Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Iowa

This Project is currently serving primarily as a noticeboard about Iowa-related things. 39 watchers, though, as of December 2014, so if you have anything cool to show off or need some help, let us know!

Town Photo Collection Now Available

Hi Iowa Wikipedians! Long time. Just wanted to let you know that I have finally put my collection of 7204 photographs from 213 towns in 59 counties in Iowa on line. These include general town photos (of varying quality), as well as NRHP buildings. They all have the Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 license. They can be found at: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/search/collection/iowatowns

For a variety of reasons, I can't Wikipedia anymore, but I'd love to see these photos go to good use. Peace, Bill Whittaker (talk) 15:26, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Here is a list of all the towns: Ackley, Iowa, Adair, Iowa, Allison, Iowa, Altoona, Iowa, Anamosa, Iowa, Ankeny, Iowa, Aplington, Iowa, Argyle, Iowa, Atkins, Iowa, Austinville, Iowa, Ballyclough, Iowa, Belle Plaine, Iowa, Blairsburg, Iowa, Boone Forks, Iowa, Brandon, Iowa, Brighton, Iowa, Buckeye, Iowa, Burlington, Iowa, Canoe Ridge, Iowa, Cascade, Iowa, Cedar, Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Charter Oak, Iowa, Chester, Iowa, Clarksville, Iowa, Clear Lake, Iowa, Colfax, Iowa, Columbus Junction, Iowa, Coppock, Iowa, Coralville, Iowa, Cotter, Iowa, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Dakota City, Iowa, Davenport, Iowa, Dayton, Iowa, Decorah, Iowa, Defiance, Iowa, Denison, Iowa, Denmark, Iowa, Denver, Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa, DeSoto, Iowa, Dike, Iowa, Donnellson, Iowa, Dubuque, Iowa, Dyersville, Iowa, Early, Iowa, Fairfield, Iowa, Fertile, Iowa, Festina, Iowa, Fillmore, Iowa, Floyd, Iowa, Fort Atkinson, Iowa, Fort Dodge, Iowa, Fort Madison, Iowa, Franklin, Iowa, Fredonia, Iowa, Freeport, Iowa, Fremont, Iowa, Frytown, Iowa, Garnavillo, Iowa, Glenwood, Iowa, Grandview, Iowa, Grinnell, Iowa, Guttenberg, Iowa, Hardscrabble, Iowa, Harlan, Iowa, Haskins, Iowa, Hedrick, Iowa, Hills, Iowa, Homestead, Iowa, Humboldt, Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, Iowa Falls, Iowa, Irving, Iowa, Janesville, Iowa, Joice, Iowa, Kalona, Iowa, Keokuk, Iowa, Keota, Iowa, Kingston, Iowa, Kinross, Iowa, La Crew, Iowa, Ladora, Iowa, Lake Mills, Iowa, Lancaster, Iowa, Le Grand, Iowa, Lehigh, Iowa, Lime Springs, Iowa, Linby, Iowa, Linn Grove, Iowa, Lisbon, Iowa, Lockridge, Iowa, Lowell, Iowa, Luxemburg, Iowa, Lytton, Iowa, Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa, Malcom, Iowa, Marengo, Iowa, Marion, Iowa, Marquette, Iowa, Martelle, Iowa, Martinsburg, Iowa, Maynard, Iowa, McGregor, Iowa, Mediapolis, Iowa, Millville, Iowa, Milo, Iowa, Missouri Valley, Iowa, Modale, Iowa, Mondamin, Iowa, Monroe, Iowa, Monticello, Iowa, Montrose, Iowa, Moorhead, Iowa, Morning Sun, Iowa, Morse, Iowa, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Mount Vernon, Iowa, Mt. Hamill, Iowa, National, Iowa, New Boston, Iowa, New Hampton, Iowa, New London, Iowa, New Vienna, Iowa, Noble, Iowa, Oakville, Iowa, Oelwein, Iowa, Olds, Iowa, Ollie, Iowa, Orchard, Iowa, Osage, Iowa, Oskaloosa, Iowa, Otho, Iowa, Otley, Iowa, Oxford, Iowa, Pacific Junction, Iowa, Packwood, Iowa, Palo, Iowa, Parkers Grove, Iowa, Parkersburg, Iowa, Pella, Iowa, Peterson, Iowa, Pisgah, Iowa, Pleasant Plain, Iowa, Pomeroy, Iowa, Prairie City, Iowa, Readlyn, Iowa, Richland, Iowa, Roberts, Iowa, Rochester, Iowa, Rome, Iowa, Rubio, Iowa, Rudd, Iowa, Rutland, Iowa, Sac City, Iowa, Salem, Iowa, Sawyer, Iowa, Shell Rock, Iowa, Shellsburg, Iowa, Shueyville, Iowa, Sigourney, Iowa, Sioux City, Iowa, Sioux Rapids, Iowa, Sixteen, Iowa, Soldier, Iowa, Solon, Iowa, South Amana, Iowa, South English, Iowa, Spillville, Iowa, Spillville Mill, Iowa, Springdale, Iowa, St. Ansgar, Iowa, Stacyville, Iowa, Stone City, Iowa, Storm Lake, Iowa, Stratford, Iowa, Sutliff, Iowa, Swedesburg, Iowa, Swisher, Iowa, Tama, Iowa, Timber Ridge, Iowa, Toeterville, Iowa, Toledo, Iowa, Toolesboro, Iowa, Urbana, Iowa, Ute, Iowa, Volney, Iowa, Walcott, Iowa, Walford, Iowa, Walnut, Iowa, Wapello, Iowa, Washington, Iowa, Waterloo, Iowa, Waukon, Iowa, Waverly, Iowa, Wayland, Iowa, Webster, Iowa, Wellman, Iowa, West Branch, Iowa, West Liberty, Iowa, West Point, Iowa, West Union, Iowa, Westfield, Iowa, Wever, Iowa, Williams, Iowa, Winfield, Iowa, Winterset, Iowa, Worthington, Iowa, Wyman, Iowa, and Yarmouth, Iowa.

