Forum:County Pages Idea

Forums: Index > Watercooler > County Pages Idea

I have not noticed this on this site, but then there is so much here I could have missed it. Perhaps we should have county pages for each county in a state. Have indexes of people and places pages from the county on each county page. Does this sound useful at all? --Will 23:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Robin's first response

Will, that's the plan. But someone has to create them. I expect every county of every country deserves its own page, as soon as there's some material about the county. We should at least have a category for each county that reaches that stage, with subcategories and/or links to the indexes you mention; then a page (listed at the top of the category page) can follow as soon as there's more than a paragraph or so about the county. See Category:Allegan County, Michigan for an example of one of the many existing categories (which, like most, has no separate county page yet). (I don't think it's a good idea to have an individual's page in a county category unless he or she never lived anywhere else; but we'll see how it goes.) If you're writing a page about a city, township, hundred, or other place, please include its county category in that form. Some of the larger units inside a county may get their own categories eventually. Robin Patterson 15:36, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

So, do we have a master location starter? I would imagine a page to select country, when you click on that it has links to states/provinces, when you go to them you can click on counties, etc, etc. If we have a starting point, I could volunteer to start on making the links with basic pages. --Will 17:00, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

The "starting point" is Category:Places. But it's useful only for planning a category structure, whereas the creation of the categories is from the bottom up. I included a sentence (now in bold) above about how that happens. But Zeph has probably already created more than half of the U.S. state and county categories. What would be valuable as the next stage is to create a page about each county so that it can include descriptive material as well as links to related pages that aren't in the county category (such as a genealogical society that covers several counties). That page has its category link with an extra tweak - a pipe and an asterisk - so that it lists at the top of the category, eg [[Category:Allegan County, Michigan|*]]. Robin Patterson 02:05, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Now see where I have started what may be the first county page: McCormick County, South Carolina. Please copy/improve as much as possible! Robin Patterson 04:54, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Check out [1]. What we may want to do is a massive import from Wikipedia, cutting out a lot of the detail extraneous to genealogists---such as the FIPS codes. The nice thing about the Wikipedia treatment of this is that some nice person has included state county maps. Very helpful for genealogists. This maybe something that we can get from the Wikipedia management as a single download. Would certainly save a lot of time, especially if they included the state/county images. Bill 13:51, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Bill, it's a redirect page! Now we have our own List of counties of the United States but it needs work, such as the exact copying of some templates. Robin Patterson 11:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Robin, Great!---but there is a massive amount of template/image copying that would be needed. Is it possible for us to ask Wikia to transfer the images, etc, wholesale? That would save a lot of time, rather than manual copying of each image, etc. Bill 14:06, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't know. I doubt it. Ask on the mailing list. There will be lots of images but relatively few templates to copy, I expect. Robin Patterson 12:38, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Bill's offering of tabular county lists

Not saying how to do this, but this problem was explored a bit previously. I've salvage some of the coding to create a page that displays a tabular list of US states, then a page with a list of counties for one state (Virginia). (Virginia is unusual. It has Independent Cities that have nothing to do with the surrounding counties. In effect, they are separate counties).

U.S. State Data

U.S. Virginia Counties

I would think that within each county you would want a set of data types, e.g., Marriage Records, Census Data, Cemeteries, etc. Before going very far adown the road on this you really need to think through the issues of how all of these pages are to be titled. If implemented this is going to be a very large project. Potentially many many thousands of pages. Getting it half built, and realizing that the name choices aren't the right ones, would create an awful lot of work. Its the carpenters adage: measure twice, cut once. Bill 19:35, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Zeph's broadening of the subject

I would encourage people to take the "envelope" approach, it is familiar with everyone: start with the smallest and go to the largest:

Individual Name/Person

Street Address

(Township Name, if County is divided into Townships)

County Name

State/Province

Country

NB: For the United States, please use USA not US. "USE" - the United States of Europe - is talked about at least at the broad theory level, as is the United States of Southern Africa.

"USA" is a noun (which I don't mind seeing used wherever appropriate); for the adjective, please always use "U.S." - see the Central Wikia standards. Robin Patterson 02:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Therefore, it would be:

Census Data for Willis County, Virginia, USA (this page can have = = subheadings for years = = )

Census pages are discussed at Forum:Census pages - no need to discuss them in detail here because they will be linked in a number of ways irrespective of what the page names are. Robin Patterson 02:38, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Counties in Virginia, USA or List of Counties in Virginia, USA

or Townships and Counties in Virginia, USA (if Virginia has Townships)

Caution - unless they have compact pretty tables such as Bill displays below, these may be no better than the category listings. Robin Patterson 02:38, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

