Wikipedia:New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board

Time and Date: 07:29 25 May 2024 NZDT

Wikipedia Time: 18:29 May 24 UTC

This page is a notice board for things that are particularly relevant to New Zealand Wikipedians.

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• Wikipedia:WikiProject:New Zealand - the purposes of the project and this notice board overlap considerably. This was inadvertent.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand_places
• Wikipedia:New articles (New_Zealand)
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/New Zealand
• Māori-language Wikipedia

Archives

• Archive 1 (2004 - 2005)
• Archive 2 (Jan to April 2006)
• Archive 3 (April to June 2006)
• Archive 4 (June to September 2006)
• Archive 5 (September 2006 to December 2006)

New Zealand Collaboration of the Fortnight

The current New Zealand collaboration is None. Every month a different New Zealand-related topic, stub or non-existent article is picked. Please read the nomination text and improve the article any way you can.

NZ Meetup No. 2?

Following up to from the last meetup (and a reminder) how are people for another one?. I would guess Wellington would be a natural choice of venue or perhaps elsewhere (Chc?) if enough are interested. Alternatively Auckland could have another one. I'm not sure Dec/Jan is a great time but perhaps it doesn't make a big difference. Thoughts? / Availability / Interest / Timing / Location ? - SimonLyall 06:05, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah I am preliminary interested at a second meetup. I thing it’s to late to get one for December now, maybe early Jan? I don’t mind Wellington or Auckland, perhaps where the most people are interested? Yeah I am preliminary interested at a second meetup. I thing it’s to late to get one for December now, maybe early Jan? I don’t mind Wellington or Auckland, perhaps where the most people are interested? Brian | (Talk) 09:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I would be interested in attending if it was in Christchurch. However I am not a Wikipedian but a Wikinewsie. Nzgabriel 09:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I'll attend any meeting in or near Auckland.-gadfium 02:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I'll also do an Auckland thing if one happens. Mostlyharmless 07:11, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Looking at my schedule I'm thinking the weekend of Feb 10th looks okay. If we want to have it somewhere like a pub then there are some Super 14 matches in the early morning (7am kickoff) or evening (7:30 pm kickoff) and a cricket final on the following day (don't know start time). If people are fairly happy with Auckland on that date then I can probably get the page started. - SimonLyall 11:26, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Feb 10 or 11 would be fine for me.-gadfium 21:48, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I have setup a page for the meetup at Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland 2. This is just a soft launch for now until we finalize the time, date and location. Please update the page (or it's talk) as requred. Suggestions for locations and agenda welcome. - SimonLyall 03:26, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Added myself to the list. Is there a policy on how we publicise this? Is it a no-no to simply put a note of that type on every NZ user's discussion page? MadMaxDog 08:24, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

That's what was done last time. Spamming of user talk pages is okay for a meetup, just not for anything which you might appear to get an advantage from (ie support/oppose an RFA, XFD, or poll).

I suggest you look at the user page first, and if they give a location which is further south than Hamilton or further north than Whangarei, then don't tell them, but if you can't establish their location within NZ or they are close to Auckland, and they've made productive edits in the last month, then put the note on their talk page.-gadfium 08:17, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Damn, the place I was going to book doesn't take bookings on Weekends during the day. I'll move the place discussion over to Wikipedia talk:Meetup/Auckland 2 and post there in a minute. - SimonLyall 02:16, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Nambassa - 1.2MB article

Someone has created a very extensive article on the Nambassa organiation and festivals, but it has 43 images and weighs in at 1.3MB (which given the load on Wikipedia servers takes several minutes to load and has a good chance of not completing).

It looks as though the Wikimedia thumbnail generator is set to produce high-quality jpegs, with an average file size of 20-30KB. I'd reckon that I could get most of them under 10K if I was optimising them manually, but that of course requires human judgement to avoid images with bad jpg artifacts. Of course there is no means for attaching custom thumbnails to an image.

