Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States/Archive 5

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Category tagging

I have just done a fairly random check and tag of project related categories - and very few seemed to be tagged - anyone into raising bots to do the rest at all? or is the number of categories to large for the idea of a bot? curious if anyone is interested - it really helps project management to have categories tagged. Maybe in the end it is a manual job if the number has been estimated - as I do understand some bots hang up on larger numbers SatuSuro 15:52, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Also someone has very wisely narrowed some tagging on the Supreme Court categories - I would appreciate if anyone has any lead/link on an overall USA category tree at all SatuSuro 00:13, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

The current US-related WikiProjects template needs to be updated to make fools like self understand the inactives and the merges - for more clarity as to tag what - anyone in for a template upgrade? SatuSuro 00:15, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Connecticut portal

Comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Connecticut. Thanks! –Juliancolton | ^Talk 13:59, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

US stamps

A bunch of US stamp images have been nominated for deletion over the last few days. 70.29.210.174 (talk) 03:53, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Africana womanism

Helo everyone! You may be interested in checking out Africana womanism. Thank you! The Ogre (talk) 12:27, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

POV b.s. on Commission for Environmental Cooperation

Please see Talk:Commission_for_Environmental_Cooperation#Bullshit.2FPOV_nonsense.Skookum1 (talk) 14:24, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Individual articles for each Article of US Constitution

Why is the need for that? (Is there an urgency?, considering each article reflects the original text?) Does it promote American "self-centrism"? I mean, how about other countries' constitution? Why this needs to be in separate articles? Why not merge them into the whole US Constitution article? Why does they have their own article, especially that they are repeating on every mother articles, or why is there a need to explain each section, each article of the US Constitution?--JL 09^{Talk to me!} 09:24, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Virginia for FAC

Hello all. I'm posting this because I'd like to put Virginia back up for Featured Article Candidate, and hope that the third time's the charm. I'm looking for any suggestions editors here might have with the article before I do that. Also, since its been a while since I navigated the FAC, any suggestions from someone whose done it more recently, as it keeps getting more difficult. I am aiming for the end of next week, so please let me know before then if there's anything. Thanks guys!-- Patrick {_oѺ^∞} 19:18, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I realize I should add the link to the FAC page: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Virginia/archive3. It's been up for a while, and has garnered some support and good reviews, but more always help if you guys have the time!-- Patrick {_oѺ^∞} 16:29, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

MOH recipients

Does this Project have an SOP dictating Medal of Honor recipients' biographical articles fall under it and should be of "High" importance? — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 20:35, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Seniority lists for early Congresses

The following discussion may be of interest to project members: Talk:List of United States Senators in the 18th Congress by seniority#disputed. -Rrius (talk) 05:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Article: National Economic Council

The present article covers only the National Economic Council in the U.S. White House. However, there was another National Economic Council that existed in the mid-20th Century as an advocate for libertarian thought. Can someone who knows the history of the earlier National Economic Council write up something on it as disambiguation? I know that Rose Wilder Lane wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council in the 1950s.

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by RDCushing (talk • contribs) 21:07, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Household income in the United States GAR notice

Household income in the United States has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 15:31, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Pennsylvania GAR notification

Pennsylvania has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 21:41, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Relevant AfD

Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/101 People Who Are Really Screwing America. Cirt (talk) 06:38, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Revolutionary War

I am disenchanted with the current overall outline of the Revolutionary War. It may have served well originally to chronicle this like all other wars: Napoleonic or Civil War or whatever, by outlining a series of battles, won or lost, etc. etc.

But the American Revolutionary War was more like a guerrilla war. It was necessary for Washington to learn to husband his resources, fighting only when he was absolutely sure he could win. This was serious problem with no money, horrible soldiers, lousy training, etc. etc. That is the story of the war, plus maybe Lexington, Bunker Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Saratoga, Monmouth, and Yorktown; with Trenton and Ticonderoga thrown in for comic relief (okay cannons from Ticonderoga). But the rest should be outlined with emphasis on getting the troops through the winter, always a major problem, getting them trained, finding capable officers, etc. etc. The story is one less of battles won, then morale, logistics and politics. Right now there is "no room" in the outline for such "trivialities." No room for barely managing to preserve the army's integrity at Morristown in 1779-1780. The battles were "all over with" in the north, and the outline is therefore complete. End of story. The outline and emphasis needs serious restructuring at the highest level from someone who can grasp the entire war. The articles are already written. So it's "just" a matter of re-writing the highest level articles to reflect reality and not some bureaucratic focus on battles, mostly lost by Americans, not untypical during a guerrilla conflict.

And, oh, the templates reflect that emphasis also. Don't know how to "correct" this. "All" Wikipedia wars have battle templates, almost meaningless here, along with battles generally in the Revolution, the ones mentioned above excepted. Student7 (talk) 23:25, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Marijuana Reform Party

WikiProject United States members are invited to help improve the Marijuana Reform Party article, which needs much attention. Along with WP Cannabis, members of WP Political Parties and WP New York are welcome to improve the article in any way possible. Hopefully we can all work together to upgrade the article status within the next 2 weeks. Feel free to use the article's talk page to discuss how the article can be improved. Thanks! --Another Believer _(Talk) 00:34, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

NOTDIRECTORY

I came across this article at the end of the NPP backlog: Historical U.S. Census Totals for Penobscot County, Maine. I think it falls foul of WP:NOTDIRECTORY as it lists census statistics: it isn't an encyclopedia article about a notable topic. There's a whole series of these articles for Maine. Opinions? Fences&Windows 20:05, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I get the impression that they are universal for the US. See Historical_U.S._Census_Totals_for_Orleans_County,_Vermont. Just a place for official figures that they couldn't conveniently place anywhere else. I don't think they violate any policy. If a general place can be found for them outside of these articles, I'm sure editors and readers would appreciate the new organization. But these are important historical information, we don't want to lose them. Student7 (talk) 19:06, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Redheylin (talk · contribs) has proposed a possible merge of articles North Carolina v. Alford (1970 Supreme Court of the United States case), with the form of guilty plea it spawned, Alford plea. Discussion is at Talk:North_Carolina_v._Alford#Contradiction_tag. Thank you for your time, Cirt (talk) 14:54, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Please also see Wikipedia:Content_noticeboard#Tags_at_Alford_articles. Cirt (talk) 05:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

ArbCom election reminder: voting closes 14 December

Dear colleagues

This is a reminder that voting is open until 23:59 UTC next Monday 14 December to elect new members of the Arbitration Committee. It is an opportunity for all editors with at least 150 mainspace edits on or before 1 November 2009 to shape the composition of the peak judicial body on the English Wikipedia.

On behalf of the election coordinators. Tony (talk) 09:40, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Rape during the occupation of Japan

Interested editors may wish to comment on this article's content and sourcing. Nick-D (talk) 18:56, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

List of the largest US companies

Someone might like to merge this new stub into something else? PamD (talk) 11:28, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Area codes in Wisconsin

I've found the area code listing for cities to be extremely useful. I help at WikiProject Wisconsin, and we haven't had the area codes added to the city infoboxes. How did other states add this? Did a bot do it? Someone use an AWB? Where did they come up with the database to fill the fields? Royalbroil 01:44, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

2009 population estimates

The United States Census Bureau released its estimate of 2009 state populations yesterday. I've updated the U.S. state population data from the Annual Estimates of the Population for the United States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2009. Yours aye, Buaidh (talk) 18:40, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

New article United States Congressmen wounded or killed in the line of duty

It's a bit of an unusual idea, but I thought it would be worth noting United States Congressmen wounded or killed in the line of duty. Only one has actually been killed, but I know various others have been wounded. Is this WP-worthy? Any help filling out other examples in the article? MatthewVanitas (talk) 08:33, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Please provide some reliable sources for the article to verify the content. Right now (without any sources) it looks like something that people will read as being made up. Royalbroil 23:29, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Added some references, though the full details/references are available in the wiki-links for each person/incident in question. Mainly though, I was hoping that folks on this project might know of other wounded Congressmen who should be included. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:52, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

New category Category:Bison hunting

I've formed a new category to collect all the articles (and new subcats) dealing with the hunting of bison (primarily American buffalo). Since bison/buffalo hunting was closely tied into the history of Western Expansion in the United States, I've tagged it for this project. I'd appreciate any input on building the category, and also as to whether it should be re-named, as though the American buffalo is technically a bison, it is far better-known by the term "buffalo", and labeling the category "Bison hunting" might hurt more than it helps. Alternately, folks could try and add a few pages on hunting European bison (wisent, etc) to round it out. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:44, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Defenceman -> Defenseman

Defenceman has come up for renaming again, see Talk:Defenceman

76.66.197.17 (talk) 04:59, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 04:06, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Query: Policy on metro areas

I have noted that there is a lot of inconsistency in how metro areas are referred to across different articles. There are some editors who stick very strictly to first referring to a metro area by its OMB designation (e.g. "Chicago-Naperville-Joliet-Gary"), and only afterward possibly mentioning the area's common name (e.g. "Chicagoland"). Other editors use the common name almost exclusively, except when specifically referring to government statistics about the area.

Has any policy statement ever been discussed? Not that it is a huge deal but looking at different articles across WP there is a good deal of inconsistency, which (to me) seems a little confusing.

Thanks.

--Mcorazao (talk) 04:42, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Cities in state election templates

In some state election templates, people have inserted city elections. There are a number of problems with this.

1) City politics are not intertwined with each other, much less the state. Legislator election is different since they will interact with each other statewide. But if city x does one thing, and city y does another, who cares? Really. There is no interaction.

2) It appears a way to "promote" (WP:PR) city politics to a statewide audience who, to tell the truth, doesn't much care in Modesto, what Lemon Grove does. So it is of scant interest and is off WP:TOPIC for a statewide audience, which the template was aimed at.

3) Some states have a lot of cities. It is just clutter in what was supposed to have been a state only template.

4) Elections are often held at different times, so there is even less interaction with statewide politics. This was done deliberately at the city level to avoid issues at the statewide level from "messing up" city elections. This is fine, but the reverse should also be true. City elections shouldn't mess up a state template.

5) There would be absolutely no point in inserting each city separately in a template for cities only. Because there is no interaction between them. It is this that reveals the charade of inserting them into another template. No one cares about city elections except people in that city only. People looking at a state template do not care.

Let's take city elections out of state election templates. Let them perform their local WP:BOOSTERism in some other fashion. Student7 (talk) 12:54, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Hydroelectric Dams

Need some help in sorting List of hydroelectric power stations/Temp into regional lists in List of power stations in the United States. Can anyone help? Examples on how it should be done can be found here. Feel free to contact me on my talkpage if anything. Thanks. Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 07:18, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Medal of Honor related articles

Over the past month or so I have been going through all the Medal of Honor related articles varifying their assessment status, makingn notes and creating a page to track it. This is not a formal project, just smoething that I created to give myself a starting point to start building up the content of the Medal of Honor related articles. I though I would post this out here as well in case others are interested as well. If you look at this page Medal of Honor assessments other than Amerian Civil War (ACW) you will find tables oif all of the Medal of Honor recipients other than those for the ACW with their assessment and some rough notes. This page reflects the same for the ACW Medal of Honor recipients and this page reflects those that still need to be created. The ones who are lined out are already done, although some are still stubs and need work. Just a few notes about the state of the articles in general:

1. All have infoboxes
2. Most have persondata
3. All have references although some need to be cleanup and expanded
4. Most have a link to at least one applicable portal
5. Most have a link to at least 1 list
6. Many still need photos
7. A little over half the recipients have pages but a lot still do not, most of those that still need articles are in the Indian wars or the American Civil War.
8. I am currently working on cleaning up the talk pages making sure they all have appropriate project banners (At a minimum they should have biography, MILHIST and United States), task forces and general info tags (needs photo, persondata, infobox, etc.).

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. --Kumioko (talk) 21:31, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Economic History of the US - Alt Source Needed - Link Dead

The first link for citation #37 at page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_States is dead. The specific paragraph in question is quoted below:

Figures for before 1929 have been reconstructed by Johnston and Williamson based on various sources and are less reliable. See http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/GDPsource.htm for more information about sources and methods.

Alternate source is needed.

--ExtraTrstl (talk) 06:20, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Syrian American

I have conducted a reassessment of the above article as part of the GA Sweeps process. You are being notified as this project's banner is on the talk page. I have found some concerns which you can see at Talk:Syrian American/GA1. I have placed the article on hold whilst these are fixed. Thanks. Jezhotwells (talk) 03:23, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Problem with the Template

On every single template, the assessment comes up with additional jibberish, something on the order of:

dwmlkdsfrhfjendchwsz,mdxcfvghgtfrdxfcvghgfcvbhgtfdcfvbghgytfcvgbhf by rohaan

This needs to be fixed ASAP Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 20:53, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Are you referring to the WP Project banner template? Can you give an example? --Kumioko (talk) 21:46, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

It go fixed, but for like an hour the gibberish above was appearing in the banner template Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 23:40, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Pulaski

There is a move discussion potentially relevant to participants at this project: Kazimierz Pułaski → Casimir Pulaski at Talk:Kazimierz Pułaski#Requested move (2). -Rrius (talk) 00:31, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Paralympics Task Force

Made a Paralympics task force: Wikipedia:WikiProject Olympics/Paralympics. Please edit and/or join, and help improve Paralympics articles related to the United States. Bib (talk) 14:41, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

AfD:Reverse scientific method

Please, go make your voice heard in the discussion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reverse scientific method! Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 12:59, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects provides a list, updated daily, of unreferenced living people articles (BLPs) related to your project. There has been a lot of discussion recently about deleting these unreferenced articles, so it is important that these articles are referenced.

The unreferenced articles related to your project can be found at >>>Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Archive 5/Unreferenced BLPs<<<

If you do not want this wikiproject to participate, please add your project name to this list.

Thank you.

Update: Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Archive 5/Unreferenced BLPs has been created. This list, which is updated by User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects daily, will allow your wikiproject to quickly identify unreferenced living person articles.

There maybe no or few articles on this new Unreferenced BLPs page. To increase the overall number of articles in your project with another bot, you can sign up for User:Xenobot_Mk_V#Instructions.

If you have any questions or concerns, visit User talk:DASHBot/Wikiprojects. Okip 23:19, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

white vs caucasian

Why doesn't the US C use the race of Caucasian? instead of White-white is not a race, and why deferieinate between races and just do a body count? ---- ____ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.232.153.242 (talk) 15:51, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Approval of revised version of Wikipedia article

The current article Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is not very good. It contains just a few sentences which are not sourced very well. I've written a more developed alternative version, updated now that it has been created and is in the news. This version can be found on my user page here. I would update this myself now but I am affiliated with one group listed in the Controversy section (ALG) so I am hoping that another editor see this as an improvement and move it over. Please make this change at your convenience. Or if there is consensus it is OK for me to add it, I can do that, but I thought it would be better to ask. I first asked about this at the Wikipedia Help desk but they sent me here. And there is no one editing the TPSAC page, it has only been edited once, so there is nobody there to ask. Thanks. --As in liberty (talk) 19:49, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

I went ahead and did it with a change to how it deals with the committee's remit. -Rrius (talk) 20:33, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

That's fine. I had changed it to be specifically based on what I saw in the FAQ, but I don't have any reason to believe this version is wrong. Thanks. --As in liberty (talk) 21:07, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

WP US Talk Page Banner

I was recently informed by an editor that there is no need to add the WPUS talk page banner if the MILHIST banner is there with the US task force checked as yes. Personally I do not agree and wanted to get clarification. Is it appropriate to use the WP United States Banner on US related articles or is it enough to use the MILHIST template with the US Task force option. --Kumioko (talk) 13:52, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Wykked Wytch

Your comments would be greatly appreciated at an Afd for an American musical ensemble here. Neelix (talk) 21:27, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Article for Deletion

The following AfD may be of interest to editors here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sessions of the United States Supreme Court -Rrius (talk) 01:53, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

North Carolina

Greetings. I've expanded Blackbeard to the point where its almost ready for FAC, but another editor highlighted a minor problem. Blackbeard died at Ocracoke Inlet (presently in North Carolina) in November 1718. Given that the state of North Carolina didn't exist then, which article should I link to? The Province? Parrot of Doom 14:38, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The province sounds good to me. Maurreen (talk) 16:44, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Parrot of Doom 09:38, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Diane Wood

At Diane Wood, part of this project, a discussion is occurring as to the of necessity of including 13 references in the lead for the proposition that a person has been mentioned as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court. -Rrius (talk) 01:05, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Racially biased statistics removed

"The U.S. Department of Justice compiles statistics on crime by race, but only between and among people categorized as black or white. There were 111,490 white and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault reported in 2005. Out of the 111,490 cases involving white victims, 44.5% (49,613) had white offenders and 33.6% (37,461) had black offenders, while the 36,620 black victims had a figure of 100% black offenders, with a 0.0% estimation for any other race based on ten or fewer sample cases."

This is unnecessary, biased and inflammatory, it was copied and pasted from stormfront, why did they only post 2005 and ignore the other statistics?, either post all of them or don't post anything. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Empyrium (talk • contribs) 06:27, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

This edit, along with the rest of the nonsense edits has been reverted. Start using edit summaries when you make massive deletions. AzureFury (talk | contribs) 06:32, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, if you remove large chunks of content and don't leave an edit summary most users will automatically just revert it. mauler90 (talk) 06:36, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Lowercasing "state"

When used as a modifying noun, the word "state" (also "city", etc.) is never capitalized. For example, the city of New York is in the state of New York. How come every single US state article says, "the State of _________"? People need to take care to be grammatically correct. I watch only a small number of state articles because editors always capitalize this word. But it'd be nice if other editors could sort of help and lowercase this word when appropriate. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 18:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

This discussion I think was fleshed out over on the Manual of Style talk page, so this discussion can be closed here. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 18:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Proposed move discussion re: Washington

A discussion has been started at Talk:Washington#Requested move which may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 18:06, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

A lower level "United States" article needed?

