User talk:MrD9

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Wikiproject; New Jersey
You've already gotten off to a flying start, but I wanted to invite you to participate in Wikiproject New Jersey, which aims to fill in the holes and expand the details of pages regarding New Jersey. Our loosely formed group has no rules or regulations, other than to provide a forum to work together to help make New Jersey a bteer place (at least on Wikipedia). Alansohn 19:15, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Joined. Thanks for the invite. //MrD9 05:43, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

"Township" and other address confusion
It seems you've been doing a lot with municipalities, so I figured I'd ask you about my recent source of much confusion: Why are many of the "XXX Township" municipal buildings (their addresses via their official websites) located in places other than what appears to be the township itself? For example, Cape May County's "Dennis Township" has an address of "Dennisville, NJ" (I did not find a WP article for it. USPS.com yields a result for Dennisville but none for Dennis/Dennis Township. Many other places have "XXX Township" but then the address of everthing in it are located in one or more other places, which is weird when, for example, XXX Community Center is located in YYY, NJ. This all started because I was trying to figure out if people actually use the word "Township" in place names, because up until recently, the only time I ever heard township/borough/village/city used in NJ regarded the Washington townships, Ocean City, Sea Isle City, and possibly 1-2 more, but many pages seem to use Township in their names.

I think I might have lost you in explaining what I'm thinking, but that's just because I'm lost. Could it just be that most places in NJ (I only listed one example, but I've found many in many counties while trying to find out how to "cure" my confusion) are like this and simply that Bergen (where I am from, too) is not? On second thought, despite your living in a "Township," you're probably not the best person to ask because Bergen does not really have any of these "conflicts." Basically, if you or anyone else could explain somehow why many places in NJ have addresses in other places (or places located inside of the first place), I would be very greatful. At least we dont have incorporated places inside incorporated places--I was reading about NY municipalities and was completely lost at how Rockland County only has a few "townships" but that there are many places inside them.

Thanks, and hopefully I did not confuse you, either. And thanks for the WP:NJ invite. //MrD9 05:36, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I went through the same confusion that you went through. Part of the problem seems to be related to what we're accustomed to hearing. Here in Bergen County, I never hear anyone refer to any municipalities by their formal name, other than "Washington Township." I live in Teaneck, but have never heard anyone refer to it as "Teaneck Township" in casual conversation. The next factor up in this area is that post offices overlap almost exactly with municipal boundaries. So people who live in XXX municipality, get their mail sent to "XXX, NJ 07777."


 * Elsewhere in new Jersey this doesn't hold. First of all, there are far more municipal pairs further south, where XXX Borough and XXX Township coexist, so that people are far more likely to call XXX Township by its full name to avoid confusion. Furthermore, many of the townships outside the densley populated areas, are huge. Communities were established within the townships, but never formed new municipalities. But these non-independent communities may be recognized by the Census Bureau as a census-designated place (or CDP), or by the Postal Service for a ZIP Code. Many people will say they "live" in their CDP, most notably in Toms River, New Jersey, which has become for all intents and purposes the "name" of Dover Township, New Jersey. All of the 100+ CDPs have pages, which specify their CDP status, list the associated Township (the Census Bureau only subdivides Townships, never any other type of municipality), have census data for the CDP and have maps showing the CDP's borders within a township (or across the borders of multiple townships).


 * But people also use ZIP Codes to identify their "hometown" which accounts for the greatest source of confusion. I am sure that this is what accounts for the Dennisville scenario. ZIP Codes are proprietary to the United States Postal Service, and the USPS does not provide boundaries for areas covered by a given ZIP Code. The Census Bureau does have a workaround called ZIP Code Tabulation Areas: They figure out which ZIP Code each address corresponds to and then assigns Census Blocks to a ZCTA. All of the Census Blocks with the same ZIP Code are part of the same ZCTA. This works well in urban and suburban areas with classic "blocks," but breaks down in more rural areas. The Census Bureau does have the ZCTA data, but I've never been able to get going on creating all of these pages, or even harder, to get maps to go along with the data.


