Talk:Sarasota, Florida/Archive 2

Pulitzer Prize Nomination for Sarasota Herald-Tribune
I represent The New York Times Company, owner of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

I would like to point out that the paper was a finalist for a Pulitzer last year (http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2008,Local+Reporting) for their series Broken Trust (http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?CATEGORY=MULTIMEDIA0202), which I think might merit inclusion in this article. However, I will leave it to others to decide.

('EBohan (talk) 18:56, 2 January 2009 (UTC)',,)

Man, whenever I come back to this article, I notice it just keeps getting worse and worse

Another speculation crash
"The boom of the 1950s failed to end in a crash, but almost a hundred years after the first speculation crash that affected her so badly in the mid-1920s,[9] Sarasota became identified as the epicenter of the 2008 real estate crash.[10] [11]"

Following citation 11:

"The Financial Times based its conclusions about Southwest Florida's prominence in the squeeze on data showing that the Sarasota-Bradenton market has experienced the biggest drop in home prices nationwide.

The newspaper did not say where its data came from.

The Financial Times was wrong to single out Sarasota as the epicenter of the global financial crisis, but focusing on the Sunshine States makes a lot of sense, said Jack McCabe, a Deerfield Beach-based real estate analyst.

'''"Naples, Fort Myers, the Cape Coral market has experienced the largest price drop in the U.S.," McCabe said. "So they botched that one."'''

I feel that this statement could be removed, since the citation included for it is contradictory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.73.152.100 (talk • contribs) 17:06, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Recent Clean-Up
I followed the advice of all comments below and removed lots of content that wasn't directly relate to the city of Sarasota. There is still lots more but it's some one elses turn.

I also agree with the reverse Vandalism statement below. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Texxs (talk • contribs) 21:19, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Reverse Vandalism
Too much reverse vadalism going on here. Let's get this page under control. We don't need thousands of words on the history of transportation of the city of Sarsota. Especially considering most of the content was about the COUNTY, which has it's own page. Same with early pioneers, etc. Look at other cities entries. Lets clean this article up, quit making it sound like a tourism advert, stop removing negative but true and cited content etc. etc. etc.

Let get some moderation in here too. There's some agressive spammers trying to take over this article for their own purposes (real estate sales?)

Ok they did it again. Seriously we don't need a dozen paragraphs about Owen Burns for instance. This is getting ridiculous! If you want to write that much about any one person, start a new article. At most one or two paragraphs should be included about these notable(?) people. THIS IS NOT THE PLACE FOR A BIOGRAPHY ON OWNEN BURNS OR CHARLES RINGLING OR ANYONE ELSE! Is that clear enough? texxs (talk) 00:11, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Request for Moderation
Please, content that doesn't belong here keeps ending up here, like long involved biography of historical figures. They can just have their own article. Maybe a paragraph mentioning they are from here and a link to those articles but they certainly don't belong here.

More disturbing: People keep removing anything negative (but true and cited), like the section about the country's meanest city, cost of living info etc.. Comments on this talk page about this have been removed (that's definitely vandalism!) as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.91.70.49 (talk • contribs) 15:25, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

If this article can't be controlled properly, can any article on Wikipedia? As it is now, articles like this drive people away. If they wanted a "rose colored glasses" view of the city they would just go tho the cities web site. They came here looking for the truth. 72.91.70.49 (talk) 14:02, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Notable Residents
Should we add this as a category? I can't imagine that Brian Johnson needs to be mentioned before the start of the article, and 'some famous people live here' is not a wiki-quality sentence.

