Talk:List of the oldest restaurants in the United States

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A good start, but[edit]

1. There is no introductory text. You simply slam a list onto the screen w.out defining your terms. What's the difference between an inn, restaurant, tavern, yadda yadda? They all serve food. I came here to identify the oldest restaurant in the U.S. I failed.

2. If your facts are right, fix your wording. If your wording is right, fix your facts. Case in point:

1686 - Wayside Inn - oldest restaurant in America (continuous)

1826 - Union Oyster House - oldest continuously operated restaurant in America

a) Fix the contradiction. b) Don't state a data point as an adjective in one cell and an adverb in another. Use the same part of speech. c) Don't state a data point in parens in one cell and not in parens in another.

3. The table is insufficiently dimensionalized. Create at least 3 new columns: Type, Where, Continuous. And possibly change Claim to fame to Notes. If something is the first inn in continuous operation in the U.S., put Inn in the Type, U.S. in the Where, and Yes in the Continuous column. As it is, most cells in your Claim to fame column begin with the word Oldest. Besides being ungodly tedious on the eyes, the repetition tells you the table is designed wrong.

4. The table fails to accommodate entities which are more than one type, in your terminology. The Wayside Inn, for one, is an inn, because it has rooms; a restaurant, famous nationwide; and it has a well-known tavern, all dating at least to, oh, the Nixon administration. So how are you going to deal with that? Sure, in the Type column you can say Inn, Restaurant, Tavern. But that doesn't satisfy me. I'm looking for a higher-order term that represents any of those three.

5. America is specious. It means the Western Hemisphere. If you mean the U.S., state U.S. If you mean that an entity is, in addition to being the oldest in the U.S., the oldest in the hemisphere, state it in the Notes column.

6. Oldest continuously operated (except for Prohibition) is an oxydoofus. Something is either continuously operated or not. The value is Not continuous. State any remarks about an interruption in the Notes.

Jimlue (talk) 01:28, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]