Talk:City-Data

Untitled
The New York Times references cited make no reference to city-data, or any website. Pcdrlaura (talk) 17:16, 13 November 2009 (UTC)pcdrlaura

Wrong. See "Cheshire facts and figures" and "Bronx Park South" links in these NY Times articles. You also wholesale deleted many other relevant media mentions. Certz (talk) 00:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Media "mentions" aren't all that relevant to the entry. And the Times links are links in a sidebar, CityData is nowhere mentioned in the article. Hairhorn (talk) 00:54, 15 November 2009 (UTC)


 * These are not just media mentions (though some are), some of them talk about the website, quote from it, or refer people to it (ex. CNN, LA Times, Investor's Business Daily). In the NY Times articles, one link is in the sidebar, the other is in the article text itself. This was not a full section going into detail about all these mentions, it was just a sentence, and I believe it should remain there. Certz (talk) 14:30, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Possible vandalism? "The forums are well known for their heavy-handed[38] and racist[39] moderators." Now, I dislike mods as much as the next guy, but is that really appropriate for an encyclopaedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.103.247.232 (talk) 13:38, 11 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Removed. Clear vandalism, likely by one of the banned forum users. Not supported by anything by links to other forum and some blog. by Certz (talk) 19:16, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Off topic
== Site offline ==

I haven't been able to connect since early yesterday morning. iidrn.com confirms that the site is offline. Does anyone know what's going on?173.58.96.84 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:04, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Article talk pages are for discussing improving the article, not for general discussion of the topic. - Sum mer PhD  (talk) 00:10, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Alexa ranks
Please revert your reversion of my edit. I've already explained why Alexa ranks aren't advertising on FreeRangeFrog's talk page. -- Amaryllis Gardener  talk 19:41, 28 December 2014 (UTC)


 * @AmaryllisGardener please see my message about why the Alexia Rankings should not be included on the Wiki page. You also did not represent the Rankings correctly. You only showed the Global Ranking without any explanation as to which ranking you were using. These rankings change daily which makes them disingenuous to use on the page. These rankings are for advertisement purposes and Wiki is not the place for advertising ones business. DeDe4Truth (talk) 19:44, 28 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Regardless of your personal reservations regarding the inclusion of Alexa rankings, there is no policy against using it in articles and it's part of the Infobox template for websites. Even the article for Wikipedia itself includes it, which would seem rather redundant if it's used here for advertising purposes. &#9737; nbmatt 05:04, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Request for edit
I believe that this article has been edited by disgruntled users of our website. Untrue and non-neutral information has been posted about City-Data.com. The edit made to this page on 18 July 2015 ignores WP:NPOV and WP:VER, as well as Wikipedia’s guidelines on substantive content changes to a page. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations, I am requesting edits to bring this article up to Wikipedia standards. I propose the following edits:

1. Removal of the "Privacy and Opt-Out" section. It refers to the section of City-Data.com where publicly available assessment data is reposted, not to any private user information. The names of property owners are public information and they are all publicly accessible through assessors’ websites or through FOIA requests. Despite this, as a courtesy service, City-Data provides a free tool to dissociate names from an address. There is a direct link to this tool on all pages where assessment information is listed. Additionally, the contact number listed in this section is incorrect. The sources in this section violate WP:VER.

2. Removal of the "Advameg, Inc." section. It is non-neutral and incorrect. Advameg's address is available through regular means and is not very relevant for an Internet publishing company.

3. Removal of "Consumer Complaints" section. This section is clearly an attack, and violates both WP:NPOV and WP:VER. City-Data.com is a completely free-to-use informational website. As such, it does not have paid customers, only visitors, and has no interest in responding to complaints at a non-government company such as Better Business Bureau. BBB rankings are irrelevant to informational websites. We have 1,900,000 registered users on our forum. Forum discussions are well-known for becoming heated, and our moderators and admins can and do ban users for violating the forum rules (such as spam or personal attacks). Even if only one percent of users are ever banned, that's a large number of unhappy posters. Some of them will then do things like vandalize our Wikipedia page (as can be seen in the edit history).

4. Removal of the "Personnel" section. It is incomplete and not relevant. It lists a few people working at Advameg. Advameg owns multiple websites, and City-Data.com is just one of them.

5. Addition of a section about the City-Data forum. With 38 million posts, our forum is one of the largest on the Internet, especially on the topic of relocation. As another notable fact, we have awarded $99,000 to most informative forum posters in our contests.

