User:Epicgenius/Improving NYC building articles

This is a general guide on improving articles on New York City buildings, structures, parks, locations, etc. Surprisingly, many notable NYC locales such as bank buildings, churches, houses, office buildings, etc. do not have articles, even historic landmarks designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Many other pages are merely stubs/redirects even if a wealth of information may exist about them. Please note that this is just a guide, and it does not have to be adhered to strictly. There is no guarantee that an improved article may attain good article status.

General

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In general, when writing for an online encyclopedia, you need to use secondary reliable sources, which are mostly books and articles from scholars and reports from news outlets. If you think that you are not going to agree with such sources on a particular topic, don't pursue it. You can't avoid reliable sources, and you can't cherry-pick sources either.

Please note that, while searching for sources, the subject may go under a different name, address, or spelling.

Lead

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Infobox

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There is no general rule on including infoboxes and, depending on the subject, adding an infobox may be controversial. However, should you choose to add an infobox, the following may be useful:

Should you choose to include an infobox, ensure you have all basic data to make the infobox useful, such as location, coordinates, dimensions, opening/closing dates (manmade structures), and architect (buildings and structures). Try to avoid "disinfoboxes" without useful information, which are not useful to the reader and are just on the page for the sake of being there.

Prose

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The lead is the first thing most people will read upon arriving at an article, and may be the only portion of the article that they read. - quoted from WP:LEAD

The defining aspects of the article go in the first paragraph of the entire article. The first sentence identifies what the subject is in plain terms, without any jargon. According to WP:LEAD: "The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." Key points of the article should be mentioned in the lead, both with a neutral point of view and in a format which is easy to understand. For example, in this version of the "224 West 57th Street" article, the lead is excerpted as follows:

224 West 57th Street, also known as the Argonaut Building and formerly as the Demarest and Peerless Company Building, is a commercial building on the southeast corner of Broadway and 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, just south of Columbus Circle. The building consists of two formerly separate structures, the A. T. Demarest & Company Building and the Peerless Motor Car Company Building, both used by automobile companies. Both structures were designed by Francis H. Kimball and erected by the George A. Fuller Company with similar Gothic Revival and Romanesque Revival architectural details.

The portion of the building at the corner of 57th Street and Broadway was built for car manufacturer Aaron T. Demarest and his company. The section belonging to the former Peerless Motor Company is an "L"-shaped structure wrapping around the A. T. Demarest Building. 224 West 57th Street is 11 stories tall; the former Demarest section rises nine stories, while the Peerless section contains a partial tenth floor and an additional two-story tower. 224 West 57th Street contains a steel-frame curtain wall, concrete piers, and a facade of glazed architectural terracotta. Inside, both of the former structures had automotive storerooms at ground level and warehouses and repair facilities on the upper floors.

The Demarest and Peerless buildings were constructed simultaneously in 1909. General Motors (GM) bought both buildings in 1918 and combined them internally. After GM constructed other buildings in Manhattan, 224 West 57th Street was renamed the Argonaut Building to avoid confusion. The Hearst Corporation bought 224 West 57th Street in 1977 and housed its Hearst Magazine department there until 2006. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building as a city landmark in 2000. The building was renovated from 2008 to 2011 and subsequently became the headquarters of Open Society Foundations.

There is no standardized format for writing locale leads, though two to four paragraphs are recommended. WP:LEAD states that "the appropriate length of the lead section depends on the total length of the article. As a general guideline—but not absolute rule—the lead should usually be no longer than four paragraphs." If our lead is accessible enough, the reader will be interested enough to read further. Too much and the reader will leave the article without potentially seeing what they need. Too little and the reader will leave the article because they have not found the page useful.

With regards to content, the order of paragraphs in the lead is dependent on the order of sections in the body. In our 224 West 57th Street example, the second paragraph talks about site and design, and the third paragraph about history, because that is the order of the sections in the body. Note that the lead did not summarize critical reception, even though that is a section in the article. This is because the critical reception section is pretty sparse.

Header arrangement

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Generally I put my sections in a certain order.

  1. Site: the physical characteristics of a building's site. If possible, neighboring sites that are notable as well. If no neighboring sites exist, see "design" below.
    1. Sometimes, if a site's previous uses are notable (e.g. 28 Liberty Street#Site), then the previous uses may be detailed.
  2. Design: the design of a building. If not enough info exists on neighboring buildings, this includes site info as well.
    1. Form: for skyscraper articles mainly. Some skyscrapers will have Setbacks or other weird attributes, such as a public plaza next to a huge slab. So their general shape, or form, is mentioned.
    2. Facade: self-explanatory, but usually NYC landmarks and skyscrapers have detailed info about their facades and exteriors.
    3. Features: structural features, interior, other info that are pertinent (may be level 3-4 as warranted)
      1. Structural features: anything about the substructure (foundation/below ground) or superstructure (aboveground)
      2. Mechanical features: e.g. ventilation, lighting, power, electricity
      3. Interior: notable interior spaces. Particularly pertinent if the building is an interior landmark.
  3. History: this is usually flexible, but planning/construction and operation are usually two main parts.
  4. Critical reception/impact: if the building had some critical reviews or was notable architecturally, this may be a section worth including.
  5. References
    1. Notes: explanatory notes, {{notelist}}
    2. Citations: inline references, {{reflist}}
    3. Sources: multi-page sources. Any reference that uses a {{sfn}}/{{harvnb}} has a footnote that links to something in "Citations", which in turn leads to an anchor to a reference in this section.
      • If a page number is defined solely in an inline reference, then it does not use a {{sfn}}/{{harvnb}}, and so it does not go in here.

Notable exceptions:

  • Theaters:
    • These will also have a "notable productions" section. See, for instance, New Amsterdam Theatre#Notable productions. Only productions with articles are linked down there.
    • Critical reception usually fits into some part of the history or design.

References

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Be sure to read tertiary and general sources as well. Tertiary sources like encyclopedias and study books can also be used on Wikipedia, but are considered less valuable than secondary sources. However, it is sometimes good to start with tertiary sources, in order to establish what subject matter or scholarly opinions should be covered and to what extent. The LPC has provided an excellent guide for researching historic buildings.

For how to mine your sources most effectively, see WP:SOURCEMINE. After we have acquainted ourselves with our sources, we may come across other sources cited therein, that we had not found yet. These may be foreign-language sources, open source articles, chapters in conference reports, etc. We can then attempt to find those sources, and continue with those. Using sources cited in sources is also known as citation chaining.

Useful general sources

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Useful specific sources

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See also

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