was able to find, the District may be due to the fact that the ferry is "split" by the river. It's not located on one side or the other, but on both. There are apparently some buildings associated with the ferry:

Glastonbury--Rock Hill Ferry Historic District

(added 2005 - Hartford County - #05001046)

Roughly along Tryon St., Ferry Ln. and Glastonbury Ave., Meadow and Riverview Rds., Glastonbury
(2300 acres, 153 buildings, 2 objects)

	

Historic Significance: 	Event, Architecture/Engineering

Architect, builder, or engineer: 	multiple

Architectural Style: 	Colonial, Federal

Area of Significance: 	Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture, Architecture

Period of Significance: 	1650-1699, 1700-1749, 1750-1799, 1800-1824, 1825-1849, 1850-1874, 1875-1899, 1900-1924, 1925-1949, 1950-1974

Owner: 	Private , Local Gov't , State

Historic Function: 	Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic, Landscape, Transportation

Historic Sub-function: 	Agricultural Fields, Agricultural Outbuildings, Animal Facility, Secondary Structure, Single Dwelling, Storage, Unoccupied Land

Current Function: 	Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic, Landscape, Transportation

Current Sub-function: 	Agricultural Fields, Agricultural Outbuildings, Animal Facility, Secondary Structure, Single Dwelling, Storage, Unoccupied Land 

Now, what do you make of this? It sounds to me as though the ferry is central, but not alone, by the fact that it's mentioned in the name of the District. - Denimadept (talk) 22:50, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Thanks for contributing!

About the merger proposal: I don't personally want to be developing the NRHP HD article, but it appears to me that the HD is substantially different than the Ferry alone, and dicussion of the historic district could easily overwhelm and detract from the Ferry article. The HD is apparently quite large on both sides of the river and is far more than merely a few structures in landings areas. Check in Google satellite view, how far away is "Pease Lane, Glanstonbury, CT", from the ferry. Pease Lane appears to be wholly included in the HD, and is not by any means part of any approach to the ferry crossing. Check other streets mentioned in Hartford Courant article. It appears to me that there are hundreds of structures in this HD, and the importance of the HD is partly about being the first one in the town of Rocky Hill (while Glastonbury has many HDs), per the Courant. Also, here, no one has collected the NRHP application document. So, currently, I oppose merger, and think it is best to allow the HD article to be developed by any editor who chooses to get the NRHP documents and otherwise develop it.

My bothering to create the HD article is to test out a proposed approach to discussion and development, leading in many cases to merger proposals and noncontentious decisions to merge, later. My point is to proceed in an orderly way that allows for information to be developed, constructively, and recorded in articles rather than reflected only in edit summaries and Talk page arguments. doncram (talk) 22:59, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm mainly interested in the ferry. I included the NRHP stuff because it was related. Should I remove it? Unfortunately, the NRHP infobox doesn't allow for mapping a district. It can only be fed a single location, rather than some arbitrary geometric figure based on lat/long coordinates, whcih it could then map on the locmapin image. I looked, as it would've made more sense. The location in the Ferry article is the Ferry's western quay. It'd have been perfect, from my point of view, if I could have fed the ferry infobox a set of quay coords and/or waypoint coords, so it could map the ferry route on a map, but again, that wasn't an option. - Denimadept (talk) 23:07, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, Orlady didn't add the NHRP box to this article. See [1]. Also, [2] I added the Ferry infobox too, further back. I'd like to call myself Teh Infobox Masta, but I'm not. - Denimadept (talk) 23:21, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for clarifying to me, it was my misunderstanding that Orlady had done that. It's fine that you did. Now that there is a separate HD article, and if it is agreed that it can/will be kept separate, then it would make sense to revise your NRHP coverage in the Ferry article somewhat. Currently the merger proposal is open, and Orlady and Nyttend's previous statements were pro-merger. About info for the Ferry article, I am sure there is plenty of good historical information, and probably an exact map of the ferry route, included in the NRHP application documents. The exact route of a ferry and specifications about the landings were present in the NRHP application documents for Millersburg Ferry, a Pennsylvania ferry (whose HD listing is just the river plus landing areas). See the PDF document in its footnote 2: it is the full NRHP application, available on-line for PA NRHP listings. You can obtain the NRHP document for this CT NRHP by email request to nr_reference (at) nps.gov. They will send it by email if it has been scanned, or by postal mail, at no charge. Hope this helps! About the merger proposal, i interpret your comments as opposing merger, like me? Thanks. doncram (talk) 23:45, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I can see a separate article for each, where the HD article talks briefly about the ferry and refers people to the full article for more information. What happens to the infobox in that case, I dunno. This assumes that we have a lot more to say about the HD as a whole with the ferry as a kind of side-issue. This is very possible, as what ARE all these buildings and objects and such which were included in the HD? Why were they included? Was there general agreement to include them? What's the history of the area? Did the two sides of the river develop because the ferry was present? Development happened to Cambridge due to the Harvard Bridge, so it's possible. What do we have to say about the HD? Are there particular buildings we want to talk about at length? What questions is the HD article to answer? - Denimadept (talk) 00:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Now y'all have gotten me curious. I've now requested the NRHP application. Let's see what develops. - Denimadept (talk) 20:00, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

They have responded by telling me it'll be 3 or 4 weeks. - Denimadept (talk) 20:10, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

I suspect the 2,300-acre area is wrong, and that it's really only 230 acres (which is still pretty large). This is largely based on the discovery that NRIS has extra zeros on the acreages of other HDs. I've outlined the issue on the article talk page for the HD. --Orlady (talk) 21:05, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

What's an order of magnitude or two between friends? I wouldn't be surprised if someone lost a decimal place after "23". - Denimadept (talk) 21:19, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast. According to the reply, they recently finished digitizing all Connecticut-related files, so I now have the application and photos documents, each as a PDF. I'll place them where y'all can get them later today. - Denimadept (talk) 17:43, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Here they are, grab 'em: scanned text of and pictures from the application. I'm working on OCRing the text right now. If I succeed, or once I succeed, it'll be there too. - Denimadept (talk) 02:01, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! About the merger proposal that is still outstanding here, I think the NRHP documents make it clear that this NRHP HD is not very much at all about the ferry, and that it makes sense to keep the ferry article clean and separate. This is different from one ferry NRHP in Pennsylvania, where the NRHP HD was the water plus landings only; this NRHP HD is about the shipbuilding community and farmscapes. The ferry article is appropriately linked from the NRHP HD article, and vice versa. I sensed before that Denimadept also tended to agree the two seemed different, before, and with the documents Denimadept has collected I think it is more clear. So I would like to move that the merger discussion in this case be closed as "Do not merge". For this merger/split case and others I hope we could round up some uninvolved third parties to assist in closings, but I am hoping we the involved parties could just agree here and take this one off the table. doncram (talk) 14:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I have very little interest in the HD. I just wanted to be involved before someone screwed up the ferry article. :-D If I'd been interested in the HD, I'd have finished proofing and reformatting the Word DOC. As it is, I haven't actually finished reading it. My focus is on bridges. Even the ferry itself is kinda secondary. The HD, from my point of view, is tertiary at most. - Denimadept (talk) 15:11, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

• After seeing the nom form, I agree with Doncram that the ferry is only a small (but significant) part of this historic district, so it makes sense to have a separate article about the HD. --Orlady (talk) 15:33, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

PS - For the benefit of posterity, I'd appreciate it if this discussion were archived (after it is concluded) on the talk page for one of the affected articles (where people interested in the article have a good chance of finding it), rather than in the archives for this talk page. --Orlady (talk) 15:35, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

So, are we done here? - Denimadept (talk) 20:51, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Newington Junction North Historic District and related others

Newington Junction North Historic District, Newington Junction South Historic District, and Newington Junction West Historic District have been redirected to Newington Junction article, in edit warring on July 4. Offhand, I am not necessarily opposed now to a joint article, if credible notice can be given that editors would be welcome to develop the separate NRHP HD topics, if they care to go through the trouble of doing research and/or getting pictures. doncram (talk) 19:46, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Tariffville Historic District

As mentioned above, Tariffville Historic District was subject of edit warring redirecting it to Tariffville. doncram (talk) 19:46, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

The current situation looks just fine to me. Tariffville Historic District was originally created as a redirect to Tariffville. All of the content that was ever in the separate HD article during its ~45 minutes of separate existence is in the village/CDP article, except for the sentence "It may include or be included in the modern Census-Designated Place of Tarriffville, Connecticut.{{cn}}" IMHO, the interests of Wikipedia users who want to know about this historic district are well-served by the redirect. --Orlady (talk) 23:44, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't agree with your last assertion. About the HD, the Tariffville article contains just the NRHP infobox and the lede "Tariffville is a neighborhood and census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Simsbury in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 1,371 at the 2000 census. The area is listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places....". Even that information, if you can credit it as that, is just an unsourced statement; it is not known or supported that the NRHP HD is the area of the neighborhood and/or CDP. At the current condition, like if we were just going to walk away without developing it ourselves, it would be better to leave in place a redlink or restore the stub article, IMHO. doncram (talk) 00:45, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I stand by my comment. All that the HD article (which you created over the redirect) contained was the NRHP infobox, the statement that the HD is listed on the NRHP, and that speculative sentence alleging that it might or might not be related to the misspelled "Tarriffville." --Orlady (talk) 03:53, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Collinsville Historic District (Collinsville, Connecticut)

Collinsville Historic District (Collinsville, Connecticut) also was subject of edit warring. Currently redirected to Collinsville, Connecticut. doncram (talk) 20:50, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Um, the only "edit warring" on that page occurred when somebody named Doncram changed the redirect destination from the Collinsville article to National Register of Historic Places listings in Hartford County, Connecticut. Since the Collinsville article is focused on Collinsville's historic past and the historic character of the community today, it seems like an eminently sensible destination for the redirect (and far more useful to the reader than a county-wide list would be). No reason to change the status quo. --Orlady (talk) 03:57, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Old Wethersfield Historic District

Old Wethersfield Historic District seems not to have been warred about, as redirect to Old Wethersfield in place since 2006. However the HD seems likely different than Old Wethersfield, and article needs editing at a minimum. doncram (talk) 20:50, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Current situation looks fine to me. The Old Wethersfield article needs work, but your unsourced hunch that the historic district "seems likely [to be] different from Old Wethersfield" does not justify deleting the potentially useful redirect. Furthermore, your hunch does not justify creating a whole separate article, particularly since it looks like the historic district is the main topic of Old Wethersfield. --Orlady (talk) 00:05, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually we may be agreeing, sort of. Given that the only 2 inline sources in the article are about the NRHP HD, and there are problems with the 2 external links (I just moved those to its Talk page to discuss), it would probably better to move the article to the NRHP HD name, "Old Wethersfield Historic District". The lede assertion that Old Wethersfield is also known as Old Wethersfield Historic District is the main unsourced statement in the article, in my view. That assertion could be dropped naturally if the article is moved to be clearly about the NRHP HD, which is a wikipedia-notable topic on its own. Some more development of sources should help here, but in the current condition I think placing the article at the NRHP HD name would be better supported. doncram (talk) 00:36, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean in saying that we may be agreeing. I guess we are both saying that this should be one article. I figure it should be one article entitled "Old Wethersfield," about a section of the town of Wethersfield that was first settled in 1634, includes 3 National Historic Landmarks, was designated a town historic district in 1962, was listed on the National Register as an HD in 1970, and is apparently a tourist attraction. As I see it, you are saying that it should be called "Old Wethersfield Historic District" and the article's primary focus should be the NHRP HD, because you say the reason the place is notable is the fact that it is listed on the National Register. Sorry, but I disagree with you on the name. It looks to me like this would be a notable place with or without the National Register listing, and its primary name is "Old Wethersfield." --Orlady (talk) 23:57, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Hartford city HDs

