Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Protected areas

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[edit] Categories of protected areas in a given state

Background: See short discussion at Category talk:Protected areas of the United States, see definition given within "Category:Protected areas of New York", and see discussion far above in this Talk page about category naming.

It seems somewhat natural to want to break apart the category of Federally protected areas of the United States into state-specific categories, and also to add state-protected and perhaps also to add locally-protected areas within the states. However, the nature of what is a protected area is not clear. The Wikiproject Protected Areas display box visible at, among other places, Category talk:Protected areas of the United States is pretty clear that Protected areas of interest are those designated by national governments only. IUCN definition refers to nationally designated parks.

The "of" vs. "in" distinction was discussed in the context of U.S. National Historic Landmarks, when the "Category:National Historic Landmarks of the United States" had grown to about 1500 items out of a possible 2,430 or so. At first some categories like "Category:National Historic Landmarks of California" were created. But it was pointed out the NHL designation is "of" the nation, not "of" California, and these were switched to "Category:National Historic Landmarks in California" and the like.

But a list article or a category of "Protected areas in California" can be ambiguous. Does that include only Protected areas designated by the nation that are in California, or does it also include California-designated areas. I think that the should perhaps be divided explicitly between a category of "Protected areas of the United States in California" to cover the Federally-designated ones, and a category of "Protected areas of California" to cover the state-designated ones. Note, a list-article could easily include both a list of one type and then also a list of the other type, while category titles can't convey so much. But then I wonder if states can designate "protected areas". What is a protected area? In common usage, a protected area might be a building that has a security guard. There apparently is a formal usage in which "Protected areas" is a term defined by IUCN for nationally designated natural conservation areas. "Protected areas of California" is a term not in common use, however, so that we would be inventing a term if we created such a category. I think a category of "State parks of California" or "State parks in California" is fine, that is well-defined and we are not inventing anything. But i am currently not on board with either "Protected areas in California" or with "Protected areas of California". I would be inclined to support deletion of any such categories.

Perhaps the existing categories along these lines should be nominated for deletion, as the proper way to focus a discussion? I am afraid there might not be a quorum here in this Talk page, to get to any consensus. doncram (talk) 07:41, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Upon further investigation it appears that Protected area and Category talk:Protected areas of the United States cover only areas designated as Protected Areas as defined by the WCPA and the IUCN. A list of such sites is here [1]. Their focus seems to be mostly about natural habitat with the purpose of maintaining bio-diversity, although some historic sites, monuments, and recreational areas are on the list. Their definition is, "An area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means."[2] Because of this, the text in Protected area and Category talk:Protected areas of the United States should both be modified to clearly state that their scopes cover only sites on that list. Because the list doesn't cover our other categories comprehensively, I think the applicable articles will need to each have their own category. Due to the size, sub-categories by state would make sense. I'd suggest renaming these (Category:Protected areas templates) to use "In" instead of "Of", since the designation comes from an international group.
Although places such as cemeteries, burial grounds, battlefields, nhls, nrhps, lakes, rivers, streams, state parks, national parks, national forests, national wildlife areas, etc. are also somewhat protected from destruction or redevelopment, in order to avoid judgement by editors, we need to stick to WCPA's list and try to make sure that places omitted from their list are also omitted from the categories.--Appraiser (talk) 15:06, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
I support Appraiser's opinion. When this project was started, there was some confusion over whether or not, say, National Historic Sites should be included, and the lack of provision for them elsewhere (at least in terms of an infobox; recently rectified by WP:NRHP) as well as their management by the park service led people to include them as protected areas.

