Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Archive 20

Google Street View

For those as mayn't know, it appears that there's been a major update. Most of the United States is now covered. The photos, I'm sure, are copyrighted by Google, so unlikely we could use them. However, it's a tremendous resource for those of us who take photos, to get a preview of where we're going. Or for anyone going on a trip anywhere, really. Anyhoo, HHoYC (Happy Holiday of Your Choice)! :) --Ebyabe (talk) 21:11, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

I have begun to see links to the street view of a site being added to articles, so that's an option. I'm wondering when a template'll be created to improve the process. Hmm... --Ebyabe (talk) 21:13, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I discovered it a week or so ago. I've already put it to good use in finding a few potential photo ops for NRHP articles! Altairisfar_talk 22:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

One more question

We have Category:Warehouses on the National Register of Historic Places and Category:Registered Historic Places of religious function, but nothing for any other types of buildings. Would it be reasonable to have a Category:Houses on the National Register of Historic Places or Category:Residences on the National Register of Historic Places? I'd create such a category, but I don't want to create a new scheme without input. Nyttend (talk) 23:02, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about categories, but it would seem to me that "Houses on the NRHP" would be too broad to be useful; there would be about 50,000 of them i suppose if it was attached to historic districts and any NRHP property that has a house involved. Arent't most NRHPs houses? There are categories like "Houses in New York" already, too, but i don't think there is "NRHP houses in New York" or anything just like that. doncram (talk) 01:51, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

"NRHP houses in New York" might be useful for the many people who are interested in details of residential living (architecture, gardening, cooking …). Such a category could be a subcategory of both "NRHP houses" and "Houses in New York". Category naming conventions should be applied to the name, if it is to be created. -- SEWilco (talk) 06:31, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, that'd be the way to do it. There are over 250 house/homes on the Register here in Florida. If you figured an average of 200 per state, that's about 10,000 right there. It'd only be manageable as subcategories, imho. I think it's a good idea. --Ebyabe (talk) 16:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I've put all the houses I could find in Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming into state-level house categories: Kansas and Ohio because I've been working with them a lot lately, and the others because there were only a few houses with articles. I was going to do Hawaii, too, but there aren't any houses with articles. Hopefully this is a good start; perhaps you working with New York, Florida, and other states can expand this to your states too.

On a somewhat related note: as there's already the Category:Registered Historic Places of religious function, I decided to create a New Hampshire subcategory. Remembering SEWilco's note to heed the current naming conventions, I didn't go with "Registered Historic Places of religious function in New Hampshire", but with the (admittedly somewhat absurd) Category:Buildings of religious function on the National Register of Historic Places in New Hampshire. Is this an appropriate name, or is there another name that would fit better? The only other state-level religious buildings category (Oregon) is no help, as it's "RHPs of religious function in OR". If there's a better name, I'll be happy to change it, so we can go for speedy renaming. Nyttend (talk) 15:35, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Florida houses are done. And updating my comment above, there are 298 homes/houses in the category. --Ebyabe (talk) 17:49, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I actually think Nyttend's solution to the religious building naming controversy works. We'll just have to create a separate category for "Sites of religious function ..." to allow for a lot of the Native American sacred sites. Daniel Case (talk) 18:13, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

(unindent)I don't think we should reinvent the wheel when we can make our categories fit into what has already been developed elsewhere in WP. There's already a category structure under Category:Architecture that should suit our needs. We can replicate as much of that structure as makes sense under Category:National Register of Historic Places. So we would have something like:

 Category:National Register of Historic Places
   Category:Architecture on the NRHP
     Category:Buildings and structures on the NRHP
       Category:Bridges on the NRHP
       etc...
       Category:Housing on the NRHP
         Category:Apartment buildings on the NRHP
           Category:Apartment buildings on the NRHP in Alabama
           etc...
         Category:Houses on the NRHP
           Category:Houses on the NRHP in Alabama
             Category:Houses on the NRHP in Birmingham, Alabama
             etc...
           etc...
         etc?... (we may not need any other subcategories for housing)
       etc...
       Category:Religious architecture on the NRHP
         Category:Religious buildings on the NRHP
           Category:Places of worship on the NRHP
             Category:Chapels on the NRHP
             etc...
             Category:Church buildings on the NRHP
               Category:Churches on the NRHP in Alabama
               Category:Churches on the NRHP in Alaska
               etc...
               Category:Churches on the NRHP in New York
                 Category:Churches on the NRHP in New York City
                   Category:Churches on the NRHP in Brooklyn
                   etc...
                 etc...
               etc...
             Category:Mosques on the NRHP
             etc...
             Category:Synagogues on the NRHP
               etc...
               Category:Synagogues on the NRHP in New York
               etc...
             etc...
   etc etc etc ...