The city has its own list-article National Register of Historic Places listings in Hartford, Connecticut. I only note one issue, the Downtown North HD one. doncram (talk) 22:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Downtown North Historic District

Downtown North Historic District (Hartford, Connecticut) currently redirects to Downtown Hartford, an article about an area that includes eight NRHP HDs. I think all eight should be linked, and currently appear as redlinks, from the Downtown Hartford article. doncram (talk) 22:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

About half of the historic districts are part of a Downtown Hartford MRA and the other half are older. Downtown Hartford is a very compact place with a unified history and it makes more sense to develop the Downtown Hartford MRA as a single article. --Polaron | Talk 00:10, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, maybe we could not judge that particular idea right now, about how later development might be done. I haven't browsed whatever MRA you are referring to, and maybe it makes sense to have an article on the topic of the MRA (Note, any such article should not be about the MRA itself, which is just one study document like a book, but perhaps it is okay to have an article about the topic, largely sourced from the document). For now, though, would it be okay to delete the redirect from the Downtown North HD, leaving it open to be created as an article by someone else? That would take it off the list of items here. And, if in the interim someone else did choose to take pics and develop the Downtown North HD article, I would think that should be fine by you, whether or not you later want to merge material into some other combo article. doncram (talk) 01:17, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, no. This is better discussed as a set of historic districts. By all means develop the content within the current framework but it would better serve readers to discuss closely related topics in one article. --Polaron | Talk 02:22, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Okay, well this is a problem then. You seem to have intentions to develop this and many other NRHP HD topics as part of other articles, and for that reason you want to prevent others from doing individual articles which might not fit with your vision for combined articles. Is that a fair statement? You are not prevented from trying to develop area articles which include some coverage of NRHP HDs, but IMO you cannot be allowed to prevent other wikipedians from developing articles on NRHP HDs in. the meantime. Redirecting NRHP HD names is preventative; allowing redlinks and stub articles is part of allowing others to do what development they want to in Wikipedia. I don't get why you should object; you are not prevented from developing what you want. Even if you do develop all the articles you intend, in many cases that still should not preclude the development of more detailed articles on some of the covered individual NRHP HDs. Could you comment on whether what I state as your reasoning, accurately states your view? I wonder, also, if you wish to enlist others in working on your approach to covering CT in wikipedia, whether you could find some more positive way. doncram (talk) 02:37, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

In case you want it, the MPS form for the Downtown Bridgeport MRA is here. Nyttend (talk) 14:57, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Nyttend. Bridgeport was also under discussion, but here you meant to point to the Hartford Downtown MRA. I see that document, prepared in 1984, mentions 7 historic districts, not necessarily NRHP ones. The Downtown North HD was NRHP-listed in 1988. doncram (talk) 15:16, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I was confident that I'd seen Bridgeport, but a search of the entire page doesn't reveal anything about a Bridgeport MRA except this comment. Sorry about that. Nyttend (talk) 01:34, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

This seems like a straightforward case, where redirect of one or more NRHPs to an article about a larger area that includes many, is not appropriate. I just started Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 September 21#various NRHP HDs in CT to have this redirect and another one deleted. Please discuss there but i do think this is straightforward. doncram (talk) 16:25, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Tolland County HDs

I went through the 17 or so NRHP HDs in National Register of Historic Places listings in Tolland County, Connecticut, the smallest CT NRHP list. I found that redirects to town/village articles had been set up for all of them. Trying something different, I requested deletion of the redirect for each instance where there was no information about the NRHP in the redirect target article, which was maybe a dozen or more cases. Given others' distaste for stub NRHP articles (which I understand), I think it is best for there to be just a redlink from the NRHP list-article, and to leave it to any interested NRHP editor to start the article. In a few cases the redirect was to a CDP article that covers an area different from the HD but which had been edited to include the NRHP categories (which usually do not apply) and infobox. I removed that material and linked instead to a new separate NRHP HD stub which i created. In a couple cases the NRHP info had been placed into a new article about a hamlet, with no other information about the hamlet. I moved the article or created a new article from scratch for the NRHP HDs, leaving a redirect from the hamlet name.

In many of these cases, my steps effectively attempts to reverse redirects that had been set up, but I believe in many/most cases Polaron's revised preferences would be to not include the NRHP HD in the previous target article. If there are any cases where there is disagreement, those should be listed and discussed here. In no case, however, did i find any source/evidence that the NRHP HD was substantially the same as one of the town/village targets, which would be needed as part of arguing (why argue?) that the HD should be merged. doncram (talk) 21:07, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Let's say that I had never heard of the NRHP or this dispute until now. If I believed that you were right by fact and by policy, would it be right for me to delete these redirects? Are these supposed to be some sort of PROD tags, or speedy delete tags? I'm quite confused about the tags that you placed. Nyttend (talk) 02:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I think so, i am in fact requesting the redirects to town articles where there is no NRHP info in the town article, to be deleted. This is a proposal, below, in #Moving forward, cleanup tasks below, to ask you or other admin to go through and delete such redirects. The speedy delete requests i first placed on several Tolland County redirects were technically incorrect and have all been rejected, i believe. I've just tagged some of the redirects with vague-sounding template / category, {{NRHP redirect cleanup needed}}. By "cleanup", I personally want all those to be deleted. Maybe the same template/category could be used in some future cleanup project too, but here i have just used it to tag redirects that are unhelpfully implying an HD article exists, and should be deleted. Type 1 (?) in discussion below.doncram (talk) 03:28, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion would certainly not be proper; you should either use PROD (if you don't expect any opposition) or RFD. --NE2 04:28, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Here is one thought:

• Tolland, Connecticut does have some information about Tolland Green Historic District, which makes the current redirect more useful than no information at all (or could be the basis for a stub article). --Orlady (talk) 19:30, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

I responded in the RFD for the Tolland Green HD redirect, at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 June 25#various Tolland County, Connecticut NRHP HDs, which is where discussion about this one should continue, I believe. doncram (talk) 14:21, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Windham County HDs

In the absence of other movement, I am beginning to review Windham county NRHPs. Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District and Bush Hill Historic District are two that had surprising-to-me redirects and some evidence in edit history of combative edits. I've restored articles for them and added links from town/neighborhood articles to which they were redirected. I think it's possible that now there would not be disagreement, but am mentioning these here in case there is interest in discussion. doncram (talk) 06:47, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

• I've edited Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District and put a merge template on it. Given the paucity of information in the HD article, it makes far more sense to send a user to the article about the small borough of Danielson, Connecticut (at least until such time as the HD article has meaningful content) instead of exposing the user to an article that says little more than "Fill-in-Name Historic District is a historic district." Bush Hill Historic District looks like its sufficiently distinct from the town that it needs an article, though. --Orlady (talk) 21:21, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

I continued through the Windham county NRHP HDs and replaced a number of redirects with NRHP stub articles, adding wikilinks to these stubs from the town/CDP/hamlet articles they had been redirected to, if the town/CDP/hamlet article actually mentioned them already (at least some did not). Please feel free to check them all and discuss. I believe Polaron has noted at least some of these already and "approves" in at least some.

Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District

resolved discussion on Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District

(discussion moved by doncram, to here, from Danielson, Connecticut article.--Doncram)
I propose merging Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District into this article (leaving a redirect behind) because the stub article about the historic district has far too little content or context to merit a stand-alone article. The stub is currently a database entry in two different formats: once as an infobox and once as prose. It explains nothing about why the district is listed (we can be reasonably sure that the architectural styles represented are not the reason for its listing -- more likely it has to do with the history of the community), nor what the surrounding community is like, nor anything else that justifies the existence of an encyclopedia entry. The Danielson article also is sparse, but the combination of the various elements (boilerplate info on geography and demographics, boilerplate info on two historic districts, and a few user-contributed elements including images) are the beginnings of a worthwhile article that already provides greater understanding of the HD than the separate HD article does.

As I understand it, the idea that NRHP listings are "inherently notable" is predicated on the notion that sufficient information has been published about each listing to impart notability and form the basis for an article. This does not necessarily mean that an article should exist for every such listing even in the absence of that "sufficient information." --Orlady (talk) 13:39, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

About the Broad Street-Davis Park Historic District, I suppose we can have the same discussion. There is a paucity of sources so far, but the NRHP HD has an extensive, authoritative NRHP application document which can be obtained which will provide detail for future editors to tabulate and describe and illustrate the contributing properties. It is not conceivable to me that it will be appropriate to include all that detail in the Danielson town article.

Note, Danielson is a town/village/whatever with at least two separate historic districts. It will be impossible for someone to document that Danielson is the same as the first one and also that Danielson is the same as the second one, which is distinct from the first. Rather impossible actually. Orlady, it seems inconsistent with your arguments elsewhere that you should seek to enforce a merger here. Could you please just withdraw the merger proposal? Or, let's discuss here in this section, in parallel with other CT merger proposals on this page. I will seek to direct the merger proposal tags to point discussion to here. doncram (talk) 01:12, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm inclined to leave this as a separate article as this is basically a park and its adjacent street, which will have a somewhat different history from the borough as a whole. This is a different situation from unincorporated New England villages. --Polaron | Talk 01:26, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to be bold and remove the merger proposal, and call this resolved. doncram (talk) 18:38, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Wauregan Historic District

I guess there is dispute about Wauregan Historic District, too, as it was just redirected to Wauregan, Connecticut, and I just reverted that. doncram (talk) 18:14, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

New London County HDs

I'm starting through the NRHP HDs in National Register of Historic Places listings in New London County, Connecticut now. Baltic Historic District, for first example. doncram (talk) 09:22, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 August 31#various New London County, CT, redirects. I am proposing deletions of redirects that I think should be non-controversial there, and will note below potentially controversial items in the county. doncram (talk) 23:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Noank Historic District

Noank Historic District was redirected to Noank, an article about a CDP. doncram (talk) 23:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion created at Talk:Noank to close or modify the merge. Acroterion _(talk) 12:25, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Norwichtown Historic District

Norwichtown Historic District was redirected to Norwichtown, an article about a neighborhood. doncram (talk) 23:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion created at Talk:Norwichtown to close or modify the page move. Acroterion _(talk) 14:09, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Poquetanuck Village Historic District

