A fact from Illahe, Oregon appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 June 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that due to rapids on the Rogue River, mules had to be used to transport mail to the post office at Illahe, Oregon?
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I don't know what the source says, but Illahe really just means "land, ground, or earth". This might be one of the many cases where settlers attribute much more poetic meanings to ordinary Native words. Clarification may be needed. Katr67 (talk) 23:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The source says "beautiful land", but I think you are right in thinking it's a pretty interpretation rather than an accurate translation. When I get a minute, I'll look at some of my other sources and do some tweaking. Finetooth (talk) 23:42, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, you are right in saying that numbers from one to nine are normally spelled out as words. However, several exceptions to this guideline are listed at WP:MOSNUM#Numbers as figures or words. One exception is "Comparable quantities should be all spelled out or all figures: we may write either 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, not five cats and 32 dogs." Thus 8 miles (13 km) is correct. Finetooth (talk) 23:56, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Illahe derivation is fixed, citing the trusty McArthur. Thanks for catching this. Also, thanks for fixing the pipe to the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest. Here we have another exception to a general rule, except this time I forgot about the exception. I was applying the general rule about spaced en dashes, but the rule says "Spacing: All disjunctive en dashes are unspaced, except when there is a space within either one or both of the items". I made this same mistake in the Rogue River article and some of the cousin articles as well. I will backtrack and fix them. Finetooth (talk) 00:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Glad I could help. I didn't have my McArthur handy. Did you know there's a whole book on Illahe, BTW? Thanks for the info on the conversion template--that makes a lot sense. Now the silly things won't bug me near as much (I hate the fact that the template doesn't work with spelled-out numerals). I forgot to double check the Nat. Forest link after I tweaked it, so I'm glad I was right. I think Ipoellet (talk·contribs) fixed all the en dashes in all the Oregon articles to be correct, so I don't think any of them need to be piped. That en dash rule baffles me a bit too... Cheers! Katr67 (talk) 03:08, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I have a copy of the Illahe book, but its author uses "Illahe" in a broad sense to mean the whole Rogue River Canyon, and only about 20 pages are devoted to Illahe in the more narrow sense. Those 20 pages focus mainly on individuals and personal stories, and I found it hard to distill any general claims from them that I could use in this article. Maybe we should add the book, though, as "Further reading"? Finetooth (talk) 05:01, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Good to know about the scope of the book. I saw it at the library and thought "Wow, there must be more to that lil' ol' place than I realized." Adding it to a "Further reading" section is an excellent idea. So is the Rogue River Canyon notable enough on its own to merit a separate article? Or maybe it should be an article on the Upper Rogue River? (Neither of those titles indicate a separate GNIS designation...) Katr67 (talk) 17:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The canyon might merit its own article; I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure the upper Rogue doesn't, but it might. How's that for evasion? I'll add the Further reading section. Finetooth (talk) 18:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
