Wikipedia talk:WikiProject British Columbia/Archive/Archive 2007

Politician/MLA/MP cats

Noticed when adding the British Columbia politician cat to Robert Bonner (politician) he should be in the MLA category - unless the MLA category is only for current MLAs? If not I suggest there should be "current MLAs" and "current MPs" categories vs "past MLAs" and "past MPs", or both cats are going to be chock-full; not to say they can't be....Got confused a bit too because Bonner's predecessor as MLA for Vancouver-Point Grey was George Clark Miller, whose current article makes no mention of being an MLA - I'm not familiar enough to fix it; he was an MLA, an MP and a mayor, currently he's only got the BC politician stub.....so at what point does someone get the politician stub of the politician cat, and should the politician stub be good for all past MLAs and MPS and mayors and what-not? What about senior civil servants and others with political profiles who were not elected? (notable aides, consultants, party chairs etc). Basically just trying to sort out and understand the cat hierarchy; did the list of those I compiled for User:Buchanan-Hermit's old sandbox version of this project get migrated here?Skookum1 03:53, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

template for userbox for Members of this project

Hi; don't know how to create these well but it seems to me we should have userboxes saying "This user is a member of WikiProject British Columbia". Suggest we use a dogwood rather than the flag for this, as the flag won't look good if it's tiny IMO; and the escutcheon is an official trademark signifying government publications/authority.Skookum1 02:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Your userbox looks nice. Good work. -- Selmo ^(talk) 19:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Chief Dan George article - COTM/FA?

Am I the only one of us with this page on their watchlist? Whatever. Just dropping the BC template into various pages I knew didn't have it, including Dan George, which is for Chief Dan George (redirect already in place). I've been giving "high" importance ratings for all major First Nations leaders/personalities, but I venture that in his case it's worth making him "TOP" priority and it's going to be more than worthwhile to try and turn this into an FA via a COTM at some point. I don't have any of his books, but I'm sure as far as pics go the Tsleil-wau-tuth would be happy to donate some, prob. already in the public domain. Easily the most recognizable and popular and influential First Nations figure in BC history, even though he's gone from us now, and well worth a feature article, wake nah? (wake nah? is the Chinook Jargon equivalent of n'est-ce pas?)Skookum1 19:52, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

All I know about Dan George is: his sister is my great great grandmother's auntie. errr' something like that. I don't have many books, or records of him. But, I'll add this to the list of things to do. OldManRivers 10:23, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Tools

I have been tinkering with the Tools for this project. I hope I am not breaking anything . . . In the tool box, under Tools|Announcements|Article Requests I have changed the link. It went to the Canada project. Instead I have created an article for listing articles wanted about BC. It is at Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/Article requests. I made the mistake of creating a category, but you can't put articles that don't exist yet in a category, so this looks like a better way to go. Being bold here, hope I am not messing things up. KenWalker | Talk 02:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Begun map collection/directory in my sandbox

Just now I finished the first batch of NASA Virtual Earth images in the form of a link-directory on my sandbox page at British Columbia and Pacific Northwest History Map Resources. The Map Resources page will also be a place I'll assemble other map and map-image (like sat photos) that can be used in Wiki, i.e. all will be public domain as these NASA images. A few of the Wikipedians in WikiProject Mountains (including Qyd, who also is in the BC WikiProject, are good mapmakers and there are others I've run into in the course of various articles who have provided maplinks or inserted images supplanting my own fudgy maps - see Monashee Mountains, for example, which uses one of these NASA images as its base (could be brightened, but we'll deal with that). A bunch of the pictures are neat in their own right, but because typically they're taken in clear weather, even if they're of forest fires (many are) there are areas which can be cut-and-copied to separate images for illustrative/mapping purposes. When you visit that page, feel free to comment on any of the images as I have (check out the one mentioning Meszah Peak in its notes, and also the Tagish Lake one, which is a very frozen view of what Yukoners prosaically call the Southern Lakes (Atlin, Taku Arm, Tagish and Teslin Lakes; you can see the cracks in the ice). Most shots tend to have snow cover on the ranges, but not all; good to illustrate some things, not for others; some have scattered cloud - mackerel sky and cirrus streaks - but it's a good collection. I'll be adding other maps in the next few days, and feel free to add sections for other maps and links, and thumbnails if you wish.

The bigger sandbox is BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum & Resources which also has a sub-sandbox at User talk:Skookum1/BC&PacificNorthwestHistory/Resources; the main area right now is a compilation of stuff I've left on talk pages all over Wikidom, and the intent was to migrate a lot of my geographical musings and historical ramblings to this "Forum". Items of my own and links to various historical and other regional resources will also be compiled here over time, or again that's my intent (it's been pretty fallow since I first created it, but I've been...er...busy with too much else....). The second-named sandbox User talk:Skookum1/BC&PacificNorthwestHistory/Resources is meant for transcribing out-of-print materials to be used as reference; not entire works but quotes/selections on different topics (since even out-of-print materials may still be in copyright). Some stuff that's archival/documentary that I know of I'll plunk into WikiSource as applicable, but the idea here is selected material on given topics. All that's there now is selections from a certain book on the subject of Joseph Martin (Canadian politician), but there are other things I've been meaning to hand-transcribe/excerpt - next on Arthur Bunster. The Martin material I will probably migrate to User talk:Skookum1/BC&PacificNorthwestHistory/Resources/BioResources where I've promised someone I'll put the Arthur Bunster stuff (I think it was User:JGGardiner, who may or may not have joined this WikiProject by now). Needless to say, those two are among the most outrageous and colourful characters in BC's history, and so a good place to start.... But pls add material on anyone or anything that can't be quoted directly in an article - except for short bits; this material is provided for reference and study towards the writing of articles; can't remember who took what I put up and augmented the Joseph Martin article, but they did a nice job - but there's even more on him I know of, it's just a question of transcription time. And anything someone else might care to add. Suggest that, if you use one of these sources, or something's interesting enough, linking to the sandbox from a talkpage might be a good thing to do, as appropriate.

I may start a sandbox that's a joint forum for BC, Oregon, Eastern Washington, Alaska and Alberta WikiProjects, since there's obviously common/cross-over interests (WikiProjects Washington, Idaho and Montana bit the dust a while back, but their redlinks/templates still show up now and then on various pages, as I've found).

Please add anything you like on any of these pages that could be of use to other Wikipedians interested in history/geography to do with the region. The region defined as including the AK, YT, BC, WA, OR, ID, MT, western AB, northern CA and NV, and maybe far western NWT (as Selwyn Range and Mackenzie Range both need creation as well as maps/illustration). Skookum1 10:58, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

finally made British Columbia Interior!

It was getting to me, because for Interior many links were put to Interior Plateau, but that's not quite right because that's a landform article; this is for the region, including non-plateau areas like the Kootenays and Canyon; hard to cite my descriptions but if you're from here go ahead and quibble and we'll figure out how to cite the various subregions I've described; left open the Demographics, Economy, History, Society, Culture etc for expansion, and will come up with maps etc. This had to get made - if you're reading/editing a BC article and see an "Interior" link please check it and, if the context is appropriate, link it here instead.Skookum1 04:34, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Loose guidelines for ratings

As recommended by someone (Bobanny? KenWalker?) I'm posting here an FYI as to certain guidelines I've been using for giving articles their importance ratings in the WikiProject; these are what I've been using anyway; you don't have to but some kind of consistency would be nice:

• All major First Nations ethno/people articles and major political groups get "high" rating (this is just protocol/respect and "smart politics")
• All 18th-19th Century First Nations leaders get "high" ratings (e.g. Nicola, Maquinna)
• All major fur trade-era, colonial and early provincial figures get "high" ratings (which is why I just gave Peter Skene Ogden a high rating, even though he's an obscurity by modern standards). All Premiers and Lieutenant-Governors and Colonial Governors are necessarily "high", as also certain cabinet ministers. Outside of politics, prominent businesspeople and landowners are a consideration, and "businesspeople" here includes prospectors like Billy Barker and Volcanic Brown (I'll be writing Brown soon) and freightmen like Frank Barnard, lumbermen like Sue Moody or Stamp or Raymur, etc. Major-city mayors also (defining "major city" is a different matter).
• All major mountain groupings and geographic-region articles get "high" ratings. Lesser mountain groupings, i.e. subgroupings (e.g. Pacific Ranges, part of the Coast Mountains) get at least "mid" rating; if they're prominent/high-profile like the Garibaldi Ranges then "high" is more appropriate.

Those are the ones that come to mind at the moment; there are others I know I was ballparking so I'll come back and add them later when I see them again, or when they occur to me post scripti.Skookum1 03:44, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I have assessed quite a few articles and I think I am following the guidelines at Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/Assessment. It would be useful if those who have been assessing and/or writing articles refined the descriptions in that article so that they can be consistently applied, making the categories they produce as useful as possible. My comments are:

• Low importance is only for things that are nearly not worthy of an article at all, things that someone out of province would probably not find useful at all. I think the example in the the assessment scale of the biography project was was a bio article of a political candidate who had not been elected. I put in the example about a local high school but on reflection I would think that the Mid importance scale would be better for the Skytrain example shown. Something on a mountain peak that no one really cares about that is just there because it is on a list or a village without any significant history or interest could fit here.
• Mid Importance. Most articles should be here.
• High Importance. Not too many here, for a selection of key articles.
• Top. Reserved for very few core articles, for very important stuff.

and then, the Quality Scale,

• FA - those with little gold stars . . .
• A see below
• GA See the discussion under Good Article Candidate at Talk:Taylor,_British_Columbia. I read the assessment guide to mean that until an article went through the Wikipedia:Good articles/Candidates process to become WP:GA, it didn't move up to A so that if it wasn't a GA, B was as high as it rose. As you can see from the discussion, that was quickly dispensed with, partly because it seemed a burden but really because the particular article simply deserved an A on the face of it. I have never participated in the GA process, so maybe someone with some experience with it could comment about whether we should use it.
• B see below
• Start Clear enough I think.
• Stub Same, I think we know a stub when we see one.

Overall, the quality descriptions seem to me to need some refinement. The descriptions don't really seem to distinguish between A, B and Start when I read them, they don't really seem distinct. Essentially they are the same descriptions leaving the editor doing the assessment those 3 choices to be used in a subjective way. Maybe that is good enough. Maybe all we need to know is that A is better than B and Start is just past being a Stub. It may not be very consistent, but it does seem simple.

Just my thoughts, things to think about and perhaps discuss. KenWalker | Talk 07:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Model Articles

The banner on the Wikiproject BC page says: "It has been proposed that every WikiProject choose a single article which represents what the Project members hope each article will eventually look like, so that interested onlookers can see where a Project is heading." We couldn't go far wrong with any of these: Pouce Coupe, British Columbia, Chetwynd, British Columbia and Taylor, British Columbia Any other suggestions? KenWalker | Talk 21:46, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Those are really well-done!! Who is it that's focussed on the Peace River Country anyway? I note that there's a string of small town-stubs up there, too - and am still wondering where Baldonnel is, as it's not on BC Basemap...but seems "of a kind" with others in that area (e.g Beryl Prairie)Skookum1 21:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Those would be User:Maclean25's excellent contributions. Dawson Creek is probably the best in the series (and a confirmed FA). Baldonnel is a small hamlet east of Fort St John, near highway 97, at 56°13′02.0″N 120°41′21.4″W. Baldonnel also gives the name to a stratigraphical formation used for gas extraction in the area. --Qyd 22:05, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not listed through "Find Location" on BC Basemap at http://maps.gov.bc.ca, which is why I was asking; but that it's probably a new settlement - ?? - is more than likely why. Not sure how often Basemap is updated, but I know how fast things are growing/changing up in that country, so it's not surprising it hasn't shown up. It's given in its stub as being at over 5000' elevation though, which is what surprised me in the first place about it; there are very few towns in BC of that elevation range, unless it was a typo.Skookum1 22:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

My mistake; not Baldonnel - another one in the same area; I'll have to check my notes; Baldonnel is 2,204 ft; must have been a different one, but in the same series of very-short stubs, whatever it was (at 5000'+).Skookum1 22:25, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I think Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia is the best of them. Baldonnel is an old farming community (1930s), today it is about 4 miles (a couple of hay fields) east of Fort St. John (incredible thing is that FSJ is in Peace River North and Baldonnel is in Peace River South). Beryl Prairie is a farming community in Hudson's Hope and 300 people is a generous population estimate. --maclean 00:29, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Nah, Tumbler Ridge only has one photo, and the coat of arms was lost in the {{coatofarms}} deletion disastre. --Qyd 01:32, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

So, can we pick one of these (or are there other suggestions?), complete the link the box asks for and get rid of the box? I would pick one myself and do it, but I am not clear on just where it is asked that we link our choice of model article.KenWalker | Talk 16:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Done. I used Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Hope I did it right. It is at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory/Geographical/North_America#British_Columbia KenWalker | Talk 07:21, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Ahousat - Ahousaht?

Hey everyone, I was just going through ranking some articles and came along these two (Ahousaht, British Columbia and Ahousat, British Columbia) and I think they're probably about the same place. Now I don't know anything about this place or which one is correct, but I thought maybe someone here might. Buzzfly 23:38, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Ahousat is the officially-gazetted name on BC Basemap, so I'd say we go with that and make the other a redirect/merge (probably both stubs, though, right?). Ahousaht is actually etymologically correct - the name of the people/language that we customarily call Nootka was historically "Aht" and they were the "Aht" people (18th C., with the usage dropping off in the early 19th). In some ways "Aht" is also more practical, as groups such as the Ditidaht and Pacheenaht and a couple of other groups, mostly southeasterly as I recall, are not part of the Nuu-chah-nulth, which is more of a conglomeration of various "Ahts" (Muchalaht, Mowachaht, Kyuquot, Clayoquot/Tla-o-qui-aht - which includes e.g. Opitsaht on Meares Island etc.). So ethnologically Ahousaht is more correct; but on the map it's Ahousat...Skookum1 11:13, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Alright, I've merged Ahousat into Ahousaht and subsequently made Ahousat into a redirect. The article is still a stub, but at least having one page will avoid future confusion. Buzzfly 22:07, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I should have been clearer in my explanation - I thought the proper title should be the "Ahousat" form because it's the legal descriptor and what's on the maps; Ahousaht is ethnologically correct and used by the First Nation even on its webpage; or - not sure here- what takes priority? The spelling on BC govt maps, or that preferred by the First Nation...OK, I suppose the answer is obvious, given precedents elsewhere - St'at'imc, Nuxalk, Secwepemc etc (which even redirect to titles with accents and other characters not present in English) although those are for whole First Nations/ethnic groups, not placenames. There's a few anomalies - Gitksan should, by reading the article, probably be Gitxsan). Not sure what happens with Tla-o-qui-aht vs Clayoquot so typing those here to see what happens link-wise.Skookum1 22:27, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, since we can't really decide for sure on which should be chosen, I think we should leave it for now and if someone strongly feels a need to change it, they can. Also since the First Nations web site itself says Ahousaht I tend to lean a little more towards that one. Buzzfly 22:54, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Clayoquot and Kyuquot - disambigs needed

Well, as it turns out, Clayoquot is a redirect to Tla-o-qui-aht, although because of Clayoquot Sound it would seem to be needing conversion to a disambiguation page. It's worse with Kyuquot, which unless I've disambig'd it goes to a whale named Kyuquot....Skookum1 22:28, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Yup, still about a whale....I've been busy this last couple of hours making Okanagan band stubs and related material, and really have to get out of the house; if someone else would care to do the conversion to disambigs in these cases please do; I'm not sure if there's a "move" or "retitle" that has to be done in order for the changes to be made correctly. Re Kyuquot - Kyuquot, British Columbia, Kyuquot people and Kyuquot Sound for starters....Skookum1 22:34, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Sample ranges and landforms map for Southwestern BC

Please see Trial Range maps for Sousthwestern BC on the WikiProject Mountains talkpage].Skookum1 11:09, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Great idea. Do you have then information needed for Vancouver Island Ranges? KenWalker | Talk 16:42, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Sort of: I don't know the Island's range boundaries as well as I know southern BC's; given a Bivouac membership I might be able to get access to the extensive boundary descriptions that underlay its pages, but right now they're not visible (I had a falling out with the site-owner and don't want to pay for a membership, ie. give him money....); peakbagger.com has some indication by way of its maps, but not creek-by-creek, pass-by-pass descriptions like I'd done in Bivouac (with long lists of lat-long points, all done by hand-parsing from BC Basemap.....for months on end.....seems like a long nightmare now.....;-0 ) Anyway, I could try the Island next I guess; would take some hunting and pecking with Basemap but it might be a nice break from all the FN stubs I've been doing (I like maps....). Were the yellow lines and number-coding OK? Should the colour-line be more transparent or lighter or darker or ?? Next I was thinking of the Ominecas and Cassiars, maybe the Selkirks, but if VI is what you've asked for first I'll do VI; there's a clear image of it from Nasa, also. BTW want to have a look at Talk:Wakash Indians for me?Skookum1 07:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

FN stub hierarchy discussion at Indigenous peoples project

Just to let y'all know there's a discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America about stub-sorting, because of the large inventory of otherwise further-unclassifiable stubs, and also a discussion about new stub categories/hierarchies: First Nations/Native American stub discussion. I don't have a solution, other than making sure that if we find something we can call "start" instead of "stub" we take off the stub, maybe, but the notion of further layers of stubs/stub categories makes a lot of sense; it's just how to divide the pie that doesn't follow suit easily, which is what the discussion was when I found it. So this is a heads-up about the stub-clogging going on, and what the WPIndigenous folks are preparing to do about it; I'd say there's too much overlap between WPBC and WPIndigenous for there not be some deliberate effort at coordination of this kind of stuff....but ME, coordinated????!! Skookum1 07:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Category help?