So what should be done with this page to give it a reasonable load time? dramatic 19:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts:

• Most of the images should probably go in a thumbnail gallery at the end
• I'm not an expert on this, but the image copyright legalities might be too restrictive for Wikipedia, so most of them might have to be removed
• Read WP:SIZE from the Wikipedia:Manual of Style

Papeschr 21:12, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm no expert on licensing, but I would have thought all the photos are asking is for the copyright holder to be acknowledged in any reproduction, and this is exactly what cc-by is for. CC-by is an appropriate license for wikipedia and for the commons.- gadfium 21:29, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

That's as may be, but at Wikipedia:Image use policy, under Rule Of Thumb, it clearly states "Don't put credits in images themselves". Moriori 02:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

(After edit conflict)I'd suggest

1. If you haven't already done so, put a message on the talk page of the major contributor explaining the problem and pointing them here for the discussion. Put a message on the talk page of the article as well.
2. move all images with suitable licenses to commons. Put the images into a Nambassa category on commons. The person who uploaded the photos should be consulted about this as a matter of courtesy.
3. remove all but three or four images from the article, and add a link to the commons category.

Alternative approaches:

1. break up into multiple articles. I don't think this is a viable approach for Nambassa, partly because the event itself doesn't warrant multiple articles, and partly because we don't have enough text on the individual subareas, such as "Sound and lighting at Nambassa" or "Workshops at Nambassa"
2. move to wikibooks. Again, not my preferred approach. The text is not excessive, the problem is load-time due to the pictures. I think we want to keep this article on Wikipedia.
3. link to a gallery of "images of Nambassa" on Wikipedia, and remove most from the article as above. I don't think this would be acceptable to most Wikipedians, but it might be possible if the uploader has a strong objection to the images going on commons.

Once the size is sorted out, I'll consider this as a selected article for the New Zealand portal.- gadfium 21:21, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

If it suits I'm happy to run all images by photo-shop and considerably downsize. Even remove the watermark on photos to keep ole' Mori happy? Mombas 11:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with that. If we have high res photos under a suitable license, there is no reason to downsize them. You could produce alternative versions if necessary but IMHO don't delete or modify any images, unless you're sure you've increased the quality. However the photos would be best kept on the commons not wikipedia IMHO. I would suggest the photos not used inline in the article be removed from the article. Link to the commons gallery instead with all the photosNil Einne 16:14, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

As the person responsible for all the Nambassa photos and 95% of the content of this article, may I suggest a compromise? Within the next month or so the official Nambassa website will host photo galleries with some 700 photos of these events, which I will link to from the Wikipedia article. I would then suggest that most of the photos on Wikipedia be deleted with the exception of around 5-7 selected images. Hopefully this will maintain this article within the 1.2mb criteria and still enable people wanting to look at more photos of these events the opportunity to do so on nambassa.com? Of the remaining photos on Wiki I will remove the watermark? Do I have agreement on this? Mombas 11:02, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

That sounds fine to me. However, I can't say whether your request to delete the other images will be accepted. A few of them are used in other pages, such as hippie.-gadfium 03:38, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

The actual images don't need to be deleted at any point. They can remain in wikipedia so other articles can link to them. Nil Einne's idea sounds best. - SimonLyall 05:15, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

List of New Zealand lakes

I came across the List of New Zealand lakes just the other day and found it in a fairly sad state. Since then, I've downloaded the list of geographic names from LINZ, parsed it - and have a provisional list of just over a thousand lakes(!). I was intending to re-hash the Lakes page to be similar to the List of rivers of New Zealand page, but some questions before I start.

1. There's going to be a LOT of red links - is this going to be a problem for anyone?
2. There's enough data to split them up by roughly by region (and hence by island). Is it preferable to do this and then list them alphabetically by each region - or just to produce one huge list (like the Rivers page)?
3. Is the list name correct? We have List of New Zealand lakes, but List of rivers of New Zealand - shouldn't they both follow the same standard phrasing?

Malathos 19:37, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with there being many redlinks.

Yes, split them up by region, or at least by island.

Looking at Category:Lists of lakes, most such article titles seem to be in the format "List of lakes in <country>" rather than "List of <country>an lakes", and the former style is preferred, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (country-specific topics).

Since you are going to be putting significant work into this, take a look at Featured lists for what makes a really good list. This won't qualify for featured list any time soon because of the proportion of redlinks, but following best practice guidelines would be good. We don't currently have a featured lakes list, but Lakes of Alberta looks to be rather nice.-gadfium 02:30, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. I'll see what I can do :) Malathos 06:47, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I pretty much agree with Gadfium - the List of rivers of New Zealand also has lots of red-links, so that's no problem at all. One thing to be aware of when you're making this list is that several of the pages on NZ lakes are little more than glorified disambiguation pages - Blue Lake, New Zealand, for instance. The other thing to note is that when you're making the redlinks, try to follow the naming guidelines for NZ geography (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (New Zealand)). Grutness...wha? 23:40, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Where I encounter disambiguation pages like Lake Rotoroa - do I put an entry for each lake on the same page - or should I stub them all off like - Lake Rotoroa, Northland, Lake Rotoroa, Waikato etc ? Malathos 20:09, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

