Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers/Archive 1

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Disambiguation

(moved here from User talk:Stan Shebs) Hi Stan, I notice you have a Rivers Wikiproject...I thought I should mention that I can think of one river in particular that has a naming problem at the moment, the Thames River/River Thames. The British one is River Thames, the one in Ontario is at Thames River (formerly "River Thames, Ontario"), and there is one in Connecticut that doesn't have an article (but I think the red links to it are under River Thames, Connecticut). Does the project have any recommendations for cases like that? Adam Bishop 04:01, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hmm...I think I see. "Thames River (Lake St. Clair) sounds kind of strange thought. Perhaps I will just leave them alone until someone else renames them :) Adam Bishop 04:25, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Actually, Adam, the idea for disambiguating was mine. And the reason I was proposing giving preference to a geographical identifier over a political one was due to the Jordan River. I suspect that there are a number of various waterways in the US & elsewhere named for the one in the Near East, yet how do we identify that one without a flame war? Jordan River (Israel), Jordan River (Jordan), Jordan River (Palestine) ... You see the problem. Calling it Jordan River (Dead Sea) nicely avoids the fireworks. But if you can think of a better way to handle disambiguations, please put it forth! -- llywrch 04:51, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I see...how about Jordan River (Asia) or Jordan River (Middle East)? Or the most common river may not have to be disambiguated at all...presumably people searching for Jordan River would mean that one. Similarily, people searching for Thames River would mean the British one, not the slightly less impressive one that flows behind my house :) (Also similarily, London is at London, but London, Ontario has extra info.) Adam Bishop 04:55, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The Jordan River in the Middle East is so much better known than the others it doesn't really need the disambigger, but others will. Stan 05:01, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

---

Problems with disambiguation: Michigan has 7 separate Black Rivers. 3 of them flow into Lake Huron so Black River (Lake Huron) is out. Some of them flow through multiple counties like Black River (Cheboygan/Montmorency/Presque Isle/Otsego Counties) which is overly cumbersome and Michigan has four counties which each have two rivers of the same name. In one case both rivers have their mouths in the same county so that wouldn't work in that case. I would use Black River (Michigan) and describe all of them on one page but there is also the problem that one of the rivers runs through Michigan and Wisconsin. It seems we have a mix of pages so far: pages with all named rivers described on them (Grand River, Jordan River or Bug (rivers)), pages separated by political boundary (Rogue River (Michigan) or Colorado River (U.S.)); pages using an alternate name (Red River of the North but Red River (Mississippi watershed), not Red River (Mississippi) or Red River (Mississippi River)) and pages described by what body of water their mouth is in (Wietze (Aller) or Wietze (Örtze)). Also some disambiguating from other non-rivers of the same name like Lippe (river). Quite a confusing mess Is there anyway we can do better? Rmhermen 19:34, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)

I'm very happy to engage in a discussion about this. I have been adding many rivers to the database lately and I have encountered a great many instances of that would require disambiguation. I personally favor political ones when possible for disambig, because that's the way people usually refer to rivers. I did disambig Jordan River, but completely avoided the issue by leaving the default as the Asian river and simply pointing to a disambig page for the others. Like everything else, I regard these as ad hoc additions to keep rivers from building up on the same page, which I personally feel is not good, considering that the two bodies of water may have nothing in common other than a name, and certainly the Jordan River in Utah deserves its own article page, for example.

Here's the rule I've been using personally, mainly for rivers in the United States. When a river flows through one state only, it can be unambiguously identified by the state of its location. This seems to be the convention being used, with some exceptions like Red River, which is sort of a tricky one, but having a few anomalies is OK by me, so long as there can be a general rule of thumb. When a river flows through more than one state, I have been using the state in which its mouth is located (like I said, these are ad hoc rules that I have willing to change). In the case of multiple rivers in the same state with the same name, there obviously would have to be a further method, perhaps by county, or region in the state, or by body of water of its mouth. I haven't encountered that problem yet, but I know Rmhermen recently expanded the List of Michigan rivers that brought this issue up.

I don't know if there can ever be a coherent and simple rule that can apply to all instances around the world. But perhaps there doesn't need to be, perhaps. I've happy so long as there are some rules of thumb. My feeling is that this is the beauty of lists of rivers, which can serve as the de facto convention for a particular river's naming classification. Obviously it's nice if things are harmonized to some degree. There is the case of rivers which are so well known that they should be the default article, probably. In disambiguating Jordan River, I realize it had the side effect in this particular case of avoiding a world of controversy how to label in disambiguation (which I was very happy to avoid). Most rivers of course will have no such political controversies. I'm willing to alter my contributions in any way according to good practice, or to rename pages as necessary, but I am addng many rivers lately, as I somehow motivated to, with each river has its own article.Like I said, I'm very happy to engage a discussion about this. I think it is very necessary too. -- Decumanus 20:37, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I would certainly like the main river to stay at the main article like Jordan River. I suggest we rewrite this as the first step of disambiguation. And rewrite the second step as smallest political entity. So state if all within one state, country if within one country. But that would still leave the problem of international rivers. Currently we have Saint Mary's, Ontario which should be Saint Mary's (North America)]] except that there are at least 3 other Saint Mary's in North America. Maybe Saint Mary's (Canada/U.S.). I would think that in most cases rivers that run through many countries would be important enough to be the main title (Niger River, Danube River). I don't see a need for each river to have its own page. Most rivers won't have huge amounts of text and the table of contents and even sectional linking would help. It would certainly reduce the problems of trying to establish a complex disambiguation scheme to cover some cases. Some other problems I have seen we have groups of articles under name, place like Saint Mary's River and others under name (place). We should certainly use the second (such as Indian River (Michigan) to avoid confusion with the town of Indian River, Michigan. "River Thames" is the article on river in England with "Thames" and "Thames River" as redirects and the disambiguation stuck at the bottom. So far the two disambiguated rivers are both "Thames River" so couldn't we take that title back for the disambiguation page. Thames River isn't really correct for the English one anyway. Also some of the German rivers on List of rivers in Europe have started showing up as, for instance, Tegeler Fließ and Neuenhagener Mühlenfließ. Isn't this just Tegeler River? Rmhermen 21:10, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)

I don't think I quite understand your concern about Thames River. It seems to me to be a good way of presenting the information. -- Decumanus 21:29, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you mean that the disambig reference on River Thames is stuck at the bottom of the page, I agree with you that it is deficient. It should be probably in italics at the top (because it is a redirect of Thames). -- Decumanus 21:35, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree. Also we could use Thames River (disambiguation). Rmhermen 21:37, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)

I just noticed we have an article titled Colorado River (U.S.) which doesn't even mention the other Colorado River in the U.S. which is titled Colorado River (TX). I don't like the abbreviated state name at all. Rmhermen 21:49, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that's a mess indeed and needs to be fixed. The abbreviated state name is ghastly (disclosure I used to live along the Texas river). -- Decumanus 23:20, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The (TX) is gone. It's now Colorado River (Texas), as it should be, with all current links fixed. Feel so good. Now the Colorado River (U.S.), I don't know what to do with that. Of course, it flows through Mexico too (or at least it would if any water actually made it across the border :) ) but it looks ghastly as it stands. -- Decumanus 23:47, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There are too many rivers to have a clean and simple naming scheme, so it's going to be messy no matter what. One thing to consider is that really minor rivers that are tributaries can just be described inline in the parent river's article; there is literally nothing to say about some of the uninhabited tributaries of the Congo beyond location and length. I would do that for any river whose article doesn't seem to support more than 2-3 sentences, and for which links to it are uncommon (only passes through two towns with articles, say). Ditto for minor feeders of bodies of water; add a section to Lake Huron for instance. One can always be split out later if it becomes notable, perhaps if an endangered species is discovered in it. In general I've come to prefer a breadth-first rather than a depth-first approach to WP-building, because depth-first tends to result in uneven quality, and generate ambiguity difficulties before we have enough experience to know the best way to disambiguate. Anyway, my preference is to express as "()" disambiguators (some days we may want automated processing, so the special syntax is good), prioritize in the order of country/countries, tributary-of/watershed, body of water at mouth, state/province, county. This should be sufficient, since one-county rivers are unlikely to support their own articles. If more than one formulation seems rational, pick randomly and make a redir or note on the talk page. Stan 23:14, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree with that very much, about putting minor tributaries in line with the body of water. I've actually done that in quite a few articles. Some creeks and very small rivers without a significant history associated with them are going to fall into this category. -- Decumanus 23:18, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, I'm the one who originally suggested favoring body of waters or principal rivers for tributaries over political names to disambiguate rivers, & I still favor that approach -- although I can be persuaded differently. (And, as usual, no one likes my ideas. ;-) The best reason why I chose this preference is to side-step messy edit wars grounded in national pride; however, the fact we have lists of rivers by nationality is also a good poiont. Probably the deciding point between these two approaches I can think of is how the majority of the cases are done -- following an old Open Source rule that "He who does the work makes the rules." I do concur with the point that we should consolidate minor streams or tributaries under the major one; to use one river in Oregon (the Tualatin River) as an example, I can't think of one tributary one could write more than a couple sentences -- which would consist of the origin of the name, its length, & perhaps some infamous crime. The traditions of the native Americans in that area have not survived. And I concur with Stan's preference for parentheses to express disambiguators over an attached prepositional phrase -- unless the later can be proven to be an observed practice. (A hypothetical example of what I mean by "an attached prepositional phrase" would be "The Deschutes of Oregon" or "The Red River in Ohio".) Again, as Stan said, "it's going to be messy no matter what." -- llywrch 00:22, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This is hilarious. I could literally write a book about Chicken Creek in Sherwood. Sigh. But an encyclopedia article, no. -- Decumanus 06:35, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I definitely prefer political body before which body of water it is a tributary of. I would think someone trying to link say to the Yakima River is more likely to know that the river is in Washington (Yakima River (Washington)) than that it flows into the Columbia (Yakima River (Columbia)). (I would think that particular one could go at just Yakima River which I see it is.) Also I think the format name (place) is the most common in Wikipedia so far (after just name). Of course that leaves problems like Milk River (Montana) which also flow through Alberta.

Listing minor rivers under their body of water will not be practical for say the Great Lakes or the Oceans where you will have hundreds of minor rivers. I still favor putting say all the same named rivers in a politcal body under one title like all seven Michigan Black Rivers under Black River (Michigan) instead two of them under Lake Huron, two of them under Lake Superior, one of them under Lake Michigan, one under Lake Macatawa, one under Black Lake (Michigan). That seems needlessly messy to me. Rmhermen 19:54, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

Well, Decumanus, I myself couldn't write a book about Cedar Mill Creek, although it is the subject of some fond childhood memories. Two further points I'd like to throw into the discussion:

1. Should the disambiguation token be the source of the river or stream, or its mouth or confluence? I ask this just in case some rivers are better known for where they rise than where they empty.
2. Having just waded thru a number of articles of Anglo-Saxon Kings, let's not disambiguate for the sake of disambiguation. (I still wonder that someone could think that there could be more than one Eorcenberht.) -- llywrch 20:27, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Etiquette for updating project

What's the etiquette for joining the project? Do I just add my name? I would also like to add a section on rivers with multiple names. This is a big problem in Africa, at least. I wanted to outline the rules I used when creating pages for rivers in Africa as a first draft. -- Walt Pohl 19:45, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No formalities. Just join the discussion. The problem you mention with African rivers is very interesting. I see you've been adding some redirects. The question is of course which name is the normative name that appears in the title. I'm guessing this can be a matter of delicate sensibilities between languages and cultures at times. Have you come up with any rules of thumb so far? --- Decumanus 20:19, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

In the long run there's some danger of someone being offended, but based on how sparse the information on African rivers currently is, there doesn't seem much interest in the subject in the moment. Here are the rules of thumb I evolved to deal with the situation:

• Choose the name used closer to the mouth, unless
• An earlier part of the river is much longer, then use that (so Cunene River instead of Kunene River, unless
• For whatever reason some other name is more famous in English (so Okavango River, which is famous primarily for the freakish Okavango Delta, rather than Cubango River.

I'd like to eventually add these to the project page for reference, and as an important source for future flame wars. :-) -- Walt Pohl 20:57, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Votes for deletion - Trasvasement

Trasvasement is currently being voted on for deletion, as there is no verification for the word yet, nor an alternative. If you have any related opinions / ideas / facts, please add to the discussion. --Zigger 03:36, 2004 May 2 (UTC)

Template Ready?

