Talk:Shelby House

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Shelby House which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 14:15, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

The notice was regarding the 2nd of two requested moves that affected this article, at Talk:Shelby House (Botkins, Ohio). The result was this disambiguation article was moved from "Shelby House (disambiguation)" to "Shelby House". --doncram (talk) 15:15, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

city and county names identifying places

There's been back-and-forth editing recently between two editors on a point that has bedeviled me and others in other disambiguation pages involving NRHP items. This is about whether and how to show location of places, in terms of city and county as well as state.

In this edit one editor calls for something less redundant, without repeating state in particular. I am one of those most responsible for putting in place the somewhat duplicative wording, but am sympathetic to the request. What other wording, for one or two items would you suggest?

An advantage of the somewhat redundant style wording is that it can stay mostly the same for items that are currently primary redlinks (with supporting bluelinks pointing to county NRHP list-articles) as for items that are currently bluelinks. The wording is the same: "X House (Town, State), listed on the NRHP in Y County, State", whether or not "X House (Town, State)" is a bluelink or not (which determines whether "listed on the NRHP in Y County, State" is a bluelink or not a link. The wording stays parallel with a mix of items. Again, what alternative wording is suggested, that shows both city and county, for an article with target name "X House (Town, State)" which is covered in NRHP list for "County, State"? --doncram (talk) 03:48, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

You could just say "Shelby Family Houses, Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky" but the county isn't really necessary to disambiguate the entries on the page. Station1 (talk) 05:46, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I think it's unnecessary to include both city AND county. It's also unnecessary to mention -- for every single entry -- that the item is on the NRHP list, and it's contradictory to the guidelines for disambiguation pages, but I know you've participated in multiple past arguments defending your convictions that a) this info must be included and b) the page must be a disambiguation page that ignores the guidelines, instead of a set-index page that effectively would have no guidelines to follow, and while I've always remained baffled about your reasoning, I'd much rather cede to you on that matter than start another one of those discussions.

But going forward on the basis that it is absolutely necessary for every single entry to mention that it is listed as a NRHP, that still does not mean that every entry must be needlessly redundant in the way I am protesting here. Just eliminate the state and/or county from the NRHP list reference. For example:

• Charles and Letitia Shelby Todd House, Shelbyville, Kentucky, listed on the NRHP in Shelby County

or

• Charles and Letitia Shelby Todd House, Shelbyville, Shelby County, Kentucky, listed on the NRHP

or

• Charles and Letitia Shelby Todd House, Shelbyville, Kentucky, listed on the NRHP

or for an entry that has a dedicated article and thus does not need to link to any NRHP list:

• Thomas Shelby House, Lexington, Missouri, listed on the NRHP in Lafayette County
• Thomas Shelby House, Lexington, Lafayette County, Missouri, listed on the NRHP
• Thomas Shelby House, Lexington, Missouri, listed on the NRHP

Listing the state twice is the part that looks worst and provides absolutely no benefit or information whatsoever. Propaniac (talk) 15:11, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

About set-index articles as an alternative, briefly, I don't believe there's a readership for NRHP places that coincidentally have the same name or similar names; i aim to serve readers who are trying to find out what is the article name for an NRHP place and/or to verify there is no current article. This is unlike ships, where a series of ships are named after one another and there is coherence between them so a set-index article works and gets wp:SHIPS editors out of the disambiguation editors' scrutiny. If there are non-NRHP places like a college dorm named "Shelby House" or a publishing company named "Shelby House" I would certainly want them included. The purpose is disambiguation. Disambiguation editors such as JHunterJ have been very clear in the past that just applying "SIA" label to what is really a disambiguation page does not cut it, does not get the dab page out of disambiguation guidelines/policies. So mainly it does not work to go with "SIA" labelling.

I work to fix the guidelines/policies on disambiguation pages when they don't work in application to dab pages with NRHP items. The guidelines/policies are wrong if they seem to force things that are unhelpful in application to these pages. Setting aside what is helpful or not, isn't that clear, that a policy developed/written for other types of pages is wrong and needs refinement if its application to these pages is stupid? I believe that the dab pages with NRHP items that I work on do comply with all disambiguation guidelines/policies.

