User talk:Skookum1/Archive 12

Hello old timer :)
I was wondering if you have no real plans to come back would it be possible to get a copy of your watch list so i can insure that this articles you have been watching over still have an experienced editor monitoring them.,,Moxy (talk) 14:43, 10 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Don't worry. He never really left.  .  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 17:08, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
 * An anti-vandal edit here and there may still be needed; but I'm not on here ten hours a day anymore, Hong....I see because you think I've left you actually had the courage to speak about me....mayhbe if you'd fixed the History of Chinese immigration to Canada POV-attack I wouldn't have had to....I stop by my account out of curiosity now and then to see who's had something to say; as usual, you've had something to say, but of not much import than a sideways-snipe...Skookum1 (talk) 22:10, 21 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Go to the top right click "My watchlist" then click on "Edit raw watchlist" and past that info on my talk page pls...Moxy (talk) 23:12, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

I Thought we were rid of you!!
You had claimed to be retiring from wiki because you continue to fail in your attempts to push radical left wing, fringe theories and positions in to wiki articles but now I see it was all just a false promise. Your constant drive to try and justify extreme leftist positions and sources as legitimate continues to be old and moldy. You have no respect for wiki policy and etiquette unless it aids in your drive to demonize anything less liberal than the Tyee or Georgia Straight and from where I sit wikipedia would be better off if you followed through on your promise to let go and move on to other endeavors 206.108.31.34 (talk) 19:51, 11 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Please read No personal attacks 206.108.31.34 not that i think you will judging by YOUR lack of respect for Wikipedia policies.Moxy (talk) 22:56, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your support, if you'd like me to stay please see the last few sections on Talk:Lower Mainland. I don't suffer fools gladly, and right now I'm not very happy; engaging an RFC as a way of attacking me is yet more typical wiki-nonsense...Skookum1 (talk) 16:05, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
 * An RFC is not a personal attack. It is a way to get more than 2 opinions on an issue. Wikipedia will be a less toxic experience for everyone if we can reduce discussions about personal qualities. --JimWae (talk) 08:44, 8 September 2010 (UTC)


 * @ 206.108.31.34 - ROTFL didn't anyone tell you tory zombies that it's not wise to poke a sleeping grizzly bear with a stick? If I DO come back to Wikipedia, it's not to argue with code drones and template-fiddlers but to take on the propagandroids and political shills and make sure you don't dilute and deceive future history with your lies and deceits.  There's lots of political and historical articles which called for expansion and correction; it was frustration with the time-wasting endeavours of non-content-writing admins that drove me on to higher and better things.  But you guys are sitting ducks, bathing in your lies and the rightist control of the National Post and the Vancouver so-called newspapers like some kind of skin cream as if you were immune from criticism or as if the Straight and Tyee were "extreme left" and "fringe" in nature.  If you guys didn't represent outright forces of evil I'd be laughing......but I AM a grizzly bear, and I'm not really sleeping, so watch your IP-address mouth....lies only stand so long as no one publishes the truth to shove them back into the hole they came out of; I may not be around right now, but life is long and while my attention span has better uses, it's not like the truth is something that you're interested in, that much is clear....I'm not a "leftie", I'm a "truthie", and there are those on the left and p.c. side of things that hate me as much as you apparently do.....wallow in my absence while you can, but you've just raised my awareness of the articles you've fiddled with, so.....Skookum1 (talk) 22:30, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Since when does left wing count as bad? I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be an unbiased place, that's when it comes in. 206.1o whatever should appreciate that one of the people who made worthy and informative contributions has returned, not driving them off again. I had an experience with an IP once somethinng like this, and there was a huge dispute over the Owens River article resulting in the page getting full-protected for who knows how long. The IP tried to get me blocked and had a LOT of sockpuppeting and maybe in this case, he should just be ignored cause the Ip that was attacking me got blocked after about a month. I don't know. We all get stewed up over people who think they have authority and really do nothing. Shannon  talk   contribs  05:40, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * P.S. Seriously I just need to add this, I haven't seen this happen with any other editor. Why does Skookum get involved in huge arguments with people for anything he does? I don't see anything wrong with these edits. And I know I'm not blind. Shannon  talk   contribs  05:45, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your support; please see the last few sections on Talk:Lower Mainland. I have considerable expertise in BC history and geography and am being put to task and an RFC called because I reversed someone's absurd addition, and refuted all their invalid points in defense of it...I'm getting tired of this, it's a sad reminder of the same juvenile officiousness that had me quit a few months ago...if you'd like me to stay/return, your input/comment would be appreciated; I know I'm not supposed to "poll" but I'm feeling backed into corner and feel that someone's trying to incite the dog pack against me....Skookum1 (talk) 16:05, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
 * An RFC is not a personal attack. It is a way to get more than 2 opinions on an issue. An RFC is not a personal vote of confidence or non-confidence. Wikipedia will be a less toxic experience for everyone if we can make it less about personal qualities. ---JimWae (talk) 08:51, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Because the propagandists and p.r. people have learned that if you throw enough accusations and invocations of wiki guidelines you can either block someone, or drive them away in frustration, leaving them to control Wikipedia. I know of p.r. companies and govt agencies which have held meetings on how to write/edit wikipedia, and while I haven't sat in on any of these seminars I'm sure they'd include such things as "establish your account and do innocuous edits for a while so you can see like a bona fide editor" and "if you find someone in the way of the information you're trying to insert, accuse them of personal attacks or some other violation of wikipedia guidelines, and note the use of the adminstrator's notice boards" and "when accused of censorship or conflict of interest, counter-attack with a claim of personal attack and also claim that you're in another country and don't know anything about the subject matter in question etc".  What I DID see was a lot of very suspicious edits made by people claiming to be innocent of surreptitious intent......with everyone going "who, me?" it's as if all these p.r./business/government people trying to use Wikipedia for their own agendas don't actually follow through on what they've learned in the expensive courses they took to learn how.....at present, named accounts are not subject to WikiScanner....I don't think this is the right thing to do, and it defeeats the purpose of WikiScanner....intrusions of Wikipedia from government and corporate servers should be publicized and the "blacklist" in WikiScanner expanded to include named acccounts, SPA or admin or other, which originate from known p.r. firms and government agencies.....consider also that if someone is posting from a government server, they are doing so on the public purpose, so the claim they are doing "private" edits on government time/equipment falls a little flat...that these IP users and many named accounts parrot the buzzwords and platforms and rhetoric of p.r. and govt/party political campaigns is a dead-giveaway.  But simply for pointing it out I had not just an ANI filed against me, but lengthy diatribes, usually migrated from the subject talkpage onto my own, and as a multi-user attack ("yeah we hate him too").  This especially this last year re Talk:Concerns and controversies surrounding the 2010 Winter Olympics or whatever it's called now but also on other topics (e.g. the prorogation disupte, adn the Gordon Campbell article).  I've actually recused myself from subjects where I have some reason to do so, e.g. Green Party articles (I was a founder, of sorts, of the BC Green Party in 1983); I don't see any such evidence of disclosure ;by those attacking me, including many who have blatant Tory/BC Lib sympathies but disavow any connection to the party...including claims that they represent the majority of Canadians/BCers while the polls and actual votes belie that completely.....the resulting "neutering" of various articles by the introductino of p.r. spin to dilute the truth - simply because it's citable - raises questions across the board; but it's also to be found in - notably - Chinese propaganda attacks on the Tibet and Uighur articles and no doubt in countless other political contexts; it's just that in North America the p.r. firms contracted to the governments and politicians have been actively studying and "teaching" Wikipedia - because articles in Wikipedia come up on google; and because they're so easy to manipulate...as is the process of having someone drummed out of Wikipedia if they're in your way.  Some realpolitik has to be brought into Wikipedia's conduct guidelines, and power not entrusted to people who have power solely because they've leanred to dance the admin game.....some manipulators seem to specialize only in "neutral" activities like deletion campaigns.....why else would a whole string of images I added, which had stood for a number of years unchallenged, suddenly be up for deletion and require my attention?  To keep me from doing useful things, that's why.....Skookum1 (talk) 15:31, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * More briefly put, one recognizable method used by propagandists and p.r. people is, when the facts and logics fail you and someone else is winning the argument, attack them on an ad hominem basis and use whatever rules of debate you can to shut them down. Wikipedia enables that far too easily and those guidelines, and the qualifications for adminship, should be reviewed in that light....come to think of it anyone wanting to be an admin should have their IP address checked against WikiScanner....Skookum1 (talk) 15:34, 23 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Didn't realise that you were back until just now. Glad to see it. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 22:47, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

I knew you couldn't stay away ;) -- &oelig; &trade; 12:20, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * killing time in Nictaux, Nova Scotia while waiting for file conversions/uploads etc....once I'm back in Halifax, or on the road, I won't have time again....the issues above I'm worried will eat me alive if I try to "fight" them - "them" - as they are by far the dominant force in Wikipedia and among hte adminship right now IMO. Wikipedia's guidelines are too easily subverted by professional manipulators of all kinds/stripes....using guidelines to subvert principle, or to counter attack those defending principle by accusing them of personal attacks etc.  "something must be done"...I don['t have the focus/time to re-invest in preparations I'd made to correct huge omissions in stuff like Alaska boundary dispute and Oregon boundary dispute, whch remain heavily USPOV in nature/flavour, and there's BIG issues like the absence/silence on BC Legislature Raids and waht can or cannot be added to it and/or by whom and/or from where because of the shifting publication ban associated with it.  "Neutral in tone" all too often, also means "neutered in meaning" or "neutered of value"  and too many admins, especially the code freaks, just don't have the background to validly have any say in the debates surrounding some pages/issues, but presuppose to use their powers anyway....plus there's a lot of disingenuous behaviour/conduct from people, including some in WPCanada, who have clearly ulterior motives/agendas (while accusing me of same, or complaining that I don't talk nicely etc but to me that's just passive-aggressive evasiveness/deflection).  AS for the code freaks, the debate about BCGNIS vs cite bcgnis was one that really p'd me of, in the sense of "don't fix what ain't broken"....one of the proponents of the newer/more cumbersome template says that there's a wikipedia policy that says "write code as if we had all th space in the world" - which presupposes a lot about what donations made are for - what?  more servers so that code-writers can get happy??  What about content?  As Black Tusk (now VolcanoGuy) pointed out, the bulk of kb that a whole bunch of BCGNIS cites on one page can add up to th point where the page's TEXT has to be shortened to fit page-length guidelines.  If ther'es anything we should be able to write without constraint, it's content; but to be expected to write content to keep it brief so that the cumbersome template codes can be not just fully used by ENFORCED, that's just nuts.  Oh, I'll be called "personal attach" for saying "nuts" won't I?  Sheesh.  I"m boycotting that template now altogether, and will just use the square-bracket on the full http:// URL (which winds up being no longer than the new template in most cases).  Then there's the deletionists; in one recent case re Fanny Bay, British Columbia a new editor had added some good copy on the shellfish industry; instead of asking for cites, some other editor just deleted the material for not being cited instead of giving the new contributor a chance.  Oddly enough on his talkpage there's an item about "thank you for being welcoming"...but when an obviously valuable and worthwhile new contributor has material deleted within minutes of it being added, without any invitation to correct the matter....that's fucked up.  One day, as I've said, all that will be left of Wikipedia is the formatting and templates, the content will all either be neutered or deleted, and people who might otehrwise be valuable contributors will find other places for their energy/knowledge and/or just go t o the bsr...or like me, to their guitar. If the younger generation are more interested in code-details than in the content those code-details are meant to ASSIST (not hinder), then fuck it, it may ust not be worth the bother; lt ignorance reign, in the guise of code-perfection....wikilawyering and wikicopping need to be checked......as you both know I could go on at length, it's torrid-hot out there and I've got to walk into Middleton and back (to see if I can get a USB plug fixed, it's bent) before Hurricane Earl hits sometime this early evening...Skookum1 (talk) 17:39, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Granville
Thanks. I always keep wanting to make it an avenue, no idea why. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 17:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Avenues are E-W in Vancouver, streets N-S.Skookum1 (talk) 23:12, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
 * And Seattle, where I live, is the other way around. But complicating that is that in downtown Vancouver (as in downtown Seattle), the grid is way off of the compass bearing. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 01:21, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, parts of it anyway; I'm half-familiar with it, e.g. Denny Way. What I remember, though, is the NE 24th is not the same as 24th NE, and NE 24th St and NE 24th Ave may both exist, with one running the one axis, the other the other etc.  And something with "E" on the end of it doesn't mean the east end of that street, it means it's in the "East" sector.....IMO Calgary's worse, though folks there swear by their system, and once you get the hang of it the system in the Fraser Valley - south of the river anyway - actually makes sense; but it's a different number system from VAncouver, which has a different numbering system from Burnaby, which and Burnaby's system sort of integrates with New West's, both of them being diagonal and only partial...there used to be another numbering system in Maple Ridge (e.g. 222th was 8th, I think; our street, 287th, used to be 34th, except when it enters Mission it becomes Wilson St (formerly Wilson Rd).  Then there's No. 1 Road, No. 2 Road etc in Richmond...but also in Abbotsford/Sumas Prairie.  The reason New West and VAncouver have diagonal street grids is because the British survey system is usually aligned to the adjacent waterfront, not (necessarily) to compass points; you'll note there's two diagonal grids in downtown Vancouver, th small one on the isthmus, the old Granville/Gastown downtown, then the one off the old CPR Townsite (between Hamilton and Burrard); the reason the grid changes at Burrard is because west/northwest of that was a different developer than the CPR....it's worse in Victoria, there's no numbered streets at all, other than the numbered highways (1 and 17), and you have anomalies like the fact that Bay Street and Quadra Street cross each other twice on their ramble northwards; more like woven streets, never parallel.....Skookum1 (talk) 05:20, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Er, maybe that's not Bay Street...it's definitely Quadra that does that, it's been a while since I've been in Victoria....whatever, something crosses Quadra twice that starts out parallel with it in downtown. There's grids in Victoria, but by neighbourhood, not over the whole city, e.g. Fernwood is on a different grid from James Bay, is on a different grid from Fairfield, and lower and upper Fairfield are different...and downtown's its own trip....so be warned, take a map, if your car doesn't have GPS ;-).Skookum1 (talk) 05:22, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Reading this earlier I thought I remembered reading something about how some early US grid system, maybe Philadelphia, had been copied widely over the US and perhaps Canada--and that this involved N-S avenues and E-W streets. But I was wrong. A quick look at various cities shows no obvious pattern. Some cities use N-S avenues, some E-W. Many use only streets. There's no geographic pattern to how streets vs avenues were laid out. There is somewhat of a pattern for having numbered streets or avenues centered on some key feature like a river or shoreline. There's also somewhat of a pattern inspired by Philadelphia's use of numbered streets/avenues one way and named ones the other--with the named streets often copying Philly's "tree theme"--Pine, Walnut, Cypress, Chestnut, etc etc. Few seem to have copied Manhattan's style of using numbers for both directions, streets and avenues. It works there in part because the island is narrow, so the number of avenues is limited. And yea, lots of city grids are not aligned to the compass but to something like a river or coast (or lacking those, train tracks), with alignment shifts as the feature bends--like Seattle's center area. The way downtown Seattle's shifted grids collide poorly is something I've seen explained as the fault of "drunken surveyors". But I recently read in Skid Road that the main reason is because Arthur A. Denny and David Swinson Maynard couldn't stand each other and refused to compromise their platted streets. That book, Skid Road, paints Maynard in fairly glowing terms, while Denny and the other "upper class" founders come off looking pretentious and snobby. But the upper class "establishment" gets the historical laurels, the streets named for them, etc, while Maynard, too kind for his own good, earns the wrath of the city by helping the "neutral" Indians during the Puget Sound War. Anyway, yea, when I looked at Victoria's grid it looked like a grid crossed with the cowpaths-turns-streets of Boston. Maybe not that bad. Boston is in a class of its own. Best to have a compass in the car. Pfly (talk) 12:19, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Have a look at Halifax, or St John's....not as bad as Boston, though...(I've been there). And other than its freeways ("Trails" they call them), Calgary is a numbered grid; so, for the most part, is the Fraser Valley....8th Avenue is 1 mile from the border, 16th is 2 miles etc; and streets (N-S) are numbered from the Gulf of Georgia eastward (not that there's a 1st Street or a 0 Street, but it would be in Tsawwassen if there was); not sure the spacing, e.g. 120th (Scott Rd) isn't 12 miles from the sea; that would be, I think, 96th.  The Royal Engineers laid that out....I think; New West has both numbered streets and avenues; so when you say "8th and 6th" it's different from "6th and 8th"....Skookum1 (talk) 13:00, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Talkback
– xeno talk 20:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Deroche, BC
When there's a completely uncited section added, including a Copyright notice+legal threat, I have no compunctions about blanking the whole thing. It's always in history if there's really something savable, anyway... --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:04, 12 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the tone of it was obviously very POV, though if you'll look close the remaining paragraph above what you took close is also "leading" in the same topic/POV....many community pages, and some wilderness/enviro pages, get diatribes like that posted too; thing is when it's such "current" material - whether it's POV or not and whether or not it has that particular harsh tone/threatishness, as you note - it's "news" not "history" or "geography" and I've wondered for a while if there's some kind of template to throw on user pages like "thank you for your attempted contribution. Its content is not suitable for encyclopedia use as it falls in the vein of "news" or "current events".  Please be aware of http://www.wikinews.org".  Likewise when someone makes a "travelogue" or "tourism" contribution, a template to refer them to WikiTravel.....I'm not a template designer but I just see so much of this, often very earnest and genuine and sometimes worthwhile, but still not belonging in Wikipedia (or with "gussied up" language that can't stay in, especially re travelogue/tourism) that it seems it might be better p.r. to not turn people off from WikiMedia services, but rather direct them to one where their contributions are more suitable.  In the case of political/agitation material like what you removed, maybe http://www.WikiRant.org might be better ;-).  Skookum1 (talk) 17:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

WT:CWNB - templates not working
You might read my answer there and think "what the heck is that supposed to mean?". In the event that you want to tackle the problem and figure out what is the best way to fix it, I can walk you through the basics of template intricacies and help you experiment a bit with them. It's not that hard once you draw it out on a bit of paper. Probably best done via email or even better, chat if you are set up for that. The basic ideas aren't that hard, but figuring out how best to fix the problem might be a little tedious.

