Talk:Peshtigo fire

message: Peshtigo, Wisconsin Fire of 1871 is the same think, only a stub,  merge the info?--Rayc 03:19, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge?

message: Meteorite experts say that meteorites are cold when they land on earth.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.22.42.47 (talk) 01:30, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: So then please see preceding discussion of the difference between an asteroid and a comet. SunSw0rd 15:19, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

text: Which experts say this??? There is one unverified anecdote from 1917 and that's all there is. Kortoso (talk) 01:03, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

text: That's not critical to the article, given that there were already numerous small fires burning in the area before the firestorm arose. WolfmanSF (talk) 20:20, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  comet/asteroid theory 

message: Not sure which to use.
# Magician (paranormal), a person who performs feats using supernatural means
# Magician (fantasy), a character in a fictional fantasy context who performs supernatural feats.  I used No. 1.  But it could have been the other.  7&6=thirteen (talk) 19:57, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikified and dismabiguated [[mage]]

message: It looks like the intro summary misrepresents the numbers.  It says "as many as 1,500", implying no more than that.  Later, under the Firestorm heading, it says "Between 1,200 and 2,500".  Is the intro just wrong? Westphjm (talk) 16:30, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of deaths 

message: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303110/
Mentioned one hour and six minutes into the movie.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.44.164.5 (talk) 10:54, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Movie "Superfire" 

message: I found a fairly detailed history of the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in a 1959 newspaper article (Jack Rudolph. "Catholics in Pilgrimage to Robinsonville Today", Appleton Post-Crescent, August 15, 1959, p. 4, cols. 3-7.). It turns out that the pilgrimage held annually at the shrine has nothing whatsoever to do with the Peshtigo fire. The pilgrimage, begun in 1861 (10 years before the fire), celebrates the Feast of the Assumption, which was Adele Brise's favorite religious observance. Please don't reinsert the unsourced statement about the pilgrimage having begun because of the fire. 71.139.148.134 (talk) 01:35, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pilgrimage 

message: A chapel is not a sentient being capable of cognition or reasoning, so how can a chapel posit? 71.139.148.134 (talk) 04:30, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: LOL.  YGBSM. It is those who administer the chapel.  See above.   7&6=thirteen (☎) 14:32, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on Peshtigo Fire. 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/20101205000000/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2006/4/2006_4_26.shtml to http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2006/4/2006_4_26.shtml
*Added  tag to http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1870.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131127043314/http://shrineofourladyofgoodhelp.com/htmPages/g_hst_p5.html to http://www.shrineofourladyofgoodhelp.com/htmPages/g_hst_p5.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090325065110/http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMPDC04_865/PV2004_1419.pdf to http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMPDC04_865/PV2004_1419.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 21:51, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: * Support as nom – Books n-grams clearly confirm that it's more often lowercase in sources.  Certainly nowhere near the usual criterion of "consistently capitalized in sources"; unlike some other fires. Dicklyon (talk) 03:27, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Right... well, it's a complicated question and no mistake. The principle is just that, IMO, our MOS mostly trumps sources for style issues such as capitalization. That doesn't mean the article shouldn't be moved, just that the Ngram is not very important. (It's not nothing, but it's not very important IMO.) Our MOS has capitalization guidance for military terms, literary genres, sports, and so on, but not natural events. So, we must look elsewhere -- common practice, and the MOS for the most-similar situations. OK, recent fires have "official names" that some agency give them; the fire in Peshtigo is too old for that. So... looking backwards, in chronological order from oldest, and skipping instances where title case decides capitalization ("Fire of Moscow" etc...) we see 1681 Trondheim fire, but Copenhagen Fire of 1728. Tiverton fire of 1731. Great Podil fire, Richmond Theatre fire. Great fire of Tirschenreuth. Grue Church fire, Great Fire of Turku, but it's reasonable to say that "Great" fires can be treated differently... 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire. And now Great fire of Hamburg, but then Great New York City Fire of 1845... Hofburg fire. Alright, that's enough. I'll concede the point, and change my vote. What can I say? The point of these discussions to change people's minds, not just yell at each other. Herostratus (talk) 07:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: And who's to say you can't be persuaded to change back again. This fire was, as mentioned on its pages "the deadliest natural fire in the history of the United States". So it has a mortality notability that no other fire in the U.S. has. Great or otherwise. The upper-cased name is used for its museum and its historically significant cemetery. This is not middling fire, or even a once-in-a-decade occurrence, but the deadliest natural fire in the country's history. It's the real deal, and this page should keep its long-term proper name. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Nobody is disputing the notability of the fire.  It has an article because it's notable. Dicklyon (talk) 06:40, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

