Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 November 26

= November 26 =

Compulsive behavior
What causes Wikipedia's compulsive preoccupation with a.) minor/obscure Australian or Canadian politicians, public figures, etc. and b.) the Catawissa Creek and its tributaries in Pennsylvania? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.36.94.245 (talk) 08:01, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * That "minor" politician isn't so minor if he's your mayor and sets your taxes. The mayor of Winnipeg has massively, massively more influence on my day-to-day life than every citizen of the United States combined. --NellieBly (talk) 11:57, 29 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Please substantiate your premise that our coverage of such subjects amounts to "compulsive preoccupation". --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  08:09, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Interesting. That unsigned post comes from an IP address that actually geolocates to a place in Pennsylvania. Wonder what he's got against the Catawissa Creek? HiLo48 (talk) 10:24, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Obscurity is relative, the two previous posters and I could name dozens of Australian politicians but, speaking for myself, I couldn't name a single Pennsylvanian politician. Hack (talk) 14:14, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Apparently James Buchanan is consistently ranked first in "Worst Presidents" lists. I'm relatively closer to Pennsylvania than Australia, but it's the first I hear of it, or that he was from there. Seems like one of those things that should make someone world famous. Being the worst, I mean. Not being from Pennsylvania. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:18, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The user may be off base, but as of one time, 1/20 of our articles consisted of stubs related to tiny jurisdictions in Poland, with slightly fewer being stubs about places in France and Kenya--apparently the governments of these place paid someone to get the started. One could verify that 5% of wikipedia articles were about Polish places by hitting random article.  Maybe these were the results for our unsigned OP?


 * More generally, since articles are written by volunteers, it will just happen that you will find more volunteers with certain interests than others, and subsequently have more articles on those topics. The hope is that, eventually, volunteers will sign up to fill in the lightly covered areas. StuRat (talk) 20:28, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I suppose everyone's seen this somewhat out-of-date graphic. Perhaps we should now replace the "Stephen ... Colbert" label with "Minor Pennsylvania watercourses". (I've even geocoded a number of those articles, and they appear to be the result of one editor's desire to be exhaustive.) Deor (talk) 22:17, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Kena, really? —Tamfang (talk) 05:36, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * My keyboard has been running a long-term campaign of passive resistance against me, especially in the qwerty, asd, and bnm, areas. I fixed the mipselling before I saw your comment. μηδείς (talk) 18:14, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Sympathy. I had to retire a keyboard not very long ago when two or three keys stopped doing their thing. —Tamfang (talk) 06:13, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * How long since either of you has cleaned them? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:21, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Regularly with canned air. But I am afraid to open it up and see what stephenkingian thing's down there. μηδείς (talk) 17:32, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * If there's nothing to lose anyway, you could try a tip someone once gave me: Run it through your automatic dishwasher, if you have one, on the top rack. I think you want to pull it out before it gets into the dry-heat cycle. Then let it sit somewhere for about a week, to be sure all the water has evaporated. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:27, 29 November 2014 (UTC)


 * To the OP: the same thing that causes some wikipedia editors to put a gigabyte or so of Game of Thrones trivia on the site, and me to add "and parishes" to any reference to US counties - either mistaking particular interest for general interest, or a compulsive need to inform the wikipedia reader of things they may not have known (such as "there are no counties in Louisiana, only parishes"). loupgarous (talk) 00:09, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Speaking of Game of Thrones, doesn't James Buchanan look like Charles Dance? InedibleHulk (talk) 06:19, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Finding participants for my survey
Where can I post my marketing questionnaire in order to get more answers on it? 176.14.253.145 (talk) 10:11, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Please, please, please, stop what you're currently doing and read selection bias, sampling bias, participation bias, convenience sample and accidental sampling - as well as any decent reference on how to conduct a valid statistical sample. The way you select your respondents is as critical in getting decent survey responses as what questions you ask is. Sloppy sample choice can make even the best crafted survey meaningless. A classic example is the "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper headline, which was based in part on telephone surveys which neglected the fact that only the more affluent (who were biased for Dewey) had telephones at the time. Randomly placing your marketing questionnaire on the internet means you get random people on the internet who voluntarily complete questionnaires - which is probably not the demographic you're looking for. Know exactly who you want to target before you post your questionnaire, or you're just wasting your time. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 16:24, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Buy ad space and advertise it. Offer free gift cards. Expect to only get responses from people who a) read ads on the internet and b) like gift cards. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 06:26, 27 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you should consider Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is a service that lets you get a large number of people to do 'work' for you, for about $1/hour.  The demographics have been researched and are believed to be a reasonable cross-section of US internet users - so if that's a match for what you're looking for, then it's a good match.  Because you're paying for people to do the survey, you avoid some selection biasses.  It's been used for this kind of thing in quite a few serious studies.  It's also a fairer way to do surveying - you're not expecting people to give up their time for no reward.  You can also set the exact number of surveys you wish to have done and when you need the results by. SteveBaker (talk) 16:33, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Inaccurately surveyed borders
If a national or sub-national border is defined by law or treaty as one thing, but surveys have marked it as something else (due to poor technology of the survey process), what is the actual border? Is it the line defined by law, or the surveyed line? As example, I'm thinking of the Canada–United States border along the 49th parallel or the New York–Pennsylvania border along the 42nd parallel. Both are surveyed as zig-zaggy but defined as following the parallel. Could they (should they) be re-surveyed with better accuracy? [That last part may be conjecture, so skip that if you want.]  → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 17:15, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't see how we can answer this definitively with one umbrella answer. The actual process and the settlement of the argument will likely change depending on the local/federal government, the reason for the discrepancies, the wording of the law or treaty, and so on.  Just to add to your list, there is currently an effort going on to better establish where the border of North and South Carolina is.  Dismas |(talk) 17:44, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Speaking of the Canada-USA border, it's not as simple as most people think. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:33, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The thing to remember is that boarders and boundaries are relative and not absolute. In other words, it is the surveyed line which is upheld in law. However accurate surveying techniques become, the grid lines will always be imaginary concepts.  Besides, just who's grid lines is one to use? Pick any one and some boundaries will be several yards out  again in a few generations time. Some boandraies zig zag because by the time of ratification, much land had settlers with a legal title, whose owners were paying their taxes to one side or the other. The administrators are the land owners servants, not the other way around. So the borders had to snake around existing legal land claims rather than imaginary lines that only appear on maps, which might change position at any time on the whims of geographers and cartographers, earthquakes, continental drift, etc.--Aspro (talk) 21:19, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Indeed. Even something as simple as the "49th parallel" moves over time; the definition of the "49th parallel" depends on which Geodetic datum one is using to define said parallel.  If the definition changes, the line moves.  And if the line moves, then property and sovereignty boundaries can also move, which can create problems.  That's why surveying and marking territory is so important, the actual markers on the ground provide relatively immutable boundary definitions.  But even those aren't absolute: erosion, soil creep, continental drift, etc. mean that such markers will also tend to move slightly, meaning that no boundary stays in the same place forever, to any infinite degree of precision.  It's always a bit fuzzy and changing.  -- Jayron  32  02:39, 27 November 2014 (UTC)