After further investigation, noting for example that Georgia has 169 counties, I think Bill's idea may have distinct value. We don't want 169 county pages (several starting with "C") cluttering a state page that is trying to list census and cemeteries under "C", for example. I'm going to follow the Wikipedia categories even more closely. Robin Patterson 04:54, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Marriage Records from Robinson County, Wellington Province, New Zealand

Death Certificates filed in Cook County, Illinois, USA

See also: Cemeteries in Michigan

Respectfully, Zephyrinus 01:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

I wrote several paragraphs in reply but my ISP cut me off and I hit the wrong "refresh" sequence and lost the lot. See you tomorrow. Robin Patterson 13:42, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Cautions from Bill

This is not a trivial problem. To solve the problem someone needs to understand more than anything else, how the dataset is going to be used by the majority of end users. That's the majority of end users---not how you personally would use it, because your needs may be different. No scheme is going to be efficient for every user, and no scheme is going to be efficient for every search conducted by any given user. The objective is to make the scheme match the most common needs of the largest number of potential users. Hard problem.

Usually, what you want to do in setting up an access scheme is to find the item that most folks are going to key on first when they start looking for information, and place that item first---sort of the largest common denominator that will help people with the least amount of information to drill down to the actual information that they need. If you pick the right scheme most people are going to be able to drill down quickly to the information they want. If you pick the wrong scheme, you end up with a lot of frustrated people. And you don't want frustrated end users---because they soon stop being end users. Bill 16:17, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

"Search" may be the "key" word, so to speak. If the search box function is working properly, the precise form of the page names is not important for searchers, as long as the page name reasonably describes the contents and therefore allows the searcher to choose the right hit and probably not need to "drill down" at all. For example, a page called "1840 census" may contain very little actual information but it may be the best-looking hit in someone's list and must therefore have links that help the reader find most or all of the other pages on the subject of "1840 census". Robin Patterson 02:58, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Where page name consistency scores highly is where a searcher is browsing categories or lists. If the word order is consistent, the searcher will soon work it out and know which part of the list or which subcategory to jump to. But if it's a jumble, like the pages in the "WeRelate" category list I referred to at Forum:Census pages, the whole list has to be browsed, which is OK if it's half a screenful but not OK if it's many screenfuls. Robin Patterson 02:58, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Where to use complete names, not abbreviations

Sounds like this is out of my hands. But it does lead me to another question. When we enter place names in our genealogy pages, should we be typing out the words completly. As an example:

Polk Township, Atchison County, Missouri

instead of

Polk Twp., Atchison Co., MO

--Will 19:33, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Elrondlair---I don't know about that. Seems like this is a user driven site, and its a group kind of thing. We just happen to be touching on a significant issue. I've concluded that I don't personally want to spend the time working collateral developments. Developing this site as a data base could be a fairly heavy duty task, and would need many folks working on it. YOur thoughts on this are good, so are Zephyr's, and of course, Robin's. I don't know what the right answer is. But at the moment, I'm not in a position to think it through. So I've just made some observations. I suspect that Zephyr's Cemetery page is going to pave the way for people interested in other aspects of the problem. And I really don't want to put a damper on anyone's contributions in this area. So perhaps I should just shut up. If I'm not willing to cook, perhaps I shouldn't comment on the cooking.

On your final question, I'm fairly sure Robin would go for the full spelling. I personally am not consistent. Bill 19:49, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, full spellings for anything that could end up as a link to another page. Our place pages and categories should match the Wikipedia page names wherever practicable so as to minimise the amount of changing we do when copying from WP. But second and subsequent references within the text need not be in full. (They can still be links, though, if you use a pipe, eg: [[Polk Township, Atchison County, Missouri|Polk Twp]]). Robin Patterson 03:07, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Back to state and category pages and nesting

Well I could make state pages, but I am not on how to make things a category page. If it can be made a category page later maybe I can help. As for spelling thing out, I think personally I will start spelling out everything, before I get too many pages on here to change. --Will 19:52, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

See above (my second response). Robin Patterson 02:05, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

I've probably succeeded in confusing things. There are two (perhaps more) separate problems here. What I was really thinking of was the way that you nest article sets. What others are talking about (and I probably inadvertently slipped up and started talking about as well), is the name of the article itself. For the article name, its not that critical, but generally I think Zephyr's envelope idea has real merit. Its also easy to remember since it follows the style of a mailing address: eg., Cemetery Name:County:State:Nation. For a hierarchy of articles, each set of articles placed in separate "folders", you probably want it the other way around to facilitate accesses: Nation:State:County:Cemetery Name. There the start I pointed to

U.S. State Data

USA Virginia Counties

Works well---but incorporate Zephyr's point about U.S., versus USA. But then, where do you put the Data Type? is that a series of subsets under counties (ie, all cemeteries in the county, all marriage records for the counties, all....? If you do it that way, then when some one is looking up data for a person born in Rockbridge co, then they have it all together in one folder. But maybe you want the data type to occupy the highest level of the hierarchy, e.g,