Poquetanuck Village Historic District is redirected to Poquetanuck, an article about the historic district. At this point, in absence of any information besides the Elkman generator info in the article, I would move this to the NRHP HD name, but it will require a Requested Move, due to the NRHP HD previously being redirected elsewhere. doncram (talk) 23:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion created at Talk:Poquetanuck to close or modify the page move. Acroterion _(talk) 14:12, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Quaker Hill Historic District

Quaker Hill Historic District (Waterford, Connecticut) is redirected to Quaker Hill. doncram (talk) 23:25, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion created at Talk:Quaker Hill to close or modify the combined HD/locale. Acroterion _(talk) 14:14, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

New Haven County HDs

I'm starting through the NRHP HDs in National Register of Historic Places listings in New Haven County, Connecticut now. Have nominated a good number of redirects in a batch for deletion, following the model for the batch Tolland County redirects that were deleted, at wp:RFD. I would appreciate if others could add more to that batch. In a couple cases i have started a stub NRHP article. Please note here if there is anything to discuss. doncram (talk) 12:34, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I think you intended to provide a link to WP:RFD#various New Haven County, CT, redirects. By the way, if you or anyone else is creating new pages for Connecticut HDs, please add them (manually) to Category:Historic districts in Connecticut. --Orlady (talk) 13:59, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Stony Creek-Thimble Islands Historic District

resolved discussion on Stony Creek-Thimble Islands Historic District (leave as separate articles)

In response to objection at wp:RFD to simply deleting the redirect for this NRHP HD, which pointed to an article that had no mention of the NRHP HD, I created an NRHP stub article at Stony Creek-Thimble Islands Historic District, which Polaron promptly deleted and put in place a redirect to Thimble Islands. He copied in most or all of the NRHP HD article into the Thimble Islands article. Polaron, I don't get what about the suggested process you don't understand. The process is: 1) don't delete my work, 2) make a premature merger proposal if you wish, 3) wait for me to point out the merger is premature because no one has obtained the NRHP document and other materials, to allow for informed judgment about geographical overlap, ETC. Don't delete my work, please, again. This is beyond tedious!

You haven't made a merger proposal, but let me point out that the NRHP HD includes first in its name "Stony Creek" which is a non-island area outside the Thimble Islands. It seems random to me that you are trying to redirect the article to the Thimble article rather than to the Stony Creek article. Certainly the NRHP HD spans two areas and it will probably not ever be appropriate to shoehorn it into one or the other. Even if you had the NRHP application, which I presume you don't. You just don't get to go around erasing wikipedia-valid NRHP articles with no due process, no consensus. doncram (talk) 01:58, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Excuse me, but .... In the discussion at RFD (that's a link to the specific discussion), Doncram proposed deletion of the redirect, Polaron said "Keep The islands article is an appropriate place to discuss the district. The entire island group is in the district." and Doncram proceeded to create a new article in place of the redirect after saying "There is/was no mention of the NRHP HD in the article, but if u say there is substantial overlap then a separate NRHP HD article needs to be created and/or the NRHP HD is to be discussed as part of Thimble Islands article. Merger vs. split discussion to occur elsewhere." That doesn't look like a consensus process to me, but rather like unilateral action. If you truly want others to engage in productive discussion with you, I suggest that that you refrain from short-circuiting discussions by taking unilateral action that is calculated to get a reaction. Sorry, but the "process" I see Doncram "suggesting" seems to boil down to "do things my way or get out of the way", and that's not the Wikipedia way. --Orlady (talk) 03:22, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

That was a discussion of the Redirect. It seems that Polaron and perhaps you want for there to be substantial discussion of the nature of the NRHP HD and so on. So I created the NRHP HD article, to start that. This, here, rather than at wp:RFD, is an okay place to discuss whether the NRHP HD should be kept separate or should be merged. Honestly I thought creating the NRHP HD article was fine and productive to do. Note, there was no mention of the NRHP HD at all in the Thimble Islands article, and on the face of it, also, it covers area in Stony Creek, first, so it just appeared the redirect was a surprising, unhelpful one. Polaron has since taken issue with that, by copying the material i created into the Thimble Islands article, but on the face of it it was reasonable for me to assume there would be no real issue (I did assume that). About "my way or the highway", THAT IS WHY ALL THIS IS GOING ON, that Polaron showed editing practices of edit warring to get his way, on numerous CT NRHP HD topics, previously. I have invested tens of hours if not hundreds of hours now in attempting to deal with this constructively, notifying everyone of every step i take, and he is battling by redirecting, on the basis of his opinion and in the absence of sources. This is back to the RFC question: shall one editor be allowed to force his views, in the absence of sources and information. All the time i put in to create constructive discussion is wasted here. You, Orlady, should get beyond looking at the small-scale assertions of fact about these places, and look at the bigger process here, and at who is ignoring wikipedia processes and forcing his opinion. doncram (talk) 04:03, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

And you're not forcing your your opinion? And you're not edit warring? If you look at the bigger picture, you would be adding content rather than edit warring. I have refocused to adding content in the past 2 days, which I hope you will as well. Unless you yourself will be working to expand these articles in the future, please allow editors who are interested in expanding them to edit the articles in the way they prefer. In case you haven't noticed, at the moment, no one else really edits Connecticut locality articles substantially but me. If you are making a commitment to expand these in the near future, I'll let your editorial preferences stand. Otherwise, let the people who are interested in these topics have their editorial preferences stand. --Polaron | Talk 04:25, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

(Comment moved from Talk of the NRHP HD article by Doncram): The islands are the main part. Only a narrow strip of the mainland is included. Content should be expanded at the main article. --Polaron | Talk 02:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't follow what is the "main article". The NRHP HD article is the main article about the NRHP HD. If you have maps or information, by all means please share. On the face of it, the name of the NRHP HD includes first the name Stony Creek, perhaps suggesting that the Stony Creek mainland portion is the larger or more important part of the NRHP HD. It is immediately obvious that there is significant difference geographically between the NRHP HD and the Thimble Islands. doncram (talk) 02:29, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Stony Creek is the entire southeast section of Branford. It is basically the portion of the 2nd voting district east of the stream known as "Stony Creek". The Route 146 Historic District is partly in Stony Creek. The Thimble Islands are also part of Stony Creek. It is true that densest part of Stony Creek is in that strip heading towards the Thimble Islands but that portion is a tiny part of Stony Creek. --Polaron | Talk 02:38, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe a word you say. I have given you leeway in countless discussions, assuming you have knowledge, but at this point i don't care what you supposedly know. You have no sources. If you do have sources, you hold them back and don't add. This is getting impossible to deal with.

I added more to develop the NRHP HD article, and Polaron redirected it again, losing the content that i added (when he redirected a previous time, he had copied my content into the Thimble islands article). I restored the NRHP HD article and added a bit more. The process is: allow development of separate articles. Discuss civilly. Make a merger proposal if you like. Do not delete valid wikipedia articles and content unilaterally. I think your behavior is disruptive and unhelpful and it is edit warring and destructive, deliberately ignoring wikipedia processes. I would block you from editing, if I were an administrator and were not involved. doncram (talk) 03:44, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sure you know more about this area than I do as I have never ever contributed anything worthwhile. Also, no one is deleting information here. I am consolidating the relevant information into the main article. Why is it that I must be the one to propose a merge. For a change, you should allow a consolidated article to develop and propose a split if you think the article is getting too long. I have given you a lot of leeway in letting the split articles stand and proposing mergers even though the original state was a merged article. Per WP:STATUSQUO you should be the one proposing a split. All you have done in the discussion mergers is to stonewall and not even consider each case on its own merit. Is there a point in even discussing with you if you've already made up your mind? --Polaron | Talk 03:50, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

a) i didn't say i knew more; i do say that i try to write only what is supported by reliable sources; b) you did delete information (not at first, but later); c) you must propose the merger because you wish for the merger. You could just let there be two articles, I don't get why you are interested in battling to make just one. d) I do let the town/CDP/village articles develop, i do not delete them. I have been removing the NRHP infobox which is especially duplicative in appearance and removing NRHP categories, but leaving in all the text coverage about the NRHP HD in the village/whatever article, whatever you like. I do insist that a link to the separate NRHP HD be included. e) There you go with the WP:STATUSQUO now, whose relevance is unclear to me. f) About "stonewalling", i do feel that I have backed into a kneejerk type reaction to oppose mergers, but note, that in all but one of these recent cases has someone gotten the stupid NRHP application document (in the one case, there was an NRHP document online which clarified the NRHP HD is different from the village/CDP/whatever). Why won't you get the reliable source that is most relevant to all these? And then please share it. Otherwise, all these merger proposals are ridiculously ill-informed. doncram (talk) 04:27, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Look I don't merge just everything together. I do give some thought as to which ones to merge and which ones to split, ok? In almost all cases where merging is appropriate, the histories are identical. You should be the one to propose the split because I initially setup the articles as merged and that is the status quo. I have given you a lot of leeway in allowing a split then proposing a merge. If there is information that got left out during the merge, let me know and I will add it to the consolidated article. If you let me have my editorial preferences, I will expand these consolidated articles including using the NRHP source. You could just let the merged articles stand. They will explain the differences and specifics. I don't get why you are interested in battling to have them separate and redundant. --Polaron | Talk 04:35, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

You seem to think that it would be equivalent process in wikipedia to enforce merger until there is consensus for a split, but a) that is not how wikipedia works, and b) that would not allow separate content to be developed. It would unnecessarily inhibit editors from developing NRHP HD material that clearly does not fit with a town/CDP/village topic, and it unnecessarily would separate edit history from the separate NRHP HD article which will in most cases be developed eventually. It works to allow there to be two articles, developed in competition if you will, and then make a merger proposal. It does not work logically to suppress development of one, until it is proven (how?) that the one is different from the other.

Wikipedia process wise, stub articles can be created on any wikipedia topic, if their wikipedia notability can be defended in AFDs. The NRHP HDs are wikipedia notable. Your putting a redirect in place of one, does not establish any meaningful status quo or anything. A redirect is not an article. The first-level correct process for you to follow, if you want a merger, is to propose that. Then if consensus is not reached (and it seems unlikely in any case where the NRHP application has not been obtained for one thing), then you put the article you wish to disappear up for AFD. I believe that will not ever work for NRHP HDs, knock on wood, because they are wikipedia notable, but that is the stronger, second wikipedia process to use if you are frustrated by a lack of consensus on a merger. AFDs often conclude with decisions to merge material and redirect.

I appreciate that you do seem now to give more/different thought to which ones you seek to merge, and that you do not now battle to force redirects/mergers for many (perhaps about 3/4 of the original 300 CT NRHP HDs that you originally redirected to town/CDP/village articles). But, your judgment now is still not informed by actual facts and sources. You are still over-confident in your knowledge of Connecticut towns and history, in the absence of having the actual NRHP HD application documents. How would you know the merging is appropriate? How would you know the histories are identical? You can't and don't know.

