Talk:List of lakes of Ontario

Cleanup

I just completed a bit of cleanup here, and there are now more red links than before - this is because many of the blue links were pointing to pages having nothing to do with lakes in Ontario - most of them were dabpages with no Ontario lakes on them; one was even a biography of somebody whose last name was "Lake". Merenta (talk) 20:05, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

External links modified

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090207222912/http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.php to http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.php

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External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on List of lakes of Ontario. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160314110648/http://wldb.ilec.or.jp/lakedb2/lakelistcountrycode.asp?countrycode=ca&routeprm=0%3A%3B6%3Aload%3B to http://wldb.ilec.or.jp/LakeDB2/LakeListCountryCode.asp?CountryCode=CA&RoutePrm=0%3A%3B6%3Aload%3B

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Size issues

@Earl Andrew, MSG17, and Ahecht: I've been waiting to see if the size issues will be resolved naturally, but after exceeding one million bytes, it's clear the size of each entry needs to be reduced dramatically before we can continue. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:33, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Because of the huge number of lakes in Ontario (and Canada in general), it would be best to either split the page (by letter and/or subdivision) or establish some notability criteria. MSG17 (talk) 12:17, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

I figured it would be split by letter, which is easier for me as I'm going through the list alphabetically. Trying to figure out which ones are notable (or not) would be a lot of work, but I think whether a lake is notable enough for an article should not be a reason for removing it from the list.-- Earl Andrew - talk 13:58, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

When lists are this large, it can be useful to establish notability criteria. The article listing lakes starting with B is itself far too large as well. Is there no source that can be used to cite multiple lakes? It's incredibly overbearing to reference each lake with its own separate source. Onetwothreeip (talk) 01:54, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

A partial solution would be a template to handle the reference. A better solution would be to not list and link every puddle in the province. pauli133 (talk) 01:50, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

The original reference I used was a template, but it stopped working due to technical issues. Anyway, I haven't even been listing every single lake and pond in the province, just the ones listed in the Geographical names database, which only accounts for ~10% of all lakes in the province. I guess the remaining 90% covers every other "puddle" in the province. :-P -- Earl Andrew - talk

@Earl Andrew: Can you use one reference for all these lakes? Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:55, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

It would have to be for a very large data file, and wouldn't be particularly user-friendly. -- Earl Andrew - talk 13:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

What do you mean? You could just have one or a few references at the start of the article, and then list the items without references on each. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:10, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, it's a csv file. While I understand the references as they are take up a lot of bandwidth, it's handy to have a direct link to the Natural Resources page for the lake, as it includes all the information about the lake right there, plus a map. Looking up the lake in a csv file is a bit more work.-- Earl Andrew - talk 22:01, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't a WP:DIRECTORY though. We don't create articles to be directories for other sources. It's highly unlikely that these articles would survive a deletion discussion as they are, across many articles. Onetwothreeip (talk) 22:58, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Stepping past the issue of which lakes should be included, I've reduced the size of the references in List of lakes of Ontario: B, and thereby cut the article from 632,596 bytes to 265,337. If this works for other editors, the other articles can be treated in the same manner. pauli133 (talk) 19:07, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll use what you've done going forward. -- Earl Andrew - talk 00:58, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

• @Earl Andrew This and the subsidiary articles of this page still need work in order to pass WP:NOTDIRECTORY

What do you recommend? -- Earl Andrew - talk 15:36, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

It's just a list at the moment, I recommend giving some basic information about each Lake, such As:

• Surface Elevation
• Diameter
• Location
• District
• Road Access

I'd say make them a table with sortable columns

• So surface elevation and diameter are self-explanatory
• Location is the coordinates
• District is the district or county it's in
• And road access is a yes or no type column as in "does a road come within 100 metres of the shoreline"

Finally you could do what List of major district roads in Tamil Nadu does and add an OSM relation to each lake.

N1TH Music (talk) 05:17, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Considering there are 250,000 lakes in Ontario, we would have to look into automating this. -- Earl Andrew - talk 13:23, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I thought this list only consists of 10% of them. Also didn't you create the massive list in the first place or was that automated? N1TH Music (talk) 14:49, 22 August 2022 (UTC)