If there are too few NRHP churches in Alaska, they can be categorized under Category:Church buildings on the NRHP until there are enough to warrant a separate subcategory.

We should also make our categories subcategories within the Category:Architecture structure. For example, Category:Churches on the NRHP in Alabama should be a subcategory of Category:Churches in Alabama and Category:Mosques on the NRHP should be a subcategory of Category:Mosques in the United States. --sanfranman59 (talk) 19:47, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

NRHP categories on Commons

Hey, the NRHP photo categories available on Commons could be cleaned up, and there's some filing away of photos that could be done there. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Register_of_Historic_Places. doncram (talk) 01:46, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Hm, the state ones should probably be changed now to match what's here on Wikipedia. It can be done by a bot. I had them done for Florida a few months ago, as can be seen here. Ironic, actually, since the way I'd been naming the categories originally. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 02:43, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree, they need to be changed. I had made up one that complied with our naming structure here on en.wikipedia, and someone was "nice" enough to rename it to the wrong name to comply with the rest of the structure. They didn't ask me about it, they just did it. Hmmm. Royalbroil 03:29, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

As I've worked on creating county and city tables here, I've tried to categorize images over at Commons along the way. I did a whole bunch of work on photos of NRHPs & NHLs in California. But there's still a huge amount of work to be done. Unfortunately, many contributors to Commons don't bother adding categories (or even descriptions) to their photos when they upload them, making it almost impossible to match them up with articles here. --sanfranman59 (talk) 18:27, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Yet another question: contributing properties

Are contributing properties notable? This Masonic temple is part of the Rock Springs Downtown Historic District in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and not listed on the NRIS or Elkman or nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com. I don't know that it's a contributing property (or more to the point, how to find out whether it is or not), although judging by the picture in the article it's probably one of the classical revival structures that led to the district being listed in the first place. At the moment, the only source appears to be from the temple's website, and as it's apparently not a specifically listed property, I doubt that we could have the necessary sources unless it's notable for non-NRHP reasons. Nyttend (talk) 01:16, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Hold up, it's a copyvio; as an admin, I'm speedy deleting for copyvio reasons. You non-admins can still see everything: the text of the article is the first paragraph (minus the last sentence) of this, the main page of the lodge website, and the picture is a copyvio of this image. Awaiting opinions... Nyttend (talk) 01:21, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I rather expect it is indeed a contributing property, as similar lodge buildings are in many other historic districts. You would confirm that by getting the NRHP nomination document for the Rock Springs Downtown Historic District, which will detail all the contributing and non-contributing properties. It's free. :) doncram (talk) 01:46, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

The author of the page, Leveck, may be the owner of the content in question. The copyright notice at rockspringslodge12.org says to contact leveck at sign rockspringslodge12.org. As far as whether or not it's a contributing property, I can't tell that for certain. It probably is, given the description and the fact that rockspringslodge12.org has a photo of their NRHP plaque. I found a narrative description of the district by going to [1] and searching for "Rock Springs", but it doesn't contain a list of contributing properties.

In general, I think a contributing property to a historic district is notable, though there's a decision to be made between writing a separate article versus just including that property in the district's article. There are probably many houses on Summit Avenue (the Historic Hill District) that have enough research material for their own articles. On the other hand, Gooseberry Falls State Park is part of a historic district that contains 88 contributing properties, but I don't think I'd write separate articles about the concourse (the "Castle in the Park"), the water tower, the refectory, the kitchen shelter, and so on. It boils down to how much research material is available for a given property, as well as how long an article can be made from it. (Which reminds me: Gooseberry Falls State Park could probably use a lot more description of its CCC buildings, as well as pictures. The existing article is kind of thin in that regard.) --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 02:49, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Nyttend seems pretty good at rounding up references. Congrats on getting GA rating for super-well-referenced Southworth House (Cleveland, Ohio). As the promoter said "Great job improving the article thus far; we need more "short" articles such as this. Congratulations". :) doncram (talk) 07:00, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

