Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers/Archive 3

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Nine Mile Run (New Jersey)

Please help find sources and data, such as USGS data, for this article. I created this article for a branch of the Six Mile Run (New Jersey). If it is not notable enough, it probably could be merged to the beforementioned Sixmile Run article.--Chemicalinterest (talk) 18:37, 30 May 2010 (UTC) Nevermind. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 15:39, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

River Parrett at FAC

Just to let you know River Parrett has been nominated for Featured Article status and discussion is ongoing at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/River Parrett/archive2. It would be great if anyone had any comments.— Rod talk 19:50, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Done. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 15:39, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

River Sweep creation

Is River Sweep (of the Ohio River, its tributaries, and watershed) notable? The website for it is at this address. If so, we should create it asap. All is One (talk) 17:16, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Probably not on it's own, but a mention could go in the Ohio River article which probably ought to have a section on pollution and cleanup. Kmusser (talk) 19:39, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
Also I would think ORSANCO is notable, that article could be created and include River Sweep info. Kmusser (talk) 19:45, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The Great Ditch!

Would an article for this be worded in the same way for a stream such as the Terhune Run? It is classified as a canal here. Thank you. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 15:31, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I just made a couple edits to the page you made, Great Ditch, and thought I'd mention one here. The GNIS "canal" class is broad and everything classed as a canal may not necessary best be called a canal. As the GNIS FAQ puts it, "The GNIS database utilizes 63 broad categories of feature types originally defined solely to facilitate retrieval of entries with similar characteristics from the database." Since this Great Ditch was apparently made to drain part of Pigeon Swamp and not for purposes of navigation, irrigation, drinking water supply, etc, it seems better to say it is a drainage ditch instead of a canal--at least it fits the meanings given on those Wikipedia pages better. I did some quick searching for info about this Great Ditch. It sounds like it was originally made to drain part of the swamp, but has not been maintained for a long time and is now regarded as one of the tributary "streams" of Lawrence Brook--but I didn't find any great source about it, just various bits and pieces (also that there is another Great Ditch in New Jersey, U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Great Ditch (apparently you need a license to fish in that one), and another in North Carolina, U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Great Ditch (although that one doesn't look like what I'd call a "ditch"!). Looking at it in ACME Mapper and comparing the Topo and Satellite views, it appears that a housing subdivision has been built over part of it. Pfly (talk) 06:22, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
The Great Ditch does flow between houses on Fresh Ponds Road at 40°23′20″N 74°29′35″W / 40.388854°N 74.492937°W / 40.388854; -74.492937, but it does not flow through them. It also crosses Viking Way at 40°23′50″N 74°31′08″W / 40.39723°N 74.518901°W / 40.39723; -74.518901, where it is blocked by cement walls from the road. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 19:01, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Move of Royce Brook River to Royce Brook

I would like to perform the move stated above because the USGS GNIS lists it as "Royce Brook" here. Any opinions? --Chemicalinterest (talk) 11:57, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Go for it; makes sense to me. Pfly (talk) 06:05, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Moved. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 18:57, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

FA for small stream?

Is there any way you can get an article for a small stream like Oakeys Brook to FA status? --Chemicalinterest (talk) 12:03, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Sure, take a look at Balch Creek or Plunketts Creek (Loyalsock Creek) as examples. Kmusser (talk) 12:22, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup needed

Cleanup is needed near the bottom of the page. ContrillionAU (talk) 10:10, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Which page? Markussep Talk 11:51, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

GNIS elevation

Is the GNIS stream elevation for the mouth, source, or some average? All is One (talk) 00:28, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

GNIS gives two numbers, the first is for the source, the second is the mouth. Kmusser (talk) 00:50, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
I don't think so -- unless you're looking at something other than I am. The two numbers for elevation are feet and meters -- I think at the mouth only. older ≠ wiser 02:10, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
It is the mouth in feet/meters, yes. The [GNIS FAQ] page describes the elevations: "Question #16. How accurate is the elevation data in the GNIS Database? How was it measured?" In short, the elevations are "not official" and might be inaccurate in some cases. I've come to be wary of them and usually verify them with other sources, even just a quick check in Google Earth or the like. Pfly (talk) 10:29, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the correction. Kmusser (talk) 11:25, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarifications. We should incorporate this information into the main project page to help everyone. All is One (talk) 00:21, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
I had a problem with that in some of my articles. Since I used the infobox that had the conversion template built in, I noticed that the SI measurement for one field was always equal to the English measurement for the other field. I then realized what happened. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 11:23, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
To find the source elevation, plug the GNIS source coordinates into the Google Earth search box and click. When Google Earth stops hunting and has centered on the coordinates, it will display the source elevation near the bottom of its display screen. Finetooth (talk) 14:50, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
Just a note - in GoogleEarth the Terrain box has to be checked in Layers for this to work (it also shows the apparent elevation of the point of view - I think this is usually 1000 meters if you go to coordinates). For streams in the United States, you can also paste in the source coordinates from GNIS and check the elevation on the USGS topographic map in Acme Mapper. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 16:04, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
BTW, with the Terrain view you can also see the names of streams. --Chemicalinterest (talk) 17:01, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
Is the GPS Visualizer website accurate? Its elevations vary slightly by a few feet from the GNIS elevations. Maybe it is more accurate ... You can paste coordinates into the search field first for the stream's source elevation and again for its mouth elevation. This is another way to obtain data for infoboxes by using two individual searches. All is One (talk) 20:20, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

(out) I have not used GPS Visualizer, sorry. I do know that when DIncher and I were working on Waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park, some ofthe elevations were way off - a few falls that were upstream of others, were listed at lower elevations, or more subtly, the difference in elevation between two consecutive falls was less than the height of eiither falls. I contacted GNIS and they fixed the elevations - often the "dot" was off by a bit and so was up higher on the side of the valley. They also emailed me that the elevation database is being updated and that "...the rounding of GNIS to the nearest second causes some discrepancies between what was input for the point coordinate in decimal degrees and may cause a difference in the elevation ...". Ruhrfisch ><>°° 20:42, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Another thing about GNIS coords, etc: there are mistakes here and there in the GNIS database. In my experience river mouth coordinates seem to be almost always very accurate, while the source coordinates are usually pretty good, but sometimes a bit misplaced. Looking in Google Earth/Maps, satellite view, can sometimes clearly show source coordinates to be less than perfect (I imagine this is true for things like waterfalls too). Sometimes it is hard to tell from a satellite photo (actually in Google Earth/Maps they are usually aerial photos done with airplanes in the US) where exactly a river's source is, but sometimes it is fairly obvious--when the stream begins at a lake outlet, for example. Even if the source isn't exactly clear in the imagery, sometimes it is clear that the GNIS source coordinates are not quite right--they seem to often come out upslope from the valley's base, for example. These might be things to consider if one really cares about getting a particular stream's source elevation correct, or at least as close to correct as possible. I think most GNIS coordinates were obtained from USGS topo maps, years ago. Topo maps are great, but the kind of terrain models and aerial imagery available now, in Google Earth/Maps and such like, are probably more precise and accurate in most cases (this was my experience working at a local county's GIS department--the best available dataset in terms of precision and accuracy was the orthophotography--the exact same imagery Google bought and used; it was better on average than any other GIS data we had, including USGS data).
Also, sometimes there are glaring errors in GNIS data. I've seen source coordinates that were off by many many miles. I can't remember an example of that right now, but I remembered one I recently saw that had a huge and obvious mistake in one of the stream's sequence of coordinates (but not the one used for the source): Rio Chama (Rio Grande); the GNIS entry (U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Rio Chama) lists 14 coordinate points along the river, and #12 is something like 50 miles too far north, across several other significant river basins. Anyway, all this is just to say, if something seems fishy in GNIS, it might well be! And just to not be dissing GNIS too much--it's way way better than the GEOnet Names Server coordinate data for streams outside the US, which I've been using recently--sometimes it is sooo bad. Pfly (talk) 05:17, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Naming rivers in translation

I've been working through a small part of the huge pile of stub pages on rivers in the La Plata Basin of South America--mostly just adding coordinates. It looks like nearly every river (or rio) in the basin already has a page, but almost all are bare-bone stubs. They mostly provide only the river's name and what country it is in--perhaps the state too if it's Brazil. Since some Spanish and Portuguese river names are used for multiple rivers there's often disambiguation, like Grande River (Jujuy) and Pardo River (Mato Grosso do Sul). Those two pages are typical of the "stubbiness". In almost every case, especially for Brazil, the river's name was changed from "Rio Foobar" to "Foobar River". I'm guessing this was done to make the names "English" for the English Wikipedia, even though there are plenty of rivers whose English names use "Rio", like the Rio Grande. For large, well-known rivers, like the Paraguay River, there is an established "conventional English" name. I'm not quite sure I agree that every South American river named "Rio X" should be rendered "X River" in English. But, since these pages already exist I'm okay with using them as named--it's not a big deal...whatever. Except! There's quite a few rivers with names like Rio do Sangue, Rio Do Peixe, Rio Do Leão, Das Cinzas River, etc, whose pages have names like Do Sangue River, Do Peixe River, Do Leão River, Das Cinzas River, etc. These names would literally translate to something like "river of blood", "river of the fish", "river of the lion", and "river of cinders". Rendering them into English by translating "rio" to "river" and moving it to the end gives us literal translations like "Of Blood River", "Of the Lion River", etc. Is it just me, or does this not seem right? Would it make sense for me to rename those, when I come across them, back to "Rio" forms, un-"translated"? It is a minor point about a set of rivers most people outside Brazil have probably never heard of, but I wondered what y'all might think about it. Our naming guidelines, Wikipedia:WikiProject Rivers#Naming does not get into this kind of detail. Pfly (talk) 06:58, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm responsible for most of those, in trying to judge most common English name "Rio Foobar" and "Foobar River" seemed about even (if anything most of the big rivers were translated while most of the smaller ones keep the Rio) - the handful of existing articles all used "Foobar River" so I went with that as precedent. I would not however be opposed to a wholesale renaming, I'd actually prefer "Rio Foobar", I just figured someone else would move them if I did, but if there's consensus for a move I'm all for it.Kmusser (talk) 11:32, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
That makes sense. I'm not about to launch a wholesale anything. Maybe someday. I might rename a few if "Rio X" seems common in English--it seems that streams named "Rio Negro" tend, I think, to be left in that form, for example. I just looked around Wikipedia for river names in other parts of the world, to see how this has been handled, at least for areas with languages closely related to English (Rio, Rivière, etc). Of course in Europe the word for "river" is rarely used at all, so that's no help. One curious case is Quebec. The List of rivers of Quebec is mostly redlinks, but an interesting mix of "X River" and "Rivière X". Perhaps there is a specific Canadian guideline being followed. Its curious how many names in the form "Rivière aux/de/du/etc X" were left in full French form, although there are some like Du Lièvre River. I'm starting to think this is something impossible to answer in a general way. Hmm. Pfly (talk) 19:20, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Conventions vary. In the UK river names are almost always "River X", but there are a few exceptions which are "X River". In the US it's always/mostly "X River". Part of the reason may be that US river names are often descriptive or named after a tribe/town/geographical feature e.g. "Big Black River", so "River Big Black" doesn't make a lot of sense. In Germany and France they are just "X". A quick Internet trawl suggests that some sources use "X", others use "X River" except, in both cases, they retain "Rio" for certain rivers as in "Rio de la Plata" or "Rio Grande". The best advice I can offer is to find an authoritative English source e.g. on the geography or rivers of South America that you can quote. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:41, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

River Main - move discussion

There is a proposal to move Main to Main (river) and use Main as a disambiguation page. Feel free to contribute here. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Tygart Valley River source of Mississippi by discharge?

There's a small discussion over at Talk:Tygart Valley River about whether the Tygart Valley River is the source of the Mississippi River by discharge. I hadn't realized the Ohio River is larger than the Mississippi at their confluence, by discharge, but so it is. I searched a bit for a source that simply stated that the Tygart Valley River is the source by discharge, but didn't find one. I didn't look too hard, and my search terms were probably less than perfect. I wondered if anyone here might have some leads on this topic. Thanks. Pfly (talk) 03:54, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, a bit more research makes it looks like the Monongahela River has a discharge far less than the Allegheny River. However, the Monongahela River page lists a discharge higher than the Alleghany. It looks like the Monongahela page is probably wrong. Right? Pfly (talk) 06:52, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
The Allegheny and Monongahela rivers were once considered the forks of the Ohio; they are sometimes referred to as such. I believe that the Allegheny has a considerably higher discharge than the Monongahela. All is One (talk) 21:00, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Right (see further discussion at Talk:Tygart Valley River). --WWasser (talk) 18:22, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I corrected the mean discharge data of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers according to the USGS Gauges. By the way: the dominance of the Ohio River is illustrated here. --WWasser (talk) 14:37, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Pollution claims on Connoquenessing Creek

Main article: Connoquenessing Creek

The Connoquenessing Creek article has claims that it is the second most polluted river in the United States. It has no ratings on the talk page and is a stub. Please take a look at this and edit as necessary. All is One (talk) 20:15, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

The claim is backed with a reference to a reliable source and makes it clear this was in 2000. How should it be edited? Ruhrfisch ><>°° 20:46, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I thought so too; just wondered if anyone is interested in expanding the article considering its notability. Also, the article needs an importance rating for our project. All is One (talk) 21:48, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

