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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Artugade.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:52, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Inland extension

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I deleted the passage relating to the possibility of an inland continuation of the Mendocino Fault as both obsolete (1965 is pre-plate tectonics) and erroneous. The Mendocino Fault definitely terminates at the triple junction. That is not to say that there may not be a tectonic zone extending inland which aligns with it. The alignment is there no doubt because of the drag and compression imparted by the descending Gorda Plate. There is speculation that this zone may eventually become part of the western tectonic boundary of the North American Plate as the Sierra-Great Valley Block breaks off (if it does) and either moves independently or as part of the Pacific Plate. The whole region is comprised of old terranes anyway, only "recently" and tenuously appended to the North American Plate, plus the rifting in the Great Basin is likely connected to the same mantle upwelling which was overridden by the North American Plate and has re-appeared as the East Pacific Rise "unzipping" up the Gulf of California toward the Great Basin. Tmangray (talk) 01:43, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The concepts of Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift date to 1912 with Alfred Wegener and 1929 with Arthur Holmes.
Newer concepts do not invalid older data and observations. Rather, these concepts were built upon old data and observations compiled over several decades, and especially the 1960s. Without that data, the concepts of Plate Tectonics could never have been discovered.
Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics explain the context and the cause of the phenomena described by the old data and observations. However, if we reject data just because it is old, we have no right to the concepts upon which old data is based.
You describe the region as composed of old terrains, and indeed, it is. Extrapolating from the observations of Pease, using the concepts of Plate Tectonics, it is likely that the tectonic zone we're discussing was the surface boundary between the Gorda and Pacific plates that accreted onto the continental plate as the primary mass of these plates subducted.
That explains why this tectonic zone is no longer very active. In turn, the existence of this zone explains why the surface features of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane - the eastern plate boundary you mention - do not extend much beyond Honey Lake Fault.
There is much we can learn from applying the concepts of Plate Tectonics to the data and observations available to us, because all the observations exist in context with one another, and Plate Tectonics describes that context. For example, we may be able to learn from the context whether Walker Lane represents a future plate boundary, or a plate boundary of the past. However, we will not learn that, if we reject the context in which it exists.
Wikipedia editors do not remove sourced information from articles as "erroneous" or "obsolete". If they provide a reliable source for a differing point of view, they may add the differing point of view to the article. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV
Therefore, I am reverting the deletion. Downstrike (talk) 03:26, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The modern version of plate tectonics did not exist before about 1967. There was definitely no concept of a "triple junction" before then. The current view terminates transforms such as the Mendocino at the Mendocino Triple Junction. It does not extend past it.Tmangray (talk) 20:44, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have no doubt that the Mendocino Transform Fault currently terminates at the Mendocino Triple Junction. However, that does not address prehistoric conditions, which are part of the context in which these plate boundaries exist. That context is what you have deleted.
Deletion of encyclopedic content from Wikipedia articles just because it is historical or you believe it is erroneous, is in violation of Wikipedia guidelines for NPOV:
All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. This is non-negotiable and expected of all articles and all editors. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV
If you continue to violate this guideline, it will be reported.
However, as a compromise, I am placing the deleted content in a History section. Downstrike (talk) 06:18, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The new edit reads far better than the previous one. It could be fleshed out though, perhaps with some mention of the evolution of the current situation i.e. arrival of terranes, evolution of the San Andreas, etc. Tmangray (talk) 21:10, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Article needs citations

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A recent deletion brought this to my notice; after the deletion, this article had NO citations left. Downstrike (talk) 03:37, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The references for this article consist for now of the "external links" which will take you to numerous sources. The article on triple junctions explains the termination of transforms like the Mendocino. Tmangray (talk) 20:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links are to help users to find additional information. They are not citations:
Any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation. This applies to all articles, lists, and sections of articles, without exception. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
Here is a tool that anyone interested in this article may use to correctly format inline citations for most sources: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/makeref.php Downstrike (talk) 06:18, 15 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This is all technically correct, but too legalistic. In fact, most of the external links are academic sites, hence having far more credibility as references than many typical inline cites. One can safely assume that the geology departments of the various colleges and universities which produce these sites have ample reliable sources for what they say. Tmangray (talk) 16:39, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
They are ideal sources for citation. Downstrike (talk) 20:33, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Add map showing true length