I tried to add under "US State" under a new subtitle "Budgets" the following information from the Washington Post: "In 2010 six states had budget deficits exceeding those of Greece, then in international news for being close to bankruptcy.Faiola, Anthony (27 April 2010). "Small city in Italy just one of many around globe facing crushing debt". Washington, DC: Washington Post. pp. A1.." This article is too antiseptic for real world data like this. It clearly doesn't belong in the "United States" article either which is about the federal government. There is currently no article for intermediate information in between federal government, and a state (singular). There needs to be one for the collective states for comparative cultural, etc. information that can't go in the other articles. Student7 (talk) 02:22, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

U.S. state seems appropriate. Maurreen (talk) 02:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

It is not appropriate there. The text quoted above is beyond the scope of U.S. state and is, if you really look at it, pretty meaningless. If anything, the information (after being significantly improved) would belong at Financial crisis of 2007–2010, 2010 European sovereign debt crisis, or some similar article. U.S. state deals with what states are and lists them. It is not, nor should it be, about the comparative fiscal health of some unnamed states relative to a nation that is not similarly situated. -Rrius (talk) 03:56, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

While not commenting on what "should" be in US State, a article is needed for collective information. Right now there is no place for "real" up-to-date information on the collective states as opposed to the federal. I don't know about "meaningless." Greece's problem was "meaningless" up until this year. Now it is a crisis. We have been warned about our debt problem at the federal level. Apparently there is one at the state level also. Is this a problem only when a state nears bankruptcy? It is in the news. The liberal news, I might add. Student7 (talk) 12:42, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree that some place should be accepted for collective information, for want of a better term. Maybe before deciding which article that should be, it would be to see whether and how this is handled for other countries, and get general agreement on the principle. Maurreen (talk) 13:00, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Not a bad idea generally except that the US system is somewhat unique. Other nations do have states, like Mexico, Brazil and, technically Russia. But the balance between them tends to leave US states quite strong as maybe compared to the others. So the interest may not exist. Also, the US does have 50, often significant in either geographics size or population. That, in itself, is unique. The quantity is high and the domestic product of each is often impressive. Student7 (talk) 00:26, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

2010 census

Will US conduct census this year?-- Bojan  Talk  07:20, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Most of the forms have already been received from residents. Maurreen (talk) 19:59, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

The Haymarket riots

I would like to know are there any good speeches about what the people said about The Haymarket riots in 1886? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.176.190.235 (talk) 19:27, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Grand View, Louisiana?

I came across this placename in the article for USS De Soto (1860). However, there appears to be no such place. There are three Grand Views mentioned in Google but none of them are obviously the Grand View mentioned in the article. Anyone have an idea what the correct name/state might be? Gatoclass (talk) 03:33, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Update of Census data

Hi, are there already plans or even projects to update all the municipalities, CDPs and what ever when the new census data will be published? I guess this will need a pretty difficult bot project. --h-stt !? 13:04, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

The general issue came up a couple months ago, but I don't remember where. I think whoever did the bot last time plans to do it again. I think there is or was a question about whether it should just replace the earlier data or be added without removal of the earlier data.

On a side note, I think the data should usually be presented in a table. The current text format is ineffecient and boring and doesn't indicate context. It would be neat if the tables had at least two columns, one of the specific subject, and maybe the other for the country as a whole. Maurreen (talk) 16:25, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

What do you mean by "last time"? There never was a Census in the lifetime of Wikipedia. The first creation of demographic paragraphs was pretty easy. You could pull the numbers from the database and insert them. This time, a bot has to check whether the data has been edited since creation and then replace it with the new numbers (or a new format). But will the bot be able to find the population numbers in other places of the articles? The info box is easy, because of the field name. But in the lead? A table with data from several decades or centuries? --h-stt !? 21:09, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

By "whoever did the bot last time", I meant "whoever ran the bot last time a bot was used to add census data". Maurreen (talk) 21:46, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

President Proposition

Looking through the president articles, I was appalled that a good amount of them were only B-Class articles. I propose that we systematically work on them to get many more of them up to being at least GAs. --Iankap99 (talk) 00:05, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

That has merit, but my attention is elsewhere for a while. Maurreen (talk) 00:44, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Ciudades de Estados Unidos

I notice the Spanish Wikipedia article es:Ciudades de Estados Unidos - It doesn't seem to have an English equivalent (it has no interwiki to any English article). Should we create one here? Or is there already one? WhisperToMe (talk) 18:55, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I added the interwiki link to List of cities, towns, and villages in the United States in both directions. The Spanish article gives statistics and discussion about trends and the English article is strictly a list - but the articles are on the same topic. Royalbroil 04:32, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons

The WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons (UBLPs) aims to reduce the number of unreferenced biographical articles to under 30,000 by June 1, primarily by enabling WikiProjects to easily identify UBLP articles in their project's scope. There were over 52,000 unreferenced BLPs in January 2010 and this has been reduced to 32,665 as of May 16. A bot is now running daily to compile a list of all articles that are in both Category:All unreferenced BLPs and have been tagged by a WikiProject. Note that the bot does NOT place unreferenced tags or assign articles to projects - this has been done by others previously - it just compiles a list.

Your Project's list can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Unreferenced BLPs. As of May 17 you have approximately 32 articles to be referenced. The list of all other WikiProject UBLPs can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/WikiProjects.

Your assistance in reviewing and referencing these articles is greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, please don't hestitate to ask either at WT:URBLP or at my talk page. Thanks, The-Pope (talk) 16:56, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps UNDER History

In this article on the USPHSCC, the end of the second paragraph in the HISTORY category ends with President Grover Cleveland signing an Act into law that formally established the modern Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The third paragraph jumps nearly 100 years into the late 1980's to early 1990's with Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta Earthquake. Can someone please clean this up and differentiate who's officers or what office it was that helped the victims of those two natural disasters?

Prmetalman (talk) 02:38, 18 May 2010 (UTC)prmetalman

Post offices info

If anyone wants to find out when a post office opened or closed, a user pointed me to www.usps.com/postmasterfinder which is a database having that info WhisperToMe (talk) 06:28, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Lists of people

Names like List of Puerto Ricans, List of Argentine Americans, List of German Americans, etc. should be put under the project's scope. Not only that, but I think they should all be renamed. There is no such thing as a list of all German Americans, and not every single one is notable enough for an article. I propose that "List of" be renamed to "List of distinguished" so the titles can accurately describe what the list encompasses. (i.e.) "List of distinguished Puerto Ricans" Feedback ^☎ 19:41, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

To comply with known Wikipedia restrictions, the title should include the word "notable" IMO. This covers an understood definition. Student7 (talk) 18:34, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

List of notable... seems fine, but this an issue that affects many many ethnicity, and nation-related projects so we need to establish an inter-project consensus. Where can this be achieved? Feedback ^☎ 21:24, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (people)? I think this has essentially already been done. All that is needed, is to implement it where you see fit IMO. Only covers English Wikipedia, of course, if that was a concern. I am not aware of a cross-language place to discuss policy, if needed. Student7 (talk) 00:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Not cross-language; cross-project (as in WikiProjects). What do you mean "already been done"? Feedback ^☎ 23:51, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

WP:PEOPLE is discussed elsewhere. When there are no articles, people cannot be listed in a "List of notable people." I do not even allow authors of reliable references to be named in academic articles. The article may not say "Smith says the vectorspace to the branes is empty." If Smith does not have an article, I replace this with "A physicist says that...." okay for Smith to be in the footnote! No non-notables anyplace. (Occasionally I am forced to allow "Jack Smith" founded Smithtown". Hard to avoid there!). So notability is covered.

Not every Brazilian can be listed because not that many Brazilians have articles. Doesn't really matter what the article is entitles, but the prose would read "This is a list of notable Brazilians." Changing to "distinguished avoids the Wikipedia definition and should probably not be used. It is also a bit WP:PEACOCK IMO. We know what "notable" is. We don't know and cannot define what "distinguished" is, but I can tell you right now that a rock music star with one album who died of a drug habit will make it into the list with the founder of his country if they both have articles. No way to avoid that! Student7 (talk) 20:05, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

2WTC

FYI, 200 Greenwich Street has been requested to be renamed as Two World Trade Center. See Talk:200 Greenwich Street.

70.29.210.155 (talk) 04:50, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

US related portal templates nominated for deletion

FYI, a bunch of US-related portal link templates have been nominated for deletion, see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2010 May 23.

70.29.210.155 (talk) 04:59, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Please help fix a broken link

I don't understand how these templates work so that I can fix a broken link.

Reference # 1 on this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_motto
The URL is incorrect. It has
http://www.treas.gov/education/fact-sheets/currency/in-god-we-trust.html

It should be
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/currency/in-god-we-trust.shtml
Grandmakr (talk) 06:09, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

new related WikiProject: United States Public Policy

Hi everyone! I want to invite anyone who's active here and has an interest in public policy to join WikiProject United States Public Policy, which is just starting up. We've got some cool things planned, including working with students and their professors for several public policy courses.--Sross (Public Policy) (talk) 12:00, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Naming conventions for United States federal buildings

Opinions are needed at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Naming conventions for United States federal buildings, which might potentially influence the naming conventions for a wide swath of United States-related articles. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:51, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Wikiproject United States

Please don't take offense to the following statement but...Is this still an active project? I was about to add my name to the members list and I noticed that it doesn't seem to be very active as a project (individual editors are plenty active though). Before I did I thought I would ask before I add my name to a Wikiproject that has been left to languish. --Kumioko (talk) 16:20, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

America is a continent not a country

That's the edit comment put onto a change in Conservapedia by someone who seems to want to remove references to America or American even though it is referred to as an American encyclopaedia rather than a USA one in the sources. Would you like to point out to them whatever it is the general policy is about this sort of thing as I'm sure it can't be the first time. Dmcq (talk) 23:45, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Southern racism source

I found a source that talks about variations of fundamentalist Christianity and Southern racism. - Leonard, Bill J. "A theology for racism: Southern Fundamentalists and the civil rights movement." Baptist History and Heritage. Northern hemisphere Winter 1999. WhisperToMe (talk) 02:57, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Relevant AFD - Rob Miller (South Carolina politician)

• Article page = Rob Miller (South Carolina politician)

AFD discussion, is at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rob Miller (South Carolina politician) (2nd nomination). Thank you for your time, -- Cirt (talk) 22:20, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

United States articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the United States articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 23:46, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject North America

FYI, there is a proposal for a WikiProject North America, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/North America

76.66.193.224 (talk) 04:50, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject North America has been started. 76.66.203.138 (talk) 16:00, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:GLAM/SI Ambassador

Hello, WikiProject United States/Archive 5! We would like to invite your WikiProject to help with the Smithsonian Institution collaboration, an outreach effort which aims to support collaboration such as Wiki-Academies, article writing, and other activities to engage the Smithsonian Institution in Wikipedia. Because of the Scope of your project, your project has been nominated to be part of our WikiProject Embassy, a place for WikiProjects to help Editors participating in the Smithsonian Collaboration improve articles, find materials, and create partnerships for the future. We hope that you will nominate an Ambassador for our participants to contact. Thanks!!!

Canadian American

FYI, Canadian American has been requested to be renamed. It apparently revolves around rules of grammar... 76.66.200.95 (talk) 04:49, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion for some of the Inactive, Defunct and semi active US related Wikiprojects

I have noticed that there seem to be a large number of US related WikiProjects that are either Inactive, Defunct or have minimal activity. I would like to recommend redirecting the talk pages of these to the WikiProject United States talk page. This will allow a more timely response to questions and suggestions. In truth some can probably just be eliminated completely but this could be a start to that. Below is a list of some of the projects this suggestions relates too. I won't do this if the consensus is that everyone is happy with the status quo but I think that we need to clean up what seems to be a WikiProject frenzy gone way out of control. There are obviously some very active projects these relate too that these could be directed to (Politicians, government, etc). I would like to hear any comments and or suggestions that folks may have.

US Geography:

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. cities
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject United States regions
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. cities
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. counties (seems to be minimal interest)
5. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. special districts
6. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. state capitols
7. Wikipedia:WikiProject Bluegrass Region
8. Wikipedia:WikiProject California/Santa Barbara County task force
9. Wikipedia:WikiProject Caribbean/United States Virgin Islands work group
10. Wikipedia:WikiProject Cincinnati
11. Wikipedia:WikiProject Eastern Washington
12. Wikipedia:WikiProject Georgia State Routes
13. Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Albany/Savannah/Valdosta (South Georgia)
14. Wikipedia:WikiProject New Hampshire Mountains
15. Wikipedia:WikiProject Oklahoma/Tulsa
16. Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon State Highways
17. Wikipedia:WikiProject Rhode Island Routes
18. Wikipedia:WikiProject Shreveport
19. Wikipedia:WikiProject South Carolina
20. Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern United States
21. Wikipedia:WikiProject Youngstown

US Education related:

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject Columbia University
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject East Carolina University
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject Florida State University
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject NCSU
5. Wikipedia:WikiProject Notre Dame
6. Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio Wesleyan University
7. Wikipedia:WikiProject Rutgers
8. Wikipedia:Wikiproject Seton Hall University
9. Wikipedia:WikiProject University of North Texas
10. Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Oklahoma
11. Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Texas at Austin
12. Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington University in St. Louis
13. Wikipedia:WikiProject West Virginia University

US Sports related:

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject American Football League
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject American thoroughbred racing
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject Atlanta Falcons
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject Atlantic Coast Conference
5. Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/San Diego Padres
6. Wikipedia:WikiProject Boston Celtics
7. Wikipedia:WikiProject Cincinnati Reds
8. Wikipedia:WikiProject Kansas City Chiefs
9. Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota Twins
10. Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/Cleveland Browns subproject
11. Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/New York Giants subproject
12. Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/Washington Redskins subproject
13. Wikipedia:WikiProject New York Yankees
14. Wikipedia:WikiProject St. Louis Rams
15. WikiProject ACC
16. WikiProject American Football League
17. WikiProject Boston Celtics
18. WikiProject Boston Red Sox

General:

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject Superfunds (seems to be minimal interest)

US (semi active):

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject Atlanta
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Louisiana
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject United States governors
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
5. Wikipedia:WikiProject Boston Red Sox
6. Wikipedia:WikiProject California/California Delta task force
7. Wikipedia:WikiProject California/Southern California task force
8. Wikipedia:WikiProject Caribbean
9. Wikipedia:WikiProject Charlotte
10. many, many more

--Kumioko (talk) 01:23, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

At WP:CANADA there was a suggestion that all the State WikiProjects should be merged into USproject, as was done with Canada, and that all the banners should also be merged (as was done with Canada)... so that no state would get neglected, as there would be a heirarchical structuring. They (WPCanada) also seem to want all county/regional/city wikiprojects to be subsumed by national wikiprojects as well. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 06:32, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I would say that there should be a WikiProject US Sports, that parents all sports wikiprojects for the US, a WikiProject US States that parents all US state wikiprojects, a WikiProject US Education, to parent all the educational and university US wikiprojects. Inactive ones can be referred to their parent, and this project would end up with the inactive sublevel ones. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 06:32, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

User:76.66.200.95 is talking about the merged of all the individual templates like {{WikiProject Ottawa}} into {{WikiProject Canada}} this simply consolidates the class portals and country related WP's to be seen on one template...this was also recently done for {{WikiProject Latin America}}. We have a sandbox to play with see Template:WikiProject Canada/sandbox. What this does is automatically add the articles to the parent and sub project...this way 2 or more projects (as many as you like) are watching a page. As a result of this multiple WP's are advertised and may lead to more participants across all related projects.... Moxy (talk) 06:54, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Why is WP:CARIBBEAN listed? That's not a US Project... 76.66.200.95 (talk) 06:32, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I am basically in agreeance that merging most of the State projects into one is a good idea since most are inactive or have a low level of activity. Here are some thoughts I have on your comments so far:

• For the projects that have activity we would want to get some concensus before unilaterally deciding to merge them. Since there are so many (over 100 so far) I think starting with the inactive ones would be best and if that goes well then we can continue going further.
• I was thinking about having subprojects similar to how Milhist does task forces. More work and planning needs to be done but here are some I was thinking of:
  • Geography - Would cover articles relating to States, Regions, Capitals, Districts, Cities, streets, etc. But I like your Idea of States in one too so well need to think about the best way to do that.
  • History - Cover history including the subtopics of Military history, various wars and conflicts, military bases and equipment, coverage of some people, the Old wesnt, Early colonies, etc
  • Biography - Would cover the people
  • Culture and society - Maybe sports, Education, Slavery in America, Industrialization, etc
  • Sports (could fall under the culture and society too) - Sports related
  • Government, politics and law -
• The US is such a huge topic I think we need to be careful not to have hundreds of subprojects but at the same time be flexible enough to be responsive to the users needs.

--Kumioko (talk) 14:34, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Your divisions seem the way to go because of the amount of projects under the USA banner. As a result of this being done for the Canada projects (was done some time ago) we have noticed that many sub-projects use the main parent WP talk page/notices board. This has resulted in much broader talks in general and has help in standardizing all the projects and there articles, but has led to the impression some projects are dead...when in fact the small group is highly active and just debate on the parent projects talk or the individual articles. This may sound bad but its great that the small Wp's can seek a broader view by feeling they are part of the greater projects (this setup leads to less isolation and greater involvement by all projects)Moxy (talk) 17:45, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Agree with the redirect. Projects are frequently poorly attended and questions there can receive scant answers when they deserve better.

Having said that, WP Cities has an outline which is quite crucial to article development. If they did nothing else, that would deserve to stay. I have no problem with redirecting the talk page, however. What about redirecting them to subsections in United States? Or is that just more of the same? Student7 (talk) 14:45, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Come to think of it, I am not all that enthused about seeing dozens of posts daily in my watchlist, which is a bit too full to start with. Particularly when I did not select these Projects in the first place. I am not as sure as I was...Student7 (talk) 15:49, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

A misunderstanding....no one is proposing redirects for all projects just the dead ones..just for a hierarchy ? having a big watch list should not deter us for improvements.Moxy (talk) 15:51, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes just to clarify right now I am just trying to get my arms around all the projects that are out there. We need to start by pruning out the projects that are inactive or defunct before we even start worrying about the ones who are actively working on things like WP Cities or the like. If we can clip the weeds and get the grass to grow then we can start working on cross project efficiency. --Kumioko (talk) 16:35, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

An idea. There are 94 watchers on this page alone. How about batching the others so that the total watchers equal (say) 100 and see if that is enough. Further, the "new" Project (is this getting out of hand for you?  :) can be folded upwards if this doesn't achieve the goal we are looking for. I get enough activity from this page. I am happy with material that I have selected. Having "other" stuff to cope with would force me to reconsider whether I want to watch this page. I know this sounds discouraging, but I think you have a good idea. It just needs a bit of refining so that "watchers" are matched to projects they understand and vice versa.