Templates are very convenient for editors but they're a bit of a nightmare for the people who run the servers, so no, I seriously doubt anyone is going to increase the size limits, if that's what you're thinking. :) If you want to get the page to work, you're pretty much on your own, but I'll be happy to help where I can. Franamax (talk) 23:02, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Skookum1, please keep your temper down. If there's a problem with the BCGNIS template, we'll just write another one. Give me some specific links to the previous discussions and let me look at it. Wikipedia works on discussion and continuous exploration of new ways of doing things.

More generally, you don't help yourself at all when you get personal and post long rants. This is a very, very frustrating environment, no doubt about that. You have an incredible amount of knowledge and are a fantastic resource here, I would definitely like to see you stick around, and I'll try to help you with the various obstacles when I can. But you need to keep your talk page posts shorter and more focussed, and avoid getting personal like you recently have at the CWNB and Lower Mainland discussions. You may find other editors coming up with dumb ideas, they are the easiest ones to have, but there are lots of smart and committed people here who will help you out too. You make that immensely difficult when you post a long ramble about how awful everyone and everything is. Please rein it in a bit. Regards! Franamax (talk) 21:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Bear in mind that it's explicitliy this geonames information template and its siblings and how they were treated/changed that got me so finally and totally frustrated at the amount of timne wikipedia takes just to handle changes to the interface and such taht I rarely get a chance to actually work on content any more - that led me to quitting. Content should trump inteface, tweaks, and ease-of-use vs "elegant code design" has GOT to weigh in favour of content; the initial discussion was at [User_talk:Droll/Archive_1#.7B.7Bcite_cgn.7D.7D_was_a_dumb_idea User talk:Droll "cite cgn was a dumb idea"] (re CGNDB->cite cgn) and then continues somewhere on Plastikspork's page; I think it's somewhere on the latter page that there's the justification that the code-types were told to work on their code without thought of server or storage space; I think it was Plastikspork's rationale; I'm not going to re-read through it all to find it, if you'll forgive me, I'm aggravated enough.  Please also consider that a lot of as-yet unwritten pages may be as similarly citation-intense as the two bordeer lists; e.g. List of peaks in the Canadian Rockies or similar.  Having to trim content to make room for template/interface bulkiness/complications is just "not on" for me; I think the original BCGNIS actually got deleted and it was only on my protest that Plastikspork created the name aqain, albeit with different code than the original and only serving as a "front end" to the new, supposedly marvellous "cite bcgnis"; the original, and the original CGNDB was as noted created by I t hink User:Mkdw or maybe it was user:Maclean25 (or McLean25, whichever it is; teh guy from Dawson Creek).  So it's not the code on the current versions of BCGNIS and CGNDB that was simple, though maybe it's in their pages histories or in delete logs; they were ditched summarily, with only their creator consulted (and he didn't answer cause he was away) and "done away with"; i noticed because I started getting redlinks when I used BCGNIS....for now I'm not using it at all, and refuse to use the "cite + name" ones as having been shoved down my throat, and those of others, wi9htout consultation OR PURPOSE OR Need.Skookum1 (talk) 23:22, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Here is the start of what's on Plastikspork's user page, now like Droll's it's been archived; and the second section following after taht, there may be more. And yes, I was pissed off and feeling - knowing - that I was getting a lot of passive-aggressive backtalk to justify what had been a very very aggressive way of destroying/deprecating a useful template.Skookum1 (talk) 23:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Stay cool man, we'll get through this. :) I missed these posts 'cause I was writing you an email, so you can check your inbox for that. I shook hands with Mkdw and Maclean25 at the Van meetup a few years ago (scheduled becuase Maclean was passing through), they're both good guys. I've posted over at BCGNIS in the section about "break the wiki". From my POV, we can be bold and change anything we want - but if it causes a problem, then we roll back the change. I'm a little confused on the change to the web link. We'll get this settled. Might not be able to devote much attention though in the immediate future, I have to plan anotther geocaching expedition up to Whistler. I might not have been to "extreme points" in BC yet, but I'm getting there. :) Franamax (talk) 23:51, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * And yes, when the choice is between article content and elegant coding, articles win, every time. Franamax (talk) 23:54, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Re: BC Islands
Thanks for that. Could you swing by the discussion page for that article and give your thoughts on my post there?

Cheers, Ewaladel (talk) 04:37, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Lower Mainland - consensus
Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, you may be blocked from editing.

Skookum1, your recent edits to the Lower Mainland page, adding to the consensus-developed footnote regarding the term "mainland," weren't productive or helpful. The other editors of the page came to a mutual agreement about the location and phrasing of the note, and things were peaceful. I'm at a loss to understand why you felt it necessary to make these edits. You've been around for some time, and I'm sure you're familiar with WP:POINT. Your edits this evening certainly appear to me to be disruptive edits in an attempt to prove a point. Please, just let this one drop... // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 04:42, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Disruptive edits? No - only correcting a falsehood re-inserted by the perpetrator, who took liberties with the "consensus" decision that he was wildly off base.  Even in a footnote, his original research that islands in the Fraser River are "not actually part of the continuous mainland" is fictitious and constitute digging in his heels on his position; I simply corrected his (ongoing) error and mis-use of language; he wants to mention the City of Richmond, not its main island (Lulu Island, which also includes about 1/3 of the City of New Westminster, namely Queensborough), yet his "footnote" spoke of Richmond as an island.  I'm not the one making the disruptive edits.  Franamax, who's familiar with the area, also concurs about the notion that freshwater islands are obviously part of the mainland and distinct from offshore islands such as Bowen; and that same footnote also re-digs in the false notion that dictionary definitions have anything to do with the meaning of the name.  The RfC accomplished nothing, except the consensus refutation of any validity to his position, and rile my back up over something wildly silly in nature for no good reason; and the RfC closed, with the consensus that JimWae's position was wrong, but a footnote explaining, not asserting.  JimWae simply went ahead and reinserted his original problem-content as if it were all peachy keen and he had won.  But he didn't even get the English idiom "contiguous mainland" correct, I corrected that; he also wanted to centre on the City of Richmond even though that's not, in and of itself, an island (it's about 20); I simply pointed out the absurdity of what he had added by adding other things that didn't fit the dictionary definitions attached to "lower" and "mainland".  If you give as license to absurdity, or tolerate it, then you have to tolerate absurdities ensuant on it with impartiality.  Rivers and lakes are not land, but they are part of "the mainland", mountain peaks are not "lower", but they are part of the Lower Mainland.  So either the RfC stands - with JimWae's assertions being dismissed as original research - or you are enforcing a selective interpretation of it forbidding anyone from altering what JimWae wants to add, even though his addition was not supported by the RfC.  *A* footnote was tolerated by the RfC, or suggested by it.  But nobody said "let JimWae say whatever he wants so long as it's in footnote form".  And if he uses incorrect language/idiom, then anyone (including me) can correct it - the City of Richmond is not an island, and the expression "continuous mainland" is not the correct English idiom for what he thinks he's saying. It's that simple.  You're welcome to reverse the consequent absurdities I've added; but if you do, and leave JimWae's false and original research as it is, then you have gone against the consensus of the RfC.....Lulu Island is in the Fraser River, not Georgia Strait, it's that simple; and the river is on the mainland, so what's in it is on the mainland.....if that needs to be explained in a footnote, it doesn't need to be explained in the way that JimWae put it; which was, again, simply his re-iteration of his original erroneous and original-research interpretation.....Skookum1 (talk) 05:07, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
 * The Consensus of the RfC is that JimWae was wrong. Yet (perhaps I'm wrong) you didn't chastise him for re-inserting verbatim waht  the consensus had decided was wrong....Skookum1 (talk) 05:08, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Outline of British Columbia
( I've replied to your message there. The Transhumanist  05:59, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Navigating British Columbia on Wikipedia
You seem to be very interested in the coverage of British Columbia on Wikipedia.

I've been trying to construct an overview of that coverage, and was wondering if you'd be so kind as to apply your expertise to improving it and adding key missing articles. I definitely do not know BC or Wikipedia's treatment of it anywhere near as well as you do.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist 06:10, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

P.S.: By the way, are you familiar with using Google to search Wikipedia only? Just curious. -TT

Pictorial coverage
British Columbia is a beautiful place, and I was wondering if you were familiar with the best pictures of it on Wikimedia Commons, or if you'd be interested in selecting the pics to adorn the outline.

Keep in mind it is usually best to use pictures not already in use on the major articles of the subject, and instead complement them with new highlights (unused from Commons, or presented on more obscure articles).

Here are some examples of other outlines that have decent image support:


 * Outline of Japan
 * Outline of Thailand
 * Outline of Vatican City
 * Outline of France
 * Outline of Taiwan
 * Outline of Iceland
 * Outline of Gibraltar

I hope you find this interesting.

The Transhumanist 07:10, 4 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I always think about the mountains of BC. Some nice photos I'm aware of: Howser Spire, Mt Sir Douglas, Black Tusk, and Yak Peak. I also like Malaspina Galleries--bizarre formation, although maybe not a beautiful photo. Pfly (talk) 02:12, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Japan current
Well, I'm not sure I can help much except to say that after living in Vancouver for nearly two years, I can say its climate is similar to the same latitudes of the "other" west coast- that of northern Europe- but with notable differences. Unlike the UK, for example, Vancouver does experience a drying trend in the summer- which is characteristic of Med climates, but people read too much into that in my opinion. The climate there is in no way Mediterranean! Another difference, in comparison to the UK, is it seems to rain for longer, extended periods of high intensity in the winter in YVR... I mean a lot of rain! I don't think these characteristics are the result of only the pressure systems. Koppenlady (talk) 23:40, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * My own take after three years here is that rainfall is completely dominated by happenings over the open Pacific, and takes as long as that weather system feels like unfolding over. Temperature and wind speed may come from over the mountains, bur rainfall, never. Even in the city, rainfall is dominated by mountains, the north shore is often wreathed in raincloud on a beautiful day in the rest of the city. Summer (15May - 15Oct) is paradasiacal for humans, except when a week-long rain system sets in. The climate is mild, whether that is the result of an ocean current or general moderation of climate due to ocean proximity, I dunno, what specific sources support it? (Just my 2 cents.) Franamax (talk) 00:24, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, given that proximity to this particular patch of ocean means direct exposure to the butt-end of the Japan Current- which actually hits North America around the latitude of the Columbia River, and what's offshore from Vancouver Island is a northward-bound "fork" of that current, and decidedly warm -as many fishermen can tell you there's a noticeable thermocline at a certain distance offshore, notably when the mainland and offshore waters are at freezing temperatures, it's very hard to exclude the Japan Current from the proximal ocean; they are one and the same, to the extent that this is virtually axiomatic. What other currents are there, after all, off shore?  None, none at all.  And the pressure systems are inseparable from the oceans, in the same way that winds and currents are interlinked.  There's a difference between a Gulf of Alaska low, which will produce relatively cooler rains from the northwest, but those are anomalous and most offshore systems come either from the west or the southwest; the Pineapple Express (the article for which defines it in US only terms far too much), aka the Coastal Chinook ("the true Chinook", though the popularity of that term has overridden the original meaning, i.e. a warm, wet southwesterly, "from the direction of the country of the Chinook" in its original sense, i.e. from the direction of the mouth of the Columbia (whether that's in the Columbia Plateau, i.e. directly from the west, or in the Gulf of Georgia-Lower Mainland, thus from the west/southwest); those are decidedly oceanic patterns.  I remember seeing satellite maps showing this big virtual river of cloud coming northeast towards BC from the direction of Hawaii, and the weatherman showing this saying, not without a touch of distaste, that the pattern was "set" and wasn't going to budge; those are transoceanic systems and "above" and crossing the current, either across it or as in the case of the Gulf of Alaska storms, against it.  But the moderating effect of the Japan Current, as I said to the IP user raising this issue, is a nostrum in school textbooks and I'm pretty sure should turn up in Environment Canada and BC Environment materials....I was surprised to see this fact, and this fact alone, challenged on that page.  by someone who clearly doesn't understand climatological logic or the nature of the relationships between oceanic systems and onshore climate; it's like saying the Peru Current, or whatever it's called down there, doesn't have anything to do with the Atacama, or the southward "fork' of the Japan Current doesn't have anything to do with the arid nature of California/Baja California.  I think we all know, and as salt conveyor theorists have beern warning, that the loss of the Gulf Stream's current orientation would plunge Europe into an Ice Age.  I'm nonplussed to have to search for citations to make this guy happy, partly because rather than lecture he could have provided citations for his own assertions but it's more like he doesn't want to learn, or consider new facts that he's never heard or realized before....and for the record, Franamax, sometimes rain DOES come from over the mountains, but continental storm masses are rare, often thunderstorms when they do happen...well, I was hoping for more from Koppenlady but "the truth is out there"; maybe a search of DFO or Environment Canada for the string "Japan Current" will turn up something; but it's 2:53am in Fredericton, I've stayed up waiting to call BC and my friend has his phone turend off, so I'm going to bed....Skookum1 (talk) 05:53, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Heh, the little whiffles that happen here barely deserve the name of thunderstorm. ;)
 * I would've thought finding a source would be easy, but not so. The best I got was googling "kuroshio current effect on british columbia climate" and that was not much. Here is an article in American Scientist, not peer-reviewed but fairly well respected I think. Their argument is that it is sheer thermal mass that moderates the climate on "right-hand" coasts and that heat transport in ocean currents is a relatively minor factor. Here is a Ph.D. thesis, which would be peer-reviewed assuming the author got their doctorate. It paints a more detailed picture of winds and currents. I'm not precisely clear how much water is contributed from the Kuroshio, the Alaska Gyre, and the Oyashio current. It also discusses upwelling/downwelling, which would partly explain why the fishermen find the warmer water where and when they do. Neither of those sources discuss exactly where the warm water is coming from and what the climate effects on BC are, so really, I got buthin'. :( Franamax (talk) 17:04, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Huh, I just searched DFO and Environment Canada, no hits at all for either Kuroshio or Japan Currents....I'm wondering if the Pacific Marine Institute in West Van or the marine station in Bamfield might have something; I'll consult with a friend of mine who's a fisheries reporter and see what he says. I know it's not a myth; that warm water ain't coming from submarine vents, that's for certain, and there's only one current that hits the BC coast,and that's the Japan/Kuroshio.  As for the thunderstorms, back in the mid'70s, not sure which eyar, either 74 or 76 or maybe 77, there was a massive round of them, my memory is that they came from offshore and "set up shop" over the Lower Mainland, but also in the Interior.  The lightning strikes were intense, all the powerlines on the west side of the city were glowing - in the grey daylight as well as at night - though after a day or two the storms retreated into the Lynn/Seymour/Capilano/Indian Arm etc valleys and you could see them all day, flashing and dark, while the city was clear; then at night they'd roll back over the city.  Obviously doesn't happen often and it was a freak occurence.  The Interior regularly gets heavy thunderstorm activity, which is why all the non-human-caused forest fires all the time, but those are convection storms, more or less.  I'm sure the Japan Current thing isn't a myth, or it's a widespread myth anyway, as it's clear in my memories of my early education about why BC is as mild as it is, relative to the rest of Canada; the presence of the ocean itself isn't enough - consider St John's and Labrador (St John's is farther south than Vancouver), and the Gulf Stream is far offshore there....though you can certainly feel it in Halifax's weather at times, even in the winter.  I just think this guy's rationale that there is a normal mid-latitude temperate pattern on west coasts completely ignores the blatant fact that both (Europe and the Pacific Northwest) have the Gulf Stream and teh Japan Current hitting them; the reason the east coasts are colder (Russian Pacific and Atlantic Canada) is because of the absence of them - despite the presence of the Gulf Stream offshore from the Maritimes.  What he's saying is that the temperature of currents don't affect climates, as if they were somehow indepedent of the ocean's temperate/moderating effect.  How does he explain El Nino and La Nina then?  Maybe he doesn't believe in them, either.....Skookum1 (talk) 18:54, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I was under the impression that the "marine west coast climate" type, found on the PNW coast, NW Europe to some degree, SE South Africa, southern Chile, SE Australia (esp Tasmania), and much of New Zealand (Wikipedia calls it Oceanic climate, but that's clearly a broader term than I learned back in geography classes--based on the Köppen system and so including places in Kenya and other oddities) -- was largely a result of prevailing winds blowing across an ocean and onto a continental coast, with effects magnified by coastal mountains (thus stronger in the PNW, weaker in Britain). The prevailing winds in Nova Scotia, New England, etc, are mostly westerly, from the continent, aren't they? ("prevailing" here glossing over the occasional Nor-easterner storm) And that it wasn't the temperature of the ocean water that mattered so much as the fact that the air masses were forming and traveling over ocean waters. Even cold ocean waters are above freezing (nevermind the poles). But winter continental land at similar latitudes is likely to be much colder. I guess the idea can be summed up with the words maritime vs. continental. But I am merely trying to recollect half-learnt lessons from textbooks read long ago. And the basic model I'm remembering is clearly a great simplification of things. I'm sure ocean temperatures have an effect, but perhaps it is relatively small compared to other factors? The old idea of the Gulf Stream keeping Europe warm--isn't that at least a bit overstated as the reason for Europe's relative mild climates? Well, if nothing else, the presence of high mountain walls close to the PNW coast has a significant effect on the climate--making it much more "maritime", I would think. Perhaps I'll dig up one of those old textbooks. Pfly (talk) 19:11, 6 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok, so it is a textbook from the 1980s, so might be out of date. But it has some interesting climate maps that use schemes other than Köppen. The Köppen system is good, but perhaps a bit too much thought of as Truth. One climate map I'm looking at shows the PNW coast (from abt the CA/OR border north to about Juneau) as climate type 8, "Marine west-coast climate". Nova Scotia is shown as type 10p, "Moist continental climate", p=perhumid (more humid than plain humid). The only other places shown with 10p climate on this map are: most of Japan's main island and a tiny slice of SE Korea. That's it! The 10h climate is a bit more widespread, including a good chunk of eastern North America, much of Germany, France, northern Italy, southern Sweden and Norway, the rest of Korea and parts of Manchuria, and a swath of China along the Yangtze.
 * The author describes these climate types (I think he might have invented them himself). The marine west-coast climate is distinctive for "receiving the prevailing westerlies from over a large ocean", and "experience frequently cyclonic storms involving the cool, moist mP (marine polar) air mass..." The first example given is Vancouver BC. The Moist continental climate is described: "this climate is in the polar front zone--the battleground of polar and tropical air masses. Seasonal contrasts are strong, while day-to-day weather is highly vairable..." Summers have "invading marine tropical air masses", while the "cold winters are dominated by continental polar and continental arctic air masses". In the book this section is followed by one explaining the Köppen system, which maps climate quite differently. Köppen doesn't take ocean currents and such into account, I think. It's interesting that the first system ("Strahler"?) here does. Köppen seems "descriptive", and Strahler's more "explanatory". Anyway, I've probably gone off on a tangent from what this thread was supposed to be about. Pfly (talk) 19:30, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, and yes, it seems Strahler did invent this system of climate types--hoping to make something better than the Köppen system. Köppen has not fallen, even though Strahler's system may be better in some ways. Arthur Newell Strahler, the same guy who invented the so-called "Strahler Stream Order system", Strahler number. I didn't know that. Pfly (talk) 19:41, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That is the impression I got from my reading too. When the prevailing winds are coming from a large body of water, the climate is maturally milder, at least in temperate zones. The air creates the current when it has a long fetch. The incoming air tends to be at ocean surface temperature, which is relatively constant and always warmer than freezing. It seems obvious that the delta inntemperature of the current would have some effect, but a 3 degree difference in temperature of the current pales in comparison to the delta with inland temperatures, which can easily be -30. Where that air forms the prevailing wind, you will see more extreme climate. So perhaps there could be a batter explanation than just saying "the Japan Current is the reason". Pfly, you say Strahler takes ocean currents into account but I didn't see it in the excerpts you included - do you have more on that? It's rather vexing that there is so little online about this, at least somewhere I can find it. Franamax (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Oops, did I say Stahler does take ocean currents into account? I meant to say he didn't, as far as I've seen. I looked into the topic more after posting here and found some useful and interesting info from the online Encyclopedia Britannica (behind a paywall, but my library card let's me access it, along with the OED and other goodies--thanks Seattle Library!). Then I looked into Wikipedia's coverage of climate types and classification schemes. It's Köppen Köppen Köppen, and even then not well done. I'm tempted to write a page on the Stahler system. Some stuff I read, in a nutshell--there's two basic kinds of climate classification methods: empirical and genetic. Empirical methods are based on simple observation data and are "largely descriptive". Most, including the Köppen system, rely on natural vegetation as a key indicator of climate, "like a thermometer measures temperature"--which helps explain why these systems tend to name classes things like rainforest climate, taiga climate, tundra climate, etc. A vegetation-based empirical system alternative to Köppen is the system devised by C. W. Thornthwaite (no page on the system though). Of the "genetic" methods, apparently Arthur Strahler's is the most influential. It was expanded upon by John Oliver around 1970. Genetic methods make climate classes "based on causal elements, the activity and characteristics of all factors (air masses, circulation systems, fronts, jet streams, solar radiation, topographic effects, etc). Thus largely "explanatory" (or should be). But more difficult to implement, therefore less common and less successful overall." A final scheme that sounds interesting is one devised by Terjung in 1966. In contrast to vegetation-based systems, which while relevant to human activities like agriculture, "cannot give any sense of how human beings would feel within the various climate types", Terjung tried to group climates "on the basis of their effects on human comfort"; on how they actually feel to people. I don't know much more, except on the Strahler system. But it all makes me think--even if the Köppen system is by far the most commonly used, Wikipedia ought to have more info about other systems. As it stands, Wikipedia's climate pages are almost entirely Köppen-based--sometimes to the point of suggesting there is no other way to classify climate types. ...ok, that was a macadamia nutshell. Pfly (talk) 10:31, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Here's a few links about some of the currents Skookum was writing about. I'm sure there's variability in terminology and usage, but as far as Wikipedia goes (and this old textbook of mine), the Japan current, or Kuroshio Current flows northeast up the coast of Asia. Around latitude 40-50 degrees it merges with the North Pacific Current, a "west-wind drift" current which crosses the Pacific and indeed slams into Pacific Northwest coast. There it forks north and south, as Skookum said. The southward fork is the California Current, which is an eastern Boundary current akin to the Humboldt Current in the southern Pacific. Both are relatively cool. The northward fork is the Alaska Current, which is relatively warm. There's a couple nice maps showing all this on the Commons: commons:File:North Pacific Gyre.png (north Pacific only) and commons:File:Ocean currents 1943.jpg (global). A curious thing I saw on this global map was that the Gulf Stream's smacking into Europe is basically akin to the Alaska Current. There's a cooler southward fork of the Gulf Stream, the Canary Current. So perhaps the PNW, esp BC, is warmed by ocean currents similar to the way northwestern Europe supposedly is. There are obvious differences in the way the currents fork and flow due to different ocean basin and coastline shapes, so... who knows.