I think we should. When I lived down there I remember a pee wee football player who was better than any other player I have ever seen. If my memory serves me correct the legends name was "sticky fingers." He looked kind of like an amish frenchman, you know what kind I'm talking about. From 1982-1985 he was the best wr in the country. On that final christmas day game his thumb was crushed in front of thousands of fans and ended his career. Legend says that if you go back to that field in Sarasota, you will see his severed thumb still clasped onto the ghost football. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.247.156.10 (talk) 19:14, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps, but only if the people that keep adding bio's to this page add bios. This sounds like it should be a list with the names that are linked to the article about them.72.91.70.49 (talk) 22:34, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Disaster of epic proportions
My God, what a mess this article has become. There is a wealth of information here, and with proper citations, pruning and forking, and expansion of some of the underdeveloped sections (like the missing economy, government and education sections) this could be another good article. But constant reinsertion of unsourced or off-topic information is not going to help this article, and it's arguably in worse shape than when I first discussed fixing it, two and half years ago.  Horologium  (talk) 02:25, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * It is way too big, with walls of uncited text.
 * The history section is disproportionately large compared to the rest of the article; it should be forked into an article of its own, and summarized here with a main link to the whole thing.
 * The sections on famous residents (which seems to have been dropped into the middle of the history section) stray far off-topic; this is the article for Sarasota, not for Owen Burns or Martha Palmer. If all of that information can be cited, create articles on the people and add wikilinks to them; don't use this article as a proxy for proper biographies of them.
 * There are huge sections of the article which are uncited, or use external links to commercial or self-published sites masquerading as citation. There are also lots of redlinks, which is a good thing if they are appropriate targets for future expansion, but many of the people in the history section are not notable enough for articles of their own, and none of the redlinked magazines in the print media section qualify either.
 * The culture section should be split up into at least three sections: culture, education, and the Sarasota School (which already has an article at Sarasota School of Architecture; that should be summarized and linked with a main link.
 * The "meanest city" factoid does not need three separate citations; pick the best one and use it.
 * The sports section is filled with uncited and wildly promotional statements; I'll remove them myself if citations are not provided within a week, since I tagged them as needing sources in August 2007, the first time I took a whack at fixing this article. If nobody can find sources, they don't belong in the article.
 * The article needs to be rearranged, since the geography and demographics sections should appear much earlier in the article, immediately following the history section. See good articles like Coral Springs, Florida or Fort Lauderdale, Florida for how articles should be structured.

Sarasota Plan Of Action
I've done a lot of work to Polk County, Florida articles, but am a bit "Polked out" right now and need a break from the aame articles I've been working on forever... so I have decided to work on this article some. My plan:
 * ✅ Rearrange order of sections as Horologium suggested moving geography, demographics and government under what I think is the history section(hard to tell where history ends with all the "mini biographies" interspersed within it). People (especially those who have been around Wikipedia a while) who browse to a city article expect certain things in certain places. There may be room for some leeway (I usually put them in this order: history/geog/gov't/demo/economics which is the same as some FA's), but history and geography should always be first. I'm not picky about the other three(gov't, demographics, and economics), but they need to be near the top.
 * ✅ Bumped media and historical buildings up to the culture section and "demoted" them to subsections. That could change as other sections in the article are cropped and expanded, but for now it makes the article more readable.
 * Upon reading the transportation section, I realize how long it's been since I've been to Sarasota... apparently Interstate 75, the Tamiami Trail and every other road in the Sarasota area must have been torn up since there is no mention of them at all in the article. Good thing they have all those barges and the railroad which are covered thoroughly in the article, to get around. Seriously, this is the first thing I plan on rewriting. You can find my work here until it goes live.
 * ✅ A leaner, meaner(appropriate for a "mean city" like Sarasota) and more compact transportation section which skips the stuff about historical barges and railroads which have been defunct for a generation. Roads are mentioned, more is said about the airport today and we even bring up bus service, (plans for future) light rail and the fact that Sarasota sits on the Intracoastal Waterway. I have a few more sources to add, but I'm going to call it a (wiki)day and put them in tomorrow.
 * The History Section- I've looked at the history of the history section of this article and it's been this way for a long time (by Wikipedia standards). My plan for the history section is this:
 * Rewrite the entire section in this sandbox. I'm not even going to look at the current section when I write it- if there's something important in there it can be added later.
 * Once the history section in my sandbox is ready, I'll go live with it and move the current section to (the new) History of Sarasota, Florida article. Then I'll work on that article (adding sources, cutting non-encyclopedic stuff, etc). My approach to history is simple: if it isn't an event which lead to what the city is today, it doesn't belong. When people are mentioned, they are mentioned for their role in creating the Sarasota of today... we don't need their life story.
 * Create an economy section for this article (and put it in the top 5 sections).
 * Create a new education section perhaps a few more sections (sites of interest, maybe health care). We'll see how it develops.
 * Add some pictures, cite(I usually cite as I go), and some misc. tweaks here and there and we'll be at B maybe GA level.

