User:Thnidu/Philadelphia parks

I thought it would be useful for us to have a complete list of the city's parks, whether adding it to WP or not: at least it would be useful for seeing what articles we might want to add.


 * Edit 20:13, 29 June 2015 (UTC): What I didn't know about: Fairmount Park! That will make things a lot easier.

I went to the Parks & Rec website, but their search engine failed me:

I got a very nice letter back:

Here's the agreement and disclaimer lawyerese I had to agree to in order to download the data (URL):

The data was in a .dbf (database file). I opened it with a spreadsheet program (OpenOffice.org), saved it as .xls, sorted it by name instead of object-id, and converted the result to a wikitable with excel2wiki. The column headers include format information, which I've deleted from the table; if anyone cares, the original headers are OBJECTID,N,10,0 NAME,C,100 DISTRICT,N,9,0 ADDRESS,C,50 ZIPCODE,C,5

The database contains 166 entries. I'd expect that to be the number of parks, but there are eight entries for "Poquessing Creek Park", with different addresses and several zipcodes. I didn't notice any other such multiple entries, but there are some sets that may be comparable, such as "Vine Street Cover" and "Vine Street Park".

I have no idea of the reasoning behind the OBJECTID values; they may well be arbitrary and meaningless outside the database.

List of parks

 * The level 3 subhead makes it easy to edit the table without scrolling through the collapsed parts.
 * If the park's name is bolded, it's a link to the existing article about the park. The article's name may not be the same as the name in the list: e.g., the table entries for "Pennypack Creek Park" and "Pennypack on the Delaware" are both linked to Pennypack Park.
 * A park name that is linked but not bolded should point to a temporary or draft article in user or project space. Such articles should be deleted when no longer needed; see Help:Editing FAQ.