Talk:Water stop

A fact from Water stop appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 October 2007. The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that railroad water stops contributed to the development of bass fishing in the 19th century United States? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Did you know archive/2007/October.

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Undiclosed for now. Laudak 23:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

OK. Now I talk: it was my experiment, carried out for the following reasons. During September I wrote 22 new articles of varying size and importance. With growing amusement I observed that nearly all of them of decent size having been posted at the "did you know" page. With no less amusement I noticed that while some people have found them worth noticing, at the same time all 22 of them were extremely scarcely edited by others beyond fixing my typos, grammos and style.

Therefore without thinking much why would I want to do this, I deliberately started looking for a topic not covered in wikipedia but quite commonly known. After several attempts I hit the one: "water stop", I knew from marathons and other kinds of hitting the road. To my surprise, a quick google search revealed that there are several meanings of the term, so I started with Water stop (disambiguation). It also turned out that most of "encyclopedable" information is for "waterstop" and for railroad "water stops", so I proceeded with the later one with the sole purpose to see whether someone will notice it, and I will bring my DYK-trophy hall to a nice, round count of half-dozen.

It looks like God of Wikipedia wanted to punish me for my wikivanity by giving me some stress:

• The article was noticed indeed, but it had happened on only the 4th day of the 5-day DYK window
• Next thing I see it moving into the "Expired noms" section
• But wait! user:Allen3 squeezes it into an October 11th release (at the last moment before posting, I guess)
• And a nice touch of cruel fate: I am not credited with the creation of the article!
• Driven by an ugly suspicion rooted in the Murphy's Law, I checked "what links to 'Wasserhaltung", and lo!, I see that User:Mikkalai is credited with "the article water stop, which you created or substantially expanded". Substantially expanded, my ass" I was, like, ROTFLMAO, but then recalled that he actually nominated it. OK then. user:Allen3 screwed up a little bit in a hurry with this rather boring job of DYK maintenance, no big deal; after all, he did squeeze the article into the DYK in the aftertime.
• My best guess is that wikiGod favors the Decimal system and hints me to be happy with a nice round count of 5 DYK-trophies, rather than half-dozen. There is such thing as decimal inch, so I am wondering whether there is such thing as decimal dozen (it was a red link at the moment of writing this text) ... Absolutely!!!! And this will be my next article!

Laudak 17:23, 11 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

The article talks about how water was accumulated and pumped, but never says where it came from, except in the cases that it came from streams that crossed the tracks. What about all the other cases? Wells? Bryan Henderson (talk) 03:14, 17 January 2010 (UTC)Reply