I haven't seen any discussion of the proposed template on the project page. Is this ready for prime-time? I was going to start adding it to river pages. -- Walt Pohl 22:47, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The river articles using w:Template:River are listed here --scupper 08:49, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Armlet

River_Vuoksi, the most famous unknown River ;-) starts with armlet, I wikified it, because I wanted to find out what it is - but there is no article. Can some of the river-experts help? best regards Tobias Conradi 22:27, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I beleive this should be branch, not armlet. Armlet is used as a synonym for inlet when describing seas and fjords. Also I see that the southern "branch" is called River Burnaja which I don't think the article mentions. Rmhermen 13:51, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

I just redirected Armlet to Arm ring, since all other links to it were about jewellery. I second the "branch" change, and will do it now. -AndyBQ 06:28, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

A source

Whilst trying to help "fill in the reds" at Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics, I noticed that there was quite a few rivers still to do... I start extracting out the rivers (have done the first 11 pages worth so far) and listing them at User:Pcb21#rivers... so if you are looking for something to do... there is at least 100 hundred articles to write right there! THanks Pcb21| Pete 11:39, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

List of rivers in another major encyclopedia not in Wikipedia

1. Alpenrhein River

Arecibo River

1. Arinos River
2. Bakoye River
3. Balsas River
4. Bandama River
5. Baram River
6. Camu River
7. Catatumbo River
8. Cauto River
9. Cavalla River
10. Ceyhan River
11. Chelif River
12. Ch'in River
13. Chin-Sha River
14. Chiu-Lung River
15. Ch'ongch'on River
16. Chu River
17. Cuiaba River
18. Daly River
19. Dawson River
20. de Grey River
21. Deseado River
22. Digul River
23. Dinder River
24. Dja River
25. Doca River
26. Dong Nai River
27. Dwanga River
28. Escarvos River
29. Fu-Ch'un River
30. Gandak River
31. Gascoyne River
32. Gash River
33. Great Scarcies River
34. Grijalva River
35. Groot River
36. Guainia River
37. Guapore River
38. Guaviare River
39. Gumal River
40. Gundlakamma River
41. Hei River
42. Herbert River
43. Hsin River
44. Hung-Shui River
45. Hunyani River
46. Iskur River
47. Itapicuru River
48. Jacui River
49. Jaguaribe River
50. Jari River
51. Javari River
52. Kuei River
53. Kushk River
54. Laja River
55. Larne River
56. Lempa River
57. Lerma River
58. Loa River
59. Logone River
60. Loiza River
61. Mazaruni River
62. McArthur River
63. Meta River
64. Mohaka River
65. Mokau River
66. Moulouya River
67. Mu River
68. Murat River
69. Naktong River
70. Nan River
71. Nazas River
72. Nechako River
73. Nen River
74. Neosho River
75. Nestos River
76. Para River
77. Paru River
78. Rokel River
79. Roper River
80. Ruo River
81. Ruvubu River
82. Ruvuma River
83. Sabbath River
84. Sabi River
85. Saint Paul River
86. Salado River
87. Saluda River
88. Sanaga River
89. Sankuru River
90. Santa River
91. Sao Lourenco River
92. Sarda River
93. Sassandra River
94. Sebou River
95. Seekonk River
96. Semliki River
97. Sewa River
98. Shemanker River
99. Shoshone River
100. Shyok River
101. Sierra Leone River
102. Sileru River
103. Sittang River
104. Sobat River
105. Sokoto River
106. Solimoes River
107. Solo River
108. Somes River
109. Sonora River
110. Strawberry River
111. Subarnarekha River
112. Sure River
113. Suriname River
114. Surma River
115. Swat River
116. Tuckasegee River
117. Tumut River
118. Vardar River
119. Verdigris River
120. Wailua River
121. Winisk River
122. Wouri River
123. Wu River
124. Yu River

Pcb21| Pete 22:33, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Breadth: lots of rivers

Hello, all. Just found this project. There is some good stuff here regarding the depth side of things: how to write a good, comprehensive article on a river. But lately I've been wondering about the breadth side: listing lots of rivers. (By the way, if this has been discussed before somewhere, please point me to that discussion. Thanks.)

Wikipedia is eventually supposed to have an article on anything "noteworthy". And, for flowing bodies of water, I would say that a good rule of thumb for whether something is noteworthy enough is whether the locals call it a "river" (or the equivalent word in whatever language they use). In short, Wikipedia ought to have an article on every river in the world.

Of course, to start with, the vast majority of these articles would contain very little information. But what would make it all worthwhile would be the lists & categories tying everything together. Therefore, along with the guidelines for an article about a river, how about also putting together standards for regional lists of rivers (by watershed & alphabetical), categories, etc. Also a brief guideline about what the minimal article on a river ought to look like (I figure name, general location, stub tag, categories, along with an associated entry in whatever relevant list articles there may be).

Now, with only six people listed as project participants (seven if I sign up), this is a ridiculously large job. But we can dream, can't we? More practically, we can also write bots to lighten the workload, and we can put together standards for those who follow.

Thoughts?

— Nowhither 16:37, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm with you. The hundred-odd red links in the list above are unquestionably noteworthy enough for WP to get us started ;-). Pcb21| Pete 18:16, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I've been working on European rivers. There is a good list by watershed at List of rivers of Europe. As it was getting enormous, I removed rivers that are too insignificant (see the talk page), criterium length under 100 km. There are lists of rivers for several European countries as well, most of them by watershed and alphabetic. An alphabetical list of rivers of Europe would be nice as well, that doesn't exist yet.

I agree with your minimal-contents-proposal. General location should include what river, sea, ocean or lake it flows into. Markussep 19:32, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Okay, so what needs to be done? This project should probably be better known, and if lots of rivers are to written about, there needs to be some organization. I figured we should put together a River-stub template, which could include an invitation to join this project. However, it seems a similar tempate was recently deleted, so that's probably not a good idea. More generally, the overall organization of geographical stuff on Wikipedia is national/regional; watersheds don't fit into such a scheme very well, so there might be some opposition to other ideas that would get rivers better organized. But I think the following can happen:

1. Design a box (like the one at the top of this page, or, better yet, this page) to be placed at the top of talk pages, pointing people to this project.
2. Put together standards for lists of rivers.
   • The current de facto standard seems to be to have a list page & category listing rivers in a particular country, or province/state for larger countries. On the list page, rivers are given in alphabetical order, and in "tree" form, by watershed. If the lists are long, sometimes this information is split into more than one page.
   • Do we all like this? I figure it's not too bad, but, as I said earlier, nations vs. watersheds often don't fit together very well.
3. Finish up a standard for a minimal river stub. How about:
   • Name, general location, regional <sigh> stub tag, category, and IF KNOWN
   • body of water it empties into.
   • Something like, "The Blurg River is a river in Blurgland. It empties into the Big Blurg River at Blurgville." + stub tag & category.
   • Also place into appropriate list(s).

— Nowhither 02:23, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. We definitely need a river stub template at least, for those short articles like Choaspes. --M1ss1ontomars2k4 22:01, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Template:Geolinks-US-river

I was dissatisfied with using Template:Geolinks-US-streetscale for rivers for two main reasons (google maps often don't show water--click the second google maps link; for the "Source"--and you just had to pick a single random spot on the river), so I created a river-specific Template:Geolinks-US-river that can map both ends. I also tweaked the formatting a) to better support the two sets of maps, and b) because I didn't like some of the 'streetscale' formatting. Any comments/suggestions? I suspect the most likely area with room for improvement is the 'Mouth or other endpoint' and 'Source' labels. Waterguy 18:42, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

This just needs a discussion page with some explanation of how to use it. Daniel Case 18:12, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Infobox update

A proposal has arisen at Template talk:River to create a new infobox template to replace the current one from the Dutch Wikipedia. The current one, in the eyes of many (myself included), is inflexible and difficult to use and not consistent with most other infoboxes. Participants of this project are invited to participate in the discussion, as Wikipedia:Infobox notes that "if you want to redesign an Infobox, please take it up in the appropriate WikiProject". Thanks, Wikiacc (talk) 19:30, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm the one who's been putting together a new template. Somehow I missed the fact that there's a whole WikiProkect for rivers; it's not listed in a couple of the obvious places. I don't think Jdorje, who's been helping with the template, knew about it either. At any rate, glad to know you're all here, please do drop by and chime in. Thanks, —Papayoung ☯ 21:42, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm eager to move rivers to the new template; I'd love to have more feedback before doing so, but I'm going to get started soon! The new structure is pretty flexible, so changes down the road will be easier than with the old template. Thanks much, —Papayoung ☯ 00:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and moved all of the rivers that were using {{River}} to {{Infobox_river}}, generating measurements in both metric and Imperial as I went. There are no more articles using the old template other than a couple of Sandboxes, so in a bit I'll mark it for deletion. That was really satisfying. —Papayoung ☯ 01:59, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:River

Template:River has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:River. Thank you.--Wikiacc (talk) 19:59, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Translation of river names

A recent move from Weiße Elster to White Elster made me wonder whether we should translate the adjectives in names like this. I'm only talking about rivers that have no commonly used English name. Some more examples (I put the link to where the article is located now):

• Schwarze Elster, Black Elster
• Fränkische Saale, Franconian Saale
• Tiroler Achen, Tyrolean Achen
• Bolshaya Belaya River, Great Belaya River or Great White River
• Oude IJssel, Old IJssel
• Sèvre Nantaise, Nantes Sèvre
• Sèvre Niortaise, Niort Sèvre
• Westerschelde, Western Scheldt
• Oosterschelde, Eastern Scheldt
• Nieuwe Maas, New Meuse
• Crişul Alb River, White Criş or White Körös
• Someşul Mare River, Great Someş
• Podkamennaya Tunguska, Stony Tunguska

I'd prefer not to translate them, but give the translation in the text. Thoughts? Markussep 13:32, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

I moved Weiße Elster and Fränkische Saale to their German names. Markussep 16:54, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

• • problem with translation of geographic features: if you go there the people won't understand you. On the other hand, it makes the english WP more english. This should probably be addressed in general not only rivers. undecided - Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:26, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Help request for Arkansas River (Talk), Kansas River (Talk), Marais des Cygnes River (Talk)

Hello, there is a very enthusiastic new user presently insisting on adding these rivers to various broad categories (Category:Human geography and Category:Biogeography), and is also adding an array of strange messages, numbers, etc., to the Kansas River article. I seem to be alone in the matter, so if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it. Thanks -- Malepheasant 08:38, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

This project was launched during 1968 with the Cimarron River watershed.

The expansion of specific Kansas Rivers was inspired by adult lifelong learners who particpated in the ALL-WinWin Kansas Envrionmental Leadership Program (1999-2005).

• See more USGS National Map Hydrology background: Talk:Kansas River/Biogeography
  RJBurkhart 15:44, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  

More nonsense not about improving articles. Rmhermen 17:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

Hi, I'm a member of the Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-class, B-class, and Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable articles? Please post your suggestions here. Cheers, Shanel 22:19, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Categorization of tributaries

On a whim, creating Kurrum, I categorized it in Category:Indus tributaries. Now before I create this category, I wanted to check here: How about grouping tributaries of major rivers in categories? Of course, this should remain at firstrestricted to major sea-going rivers, such as the Indus, Ganges, Rhine, Danube, Volga, Ob, Mississipi, Yangtze etc., but in principle, categories are perfect for reproducing hierarchical systems, so that there could be a full representation of the topology of the world's rivers in Wikipedia categories :) dab (ᛏ) 16:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

We already have Category:Tributaries of the Mississippi River, Category:Tributaries of the Missouri River, Category:Tributaries of the Ohio River so I don't see any problem. It shouldn't be used to replace the text about the tributaries, however. Rmhermen 17:08, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

good to know. it would be better to choose the a consistent title of Category:Tributaries of the Indus River, then. dab (ᛏ) 14:49, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

on second thoughts, "X basin" categories seem to be doing the same job. Category:Rhine basin at least seems to render superfluous a Category:Tributaries of the Rhine. dab (ᛏ) 15:06, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

There is also a Category:Mississippi basin which serves as a parent for the three categories I mentioned before. The problem I see with this is that while "Tributaries of X" is explicit in what the category contains, "X basin" could include other subjects besides streams alone. Rmhermen 15:11, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

User:P-A. recently created several categories for tributaries, see for instance Category:Atlantic European basins and its subcategories. I don't think he made any subcategories for major tributaries (yet). I don't really see the added value above the existing lists of rivers (provided they give that kind of information, like the list of rivers of Europe), but well, it doesn't hurt anyone. Markussep 15:16, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Suggested article

According to a new report, the U.S. may help Tajikistan build a hydropower facility on the Piandj River - we don't seem to have an article for the river. Rmhermen 20:47, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I suppose it's the same as the Panj River (Pyandzh in Russian). I've never seen the Piandj spelling before. Markussep 21:06, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I believe that you are correct and have updated the article. I suspect it is one of those translate from a foreign alphabet problems. This was the article that mentioned it. I see we already have an article for Vakhsh River. Rmhermen 23:19, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Good work on this, Rmhermen! --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 08:47, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Landforms by country

Comments regarding a proposal at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories) that would make "in country" the naming convention for Landform by country categories (such as rivers by country categories) would be very appreciated prior to a cfru. Kurieeto 22:53, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Increasing project visibility

Hello. I just found out about this project last week by typing in "Template:Infobox River" and suddenly finding that, to add to Wallkill River, which I created last summer. I wished I had known of this project then.

Then I wound up adding the infobox to the articles on four of the five major rivers of the Northeastern United States (all except the Potomac).

This project needs greater visibility. I created the WP:RIVERS shortcut. I am surprised that unlike the mountains and protected areas projects (among others), no one has bothered to create a messagebox for corresponding talk pages.

I volunteer to do so. Can anyone recommend a good river image to use? Daniel Case 17:53, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

• I would welcome a message box for the project. As for pictures, this one of the Hudson might work well. Malepheasant 18:26, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

This is done ... see {{river}}. I chose a picture of the Columbia instead ... I wanted one that makes it clear it's a river and not a lake. Plus I feel using a pic of the Hudson would seem like regional boosterism on my part. Daniel Case 02:53, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Now go and plant that on every river article's talk page. Daniel Case 02:55, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Silly question, but before I plant this on every river talk page on my watchlist; is this a template you'd normally "subst:'? Or sans subst? Kuru ^talk 03:13, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I usually do that with all project templates, yes. Daniel Case 17:55, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure that that image is clearly a river at the small resolution of the the template. I would suggest something like Image:Cuyahoga_River.jpg if it wasn't so dark. Rmhermen 23:41, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

This one is better: Image:River gambia Niokolokoba National Park.gif. I think this would look better than the current one, clearly showing a meandering river. Rmhermen 03:46, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Broken archive

The "Archive 1" link at the top is now red. What happened to the archive? --M1ss1ontomars2k4 ^{(T | C | @)} 04:43, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

16:22, 7 April 2006 Sceptre deleted "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers/Archive 1" (orphaned talk page)

Not sure how the orphan term was applied - seems to follow the naming convention an had at least one link to it. Will drop a message on his talk page. Kuru ^talk 12:29, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Naming: Multiple rivers with the same name

Re: Rivers in the USA: I would like to unify the methods for the naming of multiple rivers with the same name. Currently, several different methods are suggested. I suggest the following:

• The first way to disambiguate should be to add a state qualifier: Jordan River (Utah).
• When multiple rivers with the same name exist in the same state, the river should be identified as a tributary of another river with the name of the principal river acting as the qualifier: St. Joseph River (Maumee River). The word "tributary" should not be added as a qualifier.

