Talk:National Register of Historic Places listings in Stamford, Connecticut

neighborhood info sourcing
An editor has added neighborhood/section identifications in a column, but with no source given for the column's information as a whole or for individual items. Having seen the consequences of permitting unsourced, personal knowledge-type info in other cases, and having learned from the experience with another CT city that neighborhood definitions can be surprisingly contentious, I am of the opinion that unsourced information should not be allowed, should be rooted out upfront. Can sourcing be added promptly? If not, I expect to delete the info given. One approach to creating info about neighborhoods and getting that validated would be to start and develop a List of Stamford, Connecticut neighborhoods. In the absence of clear definitions and sources, the info should be deleted from here though. --doncram (talk) 06:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm sure that if it was not I who added the information, then you would not even bother with this, right? Just go ask any other Connecticut editor to validate and/or fix them. --Polaron | Talk 12:50, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
 * It's certainly true that my negative experience is with you and your assertions about New Haven neighborhoods and elsewhere, and I am more alert now to your editing style. But i would object to unsourced assertions of neighborhoods put in by anyone. I have developed neighborhood identifications in other cities like Baltimore and Boston and Detroit, using official maps.  As you know, i visited the Stamford, Connecticut article looking for neighborhood info and tagged its section as unsourced, too.  I interpret your response as you saying you will not provide backup here or elsewhere, and i deleted the neighborhood assertions.  Others are welcome to provide sourced information. --doncram (talk) 16:11, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * P reverted my removal of the unsourced info, just before the above edit by me was posted. Seeing that adequate notice was given and that the above followup was given, i have reinstated the removal of the info.  P's edit summary asked me to identify which info was wrong;  i decline to do that.  I have many times challenged P's unsourced additions to articles;  in many cases he has eventually provided adequate support and in other cases his personal knowledge has been proven wrong.  The onus is upon the editor adding info to provide convincing support. --doncram
 * I think I've asked this several times before: which cases have I been "proven wrong"? --Polaron | Talk 16:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, we've had that discussion several times, in which i provide examples and you have argued you were not wrong in any case. I don't care to argue out a whole list, but recently it seems you were wrong about asserting New Preston Hill HD is the same as New Preston (I expect you will dispute you were ever wrong about anything there tho), for one.  Your addition of unsourced information of many types has been condemned by other editors many times, and your actions in doing so again here, too, is wrong for wikipedia.  I asked EdJohnston to take a look here, by the way.  I do challenge your information as unsupported. --doncram (talk) 17:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * And where did I say that it's the same? See Talk:New Preston, Connecticut. --Polaron | Talk 17:20, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The behavior here was noticed and reviewed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring ‎ (→User:Polaron and User:Doncram reported by The Thing // Talk // Contribs (Result: ). I commented there about the pattern of editing to add unsourced material, and i don't want to discuss all the previous history again. --doncram (talk) 19:24, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Followup: The previous discussion was picked up at ANI and Polaron was blocked from editing, although he cheated and edited from two sock-puppet accounts.  The block was given at Administrators' noticeboard/3RRArchive140;  the sockpuppetry was confirmed at Sockpuppet investigations/Polaron/Archive.  There were no consequences meted out for block evasion. --doncram (talk) 01:57, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

