Talk:Vehicle registration plates of Massachusetts

Expanding this article

The serial format should be explained better - at present it makes little sense to those who don't already know. 72.70.252.192 (talk) 02:32, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm a license plate collector and ALPCA member who used to live in MA, so I did my best. I think I'll come back to this article and maybe add some photos from my collection. --Tckma (talk) 18:28, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Nice work. The section "Current passenger base plates" is a relic left over from when I merged two very similar articles on this subject, and so the table at the bottom of this section should be integrated into the table in the first section of the article. I can get to that if you don't—I had forgotten to do that when I merged the articles, but since it looks like you'll be doing a lot of work on this article, I'll defer to you in the mean time. Qqqqqq (talk) 21:51, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Been quite a while, looks like the section is still there. There's a lot of information in it, and I just updated both "1967->present" and "current passenger base plates" to reflect what serials are currently being issued. October's in a bit of a holdover phase where they are moving one letter around. It's almost a full series ahead and I think they're trying to catch up the other months before moving it onto a new series.

They probably should be still merged, but given the amount of information available in each section that's not in the other, that would be quite a task. Perhaps for now it's best left the way it is. The article could definitely use some new images for the recent formats though. Thewolrab (talk) 23:23, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Images for recent formats? I could probably get a few. I'm also trying to slowly but surely expand the non-passenger plates to many more types. I had an idea for a new section: uncommon formats. This could include things like 123 456 on a spirit base passenger plate, 123 ABC (from AAA to VZZ) on a spirit base, all of the weird spacing errors, and possibly move the 123 4AB format there. H0si7 (talk) 00:58, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

massrmv.com license plate images

Are license plate images from [1] in the public domain? They would improve the article a lot and if I can confirm they are I will upload and add them. AnAwesomeArticleEditor (talk) 00:52, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

That's a good question - I would say yes, we can use them, as the copyright on the page shows it is property of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and therefore public domain, per this guideline, which I've quoted below:

"Those records created by Massachusetts government agencies and institutions held by the Massachusetts Archives are not copyrighted and are available for public use. Copyright for materials submitted to state agencies may be held by the person or organization that created the document. Patrons are responsible for clearing copyright on such materials.[15]"

Garchy (talk) 13:16, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Good faith edits

@Daniel Quinlan

I saw your recent edits to this page about this unregistered user who had been actively editing this page over the last few weeks. You said that it was impossible to determine if this was a good faith change or not. Massachusetts license plates have been of great interest of mine, so I can verify some of the information. Most of the new information is based on [2], which is Eric Tanner's original research over many years, and I believe to be a reputable source. I find that a lot of the new edits are unnecessary and don't add much meaningful information though (see sections 1.1.1 and 1.2.1). Do you have any other thoughts on this from when you looked at it a few hours ago? H0si7 (talk) 01:36, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

I was concerned because the unregistered editor started vandalizing pages. Even if their recent edits have been made in good faith, the article as a whole is woefully short on citations. It also seems to be treading into territory discouraged at WP:NOTDATABASE, but that may be true of most if not all of the state-specific articles on license plates. Apologies for the limited thoughts, I don't have a lot of familiarity with this topic area. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 01:59, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

This user actually had a previous IP address banned for a month for editing Michael Rosen to add, "His pen is missing." Part of the reason the article is short on citations is because there just aren't very many sources available on this topic. Comparing this to Vehicle registration plates of California and Vehicle registration plates of Texas, it does seem like the new edits aren't necessary. I believe this to be in good faith, but the edits seem to have been made by someone who was basically ripping the information straight from [3] H0si7 (talk) 10:21, 21 March 2024 (UTC)