Wikipedia

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EOst
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Wikipedia

Postby EOst » December 10th, 2014, 2:27 pm

Since we're all, evidently, well-informed urbanist nerds with too much free time (why else post here, right?), I thought it might be good to point y'all to an underappreciated problem with Minneapolis-St. Paul; our Wikipedia pages are, almost uniformly, terrible.

What do you mean?
With a handful of exceptions, the Wikipedia pages for our transit networks, neighborhoods, and major attractions are severely underwritten and lacking up-to-date photos--if they even have them in the first place. A few are particularly egregious; the article for Stadium Village is dated (the picture is from before the TCF Bank Stadium was constructed), extremely short, and lacking virtually any pertinent information. Many neighborhoods, such as Lyndale, are basically stub articles written with census data. Our few attractions, like Peavey Plaza and the Stone Arch Bridge, have unappealing articles at best.

You can see the problem best if you compare these articles to those found for the major urban features and neighborhoods of other cities. The articles for places like Queen Anne in Seattle or Union Square in Boston are long, full of pictures, and packed with historical trivia and descriptions of amenities. The articles for MAX in Portland or Link in Seattle put our METRO article to shame, to say nothing of the fantastic articles for big urban transit systems like Boston's L or Chicago's T. The articles for our parks are especially embarrassing; who would want to visit the Chain of Lakes if all they knew was the Wiki page?

Who cares?
It's easy to dismiss Wikipedia; after all, it's frequently unreliable and run by a cabal of administrators with questionable motives (and sanity). But it's also critically important. When you google "Marcy-Holmes", the second result, after the neighborhood organization, is a link to its lackluster article. As well-informed locals, we already know which links to investigate, but we aren't the norm; people expect the Wikipedia article to be good, and if it isn't, they're going to turn somewhere else.

Where else? For a depressingly large number of Minneapolis attractions and neighborhoods, the next item down in a Google search is a link to City-Data or Yahoo Answers, where the answers are all written by suburbanites or people who moved away in the 1980s. What those sites will tell you shouldn't be surprising; that living in Whittier is asking to get raped, that Elliot Park is a 24-hour outdoor drug market, that only prostitutes live in Powderhorn... you get the picture. Faced with a lack of reliable information, people take what they can get. Just the other day, someone told me that, based on what he had read online, he was afraid to move to Loring Park "because of all the crime." This same person lived just off the intersection of Chicago and Lake in Phillips, which he thought was "generally a safe neighborhood"--to a large degree, because he had moved there without reading anything online, and only knew the area from his own experience.

This has other effects. When I moved here, I had to choose an apartment sight-unseen, entirely from Craigslist and what I could find on the internet. Quite frequently, I had an extraordinarily difficult time figuring out what neighborhoods were like, where major transit lines went, what kind of amenities were found in particular areas, etc. That isn't something you have trouble with in other cities, in large part because Wikipedia can do such an admirable job of conveying a sense of the place (albeit sometimes a bit whitewashed).

What can I do?
Write! No one's stopping you.

In preparation for writing this post, and to give an example of the kind of thing that could be done with a little work, I renovated the Wikipedia page for Stevens Square last night from this into this. The new page still isn't perfect, but for an hour and a half of work, it is a tremendous improvement. The best thing is, much of the work is already done for you. Most neighborhoods have "History" pages that you can cannibalize and summarize for article content (with citation, of course!). Pictures, especially of popular areas, are already plentiful; you can drill down here and find hundreds of them from different decades (all the pictures used on Stevens Square were taken by our very own mulad). If you're lacking inspiration, think of a comparable neighborhood or resource in another city and simply copy its structure, adding or cutting out sections as appropriate. These things sound like a lot of work, but many of the hardest elements have already been done for you.

Even small, incremental improvements would have a dramatic effect on how these pages look and feel. Adding a picture or an illustration is huge. So is adding a little bit of local knowledge, like bus routes or popular businesses. Even if you don't personally have time to dramatically renovate a page, even little improvements can have a real effect, and might as easily encourage others to do the same.

So, honestly, get to it.

twincitizen
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby twincitizen » December 10th, 2014, 4:14 pm

You should make this a streets.mn post.

Contact Nick and he'll put you in touch with the right people to get authoring rights.

Surely I'm not the only one who has noticed that the Minneapolis page still has a picture of the Twins playing at the Metrodome

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MN Fats
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby MN Fats » December 11th, 2014, 2:20 pm

I steadfastly agree with all points you've made here. Good to see others are concerned with this issue. I've been editing wikipedia for almost 10 years now, all it takes is desire and some spare free time to bring quality information and articles to the site.

talindsay
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby talindsay » December 11th, 2014, 2:25 pm

I steadfastly agree with all points you've made here. Good to see others are concerned with this issue. I've been editing wikipedia for almost 10 years now, all it takes is desire and some spare free time to bring quality information and articles to the site.
Also ideally, facts with reliable sources backing them up, something that's sadly lacking from a lot of Wikipedia pages in question.

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MN Fats
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby MN Fats » December 11th, 2014, 2:39 pm

I steadfastly agree with all points you've made here. Good to see others are concerned with this issue. I've been editing wikipedia for almost 10 years now, all it takes is desire and some spare free time to bring quality information and articles to the site.
Also ideally, facts with reliable sources backing them up, something that's sadly lacking from a lot of Wikipedia pages in question.
True, it must be done properly. That's where Wikipedia gets its bad name from.

