Talk:Portland Museum (Louisville)

Request edit on 15 June 2021

Hello, I am an employee of the Portland Museum and I wrote up a large-scale edit for this page. Since I don't want to start any conflict of interest I will instead post my work as an edit request, and hope that a kind, independent Wikipedia editor will edit my work as they see fit and add it to the article. My motivations behind editing this page are not found in marketing, but simply wanting to have our museum have a high-quality, well-sourced, and accurate page instead of the sorry state it has been in for a number of years now.

Extended content

Portland Museum Portland Museum, March 2008 Established 1978 Location 2308 Portland Avenue Louisville, Kentucky 40212 Coordinates 38°16′09.7″N 85°47′11.3″W Type History, Art Website www.portlandky.org The Portland Museum is a neighborhood history and art museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It details the history of the Portland neighborhood through several permanent exhibits and rotating art galleries. The museum is comprised of three buildings: Beech Grove, an 19th century Italianate mansion, the former Portland Bridge Baptist Mission Building, connected at Beech Grove’s north side, and the AHOY House, a renovated Victorian property adjacent to the museum. History Established in 1978 at Portland’s Roosevelt Elementary school, the museum started as a project by seven of the school’s teachers with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Members of the Portland neighborhood community were initially encouraged to donate family scrapbooks for preservation, and since then the museum’s collection has grown to contain photos, slides, paintings, portraits, and artifacts of all kinds. Upon the school’s closing in 1980 the museum was moved to the Brown School before settling into its current facility in 1983. The oldest part of this facility, the Italianate residence Beech Grove, was built in 1852 and purchase in 1864 by Scottish immigrant William Skene, who with his family lived in the building for 80 years. Exhibits Notable permanent exhibits of the museum include profiles on some of the Portland neighborhood’s famous historical residents composed of artifacts and representative mannequins, including “Big Jim” Porter, Increase A. Lapham, and Mary Millicent Miller. Also featured are small scale dioramas, historic photographs, and several original paintings by John James Audubon. In 2014 Portland native and former football star Paul Hornung donated various pieces of sports memorabilia covering his life and career, which today are displayed in the museum. Since 2019 the museum has featured two rooms acting as dedicated galleries for rotating exhibitions of art. The museum is also host to Portland neighborhood events, including the annual Portland Art and Heritage Fair, a celebration of the creativity and history of Portland’s current and former residents. Beech Grove Press The museum houses within it a printmaking studio, Beech Grove Press, equipped with Chandler & Price presses, cases of foundry type, and bookbinding equipment. With the press the museum prints educational materials and hosts programs where children and adults learn and practice various printing techniques. Through Beech Grove Press the museum has published various history readers for local elementary students and the Kentucky Institute for Creative Kid Stuff, or KICKS, a children’s newspaper focused on Louisville’s learning resources. AHOY In 2020 the museum acquired an adjacent Victorian home and has since begun developing it into a children’s “explorable and immersive art experience” called Adventure House of You, or AHOY. Currently the project is publicly slated for completion by Fall of 2022 and will be accessible from the former Portland Bridge Baptist Mission Building through a connector. The project is reportedly inspired by “the gonzo creativity of the City Museum in St. Louis, the repurposed Victorian architecture of the Gilbert House in Oregon, and the immersive magic of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe." References

Sukapon (talk) 16:08, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Sukapon Your edits look great! I took a quick copyedit and removed the bit about "gonzo creativity..." as it sounds a little more on the promotional side and the only source is a the museum webpage itself. Otherwise, your edits have been added to the page. Thank you for taking the time to do this in a neutral non-promotional manner. Sasquatch t|c 17:22, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Sasquatch, I'm truly sorry, but I don't agree. I've reverted your edit because most of the content was sourced only to the website of the museum itself, and because (for exactly that reason) it was not neutral in tone. The first bullet-point in our instructions for answering these requests is "Do not insert major re-writes or controversial requests without clear consensus. When these are requested, ask the submitter to discuss the edits instead with regular contributors on the article's talk page". In my opinion, that applies here. Wikipedia has no interest in what this or any other organisation chooses to say about itself – what we need is independent reliable sources. Unfortunately the notability of this institution is very questionable, so there may not actually be very many of those. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:42, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Please note that the COI editor has reverted your reply to the {{request edit}}. Rightly or wrongly, I've now declined with response |D|D – discuss! Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:44, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, I understand the issue with the museum's own website being cited, but considering that the information presented from it was so brief, basic, and backed by newspaper articles I'd hadn't been sure if it was an issue. Other museums from the Louisville area carry similarly small reference lists backed by their own websites (or self-published texts). I could remove specific facts like dates that are from our History page and replace it with the more general coverage of the articles, if that is what is needed. Regarding the notability of the institution, we are considered mid importance by the United States WikiProject, if that matters. Overall I'd just like to make clear that this is an effort to improve the page, not market or have the organization write about itself. If you consider everything outside of the general history and contents of the museum doing that, then I am fine to remove those sections. If you consider everything I've proposed for the edit outside the bounds of acceptability, then why even have the page continue to exist in such low quality? Respectfully, I do not understand why attempts to improve the page are being reverted in favor of keeping it in its current quality. Where does the line between the museum writing about itself and someone improving an existing page sit? In my opinion, the edits I've proposed are far from biased, and don't go into exhaustive detail, but if you feel there is still a conflict of interest I would appreciate the help in getting my edits to a place where they can remain on the page. My goal here isn't to self indulge the museum, but to simply to add to this already-existing page basic information about the museum because its current state is and has been poor. I suppose the other option is to wait for an independent editor to take up that task, but considering the years that have gone by without that happening it might not be exactly realistic. Sukapon (talk) 22:17, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, to rephrase, I would appreciate if you or any other kind Wikipedia editor would take the edits I've proposed and trim them to your specifications, instead of simply reverting the page. To simply deny my edit request ignores the current poor quality of the page. Sukapon (talk)