Adopting these naming conventions would eliminate some other methods currently used, such as: River X (County A, State B), River X (Township A, County B, State C), or St. Joseph River (Maumee River tributary). If some consensus could be reached on unifying the naming of multiple rivers with the same name, either with the suggestions above or something else, perhaps we could update this article page accordingly. Gjs238 01:06, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I am not seeing how your suggestion differs from the naming standard already described on the project page. Rmhermen 03:05, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I gave it a few days thinking perhaps it would be noticed, so I'll just cut & paste from my previous post.

"Adopting these naming conventions would eliminate some other methods currently used, such as: River X (County A, State B), River X (Township A, County B, State C), or St. Joseph River (Maumee River tributary)."

In other words, when two rivers of the same name exist in the same state, currently two naming conventions come into play. Some disambiguate by tributary, others delve into counties and other political subdivisions.

Also, some place the word 'tributary' in the disambiguation.

Would not a standardized approach be desirable? Gjs238 12:17, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

IMO dab by destination waterbody is better than counties etc. Rivers are from physical geography, counties from human. In doubt, avoid mixing this two systems. Countries as dab may be treated different, as they are well known worldwide. But a physical geographer should may be not need to learn township names. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:45, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

The practice you suggest is pretty much the current standard in most cases, especially for tributaries of bodies with a relatively high level of recognizability. But I think there are exceptions as well, usually with good reason. For example, with the Great Lakes, there may be any number of rivers with the same name that empty into the same lake, so some sort of geographical disambiguation is needed. Also, when dealing with tributaries of small bodies of water that are not well-known, it may be more intuitive to use a more recognizable feature for disambiguation. I think the preference should be for using the tributary method, but I think there should be room for common sense exceptions rather than trying for a universal, one-size-fits-all standard. older ≠ wiser 13:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

agree. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 13:46, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe I have ever seen River X (Township A, County B, State C) and would suggest that some simpler alternative could be adopted - also I don't think there is a naming standard which suggests this form. Rmhermen 16:20, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't think I've seen the township used as the disambiguator in a river name either. I know of several using the county in the name (I may have been responsible for creating a few of them). older ≠ wiser 16:52, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Naming: Multiple political jurisdictions in the U.S.

Related to the above discussion, a user has politely proposed moving Cedar River (Iowa) to "Cedar River (Minnesota and Iowa)," because the river rises in Minnesota. (It flows for most of its length in Iowa, but does pass through Austin, which is a fairly important town in its region in southern Minnesota.) What is the preference in this case? For a few examples, we have these hyphenated disambiguators (not all of them good articles):

• Chattooga River (Alabama-Georgia)
• Montreal River (Wisconsin-Michigan)
• North River (New York-New Jersey)
• Pearl River (Mississippi-Louisiana)
• Pigeon River (Minnesota-Ontario)
• Pigeon River (Tennessee - North Carolina) (with spaces around the hyphen)
• Red River (Tennessee-Kentucky)
• St. Croix River (Maine-New Brunswick)
• St. Croix River (Wisconsin-Minnesota)
• St. Marys River (Michigan-Ontario)

And these with slashes:

• Little River (Missouri/Arkansas)
• Little River (Oklahoma/Arkansas)
• St. Marys River (Florida/Georgia)

(Disclosure: I started the 2 "Little River" articles above with hyphens, and they were moved by another user to the "slash" format.) (Further disclosure: The article at "Big Sandy River (Kentucky-West Virginia)" was recently moved to "Big Sandy River (Ohio River tributary)," and I moved it to Big Sandy River (Ohio River) per the above discussion.)

If the "tributary" format were used, the above lists would be:

• Chatooga River (Coosa River)
• Montreal River (Lake Superior)
• North River (Hudson River)
• Pearl River (Gulf of Mexico)
• Pigeon River (Lake Superior)
• Pigeon River (French Broad River)
• Red River (Cumberland River)
• St. Croix River (Atlantic Ocean) or St. Croix River (Bay of Fundy)
• St. Croix River (Mississippi River)
• St. Marys River (Lake Huron)

--

• Little River (Red River)
• Little River (St. Francis River)
• St. Marys River (Atlantic Ocean)

Which is better? I think the second list looks cleaner, and I think I'm coming around to Tobias Conradi's suggestion above that the "tributary" format might be worth considering as the generally preferred option for disambiguating -- because what we call the St. Croix River (Wisconsin-Minnesota) was a tributary of what we call the Mississippi River long before it was used to define the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin, and because the Mad River (California) went into the Pacific Ocean long before California existed; and because U.S. political subdivisions are well-represented on the Wikipedia whereas watershed networks are not. But I can also see where such an approach might be viewed as extreme in practice (and it would create its own disambiguation problems where streams of the same name entered the same body of water). Any thoughts? And, more simply, if Cedar River (Iowa) is to be moved, where should it go? To "Cedar River (Minnesota-Iowa)" or to "Cedar River (Iowa River)"? Or should it not be moved? Thanks -- Malepheasant 03:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I must say I have never been a fan of the "Little River (St. Francis River)" format - how do I know (if I am The man on the Clapham omnibus) that this means the Little is a tributary of the S. Francis and not that St. Francis is an alternate name for the Little. I have moved a couple of rivers (which flowed close together) to "Y River (X River tributary)" which is think is more obvious in this respect. Rmhermen 03:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Good point. Maybe for X River (Y River) the word tributary should be added. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:24, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the tributary naming convention is more workable. As an extreme example, look at "Pine Creek". A search at www.topozone.com reveals 18 Pine Creeks in Pennsylvania (PA), with three counties that have two Pine Creeks each and one county that has three of them. Arkansas and Arizona have similar Pine Creek issues, as do other states. We would have to go with county names if we chose political locators and then the possible issue of multiple counties arises (like multiple states above). What we have done so far is name the largest Pennsylvania Pine Creek's article Pine Creek (Pennsylvania) (as "Pine Creek (West Branch Susquehanna River Tributary)" or "Pine Creek (Potter - Tioga - Lycoming - Clinton Counties)" was too ungainly) and it is the largest 'creek' in the United States and best known Pine Creek in Pennsylvania. the others are named as tributaries. My $0.02 worth, Ruhrfisch 03:41, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Request for Peer Review help

I would appreciate it very much if anyone could take a look at Larrys Creek, which is up for peer review at Wikipedia:Peer review/Larrys Creek/archive1. It does not have a list of tributaries yet. Thanks, Ruhrfisch 04:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Moves

• Talk:Aura (river) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:04, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
• Talk:Sava Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:59, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
• Talk:Emme (river) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Move questions

• shall "X reka" in Category:Rivers of Serbia be moved to "X River"? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:30, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
• what to do with Göta älv? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 00:57, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I say move them both. This is the English Wikipedia and those are by no means common terms in English. Although the local name can be included in the introductory sentence. Rmhermen 18:47, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Agreed (the redirects will still be there after the move if anyone is looking for reka or älv. Ruhrfisch 19:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Also agree. --Malepheasant 02:50, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
• done :-) with ref to WP:NC:LFORM#Rivers. We should include translation there. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:15, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Maps

Hi there! I was thinking about doing maps for the Category:Rivers of Argentina, and I wanthered if there's a standard for them regarding colours, topografy, etc. More importantly, I wanted to know if any of you knows a good way to do so (sources, programs, wites, etc) Thanks a lot, Mariano(t/c) 16:36, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

For colors, etc. I try to follow Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps. For sources - if you have GIS software you can go use [1] for the rivers and [2] for boundaries. If you don't have GIS try using the Online Map Creation at [3] and then cleaning up the map in a graphics program like Photoshop or GIMP. Kmusser 16:59, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeap, I've already gathered enough datafiles (E00, shapefile, etc). I really don't like the OCM map generator, so I tried to install some free software for map-creation. I'm curently testing GvSIG, which is not that bad, but still a little bit buggy and limited. I got the idea that ArcGIS is kind of the as good as it gets right now, but I haven't tried. Can you give me your oppinion on these two, JUMP GIS, and GRASS GIS?. Thanks a lot. Mariano(t/c) 09:14, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem with ArcGIS is how expensive it is, I'm fortunate to have a copy from work. I've used GRASS GIS in the past and liked it, haven't heard anything about the others you mentioned. Kmusser 13:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, I think I will settle with MapWindow GIS, wihch proved to be more stable than the rest. Problem is I can't open E00 files, nor grids, but you can't have it all!!

BTW, any more detailed source for rivers with dams ? Thanks a lot, Mariano(t/c) 13:50, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

On dams, for the U.S. you can get them out of the National Atlas, but I don't know for Argentina - I don't know of any world data set that isn't copyrighted. Kmusser 13:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

There ought to be freeware conversion programs out there that will turn E00 (aka "interchange") files into shapefiles, coverages, and what not. A quick google on "E00 interchange conversion" gave lots of leads. I'm not sure what MapWindow GIS needs, but I'd bet there's a way to convert E00 files to something useable. Pfly 03:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Members

Can anybody join this group? I've never joined a WikiProject, but as a California based water resources engineer (presently I work on the Bay-Delta estuary for the government, but Oct. 1 I'll be joining the State's flood forecasting group), I have access to large amounts of information (including photos) on California rivers. MCalamari 18:01, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Anyone can join. The Wikiprojects mostly function to keep terminology and styles the same among large groups of articles. And to provide a pool of interested and knowledgeable persons to ask questions of when they arise. Rmhermen 19:04, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I quickly looked at List of California rivers (I don't know how complete that is) and noticed there are a lot of articles started for California rivers. Hoewever randomly checking two found one (Big Pine Creek) using unit of acre-feet but no metric (or possibly more common "English" system) units and another (Sespe Creek) stating that it "...is one of the longest creeks untouched by dams or concrete channels." without stating how long the creek is or where it is one of the longest (longest in the world?, in California?) So obviously there is work to be done yet. Rmhermen 19:16, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Proposed move

See the proposal to move Litani River to Litani River, Lebanon at Talk:Litani River. Rmhermen 19:04, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

British Columbia Rivers added to project

I'm not signing on as a participant; too much already on the boil; but when I saw the {{Rivers}} tag on the Talk:Okanogan River page I went at the BC Rivers Category and added it throughout, where it wasn't placed already. Just wanted to note that the tag has been placed on some major creeks, which have articles, and it's worth understanding for non-BCers reviewing any of these pages that many creeks in BC are much larger than "named rivers"; and there will be more to come. Also I'd already used the rule-of-distance in naming the Okanogan River article, as most of the length, especially the naturally-flowing length, of that river, is in the US and so the US spelling seemed a propos; even though the name for the valley, Okanagan, is a major geographic name/region in BC. I also amended the Pend Oreille River article to give the BC/Canadian spelling for its brief stretch there, "Pend d'Oreille River"; and somewhere in there made an edit-comment that the official mapped name of the Clark Fork is exactly that, NOT "Clark Fork River"; "Fork" turns up here and there for "river" in the same way that "creek" does, y'see. But especially in that case (the Snake River used to be the Lewis Fork or something like that, as I recall); Skookum1 06:28, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I made the correction on the Clark Fork River page. There are quite a few rivers in the U.S. that use both Fork and River in the official name, but Clark Fork isn't one of them. Not sure if the page should actually be moved though as it is useful to distinguish it from the town of the same name. Kmusser 15:04, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I moved it to Clark Fork (river). Rmhermen 15:14, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

which is not in line with the Naming conventions of this project. (river) is depreceated. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:59, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually it isn't deprecated. "Clark (river)" would be a deprecated form. Clark Fork (river) isn't. The phrase could also be (stream) as the USGS uses. It is a name with an added disambiguation phrase to separate it from Clark Fork. I can't think of any other rivers disambiguated this way. All the others I can remember not only disambiguate from towns, but also, other rivers of the same name. Like the example Indian River. Rmhermen 21:25, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

A River Featured Article Candidate

Larrys Creek (in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, USA and with our project tag) is a Featured Article Candidate. If you want to weigh in on the nomination, it is here Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Larrys Creek. Thanks for any feedback! Ruhrfisch 17:41, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• Larrys Creek made featured article today - thanks to all who helped in any way! Ruhrfisch 03:36, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Issue with River infobox

Looking over the above FAC, I noticed that it displays the "Basin countries" listing a single county. It will be the case that many rivers do not cross international borders. I think that this line would be better called "Basin location" allowing more variability in the information included. Rmhermen 18:06, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks - I also think it would be good if it also listed the mouth elevation (as many rivers do not have their mouths at sea level). Ruhrfisch 18:29, 24 August 2006 (UTC) PS I am working in the map color issue in the FAC - may take a while.

On the map I just made the orange a little more orange for you. Kmusser 18:40, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• • Thanks so much - I really appreciate it. Ruhrfisch 18:54, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I added the variable mouth_elevation to the infobox to allow entry of the elevation at the end of the river. The source elevation still uses the variable named elevation which is slightly confusing. Changing that to source_elevation (or changing basin_countries to basin_location) would require changing all the pages that use the template. Rmhermen 20:37, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Bot requests. but maybe only if some more stuff needs to be done. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:01, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I put "| mouth_elevation =" with the proper example units into the examples to copy and paste on Template talk:Infobox River (it was only in the actual infobox, but not the examples). I would appreciate it if someone would check that I did this properly.
  • As for the "basin_location" parameter, if I understand it right, here is a possible (although not very elegant) solution / kludge. What if there were just an optional pararmeter called "basin_location" that could be used in place of "basin_countries"? Since any parameter can safely be left blank, just leave "basin_countries" blank and put in "basin_location" instead. There could even be an example box to copy with this text. If I have misunderstood how the software works and this is not practical, I apologize. Just an idea. Ruhrfisch 19:23, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
    • This is possible. However, if we have two parameters to change (and source_elevation would be much more elegant) it may be a good idea to request some bot help. I believe there are 516 pages using the infobox. I was going to add the mouth elevation to the example myself but some of the pages I checked were behaving oddly. It may have been a caching issue, but if anyone else notices odd lines in the infobox, please speak up. Rmhermen 19:37, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I remember checking the Volga article to check what the river's mouth's elevation actually was to use it in the example but the article was not clear at all on where the mouth is. And the map is only in Cyrillic! Rmhermen 19:40, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
        • I put the mouth elevation into Larrys Creek and it worked there. Can't help with Cyrillic. Feel free to revert my other edits in the examples - it sounds like a bot is the way to go. Ruhrfisch 21:13, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Version 0.5 Rivers selection - request for comment

I have nominated a set of rivers at Wikipedia:Version_0.5_Set_Nominations#Rivers for Version 0.5. This is a small test CD (~1500 articles total) representing some of the key articles on Wikipedia. Geography was chosen as an emphasis, hence we want to get perhaps 20 or so major rivers. It is a balance of importance and quality, with importance being the more important. We have to include the "must-have" rivers, but beyond obvious ones like the Amazon we have to look at quality too. Can you look over my proposal and give comments and suggestions? Thanks, Walkerma 03:32, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

• River Thames is listed on its Discussion page as at least a candidate for the Wikipedia CD Selection and is a notable and historic river and OK article (a bit list heavy, although not all "38 major tributaries" are listed). Ruhrfisch 14:18, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Naming Help

I need help naming articles for the two creeks named Conewago Creek. Both are tributaries of the Susquehanna River in the U.S. State of Pennsylvania. The larger is west of the river in Adams and York Counties (mouth is in York Co.).[4] The smaller is east of the river and is the border between Dauphin and Lancaster Counties (mouth in both Cos.) and is also in Lebanon County.[5]

I am making start class articles for Lancaster County, PA red links which is how I found these. I will also make a start class article for the other Conewago Creek and a dab page (they each have a "Little Conewago Creek" tributary and Conowingo Creek has "Conewago Creek" as a USGS recognized variant name).

