Talk:Geography of the Gambia

RfC: The Gambia or the Gambia

There is currently a request for comments at Talk:The Gambia on whether to capitalize the definite article in the country name. Feel free to participate in the discussion. Jafeluv (talk) 05:38, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Highest elevation

• Red Rock (Gambia) (AfD discussion)

The 53m figure never had a source, right from the very first MediaWiki revision of this article in 2002. The AFD discussion, and Kourier in the German Wikipedia, show that it is factually wrong, with people (including the USGS) citing Wikipedia as their sources. It proves to be quite difficult to tie down what actually is the highest elevation, from something other than a WWW site named "peakbagger".

After Wikipedia, the 53m figure starts appearing, and we already know that this figure has been recycled back into Wikipedia via people who got it from Wikipedia in the first place, so I looked for sources pre-dating Wikipedia. Before Wikipedia turns out to be an utter mess of contradictory sources, sometimes even self-contradictory (as they get the conversion between old measurements and metric wrong).

• Grolier's 1997 American Academic encyclopaedia: 49m, "near the eastern border"
• 1991 Hammond universal world atlas: 100ft (30m)
• Jones's 1990 Flowering Plants of the Gambia: 50m "around Brifu"
• John Haydu's 1986 Mixed Farming in The Gambia: 152ft "nearby" the point where the river enters the East of the country
• Terry Palmer's 1989 Discover the Gambia: 153ft "north of Basse"
• 1993 World book encyclopaedia of people and places: 184 ft. (50 m) "Eastern plateau"
• 1981 Sub-Saharan Africa Report: "not even 90 meters"
• 1992 Economics of Village Cattle Production in Tsetse Affected Areas: 60m
• 1988 "A profile of The Gambia" in Crops and Soils: 100 ft
• George Thomas Kurian's 1998 Geo-data: The World Geographical Encyclopedia: 50m (150ft)

Uncle G (talk) 19:54, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

• @Uncle G: I added 53 m with some quite official sources: CIA factbook, UNEP, a 1966 map etc. (Concerning your 1993 source, 184 ft does not correspond to 50 m but to 56 m.) Thus at least 53m seems to be very well substantiated. The 1992 book (60m) does not cite any source, and I have found some sources explicitly writing "not higher than sixty", apparently without knowing the exact height, similar to "not even 90 meters" that you found. One could guess that in the 1992 book, 60m was given based on a wrong understanding of this statement. -134.106.100.216 (talk) 13:32, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
  • The World Factbook is actually a rather unreliable source, that provides neither its methodologies nor its sources of data, and has turned out in the past to be recycling woefully out of date information. Neither do many of the others provide their methodologies and sources, and there is no reason to favour any of them as good sources.

    I think that I have not explained the point well. I think that ″peakbagger″ is possibly right, I am just not sure enough of its methodology to hold it out as a reliable source here. As such, your adding 53m back is adding incorrect information, that may well have been sourced by the Factbook to that 1966 survey. ″peakbagger″ claims to be sourced to a more recent survey, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. But it also says ″void filled″, and this may have been a void that was filled.

    I think that picking out the Factbook as the one source to trust out of a mess of contradictory sources where we really have no reason to trust one over any of the others, and have a fair idea that its fact is wrong, is not the wise thing to do. Uncle G (talk) 14:51, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

    • Whatever the current estimate is (with a few dump trucks - I can build a higher peak of rock!) - I think it is rather safe to say that the highest "peak" in Gambia is unremarkable and that the country possibly is the most flat country is existence - following the course of the Gambia river from a lowest point at sea level (0m), having an average elevation of 34 meters, and a peak of elevation of around 50+ meters. Icewhiz (talk) 16:46, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
      • Thanks for paying attention. Another puzzle: According to openstreetmap (data apparently based on CIA World DataBank II), the peakbagger location lies outside Gambia, although I certainly don't trust openstreetmap there. In maps.google.com and ArcGIS on peakbagger, it's inside the country. We could simply write that the highest location is "53 m according to a 1966 map and The World Factbook and 64 m according to SRTM data", referencing peakbagger. -134.106.100.216 (talk) 15:51, 1 August 2019 (UTC)