Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Antarctica

The map of the Times Concise Atlas of the World
As a first selection of articles to be created, I'm using the Times Concise Atlas of the World. The Antarctica map of this atlas has a few hundred names on it; I aim to create an article for each name in this atlas. Eugene van der Pijll 21:27, 28 September 2005 (UTC)


 * There are now articles on every feature named on that map except for those in Victoria Land and in the Transantarctic Mountains. Eugene van der Pijll 18:59, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Suggestions for Eubot's work
Discussions between User:Eugene van der Pijll and User:Citylover mostly removed, for clarity. If you want, you can find them in the history: ; or see User:Citylover/Workinprogress/Eubot.

I've left some points that I had not yet answered. Eugene van der Pijll 15:24, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

.
 * "whalers": Another more general suggestion for Eubot would be that it could automatically wikilink expressions related to the topics Seal hunting and Whaling, for example the expression Sealer, Sealers, Sealing, Seal hunter, Seal hunters, Seal hunting, Whaler, Whalers, Whale hunter, Whale hunters, Whale hunting, Whaling ( Sealer, Sealers, Sealing, Seal hunter, Seal hunters, Seal hunting, Whaler, Whalers, Whale hunter, Whale hunters, Whale hunting, Whaling ). -- Citylover 17:34, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It's a bit much, but something like this could be done. Eugene van der Pijll 15:24, 20 October 2005 (UTC)


 * If you are going to link kilometre (personally, I think this shouldn't be done but anyways), please link to it kilometre and not the American kilometer which is a redirect to the former. RedWolf 07:20, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Also, only the first occurrence should be linked not the second or third ones. RedWolf 20:31, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
 * This is more trouble than it's worth; I've removed wikilinking. Eugene van der Pijll 15:24, 20 October 2005 (UTC)


 * For mountains starting with "Mount", a sort key should be added to the category tag.RedWolf 20:31, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Done. (Also for Islands, Capes, Glaciers; in fact for all entries.) Eugene van der Pijll 15:24, 20 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I generally suggest to not only write out abbreviations like "ScotNAE", "SwedAE", "GerAE", "SovAE", "FrAE", but also to write the abbreviation itself within parenthesis (as usual) behind the written out and wiklinked expression. This would apply for the following (and maybe even more) expeditions: -- Citylover 13:12, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't think most of these abbreviations are official: I think most of them are invented by the USGS. That is why I didn't leave them in the text. Eugene van der Pijll 15:24, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

What about allowing Eubot to create the original articles?

 * Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one sentence explanation, then sign your vote with ~ 


 * Support
 * I support it because Eubot is already now better or even much better than most humans (especially unexperienced ones) but Eubot should maybe still be a little bit improved (see also the discussion below).-- Citylover 07:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * That'd be great - it looks reliable now and can do the work far more efficiently than a human. Warofdreams talk 12:03, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I support this but (perhaps this is obvious) do a couple of short trial runs so they can be manually checked. RedWolf 07:52, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Support; agree with redwolf that we need to let it run on maybe a little-noticed letter of the alphabet first. Maybe have it do all the 'v's first and see how it goes. -- Creationlaw 21:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose

Discussion

 * Add any additional comments
 * I would generally suggest that Eubot inserts the articles automatically and not just creates the pages. The only question for me is when the moment is reached that Eubot should do it. I think that already at this moment now, Eubot is better than maybe 60% of human editors, especially the unexperienced ones (unexperienced in regard to creating new pages about geographical features in Antarctica). As soon as Eubot has reached the point when it is better than maybe 70% or 80% of human editors and almost no mistakes are found anymore, in my opinion, it would be wise to allow Eubot to create not only the lists, but also the original pages (unless this would be against copyright law, but this is a purely legal question). Otherwise, these articles might be created slowly but surely by others who might not find the pregenerated pages because they do not try out the Whatlinkshere-page and the work on Eubot was for nothing. -- Citylover 07:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I would only consider this if there is a general consensus that this is a good idea. Let's wait a week or so, to see if there are large improvements that can still be made. After that, I can mention this discussion on Wikipedia talk:Bots, and on the Missing articles project page (where there was some enthusiasm about these articles. If the people there think the articles are good enough, I'll upload the articles. Eugene van der Pijll 16:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Today, I worked on other pages but I have not forgotten this page yet... I hope I find time still today to check the entries until S generated by Eubot (probably I will also re-check my suggestions above at R and especially S and T. -- Citylover 15:28, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I created dozens and dozens (hundreds maybe) based on the USGS GNIS. Doing it by hand is a (tedious) chore. A bot that could create new entries automatically from this public domain info would be most welcome. It should never try to overwrite an existing article - a human would need to verify that the previously existing article included the USGS info or disambiguation was needed. RedWolf 07:52, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

