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User:Eloquence/Platform

 * This document is part of my candidacy for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended as a supplement to the brief statements "Concerns I hope to address" and "Vision for the future of the Wikimedia project" on Election Candidates. Feel free to edit this page in accordance with my editing policy for comments.

 * Ask me questions

Why I am doing this
Before I joined Wikipedia, I was an active contributor on Kuro5hin, a technology and culture weblog, where I wrote over 45 articles and hundreds of comments. I learned from Kuro5hin that democratic processes can work to produce high quality content: articles on K5 are democratically voted on and go through an editing phase, which is however much less collaborative than a wiki.

This is also where I first heard about Wikipedia in July 2001, when Larry Sanger wrote his article about Britannica and Nupedia. I became curious, but I was skeptical about the wiki concept at first, like probably all of us were. Nevertheless, I edited on again, off again (often deterred by the heavy slowdowns that followed the transition to the new software), and eventually became convinced that this wiki thing could work. I started my own wiki in August 2002.

By now I have done quite a bit on Wikipedia, editing articles but also participating in technology and policy discussions on the mailing lists as well as creating and improving policy documents on the wiki itself, organizing several project-wide votes (most notably the international logo contest), etc.. When I discovered a feature called "double click editing" on another wiki I tried to nag the developers into implementing it, and eventually did it myself. Other improvements like table of contents generation, section editing and the graphical edit toolbar followed, and I also helped with the server administration where possible.

My user page has a list of most of my on-wiki contributions in terms of code, policy and articles. I also run the Wikipedia shop and I took the initiative  to start the fundraising campaign which brought us $40,000 in donations in a week. Off the wiki, I have also done quite a lot of work related to Wikipedia. I've written the four-part article series "Tanz der Gehirne" (German) in May 2003, which examines Wikipedia and compares it with Everything2, H2G2, and traditional encyclopedias; to my knowledge, it is still the most comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia to date. I've talked about Wikipedia at conferences in Vienna, Stuttgart, and Sarajaveo (a video of my lecture in Vienna is available). I will moderate the "Wikipedia and Friends" panel at the Wizards of OS conference in June 2003, where Jimbo Wales will be a speaker. I have written articles about our software, MediaWiki, for c't magazine and Linux Magazine. I run a small MediaWiki hosting service which currently hosts SymbolWiki, Memory Alpha, and a few private MediaWiki installations. As such, Wikimedia has already become a part of my professional life.

As one of the MediaWiki coders I know very well the limits of what our software and hardware can and cannot do and will raise early objections against projects which are likely doomed to failure. On the other hand, this technical knowledge also gives me the ability to look ahead and help along important innovations that are crucial to the future growth and health of all of Wikimedia's projects or just some of them.

As a contributor I am no stranger to controversy and the different models of dispute resolution which exist. I do not seek to gloss over problems with the wiki model, such as the fact that being persistent and acting like a bully can often get you what you want. Instead I constantly look for technological and social remedies, such as the Quickpolls idea which I implemented here on the English Wikipedia that allows for temporary bans on a limited set of policy violations. You may want to take a look at the history of the quickpolls-related pages as an example for how I believe policy discussions should work -- we debated the propsal until an almost unanimous consensus among over 20 contributors was found (which doesn't change the fact that quickpolls have flaws, and need further improvements).

As a longtime Internet user, observer and member of online communities as well as online economies, I believe I have a reasonable understanding of what factors help and hinder our success. I have collected data on the working models of online donation campaigns and gift economies, long before people like Howard Dean proved once and for all that online donations do work. I believe I have quite well-developed ideas of what can and cannot be done on the Internet, and that this knowledge can help me in what I consider one important role as a member of the board, to formulate rules for the creation of new Wikimedia projects and help them along.

As a moderately active contributor to a non-English Wikipedia, I have first hand knowledge of the mood in what is sometimes jokingly called one of the "colonies" and am very much interested in making sure that we do not give any of our non-English projects an incentive to split away, and that we instead nurture and feed them and that we indeed view ourselves as one community, indivisible by ideology, language or nation, sharing the common goal of contributing to the enlightenment of humanity.

I believe that our hopes for what Wikimedia can and should be will only be realized with a full understanding of the technological, political, economic, and social components of our project. Do I have this full understanding? Of course not, as such an understanding can only be a shared, collective understanding. To quote Douglas Engelbart:

 * "If we don't improve our ability to deal collectively with complex things, as the problems grow more urgent, we're in trouble."

This is, of course, also true for Wikipedia itself. The role of the board cannot be to dictate, it needs to listen, but it should also be able to act quickly if necessary, and it should take a guiding role in the progress of Wikimedia based on a solid understanding of the state and health of the community.

There are, without doubt, many members of our community who excel in one of the areas I mentioned: technical knowledge, social competence, political skills, economic wisdom. However, I believe that a member of the board should not necessarily excel in any particular area, but that they must also not disappoint in any of them. I see these qualities in myself. I do not excel in any area -- unlike some of the other candidates --, but I do believe I have a solid basic understanding in all of them.

Like all human beings, I have flaws. I am sensitive to personal attacks. I can be overzealous in defending what I believe to be truthful. I am eager to get things done, and may push things a little too fast on occasion. And of course I have a life besides Wikipedia which sometimes takes more, sometimes less of my time, and since this is an unpaid volunteer role, I can only do so much of the things I would like to do.

But nobody can dispute my commitment to the success of this project and my passion for it. I take this candidature quite seriously, and regardless of whether or not I will eventually join the Board, I will use whatever influence I have to promote the following goals.

Quality control and print editions

 * "The day will come when I will put out the call for funds to distribute paper copies of Wikipedia to every child in every third world country in the world." – Jimbo Wales

I fully share Jimmy's vision of getting Wikimedia into print (and DVD, for that matter). This may in fact be even more important for Wikibooks, which can have much more practical value in poor nations. Wherever there is a sufficient level of literacy, people should have easy access to our content, with or without the Internet. Where that level of literacy does not exist, we can seek to promote it, although other organizations will perhaps be better suited for that. Getting into print will indeed require massive funds, which I believe we can unlock (see ).

Education is the foundation of democracy and civil rights. Therefore, we can play a very important role in promoting both. However, this requires that our content is actually accurate and credible. We like to tell ourselves that the wiki process leads to accurate information, but we all know that there are many exceptions to that rule, especially when an article is so contentious that new claims are being added every day, or so obscure that only one person has ever edited it.

I firmly believe that establishing working, fun quality control mechanisms will be our greatest undertaking ever since the creation of Wikipedia itself.

I emphasize the word fun because that is, after all, the reason you and I started working on these wikis – the instant gratification of editing, the feedback from other editors, the satisfaction of looking at a page that developed from a stub into a well-illustrated treatise, the amazing usefulness of diffs, recent changes, watchlists, and so forth.

People work on Wikipedia as long as it is fun and they cease doing so when it stops being fun. It stops being fun when the site is dominated by trolls and bullies, made overly complex (see ) or becomes too much of a clique or oligarchy (see ). Peer review processes, if not properly implemented, can harm usability. But mostly, they will just be ignored, which would be very unfortunate.

So we need to find ways to make reviewing articles as much fun as creating them. Peer review includes:
 * checking the copyright status of an article
 * verifying whether all the facts are correct
 * checking the spelling and compliance with stylistic guidelines
 * looking for violations of our neutrality policy
 * determining if the article is as comprehensive as it should be, includes enough illustrations, etc.

I believe a working peer review process must be multi-staged. It is not enough to simply ask people, as we do on Featured article candidates, whether they like an article, especially as this particular process is heavily biased in favor of promoting articles (most people don't want to stand in the way of a promotion too long). My experience on FAC indicates that many people have not even read the articles they support (no surprise, many of them are 40,000 characters and longer). Still, even with this simple process, we only have about 100 articles which haved pass this type of review.

We have two conflicting goals here. Peer review needs to be rigorous, which tends to make it tedious, but it also needs to be rewarding, which might drive people to push pages through it to get the feeling of reward associated with it. Having a multi-staged process does address this to some extent, but not fully. Offering additional incentives for finding and fixing problems in any of the named problem areas may help. On a technological level, peer review must be very, very fluid – ready-made page templates should be provided for peer review pages, and adding information about any of the above categories of review should only take seconds. Yet we must not forget that we are a wiki, and the first thing people should do when they see a mistake is fix it. So peer review should be directly linked with the editing process.

I believe that the Wikimedia Foundation must take a steering role in developing peer review processes for all Wikimedia projects which satisfy these criteria, with enough freedom given to allow for competing implementations. Some projects may prefer elected editors to a fully open consensus-based process, some may want qualified experts while others will accept anyone who claims to know what they are talking about. We should experiment with these solutions and eventually promote the most effective one.

I believe that we need ways to distinguish "stable" revisions of articles and "unstable", current ones. An article which has undergone peer review will not be frozen, but the peer reviewed version will be flagged, and users can browse in such a way that they will never encounter any non-reviewed articles, without moving to a separate site or losing the ability to edit. This takes away our crtics' strongest argument, that it is impossible to trust a wiki. "No," we will be able to say, "you have a choice – get a limited set of potentially outdated, but accurate and systematically reviewed articles, or get the full set of pages which may or may not be accurate (think for yourself!)."

We should set optimistic, but realistic goals – let's say 10,000 peer reviewed articles on Wikipedia in the first year of the process being used. And we should move away from "the nth article" press releases, at least for the very large projects. If we can say in 4 or 5 years that we have 100,000 peer reviewed English or German articles, that will be as gigantic an accomplishment as the creation of the articles themselves.

