Talk:Little Italy, Cleveland

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For the May 2005 deletion debate on this article, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Little Italy, Cleveland.

Reasoning for Little Italy Merger

Little Italy is a major district in Cleveland, however, for the purposes of the Census Bureau, the neighborhood isn't considered an independent district. So far as the Cleveland City Planning Commission is concerned, Little Italy is part of the University Circle Statistical Planning Area, which is what the Cleveland neighborhood template, as well as the census data in each neighborhood's respective infobox, is based on. In an attempt to make the neighborhoods of Cleveland system more standardized for Wikipedia readers (and remember, these are encyclopedia articles meant for the world, not a collection of neighborhood pride Facebook pages), it is vital that we keep the listings on the template consistent. For Little Italy to be part of this, the merger is necessary.

It is the goal of WikiProject Cleveland to sort and improve and Cleveland-related articles for Wikipedia's larger readership. This merger with the University Circle article won't lose any of the Little Italy article's original content, and in fact will connect it better to the Cleveland Neighborhood sub-project -- which only includes the larger census tracts as defined by the aleady mentioned City Planing Commission.

I grew up close to Murray Hill and I undestand the pride the neighborhood has. It is not my intention to water down the article's content, or to disenfranchise the people who live or have lived there. Quite to the contrary, the aim of this move is to increase the awareness and thus the availability of info on Little Italy.

In case there are any who disbelieve my statements regarding the Cleveland City Planning Commission's partitioning of Statistical Planning Areas (SPA), here is a link to the webpage: http://planning.city.cleveland.oh.us/census/factsheets/cpc.html

Thank you for your input.Ryecatcher773 (talk) 03:44, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I think I understand where you're coming from, but I also think it's not a good idea. First, to clarify, the Statistical Planning Areas are a creation of the City of Cleveland, the the Census Bureau was not involved. The SPAs are constructed of census tracts, but that's as far as it goes. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History has a good entry about the SPAs. That said, the SPAs often are a good proxy for neighborhoods, but they don't always align perfectly. Most of the time, they work well, but in some cases they don't reflect neighborhood boundaries.

Sometimes our articles align with the SPAs, and sometimes they don't. We have cases where one article covers multiple SPAs, and some SPAs that are split across multiple articles. That's okay. Little Italy and University Circle is one example, West Park is another. Downtown Cleveland includes The Warehouse District and North Coast Harbor, and that may be the best template to use here. It might be a good idea to mention in each article that the University SPA encompasses both neighborhoods, and then make certain that the two articles clearly link to one another. We shouldn't, however, allow the SPA definitions to override common sense. - Eureka Lott 00:44, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying, and I also understand that the SPA's are over-inclusive, and overlook the individuality of neighborhoods in Cleveland (I lived just up Mayfield Road from The Hill for the first 22 years of my life, and I understand that once you pass under the tracks at the viaduct at the bottom of Mayfield, Little Italy ends and a completely separate neighborhood begins). The problem is, the neighborhood template doesn't include Little Italy or any of the neighborhoods you mentioned... which, if you may recall from this [edit], was something I tried to address back in July.

We have to find some sort of a compromise here that has consistency. The template is important to the project, as points people to the various neighborhoods with a considerate degree of connectivity. But, the template either has to change to reflect the commonly recognized neighborhoods like Little Italy and Slavic Village (which I'll reiterate, is something I tried to change to in July), or the articles need to be merged to accurately reflect the SPA's used in the template. Because the census tracts for block-to-block demographics and population aren't available, it sort of undermines the whole principle of accuracy in an encyclopedic article... which means that it wouldn't be consistent with what we are attempting to do with the artilces in the first place: accurately convey info that can be cited with authority.

I'll finish with this because I currently live in a city that has its own WikiProject, and covers a lot more neighborhoods, but also has some of the same problems with conflicting boundaries: A prime example is New City (one of the 77 officially recognized areas of Chicago). New City has two very distinct neighborhoods: Back of The Yards and Canaryville. One is mainly Irish, and one is predominantly Hispanic, and if you are at all familiar with the self-imposed segregation that is implicitly entrenched in Chicago neighborhood provincialism (as well as the underpinnings of racism), you'd understand how much the residents of Canaryville do not want to be associated with the former, regardless of how the city officials may see it. However, for census purposes, New City is where both neighborhoods fall into, and inasmuch, after some hemming and hawing by a few members of WikiProject Chicago, the articles were both merged and now have subsections in the New City article. It came down to an argument very similar to the one I'm making for the SPA's in Cleveland. We need consistency and we need citability (if that is a word). With Little Italy as a stand-alone article, we don't get the facts that are pertinent to anyone interested in statistical information. There is nothing wrong with subsections for individual neighborhoods, particularly since this is an Encyclopedia after all, and we need to offer more than just a flavor of the neighborhood, which could be found on any Chamber of Commerce website. Ryecatcher773 (talk) 07:07, 9 January 2011 (UTC)