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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Minnesota#An issue over sources: WP:RS and.2For WP:OR

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Proposal to reconfigure and delete some subpages

I'm working on a proposed redesign of the WikiProject Minnesota main page (not completed yet), and I think that the subpages also need to be audited. A lot of the content on the current main page would be better as a subpage, and a lot of the existing subpages have not been edited in a long time and may no longer be useful to the project. Part of my proposal is making WikiProject pages as low maintenance as possible so that if the project ever goes dormant again, the remaining content will still be helpful to new users. Here's a list of the subpages and what I think we should do with them.

Please let me know what you think. If we get consensus, we can remove a lot of old pages and focus on keeping some of the most useful ones updated. I'm pinging @Myotus who has been active as well. Pingnova (talk) 23:59, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

:Thank you for working on a revamp, the main page could use an update. I think we should retain the article alerts and assessment modules on the main page. They're updated by bots and are a good way to monitor article activity and progress. I think we should also add the bot-updated Hot Articles list, which lists the project's most-edited articles from the last week.

:As to deletions, the usual practice is to add :Template:Historical to legacy pages and preserve them as a history of the project. I think many of those subpages could be marked as such. A lot of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota/(topic) articles were created by {{u|Jonathan Kovaciny}} early on and don't really get any pageviews.

File:Tater Tot Hotdish, 2025 Wikipedia Day, Minnesota-03.jpg

:I'd also love to see a logo or image that incorporates both Minnesota and Wikipedia at the top of the main page. I seem to remember there was a logo for the user group at one point. gobonobo + c 02:25, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

::Agree with above -- keep everything bot-updated, including mainpage alerts, archive the manual updates. Deleting via turning them into historical archive feels better than full deletion as historical preservation is always a decent plan and we don't know what might be possible in the future

::Also, a hotdish as a logo is a wonderful concept. ~Malvoliox (talk | contribs) 02:48, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

::Ok, so edit the historical template onto the manually updated pages. Would it help to move the page names to Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota/Archive/[pagename]?

::I'll keep the bot updates on my draft of the new main page. Some of the bot updated pages need to be fixed since they were not displaying anything when I last checked - I'm not sure how to do that, so anyone who wants to work on that feel free.

::I don't do logos, but a new logo sounds cool! @Myotus was working on a new one for the Minnesota User Group and might be a good person to lead that. Pingnova (talk) 06:16, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

I am all for bringing Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota/GNIS cleanup to the attention of wikiproject participants. ☺

At the moment, Mangoe is working through the massive U.S.A.-wide backlog at the rate of a handful of articles per day, and is currently somewhere in the middle of Indiana.

It takes me a significant amount of time at AFD to research each one against all of the gazetteers and histories.

I had to take a break from systematically working through Kentucky and bringing it into line with what Rennick and Hodge (and others) actually documented (see, for example, Little Goose Creek (Kentucky)).

There are just under 800 bogus claims to forms of settlement that Minnesota does not have, still outstanding, many of which will turn out to be falsely described extinct rural post offices or railroad stations (or even other things) that Wikipedia is misleading the world about.

At this rate, we'll be done in another quarter of a century, far longer than it took to rôte mass-create these articles in the first place.

Uncle G (talk) 14:24, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

  • I'd love to help with GNIS cleanup but I am not sure where to start on actually researching these things -- if the article's only source is GNIS and it's extremely stubby, does that mean just putting it on AFD/deleting? Otherwise, I check against the sources to figure out if it can be merged? For something like Acton, Minnesota I imagine we'd want to just merge info into the township article, because it seems clear that the sources used describe things that happened in Acton township (but that are significant to the Dakota War of 1862, but for others, it seems unclear if there's anything to keep.

    I've read the main page on this wikiproject's GNIS cleanup, but is there more detail on the "how-to" of fixing it somewhere else?

    Wanting to help, just trying to figure out how. Sorry, I'm relatively new to a lot of this and there's likely an obvious place to go. ~Malvoliox (talk | contribs) 16:21, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

  • The first step is discounting the GNIS information completely, including the article content sourced to it, and finding out what the subject is. This involves all of the county/state history books and contemporary gazetteers.

    In the case of Acton, for example, all of the "is an unincorporated community" nonsense gets excised and replaced by "was a village" once you have found the entry for Acton on page 26 of the Syndicate Publishing Company's 1898 Imperial Reference Library and confirmed it with the 1874 Lippincott's gazetteer saying "ACTON, a post-village and township of Meeker co., Minnesota, about 90 miles W. by N. of St. Paul". (You need to check a Lippincott's of the right decade(s).) Lippincott's has a reasonably uniform terminology where "post-village" means a village with a post office and "and township" means that there's the township of the same name incorporating the village.