California rivers are being pounded by the IP :d

I’ve been fighting this problem for a significant part of 2010 but an anon has been completely messing up pages on rivers and also categories in Northern California – probably the rest of the world too, but you never know. I don’t feel right just reverting his edits because they can’t be called vandalization, and they’re really not wrong, and they don’t break Wikipedia guidelines, but I think a lot of the unwritten Rivers guidelines are being broken… Furthermore he leaves no explanations for his edits and enjoys personal attacks on other users via edit summaries and hidden comments in his rambunctious modifications. I’ve been trying to say that a watershed is a watershed, not 3, or 4, or 5, or 9 watersheds, it’s a watershed. I’ve been trying to say that a dam is a dam, even if it does comprise several components like a main wall and a powerhouse and a spillway. I’ve been trying to say that the individual arms of a lake still count as part of the lake; I’ve been trying to say that references are references and shouldn’t be consolidated, that external links in the body of an article are extremely discouraged, that it’s often easier to fix a tiny problem than to place a giant tag in the middle of the article, that subsection guidelines don’t agree with one or two sentence paragraphs, articles shouldn’t rely too much on a single source, using @ and other slang is not encouraged, undoing other users’ regular edits without explanation is rude and unproductive, … Lastly User:Hike796 is the same as the IP, 138.210.143.117 most recently. The Ip address continuously changes and it’s hard to keep track. I have most of the Northern California river pages on my watchlist and check them every day but I’m losing this, and last of all, even though the Feather River article was placed on pending changes, it isn’t doing any good because the very reason that happened was the IP, and the reviewers who don’t give a f*king damn about it accept all of his edits anyway. Shannontalk contribs 20:54, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Could you provide some diffs please? The articles could be semi-protected, which would prevent IP addresses from editing them. This would also make the editor make all the edits and not use IPs. Being disruptive as an editor is against the guidelines. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:24, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
First see Feather River, North Fork Feather River, South Fork Feather River, Template:Tulare Basin Hydrography, Lake Oroville, etc etc. Look how much the articles are messed up. A huge cacophony of numbers and the main points are hard to discern from the thousands of values and random information within. Here and here he keeps adding an unnecessary contradiction template just to make me and Pfly look like idiots, and in the second one he places a link, [[Nicolaus, California|Verona]]… what the heck? These are two different places, obviously. Then there is also [[Oroville East|Kelly Ridge]] repeated many times within the Feather River article. Plus there are many categories that just shouldn’t exist out of common sense – I haven’t even found all of them yet – for example Category:Feather Headwaters. In Category:Feather River, the IP under Hike796 changed the description to “The Feather River Basin is a Lower Sacramento River region of 3,920 sq mi (10,200 km2) that includes 9 watersheds such as the upper and lower watersheds of the Yuba and the Bear rivers.” which does not make sense to most people who know anything about rivers, and also 3920 square miles is simply wrong, the Feather drains over 6000 square miles. I’ve a lot to say, but I will stop here. Shannontalk contribs 20:45, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I believe this is a more important matter than it seems?? I can't fix this alone! Shannontalk contribs 21:10, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
My comment: I had been working on the Feather River page a while back but ended up feeling so steamrollered I walked away. I edit Wikipedia for fun, not for fight. I can't deal with this person. Here's a diff of the kind of major edit I'd find after addressing a string of previous edits of this kind. I suppose there is nothing exactly wrong with it, but it was disheartening to address a number of "Specify", "Clarify me", "Cititation eeded", etc templates, all with questions inserted in the wikicode you can't see until you edit the page and search them out--to address scores of previous such templates only to have another 10 or 20 slapped on the page within an hour. As far as I've seen the editor refuses to engage in human dialogue on talk pages, preferring instead to insert questions and demands in template wikicodes. I'm not sure the editor has done anything wrong, technically speaking, but if you look through the histories of this and other pages will might get a sense of why I had to walk away in frustration. Pfly (talk) 23:15, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
Actually, he/she/it is doing something wrong - disruptive editing. His comments are nonsensical and, well, disruptive. I'd suggest reporting him. - The Bushranger Return fireFlank speed 00:33, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes, this is nasty and encyclopedia-destroying stuff. It should be stopped. Once the user is banned (and I don't know anything about the process for doing that), I'd suggest reverting all of his or her edits and restoring damaged pages to their previous states. Finetooth (talk) 00:52, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
As a start I have semi-protected Feather River so that IPs cannot edit it. I am also watching it. I notice that the user in question has not had any sort of warnings on his/her talk page about this disruptive behavior. I will be glad to semi-protect other articles as needed. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 01:00, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks Ruhrfisch. It's true I for one didn't give any warnings. It seemed like there was no single IP to post to but rather ten or more (I stopped paying attention before a named account was made, as I hear now). Plus, I've never warned anyone about anything on Wikipedia. I'm more the type to walk away from conflict (sometimes a flaw on my part--I would not be a good admin!). I could have made a better effort to engage the person though. Most of my communication efforts were via edit summaries, which is obviously non-ideal--although they appeared to have been read and responded to in other edit summaries. Also, I'd like to say that this editor is obviously knowledgeable on the Feather River and Wikipedia editing, but has an unusual style and a seemingly confrontation, sometimes hostile approach. Some of the editor's actions seemed to border on vandalism, or at least "making thing ugly to make a point", but I can't really say what their motivations were. At least some of the editor's additions/questions/etc were useful, but the approach was such that I had to disengage. Just offering another point of perspective here. I have no idea how this kind of thing should be handled, really. Pfly (talk) 03:10, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
I don't know either -- all the information he is posting appears to be legit but it is worded in such an odd and confusing way (tons of numbers, lots of small details and little focus on main points) that I don't think the average reader would understand. For example the South Fork Feather River article doesn't even get the point across that it is in the USA, that it is a tributary of the Feather River, how long it is, that it drains from the west slope of the Sierra; those are more important points than the fact that it flows through Little Grass Valley. But anyway, got some major cleanup work for a bit… Just like what I keep trying to get across to that editor, it's often faster to fix things up than complain about them… Shannontalk contribs 03:34, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
My god, this is a epic mess, and it’s going into Nevada and Utah. It’s going way further than I thought. I nominated Central Nevada Desert Basins at AfD just now but I seriously can’t find all the rogue pages. There’s a lot of categories that need deletion… could there be a mass blanking by a bot, of all the pages that this user has created? I’m not a bot, I don’t know how many pages are out there that don’t belong… there are also a ton of bad categories, like Sevier Basin, North Mojave-Mono Lake, Lahontan region, Honey-Eagle watershed. Aaaargh! Now for an epic attack. If one user can make a mess another user can certainly clean it up. *sigh* But I don’t spend 24 hours a day on Wikipedia like he does… Shannontalk contribs 21:01, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Let's be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater - categories by basin/watershed, including the rivers and lakes within said area, can be useful (lists aren't though). But if they're arbitrary...ugh. - The Bushranger Return fireFlank speed 21:12, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
The subject is covered by the perfectly good article at Great Basin (which could use a category of Great Basin watersheds) - As Shannon mentions there is no particular reason to separate out the central Nevada portion for its own article. What the disruptive editor is doing is taking the USGS hydrologic units and trying reorganize wikipedia's river and basin articles to follow that structure. The problem with that is that the USGS hydrologic units are not the same as drainage basins, they're created for USGS' data reporting convenience, they often combine or divide basins arbitrarily to make similarly sized polygons that look good on maps. Kmusser (talk) 21:27, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, I see. In that case, fire at will. - The Bushranger Return fireFlank speed 01:12, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I noticed the use (sometimes misuse) of HUCs on the Feather River page. I almost tried to explain some of the complexities and pitfalls of using HUCs, but got overwhelmed and left first. Looking again, I see that all the info about the upper Feather forks, which had been on the main Feather page, then shunted off into rather ugly pages of their own, are now described at Feather Headwaters, which seems to be up for speedy deletion. It's funny--it was the complexity of the upper tributary forks that got me interested in the river in the first place. I added a bunch of info about them to the main page and suggested they could be split off onto pages of their own if warranted. This "Feather Headwaters" is not what I had in mind, to say the least. Curiously, there appears to be almost no mention of the upper forks on the main Feather River page now. The whole way information has been organized confuses me. For what it's worth here is how the Feather River page looked just before the craziness began. Some of the tributary forks were ready to be split off, but otherwise the page seemed not half bad. Anyway, I'm not personally invested in it anymore. More amazed at what happened. Pfly (talk) 01:02, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I was bold and restored it to the version Pfly linked above. As for the mass of articles that have been messed up and / or need to be deleted, it might help to make a subpage somewhere lisiting the articles that need to be cleaned up (and semi-protected) and the articles that need to be nominated for deletion. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 02:38, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
I don't know if I'm right – User:Hike796 and User:Mmcannis are probably the same person – it's quite obvious, really, even though their edit summaries' style differ. Obvious sock. The latter user continuously posts comments on talk pages – also posts on the talk page of Hike796. Or maybe these are all people working for the USGS? I don't exactly know. Shannontalk contribs 02:46, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
On a further note, many of the categories he created could, with modifications, actually be used – for example Category:Sevier Basin needs to be split into Category:Sevier River and Category:Escalante River or something. Similarly Category:Honey-Eagle watersheds should be split into Category:Honey Lake and Category:Eagle Lake (California). Shannontalk contribs 02:49, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Chetco River on the Main Page today

Just a heads up. (And if anyone could watchlist it and revert vandalism as it pops up, I would really appreciate it.) Thanks, LittleMountain5 02:59, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Congrats! Watching it. Awickert (talk) 03:16, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
Ditto, and ditto. - The Bushranger Return fireFlank speed 03:19, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
Me too, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:20, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
Likewise. Finetooth (talk) 17:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
Over now. Thanks to everyone who helped. :) LittleMountain5 00:02, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
A bit late, but my compliments. :D Shannontalk contribs 02:50, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

XX River, River XX ? - France

I suspect this comes up regularly, but this time in the context of France. French rivers are normally (I can't vouch for 100%, but it looks like close to that) given a name and that's it. la Saone, le Rhone, le Lot, le Seine, la Marne . . Americans dub them 'Rhone River', British dub them 'River Rhone'. Is the following the Wikipedia style?:

  • The Anglophone rendition is "the XX"
  • Where possible, keep to 'Rhone' as in " . . the Rhone does this . . "
  • Where disambiguation is necessary (for example between the Rhone valley and the Rhone river) then add the qualifier, lower case, in parentheses, as in " . . Rhone (river).
  • Avoid either River Rhone or Rhone River, either of which might be viewed as partisan from an American or British point of view.

NicholasStrong (talk) 10:19, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers/Archive 2#River naming convention for the most recent naming discussion. That's about article titles, not about how the rivers are referred to in the text. I agree with most of your summary, I suppose in cases where it isn't clear that a river is discussed, I would use "the river X". For instance "Route nationale 7 crosses the river Isère near Valence". In practice there's a pragmatic solution for your last point (US vs. UK English), see WP:ENGVAR. Markussep Talk 12:19, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Agreed. (US:UK point) Yes indeed, the Hudson River and the River Thames, but many European rivers do not have a 'River' in the proper name. NicholasStrong (talk) 13:03, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Just avoid the problem. For instance "Route nationale 7 crosses the river near Valence" or "Route nationale 7 crosses the Isère near Valence", depending on the focus of the paragraph. Neither the River XX, or the XX river is really a concept. --ClemRutter (talk) 12:45, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Quite clear. I assume you mean XX River as the counterpart to River XX, but please correct me.NicholasStrong (talk) 13:03, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
For article titles for rivers in France, Germany etc. we chose plain "X". If the name is ambiguous, and the river is not clearly the primary topic, we add " (river)", or a disambiguator if there are more rivers with the same name. Markussep Talk 13:18, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

US watersheds, HUC, WBD, NHD, etc

The recent talk about USGS HUCs and whether there should be pages for them and various related issues got me to think about improving info about hydrologic codes and watersheds in general. I've added some info to the current relevant page, Hydrological code. One of the key things I found and added (tersely) to that page is that the system has changed over time in quite a few ways. There's a lot of info out there that still follows the old system, with its "catalog units" and "accounting units". This page is frequently cited on Wikipedia, but the info there is quite out of date. I'm not sure why the USGS has even kept it up and so easily found. I added links a basic facts page about the system today and a short history of it. I still can't decide whether it makes sense to have Wikipedia pages on specific hydrologic units, but if such pages are made they ought to conform to the current system, not the one dating to the 1980s, right? The main webpage on the topic seems to be Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD), which has links branching off to many things. The big PDF about the system's standards, definitions, and so on, seems to be Federal Guidelines, Requirements, and Procedures for the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, also available via this page, which has an abstract summary and other info.

Thought I'd post here, as a info source on the topic at least. Also, did I get anything wrong? It is confusing the way the older system is still online in great detail. Pfly (talk) 21:38, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

The WBD was only completed last year so it still isn't widely known, we should definitely be updating articles to use it. Kmusser (talk) 03:04, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

River articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the River articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Sunday, November 14th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of November, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

If you have already provided feedback, we deeply appreciate it. For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 16:36, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Aina River

Hello, my friends: A group of us are working on clearing the backlog at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sources_from_October_2006. The article in the above header has been without sources for the past four years and may be removed if none are added. I wonder if you can help do so. Sincerely, and all the best to you, GeorgeLouis (talk) 17:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I think Ayina is the more common spelling and should get you plenty of sources, it's a major river and visible on the map at File:Gabon Map.jpg. http://geonames.usgs.gov/ and my Rand McNally Atlas both use Ayina. Kmusser (talk) 18:00, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Naming advice and Ganges/Ganga debates

I've been watching the debates over whether Ganges should be moved to Ganga. The topic has come up on Talk:Ganges repeatedly, most recently under Talk:Ganges#Move Ganges to Ganga. A lot of people have weighed in with quite a few detailed arguments for or against the move. I thought the results and various arguments given one way or the way, whether or not the page is moved, might be useful for our Naming section here. The Ganges/Ganga issue is rather tricky, in part due to the use of English in India. Anyway, thought I'd post the idea here for now, if only to remind myself later. Pfly (talk) 00:08, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Missouri River importance for WP:RIVERS

...should it be high, or top importance? I can't quite decide. It is the longest river of North America, after all. There are a lot of reasons but I won't list them. Shannontalk contribs 05:15, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Got me. The whole thing seems so subjective. I guess it plays a role in article selection for the "Wikipedia 1.0" thing. Our own guidelines say top importance should be for "globally significant" rivers. Not sure the Missouri is quite that important, but then again, is the Ob River, Amur River, Amu Darya, etc? Seems like extra long rivers have been rated extra important. Maybe taking it too far. If you feel like topping it, go for it, I say.
Looking at the stats just now, via toolserver (does this link work?), I see we have 23 top articles, of which 8 are "start" class, and 56 high articles, 17 start class (not sure these stats jive with the table at Wikipedia:WikiProject Rivers/Assessment, hm...guess toolservering listing just those picked for Wikipedia 0.8). Anyway, the 17,000 or so unassessed pages seems a shame. Importance unassessed: Cuyahoga River, Gambia River, Chicago River, Charles River, Kootenay River, Willamette River, etc. Also Endorheic basin, confluence, Distributary, ...others. Pfly (talk) 09:40, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
Hmmm... still thinking about it. This is quite a problem. I can understand rivers like the Amazon, Nile, Yangtze being top importance, but the Missouri... I don't know. It seems in the middle somewhere. High is too low and top is too high. It stays high for now as I read the guidelines over. Shannontalk contribs 23:29, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Template:Rivers/Categories

Template:Rivers/Categories has been nominated for deletion. 65.93.14.196 (talk) 04:48, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

List of north-flowing rivers

Because I've sometimes encountered the unsourced claim that few rivers flow north, I decided to make a list of the longer north-flowing ones, using inclusion criteria to prevent the list from being impossible to complete or monstrously long. The criteria at the moment are that the rivers must be rivers by formal name (no creeks), that they must be at least 100 miles (160 km) long, that their direction of flow be assessed by calculating the overall angle between a line drawn between two points (source and mouth) and true north so that meanders don't count, and that they be in the U.S. This last criterion (and the no-creeks business) seem especially arbitrary to me and might be a function of awe or laziness; Canada alone looks like a fairly formidable add-on. After putting considerable work into the list, which you can see in User:Finetooth/Sandbox2, I have discovered that similar lists in Wikipedia's past have gotten the boot, the heave-ho, and a few cat-calls. (See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of northward-flowing rivers of the United States). Nonetheless, I've enjoyed puzzling out how to do the list and then plunging ahead. Before I go much further, I'd like to know if the attempt is daft, or can something useful come of it? Should I, for example, make companion lists for rivers that flow east, west, and south (maybe changing the length criteria to 250 miles and merging the four lists). Then I could perhaps include Canada and have a whole continent's worth. Would it be more useful to attempt a world list of rivers of, say, more than 500 miles in length and to determine the overall direction of flow of each? Or should I find something else to do with my life? Finetooth (talk) 00:19, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Your effort would almost certainly be bound for deletion, I think we've gone through 3 of those and your criteria sound essentially the same as the last one to be deleted. The problem is that the claim that north flowing rivers are rare is just plain wrong, there's nothing special about flowing north. It might survive if you did all 4 directions, although I think it would still be a pretty arbitrary list. It would be sort of nice to address the northward-flowing rivers myth in some way as people are going to keep trying to compile such a list until it is. Kmusser (talk) 03:29, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
I first became aware of this issue with the St. Johns River PR and FAC, but was not aware of the deleted earlier version of this list. I agree it looks now like recreation of a previously deleted article and would have a hard time surviving. What if this were changed to a longest rivers of the United States article and included direction. The List of north-flowing rivers could be a redirect. My guess is that the cutoff would have to be for longer rivers than just 100 miles to keep the list manageable. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:38, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks to you both. I will give the longest rivers ideas some thought and see how that might go. I sensed some raised eyebrows but no fierce opposition to List of longest streams of Oregon, so something similar on a national scale might fly. The cutoff would have to be higher than 100 miles, I agree. I'd have to fool around a bit to decide on something approaching optimum. It would almost certainly be easier to find details about the even bigger rivers than for the relative shorties, and going long would probably exclude the intermittent streams that gave me fits when doing the Oregon streams. Finetooth (talk) 03:58, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
I'd certainly enjoy seeing List of longest rivers of Foo type articles. - The Bushranger One ping only 06:57, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Finetooth, the Yukon flows more southwest than north and its north flowing portion is entirely in Canada. The Yellowstone flows more east than northeast... Shannontalk contribs 00:58, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Lea RM

