Talk:Kīlauea

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[edit] most visited?

"Most visited active volcano." does anyone have a reference for that? Does it refer to "currently active" volcanoes, or does "active" here include volcanoes such as fujisan (dormant for 300 years, but does have active magma chamber.)? Zeimusu 01:21, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

To my mind, active means erupting in recent time. I think Fuji is at best dormant (as you indicate), much like most of the Pacific Northwest volcanoes. Hard to beat Kilauea on this one. It has been actively spewing lava (almost continuously) since 1983 and is visited by tens of thousands each year, who can regularly drive or hike close to active eruption areas. You would not want to be anywhere close to the Ring-of-fire volcanoes such as Fuji and Mt. St. Helens when they are actively erupting. The Kilauea article needs a lot of work. - Marshman 01:51, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] overlap

I see that this page Kilauea Volcano that I recently enhanced following someone elses desultory beginning overlaps with another called Kilauea. What should be done?

Hey King, Hi! I just discovered that fact myself. I have been working on Kilauea recently. I'll take care of merging the two, I think under the shorter name "Kilauea" in as much as the few other volcano articles I checked (like Mauna Loa) don't use the term "volcano" in the title. There are some other uses of Kilauea in Hawaiian, but this is the main one. I'll make the move by copying over my stuff to here, in order to preserve the longer page history on this page. Then I'll change the name back. - Marshman 22:27, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
Actually, the other article has about an equal page history. I'm unsure how to merge pages and history. Since most of that work was mine (there was some error correcting by others), I'll still aim to preserve this page history and talk page. - Marshman 22:30, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] categories

This Category stuff may be getting out of hand. Why would we want a category "shield volcanoes" or "Hawaiian volcanoes". What possible advantage could there be to having a category, all members of which could be listed in a short list within an article? - Marshman 01:39, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I dunno, but the category page has an example of "Paul McCartney" in category Beatles (in category british musician etc.) The question "what good are categories?" has yet to be answered, but the advice from above seems to be "make lots of small categories". How is Kilauea different?Zeimusu 13:17, 2004 Jun 5 (UTC)

Although I have yet to see ANY value in the concept of the categories, there seems no value in small categories like "Hawaiian volcanoes" that can be easily (and more intelligently) addressed in the text. Kilauea should be part of the category "Volcanoes"; but getting too small seems extremely counter productive. Why not category:Roads South of Hilo or category:Hills around Dallas. Like endless lists, categories waste peoples time to produce questionable value, avoiding the true purpose of Wikipedians to gather and present information. I say you are wasting your valuable time by even participating in something so mis-guided. But I deleted your categories not because they were "silly", but because they were screwing up the page formatting. It now looiks like that problem may have been fixed. So have at it. I will go read the "Category page" if I can find it. Maybe it will give me hope that there is some sense behind this madness - Marshman 17:02, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Category page, yes, that was a rubbish reference. I meant wikipedia:categorization. The formatting is a problem, but a different issue from the question of categories being a good or bad thing.Zeimusu
Well I read up on them, and while I'm not convinced the idea will work just by making up a bunch of categories, I do now see the potential for a sort of Yahoo approach to finding stuff (as opposed to the generally better search engine approach). The problem is going to be in deciding what are good subcategories and what are not. I can see "volcanoes", and perhaps "shield volcanoes" here, both approaches one could use perfectly well without the categories but which might be subjects of interest. Hawaiian volcanoes runs into the problem of: are we going to list every hill that is now an extinct volcanic eruption? Without text to explain why you ended up at Honolulu when you were looking for Hawaiian volcanoes (or Shield volcanoes), the category approach falls flat and a good set of internal links is far better. Are there cases where the categories are a good idea? Perhaps. But the strength of Wikipedia over other similar information documents is the possibility of relevant links in every paragraph. A search through categories might get one to somewhere not thought of, but that is more sensibly fixed by adding to an article. The fact is, what the category people envisioned as something wonderful was already here in the strength of the links. Now they have created a potential monster. Mr. Natural Health was putting "food" in the category "alternative medicine". That is how wacko the category approach can get. If there were a discussion under food about how food IS an alternative medicine, there would be opportunity for all to work out the text and come to some kind of solution. Now, we just argue about relevancy without anything to stand on either way—the reason I gave up going to the "vote for deletion" page. Anyway, it appears that if anyone wants to maske up sub-categories, they are free to do so. The usefulness can be worked out later, I guess - Marshman 03:59, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Bad Links

Very typical of the University of Hawaii. The departments know just about zip about the web; like US gov sites, they just move them without any regard to setting up forwarding of any kind. One day you go to look up something, and the link is dead :^0 - Marshman 02:45, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Is Kilauea really a mountain?