It's also nice you offer to expand articles using the NRHP source, but I believe you have not once requested and obtained a free NRHP HD application document. I understand you went and consulted some NRHP documents in Hartford, but AFAIK you don't have copies of even those. I would give more leeway to someone who actually was working from the relevant document and was actually developing the NRHP HD information. doncram (talk) 05:15, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Sigh. Nobody wants to delete anything. One does not need to AFD an article in order to redirect a redundant article into another one. Everything I've proposed so far qualifies under WP:MERGE. The fact that there is one article rather than two does not preven anyone from expanding the topic in question. Propose a split once you've added enough content and it looks like the main article is getting too long. --Polaron | Talk 12:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually discussing a merger before it happens is different. Merging/redirecting a contentious subject without discussion is not the way that we're supposed to go, especially since both merge candidate and merge target are notable. Nyttend (talk) 12:52, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

And, doncram is not the only one opposed to these redirects/mergers. He's just the only one with the energy and stubborness to continually and methodically make the views of the pro-HD article side as apparent as the views of Polaron. I agree with Orlady that content development is a superioir way to use time. However, it appears that often when Doncram tries to develop content in an HD article, Polaron redirects it. I don't understand how Polaron can contend that this doesn't block development of the HD stuff. It is MUCH easier to start from scratch and develop an article on a Historic District than it is to add content to existing articles, easpecially stub articles about some little place. Why is a geo-stub automatically the more norable when both a geostub and an NRHP stub exist? I would even go so far as to offer to develop the HD stuff, methodically, if someone will provide me with a list. I'll request the NRHP documents, and use them to develop an appropriate HD article for every contested merge/split. I won't go looking for them, though. It is too tedious and too disheartening in light of watching Doncram's attempts at development eradicated. Recently, in a nother state, Orlady proposed merging Bethel Historic District (Bethel, Missouri). I responded by using the available online NRHP info to develop the article, and Orlady responded by deleting the merge proposal, even though she still would have preferred the merge. In my view, THAT was productive. I'm sure I have more to say, but honestly, I just find this whole thing exasperating. Lvklock (talk) 13:16, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

These articles are best left separate in my opinion. Acroterion _(talk) 01:37, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Middlesex County HDs

Please see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 July 17#various Middlesex County, CT, redirects. I proposed deletion of 8-10 redirects away from valid NRHP HD wikipedia article topics, which should show as redlinks instead at National Register of Historic Places listings in Middlesex County, Connecticut. As i went through the county NRHP list i addressed some others by creating NRHP HD stub articles. If there is disagreement that should be noted here. But, the redirects to be deleted should be non-controversial, i think. doncram (talk) 07:01, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

To update from the RFD, Polaron approves of others but objected to deleting one, Fenwick Historic District, which currently redirects to Fenwick, Connecticut, an article about a borough. doncram (talk) 01:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Litchfield County HDs

Please see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 August 10#various Litchfield County, CT, redirects, in progress, where I'll try to identify ones that should not be controversial, where red-links should be restored to encourage article creation. doncram (talk) 20:21, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

The RFD concluded with deletion of all except two, Falls Village District and Downtown Torrington Historic District, for which i went ahead and created NRHP stub articles. doncram (talk) 19:19, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Canaan Village Historic District

Canaan Village Historic District redirects to Canaan (CDP), Connecticut, an article about a CDP which currently claims the CDP is a historic district. On its face, that assertion is almost surely a false statement. Can this one be separated? Certainly the CDP article should be revised to remove false statements. I won't put this in the RFD proposal as there may be disagreement. doncram (talk) 20:35, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Since Canaan Village (the place), Canaan Village (the historic district designated on an NRHP nom form), and Canaan Village (the CDP designated by the Census Bureau) clearly are all the same place (not to be confused with the Town of Canaan) and there's precious little information in any article about any aspect of Canaan Village, I oppose splitting this topic into separate articles. --Orlady (talk) 21:08, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a copy of the NRHP nom form? That would be very helpful. Otherwise, I don't believe your assertion that anything is "clearly" the same as something else. I am fine with your merging the CDP with information about the village; I just would prefer to have the NRHP HD separate as it is known to be notable and I believe there is no clear information available showing it is the same or nearly the same as the CDP (or the village). doncram (talk) 21:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't have a copy of the nom form. I have driven through Canaan a bunch of times, bypassed it on the highway a few other times, and even stopped off there once for lunch. I say that mostly because I know it makes absolutely no difference here. As I see it, the CDP and the historic district are less "notable" than the village. Canaan (CDP), Connecticut, which is the subject of an article, is merely a statistical entity. This Canaan Village Historic District, about which you are eager to write a stub article, is a conceptual entity that exists primarily on paper, in the form of an NRHP nom form that has been dutifully filed and digitized by the NPS and the state of Connecticut. Meanwhile, the actual village of Canaan, Connecticut -- the very real place that has existed for a couple of centuries and has a commercial district is ignored by Wikipedians. I would like to see one decent consolidated article about the village that includes the demographic data that are the CDP articles raison d'etre, the information about the historic aspects of the village that are recognized by the HD designation, and such other information about the place that people can assemble. I fully recognize that you will oppose that, because you are more interested in the paperwork on file at NPS than you are in the real-life village that the paperwork describes. --Orlady (talk) 03:05, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it is helpful for you to speculate about what I or others want to do or why. I don't find your perspective about me personally to be very insightful or funny. I do think your personal observations get in the way of deciding what to do about developing the wikipedia. Anyhow, this is a list-article about NRHP places, and Canaan Village Historic District is a very real NRHP listing. If you don't like articles about NRHP places, I think this is not a good area within wikipedia for you to be contributing. doncram (talk) 05:41, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

As an active NRHP contributor, I am insulted by Orlady's characterizarion that we "are more interested in the paperwork on file at NPS than you are in the real-life village that the paperwork describes". I am interested in covering the NRHP's, which are documented, notable subjects in Wikipedia. My knowledge and interest does not always extend to the various larger entities in which each NRHP is contained. I prefer to keep my focus manageable and precise. Inclusion of NRHPs in larger articles pretty much excludes the possibility that I will develop that topic further. I cannot imagine that I'm the only editor to feel that way. Lvklock (talk) 14:49, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Falls Village District

Falls Village District was a redirect to Canaan, Connecticut an article which does not mention the historic district. Believing it was an obvious case, I first proposed deletion of the redirect, but I have now replaced the redirect, instead, by an NRHP stub article. This was per discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 August 10#various Litchfield County, CT, redirects where Orlady objected to proposal to simply delete the redirect. I believe that neither she nor i have any sources actually speaking to whether an unincorporated village and an NRHP HD are substantially the same or not. I have requested a copy of the NRHP application document. This note here is just to record that there is some issue, and this therefore may be subject of a merger proposal at some later time, hopefully after some shareable sources have been collected. doncram (talk) 23:25, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Much like Canaan, I've been to Falls Village and had friends who lived there. It's a well-defined discrete place that also exists as a postal address. However, that doesn't matter when your goal is to write articles about NRHP nom forms.

I don't think that Falls Village should redirect to Canaan. The village needs a separate article. And as you have likely gathered by now, while I'm interested in writing articles that document historic villages and I think that NRHP nom forms can be good resources for those articles, I'm not interested in Wikipedia articles about NRHP nom forms and database entries. --Orlady (talk) 03:11, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Per my reply to your personal comments in the Canaan Village Historic District section above, if you don't like NRHP articles then please take your energies elsewhere. doncram (talk) 05:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

My concern is that this single-minded dedication to the creation of articles about NRHP nom forms results in trashing of the real places that are documented in those nom forms. For example, your stub article about Falls Village District erroneously and derogatorily described Falls Village as an "unincorporated hamlet". I've fixed that error, and I created the article Falls Village, Connecticut. --Orlady (talk) 14:04, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

And I would certainly applaud your correction of a sourced error. That certainly doesn't make the error a "trashing" of the place. It does reflect the contributors lack of expertise on the area, so why on earth would you insist that they contribute about things they have no expertise on? Lvklock (talk) 14:51, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Hey, what is the error referred to? Falls Village is unincorporated. As it is not any official type of entity, I believe it is fine to refer to it as an unincorporated community, an unincorporated village, or an unincorporated hamlet. I happened to chose the word "hamlet", the word "village" already being used in the proper noun name. But, sure, this has little to do with development of articles on NRHP listed places. doncram (talk) 15:17, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Just link to the Falls Village article, which makes it unnecessary to invent descriptive nouns for the place. --Orlady (talk) 15:45, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, actually, I think it is helpful to clarify for readers in articles about or referring to these Connecticut hamlets/communities that they are unincorporated, to suggest, properly, that there is likely no specific area which is always meant by the term. For example, the Falls Village article you wrote now defines it as two different areas. doncram (talk) 15:51, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't have time right now to figure out what you mean by "two different areas." --Orlady (talk) 19:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

LATER. OK, I see what you were talking about. Falls Village is a distinct place in the town of Canaan, and in fact is the town center of Canaan. I indicated that the name "Falls Village" is often applied to the whole town of Canaan; that's information I found in the Canaan article, verified with a source, and added to the Falls Village article. You apparently interpreted this a s two different topics, and decided to turn the article into what was essentially a disambiguation page. I reverted that change. IMO, confusing nomenclature like that does need to be documented, but is not a basis for creating disambiguation pages.

The postal service is particularly guilty of creating geographic confusion by its consolidation of postal addresses -- for example, the postal service insists that all rural delivery addresses in Sevier County, Tennessee should use the name of "Sevierville," with the result that pretty much the entire county (everything outside of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge) has a "Sevierville" mailing address, and may over time start to be called "Sevierville," including places that are pretty far away from the actual city of Sevierville. I suspect that the postal service might have done the same sort of thing with Canaan and Falls Village. --Orlady (talk) 23:28, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

This is a bit silly to continue here, but, Orlady, why would you include in your edit summary the statement "Falls Village is NOT an unincorporated community; as the Falls Village and Canaan articles". It is an unincorporated community, I believe. If i am misunderstanding something, I hope you would please clarify. doncram (talk) 16:03, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

An unincorporated community is a place that has no local government below the county level. I could show you plenty of such places in Tennessee, but they don't exist in Connecticut. Falls Village is the center of the fully functional town of Canaan. It is NOT unincorporated. Would you call Flushing, New York, an unincorporated community in Queens (for just one example)? If not, please don't call Falls Village an "unincorporated community". --Orlady (talk) 19:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I see what you mean, I guess: you would reserve use of "unincorporated community" for settlements in otherwise unincorporated areas of counties; I certainly do know of such places. I have been using it instead to mean any non-incorporated area, and I would have been willing to call Flushing one (assuming it is not defined as a village in New York State). Hmm, I see that there's a wikipedia article unincorporated community which defines it as you have been using it, and that my usage has apparently been incorrect or at least non-standard. I will stop using it that way. Thanks for bearing with me on this. But, then I am still searching for a correct term to refer to non-legal entities like hamlets, specifically to describe these New England "villages" clearly for general wikipedia readers. I would like an alternative term, perhaps a 2 or 3 word phrase, which conveys that an area/neighborhood/community/hamlet is not a legal entity, that it does not have a government, that it likely does not have a specifically defined area. I think "village" is often not the right word to use on its own, as I and many readers have experience with villages that are legal government areas, or at least it would be helpful to have an acceptable alternate term for variety's sake and/or to provide a different emphasis where appropriate. doncram (talk) 00:56, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I've also been pondering about the possibility of a different word to use in place of "unincorporated." One possibility I thought of was "non-incorporated," so I'm interested to see that you also used that word. However, I don't think it's ideal. Words like "lacking legal existence" or "not officially established" or "not officially designated" or just "informal" also have come to mind. A possible complicating factor is that some New England villages were incorporated municipalities at one time... In the meantime, linking "village" to an explanatory article such as Administrative divisions of Connecticut#Village, neighborhood, section of town can help avoid the need to provide a verbose explanation. However, I'm not impressed with that particular article section -- it uses the misleading word "unincorporated", it suggests that the term "section" might be unique to Stamford, and all-in-all it reads like original research (I checked the history and determined that it was drafted by Polaron and Noroton back in 2006, so we could still ask them if they had any sources for it).