 * You'd think the surveyed lines would be well settled by now, and yet in recent years I've heard of a family who learned to their shock that their house is in Connecticut rather than Rhode Island, and of a bit of land that was transferred between South Carolina and North Carolina when someone took a closer look at the paperwork. —Tamfang (talk) 05:24, 27 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Washington v Norman is instructive: "Never mind the very clear letter of the law, we know what they meant." —Tamfang (talk) 05:24, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Another case in point: Cambodian–Thai border dispute (Preah Vihear Temple). It went to the UN for arbitration and wasn't settled until 2013, and even then only partially.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 06:40, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Due to surveying errors, the border area between the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia was disputed and was subject to legal action even after Australian Federation occurred. Even after the resolution, there is still a slight dogleg in an otherwise straight border. The South Australia–Victoria border dispute article has some detail on the issue. Hack (talk) 06:48, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

More fun with borders...and emergency vehicles
What happens if an emergency vehicle comes to a border post?-surely an ambulance with flashing blue lights whizzing along or a fire engine wouldn't have to stop to fill out bits of paperwork or wave their passports before being allowed through?And if they don't,wouldn't that be an ideal way to get something/somebody through the border without being stopped? Lemon martini (talk) 17:38, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Generally speaking emergency services only operate in the country they originate from. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:42, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Some areas, such as Derby Line, Vermont, have agreements where emergency services work on both sides of the border. See Derby Line, Vermont.  This makes sense, especially in this case, because the international border goes through the town library.  Dismas |(talk) 17:52, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Do they have librarians on both sides, so you can check out a book on one side of the border, or check it oot on the other ? :-) StuRat (talk) 20:48, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * There are provisions that have allowed for pursuit across borders. This has no details on procedure but does talk about it generally: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cross-border-policing-provokes-sovereignty-worries-1.1162116 Mingmingla (talk) 19:14, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * In the European Union there is a treaty about it. A hot police chase can cross borders, but must inform the "invaded" country ASAP, and pursuing police must turn back immediately if told so by the host country. Kind of common sense, really. An ambulance is much less likely to cross a border in an emergency; you'd call for emergency services located in your own country. In a sparsely populated areas small border towns can share emergency services by pre-determined agreements; common sense will prevail in border formalities. 88.112.50.121 (talk) 20:59, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I used to work with someone who had previously worked for Eurotunnel. Commendably, the fire services on either side had worked out in advance how to co-operate in the event of an emergency. One problem that needed ironing out was that British fire crews "attend" an incident, whereas in French, "attendez!" means "wait!", so that two very similar words mean either "go" or "stop". Alansplodge (talk) 13:41, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * A bit more pertinent than my previous anecdote, I found GP Out-of-Hours and emergency ambulance services  by the North/South Inter-Parliamentary Association, which says of the UK's only land border: " A Memorandum of Understanding between Northern Ireland and [the Republic of] Ireland exists which enables ambulance services on both sides of the border to provide mutual aid and support. To date, there have also been discussions between the two Health Ministers regarding how both jurisdictions might co-operate on the issue of air ambulance services" (p. 4). According to a table on p. 32, Northern Irish emergency ambulances were dispatched to the Irish Republic 113 times in 2012-13, although reciprocal figures aren't included. Alansplodge (talk) 16:20, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hot pursuit seems to have very little information. I thought I read a far more detailed article on wikipedia once, but must be mistaken and read it somewhere else. Anyway gives some old stats. Even in a case like the EU, it's not that common that such pursuits actually happen. Nil Einne (talk) 12:44, 28 November 2014 (UTC)