Talk:List of disasters in New Zealand by death toll

Borderline cases

Should we list the Boyd massacre here? I'd be inclined not to, since utu in that era seems to fall more or less under the "act of war" exclusion, but I'd be interested in other opinions. The loss of 469 immigrants on the Cospatrick also doesn't quite seem within the list's scope. -- Avenue (talk) 03:49, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Maybe the scope should be loosened a bit. I had taken it as excluding ships en route to and from NZ, unless several NZ citizens lost their lives or the ship was in NZ waters. But this might be unnecessarily restrictive. For instance, NZhistory.net.nz includes the Cospatrick on their list of NZ disasters (although they implicitly concede that its inclusion is arguable, and they don't include any other disasters outside NZ - unless you count the Erebus crash). Gadfium has just added the Marlborough, and I've now added its sister ship. The impact of these incidents was certainly felt in NZ, so I think it's worth expanding the list's scope. I'll do so and start adding more of the many ships lost en route. Feel free to object if you disagree. -- Avenue (talk) 09:04, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I added the Marlborough because it's reasonable to assume that most of its crew were New Zealanders. I have no objection to including ships on route to and from New Zealand in general. It's a bit of a slippery slope however. We now list the Assaye because it was lost at sea on the way to New Zealand, and wreckage was found in the Chatham Islands. No problem with including it. However, on an earlier voyage, the same ship lists 10 deaths.[1] These are on a single voyage, but not from a single incident, so I think it is correct to exclude this voyage.

Incidentally, is anyone thinking in terms of featured list for this article?-gadfium 19:37, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I had been wondering about whether this could become a featured list. It probably needs quite a bit of cleaning up first - consistent citation formats, filling in empty cells where appropriate, etc - but I think the bulk of the work is already in place.

I think "en route to/from NZ" is a reasonable criterion, at least during the 1800s. With the Cospatrick, one could argue about whether the victims were New Zealanders, but since most were intending to live in NZ, I don't think it's stretching things too far. That criterion might also include a few cargo ships with non-NZ crews that we don't really need, but I think having a simple objective criterion is worth being a bit over-inclusive.

I've noticed that the corresponding Aussie list has a section for "Significant incidents resulting in fewer than 10 deaths". While "significant" isn't at all objective, this would let us mention incidents like the 1855 Wairarapa earthquake and the recent canyoning tragedy. Should we add a similar sublist here? -- Avenue (talk) 23:27, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I can't think of any way of objectively defining "significant". I couldn't support this as a featured list with such ill-defined criteria.-gadfium 06:24, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

If the Cospatrick or the Trevelyan are not included in the main list there is no argument for including the Knowsley Hall. Also, having multiple sortable wikitables is counter-intuitive when sorting by anything other than number of casualties - I'm amalgamating the separate lists.FanN | talk 01:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for amalgamating the lists. I've been meaning to do that. I agree that including the Knowsley Hall was inconsistent, so thanks for fixing that too.

Perhaps we should clarify the inclusion criteria being used, though. At present the main list generally excludes ships lost en route from Britain to NZ (like the Cospatrick, the Knowsley Hall, and the Trevelyan) but includes the Assaye (en route to NZ, with wreckage discovered in the Chathams) and the Matoaka, Dunedin, and Marlborough (en route from NZ to Europe). Is this sensible? --Avenue (talk) 03:17, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I would think that in the 1800s the number of passengers on a ship coming to NZ who might be identified as "New Zealanders" (i.e. have actually lived in NZ) would be rather small. A ship leaving NZ is more likely to have people who might be regarded as NZers (rather than tourists). I suppose it depends on whether you count the intention to settle here, or reaching the territorial limit, as sufficient to identify someone as a New Zealander. DerbyCountyinNZ ^{(Talk Contribs)} 03:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I was wondering whether these distinctions were a bit anachronistic when applied to settlers in the 1800s. The list's lead section currently talks about NZ citizens, which didn't exist until 1949. From 1840 to 1948, New Zealanders were British subjects instead, so immigrants from Britain did not change their allegiance on arrival. And I would guess that the vast majority of passengers on those boats to NZ were not tourists, but intended to settle here. You could argue they would have had a stronger commitment to New Zealand than people going back to Europe. Many were eagerly awaited by relatives among those already in NZ, and contemporary newspapers show the degree of loss experienced by those in NZ when a ship failed to arrive safely.