I don't know what effect these things have on climate, but thought I'd mention and link to them anyway. It's interesting that the southward fork is cool while the northward fork is warm. Seems counter-intuitive. Pfly (talk) 21:26, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
 * But isn't the "cool" and "warm" terminology expressed relative to what the temperature would be in a standing body of water at any given latitude? So where the Japan Current forks, assuming it is at the "right" temperature for its latitude, anything going north will be warmer than its surrounding "native" water, and anything going south will be cooler? The question still remains as to the relative contribution of these "warmer" and "cooler" temperatures versus the absolute temperature difference between unfrozen ocean water and definitely frozen land temperatures to moderate climate when the prevailing wind is onshore. Franamax (talk) 21:42, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't really know. I mean, sure, that makes sense. The Boundary current page says things like "eastern boundary currents flow equatorward, transporting cold water from higher latitudes to lower latitudes". And the Alaska Current might be "warm" in a relative sense, but I would think it's pretty cold compared, say, Hawaiian waters, or even the Atlantic off Massachusetts. But... the California Current page talks about additional things like, "extensive upwelling of colder sub-surface waters occurs, caused by the prevailing northeasterly winds acting through the Ekman Effect." The Ekman Effect page leads me to pages like Ekman transport, Ekman spiral, and Thermohaline circulation, and I'm quickly over my head, so to speak. Pfly (talk) 01:02, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

[undent]The way I as taught it, in the stone age of climatology in the late '60s and early '70s, was that it was the relative warmth of the Alaska Current (I guess that's what we call the Japan Current in BC) that brought moist temperate conditions to the PacNW, and the relative coldness of the California Current that made that area arid....the same rationale was provided for the Atacama re the Peru Current and elsewhere; but things were, like so much else, much simpler in those times and much less was known.....Skookum1 (talk) 20:37, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Trying to catch up after a bit AFK: I asked User:William M. Connolley to look at this. He mentioned the American Scientist article I linked above, and also this link has Seager's various papers linked therefrom, some peer-reviewed. WMC also mentioned that the Kuroshio and Gulf Stream situations seemed analogous, and pointed to the careful wording at Gulf_Stream. However we don't really have anything directly sourcable, other than the single sentence in American Scientist. I have the UBC faculty list up right now and I'm going to fire off an email and see what happens. Franamax (talk) 21:12, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Talkback
Quigley (talk) 02:58, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

BC Indian Reserves
Just want you to know that I'm more confused than ever. But my main concern was that none of these places were in Category:Populated places in British Columbia (or if they are no longer lived in, they should be at Category:Former populated places in Canada). Also I agree that we need a cat for the sites of former FN villages pre-contact. But note that calling them "aboriginal communities" is too vuage. Too easy to confuse with non-geographical communities of interest or ethnicity, or modern settlements. (viz. Category:Communities on First Nation reserves in Alberta). --Kevlar (talk • contribs) 04:13, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually I was just looking at Category:Anishinaabe reserves in Canada, which lists governments as if they werew reserves; but for example the O'Chiese First Nation has two reserves, and they are not contiguous and are in fact distant from each other, as reserves under the same band often are - see here. And many reserves are shared by different bands; these tend to be fishing sites though Peckquaylis and places like it are educational facilities (that's the old St Mary's school/residence in Mission).  I'd said "aboriginal communities" because I thought I saw Category:Aboriginal communities in Canada somewhere but I was mistaken.  One problem is that we can't use "settlements" as that's an official type of place - capitalized as in Metis Settlement or Indian Settlement, which is also why I'm adamant that "Indian Reserve" (caps) be used, and why "Indian village" won't work in wiki-construction ("Indian Village" is an official designation).  And with Nisga'a and Sechelt former-reserves none of those terms apply, and in the Nisga'a Lisims (which means both the government and its lands/territory) I don't know what the official term is; BCGNIS uses "Community" (capital-C).  The muddling of reserves and governments and settlements on List of Indian Reserves in Canada needs a lot of straightening out; in O'Chiese's case I discovered there's O'Chiese 203 (currently in the system as O'chiese 203 but I don't think that's right as capitalization - and I disagree with using StatsCan's names vs INAC's), which is their settlement and location of the band government; but O'Chiese 203A doesn't have an article/stub and should.  Lots of work straightening this out; Iv'e tried to raise the issue before at WP:CANTALK a while ago.  I'd wondered aboutcat-titles like Category:Populated places of the Secwepemc or Category:Villages of the Kwakwaka'wakw and Category:Former villages of the Haida and so on, but again "villages" is problematic.  IMO the "reserves" category should have only the reserves as such, redirecting when necessary to either a placename (as with Moricetown and the Moricetown Indian Band; in some cases I've redirected them to goverrnnments and in some cases to the placename where applicable - but those redirects are what should have the reserves category, not the governments or the historical villages/settlements like Chiyakmesh and Homulchesan and Esla7an (the latter two being the two main North Van villages of the Skxwxu7mesh, the Capilano and Mosquito Creek reserves as they are customarily known.  A tanbled web, all of it, needs straightening out and "not bot-able".  BTW see my post on User talk:Good Ol'Factory about "former populated places" vs "formerly populated places".Skookum1 (talk) 12:24, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

User page
I noticed that had been editing your user page. After looking through it I restored it to what appeared to be the last good version. If not feel free to yell at me. Cheers. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 14:45, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Quick Haida questions
1. Do you know a reference that spells out the three historical Haida villages that merged in 1911 to form Hydaburg? I can infer but want something citeable. 2. Is someone working on a Kaigani Haida article - the wikilinks in the Haida list of villages just point back to the Haida article. If this isn't someones work-in-progress I'll unlink.

I'm not trying to work on Haida, just complete the Cordova bay article. Thanks, Dankarl (talk) 14:47, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I think one of the Kaigani Haida government or community websites has information about the founding of Hydaburg, it's been a while since I looked at them though. To my knowledge, also, no one is working on a Kaigani Haida article and you'd be welcome to start one; just convert the redirect into a full article.  Articles on the historical divisions of the Haida, e.g. the Kunghit Haida are also ripe for creation, as also with separate articles on the many historical villages, though little is known about most.  As for Cordova Bay, I'll alert User:Pfly who has worked on a lot of Spanish history in the PacNW and may be able to add much to it.Skookum1 (talk) 05:14, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the suggestion and encouragement. I was drawing a blank on searches but it pops up pretty quickly if you search the historical villages + Hydaburg. I might put up a Kaigani Haida stub but to do it right would be more reading (library, not net) than I can commit to.Dankarl (talk) 14:22, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * There's also elements to the story that might not be on those pages; I recall one Tlingit history page which talked about their forebears, of whichever kwaan, being descended from the offspring of four Haida women on PoW Island with Athabaskans from the mainland; the present-day kaigani are not the same, but are/were refugees from persecution by other Haida in what's now called Haida Gwaii. Links between Kaigani history and Tlingit history are no dobut extensive, likewise Nisga'a and Tsimshian, just as the latter are interconnected with the Tlingit (see Chief Shakes).Skookum1 (talk) 17:27, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Counties vs. RDs
The differences between counties and RDs then needs to be better explained. The current descriptions only says RDs "provide municipal services as the local government in areas not incorporated into a municipality, and in certain regional affairs of shared concern between residents of unincorporated areas and those in the municipalities such as a stakeholder role in regional planning." That description makes them sound exactly like U.S. counties in most states. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:23, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Seeing your post here, Mwalcoff, got me to finally research the topic a bit more. There's some good info about the history of regional districts in BC here, Local Government Department History, and lots of info here, CivicInfo BC (maybe too much info! a bit overwhelming). Reading the County (United States) page reminded me how county functions and powers differ over the US quite a bit. In New England, counties do very little--in some cases nothing at all. But even the most limited counties (aside from those with no function at all) still provide one thing no regional district does: courthouses and court districts. I think one could argue that establishing courthouses and court systems was the most important thing to do as counties were founded across the US. Often the county courthouse was the first public building of note in frontier areas.


 * I considered comparing BC regional districts to the US counties typical of the Pacific Northwest, especially bordering states: Washington, Idaho, Montana. I did a quick browse through the websites of a number of WA counties and a few from ID and MT, noting what departments and services they had; then did the same for a few regional districts in BC. It quickly became clear what the main differences are. Among the things US counties in these states do that regional district do not: Courts and related services (public defense/assigned counsel, prosecuting attorney, law libraries); Sheriff departments with law enforcement officers, detectives, and so on (real police work); and Jails and correction departments (including parole/probation management/supervision, victim assistance, home detention, work release, etc).


 * These three--courts, sheriff, jails/corrections--stood out as most significant. Other things US counties do (in these three states anyway) that RDs do not seem to: More extensive public health services (incl. coroners/medical examiners); more extensive public works (road construction, maintaince, etc--the whole "county road" system thing); "welfare" type financial assistance, public housing & housing assitance, veterans assistance, etc; Animal control departments; county clerk vital records (birth, death, marriage, divorce, etc--I think RDs don't collect/officiate/archive this kind of info, but I could be wrong), and finally, in at least some Montana counties, the public school system is run at the county level.


 * The main areas where counties and regional districts do seem to both cover: urban, community, and regional planning (including ordinances/bylaws); building zoning, permits, inspection/enforcement; public utility services like drinking water, sewers, solid waste (garbage, recycling, etc); emergency management & 911 services; parks and recreation services; flood control and protection, storm water drainage management; GIS and mapping services; and pest and weed control.


