User talk:Uncle G/Archive/2022-04-22

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Uncle G in topic Maybe you could take a look
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You never know what you'll find with a geostub edit

So, when researching Lane Redwood Flat, California, I found that this site was actually a private resort that became a California State Park in 1963. The state park was redlinked, so I expanded it and moved the page, so now there's a new state park article for California. It's far from a perfect article, or even GA (I don't know what to assess it as, so I changed the talk page assessment from stub to blank), but it at least tells the actual history of the site, rather than something vague and mostly false. Hog Farm Talk 18:30, 19 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Disambiguation link notification for April 21 edit

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Reynolds, Mendocino County, California edit

I'm really coming to the conclusion that Reynolds, Mendocino County, California is actually Reynolds Wayside Campground, a private-campground-turned-redwoods-park and a redlink at List of California state parks. If the Wayside Campground is a CA state park, then it's going to be notable, and there's coverage for the park as well. However, I'm having trouble making the explicit connection, as it seems that only GNIS and one topographic map really called the private campground "Reynolds". This also seems to be a case where the sourcing exists, but is going to be hard to dig up. How would you recommend handling this? I don't quite feel comfortable trying to overwrite the existing article without an explicit connection, but the current one-liner isn't very useful. Hog Farm Talk 16:25, 21 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • The names that you need to know to look for are "Reynolds Redwood Flat" and "Frank W. Reynolds Memorial Grove" back in 1965. Reynolds was a redwood lumberman on the state board of Forestry in the 1940s and 1950s from what I can turn up, and that aligns with the 1950 date of the map. I suspect that he owned it, and the state bought it in the 1960s and turned it into a campground, even if the name change did not happen in the end. It's certainly in state park literature from the 1970s from what I can find. Have a look, now that you know the names. Did you look at Forest Lake, California (AfD discussion) and Glenbrook, Lake County, California (AfD discussion)? Uncle G (talk) 17:19, 21 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Discussion page edits edit

I have two questions. (1) Why do you edit other people's comments to change web links of Wikipedia pages to wikilinks when they aren't broken? What purpose does this serve? See here for an example, where you're also changing the displayed text in that person's comment. I don't see any notification to the user so they are aware that you are tinkering with the displayed text of their comment. In this edit you mangle someone else's working links, and it takes you two more edits over an 11-minute period to eventually fix it (to how you seem to want it anyway). And, at least in my browser, you've made the links more difficult to click on, so IMO that was actually a harmful change. Why bother? (2) Why do you seem to obsessively change everyone's indenting to bullet points? Indenting with colons is a valid discussion style on AN/ANI, no? Here are four examples where nothing appears broken but you insist on changing other people's comments to use bullet points: [1], [2], [3], [4]. Modulus12 (talk) 23:49, 22 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • There are many reasons, and converting external to internal links is a long-standing practice, mitigated by (of course) when the link being an external link is genuinely relevant ("This external link to Wikipedia doesn't work!"). Consider the editors with mobile 'phones, who do not want to be shifted between whatever sites, en.m or en, that they are on. (It used to be worse back when reflexive external links also shifted people between HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site.) Consider the screen reader users, whose softwares are encountering <dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd><dl><dd> in the HTML. A colon in wikitext isn't actually an indent or a blockquote. It's one half of a ;: pair for a definition list, and the <dd> part doesn't vanish if one only uses the colon. Whereas an asterisk is only a <li> which is a little friendlier. Quite a lot of people do care about lists that come out right in screen-readers and unusual WWW browsers, and about the semantics of the HTML. See also Project:colons and asterisks. Consider, on top of all that, when, years from now, you want to use Special:Whatlinkshere to find where something is referenced internally from discussions in various parts of the project. Uncle G (talk) 00:38, 23 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • I now see I missed Internal links made using full URLs may be converted to wikilinks or protocol-relative URLs at WP:TPO, so apologies for the first question. On the second question, I read your link (WP:COLAS) and it is talking about bad indentation, which I totally agree with fixing. But that is not what's happening in the four diffs I linked, which contain good indentation. Per WP:COLAS, the simple rule is that you're fine as long as you copy the style of the preceding indent and then you are free to add your own type of indent to your reply. The mid-thread switching of indent styles in the first and fourth diffs is done properly per your link (there is no "unwinding"), and in the second and third diffs the threads were entirely colons to begin with. So I still do not see any policy, guideline or essay justifying these diffs. Modulus12 (talk) 01:40, 23 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • No need to apologize for asking a question. However, I have just explained about the HTML that comes out, and Project:colons and asterisks does too. And we do have an article on definition lists versus unordered lists, the latter being the less complex structure. See also Wikipedia:Indentation#What kind of markup is this, anyway? Uncle G (talk) 02:01, 23 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • Your own link (Wikipedia:Colons and asterisks) says definition lists and unordered lists produce the same amount of HTML (four opening and four closing tags for two replies) and are handled by screen readers similarly: Now a screen reader will read out those [colon] lists as lists including each closing and opening tag. It's not too bad, as our regular screen reader users get used to it. As I understand it, all colons is fine, all asterisks is fine, even mixing asterisks and colons is fine, as long as the nesting order is maintained by further replies. Are you misunderstanding that essay? Or are you additionally saying that in your personal opinion, colons should be entirely deprecated in favor of asterisks because of some other reason... "less complex structure"? Here are the two diffs in question again: [5], [6]. Modulus12 (talk) 05:59, 24 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
          • There are three elements in a definition list. A ;: construct is a definition list. This is not a personal opinion. This is understanding HTML and wikitext. Uncle G (talk) 06:11, 24 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
            • You keep reciting technical HTML trivia when I was actually asking for a cogent argument defending those diffs. I guess the only thing it can possibly be is "Any usage of colons to indent is inferior and they should be replaced with asterisks on sight", a belief that is unsupported by consensus anywhere. (Interestingly, WP:TPO says removing bullets from discussions that are not consensus polls or requests for comment (RfC) is an appropriate edit of another's comment, implying that colon-indenting is the "typical" format for generic discussions.) Modulus12 (talk) 02:34, 26 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

DYK for Stratford General Strike of 1933 edit

On 23 April 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Stratford General Strike of 1933, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that during the Stratford General Strike of 1933 the Canadian military was brought in, with machine guns, to which the strikers responded with a rally and a parade? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Stratford General Strike of 1933. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Stratford General Strike of 1933), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

 — Amakuru (talk) 12:02, 23 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Abode edit

Oikonyms in Western and South Asia made me wonder if the Persian word ābād is somehow related to the English word abode. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3127 was interesting to read. 4nn1l2 (talk) 12:45, 26 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • It said "abode of" in the source that I had, which was just supplying a translation rather than asserting a linguistic cognate. Perhaps there is a toponymic source, of at least the same quality, that does a better job; so the translation will not lead people down the garden path. The problem is that for these well-known items, there are a lot of poor sources. I'm still looking for a good source for -patnam (AfD discussion). Uncle G (talk) 12:58, 26 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • The translation is satisfactory.   I'm not trying to split hairs about the article here on your talk page. The similarity of ābād and abode in both meaning and shape was interesting to me, and I thought it might be interesting to you too. Anyway, thanks for writing Oikonyms in Western and South Asia! 4nn1l2 (talk) 13:12, 26 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • You made me think of whether readers would make the inference, though. I've found something. It's not ideal, as it's from the 19th century and there has been a lot more done in this area in the 20th. But it's better than "collected from our forums". ☺ Uncle G (talk) 13:30, 26 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

DYK for William A. Radford edit

On 27 April 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article William A. Radford, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that William A. Radford assisted in producing a 1700-page encyclopedia about cement? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/William A. Radford. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, William A. Radford), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cwmhiraeth (talk) 00:02, 27 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

FC Hirnyk Kryvyi Rih edit

Hi, just reminding you that you indefinitely full protected FC Hirnyk Kryvyi Rih on the 4th of April. Has enough time passed? Anarchyte (talkwork) 06:42, 28 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Loyd, Missouri; Ramsay; and Hamlett edit