I have been browsing through the automatically generated page Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/British Columbia articles by quality/1 as an aid to assessing article. In the course of doing that, I updated the assessment at Talk:British Columbia Parliament Buildings. That done, I clicked on the link in the BCproject box on the talk page to add comments about the assessment. That done, I notice that it added the category Category:British Columbia articles with comments to the bottom of the talk page as a red link so I went to that category, which said it didn't exist but yet had some articles listed in it. I added a line at the top referencing the BC wikiproject and added a link to the category under See Also at Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia. So far so good, but the mystery I can't seem to solve is why, when Talk:British Columbia Parliament Buildings shows the category and it is no longer a red link, why doesn't the article show up in the category? KenWalker | Talk 22:50, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Are people "from" Regional Districts?

I noticed a cat change on Won Alexander Cumyow (or is that Alexander Won Cumyow? - both work, can't remember the primary) from "People from British Columbia" to "People from the Fraser Valley Regional District"? I've never thought to identify msyelf as coming from the SLRD or the GVRD of FVRD (my various domiciles), or DARD (which doesn't exist anymore - Dewdney-Alouette), and I don't know of anyone who does. For the rest of this discussion please see Talk:Won Alexander Cumyow‎ as to the utility of any cat hierarchy that says people are from an RD; I contend no one thinks/identifies like that - you're from a town, city, settlement, region (historic/geographic regions, not political-administrative units like RDs); Cumyow's particulars also involve the fact that the town he was born in didn't really exist ten years later, and in his lifetime there was no such thing as the Fraser Valley Regional District. Is anyone here "in charge" of the cat hierarchy and may wish to address/discuss this?Skookum1 19:16, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Bedtime thought on happening to see this: although he was only born there, people with origins in what are now BC ghost towns is a whole list, and an interesting one, in its own right...I'm already planning on a series on ghost towns, to go with the gold rush articles and old steamer services.....hmmmmmmm. G'nite.Skookum1 10:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Priceless. Nope, no one has ever, or is likely ever to identify themselves as coming from an RD! That can be assured and must be avoided on these pages at all costs. Your contention is thankfully correct. --Keefer4 18:18, 26 January 2007 (UTC) (Originally a person "From the Capital Regional District, now residing in the GVRD.)

Historical regions of British Columbia - article/list proposal

This issue, discussed before, has reared its head again in the SFD on those new stubs I mistakenly created "out of school"; the issue is, if we subdivide BC stubs further, it's by sub-region, whatever those regions are. I have a distaste for using Regional Districts for this, because they're mutable over time and lack permanence; boundaries change with governments, and with changes in population/industry and so on; each time a new RD is created, or the whole system is re-decked, Wikipedians would have to go through the whole lot rejigging everything to fit the new map; it's also, for me, a no-go for historical articles, as the RDs were either different then....or, in fact, didn't even exist (not sure when they were first come up with; before that I think rural administration was via the Land District, in the person of the Gold/Land Commissioner (who was usually also the Magistrate, Tax Collector, Indian Agent, and Government Agent all rolled into one, and able to sport all those titles....). Whatever the history of RDs, this brings up again my notion of there being recognizable, if ill-defined, historical regions of British Columbia which remain in use in local parlance, both in media and by the public and also as used in various government agencies/ministries/regions, though variously between different agencies/ministries/regions (the Health Ministry's boundaries in the Interior do not, for instance, coincide with those of the Forests Ministry). So I'm pondering a new article/page that's either Historical regions of British Columbia or List of historical regions of British Columbia. The use "historical regions" here is implicitly geographic, as is our history, and they're generally defined by geography; but "geographic region" is different - like Interior Plateau, Coast Mountains, Columbia Mountains, and so on. Either one of those article titles would work for a listing, with indents for regions-within-regions (the Tulameen within the Similkameen, e.g.) or overlap (the Fraser Canyon is its own region, IMO, but also overlaps with the Cariboo, Thompson and Chilcotin, and depending on where you draw its southern limit, the Lower Mainland); and could also account for common hyphenations like Okanagan-Similkameen or Cariboo-Chilcotin (both of which, as with others, have also been either federal or provincial ridings or both). Thoughts??Skookum1 09:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Re above, pls also see British Columbia stub types on my talk page, and follow the link to the SFD (if it's linked, if it's not, I'll put it in there tomorrow).Skookum1 12:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

The RDs are probably also a little small for convenient splitting (in terms of numbers of articles, that is, not geographically). Given that the RDs are the official sub-divs, it would surely be preferable if the larger regions were those definable in terms of "whole numbers" of RDs aglomerated together, and as Skookum1 says, that they don't overlap, or get too fuzzy or controversial at the edges, insofar as that's possible. Alai 05:24, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, well, like I said, one problem is that RDs are NOT permanent boundaries, in the way that counties are in the US or the UK; and I can think of a large number wher the RD is NOT composed of definable agglomerations of the historical regions; might work in some cases, e.g. the Lillooet Country, not usually considered part of the Cariboo (today) but definitely is part of the Cariboo historically, is in the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District; so the SLRD is actually two historical regions (the Squamish Country, though no one's ever called it that - the Sea-to-Sky Corridor, basically, plus the rest of the Squamish River basin (i.e. the Elaho), plus the traditional Lillooet Country (which includes the Pemberton-Mt Currie-Lillooet River, now part of the Sea-to-Sky Corridor). But that's the opposite to what you're proposing, although I appreciate the suggestion. When I look at the RD maps they're like the LD maps - they don't make much sense in terms of the experienced landscapes, with big straightlines cutting across the map, in defiance of actual regions on-the-ground. I'll go through the RD list, though, and see what DOES work; maybe Central Coast as a region can be compiled out of North Island, Waddington etc RDs; and in the north it might work, e.g. combining Atlin with the Skeena and the Nass, as I think one RD does. I'll see which ones work according to your formula, and which ones don't, and report back here. Please see British Columbia Interior for a listing of "traditional regions" there, which I just made yesterday.Skookum1 05:32, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Erg, that won't work either; I just went through the RD list and added the project tempalte throughout; the Stikine Country is "partitioned" for one thing; the one named "Fraser Valley" doesn't include all of same. Even if we wanted to divide BC into Cosat/Lower Mainland/Interior there's things that won't work....some RDs can be defined as combinations of the traditional regions, though, e.g. Cariboo, although the Thompson part of Thompson-Nicola, and the Lillooet part of Squamish-Lillooet, are technically Cariboo....Okanagan is three, and "Central Kootenay" is not a traditional appelation; it's the West Kootenay without Trail/Castlegar apparently, plus the Boundary Country. But come a change of government ALL Regional District boundaries will be subject to change/rearrangement, and will also be subject to change depending on changes in population; same idea as electoral districts, although not as directly politicized/political in the nature of the changes. The one fixed, immovable system, is the Land Districts; but even new ones of those have been created; the frontier-era ones (about ten-twelve, with small ones on the Island and huge ones on the mainland) is the only system of subdivision I can think of that IS fixed (as the new LDs are subdivisions of the older frontier-era ones).Skookum1 06:06, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

"Permanent" is a long time, and UK and US county boundaries aren't really that, either... If they're as bad as US congressional districts though, I truly feel your pain. But are there regional definitions that have any "official" standing so as to admit a sufficiently crisp definition, that are more stable than the RDs, and that would have any general recognition and acceptance? Any list that lies on "roughly" defined boundaries will be basically impossible for non-BCer to apply, and perhaps might be controversial among the locals. (UK counties can be a bit like that, with some people outraged about counties being abolished and moved.) Alai 06:11, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

An interesting conundrum this region thing. And RD's in no way represent anything in tune to the landform or local perception. Why don't we just use those weather maps they use on TV? Kidding of course, but there has to be some source of official or semi-constant regionalization for BC somewhere. The BC Gov. Tourism model comes to mind, but the regions may be a bit big, no? And the names of the regions are certainly a bit repugnant. It really makes one wish that First Nations territories would be a more promising proposal, but it would never fly with most, and may create controversies all its own. Does this have to be based on some model out there which doesn't exist or is prone to change-- or can we put our own heads together and sensibly propose something ad-hoc? I worked at the provincial gov't phone service for many years until recently, and they had the province divided up into 11 regions, which I always thought were quite clever, and took into account mountains and locals' perception Map I drew based on these zones is here-
Greater Victoria
Greater Vancouver
Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands
Southwest BC (outside Greater Van): Sunshine Coast, Eastern Fraser Valley, Fraser Canyon, Sea to Sky corridor (as far as Pemberton)
Okanagan/Shuswap
Kootenay (east of Grand Forks)
Thompson (Merritt to Blue River)
Cariboo/Chilcotin (west to Anahim Lake, east to Barkerville)
Central Coast, islands andQCI
Northwest (Prince Rupert inland to about Houston, north to Stewart)
Central Interior (Burns Lake to Alberta Border along Hwy.16 corridor)
Peace River
Stikine/Far North (Telegraph Creek, Dease Lake)
I always got the sense the government used these divisions for purposes other than just phone statistics, but I could never verify that. As for a Historical Regions article-- sounds good. It will certainly be content rich. As long as 'heartland' stays out of it, all--Keefer4 18:10, 26 January 2007 (UTC).

Hi; just looked at your map; the core of all these areas is always fine, the tricky part is the overlaps and the borders between them; the Lillooet and Shuswap areas I would tend to think of as alining towards Kamloops rather than to the Cariboo and Okanagan, respectively; I'm also enough of a diehard to insist that the Similkameen is part of the Nicola Country; but of course Keremeos is the overlap point (people from there being much more likely, for instance, to connect to Penticton than to Merritt or Kamloops). It's mostly the southern boundaries that are the complications; the North works pretty much like you've got it, although actual names for these areas are harder to define; "North Coast-Skeena" is descriptive of course, but "North Coast" properly doesn't include the Skeena; and should include the Charlottes; but I see why you've aligned the Charlottes with the Central Coast, culturally-socially speaking, even though their point-of-contact with the outside world is at Prince Rupert....my experience with fishermen and so on has been that the west coast of Vancouver Island is in the same "sphere" as the Central Coast and Charlottes, that is to say, a very different one from the Island Highway Corridor from the CRD to Campbell River..... Anyway, my list of historical regions, these being the names you'll find in the old histories and still in the public consciousness, if only rarely reflected in official names of any kind, is partially done on British Columbia Interior - see [1]. Now it's beautiful day outside, and I'm gonna go play in the sunshine and pretend I'm in Mexico.....later.Skookum1 22:20, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I like the definition of Interior on that page. I'm going to work on sketching some maps based on that and then eventually subdividing them into smaller areas based on discussion here and elsewhere. Would think V. Island would have to stay unified as a sub-region, even if demographic diversity plays it into other areas too, like Central Coast or even upper Sunshine Coast/Powell River area in spots. Note on my map (based on BC gov't zones for phone call statistics) Lillooet area is actually aligned with Cache Creek/Kamloops, although Shuswap is with Okanagan. Re-jig that and QCI with Rupert and we may be on the way to some non-RD organization for communities in BC, which in my mind, is a priority.--Keefer4 04:57, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Just a quick note on that Lillooet Boundary; not just the town, but the west side of the Fraser and over to the south end of Taseko/Chilko Lakes, more or less; that's the Bridge River Country; also historically the Lillooet River Valley (including Pemberton-Mount Currie) is part of the Lillooet Country (and is where the name came from in fact), though Pemberton is now part of "Sea-to-Sky Country" for tourism purposes; but tourism brandings are, I'd say, the last thing we want to use for a regional subdivision system for encyclopedic purposes, no? I could try and make a basic map of my own, similar to the rangemaps I did in some ways; for my list of "countries", even though again there's subareas of some, and some variable boundaries (the format used by this government/First Nations mapping project would be good, because it handles transparent layers, though in a compicated PDF format/design...p.d. though, I think...Skookum1 06:52, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

It does in all aspects except the character of First Nations geography; especially because the Kwawkwaka'wakw and Salishan peoples spill across onto the mainland and other non-Vancouver Island bits of real estate; and the Salishan and Nuu-chah-nulth-aht peoples spill over into Washington (if you include the Makah in the overall grouping, which like the Nitinat and Pacheedaht the Makah generally don't, even though their language is an intelligible dialect-tangent off Nuu-chah-nulth; and the Lummi and Nooksack and other Puget Sound peoples are interconnected, too. So sure, in terms of the post-colonization geography "the Island" exists; but in First Nations geography it's three, and all overlap on areas/land outside the Island. I've puzzled over the Coast/Island thing, too, because of the way Vancouver Island, at least the southeast of it, the Island Highway Corridor, is as apart from the upper and outer Island beyond the "metropolitan" part of it, in the same way and also for the same kind of geographic reasons that confine the Greater Vancouver population to the small built of buildable real estate by the border...what I'm getting at is like the idea that North Coast cities (and by local standards, they are cities though barely villages by European or Asian standards) are somehow more part of "the Intterior", while the Outer Coast, to coin a term or maybe revive one, is a much different place than Rupert, Terrace or Kitimat; Masset and Queen Charlotte City have more in common with Port Hardy or Waglisla/Bella Bella than it does with Rupert, other than where the shopping is, and it being the only way to get out other than by air etc. As I alluded to, or maybe blabbed about, on the adjustment to British Columbia Coast, the Coast/Island, too, is composed of subregions in the same way as the ones in the Interior I've already listed (and should stub some of; right now some go to the rivers, others are only redlinks for now; despite being in use for over a century and a half in some cases, the terms in question never really had precise boundaries; generally "the Similkameen Country" or "the Nicola Country" refer to the river basin, but often it's more than that, as in the Monashees or in the Lillooet, where several rivers and creek/canyon valleys are involved in the form of the region, instead of just being a basin; the southern boundary of the Omineca I'm not sure of at all; I'd think it would be the Stuart River but I've never seen, y'see, a definition; others are more clear like the Kootenays (sort of) or the Okanagan; so long as they don't get fudged into including the Similkameen, Boundary, or Columbia areas; the basic geographic regions almost describe some of these areas, and they also imitate the First Nations boundaries in many areas (e.g. the Okanagan, the Lillooet Country, the Chilcotin); and also, the mining districts, which at one time were near identical wit government agency and judicial districts because of the Gold Commissioner system, which maybe I might even find - ? - some definitions in the course of researching/writing (one-man regional governments, magistrate, coroner, tax collector and license-seller, and sherriff all rolled up into one; mainstay of Interior and non-urban administration right into the mid-20th Century in some areas, though dominant throughout BC even up to the Great War, and much moreso before the railway).