Any questions... feel free to add suggestions, criticism, etc. This is just a general outline and I welcome discussions if someone wants to discuss changes. I'll watch this page of course for any comments. Thanks, VictorianMutant (talk) 05:06, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Vandalism being carried into changes
Do not have time to review your changes -- but want to warn you that you now have made many changes following vandalism that was not corrected, so you are carrying those errors into your edits. I presume that you do not know the history of the community -- since you have made no effort to correct those errors. Think you are going to have difficulty because of that as well as the number of contributors to the article as it developed and their comfort with the article as it existed for a long time. 83d40m (talk) 02:37, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * A few notes:
 * "...want to warn you that you now have made many changes following vandalism." I actually reviewed all the recent edits in the past few months. Between my first edit to the page and your edit on the 20th of September, there was one verified incident of vandalism (which was quickly reverted by Tim Ross. Aside from that it was minor copyedits. Hypothetically, if there is vandalism in the article, why didn't you fix it when you made three edits  between the 9th and 20th of September. Instead you made what you called "light edits" on those days. Seriously, this article is flawed for many reasons, but I don't see anything which could be called vandalism.
 * "I presume that you do not know the history of the community..." Unlike you, I don't make presumptions, I deal with facts. Facts such as... the fact that this talk page and the archived talk page are full of posts all saying the same thing- this article is in need of vast improvement. You talk about "the community" yet seem not to understand the term very well. You've edited this page more than any other editor (56 times) but have been largely silent on this talk page(and the archived one). I may be pretty new here, but when someone posts to the talk page of an article I've made major edits to, I think I have some sort of obligation to give my 2 cents worth... That's what you call "community."
 * "...and their comfort with the article..." Are you kidding me? No one (except you apparently) has any sort of comfort level with this article as it stands now. A sampling of comments about this article: "Disaster of epic proportions", "Man, whenever I come back to this article, I notice it just keeps getting worse and worse", "As it is now, articles like this drive people away", "The time has come to make this article fit encyclopedic standards, as opposed to considerations of sentimentality, publicity and prejudice", "This article needs cleanup, bigtime", "where is this article going?" and on and on tell the story of an article which has lost its way, yet you somehow don't see that. Your one contribution to the talk page of this article before today was a silly discussion about whether Sarasota's Nickname is "Paradise." So you felt strongly about what one line in the infobox says, but ignored over a dozen negative comments about the article itself?
 * I don't blame you for the state of the article... it was a mess before you started editing it. You do seem to be the biggest impediment to improvement of this article. The one editor who made sweeping changes to this article to vastly improve it(Texxs) was reverted by you here. But I'm into consensus... let me see what I can do with this article and when I've completed my changes as detailed above... if anyone (you or anyone else) doesn't think it's better than it was before I started editing it, we'll take it to Requests for comment and if consensus is that my version is worse, we'll revert it back and I won't complaint. Deal? VictorianMutant (talk) 04:08, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I will state, for the record, that I fully support the changes VictorianMutant has made to this article. He has been going through and fixing up some of the more neglected or abused Florida city articles, and now that he has come to this one, the only changes he has made have improved it. A number of the changes he has made were ones that I suggested in February of this year,; I had originally proposed a few of them all the way back in August of 2007. The history section of the article is a monstrosity which should be burned with fire; I eagerly await VM's promised sandbox rewrite. He is right; a lot of people were not comfortable with this article, including me. I am glad that someone has the energy and enthusiasm to tackle a big project like this and turn it into something that is both focused and encyclopedic, because it is not either right now.  Horologium  (talk) 01:04, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much for your words. This article has been out of control and it seemed that any positive changes were bullied right out of the article by others in an effort to make the article sound like a combination of a tourism pamphlet and a history of the Ringling family.  more power to you!  texxs (talk) 06:21, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

