User talk:Lhynard/Projects/Bodies of Water Project

Quite an ambitious project. :)

I'm afraid with the level of granularity you have chosen that you are going to run into some of the same issues I'm encountering with map categorization, only worse. I'm just going to brain-dump some bullet points on you and see what you think. This may be more my problem than yours, it depends on what you're going to do with this project.
 * When is a sea really a lake and vice versa? We call the Moonsea a lake but the Lapal Sea is smaller than the Lake of Dragons (Dragonmere). How big does a pond have to be before you call it a lake? I'm not sure what to call the Sea of Caravans in Zakhara, and I only have Category:Maps of lakes and Category:Maps of seas and oceans to chose from! And you can't really use a fresh/salt water criteria, because then what do you do with the Lake of Salt?
 * What do we do when there is more than one name for a place? Because I want to add a  parameter to the Location template (like , etc.), I am at the mercy of the name of the article. So if the article Gbor Nor redirects to Brightstar Lake, my category has to be named Category:Maps of Brightstar Lake and whoops! I just discovered that I have it reversed: the article goes GN&rarr;BL, but the category goes BL&rarr;GN. Crap. :-P  Okay, maybe I don't have to be that careful about which name I use, but now I have to make redirects for everything with two names, just to be safe. Note that some maps do not give the alternate name for a place. You can probably get away with just redirects.
 * What do you do when a place has a name that doesn't tell you what it is? The Golden water, is it a bay or a lake? I've been classifying the Dragon Reach, Vilhon Reach, and Easting Reach as bays, but then we have the Alamber Sea which looks like another Reach, but it's not.
 * How about when you know it's a river but they don't use the word "River" in the name? The Delimbiyr is a good example. It is also known as the River Shining. Should we append "River" to these? Some maps use "Chionthar River" and others use "River Chionthar". Which one wins? The Serpent's Tail Stream sure looks like a river to me&mdash;it's longer than many rivers.

Well, there you have my badly organized semi-random thoughts. I could use a sanity check, if you are up to the challenge. ;-)

Oh, and by the way, a cape is a description of a piece of land, not a body of water. And when does it become a peninsula? 8-O &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 13:59, April 24, 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the feedback.


 * I in no way envy your map project!


 * I don't think I will run into quite as much trouble. I am not trying to make sure that all rivers are properly classified as rivers as opposed to streams but rather that anything classified as a river or stream is also categorized as a body of water. That way, we can have a link in Category jump "Bodies of water in Foo".


 * ~ Lhynard (talk) 14:21, April 24, 2016 (UTC)


 * P.S.: Thanks for catching "cape".