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Article milestones Date Process Result November 11, 2007 Good article nominee Not listed March 22, 2008 Good article nominee Listed Current Status: Good article

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Archives

Archive 1 • Archive 2 • Archive 3

Contents 1 Old course 2 More resources for future expansion 3 Source for expansion 4 GA Passed, March 2008 5 Canadian-side resources on the Columbia 6 Human paleohistory 7 found a resource 8 Columbia Icefield 9 passing through the Cascades 10 Minor wording issue about steamboats 11 Work for feature article status? 12 Infobox

Old course

I'm going to try to find some info on the old course of the river, where it followed through what is now the Wilson River valley when it flowed more straight into the Pacific (at least I remember hearing that before). Aboutmovies 00:45, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks AM, that would be a great addition! -Pete 03:11, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

More resources for future expansion

• Jim McDermott introduced this bill (HR 1507) in March '07, which would have the GAO and other gov't agencies study the impact of the removal of four snake river dams. The findings in the text of the resolution may be useful as citations, esp. in the Ecology & Env. section.
• Raymond, Camela (November 2007). "The Shape of Memory", Portland Monthly. 

Article about Maya Lin's current project, the Confluence Project, enhancing state parks along the Columbia to explore its cultural history.

• The October Portland Monthly had a relevant article, too.

-Pete 08:29, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

• Journal article advocating the aggressive development of hydropower: Lee, Maurice W. (July 1953). "Hydroelectric Power in the Columbia Basin": 173-189. The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, Vol. 26, No. 3. 

• Another suggestion I have is to look at everything you want to mention in the whole article, then make sure to describe it sequentially in the "Course" section. That way, when you mention Hanford or the Snake River, readers will have some idea or reference as to where these come along the course of the river. Of course my longest FA stream is only 22.9 miles! Hope this helps, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 00:47, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

A good suggestion. Working mostly on citations right now, I"ll come back to that if nobody else does. Another thought I had is to merge List of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River into this article, which might accomplish much of what you suggest in the form of a chart. -Pete (talk) 10:04, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Citation for "three times size of Great Pyramid" and some other stuff here. -Pete (talk) 21:41, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Source for expansion

I gotta stop finding these, the work never ends! But...this 4-part OPB series is awfully cool, and probably has lots of stuff that could be used for this article, and/or related ones... http://news.opb.org/series/2007/columbia/ -Pete (talk) 07:26, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

GA Passed, March 2008

I've taken another look at Ruhrfisch's comments from his/her GA review, and believe all the most significant concerns have been met. Not every single concern, but the most important ones. I'm going to re-nominate, and leave a note to Ruhrfisch requesting that he/she revisit the review if time allows. Any thoughts? (I know there are still many improvements in progress, but I don't think any of them will hold this back from GA. I'm convinced by recent comments that FA may be a little further off.) -Pete (talk) 18:32, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I think it's definitely GA material. Excellent work, Pete (and others)!Northwesterner1 (talk) 20:56, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I will review it in the next day or so. My initial impression is also that it is quite good, but I need to carefully read and check the article. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:17, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I read all of the article and the talk page again and am passing it with congratulations. It is obvious much work has been done since the first GA nomination and I believe it is close to FA status. I agree that Wikipedia needs better articles on larger rivers and see this as a potential model FA. Here then are some ideas and suggestions for further improvement, as well as a few typos / things that need to be fixed.

NOTE: I removed several items that have been addressed. Ruhrfisch's full list is still preserved in /Archive3.

• The footnote for the textbox quote from "Timothy Egan, in The Good Rain" is essentially hidden on my computer (IE) - just the very top shows - I can not tell what number it is.
• I noted with interest the discussion of tributaries on the talk page. For FA, I think this section needs to be expanded. I think a discussion of the major tribs and a sentence or two on the smaller major tribs and a paragraph on each of the major tribs would be useful. I would also add the size of their drainage basins to the table.

