Talk:Chicago/Archive 2

Old talk can be found in the archive. Add any new comments at the bottom. To keep this page clean and useful please remove items no longer relevant. This includes requested changes that have been complete or items under debate that haven't been active for more than 3 months.

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Chicago Flag

General

This discussion page is being used for two major functions. First, to expand and convert the article Chicago over to the new format agreed to at WikiProject Cities. Second, to faciliate active discussions on the content, formating and all other items associated with the Chicago article. Please feel free to add or edit anything on this page to help in the conversion process. Please remember to sign all comments.

Featured on Template:March 4 selected anniversaries (may be in HTML comment)

=Ethnic group

Which is larger? The small map claims that African Americans are, and text adjacent to it says whites.

Double decker streets

There should be something here or at Streets and highways of Chicago about the double-decker streets downtown. Hell, there isn't even an article about Wacker Drive, which is sometimes considered one of the precursors to the modern freeway.

I am also requesting some help. I have tried every once in a while to create an accurate map of the double and triple decker streets, and have always failed due to not having enough data. I have never seen a map that shows these streets properly. I would like some help, in the form of someone in the area that can go downtown and report on specific streets. I can and will create this map if I have adequate data. --SPUI (talk) 02:31, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Great idea! I can help you with the streets—I'm leaving a longer message on your talk page. — Knowledge Seeker দ (talk) 07:36, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Lead Section

Over the last year this page has changed significantly and the Lead Section no longer matches the guidelines for a good lead section. We should focus on working towards revising this. --Jason 18:24, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

Images

Right now I'm trying to add a lot more images to the Chicago page. I'm following a loose format of one picture (thumb) for each major section aligned to the right with a small caption at 300px. Can others adjust or add new images so we have a variety of good work. Currently a lot of the pictures are from Wikipedia but I think we should start focusing on placing images sourced from Wikimedia Commons. --Jason 17:31, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Sections to be added/revised/considered

I think the following sections should be considered for this article or Chicago Sub Articles (not lists... prose):

• Arts & culture
  • Museums & Galleries
  • Aquariums & Zoos
  • Cultural Centers
  • Buildings & Landmarks
  • Music
  • Film & TV
  • Theater & Stage
  • Folklore
  • Cuisine

• Sports
  • College
  • Professional
  • Stadiums

• Health & Medicine

• Tourism and Recreation
  • Events & Festivals
  • Shopping
  • Attractions

• Education
  • K Through 12
    • Public schools
    • Private schooles
    • Parochial schools
    • Charter schools
  • Libraries
  • Colleges & universities

• Demographics
  • Households
  • Age
  • Income

• Transportation
  • Taxis
  • Bicylcing

• Geography
  • Climate
  • Bodies of water
  • Flora
  • Maps

• Religion

• Law & Government
  • Crime
  • Social & Contemporary Issues

Chicago vs. Chicagoland

I think it really needs to be decided if the related articles with 'Chicagoland' in their names (Newspapers, Radio Stations, etc.) are going to include the suburbs or not. For example, I would NOT include Hamburger U on the Chicago page (and I'm not even sure I'd include it in a Chicagoland "Institutions of Higher Learning" or some such page, either, as it privately belongs to Mcdonalds Corporation. But there should be a spot for the myriad of colleges (including jr. colleges) in Chicago's suburbs. Northwestern I do find appropriate, because they do have a Chicago campus.

I agree.

I agree as well. --Jason 23:50, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)

Events Merger

I was doing some work to restore a bunch of deleted info, and I happened to notice there are two Events sections that need to be merged. I think it should be done by a current or former Chicagoan, or at least someone that's visited there, and I don't fall into any of those categories. Niteowlneils 02:09, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

On the page: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago,_Illinois , on the "Important Citizens or people born here," Gene Krupa should be added. Born January 15, 1909, in Chicago, IL, Gene Krupa is a drumming icon from the Swing Era. http://www.gkrp.net/genebio.html

The link to International Appliance Technical Conference & Exhibition or IATC links to redirect back to Chicago, which is rather inapropriate. There should be at least a stub, but I don't know anything about this. Samohyl Jan 12:02, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Radio Stations

