Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australian history/Exploration

earlier comments

Nice work, but I'm not sure about imposing a convention that all expeditions be named after the leader, with a year if necessary. Possibly I am largely responsible for inventing this convention, as it was me that created King expedition of 1817 and Austin expedition of 1854. But I never imagined that it would be widely applied as a general convention. Some expeditions really are better known or better characterised by their location e.g. La Grange expedition and Swan River expedition of 1827. Is it absolutely necessary to impose a convention? Hesperian 11:48, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

In developing this page, I felt that we should have some level of naming consistency. If an expedition is truly known more for its location than for its explorer, I think that could be a good exception. Go right ahead and change the 'Stirling' back to 'Swan River'. In being a red link, I felt that the change was inconsequential in the short term, and that it would draw out discussion on the topic.

In general I still think a naming guideling is valuable for other expeditions.SauliH 15:21, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. I have no objection to a suitably flexible guideline. Can I suggest some refinements?

1. For expeditions that crossed a year boundary, I think it is better to use the year they started rather than the year range. e.g. King expedition of 1821 not King expedition of 1821 to 1822.
2. Unless an expedition is widely known for more than one member (e.g. Burke and Wills; Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson), I'd like to choose a single name e.g. Panter expedition not Panter, Harding and Goldwyer expedition.
   • Corollary: family expeditions use the one name e.g. Bussell expedition of 1830 not Bussell and Bussell expedition of 1830 to 1834; Gregory expedition of 1846 not Gregory, Gregory and Gregory expedition of 1846 to 1848.

I'm still not sure what to do about the expedition you've called Brown expedition of 1850; this was a party of pastoralists travelling together as equals to explore for new pastoral land while overlanding stock from York to the newly discovered Champion Bay district. There was no leader. This title would just seem bizarre to someone not familiar with these guidelines.

Hesperian 23:06, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I have no objection to the changes you suggest. Think of the names I put up as a starting point, which can be developed. Where more than one name is listed, it is a default where I could not immediately discern who was the leader. I had hoped with the 'Brown' expedition that the true leader would be revealed when someone researched the expedition further. If it was a leaderless group then I would default to the location they explored. You probably know better than I what region that was. Does the source you used for the article have a section heading for this expedition? If so maybe use that. In any case the expedition does not seem to be well known (I am possibly wrong), so the article title for that expedition would be full of options.SauliH 00:24, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Links

Doing a very cursory glimpse - I notice places that I know that there articles about - is it worth linking the places - or are you concentrating on the actual explorers? SatuSuro 11:20, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

At the moment I am focusing more on the explorer and expedtions. However, place articles should mention discovery subjects as a part of their history, so linking could be done. at this stage I have just left that alone. Feel free to go through and link things up.

You may have noticed that I have been working through the list of names from the ABD explorer list at the base of the page. When I am through with this, I will seperate out the maritime exploration into a seperate list from the terrestrial (as well as a seperation of Antartic exploration artilces). Cheers. SauliH 13:42, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that - things are looking quite daunting - I put our projects in the what looks like a very neglected history portal project list at the right side - and have joined up with the history project - and started looking at how maritime history is very disorganised for the whole planet - I have some terrible nightmare that I will try organising an international maritime history portal/project/thingy - I think I need to get off the computer now! :( SatuSuro 13:48, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a reminder for anyone watching here who might not have seen them on the australian project or australian portal talk pages -

Please support these projects as they all need participants and help to build and maintain.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Tasmania

Wikipedia:WikiProject Victoria

Wikipedia:WikiProject Western Australia

Apologies for cross posting if you have seen this message more than four times by now! SatuSuro 06:20, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Notable journals

Hello,

Some time in the next 48 hours I will create an article on Eyre's Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, to kill the red link at Banksia epica.

It occurs to me that there are a great many notable published journals of Australian exploration: Forrest's Explorations in Australia, Giles' Australia Twice Traversed, Carnegie's Spinifex and Sand, Gregory's Journals of Australian Exploration... and that's just what this parochial Westralian can come up with off the top of his head. No doubt there are many more.

I thought you guys might see value in collating a list of them, and perhaps coordinating their creation.

Hesperian 11:53, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I'd also like to suggest you guys get in the habit of treating these journals as notable by red linking when you refer to them. Hesperian 11:54, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects provides a list, updated daily, of unreferenced living people articles (BLPs) related to your project. There has been a lot of discussion recently about deleting these unreferenced articles, so it is important that these articles are referenced.

The unreferenced articles related to your project can be found at >>>Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian history/Exploration/Unreferenced BLPs<<<

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Thank you. Okip 02:45, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Angus McMillan

Somebody from this project may want to check on what's been done with the article on Angus McMillan. J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 18:48, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, made some changes to hopefully restore a neutral tone, but other views welcome. Euryalus (talk) 01:54, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Replacement of “discovered” with other words

A number of good faith editors believe that Europeans did not “discover” anything in Australia, and that they are justified in changing text to reflect that belief. Does the project have a policy on how best to respond to these changes? Downsize43 (talk) 22:59, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Request for information on WP1.0 web tool

Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Notability of minor explorers

It seems the notability watchdogs have a low opinion of lesser known explorers, even when their achievements are well documented. Please see Draft:William Parr (1813 convict) for an example of such rejection. Any help or suggestions to get this one past the keeper would be appreciated. Downsize43 (talk) 23:04, 5 January 2020 (UTC)