Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Historic sites/Assessment

Request for Assessment
I might have missed it, but how do you go about requesting assessment for an article covered by the Historic Sites wikiproject? One that I'm interested in being assessed is the Marksville Prehistoric Indian Site and would like to know if it qualifies from being moved from Start-class to C-class. There are other articles I'm interested in having peer assessed and wondering what the process is for that. Americannomad1776 talk

GA rating not showing in table
I've tagged a few GA class articles for this wikiproject but they are not showing in the current status table & I can't work out why. It may be related to the category names but I'm not sure - can anyone else figure out why?&mdash; Rod talk 08:29, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorted it was my own error when tagging the articles.&mdash; Rod talk 08:36, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Importance tagging
I think "High" importance should be reserved for only the main article about each register and the top level list-article for its entries. 9nak has been giving "Top" importance ratings for certain South Africa sites which are very interesting ones and i am glad 9nak is calling them to our attention, but I think we need some other mechanism for us to call others attention selectively that way (a newsletter, or a wikiproject-featured article of the week for reading if not for collaboration). Currently I don't think we should give out Top rating for anything. About the South Africa or other specific historic places, perhaps editors can split them between Mid vs. Low rating, using Mid to mean the really important ones within the given register? Could these guidelines, or some variation upon, be used for a while, until the WikiProject comes to some decisions about its priorities? doncram (talk) 22:36, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not even sure we should use importance ratings in a general sense that most WikiProjects use. I really like how WikiProject Biography has either Top or none. This takes out a lot of bickering, yet lets us identify the content the project focuses on most. That way if someone assess an article as mid, low, or high-importance it wouldn't be categorized under any importance. It would also allow us to maintain a central "list" of the content that has a greater level of importance than the rest of our articles. §hep  Talk  00:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm confused. I was following WikiProject Historic sites/Assessment by tagging two World Heritage sites "top" and the two SAfrican sites of greatest national important as "high". There is a guide. I'm following it to the letter. What exactly is the problem? 9Nak (talk) 10:34, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The problem is that this is a draft and nothing is even close to finalized. §hep  Talk  10:39, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Then can we clearly identify it as such until it's ready for implementation? But I'm still unsure on two points. How is coarse-grained differentiation (Mid vs. Low) any help? And where is the opportunity for bickering? We have the World Heritage Site list for Top and can use various notability metrics (visitor numbers, media coverage, historic significance) for High. Seems QED to me. 9Nak (talk) 11:55, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, thanks 9Nak for watching here and explaining. I see now you were closely following the guide put in at WikiProject Historic sites/Assessment, which i didnt understand before.  I think that we do need to consider that a Porposal only, and I guess label it that way.  It seems very well-written, well reasoned and clear to follow, which are all good qualities for such a rating scale.  Nice job, actually, Stepshep(?).  But I think it is currently unworkable for the project, because it would immediately put 878 World Heritage Sites into our Top category.  I think that Registers and the single, top-level list-article corresponding to a register need to be highly rated, and that we should leave room for the group to choose and denote articles that we explicitly decide to work on.  I kind of like giving out power to anyone who arrives with knowledge of a very local register, say the St. Lucia one, to get their register and their top-level list slotted right in at some high importance rating.  Conversely, I wouldn't like to effectively turn away someone arriving with good intentions, good ability to go and take pics of all the local places, and perhaps even having good accomplishments already.  For example, what User:Cbl62 has done with the LAHCM system is pretty amazing and I would want to welcome not insult anyone similar, early on, even before they did anything much.


 * Certainly the World Heritage Sites deserve our attention as world citizens, and I am feeling personally a bit under-educated for not knowing much about them, but I don't think our wikiproject should take over from wp:WHS wikiproject. Perhaps as decent people interested in historic sites, we have a basic moral obligation and ought to individually join wp:WHS and to work within it to ensure that all the WHS sites become well-covered in Wikipedia?  Perhaps wp:WHS has priority schemes for which of the WHS sites get higher importance ratings?  I am also biased for WHS Stonehenge to be highly rated here in wp:HSITES, as I would like for its image to serve as an icon for this project.  If only so that I can call it "going henging" when embarking on a photo trip. :)


 * I did like the effect of 9Nak's identifying a few top South African historic sites. To follow that idea, perhaps we could add a column to the table of registers, to allow identification of a top few historic sites in each register?  In many national-level registers, it may turn out that the top ones chosen by wikipedians here are also among the nation's WHS-designated sites.  It would be nice to allow/ask a wikipedian who is "owning" a given register to use and show their unique expertise among us.  Certainly it could be a good topic of discussion, if more than one of us turn out to have favorites within a given register.