Let's not forget that Nupedia failed because of its very complicated and bureaucratic peer review system. Ours must be much more fun, much more rewarding, a new and exciting challenge for all of us.

In the end, people should say "I don't trust government textbooks - Wikibooks are so much more accurate." Or: "The Britannica article about circumcision is completely biased and very outdated. Wikipedia's is much better." We need to earn people's trust by working hard to check every fact, to create truly brilliant works like mankind has not seen them before, because they were written not by tens, but by thousands of people working together on a common goal.

Political influence
Wikimedia does not exist in a political vacuum. I am convinced that we need to use our influence as a highly respected and loved organization to call for legal changes that are useful to us and to prevent those which are harmful. We would benefit a lot from lower copyright terms, for example. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright in the United States (the Foundation is subject to US law) to "life of the author plus 70 years" for individual works. That means that if I died tomorrow, anything I wrote without explicitly putting it in the public domain would only fall into it by 2074. It has been demonstrated by economists that for 99% of works, this is completely nonsensical even if one wants to maximize profits, as there is no economic interest in exploiting them for such an amount of time. Copyright is extended primarily to satisfy the specific interests of corporations like Disney, which fear that their characters will fall into the public domain.

At the very least, we should support legal proposals such as the Eric Eldred Act, but I would also love to see broader initiatives in this area. Every single year of reduced copyright terms means that a thousand more works which are no longer economically viable but of historical interest become available to us - texts and images of all types. This is of course very useful to the mission of Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and Wikisource. Even Wikiquote would benefit from the additional pictures which they could use.

Another area of concern are software patents, which threaten the very foundation of our project, the underlying MediaWiki open source software. Wikimedia may not want to adopt a categorical anti-patent position, but we should strongly oppose the granting of trivial patents, document prior art, and be ready and willing to fight lawsuits to defend our innovations when necessary.

This is also true for overbroad interpretations of copyright or trademark law. When a corporation like Corbis threatens us with a lawsuit for hosting an image that is clearly in the public domain (but they claim to have "reproduction rights" because it was digitized by them), we will have to decide whether we want to fight a precedent lawsuit. From a public relations point of view, such a lawsuit should be fought about an absolutely unambiguous case, where it is clear who the "pirates" are -- the corporation trying to steal from the public domain. As for trademarks, this primarily applies to things like logos, where we can likely claim fair use. Nevertheless, we should register and protect our own trademarks, as that is our primary line of defense against plagiarism.

Wikimedia also has a logical interest to fight censorship, at least in forms which do not allow it to operate freely. We should strive to provide read access to our content to people living in repressive nations, whether that content is distributed over the Internet, on CDs and DVDs or in print.

We need to keep a watchful eye on the continuing changes to the "intellectual property" framework and the ways in which they may affect us. This does not only include legal changes, but also operational changes within institutions such as patent offices, and important precedents in the courts. We should comment on important issues in Wikimedia press releases, and we should employ all legal mechanisms of lobbyism to bring about changes to our advantage.

Effective fundraising
Howard Dean raised and burned 40 million dollars over the Internet in just a few months. Hopefully our burn-rate will be lower than that, but we should employ the fundraising mechanisms which he used regularly. This includes things like real-time (!) graphical updates and fundraising-related discussions. Also, there should be an opt-in checkbox when making a donation which allows one to have their name listed, and there should be stastics which show the largest donors - by name or anonymized - as well as the most recent ones.

I am largely opposed to subscription mechanisms because I believe that the funds we raise should not primarily come from editors but from readers, for obvious reasons. The slightest hint or suggestion that people have to pay for making contributions to the wikis must be avoided. Fundraisers should always be prominently announced to the outside world and not just be an internal affair. It may make sense to use a blog-style format for the fundraising page, where regular updates are posted on various wiki-related issues, as an incentive for people to visit it regularly (and make more donations).

Merchandising efforts, such as the Wikipedia shop which I run for the foundation, should be increased. If people want Jimbo Wales bobbleheads, we will give them Jimbo Wales bobbleheads. The print and DVD versions, where they are not given away for free, will of course also be sold, and each Wikimedia project should have T-Shirts, logos, mousepads and so forth with its logo on them.

While grass-roots fundraising is powerful, it would be foolish not to try to access other sources of funding. Because of the international nature of our project, we can and should get in touch with pretty much any charity that promotes intellectual progress and education, including purely regional ones such as some of George Soros' "Open Society" funds. The European Union may also be interested in specifically promoting the European editions of Wikimedia projects. Lastly, there may be wealthy individuals whom we can persuade to support our project directly.

In order to effectively raise funds locally, Wikimedia needs daughter organizations in pretty much every country with an existing Wikimedia community; if possible, these should be recognized as charitable organizations to allow for tax-deductible donations.

Bounties and rewards
One of our primary uses for funds will always be the expansion of our ever growing server farm. Aside from hardware, raised funds could be used for the establishment of a Wikimedia bounty system. The first experiment in this area which I will promote is the use of bounties for software development. For example, a bounty of $200 could be posted for the implementation of a single login across all Wikimedia projects (a fairly large and undeniably useful undertaking). Bounties would be organized on a wiki page, where users would be able to vote on the priorities, or even to say that they will implement a certain task for free, so that the bounty should be used for something else. Tasks need to be precisely defined, so that their completion or lack thereof can be judged by the community.

If this scheme is successful and does not discuourage people from working on the code without getting paid for it, a similar one could be tried for content, such as posting bounties for expert peer review, or for adding well-researched facts to underdeveloped articles. Again, the process for choosing how the bounties should be used must be democratic. Bounties should come from a specially designated set of funds which have been explicitly donated for that purpose, of from money which has been acquired by other means (such as prize money).

Competitions with prizes like merchandising items and other "cool stuff" should be considered for logos, banners and similar talent contents. If we can afford it, I would even consider ideas like "Wikimedia Scholarships" for excellent contributors (but of course there would be a competition among the users, and possibly an election, for such a reward, and the criteria for eligibility might be quite narrow).

All these incentives must be provided fairly, and there must never be the impression of different classes of membership. As such, this is an area where we should move very carefully, step by step, and stop and reconsider immediately if we run into problems.

Democracy and openness
With over 50 languages and people from all Internet-connected countries (which cover the full range of modern government types), maintaining democratic organization principles, and indeed maintaining a coherent organization will prove to be a monumental undertaking. There are very few organizations which operate in so many nations, since as noted above, we will require local organizations wherever there is a substantial Wikimedia community.

This can only be accomplished with a combination of what one might call a constitution (a shared set of beliefs and policies) and grass-roots organization. Aside from policy freedoms, we must allow local daughter organization certain legal freedoms that go beyond them -- e.g. they may legally be allowed to change their constitution to something different -- so as to not stifle their creation; however, we can use our trademark rights to prevent an organization from calling itself Wikimedia if it does not represent our interests and constitution.

Daughter organizations should have the rights to use funds for themselves as long as their operations are made fully transparent and in compliance with certain basic rules (for example, we may want to limit the types and range of political activity). There should of course be no discrimination against any individual organization.

I believe that openness is absolutely crucial in everything we do. We should hold ourselves to high standards of reporting -- be it the use of donated funds, the setup of new projects, the negotiation of deals, the declaration of certain rules, and so forth. Essentially everything the Wikimedia Foundation does in any capacity whatsoever should be reported within a defined timeframe (e.g. 3 months), and members should have the opportunity to object beforehand whenever this is reasonably possible.

Technological openness should be maintained. In fact, I believe that in some areas we can become even more open. For example, one technical innovation I would like to see implemented is FileReplacement, which could allow us to get rid of page protection almost entirely. On the other hand, I do not see the wiki principles as inviolable dogma. If a project requires different membership rules, for example, that should not be out of the question simply because it is "un-wiki." And if some of these principles were clearly and undeniably refuted at some point and replaced by something better, we should embrace that innovation (e.g. a better security model).

While I believe in openness and am a strong enemy of government censorship in all forms, I also think that members who are deliberately trying to disturb and harm our projects and who clearly violate our policy need to be swiftly dealt with. I have no sympathy for trolls whatsoever. I fully support effective anti-troll measures, although we should always try reform before we resort to punishment. I am not categorically opposed to astroturfing, but it should be exposed when provably occurring, so as to detect future instances by the same user.

Policies for how to deal with these issues are not for the Board to decide, but the Foundation also has a responsibility toward its members to make sure that all projects are running smoothly, and should instigate discussions and reforms when there is evidence to the contrary.

Neutrality and fairness
NPOV is one of the cornerstones of Wikipedia, and it should be non-negotiable for all Wikipedia editions. For each new Wikimedia project, there should be a policy on how to deal with different points of view, and in most cases, NPOV will be the policy that we want to use.

I have long planned a complete rewrite of the NPOV policy page because I consider it difficult to understand. I also believe that some aspects need to be improved, particularly the ways in which we deal with criticisms (should they get separate articles? I believe not) and with religious themes (when should space be given to non-religious perspectives, and how much?). Such a reform should be followed by a vote, and eventually, it may be a good idea to make the reformed, clarified NPOV policy a part of our aforementioned constititution, and to maintain it not in different variants, but in a single, translated text.

Being neutral also means not disparaging other points of view, not needlessly removing text, and so forth. This fairness to me is an essential component of the NPOV policy. We should not pander to any viewpoint, but we also do not pronounce verdicts.