About the neighborhoods information, P included in an edit summary a link to a website that looks highly irregular to me. The website appears to be one that copies up info from other places, maybe including from wikipedia. I don't care to accept that as a reliable source at all, and it does not detail the locations of any of the NRHP places. I think that probably there could be a good article about neighborhoods of Stamford, and that information can eventually be sorted out and validated with sources, but it's not there yet, and the lack of it should not stop this largely unrelated list-article. So at this point i want to remove the unsourced material and continue with other development. --doncram (talk) 19:24, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Followup: I further note Orlady removing the location info for Merritt Parkway item, which doesn't fit properly in a column labelled "Neighborhoods".  Funny, that was the one entry in the neighborhood column i was leaving in.  I also browsed the several Stamford neighborhood articles linked, and note no sourcing is present that actually supports any definition of any one of them.  There are some references about other stuff in the articles, but none about the neighborhood definitions.  Apparently Stamford does not have any official partition into well-defined neighborhoods.  In the absence of any objective, established partition, i think the neighborhoods column is just trouble, just advertising links to neighborhood topics that are themselves possibly non-notable.  It seems just trouble to have neighborhood identifiers and i am now inclined to just delete the column.  I'll pause for comments from any others, tho i note now that Polaron is currently blocked, and then probably proceed to just delete it and move on with other development.  If/when anyone watching chooses to take on the task of developing a decently sourced partition of Stamford into neighborhoods, certainly not be a short term task, the potential reinstatment of such a column could be reconsidered. --doncram (talk) 22:23, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Since the furor has died down, I gather that the neighborhood sourcing issue here has been resolved. However, would anyone object to moving the "Neighborhood/section" column after the "Location" column so the table is consistent with other NRHP lists? I have a semi-automated method of editing these lists when new sites are added or smaller lists are broken out from large ones (including renumbering the table rows) and putting the columns in a different order complicates things for me. --sanfranman59 (talk) 19:27, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking, and I see your need for some resolution here. About the neighborhood column, after recent edits that link to unsourced articles like Shippan, i feel re-affirmed that a neighborhood column is just trouble.  Polaron did come up with a source that partitions the city into areas given combo names like "South End / Waterside / West Side", but I believe there will never be a wikipedia article about South End / Waterside / West Side.  That was a good effort, honestly.  But, what we are then getting is portions of those combo names are getting linked to poor quality articles, with no sources about locations.  We're back to bogus info and/or unsourced assertions/implications.  Like a reader will be misled to follow the one bluelink out of 3 names, even when that points to a neighborhood article not about the area of the given NRHP place.  It's a mess, and there is no need for contention about neighborhoods in this or any other NRHP list article.  Either good info about a full partition of the city is available and can be used with no contention, or no neighborhood info is needed.  Again, this is a small place, not comparable to vast cities like Chicago and Los Angeles which do have official neighborhoods because of a general need for more specific location info than the general city.  Again, I believe if others wish to develop good sourced articles about neighborhoods of this city, or if Stamford came out with a usable good partition that is encyclopedia-worthy-of-coverage, then this could be revisited.  But the info now is crummy and is leading editors to add bad links to crummy info.  So, I'll wait for new comments, but do plan to remove the neighborhood column.  Sanfranman59, i hope/expect that will meet your need not to be encountering a neighborhood column in bad order.  Certainly if a neighborhood column is re-added later it should be later in the column order, as you suggest. --doncram (talk) 20:58, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * There is nothing bogus about these boundaries. These are the official neighborhood planning areas as indicated in the source. Delink them if necessary but Stamford is not a point location and adding this is beneficial to the reader. --Polaron | Talk 23:37, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't have any objection to including neighborhoods per se, but I don't think the source provided by Polaron is useful for identifying the neighborhood of a given site. The boundaries in the document are not drawn in a way that one could assign a neighborhood based on an address or even a location on a map. It's basically guesswork identifying the boundary lines between Westover, Turn of River and Newfield; Springdale, Belltown and Glenbrook; Cove-East Side and Shippan; and Waterside and South End. I am leaning toward supporting removal of this column unless someone can come up with a more useful source. On the other hand, the fact that articles have been developed for several of these areas suggests that they are known and I would definitely defer to someone with local knowledge. Polaron ... do you know if these neighborhood names are known in Stamford or are they just something that a city bureaucrat came up with for a 5-year Master Plan that has little or no meaning to anyone outside of City Hall? Do locals know where Belltown, Glenbrook and Springdale are (I see that the USGS GNIS database does ... as does Google Earth ... or at least it knows them as a group)? --sanfranman59 (talk) 23:51, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * The boundaries are well-defined to pinpoint where each site is located. There are maps of each neighborhood grouping in the master plan document. The combined neighborhood names are not used per se but the individual neighborhood names are in commmon use. However, only the boundaries of neighborhood groupings are precisely defined by the city and individual areas within a given grouping do not always have strict boundaries although there are common notions of them as used by real estate agents. --Polaron | Talk 23:57, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * There is also the possibility of combining the existing neighborhood articles into single articles for each official neighborhood grouping. I will suggest that at the Connecticut WikiProject to see if other Connecticut editors are okay with combining the existing neighborhood articles into an article about the relevant neighborhood grouping. For now, I have delinked some of the entries to avoid possible confusion. --Polaron | Talk 23:57, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Umm, in New Haven, where an official city partition has long been available and used in city services delivery and economic development planning, Polaron argued and edit warred that neighborhoods such as Prospect Hill are not to be understood as having the boundaries defined by the city. Mention of those neighborhoods has been repeatedly recast as being merely about planning areas.  Here, there is no official partition available.  There is just one newish planning document which states that it is making up a new partition for the purpose of the one study, a partition which has had no currency before or since.  I give zero chance to the likelihood that "South End / Waterside / West Side", "Cove-East Side / Shippan", "Newfield / Turn of River / Westover", etc., are suitable topics for definition in Wikipedia.  I don't care to ask a bunch of CT editors to give permission or not for there to be bogus new articles created about them;  the topics would be / should be deleted by AFD if created.  The existing Stamford neighborhood articles like Shippan and others are non-compliant with wikipedia naming practices, and generally have no sources whatsoever, and are compendiums of personal knowledge, and are, to be blunt, simply crummy.
 * Orlady and/or Polaron have several times taken stance that various sourced stub NRHP articles in CT are too poor to be linked to from various town/village/hamlet/CDP articles. I don't like that treatment, but here it is clear that neighborhoods are NOT needed for purpose of eventually splitting this list-article, and I don't think it is appropriate to promote unproven, probably bogus combo neighborhood topics or to promote currently bogus unsourced crummy articles that are possibly not needed in wikipedia at all.  By contrast in a large city like St. Louis, Missouri, I agree that the 79 official neighborhoods of the city should be used to split the 400 NRHP items by geographic areas, and that using neighborhood columns for a while is helpful to move towards the necessary splitting.  Here, there is no need to identify neighborhoods to help with splitting, or for any other purpose.  I don't want this contention now when those articles are in shoddy shape, and i especially don't want endless contention going forward about whether they are decent enough to link to.  Since the previous discussion was contentious already (update to ANI final ruling inserted above), what should be different now?  I see no reason to wait any further. --doncram (talk) 01:57, 1 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Neighborhoods are very real, but their definitions are inherently imprecise -- and changeable over time. Given that fact, this insistence that neighborhood designations must not be mentioned unless there is a precise and authoritative definition of the neighborhood boundaries is excessive. Indeed, this nitpickery over an inconsequential characterization is reminding me of Freemasons who appear to insist that articles must not suggest that buildings named "Masonic Temple" are associated with Freemasons unless the buildings' relationship with Freemasonry is documented by a source that has been personally checked and verified by an enrolled Freemason. --Orlady (talk) 02:47, 1 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Your sarcasm about Freemason editors is noted. I am not one of those, and/or if i were i think i would not be allowed to say so. :)  But, a difference here vs. List of Masonic buildings is that there, sourced decent articles about the individual buildings have been or are being developed, and the ability to do that has been repeatedly proven:  good sources on the NRHP-listed Masonic buildings are demonstrably obtainable.  If someone wanted to keep pressing that a given building lacking decent treatment in an article should not be listed, it would be possible just to develop its article.  Here, there are (i think) no decent neighborhood articles existing yet, and combo triple neighborhoods are submitted as the only available partition, and as i asserted above there is (i think) no likelihood of creation of articles on the combo triple neighborhood topics.


