Talk:NYC Ferry

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Mcljlm in topic Wikilinks
Good articleNYC Ferry has been listed as one of the Engineering and technology good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
September 26, 2017Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on October 5, 2016.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that New York City's Citywide Ferry Service is expected to carry 4.6 million passengers each year, roughly as many as the New York City Subway carries each weekday?

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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion edit

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 21:38, 7 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Bow thrusters? edit

I'm often amazed at how maneuverable these boats are when docking. My first thought is they must have bow thrusters, but I don't see any teletale surface disturbance like you've expect with bow thrusters. They're obviously twin-screw (with a very wide shaft separation), but the turning performance is still pretty amazing. Anybody know for sure if there's bow thrusters or not? Maybe they've got vectored thrust?

If technical specs for the boats are available, it would be nice to add things like horsepower, displacement, prop dimensions, etc. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:52, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Map coordinates? edit

What is the source (i.e. WP:V) of the dock coordinates we give? For example, Epicgenius, it looks like you added the coords for the Soundview dock in Special:Diff/877887805? Where did you get those from? My concern is that I suspect you got them by reading them off a map such as OSM, in which case I'd counter that OSM is not a WP:RS.

This is really a generic problem. We've got coords in gazillions of articles, mostly to drive map generation. Pulling a set of coordinates from OSM or Google Maps is fine for the purpose of showing a general location map, but I'm concerned that we're presenting high-resolution (5 decimals of a degree, which works out to about 1 inch (25 mm) if I did my math right) in wikipedia voice, which seems unjustified.

Where this is headed is that I see that we don't have an entry for the new Ferry Point terminal. It would be tempting to use the coords from OSM for this, but that would be WP:OR; the OSM data for that terminal comes from me taking the ferry, recording the trip on my GPS, and making the OSM edits. So clearly WP:UGC, where the U is me. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:29, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

@RoySmith, that is an interesting question. My impression was that coordinate locations are just basic facts, rather than something that can be potentially controversial and thus run afoul of WP:OR, because someone (like you) can physically travel to the dock and just get the GPS coordinates. However, it turns out that NYC Ferry does indirectly provide the exact coordinate locations. E.g. NYC Ferry's page for the Ferry Point landing links to a Google map with exact coordinates. I'm not sure if I derived the coordinates directly from NYC Ferry's landing pages, though. I think they also provide GTFS data of stop locations.
I do agree we should probably round these coordinates to something like one-thousandth of a degree, so 3 digits after the decimal. – Epicgenius (talk) 15:56, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Well, that's interesting. The link to the "Google map with exact coordinates", I'm going to say is wrong, or at least only approximate, based on personal experience. It's good enough for the purpose of the NYC Ferry website showing you basically where the thing is, but I'd say it's a few hundred feet too far north.
So, I figured if anybody knows exactly where it is, it's got to be NOAA, because they make the nautical charts. So I went to https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/enconline/enconline.html. Unfortunately, there's no way to deep-link to the specific location, so you'll just have to zoom in. And, counter-intuitively you'll need to turn off the "Natural and man-made features..." layer to see anything useful. And what you'll see is that the Soundview dock at Classon Point is correctly charted, but the Ferry Point dock isn't even on the chart! Oh well. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:12, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Just to clarify, I'm sure NYC Ferry knows exactly where their dock is. It's just that whatever web developer was given the task of adding the new page probably didn't do anything more than bring up Google Maps, click in about the right location, and say, "Yup, that's good enough". And for their purpose, it certainly was. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:45, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Yeah. It may well be that the only way to add accurate coordinates for Ferry Point is if we don't use NYC Ferry as a source at all. The alternative is that we go with the source and add a coordinate location that we know is slightly inaccurate. But again, I'm under the impression that coordinate locations are just basic facts. After all, we seldom if ever require coordinates for coordinates if they're just at the top right corner of the article. – Epicgenius (talk) 18:44, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm being a bit pedantic here. WP:BLUE is a good essay. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:49, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
BTW, I dropped a note to the NOAA folks about this. I got back an email in a couple of hours: "Thank you for alerting us about the completion of the new dock at Ferry Point Park. We will undertake to collect the information needed to depict the new facility on our nautical charts. Respectfully, NOAA's Marine Chart Division". So, looking forward to a WP:RS coming soon :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 00:22, 27 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Wikilinks edit

I inserted the wikilink from the Rockaways to Rockaway, Queens but wonder if the Rockaway, Queens should actually be in the article instead of the Rockaways. Mcljlm (talk) 22:32, 15 December 2022 (UTC)Reply