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![]() | Spokane Regional Transportation Council was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 29 December 2019 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Spokane County, Washington. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
![]() | The contents of the Spokane County Library District page were merged into Spokane County, Washington on 28 December 2009. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
Wondering how to edit this U.S. County Entry?
The
WikiProject U.S. Counties standards might help.— Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Ram-Man (
talk •
contribs) 07:54, May 26, 2006
I have just boldly removed the "timeline" section in the Library section. It was very over-detailed, listing hire and fire dates for individual library employees, and was generally unencyclopedic in my view. Moreover it overbalanced the rest of the article, contrary to the WP:UNDUE guideline. DES (talk) 23:26, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Not sure how useful it might be, but my attention was drawn to some older images of maps/plats of Spokane County. I've uploaded one such image here. It is in the public domain given its age. An excerpted portion was used in the history section of Saltese Flats (formerly Saltese Lake). As a point in time reference it is interesting, but would need some support in article text to avoid simply being decorative. If I upload more in the future I'll add them here for interested editors as a reference. — Locke Cole • t • c 20:51, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Is the Spokane County Flag, that was added by a user on May of 2023, authentic? I cannot find any reference to it on the Spokane County website or anywhere on the web, except CRWFlags.com and the wikimedia commons. Leif One ( talk) 23:56, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
The first appearance of the Spokane County Flag on wikipedia is June 2023. It appears with no citation or proof that it is legitimate. The only citation appears in January 2024 when the authenticity is questioned. See the above cited links about the history of flag. The citations are from Spokane newspapers that get the information from county government sources. The Spokane County commissioners are reported as decommissioning the flag in 1995. I contacted the office of Spokane County and was told Spokane County does not have a flag, only a logo. Unless any evidence can be found that the county flag is official, the prevailing evidence is that Spokane County no longer has an official flag. There is no basis for the flag to have been included in the first place. All evidence that it ever existed has been from research, that research encompasses the fact that it once existed, but no longer exists.
In the Spokesman-Review and Spokane Chronicle issue from April 14, 1988 an article by Lora Olson, states that there is a contest to design a Spokane County flag sponsored by the 'Spirit of '89' Centennial Celebration Committee. The article also reports that Puget Sound Tent and Awning Company agreed to produce, free of charge, a flag for each county. The flags will first be used in an honor guard for the Govenor's Inaugural Ball in 1989. This article has the earliest documentation that I can find concerning a flag for Spokane County. It has swayed me to agree with the user ExcelsiorBanjo, there is no official decree, no official record, only paraphrasing in newspaper articles. Unless there is evidence that Spokane County once officially commissioned a flag, it should not be represented as an historical artifact of Spokane County. -- Leif One
I haven't been following this "debate" at all, but catching up now I can see that there's some clear misunderstandings on how Wikipedia works. Per WP:NOTCENSORED, an offensive flag that was adopted (as evidenced by newspaper accounts from the 1980s and 1990s) can and generally should still be displayed in this article in some form. Per WP:OR, the decision on whether or not it is official must come from outside the project. If the county has a website or document or something publicly available that disavows the flag, then it can be removed from the infobox; even in that scenario, the flag should still be mentioned in prose. Sounder Bruce 04:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
outnumbered, etc, above). See WP:NOTAVOTE. You also don't get to infer support from actions as you did above (
That's right, someone other than the two of us added it. That is support for inclusion.). The person who uploaded it has not participated in this discussion, nor seen the reasons to consider not including the image (such as the source provided that states the flag was decommissioned). To be clear about NOTAVOTE and inferring support, you haven't even held a poll (which is ill-advised anyways) and you've used your claim of numeric support as a bludgeon during the discussion above.
if you actually want to continue treating unofficial actions paraphrased in a newspaper as official actionThat's not actually how sources work here, we try to use secondary sources over primary sources, see WP:SECONDARY (and also consider reading WP:IS). We generally avoid primary sources (see WP:PRIMARY, also part of WP:NOR as SECONDARY was).