The nature of NPOV is that articles will amost never concisely present the truth, especially in matters such as history, religion or morality. Because of that, I would not be completely opposed to having spin-off wikis for original research, or for determining the truth through logical argument. Such a wiki or wikis might also be a good place to send ideologues to.

Usability
In the department of technological development, usability is one of my most important concerns. We must avoid cluttering the wiki software with features which will confuse newbies. I believe in the following principle:

 * Power features for power users.

What I mean by that is that things like infoboxes may very well include complex HTML layouts, as long as these layouts are only visible to the people who care about editing them. The template system currently under development allows parameters, so that, for example becomes a country infobox with these parameters, loaded from Template:Country. I can well imagine future expansions to this scheme such as
 * storing metadata like the above Name=, Flag= in a table to make it searchable
 * allowing simple programming constructs in the Template: namespace (loops, conditions)
 * allowing a wide range of external plug-ins for things like graphs, chessboards, music, etc.

Again, if these enhancements are only visible to users who care about them, while normal editors just see very simple text with a few "magic" constructs that do amazing things, that's very much in our interest. On the other hand, cluttering our syntax with more and more tags and constructs which then show up within the article source of thousands of pages is not desirable. Similarly, the standard user interface should be free of clutter which the average user doesn't care about.

I would be very much in favor of conducting systematic usability studies to determine which aspects of MediaWiki are particularly confusing to newbies and need to be improved -- be it the editing syntax or the user interface.

Wikimedia is not just Wikipedia
Because Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia it is easy to overlook our other projects. This would be a huge mistake, because some of them have tremendous potential. To me, this is especially true for Wikibooks and Wikisource. Wikibooks is the "practical" alternative to Wikipedia, the web site that people should go to when they want to figure out how to do something. Wikisource could grow into not just a source repository, but also a place to add annotations and commentary, as well as to collaboratively create translations. Imagine that people might donate their texts under a free license just to get them translated by our volunteers! With good planning and promotion, these two projects can and will become very important.

Wiktionary suffers from the fact that the software is still very page-centric, rather than data-centric, which makes it difficult to do things like quickly getting a translation from A to B. We should promote necessary changes to the software to allow such advanced, targeted data searches.

Each and every single Wikimedia project deserves our attention. And we must also have the honesty to admit when a project has clearly failed, and get rid of it or transform it into something else (the only project which I can think of that in my opinion already is a failure is the September 11 wiki).

New projects
I am thrilled by the fact that we do not limit ourselves to one project, and will always be keenly interested in every single project proposal. However, I would like to expound here on two project ideas in particular.

The first is the Wikimedia Commons proposal, which I want to see implemented as soon as possible. It is essentially the idea to build a shared media repository for all wikis, which can be transparently accessed (which means that you don't have to care whether is on the local wiki, or in the shared repository, it will be found and displayed in both cases).

This would reduce redundancy across wikis and contribute to a more coherent community feeling of being part of the same project. But I also believe that the Commons idea is an interesting project of its own, in that it would be a central place for people to donate free and open content without having to think about how to use it -- the Commons community would examine its usefulness for them. This would allow us to get in touch with thousands of amateur photographs, artists etc. whose material might be of interest to us, and who can then easily add it to our shared archive. Furthermore, I think this project would help a lot in establishing the Wikimedia brand identity, which is currently largely unknown.

Attached to the Wikimedia Commons proposal is the single sign-on idea, which is one of the most often requested changes to the MediaWiki software, but non-trivial because of the thousands of existing accounts. The Commons is our best chance to implement single sign-on, an important feature for bringing Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikipedia etc. cloer together, so that people can easily switch from one to the other. This is one of the projects which I would strongly consider putting a bounty on, as it's simply such a large and unrewarding job.

Another project idea near and dear to my heart is Wikinews, even though the page on Meta does not reflect my current state of thinking, which I have so far not written down. I believe that the same principles which have been applied to create an encyclopedia, free textbooks, and so on can be applied to compete with every TV and radio station, every newspaper in the world -- to become an independent, neutral news website, like Wikipedia is an independent, neutral encyclopedia.

There is, however, one important difference. On Wikipedia we do not allow original research, and that gives us an easy way to deal with cranks and crackpots -- if they can't prove that someone else has made their claims, then the claims aren't relevant to the article (unless they themselves are important researches and have published them). Wikinews, if it doesn't just want to be the open content equivalent of http://news.google.com (i.e. a news summary service), has to do original reporting. But how do we distinguish between true and false reports? I believe here we cannot allow any anonymous user to make any claim, there needs to be an identity, a reputation, attached to it. On the other hand, anonymous users would very much be allowed to add attributed quotes, correct spelling mistakes and the like.

There is an expectation of immediate accuracy from news stories, which means that articles would have to undergo a peer review process before they are "officially" published. I believe simply putting an "Article in progress" tag on pages which have not yet been reviewed, and making them editable only to sysops after they have been published, would be a good way to deal with this problem.

Finally, orignal reporting takes time and money, and this is again an area where bounties or direct payments might make sense. Taken together, these may seem like large changes to the Wikipedia model, but this is a large task, and as I noted above, I do not believe that sticking to any kind of dogma will bring us forward.

The democratic potential of truly free, international news media cannot be overestimated. Aside from open content and massive collaboration, there is one key difference between this project and something like Indymedia: We would be able to maintain a neutral point of view. Indymedia is essentially an advocacy news site, while this project would be as unbiased as possible.

Content partnerships
A few months ago, I convinced Jimbo to give me the nice, official-sounding title of "content partnership coordinator". I have used this title to try to get in touch with IMDB, Amazon.com, and others who might be interested in our content. I see this as a key role for the Foundation itself, as corporations like to talk to "official" persons rather than just seemingly random community members.

I believe content partnerships with such companies can be very useful to us: Imagine that when searching for a book on Amazon.com, one of the first thing you see is the Wikipedia summary for that book (if it exists). The only requirement from our part would be a backlink to the Wikipedia article. Thus, thousands of people would click through directly to the page, and if only 1% of them edit the article, and only half of these edits are improvements, we have already won a lot.

Another type of content partnership are copyleft partnerships. The Wikipedia license requires that all improvements are also open content (aside from fair use or equivalent changes and distribution which it does not affect). So if we get a magazine to use an article we created, and they add a pretty picture, we can plausibly argue that we have a right to use that picture as well. Therefore, seeking out potential users who make improvements to our content is very beneficial to us.

Of course, we must plausibly enforce our license in order to be credible in negotiations, and also as a responsibility to our contributors, who expect to be given fair credit for their work. This is an area where the community can and does try to help, but the Foundation should become active quickly when community action has bene fruitless. I have, in a couple of instances, managed to get sites to comply with our license, and using the title of content partnership coordinator has also helped here. But aside from titles, the demonstrated willingness to use legal means is very important. Nevertheless, we should always assume good faith until bad faith has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

title: User:Eloquence/Platform


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Pinmonkey

Pinmonkey was an American country music group formed in 2002 by Michael Reynolds (lead vocals), brothers Michael Jeffers (vocals, bass guitar) and Chad Jeffers (Dobro, lap steel guitar), and Rick Schell (drums, vocals). Their first album, Speak No Evil, was released independently in 2002. Later that same year, they signed to BNA Records and released their self-titled album. It produced the singles "Barbed Wire and Roses" and "I Drove All Night", both of which charted on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks (now Hot Country Songs) charts. Schell departed, with Mike Crouch taking his place as drummer; Chad Jeffers also left to join Keith Urban's road band. Reduced to a trio composed of Mike Crouch, Michael Jeffers, and Michael Reynolds, Pinmonkey released their third album (titled Big Shiny Cars) on the independent Back Porch label in 2006 before disbanding.

Biography
Pinmonkey was founded by Michael Reynolds, Rick Schell, and brothers Michael and Chad Jeffers. The Jeffers brothers are natives of Kingsport, Tennessee, and had played in a band called the Habaneros, which was based out of Murfreesboro, in the 1990s. Chad attended Belmont University and after graduating in 1994, he worked in the mail room of Starstruck Studios, a recording studio owned by Reba McEntire, in addition to touring with The Wilkinsons. Rick Schell, a native of Homer, New York, had moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1993 and had been hired to play on Steve Earle's I Feel Alright album, leading to him also playing for Joy Lynn White, Buddy Miller, and Elizabeth Cook. Michael Reynolds had moved to Nashville after graduating high school, and was working at a McDonald's restaurant when he befriended Chad Jeffers. This led to the formation of Pinmonkey, and all four began performing at the Sutler, a club in Nashville.

The four musicians derived their band name Pinmonkey from "And Maggie Makes Three", an episode of the cartoon The Simpsons. Record executive Joe Galante heard the band perform at the Sutler, and signed them to BNA Records in 2002. Galante also allowed the band to release an independent album called Speak No Evil, produced by Chad Jeffers and Schell, which they had completed just prior to signing. It received a positive review in Billboard, which compared the band favorably to Pure Prairie League and Poco, while also praising Reynolds' lead vocals and the musicianship.

In 2002, BNA released the band's debut single "Barbed Wire and Roses". Co-written by Tia Sillers, Mark Selby, and Sean Locke, the song peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks (now Hot Country Songs) charts. It served as the lead-off single to their self-titled album, released in late 2002. This album's second and final single was a cover of Cyndi Lauper's 1989 hit "I Drove All Night". Pinmonkey's version of the song made number 36 on the country chart in early 2003. Also in 2003, Pinmonkey began to tour with Lee Ann Womack and Brad Paisley in support of their album.