 * Additional Comment: This is not exclusive to New Jersey. Here in Northern Virginia, there is a city of Alexandria, and in the Commonwealth of Virginia, incorporated cities are totally independent and separate from counties.  There are portions of Fairfax County that call themselves Alexandria.  There are portions of Fairfax County that call themselves Falls Church (the smallest city in the United States by size) even though Falls Church is not part of Fairfax County, and in fact, the parts of Fairfax County that call themselves Falls Church are probably larger in area than Falls Church itself is.  However, I note that nobody outside of my home town of Arlington County ever says they're in Arlington! Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 20:00, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I hope this helps in explaining the issue. Please feel free to contact me with any further questions. I would love to start an initiative to create pages for each of the ZIP Codes in New Jersey that are listed as ZCTAs, but it's more than I could possibly handle. Alansohn 13:54, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Still a bit confused--actually, more shocked. Despite travelling down the parkway and turnpike and many other NJ highways, visiting many places within the state, and going to the shore a few times every year, I never realized that place names around the state didn't quite work as seamlessly as they do in Bergen. I've known about the ZIP-not-matching-with-city thing, but I still don't really get the principle behind having addresses--not necessarily mailing addresses, but physical addresses, such as I live at XXX YYY St, ZZZ, NJ, not matching with AAA Township but instead using ZZZ technically-not-a-municipality-in-new-jersey. Thanks for clarifying this probably as best as it can be clarified to people who are not accustomed to it. At least I finally have some clue on the matter, though, and at least it's not as bad as the NY (and many other states) thing. //MrD9 20:58, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


 * The one thing NJ doesn't have is the village within a township situation. All forms of government -- Borough, City, Town, Township or City -- are independent municipalities that are not part of or have contained within them any other municipality. Remember, that people get mail addressed to their ZIP Code / Post Office, not to the name of their municipality. If you are trying to find information about some organization or entity, if you get their address, you're going to get the name of their Post Office, not the municipality where the entity resides. I'd love to create pages that say "ZZZZ, which covers the PPPPPPP Post Office, Zip Code 07654, serves the communities of BBB Borough and TTT Township." Then detail could be provided based on the census data for the ZCTA. If you want a great example, look up Basking Ridge, New Jersey, which for many years housed AT&T's headquarters. I was sure it was a municipality, but it's not; It's part of Bernards Township, New Jersey. Look up Short Hills, New Jersey for the same scenario (though at least it is a CDP tracked by the Census Bureau). There are lots of exits listed on Highway signs that are post offices, not municipalities. The only solution is to create ZCTA pages. Alansohn 21:18, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

That (what you would like to do) would be amazing/hard--if you ever want to attempt, I'll try to help (provided it doesn't require too extensive a knowledge of using USPS/Census databases, which I don't think I could do without much instruction). I am just as schocked as you must have been about Basking Ridge--and Toms River, for that matter. It's actually sort of driving me insane, because it doesn't make sense... again, the Bergen County everything-matches-up type influence on me. I don't think I'd be able to keep track of the 290 different names for everything if I lived somewhere else in the state. Regardless, at least I was able to update the Bernards NJ DEP report card link to 2005.... Actually, now that I think about it, the only thing I can think of where ZIP codes and towns do not match up in Bergen is Saddle River, New Jersey and Upper Saddle River, New Jersey sharing the same ZIP, and "Upper Saddle River" isn't even an "Actual City Name," it's just an "Acceptable City Name"--I guess the post office thing is why. //MrD9 21:40, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


 * There's so much to do in New Jersey as part of WP:NJ, and the ZCTA task would be huge, unless we can get some help on the bot side. Note that while both Saddle River, New Jersey and Upper Saddle River, New Jersey share a post office, each one is an independent municipality. Right now, I'm focusing on school districts / education sections for municipalities, and municipal formation history for Bergen County. Every once in a while my ADHD kicks in and I'll work on some other megatask. We really need to see if we can get some bot assistance to create pages for all ZIP Codes that are tracked by the Census Bureau and that don't overlap with a municipality. Bots were used to create pages for all of 566 municipalities and all of the CDPs statewide (and nationwide, for that matter). Alansohn 22:11, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

SR/USR: I am aware they are separate, and I was just pointing them out to show how infrequently Bergen Co. munis do not have their own ZIP codes.