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Nick
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby Nick » December 11th, 2014, 4:31 pm

Nick Magrino
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Nick
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby Nick » December 11th, 2014, 4:36 pm

I think mulad was/is a pretty active editor of Wikipedia, right? I use it a LOT for basic research for streets.mn posts b/c I'm terrified of Google and because the first result in a Google search (at least anything I do) is almost always a Wikipedia article anyway.

Admittedly, I often do scroll down to the sources on Wikipedia articles and the links are almost always broken, in particular news articles. So, a little unnerving maybe, but most of the time vandalism is pretty obvious and, I mean, if you're reading a "criticism" subsection of anything, you should probably question the viewpoint regardless of where it is.
Nick Magrino
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mulad
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby mulad » December 12th, 2014, 6:04 pm

Yeah, I used to do a lot of stuff there, varying anywhere from punctuation and grammar cleanup to writing whole new articles and taking photos. There's a lot that people can do.

I've been a bit too busy with work and have had some interests that strayed into areas where I couldn't find reliable sources online, or I basically had to do my own research and reporting (mostly train stuff). The blowing political winds made it hard to do anything useful when it came to writing about things like the Wisconsin HSR project to Madison. I've also been dumping a lot of my free time into OpenStreetMap instead, where I've been cleaning up rail lines across MN and neighboring states.

Anyway, people should try out editing Wikipedia, or doing things like taking photos or creating illustrations and maps.

David Greene
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby David Greene » December 12th, 2014, 11:43 pm

Off topic, but is there any good phone application for OpenStreetMap? The ones I've tried are just awful.

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Realstreets
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby Realstreets » January 1st, 2015, 8:05 am

I've answered the call and spent the first hours of 2015 adding info to the Minneapolis Wikipedia page. I added info under the Cuisine section to highlight the amazing food and restaurants we have here. I also added info under the visual arts section, climate section (highlighting all the sunshine we get!) and Economy section. Next, I want to clean up the Infrastructure section by separating out the modes and add info about our fantastic healthcare system. Also, I will work on the page for neighborhoods I'm familiar with.

So in the Economy section I wanted to add information about all the corporate headquarters etc in the surrounding area but there is note on the editing page that explicitly says not to add headquarters not in Minneapolis... However, other cities mention headquarters in suburbs on their pages. I think adding these would help show what an economic powerhouse the region is.

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Realstreets
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby Realstreets » January 1st, 2015, 8:09 am

I also received a camera with interchangeable lenses for Christmas so I hope to take some good photos soon.
Last edited by Realstreets on January 1st, 2015, 9:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

mulad
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby mulad » January 1st, 2015, 8:13 am

Here's a list for companies based in the Twin Cities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... Saint_Paul

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MN Fats
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby MN Fats » February 5th, 2015, 9:40 am

Edina's racist past is focus of Wikipedia 'edit war'

http://www.startribune.com/local/west/2 ... page=1&c=y

twinkess
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby twinkess » February 5th, 2015, 11:18 am

Edina's racist past is focus of Wikipedia 'edit war'

http://www.startribune.com/local/west/2 ... page=1&c=y
The edit war was re-ignited by that article. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... on=history

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MN Fats
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby MN Fats » February 5th, 2015, 11:22 am

Yeah that article is probably a candidate for full edit protection until both parties figure out what they want to do.

dragne_SDI
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby dragne_SDI » July 13th, 2015, 2:16 pm

If I can think of any Minneapolis-related Wikipedia article that needs a drastic change (expansion), it is the official "Downtown Minneapolis" page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central,_Minneapolis. Either that or there needs to be a brand new page for Downtown Minneapolis as a CBD, rather than as an official neighborhood.

Look at the pages for other similarily-sized (or smaller) cities, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Kansas_City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Phoenix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Pittsburgh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_San_Diego

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Tampa


The same goes for St. Paul, which doesn't have a Downtown page whatsoever.

twincitizen
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby twincitizen » July 13th, 2015, 2:34 pm

As you're considering what/how to edit, I'd keep an eye on this: http://www.journalmpls.com/news-feed/do ... lit-in-two

Sounds like some boundaries/names could be changing, which could then influence how you edit and re-title those sub-pages.
But yes, holy crap that's crazy there is no page for Downtown Minneapolis.

If that neighborhood change is approved by the city, the first thing I'd do is merge the existing pages for "Downtown East" and "Mill District", keeping it titled "Mill District" per the above neighborhood change.

For the "main" Downtown wiki page, would you edit the "Central" page you linked above, which includes North Loop, Loring, & Elliot Park? Or would you actually edit the "Downtown West" page, and instead change the redirect - so that a search for "Downtown Minneapolis" leads to the existing "Downtown West"(to be renamed just "Downtown Minneapolis") page? I would suggest the latter, since Mill District, North Loop, and Loring (albeit barely) already have their own specific pages.

EOst
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby EOst » July 26th, 2015, 6:49 pm

I'm working on rewriting the Wiki article for Loring Park, and I'd love to include a panoramic picture from above, sort of like this picture from Seattle's Capitol Hill. Does anyone have a suitable picture they'd be willing to give, or have access to a view and the willingness to take a picture? There must be one person here with a downtown-facing apartment in Oak Grove Tower. ;)

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nBode
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby nBode » July 26th, 2015, 9:17 pm

There was a good photo on the CityofMinneapolis Instagram page recently…

MSPtoMKE
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Re: Wikipedia

Postby MSPtoMKE » July 26th, 2015, 10:32 pm

This one is 3 years old, from my days living on Oak Grove, but you are welcome to use it, if you link back to the image and credit me :)

Image
Loring Park Dusk Panorama by Andy Tucker, on Flickr
My flickr photos.


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