Category talk:Parish Directory (USA)

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The articles in this category are in serious need of standardization. —Dcn. David ^{talk contribs} 22:31, January 29, 2006 (CST)

Agreed. The following are some issues which (I think) should be addressed:

• Inclusion: Do we include Coptic or other parishes? (If "other," then what gets included?) Should we just leave those to the CopticWiki? Does including them conflict with our Chalcedonian-biased NPOV?
• Websites: Should we link to listings in the jurisdictional parish directories to provide more information, or only to the websites proper of the parishes? Is there a tidy way to include both without being unclear?
• Maintenance: Should we have a systematic way of ensuring that the information is up-to-date?

Are there any other questions or issues which others have wondered about, like whether to include monasteries? (There are already plenty of sites which have aggregated monasteries, and this is focussed on parishes, so I don't feel a need to, at least right now.) —magda (talk) 09:35, January 30, 2006 (CST)

I agree very strongly. Having taken part in the directory formation. the points you all mention have come to my mind from the start. I'll be adding comments to each of the items below, but at this top level my first thought was that as the lists grow we are talking of thousnds of parishes, let alone the other organizations such as monastaries and other local associations. This will be a major maintenance job, especially if we decide to include volatile data such as names. I think that the listings should be formed on a strict format, with data that is not volatile. Wsk 12:46, January 31, 2006 (CST)

Contents 1 Inclusion 2 Websites 3 Maintenance 4 Organization 5 Style Manual

Inclusion

I would prefer to limit the inclusion to those jurisdictions specifically listed in the Orthodoxy in America template. Links to the jurisdictional parish directories are included for reference on the Category page. Kind of like this statement. —magda (talk) 09:35, January 30, 2006 (CST)

With the fragmentation we have in "jurisdictions" I agree with Magda's approach. Wsk 12:46, January 31, 2006 (CST)

Websites

I think we should have the main link only for the website proper; and that only if there is no parish website, I think it would be nice to have a link to the parish listing following the entry, like this (without website and with):

• St. Michael Mission [1] (Antiochian) - Fr. Andrew Moore
• St. Athanasios Chapel (GOARCH) - V. Rev. Fr. Frank Paul Mayernick

This way, there is contact information given, but it is clear that the parish website either does not exist or has not been found. —magda (talk) 09:35, January 30, 2006 (CST)

I do agree that a link to the parish's website should be included. That will provide access to all the variable information about the parish which would mean we would not need to include it in the Orthodoxwiki articles. That can save use a lot of work maintaining the articles. (See my comment above in the first section. Magda, I like the styles you propose except I would leave the names off, again to reduce what could be a major effort to keep up with changing personalities and making the 'correction.' Also, if I have understood you, I think only one site should be linked, with the 'private' site of the parish used. If there isn't one then the link could be to the site within the jurisdiction's website, if there is an standalone link. Wsk 08:02, February 1, 2006 (CST)

Maintenance

I think it would be a good idea to have each state checked in its entirety about once a year. The date can be left in comments at the top of the page. (I've been trying to do this: <!-- Last checked for completeness and working links by User:Magda on November 30, 2005 --->.) I don't know whether there's an easy way to check for completeness, but working links shouldn't be too difficult to check for; perhaps these could be separated. Maybe there should even be a "work-in-progress" template, or notes on the talk page to show which jurisdictions have already been covered. It does take a lot of work to put one of these pages together completely, though. —magda (talk) 09:35, January 30, 2006 (CST)

Just a note about checking links -- this can be done pretty easily in an automated fashion in Firefox by using the "Web Developer's Toolbar" extension(and perhaps others). Of course, it's not the perfect substitute for a manual check, but it helps when there's a lot of material to get through. Fr. John

Organization

I think the parish listings should be listed geographically, rather than by jurisdiction. —magda (talk) 12:09, January 31, 2006 (CST)

While I've tended to use a jurisdictional format, there is merit with organizing on a geographic basis. This de-emphasizing "jurisdictionalism" and leads to a presentation of "a" Orthodox Church in America as well as in other areas that have the same problem we have in the U.S. By saying "geographical" is assume we are mean the name of the city, town, or locality in which each parish is located. Wsk 12:46, January 31, 2006 (CST) By the way on re-reading this, I didn't mean 'Orthodox Church in America' as in 'OCA' but as the entirety (a single) Orthodox Church! Wsk 08:02, February 1, 2006 (CST)

