Misplaced Pages

Talk:Washington and Old Dominion Railroad

Article snapshot taken from[REDACTED] with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Corker1 (talk | contribs) at 21:16, 8 October 2021 (→External links). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 21:16, 8 October 2021 by Corker1 (talk | contribs) (→External links)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
This article has not yet been rated on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
WikiProject iconTrains
WikiProject icon
Trains Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. See also: WikiProject Trains to do list and the Trains Portal.TrainsWikipedia:WikiProject TrainsTemplate:WikiProject Trainsrail transport
???This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
Note icon
It is requested that an a map be included in this article to improve its quality. Please work with the Maps task force to create and add a map to this article.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
WikiProject iconVirginia Mid‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject Virginia, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of Virginia on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.VirginiaWikipedia:WikiProject VirginiaTemplate:WikiProject VirginiaVirginia
MidThis article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
WikiProject iconUnited States: District of Columbia Low‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States
LowThis article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
Taskforce icon
This article is supported by WikiProject District of Columbia (assessed as Low-importance).
Material from Washington and Old Dominion Railroad was split to Washington and Old Dominion Railway on 11:43, 25 February 2013. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution.

Desperately in need of a map

Is there a public-domain map of the line available? I can't recall seeing one. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thetrick (talk • contribs) 01:42, 9 December 2006 (UTC).

  • Public-domain maps of the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad and its predecessors are available in the Ames Williams Collection in a branch of the Alexandria public library system at the following location: Local History/Special Collections, 717 Queen Street, Alexandria, VA 22314-2420. Public-domain maps of the railroad are also available at the headquarters of the Washington and Old Railroad Regional Park in Ashburn, Virginia. Corker1 (talk) 21:41, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Comment

Dang that is one hyperactive bot. Thetrick 01:45, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

1911 or 1912?

According to the ICC valuation of the Southern Railway, the W&OD leased the line from November 15, 1911. Is this correct, or was it actually effective in 1912? --NE2 11:26, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

  • The Washington and Old Dominion Railway concluded negotations with the Southern Railway for the lease of the Southern's Bluemont Branch in 1911. Under the lease terms, the Washington & Old Dominion Railway would take over all of the Bluemont Branch service on July 1, 1912. Reference: Harwood, Herbert Hawley, Jr. (April 2000). "4. Transformation". Rails to the Blue Ridge: The Washington and Old Dominion Railroad, 1847–1968 (3rd ed.). Fairfax Station, Virginia: Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority. pp. 45–46. ISBN 0-615-11453-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Corker1 (talk) 21:42, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Coordinate error

{{geodata-check}}

The following coordinate fixes are need for LATITUDE NEED TO BE NEGATIVE...YOU END UP IN CHINA!!—72.192.201.191 (talk) 06:57, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Coordinate has been corrected and made negative. See Mapping on Bing Maps

File:En-wodr.ogg Nominated for speedy Deletion

An image used in this article, File:En-wodr.ogg, has been nominated for speedy deletion for the following reason: All Misplaced Pages files with unknown copyright status

What should I do?

Don't panic; you should have time to contest the deletion (although please review deletion guidelines before doing so). The best way to contest this form of deletion is by posting on the image talk page.

  • If the image is non-free then you may need to provide a fair use rationale
  • If the image isn't freely licensed and there is no fair use rationale, then it cannot be uploaded or used.
  • If the image has already been deleted you may want to try Deletion Review

To take part in any discussion, or to review a more detailed deletion rationale please visit the relevant image page (File:En-wodr.ogg)

This is Bot placed notification, another user has nominated/tagged the image --CommonsNotificationBot (talk) 21:14, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Merge Railroad and Railway articles

This page has previously been merged into the Washington and Old Dominion Railway page, as that article is more concise and covers all important historical aspects of the line (see WP:DETAIL). A Wiki article should contain a quick summary of the topic's most important points. The level of detail contained in this article far exceeds the qualifications of a[REDACTED] article and is more appropriate for a fansite. A railroad line that did not exceed 80 miles does not need two articles covering its history. Please do not revert this move until first discussing on talk page. Thank you. Oanabay04 (talk) 19:05, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