Oh and see Talk:River Lee (England) for the main move request. The previous discussion was never concluded. Simply south...... 16:22, 26 January 2011 (UTC)


That's not the end of the Lea moves. See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 February 2#Category:Weirs of the River Lee. Simply south...... 23:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Categorization of river categories

An editor has removed a large number of categories of articles related to specific rivers, leaving such categories in a single category, Category:Categories named after rivers. Examples:

and many others

I cannot see any discussion of this radical move, and it seems to me to diminish (or mostly remove) the utility of such categories for finding articles on related subjects. Any views? --Mhockey (talk) 09:41, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Not so simple. To take the first example: every article and subcategory in Category:Rio Negro (Amazon) logically belongs in the tree headed by Category:Amazon basin (now Category:Amazon Basin) - all the tributaries of, and populated places on, the river are in the Amazon basin. As for the other examples, the technical issue is the distinction between Topic categories and Set categories as discussed in WP:Categorization. Bridges and populated places on a tributary river are relevant to the topic of tributaries of the parent river, even if they are not themselves tributaries. Thus Category:France is a member of Category:European countries, even though most of its articles and those of its subcategories are not themselves articles on European countries. There is nothing in WP:EPON which bars that. On the contrary, WP:EPON says that "by convention, many categories do contain their articles' eponymous categories as subcategories".
The overriding issue is whether these changes help or hinder users using the category system to find the articles they want. To my mind, they are just unhelpful. --Mhockey (talk) 19:24, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

There seem to be no objections to reinstating the categories, so I will start the process. --Mhockey (talk) 13:38, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

River basin category renaming

There are proposals to rename river basin categories here and here which, if agreed, could set a precedent for widespread change in how we categorize rivers. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:55, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

PS and a whole lot of other river basin category proposals too numerous to mention on the same discussion page. Covering rivers across UK, Germany, France, etc. This really merits a proper debate by this project. --Bermicourt (talk) 21:23, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Move proposal: Main to Main (river)

There is a move request to move the article on the River Main to Main (river) at Talk:Main. --Bermicourt (talk) 07:04, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

The move has happened, so "Main" is now a dab page. --Bermicourt (talk) 21:06, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Basin category structure

The above debate has highlighted a key question that this project needs to consider. Currently we have a categories based on river basins e.g. Category:Mississippi basin which includes those waterbodies within the drainage basin of the given river. This appears to be a Wiki convention and is used for river basins on all continents. However, on the category page it does not distinguish between types of waterbody - river, lake, spring, moor, etc - or the Strahler number - unless sub-categories are used.

German Wikipedia, by contrast, makes clever use of the sortkey to group types of waterbody and levels of stream on the same page without the need for sub-categories (unless the no. of articles becomes large). This structure is easily set up in English Wikipedia and an example is Category:Leine basin. This is achieved by using the format [[Category:FOO basin|2Rivername]] for a 2nd order stream or [[Category:FOO basin|MMoorname]] for e.g. a moor. It provides an alternative to sub-categories especially where article numbers do not warrant them.

The question is: do we as a project think this sortkey-based structure has merit? If so, it could become part of our conventions, although we may have to convince the Categorization project members first! --Bermicourt (talk) 20:25, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

  • I think the format you're referring to is the one I used for Category:ACF basin? - The Bushranger One ping only 23:21, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
    • Looks pretty well identical, Bushranger! However, Vegaswickian has suggested this is not how categories should be used and has proposed the alternative of using template e.g. {{Leine basin}}. Whatever we do, we need a convention on this as a large no. of basin categories may be about to get changed into tributary categories (which doesn't work because as your format illustrates well, we're not just talking about tributaries). --Bermicourt (talk) 07:29, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The main problem here is that some readers will think that one uses a Mississippi basin to mix the ingrediants for a Mississippi mud pie. Devise a structure for rivers by all means. But ensure that "basin" is not left ambiguous. "Drainage basin" is the emerging concensus. (e.g. Mississippi drainage basin). Laurel Lodged (talk) 00:13, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

New list

Heeding wise counsel, I abandoned the north-flowing rivers project mentioned above but used parts of it to segue into List of longest main-stem rivers in the United States. I moved the new list from a sandbox into main space a little while ago and posted a request for peer-review comments at WP:PR. It should appear in the PR list later today. Any comments here or there would be appreciated. Finetooth (talk) 20:45, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Rivers and streams

According to stream, rivers are a subset of streams, with other types of streams being creeks, washs and the like also being subsets of streams. This is handled in the category tree by Category:Rivers being a sub-category of Category:Water streams. In general, however, the subcats of Category:Rivers (in particular, the Category:Rivers by country subcats) then just mix all rivers, creeks, washs etc together into river categories. The only exception seems to be Category:Streams of Oregon in which the creeks, etc are directly in this category while the Oregon rivers are in its subcategory Rivers of Oregon. Based on the Stream article, it seems that all Category:Rivers should be re-organized in the same way, creating parent categories named Streams of foo or Water streams of foo at all geographic levels. Your thoughts? Hmains (talk) 19:40, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

It's a good point. I think geographers call all flowing waterbodies "streams" which makes even the Amazon River a stream! However, in popular usage, stream is a small river, so I suspect we may meet opposition if we started recategorising "Rivers of Foo" as "Streams of Foo". It comes down to an important Wikipedia question: do we override the experts and write for the common man in language he uses or do we give experts the primacy and educate the common man? Currently WP:COMMONNAME favours the former. --Bermicourt (talk) 20:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
Bermicourt is right, you're running into a difference between scientific/government usage and popular usage. USGS in particular uses "streams" for all watercourses, but I think that would just confuse the general public. I don't think separating rivers and creeks is really a good idea either. In general creeks are smaller than rivers, but neither has a technical definition and there are exceptions. If anything our "Rivers of Foo" articles should get a note that they include all notable watercourses or something similar. Kmusser (talk) 01:16, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

AWB edits by user

I have just ofund a user changing Western Bug and Southern Bug to Bug River. [1]

They have mad a massive amount of edits, all of which seem to have created redirs.

Can someone investigate please? Chaosdruid (talk) 19:51, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Infobox river or Geobox?

Which is the preferred template, Infobox river or Geobox? The project page mentions both. --Bermicourt (talk) 11:34, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Hello... is there anybody out there? --Bermicourt (talk) 18:46, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I think it is largely a matter of editor preference. Personally, I find geobox unnecessarily complex, but YMMV. older ≠ wiser 19:00, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I prefer the Geobox myself, but it really is editor preference. I think most (if not all) of the River FAs use a Geobox. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 19:06, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm fond of the geobox, which I've added to so many river articles that I've lost count. I agree, though, that it's editor preference. Finetooth (talk) 16:59, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Oregon rivers

Hi. A while ago I proposed at Talk:List of rivers of Oregon#Tables? that the list be moved into tables, and so far very few editors have given their opinions, thus I am uncomfortable with making the tables quite yet. Please see the discussion for details and I hope we can achieve consensus. Thanks. --Jsayre64 (talk) 01:16, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

NHD

How accurate is the National Hydrography Dataset? Is it better than, say, USGS topographic maps or watershed assessments? I have two reasons for asking: first, if it is reliable and accurate, it would make creating lists like the longest streams of Oregon or longest streams of Idaho (work in progress) so much easier. Second, in some instances it seems to be way different than the aforementioned sources, which is fine... if it's right. Thoughts? Thanks, LittleMountain5 23:43, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

In general the NHD is going to be better, it's based on the topo maps, so should be more or less the same as them, but if there have been any course changes since the topo map was made it should be reflected in the NHD. That said I have occasionally found errors in it, so if you see a big difference it's worth double checking. I just checked those 2 changes and would favor NHD in both cases. For Owyhee it looks like the NW council was short changing the Owyhee. For Grande Ronde it looks like there has been a course change - just east of La Grande there was a big loop of the Grande Ronde that was cut off by a ditch, that ditch has now become the main channel and is counted as such in NHD. NW council may have been using an older figure that included the loop (although their maps do show the ditch as the main channel). Kmusser (talk) 14:42, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
Awesome, thank you. LittleMountain5 16:22, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
One more question: is there a fast, easy way to determine the total length of streams on the NHD? I downloaded ArcGIS Explorer and have the NHD displayed on the map, but I can't figure out how to find the total length of a stream without adding up all of its individual stream segments manually. LittleMountain5 22:34, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Should be, I haven't used Explorer recently, but in the full ArcGis you can select by name, open the attributes table and then right-clicking on the variable name gives a summarize option. The other thing I've done when doing a bunch of rivers is to export out the entire attribute table and then bring it up in Excel where sorting and adding is a little easier. Kmusser (talk) 11:28, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

req move

Some info may be useful at this requested move. Thanks! --WhiteWriter speaks 11:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Elevation profile views

Is there any way to generate elevation profile views of rivers, which could be included as an image in the article/infobox? I've only seen a handful on various websites (such as this example), but it seems that it might be possible to generate if somebody has access to a good geospatial information system (GIS) application (e.g. ESRI's ArcView). But, I'm not sure if the production of such a profile would be considered 'derived work' and not be eligible for publication to Wikipedia due to copyright concerns. Any thoughts on that? And, is there anybody involved in the WikiProject Rivers who has access to software for, and interest in, trying to produce some of these elevation profiles? If other members of this project thought it was a good idea, it might be possible to simply solicit support from folks w/ GIS expertise through other aspects of the Wikipedia community. -- 68.9.254.55 (talk) 07:27, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

As long as the source of your elevation dataset was public domain (such as USGS), I don't think there'd be any problems using such a profile on Wikipedia. Constructing one is a rather labor intensive task though, even with GIS. Kmusser (talk) 01:47, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Stub-type

Shouldn't there be a {{river-stub}} and a Category:River stubs for rivers, and this project? 65.94.45.185 (talk) 07:38, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Karst spring page should be merged with Spring (hydrosphere) page.

Springs by default are "karst" in nature. I see no reason that these articles shouldn't be merged. Any thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hillbilly2008 (talk • contribs) 03:08, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

River Parrett on front page 7 July

I've just found out that River Parrett will be on the front page of wikipedia on 7 July. Any help beforehand with ensuring it shows off our best work and then watching it on the day for vandalism etc would be great.— Rod talk 16:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I still watch it and will try to look it over before the big day - congrats! Ruhrfisch ><>°° 17:36, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

List of rivers of Sudan

This page needs split into List of rivers of Sudan and List of rivers of South Sudan now that South Sudan is independent. However, not all the rivers have articles and so some work may be necessary to see which article/s each river goes into. 75.41.110.200 (talk) 18:59, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

CfD for Category:River regulation

There is a CfD for Category:River regulation at this link. Any editors with interest or insight are welcomed to comment.--NortyNort (Holla) 02:50, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

How to calculate NHD stream lengths using ArcGIS Explorer

Copied from User talk:Finetooth

I finally figured this out with a little help from Esri:

  1. Download the summing add-in here.
  2. Download the file for the specific region you need from the list here (descriptions here). It may take a while.
  3. Open ArcGIS Explorer and click "Add Content", then "Geodatabase Data..." in the drop down menu.
  4. Add the geodatabase you downloaded by following the instructions (you only need NHDFlowline).
  5. Expand "Hydrography" which should appear on the left sidebar, then click "NHDFlowline".
  6. Under the "Tools" tab at the top, click "Query".
  7. Select "GNIS_Name - String" under "Fields", the equals button under "Operators", then type the name of the stream under "Value" and click "Use".
  8. Click "Test", then "OK".
  9. Make sure the new queried segment looks okay (no gaps or loops).
  10. Click the "Add-Ins" tab at the top, then "Column Statistics".
  11. From the drop down menu, select "LengthKM", and there you go! The total length is in the "Sum" row.

LittleMountain5 18:40, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Green/Duwamish Rivers

Please comment on merging Green River (Washington) and Duwamish River at Talk:Green River (Washington). For those not familiar, The river changes name in the middle of its course for no reason in particular, so these are two rivers in name only. (Actually, there are historical reasons for the name change). D O N D E groovily Talk to me 19:27, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

RFC on coordinates in highway articles

There is currently a discussion taking place at WT:HWY regarding the potential use of coordinates in highway articles. Your input is welcomed. --Rschen7754 01:41, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Geobox up for deletion

The Geobox template, which is used in all but one river GA with a box template, and in all river FAs (41 of 43 river FAs and GAs), is up for deletion. You may be interested in commenting for or against its deletion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012_January_3#Template:Geobox. Thanks, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 05:06, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Estimate

How many rivers are there in the world? emijrp (talk) 13:03, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I think that must depend on how river is defined. What are the determining limits? Length? Discharge? Strahler number? The word "river" in its name? A table in Rivers of the United States: Volume II, Chemical and Physical Characteristics lists the number of "river channels of various sizes" in the United States (but not the whole world). The sizes correspond to the Strahler numbers, 1 for little ones averaging only 1.61 kilometres (1.00 mi) in length and 10 for the biggest one, the Mississippi, listed in the table at 2,896.82 kilometres (1,800.00 mi). The Mississippi is the only 10 in the United States, but there are 1,570,000 of the little ones. I can tell you what the total is for the United States, according to this source, if you can tell me which Strahler numbers are of interest. Finetooth (talk) 18:18, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
If you can tell me all Strahler numbers, it would be great. Thanks. emijrp (talk) 19:48, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Order 1 = 1,570,000; Order 2 = 350,000; Order 3 = 80,000; Order 4 = 18,000; Order 5 = 4,200; Order 6 = 950; Order 7 = 200; Order 8 = 41; Order 9 = 8; Order 10 = 1. Bibliographic details about the edition of the book I'm quoting are here. The table is on page 17, and it is sourced to Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology by Leopold, Wolman, and Miller (1964), published by W.H. Freeman and Company. Hope this helps. Finetooth (talk) 21:54, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. Does Order 1 include from 1 to 10, Order 2 from 2 to 10, etc, or are disjoint sets? emijrp (talk) 21:13, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
Disjoint sets, I would say. That is, even though the path of a drop of water that reaches the mouth of the Mississippi River, for example, might be traced upstream via smaller and smaller tributaries to the source of a #1 headwaters stream, the #10 designation applies only to the lowermost segment of the Mississippi and not to any other segment in the Mississippi watershed. In the Strahler system, a #10 segment begins at the confluence of two #9s, which in the case of the Mississippi would be the lower Missouri River segment (as I recall from looking it up a year or so ago) and the Mississippi River segment that ends at the confluence with the Missouri. Main stem has a more complete explanation. Finetooth (talk) 03:00, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
Another thought: The total number of segments is bigger than the total number of rivers even if rivers is broadly defined to include small tributaries. I think the numbers are interesting, but they don't really answer your original question. Finetooth (talk) 07:07, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

New linear geolocationing system

Over at Wikiproject:Highways we've discovered a nifty way of displaying data onto mapping services that I believe will be a large benefit to your project. By using google earth, qgis, or similar software, you can draw lines onto the globe. These can be saved as a kml file, and the contents of that kml file can be used to, in place of or alongside the current {{coord}} system, display a shape or line on the Earth. I believe this group can benefit greatly from this as it can be used to trace the actual path of a river, as opposed to just marking the mouth or source.

