Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Massachusetts/Archive 2

infobox trouble
Can someone help me fix the infobox on West Newbury, Massachusetts? There's a strange dead image link in the middle of it which doesn't show up when i edit the page. I mean you see it when you're viewing the article, but when you click edit this page, you can't see it anymore, so there's no way to remove it. Any help people could provide would be much appreciated.--Alhutch 00:43, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * it's been fixed.--Alhutch 08:41, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Infobox Town MA

 * Whoever did all of the towns beginning with "A", good job! Thanks. --AaronS 02:49, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I just put the Infobox Town MA into another 107 towns tonight, and I'll try to finish the rest off by tomorrow night (there's 170 left or so). There's some problems between the data I'm using to generate the infoboxes and data already in articles.  For example, some of the "Year Settled" and "Year Incorporated" fields don't match between the article text and infoboxes I installed (I'm not sure which is correct; it might vary by town).  Feel free to help out by taking a look through the articles and verifying that the data matches (and correcting it if it doesn't).  Thanks, --CapitalR 10:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
 * (Done towns: Letter A).


 * All towns and cities (except for Boston) now have the Infobox Town MA template in them, with most fields filled in. Please help fill in the rest.  Some statistics about them:
 * All zip codes and area codes were filled in.
 * All dates settled and incorporated were filled in (though some may conflict with the article text and should be researched and fixed).
 * 244 of the 350 city/town website fields were filled in.
 * 340 of the 350 city/town elevation/latitude/longitude fields were filled in. Missing towns are: Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Boxborough, Massachusetts, Middleborough, Massachusetts, Tisbury, Massachusetts, Freetown, Massachusetts, Aquinnah, Massachusetts, Clarksburg, Massachusetts, Gosnold, Massachusetts, Leyden, Massachusetts, Mount Washington, Massachusetts, Tyngsborough, Massachusetts.
 * 302 of the 350 city/town executive leader titles were filled in.
 * Hope this helps, --CapitalR 21:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Excellent work. --AaronS 05:56, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
 * What's the status on this miniproject? How can I help finish it? It seems like we're almost done. --AaronS 21:52, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I've posted the table I used to generate the infoboxes at User:CapitalR/Mass Infobox Data. You can take a look at the table and help finish off the empty spaces.  Thanks for the help, --CapitalR 22:29, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Polar Beverages in Business Section
No article for Polar Beverages, thought it would be a good edition. -Dev
 * I just created one, although it's pretty minimal right now.--Alhutch 08:41, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Another wiki you might be interested in
Since everyone here has professed some kind of interest in Massachusetts, I would like to invite you all to contribute to the Boston Wikicity, located at this link. It's still getting off the ground, and there is plenty of work to be done. We need all the help we can get. Please consider joining up and telling anyone else about it you know who might be interested. Thanks, --Alhutch 10:16, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Help with Brookline infobox
I added the town infobox to Brookline's page, but it seems to have an extra line, that I can't get rid of. Could someone fox this as I am unsure how? Thanks, Reuvenk 18:41, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I fixed it. There was a missing value called "image_town", which has also showed up missing on other town infoboxes. to fix that you just add "image_town = |" under the nickname value.--Alhutch 18:51, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Town Meeting capitalization
Does anyone know the proper capitalization for the types of town meetings? In the articles Town meeting, Open Town Meeting and Representative town meeting, there are a variety of capitalization schemes that I would like to standarize (including in the titles of those articles). For example, should it be "Open Town Meeting", "open Town Meeting", or "open town meeting" when referring to that phrase in an article? I checked on google and found lots of different schemes. Let me know if you have any thoughts on what it should be. --CapitalR 10:53, 7 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I have also struggled with this. I think it is important that we be consistent. It seems right to me to capitilize all of the words in the name of the type of government.  For example, Open Town Meeting, Town Meeting, Representative Town Meeting.  The entire phrase is the name of the form of government.  Like House of Representatives.  U.S. Senate.  It would look wrong to have house of Representatives...  --LWV Roadrunner 02:37, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team cooperation
Hello. I'm a member of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing articles using these criteria, and we are are asking for your help. As you are most aware of the issues surrounding your focus area, we are wondering if you could provide us with a list of the articles that fall within the scope of your WikiProject, and that are either featured, A-class, B-class, or Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Do you have any recommendations? If you do, please post your suggestions at the listing of all active Places WikiProjects, and if you have any questions, ask me in the Work Via WikiProjects talk page or directly in my talk page. Thanks a lot! Tito xd (?!? - help us) 18:46, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Massachusetts
Many articles covered by this WikiProject lack photographs. As part of a subcategorization of the requested photos category, there is now a category for Massachusetts articles needing photos - to use it, just add to the article's talk page. I have only added a few articles to the category so far, but it would be an easy way to make an extensive list of Massachusetts-related articles lacking photos. I hope you find it useful! TheGrappler 08:03, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Best of
Can we get a few lists of the 'Best Of' pages that others can use for inspriation? For example, the best town pages, the best city pages, the best history pages, the best commercial pages, etc? Briancua 17:10, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, this is my work, and I think it's pretty good :) : The Skeleton in Armor--Caliga10 16:58, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Question about 'Notable Residents'
I have been working on the Acton, MA article and have had some discussion with another editor about the 'notable residents' section. Do we have any consistent guidelines (or do we want to create any ?) for what should be in this type of section? Some towns have long lists of names - some of which don't seem very notable. Others have very few. I can see a couple of different approaches: one is to put only historically significant people in the list; another is to include only people who made a significant impact on the town - regardless of their contributions or fame outside of the town. The approach I have been taking is to use Wikipedia itself as the acid test. If a person is significant enough to have a Wikipedia article then they are significant enough to list as a 'notable resident'. But I am willing to be over-ruled on this. I would just like to see some consistency across the town articles. --LWV Roadrunner 02:49, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with your assessment. If someone already has an article, by all means, link it to the town's notable resident list.  But we should not create articles for this purpose, and if there is a non-notable person who happens to be already linked as a resident, chances are their articles will eventually be deleted anyway (someone would just need to clean up the dead link).  I find these alot, and they're almost always people who created an article about themselves in a pathetic attempt at self-promotion.--Caliga10 16:35, 22 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I first spent hours reading Wikipedia a few days ago, for causes related to geographical units like counties and cities. I can't seem to get out of the wikipedia, categories, and talk namespaces and stay out! But I have visited the Pittsfield and Acton articles as well as this WikiProject Massachusetts.  Acton is listed here and Pittsfield is not.  Does that mean someone has (perhaps nominally or incompletely) converted Acton to a standard but no one has done that for Pittsfield?
 * Connecticut (the state article) includes the listing "Tebucky Jones, who currently plays for the New England Patriots of the NFL, lives in Farmington, Connecticut." Here such listings are limited to the county and city articles.  For example, the Pittsfield article names two of the ten major league baseball players born there in 150 years.  The Massachusetts state list is roughly limited to public office holders, although the heading includes public figures.
 * Here and elsewhere there is a lot of discussion of vanity and celebrity listings of people on the pages for locales, and also vanity/celebrity articles on people. Beside the work withthose motives, I suppose some lists and pages will be generated simply because the data is readily available and it feels good to complete somsething.  See Players Born in Massachusetts for example of what is available.64.48.73.24 22:13, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Question about 'Geography'
Many of the Town Articles in Massachusetts include a section called 'Geography'. This is largely a verbal re-stating of the material in the Geography Section on the Town Info Box. I am hesitant to delete this material (I know - Be Bold) without checking with others on this project. What do you think ? Should we delete the 'Geography' section from Town Articles if it doesn't add much to the info that is in the Info Box ?? --LWV Roadrunner 19:05, 21 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I would say leave it. It's a good spot for locals to expand on geographic information that the census bureau doesn't gather.  Sahasrahla 23:26, 21 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with leaving it. This section is standard across town articles in many different states, and it is a good place for others to expand. --CapitalR 06:56, 23 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Agree--leave it. I've used this section to link towns to their neighboring towns, which is useful info that isn't replicated in the geography box.--Caliga10 16:36, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Request for feedback on Acton, MA article
I have done some extensive work on this article over the last month and would appreciate feedback on it. I would like this article to be a 'recommended article' for Wikiproject Massachusetts. Please put feedback on the Acton talk page so others can comment, too. Thank-you.

