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This is an archive of past discussions about Cardinal direction. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
I am unable to understand exactly what this means, and how it applies to Mao. Can someone simplify it and explain it better? Kingturtle 03:28 May 14, 200
take it out, cause its irrelevant and somebody had vandalised it and i think they'll do it again.
I was surprised to see heaven and land listed here. Should that be up and down, or am I undereducated on this point?--Keeves 11:11, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
So how many directions are used in the newage religions? Four or seven? I know that the answer is "as many as they want," but this article makes two definite and contradictory statements. ➥the Epopt 23:23, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Almost always four in my experience. Seven is seen only in certain rituals. "New Age" is extremely ambiguous, and can refer to modern Wiccanism as well as other forms of esoterism originating around the turn of the certury (and earlier). Can someone clarify?
Someone keeps editing this page, adding "up" and "down" as cardinal directions, which they are not. That fact is given away by another portion of one of the user's edits: "Up and down aren't on a compass." Hmm, I wonder if that has any significance? --Tkynerd 18:54, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Up and Down are so cardinal directions and you know it. That's Why I keep editing that page Berchin.
If there was only 4 cardinal directions then it would be the 2D world but since this is the 3D world there's 6.
I know in geography there's 4 but in the real world there's 6 including up and down. Berchin
The information in the New Age section is highly questionable. Whoever wrote it did not know, for instance that Earth vs. Air and Fire vs. Water are opposites, and should be assigned to opposite directions in any consistent system (see Classical element). Also, there is the element "Earth" for North, and the element "Ground" for Down; what's the **** difference? While "Sky" might possibly be Aether, there is no tradition whatsoever for "Ground" as an element distinct from "Earth". In a similar vein, it is highly dubious that any serious symbolism should differentiate between "light blue" and "deep blue with a hint of green". Symbolic colors are simple — see Color symbolism.
In short, I believe that the entire data in the New Age section is either fancifully made up or, at best, reflects a single obscure source rather than mainstream New Age (if there is such a thing). I have accordingly added a factual accuracy flag. Freederick 13:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
The pages for the ordinal directions -- northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast -- are all disambiguation pages. Since dab pages should not be linked directly, they need to be piped to point to an appropriate dab target. For these pages, the appropriate dab target is Ordinal direction, which redirects here. And since a page should not be wikilinked to itself, the ordinal directions should not be wikilinked on this page. Bringing this up to explain why I've just delinked all of them. --Tkynerd 00:45, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Sorry about that! Didn't realize it was considered bad form to link into a dab page. I'll be more careful from now on. I hate to say so, but I may have made that boo-boo elsewhere... --Badly Bradley 09:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
After carefully reviewing my watch list, I found a couple reverts where I did indeed make the same boo-boo on other pages. While I'm an experienced science and technology writer/editor (retired), this Wiki stuff is new to me. Fortunately, I learn fast. Already I figured out, for instance, to perform and preview 100% of all my planned edits before doing any saves. The first couple of days, without realizing it, I was clogging the edit log.
I also learned to copy and paste my proposed edits out to a text editor every 10 minutes to save locally on my HDD: twice now my browser crashed! The first time it crashed I lost over 4 hour's worth of work; the redo took about an hour because I knew where I was going the second time around. The second crash with 3 hours of work in the bag wiped 5 minutes worth of unsaved edits, but took less than 2 minutes to restore, including the time to relaunch the browser, reload the saved text, and repeat those last edits.
I think I might have a 2-part solution to the dilemma of wikilinking the 4 ordinal points. First, modify the relevant paragraph so it looks like this:
An ordinal, intercardinal or intermediate direction is one of the 4 compass directions located halfway between the cardinal directions.
Second, link the 4 bolded key words so that when clicked the proper compass rose illustration appears. Trouble is, I don't know how to do that yet. When I tried just piping the links in the ordinary manner, all 4 illustrations appeared instantly and at full size. (Not good.)
