Talk:List of residential colleges

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Contents 1 Structuring the list 1.1 Proposal: bullet points alphabetical by University, list of colleges separated by commas. 1.2 Proposal: format as table 1.3 Proposal: make a Category for Residential College articles 2 Links

[edit] Structuring the list

This list now (as of October 12, 2005) has 33 items, and that's before the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are fully added. I think it's already getting a bit monolothic and forbidding. Would it be better to break it down somehow? Let's hear proposals here. JDLH | Talk 17:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

What probably should guide the choice is some idea of what readers will want from this list. Do they want to find a specific college, or see what colleges are at each university? Will they know to use the Find feature of their browser? Should we rely on the university's page to list its own colleges (I believe Yes)?

• Comment (--Jdlh | Talk 18:41, 23 November 2005 (UTC)): we may want to learn from those lists with featured list status. As of Nov 23, 2005 three of those were: List of NFL champions, List of U.S. states by elevation, and Provinces of Thailand. What I infer as best practices based on those pages is
  • List represented as a table, with extra information for each entry
  • Use both list and categories

• Ah, others in Wikipedia have thought about this issue before. See Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_1#Lists_v._categories for a good discussion. By the way, it appears to date from a time when the Category mechanism was a bit rawer than it is now, so the Category mechanism may be more usable for us than it appears from this discussion. See also Wikipedia:List, Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists), and Wikipedia:Categorization. What I take from this is that lists and categories should co-exist, but that we should invent a Residential College category. What is the right scope for such a category? Of what category should it be a sub-category? --Jdlh | Talk 08:45, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

• Comment. Greetings, all. I'm the author/administrator of the Collegiate Way website on residential colleges (collegiateway.org), and I'm grateful for the link on this page to my own list of residential colleges worldwide. One thing I've found in maintaining my own list is that it's a tough thing to keep up-to-date as pages, names, lists, etc., change so often. One thing you might consider here is just having a list of universities, with links to the individual lists of residential colleges within each one. That way the burden is distributed to the individual college lists associated with each university's main page, which are more likely to be accurate and prepared by people who know the local situations. Another difficulty you may discover of course is that there isn't a hard and fast definition of "residential college" - at some places use the term for what are little more than freshman interest dorms, while at other institutions the residential colleges are old, independent, and permanent corporations in their own right. As the residential college idea has become more popular, more and more places want to claim they have "residential colleges" even if all they really have is a freshman dorm with a pizza party once a month. Further, some clear examples of residential college systems, such as the Houses at Harvard, don't use the term "residential college" at all. My own list is built around the notion of residential colleges as permanent, cross-sectional (non-thematic and largely non-curricular), faculty-led residential societies within larger universities, generally having about 300-600 members. (And I consider the word member to be very important: dorms have residents, colleges have members.) You may find some of the material on the Collegiate Way website helpful as you continue to work on these pages. Good luck and thanks for these valuable contributions. RJO 05:51, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal: bullet points alphabetical by University, list of colleges separated by commas.

JDLH | Talk 17:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC) That would be:

• Colleges at the University of California, San Diego (United States): Earl Warren College, Eleanor Roosevelt College, John Muir College, Roger Revelle College, Thurgood Marshall College
• Colleges at the University of California, Santa Cruz (United States): College Eight, College Nine, College Ten, Cowell College, Crown College, Kresge College, Merrill College, Oakes College, Porter College, Sixth College, Stevenson College
• Colleges at the University of Virginia (United States): Brown College at Monroe Hill, Hereford College, International Residential College
• Colleges at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom): Queens College, etc.
• Colleges at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom): Queens' College, etc.
• Colleges at Rice University (United States): Brown College, Hanszen College, Jones College, Lovett College, Martel College, Sid Richardson College, Wiess College, Will Rice College
• Colleges at universities in Canada:
  • at the University of British Columbia: Green College, St. John's College
  • at the University of Toronto: Massey College

[edit] Proposal: format as table

Format the list as a table with two or three columns: college name, university name, (maybe country name). JDLH | Talk 17:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal: make a Category for Residential College articles

There is some mechanism, I think it is called "Categories", by which we drop a tag in each article about a Residential College, and Wikimedia creates a category page that lists all the articles in that category in alphabetical order divided into sections by initial letter. If we had the category page, maybe we wouldn't need to maintain this list page at all. Anybody have experience with using a Category to keep track of a list of articles compared to maintaining a list page like this? JDLH | Talk 17:17, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links

Can someone check out the links and maybe disambiguate them? I noticed that many of the Australian colleges lead to disambiguation pages. I'll have a go if I have time. cyclosarin 23:25, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

• Australia list entries disambiguated. --Jdlh | Talk 07:06, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
• Canada list entries disambiguated. --Jdlh | Talk 07:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
• Singapore list entries disambiguated (took zero work). --Jdlh | Talk 07:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
• United Kingdom list entries disambiguated. Only two needed to change. --Jdlh | Talk 07:19, 7 March 2007 (UTC)