A third single, a cover of Robbie Fulks' "Let's Kill Saturday Night", peaked at number 44 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks in 2004. However, the single's promotion stopped when Schell abruptly quit the band, and BNA dropped them as a result. Mike Crouch took over as drummer, while Chad Jeffers left to join Keith Urban's road band. The three remaining members — Crouch, Reynolds, and Michael Jeffers — were signed to a recording contract with Back Porch Records, with the album Big Shiny Cars being released a year later. This album produced one single in "That Train Don't Run", originally released by Matraca Berg. The album included a song written by Kieran Kane, and another which featured Rusty Young and Elizabeth Cook on backing vocals. Jeffrey B. Remz of Country Standard Time reviewed the album positively, praising the country rock sound and Reynolds' singing voice.

In 2024, Michael Reynolds released a solo album titled Tarnished Nickel Sky.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Pinmonkey


text:
Talk:John Sullivan (writer)

London
Is he from South London?He seems to write about it a lot?Andycjp 08052004

 * I believe so, but I haven't added it to the article since I don't have a source. Perhaps I'll look later, and add what I find.  But I'm 95% sure he is. --bodnotbod 12:22, May 8, 2004 (UTC)

Which football team?
This page claims, although with a fact tag, that John Sullivan is an Arsenal fan. Citizen Smith claims that he is a Fulham fan. I suppose it is technically possible to support both teams but it isn't usual, so I guess one of them is a mistake. Are there any proper citations? Sam Blacketer (talk) 22:31, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

title: Talk:John Sullivan (writer)


text:
Ripollès

Ripollès (Ripollés) is a comarca (county) in the Girona region, Catalonia, Spain. It is located in the Ribes and Camprodon river valleys. In 2001, its population was 25,744, about 40% of whom lived in the capital, Ripoll.

Ripollès borders the comarques of Baixa Cerdanya, Berguedà, Lluçanès, Osona, Garrotxa, and – across the border in France – Vallespir, Conflent, and Alta Cerdanya.

title: Ripollès


text:
Emirate of Nekor

The Emirate of Nekor or Salihid Emirate (إمارة بني صالح) was an Arab emirate centered in the Rif area of present-day Morocco. Its capital was initially located at Temsaman, and then moved to Nekor. The dynasty was of Himyarite Arab descent from a certain companion of Uqba ibn Nafi (d. 683). The emirate was founded in 710 CE by Salih I ibn Mansur through a Caliphate grant. Under his guidance, the local Berber tribes adopted Islam, but later deposed him in favor of one az-Zaydi from the Nafza tribe. They subsequently changed their mind and reappointed Ibn Mansur. His dynasty, the Banū Sālih, thereafter ruled the region until 1019.

History
In 859, the kingdom became subject to a 62 ship-strong group of Vikings who defeated a Moorish force in Nekor that had attempted to interfere with their plundering in the area. After staying for eight days in Morocco, the Vikings returned to Spain and continued up the east coast.

The Nekor kingdom comprised part of the Moroccan Rif and included the tribes of Zouagha and Djeraoua of Ibn Abī l-ʻAys, about five days' journey from Nekor. This area was flanked by the territory of the Matmata, Kebdana, Mernissa, Ghassasa of Mount Herek, and Quluʻ Jarra belonging to the Banū Urtendi. On the west, it extended to the Banū Marwan of Ghomara and the Banū Humayd and bordered the Mestassa and Sanhaja. Behind these lay the Awraba, the band of Ferhun, the Banū Walīd, the Zenata, the Banū Irnian and the Banū Merasen of the band of Qāsim, Lord of Sa. In the north, it was bounded by the sea, some five miles from Nekor.

Salihid rulers

 * Salih I ibn Mansur "al-`Abd as-Salih" (710–749)
 * al-Mu'tasim ibn Salih (749–?), said to have been very pious
 * Idris I ibn Salih (?–760), who founded Nekor
 * Sa'id I ibn Idris (760–803), who moved the capital to Nekor. In his reign, Nekor was sacked by the Vikings, who took many prisoners, a few of whom were ransomed by the Umayyad ruler of Spain. Later, part of the Ghomara tribe revolted, led by a person called Segguen; their revolt was defeated.
 * Salih II ibn Sa'id (803–864), whose brother led a revolt against him, but was defeated.
 * Sa'id II ibn Salih (864–916); his older brother and uncle led an unsuccessful revolt against him, but he was ultimately defeated and killed by the Fatimid general Masala ibn Habus, who conquered the area for six months. However, his sons took refuge in Málaga with the Umayyad caliph of Córdoba, and returned once Masala had left the region and successfully expelled his garrison.
 * Salih III ibn Sa'id (917–927); in gratitude, he acknowledged the Umayyads as the rightful caliphs, thus transferring his nominal allegiance.
 * Abd al-Badi' ibn Salih "el-Mu'ayyid" (927–929); he was defeated and killed by another Fatimid general, Musa ibn Abi'l-Afiya, who destroyed Nekor again. However, the line was resumed (and the city rebuilt) by:
 * Abu Ayyub Isma'il ibn 'Abd al Malik ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Sa'id I ibn Salih (930?–935), who was defeated and killed by yet another Fatimid general, Sandal the mawla. However, when Sandal departed for Fez, installing a governor called Marmazu of the Kutama tribe, the inhabitants rebelled and installed yet another member of the line:
 * Musa ibn Rumi ibn Abd as-Sami` ibn Salih ibn Idris I ibn Salih (936?–940), who defeated Marmazu and sent his head to the Umayyad caliph in Cordoba. However, he was soon exiled by his relative:
 * Abd as-Sami' ibn Jurthum ibn Idris ibn Salih I ibn Mansur (940–947). His people rose up and killed him, and then sent for one of his relatives from Málaga:
 * Jurthum ibn Ahmad ibn Ziyadat Allah ibn Sa'id I ibn Idris (947–970), who adopted the Maliki school of jurisprudence.

Thenceforth, the emirate remained in his line until the Azdaji emir Ya'la ibn Futuh conquered it in 1019 and expelled the family.

All dates are converted from Hijri, and may be up to a year out. This is largely based on Ibn Khaldun, whose account is itself based on al-Bakri.

title: Emirate of Nekor


text:
Hal Sparks

Hal Harry Magee Sparks III (born September 25, 1969) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, musician, political commentator, television and radio host and television personality. He made contributions to VH1, hosting E!'s Talk Soup, and played the roles of Michael Novotny on the American television series Queer as Folk, Donald Davenport in Lab Rats and the voice of Tak in Tak and the Power of Juju television series and video games.

Early life
Sparks was born on September 25, 1969, in Cincinnati, Ohio, but grew up in Peaks Mill, Kentucky.

Sparks played Dungeons & Dragons every Sunday with a group of friends at the local library in Frankfort. At the age of 11, he became a "de facto dungeon master" because none of his friends wanted to do the reading required to be a dungeon master.

When he was 14 years old, he moved to the Chicago area and enrolled at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, where he entered the theater department. Despite some initial opposition by his father, by 15 he began performing standup comedy and by 17 he won the title of "Chicago's Funniest Teenager" from a stand-up contest sponsored the Chicago Sun-Times.

Film appearances
His first breakout role in a mainstream movie was in Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), as Zoltan, the bubble-wrapped leader of a clan of nerds obsessed with outer space. In a 2009 interview with We Are Movie Geeks, he confirmed he created the hand gesture in a "Z" formation. The "Z" hand gesture became the celebratory sign of choice among the members and fans of baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates, of whom Sparks is a fan, starting in 2012. On July 25, 2012, he threw out the first pitch during a Pirates/Cubs series at PNC Park.

Sparks has appeared in other films, including Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star and Spider-Man 2, where he had a cameo as the elevator passenger who enjoys an awkward moment with Spider-Man. He also appeared in the opening scene of the 2009 Mike Judge film Extract, as one of the guitar salesmen scammed out of a guitar by the con-woman played by Mila Kunis.

In 2004, he starred as Deputy Dale in the independently produced Lightning Bug, which was written and directed by Robert Hall, who was an original bandmate in Hal's hard rock band Zero 1.

Television work
Sparks had his screen debut on the television movie Frog, starring Shelley Duvall, Elliott Gould, and Scott Grimes in 1987. Upon graduation, Sparks moved to Los Angeles and ten years later he was hired to host Talk Soup in 1999. He appeared as himself in the video "Beat It," the Michael Jackson cover, by Fall Out Boy, and voiced a cameo on Robot Chicken.

Sparks had made appearances on various television programs from as early as 1994, when he played a long-haired skateboarder on the fourteenth episode of the first season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. In 1995, he appeared in the "Gentle Horse" episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. From 2000 through 2006, he appeared in Martial Law, Frasier, One on One, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Las Vegas.

He went on to independently produce his first standup comedy DVD Escape from Halcatraz in 2008. Sparks is a regular guest on CNN's Your $$$, The Joy Behar Show and The View when he is not hosting his own weekly progressive radio show. He has also participated in the Progressive Voices Cruise in 2009 and 2010.

Sparks had a leading role on the breakthrough Showtime television series, Queer as Folk, an American adaptation of the UK series of the same name written by Russell T Davies. In 2007, Sparks became the voice of the lead character in the animated series for children, Tak & the Power of Juju for Nickelodeon (replacing Jason Marsden), which ran for twelve episodes between 2007 and 2008.

