Talk:Noon Gun

message: The external link "Picture of Noon Gun being fired" pointed to http://www.saao.ac.za/~wpk/gallery/pics/noongun1.html - which is a page containing a picture of the gun being loaded. The picture of the gun being fired is at http://www.saao.ac.za/~wpk/gallery/pics/noongun2.html. Since I think latter is the more interesting picture, I've fixed the link to suit the description, rather than the description to suit the link.
Just a head's up.
-pinkgothic 10:09, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Note on the external link fix 

message: The generic, encyclopedic article would discuss the phenomenon of a noon gun. A condensed version of this article will make a good section of that one. Anyone want to make the encyclopedic article on this?--Wetman (talk) 18:57, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Noon gun]] 

message: I've removed this section again for the following reasons:
*It was completely unreferenced.  Other Wikipedia articles do not suffice as references, as these would be self references.  Some of the articles linked make no mention of a time gun.
*The article on Cape Town's time gun is not the right place to maintain an exhaustive list of time guns at Wikipedia, particularly as it was getting so long.  Perhaps a list article like List of time guns would work if the existing :Category:Time guns is not already sufficient?
Socrates2008 (Talk) 14:03, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Other guns section

message: Quite at the end of the article it tells us: 
: ″On Friday 7 January 2005, both the main gun and backup gun failed to fire owing to a technical difficulty. This was the first time in 200 years that the noon gun had not fired as scheduled.″ 
And that 200 year fact is obviously wrong; however sadly, my observation is pure original research and my lonely source is a wikipedia-article on the Noon Gun, which - just one sentence earlier - had told me: 
: ″One day in June 1895, the gun fired at 10:30 rather than 12:00 when a spider interfered with the relay used to remotely fire the gun.″
Now some simple, however — as far as I know — yet unpublished, calculations easily demonstrate that from June 1895 to January 2005 it's not even close to 200 years. So i've obviously found an — admittedly quite little — error, but can't back my findings by citation of a reputeable source, while the article keeps misinforming his readers — even backed by citing an error-page ′404 - page not found′ of some South African news site. 
Trying to find that old news piece there, got me lucky then, but in an unexpected way. While I didn't succeed in finding that ″first time in 200 years″ article from 2005, I did find a report of another Noon Gun failure in April 2000. So the 2005 event had only been a ″first time in almost 5 years″ thing, which might  even be the reason for that other article's disappearance. 
So that's the basic facts I've found as a result of stumbling over that little factual mistake, but now I'm  absolutely not sure how to best fix the article, as I could think of at least three different options:
* Should just that ″for the first time in 200 years″ sentence, which is definitely wrong be removed?
* Should that mention of the 2005 event be completely removed from the article, if no current source for it could be found, as it's then basically unsourced trivia?
* Or should the report of that 2005 failure be completely removed regardless of finding a current source for it — as it was obviously not that extraordinary an event, that would have mandated for it's inclusion, especially as the article on the ″April 2000 delay″ cites some guy from the South African Astronomical Observatory telling that such problems could easily happen and about lots of different possibilities what could go wrong during the signal's transmission from the observatory to the Noon Gun?
-- 212.95.5.218 (talk) 09:44, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  No ″first time in 200 years″ event, but  an obvious error...