 * In two edits labelled "baby steps" i deleted unsourced assertions that various NRHP places, including one archeological site that is address restricted, are in either of two linked neighborhoods. Neither neighborhood article defines the area of the neighborhood;  it is not explicitly sourced and seems not to even be verifiable that any given place is located within either.


 * Further, if it was actually relevant in a description of a place to provide a link to a neighborhood that could be done. But there is no positive reason here why a neighborhood column is needed, in contrast to cases where neighborhood columns are needed to assist in big NRHP list splitting.  I have been developing the Fairfield County NRHP list, out of which this is split by me, through hundreds of edits over many months.  I don't own this article or the Fairfield one, but I have been the main editor for many months, and I have developed the sourced descriptions that now appear in many of the description column cells.  Besides the other reasons, as an editorial decision matter, I don't want to devote a column to this non-essential, non-helpful stuff, simply as a matter of spacing:  I want this article to look and read better, given that it does have a substantial descriptions column now.  If neighborhood is so highly relevant in a select item, mention of it can be included in the description column or the location column, as is done in the Fairfield County NRHP list-article and in most other NRHP articles that have no neighborhood columns at all.  I don't happen to see mention of a neighborhood as necessary in describing any one of the NRHP places so far, however.  It was not an issue, and need not be an issue now, that there is in wikipedia (or anywhere AFAIK) a useful, reliable partition of Stamford into meaningful neighborhoods. --doncram (talk) 04:11, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't get the animosity towards including neighborhoods. There is added value in including specific locations. Majority of the sites are actually unambiguous in what neighborhood they're in. Many of them can even be pinpointed to their specific neighborhood (not just the grouping) as they are near the neighborhood center. Let's start by identifying those whose neighborhood affiliations are unquestionable and we can concentrate on which ones are at the margins. North Stamford should be easy as that is everything north of the Merritt. --Polaron | Talk 05:42, 1 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Polaron reinserted 4 unsourced assertions about locations of places being in North Stamford. Claims here about the neighborhood area definition are not defined in that neighborhood article.    I removed the new assertions.  And, combining 3 more baby steps, I (3) removed "Stamford Harbor" (not a neighborhood and mentioned in the location column already) from the "Neighborhood/section" article; (4) removed mentions of non-encyclopedic double or triple neighborhood groupings such as "Cove-East Side / Shippan";  (5) removed then-empty "Neighborhood/section" column, in favor of allowing the Description column to spread.  That works much better in displaying the list-article in my full-screen display in Firefox browser right now.


