Talk:Continental Divide (Atlantic/Pacific)

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[edit] Merger suggestion

Continental Divide and continental divide should be merged.

No. I think one is about the general idea of continental divides and the other is about the Continental Divide, a specific one in North America. Do any other continents refer to their continental divides as the Continental Divide? Where are the others for that matter? Rmhermen 21:09, Oct 7, 2003 (UTC)
Where I'm from it's called a watershed (which is then used as a metaphor for the time after which a TV Channel is allowed to show (in)decent films). What you seem to be calling a watershed, I'd call a basin. 82.36.26.229 19:02, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Move suggestions

Should this be moved to North American continental divide? --SPUI (talk) 21:02, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

I would support that proposal. Currently, the two articles have identical titles, apart from Divide being capitalised in one but not the other. This could make it confusing and difficult to tell them apart. Ygoloxelfer 17:07, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree. This article is about a specific one and should be named more appropriately. --Appraiser 04:11, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
National Atlas deprecates the use of Continental Divide to refer to it, and suggests Great Divide instead.[1] Great Divide is in common usage as the name for this divide and would avoid the confusion (and possible chauvinism) of referring to one of many continental divides as the Continental Divide. Great Divide is also preferable to North American continental divide (which probably should be a WP:DAB page) as even under the most restrictive definition of continental divide there is more than one of them in North America, as waters flow to three oceans. Kablammo 10:55, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Weak Map

The map that goes with this article, while colorful, could be replaced with something better. For one thing, the depiction of the Great Basin in the map contradicts the explanation in the article (and the article, I believe, is correct). Unschool 22:42, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

You seem to be confusing the Great Basin and Great Divide Basin. --SPUI (talk) 21:03, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Triple Point

As the "triple point" link goes to a discussion of the chemical sense of the word, and "Triple Point (Geography)" seems like a really silly additional article, I'm removing the link to "Triple Point." I think an uninitiated reader can get the sense of the word in context, and would be even more confused by an unrelated discussion of the chemistry application of "triple point." (see the discussion page for the "Triple Point" article) Yale2010 02:07, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inconsistency

This article say the great basin divide is in/around Wyoming, but on the map it appears to be northern California and/or part of Utah... Super Jedi Droid 02:05, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The Great Basin, which is shown on the map, is not the same as the Great Divide Basin, which is not shown on the map. Nationalparks 02:20, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Move

I propose to move this article to Great Divide over redirect.

  1. There is another article entitled Continental divide, which differs from this one only in the capitalization of the second word. This could lead to confusion, yet the other article is clearly necessary as it refers to all continental divides.
  2. As mentioned above, the National Atlas deprecates the use of Continental Divide to refer to the cordilleran divide, and suggests Great Divide.[2] Great Divide is in common usage as the name for this divide.
  3. The move would avoid the confusion (and possible chauvinism) of referring to one of many continental divides as the Continental Divide.
  4. Great Divide is also preferable to North American continental divide (which probably should be a WP:DAB page) as even under the most restrictive definition of continental divide there is more than one of them in North America, as waters flow to three oceans.

If no objection is made to this proposal within 7 days I will implement the move. Please discuss below. Kablammo 22:09, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Support as proposer, for reasons set forth above. Kablammo 22:09, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Support - I've been thinking for a long time that something needs to be done about this. Thanks for making the effort.--Appraiser 18:25, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