Anyway, how should these articles be named? They are both in Pennsylvania, they are both Susquehanna River Tributaries (their mouths are even fairly near each other), and they are both in multiple counties (so naming after a county is difficult). Gertler's book "Keystone Canoeing" names them "Conewago Creek (east)" and "Conewago Creek (west)", which seems simplest. The east creek is also on the right bank but "Conewago Creek (Susquehanna River tributary, right bank)" seems a bit much. They are the only two Conewago Creeks in the United States (according to USGS GNIS), so east and west seem OK that way. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Ruhrfisch 14:38, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Do they need to be separate articles? I mean, is there that much to say about either? Until such time that the one or both have enough content to stand on their own as non-stub articles, I'd suggest simply creating a multi-stub article and describe both of them. In fact, that may make it easier to distinguish between the two without repeating a lot of detail in both. older ≠ wiser 15:00, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Excellent point: a combined article seems a very elegant solution. Searching Topozone for Conewago Creek returns only the two features.

Place	County	State	Type	Elevation	USGS Quad	Lat	Lon
Conewago Creek	Dauphin	PA	stream	unknown	Middletown	40.13222ºN	76.71472ºW
Conewago Creek	York	PA	stream	unknown	York Haven	40.113068ºN	76.71111ºW

If the time comes to separate them, the county of their mouths might be the way to go. — EncMstr 16:48, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks for your thoughtful repsonses, but I really want to make two articles, one on each creek (plus a dab), and want to have names that are acceptable (each creek is noteworthy and I have enough information on each to make a start class article at least - six or seven refs each). I am thinking long term here - get the names right at the start and we won't have to have this discussion again later (plus all the work of moves and redirects and changing links). "Conewago Creek (east)" and "Conewago Creek (west)" seem the easiest to me. "Conewago Creek (York County, Pennsylvania)" (the western one) is clunkier but would work, but the other Conewago Creek is literally the border between Dauphin and Lancaster Counties (the border is down the middle of the creek in USGS maps), so I am not sure which county to use. Pick one and make a redirect from the other? Bermudian Creek, a tributary of the west one already has a stub. Finally, can you please give me an example of such a combined article to look at? Maybe if I see exactly what you mean, it will make more sense to me. Usually it seems the opposite is suggested - articles on two subjects are split (see Interstate 76 (east) and Interstate 76 (west), for example). Thanks, Ruhrfisch 02:50, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

• • Given your work in making Larrys Creek a Featured Article, I certainly trust that you've got the material to make good articles out of both of these. I had a look at the two streams on the Pennsylvania DeLorme atlas, and I'm just as stymied for a solution, so I think the "Conewago Creek (east)" and "Conewago Creek (west)" titling you proposed is probably the best one if you want to have separate articles for each of them. The streams' mouths are so close together that a combined article in this case might make more sense than in some others, as they have a strong regional affiliation, but I'm neutral on this point and am happy to have new articles either way. Existing multi-stream "combined" articles that I've noticed, such as Carp River (Michigan) and Eel River (Indiana), cover broader geographic areas and appear to me to be unsatisfactory (though definitely worthwhile) early efforts to sort things out, and would be good candidates to be split up in the future. So I think you ought to have at it as you see fit according to your best judgment -- and thank you! --Malepheasant 06:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

• Gertler had it right when he used the "east/west" nomenclature - go with that. Each article could have a top of page disambiguation to the other to help avoid confusion. County designations are too cumbersome and a combination article is just begging to be split in the future. Gjs238 10:18, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

• • Thanks for all the feedback. I can see two streams in one article when one is a tributary of the other but is not noteworthy / large enough for its own article (i.e. Second Fork of Larrys Creek is one paragraph in Larrys Creek), but that is not the case here. I also see that the Eel River article uses north and south to distinguish between the two rivers within the article. Both the Eel and Carp River articles seem to me articles on one of the rivers with a bit thrown in on the others of that name as a temporary stopgap. I am pressed for time now, but will make something this weekend. I am leaning strongly towards a dab and east / west separate articles. Part of it is I just can't see mentally how to write it as one article - with two infoboxes??. The funny thing is I have more right now on the eastern creek, which has a watershed a tenth the size of the western creek (roughly 50 vs 500 square miles), but east has a very nice watershed association page. Thanks again, Ruhrfisch 03:00, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

• • • Thanks again for everyone's feedback. I have made a dab at Conewago Creek, and two articles: the more detailed Conewago Creek (east) and the shorter Conewago Creek (west). Edit away! Ruhrfisch 04:28, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Notability, or how short can a river be?

In writing Ada covered bridge I realised there is no article for Thornapple River (a tributary of the Grand). How short or small is the thinking on where a cutoff ought to be? thanks! ++Lar: t/c 21:49, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

There is none. We have article on the world's shortest river (can't think of their names but there are two competing claimants.) We have articles on some creeks. If you look at List of Michigan rivers you will find that large numbers remain without articles yet. If you want to start one, please do. Rmhermen 23:41, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

• Both claimants for shortest river are listed at the page for the Roe River. The criteria that I have seen for inclusion in general (not on Wikipedia) is often the area of the drainage basin. For example, the Pennsylvania Gazetteer of Streams II (1984) list all 571 named PA streams whose watersheds are larger than 25 square miles, while the Susquehanna River Basin Commission seems to use 50 square miles as a cutoff. I agree with Rmhermen - if you can find enough to write about it, go ahead and make the article. By the way, congrats on the Did You Know for Ada covered bridge, Ruhrfisch 00:32, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the info. I think the Thornapple River (in MI) has more than 50 sq in its watershed and there is good google hittage on the name, although I haven't looked at the hits to see relevance. But it was a red link in that article so was bugging me. That's the smallest bridge I've written about yet... but it's in my home town, so! :) Happy editing, appreciate the followups. ++Lar: t/c 17:20, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
    • In California there are a number of rivers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that are distributaries of the San Joaquin River that are relatively short. However, they are significant in California water supply and ecological issues (i.e. they are part of the plumbing for 23 million people), so in principal I'd say that notability isn't about the size of a waterbody, but should instead be limited to the more general question "would people be interested in this article". As for the smaller San Joaquin distributaries, I plan to eventually give them proper treatments here if somebody else doesn't beat me to it.  :) MCalamari 18:11, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I did the Thornapple River, comments welcomed. It's been tagged as being in the project. Embarassingly, it's way longer of an article than the river it feedsw into, Michigan's longest river, the Grand... ++Lar: t/c 01:59, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:52, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Paulins Kill

I invite all of you to take a look at Paulins Kill, an article I've been working on for a while, regarding a river in Northwestern New Jersey (USA). I should be almost finished with tonight. I wanted your comments, etc. on it before I submitted it for peer review and possibly as a featured article candidate. —ExplorerCDT 22:00, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I made a few changes. Rmhermen 02:01, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

• Obviously you have put a lot of work into it and it looks good so far. Just a quick scan (didn't read it all) but if it is going to be featured it needs an expanded lead section - everything that is a header or subheader has to be mentioned in some way (even very briefly) in the lead. You will also need to put in metric units (Google does conversions - if you type "28 miles in km" it gives you the answer) and put a non-breaking space "& n b s p ;" (without spaces) between numbers and units. You need more images, if possible, and a map would be great. I can run the semi automated peer review script if you are interested, though AndyZ will do this if you submit for peer review. Good luck, Ruhrfisch 02:41, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
  • If you could run the Peer Review script, I'd be much obliged. Thank you. Also, thank you both for your comments and changes so far. —ExplorerCDT 20:29, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

New River

I'm not a member of this project, but I went ahead and tagged the New River (California) as part of this project. According to a National Geographic article I read about a year ago, this is the most polluted river in the U.S., if not the world. The article could use some expanding and cleanup, if anyone is interested in helping out. --Lethargy 02:26, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Drainage basins

Is there an agreed upon source for drainage basins of rivers? I noticed a rather big difference (800.000 km²!) between the figure mentioned in Amazon River and the figure mentioned for that river in the article drainage basin. I could suggest using the figures from World Resources Institute, but there may be others? --Sir48 12:35, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I haven't find a general source that I trust. When making maps I use both WRI and USGS and they often disagree with each other and I've found definite mistakes in both databases though they're still the best I've found. I think the best you can do is pick a source and cite it. WRI does have the advantage that it doesn't take GIS software to get at it, though it only has the largest rivers. Kmusser 04:09, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Another River Featured Article Candidate

White Deer Hole Creek (in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania and with our project tag) is a Featured Article Candidate. If you want to weigh in on the nomination, it is here Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/White Deer Hole Creek. Thanks for any feedback, Ruhrfisch 15:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

• White Deer Hole Creek made featured article today - thanks to all who helped in any way! Ruhrfisch 19:13, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Featured Article Candidate: Paulins Kill

The Paulins Kill, a river in Northwestern New Jersey, is now a Featured Article Candidate. Please feel free to comment, throw your support, or trash the article here: Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Paulins_Kill. Thanks. —ExplorerCDT 17:19, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Paulins Kill is still a Featured Article candidate, suggestions have been made and the article has been edited to address all concerns raised...but very few people have given their SUPPORT (The only OPPOSE/OBJECT vote was retracted). Please show up at Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Paulins_Kill and give your SUPPORT. Your support and feedback is needed and appreciated. —ExplorerCDT 02:58, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:51, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Paulins Kill is now a Featured Article

The article Paulins Kill was promoted to Featured Article just few hours ago. Just to inform y'all and to thank you for any contributions or suggestions some of you have made to help improve the article and develop it well enough to earn inclusion among Wikipedia's finest work. Thank y'all. —ExplorerCDT 04:36, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Replacement of river infobox template proposed

For anybody unaware, a replacement of the river infobox template was proposed for discussion by another editor at Template talk:Infobox River. --Malepheasant 02:08, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Missing topics

I have a list of missing topics that includes a section about rivers. I've tried to make sure there is no equivalent Wikipedia article but I'd appreciate if anyone could have a look at the list. - Skysmith 11:04, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I added some comments. Several of these seem dubious. What was the method used to assemble the list? I would guess that there are thousands of rivers awaiting articles so this is a very small sample. Rmhermen 17:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Where does this list come from? I think your Moracha refers to the Morača River, Meckar might be a typo of Neckar, Irawasi might be Irawadi/Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwady River (d and s are next to each other on the keyboard), Syrfarja could be Syr Darya (same for d and f). Tenryū River is probably your Tenryugawi, Yoshino River your Yosginogawa, Ngounie River your N'Gounie, Sanaga River your Sanage, Tocantins River your Tocantis. Markussep 17:24, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I couldn't find any other list of missing river articles (I only found User:Markussep/rivers which lists existing articles with some missing information.) One could start to assemble such a list from the red links in the various "List of rivers in..." articles and Wikipedia:List of missing Africa topics which lists several rivers. Rmhermen 17:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposed Australian collaboration

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight#Irrigation in Australia or Water supply in Australia for a proposed new article, probably to be called Irrigation in Australia. As a lot of irrigation water comes from the Murray-Darling Basin, the article may interest participants of this project too. If you would be interested in helping to develop the article, anyone (Australian or not) is welcome to add support and comments. --Scott Davis ^Talk 00:11, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

GeoBox River

Just saw this added to Stave River and remarked that the language used in it is highly US-centric, i.e. "state" as the default for national subdivision; I'm coming at it from the Canadian end, of course, and while it's true Australia, Mexico, Brazil, India have "states" as well as the US, this is still not workable; Canada and China (to name only two) use "province", and then there's Norway with fylker. The rest of the GeoBox details I'll have to think about after seeing it applied here and there, but I just wanted to do a heads-up that if someone is designing such a box could they please think outside of the usual "Lower 48 box" and remember that the rest of the world is constituted differently, and that Wikipedia isn't only American in content/language.Skookum1 20:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Talk:Ganges

There is a discussion on whether the name of the article should Ganges or Ganga (the name in the Indian languages). Please provide your opinion. Thanks! Gizza^{Chat ©} 22:10, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Historical floods/crests

Are historical floods and crests of rivers and/or major tributaries to be included on that article's main page or within a separate article? For example, the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia has a known historical crest of 55.5 ft. in March 1936. Which particular page or heading should it go on to keep in accordance with this Wikiproject? Mphamilton 06:44, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

• I'm thinking that a specific notable flood event would probably best be covered by its own article, perhaps "Ohio River flood of 1936" or something like that. The editors at WikiProject Meteorology might be able to offer guidance for naming, notability, etc. --Malepheasant 07:59, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Rhode Island Rivers

Hello. I have joined the project as I am in the process of creating an article on every river in Rhode Island.

