User talk:Scarpy/Archive 15

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The Signpost: 31 October 2019
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:12, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the recognition
Thanks for your thanks on my Chena and Chena Hot Springs, Alaska edits. I hardly ever get any recognition for my edits ! Best wishes to you. DJ Jones74 (talk) 00:04, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * You totally deserved it. I was out there in April of this year and it then entire time I was thinking it's a hugely under-recognized area for as clever as their geothermal setup is there and for the uniqueness of the hot springs. Were you visiting or do you live in the area? - Scarpy (talk) 16:34, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * No, I'm afraid I've not yet visited Alaska. I hope to someday and do the "grand tour" there. I've just been working on updating Alaska places entries (mainly for population or pop. history). It's embarrassing to admit, but I had no idea there were tons of photos I could legitimately link to on Wikimedia to put a "face" to these individual communities, so I've been "prettifying" the pages if I can find a photo or photos related to the places (and an info box, too, with a map if they're lacking). I did one the other day for Chevak, Alaska, adding a mess of photos of the locale. I tend to put up ones of the buildings or landscape, but there was one of a cute little girl all bundled up (who was a resident) that I couldn't resist adding. Thanks again for your complimenting my work ! Best wishes DJ Jones74 (talk) 01:25, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I do like adding photos to Wikipedia. I've been using Special:Nearby around Colorado and when I travel to take photos for articles that are missing them. Generally, there's much more appreciation and less fighting when it comes to photos on Wikipedia than for text, so I like it. There's also I'd say a >50% chance that it will take you to someplace novel and interesting that a lot of other people don't go to, especially if you're traveling.
 * Wikicommons is pretty sweet. I had tried to find Kern, Alaska when I was there and couldn't. After an initial round of deliberation, I decided that maybe it was fake and nominated it for deletion. During the deletion discussion, I saw that someone had recently scanned a ~100-year-old photo of Kern and put it on Wikicommons, and I completely changed my mind. - Scarpy (talk) 17:15, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've run into problems with some editors over text they felt was "lacking sufficient references" with respect to my edits of places and trying to bring the info up to date. Have yet to do so with the photo additions. I was revisiting some edits for Alabama and noticed one particular town, Adamsville, Alabama didn't have any pics on the page. Looked it up and found several -- however, they were documentation of rather subpar conditions for mining families from 1946. I found the one with the "best" outdoor photo, a cabin next to a giant mountainous-looking slag heap, to put at the top of the info box. I put the rest down in the gallery. Well, may not present the current city in the best light, but it is historic. I'm guessing a local elected official won't be happy with them. =8-0>

I thought when I started reviewing census work from Alaska (going back to 1880), it would be a quick job. I mean, not a lot of people there, right ? So probably just a handful of recorded communities. I was wrong. By the time I was done making a spreadsheet for all the recorded places on the census, it worked out to around two THOUSAND lines. All the different names/spellings, etc. It took me around a year to research it. I thought it would take a few weeks, tops. Remember, too, this was just places the census recorded every decade. So your Kern, Alaska place, which never was formally recorded, would not even be included on that massive spreadsheet of mine. Countless places that were on the census aren't there on Wikipedia now.

Problem is, so many of them are native settlements. Sometimes as little as a single house along a river with a few people in it. That "house" might've been something substantial, or just a dugout into the ground. The census people, to make matters worse, often didn't bother explicitly placing exactly where they were on the map. Countless places I tried looking up simply could not be found. It's funny that I found they did better research for the 1880 census than 1940. The census folks in the latter year recorded countless camps (in the SW Yukon Delta region) with populations and didn't even place them on a USGS map or some such. I cannot fathom why they would write out all these places on paper and not state exactly where they were. How were they supposed to be found ?

Without the internet, though, researching this stuff 30 years ago would've truly been a nightmare. You'd have probably had to make a personal trip to countless institutions and the places themselves to get reliable information. At least we're able to assimilate the stuff now and distill into these handy entries a lot more easily !DJ Jones74 (talk) 05:18, 1 November 2019 (UTC)