Unfortunately, that NC license makes them "fair use" photos on Wikipedia. The only restrictions we accept here are BY and SA. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 23:51, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Great news! The images have been re-licensed as CC-BY-SA 4.0, so they can be used here freely. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 21:05, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Expert attention

This is a notice about Category:Iowa articles needing expert attention, which might be of interest to your WikiProject. It will take a while before the category is populated. Iceblock (talk) 21:46, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice! – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 23:53, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

To do

I've updated the project's to do list with some ideas, just in case anyone finds themselves wanting some more work. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 23:53, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

List of county courthouses in Iowa

Created Template:County courthouses in Iowa. --Southern Iowan (talk) 14:04, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Awesome! – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:13, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Board of Regents

I have created an article for the state's board of regents. I was wondering how we should deal with this stylistically on other pages. Should we accept Iowa Board of Regents as an acceptable reference, or always stick to the official name, which is Board of Regents, State of Iowa? Your input is appreciated! Medtion (talk) 20:45, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Late comment, I know, but @Medtion: I would prefer "Iowa Board of Regents", for the article title as being closer to the WP:COMMONNAME. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 17:40, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

RM: Barry Davis (amateur wrestler)

Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:Barry Davis (amateur wrestler), regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, –Chase (talk / contribs) 22:23, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion

Hello all! I was curious if anyone else thought it might be a good idea to make a (nonbinding) guideline on how all the individual US state WikiProjects should organize themselves, to help standardize them. I originally put this suggestion in the WikiProject United States talk page, so feel free to look there if you're interested. It's pretty empty though; basically all they said was to see what each of the individual projects thought about it. Please tell me if you have any concerns with this idea; hopefully we can find a way for everyone to love it! Also, I'm new at making proposals, so please forgive me if I do anything silly. :) Hope that you like this idea! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 04:55, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

@JonathanHopeThisIsUnique: Different WikiProjects serve different purposes (see my post at Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Stories/Archive 1#WikiProject Iowa), so I don't think a single guideline or suggested template would be a good idea, even if non-binding. A list of "available elements for Project design" might be handy, I suppose, but I suspect that many Project designers already look at existing projects to see what features they think will be most useful to their own project. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 20:16, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Iowa geography stubs

Howdy all - I've been sorting through the 1,300+ stub articles on geographic locations in the great state of Iowa and I need your advice. It would be helpful for stub sorters if we could figure out how to split Iowa on the regional level, so that we'd have (for example) "Northern Iowa geographical stubs" as a parent of stub articles for places in those counties that fall into that region. ANYWAY... long story short, can you recommend a source for us to determine what constitutes Iowa's regions? Thanks for any advice you can give me. Cheers, Pegship (talk) 00:54, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Talk:Atlantic High School (Iowa)#Title confusion

Hi, there is a discussion on a page of interest to your project regarding a page split and titling issue. Please add your knowledge to the discussion. Thanks. John from Idegon (talk) 08:46, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Auto-assessment of article classes

Following a recent discussion at WP:VPR, there is consensus for an opt-in bot task that automatically assesses the class of articles based on classes listed for other project templates on the same page. In other words, if WikiProject A has evaluated an article to be C-class and WikiProject B hasn't evaluated the article at all, such a bot task would automatically evaluate the article as C-class for WikiProject B.