  • WP:DETAIL encourages editors to create "parent" and "child" articles if a single article contains too much detail. WP:DETAIL states: The parent article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in child articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is first shown the lead section for a topic, and within its article any section may have a {{Main|<subpage name>}} or similar link to a full article on the subtopic summarized in that section (for example, Yosemite National Park#History and History of the Yosemite area are two such related featured articles). The summary in a section at the parent article will often be at least twice as long as the lead section in the child article. The child article in turn can also serve as a parent article for its specific part of the topic, and so on, until a topic is very thoroughly covered. Thus, by navigational choices, several different types of readers each get the amount of details they want.
Therefore, if an editor, such as Oanabay04, considers that an article has too much detail, that editor has the responsibility to create a parent article and child articles that together retain all of the verifiable information that the original article contains. Further, if an editor considers that an article contains too many Wikilinks, that editor has the responsiblity to remove those that are excessive on an individual basis, rather than deleting or replacing entire sections.
All of the information in Washington and Old Dominion Railroad is supported by in-line citations to reliable sources. However, some of the information in Washington and Old Dominion Railway lacks adequate in-line citations. For example, the reference to information in The Historical Guide to North American Railroads identifies the editor of the book, but does not identify the author of the referenced information or the primary source of the information. Readers therefore find it difficult or impossible to verify the relliability of the source. Further, the infobox in Washington and Old Dominion Railway does not contain any citations to reliable sources. This is important, as some of the information in the infobox is inaccurate (e.g., the logo in the infobox is not that of the Washington and Old Dominion Railway and the Alexandria, VA, did not contain the headquarters of the company that controlled the Railway.) The merges and other edits that Oanabay04 performed removed a large amount of verifiable information from Misplaced Pages and replaced it with inadequately sourced information. This is vandalism, regardless of an editor's intent.
One of the contributors to The Historical Guide to North American Railroads may have used the name Washington and Old Dominion Railway. However, there is no reason to believe that the contributor had sufficient expertise to use that name in the contribution. As noted above, a public entity (the Northern Virginia Regional Parks Authority) has assigned the name Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park to one of its facilities. Further, the authors of three books (including a 2013 book referenced in Washington and Old Dominion Railway before Oanabay04 deleted the reference without explanation) bear the titles of Washington and Old Dominion Railroad or Washington & Old Dominion Railroad. Together, these authors and entities carry greater weight than does the unknown contributor to The Historical Guide to North American Railroads. The title of the parent article should therefore be Washington and Old Dominion Railroad.
I am therefore restoring Washington and Old Dominion Railroad and Washington and Old Dominion Railway to their versions that existed before the most recent edits by Onabay04. I encourage Oanabay04 and other editors to create parent and child articles that retain all verifiable information in Washington and Old Dominion Railroad and Washington and Old Dominion Railway in a series of layered inverted pyramids in accordance with WP:DETAIL. To avoid any loss of verifiable information, both articles should remain open to all readers until editors have created the parent and child articles. Corker1 (talk) 03:49, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
  • I am glad you want to enourage myself and other editors to create parent and child articles that retain all verifiable information in these articles. The problem is that you failed to include the main purpose of the WP:DETAIL:
Summary style is based on the premise that information about a topic should not all be contained in a single article since different readers have different needs:
  • many readers need just a quick summary of the topic's most important points (lead section),
  • others need a moderate amount of information on the topic's more important points (a set of multiparagraph sections), and
  • some readers need a lot of details on one or more aspects of the topic (links to full-sized separate articles).
  • The only railroads that probably warrant full-sized separate articles would be the Pennsylvania Railroad, New York Central Railroad, Canadian Pacific, and public transit agencies with several moving parts, like SEPTA, MBTA, New Jersey Transit, etc. Creating two entire articles on the small W&OD brings up a serious question of notability WP:ORG. You seem to be under the impression that just because a fact is verifiable, it needs to be in a Wiki article. Hardly. Applying that logic to Misplaced Pages would result in excessively detailed articles on the over 10,000 small railroads that peppered the U.S. over the last 150 years. As long as the basic facts are present, written in a concise, simple manner and has a verifiable source, that works fine. Then, if you want to include additional sources that are not referenced in the text, you add "Further Sources," "External Links," etc. For the record, the excessive coordinate linkage of each and every station is hardly appropriate for a wiki article, but I left that (the sister article for Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park suffers from the same issue). Retaining two separate articles for a railroad the size of the W&OD overkill and more appropriate of a fanpage, as previously mentioned. I suggest you look through some other Wiki format links because it is really important to know unless you want your work mercilessly edited.Oanabay04 (talk) 18:31, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
  • WP:DETAIL describes the correct method for retaining verifiable information in Misplaced Pages while assuring that the main article and each child article will be concise. Adding "Further Sources" and "External Links", as Oanabay04 has suggested, does not permit readers to differentiate useful information from all of the extraneous, irrelevant and/or redundant information present in each link and source. Further, this procedure would often result in long and confusing lists of "External Links" and "Further Sources".
I agree with Oanabay04 that Misplaced Pages should contain only one article describing this railroad. This article should have several child articles, as WP:DETAIL recommends. In contrast, removing much verifiable and relevant information from Misplaced Pages by redirecting entire articles, as Oanabay04 has repeatedly done to Washington and Old Dominion Railroad, is inappropriate, is against Wikpedia policy, is an extreme form of vandalism, and needs to stop. Corker1 (talk) 20:14, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Dispute between two editors submitted to Misplaced Pages:Third opinion for resolution. 03:52, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Response to third opinion request:
Having had a look through this, I do not believe that WP:DETAIL is even relevant to the discussion at hand. It makes no statement as to what level of detail is "too much" for WP, but only states how any information that is included should be divided up. If, for the sake of argument, we were to accept that the information in this version of the article is appropriate for WP, then it makes perfect sense that it should be included here, in a separate article, and not clutter up the main one.