Anyway, just thoughts on the subdivisions of Vancouver Island, on the one hand, and the historical-geographic regions which I obviously believe need to be documented correctly, even though finding consensus on their boundaries might be an issue; I think the "Big Three Regions" model is classic in BC, but in pondering it it's never been clear where the Coast is aligned to, as Greater Victoria is almost the mirror image (with Vancouver as the evil twin) of the Lower Mainland, culture-space wise, and Nanaimo's increasingly an expansion of the emerging "Gulf of Georgia Metropolis" model of economic growth; anyway the point is that in the same way the North isn't really part of the Interior, Victoria's really not a part of the Coast in the same way that Vancouver isn't (even though of course in the purely georaphic sense they in fact are...as anyone from the Interior would comment as noted; there are flexible meanings to "the Coast", as also with "First Nations"; as with the sub-Interior terms, Central Interior, Southern Interior etc, depending on context....)Skookum1 06:06, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Just a disclaimer I should add-- Generally when I'm speaking to this subject, it's outside the First Nations ethno-linguistic territories and pertaining to the geographic categorization of communities historically since colonialization-- again mostly unoffically as you alluded to. Some overlap there with the First Nations geography indeed, but reconciliation on a geographic level for categorization here would be difficult. Victoria should be considered its own entity in the sub-region scheme of things for sure! I see your point on the coastal/island communities, however one could argue that there are Regional Centres to these areas such as Prince Rupert-- or perhaps some communities on the east coast of Van. Isl which would include them for this purpose in unifying the 'North Coast' and 'Vancouver Island (outside of Victoria)' sub-regions. Nanaimo's a tricky one, though. Just photo'd my giant BC wall map and now working on tentative sub-regional borders for discussion based within the Big Three. --Keefer4 06:33, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Title form for regional districts

The categories and articles in Category:Regional districts of British Columbia have a variety of different forms...

• Regional District of XXX
• Regional Distrcit of XXX, British Columbia
• XXX Regional District
• XXX Regional District, British Columbia

Anyone have any preference as to which one is adopted uniformly? - TheMightyQuill 02:30, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

They refer to themselves differently (ie: 'GVRD', 'Cariboo Regional District' versus 'Regional District of Nanaimo', and 'Regional District of East Kootenay'), and they each have their own acronyms, which are used by staff and government, in particular. Uniformity isn't possible without betraying this to some degree, unfortunately. --Keefer4 03:25, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Use whatever name is on the letterhead of their official website. As for the ", British Columbia" part, I would get rid of it. I can understand why it is used but "xxRD, BC" is not a widely used term and it is unnecessarily long (are there any other "Regional Districts" in the world?). (For other guidance, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places)) --maclean 05:15, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

To Do List

We now have more than 1200 nearly 1300 articles tagged as being within the scope of this project and all have been categorized by importance and class. There are probably many that need some tuning of the importance/class assessments and there are others yet to add to the project but at least the first run at this effort is complete. The question is: What's next? I have tried to answer that with the ToDo section added to the project page. It is just a first attempt. Feel free to add, delete or reorganize the list or to comment/discuss it here. KenWalker | Talk 22:20, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

"Recent Additions" listing and thoughts on cats

I don't suppose there's anyone in the project who knows how to write a bot? I'm wondering if there's a way to generate a page, linked off of the main project page, which would be [[Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/Recent Additions). This would be all newly-created articles which bear the template, and find those with BC cats - new articles by non-project members - and identify them so we can add the template and whatever else is needed (stubs, cats, format) - and everyone please also add the BCproject template, rated or not (technically you're not supposed to rate your own articles, but for expediency some of us have been doing so...), whenever you create any article, even and especially a stub - plus any newly-templated ones, as I'm finding things all the time that should have the BC template and a BC cat or two added, often off of anthro and other articles lately, and some bios (people who wouldn't show up on the List of British Columbians type or Category:British Columbia people and its subcats, but who figure in Category:History of British Columbia or, as often again with anthropologists, linguists, etc. in Category:First Nations. I'd recommend, in fact, a cat Category:First Nations studies in British Columbia or something to that effect; under I suppose Category:First Nations studies nationally). The Category:Languages of Canada category should have a subcat Category:Languages of British Columbia because of the fact 60% of Canada's aboriginal languages are in BC. There's a few other category splits that have occurred to me in the course of the last months so when they, er, occur to me again, I'll come back and add them here for consideration/discussion, or action.

Back to the Recent Additions idea - this is so we can see what others among us have recently contributed, rather than having a manual "New Articles" listing; and also see, given category-hunts by the bot, any new articles which may have a BC-related cat. Many of these - the unidentified ones - in all topic-areas, by the way, I've often found by working through links on other BC pages (again, especially with the anthro stuff, but often with smalltown and local-knowledge bits/stubs here and there, and by recent additions on similar pages that give a new link. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Skookum1 (talk • contribs) 23:24, 28 January 2007 (UTC).beat me to it, Hagermanbot - didn't even have time to reopen the page to sign.;-) Skookum1 23:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Notes on First Nations templates

See Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/Article requests in the "List Templates" section; these are notes written in reference to the issues of why the templates named are needed:. ...because of variant organizational parameters and lots of isolated bands or tiny nations not part of any of the tribal councils, or who can be classified in both (the Pavilions, who are both Secwepemc and St'at'imc, or Douglas, which is both In-SHUCK-ch and Sto:lo, but culturally St'at'imc, and only formerly part of the Lillooet Tribal Council aka St'at'imc Nation; there are three Nlaka'pamux Tribal Councils, overlapping a bit, and the Lytton First Nation, one of the largest Nlaka'pamux groups, is not a member of any of the three; and one overlaps with the Okanagan Nation Alliance; in that case and in certain others including the Ktunaxa Kinbasket Tribal Council, the tribal council/national organization is unified over the whole ethnic/tribal group, as also with the Council of the Haida Nation and the Nisga'a and certain others (there is no Tsimshian Tribal Council at present, although there was and it'll still need an article as something that had existed). Skookum1

So all the FN templates need redoing, although the priority one is {{First Nations on Vancouver Island}}. Even with the broader "peoples" templates there are a few still outside larger classifications; the Haisla-Heiltsuk-Owekeeno would be one template by themselves, but even "Northern Wakashan peoples" as a stab at a title won't quite work because "Northern Wakashan" includes Kwak'wala/Kwakwaka'wakw both linguistically and ethnologically - "Southern Wakashan" is the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht and Makah; Nuu-chah-nulth-aht is somewhat preferable because Ditidaht and Pacheedaht peoples do not use the term Nuu-chah-nulth because of its organizational assocations; "Aht" is the earliest and most correct term; Nuu-chah-nulth also means something to the effect of "peoples along the outer coast; and Pacheena and Nitinat aren't on the outer coast, but the inner...); anyway, in the case of such as the Okanagan, Haida and Ktunaxa peoples the template could use the name of the Tribal Council, but for consistency maybe should follow the name format of the other templates; in "peoples" templates, sub-headings for each tribal council, and then a sub-heading for "independent bands" is probably suitable for readablity/clarity. Skookum1

Another reason for all this is, as OldManRivers is around to remind us, is that the tribal council formulation is not as appropriate as a reference to the peoples in their own terms; the tribal councils are expressions of the Indian Act. They exist as articles, but they shouldn't be the definining paramater; it happens to be a useful concept for sorting out the FN templates, because of the different "organizational" nature of the aboriginal perspective on British Columbia. It's different with munis and such, because they were all legislated into existence from the top drawer to the bottom, as it were; there's no exceptions or exclusions from the RDs, for instance (except for Atlin and area, that is). For the FN templates to be useful, and not exclusionary of the smaller bands/peoples, and also respectful towards sentiments concerning "Indian Act governments" (see Talk:First Nations Government (Canada) - which needs retitling IMO - and the Talk:Kwakwaka'wakw, Talk:Kwakiutl and Talk:Sḵwxwú7mesh for more on this). Skookum1

And, in parting, do we have to stick with that blue-and-plum-red theme for the templates, or could something more tasteful-looking be come up with? Esp. for the FN ones, in fact....but also for parks, history etc. Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon has various history templates, maybe their main cities ones, which use a heavy brown (too much, but at least there's a shot at colour variations, and even logos from what I remember of the template)Skookum1 23:49, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikiproject Vancouver or B.C. or Both?

If an Article has a Vancouver Project tag should it have a B.C. Project tag as well? I mean anything in Vancouver is obviousally dealing with B.C. Correct? Buzzfly 00:27, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

As one who has tagged many articles, including quite a few that are already part of the Vancouver project, I hope that marking an article as being within the scope of both projects makes sense. I have considered the question and came to the conclusion that marking with both does no harm. This would mean that everything in the Vancouver project would be part of the BC project as well although somethings, say Talk:SkyTrain (Vancouver) for instance, might be assessed as a higher priority for Vancouver than it is for BC. Overlap is not a problem, for example, with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains or Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography, having both groups working on an article about a person or a mountain in BC should only make it better. These projects are really just a way or organizing work within the scope of a project. I can't see how it would help to say the scope should be articles about BC except for sub projects, that would make it kind of like swiss cheese. I have had a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide and don't find an answer there. They say questions can be asked at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council. I did have a look at various New York articles, and even though there are various state, city and sub city projects, they don't seem to flag their articles at all. But in Florida they do, eg Talk:Miami-Dade County, Florida is part of Florida and Miami projects. Looking at Talk:University of Miami I see several different projects. Others, such as Talk:South Florida metropolitan area and Talk:The Miami Herald do the same. I see Talk:Chicago is both a Chicago project and an Illinois project. The Talk:Merle Reskin Theatre is both. There is a directory of projects at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory that can be drilled down to find other examples. Some pretty interesting stuff there actually. So there are quite a few examples where both levels of the project are assigned to an article. I think this is worth discussing further and would be glad to hear what others think about this question, but those are my views. KenWalker | Talk 03:04, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Agree with KenWalker. I have mostly been tagging BC-related articles, but will use both if relevant and untagged. Normally if a Vancouver article is already tagged with the Vancouver Project, I tend not to add a BC, though. But it depends. Nothing set in stone with this, it seems. As long as it's on one of the lists. --Keefer4 16:49, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Just occured to me there is another side to this. Following what I have said, every BC article (and every Vancouver article) would then also get a Canada project template . . . . KenWalker | Talk 05:15, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

It would be good to be able to use one template for multiple projects, where, for example, 'city = Vancouver' would add a VAn icon to the tag. If someone knows how to do this kind of thing ... Bobanny 06:07, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Kootenay break-up into E/W

I've never bothered (yet) trying to deal with this, but the Kootenay article, where all of West Kootenay, East Kootenay and Kootenays redirect to, needs breaking up; the West Kootenay is such a different region from the East Kootenay, and has its own subregions to boot (esp. the Slocan but also the "Central Kootenay", and I've heard Lardeau-Beaton referred to as the "North Kootenay", which I suppose (?) would include Nakusp (which I always think of as "Arrow Lakes", even though that's singular now). This is also in respect to the stuff in the Historical Regions of British Columbia section farther above, where I just replied to Keefer4's comments there; "discreet geographical regions" should be recognized/dealt with; today the Similkameen and Boundary and Monashee areas often get lumped in with the Okanagan, as also sometimes the Shuswap and even Kamloops; even defining the usual Coast-Lower Mainland/Island/Interior dichotomy gets tricky - is it instead, for instance, Lower Mainland/Island & Coast/Interior? And where does the North Coast fit in, as in terms of economic-social regions it's more like the Interior.....Anyway, mostly just posting about the needed breakup/splitting of the "Kootenay" article; it's only "mid" priority but significant enough to need emphasis here.Skookum1 22:27, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Kootenays does not redirect to Kootenay. I would recommend expanding Kootenays until such time as there is enough material to branch off. - TheMightyQuill 06:52, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Interesting; either things have changed since I first was around Wikipedia's BC stuff, a long time ago, and I haven't been around those parts since (the article I mean); it may be that I only ever searched for West Kootenay and East Kootenay. Hmm. East Kootenay redirects to Kootenays, but West Kootenay goes to the electoral district by that name; my bad, as I did the electoral districts, or the historical ones like this ones; the West Kootenay one should be redone as the region article, and West Kootenay (electoral district) becomes the electoral article, as per the names format on the Elections/Politicians wikiproject; I suspect there's East Kootenay (electoral district); nope, there were "Kootenay East" and others. BTW there's still no article yet on Slocan or The Slocan (as in "the Cariboo", "the Shuswap", as per my historical regions stuff; but I've never been clear exactly is the Slocan is properly part of the Kootenay; I've always thought of it that way, but I'm not from around there; and at the same time I consider the Boundary Country to not be part of the West Kootenay, although that's in pure-historical terms I guess as per the way things are now, not how they used to be...at one time the Boundary was considered part of the Similkameen, of all things (tied together by the Dewdney Trail in a similar way to the Sea-to-Sky bunch and Hwy 99). It's in this tuff where the issue of overlaps between regions gets elaborate; and my mistake about those redirects; I thought that's how it was, but perhaps it was only the East Kootenay redirect; and I do remember a singular Kootenay page somewhere. Skookum1 07:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Parks WikiProject BC tagged checklist

Just tagged everything from TWeedsmuir until end of alphabet FYI. I will continue working backwards through alphabet from Tweedsmuir later, if anyone is feeling like a bot and want to start from beginning of alphabet at Category:Provincial Parks of British Columbia . Most I have been tagging as 'Low' with several notables Tweedsmuir, Wells Gray etc as Mid priorty--Keefer4 05:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I'll add that some of the upper alphabet ones are done already, I don't know if maybe someone was working on alphabetically tagging from letter A at some earlier time? Too tired of seeing them to check now :)--Keefer4 05:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Update: Did a bunch more. Now everything M-Z is tagged with WIkiBC, Map req and Photo Req. FYI--Keefer4 01:50, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

D, E and F are done KenWalker | Talk 08:20, 31 January 2007 (UTC)A B C G H I J K and L are now done as well. I think that may make them a done deal. KenWalker | Talk 09:01, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

List of ghost towns in British Columbia

I just started this, and there's lots more entries and I didn't try to keep track of current populations (some show '0' when they're not); hoping for thoughts on format; think maybe the latlong coordinates can get ditched, and the lifespan can be integrated into the era/peak population info; "company town yes/no" column could also make ref to if somethhing was purely a land spec but nothing ever got built (Lajoie and Tipella City, among many...and you thought real estate hype was purely a modern phenomenon...). Anyway, please look over and tweak as neede; source for most of that list so far/as it is, other than memory, is T.W. Paterson's Vol 2 of his Ghost Towns and Mining Camps books from Heritage House.Skookum1 20:55, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Old Photos, maps

I've seen a smattering of discussion here and there relating to old BC archival photo usage on wikipedia. But I'm just wondering if someone who is 'in the know' could provide a brief summary of what is acceptable use which doesn't violate copyright laws re: BC Archives, City Archives and the like. I'm looking for specific info on BC, so please don't refer me to a general Wiki guidelines page... Meanwhile, i'll try to find the answer on whatever thread I saw the discussion, and elsewhere. Much thanks.--Keefer4 22:19, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