We're still trying to work out the finer details on how to proceed with this new discovery, so if anybody is interested check out the talk page of WikiProject Highways. Cheers, - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 15:06, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

The above, should it ever become viable, should not be used "in place of… the current {{coord}} system", since it offers none of the functionality of that template, for identifying, locating, and producing KML (etc) of points of interest. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:45, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
Keep the discussion at the Highway talk page, where I am directing people, instead of trying to interject your POV before they get there. You are wrong, by the way, it can offer all of the functionality plus much more. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 14:30, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
You don't get to dictate where discussion happens. Please explain how the new system will produce a set of ten KML PoIs for, say, a river with ten confluences; and how it will enable a user to locate view such point, on a map centred on that point, with single mouseover; or find photographs near to it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:18, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
Elsewhere, you just said "coord is far more appropriate for point-based topics". QED. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:54, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
The path of a river consists of an infinite number of points. In geometry, we call this phenomena a line. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 16:02, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
None of which answers my question about PoIs for a river's confluences; and current functionality relating to them. Your edit summary, "'the worm dangles on the hook, but do I take the bait?" seems to imply that you have an ulterior motive for posting here. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:30, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
I don't know what a Pol is (a Polish person?), but I do know a river consists of more than confluences. What does a point at the meeting place of three linear bodies of water show me? Which stream is confluencing into which river? What is the direction of flow? Is this point the beginning of a new river, or the middle of one? [2] If I were to make this into a coordinate, and posted this as the confluence of a tributary of the Thames River: Which one is the Thames and which one is the river that is joining in (the tributary)? Is the Thames the river from the north to the west? From the south to the north? From the west to the south? (Please, tell me with your end-all-be-all solution)
Which direction is the river flowing? I can't tell you any of this with coord, but I could tell you all of this, as well as highlighting the entire length of the river and labelling all the confluences, using KML. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 16:59, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Images

I generated list of articles about rivers, without image in infobox on enwiki, but with image on plwiki - maybe somebody will be interested (also: similar list, but with maps) Bulwersator (talk) 09:11, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

We're on the Main Page!

Take a look! Big Butte Creek was unexpectedly nominated, then featured unexpectedly fast. Cheers, LittleMountain5 14:52, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Darn... I missed it by 45 minutes. Shannºn 01:23, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

The KML map link method, and tagging articles with KML missing

I'm not sure how up to speed this project is on a KML method for creating map links for linear features & outlines. Now there's a proposal to tag suitable articles to add a hidden KML missing category where a KML map link is missing. Discussion here. Please join in and/or acquaint yourself with the KML method. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:22, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Handling millions of creeks, rivulets and streams

I sent one redirect for deletion. During the discussion I noticed that a big number of articles about very small rivers were destroyed (deleted, turned into redirects to pages without any info about them, etc.)

Please see the discussion in Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2012 March 27#Imre River and my suggestion there. For some reason a participant of this project went emotional and instead of looking for a solution started looking for ulterior motives why is that Romanian rivers became deleted.

I have no knowledge and hence no interest in the subject. Please consider my suggestion outlined in the RFD page and continue the discussion here. Or not. I don't care.

For your convenience I copy my proposal here:

  • I am sorry I was incorrect to say "no such river". Of course one cannot make such claim. There are millions of streams and there may be Imre River, Gyorgy River, and Lajos River and Staszek River and Rossami River, who knows. The point is wikipedia policies of notability and verifiability. A redirect is to an article which has no information about the subject whatsoever. How on Earth you are voting to keep? Imre River is not even among tributaries of Arieș River! On the other hand, I can understand fructration of user:Afil, whose work was ruthlessly deleted. Here is the suggested solution: create an article, Watershed of Arieș River (Mureș) and list in the tree form all rivulets user:Afil collected from the maps, and retarget all these minor redirects there. Then the person who looks for Czaba River, will find a good information:
Because I doubt there is much more information available for these, other than coordinates; which would be of great help.

Staszek Lem (talk) 18:09, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

There are several types of persons who are seeking information on Wikipedia. Some are those who just try to find some general information on a certain issue. This is what I call the schoolboy type of readers, who could use the information they found on Wikipedia for their school essays, a common practice.
In principle there are other readers who are looking for information which is difficult to find and they need for their professional activities. These are the professional type of readers.
In the case of rivers, I can tell you that even very basic information about the existence of a river is extremely difficult to find. Even when they exist on detailed maps, they are practically never indexed. Take for example the Imre River from which this discussion started - though it exists on maps which are on the internet, it is practically impossible to identify.
In my activity, I worked besides Romania in several countries as remote as Bangladesh, Kyrgystan or Guinea. I always encountered difficulties in identifying the information regarding rivers. This can be critical in cases when people are involved in assistance in case of emergencies such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and other similar catastrophies. I have been part of teams which have been deployed on extremely short notice and sent to foreign countries with supplies or equipment for rapid intervention. In many cases we were given some name of a small river or some other geographic entity, but had not clue if that place was North or South of where we were. In most cases locals, overwhelmed by the catastrophy were of no help. Caravans of much needed supplies are simply stuck because they cannot identify their destination. Any possibility of fast identification of the destination can be critical and these are the types of readers I was trying to reach. The articles of rivers was just a first step. The second was to add maps of the river, which I did for the upper tributaries of the Bistrita River in Romania.
While a few people did understand the rational - I have received correspondence from Botswana, requesting me to help produce this type of information (unfortunately I do not have the required maps of Botswana), I have found out that Wikipedia is definitely not the place where this information should be stored. The schoolboy mentality is prevalent, and people who do not understand the issues or their importance, simply delete information, which, as indicated before, could potentially even save lives. I regret having believed that Wikipedia could be used by professionals and will probably try to find some other site which should specialize on geographic information required for emergency intervention.
In some countries, including Romania, the important rivers have been codified i.e. have received an official code (which in some ways are similar to the ZIP code or other codes used for settlements). Similar codes exist for the rivers of the United States (USGS). As these rivers have recieved official recognition by the competent authorities of the country, the rule should be that these rivers should qualify for separate articles. This would eliminate the arbitrary evaluation of some Wikipedians and accept the decisions of these authorities.
As far as the discrimination regarding various countries - in particular Romania - is concerned, this is not a theoretical case. If you have the curiosity to look at the English language Wikipedia, you will be able to assess that articles on villages of Germany, Poland and other countries have been written and kept even if these settlements had less that 50 inhabilants. However, in the case of Romania, ALL articles regarding villages have been deleted (some information regarding them has been included in articles regarding the communes) - even for villages of historical importance. An example to prove this is the case of the village of Mărăşti, which was the site of one of the major battles of WWI - but does not deserve an article in Wikipedia. This is just to tell you that the statement about discrimination against second class countries was not directed at you, but at en:Wikipedia in general.
While these issues should be discussed before decisions are take on the articles this has not been done.
A acknowledge your merits in producing a schoolboy type article for the Arieş River. But this does not correct the basic flaw of Wikipedia which is completely useless for professionals. Regards Afil (talk) 20:33, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
  • I don't know what happened with Romanian villages, but wikipedia has certain rules. I remember that human settlements all deserve mention in wikipedia if there are reliable sources about them. Being mentioned and found in wikipedia does not necessarily mean a "separate article". Wikipedia has plenty of subjects which are mentioned only in lists. In fact, putting evevry small thing is a separate page makes it more difficult to comprehend information. Rivers are perfect example. Knowing that some_very_small river flows into a somewhat_wider river is close to useless. I have to open half-dozen of pages to figure out how the water flows. If there is very little actual information, a table is much more useful.
  • Second point, you again are venting your frustration with wikipedia. I would strongly advice to work on improvement of it bearing in mind its rules and limitations. In particular, why don't you discuss my proposal? If it is bad, please explain why.
  • Third point, please keep in mind that wikipedians generally don't read very long texts that do not discuss concrete improvements of articles. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:10, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
  • About Mărăşti, how did you come to conclusion that it "does not deserve an article in Wikipedia"? When you are talking about issues with wikipedia, please be specific. Was it deleted? Did someone forbid to write an article about it? YOu did not even tell us which Mărăşti you had in mind. If you really care about Mărăşti, you should have done something like I've just done in Răcoasa and Mărăşti, Vrancea. No, I did not write a 36kb article about Mărăşti, but I made it possible for other people to find the info about it I've just found myself. Someone next who likes Mărăşti more than me will add more info. This is how wikipedia works: cooperation. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:30, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
It has generally been Wikipedia policy to includes articles about rivers/streams/creeks regardless of their size, we have featured articles on some that quite small. I didn't notice a bunch of them going to AFD or I would have commented, AFD has generally been friendly to river articles as long as their existence can be verified. That said, redirects aren't articles, we shouldn't have redirects going to articles that don't even mention the subject - a better target for those would probably be List of Rivers type articles, like Staszek Lem suggests. I see that Afil has worked on List of rivers of Romania (alphabetic), there should probably be companion articles that list rivers by drainage basin and lists by county - check out some of the lists for U.S. states for comparison (List of rivers of Minnesota). My recommendation would be to index those small streams via list articles and then those that have more information available than just their existence can be expanded into full articles. Kmusser (talk) 21:32, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
There are currently 8,576 articles about rivers in Romania, and probably over 98% of those were created by Afil, which must have been an enormous effort. Many of the rivers may be notable, but currently the quality of most of the articles is really low. Take for instance the article Lotru River. This is a notable river, 77 km long. The article is basically one sentence ("The Lotru River is a tributary of the Olt River in Romania.") and an enormous infobox with a list of 83 tributaries great and small. What I would like to know is which are the main tributaries of this river, where does it come from, which are the largest places along its course, and some coordinates (at least the mouth). I've been reworking the articles of the largest rivers, for instance Argeș River. As an example of the smaller rivers with no info except their existence, take Laz River (Someş). I happen to have a hiking map of the area, and I found it. It's a really small stream, about 1 km long. I think it would be better to make it a redirect to Sălăuţa River, which should be expanded into a real article (what's its length, isn't that given in those two references I see in all articles?), with a tributary table or list like the one suggested by Staszek Lem. Markussep Talk 13:47, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
I forgot to mention that tributaries must be listed in orographic order, but I hope that for this wikiproject it is clear without saying. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:56, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
So what? So, most of them are stubs. There's nothing wrong with stubs, every article has to start somewhere. Most of the rivers in Africa don't even have stubs. Kmusser (talk) 14:23, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
So what what? It seems you missed the main point: a big number of thiese stubs have been gotten rid of: deleted or replaced with redirects without merge. There are potential millions of such articles and who will keep an eye at them against zealous deletionists? One big article guarantees the survial of the information. In some respects wikipedia is a shark tank. One appoach is to moan and complain about this, another approach is not to piss against the wind and find a good place to collect the information. Staszek Lem (talk) 19:38, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HighBeam

Wikipedia:HighBeam describes a limited opportunity for Wikipedia editors to have access to HighBeam Research.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:00, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Notability guidelines

Unless Wikipedia:Notability (geography) becomes an actual guideline (which is very unlikely in its current form), the notability guidelines that apply to articles about rivers are Wikipedia:Notability. Specifically, the river must have "significant coverage in reliable sources". Being shown on a map does not equal "significant coverage". Please either develop some reasonable notability guidelines for rivers or follow the existing guidelines. The idea that all rivers are notable is untenable, and will only lead to further disputes. Kaldari (talk) 18:59, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

That conversation would be more appropriate for WP:GEOGRAPHY than here. The idea that physical geographic features are inherently notable isn't specific to this project, it's been the de facto standard for all of the physical geography projects. Kmusser (talk) 19:36, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
As mentioned, it is WP:CONSENSUS that, as part of Wikipedia's remit as an encyclopedia and gazzeteer, all significant geographical features for which their existiance is verifiable in reliable sources are notable. - The Bushranger One ping only 20:19, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
I believe that is incorrect. Every time that idea has been proposed as a guideline, it has been defeated, so I'm not sure where the idea comes from that there is consensus for this. Kaldari (talk) 18:03, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
It's based on years worth of AFD discussions, as far as I can tell there has never been a river article deleted due to lack of notability. When discussions reach the same outcome 100% of the time there is a consensus whether it has been articulated as an official guideline or not. Kmusser (talk) 18:31, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
As a P.S., don't take that as a defense of the current consensus, I'm just saying it exists, and pretending that it doesn't exist isn't particularly useful. I'd be ok with that consensus changing if a new consensus can be reached. Kmusser (talk) 19:19, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

As of now Wikipedia:Notability (geography) is an essay. Unlike the previous failed proposal, Wikipedia:Notability (Geographic locations), it looks like a reasonable starting point. I would like to invite you to Wikipedia talk:Notability (geography) page to make it into a solid Guideline Proposal. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:56, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Images in categories

Category:Rivers of Colombia has one mediocre image of a random river in Colombia, namely File:Río Peralonso 2.jpg (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs). Does this WikiProject think that is a good thing? I started an RfC on this sort of thing at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Categories#Image_categorisation. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:44, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Danube transformation plans

I found new article on the transformation plans, but reluctant to implement it now. Forcing the Danube to go straight in Croatia. Feel free to join the work. Ukrained2012 (talk) 13:05, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Opinions sought...

...on this CfD, please. - The Bushranger One ping only 18:11, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Panjkora Valley#Merge

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Panjkora Valley#Merge. KarlB (talk) 03:53, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Notability (geographical features)

Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographical features): the discussion to make it into a guideline is rekindled. Please joinStaszek Lem (talk) 16:07, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:River Geography

Template:River Geography has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. DH85868993 (talk) 11:14, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Discussion on beginning of the Hudson River

You are invited to join the discussion at talk:List_of_fixed_crossings_of_the_Hudson_River#beginning. --Cstaffa (talk) 00:25, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Categorization of rivers and waterbodies by river basin

Rivers and streams on Wikipedia are sometimes categorized within their river basins by stream order. This logical system has been taken a stage further on German Wikipedia, where river basin categories contain all the relevant streams listed by stream order, together with all other waterbodies following a key e.g. L for lake and so on. See Category:Isar basin on de.wiki. The key is explained in the lede of the category. This has a standard wording which is based on a simple template, which just incorporates the name of the river basin. The text translates more or less as follows:

Category:Foo basin is a sub-category of Category:Geography and one of the categories managed by the Geography Project. Based on Category:Bodies of water, it only includes articles on waterbodies (e.g. the Danube). Categories that deal with individual waterbodies thematically (e.g. Category:Danube), are not grouped within this branch of the category system. More information on geographical categories can be found on the project site here. For questions please use the project talk page.