Cheers! --Analogdemon (talk) 13:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

User:AlexNewArtBot/WaterbodiesSearchResult

Alex's bot seems quite efficient in spotting new articles about rivers (and lakes). The rules used to find them are defined at User:AlexNewArtBot/Waterbodies. How high a specific article scored to be included is logged at User:AlexNewArtBot/WaterbodiesLog. Personally I use them to find new articles to add Template:Infobox lake. -- User:Docu

Stream names

I've done some articles on streams in northeast Iowa, and have come across name space problems. Im following the ideas on the project page. See Smith Creek, Trout Run and Village Creek, and how I have done disambig pages. I'm tempted to move Menominee River to Menominee River (Lake Michigan), and turn the resulting redirect into a disambig. Another issue is how creeks tributary to rivers are to be handled in categories; for the moment, I've been dumping them in category Rivers of Iowa. Similarly, there are some very tiny tributaries of the Mississippi, e.g., Village Creek (Allamakee County, Iowa) which share category space with some very significant tributaries. --Ace Telephone 22:24, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Your disambig pages and names look fine by me. Menominee River though I'd leave as is, there are just the two of them and I think the MI-WI one is much more well known. Kmusser 23:51, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Arvandrud/Shatt al-Arab

Requested move:

• Arvandrud/Shatt al-Arab → Shatt al-Arab —(Discuss)— Thus moving the article on this Iranian and Iraqi river from a double "Persian/Arabic" title to the Arabic-language name alone, to reflect common English usage, in accordance to Wikipedia's naming conventions. — See some examples of usage in the article's talk page.

The previous move request (which took place 30 March to 6 April 2007) was rather problematic. So, I encourage (ok, beg :-) everyone to take at least a quick look at the issue.

I believe the issue to be a simple, straight-forward case of reflecting the common English usage clearly exemplified by the examples of usage.

Best regards, Ev 03:14, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

New opinions on this unsolved issue will be most welcomed at the article's talk page. - Best regards, Ev 21:20, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Once again, we're repeating the move request from Shatt al-Arab (Arvand Rud) to Shatt al-Arab. Your input to the discussion will be greatly appreciated. - Best regards, Ev 02:00, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Discharge statistics

I have a few thoughts, questions, and maybe a source, on the topic of river discharge statistics.

While working on river pages I've often had trouble finding good discharge numbers. Stream gauge data often comes in "realtime" form, giving stats for the last few days, without providing long term averages. I understand why this kind of data is not good for a river's discharge in general, but still, even when you can find good long term discharge data, it is clear that there is no truly "correct" way to determine a river's discharge, especially when it comes to maximum and minimum discharges.

For example, for the minimum discharge of a river, do you use lowest-ever reading of a stream gauge ("instantaneous") or the lowest daily mean, or the lowest 7-day mean (as the USGS often reports). For many rivers, especially those with irrigation diversion, dams, and dam construction over the stream gauge's life, the lowest-ever reading will sometimes be zero or close to it (sometimes even a negative number due to some river modification project). Even the lowest daily means can be absurdly low, representative of some very unusual, probably artificial circumstance -- and thus not really about the river's streamflow but rather some special event. In such cases, I'm tempted to use the lowest 7-day mean, or even the lowest monthly mean, depending on which stat seems least absurd.

Also, even for average discharge there are often choices to make without obvious answers. For example, some rivers achieve a high discharge volume along their course only to have large amounts of water diverted for irrigation. Some rivers dry up completely, some sink into the ground. If there are several stream gauges along a river and the discharge is higher at an upriver one due to diversions downriver, I'm tempted to use the upriver one as more "natural".

I'm wondering what thoughts the river wikiproject people have on these things.

Also, the project page refers to the relatively new Template:Infobox River Geography, but it is now called Template:Geobox River. The link redirects, but still, would be nice to have the template's current name. Perhaps I'll just edit that change myself (never edited a wikiproject page before).

Finally, on sources for discharge data, including max and min values over a stream gauge's lifetime -- I'm curious to know what sources people use. I hurt my brain trying to coax such things from the USGS stream gauge pages, but have begun to find other sources that give a streamgauge's lifetime annual mean discharge and various forms of max and min. This webpage has links to PDF files with such streamgauge data for Washington state, and this one does for Montana. Does anyone know more about these kind of reports and where to find them more easily than google hit-and-miss? Any other good sources?

And, more importantly, sources for discharge stats, stream gauge data, etc, outside the United States? I've been working on some rivers that cross and recross between the US and Canada, and the USGS's streamgauge data simply ends at the border, frustratingly. The one site I have found, just today, that looks promising at first glance, is this one. Looking for more resources! Thanks. Pfly 03:31, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I think annual mean discharge is what you want if you can find it, but for many rivers it's probably never been calculated. I haven't found any more reliable than what you already have. Kmusser 03:31, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree: I've often wondered what the intent of the numbers is. For example, the Willamette River has reverse flow for a few minutes or hours each day due to Pacific tidal effects, and a wide degree of natural seasonal variation in flow rate. I "stretched" the info box to handle these, but even that wasn't adequate: the end of the description section gives detailed extrema. —EncMstr 17:49, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I think (annual mean) discharge numbers are used as one way to compare rivers using a single number for each, although as noted, which number to use and how to get it are often problematic. While rivers can also be compared using their length or drainage basin area, two rivers could have identical lengths and drainage areas and very different discharges (say one in an arid area vs. one in a rain forest). Might I suggest the article on discharge (hydrology) be updated to reflect some of the problems / issues discussed here? Ruhrfisch 21:36, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

For U.S. rivers, I found this USGS link, which links to PDFs of stream gauge reports for most of the states (several are missing), of the type Pfly mentioned above. Also, I had a go at working the data into a short narrative on the Middle Fork River and Tygart Valley River articles, under the heading "flow rate." It makes for pretty dry reading, though no more so than the bot-generated census sections on the articles about U.S. cities. I'd very much welcome any improvements to the wording; I'd like to settle on a basic structure that I could copy-paste into other articles I work on, and then plug in the data. Thanks -- Malepheasant 05:36, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Wow, thanks Malepheasant. I found this link for all the US States reports [6] and have also had some success emailing USGS and asking them about data for specific streams. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 11:21, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Belated feedback on flow rates The flow rate sections read well. A few ideas to make them less dry (take or leave them). 1) Would it help to give the relative position of the stream gauge(s) in the watershed (distance to mouth and/or size of watershed they are measuring that point, I know USGS gauge reports usually give the size of the part of the watershed feeding the gauge. 2) If the date of the highest or lowest flow is a significant weather event, mention it (in northern and central Pennsylvania, Hurricane Agnes flooding is often the highest flow recorded, or perhaps a well known drought). 3) Would it help to make some sort of comparison for flow to help the reader visualize the amount of water involved better? "X cu ft/s is equal to Y Olympic-size swimmming pools of water a second / minute / hour?" I was trying to think of a better volume comparison - maybe standard oil tanker volume or Alaska pipeline output per minute? Hope this helps, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:05, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Feedback sought on navboxes for the Susquehanna River system

I would like to add a navbox to every stream in the Susquehanna River system and have made three different versions of possible navboxes to add, which I would appreciate any and all feedback on. The navboxes and some questions about them are here: User:Ruhrfisch/Frog. Since it is in User space you can add comments right in the page (it is one of my sandboxes, so I don't use the Talk page for it generally). Thanks in advance for any feedback, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

FAR of Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls 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. V60 ^{干什么？ · 喝掉的酒 · ER 4} 00:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Geobox river

I'm doing up the geobox for the Verde River, but had a couple snags. One, is that the headwaters of the river change, depending on the time of year. As well, the discharge section measures cubic feet per second, but the number I have is for acre feet per year. I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this needs conversion, or how to do that. Help? It's here if you wanna look at it. Murderbike 18:42, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what to do about the headwaters issue, but there are conversion factors for acre feet per year here.Kmusser 19:06, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

For the headwaters, you might use the place described by the source coordinates listed at its entry on GNIS, and then make clear in the article's text that the upper course is often/usually dry. This would have the benefit of including the uppermost course of streambed considered (by USGS data, at least) to be part of the river's course, without regard to whether water is flowing in it at any given moment. At any rate, in my experience infoboxes in general don't handle nuance very well, so you'd probably want to rely on the body of the article to establish greater accuracy and clarity as needed. --Malepheasant 00:12, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

You can do conversions like this as a Google search, triggering Google's calculator. For example try "500 acre-feet per year in cubic feet per second" in Google (500 or whatever amount you have).

Also, looking at your sandgeobox I notice one of the things about the geobox that has annoyed me. Perhaps there is a solution and I just don't know, but -- when listing tributaries, if one happens to have a page on wikipedia, it becomes a link, often to the wrong page. If there is no page for the tributary you want to list I don't know how to "force" it to not be a link. One can, of course, redlink it, but sometimes it would be nice to just have it shown in black text as a non-link. Can this be done? Thanks Pfly 03:25, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I've been using <nowiki></nowiki> on either side of words & phrases I don't want to wikilink (note that if you want to copy them from the edit page I had to double them to make them show here.) For instance on the Watonwan River article in the "tributaries" section: The north and south forks are redirects to the main article, so I used nowiki tags to prevent them from displaying as internal links. --Malepheasant 04:09, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips folks! Murderbike 07:37, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh good idea with the nowiki tags, Malepheasant. Thanks! Pfly 09:09, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Assessment

As some of you may have noticed, the {{tl:River}} template now has an argument for assessing an article's quality. This was initially set up by User:Bejnar, and I've since created the categories and tweaked the template so it adds the articles to the correct category. Details are available at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Rivers/Assessment. I'm kinda new to this project, but I think it might be an idea to mention this use of the template, and put a link to the assessment page on the main project page. Anyway, I hope it all works right, and can provide us with a useful means of finding articles to improve -Kieran 18:25, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

May I?

I am a water engineer and, though living in the USA, I have a long experience working overseas in various countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. I would like to join the team if the list is not yet closed. I have started compiling a list of rivers, for the time being I have started with Romania. I intend to continue, to make the list as complete as possible before moving ahead to other items, though I think it would be presumptious ever to claim that the list of rivers for any particular country is complete.

I also consider that besides articles on rivers, the project could also be concerned with developments on rivers, such as dams, storage reservoirs, hydroelectric plants etc. Maybe there is another project, which I failed to identify, dealing with those. But that is valid for the future. At present I just want to know that what I started is OK with everybody else.

I may be dealing with water but still dont intend to make waves. Afil 01:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to the project, have fun editing. VerruckteDan 13:34, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions regarding the names of international rivers

Most international rivers have different names in the different countries they are crossing, generally in the languages of these countries. I would suggest the folowing rule for the title of the article (all other names should be mentioned and be redirected to the main article.

• If the river has an English name, even if it does not cross an English speaking country, the English name should be used. Example: The Danube River has several names such as Donau, Duna, Dunai, Dunăre and others.
• If the rivers do not have English names, the name in the language of the country with the longest reach of the river should be used. Example: This Tisza river has the names Tisza in Hungarian, Tisa in Ukrainian, Romanian and Serbian, Theiss in German. As the reach of the river in Hungary is the longest, the name Tisza should be used.

This rule was followed in the two examples quoted. However, accepting the rule as a general rule could avoid disputes in other cases.

I would appreciate the comments of other members of the team, so that I know that, in applying an accepted rule.Afil 22:09, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of the rule. I am not sure about the sole use of the second criteria: "longest reach", if there is no English name. Our existing policy for Rivers with multiple names has "famous name" (a ticklish issue there), then "longest reach", and if all else fails, then name at mouth. Some are easy like Ganges (the English name) instead of Ganga (most famous ?). Others are more difficult. The Surma-Meghna River System is an example where the Surma is the longest reach, but the indigenous editors argued for Meghna as the biggest. We ended up with "Surma-Meghna River System" for the overall unifying article, with separate articles for each major portion of the system. Which, all things considered, is not a bad solution. The problem is exemplified by the (rather short) debate at Merger of Ghaghara and Karnali. I think we do need a clear rule, and your rule 1 is better than "most famous". I like rule 2, "longest reach"; but I think that we need a clean-up rule where "longest reach" is debatable, such as a hyphenated river system label as was used in the Surma-Meghna River System case, with the upstream river being listed first. I do not like the existing rule 3 "river mouth", especially where there is not consensus. --Bejnar 20:50, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

A related problem is the "Rio Grande River" problem where editors don't realize that one of the words in the name is "River". I think that we need a rule of thumb that says when the word for river is used in the non-English name of a river, that that word will be translated as "River" in the Wikipedia tile. Thus "Rud-e Safid" in Iran becomes "Safid River" rather than "Safid Rud" or "Safid Raod" or "Safidrud River". --Bejnar 22:50, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree that if, in any language, the name of the river contains the name "River" in that language (or any other name which indicates a water course such as "Stream" or others specific to that language) the english name River should not be added.

In such cases one of the following rules should be applied:

• the name of the river should be left as is (including the name of the river in the original language) thus: "Rio Colorado", "Bela Reka", "Rud-e Safid", "Râul Galben" etc. This version is to be preferred.

• only the name "River" should be translated and the actual name of the river should be left as is in the original language. This would lead to the forms "Colorado River", "Bela River", "Safid River" or "Galben River" for the above quoted examples.

The total translations such as, for the above quoted examples "Colored River", "White River", "White River" or "Yellow River" should be avoided. I had trouble finding out that Safid Rud means White River and whould hardly have looked it up under that name (and I sincerely believe that nobody else would.

