Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography/Archive 2

message: Please have a look at Portal:Geography. Looks like some vandals have struck. 17:22, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the prompt action MONGO :) -- • Q^#o • 18:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geography Portal needs attention 

message: Anyone wanting to help out with this is greatly encouraged. Take a look http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Geography —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Franko2nd (talk • contribs) 17:57, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Geography School at Wikiversity needs you

message: See Template:Infobox Islands. Currently used in articles including Java, Sumatra and Maluku Islands. (Caniago 07:31, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: New Infobox for islands and archipelagos available

message: May I suggest that you read this :  (Marxian subsection) and this  (obscure academic). This person is trying to undermine our work on articles about prominent geographers. Further, his/her tone seems totally inappropriate to me. Zigzig20s 13:28, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hear hear... I agree, when you speak of the tone used. Although, having said that, I wonder really in the notability of those articles. As I said in the talk page, there should be more sources added. --Francisco Valverde 18:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well for instance I heard about them in lectures...but of course I can't add "my lectures" as a source. The bottom line is, I'm sure people will want to look them up like I did. It would be a crying shame to whittle them down. Zigzig20s 18:43, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  geography hater 

message: Oakland Cemetery has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.
SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Oakland Cemetery FAR

message: Hi, I recently made a userbox for geographers. Might be of interest to those of you who waste time with userboxes! 
BTW you should consider archiving the projects talk page (as its quite long) and make a new talk page. LordHarris 01:04, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: userbox

message: I've been attempting to overview and tidy up the geography cats which involve the places where people live. From the top level down to local neighbourhoods. There has been some overlapping and various mis-routings. It's been interesting looking at it all. However, there appear to be two useful ways of doing it - by region, and by size. And these can operate side by side quite usefully. The by region isn't a problem. But the by size has become difficult because User:Hmains wishes to use the term settlements to cover all sizes of communities, and has altered dictionary definitions  to fit his own understanding of the term -
. Community appears to be the term used most often to describe the places where people live, regardless of size. This is the definition of community - . I did some sorting, placing the cat Human communities under Human geography. Human communities splitting into Urban geography and Rural geography. And those splitting into appropriate sized communities - cities, districts, neighbourhoods, villages, settlements, etc. Hmains has reverted much of my work, and insists on settlements being the term we should use - basing it on this decision, which was a declined proposal to rename Settlements by region to Populated places by region. What do people think. Is settlement an acceptable term for covering human communities ranging from well established cities down to refuge camps. Is Human community a viable alternative? Are there other choices (apart from populated places of course!)? SilkTork 13:56, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Advice requested 

message: Hello!  Please comment and weigh in on the nomination for deletion of North America (Americas), a recent fork of North America.  Thanks!  Corticopia 11:18, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As stated elsewhere, there is a key difference -- the content regarding the sub/regions of Northern America (which is not merely a UN construct; see article) and Middle America (numerous definitions provided) are well sourced, while that of the 'region' of North America isn't ... and still isn't.  This doesn't deny other continental models, but no sources have been provided that clearly delineate what the model upon which the nominated article is based.  The sources in North America (Americas) do not support the content in that article, and a read of those sources will reveal that.  Regardless, if necessary, applicable content can be added to the North America article instead of forking and conflating.  Corticopia 14:05, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/North_America_%28Americas%29|North America fork]] 

message: Thanks to those who commented on this prior AfD.  Even though an apparent consensus supported the prior AfD in some way (and the article has been deleted), this has reared its ugly head again -- please peruse and weigh in.  Thanks! Corticopia 16:29, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Again ...

message: I've been doing a lot of work relating to and thinking about articles which are about settlements (towns, cities, villages, etc.) I've noted that there is a wide variety in the way existing articles have been made and have wondered if it might not be useful to produce a Places Template which would provide a person creating a new article with a skeleton on which the new article would build.
The template I have in mind would include a suggested concept of an introductory part and several suggested sections such as History, Location and Climate, Commerce and Industry, Culture and Recreation, Local Government, Notable Characeristics, etc. A places Infobox could be included with the template.
Using a template of this sort, the new article creator would simply "fill in the blanks" with whatever information was available and leave the empty headings for other editors to add to in the future.
I'm willing to spend some time on this myself, but before starting I was wondering what others thought about this and possibly get a few additional thoughts from persons who have created other templates.
In the templates area it was suggested that this maybe would be a "preload" rather than a template but regardless of the way it is implemented, I would be interested in seeing if the idea has any appeal and or obstacles.--JAXHERE | Talk 16:40, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page template or pre-load 

message: I've been doing some articles on the various streams of northeastern Iowa and adjacent parts. I've come up against massive name-space problems. See Village Creek and Trout Creek as examples of my disambig pages (as well as links to that ultimate source of hydrography info, the USGS). There are more than 400 Trout Creeks in the United States. Pine Creek is another; see my Pine Creek (Iowa) disambig page. My naming conventions are rather ad hoc, but what does one do. I just did Village Creek, another disambig page, after moving the only article on WP with that name (one I wrote). The fount of all knowledge is US Geological Survey's Geoname site]. The USGS seems to use the county/state name for the mouth of the stream, so I'm prepared to go along (associated maps also pinpoint the mouth). Considering how many hydronyms a simple search has brought up, WP needs some name-space rules. Village Creek (Allamakee County, Iowa) is not unreasonable, with the understanding this is the mouth of the stream in question.  There is also a separate project at the back of my mind -- getting all the hydronyms of the United States recorded on WP, at least in a disambig page. One needs help. See my contribs (I don't like little articles which say about all that can be said being labelled as stubs). --Ace Telephone 04:59, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Streams,  [[Hydrography]] 