Another hopefully minor problem with the original arrangement is that we often get misplaced comments from newbies. Might be hard to tell with a greatly merged Project! Student7 (talk) 00:48, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

I understand your reservations and let me assure you that it will settle down in a short while. Right now there is quite a lot of traffic getting the project going again but after the initial jumpstart and merging and reorganizing a few of the projects (mostly the dead ones) it should settle back down. In the mean time thanks again for your input. --Kumioko (talk) 01:52, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

This is s bit off-the-wall (and maybe counterproductive since there is already a plan of action) but would it be useful to have a "formal" "Project for deletion/merge" type area? People think they are voting of course, which is a drawback, but it takes the time, allows for discussion, if any. And maybe winds up redirecting so that "watching" (I think) gets redirected to the new page/project automatically.

Since the proposer has his act together, this is probably a bit much at this late date. But it might be useful for the future. Student7 (talk) 23:17, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Each US state needs separate List of Cemeteries article

The article List of cemeteries in the United States needs to be broken up into 50 articles. There must be over 1000 cemeteries in Massachusetts alone!-96.237.8.162 (talk) 22:22, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

This list is extremely incomplete. Is there any use for it or should it be deleted? Royalbroil 23:04, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree that we need to break this list up somehow but yes I think we should keep it. I don't know that I would break it into 50 pieces but certainly it could be divided. --Kumioko (talk) 00:05, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

I sure hope you don't just delete it! The general coverage of cemeteries is woefully inadequate. My real current interest is in a List of Cemeteries in Boston. I am trying to work my way down from the almost empty existing skeleton structure. If you take away what is there, then there will not even be anything for people to build on... Not only does WP not cover cemeteries very much, there also don't seem to be any other good complete lists anywhere else online of Massachusetts cemeteries.-96.237.8.162 (talk) 00:29, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

If the lists are incomplete, I believe there are templates to warn of it. I don't think deletion is the right way to go. I don't have much of an opinion on breaking the list up, but if doing so would result in lots of little lists, perhaps some states with fewer listed cemeteries combined by something like Census region. I'm not saying that's what we should do, but if the lists would be too short, it's something to think about. -Rrius (talk) 01:08, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

No I agree theres no need to delete it. I think there be some issues with finding adaquate references though. --Kumioko (talk) 01:11, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I won't nominate it for deletion. In general I'm more in favor of keeping things and allowing people time to finish them instead of deleting. I think about how many cemeteries that their are in my relatively small area and think that a complete list of every cemetery in a small state like Wisconsin would be difficult to figure out and hard to reliably source. The list definitely needs to be split up by state at some point if it ever becomes complete. Maybe a good start would be to list notable cemeteries - specifically the ones with an article plus those listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Royalbroil 03:40, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Proposed new look for the Project Page

I have taken the last few days to revamp, reorganize and expand the information on the project page. I modelled it after the MILHIST Project page. Here is the link to see what the page could look like Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Main. I have ssplit some of the information out into separate pages for easier access and added a couple new categories. Here are the new sections I have created so far.

• Help - Currently contains some info but will be expanded as requirements and information is flushed out.
• Members - Currently contains a list of Members I gathered from Various different sources. This doesn't cover nearly all our users but its a start. A couple of notes on this page:
  • Some of the lists are transcluded (ACW members and US MILHIST task force members). I would like to try and build partnerships with other projects like MILHIST to share in like tasks to increase visibility and cooperation and to reduce redundency. Essentially the list of Members would be shared between projects with similar interest as in the US/ACW MILHIST task forces and the US Wikiproject.
  • Quality Content - This would showcase our work.
  • Special Projects & To Do - Our to do lists and Special projects. Again I would like this to include cross project cooperation.
  • Noticeboard - Not sure about this one just yet. This was a page on the old Wikiproject and Im not sure if we need this or just redirect it to the talk page for WP:US
  • Wikiproject Embassy - Because there are so many wikiprojects that fall under the scope of United States and so many others that intersect it indirectly we need to foster cooperation and ownership across the various different projects. Thats were this comes in. This is where we can establish links between points of contact or key members of the other projects to facilitate problem resolution and get things done.
  • Assessments - Another holdover from the old page. I think its got some good info but it needs some rework to get up to date.

I would like to ask for all of you to vote your support or oppose on the new layout. I also need feedback on how to make it better. Feel free to make changes on your own but if its a major change please post a note here first. --Kumioko (talk) 12:36, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

• Support...looks good to me....Moxy (talk) 15:42, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. I think its on a couple of the pages but should it be on all pages or just certain ones? --Kumioko (talk) 15:44, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Sorry i removed my comment ..Did not see help page..looks great..no need all over ..PS it was me the ip that did the user-activity check....odd it log me out for it.Moxy (talk) 15:55, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah that is a little strange and thanks. I was thinking about doing something like that and I notice a lot of those users haev been gone for years. I wonder if there is any reason to keep them on the rolls or just delete them off. If they havent made an edit in three years I doubt their coming back. --Kumioko (talk) 16:02, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

I use Tool active members thing set at the default of 240 days. Not sure about Y it does not delete instead of commenting them out. It does however seem to delete sock puppets..I have no problems deleting them all or moving them to an "Inactive section" that is hidden to the main WP-page. I also think that the members listed here on the notice broad should be move to main page or are this people special in some way like all admins? I see some are..but others have not edited in years. If they are all admims willing to help we should indicated this fact or move them. Moxy (talk) 02:57, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Delete image request section

So i guess we should fine a place for the new section "Wikipedia:WikiProject United States#Image requests".. I would guess in the new project look move it to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/To do after some rewording and linking...after looking and reading closer .. i think it should be deleted.Moxy (talk) 03:25, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I dont think we really need it either to be honest. --Kumioko (talk) 14:33, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

This looks like its been added (spammed) all over....I see its being revert else were...So i say a lets wait for a few more people to comment then we delete if thats the over all view and perhaps make page properly for this things. Odd to see links to other language wikis..i guess there trying to make traffic at the other Wikis....I have many projects that this has to be fixed at Moxy (talk) 14:51, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good I think I would give it a few days and then just do it. Since this project sat dormant for so long its doubtful well get much response. --Kumioko (talk) 15:04, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes its slow here...Still think the post is odd nice stereo type of "Japanese" and there photo habits.Moxy (talk) 15:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Since there was knowone screaming in opposition Implemented the New page layout. If anyone has any comments please let me know. --Kumioko (talk) 17:58, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Republic of Texas (1861)

FYI, Republic of Texas (1861) has been nominated for deletion. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 04:57, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Merge three noticeboards

I have started a proposal to merge three United States related Noticeboards into one due to all three having no or extremely limited activity in the last year. I believe this will invigorate the noticeboard if we keep any of them at all. I propose merging:

• Wikipedia:U.S. Southern wikipedians' notice board
• Wikipedia:U.S. Northern wikipedians' notice board

into

• Wikipedia:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board.

Please provide comments (including support or oppose). Comments are necessary to ensure that this does not intefere with ongoing efforts. If no comments are received in 7 days I will assume there is no problem and proceed with the merger. --Kumioko (talk) 19:36, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

• Strong Support - Believe that this would only benefit all projects by having a wider audience/ amount of editors to discuss ongoing situations. Will also lead to cross project collaborations and article standardization. Moxy (talk) 03:32, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
• Strong support - this can only help things if we can consolidate inactive pages. Buckshot06 (talk) 05:39, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support. This seems sensible. -- Ssilvers (talk) 17:35, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

And on the seventh day, it was done. The North and South are now one. They are now the United States. Below is a summery of my actions.

• I have archived the information on the pages to the page name/archive1 if anyone wants to see what used to be in the old pages.
• I copied and transposed the member lists into the member lists on this Noticeboard.
• The last thing I need to do is replace any pages that linked to them to this project. Please let me know if anyone has any comments. --Kumioko (talk) 03:37, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

I have a comment -> Well done..is that a Barn i see over the horizon? :) 05:38, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks my next tasks are below if you have any ideas. Still getting my thouhgts together on the last 2 before I submit them for consideration out here.

1. Bringing people back to the project. (There are huge numbers of editors working in US related topics on their own that dont bother with the project. They have already started to drift back. We need to keep that momentum going).
2. To populate the United States Banner on the talk pages of applicable articles that dont yet have it (Thousands still need it). Its hard to manage what you cant measure and right now its impossible to tell how many we have. Depending on how you gauge it conservitavely half the English WP is US related topics! --Kumioko (talk) 17:20, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
3. To start redirecting the defunct and inactive wikiprojects back to this one (as task forces in some cases). (Over 100 so far, but not all need to be accounted for individually).
4. Building some collaborations with other projects on things like Member lists, mutual goals and todo's and areas of overlapping scope and operations. (WPMILHIST, Aviation, Biography, etc) --Kumioko (talk) 17:20, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

People of the United States Image Gallery

Do you think the image gallery at People of the United States violates Wikipedia policy? I think the gallery adds to the article and would like to find some way to keep it. See [talk page] for details.--IronMaidenRocks (talk) 00:18, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

After giving this a couple days of thought, Possibly, but the bigger problem to me is that it doesnt appropriateley represent the "People". It only give a very specific view of a handful of famous folks without any particular focus. A better way to approach this article to me would be to do some kind of Demographical breakdown, possible giving smoe statistics and information about diversity of the mix of the population such as racial, religious, sexual preferance and such things as immigration into the US (legal of otherwise), possibly some family values type info, world views, etc. Personally I just dont think the gallery is appropriate or necessary. --Kumioko (talk) 13:46, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Project tagging by Xenobot

As I continue to rebuild this project I am proposing to allow Xenobot to tag articles in this project scope and auto-assess them if possible. I am posting this message to gather comments prior to intiating this task. I will leave this out here for at least 7 days prior to moving ahead and I will post comments on several of the other US related project pages soliciting comment. Based on the comments gathered I will proceed from there. Here are some things to consider:

1. After reviewing category counts and the counts of other US related Wikiprojects there are by my estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400, 000 articles that fall under the direct scope of this Wikiproject (and potentially a lot more). That includes people (over 18000 in American military personnel alone); military units, bases, awards, terms, uniform items, history, etc; Buildings, states, cities, streets, laws, government organizations, schools, etc and on and on. Currently less than 10, 000 article have the Wikiproject United States Banner and with the volume of the individual US related wikiprojects (well over 100) it is currently an excrutiatingly painful task to determine.
2. Due to the sheer volume I am going to start with the 3 below categories that I know contain only United States related (this is about 19000 articles betwen the first 2, about 40, 000 for the third one). After that we can add to the list.
   1. American military personnel by state
   2. American military personnel by war
   3. United States military history task force articles
3. Initially there will be a lot potentially filling watchlists and irritating some users. Once the initial push is done I will recommend going to a once a month or once a quarter run at a specified date so that everyonen knows when itll go and they expect it. --Kumioko (talk) 16:45, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Based on this conversation exclude articles that currently fall under Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Roads. Already tagged and assessed and the US is implied. This accounts for 13, 832 articles--Kumioko (talk) 17:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Question: Does Xenobot have the capacity to not tag for C-class? Milhist doesn't use it (though that may change in the future), and I am concerned that if it attempts to do so there could be some problems from a milhist project standpoint. TomStar81 (Talk) 20:00, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Good question Im not sure. I will find out for sure and post back here. --Kumioko (talk) 22:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes Xenobot does not use C class for WPMILHIST. --Kumioko (talk) 20:06, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Its been 5 days so far and it seems like everyone is ok with this plan. It will take me a few days to finish preparing but hopefully by this weekend I can begin the process of tagging the United States related articles that arent already identified. --Kumioko (talk) 05:17, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Since knowone has voiced opposition to this I am going to begin the process. If there are any problems or concerns please place a comment here. --Kumioko (talk) 19:27, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

(deindent) I assume that you going to omit articles that are already in children WikiProjects like WikiProject Michigan since they are automatically included in this WikiProject by inheritance. Royalbroil 23:32, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Not exactly, I asked only if projects starting with United States or US be excluded and Im not even sure if that can be done. I did this for a couple reasons but if it cant then its really not a big deal to have another WP banner. Here are the key reasons I feel we shouldn't exclude them.

1. With currently more than 100 Wikiprojects that fall under the scope of United States it would be very difficult to exclude them all.
2. Because we have so many projects that are inactive, defunct or maintain minimal activity it will allow them to be captured by a project. Rather than say this but not that I felt it was easier just to go ahead and tag it.
3. Although logically they may fall under it each project runs independantly of one another so membership in WPUS isn't necessarily inherent.
4. Adding the WPUS will allow them to more easily be counted and included in a variety of things including bot runs, to do lists, etc.
5. Starting with the Inactive and defunct ones I am going to start archiving, closing out and rolling up the projects into the parent WPUS. For know I have no intention of going after the active ones but its my hope that at some point in the future we can tie the majority into this one as subprojects, task forces or working groups. There is currently a lot of manpower going into indevidually maintaining these projects and if we start working together on things like member lists, to do lists, content cleanup and tagging, etc it wil be better for all.
6. Because all of the 100+ projects run independently, some with no or minimal activity, its difficult to keep a watchful eye on articles, especially Good class or better. By including them all under a handful of projects it will be much easier to manage.

I hope this helps but please let me know if you have any more qustions. --Kumioko (talk) 23:49, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I can almost guarantee that you will open a huge can of drama if you go through with this. You're wrong to assume that state WikiProjects will be okay with this change. Children WikiProjects are considered part of this WikiProject. It's just like the inheritance with categories. These changes will cause a huge amount of reverting your changes. I suggest that you bring up this question to several state WikiProjects - some that are active and some inactive - to see what they say. I know that it would be extremely difficult to exclude all of the subWikiProjects - that's why no one has done what you suggest. On a separate comment - you better bring up rolling some of the state WikiProject into a major discussion. I suggest a request for comment that you have a bot deliver to all of the subprojects. I'm a member of several WikiProjects that appeared to dead for months or years before one editor came and revitalized the whole project bringing back editors/finding new ones. Royalbroil 00:12, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree with your comments that there may be some reverting and possibly some heartburn. Im not trying to cause drama in fact my intention is to try and prevent it. I went and added a request for comments too some projects as you suggest as well as here but there are simply too many to go to every one individually, which is part of the problem. In the end I received minimal responses leading me to believe that knowone had a problem with it. But if complaints start rolling in then I will address them with an open mind. I am creating a bot to do what you are suggesting in the future as well as solicite members, deliver news and info (if the user wants it) etc. Im just not quite there yet. The problems is right now its next to impossible to drill down to the article stats on those child projects so essentially you have to look at each individually. Which is extremely inefficient, time consuming and quite frankly cost prohibitive. In regards to the wrapping up inactive projects I have so far just been concentrating my efforts on rebuilding the project pages and figuring out what the child projects are, how active they are, how many articles they effect, etc (you can see what I have under the Wikiproject Embassy page if you want). When I do start going after those inactive projects though my intent is to shotgun a request for comments on it, the parent to it, the city and or state it resides in. Peer projects, here and on some of the member pages if they have made edits to it. If I do close one down it will only be after I have given some time for comments (probably a couple weeks to a month), addressed any concerns and completed any of the necessary additional work related to it (like replacing the WP banner, templates, etc.) Even then I will archive the content as pagename/archive1 so if it needs to be resurrected in the future it can be with minimal effort. I would then redirect it and its talk page here so if someone comes looking their concerns can be addressed. Im not even going to touch the states yet. The bottom line though is that if a project is Defunct or Inactive and has been for some time then someone needs to actively police the article that project once covered. I have found a lot of articles with only banners for inactive projects. Again though this wouldn't remove any of the old project banners, just add US. Adding US is no different than having an article fall into multiple states, its just one more set of eyes on the topic. More eyes, means more love, more love means a better article in the end and that's good for everyone. --Kumioko (talk) 00:49, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I do see some of your points and I see some definite pluses. However, my reaction would be strongly against tagging like this. I have brought up the topic at WikiProject Wisconsin to attempt to get a gauge with how other people would react. You can read about it here. I think the most active U.S. child WikiProject is the WP:NRHP and a question asked there would be read and answered by Wikipedians from many different state WikiProjects. How useful would a watchlist of 100k+ articles be? I think there's so many articles to watch that people couldn't keep up with it. Royalbroil 03:19, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks and that's good to know about the NHRP. Ill make sure I add a message there. I bulletized my responses below to make them easier to read through:

1. I also usually post to WPMILHIST US, ACW and ARW Task forces cause they have over 36000 articles combined in them as well and comments are usually swiftly returned.
2. I dont agree with your watchlist analogy though. Watchlists and Wikiproject tags are 2 completely different things for 2 completely different purposes.
3. Thank you for posting that to the Wisconsin page. I think we also need to post it to a few others as well. Namely the 2 big ones listed above as well as perhaps some of the larger states. With that said, since it pertains to many many projects with this one as a link I wonder if it would be more appropriate to post it here. Although this project is still getting going again so responses are probably going to be higher on the wisconsin page.
4. I would also like to clarify a little further the point you made of the 100+ thousands articles. To be honest my math puts it at between 400 and 450, 000 articles that relate to US topics so your right on when you say that one giant list would be worthless. What I was planning on was to start off with something similar to the |subject= used in {{WikiProject U.S. Congress}}. They currently have Person, people, place, and Event I think. I would include Education, Government and Sports (possibly more later). Along with these my plan was to start coordinating with WPMILHIST US, ACW and AW task forces (by sharing membership lists, to do lists and the like) as well as the active child projects under WPUS.
5. Make no mistake, with the exception of adding subject to the WPUS banner these are long term goals and I anticipate it will take months or years before we will be able to build up a robust and functioning community of editors under WPUS.
6. As with any change on WP this is likely to meet mixed results within the community and I fully expect that some things would be met with resistance but I honestly didnt think this would be one of them.
7. Another point that I would like to make is that if I cant tag articles that fall under the purvue of a state WikiProject then there is no point in even tagging them and there is no point in having a WP United State project. Since all articles would be covered by a state or child project this WikiProject would be automatically defunct by the same logic eventhough most of the projects have limited activity. --Kumioko (talk) 03:58, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