The WCU's categorizations most definitely apply to PAs below the national level ... I saw a list once that included the category for every U.S. state PA; that's how I was able to apply Category V to the Catskill and Adirondack parks here in New York. I think it's pretty easy ... any site protected primarily for ecological reasons is a protected area; sites protected primarily for historical reasons are not. There are some, like the aforementioned Adirondack Park, that have official designation for both reasons. They can be included if and only if they have both official designations. Daniel Case (talk) 16:14, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank u both for providing more background and pointer to the http://www.unep-wcmc.org/wdpa/ World Database on Protected Areas. Theoretically it would be very satisfactory to rely upon the determinations of such an official designation list. However, I browsed in that database and find it is not satisfactory for wikipedia reliance, at the state/local level. At that URL, click on "Search for sites", select search by country, select United States, it gives a list of "National designations" categories starting with "Aquatic Parks", and including "Historic sites", "National Historic Sites", and "State Historic Sites". The "Historic sites" category includes 42, which when I look at them their names leap out to me as being very New York State oriented. Then select, say, "Crailo" and drill down to its "WPDA Site Details", and you see the information source is "Previous Source: NY Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1991", and you see that the WDPA is in fact unaware of the nature of the site, there are not sufficient details available for them to know whether this is a valid protected area for their own database. This site in fact is Fort Crailo, the Yankee Doodle House article which I created and added a HABS pic for, which is a building in an urban area and is not a natural preserve. According to this source, the majority of the 42 so-called "Historic Sites" in the United States are among the 37 New York State Historic Sites. It just looks like an amateur/volunteer found his/her way to the NYS OPRHP and entered those in. Note the "State Historic Sites" category has just 2 entries. The database appears haphazard, and is unaware of NHLs and NRHPs. It just looks to me that the WPDA list is not mature / accurate enough to use as basis for determining protected areas. This is in contrast to the use of the NHL list in the United States, and the NRIS system, to determine which are NHLs and NRHPs for wikipedia. Although I am aware that some NHL program webpages have some content errors (and I keep a list of these and correspond with the NHL program about them), they are stable with respect to the determination of which sites are NHLs. This WPDA database does not appear to be comprehensive or stable. So, while I think that publicizing protected areas and the WDPA's efforts may be noble endeavors, it appears that the WPDA needs staff or volunteers to work on its database, before it would be appropriate for wikipedia to rely upon it. doncram (talk) 18:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps in fact the WDPA would welcome volunteer participation, and several of us could in fact help them a lot. They might be responsive. By the way, I did obtain some response from the NHL program, which recently corrected the 3 most egregious errors in NHL webpages that I had called to their attention. The 3 fixes addressed the only 3 issues of site mis-identifications that I was aware of, and which indeed were the most important to address. Perhaps the NHL program is not staffed for it, or for other reasons, but they did not choose to make corrections for other errors of fact within the content for specific sites which I had pointed out. The WPDA could perhaps be more responsive and/or could open up access to one or more of us, if we wanted to help them. And then eventually in wikipedia we could rely upon an updated WPDA database. Perhaps we should test them by providing specific feedback regarding the historic sites which ought to be deleted from their database. But this all underlines the fact that "protected area" is not a well-defined term, not even by the WPDA, at the state/local level. Since "protected area" is not a term that is generally understood by the public, and since there appears to be no appropriate official list of protected areas, I think it is not appropriate to use wikipedia to try to educate the public about them. My neighbor's yard is a protected area, in that it has some square footage and it is protected by a big and mean dog. For wikipedia purposes, there's no more or less validity to that yard being a protected area than the natural conservation areas that IUCN would like to know about, but does not in fact know about or determine in a systematic way. So in my view lists and categories of state parks are okay for wikipedia, but not lists or categories of protected areas. doncram (talk) 18:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems there is more disconnect that should be resolved. Protected areas of the United States is written to include many types of protected areas besides IUCN-designated ones, whereas Protected areas is not. Then there are many levels of categories on the same topic, some of which include protected areas outside of the IUCN ones, such as Category:Botanical gardens in Florida. Like Don, I also found errors in the WDPA database pretty quickly (it says that Fort Knox (Maine) is in Vermont). If the IUCN/WDPA does not have an accurate master list, then there's no way we should restrict Wikipedia's definition of "Protected Area" to include only IUCN sites. I have seen infoboxes using the various categories list in Category:IUCN Protected Area infobox templates. I wonder where contributors are getting their information. Lot's of work to be done...