Classification This category is intended for waterbodies (i.e. rivers, lakes, canals, marshes, etc.) that fall within the catchment area or drainage basin of the specified river.

N.B. It is not useful to break these down by country or continent. To search by those criteria, use Category:Rivers by country and Category:Rivers by continent.

Key

  • Tributaries (rivers and streams) are classified only by their immediate parent. The classification of rivers is based on their stream order. The main river heads the list, under "1" are its direct tributaries, under "2" are tributaries of "1" and so on. For example, [[Category:Danube basin|1Riss]]. Branches of a delta, old river branches, etc., are classified as "0".
  • Other waterbodies are grouped as follows: "B" for wetlands (bogs and swamps), "C" for canals and other artificial waterways, "L" for lakes and ponds, "G" for glaciers, "R" for reservoirs, "S" for springs, and "W" for waterfalls, e.g. [[Category:Danube basin|LFedersee]].
  • River basin categories are grouped, like rivers, by stream order. However, they are also sorted into all higher-order basin systems - by the corresponding stream order number. The resulting multiple categorization is preferable in this case, because of the additional information content.

If it is felt useful I could create this template for use on English Wiki where we have already adopted this system. An example is here: Category:Selke basin. I am not proposing we organize all categories by stream order and waterbody type - that is a separate question. Views?--Bermicourt (talk) 11:57, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I think this is what list articles are for, not categories. Rmhermen (talk) 20:31, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Tisa or Tisza

Move proposal discussion could use some help.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 13:50, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Infobox or geobox

The project page talks about both Infobox river and Geobox, although as Geobox is described as the newer there is a suggestion this is preferred. Is there a preference for which one should be used, and if so, should only that version be listed? Eldumpo (talk) 20:52, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

FWIW there have been recent discussions proposing that we move away from Geobox as it has become too unwieldy and difficult for individual projects to maintain and to use project-specific infoboxes. See, for example, the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mountains#Infobox mountain range which has led to the replacement of Geobox by Infobox mountain range. I'm not sure if there's been a similar debate here though. --Bermicourt (talk) 05:58, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
Geobox may be unwieldy, but it has some features that {{Infobox river}} doesn't, such as coordinate display in the infobox. The documentation is somewhat lacking too. --AussieLegend (talk) 15:10, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
Geobox was developed by an apparent genius who sadly left the project a few years ago. Ideally the features, or the templates, should be migrated to the Infobox naming paradigm, as this makes everything easier. If someone can be found to do this, then I doubt there would be any objection. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 22 September 2012 (UTC).

Naming convention

See also: Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board § "Of" or "in"?

Some time ago I created List of rivers in New South Wales (A-K) and List of rivers in New South Wales (L-Z). These were subsequently moved to List of rivers of New South Wales (A-K) and List of rivers of New South Wales (L-Z), supposedly to comply with a naming convention.[3][4] Today, User:Lady Lotus has moved List of rivers of Australia to List of rivers in Australia because it's grammatically correct. She has also moved several other river articles. I was planning to revert, but can't find the naming convention that justifies the name. I'm mentioning it here because of a suggestion at WP:AWNB that the convention be made more explicit.[5] --AussieLegend (talk) 15:13, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Klickitat River

The source of the Klickitat River is the Klickitat Glacier. Mount Adams (Washington) says the glacier terminates at a different altitude than we have for the source of the river. Can anyone resolve this disparity? Rich Farmbrough, 16:42, 22 September 2012 (UTC).

The USGS GNIS lists the source of the Klickitat River as 46°29′13″N 121°25′16″W / 46.48694°N 121.42111°W / 46.48694; -121.42111 - see here. Plugging those coordinates into Google Earth gives an elevation of 6,689 feet (2,039 m). Ruhrfisch ><>°° 15:49, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
USGS topos show Klickitat Glacier as the source of Big Muddy Creek, a tributary of the Klickitat River. Pfly (talk) 21:09, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
On the Mount Adams (Washington) I took out the claim that the Klickitat River starts at Klickitat Glacier, which is incorrect—at least according to the USGS. Pfly (talk) 21:12, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Geoagiu River

I came across two rivers in Romania with the same name, Geoagiu River, so I created a dab page. However, it is very possible they are the same river. Should they then be on the one page? Figured you guys would be the best people to ask and sort it out! Regards, Hiding T 15:13, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

River sources

In wikifying rivers on the Indian Subcontinent, I'm encountering complications re sources. There can be different mythical sources, traditional sources and sources per accepted geographic criteria.

For example in mythology the Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra and Karnali are all sourced in Lake Manasarovar, which in turn is fed from a stream falling from Mount Kailash. Factually, Kailash and Manasarovar are totally within the basin of the Sutlej and streams descending from Kailash flow into neighboring Rakshas Tal rather than Manasarovar. The basin of the Indus is north of the Sutlej.

The Indus has a traditional source called Senge Khanbab, perhaps here: [6] (31.4282N, 81.6146E). A contemporary Chinese geographer has identified a more distal source, perhaps here: [7] (31.111N, 81.523E).

I would think traditional and modern geographic sources will differ for rivers in many if not most parts of the world. Not so sure about mythic sources, however this is common in South Asia where mythic sources are commonly asserted in order to reconcile ground truth with Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies. Perhaps river templates should be expanded to accomodate these different definitions of sources? LADave (talk) 23:08, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

When I find interesting things that don't seem to fit the standard formats, I sometimes use footnotes. I'm fond of a "notes and references" setup that I used in Rogue River. A source note could be entered in the geobox after a |source_note = , which you could add by hand to an existing geobox, I think, or just enclose your note inside a pair of ref tags right after the primary source information in the geobox. Finetooth (talk) 01:03, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
Thank you, Finetooth. I will see how far I can go with the existing template. BTW the Rogue River article is a fine example for river articles and anything else geographical. Congratulations! LADave (talk) 15:51, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

River Lee, Ireland

Does anyone want to look at Talk:River Lee (Ireland) for a move proposal? It relates in some ways to the River Lea. Simply south...... walking into bells for just 6 years 14:19, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Talk:List of rivers of China -> Suzhou River in Shanghai ?

Hi there, I was searching for a movie I saw years ago, and then I noticed that it is missing in the List of Rivers of China: "Suzhou River". I wonder why. Maybe it is written differently or it has an alternative name? The film by the way is here: Suzhou River — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.193.96.149 (talk) 13:04, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I suppose you mean this river: Suzhou Creek? Markussep Talk 13:37, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Stream lengths

So I finally got the hang of using the NHD to find stream lengths, and I've been working on a list of longest streams of Idaho off and on for the last few years. It's almost done, but I couldn't figure out the lengths of three streams. The first, Goose Creek, has two gaps on its course north of Oakley due to farming; I'm not sure what to do. The second, the Priest River, is strange because the NHD includes a seemingly arbitrary course through Priest Lake (a natural lake)... I'm not sure if that should be considered part of the river. And the third, Willow Creek, just stops near Ririe long before its mouth. Any help is appreciated. Thanks, LittleMountain5 20:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Concerning Willow Creek I just checked the USGS topo maps, and according to them the stream continues west past Ririe for around 6 miles before splitting in two south of Ucon, North Fork Willow Creek flows generally southwest to the Snake River near mile 797, in Russ Freeman Park just north of Idaho Falls. The South fork goes more in a southerly direction and then I'm assuming it disappears into a culvert as it enters Idaho Falls. The total length from Ririe Dam to the Snake River appears to be about 14 miles long, though adding to the confusion there are more distributaries including Crow Creek and Sand Creek south of Milo as well as a number of parallel irrigation ditches. The flow of the streams also appear to follow artificial channels in some places. I'm not sure if NHD just doesn't have the data for all this or if the correct layer isn't on. I might be wrong but I think there were separate layers for natural and man-made waterways. Couldn't hurt to check... Shannºn 20:49, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The NHD classifies Willow Creek as an unnamed "Canal Ditch" past Ririe, although it doesn't really start looking like one until about here: 43°34′28″N 111°53′39″W / 43.57444°N 111.89417°W / 43.57444; -111.89417. GNIS lists its mouth here: 43°33′10″N 111°59′17″W / 43.55278°N 111.98806°W / 43.55278; -111.98806, but I think a more likely location would be here: 43°33′31″N 111°58′05″W / 43.55861°N 111.96806°W / 43.55861; -111.96806. Either way, I'm not sure if the canalized portion should really be considered part of the creek... LittleMountain5 22:04, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll just comment on the 2nd case, that situation is fairly common in the NHD, I've generally included the artificial paths through lakes in river/stream lengths. Kmusser (talk) 00:30, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll include that portion then. Any opinions on the other two? LittleMountain5 01:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
You might hedge by using the NHD lengths plus estimates for the missing segments. In the case of Goose and Willow creeks, you could add notes explaining the difficulties and how the estimates were made. The notes could be linked to just after the "real" lengths you enter in the table. Just a thought. Finetooth (talk) 02:11, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
For the first one I'd need to do research on, I think I'd want to include the gaps, but you'd need another source to do that. For the third, based on Shannon's finding that touches on the more general question of how to deal with distributaries, which I don't have a good answer for. I haven't looked myself but it sounds like the NHD is trying to end it where the distributaries start, counting them as separate streams - so you could cite what you have with a footnote that it doesn't include the distributaries, but that doesn't seem ideal. Kmusser (talk) 02:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Measuring the missing segments of Goose Creek sounds good, I'll try that. As for Willow Creek, the problem is that the NHD stops well before the creek forks into distributaries... I guess I may have to measure it as well. Thanks, LittleMountain5 15:42, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)

Hi,

Just wanted to see if anybody was interested in helping me work on the article Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River). I've managed to destub it, but any help would be welcome. Thanks,

King Jakob C2 21:31, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


OpenStreetMap Cooperation

I'm working in the River Project of OpenStreetMap.

Is there a way to extract the data from the Geobox|River template automatically? e.g. length, mouth location, ... ? --Werner2101 (talk) 12:33, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Etymology of Eau

I've asked a question at Talk:Bourne_Eau#Etymology_of_Eau and would welcome all contributions there.--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 12:36, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Translation of Perfume River from Chinese characters

The Vietnamese words, Sông Hương have officially been translated as “Perfume River”. However, as cited in the Wikipedia article “PerfumeRiver”, the Hán nôm, Chinese characters (simplified 香江) or traditional 香河 mean “Fragrant River” [1]. The first character 香 is fragrant [2] and the second 河 river. The Chinese characters for perfume are 香水. Similarly Hong Kong 香港 was named the “fragrant harbor” [3].

References 1. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume_River 2. Translate.google.com 3. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong --Tfailmezge (talk) 13:35, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Renaming discussions regarding the articles Spui (river) and Drin (river)

The discussions at Talk:Spui (river)#Move? (2) and Talk:Drin (river)#Move? (2013) may be of interest to members of this Wikipedia project. Favonian (talk) 15:16, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Chinese Rivers

We have poor coverage of Chinese rivers in general. Anyone with resources on the subject would be greatly appreciated. Two in the news currently that we don't seem to have articles on are Jinjixia (金鸡峡) of the Yuxi River (玉溪河) which were affected by the 2013 Ya'an earthquake. Rmhermen (talk) 18:14, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

File:Gertar bridge 1929.jpg

File:Gertar bridge 1929.jpg has been nominated for deletion -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 07:39, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Lists / Route maps are optional

On the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Rivers#Article_structure_guidelines there is suggestion that there should be lists of tributaries, towns, locks, crossings, etc. In the map section it says "Route maps are optional". As bare lists within articles are discouraged per WP:Embed, and the route maps that are used in articles are very effective, perhaps it is time to revisit the guideline. I suggest that it is pointed out that lists are discouraged, while route maps should be encouraged. SilkTork ✔Tea time 15:19, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think WP:Embed says that and I don't particularly like route maps for this. Rivers aren't the London subway. Rmhermen (talk) 17:44, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
I note on looking through some GA and FA river articles, that the route maps are rarely used, so it appears that they are not universally liked - and I can understand that. I have a personal preference for a more organic river map, something which shows a river's relation to the geography - its nearness to towns, and how it flows through the landscape.
As regards listing tributaries - WP:Embed says: Prose is preferred in articles as prose allows the presentation of detail and clarification of context, in a way that a simple list may not. Prose flows, like one person speaking to another, and is best suited to articles, because their purpose is to explain. Lists of links, which are most useful for browsing subject areas, should usually have their own entries: see Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists for detail. In an article, significant items should normally be mentioned naturally within the text rather than merely listed.. A list of tributaries is basic data that needs explaining. A reader does not know from the list which are major tributaries and which are minor, which carry trade traffic for the main river, which have an influence on the river's flow and behaviour, etc. A list of tributaries is a list of names from which the reader has to do their own research to gather any useful meaning.
My preference would be for the Article_structure_guidelines to suggest mentioning significant tributaries and crossings in a Course section, and if appropriate, a section describing the tributaries and/or a section describing the crossings could be written. SilkTork ✔Tea time 20:48, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
I'd support taking out that "Lists" suggestion. I think you're correct in that those that are significant should be being discussed in the Course section and those that aren't significant don't really need to be in the article. I would not necessarily encourage the use of the route maps as an alternative though, while they can be cool they get unwieldy for longer rivers and I'm not sure an alternative is needed, just cut the trivia. Kmusser (talk) 13:52, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
I disagree as I think they are useful and valid embedded lists. Some may get too long but for many rivers they are fine. There is a big difference between the Amazon or Rhine article and the average river article like Bârlad River (where the tributaries are in the discouraged long sentence format) and no separate list article could ever be justified. Rmhermen (talk) 18:36, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
The thinking behind discouraging lists, is to prevent articles remaining as a bare collection of data, and to encourage development of the article into something encyclopedic which explains the topic for the general reader. The temptation for experts on a topic, is merely to collect and store the data, because their own mindset is such that they can automatically transfer that data into something meaningful. For the general reader who wants to learn something about Bârlad River, being presented with Left: Bozieni, Fundătura, Gârboveta, Hausei, Găureni, Sacovăţ, Velna, Durduc, Rebricea, Vasluieţ, Crasna, Albeşti, Idriciu, Zorleni, Trestiana, Jeravăţ, Hobana, Bârzota, Gârbovăţ, Corozel Right: Băbuşa, Buda, Stemnic, Racova, Ghilănoiu, Chiţcani, Pârveşti, Horoiata, Simila, Valea Seacă, Tutova, Pereschiv, Bălăneasa, Lupul, Berheci, Blăneasa, Prisaca, Tecucel is fairly meaningless. What impact do those tributaries have on the river? Why are they being mentioned? At an early stage in the development of an article, placing plain data on the page can be useful, so listing tributaries in a stub I see as part of the progress. But I don't see it as helpful to refuse to develop the article on from that point by enshrining as advice that such lists are what an editor should be aiming for. Explanation for the general reader is what we should be aiming for. Such explanation is, yes, much more difficult than a simple list, but that it is difficult, doesn't mean it shouldn't be aimed for. The power of Wikipedia is that it is a collaborative project. One editor creates a list. Another develops that list into prose. Working together the article develops beyond what each individual editor could create alone. But that only happens if we remove impediments to progress. The idea is we keep the data - but we add to the data an explanation for the general reader. SilkTork ✔Tea time 09:35, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
If bare lists of tributaries are being discouraged for more complete articles, then there may need to be some guidance on the use of tributaries in the Geobox /Infobox. Some articles do use this function, others don't. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:29, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
What sort of guidance were you thinking? SilkTork ✔Tea time 21:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
It could be suggested that rather than create bare lists of tributaries and settlements along a river, that these lists can be incorporated into the Geobox/Infobox. Then encourage authors to include/introduce these tribs/settlements as part of the written sections as well. May also need to say that for long lists, it may be more appropriate to create a List of ... article instead. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:56, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