The real dispute, it seems to me, is whether or not the information is important enough to be included in WP at all, and the policy for that is not WP:DETAIL, but WP:N. This is the policy used "to decide whether a topic can have its own article" and "to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics", and it is the one that applies here. As Oanabay04 correctly says, WP:ORG is the more specific version of WP:N that applies in this instance. That policy says "An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources" and "if no independent, third-party, reliable sources can be found on a topic, then Misplaced Pages should not have an article on it."

The article includes inline cites to a single independent secondary source (the other does not appear to be independent of the subject). But one is not zero, so it seems to me that the standards of WP:ORG have been met. They have not been met very well, and I would encourage the inclusion of more sources, for example, by using inline cites to the sources currently mentioned in "External links" and "Further reading". But this is not sufficient grounds to delete the article. Yes, one might argue that, by this criterion, any small railroad could have an article on WP. So what? If they can be properly sourced, then I don't see any reason why every small railroad in the country shouldn't have its own article. If they can't be properly sourced to independent reliable sources, then, of course, they shouldn't be included, because they're not notable. There are limits to this, and to some extent, they are outlined at WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:DISCRIMINATE, but the page, as it currently stands, does not seem to me to violate either of these standards.

I would suggest that, if you still disagree about this, WP:AFD may be the best place to obtain wider opinion, since the question ultimately comes down to whether or not this page should be deleted. Anaxial (talk) 16:39, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Article scope

What's this article actually about? If it's about the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad (as the lede says), the reorganized Washington and Old Dominion Railway, then it should start in 1936, but it's essentially a history of the entire company beginning with the Alexandria and Harpers Ferry. I'm not opposed to that, at least until such time as sub-articles can be written. Note that the existing Washington and Old Dominion Railway article is up for deletion as a copyright violation; Oanabay04 (talk · contribs) copied much of the text word-for-word from George Drury's book. Mackensen (talk) 11:23, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 25 external links on Washington and Old Dominion Railroad. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 12:38, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

External links

This page is a flagrant violation of WP:EL. Just Bluemont Junction alone has 24 external links, most to photos. In total there must be at least 150 external links in this article, if not more. To quote the policy: "it is not Misplaced Pages's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic." Some links can be helpful to document information that can't be included here, but what has happened in this article goes entirely beyond any reasonable interpretation of the external links policy. The vast majority will need to be deleted.

The same goes for the massive station lists - they violate Misplaced Pages policy on excessive detail. I appreciate that editors have been working to make a comprehensive article, but Misplaced Pages's policies exist for good reasons. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:06, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Trainsandotherthings (talk): Please do not delete major parts of articles without first discussing specific potential edits on article's Talk pages. Your unilateral deletion was a violation of WP policy, which emphasises collaborative efforts by editors. Such unilateral actions can lead to edit wars.
You deleted a large amount of information supported by references to reliable sources. When doing this, you repeated an action that was reverted more than five years ago by consensus. As that action involved a redirect, it does not show up in the revision history of this article.
Many readers (including rail fans) use the station lists and external links in this article in discussions and when preparing publications. There are no other easily accessible sources for this information, except by using citations that you deleted.
You did not delete only external links and lists. You deleted entire sections of text, maps and photographs. Those deletions essentially destroyed the utility of this article.
You cited a Misplaced Pages policy that states: "it is not Misplaced Pages's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic" and cited another that discusses a policy on excessive detail. While these policies are often beneficial, they are detrimental when no publications or websites put together most or all of the information in an article.
I concur that there may be too many links to photos of Bluemont Junction and other stations. However, the appearances of these stations and nearby facilities changed over the years that the railroad operated. The photos document these changes. If you believe that there are too many links to photos, please identify the ones that you wish to delete.
Wholesale deletions such as the one that you have made have no place in Misplaced Pages. I have therefore reverted your edit.
If you wish to add or remove individual items from the article, please discuss these changes first on this Talk page. This will enable other editors to contribute their comments if interested and will provide a basis for using Misplaced Pages's dispute resolution procedures where consensus has not been achieved. Corker1 (talk) 21:16, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Categories:
Talk:Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Add topic