Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Melanesia

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Melanesia
Oceania Portal
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Melanesia, which collaborates on articles related to Melanesia. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] Welcome to this Project

Well this Project seems to have got started in a small way. Please join in and help. I have started adding the Project tag as above to a few articles and I have made sure the appropriate class and importance categories have been created, and have an explanatory heading. Two problems remain (at best):

  • class=Stub and class=Start have to have a capital "S" in spite of a tweak I did to the template which part fixed it. With a small "s", the talk pages shows the right category, but the article is not in it.
  • The template does not show the importance tag, although the articles are correctly added to the appropriate importance category.

Anyone who understands the coding of this kind of template better than me, please have a go at fixing these. --Bduke 22:27, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I seem to have fixed it. Please check it out. --Bduke 22:59, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Related WikiProjects

Wikipedia:WikiProject Fiji is clearly related. I will draw attention to our Project on their talk page. Do we want to largely avoid Fiji related articles, leaving them to the Fiji Project? Or what kind of relationship to them do we want? --Bduke 22:59, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the fellow who created the project said that this project would try to avoiding "stepping on the toes" of any more focused projects out there. However, if a given article relating to Fiji also substantially relates to other areas of Melanesia, that article could probably legitimately be seen as falling within the scope of this project. John Carter 15:46, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Collabration of the fortnight?

Hi all. I am finally getting involved with this project after some time off on holidays. I was thinking that we should pool together and collaborate on some articles to get them up to better standard. So after this current tsunami in the Solomons (I am sure lots of people will be all over this to keep this article up to date) I was thinking that the details surrounding the 1998 Papua New Guinea earthquake at Aitape, when over 2000 people died, were pretty dire. So I went ahead and have created a dedicated article called 1998 Papua New Guinea earthquake and copied the text from Aitape across. There is quite a bit of info out there regarding this earthquake (old articles on BBC News for example), we just need to fill it out. So anyone else want to get their hands dirty in the name of the first Melanesian collaboration? What do you reckon? (oh and after we collaborate on this article I have plenty of suggestions for the next one - Honiara anyone). Nomadtales 06:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Waisale Serevi now a GA nom

I've been working on Waisale Serevi for some time. I have nominated it for Good Article status but it may need a copy-edit before it's promoted. Would someone be willing to have a read through and do that for me? It's very hard to do when most of the article was written by myself. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. - Shudda talk 14:03, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

  • I've copy edited your article down to "Personal Life", made some corrections, some changes.  Everything I did in each paragraph is documented in comments I wrote after each paragraph that I felt required editing. Towards the end of the article many of my edits had to do with your use of semicolons.  However, in the interim I got very busy working on the Tok Pisin Wikipedia and Wiktionary and neglected to finish my editing, but will return to it again quite soon.  Will put the copy edit tag at the end of the article when I've completed the edit.  It's a good, interesting article. If it's okay with you, I'd like to copy it as an English-language article into the (now) bilingual Tok Pisin Wikipedia (tpi.Wikipedia.org).  If okay with you, it will appear as an English subpage ("Waisale Serevi / English") to the as yet unwritten Tok Pisin article/placeholder "Waisale Servi".  The intention is that eventually a Tok Pisin version/approximation of your article about Serevi will be written.  Cheers!   K. Kellogg-Smith 03:09, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bilateral relations discussion

I would like to invite you all to participate in a discussion at this thread regarding bilateral relations between two countries. All articles related to foreign relations between countries are now under the scope of WikiProject Foreign relations, a newly created project. We hope that the discussion will result in a more clean and organized way of explaining such relationships. Thank you. Ed ¿Cómo estás? 18:57, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Waisale Serevi FAC

I have nominated Waisale Serevi for FAC. It's be great for a Fiji article to be an FA, and this guy is a great player. You can leave your comments here. Any comments are welcome, and if there are concerns raised any help addressing them would be fully appreciated. Many hands make light work! Thanks. - Shudda talk 07:55, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Assessment

Melanesia
articles		 Importance
Top High Mid Low None Total
Quality
Featured article FA 16 16
A 1 1
Good article GA 2 2
B 5 8 1 1 7 22
Start 4 47 32 8 60 151
Stub 40 62 64 176 342
Assessed 10 95 95 73 261 534
Unassessed 1 2 1195 1198
Total 10 96 97 73 1456 1732

If anyone is actually reading this can people start tagging Melanesian articles by adding {{WikiProject Melanesia |class= |importance= }} to the corresponding talk page. Assess the article as well by following the guidelines on here. As you can see by the table to the right (which is automatically updated everyday), there are a lot of articles out there that have not been caught (in fact it is currently at a dismal 38, with only 28 assessed). Thanks. Nomadtales 06:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