--Appraiser (talk) 19:00, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Browsing in the IUCN wikipedia article and then the IUCN's webpages, i wonder if a person named Kevin Wheeler is the person to aim to contact, via the CEC email address. See Kevin Wheeler's message as Chair of the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication. It would seem to me that their cooperating with a bunch of wikipedians to improve their database would be compatible with their mission and their operation by decentralized, volunteer networks. On our side, for it to be appropriate for wikipedia to cover the IUCN designated protected areas, we would want / there would have to be some regular or occasional process for IUCN / CEC to change update its database according to new information we wikipedians identified, both for additions of IUCN-protected area-eligible sites and for subtractions of inappropriately identified sites. We could possibly define Category:IUCN-recognized Protected Areas (IPAs), Category:eligible for IUCN recognition as Protected Areas (IPA-eligibles), a Category:apparently inappropriately IUCN-recognized Protected Areas (IPA-errors). The process for the IUCN would occasionally accept the 2nd category items and drop the 3rd category items in their database. If we had contact and there was some commitment on the part of IUCN / CEC to cooperate in this way, I would be more on board about supporting categories on "protected areas". I think we would need to coin a new term "IUCN-recognized Protected Areas" (IPAs) or some other proper noun, instead of using "protected area" which could just be my neighbor's yard, though. Would y'all want to make some such proposal and become "CEC members"? We could be among their thousands of supposed experts involved, and in fact we are pretty good at what we do, digging out basic facts about places and documenting them. doncram (talk) 20:03, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
That sounds a lot like WP:Original Research. The IUCN needs to tell us, in some form, which sites are "Protected Areas". If they don't have a list, then we have no references to support or deny a site's classification.--Appraiser (talk) 20:57, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
I think the database of the IUCN might possibly be a pretty good list of protected areas, but just not be very good when it verges over into sites that are protected primarily for their history, such as the New York State Historical Sites. Also, it is understandable that the IUCN and the Wikiproject:Protected areas wikipedia editors could be misled by U.S. designation of National Monuments that are inconsistent with the original intended purposes of the U.S. Antiquities Act. Perhaps it would take just a little effort to help them out. Providing information to them would be outside of wikipedia. But if they then updated their database, it would then be their list of protected areas, and we in wikipedia could rely upon it in articles and lists. It could be termed WP:Original research if we determined a site was IPA-eligible and then said in an article that it was. But if we determine a site is IPA-eligible, and we tell IUCN, and they agree and put it on their list, then I think it is okay to say in an article that the site is an IPA (because then it is), and there is no original research problem with that. Perhaps there could be a conflict of interest type of issue construed with being involved with them that way, but I personally don't see a COI problem. I think it would be like our "involvement" with the National Park Service on NHL sites. We mainly rely upon the NPS to determine what is a NHL or not, and we request and use their documents and databases. Where their systems have errors, we are free like other citizens to report those errors to the NPS, and we are entitled to state in articles that the NPS has made errors. By the way, my running list of errors in NPS systems is here. And if the NPS makes corrections, then great, and we update our wikipedia articles. I don't see a fundamental problem with planning to give info to the IUCN and then to rely upon their updated database. What else can we do? I don't see any other good alternative. doncram (talk) 18:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
If we are simply informing IUCN of errors and omissions (similar to what we've done for the NPS), I think that's OK. But how do you know if a site is IPA-eligible?--Appraiser (talk) 20:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Partly, we just use their definitions and our wikipedia articles describing sites and common sense. Daniel Case seems to be very sure about knowing which are IPA-eligible sites in his area of New York State and surrounding states; Ruhrfisch author of the List of Pennsylvania state parks and various articles on U.S. natural landmarks would be very knowledgeable about Pennsylvania sites, and so on. We can make some obvious determinations already, like that Fort Crailo does not meet any of the IUCN category definitions, and that some U.S. National Monuments meet the IUCN definition for national parks, some U.S. National Monuments meet the IUCN definition for natural monuments, some U.S. National Monuments do not meet any IUCN criteria. We correspond with IUCN about the obvious cases of omissions and errors, first. If they have training materials on how to determine what is a protected area, like the National Park Service has its big PDF document on determining NRHP eligibility (linked at the National Register of Historic Places article), then we get that, and we can then make solid determinations for many more cases. If they have some staff who can be directed to assist us, we put some questions to them about cases in gray areas, and we (and they) learn as we go. We put our working guidelines into WikiProject Protected Areas pages, and we talk here. Mostly we just do as we always do, which is write up descriptions of parks and sites and ships and districts and so on into wikipedia articles, using our guidelines and principles of notability and verifiability and no original research and so on. Does anyone else see this could work? I am inclined to start by creating trial categories for IPA-designated, IPA-probably-eligible, and IPA-probable-errors.  :) doncram (talk) 21:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
There are seven IUCN categories - see IUCN#Protected_Area_Management_Categories. I am not sure we are talking about all of them here. I also know in the past that searching the World Database on Protected Areas [3] can be a bit hit or miss. For example, Presque Isle State Park in Lake Erie in Pennsylvania is isted as IUCN II (a National Park, see here, perhaps because it contains a National Natural Landmark). Tiadaghton State Forest is listed here but without an IUCN class. Little Pine State Park is listed but no IUCN here, while Upper Pine Bottom State Park is not listed. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 05:00, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] rename Protected areas categories