It's going to work out exactly as I hopeIt's really, really not. — Locke Cole • t • c 15:46, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
I figured you'd invoke this old brief. It says "commissioners have decided to decommission that version". That only proves that they, at that time, intended to. It does not prove that they actually held the vote that that language suggests would be necessary, and the fact that no one seems to have yet found a record that such a vote was held means we cannot say with certainty that the flag was decommissioned (especially given that it seems, also, that the promised contest for a new flag design was never held, either). To claim those words as incontrovertible proof that the flag was decommissioned is writing a check they can't possibly cash.
It would be like me saying I had decided to block you for edit warring, but without anything in the block log proving that I did. That could not be taken to mean I had blocked you.
Fully protecting a page is never, repeat never, any reflection or judgement on the rightness or wrongness of the version protected. It is a message to the editors involved that they need to cool this down and discuss as they have failed at maintaining the status quo. Daniel Case ( talk) 03:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
That only proves that they, at that time, intended to.The text says
decided to. It doesn't say
intended to,
planned toor some variation of that.
decidedis the
simple past and past participle of decide. My understanding is that prior to that flag, the county didn't have any flag whatsoever, so it stands to reason that "no flag" is a possibility. Usually we defer to secondary sources, especially in situations like this where no other sources have been provided to refute the "decommissioned" status. It's kind of baffling to see you wanting something official when we typically avoid official records (just look at how biographies handle birthdates, or how we discourage using press releases for announcements over secondary source coverage of those topics, etc). Regardless, making assumptions about whether they actually decommissioned it or not is original research. You're supplanting what a reliable secondary source says with what you think they meant instead of taking the words plainly. — Locke Cole • t • c 05:10, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
I do have an idea for how we can resolve this to (I hope) everyone's satisfaction. Some people on the talk page have mentioned getting in touch with the county to see if they can find any records regarding the vote on the flag in their archives. I mean, they should have it if it were voted on ... if you keep no other public records of a body's actions on file this long, you keep meeting minutes. Of course I don't know how long they'd be required to keep them, and given Washington's reputation for having such loophole-ridden sunshine laws, I might not be optimistic.
Now, it's one thing if a bunch of Wikipedia editors ask for this. It's another if the local media does—it would turn up the heat on the people at the archives. Not that I think they'd be delaying on purpose or anything, but knowing how this works I can tell you that when they know the media's making the request (OK, I know, in a sense we are the media, but not like, say, the Spokesman-Review is) it gets a higher priority.
So, we should contact the S-R and suggest this as a story they should assign someone to cover. It wouldn't require many resources on their part (a not-inconsiderable issue given the current besieged state of local newspapers) and I can't imagine any way it could be argued that this would not be a story, especially given the recent effort to redesign the city's flag.
I am willing to reach out to the newspaper myself if desired, given my own distant-past experience in journalism. The end product of all this would be an unimpeachably reliable secondary source on this (and maybe the embarrassed county commissioners hastily voting to decommission the flag if it were found that they hadn't already). And it might make a good Signpost story, too. Daniel Case ( talk) 20:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
It's also unclear who told the (unnamed) reporter this ... it seems like they talked to just one of the five commissioners (was that the same number at that time as now?). It cannot be determined how committed the commissioners were to this course of action from that statement, much less this story. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:14, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
"Have decided" is not equivalent to "have voted".And yet the flag isn't flown anywhere in Spokane. I wonder why that would be. Could it be because they decided to decommission it? Also, how do you know it's not equivalent to
have voted? Have you found sources stating as much or is this more original research? The reporter could have said
are decidingor some variation thereof if a decision was still forthcoming. But the reporter used the exact phrase
have decidedwhich means the decision was already made. Why do you consider these sources good enough to validate that a flag existed, but not good enough to accept that it was decommissioned? You can't have it both ways here.
