Talk:San Francisco earthquake of 1906

I wrote this article (except 5 words) in March 2010 on Wikinfo based on the book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester. --Charles Marean, Jr 23:34, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

It does not mention how strong this quake was on the Richter scale and seems a bit imprecise about the epicenter. "In the Pacfic Ocean" is somewhat vague. How far from SF, and in what direction? Sandy Harris 00:48, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I wonder why. I think it was on the cover of the book and they at first thought the center was to the north of the city and then they thought it was to the south. I thought I included that. I gave the book away months ago. I just looked up what they think now online: 8.3 and two miles west. I’ll add that.--Charles Marean, Jr 08:48, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

When I added the info, after I clicked save, the word "from" was somehow in the text. I believe it is possible someone added that via the internet, or by somehow hiding an edit from the edit history. Therefore, that sort of thing could explain why the quake's magnitude was missing from the article. It was not necessarily by who Wikipedia would call an administrator, since maybe the edit could have been changed somewhere along the internet during transmission. I doubt very much I did the "from" typo, and I believe I did include the quakes magnitude in the article. I think maybe I should mention this security problem this suggests.--Charles Marean, Jr 14:57, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

It appears likely that you could have copied it directly from the source since they used the word "from." I think we are okay. D. Matt Innis 17:03, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Content of the article

It seems to me that much of the content of this article belongs elsewhere. For example, material on the history of the seismograph, on the Spanish colonization of San Francisco, on plate tectonics in general, would seem to belong in those respective articles, not here.

There are (or will be) several different articles about important individual earthquakes (Lisbon, Sichuan, N.E. Japan, etc.). If each of them contains a full history of the development of the seismograph, there will be large amounts of duplicated material, none of it directly relevant to the article at hand; it would seem more in keeping with the purpose of an encyclopedia to have the San Francisco Earthquake article concentrate on the specifics of that quake, and put the more general subject matter in more appropriate locations. This article, for instance, should probably mention which tectonic plates and faults were involved and what directions the plates moved, but the fuller details of plate tectonics and of the San Andreas fault could be located in their respective articles instead and linked to from here and from this article's Related Articles subpage.

As it stands, this article is really a chapter-by-chapter précis of Winchester's wide-ranging book, from which a concise article about the 1906 San Francisco disaster is trying to fight its way out :-) Bruce M. Tindall 15:29, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

"Cultural effects" section

Just to explain a bit about my changes to the "Cultural effects" section: I removed the description of Pentecostalists as "Negro Methodists" because not all adherents to that movement at the time were black, and although there are some historical connections and affinities between Pentecostalism and Methodism, not all Pentecostalists were (or had been) Methodists. We have an existing article explaining Pentecostalism in more detail, so I substituted a link to it. Winchester, the source for this article, does not equate Pentecostalists with a single race or other single other Christian denomination.

Also, although I would bet that the majority of the "Bohemian" artists probably were Caucasians, Winchester nowhere refers to their race, so I removed that characterization. And the artists who left town in 1906 were not necessarily the same people who had founded the Bohemian Club (which by 1906 had apparently become more of a rich men's club than an artists' society) thirty years earlier. Bruce M. Tindall 18:00, 10 April 2011 (UTC)