User:Ninly/Sandbox

		The RF Barnstar
		testing 1 2 3 out Ninly (talk) 06:57, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

1.6bln?

Without a more solid reference, I think this 1.691 billion figure for the Buddhist population is going to have to go. A number of reasons:

The only cited reference where I can find an even comparable number has problems:

The reference cites a book (Gary Gach's Complete Idiot's Guide to Buddhism—hardly a scholarly or peer-reviewed resource), but links to a mostly unrelated webpage[1] that seems primarily to be promotion of a book, Buddha's Lists (vanity-published?). Although the bulk of its ~1.6 billion "liberal estimate" is referenced to that Complete Idiot's Guide, the two sections that state the estimate don't themselves really add up analytically, and only barely make sense at all:

"Surveys (Gach-Alpha Books, U.S. State Dept. report on China, Global Center for the Study of Contemporary China, BBC News, China Daily, and a report by Christian missionaries in China) have found that about 8% to 91% identify with Buddhism as one of their religions. If we use a percent near the upper end of this estimate, of about 80% it works out to about 1.1 billion Chinese Buddhists." —about 8% to 91%?

"China, liberal estimate (80.00%): 1,070,019,251"

"China, conservative estimate (50.00%): 668,762,032"

It seems strange to me that their "conservative estimate" is just the lowest percentage offered by the most "liberal" sources they offer. Given the first quote above, shouldn't their conservative estimate be 8%?

The fact that all sources aside from the Complete Idiot's Guide are all surveys makes their argument especially murky for many reasons. For example, their estimate for the population of Japanese Buddhists (96% of the Japanese population, or 122,196,882 people) is given without any estimated range—true of all countries listed other than China. Problems with such high estimates in survey reports from Japan are clearly delineated in a link from our reference no. 6, viz. The Largest Buddhist Communities.

Our reference no. 8 reads only "US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report 2004,"—the trailing comma suggests to me that it may have been incomplete or broken as a reference, but in any case I can't find any information in said report (or the 2007 and 2008 reports) about a world Buddhist population. I might have missed it.
I don't have the National Geographic ref (no. 9, "Buddha Rising") to check—please fill me in if you do.
The provided link to the CIA World Fact Book says nothing about Buddhism, and I haven't found anything in googling their various pages that discusses the world Buddhist population as a whole (aside: their listing on China offers no percentage, so I doubt anything in the billions range would come from them anyway).

Ham band proposal

Checklist:

(Move all articles referring to specific amateur radio frequency bands from "x meters" or "x centimeters" to "x-meter band" or "x-centimeter band".)

Moving/redirecting these articles: 160 meters, 80 meters, 60 meters, 40 meters, 20 meters, 15 meters, 10 meters, 6 meters, 4 meters, 2 meters, 1.25 meters, 70 centimeters, 33 centimeters, 23 centimeters, 13 centimeters PLUS a move/redirect from 500 KHz to 600-meter band
Placing redirects on the current article names, and adding disambiguation links where appropriate (the 60-meter band vs. footrace being the only currently identified case, since 60 meters will redirect to 60-meter band—60 metres should also probably be moved to something like 60-metre footrace, but that lies outside of our scope here)
Add redirects to 600 meter band (fix), 160 meter band, 80 meter band, 60 meter band, 40 meter band, 30 meter band, 20 meter band, 17 meter band, 15 meter band, 12 meter band, 10 meter band, 6 meter band, 4 meter band, 2 meter band, 1.25 meter band, 70 centimeter band, 33 centimeter band, 23 centimeter band, 13 centimeter band
Adding redirects from 12-meter band, 17-meter band, and 30-meter band to WARC bands
Keeping an eye on possible ambiguities, with the possible addition of " (amateur radio)" to article titles, should they arise.