Talk:Robertson House

prod

I don't know what to make of this. it doesn't match disambiguation page guidelines here or here;

• The bulleted entries are (almost) all redlinks
• The information on them are bluelinks to pages that don't mention them

I suggest losing the page until there are sufficient articles on these subjects to warrant a dab page; or delete the bluelinks and clarify the notability of the subjects in an opening statement, (eg "The following are listed in the National Register of Historic Places for their respective states"). then it could be left as a to-do list. Swanny18 (talk) 22:43, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

This is a valid disambiguation page, covering mostly NRHP-listed places, each of which is wikipedia-notable (due to their historical importance for architecture or association with events or people, etc., as determined in a well-documented process, for which reliable sources are available). Guidelines for NRHP-related disambiguation pages have been well-discussed, especially in this extended past discussion at WikiProject Disambiguation.

I removed the prod just now. The first link you provided above is a redlink, by the way. The second one is about guidelines for redlinks, and I am aware of MOS:DABRL requirements for redlink entries in dab pages. MOS:DABRL explicitly allows red-links, but MOSDAB usually requires one explanatory blue-link for each red-link entry, which has more-or-less been provided. The caveat there is that the blue-link provided in many cases is not perfectly specific enough. For example, the 2nd entry, for an NRHP-listed house in Wynne, Arkansas, was explained by a bluelink to List of RHPs in AR. Technically, it could better have been supported by a bluelink to National Register of Historic Places listings in Arkansas, counties C, which is what I just revised it to, after looking up Wynne, Arkansas and figuring out it was in Cross County, hence figuring out which county list indexed at the Arkansas state-wide list it would belong to. In other cases, the state-wide NRHP list-article may contain the entry, or the same kind of lookup could be done to find a county-level NRHP list-article that contains the entry. I frankly don't think it adds a lot of value to do these lookups and refine each of these bluelinks, but I concede that technically that would comply more specifically with MOS:DABRL. Do you want to work with me to improve the specificity of these links?

An alternative is to work to create stub articles for each of the NRHP entries (or to let them be created over the next year or so). I just created a stub article for the first entry on the list, which for me is easy, though the stub quality is not great, and I and some other editors prefer not having such short stubs, but rather to wait until we have a photo and some additional sources to develop a start quality article all at once. When the stub is created, it is appropriate to delink the explanatory phrase, which i did. Which negates any value added if someone had put in the more specific county-list article link for that one. So I prefer to let a disambiguation page like this stand as it is now, and only occasionally delink the ones that have had articles created.

About the fact that there are many redlinks, I don't think that is a problem. This is not a list-article meant to provide a lot of information for reading per se, or being developed as a list-article to become a Featured List; it is a disambiguation page. It enables a reader interested in any specific Robertson House or Firstname Robinson House or variations to find out, quickly, whether a wikipedia article about it exists. By the way, every place here is mentioned in other websites covering NRHP listings, so there is some traffic from those of people looking for these places. It is helpful for them to see the redlink for the one they were looking for, so that they can stop searching, and not try, say "Roberson House".

I hope this helps. I will watch here to see if there is further discussion. Thanks! doncram (talk) 00:00, 29 June 2009 (UTC)