Talk:Waban, Massachusetts

I'm not quite sure how Wikipedia works, or about the history of Newton, but common sense suggests that it was not colonized in any part by Indonesians--at least not in the 17th century. It seems that biggest change has been to update the formatting. It was good for quite a laugh, though.

As the above (unsigned) comment suggests, almost all of the content on this page was bogus. Look at the history of this page. On 20 March 2006, somebody vandalized the page by putting a bunch of made-up facts about Indonesian settlers and nuclear bombs. Since then it has been edited for plausibility and appearance, and some other made-up stuff added, until it seems almost plausible. I care about this page because I live in Waban. I reverted it to a pitifully small but verifiably true article like it was before 20 March. CarlFeynman 02:52, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I deleted all the unsubstantiated junk that reapperaed after the last revert.JPSheridan 19:29, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

This page is a mess. That "wealthiest zip code" thing needs to be cleaned or deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.63.203.190 (talk) 20:06, August 29, 2007 (UTC)

I removed the section "richest/best educated zip code". I didn't understand what it meant-- how can Waban be the richest/best educated zip code without being the richest? Also, how do we define "best educated"? I looked at the census data for 02468, and there are lots of statistics that might mean "best educated"-- largest fraction with bachelor's degrees, smallest fraction of high school dropouts, etc. I'd be glad to see this section come back if someone could sharpen it to some verifiable fact, and provide a reference. It would be very interesting if it were true that, for instance, Waban has a higher fraction of people with graduate degrees than any other zip code. The census bureau page for Waban is at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=86000US02468&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_DP2&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-_lang=en&-_sse=on CarlFeynman 22:28, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Waban as an Abenaki word

Would someone take a look at the Abenaki article and specifically, its reference to the word root "waban." It seems to contradict with this article. Kether83 10:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

• I wrote the above after a glance and then noticed the vandalism in the article. The below was stricken from the article:

Waban, which means "Nimble Bird," was colonized by natives of the Indonesion archipelago, and is named for their leader who held the same name. Discovered in 1609, the colonizers who first stumbled upon it believed it to be holy ground, and immediately named it for their leader, who had died a month into the journey and whose body they had consumed for the purpose of sustenance. This was of course a tremendous sin, and they believed that by naming what appeared to be holy ground for their fallen comrade that they would be purging themselves of bloodguilt.

The natives who had already been living in Waban for some time (and who had named it Geasanctifae, roughly translated as "Land of the Blessed") were furious over the seizing of their land by the Indonesians, but could do nothing to resist because they had suffered tremendous losses in their population during the last winter. It seemed that the people of the island of Biak in the Indonesian archipelago were there to stay, and their prosperous reign over the area (uninterrupted until 1649) affirmed this.

I added information from the Abenaki article. Kether83 12:00, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Joe Jarell

I don't think that winning the Heintzelman award is particularly notable; somebody in Newton does it yearly 76.118.30.59 (talk) 03:50, 7 June 2008 (UTC)