it seems like they talked to just one of the five commissionersFive commissioners is a recent change, back then it would have been one of the three, assuming that's what happened and the reporter wasn't simply using the most concise way possible to report the news that the flag was rejected.
to make a judgment, especially after deliberation. Balance of probabilities: this is why we don't have further sources, there's nothing more to report. It's a shame a new flag wasn't chosen to replace it, but there was no flag prior to 1988/1989, so it's not exactly a foreign status. But this does not change that the centennial flag was decommissioned. — Locke Cole • t • c 05:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
@ Leif One, Excelsiorsbanjo, JTRamsey, SounderBruce, and IndysNotHere: Since the page has been protected given the edit war, let's reset on this and do a straw poll to see where people stand. Obviously anyone is welcome to !vote here, but unless additional sources are found I don't see that further discussion is going to accomplish much. From my reading of the sources available, it appears the flag was part of a contest sponsored by the State Centennial Committee (see the Tri-City Herald, circa June 5 and 13, 1988). The flag was produced and used for a gala event marking the centennial (apparently many counties prior to this didn't have flags), and other than Avista apparently flying it, the flag was largely ignored after that before being rediscovered and " decommissioned" by the county some time before 2002 (this is the most recent source discussing the flag, and given that it was decommissioned, makes sense that it's the last source we can find discussing it). A contest to design a new flag was apparently being planned, but never came to fruition. Prior to the centennial flag design Spokane County did not have a flag, so the commissioners decommissioning the flag returns us to a flag-less state as existed prior to 1988-1989.
With all the above discussion and this recap in mind, please !vote "include" or "exclude" to include or exclude the flag from the infobox.
Exclusion from the infobox does not preclude having it in the article body (as it currently is) to discuss it as part of the history of Spokane County. — Locke Cole • t • c 17:10, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
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![]() | The
contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to discussions about
infoboxes and to edits adding, deleting, collapsing, or removing verifiable information from infoboxes, which has been
designated as a contentious topic. Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page. |
![]() | Spokane Regional Transportation Council was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 29 December 2019 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Spokane County, Washington. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
![]() | The contents of the Spokane County Library District page were merged into Spokane County, Washington on 28 December 2009. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
Wondering how to edit this U.S. County Entry?
The
WikiProject U.S. Counties standards might help.— Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Ram-Man (
talk •
contribs) 07:54, May 26, 2006
I have just boldly removed the "timeline" section in the Library section. It was very over-detailed, listing hire and fire dates for individual library employees, and was generally unencyclopedic in my view. Moreover it overbalanced the rest of the article, contrary to the WP:UNDUE guideline. DES (talk) 23:26, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Not sure how useful it might be, but my attention was drawn to some older images of maps/plats of Spokane County. I've uploaded one such image here. It is in the public domain given its age. An excerpted portion was used in the history section of Saltese Flats (formerly Saltese Lake). As a point in time reference it is interesting, but would need some support in article text to avoid simply being decorative. If I upload more in the future I'll add them here for interested editors as a reference. — Locke Cole • t • c 20:51, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Is the Spokane County Flag, that was added by a user on May of 2023, authentic? I cannot find any reference to it on the Spokane County website or anywhere on the web, except CRWFlags.com and the wikimedia commons. Leif One ( talk) 23:56, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
The first appearance of the Spokane County Flag on wikipedia is June 2023. It appears with no citation or proof that it is legitimate. The only citation appears in January 2024 when the authenticity is questioned. See the above cited links about the history of flag. The citations are from Spokane newspapers that get the information from county government sources. The Spokane County commissioners are reported as decommissioning the flag in 1995. I contacted the office of Spokane County and was told Spokane County does not have a flag, only a logo. Unless any evidence can be found that the county flag is official, the prevailing evidence is that Spokane County no longer has an official flag. There is no basis for the flag to have been included in the first place. All evidence that it ever existed has been from research, that research encompasses the fact that it once existed, but no longer exists.