As to the seventh point, I see WP:US as having the same role as the other parent WikiProject that I've been involved in - WikiProject Motorsport. Maybe that's where the difference lies. I see WP:US as being very helpful to coordinate two types of things: 1) problems that are common to all of the state WikiProjects like coordinating naming conventions, etc. and 2) some articles fall outside the scope of the state WikiProjects - like the national government entities plus whatever else falls through the cracks like territories. If the WikiProject U.S. tag isn't for watching articles, then what's the purpose to solve some problem that isn't being fulfilled with the way things are right now? Royalbroil 04:45, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

The problem with the seventh point is that if I dont place the WPUS banner because they already fall into a state then I must apply the same logic to the other Projects as well such as WPUS Government, Politicians, presidents, presidential elections, Congress, governors, etc. There are so many projects there is very little wiggle room left. Additionally, by the same logic if WikiProject Miami is on an Article then there would be no need for WikiProject Florida but after reviewing them the majority have both. Another good example that comes to mind is if an article has Wikiproject Biography then why would we also put WikiProject MILHIST Biography task force. Using the same logic you used wouldn't it be inferred? In addition to what I have stated above here are some more bullets about why its good to bannerize other than use as a watchlist:

1. The tags place articles into categories that project members can use to find articles, to track their progress, and to watch for related changes
2. They are used to produce statistical reports about the quality of articles
3. They allow the WP1.0 team's assessment process to measure the size/scope of projects and to rank articles
4. Article Alerts uses information in the tags to produce an automatically updated list of WP:Articles for deletion, WP:Proposed deletions, and other time-sensitive news about tagged articles
5. Cleanup listings uses tags to produce a comprehensive list of all clean-up tags in a project's articles
6. There is a bot that generates a listing of all unsourced BLP articles within a projects scope
7. Walls of Recognized content uses tags to create lists of high-quality articles
8. with the rate at which projects come and go its good to have some overlap
9. and several other automated processes

In the end if consensus is that only the child project banners should remain then this Project will be defuncted because the scope would be eliminated. In regards to he one comment about coordinating. With the the way WP works I find it very unlikely that we could get three projects to agree on something let alone all of them. For the most part I have followed the structure of WPMILHIST and I continue to use it as a guide (as well as several other projects) adapting them to fit the needs of this project. As a little extra info, I currently employ 5 different bots doing different tasks related to the project (just to clarify their not mine). In addition to that I am eying the use of several others to cleanup articles, auto-assess, autotag, expand, etc. Additionally I have created a bot account which I intend to use to do this like Newsletters, Project invites/Membership requests, cleanup, assessment,etc. So at this point I have only scratched the surface but as I gain momentum you will begin to see the project and the articles in its scope grow and expand. I intend to employ every bot and technique available to enhance, cleanup and buildup the articles related to this project. As I mentioned before I am still trying to get my arms around the monster. --Kumioko (talk) 05:35, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Well I think thats the point of this project. Just to discuss things that involve all the sub-projects. Which is similar in the way WP:SPORTS works. It doesn't except in a few exceptions tag articles. It is just a place that has centralized discussion that is relevant to all the sports projects. Tagging every article that has to do with the US would probably in my opinion be overkill, just as tagging every sports topic with the sports tag is overkill. The whole point of sub projects is to break down big topics like this into more specialized sections. -DJSasso (talk) 15:58, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Thats an interesting point, but there I see a couple of problems with that logic.

1. Even though they might logically fall under this all the projects run independently of one another, there is little collaboration at this point between any of them.
2. With few exceptions non of the other US related projects watch this WikiProject at all (partially because its been inactive for so long). So comments left here frequently go unanswered unless I post it to several or all of the others soliciting comments.
3. This project doesnt have any authority or control over the others so therefore, aside from what its name may infer, its just another project so IMO adding another banner doesnt hurt anything
4. Of the 100+ US related Wikiprojects Roughly 75 of them are inactive. A large portion of the remaining ones are either semi active or knowone has botherd to check on their activity yet. There are only about 10-15 that are strong active projects (MILHIST US, ACW and ARW; NRHP; US Roads, a few of the states, US public policy and a few others). I am in fact going to start closing out (5 at a time or so) some of the inactive ones (like US Cities, State Capitals and Regions to name a few). BTW, if the projects are active I am leaving them alone (unless of course they want to work together) so they have no worrys. I have no ambitions to take over those projects I am just trying to trim the weeds and increase visibility of US topics and articles that belong to forgotten projects. As I develop the project more (hopefully with help and input from others) and things start to take off then we can start breaking them off but as it is now, with the exception of a few, it does no good to break them into like groups if knowone is workin on them. --Kumioko (talk) 16:14, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

The problem with that as I see it is that combing so many articles into one project is more likely to cause articles to get lost in the crowd than to help them, which is why sub projects help because it focuses attention on specific sub-sets. A general melting pot for anything that relates to the US generally becomes useless. You can look to the Chicago Wikiproject for an example where their tagging has gone to extremes that make it useless, basically if you have ever slept in a hotel in Chicago you have probably been tagged. No wikiproject has authority over anything. Wikiprojects are just places for groups of people with the same interests to discuss issues relating to those subjects. For most of these projects there doesn't need to be collaboration between them, if the only thing connecting them is that they are related to the US. -DJSasso (talk) 16:36, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I see your point and I would consider only tagging those that arent covered buy another related project except that there are literally thousands that arent captured by a project or the project that does have them is Inactive. I am going to make 1 tweak though and that is I am going to remove the US MILHIST one from the list of the three above. I admit that initially there are going to be a huge number but as the project gets built back up we can start slitting them off. Right now its harder to manage the 100+ projects then it is to haev all the articles in one big bag. Plus I can then start using bots to automate some of the edits like, fixing formatting, adding persondata and Infoboxes, assessments, etc. Some edits have to be done by an individual but there are a lot that can be done with tools and a lot of the articles that fall under the US scope havint been touched by anyone in some time. Plesae dont think Im not listening to your comments though I am; I just think that having them all in less than 100 groups is beter that 100+ fragments. The other problem is that its difficult to tag them without some moverlap. With so many projects its near impossible to program the bot to skip iff(insert 100+ prejects here). So I either tag them all myself (no thanks) or live with some overlap. --Kumioko (talk) 17:02, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Plymouth requested renames

FYI, the usage of Plymouth is up for discussion, see Talk:Plymouth#Proposed_Move.

76.66.199.238 (talk) 05:00, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Move/content issue List of named ethnic enclaves in North American cities

Please see Talk:List_of_named_ethnic_enclaves_in_North_American_cities#Name_-_move.3F.Skookum1 (talk) 17:42, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WikiProject Southern United States

Template:WikiProject Southern United States has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kumioko (talk • contribs) 21:20, 24 October 2010

Discussion at Talk:Plymouth

There is a discussion at Talk:Plymouth, requesting that it become a disambiguation page. I don't believe that the English city is the primary topic, as Plymouth, Massachusetts (including Plymouth Colony) and Plymouth (automobile) are more well-known in the U.S. and Canada. OSX (talk • contributions) 21:56, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Someone was counting up the votes recently, and seems like Devon is getting the upperhand. I personally think that shows regional bias, unless Canada and the USA don't count for anything in figuring out English usage. 76.66.203.138 (talk) 12:43, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

There are several discussions happening right now like Talk:Dover, Talk:Plymouth, Talk:Devon. The biases of the people who are commenting is quite obvious as nearly every vote for the U.K. communities are from U.K. residents and the votes for disambiguation pages are from the U.S., Canada, and (for the most part) the rest of the world. The discussions are pitting the U.K city vs Dover, Delaware and Dover International Speedway, the U.K. city vs the Plymouth car and Plymouth Colony, etc. The people who want to keep the status quo say that the history of these cities, mainly because they are around longer, overpower the other primary topics in other countries like the U.S. Even the state capital and major NASCAR racetrack! The shear number of their comments will likely be successful if things don't change. Royalbroil 12:58, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Clarification: I meant Plymouth Devon, not Talk:Devon's discussion. Sorry about any confusion that might have caused. 76.66.203.138 (talk) 15:42, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Slightly off topic but these are exactly the kinds of reasons why we need a central Wikiproject like WP US so that people can speak up on issues that pertain to them. Unfortunately this project laid dormant for so long most users dont use it...but thats already starting to turn around. In the meantime I agree with Royalbroil but the great (and at the same time not so great) thing about WP is in a few months theyll be brought up again and next time the vote may be different. --Kumioko (talk) 23:59, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Close out some Inactive/nonfunctional US related WikiProjects

As I work to reinvigorate Wikipedia:WikiProject United States I have found a number of US related Wikiprojects that are inactive and no longer functional. I would like to archive some of them and redirect them to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States along with any pages that might link to them. In performing this housecleaning I believe it will help us to refocus our efforts on the projects that are active. I am giving editors the opportunity to make comments before I do however. The following 4 projects are the ones I would like to close out:

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject United States regions - Inactive since at least Januaru 2008
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. cities - Inactive since at least September 2008. Changed to Defunct April 2010
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. special districts - Inactive since at least December 2007
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. state capitols - Inactive since at least April 2008

I have chosen these 4 because only one of these links to anything. There are no templates (including no talk page banner), no bots generating stats and with the exception of state capitals (it has 62 pages) none link to any articles (although some link to some user pages or Wikiprojects as part of the US WikiProjects template) which can be easily removed. Please let me know what you think about this idea. I will leave this discussion for at least the next 7 days. --Kumioko (talk) 04:58, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Make sure to drop a notice on the project's talk page, and just leave it for some at least a week or so to give people ample warning. I would also recommend dropping a note on wikiproject cities for the US Cities one, to see which project to merge it up into. In general though I'm for the moving of all four to archives, since I don't think they would be useful as task forces. -Optigan13 (talk) 06:00, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

I would say that US Cities should become a joint task force between WPUSA and WPCITIES.

US regions, districts, etc should merge together into another WPUSA task force.

state capitols (buildings) should be merged into a landmarks and government buildings task force.

76.66.203.138 (talk) 15:58, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I would agree with making them a task force but since knowone appears to be actively working on them Im not sure they would work on them in a task force either. We can always break them out into a task force later if need be. I agree with collaborating with the other projects. Ill look into that and thanks for reminding me about posting these to that project pages. I did this in the wee hours of the morning and the followup slipped my mind. --Kumioko (talk) 16:52, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea!....Normally i would say leave the Project pages the way they are (rename them to task forces) and simply redirect there talk pages to this talk page. This way project structures remain intact (meaning templates, assessments etc. will remain). However i see that non of this have there own templates, assessments etc. So yes merge is best i think.Moxy (talk) 18:54, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

If there are no existing banners, there's little to be lost, is there? And apart from the cities one, they sound rather specific for wikiprojects (check out the Pakistan wikiprojects if you want to see that approach really gone mad...) However, I would suggest that merging projects have a notice up for at least a month, barring projects that never really got off the ground in the first place. Unless there's a particular reason to move fast, it's better to take it slow. Rd232 ^talk 18:53, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

• I agree, they should be closed if inactive. I agree with rd232 that you should leave a message on their talk page and give them 1 month to respond. There is no rush. Royalbroil 00:47, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks and thats fine Ill leave it up for a month. They've been there dead for a while a few more weeks wont hurt. Also, all their talk pages have a comment as do several of the larger active projects. --Kumioko (talk) 02:14, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Since the projects don't have templates, I don't see any problem merging them with wp:usa. However, the u.s. state capitol page should be made into a subpage, at least, it's one of the four that actually has some good info on it. Also, since wp:usa has >12,000 articles, maybe there could be some task forces set up, like wp:U.S. places? See: Category:Australia-related WikiProjects for some examples on how to organize. --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:51, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

I thought hard about this over the weekend and how best to capture the various US related topics and I think that just calling it topic might be the best. This is different than task force in that a task force is a group of people trying to improve that topic. In some cases here we have a topic without an active support group. There are several categories of things I would like to capture and calling them task-forces or sub-projects just doesn't seem right. One example is cities. I agree that its a category that we shouldn't do without but since knowone is actively working them topic seems the appropriate term to use. Some other topics I thought good to capture are People (or biography), Events, Law, Education, Buildings and monuments, others as needed. What is your opinion about his. --Kumioko (talk)

I think your proposals are sound. Once again, I am pretty sure that you are not talking about losing anything these projects have done (city outline e.g.), but rather closing out/redirecting a page on which there is no activity, sign-up page, "assignments", nominations for GA, that sort of thing, which has gone dormant and hangs around merely to perplex hundreds of newbies (and us sometimes). Student7 (talk) 12:28, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

No your absolutely right I have no intention of deleting any work they have done and the purpose is for simplifying the multitudes of dormant project needlessly cluttering up artcle talk pages and confusing everyone. --Kumioko (talk) 14:26, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Since everyone seemed to be n agreement and since there was zero activity in the last 10 days I went ahead and did the archive and merger as descibed above. I also archived Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states. I still have some cleanup to do but for the most part its all done. Please let me know if I missed anything. --Kumioko (talk) 02:52, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

An off-the-wall comment that may be germane. Why aren't Projects themselves members of "Projects"? and perhaps projects wouldn't be quite the same at that level. This could allow a group of interested people (hopefully at or near the admin level) to track and maybe even give a measure of "governorship" as Kumioko is doing here, but on an ongoing basis.

All are welcome here IMO. Not sure exactly what you mean but since all of the US related projects run independently of one another it makes sense for them all t be memebers of this one as a central point of reaching out to the others. If I understand what you are saying. --Kumioko (talk) 15:02, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Consensus

It appears that some editors are concerned about tagging articles that belong to a US related subproject but I would like to get an idea of what the consensus is. Primarily, if and in what cases this project should tag articles. Below are 3 times when I think this project should tag an article as WPUS:

1. Tag articles as WPUS for Inactive and defunct US related projects
2. Tag articles that do not contain one of the active projects. (There are thousands here by the way)
3. Tag articles that fall into the scope of "National interest" except where they already fall into an active project. I am open to this one but I was thinking Medal of Honor recipients, generals/admirals, things known from a National standpoint such as the Liberty bell, Washington manument, grand canyon and the like.

If anynone else has ideas I am open to hear them. --Kumioko (talk) 17:46, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good. These are the criteria that I think should be applied to tagging articles into this WikiProject. I think you should wait with the articles in inactive projects until they are officially defunct. Royalbroil 00:55, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

That makes sense...do you happen to know where I can find the criteria for what makes a project defunct. My understanding is that you can make it defunct after 6 months or so of having the inactive tag but I need to look into that so if you have any guidance I would appreciate the help. --Kumioko (talk) 02:07, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

So how does the Starship Enterprise meet these new criteria?--Chaser (away) - talk 03:35, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Lol, Yes ill admit it was an extreme stretch. I was glancing at it and was about to hit skip and saw that it only had one banner that didnt have much info in it so since it was a US television show with US people and continues to aire on TV I figured Id boldy go and...well you know the rest. You can take it off if you want. --Kumioko (talk) 03:57, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

How about pro wrestlers and Antartic geography. I see the connection to the United States, but I don't see how they meet any of the criteria above. "National interest" is a stretch, and they're certainly less related than the examples listed above.--Chaser (away) - talk 19:59, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Well to me if they are from the US, pertain to the US, in the US, etc then US is ok if its not already covered by another US topic (or the US topic is inactive) so I dont think it need to be in the National interest, just pertaining to the United States. The bigger problem is a lot of the ones I am tagging have no or few US related tags (some dont have any tags at all). As far as my method I am using the page created by the Alex new article bot (the link can be found on the members/bots page of the WPUS page) and there is a margin of error there. I am also using subcategories under Category:United States so if an article is marked in a subcat as being related to the United States then a few non US ones might be swept in. With that said I am not looking at the main page. I am either using the assessment that is already on the page or using stub and low (I will sweep back through and continue to refine them once I get them into the project and tagged. I admit there is a margin of error involved but the project has been inactive for a very long time so there are literally tens of thousands of articles that need to be added to the project. I tried to do a bot run but I couldnt get concensus on using the bot so IM having to do it manually. If you find some that you feel dont qualify to be in WPUS feel free to take them out or let me know but I dont't think it'll hurt anything being there. Itll all work itself out in the end. IN regards to the three examples you gave Christina Von Eerie is an American, the only tags are pro wrestling and Biography so there is nothing that ties here to a US project, the second, MullerGlacier also pertains to the US. The third was mapped buy the US, discovered by the US and named for a US explorer. In the end I still believe the assessment was correct. --Kumioko (talk) 14:02, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm still ambivalent about Antartic geography, but given that these are the outliers, I'm satisfied.--Chaser (away) - talk 16:50, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Write in candidate

According to Write-in candidate and the Washington Post, the first write-in candidate to win a US Senate seat, was in 1946, and not Strom Thurmond, but the Strom Thurmond article says he was the first to do so... 76.66.203.138 (talk) 15:55, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Ill look into that. --Kumioko (talk) 16:48, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

After doing some research and based on the link on the Strom Thurman article I reworded it to be a little more accurate. Please feel free to post here again and let us know if you find anything else that needs to be adjusted. --Kumioko (talk) 02:27, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Got messes?

Just curious if there are (heh) any US politician pages that are going through rough times now that the silly season is done. I helped watch over the Palin article after the '08 elections, and I imagine there are a few like that now. Volunteering to help with responding to "editprotected" and so on. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 21:49, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for stepping forward to help in that. I am sure your right although I am not aware of any at the moment. --Kumioko (talk) 02:03, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Last North American veterans by war

FYI, Last surviving United States war veterans was renamed to Last North American veterans by war, but still is a US list. 76.66.203.138 (talk) 07:22, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Invitation to participation!

Hello!

As you may be aware, the Wikimedia Foundation is gearing up for our annual fundraiser. We want to hit our goal and hit it as soon as possible, so that we can focus on Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15 and our new project: Contributions. I'm posting across these Wikiprojects to engage you, the community, to work to build Wikipedia by finance but also by content. We seek donations not only financially, but by collaboration in building content. You can find more information in Philippe Beaudette's memo to the communities here.

