Talk:Harris County, Texas

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Alief is not a city
Alief was annexed by the City of Houston in the 1970s. This section of Houston is more properly referred to as "Houston Alief." Houston Alief has its own independent school district separate and apart from Houston I.S.D. Houston Alief also has an independent post office, zip code 77411, in which you can send mail to "Alief, TX," but there are other portions of Houston Alief that are within Houston zip codes (77072, 77082, and 77083). If you search Google Maps for "Alief, TX", it will come back at you with "Alief, Houston, TX." Also see the Alief web page: http://www.alief.com/. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Careyj (talk • contribs) 15:01, 7 May 2007 (UTC).

politic section
I think it would be best if we added information on politics here.

Point of Order -- Harris County is also represented in US House of Reps by Rep Kevin Brady, District 8. (It is is a small portion.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:2C3:8980:4BC0:6509:8403:8525:69DB (talk) 03:14, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Trivia if anyone wants to add it
Harris county receives more tornado warnings than any other county. Thousands could die if a giant tornado ever hits Houston, Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle, Feb. 20, 2007. Last accessed February 20, 2007. Ufwuct 17:34, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

[b]Harris county has sent more people to the death chamber than any other state. Death Penalty Uneven, 10:03 AM CDT on Saturday, July 28, 2007 VTNC 02:59, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Cemetaries and burial grounds
This section was removed because it is nonstandard. Also, only three were listed, I'm sure there are more than 3 cemetaries in Harris County. Postoak (talk) 04:06, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Proposed change to Harris primary topic
At present if you type "Harris" into the wikipedia search box you are taken to the Isle of Harrises entry! As there are many uses of the word Harris it has been proposed to change this so that when you type "Harris" you are taken to the Harris (disambiguation) page instead.

If you support/oppose this move or have any comments please add your input to the Harris Talk page.

Thanks --WickerWiki (talk) 19:00, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

New municipality?
Ridgway, James Jr. "City-incorporating near Northwest Houston examined." The Cypress Sun. September 30, 2010. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:33, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

probably a reference to The Woodlands. Due to ETJ, normally a community such as The Woodlands is too close to Houston to incorporate. However a 'special deal' was done to allow it anyway. Ken (talk) 19:59, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

New master planned community?
Sarnoff, Nancy. "Major planned community planned near The Woodlands." Houston Chronicle. October 5, 2010. WhisperToMe (talk) 07:29, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

and this is probably what turned out to be the new Exxon Mobil headquarters, which had been rumored to be several things over the years. Ken (talk) 20:00, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Swallowed up
This statement is out of place and possibly POV:
 * "John Nova Lomax of the Houston Press said "At one time, Houston and Harris County were two distinct entities in reality as well as law. Yes, today there are unincorporated swaths of Harris County, and numerous municipalities not named Houston, but the fact remains that they have been swallowed by the behemoth.""

And they talk about "douchifying". This article isn't really a reliable source; it's just a fun article. Houston is about 55% of the population of the county, and 33% of its land area. And the rest of Harris County is growing more quickly in population than Houston. I wouldn't say this is "swallowed up". If there's a point to be made, great, but just putting this quote here without context doesn't work.Ufwuct (talk) 19:24, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Redundant repetition .. (unintentional mistake?)
Why are there TWO copies of THIS in the article? : "Map of Harris County - Northeast One-fourth.jpg"...?

One of them is at the top, (if you look in the wiki text -- e.g., when you are editing) it is between the Infobox ("Infobox U.S. County") and the lede. (The lede is the text before the first "section".)

The second copy of that "Map" [the NE 1/4] is after the lede, right before the start of the first "section", ...which currently, [as of this revision], is the "== History ==" section.)

Were we supposed to have "all four" quarters of the map? OR, maybe, at least two of them? Or did someone edit the wikitext, and "accidentally" duplicate this [quarter of a] map?