I've been trying to help with Mahwah/Ramsey/SR (starting from northwest corner of the county, for order) school pages, but I have not gotten that far because I keep getting distracted "exploring" everything still, plus I have a million things to do other than WP. It also does not help that whenever I find something "weird" or that I did not know about, I end up looking it up trying to figure out why it is that way. The 3 parts of S. Hackensack, for example, did all but make me drive there to see it in real life--actually, the only reason I did not do that was because there would most likely not be signs showing the precise boundaries of the two little sections.

The other thing I'd definately be into helping a lot with (to the point I'd probably start neglecting my non-internet life) would be the Infoboxes for the municipalities, but from what I've seen, there'd have to be more of a consensus on implementing them first. //MrD9 22:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi, came across this conversation via Alansohn's talk page. FYI, there are other Bergen County locales where zip codes don't match up with municipality borders.  07675 is the Westwood P.O., but includes Old Tappan and River Vale.  River Vale even has a P.O. substation, but still uses the Westwood zip.  Living in River Vale, I would recieve a lot of mail addressed to River Vale, and a lot of mail addressed to Westwood.  07676 is Washington Township (Bergen), and also includes Hillsdale.  Go figure.  --ChrisRuvolo (t) 02:23, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. Looking at the ZIP boundaries on Google Earth, it's weird how 07675 is so huge compared to most of the other ZIP code areas around it. But even with those few instances, a majority of Bergen County towns still have their own ZIP codes. I am still surpised, though, that Old Tappan shares one--I've always thought of it as a larger area/town, but then again that has nothign to do with ZIP codes. At least all of the Bergen towns have corrected pages regarding their naming, and hopefully this will spread to other counties, too. (The West Milford/Wayne township thing still has to be corrected, I believe.) Btw, out of curiosity, when you say you get mail sent to yourself saying Westwood, would it be your mail with simply the wrong town written on it, or is it usually someone else's mail? //MrD9 03:21, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Old Tappan is medium sized geographicly, but is not particularly densely populated. Yes, the Wayne / West Milford naming should be sorted out.  Perhaps based on the comments on the talk pages, we can re-list them on Requested moves with better success this time.  And yes, the mail was otherwise correctly addressed, just with Westwood as the town instead of River Vale.  This is because many mailing lists go only by the zip code.  It is sufficient to get the mail to the right location, so I had no problem with it.  --ChrisRuvolo (t) 13:38, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * How would the WM/Wayne thing be done? Is there some form of formal procedure that must be gone though? //MrD9 21:13, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Normally one would just use the "move" link at the top of the page, but this cannot be done where the target has a history that includes anything but a redirect. This is because the history of the target page will be deleted upon the move completion.  Losing history is not allowed under the GFDL license if at all preventable.  So, the solution is that you have to list the page on Requested moves (following the instructions there) and get an Admin to move the page for you.  --ChrisRuvolo (t) 22:29, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Little Falls, Wayne, and West Milford: Page Moves
I did a lot of research and tried to include everything possible so that these page moves are not get denied again. The information is all located at Talk:Little Falls Township, New Jersey becuase it seemed to have the best information of the three pages regarding the previous attempted moves. Additionally, it is listead on Requested moves. Please vote! //MrD9 01:11, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Road stub image
Hey, thanks for the image! I've put it into the stub now and it looks great. Lensovet 22:50, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Welcome //MrD9 22:53, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Bergen County template
Thanks for the missing municipality, Mahwah! I knew I was short one, but I hadn't had the patience to match them up. I saw this in a PA municipality and thought it was perfect. Any thoughts on rolling this out elsewhere? Alansohn 20:43, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * You're welcome. I add almost every article I edit (more than just like a simple grammar mistake or typo) to my watch list, so when I saw Mahwah and Fair Lawn and a few other towns pop up all next to each other, I looked at the template, and I immediately saw that Mahwah (the page I was on) was not there...
 * But yes--it seems like a great idea, and I'm sure as time goes on there'll be more stuff to add to it or something--or there'll be a NJ template or the Town Infoboxes or something that adds to it.
 * And btw, regarding the Template:NJReportCard naming thing (requiring the name), are you ok with how it turned out? I assumed that your lack of response on its talk page meant that you were ok with it because there's no easy way to avoid it... but if you're not, we can try to find someone who can make it work. //MrD9 20:55, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