Sparks played Nelson Burkhard in the second season of Fuller House (replacing Jason Marsden). He portrayed Donald Davenport in Lab Rats. In early 2012, the Lab Rats premiere received the highest ratings for original series for the network. Sparks continued portraying Davenport in the spin-off Lab Rats: Elite Force. He provided the voice of the computer named "Mr. Q" on the U.S. television adaptation of 20Q, which aired on the Game Show Network (GSN) in 2009.

Reality series and hosting
Sparks became the United States' youngest game show emcee in 1988 when he hosted the short-lived, syndicated game show Treasure Mall. He also participated on GSN's Extreme Dodgeball as captain of the Chicago Hitmen team.

In 2006, Sparks competed for the charity Habitat for Humanity on the Fox celebrity competition Celebrity Duets. He performed with such musical legends as Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Wynonna Judd, Dennis DeYoung, Dee Snider and Sebastian Bach. He made it to the finale along with Lucy Lawless and Alfonso Ribeiro, and came in third in the series.

In 2007, Sparks was cast as the host for the WB reality series Survival of the Richest, where wealthy young adults were paired with those young adults with massive debts to complete challenges together and work as a team. Also in 2007, Sparks joined Roseanne to judge Nick at Night's search for America's Funniest Mom.

Sparks was a contestant on the 2008 VH1 celeb-reality series Celebracadabra, where the celebrities vie to out-perform each other with magic they have learned from their experienced coaches. Other celebrity contestants competing included Ant, Lisa Ann Walter, Carnie Wilson, Christopher "Kid" Reid, Kimberly Wyatt, and C. Thomas Howell. Howell was the winner, with Sparks taking second place.

In 2009, Sparks recorded his first Showtime comedy special Charmageddon in front of a standing-room-only crowd at the OC Pavilion in Santa Ana, California. The special aired in 2010, and was released on DVD.

In 2019, Sparks appeared in the premiere episode of Famously Afraid on the Travel Channel, a series in which celebrities tell of their personal unusual encounters, to describe his experience with alien abduction.

VH1 appearances
Sparks was one of five celebrities to appear in the first episode of VH1's Celebrity Paranormal Project. He has also been a regular commentator on several VH1 series, including the following:
 * I Love the '70s
 * I Love the '80s
 * I Love the '80s Strikes Back
 * I Love the '80s 3-D
 * I Love the '90s
 * I Love the '90s: Part Deux
 * I Love the '70s: Volume II
 * I Love the New Millennium
 * 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs
 * Black to the Future
 * Undateable

Radio
Sparks appears as a regular guest and fill-in host on the national Stephanie Miller Radio Show, providing three hours of commentary and humor on Wednesday mornings. The program is known as "Hump Days with Hal", and is broadcast weekly from his U-stream channel. Sparks has also appeared as guest host for Norman Goldman's Los Angeles-based show. Sparks broadcast hosting was also made available through Goldman's "Beyond the Norm" segments.

He continued this free "behind the scenes" Ustream show. In June 2010 he got his own radio program on WCPT (AM) as host of The Hal Sparks Radio Program (megaworldwide), which broadcasts between 11am and 1pm CST each Saturday.

Music
In addition to acting, Sparks is also the lead singer and guitarist for a rock band, ZERO 1 (previously called The Hal Sparks Band). At the start, the band consisted of Sparks, his friend Rob Hall on bass and Sparks' cousin Miles Loretta on drums. Their self-titled debut album was released in December 2006 and produced by King's X's frontman DUg Pinnick. The album is available through iTunes and on Sparks' official website.

In 2007, both Sparks and Loretta from Zero 1 participated on Doug's solo project Strum Sum Up.

The band now has a new lineup consisting of Sparks (lead vocals and guitar), Brian Crow (guitar and backup vocals), Bumper Renga (bass and backup vocals) and Lance Tamanaha (drums and backup vocals). They signed with the record label "rocket science" and have a new album on the way called The sacred nothing. Also expected to debut is the band's first video for the single "American Psycho," which was directed by Adrienne Wanyo and filmed on location at the Houdini Mansion.

Sparks was a contestant in the first season of Celebrity Duets. He often joins the Los Angeles cover band Steel Panther to sing classic 1980s metal tunes, such as the Skid Row hit "Youth Gone Wild".

Stand-up
In 2011 he joined Stephanie Miller and John Fugelsang for the successful Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour in various cities across the country. This tour topped more than a million dollars in ticket sales while raising money for local progressive causes. In 2012, Sparks and Fugelsang began the "Politics, Sex and Religion Tour."

Personal life
Sparks is an activist who regularly participates in charitable events for organizations like AIDS Walk, Farm Sanctuary, the Lilli Claire Foundation, Imagine a Cure and the Marijuana Policy Project. He is straight edge and claims never to have drunk, smoked or used recreational drugs.

While at Los Angeles International Airport in 2010, Sparks and an airline passenger used CPR on an unconscious, elderly man who had collapsed in the airport terminal.

In May 2011, Sparks announced he would become a father during a Ustream show on Father's Day. He debuted his son Camden Harrison Sparks at the 2011 AIDS Walk in Los Angeles.

Sparks has studied martial arts since the age of 8 years old and holds belts in Karate, Tae Kwon Do, and several forms of Kung Fu including Wushu.

In 2012, the Pittsburgh Pirates began using the iconic "Zoltan" hand gesture from Dude, Where's My Car? as a good luck symbol to turn around a 19-season losing streak. After a Twitter campaign to encourage the "real Zoltan" to appear at a game, Sparks flew to Pittsburgh on July 25, 2012, to throw out the honorary first pitch, and was on hand to see the Pirates win 3–2 over his hometown team, the Chicago Cubs. Despite picking up a cult following in Pittsburgh and helping the team contend in the playoff race well into September, the Pirates finished with a 79–83 record, extending their major North American professional sports record to 20 consecutive losing seasons.

Sparks is a Freemason, having been initiated on November 6, 2016, at Los Angeles Lodge No 42 F. & A. M.

He lives in Chinatown, Los Angeles. He also does a political commentary talk show on the Chicago audio station 820 AM on Saturdays, which is uploaded on his YouTube channel. He also has a Twitch account.

Discography

 * Charmageddon (2010)
 * Wreckcreation (2018)

title: Hal Sparks


text:
Talk:Annapurna

[Untitled]
鱼尾峰 At some point it would probably be good to move Anna II etc. to their own pages. --Spireguy 23:40, 17 March 2006 (UTC)-- crazyhbx
 * There is plenty of scope to write more about Annapurna II etc. within the massif article, and to send readers directly there if they search it. This encourages readers to explore the massif context more than isolated articles would.  The names of a number of peaks -- e.g. Machhapuchre, Hiunchuli, the Nilgiris -- don't evoke the Annapurna context. LADave (talk) 12:05, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

New image
The new image from Google Earth is somewhat dubious. First, it may not qualify as "fair use"; I'm not sure. Second, this is not an actual photo, rather it is a digitally generated view, and that may be misleading. It is an OK rendition of the South Face, but it is far from perfect. It should at the least be marked as not being an actual photo, and perhaps it should be removed. Comments? -- Spireguy 19:50, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's fair use at all. --Makaristos 20:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Technically this image posting breaches Google's copyright and should perhaps be eeplaced with a kml link. But I can't imagine Google objecting. GE images can be esily obtained from the article via the coordinate links. Re the quality if the image, Google have high resolution imagery in the Annapurna area, but unfortunately it has not been accurately placed, there is a c.400m displacement with respect to the underlying DEM data. Also, the image claims to be from the base camp, but according to the text the image was taken from 5.7km, whereas the base camp has an altitude of about 4.0km. Viewfinder 21:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

map
This page should really show Annapurna on a map of either the region or country or whatever is appliciable; for a reference point of where it is.

"The 7000m Mark"
I'm apt to remove this sentence from the article:

''Machapuchare (6993m) is another important peak of the Annapurna Himal, though it just misses the 7000m mark.

From what sincere source do we apply the 7000m mark as a point of greater signifigance for a mountain? Machapuchare is a sacred peak, much more so than Annapurna, and therefore, by its cultural integrity alone, is a more "important" peak. The author obviously has an affiliation with mountains according to their elevation; this, in my opinion, is a characteristic not becoming of a mountaineer. I suggest a rewrite:

''Machapuchare (6993m) is a sacred peak in the region, so sacred in fact that it is forbidden to climb it. --Bentonia School 14:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Support. "(6993m)" already implies that is misses the 7000m mark. The proposed version is more informative. Viewfinder 15:17, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Support. Perhaps better would be:
 * Machapuchare, 6993 m, is a visually striking, sacred peak of the Annapurna Himal, so sacred in fact that climbing it is forbidden.