--LWV Roadrunner 12:58, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

History buff needed
Please check out List of current and former capital cities in the United States and make sure that Massachusetts's capital cities are listed accurately. A word of warning: the page does contain quite a bit of complicated wiki formatting, so if you're not comfortable editing it, just post your changes on the talk page and someone more experienced will apply them to the article. JEK   19:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Nominate articles for Portal:United States
I've worked for the past month to update Portal:United States and keep it better maintained. Though, I think the Portal:United States would be even better with broader participation. One way to do that is instead of choosing the "selected article" myself each week, if others would nominate articles and help make decisions. (same goes for pictures, though these are stocked up through July 29) If there is anything related to Massachusetts (or anything else related to the U.S. - culture, music, literature, geography, history, politics, ...), please nominate. I'd also like people to weigh in on the nominations and help select what should be featured. Thanks. --Aude ( talk contribs ) 23:26, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

New "People from [city]" Categories
Hello, everybody. I am the bozo who just recently created the new subcategories in the "People from Massachusetts" category. I thought that some of you might want to know why they were created, and why they often have so few pages in them.

The majority of the states have "People from [state]" categories which have at least 200 entries, sometimes over 1,000. This is clearly an unworkably large number for anyone wishing to use the category for research purposes. In 8th grade in Rapid City, South Dakota, the social studies class asked us to write, over the course of the year, reports on two or three people who were or had been residents of the city. Because of that, I have reason to believe that they could be used and probably are used for research purposes. To make such research easier, I looked at the list of metropolitan statistical areas and basically entered in one new category for each metropolitan statistical area.