Having said that, we have to draw the line somewhere, and perhaps the location of the disaster is the most straightforward. Would anyone object to the Matoaka, Dunedin, and Marlborough being moved into the "International events" table? --Avenue (talk) 11:39, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Table format

I've formatted this list into a sortable table, somewhat in alignment with List of wars and disasters by death toll and List of disasters in Australia by death toll. The date column is in reverse format so it sorts on the year, and the months have been truncated to keep the column more orderly.--Geronimo20 (talk) 03:53, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm not sure I like it this way. In part this is due to poor design, e.g. some very wide columns, although restoring the default image sizes has helped a bit there. I'll read up on table options and see if this issue can be fixed without hindering people with low resolution screens. More generally, the information on each disaster doesn't seem to flow any more. Maybe this can be fixed, but I prefer the list format to the current version. Any thoughts? There was some debate about the same issue at Talk:List_of_United_Kingdom_disasters_by_death_toll#table, and they decided to stick with a list. List of Canadian disasters by death toll is also in list format.

Some information has got lost in the switch, and the footnotes often don't seem to be in the best places, but there's no point trying to fix those issues until we've decided whether a table is appropriate. -- Avenue (talk) 07:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Also, at least with my display preferences (dd MMMMMMM yyyy), sorting the dates doesn't work. The wikilinked ones are sorted by day of month, while the unlinked dates are sorted separately at the end. (The unlinked ones are sorted correctly by year, but if there were any in the same year they might not be.) -- Avenue (talk) 07:30, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Avenue. Well I don't want to push it. This page is all your work and you've done a sterling job, so sure revert if you really want to. The reason I put it into a table was precisely that the list format didn't work for me and I didn't find it clear. It was difficult to see where a particular disaster was located (unless you knew the death toll). And you certainly couldn't get any sense of disasters on a timeline. For example, shipwrecks tail off over time, and it's easy to see that with a sortable table. A sortable table makes it a cinch to analyse the disasters in all kinds of ways - and that's not the case with your static list. Anyway, to address some of your specific points:

You say the table is poorly designed with very wide columns. Well its designed to adjust to whatever window width you are operating with - if you use wide windows then the columns will be wide. It's easy to make it fixed width, but then people operating with narrow windows will have a problem.

You say the information on each disaster doesn't seem to flow any more. Well, Avenue, you are highly familiar with and accustomed to your own current format, so of course it would seem that way to you initially. To me, and I don't know but maybe to many others, the table format flows with MUCH more clarity, not to mention utility.

You referred to a debate on the United Kingdom list and said that "they decided to stick with a list". Well there wasn't really a debate at all, nor was there a decision. The discussion just bogged and the status quo ruled.

You say some information has got lost in the switch. I tried to be very careful to make sure that no information you entered was lost. So specifically what information are you referring to?

You say the footnotes often don't seem to be in the best places. Yes that's certainty an issue. I just put them all down the "Disaster" column, because that seemed less messy than jumping them around all over the place. I considered a column just for the references.

Well I certainly didn't realise the dates wouldn't sort if you use different date preferences (I assumed the format entered would be the default sort format). That could be got around by using ISO 8601 dates. Personally I find being able to sort the table chronologically makes it much more interesting.

So anyway - your turn. Cheers --Geronimo20 (talk) 08:29, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Lots of fair points there. I'm sure that part of my discomfort is just due to being more familiar with the old format. And a sortable list is certainly more flexible. I'm happy to try it out for a while and see whether my concerns fade away once I'm used to it, or can otherwise be addressed. Anyway, while I've expanded the article a lot, it's certainly not mine alone. I don't have any veto power here.