I just noticed that this article has a Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains infobox and is in Category:Mountains of the United States. But, is Kilauea really a mountain? I thought that was the name of the caldera (a valley, not a peak). Unless I am mistaken, this article shouldn't have a Mountain infobox. Or if people really like the infobox, it should be taken out of Category:Mountains of the United States -- hike395 16:47, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

You are mistaken. Kilauea is regarded as a separate, volcanic mountain. It does have a shallow caldera, called Kilauea Caldera, but the mountain is quite large actually. Read my description of driving to the caldera in the article. The impression visitors get is pretty much what you are saying; but that is because most expect the mountain to be—well, like a St. Helens or Mt. Shasta volcano. Shield volcanoes (=real mountains) are not like that, especially those as youthful as Kilauea - Marshman 01:11, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I know about shield volcanoes: that's not what I'm talking about. Over in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains, the custom seems to be not to bless sub-peaks with the infobox, only for peaks that are distinct. See, e.g., Talk:El Capitan, where I found a little bump, which qualified it as a mountain.
Now, take a look at the topo map for Kilauea: [1]. See how there isn't a distinct peak? The elevation just keeps increasing all of the way up to Mauna Loa. When you zoom in, [2], I still cannot find a peak. This seems like a sub-peak of Mauna Loa, plus a crater. Doesn't seem like it deserves a listing in Category:Mountains of the United States. -- hike395 04:41, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Well, I'd take it up with the USGS first. ;^) Kilauea is a distinct and separate volcano from Mauna Loa, not a "sub-peak". By your argument, all of the Island of Hawai'i is one big mountain with several sub-peaks. The fact is, there are three to four active volcanoes here, and their flows do interlace. Kilauea is a volcanic mountain building on the flank of Mauna Loa. However, their respective rift zones are quite distinct, their calderas are distinct (separate from the crater you see in the topo) and not physically close, and your topographic argument does not really enter into the distinction. Mauna Loa could start to erupt massively, completely burying Kilauea, and that would erase the latter topographically, but not erase it from a geological definition of what constitutes a distinct shield volcano (Mauna Loa has already buried two such smaller shield volcanoes). In effect, you are applying a dubious criterion that overlooks tons of geological evidence. On Mauna Kea some 50+ miles north, there are lots of little peaks and cones near the top. In that case, Mauna Kea is one mountain, one volcano, but one with numerous sub-peaks. It had a large caldera at one time and geologists regard Mauna Kea as a mountain and the sub-peaks simply as smaller eruptions that built cones, not separate volcanoes (= mountains). Mt. Shasta and Shastina are examples of peaks that might or might not be separate mountains; but there is no support that I have ever seen for regarding Kilauea as a sub-peak of Mauna Loa in the sense you are implying. - Marshman 06:22, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Actually, looking at the topos you provided links to (I have my own topo maps of the "peak"), the saddle between the two mountains is evident by following the 4000 ft contour. From the area north of the crater, this contour defines a shelf the rises towards Mauna Kea (north) and also rises towards Kilauea (south), and the ground falls away roughly to the east and west defining a shallow "valley" between the two mountains - Marshman 06:35, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
You mean here [3]? I see what you mean, I didn't look over there. I withdraw my objection, and will list that point as the summit. -- hike395 06:53, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Yes, it rises up to there from the "saddle", but I believe there are higher points a little more to the west as at Uwekahuna (I think you got it) - Marshman 08:37, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] rambling?

The page seems rather rambling and ill disciplined, with little discussion of the volcano and its geology and much description of highways. Re-write required.

So write what you think is missing. Although we call these "articles", the fact of the matter is they are collections of facts and information of all sorts added and edited in small doses and spurts by many different contributors. Your comment could apply to 95% of the articles at Wikipedia, because most are "works in progress". That is how it works here. - Marshman
I agree it was pretty bad. I tried to clean it up quite a bit yesterday and today. I was inclined to throw out ALL the route information, but then I realized that describing the approaches to the volcano and its summit are one way of describing the volcano itself (let's face it, the volcano is very long and flat and hardly even visible from ground level). So until someone objects strenuously and/or finds some very thorough descriptions of the volcano/mountain, I think they are OK to stay (copyedited to remove the archaic and abstruse language). I do very much agree more info can and should be added to the article -- more stuff of interest. Softlavender (talk) 04:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Puu Oo image

I changed the caption to reflect what the image is actually of: one of the six or seven small vents that are within the larger crater called Puu Oo. The entire image is of only part of the floor of Puu Oo - the pictured crater containing glowing lava is only one of the small vents on the floor, not whole of the Puu Oo crater itself, which is much larger. Tzinacan 14:07, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Too many feet-to-meters conversions

Ugh! All the parentheticals in the sentences make the article very difficult to read. It's totally unnecessary, with the possible exception of discussions of scientific phenomena. Permission to delete them, at least in the "route" directions? Thanks. I don't even know if we need them for the rest of the article -- that can be decided by you guys. Softlavender (talk) 03:53, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

We don't all think in feet and miles. I'd prefer we put most of them back. I agree converting "less than 1 mile" into km is overkill, though. -- Avenue (talk) 07:58, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I only took out the ones in the directions to the volcano. The metric conversions are not necessary there, as only someone actually on the island will be using the directions, and each mile is clearly marked with mile markers (every single mile has a marker) on the roads and highways. Those paragraphs were barely readable with all the parentheticals. I also took out redundancies -- 4,000 feet has already been converted to meters once in the article, no need to convert it every time it is mentioned. Softlavender (talk) 00:45, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


Its Is On The South eastside of Hawaii —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.67.201.63 (talk) 17:49, 27 April 2008 (UTC)