Wikipedia talk:WikiProject North Dakota/Archive1

This archive includes all comments from 2006.

Governors

I have completed all North Dakota Governor articles after John Burke. Things still needing attention: John Burke article needs to be improved, Articles needed for: Elmore Y. Sarles, Andrew H. Burke, Eli C. D. Shortridge, Roger Allin, Frank A. Briggs, Joseph M. Devine. Quality improvement needed for Frank White, Fredrick Francher, and John Miller.--Weatherman90 16:13, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

WPND launch

What direction should we be taking this in? --AlexWCovington (talk) 05:52, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm so happy to see this getting off the ground! Looks like you've been putting in plenty of work, Alex. Let me know how I can be of assistance. --MatthewUND^(talk) 07:15, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Wikiproject ND Templates

I added them today to all of the governor pages that didnt already have them, Then I added some more templates to other pages for all of the senators, congressmen, and attorney generals that didn't have one. That was about 80 total, so we should be pretty much covered for the ND politicians unless there is another area that I am missing. Weatherman90 14:30, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Shields

Hi all, I've made a SVG shield for you guys. How accurate is the shape?

If it's right, I can make all the numbers for you. atanamir 10:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks good for the 2-numbered highways, but there's also a long version for 3 and 4 numbered highways, if you could whip something up. This page has a reasonable, if small representation of the long version (though unlike your images their number placement is way off). --AlexWCovington (talk) 14:21, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

How's that? atanamir 21:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks great! Thanks for helping out! --AlexWCovington (talk) 22:43, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

• Okay; I'll make the shields for the rest of the numbers tonight.

Naming Convention

I know i'm not on this project (maybe i'll add my name on anyways) -- what's the official name for the state higways in ND? Is it just 'state highway X'? I've been working on colorado and have been using State Highway 10 (Colorado) as the naming convention. If ND also uses State Highway X, do you plan to use the same convention as well? atanamir 23:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

List of North Dakota numbered highways lays them all out as "North Dakota State Highway X", though I think we could easily drop "State" and just go with "North Dakota Highway X". I personally feel a disambiguation-style naming convention is inappropriate... but I'd like to hear some other thoughts. --AlexWCovington (talk) 04:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, a problem we're having in many states now is that a lot of the laid-out named were in correct (a part of the blame lies on me in some of the states because 2-3 years ago I went around and typed many lists out all as 'State_name State Highway X', because at the time i believed every state called them that. Shortly thereafter I found out in california they're called State Route X, and etc. etc. I'll go on the ND dept of tranportation page later and find out what he official names are. atanamir 04:19, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Article list

I have managed to complete the list of North Dakota articles just about as good as I can. I would say it is at least 95% complete. If you find any other articles that you think should be included in the project, feel free to add them. Also, be sure to put the {{WikiProject North Dakota}} template on the talk page of any North Dakota-related article you create or come across and add the article to the list. --MatthewUND^(talk) 22:59, 8 April 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! Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 06:46, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Cities of North Dakota

I've spent the last couple of days doing some routine updates to the hundreds of articles there are out there about all of the cities in North Dakota. Now, they should almost all have the city's founding date. Also, I have cleaned up the introductory paragraph for all of the cities. They are now pretty uniform and hopefully easy to read. I've been working on so many articles in an "assembly line" fashion (I sometimes open up dozens of Firefox tabs at a time) and I have done so many edits that it was even suggested by another user that I might be a bot! By the way, should we be placing updates about our work on this talk page or on the main WikiProject page under the "Progress" section? What do you guys think? --MatthewUND^(talk) 08:23, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I would still like to know where you guys think periodic updates belong: the main page or the talk page? --MatthewUND^(talk) 08:51, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, I would say the talk page but I have to admit I'm being a little lax about reviewing it. I personally think the "to do" box should contain all ongoing matters, if only they are links to sections of the project talk page. --AlexWCovington (talk) 01:31, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

North Dakota template

Do you think it would be appropriate for me to go through all of the North Dakota city articles and add the {{North Dakota}} template to the bottom of each article? --MatthewUND^(talk) 05:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I see no harm done by doing this! It is an appropriate thing to do as well. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 16:23, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in North Dakota

Many articles covered by this WikiProject lack photographs. As part of a subcategorization of the requested photos category, there is now a category for North Dakota articles needing photos - to use it, just add {{reqphotoin|North Dakota}} 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 North Dakota-related articles lacking photos. I hope you find it useful! TheGrappler 05:56, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

"Cities and towns"

Every ND county article now includes the "Cities and towns" section. As there are no designated "towns" in the state, should we rename these sections from "Cities and towns" to just "Cities"? I'm not sure how to handle counties that also include census-designated-places that aren't really considered cities or towns (like air bases, unincorporated suburbs, tribal towns). What do you all think? --MatthewUND^(talk) 05:51, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Golf course articles

Thought I should let the other WPND members know that Hillcrest Golf Course is up for deletion and the other ND golf course articles may be in danger of deletion as well. You may want to head on over to AfD and place your vote. --MatthewUND^(talk) 05:25, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

History buff needed

Please check out List of current and former capital cities in the United States and make sure that North Dakota'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   19:54, 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 North Dakota (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) 23:35, 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 North Dakota" 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 13:32, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate your interest in contributing to Wikipedia, and thank you for posting your thoughts here. There is a bit of conflict here, between our own perceptions of North Dakota, and the overall standards for categories that have been used on other U.S. state projects. We had a big fight over Category:Major cities in North Dakota way back when, and I for one still have a bit of disdain for conforming to such practices.