Regarding Flushing, New York: it's not a village. If I remember correctly it was one of numerous incorporated cities that lost their separate legal existence when five counties (now the five boroughs) were combined to form New York City. NYC is actually not a unique situation, as there are other cases in the U.S. where formerly independent municipalities have been absorbed/annexed into a neighboring city. Examples I am aware of include several parts of Boston (the Boston article lists South Boston, East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Brighton (including present day Allston), West Roxbury, Charlestown, and Hyde Park) and several neighborhoods in Seattle. --Orlady (talk) 01:41, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I spent a brief time looking for reliable sources on the topic of "villages" and "sections" in Connecticut. I did find a university-press-published book on the New England Village that addressed the topic of the origins of villages in New England. I've cited it in Village (United States). I think that similar info could be added in other articles, and I would bet that other sources exist. --Orlady (talk) 04:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Lakeville Historic District

Lakeville Historic District currently redirects to Lakeville (Salisbury, Connecticut) where it is asserted that the village is the HD and/or vice versa. I don't believe any sources are included which actually describe bounds of either or assert degree of overlap in geography and history. doncram (talk) 21:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

As you have probably guessed by now, I've been to Lakeville, too. Unlike some of the other New England villages on the National Register, which are of more interest for their industrial history than for the buildings they contain, Lakeville is full of architecturally interesting buildings. I think Lakeville needs an article separate from the town of Salisbury, and I'm not at all interested in an article about the nom form for the Lakeville HD. --Orlady (talk) 03:14, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

To repeat, per my reply to your personal comments in the Canaan Village Historic District section above, if you don't like NRHP articles then please take your energies elsewhere. doncram (talk) 05:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Lime Rock Historic District

Lime Rock Historic District currently redirects to Lime Rock (Salisbury) where it is asserted the village is the HD and/or vice versa. I don't believe any sources are included which actually describe bounds of either or assert degree of overlap in geography and history. doncram (talk) 21:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

You'll be relieved to hear that I've never been to Lime Rock, but I think that the article about the village is the perfect place to describe whatever historic aspects and elements of the village are recognized in the NRHP listing and documented on the oh-so-precious nom form. The historic district information would be an informative addition to the short article. By the way, the historic iron industry of Lime Rock and other parts of Salisbury and Canaan is discussed in http://www.peabody.yale.edu/collections/min/CT_Minerals_Pt1.pdf -- a document that I cited in the Stafford Hollow, Connecticut article. --Orlady (talk) 03:25, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

If you don't have the NRHP documents, and you have never been there, then on what do you base your opinion that the two topics must be merged together? But thanks for pointing to that source. doncram (talk) 05:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Extending edit warring to other states

Extending a low-grade edit war to other states is easily possible. Polaron, I notice your recent edits to create redirects for Downtown Troy to redirect to Central Troy Historic District and for Downtown Hudson to redirect to Hudson Historic District (New York). It looks to me that those articles/redirects are not helpful, are in fact unhelpful for wikipedia, because there is no evidence that Downtown Troy is the same as the HD (and it is not), and probably same for the Hudson one. It gives the appearance that you may be trying to set up the argument, for other states too, that HDs are always the same as neighborhoods/towns/villages.

Could you please respond here: would you agree to a moratorium on such redirects, pending a proper discussion to some consensus in a properly advertised forum. I suppose that an RfC is necessary, and will open one. For the moment now, could you please agree to stop? Sincerely, doncram (talk) 22:23, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

I noticed the blue redirects turned red after an administrator deleted them, and then the second turns blue again by Polaron's re-creating it. What happened to discussion, instead? doncram (talk) 13:37, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Removed "resolved" boxing of this thread. It does not seem to be resolved. There are no basic principles agreed to, apparently, per the three redirects implemented by one editor of Hartford Village Historic District, in Vermont, to a village article. I thought the best idea would be to allow development of the NRHP HD articles at least until substantial material was present, and not to battle by redirects to destroy the process. doncram (talk) 08:18, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Similar disagreements in RI and VT occurring. I am trying to corral discussions to relocate centrally, or at least mention separate ones going on, at Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Vermont and at Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Rhode Island. However, with protest that discussion on CT with same parties should proceed here, not multiply/escalate. doncram (talk) 09:20, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

rfc: NRHP historic districts vs. villages

In the absence of evidence of substantial overlap, and of consensus decisions for mergers, must NRHP-listed historic districts be merged to articles on neighborhoods, villages, towns that may contain them? doncram (talk) 06:08, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course not. There has to be either substantial overlap or the district must be the central area of a village/neighborhood/section of town in order for merging to take place. For the case of town centers and whole towns, in the long run, it would probably make more sense to separate them as the town center can be considered a neighborhood/village as well. --Polaron | Talk 01:37, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

To others: I proposed the RFC to discuss this question, due specifically to Polaron's wide-ranging edits to set up redirects from NRHP historic district names and due to his low grade edit-warring to merge the NRHP articles with neighborhood/town/village articles. Polaron's opening answer, that of course they don't need to be merged, begs the question: then why are you, Polaron, edit warring to force those mergers, in the absence of both evidence of overlap and consensus to merge them? Note, evidence would include having NRHP application documents which detail the boundaries of historic districts (HDs, henceforth) and clarify, in many cases, that HDs are substantially different than neighborhoods or villages of similar names. Polaron, I hope that you will please discuss here to illuminate rather than to obfuscate what are the questions at stake, for community-wide input. doncram (talk) 01:47, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Which particular ones do you sincerely belive are cases where the village and district do not have substantial overlap? One does not need the NRHP documents to show approximately the core area of a historic district since the NRIS coordinates allow you to get an idea. In which particular case is the village substantially different? --Polaron | Talk 01:58, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

To Polaron: I appreciate your offer to discuss any one case. I am sure that, with community-wide attention and your cooperation, the appropriateness of merging an HD with a village/town/neighborhood article could indeed be determined. For the record, would you agree to cease edit warring to force mergers and to allow discussion to consensus in all cases?

To others: The issue is not just one or a few historic district situations, it is about a large number, on the scale of 100 or more in CT alone. Polaron has by combative edits, by refusal to accept requests to pause and discuss, and by promises to extend his fighting, has set up combative situations in all the CT cases now, where he is pre-judging that mergers must occur. Despite or because of discussion, he has gone on a spree of new article creations relating to most or all HDs in CT. This escalates the scale of the disagreement and the unpleasant situation for NRHP editors. He has recently extended into another state. Nationwide, there are I think 14,000 NRHP HDs, so the scale of this issue is potentially quite large. The issue is whether reasonable sources will be obtained and used, and whether consensus processes for mergers will be followed, given apparent contention. Or whether one editor shall make and be allowed to enforce all merger decisions. doncram (talk) 02:28, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

What "promise to extend the fighting" are you talking about? I only work on topics I'm familiar with. Isn't creating stubs on historic districts what you wanted? --Polaron | Talk 03:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Unless boundaries are substantially the same, there's no good reason to merge. Georgetown is a great example: only the core of the community is listed. Look at the boundaries on Google Maps — because Georgetown is darker than the surrounding area, you can see that it's only a small part, and much of the center of Georgetown isn't included. There's no reason to do something so clearly against common practice — and intentionally retard expansion of these districts when there's an effort to go by project standards on the part of project members. Nyttend (talk) 02:53, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and the core is the important part of Georgetown. Also I'm not sure what you mean by much of the center isn't included. Most of the central area is the historic district. As I mentioned, the history of the entity known as "Georgetown" is identical to the historic district. If people prefer to title the article using the long form historic district name, I wouldn't be totally against it as long as we have one article about "Georgetown". --Polaron | Talk 03:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

What is your evidence that the HD is the important part of Georgetown, and/or that other parts, or community-wide issues, do not have any significance to be mentioned? As discussed in previous discussions, there is probably a lot of history of Georgetown that is not exemplified in physical artifacts in the preserved area and structures of historic district. This includes both older history and newer history. It includes both history relating to other parts of Georgetown and to city-wide events (e.g. say a story about the corruption of a mayor or town council, or about the wild success of a high school sports team, etc.) To have one article on Georgetown the town and one as Georgetown Historic District allows separate development of separate material, and mutual support by linking to the other. I can't imagine you have a source that states the history of the HD is the same as the history of any or all versions of definitions for Georgetown. Also, I don't see comparable maps of the historic district and of Georgetown the unincorporated community. Isn't Georgetown the example, discussed in different discussion section above, that has many different meanings for different persons, that spans into 2 or 3 or 4 different legal towns? It is premature to argue that there must be merger and that an NRHP HD article must carry the burden of clarifying whether Georgetown is now a community or not, what are its bounds now vs. at other times, what it means to its people, etc. Likewise, a short reference article about the unincorporated "village" should not be required to carry the burden of detailed architectural description of the 144 or however many contributing buildings are included in the district. The RFC question, however, is about whether discussions like this should take place in merger proposals, rather than having different views expressed in combative edits and reverts. doncram (talk) 03:43, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

[unindent] A pity for the people who live on Main St. between Georgetown and Reading Rds., as seen here, or those who live in what I'm guessing to be newer housing developments here — they're without the district, so apparently the history of their area isn't part of the history of Georgetown? The only definition I've seen of Georgetown is that of the CDP, of which only a small part is listed [the CDP boundaries are identical to the darker areas on the map, so it's easy to see]; and despite your distaste toward CDPs, I'm sure that you'd consider at least the Main St. bit a part of Georgetown. Its imprecise boundaries are one reason that we need a separate article, since there are likely many commonly-considered areas of Georgetown (even if we ignore the CDP) that are without the district. Nyttend (talk) 06:20, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Also I am surprised that Polaron chooses, just now, in this edit in the Downtown Stamford Historic District and this edit in the Downtown Stamford article to enforce his preferences about merging those two. The first diff interrupted my development of the article to fill in indicated blanks. More details in #Downtown Stamford Historic District section above. Polaron's clear answer to the RFC question appears to be that in at least some cases, Yes, he will edit war towards enforcing his preferences, in the absence of discussion of maps of overlaps and so on. doncram (talk) 06:30, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Article weight

Historical districts are created because the structures within the district share some historical and/or architectural context. This context, while significant, can often be relatively narrow. In the cases where historic district boundaries are similar to some other political boundaries (the Downtown Stamford article above, for example), I think they should be merged only if the historical and/or architectural context defining the historical district is also the defining feature of the political entity.