Per Appraiser suggestion above, and endorsement by others, could all the categories of protected areas in the US, at least, be renamed from "of" any location to being "in" the location?

Also change corresponding "National Forests of ____", "National Monuments of ____", "Wilderness Areas of ___", and any other similar categories within any of the "Protected areas of STATE" categories. National Monuments and National Forests are properly capitalized i believe. However, is Wilderness Area a formal name, or should it be changed to "Wilderness areas in ____", with lowercase "areas"?

Per the following discussion subsections, at WP:CFD, I put up a proposal to rename 80 to 100 renames of Protect areas, Bird and Wildlife sanctuaries, National Monuments, National Forests categories. doncram (talk) 20:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

The related Category:Wikipedia:Categories for discussion has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for Discussion page.

[edit] Rename categories "of" Australia, Canada, India, United Kingdom all other countries

It was pointed out in discussion of the ongoing Categories-For-Discussion that the renaming of all the protected areas "in" a given US state to "of" the state would cause inconsistency with the categories "of" the 53 or so other nations, and some subcategories. I notice that Australia, Canada, India, UK have the most development. I am expanding the CFD to cover renames of all of these from "of" to "in" names. doncram (talk) 01:10, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 May 13#Renames of categories for National Parks, Protected Areas, related categories world-wide which proposes renames for various categories of protected areas world-wide, as well as much more. doncram (talk) 20:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rename "National parks of __country__" to "National Parks of __country__"

Related cleanup, also being added to the CFD. For National Parks, they are designated by the nation, so they are "of" the nation. But, they are proper noun National Parks. "National parks" is perhaps ambiguous, could possibly be interpreted mean parks in the nation. As cleaning up the rest, this change should be formalized too. doncram (talk) 01:10, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 May 13#Renames of categories for National Parks, Protected Areas, related categories world-wide which proposes renames from "National parks of ___" to "National Parks of COUNTRY" or to "National Parks in SUBAREA", as well as much more. doncram (talk) 20:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Relatedly, I contend that the term "National park" is not a valid term for wikipedia, and I wish to revise and rename numerous related articles: national park, List of national parks, List of national parks in Africa, List of national parks of Algeria, etc., etc. I don't want to be contentious, but this is taking a lot of time to clean up on the protected areas categories, and now I see that the National park categories and List-articles seem also to need serious clean-up. Personally, I am accepting the somewhat informal term "protected area" as a wikipedia-coined phrase, used lightly by the IUCN. However, the article on national parks put forward that coined phrase and i do not believe it should be acceptable for use in Wikipedia. doncram (talk) 20:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wilderness areas in ___?

There exists List of U.S. Wilderness Areas, a list of the proper noun Wilderness Areas designated (and owned?) by the US government. There also exists List of U.S. state and tribal wilderness areas, lower case. Should the categories be converted from inclusion of just the Federal ones, to also include the state and tribal ones? Or maybe they are mixed up already. Perhaps general categories "Wilderness areas in ____" would be best. I am not familiar with these, some comment by someone with some knowledge would help. doncram (talk) 16:43, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I guess i am inclined to go with calling them all Wilderness Areas, capitalized, whether designated by the U.S. or a state or local government. To differentiate vs. just any old wilderness area, that is out there without any designation or protection. I will rename the state and tribal list article to reflect this, and make similar changes. Thanks for listening... :) doncram (talk) 18:39, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] draft proposal

Draft request:
Please change from / to:




etc. And note California has one extra:


etc.

And note New York has two extras:


etc. through Wyoming, the last state,
and including also Washington, D.C.:

  • Category:National Forests of Washington, D.C. to Category:National Forests in Washington, D.C.
  • Category:National Monuments of Washington, D.C. to Category:National Monuments in Washington, D.C.
  • Category:Wilderness Areas of Washington, D.C. to Category:Wilderness areas in Washington, D.C.
  • Category:Protected areas of Washington, D.C. to Category:Protected areas in Washington, D.C.


and including also:

Request all the renames as noted, except for where the "from" category does not exist.

[edit] Articles covered by WikiProject / admin issues

I notice that some articles like Wilderness area have no wikiproject, and I am adding {{Messagebox protected areas}} to that. I wonder if the wikiproject article count could be included in the main page of the wikiproject, and if a brief campaign to tag articles of / for the wikiproject is needed? Related questions:

Why is there no table of articles tallied by class of article, such as available for other wikiprojects, such as {{Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/National_Register_of_Historic_Places_articles_by_quality_statistics}}

National Register of Historic Places
articles		 Importance
None Total
Quality
Featured article FA 21 21
Featured list FL 1 1
Good article GA 58 58
B 378 378
Start 2456 2456
Stub 7830 7830
List 379 379
Assessed 11123 11123
Unassessed 2 2
Total 11125 11125

Is this wikiproject not part of Version 1.0, not that i really understand what that is?