I am gradually doing so. The downside is there are very few people willing to assessment at all, and a lot of projects wanting it done. John Carter 14:35, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
yup, very true, but all anyone out there needs to do, like yourself are doing, is when updating or creating any articles they are dealing with about Melanesia, is to check to see if the Project Banner is added to the talk page, and if not add it. Easy. Nomadtales 01:25, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm about ready to leave, but tomorrow I'll get PockBot to run through the Melanesia category so that people can see what assessments have already taken place. Then they can give it the article a quick once-over to see if the old assessment is accurate and hopefully make the assessment a bit more quickly. John Carter 01:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Grand Companions of the Order of Logohu

This category has been proposed for deletion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 May 8#Category:Grand Companions of the Order of Logohu. --Bduke 00:03, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New PNG Place infobox

Port Moresby
Pot Mosbi
Flag of National Capital District (Papua New Guinea) National Capital District,
Papua New Guinea
Location of Port Moresby
Port Moresby location
Location of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea
Population:
(as of 2000)		 254,158[1]
Main languages: Tok Pisin, English, Motu
Language area: Motu
Established: 1873
Elevation: 30 m (98 ft)
Coordinates: 9°28′10″S, 147°10′15″E
Mean Max Temp Mean Min Temp Rainfall
35 °C
95 °F		 25 °C
77 °F		 1200 mm
47.2 in

Downtown Port Moresby
  • The infobox is now in use - please add to PNG places as you work on them. Wantok 01:31, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
  • See discussion at the template talk page (deleted the copy of discussion here to avoid duplication). Wantok 01:30, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Category

I have created the category Category:Provincial capitals of Papua New Guinea and added all the relevant cities and towns to it. Believe it or not, a couple of the articles didn't even exist! Please add place infoboxes to these localities first, and make sure if they don't already have Melanesia templates in the talk places that they are added, with a high importance! Aliasd 18:07, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Maps

I've been playing around with creating topographic maps. WikiCommons has some maps, but they are often based on low-resolution large-scale data, and lack a ruler and altitude scales. The images I have made are based on 90m data, though the resolution in the final .png images is something like 200 - 400 m/pixel. Since I work on small scales, I can also select a suitable colour scaling to emphasize the local terrain. So far I have done

No, there is no logic whatsoever in selecting these islands.

I am planning to make few more, but I thought that before I start massproducing I should ask how people like them. Since all the images so far fall under WP Melanesia, I came here. Besides, I think I'll probably grow bored making them and move on to do something else, so I might as well start up with regions/islands deemed important. So if you think some region/island really needs this kind of map or have any comments, just let me know. – Sadalmelik 22:09, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

  • Great stuff, Sadalmelik, very nice maps that are useful additions to the articles. I'd suggest that if maps have noticeable missing data points (e.g. Goodenough) they not be included. If you're looking for suggestions, I'd say it could be good to start with the biggest islands - New Guinea, New Ireland, Guadalcanal, Efate, Viti Levu, etc etc... Wantok 01:22, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
It's a bit of an eye sore... SRTM has lots of missing data, and the higher you go, the worse it gets - e.g. apparently much of the Himalayas are missing. Generally a simple interpolation takes care of small bad regions, but it doesn't work well with larger regions. I think I'll experiment a bit more, as after I have done a region once, it's easy to try different things with it. – Sadalmelik 08:58, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Not sure if it is any help to you or anyone else but I discovered this webpage the other day with scans of US Army maps of New Guinea. Because they are US Army they are probably public domain. Oh yeah and great work on the maps Sadalmelik, they look great. Nomadtales 03:03, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Nice collection! I think that in ideal world, we would have at least three maps for every large geographic region: human settlements, altitude and vegetation, possibly combined into one or two figures. Vegetation maps would be nice, but I doubt detailed data exists - besides one can easily discuss that in text. Vegetation maps could probably be produced for really big regions. Topographic maps I think are more important than vegetation, but still in the same "nice to have"-category. They are easy to make though, so there is no reason not to have them. What is really needed are maps with human settlements and roads... I could add towns to my maps, but roads are a strict no-no - I just do not have access to such data. I'm also missing most of the rivers and lakes. – Sadalmelik 08:58, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suburbs of Port Moresby

The following text apeared on my talk page the other day:

Managed to order a UBD Street & Community Business Directory (17th ed 1996) and have used it to construct a template and list of Port Moresby suburbs similar to the ones we have for Australian cities. I've done up Konedobu, Papua New Guinea so that it illustrates these. Let me know what you think, and also if you have any means of checking my work as it seems the list of suburbs is rather unofficial and non-defined in PNG unlike in Australia where each suburb name is gazetted in its state or territory. Orderinchaos 19:07, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Looks good! Aliasd 02:44, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