Bear in mind our categories for North Dakota's metro areas are Category:Bismarck-Mandan, Category:Fargo-Moorhead, and Category:Grand Forks-East Grand Forks, as they are all twin cities. The largest city that stands by itself has Category:Minot, North Dakota.

But despite naming conventions, you have got me thinking about the lack of coverage in this area and it is of concern to me; that, I would say, is a bigger problem. Thanks for pointing it out! --AlexWCovington (talk) 16:36, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Image:CurrentNorthDakotaPlate.jpg

Someone's trying to delete the North Dakota licence plate sample image at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion/2006 June 29 --AlexWCovington (talk) 16:36, 30 June 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 ND is here and if there's interest, we can beef it up to look like the newly-created Virginia one plange 05:32, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Hawktree Golf Club

Hawktree Golf Club has been nominated for deletion. Please cast your vote now and let's make sure this doesn't turn into an all-out assault on the ND golf course articles. --MatthewUND^(talk) 05:34, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Grand Cities Mall

Grand Cities Mall is up on AfD. Please vote to keep the article; if deletion passes, every mall in the state is threatened. --AlexWCovington (talk) 21:43, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Results of AfDs

Both Hawktree and the Grand Cities Mall made it through their recent AfDs. I'm glad that several WPND members turned out to help save these two articles. Since we represent ND on Wikipedia, we should always try to make our voice heard when there is dicussion of an ND article. Also, it's good when we can speak with one voice (as we basically did in these two AfDs). There aren't that many ND editors on here, but when we stick togther, we can make ourselves heard! --MatthewUND^(talk) 02:18, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Time to merge some golf course articles

Since we have been accused in the past of having too many ND golf course articles, it would probably be prudent to merge a few articles about small and basically non-notable golf courses with their relevant city articles. Please take a moment to check out a list of golf course articles that I'm proposing we merge with their city articles. --MatthewUND^(talk) 02:20, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Dakota Square Mall

An editor is propsing that the Dakota Square Mall article should be deleted. Not again... --MatthewUND^(talk) 23:13, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Dwight Grotberg

Hello, I have nominated Dwight Grotberg for deletion per proposed policy. Please leave your comments on the deletion discussion page. Cheers, Vectro 17:39, 13 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 19:52, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Clarence Iverson No. 1 and oil industry

It would be nice to have an article about Clarence Iverson No. 1, the first successful oil well in North Dakota, near Tioga, North Dakota April 4, 1951. Also a little more than a bare mention of "petroleum extraction" in the middle of a sentence listing of six items in North Dakota#Economy. Gene Nygaard 12:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia: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 18:38, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

New WPND tag?

I'm thinking of creating an additional template to add to articles the project has been tagging that aren't 100% related to North Dakota; things like the Red River of the North, for example. Given the large number of geographic WikiProjects proliferating, a lot of talk pages are becoming cluttered with these notices (take a look at Talk:U.S. Route 83), so my idea is to keep it short;

This article is observed by WikiProject North Dakota.

This would mean for the article list, we'd have to monitor both the original tag and the oberver tag for updates, though we could create two separate sections of the list for the two tags to make updates a bit easier.

What are your thoughts? I may be thinking a bit far ahead in project coordination, given our level of cooperation at the moment... Would it be useful or just an unneeded hassle? --AlexWCovington (talk) 21:58, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, it doesn't sound like a bad idea to me, but I'm kind of thinking it might end up being rather confusing and a bit of a hassle. It also sounds like it would require plenty of work. Also, are there any other similar "secondary tags" like this being used by other WikiProjects or would this be a WPND idiosyncrasy?

In the case of the Red River, WP Minnesota already has their big tag on the talk page. If we put up a much smaller tag than what we currently have, it would perhaps give the impression that WPND somehow has less interest/influence over the article than WP Minnesota...at least that's kind of the impression that I would get.

Perhaps one thing we could change about our current tag is, instead of saying that "This article is part of WPND", perhaps it would be better to say "This article is within the scope of WPND". That seems to be the wording on several other state WikiProject tags I just looked at.

In the end, I would personally feel that a second WPND tag isn't really all that necessary. What do some of the other participants think? MatthewUND^(talk) 06:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I just changed "part of" to "within the scope of". --MatthewUND^(talk) 07:32, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Looks good! -AlexWCovington (talk) 01:22, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Political vandalism

WPND members are advised to watch out for political vandalism, there's been a string of it around election night. This may also be an opportunity to expand some politician articles. --AlexWCovington (talk) 15:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Bold text?