When I write river articles, I try to make sure that all the features mentioned prominently in the article (major tributaries, populated places, historic bridges, etc.) are also mentioned in the Course section, which starts at the source and follows the water downstream. If something was minor and only mentioned once or twice, I figured it was OK to just mention it outside the Course section, but even there I tried to make sure the reader had a good sense of where it was located to other, more prominent features. As a sort of experiment in completeness, I also am the main author of List of tributaries of Larrys Creek, which gives all named tributaries as well as unnamed ones in named features (i.e. "Pond Hollow") for a rather small stream. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 02:11, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Hydronymy and ancient toponymy

Hallo to everybody here. I am interested in hydronyms and toponyms especially of the old world. I have read many articles in order to collect more and newer information on the subject. As I expected the issue of hydronymy is very vexed as it goes back to prehistoric times: German linguist Hans Krahe tried to give a systematic overview of the subject. After researching European hydronyms I started to look at those of India, Pakistan, Iran and Syria. I came to the provisional conclusion that the etymologies given by western scholars or local Asian erudites may in some instances be sometimes arbitrary and that perhaps there was indeed some sort of ancient unifying protolanguage behind them. An idea which is not new and was already floated by Italian linguists since the twenties and more recently by H. Krahe and T. Vennemann, who thinks of a Protovasconic substrate. I will give these instances that I find typical:

Narmada (India): interpreted as "giver of pleasure" in Sanscrit (article). Looks instead to mean "river": from nar basis for river from Spain to Italy to Syria (and cfr. Arabic nahar, river).

Alvand < *Harvant (article) from root *har high and band cognate to German bund group, league. Looks to be an instance of Krahe' Al(a)va+ant/d.

Alborz (Mounts, Iran): interpreted as a corruption of Hara Barazati, Hara from a root *ser (article). Looks to be cognate with Albula fl. m., Albion (oros), Albioara fl. etc.

Orontes (Syria); from ancient Persian "Haeravanta" that of the high (article). May be in fact from basis ur water common to Sumeric, Hittite and PIE. Urvent rich in water. Cfr. Tiliamentum (Italy) rich in tilium trees; Malamantus (Pakistan) rich in mountains from substrate basis mal very widespread throughout Europe. The suffix -amentum/eventum alternating was noted already in Sanscrit e.g. by A. L. Prosdocimi.

I append here below a list of names I consider interesting in this respect:

India:

Mula, Hoara, Surma, Someshuari, Dorika, Son, Sarayu, Gori Ganga, Mandal, Sabari, Sileru, Varada, Sal, Savitri,, Som, Sebarmati, Durduria, Dras, Neelum, Suru, Baes or Vipasha, Khambhat, Saun/ Sawan, Pamaba Mandovi, Ulhas.

Iran:

Karum, Karkheh, Shaur, Sirwan, Ghareh Soo, Alwand, Mand, Shur, Aras, Balha, Tulun, Alamut.

Syria:

Orontes, Wadi Jerrah, Barada, Awaj, Arwand.


If anybody is interested in or has researched the topic of hydronymy (of the Balkans, Near East, Iran, India and North Africa as well), I would be pleased to exchange information, bibliography and views.Aldrasto11 (talk) 04:17, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Proposed "deletion" of Geobox River functionality

Pigsonthewing has proposed that {{Infobox river}} be changed to match all capabilities of the {{Geobox}} Rivers functionality, then the Rivers functionality would be deleted from Template Geobox. (Given what has happened with Geobox for mountains and mountain ranges and other functionalities already, I have little doubt that this is part of his long term plan to eventually delete the Geobox completely). Please see Template_talk:Infobox_river#Geobox.2C_again if you want to comment on this proposal. Thanks, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 18:07, 30 June 2013 (UTC)


List of longest streams of Idaho at FLC

I just nominated list of longest streams of Idaho at FLC. Any comments are welcome! LittleMountain5 22:56, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't feel qualified to review FACs, but I will help with editing. Shannon 04:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Rivers of India naming

Almost without exception, our articles for the rivers of India are named Something River (e.g. see {{Waters of South Asia}}). There are four current exceptions:

Sutlej was moved per a nom plus support by just one person at Talk:Sutlej § Proposed rename "because Sutlej seems to primarily refer to the river Sutlej". A Google search turns up all sorts of businesses using this proper name (e.g. bank, textile company, car company). I think they may have been thinking that, because articles about hydrography often abbreviate within their prose by dropping the word "River" from the names after the first mention (i.e. "the Ganges" being shorter to write a dozen times than "the Ganges River"), this would justify naming the article by this unofficial name, which I believe it does not, any more than The Mississippi should be the article name for Mississippi River.

The only exception I can see is if some part of those names means "river", in which case dropping the additional "river" would make sense (e.g. Rio Grande) if that is something that is routinely done in sources. Is that the case with any of these? If not, I'd like to move them to Something River. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 21:59, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

It appears that Mahanadi may be an example of this exception. If "nadi" means river, is that well-known enough by English speakers to make English sources drop the "River" when referring to it? Is that the correct criterion? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 22:19, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
Nadi does mean river. But the name of this river itself is Mahanadi. No one would call it "Maha" (meaning: big, great). §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 09:33, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Most well-known old world rivers, especially those associated with old world civilizations, do not have "river" in their Wikipedia names, unless it is needed for disambiguation (such as it is for Jordan River, and such as it obviously is for some new world rivers: the Mississippi, Missouri, Colorado, Ohio, Amazon, Wisconsin, Snake etc, but not Orinoco). Among the "river"-less rivers are not only the famous ones such as Nile, Ganges, Euphrates, Tigris, Tiber, Oxus (which redirects to the modern name), but also less famous ones such as Danube, Seine, Rhine, Loire, Rhone, Elbe, Mekong, Zambezi, ... As for Indus another famous historical river, I'm shocked to see "river" attached to its name. Many Indian rivers are not so well known historically, so appending "river" to their names is helpful to a reader. However, Sutlej and Yamuna (Jumna) are historically well-known rivers, mentioned in ancient Indian and Greek texts. If we are going to put "river" after their names, we'll have to do the same for all the European rivers mentioned above. As I see it, the only change that needs to be made is: Indus River --> Indus (which in any case redirects to it). Fowler&fowler«Talk» 23:53, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
PS Certainly in both Greece and Rome (Italy), most rivers do not have "river" after their names: See List of rivers of Greece, List of rivers of Italy. If you are saying that somehow the Wikipedia community made the decisions that rivers in India should have "river" after their names, then we should be examining that discussion. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 00:24, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Posted a notice of this discussion at the Wikiproject India talk page. Abecedare (talk) 01:11, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

WP:NCRIVER is quite clear that "X", "X River", or "River X" are all fine as long as there's reliable source referencing for that. I don't understand why we should prefer one form over the other? —SpacemanSpiff 05:44, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Totally agree with Fowler and Fowler's 23:53, 20 September 2013 (UTC) 's comment. "River" is unnecessary in Padma, Brahmaputra etc too. Padma always means Padma river --Tito☸Dutta 05:52, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Totally agree with Fowler and Fowler's comments. Wherever a name obviously means the river, the appendage of the word "river" is not required. Move back of Kaveri River to Kaveri is appreciated, SpacemanSpiff. VasuVR (talk, contribs) 08:55, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
There should be a fifth exception, Kaveri was moved to Kaveri River without discussion a few months ago on the grounds of 'more common usage' and in spite of a previously discussed move the other way. In principle this should be moved back pending a proper discussion. Imc (talk) 08:03, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Start RM to move back all these articles. "River" is not necessary here. --Tito☸Dutta 08:15, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • I've moved back Kaveri to the earlier title which was the result of as RM discussion, therefore a discussion should happen from the current title to any proposed. All others should be handled through the WP:RM process if necessary. —SpacemanSpiff 08:58, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
One of the causes for confusion here is that there are different conventions in different parts of the English-speaking world. For example, in Britain, most rivers are officially named the "River Foo" (although there are rare exceptions named "Foo River"). In the US, most rivers appear to be named "Foo River". There is thus a tendency to apply our own local usage to worldwide rivers. However, it is also normal to refer to rivers around the world simply by name: the "Foo". This is not an abbreviation of their real name, it is their name. For German rivers we have adopted the convention of calling all rivers "Foo" (emulating the German practice) and to add "(river)" only if needed as a disambiguator. Other countries may need different treatment depending on native practice and sources. Oh, of course, some rivers have to have "River" in their name for obvious reasons e.g. the "Yellow River". Bermicourt (talk) 08:45, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Yes, Bermicourt makes a very good point, and I believe AlanM1 may have made the original post because he concluded (quite reasonably), from examining the evidence, that "River" is generally added after the name of Indian rivers. (I remember when I arrived on Wikipedia, in 2006, that seemed to be the general rule for all rivers big and small; Britannica, for example, does that whether you are Nile or Ganges or a little creek in Podunk). I think the source of the confusion might be that there is no clear cut policy for Indian rivers. And I might have added unintentionally to the confusion by adding my random thoughts on well-known and not well-known, which is obviously not a good criterion—it is not well-defined. So, I think the Wiki-community needs to have that discussion somewhere, here or on WT:INDIA, whatever is the precedent. Here would be better because some rivers such as Ganges and Indus are trans-boundary rivers and the input of editors working on Pakistan and Bangladesh would be just as important. Someone in the know should suggest the next step. As for the criteria for South Asia, my own personal view is that the name should be Foo or, if disambiguation is needed, Foo (river). Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:30, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • It seems to me that dab is almost always needed, since rivers are usually named after a place, person, etc. that is also likely to be notable (and have its own article), no? Given that, isn't "Sutlej River" (or perhaps "River Sutlej" if that order is more common) less ugly than "Sutlej (river)"? If "River" is really not part of the name, maybe "Sutlej river"?
  • If the rule is to be related to how well-known the river is, do we really have to have a discussion for each country/region to determine which rule to apply to each river?
  • It seems a similar issue might exist for lakes.
  • In the U.S., even the Mississippi River is referred to that way in general discussion. In discussion specific to hydrography or a related field, "River" might be dropped mostly or altogether as long as the meaning is obvious, but I contend this is nothing specific to rivers – the same thing is done is discussion of airports, stadiums, etc. Should we not see some evidence of what is normally done in India (again, both in general discussion and in hydrography-specific writing) for the present case, and other regions/countries moving forward?
—[AlanM1(talk)]— 19:32, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
Some quick answers:
  • "rivers are usually named after a place, person, etc. that is also likely to be notable" That is not the case for the rivers listed above and many other South Asian rivers that I can think of. (Aside: Interestingly, the reverse can be true, for example the names India, Hindu, Hindi, Sindh, Sindhi etc are all derived from the Sanskrit name (Sindhu) for the river Indus)
  • "rule is to be related to how well-known the river is..." I don't think the rule should be based on that per se (as Fowler too concedes above). Following WP:COMMONNAME would be a better guide.
  • One way to get a rough idea of usage of Foo vs River Foo vs Foo River would be to use Google Books Ngram: here for example is the graph for Sutlej and variants, which shows that the river is overwhelmingly referred to as "Sutlej" without a "River" or "river" suffix or prefix. Note: This method will work only for cases when the name of the river, Foo, is not also a name of some other prominent entity, ie it won't work for most prominent US rivers that share a name with US states etc. Thankfully, it should work for many rivers in India (exceptions: Krishna, Sarasvati and a few more).
Abecedare (talk) 20:11, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
More Ngrams: for Yamuna, for Ganges, for Mahanadi. IMO the evidence for the listed rivers is quite clear-cut. We still need to evaluate whether some of the subcontinental river articles currently named "Foo River" need to be moved to "Foo". Any idea whether this page, the WPINDIA page, or the individual article pages would be the best venue for that discussion? Abecedare (talk) 20:24, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
The discussion should be conducted here. Here is where the expertise and experience is (on rivers and general Wiki-policy and conventions on rivers). The discussion should be on "South Asian Rivers," rather than just those of India (since many are trans-boundary). We should post on WT:India, WT:Pakistan, WT:Bangladesh, WT:Nepal, WT:Bhutan, WT:Sri Lanka, WT:Maldives and WT:Afghanistan. Might as well make its scope wide, if we are going to spend time on it. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:26, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
In response to AlanM1's statement It seems to me that dab is almost always needed, since rivers are usually named after a place, person, etc. that is also likely to be notable (and have its own article), no? . This is obviously the case in the English speaking New World, and perhaps also in Latin America where many or most rivers were named by colonists with terms from their native language. But I'm fairly sure that it is not the case anywhere in the Old World (including in Britain). Imc (talk) 06:39, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
I don't think ngrams (or any other bulk-query) method can be used because it doesn't deal with this issue – the dropping of "river" in hydrography-specific context. As far as which rivers it should apply to, there is already a gap between the current state and this discussion, and I predict it to widen. The more an editor is familiar with a particular location or the field in general, the more likely they are to regard a river as being significant enough to drop the "River". The problem is our readers are coming from a much wider variety of knowledge. I probably haven't heard of the Yamuna river since grade school, if at all. (WP:COMMONNAME usually ends up being the same as this, since it's those same knowledgeable editors that will be making the argument, and this doesn't necessarily represent the common name among the majority of readers, even assuming the purest of editors' intentions.) —[AlanM1(talk)]— 15:36, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
I agree with AlanM1 here. For some reason, Wikipedia debates seem to follow this pattern: Let's set up a pattern for easy linking and reader usability --> My page is an exception! ---> so is mine, Let's change the rules. --> Most pages are exceptional! (Here follows page after page of debate on why and whether and who is exceptional) ---> Rule is what? Hope someone made enough redirects to find your page. Wait two years and do it all again. See the voluminous U.S. cities naming debate which might be longer than the texts of all U.S. cities articles. Rmhermen (talk) 16:10, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
The problem with that logic is that the rule explicitly allows Foo, Foo River, and River Foo. What's being suggested here is that we shouldn't follow the WP rule, rather follow one specific piece of the rule. For that, you'd need to change WP:NCRIVER in its entirety, not just how it applies to India/South Asia, because we currently accept Foo for the geographies where it is common usage. —SpacemanSpiff 16:28, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
As SS points out, that titles can be Foo, Foo River or River Foo, i don't see how any sort of discussion further here would be fruitful. Just pick and start a WP:RM individually. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {T/C} 16:47, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I can see AlanM1's point, and to that extent, I can see myself not objecting to Yamuna-->Yamuna River, Sutlej-->Sutlej River. However, no matter what part of the world a reader is from, I can't see that they would need, for their edification, the word "river" in any form or position—before, after, or parenthetically—with Nile, Ganges, Euphrates, Tigris, Tiber, Oxus or Indus. That I believe is both an insult to the river and to the intelligence of those who make the effort to read about it. More generally, I believe, there is a tendency on Wikipedia to spend more time on nomenclature, standardization, categorization, etc than on the actual writing and revising. I believe our time is better employed working on the content of the articles than arguing about their names. In the collective time, we've spent discussing this, we could have improved Sutlej, which remains a stub. Given a choice, I would rather have well-written articles whose names follow wildly chaotic patterns than poorly written articles whose nomenclature etc. is immaculate. That is the bottom line. If there is a set of well-written articles the bells and whistles of whose titles, categories, etc need polishing, I'm willing to spend a few minutes on them; otherwise, not. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 02:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I sympathise with that view, although the truth is we probably need sensible titles too. Too often, though, titles are voted through on based on personal "likes" or usage and not enough time is devoted to finding out what authoritative sources say. Perhaps that is because they often say something different from what people "like". --Bermicourt (talk) 16:44, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
As for old the authoritative sources, in all the maps of India up to 1947, when the British left, Ganges and Indus were labeled R. Ganges and R. Indus, not Ganges R. and Indus R. For the other rivers, it varied with the map. Some had most rivers labeled: R. Foo see File:Pope1880NorthWesternProv2.jpg (1880); others had the larger rivers labeled R Foo (which was always the case for R. Ganges and R. Indus) and the smaller ones Foo R. see File:DoabUnitedProvincesIGI1908.jpg (1908).
On the broader topic here: I suspect many river pages were created years ago with a default "Foo River" form that may or may not be ideal and may be the result of a US-POV. It is certainly the case that in the US (and Canada, and perhaps elsewhere) "Foo River" is the norm. The word "River" is part of the name, just as "Creek" might be, or "Rio" in some cases, or for mountains "Mount", "Mountain", "Peak", etc. Usage differs in other parts of the world, of course.
The WP:NCRIVER text could be clearer when it says "X", "X River", or "River X". The word "River" may be some other term like "Creek", "Rio", "Fork", etc. I've long been struck by the seeming randomness of page names for rivers in Latin America, which mostly follow "Foo River" style but often instead use "Rio Foo" or "Río Foo", with little rhyme or reason. See for example the various Rio Negros—Río Negro (Argentina) uses "Río" but has text that starts "Black River...", while the largest tributary of the Amazon, commonly called Rio Negro in English is found at Negro River (Amazon) and confusingly starts off "Negro River (Portuguese: Rio Negro, Spanish: Río Negro, English: Black River)..."
All that aside, I agree with Fowler when he says "Given a choice, I would rather have well-written articles whose names follow wildly chaotic patterns than poorly written articles whose nomenclature etc. is immaculate." There is page name randomness for Latin American rivers, but then the pages are mostly stubs anyway, so I haven't felt inspired to "fix" the page names. Negro River (Amazon) is an exception that perhaps should be addressed. Pfly (talk) 00:05, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Article request