 * Ideally we'd have an article on Regional district (currently a redirect), which might get into all this. Maybe someday I'll make such a page. But for tonight, I must take a break! Perhaps later I could try to make a few additions/changes/clarifications to the Regional districts of British Columbia. Pardon my typos--as usual I wrote more than intended and must go without proofreading. Pfly (talk) 05:47, 16 October 2010 (UTC)


 * LOL that's the sort of apology I should add to most of my lengthy posts, Pfly, and in reading yours I haven't noticed a single typo, and you're far more cogent than I know how to be....but even in some of the similarities you've noted there are various complications and superseding factors:
 * Many of the items are community driven and only overseen by RDs, usually by zoning/contruction permits/rules. The public utility services fall in this category, as many local water systems were community-built and only supervised or taken on post-facto by regional districts.  Emergency management and 911 services are public-safety derived and therefore linked either to the provincial ambulance service, the RCMP (which is a provincial-level contract from the Force, as it's known), search & rescue are local-org/community driven, likewise fire services which are generally volunteer and only partly funded by RDs, and only governed by them by way of building permits etc and must also operate in tandem with Forestry and Environment ministries; and for non-residential fires it's decidedly provincial in nature, i.e. the Ministry of Forests (MoF) and its contractors, and the boundary/jurisdiction in question are the organizations of the Forest Regions and Forest Districts of British Columbia.  Parks and recreation services are also only in relation to regional district-run parks, and do not include MoF or BC Hydro or other crown-agency run facilities (some are MoE - Ministry of Environment, when not actual BC Parks - which is a subdivision of the MoE also); both ministries, and other like health and as you note courts, have their own boundaries which have little or no relation to RD boundaries, likewise provincial and federal electoral districts (which sometimes coincide with RD or RDEA boundaries, but not consistently - postal code boundaries are more relevant in that case).  And though RDs do some mapping and GIS, that is overwhelmingly provincial in nature, whether via Forests or Energy, Mines and Petroluem Resources and other ministerial-level bodies (google "Geomatics BC").  Flood control has been devolved to RDs in some ways, but DFO (the federal Dept of Fisheries & Oceans) has a lot to say, as do the MoE and MoF; in the Fraser Valley a separate body supervises flood control....this is the context of "stakeholder" in what's currently the wording - RDs are only one of several parties in such organizations, and are generally "low man on the totem pole" because of their weak powers and johnny-come-lately role; there are also Regional Management Planning Units/Areas (see e.g. Muskwa-Kechika Management Area which I think is the only one of those to yet have a role.  Also First Nations and their various subordinate and/or collective bodies have a very powerful voice now in all forms of land use, and also roles in flood control etc.  - and though while located within regional district boundaries, their territories do not coincide with those boundaries, nor do RD powers extend into Indian Reserves, and FN interests far outweight those of the RDs in most areas.  Pest and weed control - also BC Hydro and BC Rail (now CN, at least temporarily until a certain house of cards comes crashing down and that acquisition reverts to public hands) and also Forestry - and again community-drive in some areas, as well as the federal Ministry of Agriculture.  And one cultural aspect must be remembered - whereas Whatcom County or Pierce County are region-identifiers in local parlance, regional districts are not that in BC (see Historical geographic regions of British Columbia (that may be Historical geographic regions of British Columbia) and Regions of Canada; regional districts are often composed of those traditional regions.....but people say they're from the Okanagan or the Similkameen, but not from Okanagan-Similkameen or they're from the Thompson Country or Kamloops or from the Nicola/Nicola Country, but it sounds odd to say you're from the Thompson-Nicola; NB the parallel but not-by-any-means Tourism Region is Thompson-Okanagan, which has entirely different boundaries, and a lot of the northwestern Thompson-Nicola is historically part of the Cariboo.  Similarly though the Chilcotin is almost entirely in the Cariboo Regional District, it is expressly not part of the Cariboo.  Similarly the Castlegar-Nelson area is now the Regional District of Central Kootenay, but that area is traditionally known as the West Kootenay.  Saying you're "from" a regional district is not more common nor relevant than saying you're "from" an electoral district or Forest District; you'd only say that if specific powers attached to those jurisdictions/definintions are under discussion.  If someone is "from the (so-and-so) regional district", it means they WORK for the regional district.  How all that can be boiled down and cited for a regional district stand-alone article I don't know; maybe I'll make a website "A popular geography of British Columbia" explaining all that, and it can be cited (but not by me).  In any case, governance and political geography in BC is a many-layered cake, though maybe ironically referable to as "a many splendoured thing", though there's not much love attached to any of it....Skookum1 (talk) 00:41, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Heh.. everything you say holds true for US counties too. There's always some overlap between municipal, county, state, and federal operations. In some cases the county only acts as a coordinator or supervisor, helping municipalities to work together, or as a link between federal, state, and community interests, etc. For example, there are certainly federal/national parks, state parks, city parks, utility parks (akin to BC Hydro), etc. Despite looking into this a bit recently, my understand comes mainly from having worked for Pierce County for several years--although Pierce County might be unusually "powerful" for a county--having a fairly large and growing population in unincorporated areas, and a very long history. That brings up another obvious difference between counties and regional districts: From what I've read, the very concept of regional districts didn't really exist before the mid-20th century or so. And it wasn't until what, the 1980s?, that BC was wholly divided up into RDs--before then there were just two or three near Victoria and Vancouver, right? It seems like the whole system is rather new--most RDs seem younger than I am, anyway. In contrast, US counties go back to pre-statehood times. At least, pre-state territories were divided up into counties long ago--as soon as there were settlers enough to need basic government and rule of law. Granted, the process of subdividing the land into more counties continued and continues today, but the subdividing of territory into counties still goes way way back. And usually the subdivision ended in any significant sense long ago. So there seems to be a major historical difference between counties and RDs. Your comment about things being "taken on post-facto" is often true for counties too--but sometimes the date of "taking on" was well over a century ago (first example that comes to mind is the early irrigation projects in WA, community or privately built, now operated by county-level public utilities). Your comment about electoral districts is interesting. They are not necessarily consistent with regional districts? Do regional districts run elections in any way? As far as I know, all US elections are county operated, or at least aggregated to the county level. In WA, and most states, the counties run the elections and have departments devoted to it. I just filled out my Snohomish County ballot yesterday.


 * In response to your comments about "Whatcom County or Pierce County are region-identifiers in local parlance" etc.. I suppose you are right, that people sometimes refer to regions by county names, but it isn't that common. More often you'll hear more generic regional terms like Bellingham area (for Whatcom), Tacoma area (for Pierce), or Olympic Peninsula (no one says they are taking a vacation to Clallam County!). I bet around Seattle most people would not quite know where Whatcom County was--"Bellingham" would be more meaningful. People do say "Kitsap"--although whether they mean Kitsap County or Kitsap Peninsula isn't usually clear. I'd say I grew up in western New York, or "near Buffalo", not "Erie County". And so on. But still, yes, you are basically right--people do sometimes use county names this way--probably much more often than BCers use regional district names. Anyway, it occurred to me there's no need for a Regional district page. Since BC is the only place that has such things, info about them can go on the Regional districts of British Columbia page. I've been thinking about how to describe the differences with US counties...perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow. I talked a bit with Tara about counties--she grew up in Massachusetts, where counties are almost completely obsolete, *except* for courts. She said she managed to avoid jury duty by moving around the state--mostly just around the Boston area--from county to county, so often that they couldn't follow up fast enough to call her for jury duty. Am I right in thinking that courts in BC are all provincial or federal? Or are there municipal level courts? Pfly (talk) 09:23, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Only on my second coffee but here goes: regional districts were created by WAC Bennett in 1966-67-68 or so as a way to make an end-run on the original Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board, whose recommendations and regional plan he didn't like, and which smacked of the emergence of semi-autonomous local regional governments which would have diluted the centralist nature of provincial governance (it helps to remember, in that context, that Canadian governance is unitary, i.e. there is no separate executive/legislative/judicial system, everything is derived from the near-monarchical power of the first minister, which at the provincial level is the Premier). Prior to that the closest thing to regional power were the Government Agents and/or Gold Commissioners (often the same thing), whose powers were sweeping and generally defined by Land Districts, which still exist as the cadastral system but were the main formal divisions of the province before then; all directly appointed by the provincial government and responsible for everything from marriage and driver's licenses to building and mining permits and what few services there were at the rural level; Gold Commissioner and Government Agent were not always coincident positions but they often were; and many were also the Indian Agent, though that's federally-appointed.  The essence of governance in BC was and actually remains patronage, i.e. sinecures for friends of the government.  It's a bit long and complicated and come to think of it would make an interesting political science/political geography research topic.  Essentially everything outside the municipalities was under provincial supervision in some way until the '60s, and also bear in mind that the province's many company towns were not municipal but controlled by the parent company, e.g. Ocean Falls, Bralorne, Anyox and various others that are now municipalities (the three named are now ghost towns); one interesting exception was Fraser Mills, which is now absorbed into Coquitlam, where the mayor of the Village was the CEO of Crown Zellerbach, and had maybe only a few hundred, if that, voters, all company employees (it was just south of Maillardville).  Until its amalgamation with Coquitlam, it was one of the member municipalities of the GVRD, once it was created.  As for regional district boards, they are only partly directly elected, being comprised of all the mayors of the member municipalities who are automatically appointed to the board, and who have weighted votes; it's only the electoral areas covering the unincorporated areas where the board member is directly inhabited.  It's also interesting to note that who votes is property owners, not necesssarily tenants, and it was long noted that people who owned land in Whistler but lived in Vancouver voted in both municipal elections.  RD boundaries are also mutable, though such changes happen rarely (one recent major change was teh addition of Dease Lake to the Regional District of Kitimat-Stikine; it had formerly been part of the Stikine Region, which is not a regional district and is directly under provincial control, though there might be a sole electoral area within it and one representative to whatever coordination board may exist (which would have most power to Mines, in that case, as there is little forestry in that region).  It's also often observed that RDs are notably weaker than counties in either the US or eastern Canada, and I'm sorry I can't cite that immediately; it's mostly comments from journalists that I know that so it would take some time to track any specific cite for that down.  Eastern Canadian counties are more like US counties; school boards are county-defined and I think partly county-administered, depending on which province, and people in those regions, especially rural, would identify by county, though region-names exist too (e.g. the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia is comprised of Kings, Annapolis and Digby Counties, though it's worth noting that Digby County is not geographically part of the Annapolis Valley as a valley, but more as a result of cultural geography, i.e. a common highway.  I'm not familiar with Ontario counties but they seem to be more southern Ontario rather than anything north of North Bay or Sudbury where a region system applies.  The Prairie Provinces each have differing systems, if any at all, but especially in Alberta administration is highly centralist and waht regional boundaries do exist are mostly only definitions rather than empowerments.  In BC, I think there's some issue always arising at Union of British Columbia Municipalities conventions (mostly mayors) to resolve the money stream; i.e. they don't collect taxes directly, I think, or didn't maybe it's changed, and the provincial assessment authority collects the taxes and the Minister/Ministry responsible for the Municipal Act and/or the Schools Act redirects the money to the municipality and/or regional district and/or school district in question.  Water rights, by the way, are decidedly provincial, as are water permits (which govern any construction affecting any ditching, culverting etc).  The municipalities like the RDs exist at the whim of the provincial government rather than being self-derived in any way.  Only the City of Vancouver, by the way, has borrowing power, and this was a result of an all-night legislature debate early this year when construction costs/debts concerning the Olympic Village were out of control and new financing was needed; that was a political fireball which is hard to explain here.....one last thought, about your comment that US counties have a supervisory capacity; in BC the RDs do not; they are only one monkey at the banana pile and their interests are competitive rather than collaborative; Forestry and Mines in particular can pre-empt their interests at any time, or simply ignore them....and they are often frustrated by lack of cooperation or competing agendas by First Nations.  The Mines Act, by the way, pre-empts all otehr land legislation, or has since Campbell took power, such that anyone in the province can be evicted, without compensation, if someone holding hte mineral claim beneath their property wants to strip-mine....as a joke-response to this someone staked out the land beneath the premier's properties in the Okanagan or Monashees somewhere (where there is uranium speculation going on, depsite a moratorium on uranium mining in BC)......there must be some academic paper out there comparing BC's regional government system to those of other parts of Canada and/or the US, I'd presume in political science; if I see a press reference to an expert I'll make note of it and see what he/she might have to say.  I suppose the only direct difference are those of the public safety/court and school systems and health boards.....but it remains a truism that there's no point for having a category "schools in the such-and-so regional district" or "hospitals in the such-and-so regional district" because they're not organized that way; a real conundrum would be "aboriginal police organizations in the such-and-so regional district" as those are mandated by First Nations governments and completely outside any connection to regional districts; similarly there's "airports in the such-and-so regional district" but airports are under the federal Dept of Transportation and are only affected by regional districts concerning building permits for any terminal etc....Skookum1 (talk) 16:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Heya. There is quite a bit of RD history described at that link I gave way above, http://www.cd.gov.bc.ca/lgd/history/index.htm ...of course it isn't as critical in tone as what you write--it comes from the government after all. But it does get into company towns and such. Your description puts it in an interesting light. The patronage thing sounds about right, from what I've seen. The typical contrasting thing in the US would be "too much democracy", mob power, etc. In the Puget Sound War era there was a clash between federal authorities (mostly the Army) and territorial/local authorities (especially Gov. Stevens and the militias, so-called "volunteers"). In historical retrospect the Army comes off looking much better than the local mobs. Not that I want more centralized power today, just that there seems to be an interest historical angle on how the US and Canada (British Empire in earlier times) went different ways in part based on what the other was doing.

"RDs exist at the whim of the provincial government rather than being self-derived in any way" -- I think the relevant idea is home rule. Not all US counties have home rule, but they do where I've lived (excepting NYC, where county=borough=city). Pierce County is smaller and less powerful than the state of Washington or the federal government, but definitely acts as an independent stakeholder in matters of concern to the county. Then again, even within its borders there are limits. The county has little or no power in Mount Rainier National Park or in the national forest lands around the park, which together make up something like a third of the entire county. Nor over Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is quite large.

Interesting about "no separate executive/legislative/judicial system" in Canada. I was wondering last night how the judicial system works. I'm guessing judges are appointed at the provincial & federal levels, never at the municipal level. But I'm just guessing. In WA some judges are elected, which seems weird to me. I thought judges were supposed to be free from the political pressures relating to elections. ...the pessimistic idea that anyone who *can* get elected must have questionable ethics.

That only property owners can vote for RD officials is depressing to hear. The way US county officials gain office differs across the country. In some places they are not elected at all, I think. In some it may be that only property owners can vote. I could see the argument that counties get money via property taxes, so only (real estate) property owners should be able to vote. Not a good argument though.

I was reading about the Thames River (Ontario), and it seemed that the counties (or equivalents) it flows through were much more notable than BC RDs. It does look like the counties of southern Ontario are more like US counties. Not surprising--southern Ontario is practically part of the Midwest. Anyway, I should go do something productive. Pfly (talk) 19:46, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

New image
I created File:Canada kimberlite locations.png a few days ago that could come into use some day. Would be handy if I create an article about kimberlite volcanism across Canada (which I am attempting to do). Some thing mostly outside of BC for a change; the only known diatreme composed of kimberlite in BC is the Cross diatreme near the BC-Alberta border.  Volcano guy  06:40, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

/* Tribes and peoples */
Hey Skookum,

Looks like you're off line. In case you're not watching my page, I'd appreciate your input per your comments at User talk:Kwamikagami. — kwami (talk) 13:49, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, saw it, been meaning to get to it....Skookum1 (talk) 17:10, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
 * BTW good you cut through the baby mustard about Mohawk nation -> Mohawk people (see its talk page, ad nauseam).Skookum1 (talk) 17:11, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Haida name of Graham Island
Hello Skookum, I guess you did not see the : (colon), see my remarks at Talk:Graham Island. Cheers. Peter Horn User talk 01:33, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Formatting problem on Haida Gwaii
✅, see User talk:Peter Horn. Peter Horn User talk 16:20, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

closeup map needed
Skookum, See Talk:Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site and Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site. I managed to insert a closeup map. Peter Horn User talk 00:05, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

closeup map needed
Skookum, See Talk:Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site and Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site. I managed to insert a closeup map. Peter Horn User talk 00:14, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
 * We need to get map made which has all the park boundaries on it, including Naikoon and Duu Guusd Provincial Parks et al. As it is it gives the impression the whole archipelago is the national park, which of course is not the case.Skookum1 (talk) 04:31, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Or find a suitable map that is in the public domain... Peter Horn User talk 23:40, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Plains Indians
I'm trying to get the name changed again. Would you care to comment, Talk:Plains Indians? Cheers, -Uyvsdi (talk) 17:43, 3 November 2010 (UTC)Uyvsdi

About the name of La Pérouse
Bonjour, Skookum - I rather liked what you wrote on the Talk La Pérouse. Knowing pefectly well the matter, may I draw your attention to my article October 31, and some short others on November 1, 3 and 4. You will precisely read what happened. Sincerely yours,

Jacques Thomas - November 4. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.213.237.236 (talk) 20:00, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

I've been following the debate only loosely; it looks to me like a lot of wrong reasons are being used by those trying to justify the one-word form; it's clear enough that noble names of that era should be in separated form....Wikipeidans often dno't make decisions for the right reasons.....Skookum1 (talk) 21:15, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Surveying Canadian province coverage on Wikipedia
Skookum,

Do you know how to use Google to search Wikipedia page titles only?

(Google all-in-title site-specific searches)

One way to survey coverage of a subject, such as a province (or territory) of Canada, to see if there's enough meat there to warrant the creation of an outline, is to search the related titles using Google. You can get a good idea of how much coverage there is by searching on variations of titles using the name.

Once you have an outline, the outline itself becomes a tool for tracking changes to the core articles on that subject, using "Related changes". It's also a great navigation springboard, especially if you use firefox and a firefox add-on called Linky.

In the google searches I use quotes and the words "of" and "in" as qualifiers to reduce the results down and weed out location articles (towns, districts, etc.) from the searches. And I exclude the word "category", because cats really water down the results.

And there's some more subtle tricks to weed out towns (which can clog search results).

I've included a bunch of google search links below for you to browse the coverage and see what you think.

(By the way, if you know better or easier ways to do this, please let me know.)

The Transhumanist 23:53, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Ontario
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=P2N&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Ontario%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=P2N&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Ontario%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Ontario%22+-of+-in+-%22Ontario+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Quebec
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=3R3&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Quebec%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=e7N&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Quebec%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Quebec%22+-of+-in+-%22Quebec+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=o&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Nova Scotia
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Nova+Scotia%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=foi&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Nova+Scotia%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Nova+Scotia%22+-of+-in+-%22Nova+Scotia+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

New Brunswick
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+New+Brunswick%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+New+Brunswick%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+New+Brunswick%22+-category+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Manitoba
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Manitoba%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Manitoba%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Manitoba%22+-of+-in+-%22Manitoba+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=o&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Prince Edward Island
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Prince+Edward+Island%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Prince+Edward+Island%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Prince+Edward+Island%22+-of+-in+-%22Prince+Edward+Island+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=o&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Alberta
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Alberta%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Alberta%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Alberta%22+-of+-in+-%22Alberta+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Newfoundland and Labrador
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Newfoundland+and+Labrador%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Newfoundland+and+Labrador%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Newfoundland+and+Labrador%22+-of+-in+-%22Newfoundland+and+Labrador+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Northwest Territories
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+the+Northwest+Territories%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+the+Northwest+Territories%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Northwest+Territories%22+-of+-in+-%22Northwest+Territories+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=o&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Yukon
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Yukon%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Yukon%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Yukon%22+-of+-in+-%22Yukon+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Nunavut
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22of+Nunavut%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22in+Nunavut%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=allintitle%3A+%22Nunavut%22+-of+-in+-%22Nunavut+Wikipedia%22+-category+-file+-template+-portal+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&btnG=Search&aq=o&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Using Wikipedia search links
It has just come to my attention that Wikipedia's search engine was upgraded over 9 months ago. It's now possible to do most specialized searches without having to use an external search engine.

What's even better is that most searches are supported by wikilink syntax, so that you can compose all your searches first, and then load them all at once using Linky.