There aren't any special copyright laws for BC. Any Canadian work subject to crown copyright that was first published 50 years ago is PD. For things that aren't crown copyright: photographs created before 1949; and anything else whose creator died more than 50 years ago. - TheMightyQuill 22:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I should have remembered it was Fed matter since I referred people to the Fed copyright office in the course my last job.. how the memory fades. But that's good info to know, thx TMQ.--Keefer4 22:54, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Hopefully KenWalker will weigh in here, as I know he was going to look over the legal technicalities (he's a lawyer) when I told him about the 50year thing that Bobanny found out. If someone = all of us = gives me the go-ahead, there's all kinds of pics I can use to flesh out certain articles and will make possible various others (e.g. Great Fire of New Westminster, selected pics of which are currently in the external links on New Westminster, British Columbia; and any number of old railway/ghost town/pioneer portraits...); I suggest maybe we might need someonething like NASA's free licence {tl:PD-NASA}} or whatever it is, to indicate that these photos are in the public domain (no matter what BC Archives or VPL would like to pretend otherwise). This could revolutionize historical publishing in BC, by the way.....Skookum1 00:54, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

It's right here Template:PD-Canada. I don't know why the BC Archives are all possessive, since the Canadian archives have high quality PD images online without their name superimposed on the side. - TheMightyQuill 02:25, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

When asked to join in such a discussion, it would be handy to be able to say IANAL, but that ain't so. Even so, this is entirely outside of my practice areas and I have not looked into it beyond information that has been given to me around here. The PD-Canada template seems to answer it and is what I will use when I need it. That is not a legal advice, just what I have gathered around Wikipedia. Sorry I can't be more help than that. KenWalker | Talk 03:46, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Ken; I didn't mean to "out" you; it's on your userpage, though, no? Copyright, from what I know as a photographer, is just the right to sue. The law won't take someone down for you unless you call upon it to. The risks of precedents set by a case challenging Canadian copyright law by a British Columbia government agency can have only one outcome: something that no BC politician or bureaucrat can overrule, which is if these images are in the public domain there should not be a charge for them, except for custom-printed copies and rights over the negatives themselves and in fact the claim of copyright was perhaps knowingly misleading - a "bluff", which is all it really is. Where this has its roots in BC is the "user pays" ethic, the idea that public users of public resources (including data/photos/archives) should be the ones to bear part of the administrative costs; the idea that nothing can be for free, even if you don't have the actual right to sell it....to charge a fee for something that's already free is done all the time (think bottled water), and that's what this claim of copyright at the Archives and VPL seems to be; asking you to pay to use something that, as an image independent of owned prints and negatives, is of sufficient age and, private or public interest in its subject, anyone has the right to reproduce it (unless it is covered by copyright laws in another jurisdiction, which is how you get around all the messy stuff with cinema....). It's almost enough of a contentious issue that, if time were to be found in Question Period at the Ledge, a question as to why a government agency is gouging users (volunteer historian-editor users) when the pictures are of the public interest, and about the history of the province? Hmm, nope, not gonna happen, but I think the legal risks of BCArch actually exercising its nonexistent rights to public-domain material would probably be explained to them by their lawyers...Skookum1 07:06, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

• The BC situation is complicated with the BC Archives which falsely claims copyrights over all their holdings, even 110-year-old photos which are obviously in the public domain: [2] --maclean 06:34, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I see that possessive banner disclaimer on the side of those BC Arch. images says that they may be used for Research Purposes. My interpretation of that and what Wikipedia is, leads me to conclude that they're fine here.--Keefer4 07:21, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

While for that particular photo the copyright has long since expired, the assertion (although ultra vires) of "For Research Purposes" is essentially the same as "Non-commercial use only" which is not compatible with Wikipedia's use of GNU Free Documentation License. The GFDL requires that the work can (theoretically) be used for commercial (ie. non-research use) purposes. Best to use Library and Archives Canada which is much more forthcoming with their holdings. --maclean 21:20, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Except that Library and Archives Canada is very limited in terms of its BC collection, like so many other national-level cultural and heritage agencies and private bodies. The resolution of this I don't think we have clearly yet, although Bobanny's observations are in line with Keefer4's - and the truth os that its use of their negative, or a copy-print bought from them, that they have the right to charge for, as owners of the negs; many of the images in question were also postcards and similar materials, so clearly in the public domain; they don't have much of an online map collection, unfortunately.Skookum1 01:01, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with that interpretation. The "for research purposes" means that the image is being made available for purposes that don't require paying BCA a permission fee. If I was publishing a "History of BC" book and used a 100 year old image, I would have to pay a permission fee, regardless of whether the copyright had expired. If I refused to pay the fee, they just wouldn't give me access to the original to copy it, simply because they want their cut. If I just downloaded the low-rez image from the online database and used it for my for-profit book venture, there's no legal basis for them to take action against me as far as the copyright act goes because it's public domain. If I'm over-looking something, I can't see it. I emailed them for clarification and will pass any new info along, but they have a huge collection of great historical BC photos the feds don't have, and it appears to be little more than them trying to maximize the permission fees they receive. Bobanny 00:28, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Ooops, I emailed them too a few days ago. Last time I emailed them, offering to donate something, it took like 3 weeks for them to respond. Since we're calling their bluff on copyright, I'm guessing they won't respond at all. - TheMightyQuill 02:26, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I was going to as well. But didn't yet. Glad I didn't, after hearing you two had already!--Keefer4 03:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Response from BC Archives

"As you will have seen from the disclaimer on the BC Archives website, it is the page "content" that is copyrighted and is supplied only for Research not the images. There is no contradiction with Canadian Copyright legislation in protecting the intellectual property of the Royal BC Museum Corporation (e.g. Its website and individual pages on the website).

Copyright of individual images/records depicted on the web pages is another matter entirely. The BC Archives does not hold copyright for all of the records in its holdings. In the case of some records, a third party may hold copyright, or there may be a donor restriction on the use of the item. Under Canadian copyright law, the BC Archives cannot release copies of these records or images without written permission from the copyright holder and/or the donor.

The records or images held in the collections of the Royal BC Museum and the BC Archives are part of the Royal BC Museum Corporation. They are made available on our website and via in-person on-site visits and (subject to any existing copyright or donor restrictions) can be used for private or research purposes. Copies can be purchased for these purposes. However, it is our policy that for use in commercial or public applications, users must request permission in advance.

We hold our collections in trust for the citizens of the province, and thus do not charge licensing or use fees for private or research purposes. For revenue-producing projects or projects that request wide, often unrestricted uses (even if they are named applications agreed upon by both parties), our policy is to require use fees. In addition, as part of the permissions process a contractual arrangement is created with defined terms under which projects are approved for use. Such agreements include requirements for individual citations as per guidelines, timelines for approved use etc.

When reviewing applications we are mindful of maintaining a balance between what we view as fair use and exploitation.

The responsibility of maintaining (preserving, restoring, making available) the collections for future generations is a costly enterprise. Revenues from license and use fees are channeled back into the collections to ensure that they are indeed protected from deterioration and so that they can be utilized by researchers and others in the future. This is the reason we charge licensing or use fees.

I believe that our Licensing Agent has had discussions with some of the Wikipedia volunteers you mention concerning the terms under which they wish to use images and has not felt comfortable that our concerns would be addressed or upheld. I would suggest that they or you contact her again to restate your position, or change the terms under which you request the images. Negotiation is a fundamental core of establishing use fees and agreements for use.

I hope that this helps to answer your questions regarding our policy on usage of image material."

Quite the spin. I feel like I'm in the same place as I was when I wrote the message. She must be a lawyer or something. I plan to continue using their PD photos and cropping out their stupid copyright warning. TheMightyQuill 01:05, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Yikes. I agree. They can control access and usage of the physical images in their collection, but that's contract law, not copyright, and has nothing to do with lifting PD images off their website. It's still very misleading of them to imply that public domain images on their website are copyrighted along with the rest of the website contents, and embedding the copyright in the image itself. But at least it's on the border and can just be cropped off, unlike some museum collections. Bobanny 01:22, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

An interesting interpretation in the letter, which explicitly expresses very little direction IMO, except the fact they -- understandably-- want the fees.--Keefer4 03:57, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Towns vs Ghost towns cats

Just wondering if at least a mention of the ghost town cat, and also of the unincorporated settlements cats, to be mentioned in the same way that village, town, municipality and city are; some ghost towns remain incorporated, though none so enduringly as Greenwood's city status, but many were also company towns which would not otherwise receive a listing; maybe those could be a subcat of the unincorporated settlements (actually they were "privately incorporated settlements" by comparison) that would be the company towns, which once outnumbered the incorporations if I recall. Anyway, while there's no way, it seems, that a ghost town should be a ghost town subcat; the ghost town cat is a subcat of Category:Ghost towns of Canada and Category:Communities in British Columbia, but it should be noted that some in this category may also be present in the others. Not often, but often enough; part of the point of my table which I guess isn't labelled adequately yet, is that "present status" can indicate somewhere that's not just settled, but also incorporated as in the case of a few, or are part of a municipality (e.g. Barnet, which is now part of Burnaby), New Brighton/Hastings, now part of Vancouver etc); some of these are alive/revivals, as with Moodyville, which as a commercial neighbourhood adopted the name of the original housing which was quite a few blocks east, at the bottom of Queens Boulevard); Lillooet is now a District, for decades was a Village, and didn't even get that until the 20th Century (place was Government Agent/Gold Commissioner-run, more or less, before there was a muni or any of the band offices). Anyway, special non-incorporated cats like ghost towns and unincorporated settlements should probably be mentioned on Category talk:Towns in British Columbia and similar cat pages. Thoughts, perhaps about subcat issues, too? Also where the crossover between First Nations IRs and other, i.e. non-IR communities in any category;they're obviously not - by definition - unincorporated, being incorporated, at least as legal/non-constitutional objects (they can't be constitutional, as the Indian Act ultimately can't be, but that's a long and very separate discussion....) under federal laws/administration unlike municipalities, which are creatures of the province; but as far as social landscape goes, they can be tantamount to the same thing, depending on population etc; and rural towns often are both in many areas; if someone looks up Chase they're as likely to mean the Chase IR and the village (?) of Chase, although the non-IR name of the rancherie/reserves is Squilax (whatever the correct modern Secwepemctsin spelling is); but Squilax is also a placename that got carried back into English; similarlly Seton Portage and Shalalth are both, despite distinct communities within the local microlandscape, necessarily sharing the same article; D'Arcy-N'quatqua and all examples mentioned are ghost towns as well....some bigger places like Kaslo and other survivor-towns - Clinton, say, opr Ashcroft - are also ghost towns in a way, though not generally thought of as that way; I included Spences Bridge not because it's in the sources, but because it's clearly not what it was thirty-forty years ago; there are a lot new ghost towns in BC; those will require different research/citation than the simple list drawn from Paterson and Ramsey that I used to build the list, other than those I know from my local Lillooet sources and certain other materials....Skookum1 08:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Werdnabot to archive this Talk Page?

Werdna has created a dandy bot that archives talk pages automatically in a fairly intelligent way. The instructions for using it look pretty straightforward. It helped me set up mine to look at some examples at Category:Discussion pages automatically archived by Werdnabot. I have just set it up at my own talk page. Assuming it works, (won't know for sure until the next cycle) what would people working on this project think about using it here?--KenWalker | Talk 03:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Unless there are objections, I will set this up. I think with a page like this, a longer time period before a section is archived makes sense. 30 days would mean that only sections that have sat for a month without additional comment would get archived. A separate archive for each month would eventually make many small archives. That could be ok, better than a whole year in each archive. Somewhere in between means it would require manual handling which would take all of the fun out of this. --KenWalker | Talk 16:32, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

First draft of List of ships in British Columbia

Might be better titled List of ships in the history of British Columbia; see notes on talk page.Skookum1 04:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't get it. Do you want me to run down to the nearest marina and add the names of all the boats there? What kind of notability requirements are you using? - TheMightyQuill 04:58, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Incorporating 'Notable Ships', or 'Notable historic ships' would be preferable I think. I like the idea, but the current title is flamebait for the abundant deletionists waiting to pounce. --Keefer4 04:06, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Reply to both: yeah, notability's an issue; and I don't mean including the Queen's yacht here just because she visited the city in it; the list so far is just stuff from the earliest days, all of it notable, or most of it; the idea is the fleets of historical steamers on the lakes, Inside Passage, etc. as well as the notable shipwrecks along the coast (or on the lakes, for that matter); then there's things like Bowser's Navy (the two CC subs in WWI, for their short-lived duration as BC goverment property vs imperial/federal fleet). So yeah, what are the criteria? There have to be some, I'm unsure how to proceed on that account; it was simpler with the Royal Navy list, but this list should definitely exist. I was puzzling over table headings earlier too - "ship/name, captain, type (steamer, schooner, galleon etc), route/area, tonnage, year built, year wrecked/decomm etc. Thoughts?Skookum1 04:18, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

AfD RG Properties

RG Properties, an article tagged as part of WikiProject British Columbia is being considered for deletion. --KenWalker | Talk 05:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

It certainly needs Wikification and de-advertising, and that long list of entertainment people it's had indirect connections to is superfluous; but this looks to be an important modern company with enough notable involvements - the Victoria hockey team, for example - that it shouldn't be deleted. I'll look at it more later but I think it more needs editing than deletion.Skookum1 04:20, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Banana Island Provincial Park

Banana Island Provincial Park has been proposed for Speedy Deletion. --KenWalker | Talk 16:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It survived the speedy delete proposal, and I expanded it. Note stub-makers: a stub needs to mention notability and shouldn't be just a single sentence. All this one said was that it's a park in BC. Bobanny 17:48, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Most provincial park stubs are like that, so maybe that's an "article request" kind of thing that all of us should have a look at; i.e. "adopt a park" or two and make sure they're all non-deletable. Oh, by the way what was the Southern Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park and then the South Chilcotin Provincial Park now is ONLY the Spruce Lake Protected Area, so there's a retitling issue over there to deal with, parks-wise; I was surprised not to see Churn Creek Protected Area not done yet, not even as a stub, so I created it; there are lots of ecological preserve and protected area articles that need creation, I'd say (List of British Columbia Provincial Parks or whatever the list page has 'em); I'll assign myself the Empire Valley Ranch Ecological Preserve but maybe people could "adopt" one from their own areas?Skookum1 19:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It should be obvious that if an area is a designated provincial park that it's a worthy topic. Alot of those "speedy delete" zealots don't seem to distinguish between a notable subject and a stub. But yeah, it looks like someone just went through the park list and created pages for the sole purpose of making them blue links without attempting to create proper stubs, ie, with enough info to be useful.Bobanny 22:20, 26 February 2007 (UTC) Just looked at the list - damn, there's a lot. 830. Bobanny 22:24, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, and note that it's only the parks list which is exhaustive; not all protected areas are in the system, and only a few ecological preserves; and none, or few, or First Nations-designated ecological/spiritual preserve areas like the one on the map Oldmanrivers linked or posted a while back somewhere. The ecological preserves all seem notable in the long run - or else they wouldn't be ecological preserves. I'd say what's needed to get them done properly is somebody involved in the scientific/eco-org end of things who might take an interest in the Wiki corpus, the way linguists and ethnologists have done for FN languages and peoples (esp. Terry Harris and Bill Poser); it's too fine-grained for casual write-ups; much in the same way that User:Black Tusk is focussing on his volcanic landforms subjectry, the same will be needed. I know where various ecological preserves are and sometimes something about their history; but I don't know their ecologies well enough to even begin, and I'd venture that what's on-line about them is "scientifically thick" and in need of condensation for Wiki usage; cf. the ext links on Black Dome Mountain, about its particular(ly strange) vulcanology and fossilized springs; Empire Valley's a bit of a pet one, partly because it's so beautiful and kind of legendary in the Lillooet Country/Fraser Canyon, like the Diamond S (the big spectacular ranch-benchlands around Pavilion); just redlinked that ranchlink, and have in the back of my mind a List of historic ranches in British Columbia - the Coldstream, the Douglas Lake, Empire Valley, Ashcroft Manor, the Basque, the Diamond S, the Gang, various ones around Lillooet and Kamloops and 100 Mile and in the higher Chilcotin (than the Gang, that is) - Hungry Valley, Sky Ranch, and others - and so on; it's a category, and a historical subject, all in its own right.Skookum1 02:10, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Indigenous Articles Template

Hello folks! I talked to User:Skookum1 about this, and was also recommended to bring the idea here. I wanted to create some consistency among the Indigenous articles for both political institutions and ethnic/people pages. What I've mostly worked on so far is Squamish Nation and Skwxwu7mesh. The structure I used is:

For culture and ethnic pages. (Examples being Haida, Skwxwu7mesh, Sto;lo, Kwakwaka'wakw)

• History
• Culture
  • Pre-contact
  • Post-contact
• Language
• Villages

For Indian Act political affiliation (Examples being any __________ First Nation)

• History
• Elected Councilors (and/or Chiefs)
• Reserves
• Treaty Claims
• Resource and Development

There are also the actual government institutions such as Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, and other Tribal Councils or tribal affiliations, which are political institutions representing a varying degree of native peoples from different groups. Idea's? Suggestions? OldManRivers 09:52, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Wakash Indians - delete

Just put the delete tag on this; it's one of a few that are cribs from the Catholic Encyclopedia....I seem to recall they even had one for "Siwash Indians". Anyway, it's mostly CE material, and not very good other than some stats; so I put the delete tag on it; no AFD page yet but when it's there all please note.Skookum1 00:54, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

About the above, the admin who dropped by to check out the "prod" tag has suggested that it be turned into a redirect page, or disambig page I guess; I'll get to that; but I stopped by today about this:

Asked about Beautiful British Columbia photos

Just to let everyone know the situation with BC mag photos; so posting both my request and the response gotten here:

Hi. This is an unusual and perhaps bold request, but I am writing because the old Beautiful British Columbia magazine was part of my upbringing and many of its images are still in my mind as associated with certain places, and there were articles on areas and places that are forgotten about nowadays. I am currently an over-dedicated "Wikipedian" and with othes am fleshing out a full BC history and geography section of Wikipedia, or at least its basic structure. To this end, we are always looking for illustrative photos - but under Wikipedia rules, they must be copyright-expired, or copyright-released, so as to be in the public domain, or something else called GDFL (which is compliated to explain but a search for WP:GDFL at Wikipedia.org should bring up its explanation).