Incidentally, the only reason I was lured into the dab trap in the first place was the wish to link those excellent illustrations to the key words.
With amusement I note that those 4 disambiguation pages are cross-linked to each other...
Badly Bradley 14:29, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
Oops! No wonder you're puzzled. MY BAD! I forgot to specify that I wanted to link to the four icons with unique red highlighting on the relevant points, as follows:
Ideally, clicking the link would just pop-up the icon in a new small window, but I have no clue how to do that. OTOH, what I just did looks pretty cool as is. Maybe user-clickable links are not the best way to do what I wanted...
Perhaps, now you can begin to get a feel for what I originally imagined would be an improvement.
Maybe you could even become excited about it... I hope... Even it it never gets implemented, I am learning valuable stuff about Wikipedia!
How about this tweak to the paragraph:
An ordinal, or intercardinal, direction is one of the 4 intermediate compass directions located halfway between the cardinal directions.
Do you think anyone will have a problem if I go ahead and change the paragraph in the article? (I did recently figure out how to change the displayed size of the icon on the fly, as well as it position, as you can see, but I'm NOT going to do the links, since I still don't know how to do it really well...)
Badly Bradley 03:04, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
After doing some more research on color symbolism in various cultures (thanks to the anonymous editor 67.102.77.105 for providing a crucial reference) I've expanded the color table and split it into separate parts for Asia and America. Most of the entries I am reasonable sure of; I tried to track down two separate references whenever feasible. As far as the Apaches are concerned, however, the only certain fact is that they did not use the color red for cardinal directions. There are, however, a multitude of Apache subgroups, and each of them seems to use a different arrangement. To make things worse, the sources are in disagreement with each other. I tracked down three separate references: , , and , and they each say something different, and incompatible with the others. I would appreciate some help in untangling the Apache snarl—the currently displayed data for them is tentative at best. Freederick 01:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Every professionally published reference work I've checked (both collegiate dictionaries and encyclopedias) shows "earth" is a noun, but NOT a proper noun. Therefore, it should only be capitalized when it leads a sentence. I am not going to revert the recent edits which capitalized every instance of "earth" in the article, for fear it will escalate into a revert war.
I would like to know what others think.
BTW, I was the one who lower-cased them a while back, AFTER I researched which was the correct case.
Badly Bradley 03:51, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Thank You, Freederick! That pretty well nails it to the wall. Who am I to argue? Besides, as stated initially, I wasn't about to change it unless there was consensus. It's quite clear now where the consensus resides. (Note to self: Read Wiki's Manual of Style)
Badly Bradley 17:55, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure this is properly placed, plus stating Finnish words for ordinal directions without those for cardinal (or did I miss them?), leaves a lot to be desired. It also opens the door to creating a potentially huge catalog for language translation of these 8 words. Do we really want to go there?
We got into the other cross cultural thing solely because some people use colors instead or words, and/or words having nothing to do with the compass rose (e.g. named winds). All of that seemed reasonable and fits nicely.
I am *not* going to delete it. Perhaps someone else would like to improve it, or find a better home for the information.
Badly Bradley 14:46, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you both! This beatifully illustrates why I rarely use my revert powers… What we have now is *much* better.
Having said that, I reverted one of Tkynerd tweaks to one of my previous tweaks, believing it was an accident, not intended, since it met the rules. Tkynerd, if I missed something here, please enlighten all of us. Thanks again.
Badly Bradley 14:16, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Hmm. I must admit, I forgot to look for preceding instances of "language" already being wikilinked. I know better. :-P It has one redeeming merit or I would revert it myself right now: unlike all the other links which point to specific languages, this one points to the general article about all human languages.
Badly Bradley 03:15, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe it is worth of mentioning of the Finno Ugrian cardinal directions. The system is old, much older than any of the "western equivalents". It has been mentioned that it shows strong ancient Persian influence which was based to six cardinal directions and used commonly, for example, in Baktria in Central Asia. The Finno Ugrian system is based to the rotation of the sun, and later extended to eight cardinal directions all shown by the names which have also a meaning in the daily life.