message: Please see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 May 9#Category:Maps and Category:Cartography and offer suggestions. Mangoe 16:22, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories for Discussion 

message: Geography of India has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.
SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:43, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geography of India FAR 

message: Hi everyone.  I'm a mediator for a dispute at the article on the historical province of Paytakaran (of Greater Armenia).  We've run into an odd situation, in which one group wants the article to be about Paytakaran the province, while the other wants to treat it as a region over its entire hisory, regardless of its various names throughout time.  The two sides have managed to settle upon a partial compromise, by having the lead section introduce the region as Paytakaran with other sections in the article covering the history of the region prior to and after its existence as Paytakaran.  
But the dispute rages on, because one side wants all the names of the region throughout history included in the first line of the article as synonyms of Paytakaran, while the other side adamantly opposes this treatment due to amibuity reasons.  The latter group reasons that the province of Paytakaran refers to the region at a particular period in history while it was part of Greater Armenia.  They hold that to state that the region was a province of any other state implies that it was still called Paytakaran at those other times.  The other side doesn't make that distinction, because it's all the same territory (more or less), with the details to differentiate the names presented later in the article.
Another issue of the dispute is over the existence of a city by the same name, which served as the capital of the province of Paytakaran.  The two sides can't agree on the location of the city, and one side wants to represent the city as moving even though it was destroyed and the/a (new?) town (re)built several miles away and called by a different name (Baylaqan, if I remember right).  
The discussions above have gotten quite intricate and technical over various references dated centuries ago.  I'm definitely in over my head, and this discussion needs more participants to sift through the details and form an opinion (take sides) to help break the deadlocks in these disputes.  I can't take sides because I pledged not to.  So I'm sort of stuck in Limbo.  I hope my descriptions above were neutral enough.  :-)
If you know of any similar disputes that have occurred or if there's a generally accepted approach for presenting regions over time, I'm very interested in learning about them.
Please help.
Sincerely,
The Transhumanist    06:40, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dispute over how to present Paytakaran 

message: I recently started The Sustainable development Portal and  offered it up for portal peer review to help make it a feature portal down the road. Please feel free to to help improve the portal and/or offer your input at the portal peer review. Thanks. RichardF 02:30, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Sustainable development Portal 

message: A proposal has been made concerning the importance of geography articles to be included in Wikipedia 0.7. You can see them here. The page is incomplete as of current, but the geography proposal is ready. Diez2 02:39, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geography Importance Proposal for Wikipedia 0.7 

message: My diagram of Holdridge's life zones is going to featured picture of the day in less than 48 hours 1 hour, and I feel embarrassed that the caption is so dull and that there's not much text in the associated article. So I've just started Holdridge life zones but many details are missing. I've left a bunch on questions at the science reference desk Talk:Holdridge life zones if anyone's interested in helping with the article. Cheers. —Pengo 07:35, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Holdridge life zones]] 

message: Optimum population - Totaly unreferenced. An OR nightmare. Please can someone with an interest in or knowledge of the subject (that rules me out) fix this. Willy turner 15:42, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Please someone fix this terrible page

message: Over at WP:AFD, specific notability guidelines (WP:BOOK, WP:BIO, etc} are frequently cited in keep and delete votes. Just recently at one article's debate, here, a geographic location was up for debate. I was surprised to find that although geography is one of the largest portals on Wikipedia, currently there does not exist official policy guidelines for keeping/deleting place-related articles. Perhaps this could be rectified if your project banded together and started brainstorming a set of policies? Although I have not contributed significantly in the geography area, I would be more than happy to help. All the best, Eliz81(talk)(contribs) 11:56, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geography guidelines for deletion? 

message: North Sea is the current Article Creation and Improvement Drive collaboration. WikiProject Geography members may find that a relevant focus. I have refrained from rating the article pending the result of the collaboration. Perhaps a regular member of this project could find a place for the collaboration banner on the project page itself? __meco 22:24, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[North Sea]] collaboration 

message: I want to draw this projects attention to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 August 7#Category:Geography of the Palestinian territories and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 August 7#Category:Cities, towns and villages in the Palestinian territories. These are highly politicised discussions and anyone who goes to these discussions will see what side I'm on and I haven't looked at who is in here and don't know what all your views are. However, I think it is important that people in WP:Geography weigh in with how you consider the Palestinian Territories should fit into your categorisation systems and that you collectively provide a substantial contribvution to the debate. --Peter cohen 22:37, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories for deletion re Palestinian Territories 

message: I have nominated Quneitra for featured article status, following its designation last month as a good article. Please leave any comments on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Quneitra. -- ChrisO 01:56, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Quneitra]] featured article candidate 

message: There is a new article, Demographic analysis, that may benefit from review since speedy delete was denied. -- Jreferee  T/C 19:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Demographic analysis