So, I'm wondering as to the status of your photo files, i.e. if the negs/prints for all your older issues are still extant, or even if the half-screenings are scannable; I'm certainly not suggesting a blanket release of materials but in the interests of public education/edification, I hope you may consider some means of providing public viewing, at least, of some of the older image materials, which were such classics of BC scenic photography; obscure stuff like barns or little towns in the Monashees, or somewhere like Alkali Lake, and sometimes even good illustrative shots of plants, e.g. the arbutus trees, which Irembmer a special on; the fruit-industry issues were always brilliant; or pictures of areas like McBride/the Robson Valley, Muncho Lake, Dease Lake - which you jsut can't find anywhere else! I should add I got a lot of my first interest in BC history from your pages.

Anyway, just asking, and also passing on compliments for an always-good mag, and also fond memories of those from the '50s and '60s that I grew up on....one suggestion: a book-compendium of some of those older shots....

Best regards

Skookum1

REPLY

British Columbia Magazine (and, formerly, Beautiful British Columbia) only purchases one-time publication rights for the photographs and articles we print. Copyright reverts back to the contributor soon after our issues are lifted from newsstands. So, unfortunately, we cannot grant you permission to use any of the images shown on our pages--you'd have to communicate directly with the individual photographers.

I suggest that you go through back issues, and make a list of images you'd most like to post on wikipedia, noting the issue number and date, page number, and photographer's name for each. Then, if you can't find e-mail addresses or other contact information for those photographers yourself, I can try to help you out by forwarding your request on to the appropriate people, provided they're still in our database, and there isn't too many.

Sorry I can't be of greater assistance. Best of luck with the project,

Shanna Baker

--

Editorial Department

British Columbia Magazine

Tel: 250-356-5860

Fax: 250-356-5896

www.bcmag.ca

Oh well; but at least we know where to go if we see something we like; and we might be able to sort out the conflicts between US and Canadian copyright laws; I think copyright expiry for images that have appeared in magazines might be different than the usual 100-year rule in the US (vs. our 50-year rule).Skookum1 22:40, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Help with Wikicode/letter style

Hi; just about to create an article for Xá:ytem, aka Hatzic Rock, the archaeological site/museum near Mission; but it should properly have an underline-X so I tried "Xá:ytem" but that didn't work; what's the Wikicode for an underlined-letter?Skookum1 19:32, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, but it worked there, i.e. in regular Wiki text.Skookum1

trying again - [[Xá:ytem]] in case that works for some reason (since it worked in regular non-linked text...Skookum1 20:55, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, that's weird; the presence of the 'u'-html code blocks the wikilink squarebrackets from working as a link....Skookum1 20:56, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

It might not be possible in the article title, such as titles that should technically be lower case. But you might try the Wikipedia:Help desk. Bobanny 20:13, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I guess you mean like xwemelch'stn, although in this case the Sto:lo agency governing the site uses a capitalized "X", albeit underlined which is what I'm trying to emulate....but I guess the help desk is the place to go.Skookum1 20:53, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Got an answer; FYI if interested:

Try

{{wrongtitle|title=Correct title}}

and see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions). Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review!

from the help page.Skookum1 06:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Guess I'll try it; point is I guess is that in Canadian English such spellings are now expected and increasingly commonplace, and a standard for their use has already been established here with the diacritically-complete forms of St'at'imc, Sto:lo, Skwxwu7mesh, Nuxalk, Shishalh etc (though we've been cheating with the use of 7's or ?'s for the glottal stop...), because of their increasingly official stature. I'd venture that the presence of such inflected spellings in English is a unique feature of Canadian English; American and British English may add an accent here or an umlaut there; but an underline-X, a subscript-k/superscript-underline w? Nope, only in Canadian English, and so be it; I'll try the Xa:ytem page in the morning; I meant to get at the Scowlitz Mounds but had to take the book back to the library today and hadn't yet dug out its contents into Wiki form; there's some online stuff on them available I think, but the Daphne Sleigh book People of the Harrison for anyone interested in Fraser Valley or First Nations history; I may eventually get my own copy as it has connections with my existing collection of Pemberton-Bridge River-Lillooet-Fraser Canyon stuff....I made a judgement call, too, because Xa:ytem is one of those words often spelled XA:YTEM (with all diacriticals) in regular text; the uncapitalied version is also used, but there's no way I figure such a full-caps title would have survived a new-file admin's eye; and since the un-fullcaps version exists, might as well use it.Skookum1 06:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Article name query - Volcanic Brown

Volcanic Brown will definitely be the main direct, and the most likely search. If I remember right he was Robert Allan Brown and, following the model I used on Margaret Lally "Ma" Murray, I'm thinking Robert Allan "Volcanic" Brown is the proper main article title; finally getting around to this, albeit it'll still be only "start", but a very rich story and FA candidate eventually, because of content possibilities and the range of involvement in BC mining adventures this guy was into. Also btw "Sunset Brown" and "Crazy Brown" and founder of Volcanic City, purported only white man to ever know the location of Slumach's Lost Creek goldmine, and died looking to find it again (as did most who looked for it). This guy was everywhere in BC mining history....Skookum1 21:25, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Burrard Peninsula

This article was bugging me for over a year...I posted a couple of questions and comments on the talk page, and received no reply. In the meantime, the WP BC and WP Vancouver templates were added to the talk page. Finally, I expanded and comprehensively rewrote the article today. I took the liberty of uprating the article's class for WP BC from "Stub" to "Start," but I suppose that's presumptuous of me and not good form...but it's clearly no longer a stub. Does someone care to review it? -Sewing 21:05, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Looks great. I added some more wikilinks and assessed it for WikiVan. The difference between stub and start class is more about whether it has the basic components of an article (subheadings, sources, photos, etc.) than about quality of the content, and so I see no problem in self-assessments in this regard. Bobanny 22:02, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Fabulous BC gov map resource

I knew ther was a central link for this somewhere, although I've seen bits and pieces of it, and stuff using the same technology on native-language distribution/'territories' (not territories, as they point out on that page, which once I'll find again I'll return here to link also, as it's quite useful and in a way kinda beautiful in an applied-techie-using-government-boringness-makes-good kind of way; the main link is in a quote from an old email I got while researching the Tulameen, British Columbia article; the writer is one of the refs on that page, the guy who owns GeoQwest Adventures (no it's not a spam link on that page; it's the best ref I found!):

One great site that is loaded with technical stuff regarding mining is done by the BC Geological survey called the Mapplace. During the 1980-90�s when field work budgets were axed, the geologists became computer wienies. Almost everything know to mining has been put in thei GIS style site.

Although a bit technical, the user can search any showing recorded to the government (+95%). A decent guideline is that the more text there is on a showing, the more significant the history. If you ignore a lot of the geology, mineral and technical stuff, some good, factual history hides in the text. http://webmap.em.gov.bc.ca/mapplace/minpot/bcgs.cfm

The critical box to click is the �Mineral Inventory Layers� . It will give you a map of BC with every showing, producer, past producer, prospect, etc�all 12389 of them. Window into your area of interest and click on a showing.

He's meaning in reference to the take on various mines or other things that didn't quite get to be mines; gonna be useful for history as well as geology/placename/georaphy articles in some cases. But there's a lot more than mining-fun you can have with this; infrareds of the NASA landsats are available, as are the orthometric imaging (sat radar, looks like a bw photo) and two different sets of contour intervals (not self-generating trim materials), all Indian Reserve boundariers, mineral potentials areas, and HEAPS MORE just go through all the toggles on the left; and fun interposing things to see what's in where; got some revealing stuff when I compared mineral potentials to what else I know around Bralorne-D'Arcy and re the "South Chilcotin"; seem to be some funny errors like a native community where I know for SURE there isn't one (high in the Shulaps Range...maybe a hunting camp acknowledged somehow or someone lives up there part time, but I've never heard of it - I know all the hippies down at the bottom below there....). Anyway, the nice thing with these maps is they don't automatically have copyright display on them, and since it's public documentation that's being covered I'm not sure any of the generated maps could be copyrightedd even if they wanted to. But it's easier than that; there's as I said no copyright tag on these images as there are on Basemap/LRDWC images and other government stuff - so you can pull screen-captures here, edit the material, change the colours and re-text it maybe; gonna be good for e.g. road and river/lake outlines. Also of BIG interest are the LRMP boundaries, which switch 'em on and have a good look at how much sense they make as regional breakdowns; the reason is their evolution was influenced by the bioregionalists who are big on using cohesive watershed areas and identifiable social regions as boundaries/defining factors. Also neat to do was to turn on all the Indian reserves/communities, then look at the whole province to get an idea of distribution; or, in the far North, to realize how few there are. It's all scaleable, looks eminently usable, maps made from it using the NASA infrared (reduce saturation to near-grey might work well) or just the basic outlines - park boundaries!! municipal boundaries!! - and because you've done and reworked the base public domain data by altering it, their copyright doesn't apply even IF they recognized, say, the particular vectors/rasters of a river outline.....and they won't be looking, but I'm sure I'm right about changing-data making new work; it applies in other fields, too.....anyway, thought I'd better make a heads-up; I gotta get back to housecleaning but am tempted to play with MapPlace. Maybe I'll make some sample maps off it later....all needing maps for their articles please check out this system,, if you have any requests please let me know, or we'll start a list and maybe Qyd or someone else might want to play with it too.Skookum1 00:06, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Nice find. I admit when I saw "fabulous" in the section heading (I equated it with "fantastic" for whatever reason) I assumed it was a bunch of Fantasy Garden maps or something ;) Kidding aside, I remember hearing of this 'map place' while at my previous job, but didn't realize it offered so much. I'm sure it will serve the project well. On an unrelated topic, I just disambigged 'Shuswap', which was being directed (by User:Bearcat) not unreasonably to Secwepemc. But with the electoral district, and the regional usage had to create it. If there's anything to add/remove from it, feel free. Later.Keefer4 | Talk 00:25, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

The model there are the Squamish, Lillooet, Chilcotin, Okanagan, Nanaimo, Comox and Nootka pages, all of which are dabs for the English-spelled versions of native people-names so there's your precdent, although I don't think bearcat will quibble.Skookum1 21:39, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorry; Nootka should be a disambig page but still redirecs to Nuu-chah-nulth; I don't have time right now.....later maybe.Skookum1 21:40, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

And "fantastic" used to mean horrifying, nightmarish....lanuage is funny enit? Anyway, I went to the main mapplace directory looking for a First Nations languages map made with it - really cool, as you'll see when I find it, way nicer looking than the main mapplace thing, shows what can be done with the technology when a designer works with it - and it has a number of interesting local and specialized maps listed; here's the link so check it out; I'll add the Hat Creek link right now, but gotta get out and enjoy that sunshine with some tunes under the open sky.....later.Skookum1 22:13, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh, there's no Hat Creek, British Columbia article, only Hat Creek in Cailfornia....work to do.....and I think there's got to be two articles, too, Hat Creek (British Columbia) for the tributary of the Bonaparte River, minor though it is (as it's historically notable) and Hat Creek, British Columbia as a placename, usually today associated with the heritage ranch at 97 and 99 although the name includes the valley from there up to Upper Hat Creek, which Lillooeters tend to mean when they say Hat Creek; the "new" one is, old-style, Carquile, or was for a while Cottonwood (Heritage or Guest?) Ranch, aka Lower Hat Creek. Upper Hat Creek more or less begins at the big bend in 99 just at the SE outlet of Marble Canyon; Upper Hat Creek is considered to be in the Lillooet Country, while Lower Hat Creek is obviously Thompson-Bonaparte, and from that end Upper Hat Creek is considered part of that. I'm wondering also if there should be a separate third article on the Hat Creek coal development proposal or whatever the right name would be. the Hat Creek minerals MapPlace link is here since I didn't have a place to put it on the Hat Creek page. Not without a lot of work, and as I said it's sunny outside....Skookum1 22:18, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Gastown/Old Harbour map, 1929

This is part of a much larger map I trimmed so as to only show all the wharves from Coal Harbour to beyond the Ballantyne Pier, with Keefer/the Viaduct (as it was then) just above the bottom of the frame. Major civic features are shown well and which companies used each dock, e.g. GN, CP, Union Steamships, BC steamships and the rowing and yacht clubs are also shown as well as the BCER terminal; I could have included Great Northern and Canadian National / Pacific Central Station but I'm meaning here to illustrate the Port, and Gastown/Strathcona/Japantown/Chinatown areas, also the DE I guess, and West Hastings and so on; especially appropriate because this was also West Hastings' heyday perhaps....and you'll note City Hall and the Library are still at Main & Hastings. Although a 1929 map I think this one is useful for illustrating Gastown, also maybe History of Vancouver with - any suggestions for colour of the boundary? I've upped the dimensions of this article so the wharf names are readable easily at full scale, hut it's made it a bit fuzzy; if you think too fuzzy let me know and I'll reduce it. I'm going to use {{Canada-pd}} as it's over 50 years old and I believe was pd in the first place, as brochure/tourism material, and there's no evidence it was ever copyrighted in the US (meaning the 100 year rule might/would apply). but dang for now I can't remember where I found it, mabye one of the BCER maps. Oh, here's the image, with no thumbnail, just at fullsize (800px high, 1800 wide)Skookum1 07:39, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Help with/helping busy new BC contributor