Aamun (morning) Koi / Kajo (first mark of light in eastern sky) = Koillinen (North East)
Itä (the direction from where the sun appears to the sky) = Itäinen (East)
Kaakko (the direction where the sun starts to warm) = Kaakkoinen (South East)
Etelä (the highest point where the sun is located in the sky) = Eteläinen (South)
Louna (the point where the sun starts to fall down from sky) = Lounainen (South West)
Länsi (the direction of the sun where it goes down) = Läntinen (West)
Luode (last mark of the light in the sky) = Luoteinen (North West)
Pohja / Pohjo (bottom, darkness, no mark of the sun) = Pohjoinen (North)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.114.192.35 (talk) 02:44, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
It's in Finnish Wikipedia: http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmansuunta Here is a graphic: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ilmansuunnat.gif
The Kalmyks and Tibet lines in the Asian color correspondences chart obscure the similarities of the other three. I'm going to reorder them as follows: China first (I'm pretty sure that these started in China and spread outward), followed by the similar two in alphabetical order, followed by the other two in alphabetical order. If you feel like undoing this change, please tell me why in this talk page. DenisMoskowitz 02:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
After reading Wikipedia:Good articles and perusing articles that have achieved the status, I conclude that our own "Cardinal direction" is nearly there. The only obvious deficiency, IMHO, is the lack of references for some of the key points, including some of the essential core points. Meanwhile, some of the subtopics are thoroughly referenced already.
Be it known, I am not looking to place blame. In fact I am notorious for NOT providing references with my contributions. In the near future I will endeavor to reference the stuff I added. As most of it originated from books I borrowed decades ago from public libraries, it shouldn't be hard to do.
Please comment! In particular:
Until the references are fixed (at the very least) it would be inappropriate & premature to nominate "Cardinal direction" for the independent evaluation required as a condition of being awarded the "Good Article" status.
Badly Bradley (talk) 20:06, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
This begins with 'in geography', but doesn't seem to fall into any geography category. Richard001 (talk) 10:45, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
Badly Bradley (talk) 19:35, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
Looks like we're done here. In case you're not already aware, this article has been subjected to very subtle (& some flagrant) vandalism in the past. I try to check in every so often and reread the parts I mentioned earlier. Every now & then I find that numbers have been fiddled with, & words that affect meaning have been usurped - the sort of things the bots can't see, and a person lacking expertise would never figure out. (One numeric transposition persisted for more than a month; I looked at it at least 3 times before it dawned on me.) If you'd care to look in occasionally, all of us who care about this article would really appreciate the help. Other than the citations, "Cardinal direction" is pretty much a done deal. Badly Bradley (talk) 05:27, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
The article says: "Around noon, it is in the south in the northern hemisphere, or in the north in the southern hemisphere." Note this is not true for all locations. In the tropics (some 40% of the earth's surface, and inhabited by a large portion of the population) the noon sun may be north or south in either hemisphere.159.153.156.60 (talk) 10:10, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
/"TE^KOyj0[rkhgbpoadfkh[padrhopkrwae][f-erlpf]- —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.60.252.165 (talk) 20:41, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
In the "Watch face" section, a sentence reads: "provides a more reliable method for finding direction at night." Clearly the beginning of this sentence was lost, and maybe more text before that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.170.224.13 (talk) 18:00, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
The opening paragraph implies that north on an astronomical body is defined by rotation, however the IAU defines the north pole as the one that lies above the invariable plane of the solar system . The two definitions lead to opposite definitions of north for objects which have retrograde rotation (e.g. Venus and Uranus). As far as I am aware the IAU definition is in fact the most commonly used in astronomy (e.g. most published Venus cartography, statements that on Venus the Sun rises in the west and suchlike). I have therefore removed the following sentences from the lede. Icalanise (talk) 20:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
They are mostly used for geographic orientation on Earth but may be calculated anywhere on a rotating astronomical body. North and south point toward the geographical poles defined by the axis of rotation, such that the body appears to rotate counter-clockwise when viewed from above the north pole.