    If you can actually demonstrate with a contemporary 19th century gazetteer that the subject really was a hamlet/village/town/city then the right course is to remove the false description in the introduction, infobox, et al. and put the correct one, verifiable from a good contemporary gazetteer, in its place. Using the past tense not the present tense, of course, unless you can really demonstrate that it is genuinely still there with a modern source. (A lot of Mangoe's AFD nominations come from modern maps and aerial photographs showing that the place isn't there. Then I turn up what it was from a gazetteer. Checking the old gazetteers is better done before the AFD nominations, I suggest. ☺) Acton is basically fields in current aerials, so that does look like past tense.

    If you cannot turn up, on the other hand, more than a mere USPS directory listing for something that is only in USPS directories, or in Lippincott's only as a "post-office", or only as a railway station name in contemporary shipping guides, then it's time to think of alternative more drastic courses rather than just fixing lying article introductions so that they don't lie. This will be where you think of merger and how to make something that can only be barely a sentence from a directory listing into part of a larger article of some kind. (Kentucky lends itself to being documented by its creek system, because that's basically, still, how the human geography of the state works. Historically, the post offices have served and wandered along the creeks, and that is how they've been documented. Not quite the same for other states, though.)

    Uncle G (talk) 01:09, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

  • Thank you for all of your work @Uncle G! Would you be able to edit the GNIS cleanup page with a guide that explains how project participants can help out? We are trying to become more active, so maybe we can take some of the load off your shoulders. Pingnova (talk) 06:18, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
  • I have made Project:Reliability of GNIS data/Cleanup methodology and resources which might help. Uncle G (talk) 06:45, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
  • :Thank you, I will add that link to the WPMN page for interested project participants. Pingnova (talk) 20:41, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
  • :I see you've already done that, pardon me! (Lol!) Thanks so much for maintaining that page. At the Wikimedians of Minnesota User Group meeting in April we'll chat more about the WPMN main page and get the link to this subpage somewhere helpers can find it. Awesome work! Pingnova (talk) 20:50, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

[[Chet Anderson Stadium]]

Can someone please find and add reliable sources to this stub? Bearian (talk) 04:47, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

  • I'll see what I can do. Might be a few weeks but I'll get to it ~Darth StabroTalk{{nbsp}}•{{nbsp}}Contribs 04:57, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
  • {{ISBN|9781476632605}} p.45 seems like a start, Bearian. It gives a different date for the first game, though. Uncle G (talk) 12:26, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
  • :Great! Bearian (talk) 18:04, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

:Found a bit via news articles and added ~Malvoliox (talk | contribs) 21:30, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

MN projects on sister sites

I organized some of the presence of MN projects on other sites. Please also edit these since I'm unsure about some of it.

Pingnova (talk) 08:57, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Requested move at [[Talk:Delta Connection Flight 4819#Requested move 17 February 2025]]

File:Information.svg There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Delta Connection Flight 4819#Requested move 17 February 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Aviationwikiflight (talk) 14:56, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Test

test Myotus (talk) Myotus (talk) 03:27, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Hmong in Minnesota category and navbox

Is there a category for Hmong topics in MN? Is that simply :Category:Hmong-American culture in Minnesota? I identified many BLPs where the Hmong person has a significant connection to MN and it wasn't in a MN category - would I add those to the linked category? Aside from BLPs, many other articles that could/should be in some sort of topic category for Hmong in MN. My only issue with the category is that not necessarily every page would fit under the theme of "culture" maybe. I'm not a category person.

I discovered this putting together a proposed navbox for Hmong topics in MN User:Pingnova/sandbox/Template:Hmong in Minnesota - please also feel free to edit or send feedback on the navbox. Pingnova (talk) 03:28, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Minnesota photos

I came across a [https://www.flickr.com/photos/clairity/ Flickr photographer] who has uploaded hundreds of wonderful Minnesota photos with CC BY 2.0 licence, which could be uploaded to the Commons. Magnolia677 (talk) 21:39, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

:@Magnolia677 Thanks for the find! Very appreciated! Myotus (talk) 14:53, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

"[[:Wikipedia:MN]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]

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The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:MN&redirect=no Wikipedia:MN] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at {{section link|1=Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 April 20#Wikipedia:MN}} until a consensus is reached. -- Tavix (talk) 21:52, 23 April 2025 (UTC)