If a lake has at least a paragraph about it, as Lake Rotoroa, Nelson does, give it its own entry, leaving a single line in the disambiguation page. Others just get a line or two on the disambiguation page with a redlink until someone decides to write more. The dab page doesn't need to have subheadings, in my opinion. Lakes should be given the name by which they are best known, so Hamilton Lake would be preferable to Lake Rotoroa, Hamilton, with a redirect from the latter.-gadfium 20:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Phew! The new list is now up. Some notes -

• First off, it's pretty big and it'll get bigger.
• There's a LOT of red-links - which I'm hoping to start on some time soon (that's me busy for the rest of the year!).
• I'd envisaged moving an entire section out of the list and leaving a link (For lakes in Auckland region, see List of Lakes in Auckland, New Zealand) when red links in any one section become a minority.
• It looks like there are duplicates - I think I've tracked down nearly all of these - but there *are* 3 Lake Rotokawau in Northland - how we identify duplicate named features in the same region, I'm not sure.
• the data is sourced from the LINZ datafile - plus a lot of pouring over Google Earth and various maps of NZ. LINZ don't use standard NZ regions, so some of the regional positioning of lakes may be a bit off.
• There are lots of disambiguations - mostly just stubbed (or somewhere in Minnesota, bizzarrely). I'll work on those as a priority just to reduce the confusion.
• The formatting is a first stab - please make suggestions

Malathos 23:45, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Article for deletion

Jared Lane is presently at articles for deletion. Not sure if he's notable but just thought I'd bring it to the attention of NZ Wikipedians. Orderinchaos78 16:49, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

All Blacks submitted for FAC

Hi, All Blacks has been submitted as a Feature Article Candidate. If you would like to assist in the review, or help get the article to FA standard please read the comments here. Also, has been suggested that some articles of All Black coaches be created, especially Fred Allen (rugby player) and Laurie Mains. Thanks. - Shudda ^talk 11:30, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

On a related matter, most of the Ka Mate article seems to be about an American football university team. I know there are extensive articles like Haka of the All Blacks and 2006 Kapa O Pango controversy, but the state of the Ka Mate article seems not quite right to me, and I wonder if any NZ Wikipedians would be interested in sorting it out. 12:09, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Much of the material was duplicated verbatim already in the Haka in popular culture article, so I removed it from the Ka Mate article. Thanks for keeping us informed. Kahuroa 12:20, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Auckland Meetup 2 Scheduled - Feb 10 2007

You are all invited to Auckland Meetup 2 on the afternoon of Saturday February 10th 2007 at Galbraith's Ale House in Mt Eden. Please see Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland 2 for details. You can also bookmark Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland to be informed of future NZ meetups. - SimonLyall 05:02, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Reminder that meetup is this weekend. - SimonLyall 00:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Peer review/New Zealand

I have requested a peer review of the New Zealand article. It is at Wikipedia:Peer review/New Zealand. Hopefully we can get it to FA status. --Midnighttonight (rendezvous) 02:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

New Zealand governments

There is a suggestion that we create articles on the various New Zealand governments, eg Fourth Labour Government of New Zealand for the 1984-1990 Labour Government. Please see Talk:Rogernomics#4th_Labour_govt.-gadfium 07:34, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Given the discussion at Talk:Rogernomics#4th_Labour_govt, I have created a small (as in bare bones at the moment) sub-project page for co-ordination at Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/governments. --Midnighttonight (rendezvous) 02:02, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Maintaining 2007 in New Zealand

Well, we made it 10 days into the new year without anyone having created the page, so I took the initiative.

