Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRIS information issues

Other issues and anomalies
There are other clerical errors such as Colby Hall being listed as being in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, which is a neighborhood within Newton, Massachusetts. All the other listings in Newton Centre (incorrectely spelled Newton Center were put in with the other 180 or so Newton listings. (See List of Registered Historic Places in Newton, Massachusetts Also I have found entires in the Greater Boston area that from their name would appear to be in one city but are actually in an bordering city. clariosophic (talk) 22:23, 22 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I've noticed or heard of a bunch of similar location discrepancies when working on splitting out Los Angeles from Los Angeles County, and Chicago from Cook County, and Pittsburgh from its county, when creating List of Registered Historic Places in Los Angeles and List of Registered Historic Places in Chicago and List of Registered Historic Places in Pittsburgh. I also agree these are too numerous to detail all of them, but perhaps a few specific examples would add to the main list here.  However, I also am not sure whether we care very much about NRIS being wrong in these ways, as we presumably now have the correct info in wikipedia.  In the case of NHL webpages with erroneous info, it seems more important to get those fixed, because the NHL webpages are sources and directly linked from wikipedia articles. doncram (talk) 22:48, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Comments about coordinates issues
Many coordinates in the NRIS system are spot-on exact, which can be observed in Google satellite map view for many instances where the NRIS coordinates point to a spot on the very roof of a given building.

Some are way off. In the NRIS system, there appears to be an approximately one percent error rate in latitude and longitude coordinates. For example, out of about 300 properties and districts in Chicago, Illinois or Cook County, there were/are three whose coordinates were obviously incorrect, placing them hundreds of miles away. In list-articles I now make it a practice to comment out incorrect coordinates, leaving a statement of what the NRIS coordinates are and stating why I believe that the NRIS coordinates are incorrect. Is it useful to record and report these errors?

Also, there are lesser issues of accuracy, at the level of 20 or 30 yards difference in location. These are commonplace. Many of the NRIS coordinates appear to be based upon application-provided data from many years ago, often derived by tracing out locations on U.S. Geological Survey quadrant maps. That introduces small inaccuracies, because the quadrant maps have proven to be slightly inaccurate, and do not correspond perfectly to current maps used by Google and other services. doncram (talk) 23:10, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Obvious errors in NRHP listing name
I see no reason to perpetuate in Wikipedia article names the various obvious errors in NRHP listing names. For instance All Souls Chapel (Poland Spring, Maine) is listed by the NRHP as All Soul's Chapel, which is ungrammatical since Souls is plural and a possessive apostrophe if needed would go after the s. Current US usage in similar cases dispenses with the apostrophe. clariosophic (talk) 21:04, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Probably what happened here is that NRIS database entry made a mistake. Surely the NRHP application spelled the name correctly.  It is well established, I think, that articles can be placed at names different than NRHP official names.  It is also well known that NRIS system names can be erroneous.  About this one, I think you should move the article to a different name shown in reliable, other sources.  I think you should put in a correction item about this into the system above, under Names, for Maine, to be submitted to the National Register.  With that correction item submitted here, I think you should then update the NRHP infobox name to reflect the alternative.  Please let me know, is this not a clear way forward? doncram (talk) 23:03, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * This was resolved by the article being renamed and an item being started in the Maine section. doncram (talk) 15:56, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Split in two?
This article is almost 300,000 bytes and takes a long time to load, presumably because it has so many links to resolve. Would it be worth splitting it -- half is about the beginning of "Ohio" -- so it might be two articles, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRIS information issues Alabama - North Carolina and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRIS information issues Ohio-Wisconsin?. . . . Jim. . . . Jameslwoodward (talk • contribs) 19:45, 21 October 2009 (UTC)


 * It sounds okay by me. Reporting of issues arriving here is certainly by state, already, and future batching to the National Register will be by state, too.  So dividing should be okay.  If I'm not missing something that someone else might point out within a few days, you should feel free to go ahead and split it out.  I don't see the urgency, immediately, but this does just keep growing and will have to be split.  Thanks! doncram (talk) 22:19, 21 October 2009 (UTC)


 * There's certainly no hurry. Maybe some others will have thoughts about a different split -- everything after the current section 2.51 in one place, then split section 2.xx into two, or maybe three pieces?. . . . Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk • contribs)  00:21, 22 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually most of the stuff after 2.51 should be dealt with before any split is implemented. The article was previously organized by type of issue, and only later was re-organized towards being by state.  Much of what is after 2.51 should be moved into the by-state ordering.  Some should be addressed in other ways.  I'll try to clean up somewhat over the next few days. doncram (talk) 15:48, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * With nothing having been done for a few weeks, I've decided to split out the larger states. We can easily move the unsorted bits into their respective state subpages.  Nyttend (talk) 17:16, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * If the ball was supposed to be in my court, sorry. I wasn't sure the  precedent work had been done.  Anyway, it certainly loads much faster now. Thanks for taking the initiative.  . . . . Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk • contribs)  02:15, 20 November 2009 (UTC)