And she's a good thing; User:CindyBo has done some amazing work on Barnard's Express, Steamboats of the Upper Fraser River in British Columbia, and now Steamboats of the Skeena River and, atlhough this is just from articles-enountered via the watchlist and not looking at her user contributions, Cataline 'Jean Caux' which I'm here to ask y'all to look at the "name issue" section on its talk page; Cataline was his nickname, Jean Caux his (alleged) real name, but obviously that title/name format's not appropriate but I'm not sure what is; he's most famous as Cataline, and because of the Roman orator of that name the article would have to be Cataline (muleteer) or some such. See comments on Talk:Cataline 'Jean Caux' so I don't just repeat myself here, and also pls see Talk:Steamboats of the Upper Fraser River in British Columbia and Talk:Steamboats of the Skeena River and this on my talkpage. I've invited Cindy to the WikiProject but figured I needed to heads-up others here because of the topic/name/content issues posed by her prodigious productivity....I've been indicating bits of tidy here and there, e.g. references format, stylistic things, but dont' have time to keep p with her, so please folks give her a hand if you can. And some applause too; her articles are really well done.....but obviously there's some name-fixes in need of resolution.Skookum1 07:44, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

A round of applause is certainly due for the contributions so far. Truly impressive. Welcome to Wikiproject BC, and I look forward to volunteering together.--Keefer | Talk 08:03, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

regions/districts

My pet how-to issue again; I was just looking at some of the redlinks for Similkameen District and others like it and pondering one article-topic issue that such a name presents. In ordinary usage today, it's synonymous with the Similkameen Country and it's 50-50 as to which one is used more historically and currently; "the Similkameen" is by far the most common usage. I've already created articles for Boundary District and Chilcotin District and others (Chilcotin Country might hve been better because of the problem I'm leading up to...) and in some cases such as Cariboo it doesn't seem necessary (Cariboo District is prob a redirect, but the name is similar to the Chilcotin District, no one says it that's way, it's kinda formal even). So there's one historical technicality to deal with when "District" is used, though - this was commonly the contraction for Mining District and/or Land District. In the earliest days the two were synonymous, but the role of the Mining Commissioners, usually styled Gold Commissioner but also Mines Commissioner or Mining Commissioner (more "Commissioner of the XXX Mining District"), became important in the way things were run, so the Cassiar, Stikine, Similkameen, Boundary, and so on were e.g. the Similkameen Mining District, but always referred to as the Similkameen District - because there was no risk of this being confused with a Land District because everyone around then knew that it was part of the Yale Land District, Similkameen Subdivision (or whatever that subdivision is called). Point of all this is, when I create a Similkameen District article, it's occurred to me that it has two separate contexts, and possibly needs two separate articles; one in the sense of the Similkameen Country, "the Similkameen", the other in the sense of the Similkameen Mining District. Geographically they're near the same if not identical but one is an administrative entity and had officers and offices etc; in other areas e.g. Lillooet there's the general district/"Country" sense, the mines/gold district and the Land District, any one of which can be meant by "the Lillooet District". Standard usages/contexts on certain names seem more fixe - Stikine District seems pretty well the Mining District, "the Stikine Country" the entire region, although if you didn't know about the mining district they would seem to be the same. There wasn't a Stikine Land District back then I think; maybe there is now?? Anyway, these name issues have concerned me because in colloquial usage as well as historical contexts there's no standard across regions; i.e. Country vs District, and vs. those cases where it's not necessary, and where even "the" can be dropped, as with Cariboo. This also all in context of possible region categories (which can overlap but seem obvious enough): Category:Cariboo, Category:Chilcotin, Category:Lillooet, Category:Okanagan, Category:East/West Kootenay, Category:Similkameen Category:etc although the "etc" gets complicated and some longer and hyphenated forms might be necessary: Category:Boundary Country, Category:Peace River Block, Category:Fraser Canyon, Category:Omineca-New Caledonia (?), Category:Skeena-Bulkley, Category:Thompson Country, Category:Shuswap, Category:Nicola Country; . Also to note that breaking down Category:Interior of British Columbia into Northern, Southern, Central isn't that obvious, and all those overlap.....Skookum1 22:08, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

None of these are meant to override RD cats; they are complementary to them and are meant rather as subcats of the Interior and Coast and Island categories. titles in some cases are complicated and may need tweaking: Category:Lillooet would tend to imply the town nowadays so Category:Lillooet Country may need to be the form (NB it includes Pemberton-Port Douglas technically and also the Bridge River; "Bridge River-Lillooet" sounds nice but it's only vintage 1930s, courtesy the Murrays, although the Bridge River is part of the Lillooet Country in ethnographic sense as well as in local sensibility anyway, just as the Tulameen is part of the Similkameen. That area I'll tidy up some before I'm done/gone. BTW in some cases I've dab'd these District or Country names to the river, e.g. you may find [[Similkameen River|Similkameen Country]]; those will need fixing once a "District" article is started; in Similkameen's case I'll go with that, and also in others where there's a coincident name for a mining district, otherwise will try to go with most common usage. This is for stubs; the cats are just fielded here as ideas/proposals.Skookum1 22:15, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. Thanks for helping try to explain the regional category scheme, which is already underway with the parents: Category:Coast of British Columbia (with Category:Vancouver Island,Category:Gulf Islands, and Category:Queen Charlotte Islands as the subcats so far), and Category:Interior of British Columbia. Since we don't have an article on the 'North', haven't done Category:Northern British Columbia yet., and may not if consensus is that it could be split into subs Category:Northern Interior of British Columbia and Category:North Coast and others like the Peace country. The parents will be subdivided into the various regions (as verifiable as we can get them), and as Skookum alluded, there will be (and in fact already have been as in the case of Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, British Columbia, overlaps). These encompass history, geography, people, parks &etc.--Keefer | Talk 22:21, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Big example of overlap is Thompson Country, which most of is or has also been seen as part of the Cariboo, including even Lytton although to me that's a bit extreme; and exactly where the boundary between the Okanagan and Shuswap is, I couldn't tell ya. Also Fraser Canyon overlaps with others, and parts of the Lillooet Country are in the Cariboo (only the Fraser Canyon parts). It's not like the landscape was laid out by logicians ;-); BTW Category:Lower Mainland and Category:Sunshine Coast seem like no-brainers; also a Central Coast cat might suffice for including Northern Vancouver Island, where there'd be overlaps with the Vancouver Island category anyway, and when necessary with the North Coast of British Columbia cat. As for Central Interior, well, that's anybody's guess; could mean Osoyoos, could mean Williams Lake, some people might use it for PG; to me PG is where the Northern Interior starts, although maybe Quesnel's maybe more the boundary point; but I've heard other people refer to Williams Lake as the Central Interior; in historical terms it seems to be Williams Lake-Kamloops, although the low-latitude perspective of most settlement/awareness here also means people use it to mean Kelowna......Skookum1 22:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Which is why I think it's best we stay away from "Northern Interior", "Southern Interior" if we can and use the historical/geographic/watershed-defined districts, which are fixed and not quite so indefinable, even if they do overlap. I don't think of Cassiar or Atlin or the Stikine as the Northern Interior, e.g. but either as themselves or as ?? "the Far North of BC" maybe? And the Peace Country's always been referred to as being the Interior, which certainly economically/culturally it is, but it's really on the Prairies enit? And also on the border of the Far North proper (what else is "Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway" if not that?) If theres' a Category:Canadian Prairies we'd better keep an eye out for that; should towns and rivers and lakes in the Rockies all get Category:Rocky Mountains do you think (or Category:Canadian Rockies perhaps it is).Skookum1 22:34, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Similar issues exist if we did Category:Coast Mountains or Category:Selkirk Mountains e.g. - those would tend to imply mountain range/name articles, but we also use them as regional terms here....kind of un-wiki I guess but it's the same issue with, say, Banff or Jasper being in the Category:Canadian Rockies; by default then Revelstoke should be in an equivalent range-category should it exist (which it may never). There's a Category:Cascade Range which has all kinds of non-mountain range/mountain articles in it, though, so Category:Coast Mountains and also a subcat of the Cascades Category:Canadian Cascades perhaps; this implies further geographic categories though, all superfluous and overlapping on others, e.g. Category:Thompson Plateau would be the same, albeit in a different hierarchy, than Category:Nicola Country or Category:Similkameen District or Category:Similkameen or, if someone thinks it's better Category:Similkameen Country; confusion with RDs, mining districts and other administrative-name districts maybe should be avoided - ??Skookum1 22:40, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I've done a little somewhat hierarchial mark-up on my User:Keefer4/todo.--Keefer | Talk 22:44, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

It just occurred to me that we have a name-issue with Stikine District, which is the official name currently for the non-RD running NW from there to Atlin; thing is most of the traditional Stikine Country/District is in the Skeena RD, whatever it's called, and a chunk is even in the one to the east; anyway Stikine Country solves that problem, other than the parallel/differing usages being needed mention on both pages; The Stikine Country/District and Stikine Mining District were to my knowledge synonymous, unless the latter was laid out on a non-watershed basis.Skookum1 00:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Cariboo Gold Rush

Despite its relative length this page is mostly a crib; I remember adding and changing things from what I originally found, which was pretty much a long stub as I recall; but I wrote it around information from memory and didn't have sources at hand; it doesn't have dates of discovery, bios/refs to Williams and Barker and so many others important to the history of the rush, details of the take and so on; it needs details, and some loving attention (CindyBo are you listening? ;-)); other Cariboo towns like "Old" Quesnel/Quesnellemouthe and lesser-known ones like Bullion, Richfield, Antler and Quesnel Forks also need good articles; all already listed in the ghost towns area of article requests and on thta list. Cariboo strikes me as ultra-important, and I confess to similar shortcomings on Fraser Canyon Gold Rush which I should have spent more time on instead of winging it without specifics, e.g. George Moore or somebody Moore who found the strike at Hill's Bar, the events there, and the unfolding of events could be covered better, likewise the dollar take (gold rush articles all should have that, if it's known) and more figures and as in all cases, maps of some kind (again my bad but I've only got two hands and one computer).Skookum1 00:10, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

copyright-free map-making jackpot

see this for "all your map-making needs". Government-generated maps, no copyright, build what you need. This is "MapPlace Lite" - you can also make maps with the larger-format/scale MapPlace which has even more variables/toggles. Unlike Basemap, where images generated are copyrighted, these aren't; they're meant to be used in corporate reports etc........fair game.Skookum1 01:04, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Historical MLAs and cabinet minister subcats; request

Not wanting to make these myself, as wary of trodding on hierarchy-watchers as with other mistakes I've made with cats and such before. Please see Category talk:British Columbia MLAs.Skookum1 18:46, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Gold Commissioner cats issue

Please see Category talk:Gold Commissioners.Skookum1 08:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard

Just a note to someone who likes to dig up stuff, the Royal Navy Dockyard in Esquimalt has quite the story behind it, and it's also important as the first "megaproject" (using outside money, unlike the Cariboo Road or Douglas Road which had to paid out of colonial revenues) and had been lobbied for by Victoria and the local RN brass; when the RN finally budgeted/mandated the shipyard it was a cause for general rejoicing in the colonial administration because of the steady stream of imperial spending pouring into the locality; the politicking over getting the shipyard is why the article will b be interesting, and its budgets and projects until 1905, when the Canadian command took over the base, are a whole story in themselves. There was also a Esquimalt Royal Navy Hospital that might deserve an article, and also the Esquimalt RN base itself (not sure what to title it; it has an official name); the Dockyard was an addition to it, so the base itself still needs an article.Skookum1 18:09, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Megaprojects in British Columbia

Or List of megaprojects in British Columbia; suffice to say there's a megaproject article, but the special context of these undertakings in BC, where monumental projects have always been seen as a way to generate growth, and politicians have a sense of over-reach and self-aggrandizement leading to the "monumentalism" of many megaprojects (esp. Bennett Dam and its powerhouse, which are an archetype of the form). Megaproject spending/thinking has been inbuilt in the province since the building of thte Cariboo Road, but of course reached its zenith under WAC's regime, and that of his son (hence Expo, Skytrain, Canada Place, BC Place et al).Skookum1 18:12, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Some early-era megaprojects, in case someone decides to start this article:

• Douglas Road
• Old Cariboo Road
• Cariboo Road
• Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard
• Lillooet Cattle Trail
• Pacific Great Eastern Railway (which IMO needs to be split off from British Columbia Railway/Canadian National Railway

Skookum1 18:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC) The list should be a sortable table, with columns indicating budget and overruns, politicians responsible, and a column for contractors and owners (when not government-owned, e.g. the Old Cariboo Road or the PGE; if in some cases if a private venture (the PGE). The CPR and GTP and CNR seem also like no-brainers....Skookum1 18:16, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Colonial Executive Council(s) - article title issue

Please see Talk:Legislative Council of British Columbia which I just created the article for using the Akriggs.Skookum1 18:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

British Columbia naming convention

How would people feel about changing the naming convention for BC article placenames so that the name stands alone except in cases where disambiguation is necessary, in which case British Columbia would be added in parentheses? For example, Nanaimo instead of Nanaimo, British Columbia and Yale (British Columbia) instead of Yale, British Columbia. This just seems cleaner to me - more parsimonious, more precise (since the actual name of Yale is Yale, not Yale, British Columbia), and it would improve standardization (with the Vancouver naming convention) for BC articles. There's probably a better place to discuss a formal change to naming conventions, but I just wanted to see what others think. bobanny 19:15, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

As far as I understand it, the use of the comma for "town" names, vs the use of parantheses for purely geographic names, e.g. lakes, rivers, mountains, canyons etc., is a Wikipedia naming standard, and there are reasons it's very necessary in BC; most obviously examples such as:

• Campbell River, British Columbia (the town) vs. Campbell River (British Columbia) (the river)
• Christina Lake, British Columbia vs Christina Lake (British Columbia)
• Blue River, British Columbia vs Blue River (British Columbia)
• Williams Lake, British Columbia vs Williams Lake (British Columbia) (not that the actual puddle needs an article)
• Tatla Lake, Rivers Inlet, Powell River, Adams Lake, and so on provide further examples.
• Yale as you probably know is a disambiguation page to start with, so the BC town can't be "Yale", and its postal address is "Yale, British Columbia".Skookum1 19:34, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

• I still prefer Vancouver, British Columbia over Vancouver. But I will accept change. --maclean 22:09, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

I haven't actually read the reasoning for the naming conventions, but I know it's not exactly the same everywhere. I'm also not hung up on changing this (or necessarily motivated to follow through). At first glance though, it's not obvious just from the title what "Campbell River, British Columbia" and "Campbell River (British Columbia)" signify, and whatever the convention, some disambiguation would be necessary, however it's worded. Yale actually redirects to the university, with Yale (disambiguation) as a separate page. It should probably be like that for some other BC articles that currently go to a disambig page. (Nanaimo going to the town, with a dab note on the top to Nanaimo (disambiguation) for example. I dunno, the ", British Columbia" just looks excessive to me. For letters going out of the country, Yale's postal address would be "Yale, British Columbia, Canada," but we drop the Canada part for domestic letters. Just some thoughts... bobanny 23:42, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, thing is "BC" is mostly only known to people from here and the rest of Canada, and "those Americans who know" and people from abraod who've been here or have friends here or whatever. In Spanish "BC" refers to "Baja California", for instance. True, there may be no other Campbell River in which case that can be the geographic article; it wouldn't be within wiki guidelines for that to be a town; Campbell River (town) doesn't look as "normal" as Campbell River, British Columbia. But as re Yale (dismabiguation) which I'd forgotten about, on my other note I mentioned the idea of a List of British Columbia-specific disambiguation pages, i.e. pages that could only be from here; only occasionally might there be an overlap with WA, ID, MT or AK (e.g. Okanagan or Kootenay). The idea of such a list is more for purposes of project members, so maybe it can be a branch/split off the project page; the idea is to keep track of them; there's also the issue that if they are BC specific, should they get the WPBC template so we nkow where they are; and while some of them are going to be similar to [[Yale (disambiguation), e.g. Okanagan (disambiguation) and Kootenay (disambiguation, Lillooet (disambiguation), Como (disambiguation (if it is; forgotten - maybe [[Comox[] is the disambig...) and certain others; whereas Cariboo (and maybe Comox as noted, is standalone; hence the need for a list; or a category maybe? there's quite a large number of htem when you stop to think about it.....Skookum1 05:28, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

And we really can't help it if our province name isn't as short as Quebec's or Canada's or Ohio's; I guess Newfoundland and Labrador is longer; can't think of any other North American jurisdiction that's as cumbersome except for Northwest Territories maybe.Skookum1 05:30, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

How about Saint-Pierre, Saint Pierre and Miquelon as cumbersome? The naming conventions in for BC come from Wikipedia:Naming conventions (settlements)#Canada. --maclean 06:26, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

California's got some pretty long ones (seeing Los Angeles, California is one of the things that made me think about this - it's unlikely to be confused with anywhere else). Etiwanda, Rancho Cucamonga, California is a pretty long title too.