So it turns out Hamlett had two thesis about place names - one in 1938 and one in 1945. Ramsay cited the 1938 one, but the 1945 one is what should have been cited, as it has Bollinger County but the '38 thesis doesn't. And Hamlett '45 has the exact same phrasing as Ramsay. The Postal Guide is just a list of post offices, so doesn't help much, even though I was able to find the 1901, 1902, and 1904 versions, as they just say that Loyd was a P.O. in Bollinger County in those years, which we knew anyway. Hog Farm Talk 18:15, 1 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

You have got mail edit

 
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Kichu🐘 Need any help? 11:23, 2 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Extremely unimportant resorts edit

Some of them like Allen Springs, California have long ago disappeared below a carpet of pine needles. Still, with government sources a hundred years old there is no concern with copyright, so they are easy enough to expand, and I continue to hope I will find a notable one where the Rolling Stones played to the wood panel station wagon crowd before they hit the big time. Until then it is a bit like eating popcorn. Aymatth2 (talk) 21:32, 2 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

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Where is the best place to draw the notability line for places? edit

The Ore, Missouri AFD is what comes to mind - we've got some passing mentions, a statement that it was a town, and that it had 30 people. But not much that can be said about it, like you noted. I'm really not sure what the best course of action on those ones that have very little to be said about them. There's very little to be found about them, but they were places at one point in time. Would it generally be better to AFD or try and stretch a three-sentence stub into a 5-sentence stub? Hog Farm Talk 16:00, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • I think I can beat Ore. Hasan, Florida has been an article since 2008, and has been edited 71 times (although most of the edits were tests, vandalism and reverts). GNIS says it is a populated place. Hometownlocator.com just repeats GNIS. No history that I can find. Yet, I am reluctant to prod or AfD the article. - Donald Albury 20:29, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • Yeah, I looked for coverage too, and found a government document from 1948 talking about a survey marker near Hasan station. It's on the rail line, so it's likely an old rail station, but I could not find significant history of this. It's really hard to decide how to handle situations where it seems like there should be coverage, but there's none to be found. Hog Farm Talk 21:04, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • I've been digging through old maps showing railroad lines in the area, but Hasan doesn't show up. I live maybe 20 miles from there, and I may have driven through the intersection once a couple of years ago, but it hasn't turned up in the research I have done about railroads in the area. - Donald Albury 23:37, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • You are looking in the wrong place. Start here:

          The construction of railroads, however, marked the death knell of innumerable small settlements that once dotted the countryside, including the aforementioned ghost towns of Newnansville and Traxler in Alachua County and a myriad of other long-forgotten ones nearby, such as Alakaway Tolofa, Arno, Buda, Cadillac, Clinch, Grove Park, Half Moon, Hasan, Hog Town, Hydro, Island Grove, Leno, Louise, Monteocha, Paradise, Perseverance, Pinesville, Shiloh, Tuscawilla, and Wade, among others.

          — Zettler, Francis William (2016). "Florida at the Cusp of Modernity". The Biohistory of Florida. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781561649655., pages 120–121
          Uncle G (talk) 07:10, 7 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • Donald Albury, if only it had a school, or had come 17th in the Olympics that one time, it would be a done deal. Guy (help! - typo?) 21:17, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • It's not easy. Back when Ram-Man (talk · contribs) imported CDP data, people had much the same concerns as now, and the counterpoint was that people would encouraged by a poor article on their place to come to Wikipedia to make it better. It was a serious attempt to do what I jokingly refer to as the "English Professor Vaccuum" over at User talk:Drmies — trying to suck people in by having a lack of stuff.

    You can read all of the arguments on the mailing list and on pages like Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 1#Uploadable Bots (server processes), User talk:Rambot/Delete, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/User:Rambot, and Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 2#Gazetteer time? just for starters.

    I suspect that you will particularly enjoy User:Uncle G/The "dirty '-ista's"#endnote_GNIS.

    Personally, I think that the actions of the GNIS/GEOnet bulk importers have made "is an unincorporated community" meaningless, as so many things have been mis-labelled as such; and any article that is only "is an unincorporated community" supported by GNIS (plus, optionally, books of placenames and an infobox full of deductions) is worthless. When I went through User:Hog Farm/springs I crossed off only the ones that had significant stuff to say from Waring (that — hint! — they do not say yet). Those that were just incidental mentions I marked instead as further attention needed, because they only get us as far as "is a set of springs" (with an infobox) and nothing more to say from the additional source.

    Ore, Missouri (AfD discussion) is similar. The Gazetteer tells us a population and how often the mail was delivered to the post office. Whereas, as we both know, what is really wanted is in-depth material about demographics, geology, history, economics, and so forth; for which we look to histories and reports. (On that note, everyone please explain how useful local history books are to a very foolish editor at Columbia Mill (AfD discussion).) Ironically, Lakeland, Louisiana (AfD discussion) is actually how most place articles develop, with lots of stuff stitched together from a multitude of sources, especially including the Ram-Man CDP-generated articles. It's the norm, rather than the exception. For smaller places that do not have such a multitude, I still want multiple sources, either something like an Arcadia book with a significant amount to say plus a lot of adjunct sources to flesh things out and fill things in, or a couple of independent in-depth and on-point books/articles. (Multiple sources is why we do not have Dwight Hale Blackwood for the Template:Did you know nominations/1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions right now, as I only have 1 accessible biography, and why the Engineering Professor Vacuum's pump is broken at User talk:Drmies/Archive 134#FYI... where there is a bunch of in-depth biographies for which I, or any of the lurkers here, need to find a second.)

    Furthermore, the bulk importers have destroyed that counterpoint. How are people supposed to find encouragement to come along and improve articles if the only context in the article misleads them utterly? (This is more than a GNIS problem. This is a Project:use common names problem, too, for other sorts of geographic articles. No-one knew that Calico Mills (area) (AfD discussion) actually has a proper name, rather than the slang name. The Burgies (AfD discussion) exemplifies similarly our problem with common names. The point of an encyclopaedia is not to reinforce ignorance of what the right names of things are, just because slang names are common.)

    Of course, this is about the problem of Wikipedia as it stands today, two decades in: a prolific publisher of tens of thousands of falsehoods to the world, in a bunch of languages thanks to more robots. My long-held view falsehoods aside is at User:Uncle G/On notability#Notability is not a blanket. (Sadly, notice that the bad re-creation of Hoy (Lake Constance) contains only two facts that are about the place itself, rather than about some enclosing area, and only the one stating that a tree grows there is verifiable, as long as we don't want to confirm the species of the tree of course.) Human knowledge of places is uneven. Some "just a railway station"s are well known. Some are like Llandinam railway station (AfD discussion) are so not well known that only JzG and I notice that the illustrating picture does not illustrate the article at all. (A whole bunch of people have reviewed that article at AFD, and not blinked an eye at the non-illustration. This says a lot, and it is not good.) Some are like Horton, California (AfD discussion).

    So I personally do not shed a single tear for the loss of likely false "is an unincorporated community/village in area/bigger area/bigger still area/country/continent" articles sourced only to GNIS/GEOnet and placename books. But I don't buy "just a railway station"/"but it's a railway station" or any other blanket criteria. As has been apparent from several of the recent GNIS cleanup discussions at AFD "current/former populated, legally recognized, place" clearly doesn't work as a criterion (and if one knows about legal recognition of places, obviously never would have worked, as the area of grassland to the west of my house has attested for years now), and makes more problems than it solves.

    At this point, take a look at Aymatth2 (talk · contribs), a long-time unobtrusive worker, who happily works from said history books and other stuff, at #Extremely unimportant resorts. If we do not import databases, but do read books, I think that Wikipedia will be the better for it.

