Talk:Alexander Lake (southcentral Alaska)

Empty sections, infobox

<moved from User talk:Docu>

Alaska Lakes

• I am working on several Alaska Lakes and Rivers,

please do not remove "empty" sections which I am ressearching/working on.

• Also, I check to make sure that names are unambiguous,

and follow the WP guidelines of naming by tributary or civil sub-division.

• For instance there are many Alexander-Lake combinations according to USGS GNIS,

so the (Alaska) was/is there for a reason,

Alexander Lake and Lake Alexander are unique within Alaska,

but not unique in the U.S (there are many others).

• Lastly, Please do not move or remove reference citations.

There is no one source for Lakes/Rivers information, and

different "official" sources will have varying statistics.

On source will give one set of details:

like GNIS: name, coordinates, elevation, and some summary information;

while another source will give other details:

like NOAA or USGS information on flow/hydrology)

and often "official" sources will disagree on common details,

so it is important that a detail be associated with a particular reference citation.

LeheckaG (talk) 06:17, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

</moved from User talk:Docu>

Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm glad to know you contributing to articles on Alaska's lake. Please take no offense, but IMHO, it's preferable to develop the article as a subpage in your personal workspace and move it to article namespace later, rather than creating stubs two sentences and nine empty section headers [1].

The article title Lake Alexander (Alaska) correctly disambiguates, but the infobox field needn't include the disambigator.

BTW, I didn't remove any references, but moved it into the specific field of the infobox. The information remains cross-referenced. As for the coordinates, you already included "source:gnis". -- User:Docu

The references issue which I have run into is that to complete the fields in an Infobox (Lakes, Rivers, ...) several "official" references need to be consulted. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that they often/sometimes do not agree on statistics. One official source will say a statistic like an elevation or hydrology (flow, size, volume, ...) statistic is one thing, while another official source will give a similar but different statistic. So each statistic should be individually cited (with the specific official source it came from). LeheckaG (talk) 07:29, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

In general, it's a good thing to include them. For readbility, I think it's preferable to use it them in the way described at Template:Infobox_lake#Parameters (under "reference"). BTW for elevation, please read the explanation gnis provides about the dataset they use. -- User:Docu

I am familiar with "SandBox-ing", but it seems to be contrary to collaboration. When an article evolves into separate off-line threads, how are edit conflicts supposed to be resolved? Some other people suggested that I sandbox, but then am I supposed to just paste over work that other people had done in the meantime, or they over mine? On a few occassions where I spent a few hours working off-line on an article, when I went to save, an edit conflict occured and someone else had also substantially changed such articles. I do not believe in deleting another's work, so I lost a lot more time trying to manually figure out the differences and manually re-merging the two separate threads together. I am familiar with command line source-code/document/version management systems (SCCS, CVS, ...), but I do not know an easy way to merge and resolve "off-line" thread/version differences with Wikipedia? LeheckaG (talk) 07:29, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

If we would want a predefined section structure for wikipedia articles, it would probably be hardcoded for each article type. As this is clearly not the case, everybody should be free to develop the article from the two sentences further, even if there is a generally suggested (and accepted) structure.

If you are going to do this yourself shortly, {{Inuse}} is probably preferable. Personally, I don't mind stubs, but if the limited text disappears under ten headers for empty sections, IMHO we don't bring much benefit to our readers. If you plan on contributing a section once in a while, you can easily integrate them into the stub now and then. -- User:Docu

I will go ahead to hidden Wiki-comment out some of this article's SectionStubs similar to what you did, and I re-did a little "cleaner" on Lake Alexander.

All the WikiProjects I have been/am involved in have recommended guidelines for at least the relevant article structures and suggested contents (not that they are always followed - including by WikiProject participants). To me, the whole purpose of the guidelines, and {{SectionStub}}, {{Expand further}}, {{Expand list}} is to encourage constructive (rather than destructive) collaboration? "Throwing some paint on the wall" and getting people to work together. But it seems to me Wiki has a whole bunch of people who seem to delete? I will start using the {{Inuse}} to flag/tag what I am working on.

What is it about the SectionStub/Expand further/Expand list requests for collaboration which "bothers" people?

LeheckaG (talk) 09:02, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

At least as far as I'm concerne, it's not so much these tags that bother, but the ratio content/tags. In a B-rated articles, it's helpful to mark one or two sketchy sections with these, but in a two line stub, you can't have 9 empty headers. -- User:Docu