About Propaniac's specific suggestions above, i am not bothered by the state name appearing twice, but I am fine with the first ones, as in:

• Charles and Letitia Shelby Todd House, Shelbyville, Kentucky, listed on the NRHP in Shelby County

and

• Thomas Shelby House, Lexington, Missouri, listed on the NRHP in Lafayette County

Of course, there are counties named Lafayette in more than one state, but in context it is pretty clear the link would go to a list-article about NRHPs in one county that will be in one state, already named on the row. In the second and third suggestions, the bluelinks would link, surprisingly, to a list-article about NRHPs in a county when they appear to be linking to an article defining NRHPs. I think it is an imperative to avoid unnecessary surprise for readers, so I don't like the 2nd and 3rd options, which give no good suggestion what the link will go to. I think other editors would enter in to delete such links or the links would otherwise be unstable with other editor changes to "fix" them. In general, I would like for these dab page items to be stable. The supporting bluelinks will all go away eventually when the NRHP articles are created, so it is not worth too much editing back and forth. I basically want for the NRHP items to appear, to not be subject to deletion, and to be reasonably accessible to NRHP-interested readers and editors (which, in larger dab pages means having them in a sensible order for easy lookup, which is most naturally by state then town/city). Dropping second usage of "State" in an item doesn't help or hurt really, IMHO, so it is fine by me. --doncram (talk) 15:40, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

From MOS:DP#Individual entries: "These pages are to help the user navigate to a specific article...The description associated with a link should be kept to a minimum, just sufficient to allow the reader to find the correct link." I can think of no way that this guideline is met by describing every single entry as being listed on the NRHP. How can that help the reader distinguish which link they are looking for when it applies to every link? As I said, I'm willing to accept it rather than argue about it, but including it is not complying with the guideline.

If you want to adopt the first format I suggested, that's fine with me. And yes, the reason we don't need to list the state with the county is because it's obviously going to be the same state that the city is in. Including it hurts the aims of those of us who prefer efficiency and clarity over useless clutter--which is, again, one of the central tenets of the guidelines for disambiguation pages. Propaniac (talk) 16:07, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your further thoughts. It happens that all the entries currently on the Shelby House dab page are NRHP-listed. I've learned from experience with other dab pages that non-NRHP entries will get added. It doesn't work to state at the top that all of the following items are NRHP-listed places; other editors will add in the college dorms, the publishing houses, the actors and athletes named "Shelby House" and not update the top stuff. It seems necessary to say at each item that the place is NRHP-listed. So in the aggregate across many dab pages having NRHP entries, and across time, it seems helpful to identify on the individual items which ones are NRHP-listed. That actually is pretty informative: it tells a reader the place is possibly a historic house museum, possibly an unmarked but historic place, like others near where they are. Just to have "Shelby House (Botkins, Ohio)" gives no indication at all what kind of place it is. It would be also okay by me if the place is identified as a historic house museum (if it is) or describe it in some other accurate way, instead of identifying it as NRHP-listed. For the red-link ones (only one on this particular dab page), all i tend to know is accurate is that the place is NRHP-listed. Consider another dab page, say Dunn House, where most of the entries are primary red-links.