In the Spokesman-Review and Spokane Chronicle issue from April 14, 1988 an article by Lora Olson, states that there is a contest to design a Spokane County flag sponsored by the 'Spirit of '89' Centennial Celebration Committee. The article also reports that Puget Sound Tent and Awning Company agreed to produce, free of charge, a flag for each county. The flags will first be used in an honor guard for the Govenor's Inaugural Ball in 1989. This article has the earliest documentation that I can find concerning a flag for Spokane County. It has swayed me to agree with the user ExcelsiorBanjo, there is no official decree, no official record, only paraphrasing in newspaper articles. Unless there is evidence that Spokane County once officially commissioned a flag, it should not be represented as an historical artifact of Spokane County. -- Leif One
I haven't been following this "debate" at all, but catching up now I can see that there's some clear misunderstandings on how Wikipedia works. Per WP:NOTCENSORED, an offensive flag that was adopted (as evidenced by newspaper accounts from the 1980s and 1990s) can and generally should still be displayed in this article in some form. Per WP:OR, the decision on whether or not it is official must come from outside the project. If the county has a website or document or something publicly available that disavows the flag, then it can be removed from the infobox; even in that scenario, the flag should still be mentioned in prose. Sounder Bruce 04:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
outnumbered, etc, above). See WP:NOTAVOTE. You also don't get to infer support from actions as you did above (
That's right, someone other than the two of us added it. That is support for inclusion.). The person who uploaded it has not participated in this discussion, nor seen the reasons to consider not including the image (such as the source provided that states the flag was decommissioned). To be clear about NOTAVOTE and inferring support, you haven't even held a poll (which is ill-advised anyways) and you've used your claim of numeric support as a bludgeon during the discussion above.
if you actually want to continue treating unofficial actions paraphrased in a newspaper as official actionThat's not actually how sources work here, we try to use secondary sources over primary sources, see WP:SECONDARY (and also consider reading WP:IS). We generally avoid primary sources (see WP:PRIMARY, also part of WP:NOR as SECONDARY was).
It's going to work out exactly as I hopeIt's really, really not. — Locke Cole • t • c 15:46, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
I figured you'd invoke this old brief. It says "commissioners have decided to decommission that version". That only proves that they, at that time, intended to. It does not prove that they actually held the vote that that language suggests would be necessary, and the fact that no one seems to have yet found a record that such a vote was held means we cannot say with certainty that the flag was decommissioned (especially given that it seems, also, that the promised contest for a new flag design was never held, either). To claim those words as incontrovertible proof that the flag was decommissioned is writing a check they can't possibly cash.
It would be like me saying I had decided to block you for edit warring, but without anything in the block log proving that I did. That could not be taken to mean I had blocked you.
Fully protecting a page is never, repeat never, any reflection or judgement on the rightness or wrongness of the version protected. It is a message to the editors involved that they need to cool this down and discuss as they have failed at maintaining the status quo. Daniel Case ( talk) 03:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
That only proves that they, at that time, intended to.The text says
decided to. It doesn't say
intended to,
planned toor some variation of that.
decidedis the
simple past and past participle of decide. My understanding is that prior to that flag, the county didn't have any flag whatsoever, so it stands to reason that "no flag" is a possibility. Usually we defer to secondary sources, especially in situations like this where no other sources have been provided to refute the "decommissioned" status. It's kind of baffling to see you wanting something official when we typically avoid official records (just look at how biographies handle birthdates, or how we discourage using press releases for announcements over secondary source coverage of those topics, etc). Regardless, making assumptions about whether they actually decommissioned it or not is original research. You're supplanting what a reliable secondary source says with what you think they meant instead of taking the words plainly. — Locke Cole • t • c 05:10, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
I do have an idea for how we can resolve this to (I hope) everyone's satisfaction. Some people on the talk page have mentioned getting in touch with the county to see if they can find any records regarding the vote on the flag in their archives. I mean, they should have it if it were voted on ... if you keep no other public records of a body's actions on file this long, you keep meeting minutes. Of course I don't know how long they'd be required to keep them, and given Washington's reputation for having such loophole-ridden sunshine laws, I might not be optimistic.