Please we need to make this red link blue: Joshua Green River. Something important happened there and we want to be sure the readers know which place we are referring to, but the river's name is a red link. Please help!Chrisrus (talk) 06:09, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Done. I'll add more detail later if I can find any. Please give reliable sources such as newspaper articles, books, reliable web sites, etc., per WP:RS for anything you add. I'd be glad to help with the citation formatting if you like. Finetooth (talk) 17:43, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Lists of rivers - importance assessment

I have made a suggestion about improving the assessment of Lists articles on the assessment talk page, here . Jokulhlaup (talk) 18:28, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

European watersheds image

The image File:Europäische_Wasserscheiden.png, in German but used on the English Wikipedia, shows the watersheds of the major rivers of Europe. Most of the land between the Thames and the Trent is allocated on this map to the River Cam. Now, I don't know a great deal about rivers in general, so I thought I would come and ask here, but the choice of the Cam on this image seems really rather strange: it's not a particularly major river of the area. It's a tributary of the Great Ouse, which sounds like a much more sensible choice of river to show. Do you think it's worth mentioning this to the author of the image? Marnanel (talk) 17:35, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Another problem - this seems top fail the colorblind test (can't tell the difference in watershed boundary and river when run through a colorblind filter). See WP:Access. Rmhermen (talk) 19:53, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

RM re the Peace River

I launched the RM on Talk:Peace River though now see I should have made it a dual-article move, as implicit in the move of Peace River to Peace River (disambiguation) is the move from Peace River (Canada) back to Peace River.Skookum1 (talk) 19:43, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Teifi River Wales

You indicate the river as 75 miles long but omit the river from the list of longest rivers in the UK. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.181.6.216 (talk) 20:19, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I have copied the query over to Talk:River Teifi where it may get a better chance of an informed reply. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:54, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Query has been answered, with Longest rivers of the United Kingdom now updated. Jokulhlaup (talk) 18:53, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Dan River disaster

Given this unfolding disaster, our article on the Dan River may need more eyes watching it as well as any improvements that editors can make.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 03:12, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

coordinates and Infobox river

For those wanting to add coordinates to articles using Infobox river, I've got mods to that template to support this. See Template talk:Infobox river#new coordinate parameters. —Steve Summit (talk) 05:52, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

The changes to the {{Infobox river}} template are now live. Everyone can start using the new template parameters. Also, there are something like 6,725 existing river articles (!) which (a) use the Infobox river template and (b) have the coordinates specified some other way than by those new parameters. Ideally all of those articles would have the coordinates merged into the template, although it will obviously be a fair amount of work, and it probably can't be automated, because there are a bunch of different cases, and some hand checking required. I'll discuss this further (and try to figure out a way of providing a list of the 6,725 articles) in a new thread below. —Steve Summit (talk) 14:25, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject proposal

If anyone is here, they might be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Pennsylvania Streams. Thanks, --Jakob (talk) 13:54, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

any guidance for converting from Infobox River to Geobox|River?

"The field names are not fully compatible with the earlier Infobox template". I'll say! I went to add source and mouth coordinates to Ipswich River, only to discover that since it used the infobox instead of the geobox, the source_lat_d and mouth_lat_d parameters didn't work. So I thought I'd try converting it from the infobox to the geobox, but it's not trivial! What to do with basin_countries? What to do with progression? Besides converting all the parameter names that have data, should I also convert all the blank ones (since the old infobox names probably won't work with the geobox if someone fills them in later)? Or just delete them? Should I paste in a full, new Geobox skeleton, even though that'll obscure the diffs? I just don't know.

(Not trying to sound peevish, just wondering if there's a right way to do this...) —Steve Summit (talk) 14:31, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Why would you want to? I thought the general consensus was moving away from the unwieldy "one size attempts to fit all but fails" geobox back to separate topographic infoboxes. --Bermicourt (talk) 15:54, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
My only incentive was adding source and mouth coordinates, which the geobox has a very explicit way to do.
If there's good a way to do that with the infobox, I'll happily do that instead. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:13, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
I answered this at Template talk:Geobox/type/river which was basically that I tend to copy a Geobox skeleton into the article above the old infobox, and then copy over the details one by one and then delete the infobox at the end. I'm not sure there is 'a general consensus' on not using them, I don't think anything got agreed when its possible demise was discussed at Template_talk:Infobox_river#Geobox.2C_again. Given the infobox war that did occur later, my understanding was that which one to use was down to discussion etc. see WP:INFOBOXUSE. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:31, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
Wow. Thanks very much for the pointer to last summer's discussion; I shall be extra careful not to step into that particular minefield! :-)
I don't have any pressing desire to convert all the river infoboxes to geoboxes, but I do have a pressing desire to whittle down Category:Massachusetts articles missing geocoordinate data, and there are a lot of rivers on there. Now, the thing I like about the geobox is that I don't have to agonize over whether to specify the coordinates of the mouth or the source -- I can specify both, and somebody else takes care of deciding which one goes in the title bar.
If there's a well-defined way of specifying source and mouth coordinates in the infobox please let me know! (If not, I may look into modifying the infobox template to add that capability...) —Steve Summit (talk) 23:21, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
There must be a way of doing it. Infobox River could do worse that imitate the German Wiki equivalent which I still use when translating because it's far faster (no template conversion needed) and more comprehensive. Check out the Aller article for an example of what we could do with Infobox River. --Bermicourt (talk) 19:47, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
Very interesting. I think there's a little bug in this (en.wikipedia) version of Template:Infobox Fluss1, though: notice how the Aller article lists the source coordinates in the title bar, contrary to our policy (as I understand it) to list the mouth coordinates. (Nor does the German version of the template do it that way; at de:Aller, the mouth coordinates are in the title bar.) —Steve Summit (talk) 00:34, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
Anyone know the current situation on this? I see the Ipswich River now has mouth and source coords in the infobox, and mouth coords in the title bar, as it should be. But de:Aller seems to still have source coords in the title bar. Is this just an issue with the German template and the English one is working as it should? Pfly (talk) 03:04, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
At risk of opening a can of worms, my understanding of the infobox/geobox debate was that nothing was decided and people are free to use whichever template they like best. And that both could be improved, and that maybe someday, if one template is clearly superior there might be consensus to try to use just one. I assume this is still the case? I haven't been following Wikipedia as closely as I used to. Personally, I've long preferred geobox, although it is far from ideal in many ways. One thing I like about it is the way it deals with discharge data. But even there it's not perfect. If ever template folks want to hash out exactly what would make a perfect river template, please let me know. I have lots of opinions about it! As for last summer, I understand Andy Mabbett's desire for a single info/geobox, but found myself agreeing more with Ruhrfisch's comments. I think tweaking infobox river and geobox river are unlikely to ever result in one being obviously superior. To do that would take some low-level discussion on what exactly would make an ideal info/geobox for rivers. Whether it is worth the effort is another question. I suspect there aren't enough editors interested in rivers to deal with the work that would likely ensue. Me, I have no problem with there being two options. Pfly (talk) 02:58, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Boundary river naming, help please?

There are multiple Nagar Rivers, and one of them forms part of the boundary between India and Bangladesh (it's currently a red link as Nagar River (Rangpur)). Could someone please advise me what a page about it should be named? (Actually, I don't have much information about it, just some on the Bangladesh side, but perhaps enough to make a start that I hope other people could add to.) Sminthopsis84 (talk) 22:06, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

You could have a look at Category:Border rivers which has a few dabbed rivers that cross international boundaries. It would seem that you need to select the smallest political entity that covers the river on each side of the border e.g. Pigeon River (Minnesota–Ontario).--Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:56, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Nancy Branch

Hello, I recently created this article, to help disambiguate between the large numbers of articles on streams called Nancy (see Nancy Creek). I can find sources for Nancy Branch, but not reliable sources. Can anyone help? Thank you, Boleyn (talk) 16:15, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

The USGS GNIS is a good source for U.S. place names. Rmhermen (talk) 16:29, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

citing for "set of regions" demanded for Category:Rivers of British Columbia by region

One of the "support" voters for the CfD which attempted to delete or merge all subcats in Category:Rivers of British Columbia by region, who also joined the nom there in challenging all all British Columbia region titles/articles, has demanded cites as somehow mandatory for BC regions, claiming there has to be a citation for diffusing categories; I have yet to get an answer for any such guideline or policy and had intended on starting a discussion myself. Input from people actually familiar with BC's geography and regions and with categorization of rivers is needed.

  • NB in areas of the province that are barely populated I'd begun using major mountain range-groupings like Category:Rivers of the Boundary Ranges and Category:Rivers of the Omineca Mountains in lieu of the usual and conventional subdivisions of the province i.e. Vancouver Island, Lower Mainland, Okanagan, Cariboo etc. The Rocky Mountains and Pacific/Kitimat Ranges are regions in their own right; there are parts of them where, respectively, East Kootenay or North/Central Coast or Chilcotin and Nechako Country do not readily apply. Such category challenges being made on the basis of unspecified guidelines as if they were rules and an ignorance of BC's geography are, to me, a nuisance and a waste of time. But since the discussion has been launched, I am announcing it here, since the creator/perpetrator of that discussion did not see fit to.Skookum1 (talk) 00:56, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

River disambiguation

An editor has moved a number of articles on UK rivers needing disambiguation from brackets to commas. The following discussion has started at User talk:SilkTork, which I am moving here.--Mhockey (talk) 21:06, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

I think your multiple moves of river articles need discussion - I don't think WP:COMMADIS supports these moves. I have commented at Talk:River Yeo (South Somerset). Thanks.--Mhockey (talk) 18:33, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Other UK rivers are disambiguated the same way, and this does follow WP:COMMADIS. SilkTork ✔Tea time 18:41, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
I don't agree. There is a lot of variation in disambiguating rivers (and there is nothing special about UK rivers). Which bit of WP:COMMADIS do you think supports your moves?--Mhockey (talk) 18:48, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
There were two factors. 1) There were already more UK rivers that used comma disambiguation; 2): "Comma-separated disambiguation. With place names, if the disambiguating term is a higher-level administrative division, it is often separated using a comma instead of parentheses". The two factors appeared to work together in harmony. And that follows all other place names where commas are used in place of brackets. I think that at one time brackets were first choice, but over the years commas have come to be preferred as that makes it easier to link when writing article; for example: "light craft use the River Yeo, Somerset" is easy and natural. And such usage is found elsewhere: [8], "River+Yeo%2C+Somerset"&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=%22River+Yeo%2C+Somerset%22&safe=off&tbm=bks, while "River Yeo (South Somerset)" is only found in Wikipedia mirrors. It is clearly artifical, and is not a natural search term. SilkTork ✔Tea time 19:02, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
But River Yeo, South Somerset isn't a natural search term either. The natural disambiguation for UK rivers in ordinary writing is usually the name of the largest place on the river, e.g. the Bristol Avon, the Stratford Avon, the Lapford Yeo, the Barnstaple Yeo.
Rivers are not really "places", and Bristol, Stratford, Lapford and Barnstaple are not "higher-level administrative divisions" than the rivers they are on. The present consensus on disambiguating rivers is at WP:NCRIVER, to use brackets. I'll move this discussion to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers, to see if others want to change the current guidance.--Mhockey (talk) 21:06, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Any other views?--Mhockey (talk) 21:06, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

The current consensus on UK rivers is to use comma rather than brackets for dab purposes. The dab is usually the county in which the majority of the river lies. Keith D (talk) 00:31, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Could you support this assertion by pointing us to one or more discussions that arrived at that consensus? --Malepheasant (talk) 01:26, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
An indication of the consensus for commas, can be taken from the fact that Wikipedia:WikiProject UK geography/How to write about rivers still has the following section;
The talk page of which, will lead you to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Rivers/Archive_2#Correct_ambiguity_in_naming_section, which is a five year old discussion that ended with no consensus, and no change to the original 'How to' essay. I support the need for change on this, and the use of the comma dab for UK rivers, as it is similar to how UK places are dabbed.--Jokulhlaup (talk) 15:14, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
If the Environment Agency already has a system we should use that. I saw that they were using "Esk (Cumbria)", which suggests a bracketing system, but haven't done any comprehensive research to see if that's their norm. If not, then if the disambiguator is a county, we should use the normal format i.e. "Esk, Cumbria", and if the disambiguator is something else, e.g. parent river or a non-admin unit, we should use brackets. --Bermicourt (talk) 20:36, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Jokulhlaup for the links. To further illustrate how badly scattered around Wikipedia such guidelines seem to be, I'll note this from Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(geographic_names)#Disambiguation

With natural features, the tag normally appears in parentheses, as in Eagle River (Colorado). Specific pre-existing national conventions may take precedence though.