text: However, if you can pull off changing "Great Chicago Fire" to "great Chicago fire" (since, in point of fact, that is obviously not consistently capped), as well as changing other inconsistent examples, I may change my mind. I don't think having "Great" in a fire's name qualifies it for an exemption from our policy, whatever it is. WolfmanSF (talk) 08:50, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I do. If a fire rises to the level of "great", it's a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind. The Great Fire of Boston, for instance, was 145 years ago, but it was an important historical event that greatly affected the development of that great port and city and remains still vivid in popular lore. It's a big deal, and so it gets a proper name. Other fires in :Category:Fires in Massachusetts, not so much, so they don't get proper names. Herostratus (talk) 04:06, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It is very unlikely that "Great" in a fire name inherently means "this was a big fire" in contrast to fires elsewhere. It is more likely that it means "this was a big fire" in contrast to all the other fires in the same place (i.e., Boston has had many fires, and this was the biggest of those). There is no "Great Peshtigo Fire" because the Peshtigo Fire is not being compared with other fires in Peshtigo. The epithet "Great" therefore does not make such fires more important than fires elsewhere that lack the epithet. Similarly, one doesn't refer to the Great September 11 Attacks, the Great Challenger Disaster, the Great Attack on Pearl Harbor, or any number of other unique events because there is no need to distinguish them. Doremo (talk) 05:14, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, I don't think so. I think "Great" means "important" in the context of fires. "Great" is applied to fires and not battles or shipwrecks, because people. I think every important fire has also been large, but the important thing is that it's been important. "Great Depression", not "great depression". "Great War" not "great war". Great Plague, Great Hunger, Great Game, Great Terror, Great Yaeyama Tsunami. There are a lot of counter-examples too TBH. Earthquakes, here, seem to capitalize like this: "Great X earthquake; corollary here would would be "the Great Chicago fire" which seems odd... Herostratus (talk) 23:02, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Of the 10 deadliest wildfires known, only the fourth has "Great" in our article title. So, obviously there's no accepted or reasonably consistent threshold at which a fire becomes "Great". WolfmanSF (talk) 23:29, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: And Peshtigo is "the deadliest natural fire in the history of the United States", so there's that. That should count for something in keeping this in its stable upper-case title. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:34, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: No, not really no. Big does not equal important. The Great Chicago Fire is, in an important sense, a character in the history of the United States. Herostratus (talk) 23:30, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

text: Randy, this idea of yours that important things deserve caps is contrary to MOS:CAPS, has been repeatedly rejected in RM discussions, and is getting tiring.  Why can't we just go with Wikipedia's style principle of avoid caps when sources show them to be unnecessary? Dicklyon (talk) 06:39, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The importance factor is what makes it a proper noun. If "Pesthigo fire" was so insignificant that its meaning could only be determined by context, it wouldn't be a proper noun. The fact that it is important makes its meaning context independent, so that it meets every aspect of the definition of a proper name. The argument for not capping then hangs entirely on usage statistics. That is unworkable, because there is no definition of "consistently capped" and it could be argued that no historical fire name is consistently capped. Then the only logically consistent policy would be to lower-case all fire names that do not have some imprimateur of being an "official" name. Which is unfeasible, unless you're willing to uncap Great Chicago Fire and the Great Fire of London. That would also lead to many absurdities, such as upper-casing the 21,135 acre Duck Lake Fire and not the 1,200,000 acre Peshtigo Fire. Letting "Great" be the determining factor leads to other absurdities, like upper-casing the 200,000 acre Great Hinckley Fire (great Hinckley fire?) and not the Pestigo Fire. WolfmanSF (talk) 10:04, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