How many entries are in the file ANTARCTICA.TXT?
I found the following information on the talk page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles: "There are over 14,000 of them." This would mean that the number of articles is so huge that it is impossible to this with human work in a considerably short time and still in high quality: In order to achieve a high standard of quality, a human creator of these articles would have to do the tasks listed just below, some of them very prone to formal errors or typo errors. Most of these tasks could be done not only automatically, but also much faster and much more reliable than by humans: All in all, the work of Eubot has already now attained such a high quality that that the 14000 articles could be created automatically (maybe not now, but in the near future). Therefore, it could be prevented that more new articles on geographical features in Antarctica are created by people - often in a lower quality than if they would have been created by Eubot. -- Citylover 09:22, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * carefully create Wikilinks without mistakes inside the text (something that Eubot does automatically with hardly any mistakes now and hardly ever omitting any Wiklink to another geographical feature inside Antarctica that would be possible)
 * add and especially format geographical coordinates without any mistakes (Eubot does not do such mistakes at all), not mixing up E and W, not forgetting "coor dm", not forgetting enough |, not forgetting the parentheses.
 * correctly assign the different Categories like Geography of Antarctica, Mountains of Antarctica, Glaciers of Antarctica, Mountain ranges of Antarctica, Headlands of Antarctica, Lakes of Antarctica and Volcanoes of Antarctica especially distinguish between the Categories Islands of Antarctica and Sub-antarctic islands (which Eubot does with the utmost reliability).
 * mind the bold format of the article name at the beginning of the main text of the article.
 * writing out and wiklinking of all the abbreviations, which is an especially nasty task for human editors, whereas Eubot is able to reliably and correctly convert all the abbreviations into one single, standardized expression and Wikilink at the same time, enabling also new articles (for example about the various expeditions).

Speed of article creation
Maybe it would be unwise to create all the 14000 articles at once. This could provoke opposition from people who are totally against the database-aspect of Wikipedia or generally against articles created by Bots or think that these articles are generally useless and nobody reads them (which is most certainly not the case, given only the importance of geographical coordinates in the future of Wikipedia) or that the articles are too small (OK, they are small, but one has to begin somewhere and they are always open to expansion). Therefore, it is maybe better to just create maybe between 100 and 1000 articles every day, maybe during the times when Wikipedia is not overloaded. -- Citylover 10:15, 6 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think we should do it in batches just to slip under the radar. It won't work, and it's not the correct thing to do. It is probably better to do it slowly, because each article still has to be checked... They are still far from perfect. Eugene van der Pijll 16:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