Note that sharing the historical context is emphatically not the same thing as sharing a history. The historical context is what defines the district, and is usually detailed and narrowly focused. Including this very specific information in a general article about the political entity gives undue weight to the specific context of the historic district, resulting in an unencyclopedic article. Andrew Jameson (talk) 11:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I would consider that the overlap must be really substantial. I can think of three examples where the NRHP listing article and the containing-entity article (you'll see why I use this term in a minute) are and ought to be the same:

• Tuxedo Park Historic District: Although it doesn't totally cover the whole village of Tuxedo Park, NY, it represents the history that is a large part of the village. There's little to write about about Tuxedo Park without it (and furthermore, since it's impossible to get in and take pictures, there's really no point in us trying).

• Chautauqua Institute: The National Historic Landmark District covers most of the institute grounds, excluding a few recently-developed areas. They're more or less one and the same.

But other than that, no. Daniel Case (talk) 04:04, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I think my argument is the same as your Tuxedo Park example for most of these village/historic districts. The history represented by the district represents virtually the entire history of the village. This practice of merging also seems to be somewhat common in Rhode Island. I would have thought that a common history would be sufficient but apparently not. Anyway, this point is moot as I'm leaving the rest of you to work out whether merging is appropriate or not. I will be just adding content wherever I can. --Polaron | Talk 04:48, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Polaron for that accomodation. Also St. Elmo Historic District (St. Elmo, Colorado) is a ghost town, and there are other ghost towns which are NRHP-listed. For these, the historic context is indeed shared between the "containing-entity" and the HD; the HD is the artifact, the museum, of the once-active mining town. And there will be other situations, where the borders of HD and "containing-entity" are identical or nearly so, and where the significant aspect of the HD is indeed the defining, salient feature of the entity. For another kind of example, some entire, well-defined then-suburban developments in Pennsylvania and in New York have been, in their entirety, listed as HDs. doncram (talk) 08:23, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, my point with neighborhood/village-HD mergers (not the town-HD ones) was that in majority of the cases I proposed "the significant aspect of the HD is indeed the defining, salient feature of the entity" but that seemed to not have been understood. That is why I was surprised at the resistance to merging. Rhode Island doesn't seem to have problems with merging HDs with villages in several cases. But good luck in what you're trying to do with the Connecticut ones. If I can be of help just let me know. --Polaron | Talk 13:14, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I would think that at least boroughs in DT merit their own articles even if they have the same boundaries as a historic district because the borough has a separate government and much that can be discussed outside the context of a historic district article. Daniel Case (talk) 00:35, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

These mergers are with unincoporated communities for almost all of them. For example, I have not proposed merging Litchfield Borough to Litchfield Historic District even though they are coterminous. --Polaron | Talk 00:56, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Moving forward, cleanup tasks

In my review of Tolland County, mentioned above, I found about 1/3 of NRHP listings are HDs. All or almost all of the HDs in CT NRHP list-articles have been redirected to towns (the redirects were set up in June 2008). CT has 1500 NRHPs, thus there may be about 500 HDs to address. These are of 3 general types, requiring different cleanup treatments. Can we discuss each of these and how they might be cleaned up most efficiently? There is some urgency to the 2nd type ones which can be cleaned more efficiently if done promptly. Or split out separate types if it would appear helpful. doncram (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

1: Simple redirect ones with no NRHP content

Of the HDs that are redirected, it looks like 75% or so redirect to town or CDP articles that have no mention of the NRHP HD, have no NRHP categories added, no NRHP template, no NRHP infobox. There would be 300 or so of these, although this guess could easily be off by 100 or so. For these I suggest the redirects be deleted, leavig the redlink in the NRHP list-article to be created at the HD name, whenever some new CT or NRHP editor chooses to create the article. I think that is better than implying by the bluelink, incorrectly, that there is an article about the listed HD. Also I think that is better than mass creation of one- or two-sentence NRHP stub articles from the Elkman NRHP infobox generator. Distaste for such NRHP stub articles has been expressed by several others here, and also by Elkman.

Option A: These could be addressed I think most easily by one administrator going through the CT NRHP list-articles, checking each HD link, and deleting the redirect found, if it goes to a town/CDP article lacking any NRHP coverage, categories, template, infobox. Perhaps the edit summary of the admin's deletion action could be composed carefully to explain to future would-be NRHP HD editors, why the NRHP article name had once been deleted. That summary could possibly contain a wikilink to the current version of this page, by way of explaining, for future record.

Option B: Or, there could be a multistep process of identifying the redirects by a category tag, or a new NRHP cleanup type template that includes a category, and then allow for some discussion and voting. This would allow non-admins (like me) to help in the identification.

Creating {{NRHP redirect cleanup needed}} now (although an admin does not need to use). There are 0 articles in new Category:NRHP redirects needing cleanup.

Option C: Explicitly list all the redirects for discussion here, and discuss/vote on each individually. Note this would amount to restating ~300 items, duplicating a substantial part of the CT NRHP list-articles.

Option D. Open RFD discussion for each one individually to get wikipedia-wide attention on each one

Option E. Open a combo RFD discussion for a list of the 300 or so, seeking wikipedia-wide attention.

Comments/Votes

I strongly prefer Option A. Nyttend and Orlady, would you be willing to go through and do these deletions? Other options involve many more edits and far too much work, if there are admins who would be willing to do the simple deletions that i think are needed. doncram (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• I'm not ignoring this. I'm just very busy in real life.

Earlier when I reviewed some of your speedy-deletion requests, the review process was slowed down by the fact that the page content had been blanked when the deletion templates were added. In reviewing the page histories, I found that a few pages had a history of content other than the redirects and/or were linked from more places than the county NRHP list. Therefore, I believe that each one will need to be considered individually (but it should be possible to establish some generic rules and principles for that consideration). --Orlady (talk) 16:15, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. I didn't know how to proceed with those deletions, figured it was likely someone would ask about and/or consolidate the multiple db requests. I have only ever begun deletion processes by use of the {{db}} template, and only towards deleting articles i had created with accidental typos in their names, where blanking the page is appropriate when making the request. And I did not consider the idea that there could be previous history worth saving. If the NRHP HD name can not be returned to a redlink by deleting the redirect, then I guess the NRHP HD must be started as a minimal stub. How about noting those as you come across them by putting into a new category, perhaps Category:NRHP stubs needed? (There are 0 articles in Category:NRHP stubs needed) doncram (talk) 19:02, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

To advance this, I tagged all the obvious redirect deletions needed in Tolland County, and have opened a RFD for a first batch of those 10, at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 June 25#various Tolland County, Connecticut NRHP HDs. doncram (talk) 09:17, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Update: The Tolland County RFD was closed with deletion of all 10 redirects. This process has continued with 2 more batches: Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 July 13#various New Haven County, CT, redirects and Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 July 17#various Middlesex County, CT, redirects. Happily Polaron has assented explicitly in most of the cases put forward in those 2nd and 3rd batches. I think it would still be more efficient if some administrator would be willing to go through the rest of the counties and deleted the similar redirects. Would any administrator be willing to do this? Or must we/i continue to put these batch RFD requests forward for the rest of the 8 CT counties and for the 3 separate city NRHP list-articles that have been split out? I don't know whether or not administrators are allowed to delete redirects without going through RFD processes. Since the creator of the redirects, Polaron, and I agree in most cases, it seems not controversial if someone would step in to help in the obviously non-controversial cases. It sure would help to reduce the scale of the overall problem, as the RFD process is time-consuming. doncram (talk) 02:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

2: Redirects to larger town/CDP articles now with NRHP infobox

There are, I estimate, now about 50-100 cases where the NRHP HD entry in the list-article redirects to a largish town/CDP article having substantial demographic and/or other non-NRHP information. I believe that there are no cases among these where there is evidence by included maps of extent of overlap between HD vs. town/CDP, and in fact no cases where there are any sources attesting to overlap or shared history or to the "historical context" of the HD being the defining, salient aspect of the town/CDP article. Note Polaron's refinement of his view, recently, that town center HDs need not be merged with town articles (while there exist several previously implemented cases, not according to his revised views). Many of these cases (some being town center ones perhaps, and many others) were created in the last week or so, and the town/CDP articles have had no subsequent edits. I think, for these, the NRHP categories such as "1910 architecture" applied to the Downtown Stanford article, are extremely unhelpful, and that the NRHP infobox is unhelpful, and the NRHP template is unhelpful, and that the NRHP wikiproject banner, if it was added to the Talk page, is unhelpful.

Proposal: Remove the NRHP infobox, NRHP template, NRHP category and architecture categories which stemmed from Elkman infobox material, out of the Town/CDP article. Link to new separate article containing same. Edit summary could link to this discussion, to provide explanation.

Comments/Votes

As proposer, vote Yes. I think in virtually all cases this is permanently the best thing to do. If there is an exception, that can eventually be raised as a merger proposal later. There is urgency to implementing this quickly, in terms of efficiency in implementation by simple reversions of recently added NRHP infoboxes, etc. doncram (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• I agree that links to NRHP historic districts should not point to articles about the towns in which those districts are located. The scope of the articles is very different. However, an exception might be appropriate in the case of an historic district that is the salient feature of an otherwise unpopulated town (I am thinking that the historic district in Union, Connecticut might be one such). In such an instance, the historic district list might appropriately point to a link target in the town article. --Orlady (talk) 16:15, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you proposing anything different then? In order to settle this, I would prefer to go through and remove all the recent NRHP infobox and other additiongs to town articles, and deal with remergers on merger request basis later. Again, there is no documentation in any of these cases that there is substantial overlap, etc. (Also I find no NRHP mention in Union, Connecticut article.) There would be no need for any discussion if you or anyone else wants to add a section into the Union article to describe some NRHP HD. However, to be consistent with the proposals here, I think that should be done as if it is a summary, and you should add a {{main}} link to a separate NRHP HD article. It would make sense to create the NRHP HD stub article if you are linking to it. The NRHP stub article would properly contain architecture categories and so on, which might not be appropriate for the town article, and it could be expanded to list all the contributing properties. That's where we have gotten to, for CT NRHP HDs. To settle all this long-running dispute, and to clearly allow CT and NRHP editors to create NRHP HD articles, I am asking that we make a clear consensus decision not to merge CT NRHP HDs, unless discussed by a merger proposal. If that cannot be agreed, then I suppose we must create stub NRHP articles for every HD and watchlist them to prevent undiscussed mergers. Must we do that? doncram (talk) 19:25, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I deleted the Union-related redirect, so this isn't at issue. However, considering that Union is a town that consists largely of state-owned land and that has fewer than 700 people, I think it is possible that the Union Green historic district encompasses the entire town center and that the historic town center will turn out to be the main potential topic for the article. But it doesn't matter until such time as there's content for an article. --Orlady (talk) 21:16, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

3: Redirects to hamlet/village articles now with NRHP infobox

There are, I estimate, 50 or so of these, where there is little other than the NRHP infobox. Many of these were created in last week or so. These often have no sources other than the NRIS reference for the infobox. Note, a simple move over redirect to the NRHP HD name can sometimes be implemented by non-admins, but sometimes not, because in some cases the NRHP HD name has been once redirected to one town, then later redirected to a different hamlet (often recent new articles).

