Talk:List of U.S. states by elevation

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Featured list star List of U.S. states by elevation is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do.
November 12, 2005 Featured list candidate Promoted

This article desperately needs to have the elevations in US units - the current format means nothing to most of the people who live in the places catalogued. Bob Palin 23:13, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Bob. Also, the mean elevation data seems incorrect. Alaska having a mean elevation of 3,000+ m is incorrect, see [1]. -- hike395 05:05, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs changing, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit any article by simply following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to...)

The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or try out the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. --Allen3 talk 19:52, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

I certainly know how to edit pages but there are 1200 elevations listed on this page, it really needs a bot of some sort to do it, that I don't know how to do Bob Palin 21:31, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Bob (again!) This canned response (from {{sofixit}}) is useless. There is a lot of data on this page (hundreds of table rows): fixing it by hand would take me a long time, which I don't have. Checking the data by hand is going to be tedious. Was this page generated programmatically? If so, can whomever has the program check the data and regenerate the page with Imperial units? If not, perhaps someone can write a program to regenerate the page: I don't have time. -- hike395 21:32, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
No program or automation other than a straight forward cut and paste was used to create any of the tables. The information source used to create the tables was the data tables for each of the individual state articles (using the links in the first table). As not all of the state articles provide information in imperial units, but all provide metric values, the choice of units was predetermined by the information source. Once the alphabetically sorted table was created, the other tables were built by hand sorting a copy of the original tables data. I realize that this is not the magic wand you were wishing to have waved, but if you look at the articles history you can see how the various pieces were built up over time. --Allen3 talk 21:35, July 24, 2005 (UTC)
There's one canonical source for this data: The Statistical Abstract of the United States. This page should be a reflection of Table No. 351, Extreme and Mean Elevations by State and Other Areas, see [2]. That has both imperial and metric units, too. If someone doesn't get around to converting that to wiki, I'll do it eventually. -- hike395 01:53, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] WP:FLC

This article is excellent. I trust that the authors are thinking of nominating it on Wikipedia:Featured list candidates? -- ALoan (Talk) 17:20, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Datum?

I imagine all these heights are derived from USGS, so I guess that means they're expressed in terms of the NAD83 datum. If that's true (even for outlying points like Alaska and Hawaii) then I think the intro should link to it. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:50, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Sadly, not :-(. For the high points that I'm familiar with, these are the 1927 datum values. Someone changed the Mount Whitney elevation to the latest NAVD88 datum value. Not sure what to do. -- hike395 18:03, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Map?

Would it be worth producing an additional map showing the locations of the highest and lowest points? I was thinking of something much more schematic than the (excellent) topographic map, this time showing just the state outlines and having a blue and red mark indicating the lowest and highest points respectively. If there is support for this (and if there are geographic coordinates in the respective articles to allow me to do so) I can make the map (although not immediately, I confess). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:12, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

That would be so nifty! -- hike395 18:07, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
I'll put it on my wiki-todo list. To make the map accessible for visitors with colour-blindness, I think I'll draw the high points like a red ^, and the lows like that symbol upside down. Things get complicated where the low point is a coastline - I suppose I'll just colour the coast all blue and leave it at that. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:26, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
Hey, I made an image [3]. I just red circles for high points, green squares for the low. For locations with low elevations on lake or ocean shores, I didn't not include them. What does everyone think? -- ChristopherM 21:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] conversion errors?

I've updated some of the state articles to match the elevation numbers from this list, and noticed some apparent conversion errors. For example Wyoming's highest point is listed as 13804 feet and 4210 meters (13804 feet is 4.2074592 km, and going the other way 4210m is 13812.336 feet). It looks like the data in the list is directly from [4], but it seems very odd that the feet and meters don't actually match. Anyone know why this might be so? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:08, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

And how about the strange values for Kentucky? The first instance on the page lists the elevation difference as 1184 m. Elsewhere in the page it's 2084 m. The larger number appears incorrect. Teratornis 04:44, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coordinate system or Vertical datum?

This article uses the term "coordinate system" to describe the NGVD29 and NAVD88. I have never seen that term used to describe these vertical datums. Usually, a coordinate system defines a location in horizontal (x,y) space, such as the Lat/Lon, UTM, or State Plane coordinate systems. I suspect that the term is being misused here, and that "vertical datum" would be a more correct term, but I thought I would ask before making any changes. I don't frequently deal with vertical data, so it could be something I'm unaware of. - Justin 09:37, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "U.S. states"?

Ummm... I don't really know how to point this out, or whether by "fixing" it, I might break links to it, but... you do know that the "U.S." in the title stands for "United States," and that, therefore, the title reads, "List of United States states by elevation"...?

This title is wrong in another way: it's really a list of elevations by state, or elevations within the United States, not states by elevation.

rowley 23:34, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Article title is parallel to List of U.S. states by area, List of U.S. states by population, List of U.S. states by unemployment rate, List of U.S. states by traditional abbrevation, List of U.S. states by date of statehood, etc. ad nauseum. If you'd like to propose a different name for all of the articles, I would suggest proposing it at Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. States, although I predict a difficult argument, because you'll be claiming that the WikiProject itself is incorrectly named.
As for list of elevations: look at sections 2-5 --- those are, indeed, lists of states ordered by elevation, where elevation is defined slightly differently for each section. Only section 1 is a list of elevations by state.
hike395 00:27, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Making table sortable

Check out United States cities by crime rate, it has a simple class for making the table sortable. That would eliminate the duplicate tables sorted in different manners. The simple code applied is:

class="toccolours sortable"

Discussion of using the code is Help:Sorting.

