Talk:Hurricane Rita makes landfall

Correction request

{{editprotected}}

I have noticed that many internet news sources have incorrectly located the landfall of Hurricane Rita. It is important that we keep accurate information on weather phenomena, such as hurricanes, for the purpose of statistical research in our effort to understand and predict weather phenomena. Hurricane Rita made landfall approximately 10 miles EAST of the Texas / Louisiana border. --Atsrchitect (talk) 00:02, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Atsrchitect: We need documentary proof of this; then we'd issue a {{correction}}. We certainly want to issue a correction whenever one is appropriate. --Pi zero (talk) 00:10, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm new here and I do not know the proper way to go about this. Most of my sources for the actual location of the landfall of Hurricane Rita are satellite positioning coordinates overlayed on mapping and other non referable sources. The best official reference that I can find is the hurricane rita report by the National Hurricane Center that is actually the first reference on the "hurricane rita" wikipedia page. Here is a link to the PDF : http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL182005_Rita.pdf . The first reference to the location of landfall is in the first paragraph on line 4. It mentions a general location as being the LA TX border. Further on in the report (page 3 line 3) it pinpoints the location of landfall as being in extreme Southwestern Louisiana between Sabine Pass, TX and Johnson Bayou LA. This is in contrast with what is stated on Wikinews and the first paragraph of Wikipedia (among other internet sources) and in agreement with the radar and satellite imagery. So, to clarify, on wikinews it states that Hurricane Rita made landfall WEST of the Louisiana - Texas border when it actually made landfall in Louisiana, which would be East of the border. This may seem petty but it is important as the exact track of a hurricane makes a huge difference. For instance, because the hurricane tracked just east of South Eastern Texas, they received minimal surge because the winds where blowing towards the Gulf of Mexico. Thank you for your reply and I hope we can get this correct as it affected a lot of people's lives. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Atsrchitect (talk • contribs) 02:51, 10 July 2014‎

It doesn't seem petty to me. Wikinewsies are generally very concerned with facts.

Someone here will need to review the data you've provided with great care, to be quite sure of it, and then if all checks out —I'd expect the investigation to be quite thorough— we'll place a {{correction}} notice at the top of the article. It could be me who reviews the data, but if so, it won't be now, since in my timezone it's time for bed; so, to make sure we don't lose track of this, I've tagged it with {{editprotected}}.

Each of our articles is a snapshot in time, of what things looked like at the time of publication, so we don't modify an archived article to say what we now believe it should have said — we use the {{correction}} template to notify the article's readers of the correction. Although we hate to make a mistake, we feel strongly that a news site should own up to mistakes when they happen, something we've observed online mainstream news sites usually don't do. --Pi zero (talk) 03:13, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good, thank you for your help.

Done — I've reviewed the data, and you appear to be correct. This looks like a propagation error. One person made a mistake, probably at Reuters or AP, and everyone assumed they'd done their homework and proceeded to copy the mistake from them:P. — Gopher65_talk 23:59, 8 August 2014 (UTC)