Is there a problem with use of {{Messagebox protected areas}}, when something like {{Wikiproject Protected areas}} is needed instead, for tallying to happen?

Inquiring minds want to know. :) doncram (talk) 15:56, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I created {{WikiProject Protected areas}}, {{WikiProject protected areas}}, {{WikiProject Protected Areas}}, {{Wikiproject Protected areas}}, {{Wikiproject protected areas}} to redirect to the Messagebox protected areas. Easier to remember and to apply to new articles. I still wonder about how to get article counts for WP:PAREAS. doncram (talk) 23:02, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot for how to implement the assessment system. I think this is something we should do, however I just tried to do this for another project, and it didn't work, so I'll leave it to someone else...--Padraic 16:57, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Conservation areas

Do Ontario conservation areas (see Conservation Ontario) qualify for this wikiproject? If so, which IUCN category do they fit in? --Padraic 15:48, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

In my view, yes, they fit in. I think it would be helpful to ensure that the overview article describes their nature, but I would understand them to be a) areas preserving natural features and/or biodiversity, and b) protected legally by a government or through other effective means, so yes. It helps also to focus on whether they are considered by IUCN, through the associated WPDA, to be protected areas. In fact, many of them are actually listed in the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). 64 "conservation areas" and 353 "conservation authority areas" are listed for Canada there.
I think the whole category Category:Conservation areas in Ontario should included within Category:Protected areas of Canada, so I am adding it now. Category-wise, then, you don't need to add each Ontario conservation area article to the protected areas categories, they are now included. However, please do add the Wikiproject Protected Areas to the Talk page of the article.
And, it still helps if you check each one to see if it is listed in WPDA. If you come across Ontario conservation areas that are clearly protected areas by above definition, but not listed in the WPDA, please add the article to the new wikipedia category:IUCN protected area omissions. When we collect a certain number in that category, we can consult with IUCN/WPDA and eventually get them to update their database. By the way I notice that Spencer Gorge / Webster's Falls Conservation Area, the one of five parks of the Hamilton Conservation Authority areas that has a wikipedia article, is one that is in fact listed in the WPDA. doncram (talk) 18:31, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Cool, I will start adding infoboxes and talk page notices.--Padraic 15:20, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I have started classifying them as IUCN category II -- is this accurate? --Padraic 17:06, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] IUCN category check

I've downloaded a copy of the IUCN World Database on Protected Areas so I could check to see whether Wikipedia's IUCN categorizations are correct in all of those protected area infoboxes. (I was interested after a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places.) After a fair amount of database manipulation, I think I'm finally to the point where I can do some cross-referencing of articles in Category:IUCN Category V versus what's actually in the IUCN database for Category V. (Or other categories, but I'm looking at V first.)

As others would probably expect, I'm finding Wikipedia articles erroneously listed in IUCN Category V when they aren't listed in the IUCN database. I'm also finding areas that are in the IUCN database that have Wikipedia articles, but their articles here aren't in their IUCN category. These deviations happen pretty often with state parks. For example, Bear Head Lake State Park is in Category:IUCN Category V, while Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park is not.

Should I continue this analysis so we can properly categorize articles that are in the IUCN database and decategorize the articles that aren't? Are other people interested in the results of this analysis? It's been a little time-consuming so far to do this cross-referencing, though there might be ways to make it easier. I'm just wondering if the IUCN categories are meaningful enough to most people that it's worth my time to do this work. --Elkman (Elkspeak) 05:37, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

This is an interesting exercise you're doing. It may even be of some interest to the World Commission on Protected Areas?. In some ways it may be that you/Wikipedia are not only bringing IUCN database and Wikipedia categories into line with each other .. but you may also be effectively testing the adequacy of the IUCN database's current coverage!!. As I understood it, the IUCN ideal/ original charge was to endeavour to identify, list, and categories ALL the world's protected areas - to enable international comparisons, and prescribe more standardised management practices? Bruceanthro (talk) 14:54, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Skungwai/SG_ang Gwaay Llnaagay/Ninstints

Skungwai/SG_ang Gwaay Llnaagay/Ninstints - choice of name re article creation; please see THIS from Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, which needs the village split off. Formatting and orthography choices for indigenous articles in general need dicscussion/consistency somewhere/somehow.Skookum1 (talk) 17:07, 4 June 2008 (UTC)