List of National Natural Landmarks

I suspect many of you will find the National Natural Landmarks very similar to the National Historic Landmarks and National Register of Historic Places that we all know and love. I've broken out the state lists into separate articles and I've worked through the List of National Natural Landmarks in New York into as complete a list as I can make it. It's a good example of where I think we can get all of the state lists to and with just under 600 of them nationwide, it's not as imposing as what we've already done. One important todo is to modify the nrhp2 template to support NNL's as well. Besides that, it's all about the articles as usual. The NPS has provided a handy map of all NNLs. Thanks and enjoy dm (talk) 15:32, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I totally support working on the list of National Natural Landmarks, and i even went to take a pic of one of your NY NNLs recently, but i think the topic falls more naturally within the domain of Wikipedia:WikiProject Protected Areas, aka wp:PAREAS? I would think modifying the Protected Areas infobox, instead, would make sense. Me and several other people here are members of that wikiproject, too. Suggest moving/continuing this discussion at wt:PAREAS. doncram (talk) 05:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, and I can see the logic. I keep going back to the fact that the National Park Service manages the list.... dm (talk) 06:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, all the National Natural Landmarks should be listed on the world-wide list of IUCN protected areas, while they are not generally listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. So it would be natural to find a subgroup of people at wp:PAREAS interested in working on the U.S. NNLs, but NNLs do not fall within NRHP wikiproject. I would help over there, and in fact i would like some activity there to help pep up that wikiproject. For instance, i just inserted a Protected Areas infobox into the first article in your list of NY NNLs. Does the PAREAS infobox meet your needs? If not, I could help get it revised. But I think the discussion should continue at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Protected areas#U.S. List of National Natural Landmarks. doncram (talk) 07:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Category:Religious properties on the National Register of Historic Places

RE the above: Do we then want to go ahead and create

• Category:Churches on the National Register of Historic Places
• Category:Cathedrals on the National Register of Historic Places
• Category:Synagogues on the National Register of Historic Places
• Category:Mosques on the National Register of Historic Places

Einbierbitte (talk) 16:54, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

If we do, I'd suggest starting with the churches category, as that would probably the most populated one. --Ebyabe (talk) 17:52, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Are there mosques on the NRHP? The idea of having this fourfold scheme sounds good to me, and (given that the NRHP really isn't that diverse religiously) I doubt that we'd need to make a category for other kinds of religious buildings. By the way, what about my statewide category: is it a good thing, or do you think it better to do otherwise? Nyttend (talk) 23:57, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I say yes, the current category Registered Historic Places of religious function is so overpopulated that it isn't very useful at present. I definitely think that we could use a Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Alabama subcategory. It would be easily populated. I would assume that the other states have similar needs. Altairisfar_talk 02:32, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, absolutely use per-state categories. We might not need them for synagogues and mosques, though, as I don't believe there are anywhere near as many on the Register as churches. Don't think we need to create categories with only a very few articles in them, imho. --Ebyabe (talk) 03:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've added a lot of articles to Category:Registered Historic Places of religious function, knowing that these would be changed at some point, but realizing it would be much easier to find them for renaming if they're all in this huge category. Form there we could decide how to break them up. In addition to the churches, cathedrals, temples, and mosques, we need to cover religious schools and cemeteries.--Appraiser (talk) 16:45, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Two more questions: is it good to have an overall "religious" for a state, or just "churches", etc., and if so, is the name format that I used for New Hampshire good, or is there something better? I'm not trying to be impossible-to-please; it's just that I don't feel like placing categories only to find that they need to be renamed. Nyttend (talk) 03:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm working on Florida ones now. I'm beginning to think just the overall state category might be enough. Doing churches/synagogues/mosques could be overcategorizing. --Ebyabe (talk) 03:55, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

So just a "Religious properties on the National Register of Historic Places in ___particular state___" or something similar for now? Sounds good to me. Altairisfar_talk 04:19, 29 December 2008 (UTC) I followed your lead and did Alabama with "Buildings of religious function on the National Register of Historic Places in Alabama." So now Alabama, Florida, and New Hampshire are done. Altairisfar_talk 06:26, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

And Rhode Island. Nyttend (talk) 15:11, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Mosques on the NRHP

For what it's worth, there are just a handful of mosques on the NRHP. Using Elkman's search tools on likely keywoods such as mosque, muslim, and islam yields just:

• Mother Mosque of America, oldest US mosque, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• Abou Ben Adhem Shrine Mosque, not an Islamic mosque, but rather a Shriners building in Springfield, MO
• (Mosque of the El Jebel Shrine, in Denver, CO, not on the US mosques list, not sure what that is

The whole List of mosques in the United States covers just 35 notable mosques, of which some may possibly be current or future NRHPs. doncram (talk) 05:27, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Apparently the Mosque of the El Jebel Shrine is also a Shriners building, which implies that there's exactly one actual religious mosque on the NRHP. A lonely category indeed. Andrew Jameson (talk) 11:41, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Odd Fellows Hall

A proposal has been made to merge the various Odd Fellows Hall disambiguation pages. The discussion can be found at Talk:Odd Fellows Hall. Oh, and Happy New Year, all. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 01:23, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Two CFDs where input from editors here is needed

A while back when I created the "Buildings by former use" category to hold subcats for the many fire stations and schools on the Register that aren't being used for those purposes anymore, among other building types, I added train stations and churches.

Well, after a little New Year revert-warring between myself and User:Carlaude, who thinks we shouldn't distinguish categorically between congregations that have dissolved and buildings they no longer use (see an NHL, Dutch Reformed Church (Newburgh, New York), for an instance of a former building of a still-extant congregation, and I know there are others), we've taken it to CFD.

See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 January 3#Category:Former churches for my proposal to rename that category to make it clearer that it refers to churches as organizations and not the bricks and mortar. Carlaude's is at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 January 2#Category:Former church buildings proposing to delete the category I created. Daniel Case (talk) 07:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Kansas and other state NRHP list-tables

After several months of on-and-off work, I've finished putting all of Kansas into tables. Several notes:

• I ultimately split out 24 of the 98 counties into their own pages, because the page was too large otherwise. I didn't expect it, but the pre-split page was literally too large for the MediaWiki software to handle: it stopped displaying the templates about 2/3 of the way down the table!
• I've created a nav template for the various county pages: {{NRHP in Kansas by county}}.
• I spent much of today searching through community articles and Commons categories for pictures; every line has a picture if I could find it.

One thing: is there an organised effort to ask Flikr users to release their copyrighted pictures for NRHP purposes? I found a Flikr user who had pictures of dozens of Kansas sites for which we had no pictures (for example, the Allen County Jail in Iola, here), but s/he had listed them as all-rights-reserved. I never use Flikr myself, so I don't know what to do or how to do it; could someone contact this user, DIGITAL IDIOT? Nyttend (talk) 01:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey, nice work. It looks very well done, and consistent with what has been done in other states. By the way, two states whose list-articles are somewhat in flux are List of RHPs in NY and List of RHPs in AL. I added overall tables that tallied up the number of RHPs in the state, to these ones. Such a table can be used as an index, then the separate sections on counties (at least for those counties with sep. articles) might best be dropped. Not sure on what format will eventually work best. It is interesting to get an approximate count of the number of RHPs in a state, which the tally tables provide, while the NPS does not state how many there are, as far as i know. I wonder how many there are in Kansas. Hope someone else can respond about Flikr. doncram (talk) 01:43, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

I see that Sanfranman59 has improved upon the NY model with National Register of Historic Places listings in California. That includes tallies of the counties, and formats in two columns of pics that work really well. I guess it is the best-formatted state NRHP list now.... :) doncram (talk) 18:37, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

And Dtbohrer has fixed up List of RHPs in PA with a nice split-column format: photos on left and right of a tally by counties list. PA, CA, NY, and KS lack the nice clickability of the state-wide maps of counties that AL and FL lists sport, though.... doncram (talk) 22:46, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

PA has got a clickable map. --​​​​D.B.^{talk•contribs} 23:28, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

The Florida list is done. --Ebyabe (talk) 21:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

And i also shamelessly copyied User:Dtbohrer's nice format for photo layouts to List of RHPs in AZ, in progress. Hope u don't mind, DT. Also, yes, my mistake about the PA map being clickable which is nice. Would someone ever give me some hints how to create one of those? I have been obsessed about getting a clickable one for List of RHPs in NY for a long time now. :) doncram (talk) 22:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I ran across a past discussion in Ebyabe's talk page archive about making a clickable map, which helped a lot. By the way, for NY, I'd upload a PNG version of the county map because GIF files don't scale all that well. Florida looks nice with its three columns of photos (I would have done the same for PA but I was worried that on a non-widescreen monitor, the images would force the table below the images). I copied California's format but decided to switched it to a split column format (less white space). --​​​​D.B.^{talk•contribs} 00:48, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

