Template talk:Columbia Mountains

Organisation/Name

I don't have time to revise this right now, but there's organizational issues to it that should get addressed; subsections should be by grouping; with the Monashees and Selkirks etc as subranges of the Columbia Mtns, the Marble Range is a sub-range of the Fraser Plateau, the term "Interior Mountains" (used by S. Holland) is for all of those between the Rockies and the Coast Mountains north of the Fraser Plateau (Cassiars, Ominecas, Hazeltons, Skeenas - and the Stikine Plateau and its subplateaus are part of that grouping). Subranges currently redlinked e.g. on Selkirk Mountains should be in it - but if they were all added it's incredibly unwieldy, unless each section within the template could be collapsed. The Fraser Plateau has numerous mountain ranges within it - the Clear as well as the Marble, also the Camelsfoot, Fawnie, Quanchus and more. "Landforms of the Interior of British Columbia" might be a better angle to do this by, since there's subareas of the Fraser Plateau like Nechako Plain and Fraser Basin; the Highlands are generally considered part of the Fraser or Thompson Plateaus, though many people refer to the Okanagan Highland especially as part of the Monashees, I think.....and the Cascades are really an inland range, despite fronting partly on the Coast.....gotta go, long day coming....Skookum1 (talk) 19:09, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I was going to run this by you. There were many organisational issues I had to consider, especially for groupings. The name of the template in certainly up for discussion - your landforms suggestion could work, or "Intermontane" also. I see that the "Interior Range" could be defined as just ranges north of P.G. I have avoided redlinks up til this point, there are just to many for what is already a bulky template. As for collapsible within collapsible, I tried; the three tier thing is at far as the coding will allow. I guess another option is to have drop-downs for each major range, instead of the North/Central division I have now. I'm going to copy this over to the template discussion page, we should continue over there. Have a good one, The Interior(Talk) 19:20, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

above refactored by The Interior(Talk) 19:26, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

The first issue I noticed with this template is the title, simply because "Interior Ranges" is another term for the Interior Mountains. But I see Skookum1 has already mentioned that problem. Volcanoguy 04:23, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I guess [this] discussion is relevant. One way to go would be to name the template "Intermontane Ranges of British Columbia", and have the two drop downs as they are. I think I'll remove the "Plateaus (plateaux?) and Highlands" fields, and do a separate template for them. I want to leave in the Passes, as they are mountainous by nature. From what I can tell, making the ideal template where every major range had its own drop-down where we could organize the sub-ranges separately, would involve a monster template. Which would be cool, but the navigational benefit is here already, albeit without the ability to surf through each major range in a group. The Interior(Talk) 06:58, 29 January 2011 (UTC)c

Also the Central and Southeastern ranges are all really columbia range, with one or two exceptions. We could name the drop-down "Columbia", then the major ranges field wouldn't contain both parent and sibling articles. The Interior(Talk) 07:07, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Holland also gives "Northern Interior Mountains" for the same group, but uses "Interior Mountains" throughout his text, I suppose as shorthand for the longer form; yes, confusing....NB as you'll note in BCGNIS, a standardization of range-names was come up with sometime back around the 60's, with "Mountains" referring to large groupings, "Ranges" to subgroupings of those larger groups", and "Range" to small groups of mountains; which is why it's now Marble Range rather than Marble Mountains (an older usage, Pavilion Mountains, is no longer in use, it seems); the Rainbow Range in the Chilcotin was originally the Rainbow Mountains, and so on. All of the ranges in the Interior (other than the Rockies) are part of the landform-unit called the Interior System, which in the US is the Intermontane System (er, no, "system" is the Canadian usage; Intermontane-something anyway). See List of landforms of British Columbia, I think was the title I started, trying to visually lay out Holland's hierarchy, which is as close to "official" as you can get (BCGNIS is not complete and doesn't include everything that Holland defined, however).

As for this template, I think given that the region involved is not really unified other than by the BC sobriquet "the Interior" and that it's about the size of France and Germany combined, it would be impossible to cover everything; and as the Interior is not only mountains, that complicates matters. My own gut feeling is that rather than a BCInterior-wide template the range/landform macro groupings should each have their own - {{Columbia Mountains}}, {{Interior Plateau}} (or {{Fraser Plateau}} and {{Thompson Plateau}} separately, though subranges of the Thompson Plateau are relatively few), {{Cassiar Mountains}}, {{Omineca Mountains}} {{Stikine Plateau}}, {{Hazelton Mountains}}, {{Skeena Mountains}}, which would allow for their subrange groupings (e.g. the Stikine Ranges) and their subranges to be fully listed; NB some templates are very very large, like the Columbia Steamboats one. If a pan-Interior one is to survive, it should only have the major macro-groupings, with a note on it saying "see the templates on the linked pages for subranges/sublandforms" or something like that; but because the Cascades, for example, are both Interior and Coast, and most people think of the Skeena Mountains and some of the Hazeltons as being "the Coast Range" (still a common usage for the Coast Mountains, though unofficial) that it may be better to just have {{Mountain ranges and plateaus of British Columbia}} and include the coastal groupings as such, with "Insular System", "Western System", "Interior System", "Eastern System" breakdowns - NB the Eastern System is already covered by {{Canadian Rockies}}, though maybe Holland may include the Columbia Mtns but I don't think so....Skookum1 (talk) 07:09, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Alright, new plan. The Pan-Interior template I wished for simply doesn't work with the way the ranges are sorted by geographers. Separate templates for each major range looks like the way to go. I had envisioned some master template that would allow one to skip happily through the peaks of the region, but it does appear wrong to apply the "Interior" regional definition against the geographical definition. Maybe someday I'll do {{Ranges of the Pacific Cordillera}}, which would truly be a monster. Question:

or templates for each major plateau? I'm leaning towards the former, as there isn't a huge amount of total articles involved. The Interior (Talk) 02:33, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I am willing to create templates for the mountain ranges Skookum1 mentioned, but I think it would also be ideal to create something for the Interior Mountains article. I did plan to create a template for it in 2009 (see talk page), but if we are going to create templates for the subranges (Cassiars, Hazeltons, Skeenas, etc) the template will be quite small since it would be redundant to include subranges of the Interior Mountains subranges. If there was a single template it would include everything associated with the Interior Mountains. It would have a similar structure to {{Canadian Rockies}} since most of the mountain range and park articles have been created. Most of the mountains in the Interior Mountains are also unnamed. Thus, there would likely not be a huge list of mountains. Volcanoguy 19:15, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Sweet. I do think a master Interior Mountains template is the way to go, navigation-wise. I like the navbox setup here with the drop-downs as you can use them to separate major ranges within the parent range. I think I'll convert this one to a {{Columbia Mountains}} template, and do drop downs for Purcells, Monashees. etc. If you want to fire away at an {{Interior Mountains}}, please do. You could copy some of this template's markup and change the main headings, as I've collated most (I think) Interior Range articles. Link me when you've got it up and I can help out. Thanks for the help on these, I really think they make navigation easier (one could argue that the cats do a similar thing, but how many of our casual readers delve into the cat pages?) Sidebar - what do think about the Plateaus? Separate templates or master template? The Interior (Talk) 19:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Just created {{Interior Mountains}}. It's obvious that the term "Interior Mountains" is not widely used or herd of by the general public, so this template should help to make the term better known on Wikipedia and help prevent issues like the title of this template. Volcanoguy 00:04, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Got this more or less cleaned up, feel free to help populate w/ mountains, passes, glaciers, stray ranges, etc. My feeling is to keep it to bluelinks, but that's a purely aesthetic thing. The Interior (Talk) 03:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)