 * About Mid and Low, I don't have a strong opinion about how those might be used. doncram (talk) 11:39, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I was asked at my Talk page whether wp:HSITES tagging was being done, and it was noted that at least one of the top lists shown in our table of registers is not tagged. I note there are only a few articles tagged High importance now. Is there sufficient agreement here to tag all the register articles and their corresponding top list articles as High importance? doncram (talk) 02:44, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Tagging World Heritage Sites and NRHP sites or not
For now, I think we should view wp:WHS and wp:NRHP as included automatically within Wp:HSITES, no need to tag any of their articles (except their top level list-article and their heritage register definitional article). I guess same for Scottish castles, too. Any tagging done is wasted effort, i suspect, because revisions to their templates could add them to Wp:HSITES, instead, if that is the joint decision eventually reached. doncram (talk) 22:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree with you, I think. If an article has a banner for WP:NRHP or any other historical site project we don't need our banner there. I compare this project to how "WikiProject United States" is a parent project of the 50 different state projects, WP:US doesn't have their banner on every page that has an Ohio or Alaska banner. Is that what you're thinking as well? §hep  Talk  00:15, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If they are not tagged for this project how would the articles get included in article alerts, cleanup listings, stats etc? In the UK Geography wikiproject we have had these debates about articles which already have county project banners & whether they need UK Geog banners as well - the result of discussions was that they did need both banners otherwise they would be missed by taskforces etc working on particular issues. Is there some technical fix (parameters or whatever) which would enable those already tagged with NRHP to be automatically included in this projects coverage without adding the banners?&mdash; Rod talk 08:50, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, the banners could be modified to put them all under our project, but I really don't like that idea. I think we should almost treat NRHP like a task-force in a sense. Article alerts can be transcluded, there can be more than one cleanup page and many projects use more than 1 set of tables to display their WP1.0 stats. It's not a banner problem, we have WPBS to keep them tiny. It's the fact that covering every article about a historic site will be a huge task. NRHP already covers their articles very well and I don't see a need to categorize where another project very similar to ours has good control. Look at how the Music projects operate. §hep  Talk  08:57, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes its a huge task & we are not really going to know how huge until a bot starts tagging - is anyone working on setting this up?&mdash; Rod talk 09:20, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If you give me a list of categories I can do the taggings. Before we do that though, we need to decide if/how we're going to use importance. §hep  Talk  09:22, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * OK starting in my Sandbox at User:Rodw/Sandbox/HScats which people are welcome to edit or move to somewhere more appropriate. What level of detail to you need or can we just say the top level cat is X & automatically include all subcats or do you need the subcats listed?&mdash; Rod talk 11:30, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I used to do subcats with no problem, then somebody screwed up, they called an RfC about it even if I'm thinking right. So now we can only work on full category lists, "blind" recursing isn't allowed by BAG. I'll generate a list of all the subcats for you and we can fish out the bad ones. That sound good? §hep  Talk  00:26, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep if you start with Category:World Heritage Sites and Category:Heritage registers as the top level ones & produce the list we can then ask everyone to eyeball them & identify any which may contain articles inapropriate for this project.&mdash; Rod talk 08:39, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * We can know the size of the wikiproject in advance, before tagging, because there are a finite number of registers in the world and each has a knowable count. I think we can further decide to start some Task Forces, perhaps one for the U.K. and one for California among the first, pretty soon.  Categories associated with a Task Force would get tagged differently, so that a Rating X Importance table would be generated for each. doncram (talk) 11:52, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * But we can't know how many articles there are, or how many are still needed until the bot tagging. For example of the 440,000ish listed buildings in England & Wales the majority don't have articles yet. I suspect even amongst the 6,000 Grade I less than half yet have articles.&mdash; Rod talk 14:16, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I recursed through "World Heritage Sites" and got over 1,000,000 articles/cats/templates/dab/whatevers (and most likely multiple duplicates). I'm in the process of trying to get the computer to filter the list (50MB) down to just categories, but keep crashing AWB. I'll report back as soon as I get a solid list of cats. §hep  Talk  23:48, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Bot requests
It's been mentioned at the main wt:HSITES page, and above, that a bot could do tagging of articles (add the project banner to talk pages). I'm not entirely on board about adding the HSITES tag to every article in NRHP, WHS, and other "child" type wikiprojects, but I also don't want to stand in the way of some good effort. Perhaps some narrower bot requests can be defined?