On the disambiguation pages, how about creating Category:British Columbia disambiguation pages, which could be a sub-category of Category:Non-article British Columbia pages. It might be more effective than creating a list (a lot of those were strays; i just created a cat for all of the lists, so if you make a new list, tag it "class=list" with the BC template). bobanny 11:38, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

BC-specific disambiguation pages

Might as well start that list (see previous posts), as it's pretty mechanical to build; some I'll input and check as they may be town pages etc:

• Comox
• Chilliwack
• Lillooet
• Squamish
• Chilcotin
• Cariboo (disambiguation)
  • Cariboo
  • Cariboo (electoral district)
  • Cariboo (provincial electoral district)
  • Cariboo—Chilcotin - that's the riding; Cariboo-Chilcotin is also a region designation of course; they "go together" like Kamloops-Shuswap
  • Cariboo Mountains
  • Cariboo Lake
  • Cariboo River
  • any org/gov names using "Cariboo" etc. in all other cases of course...
• Atlin
• Omineca
  • Omineca Gold Rush
  • Omineca River
  • [[Omineca Country[[
  • Prince George-Omineca
  • etc
• Skeena
• Nass
• Stikine - slight spillover with AK; also with Alsek
• Vancouver (disambiguation)
• New Westminster (disambiguation)
• Okanagan (disambiguation - spillover with WA but dominantly BC; can have WPWA template too
• Kootenay (disambiguation - ditto; NB not the case with e.g. Columbia/Columbia disambiguation) or Columbia River (disambiguation) if that maybe eists; likewise Alberni which will bring up the Spanish (Italian?) terms/names; likewise Quadra etc. likewise Nicola is not BC-specific
• Peace River (disambiguation) - will be needed, I think; also Alberta of course
• Nechako (disambiguation)
• Quesnel (disambiguation)
  • Quesnel, British Columbia
  • Quesnel River
  • Quesnel Lake
  • Quesnel Forks
  • Quesnellemouthe, British Columbia - Old Quesnel on the west bank of the Fraser
  • any org/gov names using "Quesnel"
• Kamloops (dismabiguation)
• Shuswap (disambiguation)
• Sunshine Coast (disambiguation)
• Fraser Valley (disambiguation) - could include Lower Fraser Valley (disambiguation) and Upper Fraser Valley (disambiguation); Fraser is obviously not BC specific, nor Thompson;
• perhaps Haida (disambiguation), Tsimshian (dismabiguation), Kwakiutl (disambiguation), etc may be needed, simply bvcause of multkple organization names as well as Tsimshian-this or Tsimshian that, i.e. language, people etc; these are all "See also" items but still they qualify for disambigs because of the number of entries that will result

Can't think of any others just now, feel free to add them; if they're redlinked above I guess they need creation, or will at some point I'd think.Skookum1 06:05, 22 April 2007 (UTC) More:

• Coquitlam (disambiguation) - unless Coquitlam already is
• Coquihalla (disambiguation) - unless Coquihalla already is
  • Coquihalla River
  • Coquihalla Pass
  • Coquihalla Highway (obviously a redirect; text can say "often called simply 'the Coquihalla'"
  • Coquihalla Railway = redirect to Southern mainline of the CPR, or rather Kettle Valley Railway but I'm not sure that should be the case, i.e. the KVR is a specific line/sector, and was a historical corporate name too I'm pretty sure.
• Keremeos - more than you'd realize; that may go to the town in which case Krremeos (disambiguation)
• Similkameen - already a disambiguation page I'm pretty sure (think I made it)
• Slocan or Slocan (disambiguation)

Indented items added above on redlinked items above are articles not yet written which would qualify the page (.e. once there's three; Chilliwack currently has only two items, btw, the town and the band; and I wasn't sure if the band should get WPBC; do we add SPBC to current bio pages; we do for historical ones...Skookum1 06:40, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

About redirect pages etc

I was reading the above and thinking of disambiguations and redirects and looked back at the Cataline 'Jean Caux' thing I got going on. Why does Cataline redirect to Catiline anyway? Was Catiline known as Cataline by someone? If not, could that redirect be deleted and my page moved and be simply called Cataline? Jean Caux and Jean Jacques Caux could be redirected to there then, yes? No?CindyBo 08:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Cataline was a very important figure in Roman history; our guy is a bump on the landscape by comparison; the original Latin name is Catalinus I think but the conventional English form, ie. the most recogniable form, of a well-known name/famous figure, is the standard form; and it's who our Jean Caus got his nickname named after I'd bet, too....why would be an interesting question to answer. BTW I was just about to drop by your talkpage so will refer yoo to the mention of the Yale (sternwheeler I think but not sure), which is mentioend in the francis Jones Barnard article. I'd always thought it was the Umatilla that was first to the Yale docks, but Kerr would know (publ. 1890); the Umatilla was one of the first few anyway; it's the Yale's blowing-up that makes it fairly high on the priority list; but then so are dozens of othes (i.e. disastrous endings). Be nice to see articles on the Moyie and Minto and Fintry..I"ll try and do stubs for the ones on the Douglas Road/Lakes Route lakes before I'm gone....Skookum1 08:50, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I have quite a bit of stuff around here on all those sternwheelers, I seem to remember the Suprise was one of the first around Yale too, maybe. Moyie and Sicamous will be easy to research, because they're so famous anyway, both of them are still around down there aren't they? As tourist attractions of some sort? Anyway, I just thought the whole Cataline/Catiline thing was more of a spelling thing than not, as only one page(other than ours here and the talk page on Cataline 'Jean Caux') links to the Cataline to Catiline redirect, Garotte, but I'm just figuring out some of this redirect diambiguation business, so I'm glad I asked anyway.CindyBo 09:09, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

It looks like Cataline was made as a redirect primarily to catch mispellings. Now that this article's been created though, I'd suggest moving it to 'Cataline' and putting a little disambiguation note at the top of the article. bobanny 11:12, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

My mistake on the a/i spelling.....I missed your syntax above, though, bobanny - "garotte" is hte meaninig of "cataline"? I'd made a former association with Catalina Island, = "catalina" in Spanish is a sprocket, possibly means the same in French; not sure why he was called this, but it makes me wonder if it wasn't something like calling him a "gearbox" (without hte sexual connotation...)., i.e. just always busy and whirring and complicated. While French was pretty common in gold-rush California it could also be that this is a frenchification of "Catalina" and he had something to do with the Island;; such a Frtenchficiation is Rancheria vs Rancherie.Skookum1 18:08, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I think the Cataline nickname comes from a discussion back in 1858 or so from a barrom in Yale where someone was asking Jean Caux if he came from Catalonia and because he couldn't understand much English, he said "yes" and earned his nickname. A lot of these side stories about him are apocryphal so I can't say for sure. And the Garotte thing seems to refer to the Catiline rather than Cataline conspiracy, kind of a strange place to find a reference like that, seems to me, but anyway... So I should move Cataline "Jean Caux' to Cataline and add a disambiguation at the top... but then do what to that other redirect page? And then backtrack to Garotte and change the spelling on the conspiracy thing?CindyBo 18:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I fixed the 'garotte' wikilink so it now goes to Catiline. I also put in a request at Wikipedia:Requested moves, because it needs an administrator's super-powers to move over a redirect page. bobanny 23:22, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/List of British Columbia-related topics

Hello. I'm writing to inform the members of this project that I have moved the article List of British Columbia-related topics to Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia/List of British Columbia-related topics per discussion here. -- Black Falcon ^(Talk) 21:03, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

New subregions/subcats

I've only just started Category:Lillooet Country and Category:Bridge River Country and don't have time to do Category:Okanagan (or Okanagan Country), Category:Cariboo (or Cariboo Country]], Category:Chilcotin Country (needs "Country" to avoid confusion with Category:Tsilhqot'in, as is also the case with Okanagan and Kootenay re Category:Syilx and Category:Ktunaxa and re Category:Shuswap Country re Category:Secwepemc. Basically this is a heads-up as I won't have time to add my new cats to all the current Bridge River-Lillooet articles -not if I want to get more written before my wikibreak! - and I don't have time to create and populated the other needed cats, so if somebody's looking for something nicely mechanical to do ..... "cat away"....; I'd say Category:Cariboo/Category:Cariboo Country is the priority one, plus Category:Lower Mainland (Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley can be subcats, although they'd seem to replicate/dpulicate the GVRD and FVRD cats...). Keefer4 prefers "Cariboo Country" and I suppose for constistency we should apply that across the board for subcats Category:Interior of British Columbia except for rare exception like Category:Peace River Block (Category:Peace Country would probably raise wiki hackles, even though it's what we do say. Oh, and please see Category talk:Bridge River Country about overlaps and subcats/parallel usages.Skookum1 21:10, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

48-hour notice of Wikibreak

Possibly less than that; I meant to put this up last night but certain posts on the The Tyee kept me up late ;-) (I get to be wantonly POV over there, y'see). For reasons only some here know, I won't be posting again after Monday morning for quite a while (rider: I'll probably be tweaking my userpage, which I've been prepping a revamp on for a while...), perhaps a very long while, but will be available via email (I'll leave the email link at left activated). Some will no doubt be glad to see me gone but it's certainly not because of them I'm leaving. I meant to still get at a bunch of articles and a list of articles I think in need of work/creation but just haven't had the time; this is particularly painful for undone work on the Bridge River Country, near and dear to me, which always got shelved while I worked on other things either in Wiki, the Tyee, or in the wide world; and because some topics there were so important to me that I kept on stalling on getting at them, knowing how much work/detail I could put into them. Even the main Lillooet and Shalalth/Seton Portage articles I was gonna rewrite, and I have yet to write Bralorne and Pioneer Mine and the Gun Lakes and Moha (hmm - see that link; needs to have a dab line for Moha, British Columbia) and more, plus a really interesting set of bios. One thing I'll write up before wikibreaking will be a list of needed articles specific to the Bridge River-Lillooet Country and Fraser Canyon-Thompson Country-South Cariboo that need writing, as well as a list of articles in general that need creation, POV-watching, fixing etc. But re these undone Lillooet articles, if there's another Vancouver-area Wikipedian who'd care to take up the torch on them I'm even willing to loan my copies of Harris and Edwards and Green and other local histories to work 'em up. Dibs anyone? Skookum1 16:39, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Styleguide for British Columbia standard usages

This in the wake of my change mainland->Mainland on James Douglas (governor), similar to other pages where I've amended "central interior"->"Central Interior" etc. For now this is mostly a list of proper spellings/capitalizations but also what comes to mind is the old Talk:Lower Mainland discussion in which Keefer4 trotted out his old Canadian Press styleguide; I think it will be useful for Wiki editors from outside BC to have a reference place for "standard usages" here, since there's so much confusion and so many errors; Jean Barman's Toronto editors, for example, de-capitalized "interior" throughout that book, even when saying "the interior"; which just looks WEIRD. It would like be writing "the Island" as "the island"; even Washington refers to its as "the Interior of Washington" (capitalized), though "Eastern Washington" is far more common nowadays; anyway; here's a list to start this, maybe it should be on a subpage of the main page or another reference-use location:

• Always capitalized
  • Interior, Central Interior, Northern Interior, Southern Interior, Southeastern Interior (that last one's a relative 'neologism' and is usually just "the Kootenays")
  • "the Coast", South Coast, North Coast, Central Coast
  • "the Island" (as in Vancouver Island), "(the) Mainland" (w/wo "Lower Mainland" - "lower mainland" is obviously a no-go for much the same reason that "greater vancouver" wouldn't work, even "greater Vancouver").
  • Saanich Peninsula, not Saanich peninsula and similar, Comox Valley, Cowichan Valley, Sunshine Coast; all pretty obvious as with Lillooet Country, etc. (at least one of those is a riding and should have a separate region article....Comox Valley I think, in which case the riding sould be Comox Valley (electoral district) if it's not already.
• Parallel/equivalent usages
  • Colony of British Columbia = Mainland Colony, Gold Colony not "mainland colony", "gold colony"
  • Colony of Vancouver Island = Island Colony
  • "Canada" pre-1885 referred in BC parlance to what lay East of the Rockies, more properly pre-1871 of course but you'll often come across sources from the period that continue to speak of Canada as a different place from BC and Canadians as different from British Columbians....(much moreso than they are nowadays, needless to say....)
  • "Cascadia" shouldn't be used as a substitution for "Pacific Northwest", although there are neologites who are pushing that change in Wikipedia.

That's all for now; I'm cooking and hungry but there might be others that come to mind; but those are the important ones IMO.Skookum1 05:46, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh dear, Skookum1 - you and I are butting heads lately! Oh well, it's all in good fun. I agree with most of what you suggest here with two exceptions: "Mainland" and "Coast." The phrase, "the Mainland of British Columbia" looks clunky for a reason - "mainland" essentially distinguishes a principal land from adjacent islands. Washington State, adjacent to Vancouver Island, could just as properly be called the mainland - and, as an Island boy (yes, capitalized), I know it often is. The other quibble I have is with the term "Coast," for similar reasons - it could be anywhere adjacent to the ocean: North Coast, yes; Central Coast, yes; South Coast, yes - but "Coast" - again, it seems vague.

My question is simply this: What is standard usage with regard to these two words? How is it determined? I may be kayaking uncertain waters here, so I'm open to whatever reference you have ready at hand. fishhead64 14:46, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Standard usage certainly won't be in the Central Canadian-published dictionaries; it's amazing in fact that it's in press styleguides - but the press styleguides for BC were evolved in the course of the near-century-and-a-half since de Cosmos and Robson et al. established papers; it's also how mainstream historians have generally capitalized things (other than Barman). "The Mainland of British Columbia", because it has "of", isn't the same thing as saying "the Mainland"; might be OK I guess to say " on the British Columbia mainland" because there the proper name of the Mainland has been provided, as in the former case. The reason it's not the same as Washington was because Washington wasn't two entities/identities, at least not maritime-land based, and "the Peninsula" down there could mean the Kitsap as well as the Olympic of course, and those have never been separate words from the TriCounties (Pierce-King-Snohomish Counties) in the same way the Mainland has always been from the Island. The notion of capitalization here is because of it being a proper name, albeit a nickname, not just "a mainland" in the dictionary sense; likewise "the Island". [i]Both[/i] were "short" for the Mainland Colony, and the Island Colony. And with "Coast" I should have been more clear in my definition, I meant when used as apposite/parallel to Island, Interior etc. Not butting heads; being bold in one last hurrah (see below); leaving stuff in my wake, so to speak, and maybe some water wings...Skookum1 16:39, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Just noticed a usage within my material above: "in BC parlance to what lay East of the Rockies"; "the East" here is a proper name, not a direction, as is also the usage when referring to what used to be OK to call the Orient (talk about a POV mudpuddle; see Talk:The Orient); but "the East" is another quasi-proper name like the Coast, the Mainland, the Interior. And it's "the East" vs "the east of Canada", as with "the Mainland" vs "the mainland of British Columbia" etc; same as they call us "the West" (while meaning only Alberta).Skookum1 16:43, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

It's just the fact that it's a localism that I find problematic. After all, on Martha's Vineyard, "the mainland" means a very different locale, but should it be capitalised in Wikipedia? Similarly in Hawaii. Of course, "everyone" in BC knows that the mainland is the Mainland, but everybody in those other two locales know that their mainland is the Mainland, as well. fishhead64 00:31, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, but they don't have a long-standing historical usage in capitalized form, nor did they have the dual-colony/region nature which gave birth to "the Island [Colony]" and "the Mainland [Colony]"; it's from that that our later usages flow, and I was raised with treating them as proper names, same as with "the Interior", i.e. when speaking of it is a region/identity rather than in general locational terms; in the context of being-spoken-of-as-a-"region", to me it's necessarily capitalized; there seem to be lexical/semantic exceptions but my point is when historians/writers/journalists speak of it as a "comparative entity" to "the Island", it is capitalized; we don't write "lower mainland" do we? (OK, some people do, but I submit they haven't lived here long, and are reinforced by other CP/CanWest copyeditors). As I said Keefer4 has his old Canadian Press styleguide but he's on wikibreak right now; hopefully he'll weigh in on this after I'm gone...Skookum1 04:16, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Just for the record, provinces really don't get to define their own individual style prerogatives to override either standard Canadian English style or general Wikipedia style. For example, "Lower Mainland" and "Central Interior" and "Vancouver Island" are actually the proper names of specific regions, and are capitalized — but they're capitalized on Wikipedia because they're proper names, not because British Columbia usage has any kind of special privilege. The words "mainland" and "interior" and "island", however, are not proper names, and thus are not capitalized when used outside the proper name of a specific mainland or a specific interior or a specific island. Just because local BC usage tends to do so doesn't mean you can dictate that Wikipedia style has to do the same.