About what is clutter vs. what is helpful to provide clarity, that is a subjective judgment. I am sure there are editors who would be attracted to a rule that stated a supporting bluelink MUST be properly described, and that displaying "listed on the NRHP in Lafayette County" is against the rules because there are multiple counties of that name, so that it MUST instead be labelled "listed on the NRHP in Lafayette County, Ohio". I do know that there are many editors who have previously insisted that every NRHP mention must be spelled out. So that every instance of supporting bluelink on a page of 100 NRHP items, must be spelled out as "listed on the National Register of Historic Places in ...". It seems to me that editors often get very adamant how things MUST appear, based on their looking at one or two of these dab pages. In the one or two they look at, their recommendation might be fine, but i find it often does not work as a general rule to apply to all NRHP dab pages. And, myself, I would prefer for rules or practices that are the same across all of these, really for efficiency. I don't want to have to describe more complex rules and manage transitions for when more of the redlinks turn blue, for example. --doncram (talk) 23:24, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I strongly disagree that it's necessary to list a characteristic that applies to every single entry on the page, on the rationale that there may, theoretically, be another item added someday to which this characteristic would not apply. By that logic, every single time a disambiguation page is created, every entry would have to be described in the most specific possible way, just in case some other similar topic eventually exists. You couldn't differentiate songs with the same title by who performs them, because what if the same performer eventually writes a second song by that title? You couldn't differentiate towns of the same name by what county or state or country they're in, because what if someday someone founds a second town of that same name in that county or state or country? If another topic gets added and you need to differentiate it from the existing topics, you can edit the description of the existing topics. You don't need to pre-emptively differentiate the existing topics from future ones that may possibly exist.

I am similarly unconvinced by your argument that there must be editors who would insist, for no rational reason, that the state must be included in the county-NRHP link, and so we must therefore include it to accomodate these editors who have not appeared nor presented any rational reason for such an opinion, or to accomodate a rule that does not exist that would require us to behave irrationally. But I should point out, when I listed the above examples of formats I would find acceptable, I neglected to include the option of omitting the first mention of the location. In other words, if you feel so strongly about including both the county and state in the entry, I would have no objection to using this format:

• Charles and Letitia Shelby Todd House, listed on the NRHP in Shelby County, Kentucky
• Thomas Shelby House, listed on the NRHP in Lafayette County, Missouri

As for your thoughts about conformity among dab pages: I would be thrilled if you chose to apply this more rational formatting to all dab pages listing NRHP options. But for now I'm going to continue to object to making this particular page worse simply to match the poor choices made on other pages. If you're ever actually called upon to explain why this page doesn't look like the others, feel free to refer such questions to me or just to this Talk page. (And I'm pretty baffled as to how you think it would make any explanations or tasks more complex to simply omit the name of the state from the piped link description.) Propaniac (talk) 14:54, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I do agree that not every potentially distinguishing characteristic needs to be mentioned, pre-emptively. And it is hypothetical that there might emerge editors who will object to dropping the state mention and leaving the bluelink imperfectly described. I already agreed to your dropping the 2nd state mention, as in the first examples above.

About omitting the first mention of location, i.e. dropping the town/village/hamlet name, I think that would be a poor alternative, as that is usually the primary, most important identification of these places, i.e. where they are. Usually readers will know or recognize the town name and find that most useful, rather than the county name. The county name appears in these really because it is required as part of describing the NRHP list-article that is required to be linked in by disambiguation editors. If it is present as a requirement in many/most items in a dab page, to me it then seems helpful (not required by any explicit policy) to provide that info for the other items. The county information is usually secondary, but it does help in identifying places. I think readers, unaware of MOSDAB intricacies, would wonder why is the helpful county info provided for some items but not others? It looks unprofessional to be patchy that way, i think, so in many of these pages i have gone to some trouble to provide county info for some items where it was not already required to be provided as part of a supporting bluelink. If ALL of the NRHP items on a page have articles, so supporting bluelinks mentioning counties are not required for any of them, then dropping all the county mentions actually seems fine to me, as the issue of unprofessional patchiness is avoided. I guess i prefer an all or nothing type practice here. If N out of 100 items are required to have a county mention, it seems wrong not mention county for the 100-N remaining. If N is 99, don't you agree? If N is 75? 25? I think it is simplest in a way, and looks professional, to provide county info for all, until it can be dropped for all. --doncram (talk) 16:31, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

But again the county info is actually really helpful to some readers, for some items. Some of the placenames are tiny, nearly unknown hamlets in remote unincorporated areas of counties, for which supplemental info of county is helpful for readers from a given state. I presume the town/village/hamlet name is usually the most helpful, but i don't happen to know in many cases which is the most helpful, btwn that and the county name. Providing both actually serves more readers for more cases, i assume. --doncram (talk) 16:37, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

