User talk:EncMstr/List of Oregon State Parks

Lookin' good

I like this version. I think it's a nice compromise between the proposed listing of amenities available (e.g. showers, etc.) with a handy at-a-glance format. I think you could take this live. It could use a little cleanup, but you know I'll take care of that. ;) Now all we need are some images. Katr67 17:27, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I also like the new list. The sorting feature is cool, and I like that I was able to copy-and-past the list into Excel for some additional analysis. Here are some nitpicky comments of my own:

- I suggest adding a column for "designation" - i.e. state park, state scenic viewpoint, state heritage area, etc, etc. This would work very usefully with the sorting feature.

- The column of links to "park websites" is problematic to me. That's the most directory-like feature of this format, and may cross the Wikipedia guidelines. The sort feature of the list does nothing to make the links column any more useful. The links offer no comparative information about each park. And, anyhow, those same links are only a couple clicks away in the articles for each individual park (when we get all the parks de-redlinked). I recommend removing this column.

- The "open year-round" column is appealing, and supported by an external reference (OPRD's website). But I hesitate about it because I'm not sure OPRD's own tagging of parks as year-round or not is all that meaningful. I mean, who says that Bridal Veil Falls (among other parks) isn't a year round park? Certainly not the people who, like me, go there all year round. I suspect OPRD simply means they lock up the restrooms at Bridal Veil Falls for the winter. If that's what they mean, then I really don't think that's all that encyclopedically notable. I leave the use of this column to others' discretion, but I needed to vent a little.

- The "camping" column. Goodgoodgood.

- I suggest replacing the "close to" column with a "county" column. The vagueness of the close-to criterion lends itself to usability confusion, and to the hazards of original research. For example, if I was using the "close to" column to find parks in the western Gorge, I'd look up under Troutdale, Cascade Locks, and maybe Corbett - but it would never occur to me to look under Multnomah Falls because I don't think of it as a town, and I'd miss 5 parks. And to my own mental definition, Corbett includes all of Multnomah County between the Sandy River and Bonneville Dam, which is an awful lot of parks - yet none are "close to" Corbett. And I don't think there's a citable reference that says one or the other spin is correct. The use of counties, with its limited number of externally well-defined list entries would fix both these problems.

EncMstr, excellent yeoman work on adding dimension to an otherwise pretty dry list. I hope you find my comments useful, and thank you. -Ipoellet 22:54, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with most everything:

• I'll add a "park type" column—if that's an agreeable heading.
• I hadn't thought about how ugly the park links are. The column was an artifact of my effort to gather the information. Perhaps it would not be so bad to leave until (most of) the articles are populated?
• Open year round kind of suffers from being too verifiable, doesn't it? The non-campground locations are less useful with this, as OSPRD is fuzzy. It probably does mean whether anyone is scheduled to do maintenance, or something like that. Maybe a note to that effect could be added to address your concerns?
• Close to comes from the navigation directions of each park, so they would have been quite verifiable. The exceptions are all in the gorge which give goofy references like Portland for John B. Yeon State Scenic Corridor, and Troutdale for Benson. I think one gave The Dalles as a reference for one near Troutdale (but can't find it now).
  While I appreciate the idea to use the county, that's another political division I have little use for personally (if all the Oregon county boundaries disappeared, would anyone notice?); also the OSPRD website doesn't say which county they're in so it makes this even stickier.
  I felt that some way of sorting which were really close was called for: for example, I spent the weekend in Depoe Bay, so finding the parks close to Lincoln City–Depoe Bay–Newport was trivial using this scheme. I'd love to replace it all with something graphical. For the gorge locations, maybe the exit number or (dread) just stick with OSPRD website's closest hint.

—EncMstr 07:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)