Visit the Contribution project page and the Fundraising page to find out how you can help us support and spread free knowledge. ⇒DanRosenthal ^{Wikipedia Contribution Team} 20:04, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Invitation to help with the Eastern Mountain Coal Fields task force

Eastern Mountain Coal Fields task force		An invitation to join us!
		You're invited to be a part of the Eastern Mountain Coal Fields task force, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to Eastern Kentucky Coal Field region of Kentucky. To accept this invitation, click here!

Hello, WikiProject United States! We are looking for editors to join the Eastern Mountain Coal Fields task force, an outreach effort which aims to support the development of articles relating to Eastern Kentucky in Wikipedia. We thought you might be interested, and hope that you will join us. Thanks!

J654567 (talk) 00:36, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Getting all presidents to GA level

Guys, if we are committed we could get all presidents up to GA level systematically. If we work together on the most recent one that isn't GA, each one would take a week tops. Would anybody like to do this with me? We can do it starting from the most recent, that would be Bill Clinton--Iankap99 (talk) 01:34, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Ill help pitch in on that but it'll take me a couple days to wrap up what I am doing at the moment. I think a couple are already GA or better for FYI. Also, A couple notes:

• A couple tie in well with some active "Operations" that the MILHIST projects are working on. I suggest working up a list that they can help with and dropping them a line. I would think at the very least they would be interested in the ones with military backgrounds like Washington, Grant and Eisenhower.
• We should also drop a line at these other related projects and solicite their help as well.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Government.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Presidents
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject United States politicians
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject United States History
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject District of Columbia --Kumioko (talk) 01:52, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Let me first thank you for your consideration in taking this up. Yes I know that several are, as my statement was to get all presidents up to GA. I asked the U.S. presidents before this one, but I'll drop a note by all of them. Take your time with your current projects. I am very unfamiliar with MILHIST, where would I drop a line and on what operations are active? I'll submit Clinton for Peer Review now. EDIT: There already was a peer review. It's listed in the milestones. Thanks--Iankap99 (talk) 02:02, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

No problem, its a worthy cause I would say. I will say that it will be extremely difficult. Many of these articles are prone to vandalism, POV conflicts and edit wars but no reason to let that stop us. May I also recommend cleaning up the President of the United States article as well as the List of Presidents. --Kumioko (talk) 02:12, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

It looks like someone created a list for tracking the condition of the Presidential articles here Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Presidents/1.0 Rankings. This should give us a good starting off point I think. Also after scanning the talk page of the WP Presidents project it looks like a couple of other users are actively building these up as well. --Kumioko (talk) 02:33, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Fix the 769 dead links to the State department

Here's hoping the project will eventually address the (archived report) 769 dead links to the US State Department. --CliffC (talk) 18:07, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi Kumioko, I saw your response at the above link, that sounds good. However, I'm not sure your response will be widely seen, as I unfortunately neglected to mention that the above link is to an archive. Adding that detail in this edit. Best, CliffC (talk) 20:13, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

It's currently down to 650 (was at ~744 earlier today), but that's mostly from fixing easy ones in the main namespace. —Mrwojo (talk) 02:35, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Nineteenth Amendment article

The article Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gets nearly 4000 page views per day. It is, however, barely more than a stub and needs some serious expansion. Towards this end, I have decided to unprotect the article in the hopes that it will receive some random kindness from strangers. Considering that most of the people viewing this article are students, however, I'm under no illusions that it will be free from vandalism. Please add this article to your watchlist so that we can quickly revert any vandalism that occurs. Thanks! Kaldari (talk) 01:09, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I still agree its worth trying. Well just have to keep an eye on it and cross out fingers. --Kumioko (talk) 02:01, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

1990 census maps

For people looking for 1990 census maps...

It seems like this collection has the .ARC mapping data: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/pl1990.html

WhisperToMe (talk) 05:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Census 2010 & nearby cities

What plans exist for updating entries dependent on census data when Census 2010 data becomes available? Is someone working on a bot for that? Also, when that is done, it would be good to put in better information on nearby cities. In rural areas, that boiler-plate sentence in entries for towns, "The Town of X is in the Y part of the county and is southwest of Z." just isn't very useful. I have ideas about how this could be done better.

Does anyone have plans to make a bot that deals with issues like these? --Pleasantville (talk) 20:03, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

I have just started to consideer that but I am unsure if there is a way to automate the updates using a bot. Do you know if this has been done in the past? I will ask some of the bot operators if this is something that might be possible. I would welcome any ideas you have about how to go about this. --Kumioko (talk) 20:34, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

It is apparent that many of the place entries for the US were created by bot from Census 2000 data, presumable via some template, bot, or Assisted Editing script. There are over 50,000 links in WIkipedia to the site http://factfinder.census.gov/ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=5000&offset=50000&target=http%3A%2F%2Ffactfinder.census.gov%2F ). Some of those are sources for maps, but most are entries that started out looking about like the one for Dunlap, Illinois.

I was presuming that someone somewhere had planned how to update these entries each time census data came in, but perhaps not. Should I draft a proposal of maybe how to do this?--Pleasantville (talk) 21:05, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

That would be great, since it only happens once every ten years or so knowone probably gave it a lot of though as WP was pretty young at that time but hopefully it will be around for a while so we should probably have something on hand. Thanks --Kumioko (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

A bit harder this time since articles are already there (probably were constructed by the original bot if not there) and worse, data is already there but not in a consistent format. So it would have to be dumped into the bottom of "Demographics", right?

It would be nice to avoid the awkward phrase "the population is spread out" meaning there are a number of cohorts or age-groups. "Distributed" sounds less awkward. Thanks. Student7 (talk) 21:43, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

True about them being harder to update and in different formats. When they release the data we might see a pattern where we can do some find and replace logic the will look but we wont knwo until they post it. --Kumioko (talk) 16:43, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Some articles do not use the USCensusPop template at all. See Baltimore County, Maryland#Demographics. That table is not complete, either, for it begins in 1900! Contrast Baltimore#Demographics (Baltimore City is a county equivalent that should probably be covered in articles with county-level Maryland data). For all I know there may no Demographics section in some articles on counties and equivalents.

It will be a good thing to impose more uniformity during incorporation of Census 2010. I'm not sure it will be a good thing, or even possible, to bring that to a point where everything may be automated. --P64 (talk) 22:07, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. Update should include the List of counties in Maryland and its 49(?) siblings. --P64 (talk) 22:26, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Portal:United States of America

FYI Portal:United States of America has been nominated for deletion, see WP:RFD. 76.66.194.212 (talk) 05:51, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Last North American veterans by war listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Last North American veterans by war. Since you had some involvement with the Last North American veterans by war redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion (if you have not already done so). 76.66.194.212 (talk) 07:02, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

A consideration for cross project consolidation of talk page templates

There is of course no requirement to do this but I would like to offer a proposal to all the United States related projects that I think would be beneficial to many. Rather than try and coordinate 75 or more conversations I am starting this here and I will post a message to the projects of the weekend.

I would like to suggest consolidating some of the United States related WikiProject Banners under the WikiProject United States banner. The projects themselves would still operate as they do, completely seperate in scope and control from WPUS it would just allow 1 template to do what is currently done by 75-100. I know that some of the WikiProjects like United States Public Policy and US roads use special fields in their template and wouldnt be suitable for this consolidation but after revewing all the templates related to WPUS most of the state templates and many of the others use the same standard fields. This would offer several advantages:

1. reduce the number of templates that needs to be maintained
2. it would reduce the time it take to maintain the templates
3. Allow visibility of all or most US related articles through one source rather than over 75. This applies to bots, scripts, AWB and a variety of other things.
4. It will also reduce the location of comments from 75+ projects.
5. Reduce the number of US related banners that appear on articles (I have seen as many as ten US related banners on 1 article)

As an example of what this could look like please see here Template:WikiProject United States/sandbox. Most of the main US related projects are added but again some would need to be removed because of special field considerations that dont apply to the rest. Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions or if you think your project woudl be interested in this. --Kumioko (talk) 22:06, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Because of the way the WP:USRD project template is constructed, we're not interested in such a consolidation. If the other projects want to do it then by all means go ahead, just leave USRD out of it. --Rschen7754 05:06, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Umm, yeah if you read the writeup I did for the reasons you mention but I would appreciate a little less hostility if you don't mind. I find the Wiki-isolationism of your project a little disturbing. I removed US roads from the Sandbox example to eliminate any confusion or angst.--Kumioko (talk) 05:27, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:USPP cannot be part of that because of the new assessment approach we are trying. However,I like the idea, though I don't participate in any of the other projects, Sadads (talk) 22:57, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I thought that USP and USRoads would be a no go due to the special logic they used. There are a few others too that probably would be automatic no's but I figure if even 3 or 4 are interested itll be an improvement for all. --Kumioko (talk) 23:02, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Kumioko, I don't understand what the proposal means. {{WikiProject Oregon}} is already a template of some sort forced upon us based on some common template code somewhere, with some deficiencies handling regional photo requests. Would, for example, your proposal suggest changing our 10,000+ tagged articles from {{WikiProject Oregon}} to {{WikiProject United States|state=Oregon}} or some such? —EncMstr (talk) 05:40, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Basically Im just trying to see if there's interest in merging some of the multitudes of US related project templates into the US template rather than have hundreds (over 200 at least) of individual templates. But yes if WPOregon wanted too it would replace it and we could fairly easily replace the template. Im not trying to push anything on anyone but after going through a couple thousand articles, many with 5, 10 or more US related templates it seemed like it might be something worth doing...maybe not, I dunno. Regarding the photo request comment I prefer to use {{Image requested}}. It has a lot more functionality for dealing with the specifics of photos but if the consensus is to build it into the template I can do that. --Kumioko (talk) 05:52, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

As I understand it task forces operate somewhat like projects and I am not averse to such a merger if it consistent with all other cities and states.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:58, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I anticipate that some may want too and others may not. I would suggest though that if the state the city resides in does not wish too then the city should probably not either. --Kumioko (talk) 20:12, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I consider these templates mostly to be constructed backwards. I want it to say (big letters) the article Michigan is parrt of WikiProject Michigan (small letters) maybe consider looking at Project United States. Not: (big letters) this is WikiProject United States (small letters) oh maybe look at Michigan's wikisubproject too. I am not going to see Michigan-related (misposted?) discussion posted on the first prominent link in the template (United States) because I do not follow or want to follow that project. Rmhermen (talk) 20:36, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Im sorry I am not following what your trying to say. --Kumioko (talk) 20:39, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I think I follow his logic, and I tend to agree with it. What he's saying is that in all likelihood a consolidated banner would put WPUS front-and-center and relegate all of the subprojects to second-banana status on less visible lines below WPUS's main template message, since that's the way WPBannerMeta treats a project's task forces and subprojects. For that reason, I also ask that WP:NY be excluded from a potential consolidation.

Also, I have to ask: why was "Although this task force falls under WikiProject Military History and that project would continue to maintain and control it I thought it would be ok to associate the task force to both WikiProjects Military History and United States." posted to WT:NYSR when that project is (a) definitely not a task force and (b) definitely not within the scope of WP:MILHIST? – TMF 21:00, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Personally I don't see the point of this. All I can see this doing is choking out the small wikiprojects making them task forces of one huge project. (While they may have their own letters having a banner is a big way that wikiprojects advertise}--Guerillero | My Talk 21:28, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about the banners that way and absorbing the other projects really isn't my intention. I just didn't think that we needed over 125 different US related banners. All appearing individually and requiring them to be specified individually for bots, many articles having several of them, and all of them relating to the same subject in different scopes. Also requiring more than 125 different places for people to leave comments regarding those templates, etc. Regarding the message that was a huge error on my part. Ill go through and fix all the incorrect ones in the next few minutes. Good catch and please let me know if you see anything else. --Kumioko (talk) 21:48, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't really see the point either. Coming from WP:Hawaii, there are a lot of things that are Hawaii-specific. And of the advantages you list above, from my perspective they're either neutral or disadvantages:

1. reduce the number of templates that needs to be maintained - Templates shouldn't need much maintenance, they're built up and then mostly left alone. And they'd still need to be in existence as task force templates or something, so minimal gain. I guess standardization could be an issue, but I don't know if it actually is; and trying to enforce it would likely result in conflict (we've had to deal with that in WP:Hawaii from strict "English-only" nuts).
2. it would reduce the time it take to maintain the templates - Ditto.
3. Allow visibility of all or most US related articles through one source rather than over 75. This applies to bots, scripts, AWB and a variety of other things. - I don't know a whole lot about how bots work, but it doesn't seem like crawling through 75 sources would really be a big problem for one of them. The number of articles isn't reduced.
4. It will also reduce the location of comments from 75+ projects. - This means all the comments go into one place. As someone working only on WP:Hawaii, I don't want to wade through dozens of comments from the 74 other projects to find the one per month that's relevant to me. If you're working on multiple projects, it's simple to watch all of their talk pages, but you can't watch only relevant comments from a single page.
5. Reduce the number of US related banners that appear on articles (I have seen as many as ten US related banners on 1 article) - Maybe a more restricted consolidation is called for then? Or people are over-bannering? It seems to me that more than three is excessive. KarlM (talk) 20:44, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Hawaii and the others that have responded so far are some of the more active and respondant of the projects and I anticipated it would be these, and a couple more active ones (such as NRHP and the MILHIST task forces), that wouldn't be interested. It seems like a lot of folks are concerned that I am trying to consume the other littler projects but actually my intent is to try and get them to work more together rather than the Xenophobic attitude that several currently have. I have no intention or interest in making this project an unmanageable juggernaut. Here are my comments in response to yours:

1. To respond to the last issue in comment one first. The United States has no national language so knowone should be touting one language over another. IMO if the term or language best applies to that article, use it. With that said this is the English Wikipedia so it should readable in english wherever possible. I admit I have seen times where the more formal British english seems to prevail over US english but that's a case by case basis. As for the reduction comment your right the template itself (other than adding taskforces, parameters and the like) is pretty low mainatenance but what I was referring too, and should have been more clear about, is the documentation that pertains to that template. Many of the templates have little documentation, the documentation is outdated or it is incomplete. I could provide several examples (I attempted to fix one today).

2. Same for comment 2 except that I concur that the templates themselves require little maintenance (although several currently have errors that need to be fixed, categories that need to be created and are not being utilized completely or consistently).

3. Im not sure how to easily explain this other than to say that many bots have to update multiple US related templates for the same articles. This means that the bot employed for use by the projects needs to update in multiple places for the same article. Here are a couple examples:

• AlexNewArtBot - Patrols New Articles and puts relevant articles into the New Articles lists of the project. This bot is used by most of the US related projects and therefore updates multiple projects with the same links. The results of that can be found here. I have linked each of the individual US related projects subpages to a subpage under WPUS to gain visibility of most of the main ones in one place. They can be identified on the previous link by the Starting of their title as "New United States articles".
• Dashbot creates lists of Unreferenced BLP's and can also be found here. As with the other all the main US related projects have been linked to one subpage.
• It also makes it difficult when using AWB to filter out US related projects. I have been confronted by several cases (especially when adding a WikiProject Banner for United states related articles) where I have to filter out 100 projects so I dont add the WPUS banner to an article that already has a US related banner. It can be very time consuming.

4. The comments statement isn't for comments related to the project or articles under the project. Just for the Wikiproject banner and the documentation associated to it. Many of which have unanswered comments because know-one watches them.

5. The problem with this one is that its unrealistic to set a limit to the number of projects that are allowed to claim association to an article. Take for example Barrack Obama who has the wikiproject banner for Hawaii. This article has 16 Banners, 9 of which relate to US subjects. And honestly, given its importance I would say it should have at least 3 or 4 more (United States, MILHIST, Law and US Public policy). I would assume that if someone where to remove the Hawaii banner, the Hawaii project would be upset and put it back or demand it be put back. Most or all of the others likely feel the same way. But in my opinion having all these banners when, arguably 1, would do.

I hope this helps explain my thought process a little better but please let me know if you have any more comments or questions. --Kumioko (talk) 21:49, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

So far as WikiProject Cleveland is concerned, we'd prefer to not to be included in said consolidation. As we feel each WikiProject has a certain sense of TLC attended to its own set of articles, we'd like to keep ours the way it is. By no means would I dissuade you from adding articles to your own WP-USA which might also fall into our our project's scope, but with all due respect, we'll be keeping our project the way it is, thanks.Ryecatcher773 (talk) 05:11, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

No problem thanks for taking the time to comment. --Kumioko (talk) 05:13, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Kumioko, don't mind WikiProject Cleveland, as a regular contributor to WikiProject Pittsburgh we have found them to be "unique", I kid, I kid, we do love all you Browns fans, honestly! Interesting discussion here my knee jerk is to agree with Hawaii and (a first for me) Cleveland, but very intriguing suggestion I will ruminate on this more. Something tells me though that many at WP:PGH would rather keep it distinct but novel idea! Hholt01 (talk) 23:46, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm thinking that with sub-federal Projects like (I'm making this up) "American Skateboarding") there is really no alternative but to merge them up to the federal level. I am alarmed at the potential traffic there if it can't be limited somehow. It would seem to me desirable to merge inactive states (for example, Vermont) to Project New England (I haven't checked it one exists). Even if the NE Project were relatively dormant before, this might improve it by a factor of six, maybe sufficient for a viable Project.

I would like to monitor US Project Traffic discussion but wouldn't be able to if comments exceeded, say, 20 a day. Most would not involve me, but it takes time to find that out.