 * To paraphrase, P, i don't get the animosity towards your working, elsewhere, on neighborhood lists and articles to actually develop decent sourced material. Here, mention of non-existent places such as "Cove-East Side / Shippan" serves no need in the list-article, and detracts from the purpose of presenting the NRHP-listed places in Stamford in what i am hoping to make into a complete, reader-friendly, well-formatted, stable Wikipedia article.  There's no purpose served by including, and good reasons to exclude, the personal-knowledge-based information you have about neighborhoods.


 * I do, again, grant that your finding the reference on neighborhood groupings as defined by the City of Stamford Planning Board, in the Neighborhood Plans report, 2002, as your making a good shot at coming up with neighborhoods. I don't think it is good enough or important enough to justify its dominating over the NRHP information in this article.  I do hope you will use that source elsewhere in making your case, if you must, that neighborhoods named "Cove-East Side / Shippan", etc., are meaningful.  I don't currently believe that it is relevant or helpful in any single one of the individual NRHP articles to include mention of such combo neighborhoods or that source.  But perhaps there is use for it somewhere in wikipedia. --doncram (talk) 14:57, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * None of these neighborhoods are even controversial except to you. I suppose nothing I do will ever satisfy you. North Stamford, as I said, is the most well-defined neighborhood (everything north of the Merritt). I don't know why you keep saying it is not defined in the linked article (it is). I will reinsert everything in the location column then and we can get rid of the neighborhood column. --Polaron | Talk 15:02, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * You are welcome to spend some time improving the North Stamford article. My read of it is that it asserts the neighborhood is north of the Merritt and has some other claims, which is not the same as you state above (that it is the entire area within Stamford that lies north of the Merritt).  Also you might want to try using the one 2002 report in the Stamford article itself.  I don't know if it is really relevant there though.  About other uses, I don't think that any neighborhood assertions are needed in any of the individual articles, and not in this list-article.  The locations of places in this list-article are well-enough documented by their addresses and their coordinates and their coverage in linked Google/Bing map display, and further information in available by their links to articles about the places.  I think offhand it would be spam-like promotion to insert links to neighborhood articles in the location column.  Locations are well established in this list-article;  the editorial focus should be on improving historical importance explanations. --doncram (talk) 15:19, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * What are you referring to as "some other claims". There is no controversy regarding North Stamford no matter what source you use. --Polaron | Talk 15:21, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * There are other assertions in the article about its relationship to other neighborhoods. I just tagged the North Stamford article for some reference improvements;  it could really be improved a lot.  You could possibly add assertions to the North Stamford and other neighborhood articles about their including some of these NRHP places.  Then maybe local editors/readers could agree or disagree about those assertions.  If the claims survive there, that would eventually tend to support claims here that the NRHP places are in that neighborhood.  But i don't see that heavy-handed presentation of neighborhood info is needed here now or ever will be.  Your interest seems to be largely about promoting the neighborhood articles;  why not work at improving them? --doncram (talk) 15:31, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * None of the assertions about relationship to other neighborhoods precludes the fact that every source agrees that North Stamford is everything north of the Merritt. I could add the list of NRHP places to each neighborhood and I'm sure all local editors would agree. The only person that would revert me would be you. --Polaron | Talk 15:51, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * You assert stuff is "obvious" but follow practice here and elsewhere of adding unsourced material. There is no sourcing here of asserted facts that various locations are "obviously" in various neighborhoods.  The linked articles themselves mostly or all do not define the areas of the neighborhoods.  You have asserted two sources for neighborhoods information in this "discussion" such as it is;  one was a URL in an edit summary which pointed to a non-reliable bogus copycat website;  the other is the 2002 one-time study, a source which no one feels is reliable or relevant to use in any Stamford or neighborhood article.  It is inappropriate to make this NRHP list-article a battleground for neighborhoods info.  If u want to develop sourced info about neighborhoods that could conceivably be linked from one or two items in this NRHP list-article, go ahead, do that elsewhere.