The rule is applicable only for rivers. When we talk about River Systems, such as the Surma-Meghna River System, the problem of chosing only one does not arise, as both names are included in the title. I have worked in Bangladesh for several years on water related projects and am familiar with the problem of river names in Bangladesh and the confusions they may create. Most of the country is a delta area, and as such the rivers have many branches. Each branch has a separate name (sometimes even two or more names). If, for any reason, an article is posted for one of these branches, it should have as title the river name of that branch. For systems, including various branches and rivers hyphenated names should be acceptable. This also applies to various other deltaic areas. For instance, we have an article for the Rhone Delta which is posted under the name of Camargue which is the name under which the area is known, with a redirect from Rhone Delta. This is the name of the system. It mentions the two branches of the Rhone River the Grand Rhone and the Petit Rhone. There also in an article for the entire Rhone basin. If and when articles are required for any of the two branches, they may have the name of the branch as title. Afil 19:50, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

"only the name "River" should be translated and the actual name of the river should be left as is in the original language. This would lead to the forms "Colorado River", "Bela River", "Safid River" or "Galben River" for the above quoted examples." This is the better rule as it goes along with the general rule that titles should be in English. Otherwise we end up with the "River river" seen in some Wikipedia articles. --Bejnar 23:35, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

question about correct terminology

Hiya,

I know nothing about rivers, except that my grandad used to live beside one. :-) Anyhow, I have a question. I'm reading an article that was translated from Chinese, discussing the Yangtze river in the area between Wuhan and Dongting Lake. It repeatedly uses the term "meander" to describe this: Imagine a river running more or less northeast. Centuries pass, earth & sand shift and alter the course of the river gradually until it hits a big hill. At that point, the flow alters in such a way that a minor tributary suddenly becomes the main course of the flow.. but the "meander" bit is that the new path no longer runs roughly northeast, it has a couple kilometers-long bulges shaped like the head of a q-tip (or like the shape of the piece that sticks out of a crossword puzzle piece) where the water ran around large obstacles. Those bulges... are they properly called "meanders"? Thanks! Ling.Nut 15:46, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

PS The relevant article is Battle of Red Cliffs, and I'm gonna write a very brief bit (perhaps a paragraph, perhaps less) about the Yangtze river changing its course. It just occurred to me that if some WP:RIVER folks would look it over in the future (the section isn't written yet) and ensure that it uses proper terminology and has relevant wikilinks, that would be a Good Thing. Thanks! Ling.Nut 15:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes they are called meanders. I have included a link to the meander article in the one you wrote, so that persons interested can get additional information. Glad to help in the future, just let me know.Afil 19:57, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Order of presenting tributaries

The present order is to present tributaries starting from the mouth and going upstreams. This presentation should be discussed. Logically rivers are discussed from upstreams to downstreams. Thus presentations of the course of the river start with the source, describe the course of the river and finally reach to the mouth of the river. When defining the tributaries right and left are defined looking downstreams. Why would the list of the tributaries be done in a different order?Afil 19:36, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree and I asked about this a while back here, but the discussion did not develop. Any river that I work on follows the source to mouth convention and the left right designation is based on this perspective. Hopefully a discussion will develop this time so a guideline can be agreed upon. VerruckteDan 22:58, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

I also agree on the source-to-mouth order. An exception would be for "hierarchical" lists, like Tributaries of the Columbia River, in which it only makes sense to start at the mouth. Pfly 03:22, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

There is logic to both systems, source-to-mouth and mouth-to-source. For hierarchical lists such as List of rivers of Europe mouth-to-source is a lot more practical indeed. Generally the tributaries are less significant/important further upstream, that could be an argument for mouth-to-source as well. I'm not sure whether it's really desirable to choose a standard presentation, it's more important that the article text shows which order is applied. Markussep ^Talk 15:56, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I consider that Markussep is right and that a standard presentation is not really desirable. I would therefore suggest that the prescription in the list paragraph of the main article should be appropriately modified, accepting both orders, as required by the logic of the article. I also agree that the order chosen should be indicated so that readers understand what is being done.Afil 16:19, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

While I prefer mouth to source order, I can understand that the reverse order (source to mouth) might be useful in some cases. I also think that the same order should be followed for all aspects of river articles (i.e. describing the course, listing the order of tributaries, etc.). The problem is that a standard presentation is already given in the WikiProject River guidelines, which currently call for mouth to source order for listing tributaries: "Lists: List the tributaries, starting from the mouth and going upstream.". Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 16:56, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

We need to be clear in our discussion here. It may well be logical to discuss them source to mouth in an article (like Amazon River but where is its source exactly?) but mouth to source works much better for standalone lists (like List of rivers in Montana). Rmhermen 17:14, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Mouth-to-source tends to list the "more important" tributaries first in the list, which saves readers from scanning down through the multi-screen lists of intermittent creeks and the like that seem to accumulate over time. We needn't be slaves to consistency, one of the principles of pedagogy is to increase comprehension by presenting the same information in different ways. Stan 16:18, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Subclassification of rivers

At present the categories for articles and stubs is to indicate the country or countries they cross as Rivers of.... However, I start getting to many articles in the category Rivers of Romania and have been advised by the administrators to indicate subunits. It is of course possible to invent categories such as rivers of district X or rivers of county Y. However this does not make much sense to me. I would rather indicate rivers by river basins or subbasins. Of course it could be both.

I would welcome the input of the participants to the Rivers project on this matter, as they are the experts in this field. We could then submit to the administrators a coherent proposal on the best waty to subdivide the categories and stub categories agreed upon by the participants of the project.Afil 02:32, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Help with river length

So, I'm doing the Lyre River article in my sandbox, and when trying to find stats, I find this document here which says: "The Lyre River has a total length of 16.8 miles, with a basin covering 66.1 square miles. The Lyre is the only watershed in the region that is fed by a natural lake, Lake Crescent, resulting in a unique flow, temperature and water chemistry regime. Lake Crescent, located at RM 5.2, is a large, deep lake of 4,700 acres with a depth of 640 feet." So, if the river has a total length of 16.8 miles, how can Lake Crescent, it's source, be located at River Mile 5.2? Murderbike 22:08, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, checking other sources, I've decided the 16.8 number is wrong. Does someone want to rate this article? Murderbike 23:17, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Help with Columbia River?

Hi folks, I've been working pretty hard on the Columbia River article for a few months. I would like to nominate it for GA status soon, though there is certainly more work needed - see the Talk:Columbia River page for some of my thoughts on that.

At any rate, I'd love to have a few more eyes on it leading up to, and during, the nomination. I just noticed the recommended article structure here, and will consider restructuring the article more along those lines - there are some good ideas there. -Pete 19:11, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Yet Another Featured Article Candidate

Plunketts Creek (Loyalsock Creek) (in Lycoming and Sullivan Counties, Pennsylvania and with our project tag) is a Featured Article Candidate. If you want to weigh in on the nomination, it is here Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Plunketts Creek (Loyalsock Creek). Thanks for any feedback! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:38, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

• PS What do you think of the word "subtributaries" for tributaries that are not direct tributaries of the main stream? If this is not a valid word, what do you call such things? Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:20, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Plunketts Creek made featured article today - thanks to all who helped in any way! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:41, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Columbia River nominated for "Good Article"

And the Columbia River - just nominated that one. Please evaluate according to the Wikipedia:What is a good article? criteria, and comment on the Talk:Columbia River page. Thanks! -Pete 00:07, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposed deletion: List of well-known rivers

List of well-known rivers (via WP:PROD)

--User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:16, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Islais Creek

Hi, everyone. I recently created an article for Islais Creek, a small creek in San Francisco, California. I am trying to put this article in relevant wikipeojects, and am wondering if this article should be considered as part of the WP:RIVERS. Thanks. Chris! _ct 02:32, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Antuã

I'm considering nominating Antuã for deletion. It seems to be non-notable, but I'd think all rivers are notable. What, according to WP:RIVER, constitutes a notable river? --Montchav 15:44, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

The consensus over at AfD has generally been that all rivers are inherently notable.Kmusser 15:48, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Looking at the Portugese article there is a free image (lovely too) here and some info on the source elevation, basin area, etc not in this version. I do not speak Portugese, but I can puzzle out things sometimes - I think the name of the river is disputed, but if someone who can read Portugese could check this out, that would help, thanks Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 16:09, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Tibbet's Brook and diverted rivers

Anybody working on this one? I'm interested in how the northwest Bronx was relandscaped, resulting in the diversion of this watercourse. Hard to see how this one, like the Saw Mill R. to its north, had a natural course to the Hudson, when now both end in buried sewers/surface canals that cut under/thru+_+ a high ridge to the west. Seems the "history" section in cases like this should include the actual history of the river's course, not just the history of things around it. Robert Goodman (talk) 17:00, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Salmon River (Washington)

I've started work on this article (not to be confused the the White Salmon River) in my sandbox, but have kinda hit a wall on sources. Does anyone here happen to know any decent books that would focus on rivers in Washington that would have more info than I'm finding? Murderbike 20:25, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Technical term needed

Hello, I'm looking for the proper English term for a new category on Commons that should include images such as 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. In German there are the general terms "Trockenfluss" (literally translated: dry river) and "Intermittierendes Gewässer" (transl: intermittend body of water), but I'm unsure if one of these would really be the correct (geographical or hydrogeological) technical term for all kinds of Wadis, Arroyos, Riviers, Creeks … temporary rivers, big ones and small streams … and perhaps dry valleys too. Any suggestions? --Ü 16:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

English usually uses the term "intermittent river" for these.Kmusser (talk) 18:01, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, so I'll use this term then :-) or "ephemeral rivers" as the article "River" suggests.

Hmm, another point: reading this main article (river) I found the following part "An intermittent river (or ephemeral river) flows occasionally and can be dry for several years at a time. These rivers are found in regions with limited and highly variable rainfall." – The last part is obviously incomplete as the reasons for intermittent occurrence include not only rainfall extremes, but also – especially in temperate zones – geological/pedological river bed conditions (e.g. highly permeable sandy soils or karst topography, cf. the "Donauversickerung" here - en). Perhaps you could add something appropriate to that explanation? (I'm not bold enough to do so by myself as my English is not perfect, and "river" is a higly linked-to article). --Ü 20:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Done, note there is a difference between intermittent and ephemeral, basically of duration - ephemeral might last hours or days while intermittent usually lasts weeks or months. We actually have a better description over at Perennial stream. Kmusser (talk) 18:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for the additional hints! --Ü 01:02, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The gallery is there now, btw :-) --Ü 09:32, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Talk:Saraswati River (Bengal)

Similar to the last question, on this page is a debate on whether a river should be called "dead" or changed to "dry". Rmhermen (talk) 14:17, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Wiki-canoe

This seems the most obvious place to put this idea. Has this already been done? Franamax (talk) 05:27, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

• Sorry to have missed this until now - I am not aware of anything quite like this. The only thing I know of (could very well be other things I've missed) is {{Susquehanna River System}}, which shows all the tribs and sub-tribs etc. of the Susquehanna River (we decided to limit it to drainage basins larger than 40 square miles (about 100 square km). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 20:44, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Lists

Under Article structure: lists, it states that tributaries should be listed starting from the mouth and moving upriver. However, the article on tributaries states that in orography tributaries are ordered from nearest the source to the mouth. If that is the standard in academia, then the guideline should be changed. VerruckteDan 03:37, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I too, am puzzled by this. Has there been any other talk that I have missed? It makes the writing of an article quite difficult as the two cannot be integrated properly in the text.--Harkey Lodger (talk) 22:20, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

See /Archive 2#Order of presenting tributaries. Markussep ^Talk 08:36, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Project banner question

I think I could set up this project's banner with some additional parameters allowing it to assess for the various national WikiProjects as well, thus reducing the number of banners on several pages and making updating assessments as required easier. Would the members of this project be interested in such an action? If yes, I could draft a sample banner and let you all look over it before implementation. John Carter (talk) 20:08, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I would be interested in seeing a draft banner. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 20:35, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Tributaries: lists of

As a geographer I should like to question why tributaries should be listed from the mouth and going upstream? Surely that is illogical - the rational idea is that a river grows in stature as it proceeds from source to mouth, and that is simply because of its tributaries? In any case, rivers all flow that way? Peter Shearan (talk) 09:21, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

There was a discussion about that some months ago, see /Archive 2#Order of presenting tributaries. I think the conclusion was that there's logic to both ways, source-to-mouth and mouth-to-source. Markussep ^Talk 12:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Peer review request

I have nominated List of tributaries of Larrys Creek for peer review here and would appreciate any feedback from knowledgable river editors on its structure, layout and anything else. It is an attempt to list all 42 named tributaries of one creek in a series of tables. The next step after this is WP:FLC, so I would really appreciate some other eyes looking at this before that. Thanks in advance for any help, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:44, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

• Thanks to all the reviewers. It is now at WP:FLC, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

A river's coordinates

Hello, I saw a request for coordinates for the Talk:Pearl River (China). This lead me to look at Yangtze River's and Yellow River's coordinates. It seems weird to me that their coordinates aren't qualified by what location — whether its the source, delta, somewhere else — the coordinates refer to, such as the source coordinates shown by Amazon River. Is it implied that the coordinates mean the river's source's coordinates? Would someone at this project clarify this? Or am I complete off-base about coordinates? If so, please direct me to the appropriate information. Thanks. --Tesscass (talk) 18:36, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

River kilometers

It's customary and useful to pinpoint locations on a river by river mile (distance from the mouth). Since other quantities in Wikipedia are expressed in metric as well as imperial units, should we be expressing river miles as river kilometers (RK)s as well? I've been working recently on Balch Creek and other creek and river articles. It's tempting to go back and add the conversions from RMs to RKs. An example from Balch Creek might look like this: "From its source, the creek runs east on private property before turning briefly south through private land and a short segment of Forest Park, a large municipal park in Portland, at about river mile (RM) 3 or river kilometer (RK) 4.8.... It enters the city and the Portland Audubon Sanctuary simultaneously at about RM 2 (RK 3.2) and then flows northeast, entering the Forest Park subsection known as Macleay Park. Any thoughts about RM to RK conversions and vice versa? Finetooth (talk) 18:32, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

A quick look at google shows 200,000 hits for river mile - but less than 10,000 total for river kilometer/kilometre. Makes me think that river kilometer is not in wide use - but I wonder what term is usually used in metric? Rmhermen (talk) 19:34, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Merge proposal

There is a proposal to merge List of rivers by length with the List of rivers by discharge as the first mentioned list includes discharge information already. Rmhermen (talk) 19:50, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 21:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Canyon and waterfall articles

In that these are features on a river, shouldn't all such articles be part of this project? I just added WP:Rivers to Waddington Canyon but didnt' to Lava Canyon; ditto Basalt Falls. Thoughtts?Skookum1 (talk) 21:35, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure about canyons - some of them may have no river at all. Waterfalls seems ok - if no other project has claimed them yet. Rmhermen (talk) 04:43, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Aren't canyons always formed by rivers? They may no longer have them, but they did once. --NE2 11:18, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