6. Improvements to the sidebar. This includes addition of our Parent Company (Advameg, Inc.), Registration (Optional), and web traffic information: our Alexa rating is currently 1460 and we are ranked as the 79th largest website in the U.S. by Quantcast. This information is also included on the Wikipedia pages of other websites.

7. Description of the content of various sections of our website. This could include our blog, where our PhD data scientists and others analyze and visualize data, or our exclusive tools, including city comparison, advanced city search, interactive data map, gasoline usage for trips, the depth of information present on our various types of data pages.

8. Removal or updates to the "See Also" section, which only links to Wikipedia's listing of Internet Forums.Lech advameg (talk) 00:00, 8 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello Lech, thanks for helping improve wikipedia. I've taken a first pass at cleanup, and removed the most egregious issues.  The following things will help immensely:  removed some incorrect advice, see edit-history if needed, my thanks to McMatter for the correction
 * #2. wikipedia articles are supposed to be written based on WP:SOURCES, which means, magazines/books/newspapers/etc.  Right now, the City-Data article has ... well, basically zero of those.  That means that, in order to proceed, we need to dig up some sources first.  Example:  "As another notable fact, we have awarded $99,000 to most informative forum posters in our contests."  I believe you.  But that's not a very neutral sentence, so we have to rewrite it like this:  "City-Data holds contests for forum-participants, and has awarded almost $100k in prizes."  That's more of a formal, NPOV tone.  But we cannot use it, because it makes a specific claim:  that CityData gave out $100k in cold hard cash.  To show that is REALLY true, we need more, we need a reference to back it up.  Now, you've told me here, but that is not the same thing.  It might say that on the City-Data website, but again, because the claim is not a boring-to-the-core fact ("City-Data is based in Illinois") we need an *independent* source that confirms you really ran contests with the $100k cumulative prizes.  So, the question is:  do you have a newspaper article, e.g. Chicago Sun Times (if memory serves), that mentions the contests?  Or a book, e.g. Master The Internet In 24 Hours (hypothetical title), which says something about the contests?  Or if the contest were covered on the local television station (news broadcast by journalists... local-cable-access-channel and infomercials not included of course for obvious reasons).
 * #3. That leads us to the third difficulty.  Because there are so many www.city-data.com hits in the search engines, and so many crawler-copies of your data (which also generate hits in the search engines), it is very difficult for somebody like myself to dig up the stuff we *need* to properly write the City-Data article:  business-section newspaper stories about city-data, consumer-magazine articles about city-data, television newscasts where city-data is the subject, computer&internet books that have a page or two about using city-data... that sort of thing.  Here, you have a natural advantage; you might already have a scrapbook of such things readily available, and if you can provide the URLs (or equivalent info on how to locate the magazines/newspapers/books/etc that specifically talk about city-data-the-company-and-the-services-thereof, I will be able to fix the article up properly.  Note that we need stuff that is about city-data, which is different from a newspaper-story which is about some city that includes some factoids the journalist got from city-data.  Does this make sense?  In practice, maintaining a neutral point-of-view is 100% about reflecting what the sources actual say about the subject-of-the-article.  The main problem with this article, is it has no WP:SOURCES (yet), and thus is not well-written and WP:NPOV (yet).  You can reply to me here if you like, or you can click the 'talk' thing next to my username and leave me a new section there.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 07:39, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually names may contain company names as per WP:ISU. Since Lech has already declared his COI on his userpage I see no issues with his username.- McMatter (talk)/(contrib) 17:47, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks McMatter, I've nixed the wrong stuff. While you are here, I'll ask if you can also solve prob#3 for me.  :-)      Do you know a way to search the interwebz, which excludes all pages hosted at advameg-owned domain-names from the search results?  something like ... ... is what I would like to do.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 10:51, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Global Information Network Edits
The previous edit stated a business association between Global Information Network and City-Data/Advameg based on their being hosted at the same UPS Store, according to BBB pages about the companies. These pages listed separate suites/units at the store, and never mentioned any connection between the two companies. WP:SYN states that editors should not combine parts of a source to reach a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. I was unable to find any reliable, published sources that explicitly state a connection between the companies. Upon searching Google for "3 Grant Square Hinsdale," I found several other businesses hosted by this UPS store as well (See here,here, and here). 2601:249:300:232C:717D:A9ED:A294:ED2D (talk) 14:02, 3 December 2015 (UTC)