    Uncle G (talk) 09:22, 7 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

    • I am aware of only two published histories of the county, and they are rather thin. The one I have a copy of does not mention Hasan. I have not yet acquired a copy of the other one, and will have to venture out to the public library to consult it to see if it mentions Hasan. A book published in 1883, of which I have a reporduction copy, has material on many places in the county that have since disappeared, but not Hasan. I know many of the named places along present and past railroads were not stations, but just sidings with freight platforms, perhaps named for diffuse groups of farms. Unfortunately, misunderstandings and promotional inventions make their way into local histories, compilations of name origins, and other "reliable" sources, and it can be difficult balancing contradictory sources. - Donald Albury 14:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • That quote from Zettler 2016 tells us two things. First, almost all of these do not have articles, so you should breathe a sigh of relief. Second, these are not related to the railway and did not even become railway stations or sidings. The railway outright killed them. These two?
        • Pickard, John B. (1994). Florida's Eden: An Illustrated History of Alachua County. Maupin House. ISBN 9780929895123.
        • Jenkins, Lizzie PRB (2012). Alachua County, Florida. Black America. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 9781439617571.
      • Another book (ISBN 9781561640218 page 380) tells me that you can add to that list. (I'm slightly wary of the Jess G. Davis book.)
        • Buchholz, Fritz W. (1929). History of Alachua County, Florida: Narrative and Biographical. Record Company. ISBN 9780598415103. (Buchholz High School#Namesake)
        • Opdyke, John, ed. (1974). Alachua County: A Sesquicentennial Tribute. Gainesville: Alachua County Historical Commission.
      • The Arcadia books are not the be-all-and-end-all, but they are fairly good pointers to what is historical and what is likely not. It seems that Hasan is likely not.

        Uncle G (talk) 19:33, 7 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

    • Agree that the "unincorporated community" tells us nothing. And just makes it so much harder to properly triage. The content at this was not only false, but completely masked the true interesting history of Smithe Redwoods State Natural Reserve. Sourcing using books and old newspapers to create articles that try to cover the history and demographics of an area is just much better than mass-producing. I'd rather have 50 articles that provide a decent history of the place than 500 that just give a name and coordinates. Hog Farm Talk 15:55, 7 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Built-up area article deletion edit

Hi, you were involved in the discussions for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alfreton/South Normanton Built-up area and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Royal Leamington Spa Built-up area. I have nominated another one Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cannock Built-up Area (2nd nomination) for deletion. Eopsid (talk) 19:33, 9 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

United States Geological Survey considered unreliable edit

It really is not very accurate. I have been messing around with places in Lake County, California. See for example Scotts Creek (California) whose mouth coordinates on Middle Creek at "Scotts Creek", Geographic Names Information System, United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior is given as 39°09′45″N 122°57′14″W / 39.1623910°N 122.9538864°W / 39.1623910; -122.9538864. Google Maps says this is 3.85 kilometres (2.39 mi) northwest in a straight line from the actual point where Scotts Creek and Middle Creek converge. For Cow Mountain it gives an elevation of 3,914 feet (1,193.0 m). Peatbagger, based purely on the 40' contour map, gives a range of 3,920–3,960 feet (1,194.8–1,207.0 m). Google Maps agrees with Peakbagger.

I suspect that some of the USGS positions and elevations were based on 1880s magnetic compass and barometer readings and have since been cast in stone. So the GNIS database entry mainly means that the place has a GNIS database entry. If the Brits decide to dispute the 1776 results and invade, they had better not rely on GNIS information or they will get lost, Perhaps that is the point... Aymatth2 (talk) 00:51, 12 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

I just found the Teague-McKevett Ranch (a.k.a. East Area 1) at Kevet, California (AfD discussion). Uncle G (talk) 11:50, 13 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

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DYK nomination of 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions edit

  Hello! Your submission of 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) at your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! – Muboshgu (talk) 19:46, 15 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Unimportant resorts (2) edit

See Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2021 May 18#Forest Lake Resort. I am not sure that the world really needs to know about Forest Lake Resort, but right now it is attached to Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest like a clump of mistletoe on an oak tree. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:15, 18 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

"which isn't to be trusted for anything other than spelling" edit

On rare occasions GNIS can't even get that right. Clips Mill, West Virginia (AfD discussion) from 2020. Hog Farm Talk 03:42, 20 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • Paramore Spring, which the USGS has twice doubled as Parramore Springs, is, sadly, just a spring. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:51, 20 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • Just started Springs of Lake County, California. It took about 3 hours of fairly mindless cut-and-paste, and serves the gazetteer function of Wikipedia. A place like Parramore Springs could be redirected to an anchor in the list, e.g. Springs of Lake County, California#Parramore Springs. I am not volunteering, but it would be easy enough to create lists like this for all the springs, old resorts, and perhaps former railway stops, in California. Creating lists and then redirecting stubs into them would take a lot less work than working the GNIS stubs through AfD, and would leave Wikipedia richer. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:20, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

A barnstar for you! edit

  The Barnstar of Diligence
For all the heavy research you put into the geography AFD noms. Makes me feel like a slacker for not finding some of that stuff. Hog Farm Talk 04:24, 20 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hog Farm Talk 04:24, 20 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • You, me, Mangoe, and others. Let's hope that between us all and anyone else who wants to do the research and join in we cover all angles. TheCatalyst31 found a history book for Berea, Iowa (AfD discussion) that doesn't come up at all in Google Books for me. It's almost as expensive as that 3-volume Missouri one that we were discussing a while ago.

    You might want to re-visit Chelsea, West Virginia (AfD discussion) in particular, by the way. I think that Goltra, Missouri (AfD discussion) being a biography of Edward Field Goltra hiding behind a rubbish GNIS article is one of the more extreme results. (Although such a thing has happened at AFD many times before, outwith the GNIS problem area. Durban Strategy (AfD discussion) being the World Conference against Racism 2001 comes to mind.)

    Uncle G (talk) 10:22, 20 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

    • Would you be alright if I moved the Chelsea China Company material to a userspace draft somewhere to work it up? I've found some interesting older material that would be good I think to include the article - some political machinations relating to the 1900 Presidential Election, storm damage in 1904, production of "exclusive hotel china" in 1919, etc. I think the Chelsea China Co. is a notable subject, but I'd also like to see the finished product be a little more fleshed-out. Also currently working on a major expansion and rewrite of an ACW battle, so busy with article work there. Hog Farm Talk 02:27, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • I put it there to discuss whether it was enough. It's almost enough, as I said. If you think that it is actually enough, I can rename and refactor the actual article. Note that it already has the hotelware. Uncle G (talk) 02:32, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • I'd like to be able to take some time to look at it specifically once I get my rewrite of Battle of Byram's Ford done. IMO it's in "close, but not quite" territory as currently written, but I think it could be made ready with further work. Just maybe not ready at the moment. Hog Farm Talk 02:40, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • I find it funny that the company has an internet listing old 1910s and 1920s corporate charter transactions, while stating that the corporate filing was done in 1916(?) and was revoked in 2008 for "failure to file annual report". Either that's a different entity or the WV SOS doesn't do an effective job of determining what is still an active business, I guess. Hog Farm Talk 02:45, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • Sorry to clutter up your talk page, but noting other potential sources being here, some brief stuff in here. And a bit in this book. Hopefully this can be fleshed out enough over time to be a standalone article. Hog Farm Talk 02:54, 21 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Featuring your work on Wikipedia's front page: DYKs edit

Thank you for your recent articles, including Chinese proverb, which I read with interest. When you create an extensive and well referenced article, you may want to have it featured on Wikipedia's main page in the Did You Know section. Articles included there will be read by thousands of our viewers. To do so, add your article to the list at T:TDYK. This can be also done through this helpful user script: User:SD0001/DYK-helper. Let me know if you need help, Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:39, 22 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

