Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/FIPS place code: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:02, 11 April 2006

Revision as of 21:20, 11 April 2006

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===[[FIPS place code]] and its subpages===

===Argument in favor by the author===

As I am the person who has created this, I would like to make the case why it should stay as is.

* It is a cut-down version of the complete list, it only includes cities and major unincorporated areas. As is, it just becomes useful as opposed to the complete list which contains practically every ___location in the U.S. bigger than a hot dog stand.

* Where do you draw the line? If you want to set some population figure, say, 50, 100,000 or whatever, fine. But what is the criterion.

* There is the possibility of cutting it by county (borough/census area in Alaska, parish in Louisiana) but I for one am not up to the task of creating circa 3500 separate pages. Now, if you only create separate sub pages if there is several items in a county, but you're still going to have large pages.

*Most of the bloat comes from having to code them for HTML. I think I could try changing them to flat text and they would be a lot smaller. Actually I wish I had thought of that. I'll see if there isn't a way to have both.

* I think this is exactly appropriate for an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia should provide, well, ''encyclopedic'' content, which I would think means it should provide very broad coverage of a subject or an issue. This also includes providing substantial reference material.

[[User:Rfc1394|Paul Robinson]] 20:16, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

* I am looking at reformatting the pages. I use a program to create them. I think if I use a wiki table format instead of HTML I can cut the page sizes by about 1/2. But the data within them is still substantial; take a look at a test version I have reformatted for [[FIPS place code/Minnesota|Minnesota]] and it went from 380K down to 140K. I can see some places for improvement.

*The creation of these tables was a start, and was subject to improvements later on as I - and others - had more experience in how to work with them.

[[User:Rfc1394|Paul Robinson]] 21:00, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

===Other people's comments===

This is just the ''tip'' of the iceberg: I look at [[Special:Newpages|New Pages]], and was startled to see entries like "[[FIPS place code/Minnesota]] ('''390,351 bytes''')" and "[[FIPS place code/Arkansas]] ('''311,887 bytes'''). These are HUGE subpages of lists of geographic codes. The creator is stacking 'em up, one by one. Wikipedia is NOT a primary source, and it's NOT a bunch of lists. [[User:Calton|Calton]] | [[User talk:Calton|Talk]] 07:33, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

** Wikipedia is ''not'' a primary source. These are taken from the USGS files, simply cut down to be more useful than the raw data. The primary source is the USGS files and the exact same information can be found there. [[User:Rfc1394|Paul Robinson]] 20:17, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Line 31 ⟶ 20:

*'''Keep top-level article,''' remove tables from its, '''delete subpages.''' Per Barno and Johan the Ghost. —''[[User:R._Koot|Ruud]]'' 13:51, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

:'''Comment''' I'm with that. A bot for this would be nice, I didn't even know about government produced rankings. [[User:TKE|<font color="maroon">'''T'''</font>]] [[User talk:TKE|<font color="gray">'''K'''</font>]] [[Special:Contributions/TKE|<font color="maroon">'''E'''</font>]] 19:50, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

*'''Argument in favor by the author''': As I am the person who has created this, I would like to make the case why it should stay as is.

* It is a cut-down version of the complete list, it only includes cities and major unincorporated areas. As is, it just becomes useful as opposed to the complete list which contains practically every ___location in the U.S. bigger than a hot dog stand.

* Where do you draw the line? If you want to set some population figure, say, 50, 100,000 or whatever, fine. But what is the criterion.

* There is the possibility of cutting it by county (borough/census area in Alaska, parish in Louisiana) but I for one am not up to the task of creating circa 3500 separate pages. Now, if you only create separate sub pages if there is several items in a county, but you're still going to have large pages.

*Most of the bloat comes from having to code them for HTML. I think I could try changing them to flat text and they would be a lot smaller. Actually I wish I had thought of that. I'll see if there isn't a way to have both.

* I think this is exactly appropriate for an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia should provide, well, ''encyclopedic'' content, which I would think means it should provide very broad coverage of a subject or an issue. This also includes providing substantial reference material.

[[User:Rfc1394|Paul Robinson]] 20:16, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

* I am looking at reformatting the pages. I use a program to create them. I think if I use a wiki table format instead of HTML I can cut the page sizes by about 1/2. But the data within them is still substantial; take a look at a test version I have reformatted for [[FIPS place code/Minnesota|Minnesota]] and it went from 380K down to 140K. I can see some places for improvement.

*The creation of these tables was a start, and was subject to improvements later on as I - and others - had more experience in how to work with them.

[[User:Rfc1394|Paul Robinson]] 21:00, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

:*''Where do you draw the line?'' How about "none at all?" Seems simplest.

:*''Most of the bloat comes from having to code them for HTML'' It doesn't matter whether it comes from too much starch in their diet or from not enough exercise: they are still a form of raw data that is NOT encyclopedic, IS a primary source of data best handled by an external link to the data supplier, and is grossly inappropriate here. --[[User:Calton|Calton]] | [[User talk:Calton|Talk]] 21:20, 11 April 2006 (UTC)