We frequently see the same thing in regards to universities and colleges and hospitals; people often think those words are supposed to always be capitalized, but the actual rule is "capitalize only when appearing in the specific proper name of a specific institution of that type". It's fundamentally the same issue: specific proper name, capitalize. General use of the word outside of a specific proper name, don't capitalize. Bearcat 05:02, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Skuzzy

I made the article Skuzzy (sternwheeler) last night and I noticed I have another weird Cataline type problem, (as explained above, now fixed, thanks). But rather than there being a disambiguation page for Skuzzy it is redirected straight to SCSI. Is that something that should be dealt with?(There's also a Skuzzy II, and a Skuzzy River, although not made as articles yet)CindyBo 15:07, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I added a template message "Scuzzy" redirects here. For the British Columbian sternwheeler, see Skuzzy (sternwheeler)." to the top of the SCSI article. This should do the trick until more "Skuzzy" articles are created, at which time a disambiguation page should probably be made. bobanny 18:35, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Alexandria

Does anyone know what the five Alexandria, British Columbia towns on the Alexandria (disambiguation) page are? I was thinking of doing an article on Alexandria, aka Fort Alexandria, the one between Soda Creek and Quesnel. What are these other four? And how should I title my article then?CindyBo 01:39, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

They're reserves, I guess.CindyBo 08:05, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Frank Swannell photographs category

Hi, I just wanted to let everyone know that a created a Category: Frank Swannell photographs as a subcategory for Category: History of British Columbia. I never realized before I did the article, Frank Swannell just how many BC history photos are his (5000+) and I thought it would be helpful to have a category to put them in as they are uploaded from BC Archives for history articles.CindyBo 08:05, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Project Banners: multiple banners and other features

I have added a note to the Template:BCproject doc file with a link to the instructions for the use of the Template:WikiProjectBannerShell where there are several templated banners on an article talk page. --KenWalker | Talk 22:18, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Looking into this a little further, I came across the Military History Template. It has some good features. It includes a parameter "Nested=" that we may already have implemented in our template code as part of banner shells. It includes Task Force groups which go beyond what we need here but might be of use in the future. It also includes a check list setup for moving articles to B class. I think this would be useful to help us recognize the steps needed to bring articles up to B level. See Talk:Prize of war and click on the Show link to see an example. The other way to do this is the way the Biography project is doing it. The other way to provide some guidance for editors about the steps to move the article up to B class and to see that they really are B class before being so assessed, would be to do what the WPP:BIO is now doing with some added code outside of the templated box. See the Biography Assessment Rating Comment section at Talk:Ingo Steuer for an example. I am not sure whether editors here think this would be useful, but I think it is worth doing. I am slightly in favour of the WPP:BIO approach. Comments? --KenWalker | Talk 17:07, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I see value in both, the checklist is very appealing for its simplicity, but the WPP:BIO approach is more informative and links to the actual help articles associated with creating an article. Maybe they could eventually be combined somehow. Like a simple checklist as a first step and for boxes that aren't checked, links to the specific Help articles to fix the area that still needs work. While we're in the topic, I've always been a tad leery of rating my own articles, unless they're an obvious stub, as the rules for start and B Class seem rather subjective, and the importance ratings are even more so. I think that articles often need fresh eyes to rate them, much as a book needs an editor. But I don't want to be creating extra work for other editors either. What are the usual conventions? Rate your own articles or not?CindyBo 18:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Category:British Columbia Provincial Police officers???

I noticed there was a Category:Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and was thinking that a similar category would be valuable for our provincial police officers as many were notable and there are probably several articles written (and forthcoming) on them. For example I did Sperry Cline and William Pinchbeck (and had nowhere to put Cline except in History of BC). Or is there a similar local/ historical law enforcement category that I missed?CindyBo 09:40, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

• I added Cline to Category:Canadian police officers, the parent of the RCMP officer category. If there are more than just Cline and Pinchbeck, I say go ahead and add BC Provincial Police officers as a sub-category to the category of Canadian police officers. Canuckle 17:26, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm not sure how many more BC provincial police there are with articles so, for now, I'll just leave that category as something to make later.CindyBo 19:00, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Saskatchewan Project

The 17 people who are members of WikiProject Saskatchewan are doing a great job. There are several things I have come across browsing their project, that they have running at a more advanced level than we do:

• Navigational Boxes
• Category drop down list in their ToDo list and their ToDo items generally
• Tips
• Outreach
• Meetup
• Newsletter
• Collaboration

It is worth a look at what they are organizing with an eye to adopting some of their ideas. --KenWalker | Talk 05:12, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Christina Lake town article needed

Hi someone; please see Talk:Christina Lake (British Columbia) re the need for a town article. I'm not equipped to do it and won't be around much longer (48 hrs tops again) to do it. Anyone who's been working on BC communities articles please take note and at least write a stub; Christina Lake, British Columbia is currently a redirect to the article on the lake; and there's probably stuff in the lake article that should be in the town article once it's created.Skookum1 21:40, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I can write the article this weekend. But don't we need an admin to delete the redirect? I'll ask at the helpdesk, if no one comes by here and gets it done by later tonight.CindyBo^talk 21:51, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks like it was aka Cascade City, British Columbia?CindyBo^talk 22:27, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Whoops, guess not. Though that obviously needs an article too.CindyBo^talk 22:44, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

From what I've heard, Cascade ("here". BC Geographical Names.) used to be a busy place, with several thousand of people living there at it's peak. It is is now covered up by a golf course (see 49°01′N 118°12′W), and I've even read it being described as a ghost city (the pictures in a book I looked at showed a massive town layout). There is very little about this history online, so a public library will be helpful with this article. Here is a decent online source [3] for both Christina Lake and Cascade. +mt 00:05, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the coordinates, I have Bruce Ramsey's Ghost Towns of British Columbia and I found a couple of pages in it on Cascade City, I had no idea of its exact location. I'll add what I have on hand and go from there. I think we're missing a whole bunch of these Boundary/Kootenay ghost (and real) towns.CindyBo^talk 00:21, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Merge required for Nisga'a park

We have two articles about the same park. One using the English name Nisga'a Memorial Lava Beds Provincial Park, the other using the Nisga'a name Anhluut'ukwsim Laxmihl Angwinga'asanskwhI Nisga'a Provincial Park. Obviously, we only need one article. Any thoughts on which naming convention should be followed for the article and which should be redirected. Please discuss on Talk:Nisga'a Memorial Lava Beds Provincial Park... Canuckle 02:31, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Another merge required

While we're on the topic of Northern British Columbia and merging... Russian American Telegraph and Western Union Telegraph Expedition are also being suggested as a merge. Collins Overland Telegraph Company? Route? should probably redirect to whatever comes out of that merge. Important part of our Northern history and the RAT article has really good information, but no sources or sections or anything like that. I've had them on my watchlist for a while but no one's been looking at them.CindyBo^talk 06:41, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

BCGNIS capabilities added

Hi, I'm just letting people know that I made a {{BCGNIS}} template that is good for linking references to geographic information contained in the BC Geographical Names Information System. I've only used this template once, in Vaseux Lake for a reference. Please use it! (FYI: the BCGNIS is a valuble source of information for any place in BC! Sometimes really good information too!) +mwtoews 20:42, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I came across this in the Archive and brought it back here as I have a question. I have been working on Princess Louisa Inlet. There are BCGNIS entries for the Inlet, the Park and Chatterbox Falls. I added a template reference to each of these but when they appear in the footnote, all of them refer use the article name as the link. I gather that the template use the article name for the link it displays. I don't know how templates like this work, but is it possible to add a parm that allows another name to be given rather than the name of the article?--KenWalker | Talk 17:47, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

I think you can add whatver name you want using this template{{BCGNIS|id|name}}.CindyBo^talk 20:59, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

I've included your question as an example in {{BCGNIS}}. Feel free to edit any of the template documentation that doesn't make sense. +mt 00:09, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, handy template.--KenWalker | Talk 00:31, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Category:British Columbia public domain photographs

Hi, me again. I was thinking of making a subcategory Category:British Columbia public domain photographs, because the Category:Canadian public domain photographs is getting huge and it's starting to be a pain to search through it for "our" pictures. Any thoughts?CindyBo^talk 04:33, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

An interesting browse, certainly moving the BC photos into a sub category would make sense. --KenWalker | Talk 06:06, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Out of the first 400, exactly 100 were BC's. As an extra added bonus, I found these untagged BC biographies George Ritchie Maxwell and George Mercer Dawson, for whom Dawson Creek is named for according to the article.CindyBo^talk 11:03, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

It's mad lame that the BC Archives keeps copyright over their historical images... because I have an archives pass, and spend like 5 days a week working next door. --Haemo 17:52, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

They don't have copyright on the images taken before 1949. I've uploaded lots of BC Archives photos (as I'm being reminded today as I'm categorizing them). I'd say go ahead and upload them as required, just crop off their lettering on the borders. PD Canada is used for anything before 1949 with the {{PD-Canada}} tag. See conversations here and here and this government website here too, which states very clearly "All photographs taken on or before Jan. 1, 1949 that are not Crown works are in the public domain and may be freely copied. Photographs taken after that date are copyrighted for the life of the author plus 50 years". And there are dozens of other Canadian govt websites that say the same thing. However, these pictures may not be able to be uploaded to Commons as they have to be Public Domain in the US as well, and that seems to have more to do with publication dates than creation dates.CindyBo^talk 21:40, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

These site here at the United Church Archives in Victoria University have a chart that summarizes everything very nicely.CindyBo^talk 22:24, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Coolio; but for instance, a lot of their image (like this one available online have copyright notices attached. I'm not really sure why. --Haemo 00:07, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

As long as it'd dated before 1949, it's PD, whether they admit it or not. They have to abide by the same laws as Canada Archives, only Canada Archives admits when a copyright is expired and BC Archives doesn't. With that one you got there, it's harder because it's not dated in its info page here, and it's not really a photo... so you'd have to figure out its history. Otherwise as long as its a pre 1949 photo, you should be good to upload it. Just put in all the information such as the date taken and the photographer too, as well as putting the PD Canada tag.CindyBo^talk 02:47, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

As an example, see Image:Moyie.gif, it links right to the source and is dated 1898.CindyBo^talk 03:24, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Help with Bountiful, British Columbia and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

I've been keeping my eye on the article Bountiful, British Columbia, the location of the Canadian branch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints polygamist sect based in Utah, Arizona, Texas, etc. As some may know, there has been recent controversy over a) the apprehension in the US of US branch leader Warren Jeffs, and b) the Canadian justice investigation of the BC branch over the possibility of criminal charges arising from their marriage practices.

I've long felt that the Bountiful article is too heavy on information about the FLDS (especially with the weak representation of general information on the town), and I have just noticed that the article on the FLDS has very little on the BC branch. I feel a bit timid tackling it all alone, but I think this would be a perfect time to a) flesh out the general civic, geographic, historic etc information about the town of Bountiful, b) condense and re-write the section on the FLDS (particularly making it more Canada-centric), and c) expand the FLDS article to include a dedicated section on the Church's BC activities. It's particularly important because, if the Feds move on indictments, the related WP articles will become popular destinations for readers and the press. I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place (I've asked on the Canadian WP noticeboard as well), but if there's a way to place this topic (spanning at least two articles) as a priority for cleanup/expansion that would be great. Any help is welcome. Anchoress 10:38, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

While it does seem heavy on the FLDS, so far I can't find anything else about it. It isn't listed anywhere where a researcher would go to find out any additional non-FLDS facts on it. It's not on this list here from Stats Canada. There's zero results with British Columbia.com here and BCGNIS doesn't consider it an official settlement here. I can put a settlement infobox on the article, which will spruce it up, but... after that I wouldn't know what to do with it. Important article though. Because of its location, there might be some associated silver or galena mining history and there's definitely got to be some First Nation's history. Nevertheless, even if some more local history is added and more information on the general area, I would think that its always going to be heavy on information on the FLDS and whatever legal/moral/religious issues they have going on. If you google it, that's all you seem to get.CindyBo^talk 18:34, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply. I saw your comments on the talkpage of Bountiful, and I concur that there may have been some points of confusion between Bountiful and Lister. I'll reply more in depth on the talkpage, and thanks to all who have already stepped in to improve the article in whatever manner is possible. Anchoress 21:55, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Kamloops, British Columbia -> Kamloops proposed move

Pls see my comments on Talk:Kamloops, British Columbia. NB esp. Ken Walker, Cindy Bo, MacLean25. Seem to be more format-happy non-BCers rearranging our geography/articles for us IMO.....no, I'm not back, but I do have net access for the next few days courtesy of my host in Winlaw, which I'm leaving next week, Montreal-Halifax bound, guitar strapped on, as of next week (finally).Skookum1 08:26, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

"Salish Sea" -> Puget Sound/Strait of Georgia merger

Hi. Someone just left a query about this merge, as I'd put a merge tag on Salish Sea quite a while ago and haven't followed up on it; please see my notes at Merge Salish Sea and Strait of Georgia on my talk page. I'm on the road and will be off the net again by the end of the weekend but input from WPWashington and WPBC members would be appreciated to resolve this. This notice has also been posted on Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington.Skookum1 03:00, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

BC Portal

Added randomized rotating feature article, picture, and introduction to the BC Portal. Has anyone suggestions for GA class or better articles, images to add to the portal? Should the other Portal sections also have randomized rotating articles as well? SriMesh | talk 04:19, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

*Template:Roads in BC Cities

Another template for deletion by the same user arguing that templates inside templates are not good. See: the discussion--JForget 19:14, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Potlatch Improvment

I'm putting a call out for support on improving this article. It's a very important subjects for indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, as well as British Columbia. It could use alot of work, but we have to start somewhere. I've started a discussion here on improving the article. Suggestions and advice would be greatly appreciated, or even full blown collaboration. Thanks! OldManRivers 07:58, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Could anyone on the Saanich Peninsula...

...travel the length of the Pat Bay Highway and see if I got all the exit numbers correct in the British Columbia Highway 17 article? --  Denelson83  14:48, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Columbia River nominated for GA

Howdy folks, just wanted to let you know, I recently nominated Columbia River for Good Article status. It is currently "on hold" for seven days; one of the reviewer's main concerns was that there was an imbalance, with more U.S.-oriented material than Canadian. So, I'm hoping some of you will take a look, and see if you can expand it a bit. I'll work on it myself some, but I don't have much knowledge of the Canadian portion, I haven't even been to BC! Thanks for any input or help. -Pete 01:09, 3 November 2007 (UTC)