User:Hog Farm/Kentucky edit

Went through the Kentucky unincorporated community category and filtered down a "further attention" list based on ones with elements in the name that have shown a tendency to be spurious or false in the past, such as "store" or "ford" or "Left Fork of ..". Hog Farm Talk 20:20, 26 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • It doesn't catch the likes of Eriline, Kentucky, and that comes straight from researching Rennick. It's a post office not a community. It's definitely a post office, because it moved two times according to Rennick, for better access to customers, having three sites on the river on Rennick's map. This is not to single this out. It's an example of how that list probably isn't anywhere near being the whole of the set of problematic articles. Rennick wrote some 50 books on post offices, and if even a quarter of that has turned into "unincorporated community" articles, Kentucky is going to be a huge problem and a horrific drudge. Sadly, Eriline is listed as a city, no less, in our National Register of Historic Places listings in Clay County, Kentucky article. Uncle G (talk) 21:24, 26 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • Yeah. A full go through will probably involve going through thousands of pages of Rennick in parts of it, which can't be fun. I went through last year over the western half of the state and AFD'd some of the low hanging fruit such as Fish Pond, Kentucky (AfD discussion), but apparently I didn't do a particularly great job, as shown by Anna Lynne, Kentucky (AfD discussion). Good work with the "Mouth of Bear" article; I wouldn't be surprised if many of those are under the wrong name. Hog Farm Talk 22:57, 26 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • Would it not be less work to start something like List of post offices in Kentucky, maybe organized by county, and then redirect the geo-stubs to anchors in the list? That would avoid the need for a whole lot of AfDs, and give a place to hold information on the post offices where there is some but not enough for an article. It would be useful to readers if every place named on the map had an article or a redirect to an entry in a list like this. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:24, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • It's not necessarily a whole lot of AFD discussions that's the horrific drudge. There are quite a lot of postoffices in the Rennick doco that are documented in depth, at least collectively over the history of the postoffices as they have moved around and suchlike. Witness Mouth of Bear, Kentucky. But this is thousands of articles that have to be visited and have "unincorporated community" changed. Then there are the creeks and forks. I think that there's a whole article to be had on Shelby Creek in Pike County, Kentucky just from the amount of information that there is in the Pike County book on each individual tributary, left and right, and the branches thereof. Ruddels Mills, Kentucky is spelled wrongly, and Reynolds Station, Kentucky is two things with two names. And this is just the stuff that looked bogus on its face to Hog Farm. Who knows what else is lurking in there? Witness Eriline, Kentucky.

          Picking an "unincorporated community" entirely at random from the category: Sublimity City, Kentucky. Checking against Rennick this turns out to be Sublimity Forest Community originally owned by the U.S. Forest Service and an experiment in planned communities that was part of the New Deal.

          Uncle G (talk) 14:10, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

          • Understood, there is a lot of clean-up needed. But lists and redirects might make it easier.
            1. It is easy enough to create a list like Springs of Lake County, California. Some of the entries have articles, some could, some never will
            2. If a stub says nothing more than "Smiths Crossing is an unincorporated community at 23°07′24″N 24°20′44″E / 23.1234°N 24.3456°E / 23.1234; 24.3456", then nothing is lost by making it a redirect to a list that gives the coordinates, and says what it really is
            3. A redirect can be upgraded to a full article when someone has time
            4. With this approach we can give readers some information on every named place on the map, whether or not there is scope for an article, which is better than telling them we don't know what kind of thing it is, and can also skip endless AfD debates over marginally notable topics.
            Aymatth2 (talk) 14:53, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Shocking Kentucky news edit

Big Creek, Kentucky is not an "unincorporated community". It is a creek. Uncle G (talk) 19:30, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

 

USGS is not all that bad. Creek, community, school and post office. Community on the creek near its mouth on the Red Bird River, school just north of the mouth, post office in the community. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:04, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • First cut of an article listing all populated places in Clay County here. All summits here. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:15, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Your map of the creek with its tributaries only compounds the shock. Have a care for the lurkers, who might not be able to withstand such shocks upon shocks! ☺ "village", by the way. Uncle G (talk) 20:22, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
Everything you wanted to know about Clay County, Kentucky ...

See User:Aymatth2/Sandbox2

... but wish you hadn't asked. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:56, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • It would not be hard to make a template to render the table entries with links to articles where found, {{GNIS 4}} for the id, {{coord}} for the coords. Might make it easier to audit the USGS stubs. Big Creek, Clay County, Kentucky, Big Creek, Kentucky, Big Creek. I may play with that. Aymatth2 (talk) 21:12, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • I hadn't asked, in fact. More shocking news: Those are just recycled GNIS entries, and many of them are rubbish. I'm working from the original source, that many of the GNIS records mangle and distort. Bluehole, Kentucky was a post office, for example, not a "Populated Place", and two of those GNIS records for it in that list are sourced to Rennick in their citations. See Project:Reliability of GNIS data/Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection. Uncle G (talk) 21:18, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • It should also be noted that in rare cases, existence of the place can be barely verified: Brows Defeat, Kentucky (AfD discussion). A map dot in Rennick with no explanation becomes a GNIS populated place. It's gonna take a good bit of work just to properly identify these. Hog Farm Talk 21:52, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
      • Rennick seems a good source. The USGS topo maps seem good too in the sense that they show there was something by that name at that place, maybe a village, resort, railway stop, whatever. I see three GNIS entries for Bluehole, Kentucky,
      • The topo map shows a few buildings below the place name. The first post office is south of the place on Buzzard Road, with no buildings now shown on the topo map, and the second is in the place. Presumably the post office was not in the middle of nowhere but was in or beside a store or inn or some other building, with a few cottages around it. Maybe the first post office burned down and was moved up north, taking its name with it. The place is just a name on a topo map unless there are other sources, certainly not the basis for an article. But a list of place names may be useful as a list of targets for redirects that were formerly stubs. Maybe some of them will be expanded out as real articles later. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:29, 27 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
        • We shouldn't trust the GNIS for a list of names, and I really do not think that we should be mass-importing GNIS data in any way, as articles or as a placename list in a single article, given how badly we (and other people such as OpenStreetMap) have been burned by this.

          The GNIS still has "Mouth of Bear", Geographic Names Information System, United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior for example, with no indication that that hasn't been the name since 1891. The GNIS can be trusted for U.S. official spellings, and possibly coördinates (although some seem to have been interpolated by the transcribers). But it can be utterly misleading on everything else, from what the named thing is through when it was used and whether it has even been confirmed.

          You are not actually looking at the right topographical map. The map to look at is the annotated one, done by the person whose work thousands of these GNIS entries originate from. (It's actually in Ramsay's biography that the dump of xyr place-name card collection "more than doubled the number of Missouri place-names in the survey's computerized files". So over 50% of Missouri is Ramsay. The dump of Rennick is probably likewise for Kentucky; especially as, as can be seen, some of it is doubled up because Rennick recorded things that move around.)

          More shocking news to authors of springs and resorts articles: Sextons Creek, Kentucky is a creek, whose GNIS pin points to one of its tributaries, and Burning Springs, Kentucky is a set of springs (of natural gas), on a tributary of that creek named after the springs with a postoffice at the creek mouth named after the creek. (Rennick & USGS 476)

          Uncle G (talk) 08:39, 28 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

          • Rennick, Robert M.; United States Geological Survey. "Hime Quadrangle (1952)". Robert M. Rennick Topographical Map Collection (337). Morehead State University.
          • Rennick, Robert M.; United States Geological Survey. "Maulden Quadrangle (1954)". Robert M. Rennick Topographical Map Collection (476). Morehead State University.

I would not be too hasty to condemn the USGS. They do their best, and we may be over-interpreting their information. They define "populated place" simply as "Place or area with clustered or scattered buildings and a permanent human population..." Mouth of Bear (historical) was presumably the name of such a place at the mouth of Bear Creek, and Brows Defeat (historical) was presumably such a place too. Sextons Creek is a cluster of buildings on Little Sexton Creek, a tributary of Sexton Creek, and is home of Clark Cemetery. Some of these may warrant articles, probably most do not.

Suppose we had list-type articles like Lawrence County, Kentucky GNIS features, each with a standard explanation / disclaimer at the front saying "this is what the GNIS holds, what it means, how reliable it is", then a table with entries like:

Feature GNIS id GNIS Type Coordinates Elevation Notes
...
Brows Defeat (historical) 2337448 Populated place 37°57′03″N 082°38′29″W / 37.95083°N 82.64139°W / 37.95083; -82.64139 614 187

It would take a bit of experiment, but I think they could be generated in a few minutes per county. Then instead of nominating a stub like Brows Defeat, Kentucky for deletion, it could simply be turned into a redirect to Lawrence County, Kentucky GNIS features#Brows Defeat (historical). No information would be lost, and we would not waste time trying to dig up information for a topic where there may well be nothing available. Some time later, an editor who had come across a lode of information on places like this could work through expanding selected redirects into real articles. That is much more efficient, because they will only be working on articles where there really is something to be said. The table provides basic information on all the features the USGS has recognized, which is better then nothing. It meets the "gazetteer" need. Aymatth2 (talk) 11:33, 28 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • No, that's just wrong and a bad idea. The very problem with the GNIS data is that they are dodgy and that one cannot trust types. There's a discussion on the talk page there that points to a study for New Hampshire alone that found "frequently inaccurate" record types and "numerous inaccuracies" in location data especially for structures.