Oh wait a minute. I think I can answer that last question! The "history" of [edits to] this article, is kinda confusing... -- I do not have time to go through and grok all of the reversions, and [partial] "restoring" changes [edits] that occurred after some of those "reversions"; (e.g., there was one "restoring" change [an edit] that seems to have been, umm, << NOT 100% complete >>, because it was followed by a change -- this edit -- by a robot [called "AnomieBOT"], that has this comment: "(Rescuing orphaned refs ("QF" from rev 630438618))". ((Apparently, some previous edit -- which I do not have time to investigate! -- had been clumsily [partially] "restored", and the " " tag  " "  had been left without any defining instance! ...or something like that.)) ((smiley face! with one eye winking!))

OK, so with the understanding that -- as explained above -- there might well be more to this [mishap] than what I now understand, my tentative candidate for deciding which was the nominal "culprit" edit -- ((NOT for purposes of deciding whom to blame! just in order to [help] figure out how to fix things!)) -- is this one. As it clearly shows, it occurred about 2 minutes after the previous edit, which was by the same editor [well, logged in using the same account]. It has a comment of << "(Reverted 1 edit by 66.87.98.211 (talk). (TW))" >>

Now here we should probably note that the Wikipedia page for Twinkle ("redirected from" TW) ("TW"), contains this stern warning: "" ...which seems to be a sorta standard boilerplate "tool" warning, and it expands to THIS:

((except that, of course, it refers to "Twinkle" instead of to "Harris County, Texas" when it is mentioning the name of the tool... You can always just go to TW to see how it really looks.))

Does this suggest that, [perhaps?], the documentation / explanation about "how to USE" Twinkle, is maybe not self-explanatory enough? (for some users?) Obviously, writers of documentation can write until they are blue in the face, but they do not have any way to force the readers to read it! I am just guessing here, as to what happened ... but it does seem like, it might have involved, some misunderstanding regarding the proper use of a powerful tool.

((One calls to mind the scene from Fantasia where "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" -- [played by Mickey Mouse, iirc] -- gets in "over his head" by daring to use some magical tool that's best left in the hands of properly trained [wizard?] personnel! Was Mickey's "motive" one of trying to save time? /slash, to save work? a likely story!))

Anyway, pending some reasonable time for others to chime in, and give me some "advice" or other comments, here is what I am planning to do:

[1] Edit the article, to delete one of the TWO copies of [the wikitext for] the "duplicated" map (see the top paragraph above, which shows the wikitext by using some " " tags).

[2] Decide which one to delete, by referring to some of the older revisions of the article -- such as this one -- which seem to indicate which of the two copies of the map (see above) is the correct copy to "leave in" (and delete the other one). (Is that going far enough back ? Any comments?)

PS: At least one edit -- this one -- was correcting the "year" for the old county courthouse, by changing it from 1911 to 1910. However, a quick search shows that the character string "1911" does still appear, one place, in this article. That is probably a TYPO ... (right?)

Thank you! --Mike Schwartz (talk) 17:19, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Inaccurate stats in "Racial and ethnics demographics" section
In this section, some of the cited stats are questionable, specifically the ones regarding the percentage of people with postgraduate degrees by ethnicity, which appear to have relied entirely on a Houston Chronicle article cited in footnote 10, "Lee, Renée C. 'Report shows Asians a growing force in Houston.' Houston Chronicle. February 8, 2013. Retrieved on February 11, 2013." I cannot retrieve this article to verify the stats since it requires a subscription to the Chronicle, or else I would have made the edits myself. For example:

"As of 2013 37% of non-Hispanic whites in Harris County had postgraduate degrees..." This is claiming that more than a third of non-Hispanic whites in Harris County had postgraduate degrees in 2013! Even without consulting census info, this seems extremely high compared to what is generally known about people's educational attainments. According to census info, in the period 2006-2010, only 10.8% of whites in the US as a whole had postgrad degrees. See page 2 at https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-19.pdf. Only 10.3% of the general population 25 and over in the US had postgrad degrees in the same time period. Page 4 of that pdf shows that 27.9% of the general population 25 and over in the US had bachelors degree in the same period. So, 37% of whites in Harris County with postgrad degrees cannot be correct.

