Talk:South Carthay, Los Angeles

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For you reference, I have temporarily hosted the page from the Thomas Guide so that you can see that see the reference to “South Carthy” neighborhood. [1]

Additionally, I have used the Thomas Guide citation exactly as you have [2] on other Wikipedia pages. (For you reference, you wrote: "The street boundaries on Mapping L.A. are the Hollywood Freeway on the north, Glendale Boulevard and Second Street on the east, Beaudry Avenue and the Harbor Freeway on the southeast, West Olympic Boulevard on the southeast and south, Westmoreland Avenue, Wilshire Place and Virgil Avenue on the west, and Temple Street and Hoover Street on the northwest.[2][7]" Citation #7 is the Thomas Guide (here…[3]

I am not sure why your usage of the Thomas Guide is acceptable to you, but my usage is not.

I have therefore reverted your edit.Phatblackmama (talk) 23:39, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Hello. Thanks for the map. I appreciate your work, as evidenced by the WP:Barnstar I gave you. Anyway, It seems to me that the Thomas Guide does not give boundaries. It gives only approximate locations. As for that link to the Thomas Guide you mentioned, oops! You are correct. It does not give boundaries, only a general location. If you want to remove that link, just do so. Anyway, I will open this up for discussion, and I will post on your Talk page where it will take place. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 05:02, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorry I have been incommunicado. I have been grieving over the loss of ten years' worth of emails thanks to a computer malfunction. The moral is: When an Apple adviser says you should do a "clean reinstall," think twice, or more.

Anyway, Let me give you some background: Some four years ago, I noticed that many Los Angeles neighborhoods either (1) did not have WP articles or (2) were badly described by WP. So I started with San Pedro on the south and gradually worked my way north, writing articles from scratch where they did not exist (as in the broad swatches of then-called South Central Los Angeles — who knew, for example, that places like Green Meadows, Los Angeles, even existed?) Just about that time, the Los Angeles Times implemented its Mapping L.A. project, and that was a big relief, for it finally actually drew boundary lines on a map that told us where one neighborhood ended and another one began. I welcomed it, but many, many homeowners' groups did not (particularly in the older neighborhoods, like Historic West Adams, but also those elsewhere in the city). You can see the results of the work of a lot of Wikipedians by clicking https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_districts_and_neighborhoods_of_Los_Angeles&type=revision&diff=807243579&oldid=541561177 and comparing the old with the new). Also notice the previously forgotten nabes that now have articles, and good ones, too, thanks to all the Wikipedians who worked on them. There have also been "neighborhoods" deleted because we all jointly decided that they were little more than residential subdivisions, not true neighborhoods as defined by a WP:Reliable source.

Some groups, as I said, rejected the Mapping L.A. boundary lines; they wanted the lines drawn as shown on their own maps. There were some disputes (see Talk:Koreatown,_Los_Angeles/Archive_1).

Anyway, as I went through the map, south to north, neighborhood by neighborhood, I used Mapping L.A. as my principal source for boundary lines, but unfortunately there are no street names on those maps — just lines. So I grabbed an old copy of the Thomas Guide and tried to parse out just what streets were reflected in those boundaries. I was very thorough, but I may have made some mistakes. And Wikipedia, if nothing else, is set up to correct, or at least to hear complaints about, mistakes.

That's why the Thomas Guide is given as a source for the boundaries: Not that the guide delineates the boundaries, but that it provides the names of the streets that the boundary source (Mapping L.A.) uses. To my knowledge (though I do not now own a Thomas Guide), that document does not contain any neighborhood boundaries but merely plunks neighborhood designations onto the map where the TG map-makers think they should go. Nevertheless, if any Wikipedian thinks that the neighborhood boundaries are not accurately identified by reference to Mapping L.A., plus the Thomas Guide, of course they can certainly re-identify them, citing their sources.

In addition, the Thomas Guide gives a source that these neighborhoods actually existed at the time the guide was presented. This is recorded in the WP:Edit summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_districts_and_neighborhoods_of_Los_Angeles&diff=next&oldid=563642952, when a whole flock of citations to the TG were added. The Edit summary says: "Add sources that these places exist."

I hope this summary has not been too long, but I wanted to answer your very cogent question.

Yours in Wikidom, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 14:05, 18 December 2017 (UTC)