    Reorganizing Wikipedia doesn't magically make the GNIS less dodgy. You're just shifting falsehoods around doing that. "Populated Place" has been used as a default for all sorts of things. Project:Reliability of GNIS data/Ramsay Place-Name Card Collection actually has a demonstration of this. "It's on a map. There are dots. Must be 'populated place' then." No, Chitwood was a railway station, on the very source that you are entering into the GNIS. That should have been "Locale".

    Brows Defeat shouldn't be in Wikipedia at all because it isn't verifiable from the manuscripts of the very person who was the only source of the information, whose map is the very origin of the GNIS record. Other things are demonstrably not what the GNIS records say them to be, per the very sources that the GNIS records cite. All of the thousands of errors from the GNIS are not information to be "lost". They are errors to be removed. We should not be copying the GNIS database into Wikipedia or aiming to retain its errors, as articles, tables, tables with disclaimers, or otherwise.

    We actually have that lode of information, moreover. It's the work of the person that many Kentucky GNIS records came from. Xe says that Sexton Creek is a creek, "a branch of the South Fork of the Kentucky River", with a Little Sexton Creek tributary and a Sextons Creek post office all "named for a local family". Xe did not supply elevations or coördinates, moreover. You can look at the annotated Richardson map, cited in the AFD discussion, and see that xe didn't supply those for Brows Defeat. Xe does not in general do so, with distances usually only precise to the half or quarter mile furthermore. The GNIS elevations have been deduced on the assumptions that the GNIS coördinates are precise, and the GNIS coördinates are taken from a rough pen line. Many of the pen lines end in broad circles, because Rennick xyrself is taking this stuff from interviews, correspondence, and suchlike with approximate positions. Sextons Creek postoffice is "about 2 miles above [Little Sexton's] confluence with Sexton Creek" in Rennick. It's a broad circle encompassing two roads on xyr Maulden map. It's falsely precise to fractions of a second in the GNIS. But it disagrees by several whole seconds with other records for the same thing, of which there are two.

    Ironically, we could source to actual gazetteers to fulfil "the gazetteer need". That's exactly how I and others are cross-checking the rubbish GNIS articles in Iowa at AFD, against a whole bunch of Iowa gazetteers, in the first instance, and then county history books in the second. I keep meaning to make a list (Polk's, Hair's, Lippincott's, and so forth) for future reference. I've been citing the history books in the actual articles, where almost no-one has actually added histories to places, as that seems to be a useful addition to article space itself. Witness Winnebago County, Iowa#Further reading for example, and a complete lack of a history section in the article.

    That stuff in the GNIS database gives a false sense of accuracy. These are not good data. This isn't true stuff to be putting into Wikipedia.

    Uncle G (talk) 13:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

    • Some thoughts:
      • I have been looking at some lives of saints lately. Sometimes there is uncertainty about whether a saint existed at all (e.g. Mac Creiche), and sometimes a saint's "life" may in fact be a compound of the lives of two saints. We can say, "According to Alban Butler ...", but his account may be seriously flawed. We should warn the reader that the source is the best we have.
      • A list of GNIS features would be 100% accurate in the sense that this is exactly what the GNIS says about the features. We can preface the list with a template that says "GNIS data is not always accurate, see Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data. For example...". The reader is warned.
      • "Is not always accurate" does not mean "is totally unreliable". Statistics are more useful than anecdotes. Do 1% of entries have errors? 0.1%? How serious are those errors?
        • A slightly imprecise location is not too important when we are talking about some scattered buildings. We can head the column "Approximate location". Ditto elevation.
        • If many of the errors are confusion between "populated place" and "locale", we can blur that by merging the two groups into "place" in the list. "There is or was a place with that name at roughly those coordinates" is very likely true.
        • If some feature classes often (perhaps more than 1%) have serious errors, we can exclude those classes.
        • Where we find inaccuracies, we can annotate the lists: "GNIS is wrong in this case ...".
      • The stubs are much more damaging than a list would be, first because they wrongly say "is an unincorporated community" when it should be "is or was a named place where there is or was human presence or activity", and second because they do not have the cautionary preface.
      • Sweeping out all these misleading stubs by making them redirects to list entries can be done quickly and easily, without all the AfD cost and effort. Then we can work on correcting the lists and building useful articles about notable features.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Aymatth2 (talk) 18:54, 28 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • A different point is that we anyway need lists of lakes, streams, settlements, etc. to serve as a gazetteer. Many of the list entries will not be notable in their own right, so do not deserve a full article. Original research is not the right approach. For the United States the GNIS is the natural place to get a first cut of a list, just as the CGNDB is for Canada or Logainm.ie for Ireland. The entries can then be reviewed and if necessary corrected or expanded. We may want to consider informing the source agency of any errors we have found. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:03, 29 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

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Unprotect Wenis edit

Wenis probably doesn't need to be indef full protected after 15 years. Semi would be more appropriate. dudhhrContribs 04:40, 5 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Lake County revisited edit

I thought I would test my theory that it would be cost-effective to create lists of geographic features. The idea is to change trivial feature stubs into redirects to entries in the lists rather than run them through the AfD process. If it takes an hour of total effort to research, create and debate an AfD, and a couple of hours to create a list of features, we break even if two stubs can be redirected rather than deleted. I started Rivers of Lake County, California, followed by a short analysis at User:Aymatth2/counties, to test this theory. Results are inconclusive.

  • Lake County turns out to have over 200 streams. This is on the high side for a county, but not exceptional. Elmore County, Idaho has 431 streams.
  • GNIS is the natural starting point for a list, despite its known flaws. There is no better source for a complete list, even if there are better sources for some of the individual entries. But as noted at Rivers of Lake County, California#Notes on source, there are flaws.
    • Coordinates, elevations and lengths are only approximate, but that seems acceptable. Mouth coordinates tend to change over time anyway. But it is interesting to see that the mouths of creeks that enter Clear Lake vary in elevation from 1,325 to 1,378 feet. Must be something to do with the tides.
    • There are also errors in classification: streams classed as lakes, valleys classed as streams and so on. Every entry has to be checked.
    • We have to go to individual feature descriptions to find the length and parent, and where there is no description go to the map.
    • Duplicate names (Alder Creek, Bear Creek, Cold Creek, Dry Creek etc.) have to be disambiguated
    • Then the entries have to be sorted by basin
  • Bottom line is that building these lists is time-consuming, by no means a simple cut and paste job.
  • The sample of counties shows that often there are no stubs to be redirected to a list even if it existed.
  • Category:Rivers of Sussex County, Delaware has a fair number of stubs, but also has a fair number of stub++ articles like Little Creek (Broad Creek tributary) that seem to have enough to be worth preserving. It might be easier to upgrade the stubs than to AfD them or to create a list and redirect them.