First Church of Christ, Scientist (Scranton, Pennsylvania)

Help. I just reverted this to its original name and the person who changed it without consensus has reverted my change.(see talk page). clariosophic (talk) 19:16, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Fire in Milton Historic District

Two million dollars in damage estimated, but could have been much worse. Link to the story here, and this is a Google Street view of the section where the fire was. It's a nice little town; I visited it last Easter on a massive photo roadtrip, and want to go back at some point. You can see why here. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 04:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

NHL photo contest

Remember this last year? Well, finally they've announced the winners. Here it is, with an event planner using some of the photos. So, were any of our members winners? I know I wasn't. Oh, well, maybe next year. At least we know, so we have the next several months to take pictures. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 03:25, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I just got an email from the NHL contest announcing this, too, which presumably went to all who submitted photos. I was wondering what happened, too. However, it doesn't look like any of the winners are among us, rats. :( Sorry if I raised unrealistic hopes, back in June. Looking at the photos, it seems possible that the winning photos are professional film-based photos. I wonder if digital photos have a chance at all. I also wonder how the contest is run, and whether our digital photos submitted by email just get printed out badly and compare poorly with 20 inch glossy beautiful prints submitted by other photographers in some line-up at NPS area meetings. If the purpose is to select photos for a glossy calendar of a certain size, then detail quality would weigh a lot more than our usual concerns for wikipedia photos in terms of content/color/composition. Or maybe we just weren't lucky. In some previous years, it looked to me like some simple snapshots had won in some categories. Oh well. Presumably the deadline is July 1 again, but i doubt i'll bother submitting anything unless i got some super-duper camera and knew a lot more about how the competition worked. doncram (talk) 09:09, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I doubt whether the camera is digital or film (they still make those? ;-) matters. Many professionals are using digital cameras these days anyway. My guess is that there were professional submissions, and, to put it simply, they were just significantly better than anything any of us will probably ever do. Photography is an art, and its not easy. --IvoShandor (talk) 09:27, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Ivo's right, much serious pro photography these days is done with digital (the only exception that I'm aware of being some advertising photographers, particularly in fashion, who still use slide film (or as those of us with some experience shooting above the amateur level always call it, E6) and then scan the ones they like best, then do anything they need or want to do in Photoshop)). That said, I am satisfied with the NPS's picks. If they were digital, they probably used something like 12 MP digital SLRs. Let's face it, if you look through the FP collections here or at Commons (or the Quality images section at the latter), you'll see that almost every entry has a resolution of at least 300px or better, which is what you get from pro-quality cameras (Trains magazine explicitly says that any photos submitted to them must be that res or higher). While I've been very happy with what I have done with my 6 MP 230px Kodak EasyShare, I can see how it's still hard to reach professional quality with that, as you inevitably get more noise at those settings and I've had many of my few FPC candidates rejected almost out of hand for that (This image is my big hope for someday getting an FP, although it will take some work that I've barely started. But if you look at it at full size, it's surprisingly noise-free. We need to do something about the artifacting, though).

Is it just me, or does the overall winning picture look like a painting? Or the one for the Colonial Niagara Historic District? The other photos do look nice, though I'd like to see the full size version. I suppose one could go to all the links provided, but I'm laaaaaazy. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 03:37, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe we could make our own calendar or something?

But hey, who needs the NPS to spotlight our work here? We could always find twelve or so of our own great images and put together a 2010 calendar on our own (this sort of thing has been one of my fundraising ideas for a long time). anyone up for that? Daniel Case (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I can think of a couple of Illinois NRHP images I took that I think are just awesome. :) Of course, I am quite biased. --IvoShandor (talk) 20:09, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

We should do it, we could use the proceeds for any number of things, donation to Wikimedia, ship a few of us off to some ridiculous Wikipedia convention ;), I'm thinking maybe, I don't know what your thoughts were on this. If it were successful, I would imagine possibilities would increase. And I doubt this is something we could do on-wiki, but I have a website or two. --IvoShandor (talk) 20:12, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Funny, I've been putting together a calender for fun of some of the courthouses I've visited here. A project calender sounds like a neat-o idea. :) --Ebyabe (talk) 03:37, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like fun. Lvklock (talk) 00:49, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Tourist-related categories

