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Wisconsin Project‑class

This page is within the scope of WikiProject Wisconsin, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of Wisconsin on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.WisconsinWikipedia:WikiProject WisconsinTemplate:WikiProject WisconsinWisconsin articles Project This page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

@ Topeka Sam has raised some issues with articles surrounding Wisconsin towns, including our current naming conventions. Usually, we tend to name town articles with conventions such as Akan, Wisconsin; Madison (town), Wisconsin; or Germantown, Washington County, Wisconsin; and in the article text we say something along the lines of "Madison is a town in Dane County, Wisconsin, United States." Topeka Sam suggests that instead we should say "The Town of _______ is located in ______ County, Wisconsin, United States" in the ledes of town articles. On the one hand, we tend to shorten the names of cities and villages to their WP:COMMONNAME (e.g. "Milwaukee" instead of "City of Milwaukee"), but on the other hand, geo articles for other states such as Iowa and Michigan tend to use "Township" in titles and in-text (e.g. Iowa Township, Iowa County, Iowa: "Iowa Township is a township in Iowa County, Iowa, USA."). Topeka Sam is starting to win me over that maybe Wisconsin's articles are inconsistent with geo articles for other parts of the country, but I think we need more people's thoughts before making so many changes to so many articles. Does anyone know what sources we should use to gauge if Town of ______ is actually the WP:COMMONNAME for Wisconsin towns? Happy to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter. CoatGuy2 ( talk) 15:19, 5 April 2023 (UTC) reply

CoatGuy2 nicely summarized the issue from the naming perspective. I will offer another view, that naming many places the same has lead to factual errors. Last night I spent roughly an hour looking at the coordinates shown for towns, and I couldn't find a county (I only looked at ten or so) without multiple errors where coordinates for communities or CDPs were shown for towns. Because the template calls for coordinates to be shown twice, the town is shown with two different coordinates. Another resulting shortcoming is factual content for communities being attributed to towns. Examples would include post offices described for 36 square mile towns and a photo of "downtown" for a 70 square mile town. A few articles are badly confounded. The names have caused a quality control issue and calling towns by a distinct name would help. Topeka Sam ( talk) 16:27, 5 April 2023 (UTC) reply

As both a Wisconsin resident and someone who's worked on Wisconsin community articles for a while now, I still find the town thing confusing, but here are my thoughts. For towns that share a name with a city (e.g. the defunct town of Madison), they're always prefixed with "Town of" in practice to avoid confusion. For towns with unique names, it depends on the town. Larger towns are sometimes commonly referred to by their name without "Town of", like Grand Chute (recent news: [1] [2] [3]) while smaller towns are more inconsistent. For example, in Vienna in the Madison area, I got this mix of stories when looking at local news: [4] [5] [6]. That's one headline with "town of Vienna" vs. two with just "Vienna", but the ones with just "Vienna" are more local and still call it "town of Vienna" in the article itself. And of course, this might all vary depending on the conventions of any given news outlet, and some of the really small towns might not have much local news coverage to examine in the first place. So good luck making a consistent policy out of all that. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction• Creation} 01:30, 6 April 2023 (UTC) reply

• Interesting! I hail from the Eau Claire metro and all of the news outlets almost exclusively use "town of X" regardless of any potential name confusion, like the mention of Bridge Creek, Wisconsin or my NBC affiliates usage of Lincoln, Buffalo County, Wisconsin in this [7]. I wonder what is seen the Green Bay and Milwaukee markets? -- Dolotta ( talk) 22:07, 11 April 2023 (UTC) reply

Milwaukee area stations tend to say the name of the place without distinction (unless reporting on municipal government), with the exception of the few where there is still a "Town of". So if the story is in the City of Brookfield, it will just say, "Brookfield"; but if it's in the remaining fragmented Town of Brookfield, and it's relevant that it is (police jurisdictions, etc.) the story will say "the Town of Brookfield". -- Orange Mike | Talk 22:17, 11 April 2023 (UTC) reply

Another option would be to reconsider what a town is. A political subdivision created primarily to provide road and trash collection services can't realistically be considered a "community."

Even if the term is adequate for some purpose, it is totally inadequate to inform and restrain your contributors.

A long month ago I picked Fond du Lac County (randomly) and looked at its towns. I quickly found three with two different coordinates. It was easy -- I just looked for similarly named villages, CDPs and unincorporated communities.

As I am addressing a group of motivated editors dedicated to this website, I must ask you not to correct these goofy errors for a while so everybody who really cares has a chance to look for themselves.