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Alberta"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Alberta"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Alberta* -Alberta
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Alberta


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Ontario"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Ontario"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Ontario* -Ontario
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Ontario


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Manitoba"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Manitoba"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Manitoba* -Manitoba
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Manitoba


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Quebec"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Quebec"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Quebec* -Quebec
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Quebec


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Nova Scotia"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Nova Scotia"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Nova Scotia* -"Nova Scotia"
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Nova Scotia


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of New Brunswick"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in New Brunswick"
 * Special:Search/intitle:New Brunswick* -"New Brunswick"
 * Special:PrefixIndex/New Brunswick


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Prince Edward Island"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Prince Edward Island"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Prince Edward Island* -"Prince Edward Island"
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Prince Edward Island


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Newfoundland and Labrador"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Newfoundland and Labrador"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Newfoundland" -Labrador
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Newfoundland" -Labrador
 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Labrador"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Labrador"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Newfoundland* -Newfoundland
 * Special:Search/intitle:Labrador* -Labrador
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Newfoundland and Labrador


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Northwest Territories"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Northwest Territories"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Northwest Territor* -"Northwest Territories"
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Northwest Territories


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Yukon"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Yukon"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Yukon* -Yukon
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Yukon


 * Special:Search/intitle:"of Nunavut"
 * Special:Search/intitle:"in Nunavut"
 * Special:Search/intitle:Nunavut* -Nunavut
 * Special:PrefixIndex/Nunavut

The Transhumanist 00:04, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Tracking coverage of Canada and its provinces
Using the search results from the searches above, it's easy to spot items to add to outlines and tracking charts:

The above has too many redlinks for display in article space, but makes for a really good behind-the-scenes tool.

Feel free to add more entries. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Here's a link: User:The Transhumanist/Canada coverage.

The Transhumanist 03:00, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation
I suspect you might be right re Lord Taunton however I can't quickly see a citation. There are a number of biographies of him readable online which may give the answer Garlicplanting (talk) 12:49, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The present given pronunciation has no citation so could be removed from the article per wiki policy as unverified, a biography is the most likely place to confirm what the pronunciation is either way. Your intervention doesn't help the matter at all Garlicplanting (talk) 14:10, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * about the pronunciation of "Labouchere".....Skookum1 (talk) 18:19, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Above
personal attack removed DocOfSoc (talk) 10:55, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

IPA
Hey,

Could you take a look at the pronunciation of the village of Willanch at Annie Miner Peterson? — kwami (talk) 01:29, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

My thoughts
It's none of my business, but after commenting about the SoCal "Chinatowns", I've become interested in the exchanges between you, Grayshi, and DocOfSoc over this issue. Looking into DocOfSoc's contributions on other editors' talk pages as well as this latest edit, I think you have a very good case for turning her actions and words into administration because it doesn't seem as if it's going to stop short of you leaving the articles in question and allowing DocOfSoc to do whatever they want with the article(s). Like I said, it's none of my business, but if it were happening to me, I wouldn't put up with it. That you have so far speaks to your patience, however. **Maven of Media (talk) 15:28, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Have i ....
Your the expert on BC ....Have i worded the second paragraph right?? ---> Former colonies and territories in Canada.Moxy (talk) 02:16, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Did some touch ups.....New Spain and Russian America should definitely have sections if the Norwegian d Danish claims do - especially because of the HBC lease of most of the Panhandle 1837-1867, which was the basis of BC's ignored though strident claim to far more than Britain dared;.....; likewise explanation of the San Juans and Alaska Boundary dispute and the Aroostook War and Northwest Angle; the border dispute between Manitoba and Ontario was called the Rat Portage War (Rat Portage being Kenora today). BTW more than once - several times - BC governors/premiers have advanced the idea of annexing the Yukon  - Douglas, Pattullo, WAC Bennett, maybe Barrett, and either John Hart or Boss Johnson, maybe de Cosmos too....Yukoners SFAIK would rather join Alberta ;-).  Douglas had wanted for BC to get a chunk of the Priaries, but his successors in BC didn't press for that; otherwise Medicine Hat and Calgary would be in BC.....Skookum1 (talk) 03:05, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok i added [[Former colonies and territories in Canada] could you add info about the Panhandle 1837-1867 etc..Moxy (talk) 05:29, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Would i be possible to get refs for all that you added ??Moxy (talk) 06:19, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As in I guess what was the edit comment, they're on Alaska boundary dispute for starters....I'm having my doubts about 1799-1821 for the 51st, have to think about that; the Emperor Paul did retract that line after its initial declaration - to 55 N - but I'm uncertain about the timeline; following the advancement of claims to 43 N, the Russians offered to withdraw to "the line of the Emperor Paul" but were brow-beaten back to 55 N, but that may have been where the line already was by the time of teh 1821 Ukase. 55 N was adjusted to 54-40 so that the Russians would control all of Prince of Wales and Dall Islands; this was a British offer which the Americans did not oppose (the treaties were a year apart, with the US one signed first, but made the same arrangements though their terms/wording differ).  I'm "on the fly" right now, sorry didn't add those.  Russian claims continued to be an issue in later years, irrespective of the lease, which I'll get to (and will ask Pfly for help on as he's good with the particulars), such that during the 1862 Stikine Gold Rush a Lieut. Pereleshin voyaged up the Stikine to the ten-league mark from the sea, to make sure no prospecting/mining was occurring on Russian soil; that's slightly past Stikine, British Columbia and in the area of the Boundary Range, which is in the area the boundary would have been if that interpretation had held sway in 1903 (i.e. that much more of the Lower Stikine would have been in Alaska).  The cites should be easy to just copy-paste; read through them if you wish, they're interesting....Skookum1 (talk) 06:09, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok adding refs now..it is interesting .Moxy (talk) 06:19, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I kinda think it would have been interesting if the Russians had held to the 51st Parallel.....this would have made Britain dig in all the harder about Puget Sound and maybe the Lower Columbia, and also possibly send in troops/settlement (which they weren't interested in, really, even in the Gold Colony days) and, given those territories becoming part of an eventual British Columbia and had settlers, the Pacific Colony might have been in a better position economically and not forced to join CAnada, as was the case; as noted somewhere, Douglas had wanted a colony of BC to have a chunk of land east of the Rockies....on the otehr hand, had the Russians had that bit of coast it's conceivable they may have made more efforts inland (their maps sometimes show Russian claims extending to the Mackenzie....) but they never did much with their North American lands anyway; they were only holding on in 1867 out of stubbornness, and sold Alaska to the US instead of Britain (BC had recommended acquiring it) to spite the rival empire.Skookum1 (talk) 06:35, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * BTw re template contents, when La Perouse stopped by the region before he disappeared down by Australia, it was believed that he would be making a French claim; no records of his journals survive as to whether he did a ceremony of possession....Napoleon made mumbles about the area, and California, partly because of La Perouse's participation in its explorations...had his journals survive there would have been a fifth party at the imperial dining table in teh region. Also there's Fort Defiance in Clayoquot Sound to consider, though it was a corporate colony, not an American one directly, and a bit more fuzzily is the presence of Portuguese and Austrian flags on some vessels in teh region (Barkley's most notably), though neither Portugal nor Austria ever tried to make much of that by way of a claim....Still I remember a map with diagonal striping over the disputed areas of claim - usually only Russia, Spain, Britain and the UK, but I remember seing one with a French claim (i.e. in an old textbook or something) though I've seen nothing in print to that effect.  You might also consider adding a "legendary and fictional" section with Anian, Brobdingnag (at the latitude of the QCI no less...), Cibola, Bergi, and Fusang for starters.....and in a book you may see around called "Indian Wars of the Pacific Northwest" there's a theory about Hermosa/Fairhaven being the location of a corsair colony in the 1780s.....which connects to the story of the Spaniards who tried to settle at Kelowna but were driven out by harsh conditions and then slaughtered during their retreat at Keremeos; the slaughter story is true, as is the Spanish settlement at Kelowna, and this is in Okanagan legend also...whether or not it's the same bunch as at hermosa- Bellingham Bay- and whether or not hermosa existed, well, that's in the conjectural category.....there's nothing in Wikipedia about the Spanish-Similkameen battle at Keremeos....if I see that book again I'll figure out what to call it.....not known to be Spanish troops, the author's contention is that it was Mexican/etc pirates and that's why troops were sent north from San Blas.....Skookum1 (talk) 06:44, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Need your opinion on SF Chinatown edits by Grayshi.
Hi, had been adding images in the "Chinatown, San Franisco" page until several months ago when Grayshi started deleting them on the grounds of cluttering the pages with too many pix. Fine, I gave way and left things the way they were, but last week he started deleting images once again. He claims he's been cleaning up the Chinatown pages, which amounts to nothing more than the removal of 1 pix from "Chinatown, Los Angeles" that still totals more than the "Chinatown, San Francisco" page. I am under the impression that this individual carries a deep anti-SF bias, and there seems to be no order of authority here as the other editors and sys. admins don't really care. You seem to carry a bit of authority around here and are a bit more balanced when it comes to this subject, so I thought maybe u could help carry some weight in this argument as it appears there hasn't been much action as of late on the discussion boards. MealMachine (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:32, 12 November 2010 (UTC).
 * Me? A bit of authority? ROTFL.  No I've been called to the carpet a bunch of times because I speak with authority, sometimes kinda loudly.  I don't usually fuss with image-load pictures unless it's a gallery that's out of control; as general illustrations I prefer to see them, it breaks up the monotony of text-only; but they should always have a use, not just any old picture will do.  I'll have a look, but I'd recommend WikiProject Cities to see what image-number/content guidelines there are for major cities and neighbourhoods.Skookum1 (talk) 02:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I tried following the recommended guidelines by Grayshi the best I could, and even then he's not satisfied. An example of his assinine edits....removing an image of Stockton street because it wasn't aligned with the relevant text. So I comply by moving it to the section on Stockton, and guess what? He removes it once again on the grounds of cutting into the text. Now, just watch me re-integrate and re-arrange the same image so as not to look out of place, and see how long it stays before Grayshi the censor police arrives at the scene. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MealMachine (talk • contribs) 18:59, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * "A deep anti-SF bias" and "censor police"? Calm down, MealMachine. Wikipedia is not an image repository and some photo of a crowd at a street corner doesn't do much to illustrate the article. I have nothing against San Francisco or any part of the Bay Area, for that matter. …Grayshi  talk ■ my contribs 04:07, 14 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You may not think of yourself as the WikiPolice, but you sure wasted very little time in finding your way here. And, no bias against the San Francisco Bay Area? I find that very hard to believe. Stockton Street is not just any old 'street corner', but possibly the most important avenue to San Francisco's Chinese community. It's unfortunate that it doesn't meet your high standards, which includes an Italian restaurant, subway station granite, street sign, and brand-new high school structure, all of which are of very little, or no historical importance to Los Angeles' Chinatown. If only you could dedicate as much time to correcting and validating information as you would judging how others edit, it would actually go a long way in helping to serve WikiPeadia's mission which, hopefully, you won't require an explanation for.MealMachine (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 18:19, 16 November 2010 (UTC).
 * MealMachine, remember where you are. You've dragged an argument to someone else's front porch and now are making a scene.  WP:AGF.....inter-city rivalries and inter-Chinatown rivarlies are a picayune annoyance to me.  "your article has more pictures than my article" is sandbox stuff, and certainly doesn't belong on a third party's talkpage.Skookum1
 * My sincerest apologies, Skookum1. It was my only intention to ask for your opinion, not to start a debate here. I also forgot to login and accidentaly stamped my sister's name(she also uses wiki). In any event, I agree with you that this has turned into some very petty squabling so its best drop the subject. Regards, MealMachine (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:05, 18 November 2010 (UTC).

These should help when you are ready

 * Grep — search pages titles using regexps.
 * CatScan — powerful search using categories, included templates, etc.

When you are ready to start building the remaining Canadian province outlines, these tools should help a lot in finding subtopics to include. Quebec, for instance, has a lot of coverage, and these two tools can find most of it.

Grep returns results in the form of lists that can easily be imported for editing.

I hope you find these useful. The Transhumanist 05:42, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

William B. Davis Centre
Do you happen to know if the William Davis Centre for Actors Study still exists? As far as I can tell it was decisively demolished but the article doesn't mention that. --Mathew5000 (talk) 09:29, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This would seem to answer that......too important and established an acting school to just shut down.Skookum1 (talk) 17:30, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

AGF
Your talk page comments and edit summaries have been rather belligerent, as another editor pointed out. Wikipedia policies require that we treat other editors with civility and that we assume good faith. One good principle to follow is "comment on the edit, not the editor". You've been around Wikipedia long enough that you should know these things. In the future, please be less strident in your remarks.  Will Beback   talk    21:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * "Strident" is typical personal-attack hyperbole to me; there's a BIG difference hetween pointed language and belligerence. Belligerence means I'm trying to pick a fight, which I'm not; "pointed" means the language is sharp because the obvious fact needs emphatic clarification.  If complainers would do more to tend to authenticity and veracity of content - it's non OR-ness and non-SYNTH-ness - and didn't spend so much energy defending the indefensible and also engaging in actual attacks, as was done against me repeatedly there (without me even beeping because it's not worth my time, but with friends removing verbal assaults here) - if all that weren't going down and efforts were made to read RS, VS, PSTS and all the other even better guidelines than "be welcoming" and "assume good faith".  Neither one is sufficient to justify putting up with bad ideas or even worse citations and distortions of what those cites say, and soap, soap, soap and even spam - but call for more rigorous encyclopedism and take out what shlouldn't be there and it's a "personal attack", and "vandaliam", and "belligerence" etc etc etc.  Mind to your own house, and of those who stand by you, before you lecture me on appropriate conduct, or resent me for pointing out errors of your content and citation use.  And there's this other great guideline WP:IAR which I guess is what the whole point of writing neologistic travelogues like the article where we have crossed swords, as if they were somehow actual topics and not sandcastles in the ethnic-vanity sky.  Ignoring every rule in the book about content and fact, but getting real loud about the ones telling everyone to behave nice.....even when the person they're telling to behave nice they really just want to ignore and/or attack, adn not deal with the facts/guidelines that are being pointed out to them.  Mind to your own house, and those around you, before you put yourself on a pedestal and lecture me about conduct when you ignored the main guidelines ("fact", "truth", "no original research", "no synth").  Belligerent?  Doesn't seem to me I've been the one picking the fights, but people sure like to accuse me of nearly anything when I make them face a truth they don't want to admit.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:42, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Is there any Wikipedia policy or guideline that I haven't broken? ;) I get the feeling that you're confusing me with other people. I haven't made any citation errors recently that I know of, and I'm not sure what content errors you mean. I haven't mentioned anything about a personal attack. I work on articles related to many ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and other sociological groups, but I don't think I'm engaged in "ethnic vanity". You and I have worked on many of the same articles over the years, and I don't think we've ever had a conflict. We're both here to improve Wikipedia, and we've both put a lot of time and energy into it. We may disagree, but let's do so agreeably.   Will Beback    talk    13:01, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Western Cordillera
Hi Skookum1, I could be wrong with the Western Cordillera as a single geologic province. The Geologic province article is quite brief, but does mention one can be “a number of contiguous related elements” - ? It also links Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province as one so I extrapolated, perhaps too inclusively, that the whole Western Cordillera is therefore a very large one. Please let me know if incorrect and will remove from Category:Geologic provinces of Canada & U.S..---thanks--- Look2See1  t a l k →  21:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The Physiographic province page is a little better, though not much. It seems to me that a province (physiographic or, especially geologic) is a relatively large region that shares some basic geologic (or, vaguer, "physiographic") qualities. Like the Basin and Range Province, which has both a geologic and physiographic ("landform" characteristics?) identity obviously different from the surrounding Cordillera. One definition of "cordillera" I found online: A cordillera, as usually denned [?], consists of two or more mountain chains associated geographically, but not necessarily of the same age. Maybe a lead. There must be some decent geology glossaries online. Pfly (talk) 00:30, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Suburban Chinatown vs Hollywood North
I'm having trouble squaring your rejection of the concept of "suburban Chinatown" with your embrace of Hollywood North. You've suggested renaming Southern California Chinatowns to Chinese commercial districts and residential areas in the San Gabriel Valley, yet you've rejected renaming Hollywood North to Film industry in Vancouver. Could you explain the difference?  Will Beback   talk    22:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * ROTFL. Boy, you went looking for something to counter-attack with didn't you?  Why don't you read Talk:Hollywood North and note the sources for that usage and how it came about and how it was coined, and also the LA-propagandist who was insistent that, no, Santa Barbara and San Francisco were "Hollywood North".  That term was coined for Vancouver by the film industry.  Toronto has adopted it, but with a different meaning.  You're comparing a cited, common reference with a completely fictionalized wiki-definition that has no basis in normal English usage or in the geography or press kits of the cities involved.  You couldn't have picked a worse example to try and counter with.Skookum1 (talk) 22:51, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Now, if Monterey Park or Rowland Heights had big signs at their entrance "Welcome to America's First Suburban Chinatown", a big paifang, Chinese street signs, no people of other ethnicities or at least only a few so as to not dilute the Chinese-ness of the place, then fine. But as pfly has pointed out, one of the mayors of those places has rejected the label "Chinatown", that being a specific place, and also avers that they are not an "ethnic enclave", but a multi-ethnic integrated community.  Why are only Chinese people important to the article(s) about Monterey Park when, after all, other people(s) DO live there?Skookum1 (talk) 23:07, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Where, exactly, is Hollywood North? Where's the sing you speak of? Is it in Vancouver or in Toronto? Isn't the term just a neologism? Which film industry coined it? "Hollywood" is an actual place, while "Hollywood North" is a made-up term for someplace that doesn't seem to exist. I think you're being inconsistent.
 * I think you're just being obstinate and not bothering to read the Hollywood North article that you've invoked for the answers you demand of me, even though they're already there....Skookum1 (talk) 04:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh, gimme a break. Me and twenty other Vancouver and Canadian editors worked on that page, and the citations on that page speak for itself; it was coined by the branch-plant industry in Vancouver, by Hollywood people working there, and is not just a common catchphrase, it's a name of businesses, a book (or two), regularly used in the city's own press copy, and a familiar term within the film industry.  "Hollywood North" in Vancouver refers to the whole corpus of the film industry there, the crews, the production companies, studios, the actors and BG people; it refers to an economic sector.  toronto picked up the word and has taken it upon itself, also very citable, though their meaning is "aren't we glamorous, just like the real Hollywood"?  Don't even begin to pretend that there's any comparison between that article, with its many citations for that name and its established use in the Canadian media (and show business media, including Billboard), and the wiki-=campaign to extend teh definition of Chinatown to mean "anywhere Chinese people live".Skookum1 (talk) 00:12, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * "Hollywood North" is found in Vancouver's press kit, and in BC Tourism's, and in any of the companies in that sector working or based there; whereas "Chinatown" is only found on Monterey Park's own website when referring to the real Chinatown, LA, by way of an organization using that name. Nowhere in Monterey Park's, or Rowland Heights', press kits/websites do they say "Monterey Park is a Chinatown" or "Rowland Heights Chinatown"...if the LA Times says "Chinatown", it's meaning downtown LA, if it's meaning Monterey Park, it'll say Monterey Park.....and I'd venture taht those cities are wary of alienating non-Chinese businesses and residents from coming there by branding it as a Chinese-only place, which is what the origin of "Chinatown" is....I've seen one "suburban Chinatown" writeup (since taken out as OR) branding an area that was only 10% Chinese as a Chinatown.....or less, in some cases.  As if nobody else existed, and what matters is only the Chinatown-advocacy position ("anywhere Chinese people live is a Chinatown" or "a collection of won ton shops is a Chinatown").  You mocked me with this Hollywood North thing, even though Hollywood North is heavily-cited and in very common use; but you can't produce a valid citation that labels these mixed suburban agglomerations are actually called Chinatown - except in a figurative, but not defnitive sense, and all too often from sources which are wiki-clones or otherwise derivative of this wiki-instilled usage.Skookum1 (talk) 00:32, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As for the ex-mayor who rejects "Chinatown", cite please?    Will Beback    talk    00:02, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Pfly posted that, look at the article talklpage!!Skookum1 (talk) 00:12, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it was I who mentioned it, or at least here is where I read it. Franamax (talk) 00:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