Had a thought. What about:

It may be too broad or subjective, admittedly. It's just I've noticed we have a number that would qualify in Florida (tourist destination that we've been for lo these many years). On a similar note, perhaps:

Category:Hotels on the National Register of Historic Places

Back to musings... :) --Ebyabe (talk) 03:41, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, NRHP-listed in MN

I am a bit intrigued. I am more a fan of lists than categories, though. Could you start up a List of tourist attractions listed on the National Register of Historic Places, or some such variation? I wonder if u know of places like a Disneyland or biggest ball of twine, etc. Hmm, i just saw a pic of a giant blue ox that's listed in the List of RHPs in MN. I would hope tourist attraction would be defined to maximize kitsch and to exclude historic home museums that are merely historical.

About hotels, there are a whole lot. I would be more interested if a list-article could be defined to cover only the hotels that you can stay in, excluding the vacant/ruined/converted ones. I'd be interested to know, for when planning travel. If it is in that vein, then it should also include the historic homes that are now B&B's, like the "historic properties" you can search for via a website linked from the [NRHP.COM]'s "Travel Destinations" tab. Making this a valid wikipedia list-article would require some careful composition, not sure what the issues are exactly but i am sure we have to differentiate from being merely a travel site. At a minimum, could have a WikiProject page for our own travel use, as a "research support tool" for WikiProject members. Nice ideas to noodle about. :) doncram (talk) 04:11, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

I think tourist attractions is pretty inherently subjective and probably not a good way to categorize or use as a criteria for list inclusion. I think that pretty much any NRHP could be labeled as a "tourist attraction", they are to me, I go places just to see NRHP sites, and that's it. But I doubt you could ever get reliable sources to agree on what would be included and what wouldn't. Just my thoughts, that said, do as you will, I won't do anything about it. :-) --IvoShandor (talk) 05:12, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Teapot Dome Service Station, an article created by ...IvoShandor!

Hmm there is Category:Roadside attractions already, including a few that are NRHPs. doncram (talk) 06:12, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

True, every NRHP is a potential tourist attraction. I was thinking more of properties that were added to the Register because they were tourist attractions. A good example is St. Augustine Alligator Farm Historic District. In it's listing, it has "Area of Significance: Entertainment/Recreation". Maybe a category name more along those lines? --Ebyabe (talk) 17:31, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I think there is a technical term for these types of structures, something like "architectural follies." --Orlady (talk) 20:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I too have seen these described as follies, but I don't think that is an actual appropriate use of the term, despite the fact that I included it in a couple articles I did. I think there is a slightly more accurate, better term and it's on the tip of my tongue, I just can't think of it for some reason. --IvoShandor (talk) 20:38, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree that "follies" probably isn't the right term, and that there is a better term "out there." Unfortunately, that term isn't anywhere near the tip of my tongue. I hope the right term comes to you soon. --Orlady (talk) 20:51, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

What about novelty architecture? --​​​​D.B.^{talk•contribs} 20:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

THAT'S IT!!!! Nice. Now I remember it. :-) We could build cats off of that if you wanted.--IvoShandor (talk) 19:40, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

The Alligator Farm is a different story, not sure what exactly the category tree looks like for NRHP sites, but something like Category:Recreation sites on the National Register of Historic Places, or something similar, I mean, make it match up grammatically with whatever it is we're doing these days. --IvoShandor (talk) 19:46, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Scenic highways like the Historic Columbia River Highway would probably fit too. It was built both for transportation and as a beautiful scenic highway, though the former soon took precedence until it was bypassed. --NE2 22:10, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Splitting a single city

Help! I decided to put Philadelphia into a table, since every other Pennsylvania county (Philadelphia is a consolidated city-county) had a nice table. However, I just found that there are about forty listings too many: at listing #480, it passes the maximum number of templates, so every listing from #480 to #521 doesn't display properly. I know how to deal with this normally, as it's the same problem I encountered with Kansas as noted above, but there's nothing of Philadelphia to split out from Philadelphia: it's one city in one county. I note what Pubdog says above about Baltimore, but (having never divided a city list) I'd like advice or actual action please. Nyttend (talk) 13:59, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

