Talk:Alabama Black Belt

Tidying up the article

I've rewritten and wikified the introductory paragraph, and removed the context banner. But the rest of the article requires a lot more effort. --Chris Jefferies 16:07, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

References

I labeled the section references, originally it said "sources used". They seem to be external links so that might be more accurate. Do we accept these as sources? RJFJR 18:25, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It turns out we have a rather interesting situation here, there are two Wikipedia pages on this topic! As I was checking your question above I found that Answers.com was displaying a re-hash of the other Wikipedia article! Take a look at Black Belt (region of Alabama)! :-)

There's a similar page for the Black Belt as a whole - Black Belt (U.S. region). Now we've discovered this, the best thing will be to merge at least two of the articles into one. At the end of the merge we'll have an article containing the best bits of both with no information lost. The first step is to alert anyone editing these pages so that the issues can be discussed on the discussion pages. I'll arrange for that to happen.

And to answer your original question... Yes, it's a good idea to have references in an article, there are three standard sections most Wikipedia articles have. See also is a list of related articles in Wikipedia, External links is a list of related internet sites with useful information, and finally References is a special section that links references to numbered links in the text, it works automatically and is rather neat.

I'll get the merge process underway--Chris Jefferies 22:37, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Merge, and an observation

As discussion on Talk:Black Belt (region of Alabama) I think this article should be merged into Black Belt (region of Alabama) and/or Black Belt (U.S. region). The first page is mainly about the black belt as it pertains to Alabama in particular, while the second has a larger focus. If anyone feels up to it, all three could be merged into one, I think, with sections pertaining to the various meanings. Too much work for me right now though. But reading this page here, I have a couple observations.

A while ago I did some work to try and expand and improve Black Belt (U.S. region). That page's talk page contains some useful information, but is hard to read due to a very lengthy debate on Kentucky. I noticed on this page there is the claim: "The term Black Belt has also been designated to counties where black people outnumber the white. Over half of the population in the Black Belt is African American. The Black Belt Region also refers to the area of 623 southern counties that have this higher African American percentage." I don't think this is true. There is some info on this on the U.S. region talk page, but buried, so see this section: Talk:Black Belt (U.S. region)#Comments on the above section, especially the last paragraph. According to the US Census 2000, there are 96 US counties with 50% or higher African American population. The figure of 623 counties probably comes from the proposed "Southern Black Belt" federal commission region. There are a few links to more info on this topic in that paragraph. Pfly 01:23, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]