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The Mendocino Fracture Zone is ... over 4000 km (2500 miles) long

Alas the map used shows it as much shorter. Jidanni (talk) 14:26, 25 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 20 November 2024

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– Here fracture zone is generic, a type, not part of the proper name, as evidenced by inconsistency of capitalization in sources; per MOS:CAPS, then we should use lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 02:09, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose, the first one I looked at, Panama Fracture Zone, favors uppercasing by 10x and its page sources uppercase, which means that the RM is already broken and I haven't looked at any more (and not understanding why you lately have the itch to lowercase some of the largest and most major properly named structures on Earth). Randy Kryn (talk) 02:29, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Dicklyon, please revert your undiscussed controversial lowercasing move of Heirtzler Fracture Zone (and any others you may have lowercased, I'm not going to go looking for them), thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:00, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Here's another undiscussed controversial move, Hunter Fracture Zone, which has overwhelming n-gram uppercasing. How many of these did you do in the last week or so Dicklyon? Please revert them or find an administrator to revert, thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:51, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Based on the n-grams showing over 50% lowercase in some recent years, I didn't think that would be controversial. Dicklyon (talk) 00:34, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The n-grams for Hunter Fracture Zone show that uppercasing is correct. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:47, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I suggest you look up the meaning of a proper name, which is a noun or noun phrase that designates a particular person, place or object; fracture zones are a particular object. I don't know why Dicklyon is so obsessed with moving pages to use sentence case, but I find it rather controversial and destructive. Just another user who doesn't know what they're doing, especially in a field they don't even participate in and probably don't even know much about. Volcanoguy 14:57, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    All of the fracture zones listed in this RM are gazetted names according to marineregions.org in the same way as seamounts, ridges, canyons, banks, plateaus, etc. By Dicklyon's logic the names of mountains should use sentence case rather than full upper case which is faulty. Volcanoguy 15:24, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Many of those are also over-capitalized, not proper names, gazetted or not. See stats. Mountains, on the other hand, I don't see any like that, so it's clear that your interpretation of "Dicklyon's logic" is also incorrect. Dicklyon (talk) 16:33, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    And that gazette site you linked capitalizes absolutely everything, even generic types in parentheses, such as "(Fracture Zone)". And I can't see it making any claim that those are proper names, which is not an inference we can make from one publisher's style. Dicklyon (talk) 16:36, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Clearly not a reliable source for what/how to capitalize in English.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:20, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Volcanoguy, there is no "the meaning" of proper name; it has numerous conflicting definitions between multiple fields of linguistics and multiple subdisciplines and "schools" in philosophy (and none of the philosophy defintions have any implications for capitalization or other typography at all). See WP:PNPN for a summary. The only definition of any pertinence on Wikipedia is that at the top of MOS:CAPS: only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia [emphasis in original]. We have a sourcing-based standard precisely to forstall editors trying to bring in extraneous and mutually contradictory subjective notions of what "is" or "should be" a proper name to these discussions, as you are trying to do here, becaue that approach would result in wildly conflicting RM results, against WP:CONSISTENT policy, on the whim of who happens to show up and make which conflicting philosophy claims at which RM, followed by endless move-warring with counter-RMs to suit someone else's preferred definition. We've already been through that in WP's early days and it was badly dysfunctional.