Talk:Trophic state index

Objection to use of generic term 'algae' in the article.
Most articles about water quality of lakes mention algae and algal blooms, these words in fact specifically refer to Blue Green algae and Green algae only and not to Diatom algae.

Diatom algae blooms do not generally occur in nature in inland water-bodies, they do occur in estuaries and oceans.

I would like to object to the generalised use of the word algae since we are offering a solution to Eutrophication of lakes by causing a Diatom algae bloom to control Blue Green algae blooms. While this may prima facie appear to be difficult to believe, we can confirm that for the past 4 years we have used our product in a few lakes in Bangalore, India to achieve this objective.

We can convert Eutrophic lakes into Oligotrophic lakes by promoting the growth of Diatom Algae. Its conventionally believed that Diatoms are difficult to grow but when our product this is very easy.

Bhaskarmv (talk) 11:49, 13 May 2009 (UTC)Bhaskar


 * That sounds interesting. Have you published anything on it? If so, I'd be interested in reading it---to satisfy my own curiosity. With regards to the article, I'm not sure this is the place to get into the distinctions. Perhaps that would be more appropriate on the Algae page.
 * Napzilla (talk) 05:33, 30 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree. Lets leave that to the algae page. Chogg (talk) 09:30, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Correct portal
Can we add this to the ecology or geography portal? It isn't really chemistry.

Also, is it really true that deep lakes often have high oxygen content? I would have thought that deep lakes are not well mixed in their depths and thus suffer low oxygen. This is certainly the case in Lake Iseo and I either lake Milawi or Tanganyika. Chogg (talk) 09:30, 1 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Do deep lakes have high oxygen content? I was also under the impression that deeper waters tend to be more anoxic. The article doesn't say that, does it?
 * Napzilla (talk) 20:00, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, I just now noticed what you meant re. the chemistry portal. I agree, and am changing it to ecology. After reviewing the ecology and environment projects, I went with both...
 * Napzilla (talk) 01:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Mergers
Four article stubs were floating out there (get the pun?) all alone, and they fit this page well, so I put them here.

Call for discussion
merged Oligotrophic lake and three other articles into this article, eight years ago. I could detect no sign that they asked any other contributors as to whether this was a good idea, prior to making these merges. There is no sign of a prior discussion in their edit summaries.

No offense, but I think it was a bad idea.

Lake_Ohrid contains the passage "Both in terms of nutrient concentration (4.5 μg L−1 of phosphorus), as well as biological parameters Lake Ohrid qualifies as oligotrophic. " Oligotroph has a see-also to Oligotrophic lake, which is redirect to Trophic state index.

Yipes! Is this how the wikipedia is supposed to work?

No, in my opinion, this is absolutely not the way the wikipedia should work!

I am not just a wikipedia contributor, I am a wikipedia reader. As a wikipedia reader I don't want wikipedia contributors to think they are smarter than I am, and that they should restrict my rights to read the information in the wikipedia in the order that makes sense to me. In this particular case, I started by reading an article about a lake that turned out to be an oligotrophic lake. So I want to read about oligotrophic lakes. I do not want to read about the Trophic state index.

Sadly, this kind of merge-mongering, merging for the mere sake of merging, is much more common than it should be. Stubs articles, that are about just one topic, are good. Shoehorning perfectly adequate short articles into long rambling articles that try to cover multiple topics at once, should generally be avoided.

Napzilla, no offense, but you seem to have only considered one population of readers, those who searched for autotrophic lakes because, although they didn't actually realize it, they really needed to read about the trophic state index.

Well, no. What about people like me, who came to the link to autotrophic lakes, who were primarily interested in LAKES?

Napzilla, no offense, but I suggest what make for a good reading experience here are small focussed articles that are richly interlinked.

Why? Because navigating to a new concept is much easier when you all you need is to click on a link... and, if you click on that link and decide after reading the lead paragraph, it wasn't the right article, our browsers provide a trivially simple mechanism to return to where you were -- the back button.

Once someone who has decided he is smarter than our readers, has merged perfectly adequate one-topic articles into an omnibus article, the reader has to navigate within that article by scrolling, or using the browser's search function. This is innately more difficult than clicking on a link. And, if they decide to return to where they were, there is no equivalent to using the back button. Returning requires more scrolling, or using the search function, again.

Newsflash. Current browsers can only search for one thing at a time. I probably already have a phrase I am searching for loaded up. Napzilla, why would you force me to drop my search term, just to go back to where I was.

When readers have a question they want to answer they should be allowed to focus on their question, as far as possible, with no distractions. Using the back button is second nature. We are so used to using it, to return to where we were, we don't have to give it conscious thought. So it is not a distraction. Napzilla, when you shoehorn perfectly adequate stub articles into an omnibus article you are going to be forcing readers to temporarily stop thinking about their actual question when you force them to think about how to return to the passage they were reading prior to taking a detour to look into a related topic.

I am going to repeat my opinion that this really is not how the wikipedia should work.

Let me add further reasons why this kind of merge-mongering is a bad idea. Watchlist, and "what links here". When topics are each covered in smaller articles that only cover a single topic, watchlists retain much more usefulness. When an article is about just a single topic, when one adds that article they are interested in to their watchlist, that reader can be pretty sure that any time their watchlist tells them that article has been changed, they can be confident that the change is of interest to them. But, when Napzilla merges oligotrophic lake and three other article into trophic state index, if I am only interested in oligotrophic lakes, I am going to get way too many false positives, when people update the portions of the article that cover one of the other topics. Geo Swan (talk) 00:22, 7 December 2018 (UTC)`
 * Let me start by stating that, Wikipedia policies & guidelines aside, I would prefer that there be a separate Oligotrophic lake article. That said, the arguments that you gave are, IMHO, not the relevant ones. The most relevant one is deciding with respect to wp:GNG. The article existed separately for 3 years and after that period ended up as a stub with zero references.  May I suggest the following.  If you are willing to expand the oligotrophic lake article in the near future, including/ especially adding references, say so here and then let's undo the merge and then you could do so. North8000 (talk) 12:47, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
 * No offense taken, Geo, though you might have spoken up a bit sooner given how passionately you seem to feel about this. I don't remember much about this eight-year-old edit, though I do remember taking some pride in this article as my first big contribution to Wikipedia, and in following the admonition to be bold (is that no longer a thing?). I vaguely remember coming across a decent starting article on the trophic state index and three or four one- to two-sentence, nearly orphaned stubs on each of the different trophic states. Following the admittedly inappropriate logic of someone raised on a printed encyclopedia, I thought that the stubs might make more sense together and boldly went ahead with the merger. Obviously I never would have acted so rashly had I foreseen that my thoughtlessness would result in you being subjected to the travails of scrolling through an article rather than clicking through several almost a decade later. After reading your plaint a few times, I'm still not sure what, if anything, you want from me now, but I imagine you'll have the issue straightened out in no time if you put even half as much effort into your own contributions as you do into berating other contributors on the talk pages. BMN (talk) 06:23, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Biogeochemical Processes
— Assignment last updated by Tafoy013 (talk) 03:47, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

units missing in table
There are no units listed for Secchi depth in the table. Common units are feet and metres, but I don't know which the table is based on. Dave.Tamblyn (talk) 22:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)