However, I would suggest that a comment like "The author obviously has an affiliation with mountains according to their elevation; this, in my opinion, is a characteristic not becoming of a mountaineer" is (while pretty gentle) ad hominem and somewhat presumptuous. It might be better to stick to the substance of the edit and not speculate on motivations. One could just as easily assume that the intent was "Machapuchare is more important than one would expect, given its lower elevation than the surrounding peaks." Disclosure: I might have been the author in question; I really don't remember and I haven't checked. -- Spireguy 15:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

 * I agree with the above paragraph. Viewfinder 19:15, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

suitic briefing on Annapurna 1 expedition
I wanted to know the actual mounteneering history about  the mt Annapurna 1  then I went for  yahoo search meanwhile got annapurna encyclopedia Wikipedia. I got here good historical breifing on the annapurna 1 expediton thanking you Jaya N Bhandari tre leader Adventure thirdpole treks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.52.241.131 (talk) 07:27, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

New picture from basecamp
Which face of Annapurna I is pictured in the recently added image? From which basecamp (or is it an Advanced Base Camp (ABC), as the image name suggests)? I can't easily match it to the pics in my sources, so clarification would be appreciated. Thanks! -- Spireguy (talk) 03:08, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't know exactly, but the French route to the top is from the (north-)east side of the mountain. If the given information "sunrise" is true, it'll make sense. To get there you must find a valley (or maybe a col, because the valley is too steep and to narrow) that takes you from Kali Ghandaki right to the Grande Barrière. So you start at the north-west side of Annapurna 1 and walk basically along it's north face until you're east of the mountain. Then you might get to see it from that perspective.--Rupert Pupkin (talk) 07:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It looks like the picture is actually from Annapurna South taken from Annapurna Base Camp (ABC). I think this picture might clear things up. Notice that from that perspective South looks a lot taller than Annapurna I, which might cause somebody to confuse the two. 80.221.38.30 (talk) 18:51, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Correct! Thanks for looking into it. I've changed the caption and moved the pic to a more appropriate location. -- Spireguy (talk) 03:00, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys, I think it actually is Annapurna South not Annapurna I. It was taken from Annarpurna Base Camp (ABC) from the Annapurna Sanctuary. I ammended the caption since it is not Annapurna South Base Camp. For further clarification here is a link to a panorama I also took. Cheers, Arite (talk) 16:41, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Prominence
I found an inconsistency between the prominence value given on this page and that on List of highest mountains. The best reference I found was on peakbagger.com. I updated the value to 2984m as given there. If the value of 2894m can also be referenced (I haven't yet found a good source), please give the source and we can resolve or note the uncertainty. --David Edgar (talk) 16:26, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

It was likely just a typo. I will add a confirming reference for 2984m. -- Spireguy (talk) 20:55, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Annapurna IV's Status
Annapurna IV's Status is not given ? I did not find it in the list of highest mountains also. Is it too un-prominent ? Khalil Sawant (talk) 11:27, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Parent peak
I have boldly changed the parent peak in this article from Everest to Cyo Oyu to match the info on List of highest mountains. I think the latter is correct, but not 100% sure and I couldn't find a confirmation. If Im wrong on this please make the needed corrections on both pages. Thanks. Racerx11 (talk) 15:47, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I wonder how can Mount Annapurna's parent peak can be Cho Oyu? Mount Cho you lies in Everest region close to Everest, where as Mount Annapurna lies in Annapurna region hundreds of kilometre far from Everest region.

I believe Wikipedia needs to do some research before publishing... Ajit Maharjan 1 (talk) 05:46, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Annapurna 1 highest fatality rate
The claim that Kangchenjunga has surpased Annapurna 1 as the highest death toll seems untrue.

Even the source cited by Eberhard Jurgalski has it listed as 4th with Annapurna much higher than the others. Am I missing something, please double check cite and lets give these moutains the proper respect they have earned. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.17.82.97 (talk) 16:28, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

 * Yes, the Jurgalski list has it fourth. However, the claim in the article says The Annapurna peaks are the world's most dangerous mountains to climb although, from figures since 1990, Kangchenjunga surpasses Annapurna's death rate. Keywords here "since 1990". In fact, according to the article eight-thousander, Kanchenjunga has the highest fatality rate from 1990 to ?, though I do not know the source of this fact or data.--Racerx11 (talk) 16:43, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

 * The wording in the article suggested an interpretation precisely as you apparently understood it. I have changed the wording to avoid this kind of confusion.--Racerx11 (talk) 17:15, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

"Mount Annapurna South Face" Picture Gallery
I'm troubled by two things about this gallery.

1) As per local custom, it is customary to NOT refer to a Himalayan peak as "Mount" Anything - so "Mount Annapurna" is not the correct name for the peak. The exception to this is "Mount" Everest, which has become the accepted appellation due to its western origin.

2) In addition, none of the photos in the gallery are of Annapurna I itself - they are all of the South Face of Annapurna South: a subsidiary peak south of Annapurna I (although Annapurna I can be seen in the left distance of the 2nd photo from the left in the gallery). This is misleading.

I propose removing "Mount" from the names, and labeling the gallery as views of Annapurna South.

While we're at it - could we get a picture of Annapurna I in the summary block at the beginning of the article? Also, a view of Annapurna's North Face (by which the peak was first climbed) would be a welcome and informative addition to the article.

I will do some research and see if I can locate the appropriate photos and secure permission to use them.

Big Lew 13:44, 15 July 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lew Sheen (talk • contribs)

 * I've located an excellent source for some illustrative and informative photos - comments on my proposed changes welcome. I'll give this a couple of days, then if there are no objections I will go ahead and make the changes I've proposed above.

 * Big Lew 15:03, 15 July 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lew Sheen (talk • contribs)

 * After carefully reading the article, I believe the brief description of the first successful (French - 1950) expedition could be cleaned up, too. I'd like to clean up the grammar to make it clearer, and add brief references to the difficulty that expedition had even finding the mountain and also mention the fact that the first ascent was from the north side.

 * Big Lew 16:30, 15 July 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lew Sheen (talk • contribs)

 * Existing Text (15 July, 2014)

 * Annapurna I was the first 8,000-metre (26,200 ft) peak to be climbed.[7] Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, of a French expedition led by Maurice Herzog (including Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat, Marcel Ichac, Jean Couzy, Marcel Schatz, Jacques Oudot, Francis de Noyelle), reached the summit on 3 June 1950.

 * Proposed Changes to Existing Text (15 July, 2014)

 * Annapurna I was the first 8,000-metre (26,200 ft) peak to be climbed.[7] A French expedition led by Maurice Herzog (with members Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat, Marcel Ichac, Jean Couzy, Marcel Schatz, Jacques Oudot, and Francis de Noyelle) reconnoitered the area for 6 weeks, exploring various approaches to, and deciding against attempting, both Annapurna via its huge South Face and also the neighboring 8,000 meter peak of Dhaulagiri. The lengthy exploration was needed due to the inaccurate maps available to the expedition.

 * On 3 June 1950, Herzog and Louis Lachenal completed an epic ascent via the North Face of Annapurna. As well as being the first 8,000 meter peak to be successfully climbed, it is the only 8,000er to be successfully summited on the first attempt - a unique accomplishment in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.

 * Big Lew 16:45, 15 July 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lew Sheen (talk • contribs)

October 2014 trekking disaster
I've started a section on the current disaster, using this BBC source. More will need to be added, and I'm sure there is a need for a spin-off article specifically about it. Haven't seen it created yet, though. Ghmyrtle (talk) 11:40, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Misnamed article?
Is this article appropriately called "Annapurna I Main" or should it be called "Annapurna I" as per what seem to be most references? Isambard Kingdom (talk) 23:26, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Most call it Annapurna I only when East and Central aren't relevant to the topic, but when it's discussed in tandem with the other two peaks it's called Annapurna I Main. DN-boards1 (talk) 23:50, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you have a source for this? Is this an official name? Isambard Kingdom (talk) 23:54, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Whoops, I better move this to Annapurna I. DN-boards1 (talk) 00:04, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Annapurna edit wars?
I contributed to this page some years back, treating it as an article on the entire massif with sections for the individual peaks. Returning now, I find some of the massif material still here, with other material split off into articles on individual peaks. Now Annapurna per se has ambitions as an outline for the massif with links to individual peak articles, without much contextual information. Unfortunately it fails to mention that Gangapurna, the Nilgiris and Machapuchare all belong to the massif.

All in all, I find the change counter-productive. Wouldn't it be better to have one consolidated Annapurna article, as before? With the individual peaks addressed in sections of an inclusive article? Readers searching even for variantly-named peaks like Nilgiri could be linked to the appropriate sections. Finding them embedded in the enveloping massif article would encourage further reading to understand the massif context.

I'm also finding it odd to see so many references to an "edit war" in the history, without any discussion of this in the Talk section. Could some of the "warriors" please edify us? LADave (talk) 18:13, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello [[User:LADave|LADave] I couldn't agree more with you! I have been trying to fix the whole Annapurna thing here, let me explain what happen.

A user (DN-Board1) who was blocked forever soon after his actions, Moved and in the process destroyed the original (your) Annapurna Page.. He created pages Annapurna II-IV and made (as you mentioned) extremely small and incomplete articles about them. He Then Moved the entire Annapurna page to "Annapurna I Main" so we no longer had a main article at all!!! That is why there is now a article called "Annapurna Massif" I created this because i was unable to move Annapurna I Main back to Annapurna, as you mentioned we need an article on the Massif itself. So for the past few months I have been trying repeatedly to Re-Consolidate the articles back together the best I can with my noob experience.. However even though I continuously am doing things properly, I continuously get my edits reverted by some hotheads to with there head stuck so far up there that they don't take time to even read the edits.

I have decided to give up after threats of being banned so perhaps you can re-consolidate them. Thanks, Grand Hustle Ent (talk) 01:37, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

 * That's irritating. Short term, a new Annapurna I/Annapurna I Main article would be useful. I really don't mean the Massif when linking here --Spacepine (talk) 13:59, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

title: Talk:Annapurna


text:
Nunawading railway station

Nunawading railway station is a commuter railway station on the Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Nunawading in Victoria, Australia. Nunawading is a ground-level premium station, featuring an island platform with two faces connected by two concourses. It opened on 4 June 1888, with the current station provided in 2010.

Initially opened as Tunstall the station was given the name Nunawading on 1 November 1945.