New Jersey Report Card template
I have my default set to add any page I change to be added to my watchlist. Sometimes I make changes to a page that's not in my (admittedly huge) sphere of influence, and if it pops up to often I just unwatch it. On the subject, I created an article for the New Jersey School Report Card and thught that it would be useful to link to this new page from the NJReportCard template, so that people could understand what the Report Card is. When I tweaked your template to do so, I basically finessed it so that both formats are the same. I still would have preferred the ability to default to PAGENAME, but I've already changed so many pages, and it wasn't really that hard to past in the name of the district / school, so you could take my non-reponse as a tacit acceptance. Take a look at the template as I've changed it and let me know what you think. Alansohn 21:03, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * It's fine, and nice article. The only reason schools and districts were treated "differently" was becuase of the link format; I had not purposely attempted to make the link text different. I like how you put the name at the front, as it resolves any the/plural/weird name issues with the old link text format. Good job. //MrD9 22:21, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll gladly take credit for it, but it's entirely undeserved. I was just trying to pull the "School Report Card" wording out and make it a wikilink, without affecting the other text. Once I made the change, I realized that this finessed the whole District vs. School issue by putting the name up front. Alansohn 23:35, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

NJ Flag
I've been waiting a few days to mention this to you (because your user page has said and still says you're on vacation), but since you've edited stuff recently, I figured I'd just do it now (since either you're still away and checking or you've forgotten to take the message off):

The flag on WP:NJ (Image:New Jersey state flag.svg) differs from the flag on New Jersey (Image:Flag of New Jersey.svg). I think the latter (if I remember correctly) is used more often, but I might have this backwards (it does not really matter).

Since the colors (and even the designs to a minor extent) are very different on each of the above flags, one is obviously wrong (unless I am mistaken), or both are wrong to varying extents. The WP:NJ/first one matches the background color of the flag on the NJ website] more, but it appears that the New Jersey article's (second) flag has better coloring regarding the two women's top halves, but the bottom half appears more correct on the first flag.

I'm not well versed in flag-related stuff, but I do know that many websites have it wrong. Since you appear to have dealt with them before, I figured I'd bring it to your attention, since you probably know more than me (and you appear in the edit history of one or more of them somewhere). I think that they should be "merged" into one that is more correct than each individual flag at the moment, and that all articles on WP using a NJ flag should use this new one (right now, there are at least two versions that articles use). (And I do realize that the one on the NJ site is potentially incorrect itself, but I hope it's not...)

Finally, for my own (and probably others') knowledge, if possible, could you comment on why the white skirt-like things are now blue (if you know)? A google image serach for "new jersey flag" reveals mostly white ones, and the second flag above has white. I think I saw a NJ flag on the Parkway recently, and it (if I recall correctly) was blue, too. Thanks. //MrD9 00:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I've tried to find official descriptions of the flag and its colors, but havn't been able to find much. Officially the flag background is "buff" and the seal background is "jersey blue".  I've found many various descriptions of what RGB values these two colors should map to.  It appears to be up to debate.