Bottom line is, Dunno. Once my tendonitis clears up I may start some saints. Nobody puts saints up for deletion, however dubious the sources are. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:06, 7 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • I've been playing with something similar for populated places in a county, but keeping it as a user sub-page - User:Donald Albury/Notes/Alachua County communities. I have been able to create a couple of stubs since starting this list; Fairbanks, Florida, which I have known about for 70 50 or so years, and Tarver, Florida, which I just learned about while compiling the list. I used all entries for populated places and railroad stations (and a scattering of churches and cemetaries that match possible now abandoned populated places) in the county that are in the GNIS but do not have WP articles. I also found names of places on old maps, which may have been populated places, or RR freight stations. There are a few names found in books, as well. For most of the places in the table, I have found nothing more than a name and a location (GNIS coordinates, or position on a map). For a few, I have only a name. With the information I now have, I cannot justify creating even a sub-stub from the places currently in the table. I spent some time compiling the table and got just a couple of stubs (and a sentence or two added to a couple of existing articles, documenting name changes) out of my effort. The working file itself is not suitable for conversion to an article, but will be useful to me if I find more information about any of the places in the table. - Donald Albury 16:01, 7 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • I think a list-type article should generally be one of:
      • A list of notable topics, where every entry has a blue link to an article or red link to a potential article
      • A complete list of all things that meet the list criteria, supported by a reliable source, where some entries may never have articles
    I wanted the second type: a well-documented complete list that would be useful as a target for stubs converted to redirects. I think Rivers of Lake County, California fits that definition. But it was a lot of effort to create the list, and not many stubs. With populated places, current and former, it is hard or impossible to get any agreement on what goes into a complete list. The USGS is much less useful for these than for physical streams, lakes, mountains etc. We could make complete lists of railway stops, post offices, churches, cemeteries etc. for use as redirect targets, but I have become skeptical about it being practical to make complete lists of "populated places". Aymatth2 (talk) 16:35, 7 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    There certainly are articles like that. One I've added to in the past is List of rivers of Florida, which is, or course, nowhere near complete. How well you can document smaller streams is an issue. There is a little stream about 1/2 mile from my house called Royal Park Creek, per the sign by the street it passes under. I can find maps that show it, and mentions that it is a tributary of Hogtown Creek, but it does not show up in GNIS (at least with that name). In fact, of 24 named streams on one map I found, only 4 show up in GNIS. So, a well-documented complete list of streams in an area may be something that is hard to achieve. - Donald Albury 17:42, 7 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    I suppose big streams are fed by small streams, small streams by smaller streams and so ad infinitum. But "streams named by GNIS" is probably good enough to cover all the notable ones and a lot more. List of rivers of Florida looks like the first type of list: only notable topics, and no source given for the list as a whole, which is incomplete. It would not work as a target for redirects, since it says nothing about each stream apart from what its parent is, and the redirect name probably includes that anyway: Stony Creek (Big Creek tributary) . Aymatth2 (talk) 21:09, 7 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

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DYK for Wises Landing, Kentucky edit

On 11 June 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Wises Landing, Kentucky, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the post office for Wises Landing, Kentucky, was established in June 1878 but did not receive a postmaster until January 1879? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Wises Landing, Kentucky. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Wises Landing, Kentucky), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cwmhiraeth (talk) 00:02, 11 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

"Hhaha" listed at Redirects for discussion edit

  A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Hhaha. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 July 13#Hhaha until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. CycloneYoris talk! 23:03, 13 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

"Sunnydale-syndrome" listed at Redirects for discussion edit

  A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Sunnydale-syndrome. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 July 25#Sunnydale-syndrome until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 20:15, 25 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Nomination of Portage Path Elementary School for deletion edit

 

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New Page Protection on Christian Weston Chandler edit

Hey Uncle G,

I noticed you protected Christian Weston Chandler from creation, and I believe that this was a good call—nothing apart from niche internet fame lived up to BLP standards (apart from the fandom claim that he/she was the most documented person in history). However, after the recent News that came out and Christine began trending on Twitter, I do believe that Chris Chan needs a page. Carwile2 *message* 18:37, 4 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

(talk page stalker) This has already been discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Chris_Chan, where the general consensus was that the protections need not be removed. Writ Keeper  19:20, 4 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2021 Elections voter message edit

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Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled edit

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How we will see unregistered users edit

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Precious anniversary edit

Precious
 
Three years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:58, 7 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

Nomination of Autonomous circuit for deletion edit

 

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Autonomous circuit, to which you have significantly contributed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or if it should be deleted.

The discussion will take place at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Autonomous circuit until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

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Disambiguation link notification for February 11 edit

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Request: Article approve edit

Hi Administrator, i have created my furst article. Can you check and get it approved if it meets the criteria. Draft:Youthistaan Shubamjoshii (talk) 07:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

"information-free cop-out" edit

I've been calling it a euphemism, but yours is better. Mangoe (talk) 01:27, 12 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Aikanaka (mythology) edit

Thank you for the detailed evaluation of the Knappert's source. I checked the relevance of another claim in the article Aikanaka (mythology) and corrected the citation respectively. Best, --ThT (talk) 13:19, 17 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Since I see you're currently active edit

Are you still interested in our having an article on the Contes drolatiques? I have one in my userspace, User:Yngvadottir/Contes drolatiques, that could be cannibalized to save some time. I don't expect to mainspace any of the articles I have there any time soon, and it may well not be good enough as it is. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:02, 23 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Sublimation (psychology) edit

Thanks. I was just trying to find a link for a student who asked why Guigemar was so obsessed with hunting. I appreciate your help! Drmies (talk) 17:03, 23 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

In case of emergency, break glass. edit

  • John Frederick Hintz (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
  • Graf, Lanie E. (2004). "Moravians in London: A case study in furniture-making, c. 1735–65". Furniture History. 40. The Furniture History Society: 1–52. JSTOR 23409297.
  • Graf, Lanie E. (Fall 2008). "John Frederick Hintz, Eighteenth-Century Moravian Instrument Maker, and the Use of the Cittern in Moravian Worship". Journal of Moravian History. 5 (1). Penn State University Press: 7–39. doi:10.2307/jmorahist.5.2008.0007. JSTOR 41171488.
  • Boynton, Lindsay (1993). "The Moravian Brotherhood and the migration of furniture makers in the eighteenth century". Furniture History. 29. The Furniture History Society: 45–58. JSTOR 23407783.
  • Graf, Lanie E. (2001). Impact of the Moravian Brotherhood on Anglo-German Furniture Trends in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century. Sotheby's Institute of Art.
  • Holman, Peter (2010). "John Frederick Hintz and the cult of exotic instruments". Life After Death: The Viola Da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch. Music in Britain, 1600–1900. Vol. 6. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 9781843835745. ISSN 1752-1904.

Uncle G (talk) 09:36, 5 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Mucking around with her and it edit

I very much enjoyed your comments at the ship pronoun rfc based on the history of linguistics. (I'm also biased in favor of those who won't put up with blather, and call it out; so there's that, too.) It's one of those (rare) times that I wish Wikipedia had a "follow" feature, like Twitter. Hope we cross paths more frequently in the future. Happy editing! Mathglot (talk) 05:23, 13 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Maybe you could take a look edit

At this mess: Mervyn Bunter. I've added a reception section and some sources, not sure if he is notable or not in the end. Maybe you saw something useful while working on the Duke of Denver? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:17, 21 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

GNIS (historical) edit

Thanks for looking into the Bob, West Virginia "article". What's your source for the old GNIS historical site records, since GNIS seems to have purged them in their UI update? I don't think anything's saving Bob (or some of the other junk stubs that same author produced without context to identify the location and sometimes not even location - cf. Big Right Hand, West Virginia (AfD discussion), Scott, West Virginia (AfD discussion), Brows Defeat, Kentucky (AfD discussion), etc.) but it would at least be helpful to see the tiny bits of information GNIS gives, like if I'm looking for a post office or a community or what. Hog Farm Talk 19:59, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

How's your Azeri? edit

The house with angels. Drmies (talk) 16:34, 24 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • You can tell Kevo327 that xe cannot read and that Special:Diff/1079003708 and Special:Diff/1079003865 are an embarrassment. That house, 26 Nigar Rafibeyli Street, very much currently is on that historic building list. commons:Category:Building on Nigar Rafibeyli Street 26 even gives the ID number on the list at the top of the page.
    • In the original:

      3270. Yaşayış evi 1893-1899-cu illər N.Rəfibəyli küçəsi, 26

    • Translated:

      3270. Residential house 1893-1899 N. Rafibeyli Street, 26

  • At the top of the section we have:
    • In the original:

      Azərbaycan Respublikası Nazirlər Kabinetinin

      By Decision No. 132 of August 2, 2001

      təsdiq edilmişdir

      3 nömrəli əlavə

      Yerli əhəmiyyətli daşınmaz tarix və mədəniyyət abidələrinin siyahısı

      Memarlıq abidələri

    • Translated:

      Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Azerbaijan

      By Decision No. 132 of August 2, 2001

      approved

      Appendix 3

      List of fixed historic and cultural monuments of local importance

      Architectural monuments

  • If even I can figure this out, with no language userboxes at all on my user page, Kevo327 surely could have.

