Talk:Recorded Texas Historic Landmark

Reorganize by Texas regions?

How about reorganizing the list of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks by region, instead of by alphabetical groupings of counties? The corresponding list of NRHP-listed places in Texas has effectively been reorganized that way recently, using the 12 regions defined by the Texas state comptroller. One reason would be to make it easy to use the "map all coordinates" (and/or download them to use in a phone app) to see all nearby RTHLs in a regional group of counties (such as in this map of NRHPs in 28 counties of "South Texas"), instead of seeing maps of RTHLs in scattered counties (such as in map of RTHLs for counties in Anderson-Callahan alphabetical range).

Pinging editors that I notice have recently edited RTHL list-articles (User:Fortguy, User:Morogris, User:Nv8200pa, User:Dclemens1971, User:ToThAc, User:Renelibrary) and also everyone pinged recently to discussion about dividing NRHPs by region (User:Oldsanfelipe, User:Magicpiano, User:WhisperToMe, User:TheCatalyst31, User:25or6to4, User:Reywas92, User:Bubba73). --Doncram (talk,contribs) 20:52, 17 April 2023 (UTC) [revised and re-signed so pings should go to all, thanks Reywas92 for pointing out that my pings didn't all work --Doncram]

• Just commented at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_National_Register_of_Historic_Places#Texas_regions since that ping didn't go through. Yes, I agree that having articles sorted by region may be more useful than alphabetical, though I am uncertain if the divisions from the Comptroller as used for NRHP are best – Geography_of_Texas#Regions is low quality and doesn't provide good alternatives, but if this is just used by one agency for economic data it might not be the most appropriate. Reywas92^Talk 20:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
  • The only MECE (mutually exclusiive and collectively exhaustive) partition of the state into groups of counties which is presented at that "Geography of Texas#Regions" page is the Texas Comptroller's partition (now that I just added it, presented mainly by User:25or6to4's nice map of the 12 regions). As it is a partition of the state into population and economic regions, it works pretty well for partitioning the NRHP listings, I think. Having about 12 regions works well in the NRHP reporting, I believe. Same-industry type listings (e.g. ships and other coastal things) will likely be grouped together. Population areas make for coherent sets of listings. Other partitions that I am aware of, e.g. for tourism such as at Seven most beautiful regions of Texas, don't have "legs" as far as I know, while the Texas comptroller has reported 2022 populations and other statistics by their 12 regions and is committed to updating all such statistics. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
• If it works better for mapping, then I guess that is a good reason. It is important to me that all of the "Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks in X County" links in the "See Also" section of the individual county article pages be updated to point to the correct section on the new pages to make navigating easy. Regards, Nv8200pa talk 21:36, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Yes, every inbound link to, say, List_of_Recorded_Texas_Historic_Landmarks_(Anderson-Callahan) would need to be checked and eliminated.

By the way it seems weird to me that many (most?) of the articles linking go explicitly to the "(Anderson-Callahan)" page, with that being hidden by pipelinks, (e.g. Caldwell County Courthouse (Texas) displays a link to "Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks in Caldwell County" which in fact goes to List of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks (Anderson-Callahan)#Caldwell County, when IMHO it would be better simply to use a straightforward (non-pipelinked) link to List of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks in Caldwell County (currently a redlink, which should instead be a redirect to the "(Anderson-Callahan)#Caldwell County" location). That simpler link could be used in multiple articles, and using that instead of the more complicated expression would likely help avoid errors. And, as might happen now, if the counties get grouped differently, then only one redirect per county would need to be updated. IMHO it would be good, no matter what, to set up all those redirects, one for each of 254 counties, and to eliminate all links to expressions like "(Anderson-Callahan)#Caldwell County". But this is just a technical matter of implementation, Nv8200pa's point stands.

And then properly categorizing the redirects will put ""Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks in X County" into "Category:X County, Texas" and/or "Category:Buildings and structures in X County", where it in fact belongs. The RTHL lists by county have been missing (while the county-specific NRHP lists have been showing in such categories). --Doncram (talk,contribs) 04:30, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Starting into setting up such redirects, I am finding LOTS of errors (or at least imperfections) which this fixes, e.g. the NRHP list for Bell county linked to List of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks#Bell County which is not an anchor or section, and which provides no RTHLs in Bell County, not as helpful to readers as directly linking to the new redirect which brings them to List of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks (Anderson-Callahan)#Bell County, instead. In fact there are more than 2,000 (!) bad inbound links from mainspace pages to the likes of "List of Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks#X County" (which can all be fixed relatively easily when the redirects are set up)!!! --Doncram (talk,contribs) 05:18, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Pinging also User talk:Bryanrutherford0 and User:Oldsanfelipe2 (I found you!) to this discussion. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 04:07, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

I lost my password and changed my handle a few years ago. I have not been doing much with architecture articles in Wikipedia, but I wrote an essay on an NHRP-listed property and submitted it for publication. So there is a non-zero chance that I will be a reliable source! Ha. If I get back to editing these articles I will look at these tips. Thanks.

Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 18:08, 18 April 2023 (UTC)