Perhaps "lost" was too strong a word for the missing information. The problem I noticed was that further details seemed to be missing for several entries where I was sure there should be something. Looking again they mainly seem to be ones where the wikilinked location served double duty as a source for further information. There are also a couple where the article on the disaster appears in the Location column (Tangiwai), or vice versa (Murchison). This seems awkward. The footnotes serve different roles in different places; sometimes they clarify uncertainty about the death toll, while other times they reference more general information not already in an article. It might be best to leave these issues aside until the basic table design is sorted out though, to avoid wasting time if we do eventually decide to return to the list format. -- Avenue (talk) 09:46, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

You are right about the date ranges - and no matter which way you crumble things the inbuilt sort algorithm just will not sort them chronologically. Even converting to ISO 8601 doesn't help. So I added a "Year" column. That of course works fine, but it's messy and seemingly redundant. On the other hand it does free the "Date" column so it can be formatted any way you want. --Geronimo20 (talk) 22:38, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the date column to use {{dts}}, which is (almost) the recommended way to show dates in a sortable table, and removed the year column. The preferred way is {{dts2}} which takes parameters in the reverse order; to convert seems like busywork to me but someone will probably get a bot to do it eventually.

There is one anomaly left: the 1863 floods come before the wreck of the Orpheus although the wreck happened earlier in the year. This is because the template doesn't handle date ranges. We could change the template to "1863 Jul" for the floods to fix this, but we cannot then easily display for all preference settings that the floods continued into Aug. Similarly, when events happened overnight, eg the 1868 storm, the list now displays the first date rather than both. I think this minor drop in accuracy is worthwhile for the loss of awkwardness of having a separate column to sort by.-gadfium 19:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Epidemics

I would like to explicitly exclude disease outbreaks from this article's scope. The list's coverage of these is currently very incomplete - the 1918 influenza outbreak is the only one mentioned, and there must have been dozens in New Zealand's history. It also seems hard to find authoritative death tolls for them, especially ones involving Maori in the 19th century, despite their massive death toll. I suspect many outbreaks with 10 or more deaths will have simply gone unnoticed. It is also arguable whether they constitute definite "incidents" in the same way as the other events in this list. For example, the recent meningococcal epidemic has lasted more than a decade,[2] and despite some searching I can't tell how many of the deaths from meningococcal disease over this period were due to the epidemic strain. Maybe a separate list would work, but I don't think disease outbreaks fit well into this one. -- Avenue (talk) 03:11, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Since no one has objected, I'll go ahead with this. -- Avenue (talk) 00:41, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Sawtooth image configuration

I'd like to suggest changing the image configuration from its current "sawtooth" arrangement. A couple of previous attempts to remove the upright option have been reverted, one reason given was keep the area the same. To me it looks a bit untidy/unprofessional, I don't think I've seen a newspaper or magazine use such a layout. The images are different heights, adding different widths as well makes it look rough, and generates whitespace gaps with the table. As alternatives to removing the upright option I can suggest:

• put all the landscape images together at the start or end of the stack
• List of disasters in Australia by death toll has a row of images beneath the tables
• add the upright option to all
• use only one type of image - landscape or portrait

XLerate (talk) 10:10, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, the sawtooth arrangement is untidy and unnecessary. One type only is preferable, although forcing the same width for all might work. DerbyCountyinNZ ^{(Talk Contribs)} 11:29, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

I would suggest changing the layout a gallery at the bottom as is in use in other pages with many images. TeigeRyan (talk) 04:13, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

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MV Joyita

Is this really a New Zealand disaster? NealeFamily (talk) 08:37, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

The introduction does say this is a list of disasters that "occurred in New Zealand and its territories" [emphasis added]. While we could change the list's scope to exclude disasters in NZ territories, I wouldn't be in favour of that. It would rule out Air New Zealand flight TE901, for instance, which I think would be widely seen as an NZ disaster. --Avenue (talk) 22:12, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Asylum seekers

A fishing boat with 248 people seeking asylum, reported to be heading to New Zealand from India, disappeared in 2019.[3] These are not New Zealanders, but they were people who aspired or intended to become NZers, if the report is correct. This has some similarity to the loss of the Cospatrick on its way to NZ in 1874. Should we add this to the section "Significant incidents of New Zealanders being killed overseas" (and retitle it to "Significant incidents of New Zealanders or aspiring New Zealanders being killed overseas"), or is it too speculative?-gadfium 22:53, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't include them. Definitely not New Zealanders at the time of their assumed death, certainly no guarantee that they would even become so if they reached here and no certainty that NZ was in fact their destination. Different from the Cospatrick in that the passengers were British when they boarded and would have still been technically British once they arrived in New Zealand as NZ was still a British colony and its people therefore British citizens. DerbyCountyinNZ ^{(Talk Contribs)} 23:01, 6 April 2023 (UTC)