Talk:List of casinos in the United States

Destruction of this list article
Converting this list into a list of lists makes it totally useless. This should be a list of casinos in the United States and not a list of links to lists. The fact that transclusion allows you to have the list here and have a by state list is the correct implemention. The reverting of changes to do do both makes not sense what so ever. Vegaswikian (talk) 04:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I converted List of casinos in Mississippi to the table format. Take a look at that and see how it looks. Any major changes need to be made before we migrate this to all of the other states. Next I need to get the inclusion into this article working correctly. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:28, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * please explain how this list becomes 'totally useless' if it is a list of lists. Your unsupported assertion of something does not automatically make it true--it is just your preference.  Hmains (talk) 05:17, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Because if you continue to edit it as you are, if will not contain a single casino. Is that really what a list of casinos should contain?  You have yet to explain why your changes are needed or are superior.  My suggestion allows the by state lists to exist and to have a list of casinos in the United States.  In other words, the intent of the article as it existed is preserved and your wish to create and categorize lists by state is implemented.  I think you need to show why a solution that meets everyones wishes is not the best solution. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:36, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Thinking about this, I am wondering if an additional list would be helpful: a simple alphabetical list of all casinos in the US, not subdivided by state, city or any other way. This would allow readers to quickly search for casinos just by name while having the evolving list of lists for the state level lists.  What do you think? Hmains (talk) 20:44, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I have been considering that after the transclusion debate here is resolved. To make this happen, the data can be converted into a sortable table.  The tables can also be transcluded so you have have the sortable table at both the US and the state level.  My concern was what columns to use.  If we go in this direction, groupings below that of a settlement might be lost.  I would see the columns being name, city, state, county, and comments.  So current groupings like 'the strip' would be lost.  Not sure exactly what that means, if anything.  Since Nevada have many gaming reporting areas, that is important to some people.  Vegaswikian (talk) 21:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If a table can be created that is sortable in the ways you state and the content of table can be maintained at the state level, and each state level table could be put into its state categories, I would have no concern. The extra column that is needed might be is 'area' or 'district' or something like that to take into account the other-than-city/state/county grouping. I cannot remember having used transclusion so I depend on your knowing how that works.  Thanks Hmains (talk) 22:12, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * For a huge example, take a look at Airline codes. If you select a single beginning letter you will only see a few entries. If you select all, you will get the entire list. Be aware that the entire list will take a long time to load. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:10, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks fine. Continue.  Hmains (talk) 00:39, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * OK. Since this will take a while since every entry would need to be created as a row in the table, my suggestion would be to convert to current list to be an inclusion.  Then we can start converting at 'A' to a table format.  Vegaswikian (talk) 01:58, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I looking at the lists done so far, I think that we may need to add a column for the location or type. I see the options for this so far to be Land, Riverboat, and Racetrack.  I also wonder if we need to add a column for devices.  Some casinos are slots only or just card rooms.  I do think that making this last change would be more of a problem then its worth due to the number or permutations so I'm not convinced that it is needed. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:37, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Everything you want to do does not have to be done all at once. Incremental improvements are fine.  Hmains (talk) 23:54, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Things are looking up. Good work Hmains (talk) 00:12, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

OK, the conversions are done and a navigation template is also available. If anyone wants, they can insert the template Lists of casinos by U.S. state. See List of casinos in Alabama for an example. Also someone really needs to review the contents. There are many Native American casinos not identified as such, or at least I think they are based on the names, is one example of needed cleanup. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:27, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

You are sorting with 'The' in the title? This doesn't match standard sorting rules.

Cruise ships
Do cruise ships really belong here? In most cases, they don't open their casinos until they're in international waters. So to say they're "in the United States" because they call ports in the US is more than a bit inaccurate. I am going to remove them.oknazevad (talk) 23:26, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Sounds reasonable. Vegaswikian (talk) 05:03, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Geolocation
Am slowly adding coordinates where known. 79.139.205.64 (talk) 10:10, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Column for operating entity?
Not knowing that it was part of a larger table on another page, I added a "tribal operator" column to List of casinos in Oklahoma. Of course, this had to be reverted since it broke the combined table on this page. I think this is useful information, however, and should be presented in the table; who runs a particular casino is certainly one of the property's "vital statistics" and should be included in a list like this. The scope of the column could be expanded to state the name of the entity that owns or operates it, regardless of if it is tribal or not (this would be useful so that one could sort the list to see all properties operated by Caesar's, or by StationCasinos, or by a particular tribe, etc). I don't think such a column would be redundant to the navbox templates that include all the properties for a particular company, as was suggested by Vegaswikian, because a) such a template wouldn't be appropriate if a particular entity only operated two or three properties and b) the table includes location information alongside each property, which the templates don't do for space reasons. This lets you sort by location and see who is competing in a particular market. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 06:38, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I have not much of an opinion on this other than "county" is a redundantly useless column, so virtually any other column of information would be better. 2005 (talk)

This might be sensible for a state like Oklahoma where all or most of the casinos are tribal. Tribal casinos always have a single owner who can be listed succinctly in the table. For commercial casinos it's more complicated. Often the owner and the operator are two different entities, and it wouldn't make much sense to list one and not the other. Often there are multiple owners with different percentages, or there are complicated legal situations (try explaning the Borgata's ownership in the space of a table column). In some states like Colorado and South Dakota, most casinos are small independent operations, so the "operating entity" column would be a list of individuals or small holding company names that would be meaningless to almost all readers.

The root problem here is this list's transclusion structure that prevents decisions being made on a state-by-state basis. This arrangement prioritizes the convenience of editors (not having to update the same information in two places) over the experience of readers. I strongly believe that all the state-by-state lists should be substituted back into this article so that each article can evolve on its own terms. For example: Toohool (talk) 18:36, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Different states may call for a different set of columns (e.g. South Dakota and New Jersey only allow casinos in one city, so it's redundant to have the city and county listed).
 * Some states might call for a list that's divided into sections (e.g. in California, cardrooms and Indian casinos are very different, maybe they should be in separate sections).
 * Different lists may need different inclusion standards (Nevada has tons of non-notable casinos, and we probably shouldn't attempt to list them all per WP:NOTDIR, while Idaho has 5 casinos, so it's no problem to list them all even if they're not all notable; the main US list should probably only include notable casinos).
 * Most states have so few casinos that it would be better to integrate the list into a general gambling overview (e.g. Gambling in Oregon), rather than having a standalone "List of casinos". It's especially absurd for states that have just one casino (Texas and North Carolina).