History
Nunawading station opened almost six years after the railway line from Camberwell was extended to Lilydale. Like the suburb itself, the name of the station is from an Indigenous word, numphawading, meaning ceremonial ground or battlefield. The settlement immediately adjacent to the station was originally named after Tunstall, England, famous for its potteries.

In 1956, boom barriers replaced hand gates at the former Springvale Road level crossing, which was located at the up end of the station.

In 1979, the station was one of three used as trial sites for new bike lockers under the Melbourne Bicycle Strategy, available either for occasional, monthly, or quarterly hire.

On 18 December 2009, the original ground-level station closed as part of a grade separation project to replace the Springvale Road level crossing. A new station, in a cutting west of Springvale Road, opened on 11 January 2010.

Platforms and services
Nunawading is served by Lilydale and Belgrave line trains and consists of an island platform with two faces located on the western side of Springvale Road, with concourses on both sides of the road.

The main concourse, on the western side, comprises a customer service counter, an enclosed waiting room, toilets and a café. The concourse on the eastern side is linked to the platforms via an underpass beneath Springvale Road. Both concourses have stairs and lifts that provide access to the platforms. Both concourses of the station have access to the Ringwood – Box Hill bike path. On the platforms, there are metal benches, vending machines, and passenger information displays. The station car park is on the corner of Laughlin Avenue and Springvale Road.

Platform 1:
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations services to Lilydale
 * all stations services to Belgrave

Transport links
Kinetic Melbourne operates two bus routes via Nunawading station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : to The Pines Shopping Centre
 * SmartBus : Chelsea station – Westfield Airport West

Ventura Bus Lines operates one route to and from Nunawading station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : to Box Hill station

title: Nunawading railway station


text:
Hawthorn railway station, Melbourne

Hawthorn railway station is a commuter railway station on the Alamein, Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn in Victoria, Australia. Hawthorn is a ground level unstaffed station, featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. The station is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register, and was opened on 13 April 1861.

History
Hawthorn station opened when the railway line from Pic-nic was extended across the Yarra River. When it opened, Hawthorn was a terminus, with a single platform, the current Platform 1. In 1882, after the line was extended to Camberwell, an additional platform was constructed. In 1890, an island platform was provided to accommodate the newly opened branch line to Kew, using a canopy from the original Flinders Street station.

In 1963, a third track was provided between Hawthorn and Camberwell, which was extended across the Yarra River to Burnley in 1972. The third track allows bi-directional running on the middle track for express services during peak hour. A signal box at the station was abolished in that same year.

In 1973, bulk briquette handling facilities were abolished at the station and, by 1977, the goods yard was closed altogether, with the siding and connection to the yard abolished in 1978.

By the mid 1980s, the station had not been maintained for many years and was in a dilapidated state. In 1984, the Victorian State Government, with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (The Met), approved a $300,000 face-lift of the station, which included repainting, the re-panelling of the waiting room, the re-cladding of the canopies and landscaping. The refurbishment was completed by May 1986.

Platforms and services
Hawthorn has one island platform and one side platform. It is served by Lilydale, Belgrave and Alamein line trains.

Platform 1:
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations and limited express services to Lilydale
 * all stations and limited express services to Belgrave

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Lilydale; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Belgrave; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Alamein

Transport links
Dysons operates one bus route via Hawthorn station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : to Fairfield

Yarra Trams operates one route via Hawthorn station:
 * Melbourne tram route 75 icon.svg: Vermont South – Central Pier (Docklands)

title: Hawthorn railway station, Melbourne


text:
Glenferrie railway station

Glenferrie railway station is a commuter railway station on the Alamein, Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn in Victoria, Australia. Glenferrie is an elevated premium station, featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. The station is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register, and was opened 3 April 1882.

Initially opened as Glenferrie Road, the station was given its current name of Glenferrie on 1 September 1882, seven months after services began. Much of the stations current traffic serves the nearby Hawthorn campus of the Swinburne University of Technology.

History
Glenferrie station opened on 3 April 1882, when the railway line from Hawthorn was extended to Camberwell. The station is named after nearby Glenferrie Road, itself named after a property which was purchased by solicitor Peter Ferrie in 1840, who later named the property Glen Ferrie.

In 1963, a third line was provided between Hawthorn and Camberwell. These works included a new up platform (Platform 1), with Platform 2 becoming a bi-directional platform.

On 26 February 1996, Glenferrie was upgraded to a premium station.

Platforms and services
Glenferrie has one island platform with two faces, and one side platform. It is serviced by Metro Trains' Lilydale, Belgrave and Alamein line services.

Platform 1:
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * weekend all stations services to Lilydale
 * weekend all stations services to Belgrave
 * weekday peak hour all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street. Off-peak services operate express past this platform.
 * weekday peak hour all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street. Off-peak services operate express past this platform.

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Lilydale; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Belgrave; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Alamein

Transport links
Yarra Trams operates one route via Glenferrie station:
 * Melbourne tram route 16 icon.svg: Melbourne University – Kew

title: Glenferrie railway station


text:
Auburn railway station, Melbourne

Auburn railway station is a commuter railway station on the Alamein, Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn East in Victoria, Australia. Auburn is a ground-level host station, featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. It opened on 3 April 1882, with the current station provided in 1916.

Initially opened as Auburn Road, the station was given its current name of Auburn on 1 September 1882.

History
Auburn station opened on 3 April 1882, when the railway line from Hawthorn was extended to Camberwell. The station was named after two nearby residences which were built in the 1850s. Reverend Henry Liddiard's Auburn Lodge was built south of Burwood Road, between Glenferrie and Auburn Roads, while John Collings' Auburn House was built south of Liddiard's residence in the present day Goodall Street.

The current two-storey station building dates back to 1916, when the line between Hawthorn and Camberwell was regraded. It features brick and stucco facades punctuated by arches, and is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

In 1963, a third line was provided between Hawthorn and Camberwell. These works included a new up platform (Platform 1), with Platform 2 becoming a bi-directional platform.

Platforms and services
Auburn has one island platform with two faces and one side platform. It is serviced by Metro Trains' Lilydale, Belgrave and Alamein line services.

Platform 1:
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations services to Lilydale
 * all stations services to Belgrave

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations services to Lilydale; weekday all stations services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Belgrave; weekday all stations services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Alamein

Transport links
CDC Melbourne operates one bus route via Auburn station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : Kew – Oakleigh station

title: Auburn railway station, Melbourne


text:
Segrià

Segrià is a comarca (county) in Catalonia (Spain). It is located in the western region of Ponent, bordering Aragon. , over two thirds of its population live in the capital city of Lleida, which is also Catalonia's sixth largest municipality, and remains the most populated comarca in the Ponent region and the Lleida province. It takes its name from the river Segre.

title: Segrià


text:
Camberwell railway station, Melbourne

Camberwell railway station is a commuter railway station and the junction point for the Alamein, Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Camberwell in Victoria, Australia. Camberwell is a ground-level premium station, featuring three platforms, an Island platform with two faces and one side platform connected by a ramp accessible overground concourse. The station opened on 3 April 1882.

History
Camberwell station opened on 3 April 1882, when the railway line was extended from Hawthorn. It remained the terminus of the line for a few months in that year, until the railway was extended to Lilydale. When the first section of the Outer Circle line opened in 1891, a new station was built at East Camberwell, to provide an interchange. However, the Outer Circle line quickly failed. By 1898, only the section from East Camberwell to Ashburton remained in operation (later extended to Alamein in 1948), and services for Ashburton began to depart from Camberwell.

In the late 1910s, the line from Hawthorn to Camberwell was regraded, to ease the steep gradient facing down services. Steam locomotives could not pull a fully laden train between the two stations, so peak-hour services had to be split. The locomotive would bring one set of carriages to Camberwell, then return for the other set, causing significant delays. With the regrading, the tracks at Camberwell were sunk into a cutting and the existing station was demolished. In 1919, the current Federation-style station buildings were provided, when the works were completed.

Immediately east of the station, the Alamein line diverges south, with a flyover carrying the southbound line over the Lilydale and Belgrave lines. This flyover was provided in 1959, when the line was duplicated to Riversdale. In 1963, a third line was provided between Hawthorn and Camberwell and, in 1964, the third line was extended to East Camberwell. Also occurring in November of that year, the signal box at Camberwell was the first in Victoria to have push-button signalling installed. In 1972, the centre track was extended to East Camberwell and, in 1974, the platforms were renumbered to their current arrangement.

At around 7:20am on 9 August 1975, a Tait train set rolled away from the station prior to operating an Alamein service. It occurred after the driver and guard left the train and went into the station building. It reached speeds of up to 30kph before it slowed to walking speed near Flinders Street, allowing a driver's supervisor to jump aboard and stop the train. No passengers were onboard at the time.

On 27 April 1996, Camberwell was upgraded to a premium station. In 1997, four stabling sidings were constructed on the site of the former goods yard, to replace sidings that were removed at Jolimont Yard, with the sidings brought into service on 5 January 1998. The stabling sidings had been first proposed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (The Met) in the mid-1980s.

Redevelopment controversy
In 2001, the Victorian State Government launched a new metropolitan planning strategy, Melbourne 2030, which proposed intensification of development around public transport nodes, such as railway stations and tram routes, along with limits on such development in residential neighbourhoods. The precinct around the station was identified as one of a number of "activity centres" earmarked for redevelopment.