[[USA Cemetery Transcriptions}}

USA State Cemetery Transcription

USA Virgnia County Cemetery Transcriptions

Bill 23:00, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Progress in subsequent weeks of April

Bill has renamed and expanded his USA Virginia Counties. Well worth a look. Long page names with slashes in them are a bit of a mouthful but have some merit in standardisation. Meantime, I've been copying and adapting more from Wikipedia. Very easy if one is proficient at copying and pasting. Hardly any typing needed. In particular, links to categories and other pages need no changing if the target page names have been copied exactly - which includes the capitalisation or lack of it. (Our founder did not fully appreciate the value of sticking to standards.) Some of Bill's new pages will be able to have cross-linking with "mine" - see, for example, Rockbridge County, Virginia, where I'm still working on making as much as possible look good and be useful. Robin Patterson 05:49, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Robin. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Consider these pages you reference as "experimentation". There are so many ways to cut a layer cake, that its hard to confine to one particular arrangement. You're quite right, page names like "USA/Virginia/Rockbridge/marriage records", are a mouthful. So I usually add a piped alternative name to simplify things---ie, "USA/Virginia/Rockbridge/marriage records|marriage records". As to layout, I'm not sure that what I'm doing is compimentary or additive to what you are doing. I may be simply duplicating effort. From a large scale development perspective, there's really too much stuff that has to be imported from Wikipedia to make this easy. The clickable state-county maps on Wikia are really good navigation tools---but importing all of the stuff that you'd have to have to make them work, is really time consuming. Like yourself, there are things I'd like to focus on---which is mostly my personal family history. But there are also things that I think are important for the growth of the site.

One thing we need to think about is whether or not we want the site to become a "data repository". I had something like that in mind when I started working---but that's a lot of work---and there are other data repositories out there that are far ahead of where we are---like USGENWEB, etc. Do we really want to duplicate that effort? There are considerable advantages to doing something like that on a Wiki---still, I don't know that I personally want to devote the rest of my life to bulding something like that. There are entirely too many interesting things that can be done with this site.

I should probaby add that for my part duplicating modern day information that's available on the Wikipedia seems unnecessary. Few of us are likely to need to know the current population statistics of any given location or the details of current local government, so on the Rockbridge site I've tried to focus on the information that would be needful to follow up on family history. Hence maps, and links. Sites that have long-term viability (like Rootsweb or ancestry) probably don't need to have the data deposited anywhere but where it is. Personal sites are often very useful, but do not have long term viability. So those may be the sites whose inforation needs to be preserved here. But of course, then you run into copyright issues, and we should secure the site owners permission to place here if we go that route. Bill 12:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Zeph Semi-Returns

I'm not quite ready to read all of this, but I did want to comment on a red flag which I saw in Bill's post.

We really shouldn't use "/" at all. Maybe I'm just an old fart - no, I am an old fart and I remember that "/" always, always had to be avoided in file names -- it caused the computer file operating system to assume what followed the slash was in a different computer file directory.

Now, perhaps this isn't a problem in modern browsers with modern operating systems. But there are a lot of old systems out there. I can tell you stories of dial-up modems when I was in Russia - and some developing nations have one T1 connection for the entire country (or so I've heard). They can only survive with MS-DOS. But, those are stories for another time. Email me sometime, Bill, and we can do coffee . . . .

Unless you really want to have an entire subdirectory devoted to Rockbridge, why not just avoid this potential problem by using some other character on the keyboard; it seems easy enough to avoid this "problem". Anyway, again, I'm probably just an old fart.

Best,

Zephyrinus 00:07, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Zephyr

Sorry, but the formalism of Page Name/Subpage/Sub-subpage....

is fixed within the underlying programming. That's the way you have to do it if you want to use subpages.

You don't HAVE to use subpages, but they have their advantages. And no, if you are using a system so old that it gets the MS-DOS willies about using slashes in file names, you probably aren't able to do anything on the wiki anyway. Bill 00:51, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the slash for subpage has certain advantages over other symbols, the most obvious being that each subpage displays an automatic backlink to its parent page. See Cities:project:Subsidiary pages for the advantages colons have. Robin Patterson 13:15, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

"Model County, Statename" articles

Will's welcome return to active editing has inspired me to come up with a model (or what we sometimes loosely call a template) that people can use when not wanting to copy much from Wikipedia (or if it's an abolished county so they can't). (We can easily adapt to create a Model Borough, Alaska and Model Parish, Louisiana and near-equivalents for other countries when the main one is near consensus.

Please see Model County, Statename and a slightly worked example at Tulsa County, Oklahoma.

Would you all please look at it and fill its talk page with ideas for improvement. (And Phlox is welcome to "fix" the Commons template if it's "broke" - there is a category for Tulsa County but not a "page".)