Style Manual

I think it's probably a good idea to summarize these ideas into a clear style guide to follow. Here are some of the things I think are useful:

• No table of contents: __NOTOC__
• Template:Orthodoxyinamerica should be included unless the template is significantly longer than the article
• Dated comment about a complete update to the page; a complete update should include:
  • searching each of the jurisdictional listings for parish listings
  • searching independently for parish websites if they are not given by the jurisdiction
  • checking each link to make sure it works
• Standard introductory sentence, currently something like: "This is a listing of Orthodox Christian parishes in the State of X."
  • Would it make things clearer to have a statement like this at the top (as discussed earlier on this page)? How should that be worded? The category page has something similar: "Links to the official parish directories from the jurisdictions featured in the Orthodoxy in America template include the following," but it might be easier to have a short sentence at the top of each page.
• Geographical listing of cities
  • What is the best way to organize these listings so that small towns near a large city will be recognized?
  • Should we consider adding google maps (not sure of feasibility) or leave that up to the pan-Orthodox parish finders already out there?
• Individual parish listings
  • parish name, with link to parish website
  • parish name, followed by link to directory (in the case of the parish not having a website)
  • jurisdiction in parenthesis
    • Not each jurisdictional mention should have a link, per the Style Manual: "When creating wiki-links within an article, it's only necessary to link a given term once in the introductory section or when the term is first introduced in the article. In longer articles, it is acceptable to link a given term again at the beginning of later major sections."
    • Should we link only once per article; only once per city listing; or just aim for once per article, adding later links as subjectively needed for longer articles?
• External links for Orthodox resources within the geographic area which include more than one parish, and resources for college Orthodox organizations within the state
• Include Template:Parishes of the USA, and categories "Churches" and "Directories"

Questions? Comments? Complaints? Criticism? —magda (talk) 14:52, November 6, 2007 (PST)

I feel that on many of these pages, it's very hard to tell where parishes are actually located.

In some cases, parishes are listed under their individual municipalities, no matter how small. This makes it tough if you're using the page to find a parish to visit; if you're an out-of-stater, looking at Ash Grove, Glendale, Kirkwood, House Springs, and Town and Country, how would you know whether any of those are in/near St. Louis, MO? (All are, except Ash Grove, which is near Springfield.)

In other cases, the parishes are listed under major city, then locality, but with (in my opinion) insufficient contrast between the two: merely a somewhat smaller font for the municipality, which can be hard to see.

I've formatted the page for Missouri in a way that I think better draws out the contrast between cities and the individual municipalities. It makes it very easy to scan the page for the metropolitan area you're looking for, then to look through that area for individual parishes. I'd like to solicit feedback on using it as a model for the other pages to improve both their readability and scannability. --Kyralessa 16:42, January 4, 2008 (PST)

What are your thoughts on this for Missouri? The map wasn't too difficult (even for Texas), but I also tried to make a compromise in terms of the headings (=== for the larger areas, plain bold for the sub-areas) and clarifying municipality collections with full lines. One of the things I changed back to was keeping the directory listings (cf. Desloge) separate from the actual webpages (cf. Kansas City) as shown above (Websites section). Another is the inclusion of the {{Template:Orthodoxyinamerica}}. I'm interested in hearing opinions and suggestions on each part. —magda (talk) 18:54, February 19, 2008 (PST)

I had not thought about the size of the browser window being an issue with the map displaying properly. The map itself can be resized, etc. —magda (talk) 19:18, February 19, 2008 (PST)

Just one comment, if someone was looking for a church in the Kansas City Missouri area, should the map not show their options just over the state line in Kansas? Like Overland Park, or Kansas City? Can the data for the maps be templates so states can include neighboring states? - Andrew 15:33, February 28, 2008 (PST)

Good point. Perhaps for the larger city areas which spill over into other states, we should have something like: See more parishes in this area in X state. with a link to whatever state or states. Right now the only metropolitan area I know of with this taken care of is DC, which simply relists all the parishes from other states. I'm not sure what you mean in terms of templates for maps, though. —magda (talk) 15:44, February 28, 2008 (PST)