List of U.S. watersheds

I created User:NE2/US watersheds from USGS GIS data. I have disambiguated and fixed all links except for the "Cataloging Unit" (which is the actual name of each watershed). Thus we have, more or less, a list of major rivers if we ignore that column. The following are red links:

• Christian River (Alaska)
• Clear Fork Brazos River (Texas)
• North Fork Red River (Oklahoma, Texas)
• Saline Bayou (Louisiana)
• Salt River (Missouri)

Some Mexican rivers with U.S. tributaries:

• Rio de Bavispe
• Rio de la Concepción
• Rio Sonoyta

Some endorheic basins:

• Buena Vista Lake (California)
• Central Lahontan Basin (California, Nevada)
• Central Nevada Desert Basins (California, Nevada)
• North Lahontan Basin (California, Nevada)
• Oregon Closed Basins (California, Nevada, Oregon)
• Rio Grande Closed Basins (New Mexico, Texas)
• Willcox Playa (Arizona)

--NE2 11:28, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

First I think we should clearly note that those are government defined watersheds - not the standard geological definition. I seem to see some variations in the Michigan entries from those differences. Second I am not sure we need all the information - the Hydrologic Unit Code column doesn't seem to have a good encyclopedic value; the Water Resource Region and Subregion entries all identical in the majority of cases - is it really valuable to have both columns? Rmhermen (talk) 17:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry - I forgot to mention that the table isn't directly for article purposes. It's useful as a sort of "missing articles" list though. --NE2 17:41, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I encountered the non-existence of a page for Buena Vista Lake when working on a Kern River page a while ago. The lake doesn't exist anymore but could have a page like the similarly extinct Tulare Lake. The two small surviving lakes in Buena Vista Lake, Lake Webb and Lake Evans, are also pageless. Also, "Oregon Closed Basins" is kind of a catch-all term. We do have pages for some of these basins, like Harney Basin. A number of other closed basin pages are linked to from Great Basin. Pfly (talk) 05:54, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

If these basins are all listed in Great Basin, a redirect there from the catch-all terms is probably a good plan. --NE2 06:43, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Geobox versus Infobox

Any {{Geobox}} versus {{Infobox River}} consensus? Any beneficial changes which WP:RIVERS should request to them?

Personally, for those who do not have access to a nice GIS system capable of producing "free" maps compatible with Wikipedias various copyright/licensing requirements, it would be nice if we had at least the functionality provided by {{Location map+}} and {{Location map~}} so that at least mouth and source could be plotted if not also the confluence points with major tributaries (to present a rough idea of the river's course).

For some rivers, it would also be nice to present a river mile versus elevation chart (with dams, falls, major confluences, rapids, ... annotated). A very very crude one can be produced as a "Bar chart" with {{Bar box}} and {{Bar pixel}}.

Has anyone addressed the issue(s) of Rivers having "Lakes" in them? i.e. Some rivers are considered to "flow through" a Lake, usually but not always a Reservoir (artificial Lake) created by a dam.

Has anyone considered a Navigation box template to "connect" inter-related tributaries or Lakes (or Waterfalls, rapids, dams, ...)? LeheckaG (talk) 22:35, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Participants

Use this on your User: page to show you are part of this project:

Code	Result
{{User Wikiproject Rivers}}	This user is a participant in WikiProject Rivers.

This is the "standard" way a WikiProject shows user membership, It transcludes a WikiProject Rivers Category to your User page. LeheckaG (talk) 22:47, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

It is a way of showing membership. But not a requirement or the standard. In fact, some of us reject all userboxes (a number of which have caused controversy in the past). Rmhermen (talk) 14:10, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Geographic Names Information System

Please use the "official name" from a Geographic Names Information System for a River article title, and create REDIRECTS when there is a "Common" name.

For instance (for the United States of America): GNIS Search by United States Geological Survey, and enumerate all/any additional names within the article under "Etymology" which should be under "History". LeheckaG (talk) 22:57, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

This is too U.S. specific - and at Wikipedia we use the common name for article titles - even if it conflicts with an official name. Rivers often cross national and subnational language boundaries which would cause conflicts with this criteria. There is no need to include ever alternate name listed in a database as some are very uncommon, unlikely or too minor of variations to need mentioning. Rmhermen (talk) 14:14, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation

While it is often common to refer to a Lake by the smallest civil subdivision which contains it, most larger Rivers, Streams, Creeks, ... with "non-unique" names requiring disambiguation tend to cross multiple civil subdivision boundaries.

• For those in the U.S., please perform a GNIS query for the uniqueness of the Official_Name, and Downstream_Parent.

• A "contested" ambiguous name should redirect to a "Official_name (disambiguation)" page and not to an "Official_name" article.
• Please document your justification for "most important", compare: Flow volume, Length, Historical Significance, Population, Traffic, ...
• An undisambiguated "Official_name" article name needs to have a disambiguation template at the top linking to an appropriate (disambiguation) page.

• Rivers pay little attention to political boundaries!

• A river can be identified uniquely as a tributary of another river or waterbody (lake or definable sea).

• In the U.S., the USGS, (Federal and State) EPA, and (State) Department of Natural Resources, ... uniquely identify rivers by either a hierarchical "hydrological unit code" (8-, 11-, or 14-digit) number or by their downstream parent.

• Article should be named with the downstream river or waterbody following in parentheses "Official_Name (Downstream_Parent)", Examples:
• St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) and St. Joseph River (Maumee River)
• Brandywine Creek (Christina River), Brandywine Creek (Cuyahoga River), ...
• Churchill River (Hudson Bay)

• Remember to perform GNIS queries for the uniqueness of the Official_Name, and Downstream_Parent.
• If you are not sure whether two or more rivers share a common downstream parent,

• For those in the U.S., go to a "Feature Detail Report" (by selecting a Feature ID), and select "Find the Watershed", if the leading/leftmost digits of the USGS Hydrological Unit Code (8-, 11-, or 14-digit number) are different, then they are different downstream watersheds, For example:

• Brandywine Creek (Broken Sword Creek); U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: 1038266 in Crawford County
• Brandywine Creek (Cuyahoga River); in Summit County
• Brandywine Creek (Miami River); U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: 1065935 in Logan County and Shelby County
• Brandywine Creek (Sugar Creek); U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: 1038267 in Tuscarawas County

• Useful resources: USGS; (Federal and State) EPA, (State) Department of Natural Resources.

• In the case where two or more rivers cannot be disambiguated by "Official_Name (Downstream_Parent)":

• In practice, most rivers needing disambiguation have been identified by the smallest appropriate civil subdivision (Town or Village, City, Township, Borough or County, Province or State, Country, or Continent).

• Colorado River and Colorado River (Texas).
• Litani River (South America)

• Smallest appropriate means:

• Civil sub-division needs to completely contain the named river

• mouth to source including unnamed tributaries, but NOT named tributaries nor watershed).

• River name needs to be disambiguous within that civil sub-division.
• Where two or more rivers cannot be disambiguated by "Official_Name (smallest appropriate civil sub-division)":

• Use the smallest appropriate civil sub-division containing a river's mouth and as much of the river as possible, while still being disambiguous.

• Always use parentheses for the disambiguator for U.S. and Australian rivers, not a comma.

• For example Indian River (Michigan) not Indian River, Michigan which is actually a town.

• New Zealand and British rivers have used the River, place format.

• Failing that, the most "common" disambiguating name could follow in parentheses.
• Try to be accurate, but be consistent!

LeheckaG (talk) 23:46, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Besides the enthusiasm!, which I find misplaced, you have reversed our two disambiguation schemes. "In practice, most rivers needing disambiguation have been identified by the smallest appropriate civil subdivision" is the primarty scheme, not by tributary as you have listed. See the archives for these discussions. Rmhermen (talk) 14:17, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Agree regarding the reversal of standard disambiguation scheme -- but this statement is also mistaken (or at least misleading): A "contested" ambiguous name should redirect to a "Official_name (disambiguation)" page and not to an "Official_name" article. Per WP:DAB regarding primary topics, if the simple title (that is, without any parenthetical phrase) is not a primary topic, then the disambiguation page should be at the simple title. There should not be redirects from Simple title Simple title (disambiguation). older ≠ wiser 15:40, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Template Geobox

Read the current Template documentation! and Please update the WikiProject documentation accordingly: {{Geobox River}} has be superseded by the Geobox2 templates: {{Geobox}} and supplying a parameter of River; See: Template:Geobox/type/river. LeheckaG (talk) 23:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

The WikiProject does not recommend the use of Geobox River so the request to upgrade to Geobox2 seems out of place. In fact, it appears that Geobox River was poorly reviewed by members of this project commenting on that template. A first step would be to either get Geobox used here before getting it upgraded. Rmhermen (talk) 14:07, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Do you read template documentation? What I said above, and what the documentation cited above says is that they made several "in-place" modifications to the Geobox template, i.e. when you transclude {{Geobox}} you are really transcluding "Geobox2", which is not a separate template but one Geobox template with all the modifications they made to the original. The difference in usage is whether you say "Geobox River" or "Geobox|River", the former separate templates have been superseded by the later which implements all the various Geoboxes, i.e. "Geobox" versus Geobox "2" is a matter of making sure you are reading the appropriate version "2" of the documentation. LeheckaG (talk) 18:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

My "point" was that the "new Geobox" template "recommendation" (on the WP Rivers page) is not in synchronization with the Geobox template documentation, which has changed from the "Geobox River" to the "Geobox|River" a.k.a. "version 2" format. LeheckaG (talk) 18:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

My question was: Has anyone done an evaluation or taken a poll/vote on "Infobox River" versus "Geobox|River"? I am not sure whether there is another motivation, but in some other WikiProjects - there has been a "push" to use Geobox instead of Infobox so that they are consistent (across feature types and projects). Geobox is based on one single template - whereas the Infoboxes diverged into a "family" of templates which are now sometimes a bit different from each other. As far as I can see, "Geobox|River" can do everything "Infobox River" can do - I am not aware of something which it can not do, and it offers a little bit more. Which I see as both a plus and a minus, there are some useful additional things it can do, but I also can see people "misusing" parts it if they do not have proper guidance. i.e. specific project recommendations on how to use certain parts - and how not to. LeheckaG (talk) 18:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, almost all of the Featured Articles that also have this project's banner on their talk pages use either Geobox2 (or the older Geobox). I think Zambezi is the only one that does not. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:21, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 12297 articles are assigned to this project, of which 480, or 3.9%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. Subscribing is easy - just add a template to your project page. If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 08:30, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I assume the list would be here or linked from here? I am interested. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:22, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Yangtze River

Does anyone at this project care to comment on the recent additional section in Yangtze River called "The Arrival of Steamships for a variety of purposes"? I've suggested that it be split off, but the author is an anonymous IP and I've gotton no response. Thanks! --Tesscass (talk) 00:42, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Category:International rivers

I created Category:International rivers, molded after Category:International lakes and populated it based on some lists for Asia, Africa and Europe. I wasn't able to find any source for border-crossing American rivers though. Now, as I was working on this I realized that the name I had picked perhaps wasn't the most appropriate name, so I nominated the category for renaming. You might want to participate in the renaming discussion. __meco (talk) 00:54, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm a great advocate of adding coordinates to articles (using {{coord}}, to generate a Geo microformat, and to make them appear on Google Maps/ Google Earth, etc)). However, unless we can agree a convention for, say, always using the source and a note to that effect next to the entry, I don't see the sense of adding coordinates, which denote a point, to articles about a linear feature like a (potentially very long) river. Ideally, of course, we'd have infobox fields for source, each major confluence, and mouth. This is touched upon on the project page, but I can find no further discussion. Is anyone interested in taking this forward? Another possibility is adding tables of features, like that on Tame Valley Canal. Even then, we still have to decide which feature (source, mouth/ final confluence, whatever) to use as the defining point for a river. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I am interested in coordinates, for instance like it is done in the infobox at Vltava (both source and mouth, the title coordinates are the mouth's). This article uses the {{Geobox}} template, adapted for rivers. Many rivers (e.g. Loire River) use the specific {{Infobox River}} template, which doesn't have a field for coordinates. I'd say rivers are usually more notable at their mouths, and mouths are often better defined than sources (which may be any place on a slope or in a marshy area). What we could do in articles using the {{Infobox River}} template is add the coordinates to the "mouth" field there, e.g. mouth = [[Rhine]] {{coord|50|0|N|8|16|E}} (same for source in the "origin" field). Not sure what effect that would have on Google Maps etc. Markussep ^Talk 11:24, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree that using the source is too problematic. Some are undefined, some not specified with much exactness. While some river mouths do shift, there is probably more information available to locate them. Rmhermen (talk) 20:52, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. What about rivers with no mouth (i.e. tributaries)? Are just two sets of coordinates appropriate for long rivers like the Nile, Amazon, etc? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:01, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Mouth can also mean confluence (Merriam-Webster definition of mouth: "the place where a stream enters a larger body of water"). So for tributaries, you use the larger river it flows into. In the Vltava example, the mouth is the Elbe at Mělník. I think articles about larger rivers would benefit more from a good map than from an elaborate list of coordinates. Markussep ^Talk 14:33, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks again. That all seems sensible, though I do like to see tables of features, even if on secondary pages; see also, for example, List of crossings of the River Severn whose coordinates, like those for Tame Valley Canal, can be exported as KML, or displayed on a map. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:00, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I didn't know about that kml feature, looks interesting! Would be nice to add that to lists like List of rivers of France, for instance coordinates for each confluence (titles of the confluences could be major river-tributary, like Elbe-Vltava). And a lot of work. Markussep ^Talk 17:52, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

That should be do-able, but first consider creating a tabular version of the page, perhaps using a template. If the titles are to be double-barrelled as you suggest, they would need to be in one table cell. I'll watch that page, do you can raise any specific issues on its talk page.Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:08, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Is there a special reason for using tables? I made a test version of part of the list of rivers in France at my user space: User:Markussep/rivers#North Sea, it seems to work. A reason not to use tables is that the indentions in the lists have a meaning (the river is a tributary of the previous river with one level less indention). Markussep ^Talk 14:08, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

By using tables, I meant one row per river (or per confluece/ point). It's much easier to apply classes consistently (and to prevent inexperienced editors from inadvertently removing them) if the data is presented in a meaningful tabular format. You can then apply microformat classes to other features, such as the country name or region. The use of coord's "name" parameter, as in your examples, is bogus, because the data is not written on the page. Some microformat parsers will ignore it.