The UBDs and another map are actually scanned and up at this address. Pretty handy as I was checking them out last night. These are no doubt copyrighted but good for reference. Nomadtales 23:47, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wantok

User:Wantok has been nominated for a RfA. If you know Wantok, and think he should be an admin, please lodge your support at his RfA discussion page. Aliasd

  • ...or oppose the nomination if you wish - I won't take it personally. Wantok 04:07, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
    • The proceeding conversation has become controversial. I am sorry for anyone I may have offended by posting this, and did not intend this to be posted as a campaign. If this section of the talk page should be removed, I will not object. Aliasd 09:53, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
    • I entered a Support vote for Matt.  Those opposed to Matt's appointment without exception cite Matt's small number of edits and contributions.  I consider that argument completely irrelevant, even frivolous.  I just don't believe that high editorial volume has anything whatsoever to do with an Administrator's ability to execute good judgement in making decisions and providing help to authors and editors.  An Administrator's job is to help the Wikipedia community, not to hunker up to a computer and write/edit articles.  K. Kellogg-Smith 19:41, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kanak

I have reverted edits on this article. User:Fiona Foam has claimed that the Kanak do not exist, and strangely, seemed to complain in the edit summary that New Caledonia does not exist! As I have not yet been able to open a dialogue with this user, I have reverted their edits as vandalism. My understanding is that the native Melanesian inhabitants refer to themselves as Kanaks, but I am aware, of course, that the term, and similar terms have been used to refer negatively to Melanesian people, could this have been what this user was upset about? Is this term politically correct to be used in this instance? Aliasd 13:13, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

  • Completely agree with your reversion - this appears to have been straight vandalism. "No such island?" :) Wantok 14:27, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stub Sorting

I have constructed a new template called provstub. Basically, you call it like this: {{provstub|ncd}} or {{provstub|nip}} etc. It is a stub template for a province related article, and has a name a lot easier to remember than PapuaNewGuinea-Geo-Stub, or whatever it is :) The stub automatically calls the flag of the province, and adds the stub into an appropriate category, Try it today! Aliasd 01:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, the three letter codes are the same as the codes used in the infobox png place template Aliasd 01:54, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Well, apparently you have to propose stub types and make them go through an approval process. Template has been nominated for deletion Aliasd 02:20, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
The shitfight is here if anyone wants to weigh in Aliasd 05:48, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Instead of creating a new template why don't you just alter the existing stub to have a function for the province? I can see it working something like this {{PapuaNewGuinea-geo-stub | prov=nip}}. Saves the creation of new templates and existing stubs can just be altered if they need to be. Nomadtales 07:46, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Yea, good idea, that should be the way, I guess I just got peeved with the way all this was handled by the stub cartel, didn't see the real obvious solution. Aliasd 14:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Amazing PNG online resources

I have come across two amazing online resources that must be shared with you guys! They both involve experimental metadata placed across interactive maps of Papua New Guinea. Together they provide an accurate representation of llg divisions, districts, towns, population areas, as well as school locations, hospital locations, precise boundaries, etc. This information has proven hard to find online, and I hope it comes in handy for you guys too. I persnally have used this information to begin mapping and documenting the Western Province, such as North Fly District, Western Province and all wikilinks from that page. Anyway....

  • [1] This is the UPNG Remote Sensing centre. I couldnt get it to work for a long time, then installed Internet Explorer through wine and discovered it was heavily reliant on activex. Thank god i did install IE tho (has anyone EVER said that?), as this resource is great, and will allow me to easily make accurate SVG images of the LLGs of PNG and their corresponding Population centres (which I will be doing a lot of) If you want me to make a svg of your province, please ask me, and I will prioritise requests!
  • [2] I discovered this resource when the xml returned on a google search. The most cool thing about this is you can do an overlay of the 2000 census wards and zoom in by district, and have population centres clearly marked. The sad thing is it is only kind of accurate, with some dots in the wrong place, some names marked wrong, and some areas just completely mis marked (for instance it puts all the refugee camps like Black Wara over near Hawenai, instead of on the border! Still I think this experimental resource is COOL and when used as a guide can provide some clarification.