Proposal: If there is no sourced material about the hamlet/village, move over redirect to the NRHP HD name. If there is sourced material about the hamlet/village, leave that in hamlet/village article with link to new NRHP HD article. If it turns out later there is documentation of substantial overlap, and stuff about "context" and "including entity" defining quality, that is to be addressed by merger proposal later.

Comments/Votes

As proposer, vote Yes. doncram (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• I disagree. As Daniel Case pointed out with his New York analogies, in the majority of these instances, there is a strong identity between the hamlet/village and the historic district -- for all intents and purposes, they are one and the same place. In most all such instances, the name of the village should take precedence. The village is a place that may have existed under that name for centuries, as the place where people established factories or seaports, lived, worked, died, buried their dead, etc., and the name of the village appears on road signs, etc. Sometime in the late 20th century, someone in the village or the encompassing town decided to seek "historic designation" for the village, and the "historic district" appellation exists because that's how the paperwork process for designation works. The name of the actual village should take precedence over the appellation used for the historic designation. (Stafford Hollow is an example of this. While not a village, the Rocky Hill – Glastonbury Ferry article that I ran across yesterday is another example -- the historic district designation was sought to recognize/preserve the historic ferry, and the article focus should be the ferry, not the metes and bounds of the historic district that was designated in order to protect the ferry.) --Orlady (talk) 16:15, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

(Discussion about Ferry exception moved to new discussion section for it, #Glastonbury-Rocky Hill Ferry Historic District. Please see that discussion for comments about general process here, and/or please restate here.)

The Ferry HD vs. Ferry article merger/split decision appears to me not relevant to this process section, technically, which was meant to be about when there is infobox etc, but little/nothing else, in a hamlet/town article. The Ferry article in this latest version before Orlady began adding NRHP info on June 23 had no mention of any NRHP, but had plenty about the ferry, so it is not a candidate for moving to the NRHP HD name. There was a redirect of the NRHP HD to the Ferry article, which had no edit history worth preserving. The proposal (in previous section) is that in such cases, cleanup to delete the redirect would be done, allowing for article creation later, and merger proposals and so on. I think that deleting the redirect would have been fine and good in the Ferry HD case. The proposal is to address approximately 300 redirects right now. I don't want to develop 300 articles, i just want to delete the darn redirects! :) Can people comment on that cleanup process, please?

For an example of what this cleanup section is about, consider this recently created Somersville, Connecticut article, to which Somersville Historic District redirected. The proposal is, in cases like this to move it over redirect, which I did. It is now this version of Somersville Historic District, to which Somersville, CT now redirects. (Actually, I could not move the article directly so I created article anew starting with new NRHP infobox generator output). doncram (talk) 23:15, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

About Nyttend's view (Nyttend, sorry to have moved and now cut up your words). I asked here, previously, within discussion moved to Ferry HD discussion: "Are you agreeing or not to a process of not forcing mergers of NRHP HDs to town/ferry/park/whatever articles, except where there is a merger proposal? Are you agreeing or not to a cleanup program to undo the recent and previous additions of NRHP stuff to hamlet/village/town articles?" Nyttend responded: "Are you talking to me? I'll respond, assuming that you are. In short — overall, I oppose the redirection of titles in general; the Marion HD is a good example. However, as I've said before, if the areas are functionally identical, I think that it would be silly. Take the Eureka Historic District in Utah as an example: it's "Roughly bounded by the city limits", so a redirect to Eureka, Utah is a good idea." I (doncram) agree, that yes if the NRHP HD location description is like that, do not separate from town/village article. However if there is no specific information about the bounds of a hamlet/village vs. a NRHP HD, I want to create the HD article, which will on its own be sourced and accurate and involve no unsourced claims about relationship of HD vs. village. I interpret Nyttend's perspective (from that and what else he wrote) to be, basically, yes we can move over redirect and do this, as I did for Somersville Historic District. Nyttend, is that right? doncram (talk) 23:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

A little confused on your exact meaning, so I'll just say what I think should be done. I think it's a good idea to have an article on the ferry, and in this specific case I think it's best to have one article, with the NRHP title redirecting to the ferry article. Nyttend (talk) 01:57, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

4: Exceptions and other complex cases

These are the several cases discussed in individual discussion sections above. For example, Stafford Hollow Historic District, where I guess consensus was to merge it to Stafford Hollow, Connecticut. I personally would prefer that one to be placed at "Stafford Hollow Historic District", but i don't care enough to review the discussion further or to make a requested move proposal.

I think those listed as separate discussion sections on this page should be dealt with according to consensus in those discussions. Not all have reached consensus yet, perhaps.

Proposal: Any new exceptions/complex cases that may come up should be dealt with by discussion in merger proposals (if the issue is splitting vs. merging) or by Requested moves (if the issue is to use the town/village name rather than the NRHP HD name). There should be no edit warring between editors favoring a separate HD article vs. editors favoring incorporation into a town/village article. The separate editors should work to develop their proposed treatments of the HD in the separate articles, without tearing down the other, and conduct a regular merger proposal, giving notice where appropriate (perhaps at wt:NRHP and at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Connecticut).

Comment/Votes

As proposer, i vote Yes. doncram (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I vote yes. I had some issues with CT NRHP stubs being merged with no discussion. No need for edit wars or needless misunderstandings. It may be a hassle splitting off HD artcles at a later point if editors decide that a separate article is warranted.Swampyank (talk) 18:55, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

5. Proposal on all NRHP HDs where there is currently no conflict

I am concerned that new articles might be manufactured that will extend the scope of cleanup needed, and that could cause the conflict intended to be addressed by this RFC to be extended. In my view, it would be unhelpful and just a different kind of edit warring, if someone were to create new articles corresponding to NRHP HDs, but named slightly differently, and to add the NRHP infobox there, and gum up the process of cleaning up here. It would definitely make more work.

In one discussion here, it was argued wp:STATUSQUO applied. That guideline reads: "Don't revert to undo a good faith reversion of your change. If there is a dispute, the status quo reigns until a consensus is established to make a change. Instead of engaging in an edit war, propose your reverted change on the article's talk page or pursue other dispute resolution alternatives." I think someone could think that by creating new articles they could establish ownership in some way, that their new article has priority over the NRHP HD name, and they might plan to rely upon wp:STATUSQUO to enforce their preference on the name of an article. I would consider this wp:POINTY and would take issue. Please understand, with respect to STATUSQUO, and I think it is fair, the scope of dispute is ALL NRHP HDs in CT and all adjoining states. I hope that parties here could chip in and help clean up, and work to minimize not to extend conflict. doncram (talk) 01:37, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't know how to address this potential development. Perhaps something like these principles: Parties here agree that NRHP HDs are wikipedia notable and that articles should generally be created at the NRHP HD name, as part of WikiProject NRHP. Targetting the list of NRHP HDs not yet created, to generate new articles at similar names, would have the effect of making NRHP HD articles more difficult to create, and would set up future conflict. Such practice, using the NRHP designations in effect to establish notability, but to make it difficult for NRHP HD articles to be created at their natural names, the NRHP name, is to be avoided. What I am talking about is many cases like "Name Historic District" where an article like "Name" or "Name (Town)" might be created. A pattern of article creation along those lines would appear to me to be deliberately extending the zone of disagreement. doncram (talk) 02:01, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

all going to hell now

Combative editing is expanding now. Polaron has created a number of redirects from NRHP HD names in Vermont and in Connecticut now, redirecting to inappropriate target articles, where having just a redlink from the NRHP list-articles would be preferred. I guess the whole tentative agreement is falling apart, and the only thing to do is create NRHP stub articles in every case and battle to keep them in place and to keep out unsourced junk from them, and battle in corresponding town articles to remove unsourced claims about the NRHPs also. I don't see what else to do.

Also, the test of the RFD process, with a first batch of 10 Tolland County redirects to delete, has not gone through. It's not resolved, but it seems that a minor objection that "there's been some discussion" is enough to derail prompt treatment of the unhelpful redirects in CT. doncram (talk) 00:37, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Content forking

An underlying issue that has not been articulated in these squabbles about redirects for historic districts is content forking. It is not uncommon at Wikipedia for multiple articles to exist about essentially the same topic, often by accident. Having two articles about essentially the same topic is generally regarded as not being a good thing, and the Wikipedia guideline recommends that duplicate articles be merged. Similarly, the Wikipedia page on merging states that good reasons for merging two pages are:

• that they are duplicates,
• they have a large overlap,
• one of the pages "is very short and is unlikely to be expanded within a reasonable amount of time", or
• "if a short article requires the background material or context from a broader article in order for readers to understand it."

There are plenty of examples of situations where Wikipedians have decided that it is appropriate to merge topics instead of maintaining several separate articles. Some examples that I am familiar with:

• People who probably are notable sometimes are covered in articles about the topics for which they are notable, instead of creating separate articles. For example, Arlin Horton is a redirect to Pensacola Christian College.
• Individual public schools often are covered in an article about the school district or city, instead of maintaining separate articles about them (although high schools generally qualify for separate articles).
• The marginally notable family members of a notable person often are discussed in the article about that person instead of in separate stub articles (for example, Kyoko Chan Cox is a redirect to a section of the Yoko Ono article).
• Notable (or possibly notable) crimes sometimes are covered in an articles about the general type of crime or the place where the crime occurred, instead of creating separate articles; for example, Herbert Henry Dow High School covers a school shooting that is not covered elsewhere, and Fort Campbell describes two criminal incidents that occurred on the base and terms related to one of the incidents (e.g., Nicholas Mikel) are redirects to the Fort Campbell article.
• In general, higher education institutions that are historically connected are covered in a single article, even though may there have been significant changes (in name, location, governance, mission, etc.) during those histories. Examples: University of Atlanta, Barrington College, Warnborough College
• Business entities often are covered in articles about related entities, instead of in a separate article. For example, A Beka Books is a redirect to Pensacola Christian College.
• Wikipedia radio aficionados apparently have decided that all U.S. radio stations operating under the same FCC operating license should be covered in a single article, although there may have been changes in ownership, call sign, broadcast frequency, and programming (for examples, see WNOX and WOKI). However, this sometimes is controversial (see Talk:KZAM (defunct)) -- and I find some of these combined articles to be unduly confusing.
• Multiple diseases that are discrete diagnoses but have common attributes sometimes are covered in a single article, such as Hereditary spastic paraplegia (see redirects to that article).
• The topic Corn Belt is included in the article about the related topic Grain Belt, and Jell-O Belt is a redirect to Mormon Corridor.