Same with other statements in this section regarding postgraduate degree attainment of other races and ethnic groups:

"As of 2013 19% of blacks in Harris County have postgraduate degrees.[10].... As of 2013 13% of U.S.-born Latinos have postgraduate degrees, and 7% of Latino immigrants have postgraduate degrees.[10].... During that year, in Harris County, 50% [!] of the county's Asian immigrants have postgraduate degrees.... f [sic] Indian and Pakistani residents, the most educated Asian group in the county, 71% [!] have university or post-graduate degrees and 2% did not finish high school. Of Vietnamese, the least educated Asian group in the county, 30% have university or post-graduate degrees and 20% did not finish high school.[10]"

These stats seriously need to be corrected! They are most likely inaccurate or misunderstood quotations of stats from the Houston Chronicle article. Liem (talk) 08:32, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Emergency Services
I've started a cleanup on the emergency services section. It's kind of a morass, since there are fire-only ESD's, EMS-only ESD's, dual-purpose ESD's, dual-county ESD's, and municipal service (fire, EMS and dual) all overlapping. I've also included the most recent property tax rates for each as a reference point.

Feel free to expand this or provide links to the entities named - I'll go back and clean that up as I can. Open to suggestions, too.

Harris County vote by party in presidential elections
All of the information appears to rely upon a source such as Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections here, which I am not sure whether is a reliable source, although its Wikipedia article does say that it is used by organizations such as CBS News. Gamingforfun 3 6 5 ( talk ) 07:03, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Close paraphrase
The entirety of the History section of this article is a very close paraphrase of the following article from the Handbook of Texas Online:. I have notified the editor responsible and offered to assist in writing new copy.

I am not familiar enough with Wikipedia policy to evaluate possible copyright violations. However, I have sought advice from one administrator and I will be forwarding this information to other administrators.

I am currently researching the subject and I should have a replacement text ready over the weekend. Oldsanfelipe (talk) 20:41, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fha85. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and, if allowed under fair use, may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, providing it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore, such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:05, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Harris County Block Book maps
Those related to the county government: WhisperToMe (talk) 14:40, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Harris County Central Plant, in Downtown Houston: http://books.tax.hctx.net/BlockBooksPDF/v119/AE1997_119-1_0082.pdf and http://books.tax.hctx.net/v119/AE1997_119-1_0082.jpg - Next to a county courthouse

Harris County, Georgia

 * curprev 16:58, 9 March 2019‎ Dicklyon talk contribs‎ m 2,168 bytes 0‎  Dicklyon moved page Talk:2015 Harris County, Texas shooting to Talk:2015 Harris County shooting: Better grammar fix, removing unnecessary disambiguator undothank
 * curprev 15:01, 5 March 2019‎ Anthony Appleyard talk contribs‎ m 2,168 bytes 0‎  Anthony Appleyard moved page Talk:2015 Harris County, Texas, shooting to Talk:2015 Harris County, Texas shooting over redirect: Requested by Walk Like an Egyptian at WP:RM/TR: See this requested move where the same user that moved the page wants to move 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting to 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting. undothanked
 * curprev 17:42, 3 March 2019‎ Dicklyon talk contribs‎ m 2,168 bytes 0‎  Dicklyon moved page Talk:2015 Harris County, Texas shooting to Talk:2015 Harris County, Texas, shooting: matching comma undothank


 * Per WP:USNAME we disambiguate in cases like this don't we? In ictu oculi (talk) 08:24, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Translations
https://www.harrisvotes.com/Docs/EarlyVotingPDFMaps/Early_Voting%20Schedule_November_2020.pdf states that Harris County Clerk is: WhisperToMe (talk) 23:34, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Spanish: Secretario del Condado de Harris
 * Vietnamese: Giám Đốc Nha Hành Chánh Quận Harris
 * Chinese (Traditional): Harris縣行政書記官, (Simplified): Harris县行政书记官

Orphaned references in Harris County, Texas
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Harris County, Texas's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Census": From Collin County, Texas:  From Texas's 22nd congressional district:  From Native Americans in the United States:  From Denton County, Texas:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 18:07, 1 April 2023 (UTC)