It's very common on disambiguation pages (both cleaned-up ones and trainwrecks) for different levels of information to be provided for different entries, particularly entries where one is a bluelink and one is a redlink. When linking to a redlink, you have to provide more description so that you can include a bluelink as well, but when linking to a bluelink that same level of description is often unnecessary. (And occasionally, a redlink's description can become rather convoluted when it's forced to fit in a link to whatever article actually mentions the topic. For example, if the entry for a redlinked song has a bluelink to the article for a TV series that features the song, that doesn't mean that every other song on the page needs to mention whether that song is also featured on a TV series, simply for the sake of conformity among all the entries.)

I still really, really do not buy your argument that a disambiguation page where some entries look dissimilar to each other, or dissimilar to entries on other disambiguation pages, will cause any kind of damaging confusion to readers or editors. Two reasons come to mind: A. A massive percentage of disambiguation pages are messy, and I'm not talking about the kind of issue we're discussing here; I'm talking about pages that are totally lacking in order or logic, where entries are thrown in indiscriminately and you can barely figure out if the topic you're looking for is even listed. And yet, somehow, users get through them and I've barely ever seen even a comment about such chaos from a casual user. So I think they can cope with a neat orderly page where one entry doesn't look quite the same as the others, even if they don't understand why. B. Whenever I see anyone add an entry to one of the many disambiguation pages on my Watchlist, there is about a 95+% chance that they will format it differently than every other entry on the page. The page can link to ten songs, all in the exact same format, and someone will come along and add an eleventh song and manage to do every possible thing differently from the ten that are on the page. Which leads me to believe that this site's general readership does not possess a great recognition or respect for maintaining conformity on these pages. Propaniac (talk) 21:41, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Although, that being said, I don't totally disapprove of the notion of making all the NRHP entries look the same. I just don't think the NRHP information needs to be included at all except when needed for a redlink, but I am willing to accept its inclusion, including the counties if you wish. I just loathe the inherent redundancy of listing the state twice. And for all your allusions to hypothetical readers who may be confused about entries that don't look the same as other entries, or piped links where the description doesn't precisely match the linked title, I cannot believe there aren't just as many readers who are thinking, "Why do all these entries list the state twice?" Propaniac (talk) 01:31, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I also don't totally disapprove of letting the NRHP entries become different, i.e. dropping the "listed on the NRHP in X County, State" construction for an item that has obtained an article, at least in some dab pages. I think it is a matter of some subjective judgement about what is best. If this were a real encyclopedia, there would be marketing staff who would run focus groups and perform other real market research and sort out more accurately what is best for the most readers. However, I was remembering another point to consider, too, that on many church dab pages for a long time there were a huge number of random additions of individual churches, by just anyone. I also helped maintain one church list-article which I eventually took off my watchlist after fighting the good fight for too long. But I think the problem was lessened by the good effect of my being forced by disambiguation editors to carefully add supporting bluelinks "listed on the NRHP in X County, State" to redlinks and the fact that that wording was kept when redlinks turned blue. The NRHP mention is very effective at conveying notability, and clarifying for readers that just any local church does not need to be added. I know there are dab editors who will swing by and delete all unsupported new redlinks every so often, but why not make it clear and dissuade the adders who will just get frustrated with a negative experience. The repeated mention of NRHP for most or all items on a dab page serves a purpose that way, for the church dabs and others. I do think it has helped.

I am also reminded of this by, just now, Station1 deleting mention of NRHP and county for several items on the Masonic temple (disambiguation) page (which i just reverted, adding a note to Talk page referring to here). I think Masonic temples are, tho not churches, a lot like First Presbyterian Church or other churches that seem to many users as notable, when most such places are not notable. Keeping "listed on the NRHP" in is good there for that purpose. This purpose does not apply so much for Shelby House, where there are not a lot of local Shelby Houses of some religious order where readers are likely to think that if some are wikipedia-notable then all are. --doncram (talk) 00:42, 12 June 2010 (UTC)