Talk:Opa-locka, Florida

message: Why is this sentence included in the article?
:[...]look.Opa-locka will alway be considered The "Great" City.[...]
--63.145.26.194 (talk) 17:06, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Great" City? 

message: Man, this article is badly written.
:An increase in the he median income is projected wherein a household in the city will move from $25,000 to $32,000 and the median income for a family from $2,742 to 3,200.
--63.145.26.194 (talk) 17:12, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  ~$3,000 Median Income for Families? 

message: The article reads: The name Opa-locka is a contraction of a Native American name for the area, "Opa-tisha-woka-locka", meaning "The high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place."
"Native American" is not a language. The likeliest candidate for the native language of the area is Seminole. I have been unable to get access to the sources cited in the article supporting the "camping place" theory, but a little research turned up a total of five alternative translations. So here is a list: 
1. The one currently used in the article: "The high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place."
2. Lexicographers have derived Opa-locka from Seminole opel-rakko , "big swamp." See A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee by Jack B. Martin and Margaret McKane Mauldin, . 
3. "The name Opa-Locka is from the Seminole Indian word "Opa-tisha-woka-locka," meaning "a dry place in the swamp covered with many trees." (Marvin Kitman, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly (Macmillan, 2008), p.11) Apparently Kitman got this info from an earlier version of the city's official website. 
4. The current version of the city's website translates it as "a big island covered with many  trees and swamps." Apparently this info changed since 2008. 
5. An earlier source rearranges the elements of no. 4: "big island in the swamp covered with many trees". (Larry Luxner, "Opa-Locka Rising," Saudi Aramco World Sept./Oct. 1989, pp. 2-7). 
6. The name was originally Opatishawockalocka (slightly different spelling), meaning "a sturdy growth of trees." (Lauren Kroiz, "Stealing Baghdad: the city of Opa-locka, Florida and The Thief of Bagdad", The Journal of Architecture 11, no. 5 (November 2006), p. 587.) 
None of these names is especially well attested, and only no. 2 offers evidence from an Indian language. The likeliest language of origin is Seminole, but this is not certain. A few sources link the name to the Tequesta Indians rather than the Seminole, but this is unlikely, as nothing has been preserved of the Tequesta language. It's possible, if Glenn Curtiss really did bestow the name personally, that he could have gotten the name from anywhere, including fiction. 
I'll see what else I can find out to help choose between the candidates — or dismiss all of them! — ℜob C. alias ÀLAROB 02:28, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of the name Opa-locka 

message: I reverted a sentence copied directly from cityrating.com which predicted that crime would go down in the future. Text from cityrating.com should not be copied and pasted (it is copyrighted) but the bigger issue is that cityrating.com is not necessarily reliable for predictions. The larger picture is that Opa-locka crime is still staggeringly high, according to many news reports. Painting a rosy picture about the city's crime is against the guideline at WP:NPOV. 
Also, User:CityofOpalocka is in violation of username rules and will have to change to a personal username rather than an organizational one. There is the WP:conflict of interest matter regarding a city agent making changes to the article to skew its neutrality. Binksternet (talk) 15:24, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Press reports indicate that the city has hired a new police chief. The public found out when another town announced their chief was moving to the OLPD. In any case, this police department has a lot of newsworthy stuff and is due for its own article. Paul, in Saudi (talk) 15:56, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Crime again 

message: The “Surrounding areas” section is a layout hack that looks ridiculous (on mobile at least). If there must be such a section, isn’t there a template for that? 172.56.31.53 (talk) 14:51, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: That layout is used in a lot of articles about populated places. There is :Template:Adjacent communities, used in a number of articles about cities, which is similar in appearance. - Donald Albury 18:00, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Surrounding areas section looks terrible