 * In Polaron's latest edits, he re-added neighborhoods info, now to the location column. At an earlier date, i cooperated in transfering some of that info there, to remove it from description column where i thought it was clearly inappropriate.  At this point i am aware the info is unsourced.  I do challenge it.  I have challenged it.  There is no progress shown in sourcing it.  Even if the neighborhood articles were sourced, I don't agree that excessive noting of neighborhoods is relevant in this list-article.  I will now remove the unsourced, seemingly unrelevant neighborhoods information again.  Please stop.  If it is returned wholesale again i will certainly request higher level action to address the repetitive edit warring to install unsourced information.


 * If, for one or two places, neighborhood information is actually seriously relevant in describing the historic relevance of the place, please do explain, and provide sources. --doncram (talk) 02:22, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The neighborhood locations are from each individual nomination form. I'll add them over the weekend if you can hold on a couple of days. --Polaron | Talk 02:50, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't believe you, if you are claiming the NRHP nom docs were your sources. Are you claiming that?  And, your assertion that sources, somewhere, exist which prove you are "right" is irrelevant.  You are so full of arrogance, that no policies apply to you.  I am re-re-re-removing the unsourced assertions.  Please document, here, your claims. --doncram (talk) 03:19, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, these are sourced from the NRHP nominations. I don't get why you're so adamant about excluding neighborhoods even when it is the nomination forms themselves used as the source. --Polaron | Talk 05:04, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * You're being deliberately misleading here. I think you're trying to suggest that you had only added sourced information, and that your sources have been the NRHP nominations.  If you said that outright, it would be a lie.  You previously added claims about neighborhoods for all the items in this list, and you had not checked NRHP nominations for all of them, and you previously provided no NRHP doc sources.  You've now added NRHP doc sources for some neighborhood claims, but NRHP doc sources are NOT available for all the claims of yours which I have deleted repeatedly.  You just seem to claim privilege to add unsourced info willy-nilly that you personally believe to be "correct".  In my view the neighborhood claims are useless or at best marginally useful information here.  I don't see why you are so adamant about adding such. --Doncram 15:54, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The latest revision before your outright revert used information from the nomination forms as well as pre-existing information that was already in the Fairfield County list before you split it out. This pre-existing neighborhood information wasn't a problem for you then and I don't see why it suddenly becomes a problem for you now. In addition to using the nomination forms, I only added locations that were already well-established in the county list prior to splitting. --Polaron | Talk 17:52, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I've removed similar neighborhood claims now from the Fairfield County list now, also as a matter of copyediting to remove unneeded verbiage, and to avoid unsourced claims / personal knowledge. You're right, it was not previously recognized as a problem, but not it is.  It all should have been entirely removed sooner. --doncram (talk) 17:04, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

address restricted sites
Polaron's edits have included address or other information identifying locations of archeological sites which are "Address restricted" in the NRHP's database. In general, I believe the NRHP's use of "Address restricted" should be respected, but also there needs to be some process for getting the NRHP to acknowledge that some sites' locations are now public knowledge. I am interested in working on that problem and a general Wikipedia policy about archeological site locations, but the process should not happen by edit warring to disclose specific places in scattered wikipedia articles.

I recognize that individuals may know the actual location of archeological sites, and they may even have documention that could serve as reliable references. I don't agree that providing the information in an uncoordinated way is helpful. I am going to remove the information from this article. --doncram (talk) 15:40, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Rockrimmon Rockshelter is on private property and the address restricted should be respected. However, Fort Stamford is a well-known city park and is used for many events such as weddings. By default, archeological sites are listed by the NRIS as address restricted. However, if the site is advertised and open to the public, there is no reason why it cannot be listed. --Polaron | Talk 15:49, 1 October 2010 (UTC)