It looks as though whoever had been updating current events regularly got distracted last october and the Year in NZ pages have been languishing since then. Any volunteers for a roster? Would it work best if we broke it down by areas of interest (e.g. news, politics, sport, culture) or just had several people checking sources regularly. dramatic 09:37, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I used to transfer news over from the portal every couple of months. It is not too hard to do assuming the content is there. Perhaps we can also use wikinews as a source. I notice there have been no new stories on the portal for a couple of weeks. No pointing doing the collecting twice. - SimonLyall 10:02, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Well I would be keen to monitor politics for 2007. Jonathanpl 03:32, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

New Zealand Collaboration of the Fortnight

Hi, I'm trying to resurrect the New Zealand Collaboration of the Fortnight (NZCOTF). If you would like to help out please visit the collaboration page here. Thanks. - Shudda ^talk 00:43, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

New Zealand constitutional crisis, 1984

I've put a snippet about this article up for DYK at Template_talk:Did_you_know#January_22. My wording is a bit clumsy, so improvements would be welcome.-gadfium 02:39, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

RfC

Hi everyone... I'm involved in a dispute with another user who has accused me of being an anti-Asian racist. I'd greatly appreciate it if some editors here who've known my work over the last few years might be able to take a look at Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Yugayuga and make some comment, even if they agree with what he said. It would be good to have some input. Grutness...wha? 06:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeepers, what a load of ****. Should never have gone that far. And since I didn't just want to endorse a view favouring you just because I know you a little, I actually had to spend 10 minutes reading through the whole mess before I did! Ah well, at least learned a little about stub sorting. MadMaxDog 09:21, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

1981 Springbok Tour

1981 Springbok Tour is now the collaboration of the fortnight. The article needs a lot of work, and hopefully a few Kiwi editors can dig in and help. For example, it would be nice for someone to add a lead section! So please have a look at the article and help out if you can. If anyone would like to nominate another collaboration or vote for any current nominees, please visit Wikipedia:New Zealand Collaboration of the Fortnight - Shudda ^talk 22:46, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

New Zealand topics

I see the template {{New Zealand topics}} has been created and added to many New Zealand related topics. The template looks very nice, but it is substantially a duplicate of Portal:New Zealand/Topics (a version of which has been substed into the New Zealand article). Should we use this template on the portal and in the New Zealand article instead of the Portal topics page? If so, we should remove the graphics since these pages already include those graphics. Do we want this template in the other New Zealand articles?-gadfium 04:59, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

See whatlinkshere for a list of the articles containing the template.-gadfium 05:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• It didn't occur to me that the portal may already feature something similar; apologies, especially if I have created something redundant. I was prompted by the New Zealand article's former "See also" section plus seeing similar templates for other countries; those templates appeared on the pages they linked, so I began doing the same for {{New Zealand topics}}. I'll now wait pending the outcome here. Regards, David Kernow (talk) 05:20, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• ...No further input here, so shall I finish adding {{New Zealand topics}} to the articles it links...?  Regards, David Kernow (talk) 05:43, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not entirely comfortable with such "navigational templates" being added to articles (because I don't think they add value), but since no one else is objecting, go ahead. I do see value in the template as a replacement for the portal topics template, but it would need to lose the graphics to become a replacement for it. In the absence of comment, I suppose we'll keep both of them.-gadfium 08:13, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I've amended it so that its default state is collapsed (to make the template more discreet) and will add it to the remaining articles it links. I agree that too many of these navigational templates in one place may overload an article – I see, however that other country articles now group these multiple collapsed templates; perhaps these groups could themselves be collapsed – but not that they add no value; at least, not insofar as someone browsing rather than researching can see the scope of related articles and choose one to visit. Hopefully, though, if they're collapsed by default, they'll be less obtrusive.

If there's interest in adopting the template minus its images for the portal, my first thought is to try adding a parameter such as {{New Zealand topics|without images}} to suppress them.

Thanks for your thoughts; I hope the above is acceptable. Yours, David (talk) 10:15, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Could you possibly add a link to NZ cuisine ( Cuisine ). that was in Portal:New Zealand/Topics. Food is an important part of the culture. There's a link to New Zealand wine within the cuisine article. Perhaps it is worth looking at Portal:New Zealand/Topics to see if any important/main topic is not included in your template. I notice there's a link to List of New Zealanders, is it worth adding or List_of_New_Zealand-related_topics in that "section"? The latter looks like WIP and not as complete as the former. Just a few ideas. Linnah 16:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for these pointers; I'll take a look a little later. Meanwhile, this being Wikipedia, feel free to try adding them!  Best wishes, David (talk) 22:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I didn't want to alter your original template as I thought it was your project and wasn't sure if my ideas fit in or if you'd mind others making changes to it. Thanks for letting me know you don't mind. I'll have a look in due course. I think care should be taken to pick what to add to the template you have created otherwise we'll end up wiht a list of all topics (which is what we don't want). Linnah 07:32, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Having now encountered a page with the template, I really don't like it - I feel that it adds way too much weight of irrelevant material to the pages its on, most of the links being one click away already as there is a link to New Zealand on nearly all the pages. As well as wasting bandwidth, it might corrupt search results with articles turning up in searches for unrelated keywords. dramatic 08:25, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I've just had a look at New Zealand cuisine, and I think that anyone searching for New Zealand food should end up there. I have no idea how to set that up, so could someone either do that or explain how? Ta. --Helenalex 01:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. Shudda ^talk 02:30, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