Congratulations and well done! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:53, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Canadian-side resources on the Columbia

turns out there's a Biodiversity Atlas underway funded by the BC Gov with the participation of Selkirk College. The main links off maps.gov.bc.ca didn't work but I found this which gives statistics on the Canadian length etc. and is a spinoff of the main project page. I don't have time to "mine" the article and add relevant contents here, but there was a need for Canadian-side citations/data so this should provide some of hte main stuff.Skookum1 (talk) 16:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Great find, thanks Skookum! I'll dig into it shortly (unless somebody gets there first.) -Pete (talk) 16:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Human paleohistory

i.e. the indigenous peoples section but in ref to Kennewick Man and other early-digs/finds; I'm mostly thinking of only one addition, but I don't know where to find the citation; so many hundred years ago, IIRC about 1500BP, maybe 3000BP, there was a pottery-using culture (presumably also pottery-making but finds are marginal); buried in alluvial ash or whatever, evidently wiped out by natural disaster. Bona fide but I don't know more than that tidbit, remembered from the CHINOOK-L listserve's discussions of various things. Oh, another aboriginal name for th river was Sesotkwa or Tsesotkwa, but nobody knew which language it was from; similarly when Simon Fraser started down the Fraser it was in the hopes to prove it was the Tacoutche Tesse, the Columbia; although once again in whose language I don't know, as that's not a Carrier-looking name (ko=river) nor is it Salishan (meen/een=river). The Chinookan name that turns up is Wihml - Wimhl? - with only one vowel; whether etymologically it means "big"+"river" I don't know. Oh, there's another "ancient" dig in the upper Columbia somewhere; might be in that diversity atlas or resources connected to it...basic drift is maybe there should be an archaoelogical section; won't be large but worthwhile.

found a resource

I was looking for other stuff about elsewhere in BC and came across a Columbia Basin page on "Living Landscapes", a Royal BC Museum webproject; the Human history page looks like it has some interesting stuff but the natural history page looks like it has some material useful for this page, and for Columbia Basin. Also found this but you probably already know about it (?)Skookum1 (talk) 15:36, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Columbia Icefield

Although Columbia Lake is nominally considered the headwater of the Columbia, ultimately the source is the Columbia Icefield, hence the name (as also of Mount Columbia. Which little upper tributaries exactly come from the icefiled I'll have to look at later; I had a vicious stomach flu yesterday and have to mobilate myself for errands and some fresh air right now; though this was worth mentioning, maybe someone can stitch a mention into the article on it? Also found this which if you zoom in on BC is interesting, more for the way the Fraser basin was dealt with; but useful anyway perhaps. The diverted areas shown are, from N to S, the Nechako, Bridge and Cheakamus Rivers; only Nechako changes actual basins, though, so I don't see the point, i.e. there's other basin-to-same basin diversions...I'll have to read up the backinfo on this page to se what's up with that. Not that the Whatshan is a big deal, nor Alouette Lake nor Jones Lake; usually these national-level things are complied with only a loose understanding of BC geography/history, though.....(my stock complaint, no?)_ Skookum1 (talk) 18:04, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

passing through the Cascades

Along with the Klamath River in southern Oregon and the Pit River in northern California, the Columbia is one of only three rivers to pass through the Cascades.

that line has always bothered me, although the exception to it I'm thinking of doesn't pass through the Cascades from one side to the other; it loops through it - the Skagit River; I guess it never crosses the divide of the Cascades, though....but is such a concept of a "divide" on a range pierced by, or spanning, the Columbia, even relevant?Skookum1 (talk) 03:59, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Minor wording issue about steamboats

I'm doing some bits of minor copyediting and am stuck on this sentence, from the Navigation section: The use of steamboats along the river, beginning in 1850... There is a footnote, to this timeline page, which phrases it "1850: Steamboats Columbia and Lot Whitcomb begin regular service on the Columbia River." The thing is there was a steamboat in regular service on the river before 1850, at least to Fort Vancouver: the Beaver (steamship), which arrived on the river in 1836. I thought about rewording the sentence The regular use of steamboats along the river..., but that isn't quite right either because the Beaver was in "regular use", even if its operations were not limited to the river. Anyway, I can't come up with a way to reword this bit, especially given the existence of the footnote, which does not mention the Beaver. So I'm just mentioning it here. It is a minor point to be sure, but symptomatic of an unfortunate US bias present in many history books and web pages. Pfly (talk) 04:46, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I put two brain cells together and solved it myself. Brain cells are sometimes hard to come by. Pfly (talk) 02:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Work for feature article status?

