Talk:Bostick Female Academy

development

This article was just now started in a semi-automated way, and could use more attention, perhaps including use of sources that might be found online. Please help!  :) Try Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

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Or develop from the sources already included in the article! Thanks. :) --doncram 18:03, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

At a loss

When I found this article, I had the intent of expanding/improving it, but there are too many things I don't understand about it.

• It appears from some of the wording that this is a National Register historic district with one contributing structure, but the infobox doesn't say it's an historic district, so that doesn't make sense.
• The article says it's in College Grove, but the one source indicates that it's in Triune.
• The article says that Triune is a crossroads community and a hamlet, but the sources I've consulted give no indication that it grew up around a crossroads. Also, they indicate that it was much larger than that in the 19th century, and maps show that it is much larger than that now.

I can't do much with an article that fails to make sense to me -- I can't even fix inappropriate language like "At one time Triune was quite a little educational center." --Orlady (talk) 21:57, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Orlady, your sarcasm is typical for you and not appreciated. I restored the article without what seems-to-be nasty-spirited tags. Your recent accusations about me, at several Talk pages, seems to suggest that you are engaging in wp:harassment here on this article. Is it your intention to dissuade me from editing Tennessee articles because you wp:own the state? Your edits here seem to serve a goal of making editing here unpleasant. That is the effect I receive, anyhow. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I long ago formed the impression that you work on Tennessee articles solely to annoy me. Since you removed the cleanup tags I placed on the article, I'm pleased to see that you also converted the sentence fragment to a sensible complete sentence and that you fixed up the malformed reference citation to Brandt. I'm still taken aback by the breezy tone and the imprecision of the article, particularly the part that says: "At one time Triune was quite a little educational center..." --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

If you have positive wording suggestions for the article, however, please do suggest them here. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I guess I need to be grateful that you want me to comment on this talk page, since you remove everything I post on your user talk page and you have persistently reverted my changes to the article. --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Also about content, the article is about a school building, not a historic district. Read the sources available. You have previously claimed to have downloaded the NRIS database: look it up there, for one source. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I haven't bothered to look at the NRIS database, since I don't much care about NRHP listings of old buildings, I have found plenty of other sources about Triune and this school, and the contents of the NRHP database are extracted into the NRHP infobox. I was confused about the historic district situation since the content that you created for this article says "The listing was for an area of 2 acres (0.81 ha) with just one contributing building." As you are well aware, the "contributing building" terminology only has meaning for historic districts, and the acreage of the listing generally is not a major focus except for historic districts. Since you say the listing is for the building, I assume you will be fixing the article to correct the mistaken wording. --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

About Triune, it is described as being at a crossroads in the Brandt source. You copied the Brandt source that I provided here to the Triune, Tennessee article and developed that article somewhat using that source. You have read the source. I believe it says that Triune grew up at a crossroads, and it is a small community. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

You probably have seen that I removed my objection to calling it a crossroads community before you commented here. I removed it based on an extensive discussion of the county's historical development in another source that I cited in my expansion of the Triune article (not Brandt, which BTW I did not copy from you; if you want to see my other sources, check the Triune article). When I noticed that you had started an article that mentioned Triune but didn't link to a Triune article, I went to see whether we had an article about Triune, and found sources on my own. Brandt does not describe Triune as a crossroads community, but it does say that the original name was "Hardeman Cross Roads"; maybe that's where you got the idea. Still, no source I've found has ever called it a "hamlet," and Brandt says it was a "thriving town" with a weekly newspaper in the years before the Civil War. Brandt doesn't mention it, but it also had a post office and several stores. Moreover, if you check online maps you will find that Triune is now the site of an Interstate exit, and it appears to be the site of a lot of development. That's a lot larger than a "hamlet" (although I suppose it it may be consistent with what New York might call a hamlet). --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

About College Grove, that is the location given in the NRIS database. Presumably Triune is near College Grove and I am guessing College Grove is or was a bigger community. Both their articles could probably be improved and refer to each other. Both are unincorporated communities, I guess, so it is hard to know. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah -- the theory that cryptic entries in the NRIS database are more reliable than any other source. Every source I've looked at, including a National Register document that describes it as a site previously listed on the National Register, places the school in Triune. Far be it from me to guess why the NRIS entry says it's in College Grove -- it's possible that the postal address is College Grove. Considering all of the good work you have done in tracking errors in NRIS, I know that this isn't the first time you've been aware of errors in the NRIS database. --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

If you have specific suggestions, make them. Generalized complaints and unnecessarily mean tone, in the context, seem like wp:harassment. Even the title of this discussion section is posed in complaining tone. Not fun. --doncram 02:47, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

"At a loss" was an accurate title. I wanted to try to improve the article, and I had the source you cited plus other sources, but too much of what was in the article was totally inconsistent with the article sources I had. I was at a loss to know how to address the situation. Your explanations here have helped; now I hope you will follow through in the article. --Orlady (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Orlady, nice job with the mix of sarcasm and information. You got in a lot of good digs! It's sufficiently mixed that maybe other editors, reviewing, would focus upon the legitimate points mixed in. But you get across to me that you continue to dislike me (as you have stated before) and that you don't want me developing historic site articles in the area of Tennessee. Thanks for trying to make me feel unwelcome. I'll respond more specifically to the content-related comments sometime later. --doncram 13:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