Where I am going with all this is that it is content forking when there are two very short articles about a single unincorporated village that is listed on the National Register as an historic district. It is a disservice to users to present them with two articles about essentially the same topic. The fact that there might possibly be minor differences between what's considered to be the "village" and the official definition of the HD (for example, there might be 100 buildings in the village but only 76 of them are included in the historic district, of which 11 are not contributing properties) does not change the fact that the village and the historic district are the same place. Application of the Wikipedia guideline on content forking, as well as the advice on topics such as merging articles and splitting articles, leads to the conclusion that the small distinctions between villages and historic districts (or ferries and historic districts, etc.) do not justify creation of separate articles, particularly when those separate articles contain very little information. Referring to the "Merging" recommendations, these pages typically are either duplicates or have large overlap, one or both of these pages is very short and is unlikely to be expanded within a reasonable amount of time, and one article often requires the other article for context. --Orlady (talk) 17:08, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Orlady says above that "Having two articles about essentially the same topic is generally regarded as not being a good thing, and the Wikipedia guideline recommends that duplicate articles be merged." I do not disagree with this. The problem is that we disagree about whether amorphous villages and historict districts are "essentially the same". In my opinion, they are not. The historic district is a specifically bounded area (maybe not a neat boundary, but there are buildings that are in the district (and I won't argue the contributing/noncontributing factor here) and buildings that are not in the district. In all likelihood, each amorphous "village" contains substantially more than the historic district. A reader, in my opinion is disserviced by not having available the information about the historic district, even if it's just what was in the infobox. When I visit other areas, as a wikipedia user I look for articles about what historic things to try to see while I'm there. Many of these village articles just declare "the village is listed on the NRHP as a historic district". This gives the reader no clus as to what portion of the village might be historic, nor does it give good venue for detailed description of contributing structures in the district. With any luck, seeing undeveloped stubs or redirects from the NRHP lists could attract local editors to develop these articles. It could attract pictures by having some detail about what streets actually comprise the district. In my opinion, in light of apparent lack of consensus on the issue, both articles should be allowed to exist, as both are wikinotable in their own area, even as stubs (geo-stubs or NRHP-stubs). Lvklock (talk) 18:06, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate Orlady's naming this principle and pointing to guidelines and examples. The principle is relevant to the general discussion here, and it is better to discuss principles and their application. Another principle that is important here is that NRHP HDs are wikipedia-notable topics, and for each one of these in a "reasonable" period of time wikipedia editors can/will create detailed articles for many of them. It is not possible to predict which NRHP HD redlinks or stubs a local wikipedian will choose to adopt and develop, but I am dedicated to facilitating that kind of constructive wikipedia activity. In practice, supporting local wikipedians' ability to start/develop NRHP HD articles involves:

• setting up NRHP state- and county-list articles listing them all in tables with location/boundary type info and other info (done, nation-wide, as of 7/4/2009)
• providing support advice about where to get NRHP documents from Federal and state sources (done by editor help materials at wp:NRHP. Thanks Orlady for recently adding RI material link there)
• provide support about handling coordinates, handling footnotes, etc. (done by wp:nrhpmos)
• noticing when new wikipedians start contributing articles or adding pics to state- and county NRHP list-articles, and welcoming / supporting them, helping them to get started using the NRHP infobox generator, etc. (often done by me, sometimes by others, though NRHP wikiproject could set up a more systematic welcoming system nation-wide)
• otherwise providing support in response to inquiries at wt:NRHP or at Talk pages of state or county NRHP list-articles

In practice, the discussions expose to me that the principle of avoiding content forking comes into conflict with the principle of supporting would-be NRHP editors, particularly if an editor uses the list of wikipedia-notable NRHP HD titles to create stub hamlet articles effectively based on the notability of the NRHP HD and replaces the NRHP HD redlink by redirects to them. In multiple cases there is merely a hamlet article with the NRHP HD infobox and a statement that "X is a village and a historic district." The assertion of equivalence is unsupported and often false. There could be other solutions (move the article to the NRHP HD name and remove false/unsupported statements, or delete both the stub hamlet article and the redirect from the NRHP HD name, restoring redlink status for the NRHP HD name), but the only so-far-feasible outcome I see to support the future NRHP editors is to start the separate NRHP HD article with infobox and defend that to be a fully-sourced and accurate stub article (and to fight at the stub hamlet article to remove false/unsupported claims and to link to the NRHP HD article). If a redirect from the NRHP HD name is in place, it is too daunting for new NRHP editors to create/develop the NRHP HD article: note many new editors naturally believe that only an Administrator can change a redirect to start an article. Note also that previous would-be NRHP editors in New England have encountered edit-warring and replacement of redirects, wherever they have tried to start/develop an NRHP HD article separate from a big town / CDP article. So it is certainly daunting and difficult. In CT alone I have over the last two years provided some support and encouragement to 4-5 different starting editors, and unlike editors that I have similarly encouraged in other states, they have not developed into active editors (actually one did, but moved to a different state). I suspect the difference in CT vs. in WI or other states, is that CT new editors encountered a different, highly negative experience of edit warring to prevent their making progress. Either way, I am stuck with the only currently-practical way for me to support the future CT NRHP editors is to create the NRHP HD articles and fight all the necessary fights upfront to establish their rights, so they will not have that negative experience. The most basic principle to uphold is that new NRHP editors should not have to encounter nastiness in their early experiences, and content forking concerns are secondary in my view.

Note, there has been substantial movement by Polaron about these practices, and my thinking has also evolved through these discussions, and there is room for agreement. In the past Polaron judged for all 300 cases that a redirect to a town / CDP / new hamlet stub article was to be fought for, and HDs named differently than the towns they are in and for town center HDs which clearly differ from the whole town as well as for other cases; now the zone of any disagreement between Polaron and me is much smaller. However, no administrator has yet been willing to agree to assist in actually deleting classes of redirects that he and i both now feel are unhelpful, or to otherwise tangibly assist in reducing the problem that 300 or so NRHP HDs remain as unfriendly-to-new-editor redirects (either that they are redirects which are mines which will explode into bad experiences if touched, or that they are no longer active mines which will not blow up, but which are indistinguishable from the dangerous kind). doncram (talk) 20:06, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Doncram, seeing your focus on setting up stubs in hopes of recruiting contributors and Wikiproject participants, it would appear that you think of Wikipedia as primarily an online community, and only secondarily as an encyclopedia. I, on the other hand, subscribe to the view that Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia, and I believe that my view is consistent with Wikipedia's basic principles, as outlined at Wikipedia:Five pillars. Although encouragement of new contributors is also one of the core principles, it does not justify creating nonencyclopedic content in article space. --Orlady (talk) 15:13, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Orlady, I don't appreciate your tone, which I perceive to be snide, perhaps deliberately sarcastic. You misconstrue my general activity, which is not to set up minimal stub articles generally. I have explained to you elsewhere that I do not generally create minimal stube, but do so only where that seems to be specifically helpful, such as to establish useful disambiguation or to deal with combative editing that undermines the possibility of new editors contributing on valid wikipedia topics. And, I do not create unencyclopedic content. I do battle with you and others to remove unsourced and often-false claims equating NRHP HDs with town/hamlet areas that overlap, in the absence of accurate information. Please see RFC on this page. doncram (talk) 16:08, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry if I have misconstrued statements like "the principle of avoiding content forking comes into conflict with the principle of supporting would-be NRHP editors" and "the only so-far-feasible outcome I see to support the future NRHP editors is to start the separate NRHP HD article with infobox and defend that to be a fully-sourced and accurate stub article (and to fight at the stub hamlet article to remove false/unsupported claims and to link to the NRHP HD article)" and "if a redirect from the NRHP HD name is in place, it is too daunting for new NRHP editors to create/develop the NRHP HD article" and "note also that previous would-be NRHP editors in New England have encountered..." and "I am stuck with the only currently-practical way for me to support the future CT NRHP editors is to create the NRHP HD articles and fight all the necessary fights upfront to establish their rights, so they will not have that negative experience" and "the most basic principle to uphold is that new NRHP editors should not have to encounter nastiness in their early experiences, and content forking concerns are secondary in my view." (Emphasis added.) After reading through your treatise several times, I determined that you were trying to tell me that you consider it more important to entice and support newbie NRHP Wikiproject participants than it is to present Wikipedia users with encyclopedia-like content or to direct users to the best information here that is at least somewhat relevant to their query. I'm not objecting to enticing and supporting newbies, but I happen to think that the quality of the encyclopedia's content takes precedence. Also, I'd like to suggest that my experience of new contributors indicates that elaborate templates are one of the most off-putting aspects of Wikipedia, as the syntax is not intuitive to most people and new users' attempts to edit inside templates are often disastrous.

BTW, I happen to share your concern that it is generally unwise to redirect a historic district article to the articles for the larger city or town in which the HD is located. However, I find it pointy of you to insist that any National Register-listed historic district established for an historic rural village or a historic neighborhood (or ferry) must necessarily have an article that is totally separate from any article about that village or neighborhood. Your insistence on creating content-free stubs about HDs, including speculative remarks along the lines of "it might include part of the village of the same name, but we don't know", and sometimes refusing even to link to the article about the village/neighborhood (as you have done with the HD pages for Southport (Fairfield) and in some other instances) is making Wikipedia look like a bush-league operation and your NRHP Wikiproject look both petty and silly. --Orlady (talk) 21:16, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

"Your insistence on creating content-free stubs about HDs". As far as I know, stub are not disallowed in wikipedia. Obviously, we'd all like to see better articles about them all. That's what we're working towards. Doncram has, in my opinion, show great care and patience at the often thankless task of trying to set up the network of NRHP articles in a coherent and consistent manner in order to foster the continued growth of content within the project. On the other hand, I appreciate Orlady's views on content, and in many cases agree that the verbiage can be improved. Certainly it can be where the nomination form is readily accessible. However, it seems to me that Orlady is trying to improve content by deleting stub articles that are acceptable under wikipedia guidelines. Neither Doncram nor I advocate rushing through and creating stubs for every NRHP property. I believe I remember watching Doncram arguing successfully against that practice as an editor was pursuing it in some NE state in the past...Massachusetts? But, there are times, such as when setting up DAB pages, where a stub is helpful in some other way. I have also historically sometimes set up stubs in order to have a place to add pictures that I have taken of NRHPs. It is also frustrating to spend time and energy setting up appropriate DABs, only to have them disrupted by redirects and mergers. I also think that I am far more likely to espouse "that any National Register-listed historic district established for an historic rural village or a historic neighborhood (or ferry) must necessarily have an article that is totally separate from any article about that village or neighborhood" than Doncram. I have certainly observed him working within frameworks of related wikiprojects for thing like ships and lighthouses. And, I have seen him agree with a merger or redirect to an article in which there was specific and appropriate mention of the historic district, and it didn't disrupt some other thing, such as a DAB. With historic districts, especially, I think it is important to have separate article eventually that specifically defines the districts precisely because that information is not readily available elsewere to the average wikipedia reader. I think that it will provide valuable content not duplicated elsewhere (at least not before it's developed here). Yes, Wikipedia is and encyclopedia before it's a community (which can be hard to keep in mind once you become involved with other characters in the community story), but it's a growing changing encyclopedia, not an already completed one. Lvklock (talk) 03:41, 13 July 2009 (UTC)