text: *...and per six upper-case mentions on Wikipedia's main page in the On this day... section, starting in 2004. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:33, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

text: *:It seems clear enough that Peshtigo Fire Museum and Peshtigo Fire Cemetery are proper names.  But that's not really relevant.  Why do you still want to cap everything you think is important? Dicklyon (talk) 04:31, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree with Dick on this... the museum is distinct from the fire (we cap “Museum of Natural History”... but not “natural history” on its own). Blueboar (talk) 11:54, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: No doubt many of the editors involved would like to consider this a resolved issue, but that is unlikely to be the case, because of all the absurdities the article move has created, some of which I've already pointed out, as well as the specious arguments used to justify the move.
It is instructive to consider what Wiktionary has to say on the subject of proper nouns:
Definition: "A noun denoting a particular person, place, organization, ship, animal, event, or other individual entity".
Usage notes: "Some references erroneously conflate whether a noun is common or proper with whether it is capitalized or not, although these are not the same."
So, any noun phrase that refers specifically to a given historical fire is a proper name, by definition. There is no basis for claiming a distinction between such noun phrases that are proper names and those that are descriptive terms. They're all proper names. One could draw a practical distinction between widely used terms and those that are one-offs or seldom used. There is no basis in claiming that "official" names are more "proper" than those that lack such status. In astronomy, informally proposed names are capitalized along with officially accepted names.
The bottom line is, it is operationally foolish to claim that the names of some historic fires qualify for capitalization, while others do not, on the basis of an undefined standard of being "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources". Given that the standard is undefined, its application will inevitably be arbitrary, and efforts to try to apply it it to individual cases like this one will be an unproductive use of editors' time. The treatment of members of a class should be consistent. Wikipedia has specific policies dealing with the names of organisms and names of astronomical objects to ensure consistent treatment of members of these classes. We obviously need a similar policy to deal with historical events. WolfmanSF (talk) 23:54, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  More comments on capitalization 

message: I removed the following passage from the article:
And I edited the following passage
to instead read
Both of these being ref'd to a source I consider substandard: 
It's the site of Our Lady of Good Help itself, and it's biased and unreliable. (The bit about a deep well isn't in the ref and therefore has no ref so its swept away with the rest. The deep well thing suggests there're other more reliable refs out there about what actually happened.) Herostratus (talk) 13:39, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Miracle indeed 

message: It's irresponsible to imply that this is a form of managing the area, as practiced in 19th century Americas 2001:56A:7D81:BF00:DD83:CEA5:8E32:3DDA (talk) 17:21, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Slash-and-burn land management is a common term in English. Doremo (talk) 17:54, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Slash-and-burn land management is oxymoronic  

message: As per WP:ELBURDEN, disputed links should be excluded by default until there is consensus for inclusion.  please explain what unique value you feel the disputed link provides when there are already several other links that include images of the memorial. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:14, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. Sundayclose (talk) 18:16, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: External link

message: "However, the fire did not jump across the bay. Most likely, the firestorm spread and created a new ground fire in New Franken which then spread and burned everything northward up until Sturgeon Bay." No definition I know of would not call this "jumping the bay". The source cited after this also makes no mention of jumping or refutes any claim about the fire jumping the river. If material from the fire got to the other end of the bay and it caused the fire to spread there, then using "Jumped" should  be appropriate. 2600:6C44:7D7F:3708:6745:1686:67C1:3F (talk) 01:22, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Jumping" the bay 

message: So allegedly the Great Peshtigo fire was caused because Jesus was mad that people in Wisconsin weren't Christians? So 12 years later he started this specific area of the USA on fire as punishment (as the phrasing alludes)? And then allegedly they prayed and God sent rain? The rain didn't come because they prayed... the rain came because that's how weather works lol. Why would God start a fire, just to put that same fire out after a small group of people prayed? He allegedly started the fire!! Why are we pushing this as even a little factual when this is incredibly religiously biased? On another note, weird that a loving god (the one most modern Christians push) would torch, at most, 2,500 people and then save a random church (despite I'm sure many other churches being lost in the fire). It's fascinating how much that religion has changed in such a short amount of time. 199.168.95.209 (talk) 20:03, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification