Talk:Egiin Gol

Egiin gol (moved from User:Bogomolov.PL's and User:Yaan's talk pages)

Hi, I just recognized a problem with the length of the Egiin Gol river. Hovsgolian source (M.Nyamaa) says it is 535 km, statistical yearbook 2007, p. 75, says it is 475. My guess is that the statistical yearbook is probably the more respectable source, but in any way it might be better to check one or two more sources. Any idea where to look (except using a pair of compasses) ? Yaan (talk) 11:42, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Its length 475 km, drainage basin 49100 sq km, discharge 100 qb m/s are from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia [1]. But with the Khar-Us Nuur it claims Agbash island area 274 sq km, but really its area is 369 sq km (not less!) measured using both topo maps and satellite imagery. But these measurements will be an original research and not allowed in Wiki. I guess the value in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is simple misprint: 274 instead of 374. But encyclopedia corrections are not welcomed... I can measure the length of the Egiin gol, but what with the original research?Bogomolov.PL (talk) 05:58, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Measuring a distance on a map (within certain limits of accuracy) is not original research, but simply a special case of reading a source. If several maps agree and give you reason to think that the figure in an encyclopedia contains a typo, by all means use the correct value. --Latebird (talk) 13:23, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Measurements made on the orthofoto (LandSat, circa 2000, pixel size 14.25 m) result is 523 km. Measurements were made along the centerline of the wider riverbed (usually there are several beds). Topomaps are out of date, but it is possible to check how long this river was before. Bogomolov.PL (talk) 06:12, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Any idea what kind of errors would be expected with this method? Should we accept 535 km as the more plausible length, or not? Yaan (talk) 15:21, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

The main source of the "errors" is the deciding where is the main stream, but law of large numbers makes a filtering of these decisions.

How the length was measured before? There are two methods: measuring using Opisometer and topographic maps - smaller scale derives less length. Or they used a palette of lines, when crossings of transparent palette lines with the river line were counted and then from the possibility value was computed a river length.

Any computers, any digital cartography in 1970s (for an ecyclopedia creation).

And every river consequently changes its bed and length. Bogomolov.PL (talk) 06:13, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't doubt that. The point I was trying to make is that 523 is quite close to 535 (relative difference below 2.5%) and a bit less close to 475 (relative difference around 10%). So, should we use 535 km, from single offline source, but apparently consistent with recent maps and our measurement method, or 523 km (is it really exact on the kilometer?) from the map, or 475 km because the majority of sources say so and it's still within the error range of the method we used?

I understand rivers still become longer when the scale cf. pixels gets smaller, right? So maybe giving 523 km and the scale of our map is the most meaningful way. Or we just ask Wikiproject Rivers for their opinion. Yaan (talk) 19:13, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I think we are not the first with this problem, so third opinion should be useful.Bogomolov.PL (talk) 06:40, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was page moved.  Skomorokh  06:53, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

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Eg River → Egiin Gol — Relisting. Not positive how to close yet. Wizardman 05:38, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

per WP:COMMONNAME. google book yields 61 hits for "Egiin gol" + "Mongolia", vs. 19 for "Eg River" + Mongolia. Yaan (talk) 12:00, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose It should be Egiin Gol River, since the "G" is capitalized in the majority of the hits. About half the hits talk about the administrative district or the town. The other half talk about the valley or the river or the dam project or the hydrographic drainage basin, which are not exactly the same thing. 76.66.197.2 (talk) 15:01, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Comment: "Egiin gol River" would be a pleonasm, like Rio Grande River. There are quite a few other river articles on wp whose title does not contain the English word "river", for example Elbe, Mekong, Ganges, Arno, just to name a few.