For how you do it, see Wikipedia:Redirect.-gadfium 04:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

If subsequently there's consensus to remove the template, that's fine. Along the lines of a comment above, I reckon that whether someone regards these templates as useful or a hindrance depends on why/how they're using Wikipedia, e.g. focused reseach vs. curiosity-driven browsing. Re "corrupt[ing] search results with articles turning up in searches for unrelated keywords", I'd say (hope!) that anything like that is unlikely, as the template appears at the end of the articles to which it's been transcluded. I realise, though, I may be misunderstanding how the wiki software conducts searches (and/or overlooking something else). Regards, David (talk) 08:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

New user

Hello! New user Scooby101 is in, making several new articles about train stations in New Zealand. See his contributions: [1]. They will need check from NZ WikipediaNZ as well as some consistency work. - Darwinek 12:19, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Idea for article

Considering that there is a page on the 2006–2007 Dutch cabinet formation, maybe one should be made for the 1996 New Zealand government formation?

See Fourth National Government of New Zealand. It probably isn't worth splitting out the material on the 1996 Government formation. If a similar event occurs after the 2008 election, it might become a separate article, simply because we write in more detail about more recent events (I'm not saying this is a desirable thing; just that it happens).-gadfium 07:21, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

When I wrote the 'National-New Zealand First coalition' section of that page I wondered if it would work better to split that off and just have one or two paragraphs on the government page. As it is it seems a bit long. I would tend to think that a page on the coalition - how it was formed, how it worked (or didn't), how it fell apart and the aftermath - makes more sense than just a page on its formation. If anyone wants to start this, beginning with transferring my stuff onto a new page, I think they should. I will probably keep working on the government pages rather than contribute to it, though. --Helenalex 00:02, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Crusaders (rugby) as FAC

Hey, I've nominated Crusaders (rugby) to FAC. As many will know the article is about the New Zealand rugby team. It's not received much comment or feedback yet. If you would like to have a look at the article and add your support or opposition (with reasons please) to it's nomination then please do so here. Thank-you. - Shudda ^talk 04:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Births and Deaths in timeline of NZ History

We now have a couple of thousand articles on New Zealanders linked from their birth/death year in the "Year in New Zealand" series (1900 - 2007). This makes the scattering of births and deaths in the timeline seem inappropriate. Other than deaths of Prime Ministers while in office (which had significant effect on the country) does anyone think that there is any category of New Zealanders important enough for their birth/death years to remain on the timeline?

I have only one candidate for inclusion - the deaths of Māori monarchs and subsequent coronations of the new monarch (these weren't even in the year articles until last week).

I suggest that we leave the current entres for 19th century and earlier as these are not yet covered by year in NZ articles. dramatic 10:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the births and deaths no longer belong in the timeline, with the exception of deaths with significant effect on the country. To rationalise births and deaths prior to 1900, should we create an article 19th century in New Zealand, or possibly a series of articles 1890s in New Zealand for each decade? These could have the births and deaths, and events initially copied from the timeline. I would suggest we not add empty sections but instead build up the article(s) with lists of mayors, etc only as someone has the inclination. I'm not volunteering to populate them!-gadfium 19:08, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Another hoax article?

Tu Pounamu IV does not ring true. Not one of the names mentioned on the page gets a google hit, the language is unusual for an article about a Māori leader (Aproriginal, prince), Ngāti Awa do not come from Gisborne, etc. This not only needs references, it needs verification of the references. (The book is real, according to National Library catalogue, but its subject matter does not appear relevant). dramatic 09:22, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Totally bogus. BTW the creator of the article has made a reference to Tu Pounamu IV in Aquinas College, Tauranga, giving Grey as a source for the family having converted from Ringatuism to Catholicism. Grey is purely and simply a collection of traditional stories, and makes no mention of Catholicism or Ringatuism - in fact Grey, first published around 1854, predates Ringatuism which was started AFAIK by Te Kooti who was much later in the 19th C. Kahuroa 14:13, 3 March 2007 (UTC)