    Uncle G (talk) 08:37, 25 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

    • Uncle G I had searched the list by the azeri name in the article and couldn't find it, now after checking what the other user has written I did find it and on my way to revert it, and I don't have Azeri language userboxes. I made a mistake and I apologise for it. - Kevo327 (talk) 09:35, 25 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
      • No worries. Just fix it back, because otherwise the historic monuments people will be at you. I don't know how they are with monuments in Azerbaijan, but with historic monuments in North America and Western Europe I have seen them be quite vocal. ☺ Tip: Be careful about throwing around accusations of vandalism. Uncle G (talk) 09:48, 25 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

help edit

Uncle, you are so much better than me at unearthing sources. I need them for "St. Agnes of Guienne" (or "saint"), by Daniel B. Lucas. Maybe there's enough for a Wikipedia article--but personally I just need a few sentences. This and this promises a wealth of information should be available--but the first is a collection of blurbs, and the second from a professor, of the English kind. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 22:35, 26 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • Sans the "saint", it's an alternative name for Agnes of Poitou that we do not list, note. You might want to draw that and York 1999 to the attention of your talk page lurkers.

    As for the poem, there's a bunch of review excerpts in one newspaper, which of course are possibly out of context and only the favourable reviews as this is an advertisement, not a good source at all. Hence "handsomely received by the critics" in Kent, though. Two such quotes:

    “‘St. Agnes of Guienne’ is the poem of the whole book, from which, according to the usual and very proper fashion, the volume ought to have taken its name. It occupies some forty pages. In length, in execution and detail it is evidently a carefully studied performance." — Baltimore Statesman.

    "Barring whatever immoral tendency this poem [St. Agnes] may contain, it is decidedly one of the most beautiful in conception, and elegant in execution we have ever read." — Maryland Free Press.

    — KP 1869, p. 4
    This does tell us where to look for stuff, as it names the newspapers and magazines with the reviews, and where the quotation from Margaret J. Preston bandied about in Bedinger 2014 comes from, however. It's from The Land We Love. Looking at the quotations, there might not be the quality of review material that you might have hoped, and Kent's summary may be the best that can be done. What you need is someone with a subscription to one of those U.S. newspaper archive services, to search the contemporary issues of the Statesman, the Virginia Herald, et al.. Maybe there's one of your talk page lurkers who has that, too.

    I cannot find the date of Kent. Kent died in 1917 and edited a collection of Lucas's works in 1913, so it's obviously not the date on the WWW site.

    And since you are looking for a particular form of words, I give you a bonus which I leave you to check inside the book.

    Uncle G (talk) 08:46, 27 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Reading that edition of Spirit of Jefferson is quite amusing. Someone should be User:Superfine Ketchum Best Quality here. I wish I had found the possible immoral tendency in skimming over the content of that poem--it escaped me. Those blurbs--I'll give the poem another shot, I guess. Listen, thank you for your good work; I really appreciate it, and I'll put it to good use. Drmies (talk) 00:48, 29 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

A barnstar for you! edit

  The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
Thank you for your numerous rewrites and rescues of interesting topics found at AfDs. IMHO you are doing a much better job than the entire Article Rescue Squadron combined :) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:33, 27 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Dainik Prayukti edit

There seem to be both some true info mixed in with some false with the article. Here are the major issues I found with the article:

  • It did win a WAN-IFRA award, but not the one specified on the page. It won a "new products" award.
    • Concerns about hoaxes or misinterpretations aside, the issue here is whether or not that award would be major enough to count towards total or partial notability. Per things like this, the organization seems to be notable enough. I'd argue that this could count towards notability but wouldn't be a major enough award to be notable in and of itself, as it wasn't the main award.
  • The claim about being one of the top 10 papers looks like it's probably false.
    • One of the two links is dead and doesn't link back to the WAN-IFRA post that is meant to back up the claims. A search on the main WAN-IFRA site for the newspaper's name brings up nothing. The other, Smartwoop, doesn't look reliable. It allows for paid articles and the list is also clearly stated to be made up to the desires of the person who wrote the article. It would make sense hoax-wise for the paper to not be one of the first couple of newspapers listed, given the competition out there. Further proof towards this being a hoax is this, which covers Indian readership for 2019. This paper isn't listed anywhere.
  • Circulation numbers are pretty large.
    • The circulation numbers are roughly half of the circulation numbers for the LA Times, yet there's no evidence of any actual physical paper. There's no mention on the newspaper website to show that anyone could purchase a physical copy. Granted it doesn't seem like there's info for this on some of the other papers, but it is suspect. It also doesn't help that the site is on Wordpress. Not that there aren't notable outlets on Wordpress, but it's kind of sketch. I don't know of an easy way to check internet traffic since Alexa went away, but I'd wager that the traffic is pretty low.

Other evidence towards the claims being a hoax or misrepresentation include the fact that the Facebook page hasn't been updated since 2019, nor has the Twitter account. The Twitter account has 299 followers, which doesn't really back up claims of it being a top newspaper. The web presence as a whole is practically nonsexistent, even considering that Google is terrible when pulling up any Hindi or India located sourcing.

Basically, this exists and can be read, but isn't what is represented in the article. There's also the issue of it being associated with someone who was blatantly caught in a scam around 2019. As such, I'm going to delete this as a hoax. I just wanted there to be some record of the reasons why in case anyone asked. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (。◕‿◕。) 12:32, 30 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • If you want to do any of the remaining cleanup, feel free - let me know if there's anything that needs to be deleted. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (。◕‿◕。) 12:34, 30 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
    • I actually went and did some myself for this - the paper had been on various pages as having given out awards. This irritates me since it can be a super uphill battle to get sourcing and establish notability for India related topics because we've seen a lot of promotional and generally unhelpful (hoaxing, misrepresentation, etc) editing in regards to India related topics. There's sort of a knee jerk reaction to it sometimes at AfD. It's just frustrating when something like this happens to help reinforce that. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (。◕‿◕。) 12:45, 30 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
  • Prayukti Publications Private Limited registered in 2013 by the supposed editor of the newspaper hasn't been heard from since 2014 and has been struck off. Some shenanighans certainly went on if this company from Karol Bagh that disappeared, suddenly turns up in 2018 in Noida. The URLs for the supposed "e-paper" use a domain name that doesn't now exist, appears in the Wayback Machine as "Services restricted due to non payment." for a long time, and then before that shows the same mocked-up newspaper pages for periods of around 6 months at a time. That was around 2017 and 2018, just long enough to fool a trade association into handing out a "new products" award for an e-paper, I suspect. Uncle G (talk) 13:51, 30 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Have you consideed edit

Reserving and redirecting User:UncleG to your userpage? Just a thought. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:24, 31 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