Re. administrative districts or towns, I think this is a misunderstanding. I see no hits for any town, one hit (the ninth) for some "Tarbagatai-Gol and Egiin-Gol district", which is not an administrative district, but apparently a term made up by geologists for certain "late palaeozoic igneous formations in North Mongolia". Obviously the name is derived from the river we are talking about, obviously the authors could have chosen to name said "district" "Tarbagatai river and Eg river", but didn't. Two hits (the first one plus one from "Soviet soil science") seem to deal with some other place in Mongolia (in the gobi?). On the other hand, "Eg river" + "Mongolia" turns up several hits for "e.g. river ..".

It is of course to be expected that there is going to be some correlation between the name of a river and the name of the valley it flows through, or the designation of the hydropower plant projects along the way. That the authors of the respective texts chose to use "Egiin gol valley" instead of "Eg river valley" (etc.) speaks only for using "Egiin gol" on Wikipedia too, not against it. Yaan (talk) 15:53, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Even more reason to have "River" in the title then. And it's still capitalized from everything you said. As for having two "river" words in the title, I don't see any proof that the Mongolian word for river is known to any extent in English as a word meaning river. 76.66.197.2 (talk) 09:15, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

That seems rather irrelevant. That Egiin gol is a river is explained in the very first sentence of this article, and also in the infobox. And it's no problem at all to create a redirect in case someone fails to find this article without the word "River" in the title.

Also I don't understand the logic behind interpreting the existence of article titles like Elbe, Mekong, Ganges, Arno etc. or the references to an "Egiin gol valley" or "Egiin gol hydroelectric dam" (rather than an "Egiin gol River valley" or an "Egiin gol River hydroelectric dam" as "even more reason to have "River" in the title". A reason to have "River" in the title would be that this is indeed part of the most common name, but so far it seems it's not.

I see your point about capitalization, though. Egiin Gol is OK for me. Yaan (talk) 09:55, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support - On Google Books, you can add another 21 hits for Egiyn Gol, and 29 for Egyin Gol (and probably more for other spelling variations I didn't think of). This brings the common use in English language printed media to at least 5 times as many hits as for "Eg River". "Egiin Gol River" is nonsensical, and whether readers have any previous knowledge about the meaning of "Gol" is no factor in the evaluation. After all, they come to Wikipedia to learn, and not because they already know everything. --Latebird (talk) 17:42, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Comment "Egiin Gol River" is clearly not nonsensical since it is used. 70.29.209.121 (talk) 05:04, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

In some contexts, adding an explanatory lower case "river" after "Egiin Gol" may indeed make sense (and that's the standard case how the combination is found by Google). But as a page title in an encyclopedia, such a pleonasm is clearly inappropriate. --Latebird (talk) 18:23, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

IMHO the primary question should not be whether something is used, or whether it is a pleonasm, but which version is used more commonly. From my interpretation of the search results, just "egiin gol" is considerably more common than "egiin gol river" (And yes, not all of the search results for "egiin gol river" seem to treat the "river" as part of a proper name). Yaan (talk) 14:20, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

"Egiin Gol" is used to refer to more things than just the river. 76.66.194.220 (talk) 06:41, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Care to enlighten us which those are? I hope you are not talking about items simply named after the river? --Latebird (talk) 22:26, 21 December 2009 (UTC) --Latebird (talk) 22:26, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Rivers#Naming, and assuming that "gol" is the Mongolian word for "river," the name should be just "Egiin". Also note that whatever we do here will probably have to be duplicated at all the articles on List of rivers of Mongolia for consistency. — æk^Talk 04:22, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

"Egiin" is the genitive form of "Eg", and makes no sense without the "Gol" part. While strictly speaking, "Eg" is the actual name, most often the more formal full expression "Egiin Gol" is used, even in Mongolian. There are a number of reasons why "Eg" alone is not a good choice, so your interpretation of the WikiProject River recommendations doesn't solve the problem in this case. "Eg River" and "Egiin Gol" are the only real alternatives, and we need to determine which one is more common. Oh, and before anyone asks, I have no idea why the Mongolians literally say "River of Eg" in this case, but not in most others (compare Orkhon Gol, Selenge Gol, Tuul Gol etc.). --Latebird (talk) 22:11, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.