Robin Patterson 15:24, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I think we should xfer the article pretty much as it is, then let people subtract stuff that is irrelevant. A bot could do the vast majority of the work, though a cleanup pass would undoubtedly be necessary.

This would mean a vast import of templates though. I am pretty good at esoteric templates, but it is a hassle if we have same name templates here that do something different. Knowing myself, such a huge task of pretty dry work will mean I will just run out of steam, and it will be half done. Just being honest.

Easy to do a bot though. Let me know if you want to go this route. If you got a "before" and "after" ideal transformation that you think a bot could do (nothing requiring subjective judgement calls- only something that can be done with a set rule- if it has X in the line, or Y anywhere in the article, then nuke/ comment out the line/paragraph/template string/ section up the the next section header. OK? ~ Phlox 16:04, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

What "vast import of templates"? Give us a ballpark figure and a "category" name so I know what you're concerned about. (I agree 101% about "is a hassle if we have same name templates here that do something different" - I've changed some of the "US state" ones that Zeph created, because they clashed with WP templates of the same names and much greater utility.) Robin Patterson 06:30, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

I dunno- it was you guys's proposal. We could start with the UK and US, for a start I suppose. Category:Counties of the United States and Category:Counties of the United Kingdom. I would imagine we'd want to move the other english speaking right away- eg Canada, NZ, South Africa & OZ. There must be at least 20 counties per US state, so this will be a pretty substantial influx- a few thousand pages. Plus, people in the US basically came from everywhere, so really, it's not just Anglo world. I am interested in particular localities of Switzerland, Germany, France, and Russia. Just pointing out the scale of the proposal... Anyway- if we are talking basically the world here, then I was just saying we could potentially run into a template import problem. But I am perfectly happy to do nothing on the propsal of running a bot at the problem, or to move them and leave you guys to survey whether or not there is a template problem. I will write it so that the import is reversible (assign them to a unique cat so that I can run a delete bot on it).

Let me know if you want me to do just the UK or just a particular state in the US for a starter.~ Phlox 17:32, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

We don't need to go to Wikipedia for that sort of category. See List of counties of the United States. BUT still no answer to my questions. I didn't propose importing any templates. (I did propose making copies of the current model (loosely known as a template) so that any Alaska borough or Louisiana parish would be catered for without needing any extra fiddling, and the same sort of copy for other countries. But that's a mere dozen or so "templates", none imported.) Phlox then talked about a vast import of templates. WHAT TEMPLATES? Robin Patterson 12:19, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that we are being a bit loose in what we call a "template". From my perspective, the thing most needed from Wikipedia with respect to counties, are the county maps. Those are very handy to drop in on a particular article to show where someone was living---or for other reference purposes. I'm not sure anyone besides me is making use of those maps, and I'm content to draw them over as I need them. However, that probably means the ones I draw over are going to get named whatever they get named, rather than following some specific pattern. Besides, I often fiddle with them to show something in particular, so others probaby wouldn't want to use that same image. If there was an import project doing this all at once, they'd probably follow some standard nameing convention. At anyrate, there are several different versions of the county maps on WIkipedia, all useful for different purposes. If that's the kind of thing that's being referenced as a "vast import of templates"---the observation is accurate---there are a very good many of these maps---they just aren't really templates. It might be useful to set them up so that they could appear as transcluded items---just type in {{:StateCountyMap}} and you get the corresponding map image inserted. But I don't know if that would be really useful. With some exceptions, people don't really use templates all that frequently---one of the reasons being its hard to remember the specific code needed unless you are using it a lot. For most of us its an occassional thing that you have to look up each time you need it---and so probably don't bother to look it up, but create the thing anew each time. And I bet that's the way it works on Wikipedia too! Heck, only someone who is doing a major project is going to bother with most of those templates. Just too much to remember. Chasing grannies and grandaddies is a lot more fun. Bill 16:41, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

What number of templates? Really I don't know- I was just guessing and I don't really want to spend time estimating it. I just know from experience that everytime I want a WP article I seem to run into yet another template that I have to import (EG- the multitudes of flavors of infobox templates for example). I just don't want to dick with stuff like that, especially if they have imbedded CSS classes that we don't have on this wikia. It's a dang pain to get them to look the same. I suspect that counties are fairly normalized due to the vigilance of the WP thought police. heh heh. So anyway, I will just move a state or so over and if they look ok we can expand from there.

While maps are useful (it was the first thing I did with counties), I have found that especially for prior period, it is really amazing how many generations will stay in the exact same place. Maybe not so amazing, since we all are aware that mass mobility is only a recent phenomenon. It just is stunning when you look into church records and see the exact same neighbors in the same district a century later. It really helps to know something about the area- which are relatively close and associated by agricultural activity, and which are not associated closely. -~ Phlox 21:20, 20 September 2007 (UTC)