WP:TPO edit

How does this reconcile? It was their second edit. Tag as spa, hat if necessary, report somewhere, but there's no basis for just removing what someone writes when it's about the subject AFAIK. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 12:54, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • My mistake for assuming the DS box contained a standard DS warning rather than a novel requirement. Saying that an AfD must be limited to discussing the sources for this biographical article, and that everything else is off-topic and can be removed, seems like kind of a stretch (sourcing isn't even the only conceivable reason for deletion, and there are many other issues related to BLP, weight, merging, etc. that are related to, but not exactly discussing sources). But meh, I guess I'm not going to complain too much about removing content that verges on misinformation, even if "you were warned" to someone on their first edit the page is going to be confusing. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:06, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
    • I explicitly said that other policies is what to discuss, which obviously includes the BLP policy, in that very edit, even. And it should be screamingly obvious that I've not touched any of the many rationales that have discussed the BLP policy before that one. But a long digression on personal views on a series of YouTube videos and the person who made them is in no way discussing the merits of the deletion or otherwise of a Wikipedia article. Note that the account had also done much the same thing on the article talk page, going beyond even where it went at AFD to discuss Wikipedia editors directly, and the AFD discussion was not its first edit. No censure there from me, because this is limited to the deletion discussion. AFD is not going to get out of hand in this case, if I can help it. We're going to stick to what AFD is about, and not go off into the weeds with personal views about COVID-19, YouTube videos, or the subject of the biography, or even each other, and end up with the utter train wreck that you and I know happens. COVID-19 is a sanctionable area, and at the end of the process we can say the result, whatever it is, is because of a consensus or otherwise on the article, policy, and sources not because the AFD discussion turned into the usual disaster. I'm hoping that the strong use of editorial and administrative tools, starting with the gentlest approach of highly visible warnings, and just refactoring (keeping as much as I can of a rationale that does deal with the article, policy, and sources, notice), with firm guidance to stick to what AFD is about, will fall short of having to issue formal sanctions. Heck, I'm hoping to get away with not even blocking anyone or protecting anything. If we can make it through the second week of the fortnight with nothing happening more serious than a little refactoring and a couple of big warning boxes, which we have during the first week, that would be great. Uncle G (talk) 14:24, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
      • Fair enough. Thanks for the clear response. I guess I feel like because AfDs get out of control so often, there's not a lot of precedent for removing ~NOTAFORUM type material, but this novel idea of trying to prevent it going off the rails in the first place seems a worthy experiment. :) — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:30, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
        • I've actually done it before. It was a few years ago, and I forget which discussion it was, but I sat on it pretty heavily, knowing the usual things that happen. I don't do it often, most of the time doing more usual AFD Patrol stuff, but this is very clearly one of those things where the potential to go way off the rails is great. And it went well before, so this isn't quite totally groundbreaking. ☺ See also Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#COVID-19 sanctions warning in an AFD discussion if you haven't seen it. Uncle G (talk) 14:50, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
  • No offence, my commentary was specifically ABOUT the sourced criticism in the links immediately above my section. Sources and content that is currently being used to justify his notability for an article. Now the factoring makes my comment makes 0 sense. I have never been "refactored" in such a way and it seems bizarre that this non-topic would be a first for summarising the subject of the BLP's "notable" output on a discussion about what makes the subject of a BLP notable. Koncorde (talk) 17:37, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
    • No. You went over the line and started discussing the videos themselves. Not egregiously, but you did, and that way leads to disaster, from long experience. (Recent example of many: Look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marina Ovsyannikova where people started discussing the merits of the biography subject, and before long editors were throwing around accusations of other editors being "kremlin propaganda trolls". Then notice that the AFD discussion here had already started with the name calling, which I have attempted to stop in its tracks.) Stick to the provenances and depths of sources, and how policy applies to the article. Your argument about mentioning in other articles because of what you thought of the depth of sourcing stood, notice. That's a fair argument to make about where and how something is included in Wikipedia. But taking the discussion onto COVID-19 topics and the supposed rights and wrongs of some YouTube videos is not what an AFD discussion is for. AFD discussions that go that way go sideways. That's not going to happen here. We're going to have a discussion showing the world that it's about the inclusion/deletion of a biographical article, in light of our policies, and analyses of sources. We're not going to argue about COVID-19. We're not going to argue the merits of the biography subject xyrself, or digress into our opinions of what the videos mean. How the sources stack up (depths, correctness, fact checking, authors, being on point, and so forth) and what that means per our policies (deletion, verifiability, BLP, and so forth) in terms of addressing the subject of this person in Wikipedia, where and how and if at all, is entirely fair game for an AFD discussion. Analysing the subject's YouTube videos is not. Uncle G (talk) 18:24, 3 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Closed noticeboard discussion edit

You provided great input and analysis in this noticeboard discussion a few weeks ago, in which another editor tried to get me sanctioned. Unfortunately, the reporting editor ignored everything you told him. I'm not sure if you're aware, but shortly after that he went to another noticeboard and filed a new complaint against me. I wrote to the admin who closed it, but am not sure if he was aware of the background story of the dispute. 2605:A000:FFC0:D8:FDF2:3EB5:8751:7A62 (talk) 14:37, 6 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Re: Noticeboard edit

Well, I'm not sure where you're looking, but I did start discussion on talk, which you can see at Talk:Matija Zmajević. I've reviewed some of the sources that Silverije started adding to this woefully under-referenced article. Some of them didn't require an extended discussion because they were just bad and I removed them with an edit summary linking to a policy; one was a tertiary source with a national-themed context (also discussed years ago, also by myself, on that talk page) so I described it as such; and one was from a scientific database but I couldn't verify its journal actually being scientific, so I brought it up on talk. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to stop the edit-warring, because the two 'sides' kept doing the whole routine, ignored talk, reverted my edits indiscriminately, etc. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 05:40, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • Here's hoping that they don't ignore it now. There isn't a a discussion of the source in Special:Diff/1081309103 on the article talk page, and there's only edit summary discussion, again not talk page discussion, of the second one in Special:Diff/1081199939. The third one there seems dodgy on its face, but again, let's be complete about this. That one, too. Then there's the one in Special:Diff/1077727061. It's these that I'm getting at. Let's have them all on the talk page and discussed. If you think that they're all bad, that's fine. It's a place to start talk page discussion. Let's have it all explicitly laid out on the talk page. Uncle G (talk) 06:57, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
    • Oh, there is a discussion about the first, https://www.bib.irb.hr/997537 says Zdravka Zlodi and 'Adriatic News' so that's what I brought up in Talk:Matija_Zmajević#'Adriatic_News'_journal For rbth.com, that's the one that I removed based on the list perenially unreliable ones. RIA Novosti was previously used in one of those older diffs you found, too. The fourth link went to RIA Voronezh, so presumably that's just the local branch of RIA in that city - it's the same deal. Folks aren't advocating for these Russian sources on talk because they're likely just churnalism. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:34, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
      • Not here. It doesn't do any good to put your evaluations here. Uncle G (talk) 08:00, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
        • It doesn't matter, it's not like we're at a point where someone is making a substantive argument in a content dispute that revolves around the subtle details of source analysis. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 08:25, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
          • It does matter, and we've got an edit war where people are trying to get the discussion onto the talk page. If even you won't go to the talk page, this isn't going to get any better. Please, for pity's sake, set a good example for them to follow here. You clearly know what you want to say. Uncle G (talk) 08:37, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
            • Honestly I don't know what you're talking about at this point. I went to the talk page, several times now, over a period of several years. These people who are engaging in these pointless edit wars, they don't really care. The only new discussion we have at the talk page now is an apparent WP:NOTAFORUM violation. At some point, one just has to accept that some people do not give a rat's ass about the encyclopedia, i.e. they are WP:NOTHERE, and admin powers need to be used to remove the damage that's being done. We've seen the same scenario play out countless times in the WP:ARBMAC topic area, and the result is always the same. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 14:57, 9 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

New administrator activity requirement edit

The administrator policy has been updated with new activity requirements following a successful Request for Comment.

Beginning January 1, 2023, administrators who meet one or both of the following criteria may be desysopped for inactivity if they have:

  1. Made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least a 12-month period OR
  2. Made fewer than 100 edits over a 60-month period

Administrators at risk for being desysopped under these criteria will continue to be notified ahead of time. Thank you for your continued work.

22:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

How to search for deleted articles.... edit

How do I check to see if someone has attempted an article before? I cannot find an article for a movie and tv series which should have already been created, which makes me think it might have been deleted previously. - Jack Sebastian (talk) 23:08, 15 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

  • Probably your best bets are a search of sub-pages of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (advanced searches can be limited to prefix ranges) and Special:Log/delete (which won't get you much unless you know the exact title). Uncle G (talk) 23:17, 15 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
    (talk page watcher) Jack, what I find helpful is User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/deletionFinder. Not only will it tell you at the top of any article if it's previously been deleted or gone to AfD, you can use it for articles that don't exist as well. For an article that doesn't exist, create a redlink to the title in your sandbox. When you click the redlink, it will open a "Creating (title)" page, and the deletionFinder tool will give you links at the top if there are previous deletions for that title. (It doesn't work if you try to create the title using any other method, I don't know why.) Hope that helps. Schazjmd (talk) 23:24, 15 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Both of these suggestions are very helpful. Thanks, guys. - Jack Sebastian (talk) 04:27, 16 April 2022 (UTC)Reply