OK, so one official doesn't like the term, but the article indicates that these labels are commonly used anyway. It's used in books by scholars, and in newspapers. Again, I don't see a big difference between "Suburban Chinatown" and "Hollywood North". I expect that some people in the real Hollywood disagree with calling Vancouver "Hollywood North", so a little disagreement doesn't invalidate a label.  Will Beback   talk    01:10, 20 November 2010 (UTC) [post edit conflict with below]:**You will hear on the media in BC at least a few times a week something to the effect that "Vancouver's film industry is known as Hollywood North" or "news within Hollywood North today [meaning within the industry]....". You'll find it in government and corporate press copy alike, you'll find it in common speech, you'll find it in company names and publication titles. But you won't hear on a Greater LA news station "there was a fire in the Chinatown in Monterey Park today" or "Monterey Park's Chinatown community had a lion dance", and you won't find that city, or LA County, or teh State of California, describing it as a "Chinatown". And while there are some Hollywood pooh-bahs who don't like the term Hollywood North, there's just as many that come up and make films in Vancouver and who regard Vancouver's various agencies and companies as extensions of the Hollywood film corpus; which is how the name came about; it's not about the native film industry, it's about the Hollywood people who came/come north, though since then it's been extended to mean a lot more. But it's a totally different thing, and a totally different kind of dispute (Hollywood doesn't like Vancouver because it cuts into their studio-rental market).....the difference is a well-established albeit fairly local usage (Hollywood North) vs an effort to popularize the term "Chinatown" to mean "any place Chinese people have businesses/live". Skookum1 (talk) 04:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Since Chinese immigrants are the city’s majority, media and social researchers have called Monterey Park a “suburban Chinatown.” Some, however, argue that it’s not an accurate label. “I do not appreciate the title,” said Judy Chu, a former mayor and a Chinese American member of the city council since 1988. “The Chinatowns of before were ethnic enclaves. This is a diverse community.” But the labels persist. Some of Monterey Park’s nicknames could be perceived as flattering, as with the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” or derisive, as with “Mandarin Park.”
 * Apples and oranges.Skookum1 (talk) 01:22, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Again though Will, you haven't searched for sources on people disagreeing with the Chinatown label (which I understand could be rather difficult, maybe "Chinatown disagree"?) For the one instance, Monterey Park, "suburban Chinatown" may be well-enough established (though even there, it seems to be a label applied as a claim, rather than a systematic definition. But extending the terminology beyond even that one instance seems very dubious to me. Franamax (talk) 01:35, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That's what I meant by "figurative sense".....more of a metaphor than a meaning, that "suburban Chinatown" phrase of P.Fong's (T.Fong's?)....its sense is "[a] suburban [version of] Chinatown", it's not saying it IS Chinatown, or even a Chinatown; it's only being used descriptively....well, except by those who want it to become standard for new-era Chinese settlement colonies.....Skookum1 (talk) 04:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * People call Vancouver's film industry "Hollywood North". Is it literally "Hollywood North"? No, that's just a term created by promoters. However it stuck and now it is used by many people, even though it is still not literally true or accurate. OTOH, scholars invented, or at least identified, "suburban Chinatown" as a designation for MP and parts of the SGV, and that concept has now been repeated for about 20 years in newspapers, etc. Is it literally true? We can disagree about it but that's beside the point. So long as it's a common usage we need to report it. Verifiability, not truth.     Will Beback    talk    08:50, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Hollywood North is a brand, it's also an industry, it's widely in print and in broadcasting. It's in common use.  "Suburban Chinatown" is NOT in common use - except by stubborn Wikipedians.Skookum1 (talk) 18:51, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Brands are trademarked. The industry is called "filmmaking". Elsewhere you wrote, You're advocating an original research/synth use of a word that means something else in proper English. "Hollywood North", in proper English, would appear to refer to a geographical location, not an industry. But that's OK because that term is used by reliable sources. Likewise with "suburban Chinatown". As for "stubborn Wikipedians", wouldn't that label apply to you as well?    Will Beback    talk    00:03, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * No, I'm just stubborn, period - especially when it comes to matters of truth, or shooting down nonsensical comparison and definition-picking in defense of the indefensible. Hollywood North, I repeat, is a COMMON USAGE and is WIDELY CITABLE as a standard reference to Vancouver's film industry and/or Vancouver and/or the Canadian/Toronto industry.  This is NOT THE CASE with the of "Chinatown" to refer to cities which don't even refer to themselves that way, and include other groups than Chinese.  Please stop arguing in circles and if you want to go look for another original-research-wording comparison, find something sensible instead of something that's cited up the ying-yang, which your attempt to "validate" the use of "Chinatown" for "places where there are lots of Chinese stores/residents"....if the meaning you want to apply were to be used on Vancouver, as Iv'e observed before, there would be TWENTYFIVE Chinatowns in Vancouver alone, at 15 at least in its suburbs.  But depiste that, and your enthusiastic embrace of a neologistic meaning, there's only one Chinatown in Vancouver.  One only, just like in LA, and in San Francisco.  Golden Village, Metrotown, and a patch of Chinese restuarants at 41st and Granville (which is part of an area called Kerrisdale, which though it has lots of Chinese residents and stores is decidedly un-Chinatown like) are NOT CHINATOWNS.  According to the meaning you want to enforce/reinforce, they ARE.  but like Monterey Park, none of them are considered chinatowns, by themselves or anyone else.  I'm being stubborn about the truth; you've being obstinate about nonsense.Skookum1 (talk) 00:12, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Both the phrase "suburban Chinatown" and the description of MP as a Chinatown can be cited to a wide variety of sources, including mainstream newspapers and scholarly books.
 * As for the Chinese communities in BC, Golden Village (Richmond, British Columbia) is categorized as a Chinatown. You've made a lot of edits to that page but you've left that categorization, which you've removed from MP. How do you reconcile the different treatment of these articles?   Will Beback    talk    00:31, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Stop wiki-copping, it's really boring; and going after other articles I've worked on is a form of WP:personal attack, and also wiki-stalking. And how do I reconcile the differences between those two articles? Very simple - I remove the Chinatowns category from it just like i did with Agincourt and Markham and Richmond Hill and Metrotown - and the associated uncited, and uncitable text claiming it is "known as Vancouver's new Chinatown", which is rank b.s. Richmond Council AND the business association on No. 3 Road BOTH decided to not ever refer to Golden Village as a Chinatown, a name which is associated iwth older ways and a less ethnically mixed community, and which means ONLY Vancouver's Chinatown (nowadays; New Westminster and other places in the Lower Mainland used to have Chinatowns - the real kind - but they're all gone now). Stop looking for inconsistencies in my other work, it's like I said a form of wiki-aggression and you should be concerned ONLY with the article under discussion, not picking at straws so as to take up my time and enewrgy.....and patience, with your ongoing attack as well as nonsensical comparisons like Hollywood North/Suburban Chinatown. Suburban Chinatown is NOT IN COMMON USE in English, it may have a few travelogues and wiki-clone cites, and for every academic or literary article you find that approvingly uses the phrase, there will be an equal number who dismiss it, and who associate it only with REAL Chiantowns; not modern Chinese settlement/retail colonies in suburban tract housing and strip malls....with other peoples living there, to boot. Your intrusions on my talkpage have all been accusations/allegations, and also imputations of various minor sins like hypocrisy, and like the Hollywood North item this one is based in trying to discredit me in the other debate; and it doesn't work because on all counts of your accusations here you were wrong, as with accusing me of not giving Golden Village the same treatment; you're accusing me of content added by other editors as if it were my "fault"....if you're just here to accuse/attack, just leave OK? The debate was on the other page; but coming after me here instead of debating me there says all it needs to....Iv'e seen such behaviour before....Skookum1 (talk) 03:25, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Looking through your edit history on other articles is definitely not "wiki-stalking", and it is certainly not any form of "personal attack". It's good that you removed that category, as Will seemed to merely be pointing out the inconsistency of what you were saying above.  It's public website, Skookum1, and anyone in the world is free to peruse your contributions here and make any judgment they conclude from those edits.  Your accusations are specious here: try to see that and understand that WP is more important than what one editor may feel about something.  A Google for "Suburban Chinatown" shows that perhaps that one book will alter whether it's in common usage or not.  Sometimes it happens that way.  Try to assume good faith with Will, huh?  Cheers...  Doc   talk  03:37, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Zillions of google hits only mean there's zillions of wiki-clones and food articles, it doesn't mean there's reliable sources. Clearly the issue with good faith here is that which Will is very pointedly not showing me by going after my role in other articles I've created, which does not have to do with the article under discussion.  Typical of those losing arguments to go on the attack; your ssuggestion that I'm not showing good faith is specious....and who the hell are you anyway?Skookum1 (talk) 04:39, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Who the hell am I? Where the hell are your sources for your little diatribe of a "history lesson" on historical Chinatowns below?  Is the world supposed to take your word for it?  Back your stuff up with WP:SOURCES, Skookum1...  Doc   talk  04:45, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You're welcome to wallow in your ignorance, I can't help you with that except to advise that you learn to read things about things you don't know - pretty funny for YOU to accuse ME of bad faith given your attitude above; I was asked why articles were in that category, which that same editor had previously dismissed (apparently without actually looking at its contents) as fictional/non-existent. That's just not the case; but unlike any citation which would serve to prove that "suburban Chinatowns" is in use either as a term, or even as a concept (and not a slightly promotional one at that), there are citations out there in BC history/geography for the places in that category.  That you classify a lengthy, detailed explanation as a "diatribe"(whether you overstroked it out or not) is what's pathetic, or to quote your edit comment, "pffft".Skookum1 (talk) 05:11, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not the one "synthing" policies and guidelines to level "personal attack" accusations against editors here. I will neither comment on your response as "ignorant" nor "pathetic", but I suggest you do a little "light reading" on the malfeasance you are accusing editors in good standing here of.  Cheers...  Doc   talk  05:18, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Bore-ing. It's clear your only purpose here is to criticize and attack an "editor in good standing" )me).  Go away.Skookum1 (talk) 05:34, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * A very mature response: consider me "gone". But not "really" gone: when you make garbage, POV and misspelled edits like this, I get to "watch" you.  It's an encyclopedia, and edits like that show a disregard for that agenda.  See you in the funny pages ;>  Doc   talk  05:43, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * [ec] I'm trying to understand your POV. We can discuss the individual articles on those talk pages. This is concerned with your approach to editing, so this is the correct page. Many of the articles in Category:Historical Chinatowns in British Columbia don't even mention the existence of a Chinatown. It seems to include towns that simply had Chinese populations. What makes Boston Bar, British Columbia a Chinatown, for example, or Lytton, British Columbia?   Will Beback    talk    03:49, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Those are towns that had Chinatowns, though perhaps their history sections aren't filled out enough, and perhaps, yes, the ones that were simply Chinese-majority for decades (at least insofar as the non-native population goes) should also be removed. Tonight I walked by the Shanghai Alley monument in Penticton, which marks where that particular Chinatown was (and "Shanghai Alley", "China Alley", "Little Hhanghai" are admissible in the Chinatowns definitino/category thoughthey're particular names of distinct places....Lillooet had a distinct Chinatown, as well as a China Alley, and it's also one of those places where the Chinese presence lasted in number for decades, particularly in merchanting, ranching and farming, and mining (when nobody else stuck it out); Keefer's, like Boston Bar/North Bend, had large railway-labour Chinatowns, as did a couple of decades later Ashcroft and (I think) Spences Bridge.  New Westminster's was destroyed by fire (along with the rest of the city) and never rebuilt....Hazelton and Rock Creek had Chinatowns, as did (famously( Barkerville.  Cumberland for years was joked about having a "hole to China" as there were always more Chinese around than seem to have been brought in (it was the Chiantown of the Comox Valley, but in and of itself near-entirely Chinese, once they were brought in as strikebreakers; the place was a barbed-wire company camp, protecting them frmo the people they had displaced).  Because of the oncongruities of the gold rush/wilderness frontier, I'd included in the category places that were dominantly Chinese not just in population but in characgter, like Stanley and Richfield (which were founded by others but taken over as Chinese); likewise Keithley Creek/Quensel Forks and Quesnellemouthe (now West Quesnel).  But there's a big difference between isolated wilderness towns which are majority-population, majority-comemrce Chinese, and srpawling suburbs filled with other peoples including Hispanics, blacks, Filipinos, other Asians.  And AGAIN you claim to "wanting to understand my POV", but here AGAIN you have found something to attack me about.....give your head a shake as to what you're doing....The Mission, New Westminster, Barkerville04:39, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Nanaimo's Chinatown history (there were three, and note the bit about the string of other communities that had them, and about Wellington). There's others too - easy enough to find, if you had bothered, if you had googled "Nanaimo+Chinatown", which happens to have a lot online; those in places like Rock Creek I know from particularly detailed early histories, and will get to citing them....but at least I CAN cite reality, and I don't have to rely on neologistic interpretations/re-applications of a word in orde3r to justify an article that is little more than travelogue and a directory.Skookum1 (talk) 05:34, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Added a Chinatown section to the Nanaimo article, will do the same for the others, depending on availabilty of online sources (others more long -term once written sources re-obtained). You won't find a similar Monterey Park site about it calling itself Chinatown, or even *A* Chinatown.  The two main cites there are Malaspina College and Vancouver Island University, both headquartered in Nanaimo.  I'll be doing the same for the other articles you complained about were in that category; but at least I can PREPERLY cite what I'm talking about, not rely on figurative usages and A+B=(new definition)C type logic (which is SYNTH).  And take note of the comments on teh Malaspina College introduction page, about what a Chinatown is....doesn't sound very much like a T&T Supermarket to me, or ritzy condos.Skookum1 (talk) 06:04, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Why is Malispina College a good source for this information while Temple University Press is not? Would you object if I add a section on Monterey Park as Chinatown? Or is "Chinese Beverly Hills" a less acceptable designation than "Shanghai Alley"? If so, according to whom?      Will Beback    talk    08:13, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You're comparing a placename with a monicker, a loose description; you're confusing the historical record of such places with modern-day fabvricxations (SYNTH) built out of miscellaenous references all of which are only in passing, or one-time uses, or said figuratively. More apppies and oranges.  The Malalspina and VIU university sites are publishing the historical record; a single paper from Temple using a metaphorical reference does not establish that as common use; not even rarefied use.  And if you can't see the difference between a placename, and a placename with associations to those who lived in them, and a srpawling suburb that looks just like the rest of the United States, except that a lot of people are Chinese and there are Chinese street signs.  It's getting ridiculous, really, you complaining that a visibly historical museum site was somehow the same as a single paper from another university; you can see plain as day that the Chinese communities in Nanaimo, for instance, were called Chinatown; and on the Shanghai Alley monument I mentioned (which I have a photo of but have distaste for the particularities of the image-deletion brigade) says straight on it, something to the effect that "many BC towns had Chinatowns.  Penticton's was called shanghai Alley".  What you don't seem to get is that a Chinatown, and places named Chinatowns or Shanghai Alley or Little Shanghai, was a certain kind of place, both to its inhabitants and from a different perspective those outside it, and arose from particular circumstances dictated by the times.  Richfield, which I mentioned, is actually an extension of Barkerville's main Chinatown, at the other end of a short gluch (this by way of why it qualfies).  I've seen pictures of Quesnel's and Lytton's and Keefer's Chinatowns (the latter being a railway camp made out of houses half-dug into the hillside, but the others being merchants and in Quesenl's case a Chinese Freemasons Hall (presumably a benevolent association, I've never seen the paritculars) - well, a hall built out of log timber; picturs are in a book called Ghost Towns of British Columbia, Bruce Clark might be the author's name, not sure).  I can, in other words, go through a lengthy list of places where I've seen things saying "Chinatown, Lillooet", "Chinatown, Quensellemouthe", "Shanghai Alley, Penticton" but I CAN'T find things saying DIRECTLY "Chinatown, Monterey Park", or "Chinatown, San Gabriel Valley".  I can find passing metaphorical to somewhere being "a Chinatown", but they're not common usages and/or from unreliable sources (food travelogues are not reliable sources).  But it doesn't matter whether it's a food travelogue or a university paper, or an online publication (or two)_ by universities in the city concerned as to the existence of Chinatowns, and about what those Chinatowns were.  Nanaimo today has a large Chinese population; and no doubt there's a shopping plaza and even a Buddhist temple/church somewhere, and an area where most of them live; but nobody (including htem) calls it Chinatown.  That's because there, "Chinatown" meant a particular kind of place; it's apples and oranges; on the one hand, hundreds of places with named Chinatowns, on the other, scattered figurative references to Chinese-influenced suburbs tied together by Wikipedians to establish a new usage; yet I find sites all the time that say something like "a chinatown is not one of those new suburban places" or (as on one site, which I think was http://www.chinatownology.com) "I don't like it when people call those ethnoburbs "Chinatowns".  taht's not right, that's not what  Chinatown is..." and she goes on about it.  WE're dealing with two different meanings here; thing is, mine's not backed up by synthesis of passing references, it's based in known historical places with a particular identity and feeling that is not shared by these new places, nor identified by people from either place as being the same, or sharing the same name.  You can't just take "lots of chinese people/businesses" and add "the city where they are present" and say "this city is a Chinatown", which is what you (and others) are doing.  A Chinatown is a particular kind of place, a particular legacy, a particular name.  A name with a particular history, and particular associations.  Which is why you will find as many referencers, as you will do, to (original) Chinatowns being very different places, and very separate, from the new Chinese commercial areas (this I've seen re San Francisco as well as Vancouver, ilkewise New York and Los Angeles and elsehwere), and I've also seen no attempt by either ,say, Golden Village or the City of Monterey Park, to want to use the name "Chinatown" for themselves.  I do you credit bysaying "apples and oranges".  this is more like animal, mineral, vegetable...Skookum1 (talk) 09:22, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You make some good points. I think where we disagree most fundamentally is over the role of sources and NPOV. NPOV says that we must include all significant points of view, giving weight according to their prominence. We can't decide that some views are "wrong" and so must be excluded. If a view appears in enough sources to appear significant, we include it even if it disagrees with other views found in even more sources. As Yogi Berra famously said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." In this instance, we have many sources (independent of Wikipedia) which use these terms. So we can't exclude them entirely, even if we think they are poppycock. I'll draft a paragraph for the "Chinatown" article on modern, suburban Chinatowns and Chinese business districts like Golden Village and Monterey Park. I won't extend this discussion further, though I think it was helpful. We're making progress   Will Beback    talk    10:10, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Nelson BC McDonalds
I don't know about 2007, but I was there this past September and there is no McDonalds next to the Safeway. There is a Petro Canada/7-11. I did some searches for a cite but couldn't find anything that specifically mentions no McDonalds. Google street view for 211 Anderson Street provides a visual. I'm not saying that line is appropriate for the article though. Thanks. --CutOffTies (talk) 16:32, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Lists of U.S. cities with large ethnic identity populations
Hi. Thanks for your attempt to improve on my renaming of what is now the Lists of U.S. cities with large ethnic identity populations article. However, I still don't think we have the correct wording. Every location has an "ethnic identity population" of 100 per cent, because everyone has an ethnic identity understood in these terms. The lists are about large populations of particular ethnic groups, but I'm not sure how to reflect that in the title. Cordless Larry (talk) 18:13, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You may also be interested in a related discussion here. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:00, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