The radio station listings are out of date. There's two instances of 101.9, for example. -- Bartkusa

You're correct, also we need to fix the formatting. This page has suffered a lot after the collapse. Granted, much has been fixed but a few sections still need work. This section has been moved to a new article of its own (as a result of the length/collapse) and still needs work. --Jason 10:47, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

The FM table looks a lot better, but we need to get AM stations back in there! :)

United States Political Party Conventions

Any thoughts to at least a note about twenty-five major party (well, okay, the Republicans weren't yet a major party in 1860, not until Lincoln actually got elected) political conventions being held in Chicago? More than any other US city by a WIDE margin?

Items Under Debate

Main Picture

The top pic keeps changing and it seems like we are now in a mode of dueling pixels. Anyone want to vote on what we should keep rather than cluttering it up with tons of pics?

Ethnic Groups

This entry states, "The main ethnic groups in Chicago are Irish, German, Italian and Polish." This statement comes just one paragraph after the Census Bureau demographic information, which list the white population as just over 40% - so this seems a rather inaccurate or at least incomplete statement. Perhaps the sentence should read "the main caucasian ethnic groups..." or perhaps some non-caucasian ethnic groups - who after all make up a majority in Chicago - should be added.

More on ethnic groups

I must say, I find the figure of 500,000 people of Serbian descent in Chicago rather hard to believe. Based on a population of about 2.9 million, 41% white (and that figure appears to include Hispanics who the Census Bureau classifies as white), nearly half the white people in Chicago would have to be Serbian for that to be true. While I'm sure Chicago does have a substantial Serbian population, 500,000 seems improbable.

Also, the population of Belgrade cited seems to be incorrect. According to Wikipedia's article on Belgrade, the city itself has a population of 1.27 million, not 2 million as this article states.

Cite Sources

Should a References section be added at the bottom of the article to support sources for the article? See Cite Sources.

--Jason 19:55, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

External Links

It is my belief that creating an external links section is an obsolete method of organizing content. Since Wikipedia now gives a visual indicator of an external link I don't think it is necessary to make a separate section for them. I believe it is more usable for readers to have the links in a "See also" section. For example a external link to the Chicago Tunnel Company or the Chicago GIS maps would be more fitting under sections like Transportation or Geography (respectively). Some people have changed this repeatedly but I disagree. The Manual of Style doesn't seem to have any concise guidelines for this. Thoughts? --Jason 11:11, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

There are a few good reasons for keeping external links separate from internal ones, placing them at the end of the article. One is semantic: the article itself should be about the subject (i.e. Chicago), whereas a reference or external link usually provides information about the information. This distinction is subtle, but mainly boils down to the fact that although Chicago GIS maps are indeed about Chicago, the link itself is not. Another issue is the fact that people frequently add external links where there should be an internal link, only because the article does not exist. For example, perhaps the Chicago Tunnel Company should have an article? I also noticed City Colleges of Chicago. Also, inline external links don't make much sense in an eventual paper version, and last, perhaps as a result of the above points, mixed internal and external links just don't look clean (IMHO) ;)

Although indeed there doesn't seem to be any written guideline for this, it is the standard practice, and following conventions means readers will know where to look. If readers want more information about geography, they will (only after a few articles' familiarity with Wikipedia) know how to scroll down to the external links section and expect the selection of links to be comprehensive enough.

Have you considered the solution of adding subsections to the external links section? Fredrik | talk 15:38, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Population: 2,896,016 ???

Many people seem to have questions about the population figures. Thoughts or should we close this one out or move on? On the main page it makes reference to skepticism about these figures. I think we should just settle on it rather than make reference to doubt within the article itself. --Jason 10:41, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

In the 2000 Census, Chicago had 2,890,000 people. It's safe to say that the city did not add 1 million residents in three years.

