Talk:Albany Parks & Recreation

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If anyone actually pays attention to this article (which may not pass notability by the way) you may want to disambiguate the name, as Albany article shows there are MANY Albany's, of which Albany, New York is the largest by population, the oldest, and the namesake of the majority of other Albany's in the USA (and of the one in South Africa). Most definitely Albany, Oregon would not be well known enough, let alone their Parks and recreation department, to have this title in case other more well-known Albany's (such as NY and GA for instance) wish to have articles on their parks.Camelbinky (talk) 06:19, 13 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's true the article has always been kind of dreadful. Often, however, we don't worry about disambiguating something until necessary--in this case until someone wanted to create an article about the P&R dept in another city. That said, maybe this should be put up for deletion and/or merged. Let me take a look, I haven't paid attention to the article in a long time. Valfontis (talk) 22:52, 13 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think an article on the parks of Albany, Oregon could be useful if there were more sources than it was, which was basically just one I believe. Maybe using some newspaper articles if those could be researched. Perhaps someone has written a local history book with information on some of the parks. It has potential.Camelbinky (talk) 02:18, 14 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: There's also a discussion relating to this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon#What to do with Albany Parks & Recreation. Jsayre64 (talk) 15:01, 14 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well I know I am half a year behind but I am finally getting to it. I read up on the talk about it and with the recent loss of the picture due to my still lacking knowledge of how all of wiki works I have decided I will go take pictures of it myself. Hopefully I will have all the pictures I need in the next month so so. I have also taken the liberty to message the parks department in hopes of them being able to direct me to some resources to use, such as websites and boks with history on the parks department, events that are held at the parks, Nubers: budget, employess, and anything else thay can provide. I will also look around myself and see what I can pull up. What I am hoping from all of you is a bit of advice on where I shopuld be going with the article. I know you have talked about doing it like the portland one and I will review those to see what insight they can give but I would still like advice as to what would be best. Also I am not the best at working the details of wiki so maybe templates for list or anything like that if you think that is how this should go. MathewDill (talk) 18:14, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I made a couple of minor changes just now. I'd use hectares (ha) rather than square meters for small parks. The {{convert}} template makes seamless conversions once you get the hang of it. It will convert ranges as well as individual values, and you can add hyphens, links, and a lot of other things. The 30em parameter for the reflist is also a handy thing to know about. Taking your own photos is a good idea; it heads off any copyright issues, and you can get images that you think best illustrate the text. Finetooth (talk) 18:41, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Finetooyh for the quick responce I will keep that in mind for the small parks and try to keep it that way consitantly throughout. I'll review the conversion template so I can get the hang of it. And hopefully those pictures will be able to liven up the whole thing. Do you think going to a list style setup for all the parks would be best?MathewDill (talk) 18:45, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. The text entries are so short for each park that it would make sense to turn this into a list like List of parks in Portland, Oregon, and to use the general information about the parks department and the special events to create a lead paragraph or paragraphs. Some other information that might go into the lead would be the total number of parks, the size of the department budget, the number of employees, and details like that. The parks department might have printed publications you could track down at city hall if not everything you need is online. You could clone the formatting of the Portland parks list, and that way you wouldn't have to reinvent the formatting for the list table. If you decide to make the article into a list, you'll probably want to change the title to "List of city parks in Albany, Oregon". (I don't know if the word "city" is necessary or not; perhaps there are no other kinds (private, county, state, Federal) in Albany. Finetooth (talk) 21:04, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

While a list is a fine enough way to go, I prefer prose myself. Especially if there is alot of interesting backstory and history to several of the parks, but not enough to justify the parks having individual entries. A list may be the best way to start, but if you find yourself having trouble making descriptions and history small enough to fit in a "description" column then that would be your first clue that prose may be the way to go. At least a list would give you a starting point to collect photos and make sure you had all the parks and preliminary info about year established and were not missing one. I would not name the article "list of" for the reason that the article may not permanently be a list. But if you find you go the route of having the list turn into prose and then that many of the parks deserve their own articles, you can then easily turn it back into the list format. For Albany, New York's parks since most were several hundreds of years old I went the route of directly just making individual articles (Washington Park (Albany, New York), Lincoln Park (Albany), Townsend Park, Bleecker Park, Tivoli Park (Albany), and others), and may just do a list some time in the future to link them together easier than using a category.Camelbinky (talk) 21:41, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with all the feedback so far, but I'd like to add that providing geographic coordinates of each park (using the template {{coord}}) or an address is very useful to readers, especially when dealing with a list in table format. Soon the list of Portland parks will provide coordinates and a brief note about which part of Portland each park is located in (Northwest Portland, Southeast Portland, etc.), as opposed to providing the address (see here). Using coordinates also gives readers a shortcut to view maps of the area, which would really help them find each park. Since Albany is much smaller than Portland in land area, of course, providing an address or coordinates or both would be a better idea than saying which part of Albany. In any case, depending on how you plan to go about this, stating the location is something this article/list should definitely do. Jsayre64 (talk) 02:22, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]