December 2010
Another edit vandalizing Sarasota by 70.110.69.242 during September 2010 was reversed today after an interval of other edits, including additional vandalizing edits more recently to the same article that were reverted quickly. Blocking the vandal will result in blocking the Out of Doors Academy, from which the edits originate. Administrators familiar with the articles need to examine the edits in the history of the anon for other vandalism that may not have been discovered to date. Progression in warnings should be advanced. _ _ _ _ 83d40m (talk) 03:22, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Feedback
This page does a disservice to those that would find it looking for information about Sarasota. - There are many elements that will create confusion between county and city resources and areas.
 * For example, the article mentions the keys and notes that they are separate. However, immediately, there is continued discussion about Longboat Key. In fact, this is largest paragraph in the first section. It should be removed.
 * The first photo on the page, showing the "Sarasota beachfront," would be better suited to the Sarasota County page, as the city is barely noticeable in the photo.
 * The history section includes many references to Manatee, Osprey, Myakka etc. This content should be moved to the Sarasota County page, where one could discuss the history of Sarasota and the surrounding community.
 * The SCAT busing information should be moved to the county page, as should the information about the airport.
 * At the same time that all of this superfluous county information is included, really important Sarasota information that visitors will want is excluded (because it's related to the county and not the city).
 * There is considerable overlap between the History and Culture sections. The Culture section also seems to focus on history and arts, providing little perspective on Sarasota as a unique natural and active, casual coastal community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture). The fact that the Sarasota-area has undergone a cultural revolution from retirement-focused to family-friendliness over the past decade is completely missed. These sections are overly verbose too.
 * The photos of the old Riverview school are poor and convey little meaning or perspective. They should be removed.
 * My guess is that more people are involved in daily cycling and running (both the city and county areas) than any other sport, but they get only the smallest mention in the Sports and recreation section. This is also related to the content confusion of this article which is specific set apart from the county, but includes many county references.

People visiting this page are likely to be looking for information closely associated with Sarasota, such as the geographic location, area beaches, day to day life and culture. Few are going to have any idea about the separation of the small city and the larger Sarasota County area. If the article is going truly going to be separated from one about Sarasota County, some of the content needs to be moved to that page. The Sarasota County page should then be emphasized and this one deprecated. For example, I would rewrite the introduction as follows.


 * This article is about the city of Sarasota. If you are looking for information about the surrounding Sarasota area, Sarasota County, and local beaches, please visit the article about Sarasota County.

Then I would make the article much more concise, focusing it on the city.

Jsarasota (talk) 15:39, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Andrew McAnsh and Mira Mar Hotel, auditorium, subdivision etc.
Something about this developer and his properties should probably be added? Candleabracadabra (talk) 12:08, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Sarasota, Florida. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20150201113449/http://www.sarasota-manateempo.org/ to http://www.sarasota-manateempo.org/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090314112528/http://audio.thisamericanlife.org:80/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/355.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php to http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/355.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 13:36, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

History of Sarasota, Florida
The history section should NOT be empty in this main article. A summary of history should be included in the main article. Thanks. • Sbmeirow  •  Talk  • 09:07, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
 * , the section how has the expand tag and the History article has been added to WP:CLEANUP. I'm hoping to work on this after my vacation. – TheGridExe  ( talk )  14:54, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Zoning map
Here are the interactive block book maps https://www.sarasotafl.gov/government/development-services/zoning/maps WhisperToMe (talk) 04:01, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Merger Proposal
Formal request has been received to merge Emma E. Booker Elementary School into Sarasota, Florida. Rationale: The school's only claim to fame was that President George W. Bush was visiting when the 9/11 attacks occurred. That is it. Most of the article talks about the events of that day anyway, which is already covered in other 9/11 related articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.118.34.185 (talk) 13:12, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:NSCHOOL regardless of WP:ONEEVENT. – TheGridExe  ( talk )  15:38, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Note that in the event of an American public school being non-notable, it should be merged into that of its school district or a daughter article of the school district. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:12, 9 July 2019 (UTC)