Name Change

Why the page name move? This makes no sense. -Joseph (Talk) 02:30, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

There was some discussion of this some months ago - no real consensus. john k 02:54, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There's a standard of having article names as short as possible and, if there's more than one thing with a particular name, the most well known gets to be shortest and all the others have to each have something to indicate them specifically in their name. The Chicago in question is by far more well known than the band, any other town named that, or any other such thing. -- [[User:Djinn112|Djinn112 ♠♥♣♦,]] 02:57, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Seems like bunk to me. I suggest putting it to a vote. -Joseph (Talk) 03:04, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

It's not bunk, but rather than this, the topic should've been brought up on the cities talk page, where it's been discussed before. john k 03:15, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I felt that it needed to be where most people would find it. It's not like any other use of Chicago would be more common. I admit that I didn't check for precedents or guidelines though. Also, I merged the histories (some from 2001!). Dori | Talk 23:23, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Neighborhoods & Community Areas

The Community Area list, I believe, is for the most part obsolete. I'm considering replacing the entire section (along with the following "neighborhood" list) with a much more relevant "neighborhoods of chicago" list, which should help merge the two (Mag Mile shouldn't be its own "neighborhood"... and it's really Chinatown and NOT Douglas/South Loop). At the most, information about the community area should be limited to the paragraph and the picture instead of having to expand upon it and naming the entirety of mostly stubs... which I've never really heard many Chicagoans use to reference areas of the city anyway. simulcra July 6, 2004

While it is true that many of the Community Areas fail to correspond with any presently recognizable neighborhood, there may still be reason to include them as they continue to be important official subdivisions of the city. The census still divides Chicago into these community areas, and every ten years a Community Area Factbook is published which is the major source of granular demographic data for Chicago. In addition, community areas are fixed, and therefore durable, so comparison over time is much easier with a community area then with an fuzzily defined neighborhood that may not have existed five years ago and may not exist five years hence. Lunchboxhero 19:09, Jul 7, 2004 (UTC)

Work Done/General Comments

Notable Natives/Important Citizens

Does anyone know what happened to this section? I'm tempted to create a new section called List of Important Chicago Citizens but don't want to until I know for sure. --Jason 11:05, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Speaking of Natives (in a different sense), does anybody else find it hilarious that we should say "Chicago was first settled by Europeans when Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, an African American from Haiti, settled on the banks of the Chicago River." H'm, let me think. Du Sable – he's from the Americas – his ancestors were African – so when he moves to Chicago (and marries a Potawatomi woman), it's a European settlement! Of course! I suppose Filipino immigration to Guam must be a tremendous achievement for the Sudanese people. When the Americans storm into Baghdad, they are of course scoring a major victory for the Confucian traditions of Korea. Hooray for wikinonsense! QuartierLatin1968 01:21, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What are you talking about? I mean I get the "African American" thing but can you be a bit more clear? Your last edit to the History section is ridiculous, I won't change it though because I want to hear others opinions. "Non-indigenous" is just odd, if settlers were indigenous they wouldn't be settlers would they? I realize that some people think that there is nothing wrong with destroying the English language in the name of being "PC" but I disagree. I'd rather create an honest encyclopedia than a PC one. And if you (or others) think I'm wrong and please provide more truth (with sources) rather than randomly showing up and making an edit along with colorful (yet confusing) comments. This is a community. --Jason 05:11, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

More clear? Um, just that there's nothing European about Du Sable. He's West Indian by birth, North American by residence, African by descent, Potawatomi by adoption. I see your point that the word "settler" means non-indigenous people. But the word here was actually "settled", which (to me) means something more generic that indigenous people can do. Does the expression "a Native settlement" seem wrong to you? It sounds fine to me – but perhaps this is a generational thing. Anyway, honest versus PC is the falsest dichotomy I've ever heard. It's to get rid of a dishonesty (the silly notion that Du Sable moving to Chicago makes a "European" settlement) that I made the change to start with. If people reflect for a moment about what they actually mean to say, without being bone-headedly insensitive about it, the outcome is usually as politically correct as anybody could wish. QuartierLatin1968 07:22, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Community Areas

... well, I moved, verbatim, the community areas to its own site... I suppose if necessary it can be moved back. Just my attempt at trying to de-clutter the article. simulcra 22:28, Jul 7, 2004