Talk:Geography of Western Australia

Image:WAClimates.jpg
Hi John. You describe the image as your own work using Powerpoint. Unfortunately, I don't think that that will stack up against the copyright experts here who will take a strict line in that the map is clearly based on a presumably copyrighted map previously published elsewhere. Hence it is a derivative work. Unless you genuinely are the creator of the base map (in which case you need to clearly state this on the image page), I am afraid that it'll need to be redone using a "free" base map. Some free maps of WA are at commons:Category:Maps of Western Australia and Category:Maps of Australia. A Köppen classification map for Australia has been done at Image:Australia-climate-map MJC01.png which could be cropped I suppose to show WA only. Sing out if you need a hand or more guidance. &mdash;Moondyne 07:23, 18 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Moondyne. The base map I scanned in from an old tourist base map of the state that I had.  I then drew the outline for the climatic regions myself and coloured them manually, and added the key and the title in powerpoint.  I drew the blue line marking the summer and winter rainfall regimes and coloured this too, before saving it from powerpoint as a jpeg file.  Surely this classifies as a non-copyright map. John D. Croft 08:27, 18 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I doubt it. The bottom line is that someone, somewhere owns the copyright to that old tourist map.  And the Wikimedia Foundation has decreed that it will not publish copyrighted materials, including derivative works.  Per US Copyright Office Circular 14:  Derivative Works: "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work." &mdash;Moondyne 08:39, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
 * WHat a pain that is - i bet some lawyer somewhere has the high paid job in tracing impossible to find copyright holders SatuSuro 09:46, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Copyright covers the expression of information, not the information itself. The geographical information in an old tourist map is not copyrightable; only the way in which that information is expressed is.

For example, the makers of that old tourist map had to decide upon a projection and coordinate system for them map. They had to decided whether or not to distinguish between different classes of road, and if so how. They had to decide which features to list and which not to. For roads, they had to choose between full, broken or dotted lines; they had to select a line thickness and a line colour. They had to do the same for railway lines and rivers. They had to select background shading colours for ocean, land and lakes. They had to decide upon icons for features such as bridges, hills, etc. They had to choose a typeface and font size for place names. All of these things represent creative decisions about how to represent geographic information, and all of them are copyrightable.

But the geographical information underlying the map is not copyrightable. If John extracted the geographical information from the map, e.g. by tracing it, but independently made his own decisions on colour schemes, font, iconography, etc, then the resultant creative work is his and his alone. I don't think that has happened here though; I think this map reuses the original map's iconography etcetera. So we have a problem.

Hesperian 11:28, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

OK Gents, leave it with me, I'll try to redraw the outlines and recreate the map - unforuntanely the way I have done my maps in the past have been using Powerpoint (the only map making package I have - if someone has a better system and was interested I'd gladly pass it over to them. It would be good if the new map includes the sites mentioned in the climatic texts. John D. Croft 23:12, 18 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I created a new one based on a cropped version of the Australian map. See Image:Western Australia-climate-map.png. &mdash;Moondyne 06:27, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * New map with sites mentioned in text included has been uploaded. John D. Croft 09:01, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Climate Change and Global Warming section
"... for Australia as a whole produces about 27 tonnes per person ..." List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per capita shows Australia at #12 with 18.0 tonnes (below the US at #11) in 2003. &mdash;Moondyne 06:16, 24 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually 18.0 seems to be a typo. The source  actually says 18.8, not 18.0.  Also, another series  shows all greenhouse emissions as CO2 equivalents with Australia coming lucky last at 26.11 tonnes. &mdash;Moondyne 06:25, 24 July 2007 (UTC)


 * The State of the Environment Report for Western Australia (released July 2007) suggests that the total for Australia is just under 27 tonnes per person. The recent National Greenhouse Inventory, which breaks these figures down per tonne show that Tasmania produces the least and Western Australia (with 34 tonnes per person) produces the most.  Thank god we have only 1/10th of the Australian population). John D. Croft 08:39, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Confusing lead
I am having trouble understanding the lede.

Overall, a lede is supposed to summarise the article. This lede hardly even provides a clue as to what the rest of the article is about. No mention of any of the information contained under the main subheadings

More specifically, the wording of the material that is in here is unclear.

"Due to the size and the isolation of the state, considerable emphasis has been made of these features"

What features are we talking about? The only feature we have mentioned to date is that it occupies 1/3 of the continent. Who makes this emphasis, and where did they emphasise the features? In what sense were the features emphasised? After reading this sentence, I literally have no idea what this sentence is tying to say.

"It is also the only first level administrative subdivision to occupy the entire continental coastline in one cardinal direction" 1) What is a "first level administrative subdivision". This is jargon, and needs to either be hotlinked to the appropriate article, explained if no article exists, and removed if neither of those options is possible. I literally ave no idea what a "first level administrative subdivision" is, and Google suggest it has something to do with government departments. 2) What does "occupy the entire continental coastline in one cardinal direction" mean? WA doesn't occupy the entire western coastline of Australia, which is what it seems to imply. NSW is the only state that one could argue doesn't have any western continental coastline, and even that isn't strictly true since various peninsulae (eg Cape Byron) have western facing coasts. All other states have significant lengths of western continental coastline, and SA has a greater proportion of western continental coastline than WA does. All states except NSW and Vic have significant lengths of predominantly west facing coastline. Not all of the WA coast faces west, nor does WA encompass all the coastline that is uninterrupted by significant stretches in other directions, since the west coast of the NT is also clearly the west coast of Australia I can't parse this statement in any way that makes it true.Mark Marathon (talk) 08:52, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

"... beginning the human settlement geography of Western Australia."
There has to be a less racist way of saying that, even if—which isn't true—we're all pretending that the aborigines never had settlements.

Nearly as bad, the French occupation of the Netherlands during the Napoleonic Wars was obviously completely irrelevant to colonial claims and British naval actions in 1827. It's possible it was a preemptive move to forestall French interest in the area but whatever that was needs to be separately explained and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Dutch East Indies which remained unhappily Dutch for the next century. — Llywelyn II   13:51, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Tordesillas
obviously gets length in that last edit but (a) it's worth going through why the sources claiming the line is based on Tordesillas are so wrong given how many times it's been repeated by otherwise major sources and historians (cf. the Whincup article) and (b) the real issue isn't taking a paragraph to go through it but with how truncated the rest of the section is. It should simply be expanded beyond the initial "Brits built cities where it was harder to kill them and then followed the tracks to water". Presumably there were some further settlements established in other locations and for other reasons after the 1850s.

It's also worth noting for the people who do go to the Whincup article that he does get some points wrong as well, turning 279½ leagues into 279, slightly less than 17° into 17°, misrepresenting the early agreements and discussions handled in Harrisse (even stating that the pope came to Spain to sign the treaty) and similarly misrepresenting Zaragoza as a Spanish yielding instead of a Spanish initiative. (The Spanish Cortes was passionate about getting a hold of the Spice Islands after Magellan. "Spain" in the form of its Habsburg king, much less so after his third failed expedition within the span of a decade.) All the same, it is completely correct that the 129° E. line had nothing to do with any of that. — Llywelyn II   14:19, 7 February 2023 (UTC)