Hi WPNDers. Just wanted to get your opinions on a formatting issue pertaining to lists in articles. I can't decide if it's good or not good to bold items in some lists. To see what I'm talking about, take a look at "Sites of interest" and "Notable natives" in the Williston, North Dakota article. Currently, I have bolded the items in each list to set them apart from the descriptions that follow. Do you think this is good or bad? --MatthewUND^(talk) 22:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It seems to work a bit better. --AlexWCovington (talk) 15:35, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

U.S. senate elections

I am currently constructing articles for all the North Dakota United States Senate elections. We (so far) are the only state to have articles made for senate elections before 2006 - and I am back to 1976 at this point. I have made a template:

that is being posted on all the articles dealing directly with the elections, but perhaps it should be put on the senators' and/or candidates' articles themselves? Weatherman90 15:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Roland Riemers

Somone has merged the Roland Riemers article into the 2006 Senate Election page. I personally believe Riemers has had an effect on events far beyond that campaign, and the page should be reinstated. What are the project's thoughts? --AlexWCovington (talk) 15:35, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I personally wouldn't be too worried about trying to reinstate the article. To be POV (that's what talk pages are for!), Riemers is a bit of a crackpot and I don't really care if he has an article. Just my two cents. --MatthewUND^(talk) 06:58, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Regional Portal?

I'm not sure if any of you knew this, but there is now a South Dakota Project as well. Maybe it would be possible for these two projects and perhaps others to get together on a Northern Plains portal. Right now, the only other two projects dealing with the area are Minnesota and Iowa, although its possible Nebraska and maybe Missouri might be included as well. I might personally like to include parts of Wyoming and Montana, but as only parts of those states would qualify, I acknowledge it's probably a bad idea. Anyway, I would welcome any responses, positive or negative. Badbilltucker 18:52, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Issues

It doesn't bother me that someone keeps wanting to get rid of the golf course articles. A lot of the 18 hole articles do need to stay especially Bully Pulpit and Red Mike. We may be a small state, but we do have a lot of cool stuff. I'm still trying to finish the North Dakota first ladies, but the state library is dragging it's heels as weel as the other sports for UND and NDSU. TRMF needs an article, and the Scheels article needs a store front picture like the other sporting good store articles. I'd do it but I'm not smart enough to figure it out. I'm sorry I've just gotten a little mad. Long live North Dakota. Nap Time. -Leopold Samsonite 22:57, November 18, 2006 (UTC)

A New Year's resolution for WPND members

I would like to propose a New Year's resolution for members of WikiProject North Dakota: start using the edit summary feature. The summary field is a valuable means for other editors to quickly understand how you have edited the page and, perhaps, for what reason(s) you have made the changes. It's really a very simple thing to do and a good habit to get used to. I should also mention that other editors don't look favorably on an admin nomination for a user who routinely neglects to use the summary feature. Just a thought. Happy New Year!--MatthewUND^(talk) 07:40, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Archive for 2006?

This talk page is getting to be very long. Perhaps we should think about making an archived version for 2006 and starting with a fresh page for 2007. --MatthewUND^(talk) 07:43, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

I just archived the first half of 2006. I decided to leave the second half here at the main talk page because it would look kind of silly to have a totally blank talk page here and because it may be important for editors to easily scan through some of the recent comments. --MatthewUND^(talk) 08:18, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

RfA for MatthewUND

I just self-nominated myself for administrator's status on Wikipedia. As an active member of WikiProject North Dakota, I feel that having admin status would allow me the ability to be more useful to the project and to curtail vandalism and other problems. An admin is able to protect pages that are being bombarded with vandalism and to more quickly revert pages that have been vandalized. I've always hoped that we could get an admin to join the WikiProject so we would have someone to turn to in times of need. Since we still don't have an active admin within the project's membership, I decided to nominate myself. I really hope you will visit my request for adminship and support me. Thanks! --MatthewUND^(talk) 10:41, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

After having seen how this RfA has been going, I have withdrawn my self-nomination. Please read this statement which I have posted on the RfA's talk page. I'm sorry for letting down WPND by ruining this RfA due to an honest mistake on my part. Like I said in my statement on the RfA talk page, the failure of the RfA falls entirely on my lap. I still hope that we can get an admin into WPND in the near future. Perhaps we can do another RfA on me at a later date or perhaps we can do an RfA on another willing WPND member. Once again, thank you for taking the time to vote in this RfA. Like they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? --MatthewUND^(talk) 07:23, 30 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 22:01, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

"Quicklink box"

In the "Quicklink box" (for lack of a better term) at the top of the WPND page, I'm no longer referring to the list as the "Article list". This is because the list also includes categories and templates as well as articles. I really don't know what to call the list, so I have it currently labeled as "List of all things ND". If anyone can think of a better name, go ahead and change it.

I think having these "quicklinks" in a clearly defined box makes them easier to find and cleans up the WPND page a bit. There are also now links to go directly to the article, category, or template sections to add an item. Should save some time, in the long run. --MatthewUND^(talk) 09:25, 31 December 2006 (UTC)