RE: Blue Moubtain (British Columbia)
I guess I just assumed that the hill or mountain in the SW part of Coquitlam was named Blue Mountain because there is an area with that name located on it. You can change the article to one of the other Blue Mountains or just have it deleted, whatever you see fit. Canuck85 (talk) 09:06, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Temagami greenstone belt
I do not know if this is of interest to you, but there it is. I did a total rewrite and expansion tonight with the information I was gathering for months.  Volcano guy  07:54, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

McLeod Lake
As far as I could tell the population figures for the non-native community are here and of course that includes other places and forms part of Regional District of Fraser – Fort George. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 06:28, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, well that's what I mean. Check it out (PDF of EA "G")Electoral areas can be damned big areas, with lots of different places, and different kinds of places, and if those are the only stats available, there's no way to know local figures exactly; the used to count it that awy, no longer; maybe in the core notes, yes of course, because the have the addresses for given blocks of numbers.  Population figures for some areas, like where I'm around from, can be seasonal, though nearly full-time; who gets counted where, etc?   Exact figures are always available for IRs, though bands and INAC often have different numbers (ditto BCgov), but for local communities, inside or outside of municipalities, data is generaelized over broad regions; tourist and seasonal recreaetional/work populations vary quite a bit (as here in Penticton).  I've often puzzled on the parallel articles for adjacent white and native communities, within the same placemame, and how they're counted differently, not as a whole community; whether it's a place like McLeod Lake or Alkali Lake etc and also all kinds of backwoods residents of varouis scale and remoteness; "in town" population can be quite small; draw a ten-twnenty mile radius for which it's "downtown", population is up considerably; especially if there's a reserve....the "Lillooet" article is for the district municipality; within its octopus-like arms (literally, look at a map) is all IR, with three bands in town and two-three more nearby; plus large areas of rural residents along different roads, with surprisingly high populations; "metro" Lillooet is at least double the district's size - add in the rural neighbourhoods it's another 30%, add Seton and the Bridge River towns, and the ranches up and down the canyon around it, and its service populaton could be 10,000; maybe only 8 but in summer...not much rec property around there, though tons up in the Bridge River, and Seton.  My point I guess is that data for Mcleod Lake might only show 80 people living right in town; but serving a market within 10 miles that's up to 2000...especially in summer.  How to figure that out, or find it cited, I dunno.  But it makes it hard to write fairly about places like Mcleod Lake; which there are lots of to consider; but also how to integrate the strange duality in a lot of BC communities where native and non-native life is intermingled....yet they are counted, and governed, separately.  But to find out for example the combined poulation of Seton portage-Shalalth, I'd have to source t he IRS on the hand, then hunt for specfic data about that EA, which is more than just Seton-Shalalth; historians would go by t hings like school records and payrolls and tax rolls to figure that out.  And also note you can't custom-build your own regions easily, NOT obeying the RD boundaries, or use them as designated census subdivisions; I won't explain the "deep politics" of it burt suffice to say that RDs were a way of disempowering rural residents by extending town govrnment far beyond its former boundaries; IRs are escluded because the Indian Act precludes the BC Municipal Act, or something like that (federally-designated land, or Crown I suppose in the case of those IRs designated in colonial times, of which there are a few).  Similar number problems, once we start looking/thinking, will be found throughout the Chilcotin and Cariboo, where settlement is really spread out and often intermingled between reserve and non-reserve residents; and of course in the case of the Chilcotin there's ; "Greater Quesnel", likewise in the Omineca and Babine-Takla and other areas where recreational and bush-resident populations are scattered, probably lots of the Central and South Coast too.  It's good that one editor complained about the article's mistaken take on what McLeod Lake was about, reminded me of the need to try and get cited data for places like Minpo Lake, Germansen's Landing etc...gotta go, food....Skookum1 (talk) 08:52, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

"Centred on", English as a first language etc.,
Re your message to me a couple of months ago:

"Centred around" is an idiom and need not be grammatical

And numerous sources agree with this - see this google. Prepositional constructions are fluid in English and should not be rigidly formal; by changing some of the articles from "centred around" to "centred in" you have changed the context/meaning/sense of the descriptions in question; similarly "centred on" is different from "centred in" also, as also "centred at". Please do not rigidly standardize English, which is a fluid and flexible language, unlike others...as you have no userpage and no infoboxes indicating your linguistic origin, I cannot tell if you are a native speaker, but your rigid adherence to textbook grammar suggests to me you are not. Idiom is idiom and need not be grammatical. There are thousands of journalistic and literary usages of "centred around" going back decades; calling them "wrong" because some grammar text you've read or decided is the "Bible of the English language" is patently wrong. I only changed the Vancouver article back, but please be more judicious in your rigid application of what YOU (and you only) think or assert is grammatical English.Skookum1 (talk) 00:21, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

__

What is patently wrong is your sentiment, so of course the patronising tone has no worth anyway but let's never mind that...

I'm not a wikipedia regular so it took me a while to even discover how to make contact with a fellow wikipedia contributor, but I did feel compelled to respond. My first language is English and while I can't even claim an professional qualification to do with English language (my degrees are in Latin and mathematics), linguistics and etymology are big interests of mine. I don't claim anything to be a bible of anything. (Your points about that were, frankly, pathetic.)

My complaints against "centred around" stand, particularly in the cases I pointed out. With the standards you set, one can claim any pair or set of words to be an idiom. I've read those sites, explanations and examinations many times, but the examples I saw to were there to be changed. Yes, in a drunken stupor I searched out examples of "centred around" but I read around and... well, I needn't qualify my efforts.

Calling "centred around" simply an idiom is false. It's not an idiom; it's an error. A common error, surely, but absolutely an error. There's a difference between an idiom and nonsense. If you can have "centred around", then someone can say "centred banana" a thousand times and then decide it's an idiom that no longer requires grammatical examination anymore because it's been said often enough.

Basic logic tells us that nothing can possibly be "centred around" anything.

Finally I'll point out that you started by claiming something need not be grammatical, which suggests grammatical correctness isn't required for wikipedia, and finished by disputing my understanding of "grammatical English". So, is "grammatical English" required or not?

You might be interested in a couple of things:

1) That just because someone disagrees with your grammatical viewpoint doesn't mean you're the only native speaker in the argument, and 2) The phrase "It's me!" :) That one has been erroneously used for at least 500 years, and I suppose it's thus become accepted as an idiom.  It still isn't correct because "me" cannot be.  Granted, point 2) is a bit of a non sequitur but interesting enough for someone interested in etymology and the history of language, I think.

Whoelius (talk) 04:31, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's an idiom yes, and it's not wrong because its sense is "centred around [the area of]", as opposed to being centred on a specific, precise point. I can't remember what article that was from, but it's a common construction; if you must, a contraction of a longer idiom, but still regular English in its sense and that preposition has a fuller context than the strict "on", and yes it's about usage because "places" in BC can be indeterminate and not point-specific; similarly bodies of issues, if using the phrase more abstractly; on a general area...centred around as in circling around....Idiom is a valid part of any language, and often it's a result of local necessity (as with BC's landscape and terminology/phraseology resulting from it).  Just because it's not used in the English you were raised with doesn't mean it's not normal, or incorrect.  Insistence on grammatical stricture to me is a trait of over-avid second-language speakers wanting to prove their prowess, or elitists who believe that English should have strict rules like what the Academie Francaise does for French; and insist on dictionary definitions even if those definitions are incomplete, or wondrously taken out of context.  There is no one strict rule that the verb "to centre" must take "around" as its only possible preposition, or that it can only be used that way...English is more flexible than that, so should you be.  There's a lot more important content issues in Wikipedia than tweaking (and arguing over) prepositions....Skookum1 (talk) 05:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Land districts
I wouldn't place them in the same category as current census divisions, no. If all of the land districts were census divisions under the old system, then I'd probably just crossreference whatever category is created for the land districts to the category for the current census divisions (such as with "see also" links) — but if some of them were and some weren't, then I'd create a separate category for. Bearcat (talk) 20:00, 1 December 2010 (UTC) I'll get to it when I get a chance to review early censuses; the 1871, 1891, 1901 and 1911 are online, but no others; I'll see if the Penticton Museum has archival copies of the census; some do, though I've seen them in hard copy at the SFU Library...which is far from me right now (I'm in Penticton for now). Found the 1891 electoral districts, they don't coincide though are formed of combinations of them e.g. the New Westminster and Burrard federal electoral districts subdivide the New Westminster Land District at Burrard Inlet, with the New West electoral district being the southeastern chunk of the eponymous land district, with Burrard including all of the Coast Land District ranges, and it would seem the Cassiar Land District; the Yale and Cariboo electoral district combined the Lillooet and Cariboo Land Districts (Peace River had not yet been cut off from the latter)...not sure yet about Yale, i.e. whether the Kamloops and Similkameen and Yale subdivisions were separate ridings yet, I don't think so; the Kootenay Land District and electoral district were still the same....but census particulars, that'll take some digging, though in terms of BC history coverage the tracking of population geography is important because of the fluctuating settlement/concentration patterns in the Interior; e.g. towns that no longer exist were once among hte largest in the province (Granite Creek, near Coalmont in 1885 was third largest (after Victoria and Barkerville, and larger than New West itself) or Sandon and others at various times....Skookum1 (talk) 20:16, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Undue weight?? Lines of equal latitude and longitude
Hello, Discuss and resolve this issue before removing this message. My discussion follows [ ). Regards (Crusoe8181 (talk) 11:27, 3 December 2010 (UTC)).
 * This article follows the the conventions and general structure applied to the 540 articles on individual lines of latitude and lines of longitude, follow the category; If you feel it does not belong propose it be deleted and let the community decide. I stand by the article, others may well disagree. Regards (Crusoe8181 (talk) 01:36, 5 December 2010 (UTC)).
 * You're behaving as though it was the main article for that category, and it's just not. It's junk, only a mathematical tally of completely arbitrary nature and given far too much weight, and detail, than it deserves.  No sources are provided as to why this is even a field of study that any reliable source gives a s**t about.  Mathematical abstraction imposed on an arbitrary grid: meaningless.  Geojunk.Skookum1 (talk) 02:06, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fine, take to WP:Afd, I think it is reasonable, millions may not. If it went through Florida and Saskatchewan it would probably be a featured list!! (Crusoe8181 (talk) 03:10, 5 December 2010 (UTC)).