List of already created articles
If Eubot really automatically creates these pages, it should under no circumstances forget to write down and afterwards publish a list on Wikipedia of the following things: -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * a list of the articles which Eubot did indeed automatically generate. This has several advantages: -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It is easier to manually check the articles Eubot has generated. -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It would be also possible to automatically delete the articles Eubot generated in case Eubot would have been still improved significantly after already having created the articles. If it is technically possible, I would even suggest that in case Eubot would be improved after having already created the articles, all articles only generated by Eubot and not altered by a human editor afterwards could still be declared available for automatical deletion and re-generation by Eubot. -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * and especially a list of the articles not generated by Eubot because they were already occupied (= the articles for which Eubot had an own entry but which were already occupied). First of all, Eubot should just generate such a list of all these cases without further distinction of cases. Additionally, there might be several reasons why an article has already been generated before Eubot could do it and it would be useful if Eubot could automatically distinguish the several reasons why the article that Eubot tried to create was already occupied. Eubot could especially distinguish the cases "humanwasfaster" and "othercontinent" by comparing the percentage/numbers of equal or similar words in the two articles (first article: the one Eubot wanted to create. second article: the article that was already created). If these additional lists would be published on Wikipedia, it would become possible afterwards to selectively check/improve "humanwasfaster"-articles and selectively check disambiguation problems with "othercontinent"-articles. Since the case "namingconfusionwithinantarctica" is very rare, it would not matter if Eubot would incorrectly recognize these articles as either "humanwasfaster" or "othercontinent" and it would probably not be necessary to program Eubot for that but such rare mistakes would be corrected slowly but steadily by human editors on a case-by-case base. The three cases being distinguished for now are: -- Citylover 07:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * a list of the "humanwasfaster"-cases: The article is about the same particular geographical feature of Antarctica and has already been created by a human editor, preventing Eubot to create it (for example the articles Ohlin Island or Tange Promontory have already been created). -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * a list of the "othercontinent"-cases: The article was created in another context and has (almost) nothing to do with Antarctica but has the same name (see for example Nelson Island where this case did not happen but could have easily happened). -- Citylover 08:45, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * a list of the "namingconfusionwithinantarctica"-cases (such a "namingconfusionwithinantarctica"-list would maybe not be created because such a case is rare and/or programming might be difficult): The article is about another particular geographical feature of Antarctica and there is naming confusion (because the human creator of the page created an article about another geographical feature in Antarctica under the same name under which Eubot wanted to create an article about another geographical feature in Antarctica). This case is certainly rare and might even not exist at all. (This case could have easily happened for exampole in the case of Nelson Island (South Shetland Islands) and Nelson Rock (Antarctica), but it did not happen). -- Citylover 07:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I will program Eubot to make such lists. Eugene van der Pijll 16:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

What about a "Eubot-tag"?
What about including within each article Eubot has generated with one of the tags listed in the list just below? These are just several suggestions, one single tag would be chosen among them (please make your own suggestions): -- Citylover 08:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * made by Eubot
 * Made by Eubot
 * generated by Eubot
 * Generated by Eubot
 * automatically generated by Eubot
 * Automatically generated by Eubot
 * This article was automatically generated by Eubot
 * This article was automatically generated by Eubot, a bot, please report your comments, suggestions or mistakes to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Antarctica -- Citylover 08:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I will at least leave a helpful message with a link to a feedback page in the edit summary; I may also leave a larger note on the talk page of each created article. Eugene van der Pijll 16:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Merging the articles belonging geographically to each other
While I do not oppose the idea of merging the articles belonging geographically to each other (as long as redirects are made/kept from the original articles of the particular geographical features to the article they were merged into), I think that it is much more important to let Eubot explore/conquest/occupy the new territory in Antarctica first. Afterwards, the articles can still be merged on an individual and slowly proceeding base. For more information/suggestions about this topic, see also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. -- Citylover 07:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC).

Categories
Hi - discovered this project while using the "what links here" on a stub I just made (I've on occasions been adding geography stubs on Antarctica from information on a large map I've got.). I notice that a lot of these articles are listed as where quite a few of them could use the more specific. Grutness...  wha?  23:05, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