For the California Task Force, I would support having a bot run to tag all members of Category:National Register of Historic Places in California, however. It should also tag members of Category:California Historical Landmarks and Category:Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments and those in Santa Monica and other local designations, and also the California Ranchos list members. This would pull all the covered articles together for this Task Force and address the general purposes Rodw explained for tagging (at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Historic sites. Before requesting a bot though, we should get the California Task Force banner coding to work properly (currently it does not).

For World Heritage Sites, I'd prefer to wait until I and User:Lvklock have issued some new list-articles on WHS sites, and then after that until we may accomplish a merger of WHS into HSITES.

For NRHP sites, i think the general purposes are already served by NRHP wikiproject itself: it lists the GA and FA articles as examples, and it provides a count of NRHP articles, and so on.

For U.K. listed buildings, should a U.K. or England task force be set up first?

What could any other bot request do, otherwise? Could a bot be set up to identify historic site articles that are not already part of NRHP or WHS categories? doncram (talk) 18:30, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Once banners are added a cleanup listing can also be generated, but the setup I tried (see WikiProject Historic sites/Cleanup listing) didn't work & I can't work out why. I've left a note at User talk:B. Wolterding but if anyone else can work it out that would be great. It also means more articles get picked up at WikiProject Historic sites/Article alerts.&mdash; Rod talk 18:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Assessments
There has been no discussion here for three years. I've just taken a look at the categorisation of articles into Top, High, Medium etc importance and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Maybe there was a plan, but it hasn't been carried out.

Here's a plan:
 * 1) Top Importance: All the articles listed in boxes 1 and 2 of WikiProject Historic sites should be classified as Top importance.
 * The articles and lists from the lower boxes should individually assessed. Some of the regional categories may to narrow or may be already included in a broader category e.g. List of Town of Oyster Bay Landmarks is included in the broader Top Importance category National Register of Historic Places, and ought not be included separately in Top Importance.


 * 1) Top Importance : generic articles and lists.  These should be major: List of historic houses in England is major, List of Ancient Greek temples is major. List of Town of Oyster Bay Landmarks is not major.
 * 2) Top Importance :The best of the best: only those individual sites which are of great historical renown: e.g. Acropolis of Athens, Westminster Abbey, Taj Mahal, Great Pyramids of Egypt, Uluru, Great Wall of China, Chitzen Itza, Angkor Wat
 * 3) High Importance: All the individually listed World Heritage Sites that do not include the elite group listed above.
 * 4) High Importance: There are other sites of enormous heritage significants which have not been listed as World Heritage Sites simply because they are relatively secure, and priority in processing by the organisation is given to those sites that are under threat.   This would include many cathedrals, basilicas, palaces, castles, public buildings etc that are well-maintained by church or state and have never been listed as World Heritage Sites. It would also include some battle sites, industrial sites, bridges, historic rural and important natural sites.
 * 5) High importance: Regional lists, where it is assessed that the cultural importance is sufficiently high. States should appear here.  Ancient individual cities and towns should appear here.  Most towns would not be eligible for this list unless they have a nationally important core of historic buildings eg. Bath.   Very few villages would be eligible for the High Importance list unless they have a nationally important group of preserved buildings, e.g.Lavenham. Only one correctly titled article ought to be in this section for each locality: e.g. Grade I listed buildings in Bath and North East Somerset
 * 6) Mid importance: All those other buildings and sites which fall within the category that in the UK are designated "Grade I listed buildings" or similar in other countries. This includes many fine precincts, churches, mansions, palaces, street, squares, villages etc, that are of significance historically, but are of national rather than world wide significance.
 * 7) Low importance: Locations and individual features that are regionally significant, or of relatively low national significance, or are an individual part of a location of greater significance: e.g. Within the City of Bath the Royal Crescent would be of Mid Importance, but an individual Georgian house would be of comparatively low importance.
 * Amandajm (talk) 05:29, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Rating for Cueva de las Manos
Could someone from the Wikiproject rate Cueva de las Manos? It currently has no rating from the project but it is rated in plenty of others. If an uninvolved editor could stop by and help out it would be much appreciated. Thanks! Tyrone Madera (talk) 18:11, 28 April 2021 (UTC)