If you think auto-assessment might benefit this project, consider discussing it with other members here. For more information or to request an auto-assessment run, please visit User:BU RoBOT/autoassess. This is a one-time message to alert projects with over 1,000 unassessed articles to this possibility. ~ Rob^Talk 22:31, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

US 50,000 Challenge invite

Hi. The Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/The 50,000 Challenge has recently started, based on the UK/Ireland Wikipedia:The 10,000 Challenge. The idea is not to record every minor edit, but to create a momentum to motivate editors to produce good content improvements and creations and inspire people to work on more states than they might otherwise work on. If there's the interest I will start 1000 State Challenges like Wikipedia:The 1000 Challenge (Nordic). For this to really work we need diversity and exciting content and editors from a broad range of states regularly contributing. If you would like to see masses of articles being improved for the US and your specialist/home state like Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon, sign up today and once the challenge starts a contest can be organized. This is a way we can target every state, and steadily vastly improve the encyclopedia. We need numbers to make this work so consider signing up as a participant and also sign under any state sub challenge on the page that you might contribute to! Thankyou.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:15, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Upcoming "420 collaboration"

You are invited to participate in the upcoming "420 collaboration", which is being held from Saturday, April 15 to Sunday, April 30, and especially on April 20, 2017! The purpose of the collaboration, which is being organized by WikiProject Cannabis, is to create and improve cannabis-related content at Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in a variety of fields, including: culture, health, hemp, history, medicine, politics, and religion. WikiProject Iowa participants may be particularly interested in the following: Cannabis in Iowa. For more information about this campaign, and to learn how you can help improve Wikipedia, please visit the "420 collaboration" page.

---Another Believer _(Talk) 14:55, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Popular pages report

We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject or task force is signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, Community Tech bot will post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Iowa/Popular pages with a list of the most-viewed pages over the previous month that are within the scope of WikiProject Iowa.

We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:

• The pageview data includes both desktop and mobile data.
• The report will include a link to the pageviews tool for each article, to dig deeper into any surprises or anomalies.
• The report will include the total pageviews for the entire project (including redirects).

We're grateful to Mr.Z-man for his original Mr.Z-bot, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding the reach of WikiProject Iowa, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at m:User talk:Community Tech bot.

Warm regards, the Community Tech Team 17:16, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Template:Iowa_County,_Iowa

Hi guys,

Can someone please take a look at Template:Iowa_County,_Iowa? The map is supposed to show Iowa County highlighted in red, but instead shows the whole state highlighted in red (compare with other county navigation boxes). I suspect there's a file naming conflict somewhere, since the code in the template is correct. 67.1.148.36 (talk) 18:50, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

New Iowa userbox templates

New Iowa userbox templates are now available at Template:User WP Iowa and Template:User WP United States. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 22:38, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:42, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:IAMilitary

Template:IAMilitary has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. DH85868993 (talk) 05:57, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

RfC on election/referendum naming format

An RfC on moving the year from the end to the start of article titles (e.g. South African general election, 2019 to 2019 South African general election) has been reopened for further comment, including on whether a bot could be used move the articles if it closed in favour of the change: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (government and legislation)#Proposed change to election/referendum naming format. Cheers, Number 57 15:45, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:IA listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:IA. Interested editors may want to participate in the redirect discussion if they have not already done so. — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 20:32, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

When making articles on Iowa school districts, make sure the district legally exists

Hi! I know there aren't many watchers here, but I thought I'd talk about Iowa school districts. I've written about both current and former school districts, and I'd like to talk about making sure a school district you're writing about legally exists.

Lately many Iowa school districts have consolidated with one another, and the State of Iowa maintains a list of school district consolidations since 1965. Often what the districts do is they form "grade-sharing" agreements in which two existing school districts send each other's students to the other's school. For example District A operates a single elementary school for students in district A and B, while District B operates the middle-high school. They may have a joint website and present themselves as a single school district, such as "AB School District." West Fork Community School District stated 2008 was its start year as its predecessor districts signed a grade-sharing agreement and opened a common high school.

However in this grade-sharing scenario, one should at first retain having two separate articles, because the school districts are still legally separate with their own boards of education which can make their own decisions. West Fork district didn't actually exist as a single district with its own single school board until 2011. In addition, even though Farragut School District and Hamburg School District presented themselves as a "Nishnabotna School District", they were still independent districts with their own minds, as Hamburg actually voted to stop using the Farragut superintendent (the two were sharing the same superintendent).

The actual consolidation will come if/when residents in both districts vote, with a majority (usually?) to consolidate. The two school boards will legally become one, and the State of Iowa will now count the districts as merged in that lovely PDF file. However this doesn't always come: Farragut and Hamburg held a vote on consolidating, but Hamburg residents voted it down. Then Farragut fell afoul of State of Iowa Education authorities (for financial difficulties). The State forced it to close and divided its land among other districts. The two school districts are not truly one until the district populations vote to merge!

If, for example, there are two districts presenting themselves as "AB School District" and you feel you need an article with that title, why not make an article on the high school and redirect "AB School District" to "AB High School"? (for example I redirected Nishnabotna Community School District to Nishnabotna High School) Then if a successful vote happens, you can move the "AB High School" article to "AB School District" and rewrite the page to be about the newly-formed district. WhisperToMe (talk) 19:01, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

WP 1.0 Bot Beta

Hello! Your WikiProject has been selected to participate in the WP 1.0 Bot rewrite beta. This means that, starting in the next few days or weeks, your assessment tables will be updated using code in the new bot, codenamed Lucky. You can read more about this change on the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team page. Thanks! audiodude (talk) 06:49, 27 February 2019 (UTC)