 * The state seal is the centerpiece to the flag. The components of the state seal are described in statute, but the rendering of the details is up to each artist.  The newly uploaded flag appears to be more like the official rendering (although with wrong colors).


 * The white skirts appear incorrect. All of the official flags I've seen uses blue skirts.


 * One of the best representations of the flag I've seen online is on wikipedia: Image:250th.jpg. I'll try to use that as a model to adjust the one uploaded to commons.  Also, the one uploaded to commons is off-center.  That should be pretty easily fixable.  I'll try to get a chance to this sometime this week.


 * BTW, thanks for the reminder about the vacation notice. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 15:55, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Welcome (to the last part). Again, if you don't want to do whatever needs to be done (or there's nothign to be done), don't do it, but it just seemed that you were the best pesron to go (of those I've seen, anyway) regarding this issue that's been driving me insane for the past month... especially because some pages have one flag and others have the other. Thanks/hopefully it works out. //MrD9 23:36, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I've made some edits, please review them. Thanks.  --ChrisRuvolo (t) 14:18, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Image:Flag of New Jersey.svg looks much better now. Or at least I think it does. Thanks for improving it greatly. However, should we delete the other version so it's not confused (since the new version is much better than it?) //MrD9 22:13, 7 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Let me know if you notice any other problems with it.  It already has a reference to the other image on commons.  The license is suitable.  It isn't as true to the official flag, but it is a faithful and artistic rendering of the seal.  No reason to delete it IMO.  --ChrisRuvolo (t) 23:22, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

NJ Collaboration of the Week
Thanks for participating in Wikiproject New Jersey. In an attempt to create articles for some of the non-existing pages related to New Jersey, NJCOTW was recently created to bring members of WP:NJ together to work collaboratively on a certain selected topic, which this week is List of Governors of New Jersey. Please help by nominating/voting/commenting on articles on WP:NJCOTW, or by helping to improve articles in the scope of the topic for the NJCOTW. AndyZ 00:51, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

SmackBot and American articles
I'll have some thinks about this. Rich  Farmbrough 09:00 17  March 2006 (UTC).

List of traffic circles in New Jersey
Hi, I'm currently going through the list to clean it up a bit, and I came across the Main & Spruce streets circle in Ramsey. I'm taking it out for now, because it doesn't even look like a true circle, in part because it seems that you can go straight on Main St without ever actually going around the circle. If I'm wrong let me know, but I think that in that case we will need to reword that a bit. lensovet 23:03, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Area code 845

 * 1) You are correct, I do have the telephone area codes for New Jersey backwards on the map.  That will need to be corrected for all of the area code maps that show the New York City region.  Thank you, I will correct these.
 * 2) Per your comment that you didn't know how, the way you include a reference to an image without displaying the image is to use a colon ":" before the name in the link, e.g. to show the Wikipedia logo you are using  50px at the top of this page.  To include a link only without the image, you would use   :Image: instead of  [[ Image:, like this: [[:Image:Wikipedia-logo.png.  Thought you might want to know.
 * Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 19:50, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Connecticut template
I created redirects to Connecticut today for Southwestern Connecticut, Inland Connecticut, Coastal Connecticut, to de-redlink them. I don't mind writing up the articles but I'm confused on something--I'm from CT originally, I can do up something nice for Coastal--easy enough for that. But to me, growing up in Bridgeport and Stratford, "inland" was simply anything not directly on LI sound. Do we really need that as a category/region? It's kind of an oxymoron for a coastal state. As for southwestern, I can write that up as well, as it really should be seperate from the "Gold Coast".

Thoughts on getting rid of "Inland Connecticut" as a category from the template and simply leaving it as a redirect back to Connecticut? If no one objects in a few days I'll just remove it. I posted this on Template_talk:Connecticut as well. rootology (T) 08:12, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

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