This page lists the city's twelve districts with their official boundaries, although it might be difficult to plot these on an actual map. Seeing that Baltimore today is split alphabetically, however, I'm going to be bold and split it that way; I'd welcome comments, however! Nyttend (talk) 14:12, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree that a neighborhood division is likely to be impractical, because of issues in assigning properties to neighborhoods. However, since the name of any specific property often is not intuitively obvious to the user (for example, "US Court House and Post Office Building" might be under "U" or "C" or "P" -- or maybe "F" for "Federal Building"), splitting the list alphabetically into several articles, as is done in National Register of Historic Places listings in Baltimore (Independent City), also seems less than satisfactory. Can the tables for different parts of the alphabet be placed in one article? --Orlady (talk) 14:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

I think that Baltimore and Philadelphia both should be split into geographical districts, as was done for the 506 National Register of Historic Places listings in New York County (Manhattan) by Dmadeo and myself. This is a reader-understandable way to divide the material and it works well with the accompanying maps of coordinates, although it takes some work to get it organized this way. Having multiple overlays of the whole city "divided" alphabetically seems weird to me. For Manhattan, Dmadeo came up with a good division scheme (Manhattan below 14th, 14th to 59th, 59th to 110, above 110, and smaller islands) and coarsely divided the 506 listings that way using his knowledge of the city. At first, there were a good number of places near dividing lines that were put in the wrong page. I added and worked with the maps of coordinates to identify and move properties to the right pages. There are a few historic districts that cross a border (e.g. Riverside Park and Drive) so appear in two district pages. There was a lot of manual work involved in implementing the geo division, but in my view that is the only way that makes sense and it is not too much work. For Philadelphia, since there are apparently 12 official districts, you could start by dividing the list into twelve wikipedia list-articles each with an accompanying Google map, taking your own best guess as to which properties, and then refine. Once each of the 12 list-articles is cleaned up, you could later choose to present 2 or 3 list-article chunks in one wikipedia article. Nyttend, do you agree, and are you familiar enough with Philadelphia to do the first rough division? Or is there a different natural way to partition Philadelphia besides using the 12 official districts? doncram (talk) 16:37, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

The closest I've been to Philadelphia is Gettysburg, and the most I know of the city is from the pastor of the church I attend when I'm not in college, who went to seminary there. As I'll be at college in a few days, I won't even be able to ask him. I think geographical arrangement would make more sense, but the way in which the table was before (with too many templates) was altogether unworkable; I went with the alphabetical split as a stopgap measure. The 12 districts provide a convenient way to arrange it, so I agree that it would be sensible to use those 12 districts — assuming there's someone who understands the map and/or the city well enough to divide it accurately. Nyttend (talk) 17:39, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Since I starting tablizing the PA counties, I always dreaded finishing and having deal with Philly. I've also had time to try and come up with a solution that I think would work. The city seems to already have some geographic boundaries that we could use: South Philly, Southwest Philly, North Philly, Northwest Philly, Northeast Philly, West Philly and Center City. Doncram mentioned that the city has 12 districts, but sometimes more than one district falls into one geographic section. I also thought, if we have to, contact WP:PHILLY and see what they say. --​​​​D.B.^{talk•contribs} 18:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation publishes a very detailed map of Philadelphia showing the major streets and all neighborhoods here (PDF). Since the list is only 40 items too large or so, I think it might make sense to split the city into as few districts as possible, perhaps two or three. My guess is the center city will have more than any other district. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Good. There may be little/no disagreement here. All Some of DT's 7 division parts are groupings of the well-defined 12 official districts covered in map that Nyttend (not me originally) pointed out, above. I see that DT's "North Philly" combines together 3 of those districts. "Northwest Philly" combines 2 districts. I'm happy to defer to DT and group those together up front, making it 9 or fewer parts rather than 12 parts. It's just important to have a MECE partition. Yes, as Ruhrfisch notes, it is likely that the Center City has the biggest number of NRHPs. doncram (talk) 19:03, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

And DT's Northeast Philly combines 3 more. 12-2-1-2=7 So that would make 7 list-articles:

1. NRHP listings in Philadelphia's City Center (is it OK to have an apostrophe in an article name?)
2. NRHP listings in South Philly
3. NRHP listings in Southwest Philly
4. NRHP listings in West Philly
5. NRHP listings in Northeast Philly
6. NRHP listings in Northwest Philly
7. NRHP listings in North Philly

doncram (talk) 19:58, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Agree that it shpould be split geographically. There are, I believe, neighborhoods such as Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in NW that were once separate communities and which still retain some sense of idenity. clariosophic (talk) 20:11, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