'tribe' vs 'people'
Hey, in case you've forgotten about this, you opinion would be appreciated. If you don't have time, let me know and I'll do my best. — kwami (talk) 01:47, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Half joke, half serious
You know—and I'm principally joking about this, but not entirely—B.C. should really consider adopting the New Zealand approach to official place names. In NZ we have had similar battles over using the traditional native name or the more well-established "colonial" name. The compromise that is adopted is that the government adopts names like Stewart Island / Rakiura and Aoraki / Mount Cook. They are very ugly, of course, but no one much uses these "official" names—they just choose one or the other and use it. That way, both sides of the argument can get away with legitimately using the name they prefer. The only place I've ever really seen the full official names be used is on a few road signs—other than that, everybody just mixes and matches according to their preference. Perhaps this approach would be too idyllic for Canada and its natives situation, though. Good Ol’factory (talk) 04:57, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * LOL too idyllic by half. The whole point of such changes in BC is confrontation and revanchism and an opportunity to overturn the colonial landscape and smooth ruffled cultural egos, and "getting even with whitey" is very much part of the motive, as with Chinaman's Peak becoming Ha Ling Peak (in Alberta) or various Chinaman Lakes becoming China Lake (they don't have problems with anything being called Chinatown, though, and seem intent on popularizing the term for anywhere with some condo residents from HK and a couple of Chinese-only stores).  The rationalizations for Salish Sea included "elders" talking about how it was "the ancient name" and "the correct name", even though it's not only Salishan peoples who lived around it, nor that that word is a misappropriation of an Interior Salishan's people to the whole language group.  So these "fictive" names (Haida Gwaii is of early '70s or late '60s coinage, ONLY) are often cultural justapositions to start with; in one case, Sto:lo, which should be the name of the river, it's come into use for a grouping of Halkomelem-speaking peoples formerly known as the Fraser River Indians - even the term Cowdigin/Cowichan, now confined to a certain area of Vancouver Island, applied to all the peoples up to Yale; my piont being that if they wanted to rename the Fraser River, they should have thought of that before making "Fraser River" their name in their own language.  It also doesn't help that the way our languages give names to some kinds of things, native languages don't label the landscape in the same way; they may name a particular flank or toe of a mountain, or for an eddy in the river that has some story attached to it; they may not have a name for the adjacent land(forms).  Anyway the point of the native-name movement is largely to drive "white" names off the landscape entirely...they just don't have enough replacement names to go around, and the political inertia is incredible....as noted the only reason Campbell cut the Haida name deal was so he could get them to sign onto an indepednent power proposal for his campaign donors....Skookum1 (talk) 05:27, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, there are 23 major languages and at least twice that many minor ones in BC; many places would have multiple names, even if there were a name for the entity involved; e.g. Vancouver Island (languages are Aht/Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwak'wala/Li'kwala, Comox, Pentlatch, the Straits dialect of Halkomelem, and North Straits Salish. Nuu-chah-nulth is btw another "invented" name from the '70s or late '60s.  And if Vancouver were to have a native name, should it be in Squamish, Downriver Halkomelem - or in Chinook Jargon? (it has a name in Chinook, actually - Big Smoke....Victoria is Bictoli, New Westminster is Koonspa Queensborough).  as far as the Haida name goes, it's not as if there was a Haida nation before the conquest; there were about twenty mutually hostile/rivalrous local groups, or even more maybe, and their political alliances tended to be with neighbouring, more or less, groups of Bella Bella, Tlingit, Tsimshian etc, who similarly warred with each other and were not "nations" in any kind of unitary political sense; the only close semblance of that would be the Squamish on the one hand, and the Gitxsan-Wet'su-wet'en Confederacy on the other; alliances between the Nicola, Thompson, Okanagan and Southern Shuswap were strong, but these also were not homogenous in self-government.  The government's current plan to reduce the 110 band governments to 13 or so language-defined "nations" is hamstrung on the rocks of history; as it is some of those bands combine people who were historically enemies (as with many Kwakwaka'wakw bands), which is why there's more than one tribal council within some groups, and why some bands belong to no tribal council; the politics are historical.  But they're also why it's not that simple to adapt to a native name; and when you do, they complain you didn't spell it right or whatever (there's nothing we can do right, y'see, even when they got us to do it).  And in some areas a Ktunaxa name instead of a Sinixt/Okanagan or Shuswap one would be, um, very politically dicey....on various Haida-connected pages e.g. Dixon Entrance, some acolyte put "thet more ancient name is Seegay" - but it turns out that just means "ocean", and was stated as if the Tlingit and Tsimshian/Nisga'a peoples didn't have their own names for it (which probably also mean "ocean").  During the Salish Sea debate, User:OldManRivers observed that his own people, the Squamish, don't have a name even for English Bay or Howe Sound, much less any larger entity such as the STrait of Georgia; they don'ty classify landscape that way; they do have names for various locations on Howe Sound or Burrard Inlet, and certain stretches of water; but not for the concept of a "strait" thats' really a large maze of straits and gulfs (which I prefer to call teh Gulf of Georgia, which includes areas explicitly outside the STrait of Georgia proper).Skookum1 (talk) 05:38, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry to jump into a discussion of which I wasn't really a part, but I have to agree, in general. I find it frustrating that we can't just acknowledge that there are different names in different languages.  Probably the most obvious example is Germany.  Deutschland is it's name, if you speak high German, but not even consistently spelled in all German dialects, and then there is French (Allemagne), Norwegian (Tyskland), Czech (Německo), etc.  None of those are just transliterations - they're all very different, and perfectly fine, because they exist in different languages.  The best examples I've seen in Canada are in Acadian parts of the country.  Meteghan River (English) is also La Butte (French), for example.  Therefore, it makes sense to have the Haida call a certain set of islands by one name (invented or otherwise), while we who are speaking English call them a different name.  The world does it with Hong Kong, London, Belarus, the Falkland Islands and Newfoundland - why can't we do when it comes to aboriginal languages? AshleyMorton (talk) 18:56, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Good points from both of you. I would point out that the NZ approach is also not without controversy. There was a major issue when the official name of the city of Wanganui (pronounced with an initial "W" sound) was changed to the more-accurate-in-the-Maori-language Whanganui (pronouned with an initial "F" sound). Is English the "official language" of the provincial government of BC? If it is, changing from non-English names seems a bit beside the point to what the government should be doing. If BC has no official language, then perhaps the government is more justified in doing what it did. (One reason the NZ approach was adopted is because English and Maori are both official languages of the government. It's not so simple in Canada when we're dealing with far more native languages.) Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:08, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No, there's no official language in BC, other than at the federal level and as may happen to be the case with individual band governments; English is de facto though in colonial and also in early provincial times there were debates to make German, Gaelic and/or Chinook Jargon official, all of which were widely spoken before WWI, though the last of these debates was in teh 1870s; sorry can't cite hansard from that time about it and SFAIK the colonial hansards have never been published and certainly aren't online. The "official" names in BC come solely via BCGNIS, which is a database client for the provincial gazetteer....and I'll come back alter with some examples of decidedly un-English newly official names, or re-adaptations into "modern native orthography" or previous tranlisterations (e.g. Khyex River is actually now, officially Ksi Khyex)_.  Find a BCGNIS cite in anything in Category:Nass Country and use a radius search; you'll find all kinds of both placenames and IRs, which now aren't IRs anymore, with newly-minted Nisga'a language names. A few provincial parks have dual names, including many up there and more famously Tsy?los Provincial Park of the Xeni Gwetin (Chilko Lake area, not sure if I have that spelling right).Skookum1 (talk) 21:19, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Nisga'a Memorial Lava Beds Provincial Park if you look at its BCGNIS has the native name you'll see in italics there as equally official - don't know if it's in CGNDB like that though.....Skookum1 (talk) 21:29, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

First Nations / Indigenous Peoples of the Americas pipe link
Hi there. It looks like you and I agree on many things. However, I disagree with the edit you made here:. You make a good point in the edit summary that there are aboriginal nationalities from the United States (and, of course, further afield) that, when they are enumerated during a Canadian census, end up being included in the "North American Indian" category. Your point is that the First Nations article does not include these people. I think I understand what you're saying, but I disagree. To start with, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas article clearly includes Inuit and Métis. This is definitely incorrect in the context of the census, where those two groups have their own totals. Additionally, I don't think that this case is very different than our various "hyphenated Canadian" articles, such as Scottish Canadian or Indo-Canadians. I would suggest that, if a Navajo person moves to Canada, he/she will be considered "a First Nations person", the same way many Scots end up as "Scottish-Canadians", whether they actually think of themselves thus, or not. Therefore, while not absolutely perfect, I think that "First Nations" is a much better pipe than "Indigenous peoples of the Americas" I won't revert your change until I hear from you, though - I am interested to hear what you have to say. AshleyMorton (talk) 18:42, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * the problem is that "First Nations" is Canada-specific in the same way that "Native American" and "Alaskan Native" are US-specific; it's almost as if "Merge First Nations -> Native American to "North American Indian" is needed/ except that's a Canadian label, from StatsCan only, and the US census uses Native American (in their definition, not ours, including any Canadian-origin natives). I had a Modoc-Cherokee friend who was adamant that his nationality was "North American", he wasn't either Canadian or American; that terminology is not so common but the viewpoint is; but not such that someone who's Wasco or Apache living in Lillooet or Smithers should be labelled "First Nations".  So I dunno, it's almost like there should be a separate continental-level article for "Indian", or if you will "North American Indian" or "Amerindian peoples of North America".....Skookum1 (talk) 18:47, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I think that I understand the problem. The difficulty in this case, I think, is "which is less wrong?"  I would love the census to allow people to properly enter (and have recorded) the actual First Nations group (or groups) they feel they have an "ethnic origin" in.  We would end up with Cree, Nuxalk and Mic'mac numbers, and then, probably an "Amerindian, not included elsewhere" number for people who didn't list a specific one or who listed one that was just too tiny, the same way we have "British, not included elsewhere" for both the people who only put down "British", but also people who put down, for example, "Manx".  I think that in the Canadian context, incorrectly including Inuit and Métis is a greater ill than incorrectly excluding the non-Canadian-origin Amerindians. AshleyMorton (talk) 19:05, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * do that, but it needs footnoting somehow to indicate that; maybe in the target article there could be a comment about how figures given from StatsCan, if any, are for "North American Indian", which may include non-First Nations Amerinds....Skookum1 (talk) 19:13, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, done - Check and improve if you feel like it!AshleyMorton (talk) 19:29, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Good catch
Good catch here. Like "son-and-so was elected premier, this is another example of how careless people can be in editing these articles. Regards, Ground Zero | t 21:37, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
 * All related articles - bios, elections, ridings - should be reviewed for that wording problem, and similar.Skookum1 (talk) 22:18, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Another error that I keep an eye for is "The Liberal Party elected 90 members to the House of Commons", which I see from time to time here. Ground Zero | t 13:06, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That could be just bad civics education, but it also smells like spin. Have you noticed, by the way, that first ministers' names show up in articles, announcing their presence for opening bridges or conferring legacies or "they slept here" stuff?  I've de-chaffed a lot of BC articles of stuff like that, including where when the government does something the Preem's name is plugged, as if he'd done it personally....Skookum1 (talk) 18:39, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm with you on that. I live in a world where the "McGuinty government" showers all sorts of goodies on the people - not the Government of Ontario, or the taxpayers of Ontario. It turns the stomach. Ground Zero | t 16:35, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Colony of BC
Just fyi, I looked up the proclamation and copied it into wikiksource. No mention of any capital though... - TheMightyQuill (talk) 21:38, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm....I don't have the Akriggs' BC Chronicle handy, but Howay & Scholefield are on http://www.nosracines.ca - when I get a chance I'll see how they put it. I wouldn't put too much stock in Barman, who's a neophyte in BC history despite her sell-job (ditto Bowering, whose work is thin on the ground but big on hype), and Ormsby is often vague and non-committal....Skookum1 (talk) 21:42, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
 * here are Howay's works, including the "From the earliest times to the present" history, which is detailed; Early History of the Fraser River Mines is mostly about the Canyon War and McGowan's War and Hicks and Whannell but may have something in it on Fort Langley. Not sure but I think Waddington's work on the goldfields might also have something; Begg's history, which is similar in title to Howay & Scholefield, is rather terse and un-detailed by comparison.Skookum1 (talk) 21:45, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Barman either (it just happened to be what I found on google books) but that may have more to do with her treatment of Indigenous peoples in the West Beyond the West (ie. little or no coverage after 1858, and basically none after 1900). Are the authors you've listed better in that regard? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 04:30, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * yeah, for the 19th C in particular/general for Howay & Scholefield (publ. 1916 originally). Bear in mind that there were still a lot of living witnesses to early history still alive then, or their stories well-known even if they were deceased....not so much on FNs maybe, though quite a bit.  For FN history one thing you'll find on googlebooks is Cole Harris' The Resettlement of British Columbia, which is more than a bit didactic in tone but has a lot of useful detail.  Barman's big failing is her lack of familiarity with local histories, resulting in some really egregious gaffes at times; her work draws on academic papers with all their ideological and cultural biases and agendas, but she just doesn't know - hasn't read - the local histories; which is where you'll find the detailed native history in many cases; there's no "pan BC" work for that era, though; for the Northern Interior you'll find Adrien-Gabriel Morice's History of the Northern Interior of British Columbia, which I think is online somewhere, and is mostly, necessarily given the times, native and fur trade oriented (I haven't read it fully).  An example of a local history which has lots of good FN detail is Daphne Sleigh's (?) People of the Harrison, which includes some glimpses on the Scowlitz and Chehalis and also the Lower Lillooet, likewise Pemberton: History of a Settlement by Frances Decker.  Charles Hill-Tout's work on the Lillooet has lots on them; Teit's work on the Shuswap includes his History of the Chiefs of the Okanagan - I have that on scanned TIFs; if you'd like it let me know and I'll email it (actually via cutesendit as it's too large as a regular mail attachment).  Bowering dismisses the "folk histories" and "bush poets" with an arrogant academic elitism about their poor language and non-academic viewpoint, yet they have stuff in them you just wno't find anywhere else; details of the Nicola and other peoples are in Mark Sweeten Wade's The Thompson Country which is online, and linked on Thompson Country.Skookum1 (talk) 04:46, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Geography of the US
Thanks for your support. Would you care to revert the changes to the article? I've done this before! :) Student7 (talk) 13:46, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Opitsat on Meares Island
Hi Skookum1, thanks for the profound explanation of the name variants of Opitsat. Since you appear to have local knowledge, do you know if Opitsat is the only village on Meares Island? Maps show a second village, Kakawis, but I haven't been able to obtain a population figure for out, and I suspect it might be abandoned. I'm just trying to determine the approximate population of the whole island.--Ratzer (talk) 15:24, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Uh, well not the whole island is IR, and census units outside IRs aren't as location specific....if there's anyone living outside the IR boundaries, then you'd have to find the census records (not the census) for that part of the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District and sdee if there's field notes on individual locations; if Kakawis is on an IR of its own, it may have cneus data - if anyone lives there. You'll have more luck with historical data, inaccurate though it is - in the abence of any data at all.  There's a Hudson's Bay census in 1851, for example, and during the 18th Century there may be ship's log notes about the size of the village.  Beyond that you're "SOL".  You could write the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations and see if they have their own data/records though....Skookum1 (talk) 17:37, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Chinook Jargon "muckamuck"
Saw your edit there. Noticed the term "muckamuck" (or variant spellings) isn't defined except under hyas muckamuck. Quick web search turned up this cayoosh.net page, which says "Muckamuck - food, to eat, dinner, to bite. Mamook muckamuck - to cook, to prepare food, to serve dinner." And another page on "mamook compounds". The Gibb's Dictionary says: "Muck´-a-muck, n., v. The word has been regarded as an invented one, but is probably Ojibwa, as it is said to be in use at the Sault St. Mary. Food; to eat, to bite. Muckamuck chuck, &c., to drink water or other liquid."

I don't know if these are good sources for CJ terms though. Pfly (talk) 21:17, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * that it was in use at Sault Ste Marie could simply mean the voyageurs had brought the word east; there's a Skookumchuck Creek in Quebec, for instance....and as for cayoosh.net, it's drawn from Shaw and Gibbs and Anderson and other major sources, but it's a hobby site.....I should know, it's mine.Skookum1 (talk) 21:18, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh, I wasn't saying anything about the Sault St. Mary or Ojibwe theory thing, just your recent edit removing "hyas muckamuck(s) &mdash; originally this meant "much food"..." and having the term just mean "the chief, the big boss..." Wondering whether the "much food" meaning might not be wrong, is all. Pfly (talk) 21:58, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Is that what my edit did? Maybe I selected and deleted without looking close; I meant to take only the bit from the 1953 Portland Oregonian about the totally mistaken notion that it had something to do with a great flood; even spelling it "muchamook".  The primary meaning in - modern Grand Ronde CJ it's makmak, not "muckamuck" (which is seen from the GRCJ bias as a mistake, or a mispronunciation, typical w.m. error) - the primary meaning is "food" or "to eat" - it's used a variety of ways, including the imperative; it also means "to drink" - really it means I suppose "to ingest", given the usual separation in English between food and drink; in Jargon there is none, other than saying "muckamuck chuck" specifying drinking fluid (probably water, but not necessarily; "olo chuck" is thirsty ("hungry [for] water").  The hyas muckamuck combination seems a white-culture modification when used for a person, as a chief would simply be hyas tyee, the chiefly family/clan tyee tillikums (also would mean "more powerful people" in some contexts, i.e. relative to others); in native contexts hyas muckamuck just means "large food", meaning a feast, though hyas has kind of a tone of "important" too, and it was an easy enough slip from hyas to high because of the similarity of the word; the "mucketymuck" is entirely a folk derivation of the Jargon original, and is used in an even more ironic/sarcastic/diatribal way than just high muckamuck - the bigwigs.  Its sense of "people who eat at the head table" - those who preside over the feast - I think came from smoe original misapprehension of the phrase, but I couldn't say for certain; I don't think hayash makmak, which is modern GRCJ, has that meaning.  NB hyas tyee in English, which Iv'e seen in a phrase referring to some resource industrialist whose operations were theroughout the Campell River-Johnstone STrait region as "he was the hyas tyee of all that country, meaning the big boss man and who knew the place well; tyee infers leadership and stature, not just status.  The only way to cite these comments, though, is with examples of usage as may be picked up over time from various documents and books; it occurs regularly in conversation and in print even - newspaper columnists, for example, in BC if not in WA or OR - and Iv'e even heard it used far beyond, e.g. in New York, without people knowing where it was from.  This is an example of why I think the other page (see the merge tag at the top of the article) should never have been split off; Jargon was never "pure", its meanings are mutable depending on context, but it was just as much a language current among non-natives as it was among natives, very influentially so; I'm not sure if Gibbs or Shaw give the head-table meaning for hyas muckamuck, maybe not; but that it's not used in native culture, if that's the case, doesn't mean it's not that in English or in CJ as used by English speakers; one school of chinookology says "there is only one Jargon", the nouveau po-mo post-academic one says that only the pure form is valid, others are all based off it, and white usages were in error and not "real jargon".  But one thing's for certain - it never meant "great flood"; don't know where the Oregonian'' got that idea, but there's a lot of flakey pseudo-history written ever day, why not back then?Skookum1 (talk) 02:05, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

British Columbia
Howdy Skookum1. We need a reliable source that prooves BC's got 2 official languages English/French, so as to match with the infobox heading. Right now, the infobox heading is English/French, yet the official languages section of the infobox says English. GoodDay (talk) 19:21, 23 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The fields are name and alternate name; I agree displaying C-B is inappropriate but people who don't understand BC culture/history/identity, which is most other Canadians, don't get it. English and French are official at the federal level only; BC has no official language, not by statute, not even in the House; I'll double-check that by writing the Office of the Speaker and/or the Provincial Secretary for clarification though....Skookum1 (talk) 20:59, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Just to assure you, I'm not on some kinda pro-English crusade (as others seem to believe). GoodDay (talk) 21:34, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Hello
History of British Columbia i see your having problems with some additions...I am having the same problem by the same editor at History of Newfoundland and Labrador -  look at this amount of text i have to find refs for. Do this additions look ok to you? Ps you may want to see Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Moxy (talk) 22:19, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * yeah, happened to notice that ANI while there for something else. I'll look at the NL item.Skookum1 (talk) 22:42, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Candidates for bad coordinates
Would you like to cast your eye over the 26 article edits in User_talk:The_Anome, and let me know if there are any other glaring errors there? If I've ben careful enough with, these should be all the edits to a roughly-Canada-shaped lat/long bounding in the most recent set of bot edits. Many thanks for helping track down these errors. -- The Anome (talk) 21:07, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

neighborong
I don't understand your edit here. I don't believe "neighborong" to be a correct spelling in any dialect of English. I'm going to fix it, but I welcome your feedback if there's an issue I'm missing here. &mdash;Bill Price (nyb) 23:48, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I could have sworn I typed, and saw, "neighbouring" before hitting "send"....but I have fast and also fat fingers, bad eyes and seem to have been being hasty. Neighbo-wrong.  Maybe a neighborong is a musical instrument - or muzzle - used by horses or?  A really crazy neighbourhood party?Skookum1 (talk) 02:56, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Definitely a musical instrument. Similar to a didgeridoo. — kwami (talk) 22:15, 1 January 2011 (UTC)