As there is no opposition, the redirect will be made. There are a large number of links which need to be changed. I will not be able to devote a lot of time to that right away. Kablammo 12:07, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I just noticed this discussion. "Great Divide" is not a good name, because there is another geographical feature with the same name which is referred to as often, or perhaps more often, by that name. Try the Google Scholar search ["great divide" drainage | catchment | watershed | river-system], and you'll see that the Australian Great Divide is more commonly mentioned than the North American one. Try the same search on Clusty and note that "Australia" comes up as one of the clusters. Given Wikipedia's policy of Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias, it seems that we should have Great Divide (North America) or Continental divide (North America) and Great Divide (Australia). --Macrakis —Preceding comment was added at 15:09, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. I'll refrain from making a move for a little while to give time for more comments. Kablammo 15:15, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
A few more points:
  1. WP isn't supposed to correct arguably illogical terminology, but to report on it. Compare jellyfish, for example.
  2. WP is certainly not supposed to distort the names of things in order to disambiguate them; we use parenthetical categories for that.
  3. It appears that "Continental Divide" is far more common than "Great Divide". I used the query ["great divide" drainage | catchment | watershed | river-system -australia pacific atlantic] and the same with "continental divide" on Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, and "continental" is much more common on all three, despite the possible confusion with the metaphorical term "great divide". WP policy generally prefers the most common name recognized by the general public, even if specialists may prefer another name.
  4. The article cited above as evidence that the National Atlas "deprecates" the term Continental Divide is an article with strongly stated personal opinions ("one of my favorite spots"; "the definition I have adopted herein"; etc.) and does not seem to reflect official National Atlas editorial policy. Indeed, the National Atlas's page on the topic has "Continental Divide" as the principal title, and only mentions "Great Divide" as an alternate name.
Hope this is useful.... --Macrakis 04:48, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Your points are of course useful. I took the liberty of numbering them so as to reply.
  1. Agreed. The problem here is one of distinguishing between uses of a generic term which some also use as a proper name of one member of the genus.
  2. The use of Great Divide would not a distortion; it is in common usage. (Google returns 200,000 hits for Rocky OR Rockies "Great Divide".[3])
  3. Is there a way for search engines to distinguish between the use of the term continental divide in a generic sense and a use as a proper name? I do not believe that Google searches distinguish between capitalized terms and uncapitalized terms. (The same number of results are returned by searches for Continental Divide as continental divide.) Often one only knows what divide is meant by context; as the cordilleran divide was more signficant in the development of the US it is not surprising that continental divide is a common term, but we do not know how often that term is used as a proper name. (And the presence of articles on Wikipedia itself influences the results of Google searches.)
  4. Thank you for delving further into the National Atlas page. It does not however resolve the issue of what name should be used here.
To most US residents (aside from a few folks in the northern woods and plains) continental divide means the Rockies. But it is not the only one. Kablammo 11:56, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Sidebar: we have the same issue with twin cities and Twin Cities. In the U.S., Twin Cities overwhelmingly refers to Minneapolis-St. Paul, but the generic term (not-capitalized) has other uses, and world-wide "Twin Cities" has other uses too. My tactic has been to replace Twin Cities with Twin Cities so that the link doesn't rely on the the U.S.-centric view. I have been reprimanded for making that change (see User talk:Appraiser/Archive3#Avoiding redirects), but I still think it's a good idea. In this case, I would suggest Moving the article to Continental Divide (Rocky Mountains) and then changing all relevant occurrences of Continental Divide to Continental Divide. Then the generic "continental divide" works and the Australian and other divides can have their equivalent article names without interference.--Appraiser 13:15, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

2. It is a "distortion" in the sense that it is choosing a considerably less common term (about 2x more hits with [Rocky OR Rockies "continental divide"] as with your query), but as you point out (see 3) this includes the generic use (e.g. "there is a continental divide in the Rockies"), but eyeballing the results, this doesn't look very common. And in the case of "great divide", we have the generic, non-geographic sense ("the great divide between the urban and rural populations of India").
3. Every Web search engine I know ignores case, which is why you and I are both using terms like "watershed", "Rocky", etc.
4. Agreed that the National Atlas does not resolve the issue. That is up to us.
--Macrakis 14:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

It appears we do not have a consensus on this proposal.--Appraiser (talk) 14:21, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New proposed move

I propose moving Continental Divide to Continental Divide (Rocky Mountains) with a goal of "piping" links to this article by replacing Continental Divide with [[Continental Divide (Rocky Mountains)|Continental Divide]]--Appraiser (talk) 14:21, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I would prefer Continental Divide (North America); in particular, I don't think the mountains along which it runs are called the "Rocky Mountains" in Mexico. --Macrakis (talk) 17:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] TfD nomination of Template:Ft

Template:Ft has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. — pete 14:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)