In March 2003, VicTrack announced plans to develop the airspace over the site, including the construction of a deck over the station platforms and adjacent stabling yard, with 3–4 levels of car park, and 3–4 storeys of commercial space. The original plans, involving the station's demolition, led to protests from the local community. They received a significant amount of media attention, with actor Geoffrey Rush and comedian Barry Humphries publicly backing the campaign, and heading a protest march up Burke Road from Camberwell Junction to the station. The comedian performed a poem about planners at the rally, and noted that the railway line was sometimes called "The Orient Express". To those supporting development of the station, the actions of the protesters were seen as an example of NIMBYism.

The Boroondara Residents Action Group worked with architects McGauran Giannini Soon to provide alternative ideas for developing the air-space over the station and yard that were more in-keeping with their view of community preferences, including a small public plaza and a new public library, with some small-scale shops.

Although the station is historic, it is not protected by any of the state's heritage listings for any architectural or cultural reasons, and failed to gain that protection when nominated to the Victorian Heritage Register by local residents groups.

In July 2009, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal approved a nine-story development on the site, provided that 14 design modifications were made within 28 days.

In October 2012, VicTrack announced that it had discontinued negotiations with the preferred developer, CSTP Pty Ltd.

Platforms and services
Camberwell has one island platform with two faces and one side platform. It is serviced by Metro Trains' Alamein, Belgrave and Lilydale line services.

Platform 1:
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * weekday all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street; all stations shuttle services to Alamein

Platform 2:
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street; all stations and limited express services to Belgrave
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street; all stations and limited express services to Lilydale
 * terminating services from Alamein

Platform 3:
 * all stations and limited express services to Belgrave; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * all stations and limited express services to Lilydale; weekday all stations and limited express services to Blackburn
 * all stations shuttle services to Alamein

Transport links
CDC Melbourne operates one bus route via Camberwell station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : Box Hill station – Chadstone Shopping Centre

Kinetic Melbourne operates one bus route via Camberwell station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : Doncaster Park and Ride – Camberwell Shopping Centre

Yarra Trams operates one route via Camberwell station:
 * Melbourne tram route 72 icon.svg: Melbourne University – Camberwell

title: Camberwell railway station, Melbourne


text:
East Camberwell railway station

East Camberwell railway station is a commuter railway station on the Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Camberwell in Victoria, Australia. East Camberwell is a ground level unstaffed station featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. It opened on 14 May 1900, with the current station provided in 1986 following a fire.

A substation is located north-east of the station, along with a former works depot.

History
East Camberwell station opened on 14 May 1900, and was originally the interchange station for the Deepdene Dasher service, which operated north along the Outer Circle line, that had originally opened in 1891. Three platforms were provided; two high-level platforms for services on the Lilydale line, and a single low-level platform for services on the Outer Circle line. Steps were provided between all platforms, to enable passengers to change between services. Between 1915 and 1922, a signal box at the Melbourne (up) end was provided, to control the junction towards Riversdale (on today's Alamein line), as the three tracks through to Camberwell had been reduced to two, to allow the regrading works at Camberwell to proceed. On 9 October 1927, the Deepdene Dasher service was withdrawn, and the northern section of the Outer Circle line closed on 6 September 1943, when goods services to East Kew ended. The low level platform was removed after World War II.

In 1964, the platforms on the Lilydale and Belgrave lines were rebuilt, when work to provide a third track between Camberwell and East Camberwell was carried out, with the southern platform converted into an island platform. The track amplification work also removed the bridge that had carried the Lilydale and Belgrave lines over the Outer Circle line. In 1971, the third track was extended to Box Hill.

In 1981, the Edwardian timber station building on Platforms 1 and 2 was replaced with a brick structure, partly due to the perceived fire risk. However, on 12 August 1986, it was destroyed by fire, and was replaced with the current open canopy.

In 1990, actor and comedian Barry Humphries described the station as a "scrawled-on urine-reeking wasteland."

Platforms and services
East Camberwell has an island platform with two faces and a side platform. All three platforms are linked by an underpass.

It is serviced by Metro Trains' Belgrave and Lilydale line services.

Platform 1:
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations services to Belgrave
 * all stations services to Lilydale

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations services to Belgrave; weekday all stations services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Lilydale; weekday all stations services to Blackburn

title: East Camberwell railway station


text:
Canterbury railway station, Melbourne

Canterbury railway station is a commuter railway station on the Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Canterbury in Victoria, Australia. Canterbury is an elevated unstaffed station, featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. It opened on 1 December 1882, with the current station provided in 1968.

History
Canterbury station opened on 1 December 1882, when the railway line from Camberwell was extended to Lilydale. Like the suburb itself, the station was named after Viscount Canterbury, Governor of Victoria between 1866 and 1873.

In the 1930s, a crossover was provided at the southern (up) end of the station, and a signal box provided to work the interlocked level crossing gates.

In early 1966, work on the grade separation of the Canterbury Road level crossing commenced. To facilitate construction, the interlocked gates were replaced with boom barriers, and the signal box was abolished. On 15 September 1968, the current station opened, with all works completed by December of that year. The works involved raising the station six metres, and the use of a temporary track to keep services operating. In December 1971, services on the third track from East Camberwell were extended though the station to Box Hill.

Platforms and services
Canterbury has one island platform with two faces and one side platform. It is serviced by Metro Trains' Belgrave and Lilydale line services.

Platform 1:
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations services to Belgrave
 * all stations services to Lilydale

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations services to Belgrave; weekday all stations services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Lilydale; weekday all stations services to Blackburn

Transport links
Kinetic Melbourne operates one bus route via Canterbury station, under contract to Public Transport Victoria:
 * : Doncaster Park and Ride – Camberwell Shopping Centre

title: Canterbury railway station, Melbourne


text:
Chatham railway station, Melbourne

Chatham railway station is a commuter railway station on the Belgrave and Lilydale lines, serving the eastern Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills in Victoria, Australia. Chatham is a ground-level unstaffed station, featuring three platforms, an island platform with two faces and one side platform. It opened on 1 April 1927, with the current station provided in 1971.

History
Chatham station opened on 1 April 1927, and was named after nearby Chatham Road.

The station originally opened with the current island platform only. In December 1971, Platform 3 was provided when services on the third track from East Camberwell were extended through the station to Box Hill.

Platforms and services
Chatham has one island platform with two faces and one side platform. Platforms 1 and 2 (island platform) has a large red brick building, while the non-aligned Platform 3 features a small weatherboard shelter. All three platforms are linked by an underpass.

It is serviced by Metro Trains' Lilydale and Belgrave line services.

Platform 1:
 * all stations limited express services to Flinders Street
 * all stations and limited express services to Flinders Street

Platform 2:
 * all stations services to Lilydale
 * all stations services to Belgrave

Platform 3:
 * weekday all stations services to Lilydale; weekday all stations services to Blackburn
 * weekday all stations services to Belgrave; weekday all stations services to Blackburn

title: Chatham railway station, Melbourne


text:
Estragon

Estragon (affectionately Gogo; he tells Pozzo his name is Adam) is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. His name is the French word for tarragon.

The impulsive misanthrope
Estragon represents the impulsive, simplistic side of the two main characters, much in contrast to his companion Vladimir's careful intellectualism and verbosity. He cares little for appearances, and is mostly concerned with eating and sleeping (much to Vladimir's chagrin). Due to his pessimistic outlook on life, he has abandoned all hope of any alleviation from their suffering, and regards "Godot" suspiciously.

This is perhaps because Estragon has far more to worry about. Of the two, Estragon suffers the most physically. He is kicked by Lucky, takes numerous pratfalls, and is beaten by a gang of thugs every night. He also has great difficulty with his boots. In the first act, they do not fit and cause him pain. At the end of the act, he leaves them on the side of the road in disgust. In the second act, he finds them in the same place, now mysteriously fitting him. This boot focus (in terms of the character being foot centred) may be interpreted as being representative of his lower status (see Vladimir's hat) and his "earthy" nature (e.g. his love of carrots, radishes, etc.).

Estragon has a misanthropic view of humanity: he considers people to be "ignorant apes" and seems to want them to leave him alone. However, he is very attached to Vladimir (despite occasionally bickering with him): he needs protection, and Vladimir provides it. Estragon is often seen as the child to Vladimir's adult, and as such looks for parental security in him.

The poet
Estragon should not, however, be written off as merely a childish simpleton. He easily matches Vladimir in verbal melee (he delivers the ultimate insult in calling Vladimir a "Critic!"). He also shows an artistic side, and even claims to have once been a poet. His brief, but evocative, monologue about the "maps of the Holy Land" is very poetic in nature. He can even quote Shelley (with a slight alteration):

Excerpt from Shelley's poem:

"Art thou pale for weariness/Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth..."

Estragon's play on it:

"Pale for weariness...Of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us."

Appearance
Estragon is given perhaps the most minimal description in the play. He is only described as wearing "rags", walking with a limp (that eventually wears off) and being lighter than Vladimir. Because of his rather gluttonous nature, however, he is often played as being short and slightly fat (in comparison to the often tall and lanky Vladimir). His clothes are usually a bit dirtier than Vladimir's as well, and seem to be in far worse condition. This interpretation is best attributed to his total lack of restraint and inhibitions (diving for food, sleeping in ditches, etc.).

Many famous actors have taken on the role (especially those of the aforementioned body type), notably Bert Lahr, Sir Ian McKellen and Robin Williams (with Steve Martin as Vladimir). Beckett is even said to have wanted Marlon Brando in one production (with Buster Keaton as Vladimir).

Relatives
In Tom Stoppard's Godot pastiche, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the character Rosencrantz closely resembles Estragon.

title: Estragon