I know that many of these categories might well be, in the eyes of you who know more about the cities in question much better than I do, misnamed or otherwise faulty. I apologize for any mistakes I may have made along those lines, and I would welcome any corrections, including deletion, that any of the rest of you might choose to make. With that in mind, I have also generally populated the categories with only one or two names, to ease in the process of deletion or renaming.

I thought you all should know why these categories were created, and felt some degree of responsibility for letting your know. I wish you all the greatest good fortune in making the coverage of your state in Wikipedia of the greatest scope and quality possible, and I hope that I haven't annoyed too many of you by my recent actions. Badbilltucker 13:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Military
I am with the Military History Task Force. I have come upon some article concerning Massachusetts and added them to your Military article sections. Feel free to added any additional inputs to the article and responses would be appreciated on my talk page.--Oldwildbill 10:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Copyright/plagarism issue: Massachusetts Attorney General
I recently added a "possible copyright violation" tag (copyvio) to the Massachusetts Attorney General page. The Wikipedia article, written substantially by User:Markles, contains whole section copying from the Official AG's page at http://www.ago.state.ma.us/index.cfm. I suggest that you check the other pages in your Wikiproject to make sure there isn't other such material.--Assawyer 23:31, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Braintree, Massachusetts
I note that both Braintree, Massachusetts, and Quincy, Massachusetts, claim to be the birthplace of John Adams. Any idea which is right? Badbilltucker 20:34, 1 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Theoretically, both are right. He was born in Quincy, which was at that time a part of Braintree.  Speaking historically, he was born in Braintree.  Speaking geographically, or in a contemporary context, Quincy.  Sahasrahla 22:40, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Invite
Wanted to let you know that WP:BIOGRAPHY has added a "work group" called Politics and government, and so wanted to invite you to participate on any biography-type articles. The section for MA is here and if there's interest, we can beef it up to look like the newly-created Virginia one plange 05:25, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Requested move "Boston, Massachusetts" to "Boston"
There is an ongoing survey to move the Boston city article to the unqualified name (without the state name). Please join the discussion at Talk:Boston, Massachusetts. --Polaron | Talk 05:44, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Editors needed at UMassWiki!
If you're watching the University of Massachusetts Amherst article, you may have noticed it growing and growing and growing. It's gotten very large, and there are questions about what to do with all the information which may not meet Wikipedia notability standards if split off into separate articles.

Well, there is a place where all useful, interesting and fun information about UMass Amherst is welcome. That place is UMassWiki. I founded UMassWiki over a year ago. It's picked up steam since then and a lot of information has been added, but there are still a lot of gaps. The skeleton is all there in terms of categories and lists, but we still really need people to fill in those red links and expand all the stubs.

Aside from being a useful compendium of information about UMass Amherst and the surrounding area which is far more in-depth than this Wikipedia article can ever be, one of my hopes for UMassWiki is to be a fun resource as well. The criteria for inclusion of information is less strict on UMassWiki, and I'm really hoping to pick up some of the lore and legend that makes UMass what it is, for instance legends and ghost stories about dorms, trivia about certain buildings, and facts and tidbits about the surrounding towns that would never cut it in a "professional encyclopedia" but are interesting and useful to the UMass community.

Please consider contributing to UMassWiki. It's a well-maintained wiki, open edit (no account needed!). My ultimate goal is for the wiki to become a resource useful to every segment of the UMass community, from high school seniors researching schools to current undergrads and grad students to alumni looking to relive a bit of the past. We can only accomplish this together with help from wiki editors like yourselves. --Neurophyre(talk) 21:37, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Invitation to new WikiProject
A new WikiProject has been started, and may be of interest to members here. It is WikiProject National Register of Historic Places. It covers all listings on the Register, in all states and territories. Should you be so inclined, please feel free to join. And spread the word to any other interested parties. -Ebyabe 19:44, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 19:03, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Boston Neighborhoods
I suggest we create a Boston Neighborhood section - There are already several articles on this topic and we could clean and standardize these

Climate
Massachusetts lacks a section on climate. Jcam 21:19, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Massholes
Doesn't anyone else think that Massholes should be with this wikiproject instead of New Hampshires? Caf3623 00:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Not sure if I even approve of the term. It seems to stem more for jealousy than anything. We may drive a little erratic but who has not gotten stuck behind a NH driver slowing to a stop through the "fast lane" on the pike only to realize that they do not have a fast lane pass and they back up into you.

Cowhampshire
How about creating a cowhampshire page?

WikiProject Boston
Looking for members to join WikiProject Boston

Created Middle East nightclub article
I Created an article about the The Middle East (nightclub) and its notability is being questioned - Add your thoughts to the page. Markco1 23:31, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 22:11, 29 December 2006 (UTC)