Talk:Oil Creek State Park

First oilwell?

The first oilwell in North America, let alone the World, was drilled in Oils Springs Ontario. In 1858 it became the first oil well in North America, remembered as Williams No.1 at Oil Springs, Ontario. (This was a year before Edwin Drake drilled his famous wildcat in Pennsylvania in 1859.)

68.145.52.154 20:00, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Units

Hi, I was wondering if there was a reason for the reversion? I have mine for making the edit.

Bleakcomb (talk) 01:22, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Sure. All the Pennsylvania state parks use acres and sq km to show area.Dincher (talk) 01:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I am not clear on what you mean. Is it mandated in law somewhere or is it a convention. Why do the infoboxes on the same page use hectares?

Bleakcomb (talk) 01:30, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I guess it is a convention of the state park articles. The infobox used on the articles automatically converts the area to hectares. Dincher (talk) 01:33, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) If you look at hectare, you'll see it is not an official metric (SI) unit. All 120 Pennsylvania state parks follow the same basic layout and style and use square kilometers (which are the official units of area for this scale). The infobox follows a different convention and uses hectares. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:41, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

OK. My angle is to ensure an international perspective. MoS would indicate units given in local (imperial) units with conversions given as appropriate. The hectare is not SI metric although it is accepted as a unit for area measurement. It scopes well with acres. sqkm scopes well with sq miles. The infobox does that conversion because that is the accepted convention. Also other edits that I made including in good faith spelling corrections were reverted. Is there another way of respecting others than reverting all their edits? I am a relative noob here, apologies. Bleakcomb (talk)

True. Hectare is not an SI unit. It is a metric unit. I don't know what "official" means. It is accepted as a unit for use with SI. It is the conventional metric unit of measure for land area. The infobox follows international convention as accepted by BIPM.Bleakcomb (talk) 01:58, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the quick trigger on the undo's and thanks for catching the spelling error. I stand by the preference for sq km over hectare based on what is written in the ha article itself. Dincher (talk) 02:06, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. From the article, I see this: and commonly used for measuring land area. Although this on rereading is ambiguous. Check the ext link at the bottom of the hectare page. Will we have the knives out for litres and tonnes as well? :-) Just because a unit is non-SI doesn't mean that is not the preferred or accepted metric unit. What do you see in the hectare article that supports your case. BTW I accept that consistency in the group of articles you are concerned with is important. Also consider the consistency between the article text and the infobox. The inconsistency stuck out for me. Bleakcomb (talk) 02:21, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I must admit that before this discussion I had no idea what a hectare was. I agree that hectares relate to acres better than sq km. Part of the problem here is knowledge. Most of the people I know do not know what a hectare is but would have a good grasp of what a sq kilometer. No need to worry about knives regarding liters and tons.Dincher (talk) 02:28, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I am from a metric country, where land that used to be measured in acres is these days measured in hectares. sqkm is for states and countries. Scaling - I can't recall the wp page but someone had used the convert template for a small number of acres to sqkm. With rounding the result was "0.00 sqkm". I believe on reflection that this is result of a zealous bot changing articles. I tried to find some wp examples that are local to me and many of a series of articles on state parks have been changed from ha to sq km. Again leaving inconsistent units in the article. How about a deal. I'll leave your sq km alone until I find something more concrete in terms of wp Style for ha. If and when I find it I leave a msg on your Talk page. I'll go back and redo the spelling and use the convert template judiciously for distance (miles to km). I'll revert this article to sqkm.Bleakcomb (talk) 02:54, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I used to use hectares and was told to use square kilometers instead (I have been looking for where I was told this, but have not found it yet). I am personally OK with using acres and hectares (and square miles and square kilometers) as long as they are consistent in all 120 park articles and the List of Pennsylvania state parks. It would be consistent with the infobox that way. I know heactares are not official but are commonly used. Most Pennsylvania parks are larger than 10 acres, so the too small sq km issue is rare. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:10, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Either is okay with me too. I just want it to be consistent.Dincher (talk) 03:26, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

My main concern is distance measurements (in relation to rail trails). The park pages I hit happen to have rail trails. Sorry :-) The area measurement is a side concern to me. I would want to scope the project to change all 120 pages before I did anything. I would be happy to assist, though I would want some more clarity that it would be the "most correct" thing to do (not sure at the moment). So as I said I will hold fire. Bleakcomb (talk) 04:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch, hectares are officially accepted metric units (by BIPM) with a base in SI metric units, though they are not SI units themselves. As are litres and tonnes. Life would be pretty dull for the rest of the world if we can't use all these units. Unless there is some other commandment from on high (another fairly definitive ruling from a recognised body), it is probably a matter that should end up being addressed in MoS ie non-SI metric units and acceptable metric land measurement units. My scaling example was to demonstrate the danger of inappropriate units when converting to metric and rounding. Some care is needed, not a bot as I believe has been used on many articles. Would be keen to see the source that suggested you use sq km rather than ha. Thanks. Bleakcomb (talk) 04:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Found at least part of it - Talk:White_Deer_Hole_Creek#My_edits.2C_and_some_questions. More later, done for now, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 05:21, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Found this too. Gotta go too. Later. Bleakcomb (talk) 05:32, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I shouldn't have looked! I am beginning to hate templates. Is this the reference you were thinking of? [1] Sorry for the external link but I don't know the wiki link format for that page. The respondent's saying that for Geobox Protected Areas, the default input imperial units are sq mi and the default input metric units are sq km. I don't think it prohibits the use of other units for input, either imperial or metric. When you use acres (from what I see, perfectly valid) in "Geobox 1 protected areas", you will get hectares as the metric equiv. Looking at the template code, there is no choice in this. This a decision taken by the designers of the Geobox and Unit template, which Geobox uses. This lends credence to my claim that ha is the reasonably accepted conversion for acres. Note that Geobox uses Unit template for conversions. Both these templates have been separately deprecated. The replacement for Template:Unit is Template:Convert, which also gives ha as the default conversion for acres. I don't which converter Geobox 2 uses and how it drives it - I haven't found the code yet. Also, I think your experience with Geobox 2 appears to have been marred by a bug, which the respondent alludes to being that they hadn't tested the tool for acres. They claim to have fixed the migration tool. There is probably a case for you to revisit Geobox 2? I'd be glad to help. Bleakcomb (talk) 05:32, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry not to have replied here until now. If BIPM is OK with hectares, I think it is OK to use them. I am obviously not an expert here. User:Caroig did most of the work on the Geoboxes, but is not very active now. Still might be worth trying checking with him. Also just so you are aware, we had a problem with {{convert}} on List of Pennsylvania state parks - it was there so many times it stopped working beyond a certain point and the page was very slow to load. Let me know how I can help, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:59, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Ruhrfisch. I have left a bit more info about where the hectare confusion may have crept in at the bottom of Daniel Case's talk page (probably more than he bargained for). I still have some work to do with the article first.
Geoboxes are fine for me, I think, as they give hectares for acres ;-).
I have seen discussion about WikiMedia template processing space and I appreciate the heads up about {{convert}}.
If you have any ideas about how to revert the excision of Hectares edits that I allude to on Daniels Case's talk please let me know on my talk page - bearing in mind I believe there are a lot of them. Bleakcomb (talk) 02:50, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

According to this, the convert template now is smaller and works better. I have made VerruckteDan aware of this discussion too. Now that you mention it, I recall the whole Bobblewik units flap (I was aware of it, but not directly involved). IIRC, he had a script to aid in his unit conversions and made a fair number of people upset in the process. This may be something WP:AWB could help with, but I am not sure what else would help with a large number of conversions. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:13, 11 March 2008 (UTC)