The discworld novels use Discworld_geography#Geography So their cardinal directions are Turnwise(wiktionary:Doisal), Widdershins, Rimward and Hubward, which makes sense if you use polar coordinates rather than cartesian coordinates for your map. EdwardLane (talk) 09:37, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
I came here to find out about use of cardinal points to describe parts of a galaxy etc (although I suspect Western Spiral Arm is a Douglas Adams invention). Would anyone like to create a new section on this? Nankai (talk) 03:31, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
OK a bunch of interesting stuff got added about walpiri people, standing stones, aboriginals and so forth, I spotted the edit and there were a few errors in the format of the references so when I tried tracking them down some didn't exist. Also the word aboriginal is often considered as a racist perjorative so best avoided. And final the link to that is/was a link to a disambiguation page. I tidied this up yesterday and also removed the stuff about standing stones which wasn't directly about cardinal directions. I was going to suggest that content got added to the article on the relevant standing stones articles - and it seemed sensible to tidy it up as the references were either broken or the content of the phrase wasn't related to an article on what a cardinal direction is. I got a message from Ray complaining that my edit history descriptions were not good enough - and that's fair enough, and that he was going to add the content back in - which I think just leaves a less clear article on cardinal directions - and instead starts the article sprawling off into some article about the alignment of standing stones (which should probably be a sub section of the standing stones article). I'm going to add a message on Ray's talk page - and I hope he'll be happy to move that content out of this article. Apologies for any perceived insult, the one article linked to had a good reference (once I eventually grabbed and fixed the link) to a paper which did mention 5 and 6 cardinal directions in some indigenous australian languages. EdwardLane (talk) 07:59, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for your response. Apologies for the garbled references which are now all fixed. I've also removed the broken link. Your concern about "Aboriginal Australian" being racist is misplaced - see Aboriginal Australians. In essence, the word Aborigine as a noun is racist, but the term Aboriginal Australian is not. Also, while I agree it is good to be wary of 'New Age' overtones, the material cited here is very far removed from that, and is all published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. There is no 'New Age' or hippy connotation at all - just a description of the importance of cardinal directions to traditional Aboriginal Australians. My feeling for why it's relevant here is because I think it illustrates the fact that Aboriginal Australians *did* have concepts of cardinal directions similar to western ideas, and actually were interested in measuring them to a few degrees (for unknown reasons). If it is felt that this isn't really relevant to an article on cardinal directions, then I think for consistency the other cultural sections on "Far East" and "Americas" ought to be removed too. In particular, the Far East section goes into much more detail than the Australian section. RayNorris (talk) 17:10, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Added "from north: after "the clockwise direction of rotation". wam, 7/29/2013 Amccray (talk) 11:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
While "points of the compass" is a valid search term, the content here would be better included under the more correct name "cardinal direction" A merge of these articles is appropriate. RadioFan (talk) 16:27, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Knowing the hour, you'll know if the Sun is East or West, then North and South will be 90 degree from it. Though perhaps if you're not too close but still not far enough, wouldn't the trick still work if you held the watch tilted while comparing it to the Sun, and then lay it flat after you measure the angle to get the direction? --TiagoTiago (talk) 15:16, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
The phrase ordinal directions, as referring to the intercardinal directions, seems to be something of a neologism. A Google NGram search indicates that intercardinal directions is used more often than ordinal directions. Spot checks of a few books (there aren't that many) indicates that "ordinal directions" is itself ambiguous, often being used to refer to the cardinal directions.
I suggest we replace the phrase ordinal directions with the less-ambiguous intercardinal directions. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 14:25, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
We're obviously missing quite a few. I don't know how to add them, but Spanish has Punto cardinal and other wikis probably have their own versions. Alázhlis (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:25, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Cardinal directionstion: Singular is preferred over plural.—jiy (talk) 11:36, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Done. Andrewa 10:18, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
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