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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was merge and redirect. Johnleemk | Talk 07:38, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of U.S. state legislature websites

[edit]

THIS IS NOW A NON-ISSUE. I have merged the information into the article List of state legislatures in the United States and converted this page to a redirect.

RickReinckens 07:15, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete because Wikipedia is not a repository of links. Instead, these could/should be listed in the external links section of the individual pages in Category:U.S. State legislatures. HollyAm 23:55, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CHANGING "STRONG KEEP" TO REDIRECT. I am the author of the article. I expanded the intro to show why this is useful and belongs on Wikipedia.

I created the article only shortly after first using Wikipedia. I have thought about it some more since putting the other comments below and it seems this information does belong in "List of state legislatures". I will be merging the information into that article. That will keep the information and put it in one place.
RickReinckens 05:23, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, the reason I created the article is that I research the law of multiple states on a regular basis and I have links to a lot of the state legislatures on my computer. I get tired of having to search around every time I need to find a state's law. WestLaw costs us several hundred dollars per month and does not have a way to download entire chapters. FindLaw and all the other "sources" have the same problem.

After almost a decade of Internet research, I accidentally ran across the National Conference of State Legislatures, whose website has a Java application that pulls up legislature links (in far more detail). That is the only site I have ever found with a "central repository" of legislature links. (The "source" I listed is actually one of my websites. I added that page after creating the Wikipedia article in case somebody wanted to complain about "no sources identified".)

Obviously, none of the "delete" people do this type of multi-state statutory research or you would realize why the list is helpful to those of us who do.

I was going to just add an URL shortcut link on my computer and I decided, "You know, it will be only a little more work to put a list of the sites on Wikipedia, and then everyone can use them."

Yes, users could use WikiPedia's Category: U.S. Legislatures to go to the WikiPedia article for each legislature and then search for a link to the legislature.

  • But, a lot of Wiki users don't know that much about how to use it. I didn't.
  • A lot of them won't get into it enough to figure that out. They just won't use it.
  • Navigating around Categories often is pretty confusing and annoying. I have several articles for which I have been trying to find categories and I keep winding up in the wrong places.
  • The Categories approach relies on 50 different authors maintaining the links on 50 different articles, with the link in a different location on each article.
  • Instead of one central location, the Categories approach requires jumping through several steps—for each legislature's website. Pretty annoying.
  • It's not like bandwidth isn't a problem with Wikipedia. With the List of Legislatures' Websites, the user pulls up one Wikipedia page and clicks on external links. With the Categories approach the user pulls up 51 articles and has to scour through each one to get to where he really wants to go.
  • Other than my webpage added after the Wiki article was created, there is no place on the Web that conveniently lists both the name of the state and the URL of the legislature. I didn't just put links, I deliberately put the URLs too. Again, for researchers, because they might want to print that information without having to do massive reformatting manually. If the article is deleted from Wikipedia, I have no real reason to keep it on my site. Which means the info won't be available anywhere. (Try the Java app at National Conference of State Legislatures to see what a pain it is compared to the list in the article.)
  • I deliberately broke up the article into sections with labels, to make it easier to find. Originally it was one large table but I found it more convenient for the user the other way--unlike the List of State Legislatures article.

Another option is merging the List of Websites article into the List of Legislatures article. I am ambivalent about that one for several reasons:

  • People looking for "website" information probably won't care about any of the other information.
  • The "Legislatures" article is already pretty long.
  • Regarding adding an additional cell to each line of the table in the other article, the table is pretty wide already.
  • The articles really have significantly different goals and content. The Legislatures article is about the legislatures--their composition, location, etc. The Websites article is strictly a convenient way to get to the legislature and a list of URLs, for those who want to publish the information (e.g., in a list of Sources consulted.)
RickReinckens 04:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can understand your position and can see that a lot of effort went into this list, but as previously stated above, per official Wikipedia policy, Wikipedia is not the place for a directory of websites. As a college administrator, I personally might like to see a list of websites for each state's board of higher education, but I will not be putting it here because the Wikipedia community has decided against having mere collections of external links in the encyclopedia, however helpful they may be to certain users. Another example: dictionary definitions and news articles are helpful to many but Wikipedia is not the place for them either; that's for Wikitionary and Wikinews, respectively. HollyAm 04:48, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]


The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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