miles?
The "miles" mentioned in the USGS Antarctic Viewer and therefore appearing in the various Wikipedia articles created automatically are quite possibly nautical miles, so be careful when converting to kilometres. Urhixidur 04:42, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Strongly endorse this suggestion as a serious problem that needs attention. So far, I do know of two specific, provable examples, one misconverted by the bot, and the other unconverted by the bot. But there are lots and lots of dubious ones.  This talk page has been largely dormant for a couple of years, so most interested editors probably don't have it on their watchlists any more, but somebody is likely to wander by here and read it once in a while.  Gene Nygaard 14:53, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If you take a look at the USGS pdf form, Antarctic Place Name Proposal, it becomes quite evident why this is indeed a serious problem. This form includes a box to enter:
 * DISTANCE AND DIRECTION TO NEARBY EXISTING FEATURE
 * Just that. An empty box. No directions on units to use. No warning to specifically identify any "miles" used as either statute miles or nautical miles.  No wonder there is so much uncertainty.  Gene Nygaard 15:03, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * At first sight, it looks very unlikely to me that "miles" could refer to nautical miles, but your edit of Adams Glacier seems to be valid... I'm not at this moment doing anything with these pages, but I'll keep this problem in mind if I do. Worst case scenario, I would remove all conversions of distances in miles. Eugène van der Pijll 15:47, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Nautical miles are the normal units in polar exploration. What I'm wondering is whether or not any of the miles can be presumed to be statute miles.  I'm sure some are, but I also doubt that we can count on it for any of them, based on the vagueness of that USGS form.  Gene Nygaard 16:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It is the same measurement, of course, in this draft article as well. Gene Nygaard 16:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe not just remove the conversions, but flag all of them, converted and unconverted now, with vague with the "statute miles or nautical miles" parameter (e.g. 47 miles), so that someone who uses it is actually aware of possible problems, and if the articles' creators just leave it like that, then a reader hovering over the link can see why. Gene Nygaard 16:41, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I've checked a few distances with Google Earth, e.g. the length of Adelie Island, and they all seem to be nautical miles. Dammit. Thanks for noticing that, both of you. I'll have to see what I can do about that. At least regenerate these pages. And then check all pages that have already been copied into the encyclopedia... Eugène van der Pijll 22:04, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I like to check on Shackleton's 97 miles every once in a while, since I have seen that number misconverted as 156 km, 160 km, etc. in hundreds of sources in print and on the web. The nice thing about that one is that it is so easy to prove; even many of the publications which misconvert it often include the latitude of his farthest south, often even in the same sentence or at least the same paragraph:  88°23' S.  Subtract from 90°0° at the pole, and you get, of course, 97 minutes of arc.  Gene Nygaard 03:02, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Ship names
Hi all.

Naval vessels are generally given names including standard prefixes in Wikipedia - so we have an article at HMS Victory rather than HMS Victory, and the latter link won't usually be much help except for particularly well-known ships. I recently created a list of all articles where we've got links the wrong way around, to check if they're correct, and there's a lot of hits on the various Antarctica lists.

To get some idea of what I mean, Pine Island Bay was written from one of these standard texts, so was corrected:
 *  ...for the USS Pine Island, seaplane tender... 
 *  ...for the USS Pine Island'', seaplane tender...

Would it be possible to alter the wikification script, if it's going to be run again in the future, so that it includes the USS as part of the wikilink? I'll go through and alter these ones, but may as well avoid it cropping up again.

Thanks all. These are pretty impressive article stubs, incidentally - well done to whoever generated them. Shimgray | talk | 18:37, 30 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Whilst I'm at it, the entries for Luther Peak ( USS U.S. Navy ), Harrison Nunatak, Morgan Inlet and Lofgren Peninsula ( USS Bellingshausen Sea Expedition ) seem to be slightly garbled, as these aren't ship names - not sure if this is the wiki-script glitching or a flaw in the original data, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
 * Also Lepley Nunatak ( USS Larry K. Lepley ), Tressler Bank ( USS Willis L. Tressler ) and Orton Reef ( USS Wilkes Station )

Missing articles (dab-links or link to other features)
There are still a lot of missing articles, since many entries links to dab pages or features with identical names in other locations (see e.g. WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Antarctica/H4). Would it be possible to create a list of articles not categorized in a sub-category of Category:Geography of Antarctica? - 4ing (talk) 11:27, 15 March 2013 (UTC)