The UK section on the same page addresses "localities" and "places" but not natural features (which isn't to say it couldn't.) Personally I like having a distinction in treatment between populated places and natural features. I'm inclined to think that being "similar to how UK places are dabbed" is an argument against disambiguating natural features in an identical way, because the [placename, larger placename] construction is so strongly associated with populated places.--Malepheasant (talk) 22:27, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

The consensus at WP:NCRIVER is generally to disambiguate by brackets. Until recent changes (which do not seem to have been discussed), most UK rivers used bracket disambiguation, like rivers elsewhere. Why should UK rivers be disambiguated differently? There is no clear local usage that would support comma disambiguation. The reason for preferring brackets for rivers is presumably that the diambiguator for rivers varies so much - largest place on the river, river to which it is a tributary, political entity containing the largest part of the river's course, and no doubt others. With places, you can almost always say that the place is in the disambiguator, so comma disambiguation seems natural. You cannot say that with many disambiguators of rivers. --Mhockey (talk) 22:24, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

I support bracketed disambiguation. A river name is not a "place name", and WP:COMMADIS applies to place names only. A place exists within a hierarchy of larger places, and in some countries one or more of those larger places is often treated as part of the natural name of the place - "Wilmington, Delaware" etc. Commas work fine for well-defined places such as cities and villages, perhaps also mountains, but a river is a linear entity which may pass through or beside many places at various levels. The bracket disambiguator allows for flexibility (eg to distinguish the 4 Somerset Yeos), and seems altogether more appropriate, as already recognised in the wording of the guidelines of this rivers project. PamD 19:28, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Mhockey, Malepheasant and PamD. There's nothing special about UK rivers (or their treatment in British English) justifying that their articles' titles be formatted differently from those of other articles about rivers (and natural features in general).
As Malepheasant said, "similar to how UK places are dabbed" is an argument against such a practice. The wording "higher-level administrative division" was selected carefully, and I'm baffled as to why it's been deemed applicable to rivers (which, as PamD noted, belong to no such hierarchy).
Many low-level administrative divisions (including the one in which I was raised) have the word "River" in their names (often because they share these names with nearby rivers). To me, "River Yeo, Somerset" comes across as the name of a populated place. There's no valid reason to introduce that sort of confusion. —David Levy 20:01, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguate rivers with brackets and communities with commas. For example: the river, Black River (New York) vs. the community, Black River, New York. Gjs238 (talk) 12:19, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

  • I agree with several other comments that using commas with rivers confuses the scope of applicability for WP:COMMADIS. Rivers are a geographical feature, not a place name. I have seen no strong evidence that there is a well-established tradition of using commas with river names in British English to warrant a WP:ENGVAR exception. older ≠ wiser 12:34, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
I counted the UK rivers which were dabbed, by looking through the English, Welsh, Scottish and NI river categories. The result was 166 using commas, and 54 with brackets. That's a 3:1 ratio in favour of commas, so I would say there has been a culture of using commas for UK rivers. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:44, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
That is a variety of navel-gazing -- counting what a limited subset of editors on Wikipedia do -- which does not necessarily mean there is any correspondence with real-world usage. older ≠ wiser 18:52, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Template parameters

How do I find out length, elevation, discharge and watershed for a particular river? Perhaps some of this is available from Google maps.

Also, I learn from an above item that the Template:Infobox River is being replaced by the template:Geobox. I have been using the former, in quite a few new river articles in England and Kazakhstan. Should I use Geobox instead? --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:18, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Infobox & Geobox

Not true. There was no consensus, so both are acceptable. My advice is to use Template:Infobox River which we can tailor, rather than the one-size-fits-all Geobox. --Bermicourt (talk) 15:33, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
The alternative view is that a Geobox, has a neater appearance, provides auto conversions for length, area and flows, is better for complex situations (twin sources etc), and it puts a red dot on a map for the mouth. As Bermicourt rightly points out, both are acceptable. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:42, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

River Details

I have added the sub-headings, as you asked two separate questions. In terms of river details, the answer should have been to direct you to the resources section of the project page. But, that only gives limited information, and could do with expanding to cover a wider range of countries etc. One way maybe to look at a good article from the country you are interested in, and seeing what was used for that river. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:42, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Leaflet For Wikiproject Rivers At Wikimania 2014

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (talk) 16:06, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Stub or Start Class

I recently added the WP:Rivers template to a number of Irish rivers, and assessed the articles, altering both the Rivers and WP:Ireland templates to match the class of the article - using the Did You Know length rule which is 1500 chars/ 250 words or about ten sentences of text, as the lower limit for a Start class. Some of the class changes on the Ireland templates were later altered back to a start where I had downgraded them to a stub. Because of this I would like to see if my view on these articles fits with others on this project, and ask if the following are Stub or Start class. Thanks. Jokulhlaup (talk) 20:53, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

How much more is there to say about these rivers? Consider WP:CL-RULE.--Mhockey (talk) 21:07, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
You'd be surprised. I've seen articles go from two-sentence badly referenced stubs to articles with over 32k characters of prose. I've also seen far smaller streams with far longer articles (e.g. this one). Many of the articles at hand here are also poorly referenced. I'd say definitely tag them as stubs. --Jakob (talk) 21:28, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Apologies Mhockey, I should have said that a quick search showed info on fishing, hydrology and bridges on most of these rivers, that could have been included. But as Jakob shows, it can be surprising how much there can be for even small streams - and these are larger (but admittedly not that big). It does pose an interesting conundrum - do you have Google every river that needs assessing to check that you are not imposing a big river expectation on a tiny stream, especially when the article gives no clue to its size, as per the CL rule. At least these all had a picture to give some sense of scale. Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:07, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Buffalo Creek (West Branch Susquehanna River)

Hi. A while ago, some content was added to the first paragraph of the history section of the article on Buffalo Creek. It is my opinion that this content violates two of Wikipedia's important policies/guidelines: WP:RS (a Wikipedia article and other spurious sources are cited) and WP:SYN (none of the content is explicitly stated, but is instead based on the assumptions of the editor who added them, which may or may not be correct). I attempted to remove this, but it was restored with no relevant explanation and more offending content was added. I'd like to have the article restored to this revision. I am bringing this here to avoid the possibility of starting an edit war over this matter. Thanks. --Jakob (talk) 19:39, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Have you tried discussing on the talk page? older ≠ wiser 20:09, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
@Bkonrad: No, because the talk pages of all but the most high-importance articles are deader than graveyards. I'm probably the only active editor watching the buffalo creek talk page. But I did try discussing matters with Wetman several weeks ago on his talk page. He claimed that he would remove the Wikipedia ref, at least, but he never did. --Jakob (talk) 20:25, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Romanian river stub articles

Out of a total of the 24,500 or so WP rivers pages, about half (12,700) are stub articles that have an unknown importance. The majority of these (about 8,000) are Romania river articles. Having looked at a number, they are all very similar short stubs usually of one sentence saying that the Foo river is a tributary of the Bar river in Romania - see Adona River as an example.

I am considering asking if these stubs can all be marked up with a Rivers importance of Low via a Bot request. I have reviewed the articles in the List of longest rivers of Romania, and the top 75 scoring rivers in this selection and made changes where required to make sure they are all still stubs and of low importance.

The Bot runners usually ask if the involved project has given approval for such changes, so I thought I would see if there is any support, or otherwise for getting this done. I have also asked user @Afil:, who created the articles for his views. The WP: Romania template can also be changed from unknown to Low importance at the same time. Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:46, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree with this idea in general, but I would suggest that you consider requesting Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks help rather than 'bot runner help.--DThomsen8 (talk) 18:23, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Appreciate the support, AWB was Plan B, there may also be issues with the template as they only have {{river|class=stub}} which may cause problems, I also didn't fancy clicking through 8,000 articles if a 'bot could do it instead.Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:06, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
I think it would be fine to have a bot do that. Kmusser (talk) 19:36, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
two cents here from me. The list of affected talk pages is available here Warning - large page. Please direct any queries about this to WP:BOTREQ#Romanian river stub articles. I have already coded this, so if there are no objections, I will submit a BRFA in the next few days. --Mdann52talk to me! 14:21, 25 June 2014 (UTC)
@Mdann52: Thanks for the update, and for submitting the BRFA. I have randomly checked through more of these articles, and could find no issues...Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:48, 25 June 2014 (UTC)
The 'bot User:Mdann52 bot completed a successful trial, and is now working its way at about six articles per minute through the remainder of the 8,000 articles, so may take 24 hours to complete the task...Jokulhlaup (talk) 20:22, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Indeed. However, I am unable to run it non-stop (I can't run AWB on toolserver), so it will take a few days to run through the task. My results inducate I am making around 6 edits/min during quieter times, dropping to 4 edits/min in peak times. Unfortunately, I can not run it any quicker than this. I am shutting the task down now, but plan to restart tomorrow morning. --Mdann52talk to me! 20:54, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for letting us know, all looking good so far...Jokulhlaup (talk) 21:09, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Task complete

 task complete. Please let me know if I can help in future - as I have the code, I can easily adjust it for future use. --Mdann52talk to me! 15:14, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for putting the time in on setting this up and overseeing the run, it has made a significant dent in the unknown importance articles for both the Rivers and Romanian projects. Big success all round...Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:27, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

List of main tributes to the Sambre

Thanks to help given at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#Piéton a tributary of the Sambre, I have now created an article called Piéton, I was furnished with enough information to add a list of main tributes to the Sambre, it turns out that there were a couple of other streams that already had articles. Please could someone look them all over and add any missing details such as the correct stub and an information box similar to the ones in the sister language articles to Piéton. -- PBS (talk) 14:30, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

I've added a Geobox to the only tributary with an article which was the Hanzinne, the Ligne (river) was only a redirect back to the Sambre...Jokulhlaup (talk) 18:13, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. If you have time could you please could you add the Geobox to the Piéton article? -- PBS (talk) 18:56, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Added as requested...Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:20, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Merger discussion possibly of interest

A discussion about a proposed merger of separate articles about tributaries into the article about the stream into which the tributaries flow, here: Talk:Forked Deer River#Proposed merge with Middle Fork of the Forked Deer River. --Malepheasant (talk) 01:03, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Boeme

Dear river experts: Since this is an article about a river, it will eventually be accepted into the encyclopedia. What should the name of the article be? —Anne Delong (talk) 12:15, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

French Wikipedia calls it the Boëme. As we seem to like foreign accents on Wikipedia, we should probably go with that. --Bermicourt (talk) 12:52, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
So not Boëme River or Boëme (river)? —Anne Delong (talk) 14:46, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
No, I think it's a US practice to call their rivers "Foo River", just like the Brits call theirs "River Foo". Nothing wrong with that, but for European rivers at least we tend to use the name only unless it needs dabbing in which case we use "Foo (river)". In this case there is no clash, so it'd just be Boëme. See Category:Rivers of France and Category:Rivers of Germany. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:35, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Okay - it's in mainspace now, thanks to Jokulhlaup's improvement. —Anne Delong (talk) 01:15, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)/archive4

Please comment on the FAC for Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River). Thanks. --Jakob (talk) 00:48, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Scope of Rivers Project

Whilst looking through and assessing articles that contain the Rivers Template, I’ve noticed there are some articles that could be viewed as being outside of the scope of the project. Examples include;

My view is that most of the above article types and their examples have been tagged for WP:Rivers with the best intentions, but would be better placed under other wiki projects, such as Waterfalls, Dams, Bridges and Islands etc. Not sure about the Floods and River Morphology articles though, they are related, but not really covered by our guidelines and assessments which are based on writing articles describing individual natural watercourses (of various sizes).

Does anyone else hold a similar view, or have a better oversight of what should or should not be included...Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:26, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Not sure if I should take the silence as a weak consensus on this, or as a sign that everyone has taken a Wikibreak for the summer...Jokulhlaup (talk) 21:03, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
Waterfalls, dams, bridges, mills, floods and islands have their own projects so that's fine; they don't need to be here. I think it definitely makes sense that river morphology and processes are part of this project and probably river islands. Canals and aqueducts don't have their own project, but I'm not sure they're right to be parked here. Water law and organizations - no unless they're specifically river-only related. --Bermicourt (talk) 06:36, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification, sounds reasonable to me. Having had a look around, Canals seems to be covered by WP Transport, and water supply aqueducts by WP Water, although those projects don't seem to be vary very active...Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:56, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
The clarification seems very sensible to me, too. I have added talk pages for many rivers, and contributed articles on rivers in England and Kazakhstan. I correct or add to talk pages regardless whetHer the project is active or not. --DThomsen8 (talk) 20:54, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
If we reach a consensus, we could include this in our guidelines, although it may be worth leaving some flexibility for editors to agree to include certain other river-related articles on a case-by-case basis. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:09, 17 August 2014 (UTC)D

The Category:Crossings of the Susquehanna River is the category placing the Safe Harbor Dam in a river subcategory. There are probably thousands of dams, bridges and tunnels in this category, with individual articles and lists. I have taken pictures of the Safe Harbor Dam on 4 July 2013, so that caught my eye immediately. Are we agreed that these categories are properly in the overall Rivers category?--DThomsen8 (talk) 21:12, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this, the reason I included Safe Harbor Dam, was that it has the Rivers Template banner and appeared when I compared the Rivers and Dams article lists . Looking at that Susquehanna Category, Safe Harbour seems to be the only article that has the template, so it seems to be a one-off. Your post does raise a good point though, about List of Crossings articles and the matching Categories being included within Rivers. If none of the articles in the listing or the category fall into the Rivers project, then I would think that both the list and the category should not be included within the project or tagged as such...Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:50, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
I took away the Rivers template on the Talk:Safe Harbor Dam that I put there four years ago by mistake.--DThomsen8 (talk) 20:59, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
DThomsen8, not sure you should class it as a mistake, as we have only got round to discussing this now, four years on. I have followed your lead and removed the other WP Dam related articles...Jokulhlaup (talk) 17:25, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Canals

I think some canals may be fairly significantly connected to rivers. The Cumberland and Oxford Canal, for example, was a series of locks effectively converting the Presumpscot River to a 19th-century transportation artery with associated impacts on river flows and migration of aquatic organisms. It seems as if the Winter Canal may have had similar effects. Freshwater canals (including power canals) may divert significant quantities of river flow; and might, for all practical purposes, constitute a change of river course into a new channel. Thewellman (talk) 03:58, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

(Added a subtitle for clarity) Yes, would agree that canals can have a significant affect on rivers, both for navigation and other uses. In the UK we have WP:WikiProject UK Waterways for navigable canals, and as mentioned above they are also covered by other projects elsewhere. So, my view would be keep them separate...Jokulhlaup (talk) 16:52, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

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