It's worth bearing that indentation (like colour and emboldening/ italics) are not suitable methods for conveying information to, for instance, blind people using assistive software. Imaging asking someone to read the page to you over the phone! Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:21, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

It's not just indentation, many of our lists of rivers use a series of nested lists, basically an outline, to indicate tributary structure - nested lists meet ADA and W3C guidelines and spoken word browsers can handle them fine. You could convert the lists to a tabular format and it probably would look better, but I wouldn't want to lose the tributary structure information in doing so. Kmusser (talk) 14:36, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the "name" field is also used like that in your Severn example. If you have a better suggestion, let me know. Also for the indention, I don't know a good alternative that gives the same information. Markussep ^Talk 14:38, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes; the name, field shouldn't be in {{coord}} at all. Sorry, I forgot that it was there. It was added in this damaging edit which also removed the "Note" properties from the hCard microformat which was used; and is the better solution. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:59, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on microformats, so could you show me how I should edit this *** [[Vologne]] (in [[Pouxeux]] {{coord|48|6|50|N|6|34|1|E|name=Moselle-Vologne}}) in order to improve it (and keep the same information)? Markussep ^Talk 15:13, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

← Microformats are intended for marking-up data which is visible in the page. In your example, "Moselle-Vologne" is not part of the page content. As a table row, with header row, I would use something like:

! River
! Confluence
! Region
! Coordinates
|- class="vcard"
| Vologne | class="fn org" | Moselle-Vologne | [[Pouxeux]] | {{coord|48|6|50|N|6|34|1|E}}|

(I think that's the right table mark-up) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:35, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

And if I want to use a nested list instead of a table, like on my user space (and the original list)? What's the problem with the "name" field anyway? Markussep ^Talk 15:57, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

If you want to use a nested list, then you'll have to use the name property in coord - whose drawbacks I described above (briefly: hidden data, not picked up by some microformat parsers); or create your own template; or resurrect and use {{hcard-geo}}, which was written for exactly such a purpose. If I can figure out anther way, I'll let you know. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:58, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

OK. There's no hurry, I think I'll add some coordinates to river articles first. Markussep ^Talk 18:17, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

I've added coordinates to several river articles, for instance Thérain (mouth) and Aube River (source and mouth). Do you see any points that should be improved? Markussep ^Talk 10:55, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks fine to me - I use the Geobox River template - see Larrys Creek for an example - which also does this. I forget - does the Infobox River allow the source and mouth elevations to be added? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:42, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes it does, the "elevation" field for the source and the "mouth elevation" field for the mouth. Markussep ^Talk 13:52, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for River

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Categories

Hi folks. A few of us have been working on articles about rivers and streams in Oregon. Since we are starting to get into major creeks, things like Category:Rivers of Oregon and List of rivers of Oregon, which are the default places where we add the creek articles, are seeming increasingly narrow. Has there been a discussion about creeks and their categorization that anyone could direct me to? I'm thinking of proposing a move from Category:Rivers of Oregon to Category:Rivers and streams of Oregon, or maybe make a parent cat Category:Streams of Oregon and then make the rivers cat and Category:Creeks of Oregon subcats of that one (though it starts to get messy with the forks, branches, swales, sloughs, etc., but maybe those will just default to the stream cat). Anyway, I noticed that in Category:Rivers of the United States by state, only the Virgin Islands had a "rivers and streams" cat and I was thinking that if I propose to rename the Oregon cat, we might as well move all the U.S. states at the same time. But maybe that's a really really bad idea for some reason. Thoughts? Valfontis (talk) 22:53, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

The main question for me would be: is there a clear difference between a river, a stream and a creek? If not, I wouldn't bother renaming the categories. Markussep ^Talk 08:17, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

According to GNIS, "stream" is the generic term for a body of flowing water (in the U.S.). Creeks are, well, things that are named "Foo Creek" and rivers are things that are named "Foo River". Rivers and creeks are streams, streams are not necessarily rivers or creeks. Valfontis (talk) 08:36, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates for linear features

I have started a page, to give guidance on adding coordinates to articles about linear features such as roads and rivers. I intend to use it to document current practise, and develop polices for future use. Please feel free to add to it, or to discuss the matter on its talk page. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The proposal there takes as "main coordinate" the mouth/estuary. For many rivers, neither the source nor the mouth are clearly defined points. When displaying a map for a river, it would be desirable that most of its course would be visible on a map centered on the main coordinate. Using the mouth (or estuary) as primary coordinate that would waste a lot of space. Therefore it has been proposed earlier to use a point somewhere "in the middle". As guidance could be given: the point on the river closest to the smallest circle containing all its branches. Although theoretically not unique, this would in practice be relatively easy to determine. So I propose to change the "main coordinate" in the table accordingly and move the estuary/mouth to "further coordinates". −Woodstone (talk) 14:39, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Almost all rivers have a defined mouth (exception might include Okavango and perhaps Amazon), so it makes a logical choice for a single point coordinate. Rmhermen (talk) 15:31, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

If you display a map centered on the mouth, on a scale to show the whole river, a lot of screen space will be wasted. −Woodstone (talk) 18:29, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Maribyrnong River

I cannot get the River infobox to display an image. Can someone take a look for me? Thanks, Mattinbgn\^talk 08:31, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Done, I added image_size and map_size fields to force the width to be 250px. The standard width for images in the infobox is 256px, I don't know why that doesn't work for these images. Markussep ^Talk 11:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I was getting very frustrated! Cheers, Mattinbgn\^talk 20:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Found resource for Arctic-basin rivers

I was looking up someting on the obscure Sikanni Chief River, part of the Peace-Mackenzie drainage, and found this great resource on all Arctic basins, the Saskatchewan-Churchill, Hudson's Bay, Yenisey, etc etc. Just dropping it here for refernce if someone happens to be looking for flow/discharge rates on those rivers.Skookum1 (talk) 22:18, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Recreation

Many rivers provide recreational opportunities - boating, canoeing, angling, walking - and I wonder if this should have its own section under Article_Structure or if these activities should be listed under Economy? In some areas they might be important economic drivers, in others of little economic relevance. Derek Andrews (talk) 10:31, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

sources on river length

Hi, we are currently having a problem at Talk:Egiin Gol. Basically, the question here is what is an acceptable source: can a reproducable measurement on a (published) map/ computer image be acceptable? The problem is that literature offers different values for the river's lentgh (this is even true for bigger rivers like the Selenga), so it's hard to decide which one to pick. In fact, given that other sources usually don't tell how they arrived at their result, giving a reproducable method and its result might even be the more meaningful way? Yaan (talk) 18:24, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Use them all - while providing their sources. If conflicting measurements exist, the article should mention it. Rmhermen (talk) 15:24, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

River Irwell

Could someone re-assess the River Irwell article? - it's moved on a lot since it was assessed as start class. Richerman (talk) 17:26, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Are maps to be considered primary or secondary sources?

Please give your input at Wikipedia talk:No original research#Regarding maps being "primary sources" according to this policy. --Rschen7754 (T C) 12:04, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Category:Rivers of Ulster County, New York

I have just become aware of the Category:Rivers of Ulster County, New York, which appears to be the only Rivers of X County category in New York. It is presently being added to articles that are already in the Rivers of New York cat, which (news to me) says that its OK to include parent and child cats in the same article.

I find myself thinking, is this a good idea? First, I'm wary of the parent/child combo, though I do understand that there are some places it makes sense. According to Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories, that is when the child categories do not exhaustively include all of the articles that belong to the parent. Note that this is not the case with a county/state breakdown (unless, of course, we assign rivers to a county cat only if they are wholly contained by that county?).

But whole the idea of Rivers of X County seems troubling: how many rivers fit entirely within a single county? Rivers of Ulster County contains six creeks, one "kill", and one river. Are we going to assign a dozen counties each to the Hudson and Mohawk and every other river of any normal size. Or should we consider nipping it in the bud before the rest of the River of X County cats get created? -- Mwanner | Talk 15:17, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I would also be inclined to consider this overclassification that should be discouraged. Rmhermen (talk) 15:24, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Incidentally, there is something similar going on at Bridges-- see WT:WikiProject_Bridges#Bridges_in_X_County. -- Mwanner | Talk 22:26, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

In that case we're looking at an explicit project directive to do this. Here we don't have one. And for my part, I consider that overcategorization as well. Daniel Case (talk) 21:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

That category is largely meant for rivers — streams, really — that are exclusive or almost exclusive to Ulster County. There's no need to clutter up the state-level cat with them. Rivers like the Hudson, Mohawk or Genesee which flow through a number of counties in NY should have their own cats that can be listed as subcats of the "Rivers in X County" cats, keeping down the clutter at the bottom of the article. Daniel Case (talk) 21:27, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

It's too bad there is no term that clearly encompasses smaller rivers-- that would be a nice clean solution. But our stream article suggests that the term "stream" is a general one that encompasses the entire range of river sizes. Our only article on creek suggests that they are tidal. I'm almost tempted to suggest Category:Small rivers of New York, but how the hell would one define the dividing line. We could say that Rivers of X County should be used only for rivers that are contained entirely within a county, but that seems kinda silly. Besides, I suspect that if we go ahead and create the 70 county articles, they'll end up applied to every stream in the state, with the State cat on each as well. Are county list articles a better solution here? -- Mwanner | Talk 21:49, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

"Watercourses", perhaps? Or perhaps naming the parent cat "Rivers and watercourses in ..." or even just "Watercourses in ..."? Daniel Case (talk) 23:18, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I meant "encompasses only smaller rivers". The idea being to have a cat that applied to small streams but not full-fledged rivers, so as to divide the articles up. I think it's a non-starter, though. But you're right-- does Category:Rivers need to be renamed to accommodate smaller streams?

Anyway, on the original question, it seems to me there are two options, short of letting county and state cats get assigned to all watercourse articles in NY. One is to limit county-cats to rivers that fit (almost) entirely within the county, as Dan suggests above, and the other is to delete the Rivers in Foo County cats. I worry some that the former would be tough to enforce: an editor sees that a county cat exists and goes boldly forth applying it to all streams that set foot in the given county. So I guess I lean towards deletion. -- Mwanner | Talk 19:28, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Or on second thought, what about Category:Small watercourses in Foo County? That would fit Dan's intent and lessen any tendency to apply it to every stream that crosses a county. It might also help keep such articles from being tagged with the State cat, while the Small watercourses in Foo County cat itself could belong to the state cat. Thoughts? -- Mwanner | Talk 19:35, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Problem is, who says what a small watercourse is? It's not like ponds and lakes, where there is a clear-cut, objective distinction accepted by geographers and hydrologists (and, of course, we include pond articles in the lakes project). Daniel Case (talk) 17:40, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Clear-cut, objective distinction? From pond: "Although the term pond is universally used to describe waterbodies that are smaller than lakes, an internationally recognised size cutoff has not yet been agreed, with values ranging from 2 hectares (20,000 m²) to 8 hectares (80,000 m²) used to distinguish the smaller from the larger waterbody." That's 20 acres on the high end. I could name dozens of Adk ponds larger than that, starting with 338-acre Long Pond in the Saint Regis Canoe Area. I've also seen the distinction based on depth, and on whether or not there is a dam (a "pond" being an "impoundment". -- Mwanner | Talk 18:19, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

It's not about the area, but about the water. I learned in physical geography class that a pond, properly, has no clearly discernible inflow (Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds is considered the source of the Hudson for this reason ... it has small inlet brooks, none of which are alone enough to fill it. Lakes have a definite inflow and outflow. Yes, both names are often misappplied, but that's not peculiar to bodies of water. Daniel Case (talk) 02:09, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Two comments:

• This argument has also taken place in Category:Rivers of Pennsylvania where there has been a trend to subcatergorize by watershed - certainly an alternative to subcatergorization by county. But whether by county or watershed, how does a visitor know in which subcategory to find a particular river? Is it best to include parent cats, eliminate subcats altogether, or perhaps use subcats to depopulate parent cats and direct visitors to a state list of rivers to aid them in their search? There is already a List of rivers of Pennsylvania, but as it is a manually maintained list, it does not seem a reliable way to accomplish this goal.

I don't have clearcut answers, but in general, we don't worry about readers not knowing which subcat to look into: for example, we categorize NRHP sites by county but don't include them in the state cat. Actually, I'm not sure this isn't a non-issue-- if I'm looking for a particular river, I'll type it in the search box. The cat search method is useful when I'm looking for all of the rivers in a given area. Granted, what I'm really arguing against here is the "include articles in both county and state cats", not the existence of the county cats per se. I dunno, I'm about ready to back away from the whole issue. Still, it seems to me that, at the point at which only one or two cats exist out of what will inevitably become a set of 70 cats is a real good time to think long and hard about where you want to come out. Especially given the likelihood of editors coming along and assigning a dozen or more county cats to the Hudson, Mohawk, and other long rivers. -- Mwanner | Talk 18:09, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

• The defination of "river" has also been a point of contention in Pennsylvania Rivers, with editors removing the PA rivers cat from articles. Gjs238 (talk) 16:42, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

IMO, categorization by watershed is effectively accomplished by "Tributaries of ..." cats and (if considered necessary) subcats). Or a navbox.

As for distinguishing between what's a river and what isn't, see above. Daniel Case (talk) 17:40, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

As I suggested at WP:BRIDGE, we could always keep the rivers directly in the state-level category, and just use lists for the county subcategories. That way the river articles are not overcategorized by every applicable county, the state-level category is not hindered by forcing readers to browse through county subcategories, and the county-specific information is also preserved. Postdlf (talk) 17:51, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, any river long enough to be in several different county cats (say, more than three) deserves its own category IMO. Daniel Case (talk) 02:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

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