I think basically what you are doing is right and proper, but just trying to determine the effects. Thanks. Student7 (talk) 15:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Well as far as the traffic goes the discussions should remain on whatever project they relate too. This is just in relation to reducing the WikiProject banners while increasing visibility of the article. --Kumioko (talk) 16:14, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Dumb me, I thought you were rolling up Projects to consolidate discussion pages so they would get some attention occasionally! I would prefer to leave the state banners alone. It's a nationalistic/patriotic thing. Decorative and all that. If you were rolling up the Projects themselves, it would be a different matter. Most of our states are larger than many countries. Why shouldn't they have their own banners? I'm sure most city Projects/subproject editors will express the same desire. It's a logo thing. "I belong to this group." Student7 (talk) 23:01, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Outsiders view

Strong Support I am a member of WP:Canada (since 2006) and we implemented this consolidation of templates a long time ago-> Template:WikiProject Canada. It has been an overwhelming success to say the least. I at first did not think it would be so, as i thought that the independences of projects would be affected. This did not happen - what did happen was an over all awareness of projects that led to more participants in all projects. It also had the side affect of making WP:Canada a home base were disputes could be resolved without have to go to arbitration out side the parent (country) project. You may also wish to take a look at Template:WikiProject Latin America as this has been done very recently (this year) and also seems to be well liked by the projects involved. So far the amalgamation seems to have led to more pages with proper assessments and more relevant projects being added. Moxy (talk) 05:31, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, very intersting I was not aware of those. --Kumioko (talk) 05:40, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Ps you may what to see --->Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/Assessment#Statistics (the Use of {{WikiProject Canada}}) as this is how it was implemented noone losses there assessments still all independent ...did take some time, but like i said well worth it. Moxy (talk) 05:49, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

The fact that separate assessments are available is because WPCANADA tried to force its own assessments down the throats of various WikiProjects without consultation and was severely disagreed with. I would say that WPCANADA is not a shining example of openness and consensus building in that regard. 76.66.202.72 (talk) 21:09, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Okay, looking at the Canada pages I think I understand what it's about now. It seems like the main advantage is really having a one-line banner that lists all the projects and a single assessment. Maybe it's because I don't deal much with the admin/code/whatever side of things, but phrasing it as "consolidating templates" doesn't really convey that.

Mostly I think that makes sense. One Hawaii-related issue is that WP:Hawaii also deals with things that predate the US annexation, and so don't really fall under the scope of WP:USA (the thing I mentioned above was regarding the use of diacritics in Hawaiian-language words, which a few people have violent objections to for some reason, but they seem to have abated). KarlM (talk) 07:08, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Let me give some examples of how well this works. We are staring with only the one template that all projects advertise like here. This is easy because all the projects have there own place in the one template (there own codes/parameters) see Template:WikiProject Canada#Workgroups (only those selected will appear). This has the affect of adding the article to both projects at the same time. This is a great way to see how may articles the country is dealing with overall and the assessment gets done for the selected projects (will assess for all the WPs you have parameters for and independently to if you wish). If only one assessment parameter is filled all still will be assessed at the same level. There is also the side effect that if only one sub project was selected and goes dead WP:USA will still be there at the very least. Even better is if you select many projects so that there will always be multiple projects around to watch articles.

• i.e This is what we do for a musicians article that needs a picture and lets say that Ottawa would like to assess independently because they hate the person in question LOL - We are able to recognized the Country, the province (State in your case), the city, the occupation all from on template....this way all projects are now watching over it and can contribute and assessments for all projects have been done - even with the Ottawa project making a different assessment because they would like to. Note all the portals get listed and projects icons all there so all get to advertise there project (its only fair they can - they want members to). Moxy (talk) 08:16, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

IMO, that setup treats the subprojects as second-class citizens, as one poster commented in the section above. That's a big reason why the Ontario subproject of WP:CRWP created its own banner. – TMF 10:02, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually thats a bit misleading as WP:CAN-ROADS is incorporated into template as well.Moxy (talk) 16:21, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

And based on {{WikiProject Ontario Roads}} it's safe to say the project doesn't want to be. – TMF 16:24, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

This is getting a little off topic so lets try and keep this about the United States banner but are you a member of that project TMF or are you just providing that as an example. Just because the banner exists doesnt mean they oppose being a part of the other project. --Kumioko (talk) 16:29, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I have no connection whatsoever to that project - in fact, I quit that project years ago over disagreements with some editors - I'm merely pointing out an instance where there has been opposition to a national consolidation. As for your last point, I'm not saying they oppose being part of the national project; I'm saying they oppose having their template folded into the national one. The project's most active editor has gone on record of saying as much, and has also commented that he plans on forking the rest of CRWP from it at some point as well. But this might be getting too tangential. – TMF 16:41, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I admit I still dont agree but I do understand your apprehension and I am not trying to disuade you from continuing to use the existing system I just think that something like the Canada Example above is more functional than this:

{{WikiProjectBannerShell|1= {{WikiProject United States presidential elections|class=FA|importance=Top|category=no|USPresidents=Yes|USPresidents-importance=Mid|category=no}}<nowiki> {{WikiProject Barack Obama|class=FA|importance=Top|category=no}} {{WikiProject U.S. Congress|class=FA|subject=person|importance=High|category=no}} {{WikiProject Illinois|class=FA|importance=high|category=no}} {{WikiProject Hawaii|class=FA|importance=Mid|category=no}} {{WikiProject Kansas|class=FA|importance=Mid|category=no}} {{WikiProject Chicago|class=FA|importance=Top|category=no}} }}

And these are just the US related ones on the Barack Obama articles. There sare 10 more for other projects. It also makes it a lot easier to see what articles fall under the scope of United States topics rather than pulling in 200+ different projects individually. I admit that this article might be banner heavy but who wants to be the one to tell all those other projects that their projects arent good enough to be on the article. There seem to be a lot of arguments for keeping individual banners but this is perfect example of why having one banner would be beneficial.

1. Knowone can argue that one project rates to be on an article more than another.
2. The article gets counted under the scope of United States or of the individual project as needed.
3. Less room is taken up on an articles talk page.
4. class assessments and importance could be the same for all projects (in this case the article should be Top importance and FA across the board) or they can vary by project if needed.
5. If one project goes inactive then all the article still falls into the scope of several others.
6. Its far easier to read and decipher what the project is than the myriad of redirects from this example. How many people really know what the banner for USP-Article means without looking it up?--Kumioko (talk) 15:36, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

• Admittedly, I didn't read almost any of the content here, but I support a system identical/similar to the system used by WP Canada. Looks great, easily streamlined, and the issue of WPUS engulfing or overtaking the 'lower' projects is trivial. upstateNYer 00:03, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

As an outsider, and not belonging to any of these groups I must say I heavily support moving to the WPCanada model. I have thought for a longtime that this should atleast happen on a city/state level. Because its somewhat rediculous to have banners for both Chicago and Illinois on a talk page. When one banner would do and could still convey the same information. So to do this on a national level I would probably support as well. -DJSasso (talk) 17:17, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Compromise

This conversation seems to be rubbing folks the wrong way so let me suggest this. Another avenue to consider is adding topics relating to US things: These topics could include things like American Sports, American Education, American people, etc. This would allow these articles to be "tagged" as WPUS without giving the appearance that WPUS is trying to consume the other projects. It doesn't accomplish all the same goals I had intended but does this seem like a reasonable compromise? --Kumioko (talk) 18:27, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

As someone who is a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. counties and of Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania, I can say that the counties wikiproject is very inactive and merging it into something larger and more active would only be an improvement. The Pennsylvania wikiproject is fairly inactive, and to me it does not matter much if it were called a Task Force instead. I do think that with the US Census results coming out for 2010, there should be some overall coordination on how to update articles with the 2010 Census results. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I started a bit of a discussion on the counies page already and will do the same with Pennsylvania soon. --Kumioko (talk) 04:19, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

I think the issue of merging and converting projects to task forces should be done before talking about unified banners. Once that is done, we'd have a clear view of what remains. Then a decision on how many banners should be around could be started. Talking about merging banners before that is putting the cart before the horse, since it is not clear that all current existing projects will continue to exist, they may be merged into unified projects without separate task forces for each previous project. 76.66.202.72 (talk) 21:19, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Kumioko, I see your sense, but do you think it's really worth all that work? Jsayre64 (talk) 04:09, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Frankly IM on the fence about it myself and offered it as a way to meet half way. The work of adding the logic and the categories could be done in a couple hours at most and I could add the topic to the articles through a swift kick to the bot. On one hand it would give us visibility of the US related articles in one place (which also provides better visibility of what percentage of WP articles are US related) and allows us to centrally do some things that must be done piecemeal and shotgun style know but the tradeoff is it adds even more categories, more logic, and more topics of association when we have over 200 already. There is so much more to do on the US related articles as it is it may be a while before I get to it anyway. --Kumioko (talk) 04:17, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

I think it is an unfortunate idea. For example, Kumioko left a pointed message at WikiProject Washington Metro asking why we don't do article assessments by class and importance. The fact is that we do not, so we would not be compatible with your proposed templates, because there is no consensus to do such assessements at this time. Racepacket (talk) 13:13, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. BTW I checked the coding and the class and importance are optional by project so if you wanted yours to display with no class and no importance we can do that. --Kumioko (talk) 14:30, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

It seems there is a lot of confusion over what this really means to current projects such as Syracuse, New York. While the Canadian project is nice, I guess my problem is understanding what is different about that project and the current United States project? The Syracuse pages will still have their own project and also will be part of the New York project. Will either of those banners be removed from our pages? --Nconwaymicelli (talk) 08:10, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, the answer depends on what you want to do. I would say the cities should normally fall under the state (unless the state project is inactive) and not directly under WPUS. All this is intended to do is consolidate the "banner" not the project or its pages. This isnt a forced migration of projects into WPUS or anything like that. Mostly just trying to reduce the 200+ banners, thats it. Among other things this will allow the article talk page to have less banners, allow for easier scope count of the articles relating to United States topics, reduce the number of Template talk pages to watch comments on, reduce the amount of time it takes to update and maintain the templates and their documentation, etc. Honestly I have all but given up on this suggestion. I have been convinced that there is not enough interest, cooperation, or consistency across the projects yet to be able to do something like this. Excuse the comment here but most of the projects are a bit xenophobic and dont want seem to want work together even though we are stronger as a whole than as individual fragments looking out for our own interests independently. I have decided to consentrate my efforts on the 75+ projects that are defunct or inactive and the articles that relate to US that dont have banners yet at all (and there are thousands in both categories). Of course if someone is interested well work on that too and maybe at some point once the project matures we can try and do something like this again. But well see. --Kumioko (talk) 15:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Speaking from the perspective of WikiProject Iowa, which is a periodically active project (esp. our Government workgroup, which comes to life around election time every two years), I see no need for any such consolidation and echo KarlM's (perspective from WikiProject Hawaii) points above. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 15:39, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

In response to your comments Philosopher I understand although I would argue that if a project is nly sporadically active and or that project is only active for a couple of months based on a season or event then it probably should be associated to another project that is active year round. --Kumioko (talk) 15:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

If anyone wants to see what it looks like take a look at Talk:Nye County, Nevada. We are working to add the U.S. counties project. Previously only 135 of about 3200 counties were tagged and the project had virtually no activity. The banner also did not support assessment, importance or several other things which WPUS does. I have tagged about 2000 of the previously untagged articles and by the end of the weekend should have the rest. Then we can delete this template and hopefully move to the next one. Whichever that may be. The project page remiains. The identity and culture of the project remains. --Kumioko (talk) 16:10, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

All of the U.S. counties article talk pgs have now been tagged with the WPUSA template using the |county=yes parameter. The old U.S. counties template is now redirected to the WPUSA one. --Funandtrvl (talk) 21:41, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

So Wikiproject US states is subsumed here. Wikiproject US counties redirects here and its banner is effectively replaced by a component of the Wikiproject United States banner. Frankly, I thought of those two examples (one past, one current) soon after I started reading this discussion on Kumioko's invitation, but I also wondered to myself whether there are any other good examples.

Probably the ~50 lists and ~25 see alsos at US state should carry the Wikiproject United States banner. I visited about five of their discussion pages and found no banners. --P64 (talk) 21:40, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. I don't see the point of the Compromise and it doesn't to me a good idea, offhand: "Another avenue to consider is adding topics relating to US things: These topics could include things like American Sports, American Education, American people, etc." It's mind-boggling that all articles about baseball might be tagged WPUSA, topic American sports, as might all articles about professional baseball team or major league baseball players (more than 16000). There are WPUSA categories such as Sports in the United States. That is for such things as lists of athletic clubs by county. I don't think it approaches what "American Sports" means to me. --P64 (talk) 22:20, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Good catch on those lists and articles, Ill get those tonight. WikiProject States was dead and the name quite frankly was a bit redundant with United States scope wise. Counties has been incorporated now except for the lists you mentioned above and some misc ones, plus associated categories and templates but Im less worried about them. If you want to take a look at the WikiProject Embassy page it has quite a few that are inactive or have very low articles in them. There is some interest in collaborating with WikiProject DC next so I think that is a good one to do next. The topics thing was just a suggestion. Its not necessarily what well end up doing. --Kumioko (talk) 00:54, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Scale

Hello Kumioko. I've rated 5000 or so articles for WikiProject Connecticut, so I know a bit about template mayhem. Here are my reservations about this plan. I've read this entire thread, the first point is an expanion on some of the other posts.
1. I agree with KarlM regarding Hawaii, and Rmhermen about ratings... there are many articles which are:
a. of variable importance between a project and the United States. For example, the Charter Oak is a Top article for Connecticut, it's probably a Low for the US. How does that get settled? Judging by talk:Quebec French, the states will get overruled.
b. articles which are important to the state and have nothing to do with the US such as Fort Hoop. Or for that matter, any articles about a state before joining the Union (Colonial New England, Hawaii, Alaska, pre-Mexican War California, et al).
c. quite a few articles overlap states such as talk:Connecticut Western Reserve. Seeing "supported by" instead of state ratings actually makes templates less useful.
2. Then there is the problem of actually getting people to do this...
a. I have found many articles that were never rated (3000+). It's taken me a couple of years to do it. I have no desire to see all those edits reduced to "supported by", especially when they change to no longer be from a Connecticut POV.
b. I would stop rating articles totally for Connecticut if the US template only said ""supported by", or if all ratings had to match.
3. I find the WikiProject Canada example to be misguided in terms of scale. WikiProject Canada has about 66,000 articles, all of which (as far as I can tell) are "fed" by the various sub-projects such as Wikiproject Nova Scotia. Wikiproject United States has 28,000... but that doesn't include the wide majority of state articles. WikiProject Connecticut has 6,800 of which 12 overlap... while WikiProject Texas has 21,000 of which 743 overlap with Wikiproject United States! My point here is that the US, being a country with ~10x Canada's population, a longer history as a country and a (let's just say) "a more dynamic role in world affairs" simply has more articles. If you added all the states together and subtracted those that overlap with Wikiproject United States, I think you're going to find that the Wikiproject United States ends up with well over 200,000 articles. IMO not only would this be a massive undertaking, it would be pointless without every state being onboard. Best, Markvs88 (talk) 22:46, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

I understand your concerns and let me start by saying that if a project doesn't want this its no problem they don't have too. Right now I am concentrating my efforts on projects that are inactive or defunct (like US Counties which has been completely integrated) and projects that do want to (District of Columbia (Washington DC) is almost done and Superfunds will probably be next. Since you have several concerns let me attempt to answer each:

• 1a) The problem of independent importance between projects has already been built to account for this because I agree that an article could be important to a project but not to US. There is no need to overrule the individual project here. It does assume that the assessment (stub, Start, etc) is the same across projects.
• 1b) I don't really agree with the arguments on this one. In my opinion if it applies to to the US, the pre US territories, the colonial period, Union, Confederate or in some cases outside the US such as the Battle of Fallujah, it still applies to US. Just because the Declaration of Independence was written before the US was the US its still valid. If a project wished to do this proposal I would submit the same is true of them so Hawaii for example could tag articles as far back as the stone age as far as Im concerned. It all pertains to the "history" of the state.
• 1c) I'm not following what your trying to say here
• 2a)There are a lot of articles across the projects that need to be assessed, that need to be created, cleaned up, expanded etc. Once I can get them tagged I am going to start addressing more of those concerns. I am planning on updating the US portal, doing some collaboration, assessment and recruiting drives, etc.
• 2b) If you don't like "supported by" what would you have it say? I'm not opposed to changing this but I don't know what else we would say. As far as the assessments, for the most part they should but I could absolutely see that the importance would change as I mentioned before
• 3) I agree that the Canada example isn't exactly the same but the concept of the consolidated banner is similar. They "merged" the projects, I am only proposing a closer collaboration by sharing the banner and perhaps other things in the future. Your right WPUS currently has about 28, 000 (itll be over 30, 0000 by the end of this week) but by my calculations could be in the neighborhood of 350, 000 if all projects are included (not counting duplicates, that's distinct articles), maybe more depending on how you classify the scope. You are absolutely correct in that it will be a massive undertaking and the more members and active participants the better but IMO not every state or project needs to be on board. The precedent has been set for large projects though. WPBiograpy is over 800K and WPMILHIST is huge too. As I mentioned before I plan on doing some drives to build the project up starting with a membership drive in the first of the year. Once we get more that a half dozen members actively working on stuff then I will start the collaboration of the week and other initiatives. Going back to the projects issue. This is too big an undertaking for one person or even one group, in order for this to succeed I/we will absolutely have to work together. That includes the State and other projects working articles in their scope, WPUS will also work articles in its scope but I also foresee WPUS can acting as a pivot point between the various US related projects, coordinating drives that will cross US projects. Etc. A good example would be a collaboration on US presidents. This would cross most US related projects including states and even some projects external to the US such as MILHIST, Ships, Biography, etc so it wouldn't make as much sense for an individual state to run it.

I hope this clarifies you concerns but please let me know if you think of anything else. --Kumioko (talk) 01:38, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it clarifies quite a bit! Unfortunately, it's not for the better...

There is no link off the US project page to the DC wikiproject page. Why should one believe the states would do any better?

1a) Okay, that makes sense... except that with your answers for 1b) and 3), I come to the conclusion that that's just not going to happen.

1b) Then I welcome you to the Athenian Wikiproject! Since the foundations of the US go to Colonial England, and those go to the Roman Empire, which of course "adopted" many Grecian ways... but then, maybe we need to put every article under Wikiproject Ur? Or, when the US ends (and it will, someday), will the George Washington article be rerated for Wikiproject One World Government or Wikiproject Cybermen? I hope not, but I think you see what I'm getting at. There is no justification to say that Wooly Mammoth is a Wikiproject US article, any more than Fort Hoop is.

1c) Articles like Connecticut Western Reserve are of interest to Connecticut and Ohio but not really anyone else. There's no reason for them to be in the US Wikiproject. Likewise, there's no reason for USS New Jersey to have a Connecticut stamp on it, even though people from Connecticut servered on it. In both cases, the connection is tenuous/minimal.

2a. That's great, but since the US project's house isn't in order (over 3800 quality unassessed, 2800 unassessed importance articles) and... heck! Connecticut's house isn't in order (I'm sure that we'll break 10,000 someday), I think this idea is putting the cart before the horse, especially given the number of near-dead or dead state projects out there.

2b. Good on the importance. I think instead of "This article is supported by" that a better tag might be "This article lies within the" or "This article is part of the". Supported by, IMO, subordinates all other projects under Wikiproject US.

3. It's a short walk... I've had an article with 7 citations taken to AfD (and deleted!) because it was about a middle school and only high schools have "automatic notability". So I have no faith at all that once the state banners are under the US one that it wouldn't look just like Canada in a few weeks, maybe months. Given your views of 1b), I

I also feel that such a huge structure is totally unweildy, and would (as you point out) require a ton of people to even make possible.

At the end of the day, this idea doesn't actually accomplish anything except to subordinate lots of projects to one so I'm not interested. Thanks & best, Markvs88 (talk) 19:58, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments I'm getting some good info out of this. Several of which I will take for action (see my commments below)

1. 1a) All I can say is we have done ok so far I think with adding WikiProject's District of Columbia, Superfunds and U.S. counties to the template. Aloing with the notifications we get from the various bots of chaneges in Status, new articles, etc I think we'll be alright as long as we monitor the bot feeds as changes occur. Can I promise 100% that every article is going to be done correctly? Of course not anymore than they are getting done correctly now.

1b) A bit of an exhageration but I think its meant to be. In the end its something well haev to adjust as we go along. In the end though I htink that in general if it applies to a state it would be ok under the banner. If we ever become a Worldwide government ( I believe it will but not in my lifetime) then it won't matter becuase by that time well all be plugged into the net and our society will be a virtual Tron type environment.

1c) I would argue that if it applies to a state then it applies to the country as well. I do agree that it wouldn't necessarily apply between states such as your example but with the independent importance of the banner it wouldn't need too. Just US and the state or states that apply.

2a) Your right on this one, theres nothing more I can say. Now that DC, Superfunds and US counties are done I am going through and fixing some of the assessments and other problems to get the articles caught up so to speak. I should be able to fix most of the major stuff by the first of the year including finishing up the assessments. But this also makes my point as well. Its a lot easier for a group to do this than for 1 person.

2b) I will see what I can do about customizing the wording of the phrase. I don't liked the Supported by bit either but I'm not sure I like the phrasing you suggested any better. I think there is definately room for improvement though so thats an action item for me.

3) Well for know we have some things to work through so I don't anticipate all the projects together for quite some time if ever. As far as the ton of people, we have them, The majority of editors are in the US even though many don't claim a particular project. This is another takeaway for me. I am going to clean up the member list and contact the US editors and see if I can get some more interest in the project. This wil help the project define whos interested and who wants to be left alone. I really dont have an intention of taking over the other projects unless they want to merge but I do think that we can get more done if we work together as a collective group than trying to blaze our own trails. As things are the projects only have intermittent contact with each other and some not even that.

In addition to the comments above I am going to look at making some other chanegs to the US template as well. I need to add a couple more parameters based on some other comments that I have received. Please let me know if you have any more comments or suggestions. --Kumioko (talk) 22:04, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

• I would like to know some information and state some things. I started reading the list of comments and I think the idea is generally good, apparently being implemented, and I might have interest with reservations. I applaud your dedication on such a monumental idea. I would have read farther but was sidetracked with such comments as, "Or, when the US ends (and it will, someday)". This causes me to decide to use my time for something better than to read silly comments so I didn't read any farther. A Christian would read this and might think, "Of course the US will end, along with the rest of the world", or someone as my self would have to entertain the thought of wondering why someone would even post this. "If" the US does end I am very sure any worries about such things like Wikipedia would be among the last things on everyone's mind. At any rate this absurd speculation has absolutely nothing to do with the issue.

I read, "...this idea doesn't actually accomplish anything except to subordinate lots of projects to one so I'm not interested.", and this makes me wonder why a person would have to worry about subordinating a project that would actually be part of a "U.S. project". Unless I missed something, your intentions seemed to include all projects that are related under a common banner. This would lead me to surmise that the word subordinate should not be used. A state is a part of the United States and only subordinate in matters relegated to the United States. However, any state is not categorically subordinate to the United States.

I then read, I really dont have an intention of taking over the other projects unless they want to merge..., and I begin to have issues with the idea. I understand that you will write back that either a)- You didn't mean it that way, b)- It was a poor choice of words, c)- My interpretation of what you meant is not correct, or d)- Some other similar reply, BUT!, you used the words "taking over", and "unless they want to merge". From a salesman's point of view, or a political point of view, these do not seem like good things to state when trying to gain support for consolidating banners. This will, without a doubt, garner the wrong thoughts.

You mentioned working on US counties, which is actually County (United States), and here I can see where problems arise. I live in Louisiana and of course we do not have counties. I am working on parish articles but will not join a project that does not even include the proper name of the project I am involved in. This means that I am indirectly a cause that the "county" project is languishing. Yes this might be perceived as trivial but our heritage gave us parishes and some of us are actually proud of this. I just have no interest in joining a project with the name "County", unless I start editing "counties". I would have thought that a title

• If you are trying to gain support why not have a poll to see who replies with interest or not? A list or something, so a person does not have to read an encyclopedia of information, to see who is interested. Maybe a reply of 1)- Interested, 2)- Not interested, 3)- Interested with reservations. You, and any other interested parties, would be able to easily see who is interested or not and also who might be interested with directed questions answered with satisfaction. This could lead to a list of the projects, where there are reservations, and questions could be answered to address concerns. If you, or other interested parties, have a list of supporting projects you will have a better idea of where to start. The statement, "There is no need to overrule the individual project here", is a good thing as your intended project will cause Wikipedia to lose editors if this were the case. I am not a fan of an article having more than three or four project banners and certainly not 8 or 10. I am just trying to make sense of all this and how it would work. Maybe a project page or something with information or a list of "rules", if you will, that can be edited as new information is gathered. One concern is how implementation will be addressed, and how withdrawal from the project would be accomplished if this was desired? I am just tossing concerns and ideas around, to get a feel of things and to see a direction, to discern my level of interest. Otr500 (talk) 00:41, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

First let me say thanks for taking the time and putting so much though into, your comment. When I originally submitted the above proposal I never imagined that it would be such a contentious issue. I mean I knew that some projects wouldn't want to for one reason or another but I didn't think it would be this heated. You cover quite a few topics so let me try and answer them all and please let me know if I missed one and these are in no particular oder:

1. Since Submitting the proposal I have decided to concentrate efforts, for the time being at least, on the projects that are inactive, defunct or want to move forward rather than try and "sell" something that people don't really want. There are over 200 US related projects and of that only about 40 are more than minimally active. Since then I have managed to Merge US counties which was basically defunct and I have added Superfunds and District of Columbia to the WikiProject United States Banner. I hesitate in calling them a merger because I do not consider it to be a merger or an incoroporation. The projects still maintain all the functions of the project including their own membership lists and project pages. What this does do is allow, amongst other things is:
   1. 1 banner to be used where potentially 3 or 4 might have been.
   2. It increases visibility of all the projects
   3. It increases the visibility of the articles themselves for things like article alertbot so that more eyes are on the articles if they are submitted for deletion, need maintenance, etc. This can be seen on the WPUS project page if you want an example.
   4. It also gives a better picture of how many, what the assessment and importance is and an idea whats missing, for articles in the US scope.
2. to go back to the counties issue. You are correct some places don't have counties they have other things like the parishes and some states are commonwealths like Virginia. I rather try and think of the term county as a more general term that includes all these things (since the majority of the US uses the term county) rather than saying Counties, parishes, commonwealths, provinces and other like things (or something to that effect). Other than that was what the project was called previously it would be too hard to find a name that was general enough to capture all of the possibilities.
3. to further clarify the issue about the other projects using the banner. It would be extremely difficult or impossible for one project to manage 400, 000 articles with breaking them into manageable chunks (like the projects are now). The projects would still have scope over their articles but haveing them all included in the larger US scope allows us to see the bigger picture, gives us a place to cooperatively work together in a more neutral place and I believe encourages projects to work together and even build some comraderie as we all work together for a common goal, to better the content relating to US topics. There also does one more important thing and that we gain by combining all the articles in one place and that is that of the 200ish US related projects only about 50 are more than minimally active and of that only about 20 are truly active and have a consistent stream from day to day. These include but not limited too NRHP, US roads, US Congress, US Public Policy, Wisconsin and a few others.
4. Implementation is easy we just modify the template to include that project and then we convert the articles that were in that projects scope into the US/Project template so that they fall under both US and that project and voila thats it. If you want to see an example of this take a look at the talk:Barack Obama article. This shows 2 things. If you click on the US banner you will DC embedded into it and you will see a good example of why having 20 banners on 1 article for what amounts to the same project is just plain silly.
5. Regarding the comment about a project breaking away, as far as Im concerned they are in their right to do that but it would mean removing them form the template, and separating the articles so that they had the US template as well as whatever other project template. Its a bit of work but not a ig deal in the grand scheme of things.

I hope this answers all your questions but please let me know if it doesn't or you think of something else. --Kumioko (talk) 03:18, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggested policy change to the tagging of non article items

I have submitted a proposal at the Village pump regarding tagging non article items in Wikipedia. Please take a moment and let me know what you think. --Kumioko (talk) 01:46, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Categories for discussion nomination of Category:American people of German-Jewish descent

Category:American people of German-Jewish descent, which is under the purview of this WikiProject, has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. IZAK (talk) 13:03, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Categories for discussion nomination of Category:German Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape Nazism

Category:German Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape Nazism, which is under the purview of this WikiProject, has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. IZAK (talk) 13:03, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject NASA

Note, there is a WikiProject NASA under development. It is currently being discussed under the WP:Space reorganization plan at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Space/2010_Reorganisation. As it is a US government agency, you might want to also discuss this. 65.94.45.167 (talk) 07:13, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks.--Kumioko (talk) 14:41, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. cities

Please consider participating in the Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. cities discussion. Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 05:35, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject Confederate States of America

There is a proposal for a WP:CSA ... that might also be considered for conversion to a task force of WP:USA. 65.93.12.43 (talk) 07:48, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Birmingham Airport

The usage of Birmingham Airport is up for discussion, see Talk:Birmingham Airport, West Midlands . 65.94.44.124 (talk) 05:57, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

A source about life expectancies in the USA

I found:

• Brown, David. "Wide Gaps Found In Mortality Rates Among U.S. Groups." Washington Post. Tuesday September 12, 2006.

WhisperToMe (talk) 05:21, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

United States cleanup listing

Since WolterBot is no longer active, we now have a WikiProject cleanup listing, which shows that there are 30.7% of United States-related articles are needing cleanup. Zoinks! JJ98 (Talk) 01:39, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I had been chiseling at that a little bit but its definately something we need to start working on. I am currently working on assessing and importance as well as tagging but in the next couple weeks I will start working these. Unfortunately some are easier to fix than others. Weve also got a hefty list of Unreferenced BLP's too. --Kumioko (talk) 01:43, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Census 2010: Update of articles with WP:Bots

Hi, in addition to the points covered above: I think I've seen a discussion on how to use bots to update the articles on populated places, once the 2010 census data will be published in February 2011. Do you know where it is discussed and how far the planning has proceeded yet? Would an international task force be useful, that includes bot owners from other Wikipedias as well, as they have the same needs? TIA --h-stt !? 12:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I think we need to see what the data looks like in the new format before we aan really plan for how to change it. --Kumioko (talk) 14:36, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

SORT

SORT has been requested to be renamed Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, see Talk:SORT

65.95.13.158 (talk) 10:32, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Mr. Kennedy

The usage of Mr. Kennedy is under discussion, see Talk:Mr. Kennedy. 65.95.13.158 (talk) 06:20, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

What's the point?

The vast majority of articles on English Wikipedia are about the United States. Do you really plan on tagging millions of articles? Why not just create a "Wikiproject Earth" and tag every article? Gigs (talk) 17:48, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

For what its worth, by my calculations there are only about 400, 000 US related articles templates, files, Cats, etc. --Kumioko (talk)

Relevant AFD: Santorum

Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Santorum (sexual neologism). -- Cirt (talk) 13:16, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

A discussion to eliminate the use of Find a grave and IMDB

Its been almost 3 months so its time for another weeks long discussion on the status of Find a grave. Here is a link to the discussion that is currently taking place, Again. on the external links noticeboard. Find a grave and IMDB. --Kumioko (talk) 17:44, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Voting has begun

A vote is currently being held at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard as to wether we should ban the use of the Find a grave site and the thousands of links we have to it on articles. Please take a moment and place your vote. --Kumioko (talk) 16:14, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Population rankings on individual state infoboxes

There seems to be a bit of trouble with updating the rankings of states by population with the new census data. I just noticed it in the Wisconsin and New York articles. They list both the old population ranks from 2000 and 2010, such as this:

Population Ranked 3rd in the US

- Total 	19,378,102 (2010 Census)[2]

- Density 408.7/sq mi (157.81/km2) Ranked 7th in the US FluffyWhiteCat (talk) 09:20, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

North American Chinatowns

An issue has come up that relates to North American Chinatowns and the use of Pinyin in relation to them, see Talk:Chinatown, Houston. As most North American Chinatowns were established by Toisanese, or later Cantonese diaspora groups, and Pinyin is a Mandarin transcription, there are issues of language to deal with. 184.144.170.217 (talk) 06:16, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (use of Chinese language) for a discussion on the use of pinyin in articles where local Chinese usage does not involve Mandarin (pinyin is a Mandarin romanization scheme, for expressing Mandarin sounds in latin letters) 184.144.166.27 (talk) 04:45, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I am not an expert on the subject but from what I understand, although they may call it Chinatown, the residents are not necessarily Chinese and in some cases there is a majority of one group (well say Mandarin for the sake of the discussion). I would say that in cases where there is a majority, the majority should be used but we should still explain the minority groups as well. --Kumioko (talk) 04:52, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject United States to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 01:25, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Wow, thats awesome thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 01:29, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Online ambassadors

Greetings! The "online ambassador" program, run by individual universities in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, needs more users. The program essentially has professors assigning college students to edit Wikipedia articles on American Public Policy (WP:USPP). We, the online ambassadors, assist these students in learning how to edit, how to format their articles, and how to nominate them at DYK. It doesn't take an exorbitant amount of your time. Please consider applying. It's a great program, and you will have fun doing it. Regards, Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:27, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Update autoarchive times

I updated the archive from 60 days to 15. Know that the project is getting more active I think we should shorten the duration and 15 days seems reasonable at this time. --Kumioko (talk) 23:08, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Updated barnstar

Are we going to continue to use the current barnstar of National Merit on the WikiProject page, or do we want to upgrade to the new version? —Ed!^(talk) 07:07, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

If there is a newer version we should upgrade to that IMO. I for one didn't realize there was a new one. --Kumioko (talk) 12:31, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Some WikIProject tasks that could use more help

A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects.

I know that everyone is very busy but there are a couple of ongoing tasks that could use some more help if anyone would like to pitch in. I have been mostly doing these myself up till now but since we have an updated member list now with a pretty large pool of editors I thuoght I would solicite some help if anyone has some extra time. Here are a few of the ongoing tasks I have been working on that could use some help and a few that I haven't been able to get to yet if anyone would like to pitch in:

1. There are currently about a thousand articles in the project that need assessment and/or importance. I have been going through and assessing and fixing the importance and have gotten it down from several thousand to just under a thousand but I could use some help here
2. Now that Article alerts bot is running we get notifed if an article or image when it gets submitted for a status change (promotion, deletion or comment). This can be seen on the main project page. I try and glance at that when ever I can but if anyone would like to also glance at it from time to time that would be great.
3. The embassy page cnotains a listing of most or all of the US related projects (some are a bit out of scope but relate to a US related thing). I have been working on trimming the inactive projects from the list so we can get down to a solid core group of US related projects (US, NRHP, MILHIST US/ACW/ARW, US roads, etc). If anyone has any ideas for tackling this monster I could use some help there too. IMO we simply don't need 200+ US related projects (over 100 and completely inactive or defunct).
4. We continue to tag US related topics that do not yet have a US related banner. If anyonen wants to help out here that would be great.
5. Portal:United States needs updating and could use smoe love if anyone wants to volunteer to work on that
6. We have quite a few Unrefernced BLP's that could use fixing (See the table All Unsourced BLP's relating to the United States)

OK, I'm working on these unreferenced US BLPs.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:03, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 13:38, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

1. We also have a WikiProject Watchlist, a page that lists the projects articles with cleanup tags (about 30% of the projects articles have one) and a variety of other things on the todo page here.
2. The Wikipedia:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board/to do page could use updating but I can't seem to find the time if anyone wants to help out.

There are other things as well and if anyone has ideas please let me know. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. --Kumioko (talk) 16:56, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

I've got an idea...much like MILHIS had a "tag and access" drive a few years back...in order to get the ball rolling, we should do something along those lines and award barnstars or other awards to members who participate in (and the winners of) this drive. Is this a good idea or too much work?--White Shadows ^{We live in a beautiful world} 05:32, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Don't forget about cleanup listings...Smallman12q (talk) 13:05, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Your both absolutely right. --Kumioko (talk) 13:30, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Good ideas! DocOfSoc (talk) 10:28, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

States Population

I must question the 2010 census; there are approximately 150 people living in twenty square miles using a Post Office box that did not receive a census questionnaire for 2010. As this is an example in rural Texas I would suggest that the population count is off by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. This should not surprise me. I worked as a sub-contractor for the Federal Government for years and have as of this writing not witnessed anything done that was not politically motivated. Since the majority of the Federal Government is on the East Coast it is extremely East Coast (suburb)biased, and completely lacks any understanding of rural America. This is my experience for the second straight census, and my opinon of the people working in the Federal Government after working around them for fifteen years. Dtexasracer (talk) 02:51, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

I would guess that there are at least a couple million people (there are at least 1 million homeless) ,living in the US that did not get counted for a variety of reasons. I wouldn't worry too much about it we'll just have to use the numbers that we have. They may not be perfect but they are the official census numbers so even if they are plus or minus 10% they'll have to do. --Kumioko (talk) 03:24, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, that's pretty much it ... even if it's off by a bunch, it's considered to be the most reliable source, so we use it. The Census Bureau hires workers to try to deal with these issues as best they can, but still a lot of groups end up undercounted. GIS technology helps in the modern age, as counts can be checked against population estimates generated by remote sensing, but they're still just estimates. Antandrus (talk) 03:28, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Because counting homeless is a major issue with Congress and the administration is Democrat, I would rather suspect that homeless people are more overcounted than undercounted. BTW, there are a number of ways of counting them. They are counted separately in my area by volunteers who have ways of checking that figure out with social services. Homeless people get a lot of social services, social security, disability checks, etc. They are not as "overlooked" as people are sometimes led to believe. Student7 (talk) 15:26, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Interesting thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 16:02, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Articles in the Scope of US and MILHIST

I have a question for the group regarding the tagging of articles in the Scope of WikiProject United States and WPMILHIST task forces for the American Civil War, US and American Revolutionary War. Although there are some WPUS articles that have both banners I am currently not tagging articles with WPUS if they have the US related Military History taskforce flags. This poses one problem however in that the MILHIST project does not use an importance or priority field. I would like to solicite opinions on wether we should also tag articles in the scope of MILHIST US/ACW and ARW so that we have them in our scope as well as being able to assign them an importance. --Kumioko (talk) 15:05, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

What do you recommend?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 18:37, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Well truthfully I am on the fence. I personally view them as separate projects with separate goals and although those sometimes align such as the case of some of the Milhist task forces they are strictly military history related. Whereas we have a larger more general goal of all US related articles. I posed it here because a couple editors in the past felt it was unnecessary to post 2 different US related banners (eventhough the projects are not technically associated) so I thought I would post it here and attempt to see what the general feelings where from the project members. Here are some pluses and minuses I can think of both ways. I am sure there are others as well:

Some negatives

1. As far as I can tell there are about 42,000 articles in the MILHIST US related scope that aren't in the US scope (there are about 4200 in both) so that would be a lot of tagging.
2. it could irritate some of the MILHIST loyalists (I do not mean that in a negative way at all by the way) and give the perception we are trying to poach articles from other projects
3. It causes extra edits to be made to the article
4. It adds more banners to the talk pages

Some positives

1. Since they don't give the articles an importance its more difficult for us to focus our efferts on a certain importance level such as High and Top for content drives and other things.
2. Its more difficult for us to do a drive or contest with articles scattered across 200+ projects. MILHIST has a huge chunk
3. It could generate more collaboration between their very active project and this one thats just coming back to life. We could feed off some of their energy so to speak while building up articles that relate to both projects. So potentially when they are running a drive we could sort of piggy back and focus on the US related articles (this is also true of other projects as well) providing benefit to both projects. It would take some coordination but its certainly doable. They could also feed off of us when we do article drives (which should start soon I hope).
4. It would allow better visibility of things like Articlealerts, Unreferenced BLP's and articles requiring cleanup without having to run around to different projects

--Kumioko (talk) 19:43, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh. I'm still not clear what the question is. Sorry, I'm still somewhat new to Wikipedia. I don't know enough about MILHIST, tagging, Wikiprojects, and such. My sense is this is an area where you should make a decision, since you seem to know the variables better than anybody else. If you have a subject which is (1) highly trafficked (ie lots of readers per day) (2) US-oriented (3) important (4) in need of attention, then, please let me know.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 00:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

 

They should be tagged with WPUS. Many other countries tag Milhist articles with their own country banners, especially if no specific task force for that country exists. Further {{WPJAPAN}} cotags their Milhist articles, and has a switch to activate a corresponding Milhist flag on their own template. As the importance factor is to show the importance of a subject to the understanding of the topic of a wikiproject, not tagging ARW articles seems to indicate that ARW is not important to the understanding of the US. The same with ACW articles. As the Battle of Saratoga, Battle of Gettysburgh are extremely important to the existence of the US, they should be tagged. Though all "historic" battles would be better under the subproject Wikipedia:WikiProject United States History. Stryker on the other hand is not historic, but modern, and considering the amount of screaming about it in Congress when they were introduced, seems to be politically important to the development of the army, so should be rated with WPUS, under transformational revision of the Pentagon and associated political battles over what the army should look like, politically, as well as from a military standpoint. The closure of bases also had/has a political impact, as does subcontractor allocations for big ticket programs, like JSF. 65.93.13.210 (talk) 09:05, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Collaboration time.....

I'd suggest one way of pulling folks together is reactivating the collaboration at Wikipedia:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board/USCOTW - this would be good to get folks to work together on those big articles which it is hard to bring up to GA or FA alone....12:53, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Thats a great idea too. Do you think a week is enough time or should we say a month? Especially if yuo talking articles above GA it usually takes more than a week to work it through the process. We could do both using the weekly one for specific articles and the monthly for a topic (like Presidents of the US for example). Does anyone have some suggestions of topics or articles to start with? I would like to cater to as wide of an audience as possible since we have a lot of different folks with defferent interests. Here ere are a couple that I can think of that might work well.

1. Presidential related (could include the Biographies, policies, tenures, buildings, things named after them, etc) Is a high importance topic in general and has a wide array of things within it that would allow the varying interests to participate. Would also be good for a Collab of the Week and a topic of the month.
2. 2010 Census - Again this would affect a lot of things. Many articles will need to be updated with the new information anyway.
3. Medal of Honor recipients - still a lot that need to be created, a lot need building up, also has a lot of related things like buildings, partks, monuments and ships that tie in.

All three of the above I believe would provide a tie in to a lot of the projects related to US. If you have any ideas though please throw them out and well see what folks want to work on. --Kumioko (talk) 14:44, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Early on, collaborations ran for a week or fortnight, but these were early days when many articles were rudimentary and there was not the emphasis on inline citation or formatting. These days it is much more about fine-tuning, weight and inline referencing with reliable sources as much as comprehensiveness, and thus articles need more time, especially if you want to run at WP:GAN or eventually WP:FAC.

The way I would run it is this - set it up as a monthly collaboration. Anyone can nominate any article associated with the United States (remember articles need other folks to support them). Articles stay in the nomination pool for three months (i.e. three "bites of the cherry") before being automatically archived. At the end of each voting period, the article with the highest votes is chosen as the collaboration. In an ideal world, one would look for broad articles - for instance United States (currently an A-class article and surely within striking distance of FA status...?), maybe a large state such as California, Florida or whatever, key biographies, largest cities, geographical features, Democratic Party, Republican Party etc. However, I find that in times of low activity, or if you're trying to get something off the ground, then a less ambitious target might be good - Grand Canyon might be a bit easier, or some other smaller entity - I note someone nominated Chesapeake Bay recently. also think food, legal etc. So...one can start it now, say, a collaboration will be chosen on the 1st of February and then 1st of each following month....and just try to get articles to GA and then FAC. I can help set it up if you want to coordinate it. Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:38, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea. I know we have the Collaboration Noticeboard that seems the appropriate place for this to be staged IMO. I would greatly appreciate any help you can lend to set this up, especially since I have never done that before. --Kumioko (talk) 03:48, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I'll set the page up (I've done a few of these) and then hand the reins over to you and help out along the way. Give me a few hours. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:12, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Update

Okay, have spruced up the collaboration page now and moved it to Wikipedia:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board/USCOTM. There is already a nomination for Chesapeake Bay there which is not a bad and quite modest article to start off with. I think it can sit there for three rounds and see what happens. Template:Collab-us is where the current successful collaboration is listed, and slots into Template:USCOTM as well as other collaboration noticeboards/templates. There are instructions there anyway. I'll have a think about and nominate a couple of choices that'd be good just to get the ball rolling, which anyone else is open to as well. Casliber (talk · contribs) 07:59, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Wow thats awesome thanks. Now lets see what happens. Hopefully we cna get some activity and interest. --Kumioko (talk) 13:56, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Just a couple comments.

1. Regarding the Wall Street nomination. There are a couple different wallstreets, this article and the Financial market. Their both pretty short and needing attention so it might be worth while to merge them or at least we can use the Financial market article and references to feed the other.

   Dang, it was just something that came off the top of my head (groan). You sometimes discover that these articles have developed in a haphazard way and need readjusting...I'll take a look Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

2. I think we might want to change the color for the instructions. The bright colors might be hard to read for some with lesser eyesight or who are color blind.

   Yes, I do agree they are somewhat....intense...and was going to look at that Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

3. Do we want to notify the other US related Wikiprojects that appear on those articles to let them know that an artice in their scope is being considered for USCOTM? It seems like a decent way to start getting some of the other projects to work together. I'm not talking all the users, just the project talk pages. I could do this very easily with AWB. This could potentially be a bot automated task in the future if we start getting a good amount of interest.

   Sure, why not? Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

4. I added the WPUS banner to the Wallstreet article due to its obvious national importance but in the case of the other three I did not because 2 already had it and the Lake Erie article had the state tag. I do think though that whatever article is selected as the collaboration of the week that the WPUS banner be added to it.

   Lake Erie doesn't? Hmmm, seems arbitrary. I'd add it as it is a pretty big geographical feature.. Casliber (talk · contribs)

5. Do you think March first is too long of a time. Thats about 6 weeks away. I think that 4 weeks would be sufficient for choosing the next months collaboration (but maybe thats the idea after this first one). In this case I would like to suggest that we give it a shortened period of 2 weeks so we can start on Feb 1st and get it rolling. I thnk either way is fine though I would just prefer sooner while we have people attention.

   I goofed. I meant April 1st as a deadline for the noms (remember, three bites of the nomination cherry. The next selection is on February 1st Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

   I think I am confused on this one. Do you mean that on April 1st we would start the collaboration for that article or on April 1st we would conclude and start the next one? --Kumioko (talk) 19:30, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

   Okay, this is how it goes - on February 1st, the article with the most votes "wins". Presuming there are no more votes (for example), Wall Street would become the Collaboration for the month of February. The other articles would remain in the nomination/voting pool with however many votes they have accrued. Then, on March 1st, we get the highest vote-getter and that becomes the new Collaboration. Now on April 1st, a 3rd one is chosen. At that point, those articles that have already been in the "pool" for three rounds get archived - i.e they get removed and placed in the Wikipedia:U.S._Wikipedians'_notice_board/USCOTW_nominations#Removed_nominations page. Articles nominated after the February collaboration is selected get until May 1st, those selected after the March collaboration get until June 1st etc. Doing it this way means that articles with a reasonable amount of votes might get selected second or third time 'round without everyone having to archive, renominate and vote again - I figured this was a pretty democratic way that if folks really wanted one and it narrowly missed out one month, then there's a good chance it will be selected the following month. I hope I have explained this okay...? Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:32, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

6. I added the US Collaboration nomination template to the other three articles that didn't have it yet.

   ok Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

7. Once the article is selected do we have a template that can be added to the article that says this article was selected as the US Collaboration of the Month or something? --Kumioko (talk) 15:14, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

   yes...I'll check it out somewhere see Wikipedia:U.S._Wikipedians'_notice_board/USCOTM#Templates. Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

I went ahead and tagged Lake Erie and the rest of the lakes as well. --Kumioko (talk) 19:28, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

• Also for more ideas on what folks have nominated before, see Wikipedia:U.S._Wikipedians'_notice_board/USCOTW_nominations#Removed_nominations

Thanks for all the help and that explanation makes sense now that you broke it down Mr. Potato Head style for me. Also I noticed you tossed out the todo list earlier (rightly so it was a mess). I redid the template and created a separate subpage for assessment requests (which is also linked on the todo list). This may also help with these collaborations a bit. --Kumioko (talk) 02:39, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

All good. I did muse on nominating some articles such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington, but I think both of those are pretty comprehensive, and hte work would soone be specialised into preparing for GA or FA candidacy, which might not be that useful of new editors, I would think of nominating a key historical figure whose biography was in a bit of a poorer state. Hmm...let's see.....Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:30, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

PS: Actually President of the United States is pretty patchy all over. Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:33, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

US Collaboration reactivated & Portal:United States starting next

Casliber recently posted a suggestion on the talk page for WikiProject United States about getting the US Wikipedians Collaboration page going again in an effort to build up articles for GA through FA class. See Wikipedia:U.S. Wikipedians' notice board/USCOTM. After several days of work from him the page is up and ready for action. A few candidates have already been added for you to vote on or you can submit one using the directions provided. If you are looking for inspiration here is a link to the most commonly viewed articles currently under the scope of Wikiproject United States. There are tons of good articles in the various US related projects as well so feel free to submit any article relating to US topics (not just those under the scope of WPUS). This noticeboard is intended for ‘’’All’’’ editors working on US subjects, not just those under WPUS.

The next item I intend to start updating is Portal:United States if anyone is interested in helping. Again this is not specific to WPUS and any help would be greatly appreciated to maximize visibility of US topics. The foundation has already been established its just a matter of updating the content with some new images, biographies and articles. Please let leave a comment on the Portals talk page or let me know if you have any questions or ideas. --Kumioko (talk) 20:15, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Historiography of the United States

Hey, so I noticed that there are various articles on historians and historical methods related to the United States, but not an overarching article concerning the historiography of the United States. In that spirit, I have the beginnings of an article at User:Purplebackpack89/Historiography of the United States. I'd like to get more imput before I mainspace it. Edits are welcome Purplebackpack89 21:23, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Good article. I added stuff but don't feel like you have to use it. If you need more stuff, let me know.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:33, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

New article: Beyond the First Amendment

New article, created, at Beyond the First Amendment. Additional assistance in research would be appreciated, feel free to help out at the article's talk page. Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 21:59, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Good article.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 23:02, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree. --Kumioko (talk) 23:15, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you!!! -- Cirt (talk) 01:38, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Noticed On my W2 2010

The CC code in box 12. Does the employer have the rite to fire you after the 52 weeks are over? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.14.155 (talk) 18:24, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

This is not a forum for advice on U.S. income taxes or employment law or any other topic not related to Wikipedia editing. Please take your question elsewhere. --Orlady (talk) 18:27, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

There are more civil ways of responding. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 18:53, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Try asking at the Reference Desk - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 18:53, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

This talk page is approaching 250K

This talk page is now appoaching 250K (the WP max is 500K) which is going to make this page hard or impossible to view for many viewers. I recommend we do a new section that sums up the Scope issue thus far and a separate section that sums up the Importance reclassification debate and archive the old topics as well as some of the other unrelated banter. I would do it myslelf but it would surely be taken the wrong way by some. Any takers? --Kumioko (talk) 15:45, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

That is why I had recommended moving the importance debates to assessment, which I will do in a few minutes. We could also manually archive anything that's more than two weeks old to cut down on text Purplebackpack89 15:48, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Is it possible to have this page be automatically archived?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 15:50, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

It's auto archived at two months now...perhaps we could change that to two weeks for the forseeable future Purplebackpack89 15:53, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I archived some and yes this page is automatically archived. I recently reset it to 30 days but I can reset it to a week if you want. --Kumioko (talk) 15:55, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I can set it at a week and yes I would be glad to set the assessment page as well. It won't archive anything if it is still active. Only if the conversation is inactive so since most of this is all active even if I set it to 1 hour it stil wouldn't move it. --Kumioko (talk) 16:08, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Scope

As far as "scope", the WikiProject guidelines referenced above provides good guidance -- guidance that ALL WIKIPROJECTS must comply with. It says:

WikiProject banners should not be used to duplicate the category system or portals. If an article is only tangentially related to the scope of another WikiProject, then please do not place that project's banner on the article. For example, washing toys for babies reduces transmission of some diseases, but the banners for WP:WikiProject Health, WP:WikiProject Biology, WP:WikiProject Virus and/or WP:WikiProject Medicine do not need to be spammed to Talk:Toy.

No further clarification is necessary on our projects page. We don't tag articles with only a tangential relationship to the United States. I don't think anyone could logically argue that, for example, California is only "tangentially related" to the United States.

What happens if ANY PROJECT erroneously places a tag on an article that is not "tangentially related" to the United States? This is what the guidelines say:

However, on occasion, someone clearly places the wrong banner on an article. When this happens, it is polite to ask either that individual or that project why the banner was placed. Doing so reduces the likelihood of inter-project animosity, and also could potentially help the article in some way. For example, a project's scope may have expanded to include the article; they might now be willing to work on the article. Also, particularly when a bot is being used to tag articles, the article may have been tagged because it is miscategorized. In instances like these, like in all others, civility, respect for others, and clear, unambiguous communications are to be greatly valued.

Seems simple enough. No indication that a BETTER SOLUTION would be to change the mission statement of the offending project over the objection of the ACTUAL MEMBERS of that project. Bad feelings are being created to solve what is, to this point, a non-existent problem that simply ASSUMES BAD FAITH on behalf of this project. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 23:49, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that's what I've been saying for some time now. Best, Markvs88 (talk) 01:11, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The purpose of the RFC, two sections above this, was to give widespread notice to all concerned of a centralized discussion of the scope of WikiProject United States and its relationship to other WikiProjects. Therefore, I would respectfully ask you to continue this discussion as a subsection of the RFC above rather than continuing outside that framework. I have left a specific proposal above in response to your concerns. Many thanks, Racepacket (talk) 13:44, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

There is no point in splitting this off into a different location. If the RFC contributors want to ake comments they can come here and do it and see the thousands of words and constant discussions already occuring. Since none have I assume thhat in itself is a sort of comment. --Kumioko (talk) 14:38, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The idea behind a centralized discussion is that it takes place in one location. We have posted RFC notices telling people the one place is the "Mission statement for WikiProject United States" section of this talk page. Starting a new threat in a "Scope" section defeats the purpose of the RFC notice, is disruptive and is exactly the type of forum shopping that you falsely accused me of yesterday. Please continue this discussion above, where I have already left my reply, so that people who come here from the RFC notices will find and follow the conversation in one place. Thanks, Racepacket (talk) 14:57, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify I didn't falsely accuse you of anything. You were Forum Shopping, votestacking and campaigning as well as falsely misrepresenting what was said to fit what you wanted people to think or hear. It wasn't an accusation you were doing it and I told you it was innappropriate and you needed to stop. --Kumioko (talk) 15:05, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Please reply above in the central RFC discussion, not here. Thanks, Racepacket (talk) 15:25, 26 January 2011 (UTC)