I hope this motivates someone to continue to troll me. I'm not wasting any more of my time, but I don't mind wasting yours. Topeka Sam ( talk) 04:38, 19 May 2023 (UTC) reply

• I don't have strong opinions on the styleguide for the text of articles, I just do hope that the articles that are about the municipalities themselves are very clear about that. The MDS site from the Dept of Administration might be helpful. There was also a good discussion on Hawke666's Wikidata talk page about bringing some organization for this to the wikidata classifications for these items which might be relevant for the actual municipal governments vs just unincorporated places. Erik s paulson ( talk) 01:15, 5 June 2023 (UTC) reply

I would be glad to have some help with the draft on this Wisconsin photographer. Not sure on his middle name. Did he go by G. L. Waite given the time period? Thanks. FloridaArmy ( talk) 20:09, 20 July 2023 (UTC) reply

We've begun a campaign to clean up football stubs that lack WP:SIGCOV as required by WP:SPORTBASIC #5. A big chunk of the deficient articles are for individuals who played for the Green Bay Packers. I am hoping that Wisconsin project members are familiar with sources that can be used to dig up SIGCOV and might be willing to help improve these Wisconsin-related articles. We've also set up a talk page here for any questions or comments you may have. Set forth below is the list of Wisconsin-related articles we hope to improve. Any help is appreciated. Cbl62 ( talk) 15:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Cbl62 ( talk) 15:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I've been working on going through all of our stubs and reassessing them (if they meet higher criteria) and/or improving a few things. If anyone else is interested in helping, feel free! I think we can meet the (new) goal of 70% of our articles being start-class or better.

I saw that @ M4V3R1CK32 is working on this too. And I also see above that the Packers WP is doing something similar. JackFromWisconsin ( talk | contribs) 17:05, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

Yes, please join in! Stub sorting for this project is something I started more than 6 months ago, going in alphabetical order, so there are likely many stubs that have been added to the letters I've already checked. The last one I looked at was Price, Jackson County, Wisconsin; I think that's roughly 75% of stubs sorted, but would welcome the help as I've been swamped with real-world responsibilites of late. M4V3R1CK32 ( talk) 17:13, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

• @ JackFromWisconsin: I went through every single one of the Wisconsin stubs and reassessed as appropriate 6-7 months ago back in February and March. There was quite a significant amount that I could reassess at the time to the point that it lowered the project's omega from 5.43 to its current 5.29. -- Dolotta ( talk) 17:16, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

  That's awesome to hear!

  Currently I've been going through the Category:Wisconsin_stubs and finding a number of articles with better assessment but article-side stub tag remained. So that part has been fairly easy.

  I've also added sources, marked deadlinks, and tried to resolve some maintenance tags. There are so many articles out there with easily google-able sources that just aren't included. JackFromWisconsin ( talk | contribs) 17:26, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

  Good idea! I had used AWB myself to get rid of all of the stub templates in the Wisconsin start class category after I had finished reassessing all of the stubs. Dolotta ( talk) 17:30, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

Thanks a lot for helping with this -- do you have any thoughts on the feasibility of us reassessing all the Start-class articles too? There's a good number of them that were last assessed over a decade ago. I'm thinking about starting to take a crack at this, but it's a little hard to tell the difference between what should stay Start-class and what should become C-class at times. huntertur ( talk) 19:28, 22 November 2023 (UTC) reply

@ Huntertur: Good idea! I started on it over the past few months here and there, getting through the numbers and part of the A's but burning out. From what I've done so far, a relatively small number of Starts needed reassessment compared to the stubs. In fact, I had reassessed downward a couple one line start classes that had been given a rosy initial assessment by its creator. -- Dolotta ( talk) 14:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC) reply

I don't see a place for queries about errors, such as the reported 2000 population of Sun Prairie City (23,008), which is obviously inconsistent with the reported 2010 population & 2000 number of households. Pjirving ( talk) 20:33, 25 September 2023 (UTC) reply

What is the problem? WI 2000 Census page 1887 has Sun Prairie City, Total Population 20,369, Total households 7,881. WI 2010 says 29,364 +44.16% That seems to match Sun Prairie, Wisconsin article. -- Dual Freq ( talk) 22:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC) reply

Are there any unincorporated communities that anyone thinks shouldn't just be redirects? Like I was thinking that maybe Johnsonville, Wisconsin should be its own page instead of just a redirect. But I am unsure if it should have its own page just because it is the birthplace of a big sausage company. NintendoTTTEfan2005 ( talk) 07:02, 14 November 2023 (UTC) reply

@ NintendoTTTEfan2005: If you have enough information to make it into at least a decent stub, by all means revert my redirect. I redirected most of the one line stubs to the town it was located this past spring, figuring it is pretty easy to remove. -- Dolotta ( talk) 14:11, 3 December 2023 (UTC) reply

Ok, that will do. But do you think Tibbets, Wisconsin should be a redirect? NintendoTTTEfan2005 ( talk) 19:29, 3 December 2023 (UTC) reply

Hi all, I am working on bringing Packers Heritage Trail to WP:FLC. I recently traveled as part of a longer work trip to Green Bay last week, with the goal of getting photos of each historic site along the trail. However, unfortunately it rained pretty much the whole day I was in Green Bay. I was able to get a few photos but the rain and my tight schedule meant I missed out on a good number. I was wondering if there were any Green Bay residents in this Project who would be up for grabbing a few photos for me? If so, I would greatly appreciate it! Please let me know, even if you can only grab a few, and I can kind of explain what the photos for each site could look like. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 17:23, 23 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I don't live near Green Bay, so unfortunately won't be of much help. But I wish you good luck with bringing this to FLC! It's awesome to see more Green and Gold Featured Articles. JackFromWisconsin ( talk | contribs) 19:18, 23 April 2024 (UTC) reply