I tried to apply it here but had bad luck. First it sorted on the top line. I broke the table into two and it sorted on the correct headings but unfortunately its sorting was not correct (e.g., anything beginning with a "9" was higher than anything beginning with a "2" regardless of the digits). Also I had problems getting the top line to align correctly. Trimming the units (which turns the entries into text) might help but there's some footnotes in there which create mischief. If anybody could get it work, that would make this artilce ***MUCH*** more useful! Thanks. Americasroof 17:18, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I think my edit works, but I will grant there are a few minor presentation problems. Several characters in the numeric columns were forcing alphabetical sorting (your "9" and "2" problem above):
  • units (removed - the headings should suffice)
  • the &mdash for negative elevations (replaced by standard dashes - I don't know if that will be an issue for certain browsers)
  • the two elevation references (moved over to the location column - not the best location, but I think it's OK)
Also I re-titled the column headers to facilitate sorting, but I don't like how it includes the icons for centering, making the text appear un-centered. But it's definitely the lesser of two evils in my opinion. Hoof Hearted 18:08, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks and nice job! Presumably we can nuke the other sections now. There's a header that makes mention of an impact on Template:Infobox U.S. state. I don't think this feeds that template rather I think it's just a link for an explanation on highest, mean and lowest. I put a note on the template talk page. If we nuke the sections the only graphics of use would be the map with the highpoints and perhaps the map with shows the physiology. Again nice job! Americasroof 18:28, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah, you beat me to the punch! I like all the images and think there's values to keeping them all. I only question the best display method. Still, if you think we may as well blow them away (perhaps because of the display issue), I can live with that. Hoof Hearted 18:36, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Get rid of other sorted tables?

I started to delete these when I noticed the comment about them being used at Template:Infobox U.S. state. I propose simply unlinking "Highest point", "Mean", and "Lowest point" on that table, leaving the "Elevation" heading linked to the article. Is there value to leaving the "hand-sorted" subtables? Secondly, if you agree that we could dump the subtables, how should we present the images? In a gallery or just globbed on after the table? Maybe move them ahead of the table? Hoof Hearted 18:33, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

This is great! (And I'm speaking as the person who typed in all of the manual tables!). The one problem is: when you click on "lowest elevation (ft)" to sort, and have them in descending order, then it sorts lexicographically, not numerically. Can this be fixed somehow?
Does anyone know how to force the table to have a column that is initially sorted? That way, the Infobox can link to three different versions of the same table. It may not be possible, however. hike395 03:45, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Apparently negative numbers don't work correctly yet. There is a work around here Template_talk:Sort#.7B.7Bnts.7D.7D. You can implement if you want, I'll wait for the bug to be fixed ([5] ). Unfortunately there isn't a way to pass a sort type in that I know of. -Ravedave 04:45, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Given that this list is featured, I couldn't leave it as-is. I implemented correct sorting using {{sort}}. Thanks for the tip! hike395 14:22, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Elevation difference per area

This may border on WP:OR, but it seems to me that an elevation difference is of pretty limited use - especially now that the table is sortable and one can make comparisons from state to state. Rather than simply showing the elevation "span", wouldn't it be more useful to show a measure of its "hilliness" (or rather "flatness") by dividing the span by the state's area? Of course California is going to have a greater elevation span than Hawaii since it's over ten times as big. But if you compare their "Elevation difference per square mile" you'll see that Hawaii (1.26) is much more hilly than California (.09). (I may simply be driven by my curiosity about what the flattest state is.) Hoof Hearted 19:24, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I was never fully comfortable with us doing the math (the tables don't print entirely as it is now anyway). I would be o.k. with nuking the difference columns but we might wait to see if anybody else weighs in. There's lots of other ways the data could be cut and interpreted. I think we should Keep It Simple Stupid. Americasroof 19:49, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Hoof Hearted that what he proposes borders on original research. But if one were to do such a thing, one wouldn't want to divide by the area, since the units are wrong. Instead one should divide by something with the same units as the elevation difference, such as the square root of the area or some measure of diameter, to get a dimensionless quantity. If you divide by area, then small states get a tremendous advantage. To take it to an extreme, imagine doing counties, or census tracts: as the areas go down quadratically, the height difference will roughly go down linearly, and the quotient will blow up.
As to what should be in the article, I think the listing by difference is interesting and understandable, even if it is weighted towards large states. So I would vote to keep it as is. -- Spireguy 19:58, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, it looks like even the topographists disagree on the best way to measure a state's flatness. This article sites Florida as the smallest elevation difference (it also has the smallest difference per square mile and difference per linear mile, as Spireguy suggested). However, it says Delaware is flattest if you measure actual changes in elevation along 1-km sections - which is probably a closer approximation of the true slope. Then of course there's the whole "Kansas is flatter than a pancake" paradigm. Given all the debate, difficulty with units, and lack or sources I agree with you that my proposal should be left out. The difference in elevation columns are good enough. Hoof Hearted 18:24, 13 July 2007 (UTC)