What about splitting them by function? I did a query based on the historic functions of each property (as represented in the National Register database), and something interesting popped out: There are 188 educational properties in there, the great majority of which are part of the Philadelphia Public Schools Thematic Resources. There are 175 properties listed as "domestic" (either single-family houses, apartments, or historic districts), 86 listed as commerce/trade, 42 as religion, 37 as industry/processing/extraction, 29 social, 22 recreation and culture, 17 government, 14 defense, 13 health care, 11 landscape, 7 funerary (funeral homes and cemeteries), 5 as agriculture/subsistence, and 1 as "other". (That adds up to 679 because some of those are in multiple categories.) I don't know if we have to break them down quite that much, but we could go with groupings such as:

• Educational (which includes the lone "other" entry, Philadelphia School of Design for Women
• Residential (which sounds better than "domestic")
• Business (includes commerce/trade, industry/processing/extraction, and agriculture/subsistence)
• Government and defense
• Parks, landscape, recreation and culture
• Social organizations
• Transportation
• Religious and funeral

We'd probably have to separate the historic districts out if they have multiple functions, or just pick the most prominent of those functions. (For example, the Philadelphia Marine Barracks is listed both under Defense and Domestic, but it's primarily defense). Any thoughts on this? Would this make a better grouping for the reader? --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 20:42, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Come to think of it, a functionally-oriented list doesn't have to exclude a location-oriented list, especially since maps would make more sense in the location-oriented list. The main NRHP in Philadelphia page could contain pointers to both of these listing schemes. --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 20:46, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Forgive me for not participating much in this discussion; even though a geographical split (with or without another split simultaneously) seems like the best choice, I'm really not sure what would be the best thing to do. One bit of concern about "unofficial" neighborhoods such as Germantown: as they (unless I'm misunderstanding something) don't have official borders, how are we going to be sure whether they're in that neighborhood in the way we can be certain about the properties in the "official" neighborhoods? I do like the idea of separating the historic districts, to be sure: it's a clear and natural division. Nyttend (talk) 02:45, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, informal neighborhoods are hard to use. You can mention them in selected articles, but hard to use to partition up a whole list. Anyone knowledgeable about Baltimore? It has 9 official neighborhoods. Hoping to have discussion on its geo reorganization at Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Baltimore (Independent City)#reorganizing into geographical areas of the city. Likewise, there is at least one local--BillFlis--commenting about Philly geo reorg at Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania#reorganizing into geographical areas of the city. Shortcuts are List of RHPs in Baltimore and List of RHPs in Philly. doncram (talk) 04:37, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Followup: List of RHPs in Baltimore got itself rearranged into geographical areas. 102 are in the Central area, out of 270 or so NRHP listings in the whole city. Central got a list-article, and the 8 other areas were grouped into 4 other list-articles. I think it's better than the previously implemented 4 alphabetical lists, although it was helpful to have the 4 alphabetical lists created at least temporarily (to provide access to the Google maps in order to identify which properties were in which district). I think BillFlis, Nyttend and/or Dtbohrer are rearranging the Philadelphia NRHP listings similarly. doncram (talk) 16:57, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Rearranging state NRHP lists into geo-based rather than alphabet-based chunks of counties?

Extending the principle of presenting NRHPs in geo-based groupings, it seems to me that the state lists of NRHPs, where split into chunks of counties, should use geo-based sets of counties, rather than alphabet-based chunks. For example, i notice Nyttend proceeding in table-izing Kentucky, which was previously divided up into alphabetical chunks of counties like National Register of Historic Places listings in Kentucky (Adair County to Estill County). The table-izing work is certainly helpful. Eventually, though, I think it would be better to find or create a geo-based partition of counties in the state, and regroup the counties into NRHP listings in north-west Kentucky, etc. There currently are several ways of organizing the state lists of NRHPs. List of RHPs in NY is one divided into a separate list-article for each county (division done by someone else, before i did other work on that big list). List of RHPs in MN is one where there is a big list with all the smaller counties, and with larger individual counties split off. List of RHPs in ND, with 405 total RHPs, currently has just one county split out separately. It could be revised to include, in one big table on one page, all the RHPs in the state. doncram (talk) 16:57, 13 January 2009 (UTC)