-- Aliasd 03:39, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Some minor points, the second link is only partially complete, and only works for less than half the provinces. Sadly this work was done in 2005 and it looks like the project is abandoned. As I dont have much information on the other provinces, they are more difficult to map and document, although I have successfully documented New Ireland Province which wasnt included in this resource. Aliasd 06:51, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copy Edit

Would appreciate if Tabubil could go through a copy edit, if anyone feels game. I hope to get it to GA. Aliasd 11:14, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tok Pisin Wikipedia and Wiktionary

Per an excellent suggestion from K. Kellogg-Smith, I've created a Tok Pisin subpage to this Wikiproject as a place for discussion of how to approach bringing the Tok Pisin Wikipedia and Tok Pisin Wiktionary back to life. Please join the discussion there if you have an interest. Wantok (toktok) 06:55, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Infobox Templates

I have set up {{Infobox PNG Road}}, {{Infobox Papua New Guinea Province}} and {{Infobox Papua New Guinea District}} for your editing pleasure. See these guys in action here, here, and here. aliasd·U·T 08:35, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PNG electorates and districts

Hi all, here's an issue I think we need to come to an agreement on. In Papua New Guinea the electorates match the administrative districts almost universally - but not quite. In all provinces there is one "Open" electorate per district, with the same boundaries, plus one "Provincial" electorate covering the whole of each province. However in the National Capital District (which is special, in that it's just one administrative district, but also has province-level status), there are three electorates, plus the provincial electorate.

So... we are in the slow process now of creating articles for the administrative districts, but what will we do about the electorates? Options that come to mind:

  • (a) One article per district, which doubles as an article for the electorate - so in the district articles we include information about the current (and past?) MP. Create extra articles for the three NCD electorates. Likewise, have the existing article for each province double up as an article for the provincial electorate, so, again, we include information about the current (and past) MP. Create a list page for electorates.
  • (b) Separate article for each electorate. Create a list page for electorates.
  • (c) Do nothing :)

Bear in mind that the electorate articles (whether separate or as the district/province articles) will probably carry some kind of navigation templates in future, so doubling up means we add some electorate-related nav as well as the article content.

At present I'm slightly favouring (b). Thoughts? Wantok (toktok) 11:11, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Electorates are obviously different from districts or LLGs - they just happen to mainly have the same boundries - so in effect they should get their own article. But as to when or who will get around to creating these articles is another matter entirely :), we have our work cut out with Districts as is. Nomadtales 07:23, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I thought electorates were basically the same as districts, am I missing something? At the very least, I dont think the differences are obvious. aliasd·U·T 11:35, 20 July 2007 (UTC) EDIT: Sorry, confused, but each electorate hosts LLG elections, which seems to me they are the same as districts. aliasd·U·T 12:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
  • So far the Open electorates are the same as districts everywhere except the 3 Open electorates in NCD, which are obviously not districts. However, that may well change - the Electoral Boundaries Commission recommended last year that 26 new Open electorates be created, and I don't know whether that would mean the districts themselves would also change. I would think they will, and that districts will map to electorates except NCD in future. The other aspect is really what content we want on the district pages - what are we going to expand these to include (with or without electorate info)? Would previous MP lists, current MP, nav boxes for MPs, etc, be suited there? Wantok (toktok) 12:35, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I favour (a) mabye with an infobox listing all electorates at the bottom of the page, as well as the provincial llg/district ones. If a district contains 2 electorates, we can branch off to separate electorate articles or have a subsection, realistically, I cant see the electorate article getting beyond stub class for years if they are created, we had trouble even listing districts and LLGS! I secretly hope they dont create 26 new districts tho, my mapping skills are spread thin right now... Personally, I am working on the eastlink at the moment, setting up the massive tolling, imaging, billing etc environment they need, and I will be working long hours until further notice.... aliasd·U·T 17:13, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PNG Images

I have completely revised my Images section in my userspace. It is of interest to you guys because it contains an ad for WikiProject Melanesia which you guys can use in your userspace or in the wikiproject space, as well as many PNG related images which you can use for your articles. Please use the request feature to request anything you would really like to see to compliment articles you are writing at the moment. I have limited time to contribute to Wikipedia at the moment and I would like to see this time go to use supplying stuff that is appreciated by at least 1 user immediately :) seriously, please request! aliasd·U·T 06:24, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PNG Justices

I've been thinking about doing some work on the judges of the Supreme Court and National Court of PNG, and trying to improve Wikipedia's content of the PNG legal system in general. However, I seem to be drawing a blank on being able to get an up-to-date list of the court's current judges - the court's website doesn't appear to have been updated since 2005, newspaper databases are not turning up any useful results, and since the judges don't all sit at the same time, I can't get a list of judges from past judgements. Does anyone either a) know who they are, or b) know where I might find out? Rebecca 07:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PNG Coat of Arms

Image:Papua New Guinea coa.svg
200px

The PNG COA has been vectorised by User:Rugby471 aliasd·U·T 02:20, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Papua New Guinea

Looking for members please for WikiProject Papua New Guinea. Feel free to join Ijanderson977 (talk) 17:28, 21 April 2008 (UTC)