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:18, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    We do need a consistent decision here. I had noticed the campaign and agree that Dickylon may not have done a proper consultation as MOS:CAPS in sentence case only clearly applies to the title of the article Fracture zone. In other cases it seems we should follow the majority of reputable sources rule as determined for each individual name. It does seem to favour capitalisation on my take but I have not checked all tertiary sources and all fracture zones names. I did get an impression that capitalisation was preferred when I checked data on fracture zone mapping during the last two years (the independent tertiary sources included not only marineregions.org, but ACUF and National Geographic). Academic literature tends also to prefer capitalisation recently but lots of pre-internet sources used sentence case. I do not think news media use counts as the general public presently have little interest in fracture zones. Also remember in further discussion the 5th policy WP:5P5. Whatever the campaign should stop until consensus and may need reversion as on reflection MOS:CAPS, MOS:GEO, and WP:NCGN have not been fully considered.
    Do others think Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography should be brought into discussion to see if more lasting consensus is possible, even if this prolongs a decision past the usual week. This is because once decided one way or other this could usefully be added to geographical name examples as it may stop further confusion on natural feature proper names as I suspect we would not be having this debate if the name of a fracture zone was not at least three words in English.
    I also note that while country specific guidance exists there is no guidance on geographical names agreed by an international organisation (which may over capitalise as contributors could be familiar with languages that capitalise more than English).
    In reply to another earlier comment capitalisation of two word natural feature geographical names is acceptable style if so used in tertiary sources so any one trying this in a mass change with rivers, lakes might have run into problems.
    Whatever the consensus on fracture zone article names that results, can I suggest that every fracture zone needs a redirect that contains either the sentence case or capitalisation alternative. ChaseKiwi (talk) 22:57, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    A consisent decision is reached by applying WP:AT policy and applicable guidelines (MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS), not by seeking "magical exceptions". No, more people from a specific wikiproject, probably prone to the WP:Specialized-style fallacy, do not need to be canvassed to this discussion, and the closer should be on the lookout for that. The entire point of WP:RM is that it is a system-wide process that pulls in diverse editors to interpret policy and guidelines consistently, regardless of subject. That is, the WP:CONLEVEL policy purpose of RM is specifically to thwart wikiprojects and other little gaggles of subject-specific editors from engaging in stylistic WP:OWN behavior.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:06, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: This capitalization provably fails the MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS test, as it does not consistently occur in a strong majority of reliable sources. Outside of title-case titles, headings, and captions, lowercase is frequent (for some of these actually dominant), and a consistent habit of capitalizing these as proper names in relevant sources clearly does not exist. See GScholar results in particular. They vary a bit by specific search term. I've picked four (the first two and two random ones from the list), and here are the results, using the first 10 pages of search returns for each name:

    Balleny: uppercase in 51 sources, lowercase in 27, a weird "Mendocino Fracture zone" mixture in 2, inconistently in both styles in the same source in 2, occurring only in a title-case caption or heading in 1, indeterminate in 13 due to lack of access to full text.
    Mendocino: UC in only 32 sources, LC in 55 (plus a weird case of "Mendocino 'fracture zone'"), inconsistent in 1, indeterminate in 3 (no full-text access).
    Vema: UC 60, LC 31, weird cases 3 ("Vema Fracture zone", "Vema-Fracture Zone", "Vema-Fracture-Zone"), inconsistent 3, indeterminate 5.
    Panama: UC 54, LC 34, inconsistent 2, indeterminate 7.

    So, clearly not consistent, either with regard to the class or specific members of it, with some (e.g. Vema) actually predominantly lowercase. There is no basis on which to argue that the guidelines magically don't apply to this subject, and one commenter's follow-you-around-to-oppose behavior toward the move nominator is out-of-band.

    As for Google n-grams, they have evidently become "poisoned" after 2019 by inclusion of low-quality web and self-published e-book source materials many of which are copying from Wikipedia (WP:CITOGENESIS); I've covered this elsewhere, but the gist is that there is often a serious mismatch between both a) results that include vs. exclude the material Google added to its "English" corpus after 2019, and b) the results of the "English" corpus versus either the "American English" or "British English" corpora, both of which are known to be based on scans of real books. For this reason, I recommend constraining n-gram searches to 2019, and comparing results from all three English corpora, as well as the usual tricks for trying to weed out appearances in title-case headings and captions, and then supplementing with Google Scholar or Internet Archive Scholar searches, and other approaches (e.g. a Google Books trawl, using modern materials that appear to be reliable). Google Ngrams is a decreasingly useful tool for this sort of thing, especially the more specialized the term (if few books in the corpora include the term, undue weight will be given to the editorial preferences of only a handful of publishers, these days some of them self-publishers).

    PS: Some of these article-title strings do not show up in GScholar results at all, including the Kosminskaya and Vinogradov fracture zones, which means one of the following: they are not notable (for lack of source coverage), or the strings are incorrect (misspelled entirely, or possibly old names no longer in use and thus failing WP:COMMONNAME), or the concept is wrong (perhaps the geology has changed and something once called, e.g., the Viogradov fracture zone is now classified as part of something larger, or has been subdivided into two fracture zones with different names).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:01, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    Can I suggest https://marineregions.org/gazetteer.php is a better source than GScholar for the existence of a recognised geographical name for an undersea feature. GScholar is not good at indexing the Russian academic literature. As to meeting notability criteria in English wikipedia as opposed to Russian wikipedia that is another issue. ChaseKiwi (talk) 00:28, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support—so let me guess: someone decided to cap the expanded form because they weren't aware that you don't do that. And it snowballed from there. Tony (talk) 02:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support most It is my view that article titles should be addressed on their individual merit (evidence) unless the evidence is common (eg Mens' Singles v Mens' singles for tennis). A fracture zone is descriptive and as such, these are not ipso facto proper names. Yes, we do tend to capitalise descriptive terms in the names of common geographical features but this is far from consistently applied for less common (not everyday) features such submarine mountains (per ngram by DL). A priori arguments to capitalise these terms are not supported by evidence of usage. If they were, we would see these terms capitalised in sources with the same degree of consistency as Mississippi River, yet we don't. Per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS, we capitalise article titles when capitalisation is necessary because the term is consistently capped in sources. As these articles are not well represented in the corpus of ngrams I have have reviewed usage in google scholar. It is apparent that these terms are often replaced by an initialism in prose and, while it is a style to capitalise the expanded term when introducing an initialism, this is not our style per MOS:EXPABBR. This means that when the capitalised term is used in a source to introduce the expaned term, it does not indicate that caps are necessary. On reviewing search results for the 19 articles in this RM, I have concluded that there is mixed capitalisation in sources for 12 of these article (ie the terms are not consistently capped in sources). I support the move of these articles. I also find that there is no google scholar result for 3 of these articles. Because this term is not a true proper name that should be capitalised and because there is insuffient evidence of usage to reasonably determine capitalisation in these cases is necessary, I support the move of these articles. In the case of 3 articles, the usage does appear that these are capitalised with some degree of consistency that capitalisation could probably be retained. I will be silent on moving these three but I am open to a closer review of sources to reach a conclusion one way or the other. I am not convinced by a one in, all in type argument or that CONSISTENCY prevails over LOWERCASE given the letter and the spirit and intent of WP:AT in respect to CRITERIA v TITLEFORMAT. For the last, I have viewed more closely to the degree available. From the first 40 results I found 10 usable results, of which there was 50% capitalisation. The balance either capitalised when introducing the initialism or could not be viewed in sufficient detail to confirm otherwise. I support that article being moved.
    Cinderella157 (talk) 05:46, 22 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd have no objection to uppercase if any of those were consistently capped in sources. You mention "possibly uppercase" for Hero and Shackleton and Sovanco, but when I do a book search, nearly half of the first bunch of hits (that don't have it all-caps) have it lowercase. Even if they're somewhat more capped in Scholar, it would seem odd to cap a few just because the thin stats lean that way a bit. Are you saying you don't support lowercase on those? Dicklyon (talk) 06:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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