It's now clear that the oddities in the article that were (and still are) perplexing to me are partially the result of discrepancies or errors in the sources and partially the result of silly little mistakes (the kinds of mistakes that all of us make). Now that this is clear, it should be easier to fix them, but it's also clear that I had best not touch the article again. I'm still not at all clear on where you intend (or intended) to go with this article -- and I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to correct the location of a building that is clearly in Triune, when the location is misreported in the database that is treated as gospel by the NRHP wikiproject. You might be interested knowing that the Williamson County Historical Resources MRA (which places it in Triune) calls it "an excellent brick school" and "the best remaining school building of the late 19th century" (in Williamson County) -- but the MRA gives a date for its construction that doesn't match any of the other sources. --Orlady (talk) 17:21, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Congratulations on working in more nasty-seeming digs into that comment, which also included helpful information. To anyone else who ever might read this, Orlady is insulting NRHP wikiproject editors, including me, and mischaracterizing what they do and what they believe. Orlady jolly well does know that the NRIS database is not "treated as gospel"; she defended it, largely accurately, in long painful discussions with other editors complaining about it, at Talk:List of Masonic buildings and related discussions now archived. It's a generally reliable source. I would guess that when this Bostick Female Academy was NRHP-nominated, that the nominator, probably a local or Tennessee state person, accurately described it in the NRHP nomination as being in Triune, but further deemed unincorporated Triune at the time to be too small to give as the location, so stated College Grove, possibly a larger nearby place, as, in effect, the location of Triune. Now Orlady says Triune has grown because it is a highway exit stop, so maybe Triune is bigger and not currently regarded as being located in College Grove. I do notice that the College Grove article describes it as an "unincorporated town". I don't know, i wonder if it once was the large town that Triune was a location within. This would be cleared up probably by looking at the actual NRHP nomination document. To go down that track, though, Orlady has time and again refused herself to ever obtain one of these documents, when not available on-line. In her past refusals she has dripped sarcasm. I don't really care to go around and around again and again. I might get around to requesting that NRHP nom doc. I have recently collected other Williamson County ones and intend to work on their articles soon, instead.

So, given Orlady just said she won't edit this article with a reference to wp:OWN, another dig, I guess maybe we are done here. If there are positive suggestions on wording changes I would be glad to address them. I am not really motivated to go through Orlady's comments and respond to the somewhat valid questions or pieces of information that are mixed into the deliberately offensive tone and jabs. Please tone it down, Orlady, in general. --doncram 00:10, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Regarding College Grove vs. Triune... Neither one is incorporated as a municipality. Unincorporated areas are the norm in much of Tennessee. As stated at List of municipalities in Tennessee:

"As of the 2000 U.S. Census, 3,159,375 Tennesseans, or 55.5% of the state's total population of 5,689,283, resided in incorporated municipalities. The remainder resided in unincorporated areas."

Nearly half the state's people -- and a lot more of its land area -- are outside of incorporated municipalities.
Actually, Triune was a lot more important in the 19th century than any time since. Triune and College Grove both figure prominently -- as separate and distinct places -- in accounts of the Civil War. Regardless, Triune lost its post office and currently is treated by the postal service as part of Arrington (which is also unincorporated). On the other hand, College Grove still has a post office (zip code 37046). Although Arrington would appear to be a more likely postal address for Triune than College Grove, Triune is fairly close to both of those places, so it is possible that the College Grove postal address was used on a document that went to the National Register folks. When I researched the Triune article, I did not find any sources that hinted the Triune was part of College Grove. I would like to edit this article to explicitly state that the school is in Triune and get rid of the College Grove factoid (which seems to be nonsense), but that infobox keeps staring accusingly in my face.
As for my refusal to edit the article, after you reverted me three times and said I should comment on this page, I concluded that it's not worth my trouble to try to edit it until I have a clear understanding of what you will accept as content in the article. --Orlady (talk) 01:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

You wrote above "You probably have seen that I removed my objection to calling it a crossroads community before you commented here." Is that a dig? Seems like you are saying that I am participating in bad faith. In a case where you were wrong, and you should be actually apologizing for blasting me with your reverts and your whole "At a loss" tirade, it seems you are twisting it around to suggest i was wrong for responding to what you had written here, without taking into account some further edit you made elsewhere, which, no, i had not seen. I get the feeling rather strongly that you are highly motivated to prove me wrong. You can prove me wrong about something I wrote in mainspace, or you can prove my Talk page behavior to be somehow wrong (like that I occasionally delete messages you post at my talk page that i deem offensive), and then you'll trumpet it to unrelated other discussions. You have at least twice recently done that attacking, personal-type trumpeting. That's how you seem to be behaving. It's unpleasant to be on the receiving end. I don't deserve it. I have often acknowledged errors; i don't claim to be perfect. Are you admitting an error here? Could you please apologize for some of your earlier tone?

You work in so many digs at me in general, and also directed towards the National Register, that i often don't know how to interpret your remarks. In your various comments above, are you implying that the National Register staff would override location information entered as "Triune" by a local or state person, in the NRHP nomination document, to put in "College Station" instead? You think they loked up a given zip code and found that the post office is in College Station. I think that would be entirely ludicrous. I have seen the correspondence between lots of NRHP nom docs and NRIS entries, and never seen such a discrepancy introduced by the National Register staff. Maybe you didn't mean to suggest that? But if not, what NRIS error are you suggesting is present? Please clarify.

What a waste of time this is. A way forward would be for someone to get the actual NRHP nomination document. --doncram 01:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)