So, this page has been quiet for a while, but after the last burst of activity we got it to good article status with the notion that is was near or at feature article status. Anyone interested in working for FA? I've never been involved in such a thing and would find it interesting. And I don't mean right now per se, but over the next few months perhaps? I also don't know how to go about starting such a procedure, so I thought I'd just toss the idea out. If nothing else it would be interesting to see what criticisms come out in the process. Pfly (talk) 06:41, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, while I'm at it, this talk page is getting long, perhaps we should archive most of it? Pfly (talk) 06:41, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Pfly, I would love to work on that with you. I found the GA push took a lot of energy, and I needed a break -- but that's long ago now. I don't think it would be terribly hard. Ruhrfish left a pretty good list (see above) of what he thought it would take to get to FA, which I think is a great starting point; I actually think a lot of that work has already been done.

I'm off to breakfast, but will try to come back soon and archive the talk page -- maybe we can leave Ruhrfisch's comments at the top, to set us off in the right direction? -Pete (talk) 18:10, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd be happy to help with a push. For starters, I'd like to revise the course description somewhat to include a few more specifics (river miles/kilometers and/or coordinates) about locations and to move the discharge paragraph to the bottom of the course description section. The logic of the layout part of this is: stream first, basin second. I don't think I would step on anybody's editorial toes by doing this. My impression of the overall article is that it is not far from being FA-worthy. The greatest obstacle to getting there might be the great diversity of editorial opinion that comes to bear. It seems more difficult to develop a group article about a well-known subject than to work alone on something obscure. Finetooth (talk) 18:24, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

The Manual of Style now deprecates autoformatting of full dates in the main text and citations. I can run a script that will remove the autoformatting from all the dates that have been formatted with square brackets. It won't touch the autoformatting that's part of the "cite" family of templates, but if I understand the new guidelines correctly, this will be OK at FAC. Finetooth (talk) 19:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

The geobox has a parameter for "nickname" and another for "other name". Should we add "Wimahl" and/or "Big River" to one of these places in the geobox? If so, which one? Finetooth (talk) 19:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Finetooth, I think adding Wimahl to "other name" and Big River to "nickname" might be the way to go. Your points about dates and the course description are well taken -- I say "be bold" and do it! I actually think the article is ready to go -- I'm sure concerns will arise, but I think it's clearly of a quality worthy of nomination. Anyone object if I just get "bold" in that regard? -Pete (talk) 22:43, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

<outdent>Names are done. Dates are unlinked except those not in brackets in the "cite" family of citations. Those will be acceptable at FA and don't have to be fixed by hand. (The script does not touch them.) I need to think carefully before I tinker with the course description. Finetooth (talk) 05:55, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh curses and mutterings. I didn't quite understand the autoformatting stuff completely. I must make a few more boring tweaks, and I will. Pay no attention to me while I do this. I'll probably be scowling. Finetooth (talk) 04:37, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for taking this particularly irritating bull by the horns. That stuff is a big pain, and your efforts are very much appreciated! -Pete (talk) 19:46, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I think I might have broken my record for nutty low-level fixes this time. I mis-read the fine print on the new MoS guidelines for date autoformatting consistency, and my misunderstanding caused no trouble until I got to this article. The new guidelines don't require complete autoformatting consistency within an entire article. The consistency is divided into two parts: (1) the main text autoformatting must be internally consistent and (2) the citation autoformatting must be internally consistent. What I temporarily did was to get the main text consistent as m-d-y (June 10, 2008, for example) but the citations inconsistent, some as m-d-y and some as ISO (2008-06-10, for example). My effort to hand-convert everything to m-d-y failed because although the "cite web" template will accept substitute parameters that don't autoformat, "cite book" and others do not accept these parameters gracefully. Bummer. I reverted to the only reasonable option I could think of, which was to hand-convert all the m-d-y dates in the citations to ISO. The main text dates are now all m-d-y. The citation dates are all ISO. Exceptions, if any, would be dates that I overlooked. Now the dates should be OK for FAC. If I am wrong, I will fix them again. Whatever it takes. Finetooth (talk) 20:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Infobox

As someone who doesn't have trouble (usually) editing articles with lots of markup in them, I have to say that the infobox in this article is really enormous (in the edit mode), and slightly obnoxious. To preserve ease of editing, I think it might behoove us to move the infobox in to a separate template ala Template:ColumbiaRiverInfobox or the like. Any objections? Steven Walling (talk) 00:58, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I think that's a fine idea -- I agree that it's really big and cumbersome, but hadn't thought of that solution. -Pete (talk) 05:48, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Move complete! You can edit it now at Template:ColumbiaRiverGeobox. Steven Walling (talk) 04:47, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

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