Talk:List of lakes of Minnesota

message: Should there be a limit on the size of the lake? Should there have to be an article? I am thinking that if the lake has an article or is greater than X acres it should be listed. What X is I do not know. 
The Minnesoata DNR lakefinder gives all sorts of fun facts...
-Ravedave 03:11, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Another lake-name that occurs frequently is "Mud Lake" to which I see there is a disabmiguation page associated with it.  I have added bunch of Rice Lakes in the "List of lakes in Minnesota" page -- commented them out, though -- and bunch of Mud Lakes in the disambiguation page -- also commented them out.  Would having a disambiguation page for Rice Lake be the way to go as to not to over-clutter the List page? CJLippert 13:19, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Oh, and another reason I see to not list multiple lakes in a single row: what should go in the area column?  The combined area of all the lakes with the same name?  Or should each of the areas be listed, separated by commas?  This would mean careful attention would have to be taken to keep the order of teh areas the same as the order of the counties.  I think serious consideration should be taken to having a separate row for each lake. Hack-Man 13:55, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I think I figured it out.Andercee 09:21, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criteria for listing? 

message: I did the math and figured this out, less than 2% of Minnesota's Lakes are accounted for in this list.Andercee 09:44, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I fixed this Alexkorn (talk) 07:40, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Just Saying

message: I just completed a major overhaul to the list, getting nearly all my information from www.lakehomes.com.  One thing I tweaked was some of the name modifiers.  For example, since Big Pine had what appeared to be a corresponding Little Pine, I grouped them together as Pine (Big) and Pine (Little).  However, there was another Big Pine that was all by itself, so I left it alone.  This happened a few other times with Big/Little, and Upper/Lower lakes.  Feel free to change it if my tweaking made it more confusing.  I also didn't link any counties or towns because this list focuses on the lakes and the first entity could change depending on how a user sorts the list.  Oh, and I only wikilinked to exact lake articles, not dab pages or city/county pages.  Hoof Hearted 16:08, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major overhaul 

message: Should "Lake Phalen" be listed as "Lake Phalen", or just "Phalen"?JP (talk) 04:45, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lake Names with "Lake" in the name 

message: It would be interesting to add a column to the table listing the lake's average (or typical) height about sea level, and perhaps how the level is controlled; for example, dam (e.g., as maintained by US Army Corp of Engineers) or just nature.  Could also list record high and low levels, if known. Dan Aquinas (talk) 20:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add elevation data to table 

message: I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but when you said only four counties don't have lakes, I think you should research Fillmore County because I've lived there all my life and I don't think we have a lake.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.121.193.24 (talk) 20:02, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fillmore County 

message: Lake Seymour is listed, the deepest lake within the state.   But there is no Farris County, and no town of Michael.  Is Seymour a real lake?   74.192.58.248 (talk) 04:17, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Must have been a hoax edit. North8000 (talk) 14:30, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lake Seymour? 

message: I propose that the unnamed lakes be removed from the list. The vast majority are from Stearns County, so this has got to be an artifact of some database that had entries for no-account unnamed lakes for that county. Thus, there's an uneven distribution by county of unnamed lakes. Also, most of the unnamed lakes are quite small. The smallest, in fact, is about six feet wide and two feet deep. I've seen potholes that approach that. Jbening (talk) 22:39, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Chiming in because I watch/edit the page, but I honestly don't mind much either way. I'm mostly here for the IP that keeps adding giant piles of data without bothering to keep the formatting consistent. :) NekoKatsun (talk) 22:54, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  unnamed lakes 

message: I saw this discussion up the page but it was years ago and no consensus seemed to have arisen.
There's over two dozen listings here at less than one acre in size (mostly from Stearns County), and they appear for all the world to be an assortment of small ponds and man-made pits, with a few sloughs mixed in. I've looked into several of them and can't find any references to such bodies of water outside of this list (which raises questions as to where the size and depth data came from, but I digress). I recently removed an entry which appeared to be merely a ditch.
In the absence of any formal definition that separates lakes from ponds, is there any criteria we could apply to this list that would stand? As it is, there's nothing stopping it from including thousands of un-noteworthy holding ponds with no official names.
I'd hesitate to apply some arbitrary number, but at the same time, simple logic disqualifies a number of these. The DNR's only criterion is a "wave-swept shore" which is neither quantifiable nor sourceable. I grew up near a 1/3-acre pond and I'd certainly never call that a lake, but... where's the line? Even the DNR's LakeFinder includes things named "... Pond" although many have no further details on them.
Would it be reasonable to apply a criterion of 1 acre and above to start, and see how that works? That cutoff certainly wouldn't be too high, in my view, so the risk of eliminating pertinent information is minimal.
--Olds 403 (talk) 00:57, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that that would be a good idea. Probably should be more like 5 acres but 1 acre makes it a really safe start. North8000 (talk) 02:32, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: The only possible issue I've been able to think of is that setting it loosely could make it more difficult to tighten it later, but that's probably unlikely. I'll post this at the Minnesota WikiProject for additional input. --Olds 403 (talk) 16:26, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd suggest just wp:bold and try it. I'll do one to break the ice.North8000 (talk) 20:01, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I did one, I removed "Unnamed slough 1" 1/10th Acre is not a lake. If round it would be 37 feet across, if any other shape, less. North8000 (talk) 20:10, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It turns out that the vast majority of these smaller bodies of water can't be found listed by the DNR, USGS, or PCA, and search engines turn up nothing as well. I removed a fair chunk of them and will look into the rest eventually as well. Just cleaning out the glut of them from Stearns and Wright counties eliminated all but two of the sub-1-acre entries anyway so I think we're in the clear for applying a 1-acre-plus limit. --Olds 403 (talk) 20:56, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool / nice work! North8000 (talk) 01:17, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

text: I agree that there should be some criteria, but wp:notability is a requirement for existence of a separate article, not for inclusion on a list.  North8000 (talk) 11:17, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criteria for inclusion 

message: There's some inconsistency in the number of decimal places the data is reported to, mostly for acreage. The U of M water clarity information gives the size to the whole number, the DNR lists it to two decimal places, while the PCA gives ten. Most lakes here are listed to the whole number.
Considering the natural fluctuations in size, depth, and clarity, and the inherent lack of precision in physically measuring a lake anyway, I propose reporting all figures to the whole number here, unless the number is less than 1. --Olds 403 (talk) 16:36, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: There are some pretty absurd ones in there.  One has 11 decimal places in there, where adding a teaspoon of water would change that number, and where even evaporation would keep the last several digits spinning continuously.  In that case, it presumes knowing/defining the position of the shoreline within 2 billionths of an inch. (+/- .000000002")! But knocking very small lakes down to zero decimal places would introduce significant proportionate rounding errors, and be removing known (presumably sourced) info.  Maybe just limit all lakes to 2 decimal places? I don't consider standardization to be important, but IMO removing silly stuff is a good idea.  North8000 (talk) 19:58, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Measurement precision 

message: Text and references copied from The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and List of lakes in Minnesota to Bachelor Lake (Brown County, Minnesota), See former article's history for a list of contributors.  7&6=thirteen (☎) 15:09, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Text and references copied from Bachelor Lake (Brown County, Minnesota) to The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and List of lakes in Minnesota. See former article's history for a list of contributors.  7&6=thirteen (☎) 15:14, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Attribution