Talk:O'Shaughnessy Dam

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I feel like this article needs to mention the restore hetch hetchy foundation as a part of the controversyBCann 05:17, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmmmmm... I don't really like my qualification of the Sierra Club, it seems POV, but they are such a partisan organization, I don't really like leaving their opposition in there unqualified. Ronald Reagan was known as a conservationist and it's not like it was the Secretary of Defense making the proposal, it was someone who had responsibility for parks, so I think their criticism was very politically motivated. But, that's my POV. Is there a better way to get that across in an NPOV fashion? The Sierra Club is known for opposing Republican and bipartisan environmentalist/conservationist proposals. Daniel Quinlan 20:29, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)

It's not true that the Sierra Club opposes Republican and bipartisan environmental proposals. For example, back in the 1972, the Sierra Club worked to stop a trans-Sierra highway through Minaret Summit. One of its chief allies was the Republican governor of California (at the time): Ronald Reagan.
I think we can just drop the qualification of the Sierra Club. After all, someone can click through the wikilink and find out more about the Sierra Club in a (hopefully) NPOV way. You don't need to describe every organization in every article: that's what wikilinks are for.
-- hike395 03:00, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It's true that they overwhelmingly endorse Democrats and not Republicans. It would be better to just leave out the anti-Reagan stuff and stick to the facts of what happened, but this is Wikipedia and everything must be a back and forth debate in the article. Anyway, here's an independent third-party endorsement list that makes it pretty darn clear:
http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_rating_detail.php?sig_id=002675M
Daniel Quinlan 09:06, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)
I wasn't disputing that the Sierra Club endorses (almost only) Democrats. That's why I didn't remove it from an article --- it is factual. I was responding to your concern that you felt compelled to point that out in the article, because the Sierra Club opposes Republican environmental proposals.
My main concern is that the Carl Pope sentence is very awkward, due to all of the subordinate clauses and parentheses. I believe that either a reader of the article knows who the Sierra Club are and what they stand for (it's not like they are very obscure), or if they are young or not from North America, they can click through the link. So, I would drop the extra words.
But, I'm pretty flexible about this, because the extra words are factual. I just don't know how to fit them into this article in a readable way. Perhaps that material belongs in the Sierra Club article itself. -- hike395 15:27, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] ?

As I was reading this article, I felt jarred by these two sentences:

"However, it's not just for a campground—it's to re-create a second 'Yosemite.'"

"Sometimes local self-interest puts people on the unexpected side of an issue"

I wouldn't say these are strongly POV, but they do seem like offhand opinions that someone inserted into the article. I'm deleting them for that reason, and because they don't really fit the paragraph they were inserted into. If someone notable made remarks to that extent, they need to be sourced before they're reinserted. Gershwinrb 10:39, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Agreed

A long time ago, I wrote the original article on O'Shaughnessy Dam, and have my own feelings on the issue, but -- I agree. The sentences are POV.

dino talk

[edit] Merge

A couple of years ago, we discussed how to split the topic of Hetch Hetchy Valley, see Talk:Hetch Hetchy Valley. One issue was: what was the title of the article about the whole reservoir system, should it be named after the dam or the reservoir? At that time, I said:

Let's look at Wikipedia precedence: it looks like there are articles about the dams, instead of the reservoirs behind them. For example, see Reservoirs and dams in California or Reservoirs and dams in the United States. So, it looks like Wikipedia puts the reservoir adjunct to the dam, and we should keep O'Shaughnessy Dam as the main article, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir as the redirect.

I still believe this to be true, but want to reopen the discussion before doing anything radical.

-- hike395 23:12, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't seem to be much controversy: I'll perform the merge. hike395 01:50, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
My apologies for not catching this before the merge was completed. I wrote the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir article, but I don't keep pages that I create on my talk page to avoid a sense of ownership. Usually, I just let them develop on their own, without my interference, and sometimes come back to expand them. However, in this case, I strongly disagree with a merge. First, it is customary, at least on the California lakes and dams, to have separate articles (see List of reservoirs and dams in California, many of the articles were created by me, but it was standard practice before I created any articles). Also, even if the articles are merged, it is better to keep them under the lake's name. For one thing, the name of the lake is almost always more well known, Hoover Dam being one of the few exceptions. Lakes and their names tend to be longer lived, as well. Dams are frequently renamed to honor people, but lakes are renamed much less frequently. Lakes can also go through multiple dams and the dam always has a different name, in my experience. This will probably become more common as dams continue to age (most in California were built between the late 1800s and before 1975 or so). For these reasons, I reverted the merge. -- Kjkolb 23:23, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I strongly agree with this argument. Eperotao (talk) 23:12, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removing O'Shaughnessy

October 17 Eos states that engineering studies are being done on the feasibility of removing the dam.

[edit] SF to take 60% more water from the T?

I thought I read about a week ago (thus around 1/1/08) that San Francisco was considering taking 60% more water from reservoir, and thus the T, than it's been doing, but I can't find any good source to that effect. It should probably go in here if it's true -- can anyone find it? atakdoug (talk) 10:38, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Carl Pope reference

The article says that "Some observers, such as Carl Pope (Director of the Sierra Club), stated that Hodel had political motives [1] in proposing the study. The imputed motive was to divide the environmental movement".... However, if one reads the reference, Pope writes that "Others have theorized that Hodel's proposal was motivated by a desire to split the alliance between conservationists and the Northern California politicians who have traditionally been sympathetic to their concerns." If he is an advocate of that view, he doesn't say that in the reference; either the article should be reworded, or a reference should be added that demonstrates that Pope believes that Hodel had a political motive to divide the environmental movement. Jim (talk) 05:12, 24 March 2008 (UTC)