Now, it's one thing if a bunch of Wikipedia editors ask for this. It's another if the local media does—it would turn up the heat on the people at the archives. Not that I think they'd be delaying on purpose or anything, but knowing how this works I can tell you that when they know the media's making the request (OK, I know, in a sense we are the media, but not like, say, the Spokesman-Review is) it gets a higher priority.
So, we should contact the S-R and suggest this as a story they should assign someone to cover. It wouldn't require many resources on their part (a not-inconsiderable issue given the current besieged state of local newspapers) and I can't imagine any way it could be argued that this would not be a story, especially given the recent effort to redesign the city's flag.
I am willing to reach out to the newspaper myself if desired, given my own distant-past experience in journalism. The end product of all this would be an unimpeachably reliable secondary source on this (and maybe the embarrassed county commissioners hastily voting to decommission the flag if it were found that they hadn't already). And it might make a good Signpost story, too. Daniel Case ( talk) 20:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
It's also unclear who told the (unnamed) reporter this ... it seems like they talked to just one of the five commissioners (was that the same number at that time as now?). It cannot be determined how committed the commissioners were to this course of action from that statement, much less this story. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:14, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
"Have decided" is not equivalent to "have voted".And yet the flag isn't flown anywhere in Spokane. I wonder why that would be. Could it be because they decided to decommission it? Also, how do you know it's not equivalent to
have voted? Have you found sources stating as much or is this more original research? The reporter could have said
are decidingor some variation thereof if a decision was still forthcoming. But the reporter used the exact phrase
have decidedwhich means the decision was already made. Why do you consider these sources good enough to validate that a flag existed, but not good enough to accept that it was decommissioned? You can't have it both ways here.
it seems like they talked to just one of the five commissionersFive commissioners is a recent change, back then it would have been one of the three, assuming that's what happened and the reporter wasn't simply using the most concise way possible to report the news that the flag was rejected.
to make a judgment, especially after deliberation. Balance of probabilities: this is why we don't have further sources, there's nothing more to report. It's a shame a new flag wasn't chosen to replace it, but there was no flag prior to 1988/1989, so it's not exactly a foreign status. But this does not change that the centennial flag was decommissioned. — Locke Cole • t • c 05:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
@ Leif One, Excelsiorsbanjo, JTRamsey, SounderBruce, and IndysNotHere: Since the page has been protected given the edit war, let's reset on this and do a straw poll to see where people stand. Obviously anyone is welcome to !vote here, but unless additional sources are found I don't see that further discussion is going to accomplish much. From my reading of the sources available, it appears the flag was part of a contest sponsored by the State Centennial Committee (see the Tri-City Herald, circa June 5 and 13, 1988). The flag was produced and used for a gala event marking the centennial (apparently many counties prior to this didn't have flags), and other than Avista apparently flying it, the flag was largely ignored after that before being rediscovered and " decommissioned" by the county some time before 2002 (this is the most recent source discussing the flag, and given that it was decommissioned, makes sense that it's the last source we can find discussing it). A contest to design a new flag was apparently being planned, but never came to fruition. Prior to the centennial flag design Spokane County did not have a flag, so the commissioners decommissioning the flag returns us to a flag-less state as existed prior to 1988-1989.
With all the above discussion and this recap in mind, please !vote "include" or "exclude" to include or exclude the flag from the infobox.
Exclusion from the infobox does not preclude having it in the article body (as it currently is) to discuss it as part of the history of Spokane County. — Locke Cole • t • c 17:10, 27 May 2024 (UTC)