Talk:Pavement light

A fact from Pavement light appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 December 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the purple "jewels" (pictured) in old sidewalks are pavement lights, which bend daylight into the basement below?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2017/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Pavement light.

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Text and/or other creative content from Pavement light was copied or moved into Vaulted sidewalk. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Salem, Oregon

I know from personal experience that these are in Salem, Oregon-- they're wonderfully purple, just like some of the pictures in this article. The only reference I can find to them so far is the mention of "sections of small purple glass squares (which were installed to let in light)" in this article. Anyone able to find a better source regarding their existence in Salem, OR? Outoftheazul (talk) 03:03, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Got a ref: [1]. Clearly shows vault lights. Other refs:

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/columnists/capi-lynn/2015/01/31/john-ritter-salem-history/22627533/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin= also mentions them

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2010/10/historians_explore_tunnels_beneath_salem.html

Less helpfully: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/holdingcourt/2017/06/10/salems-underground-history-display/386118001/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin= http://www.linfield.edu/linfield-news/salem%e2%80%99s-real-haunted-houses-are-buried-underground-says-linfield-historian/

And bizzarely, there is a above-ground tunnels tour! http://salemtunneltour.com/Tours.html/

I'll add this to the article, unless you beat me to it. Thank you, Outoftheazul. HLHJ (talk) 05:00, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[2] is just a porn portal. --Macrakis (talk) 05:44, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Must be your ISP; "Salem Tunnel Tours" doesn't seem a likely honey trap for a porn site. However, it _is_ a dead domain. My ISP shows a generic homepage with links that go nowhere. Laodah 20:21, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Michigan State Capitol

Does anyone have anything on this floor from below? I have no sources on anything below it. HLHJ (talk) 05:01, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting!

What an interesting article. I'm sure I've walked on these things, but never gave them much thought. Here someone went to the trouble to create an article on them. This is an example of why I look at Wikipedia every day. Eric Cable ! Talk 20:40, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Eric Cable . I'm glad you liked it. HLHJ (talk) 05:51, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to image donors

First, thanks to Ian Macky, who either took or scanned and put online most of the images in the article, including, I think, all the PD ones.

I'd like to thank Prismlights for agreeing to donate this image which she took for her blog. Without it we would not have a good image of what vault lights look like to walk over.
Thanks to User:GLOBALGRID for donating this and many more images of a non-glass pavement light when I asked for one.
Thanks to User:B137 for uploading this image and its flash twin in response to reading the article.
(edit) Thanks to Brandon Spencer-Hartle for donating this striking image.

(edit) Thanks to Brandon Spencer-Hartle for donating this striking image.

Thanks to the above-named and others we have an excellent set of pictures, and more at Commons:Category:Vault lights. If anyone can think of any other picture that would improve the article, please post here. HLHJ (talk) 05:51, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know

On the DYK day, this article got about 17 500 hits, which is a lot for a DYK. One of the articles it links to suddenly got thousands of hits. Others, like Old Pennsylvania Station, Daylighting, and Deck prisms, also got spikes. Thanks to everyone who worked on this, including the DYK reviewers. Although I now totally wish I'd put abandoned tunnel networks in the hook somehow :) . HLHJ (talk) 04:49, 10 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Spam from thepavementlightcompany.com

thepavementlightcompany.com: Linksearch en (insource) - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • Spamcheck • MER-C X-wiki • gs • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced - RSN • COIBot-Link, Local, & XWiki Reports - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.com

Initially posted to User talk:XLinkBot/RevertList#thepavementlightcompany.com, moved on advice to MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#thepavementlightcompany.com; moved on advice to Meta:Talk:Spam blacklist#thepavementlightcompany.com; posted here for the record.

Links within this domain are being spammed to Pavement light (and have been spammed to the simple-en version, and some other en-wiki pages) by a narrowish range of IPs, I assume just one person. The person says that they are a manufacturer of pavement lights, and that they are linking to their own website. They claim that they wrote most of the article text[3] (they didn't; I and another registered editor did, although they did copy a small section of text from their website, which in turn looks as if it may have been copied from another website). They call other editors "competitors"[4] and they have removed links to useful information on the sites of competing firms.[5]. While they have been particularly bad in the past six months (possibly because an inexperienced editor initially tried to revert them manually, accidentally overlooking and leaving some of their spam in the article), this problem started two years ago,[6] at which time I warned them.[7] They then apparently created an account and repeated the edits, adding the link to several other articles as well;[8] and I warned the account,[9] and they abandoned the account without responding.[10] Since then, they seem to have returned to IP editing, and two other people have warned them for COI[11] and promotional editing.[12] No response, no effect.[13] COIBot suggests that they also created another account, and abandoned it after its userpage, which contained the link, was deleted as spam. This may be partly my own fault, as I did initially add one link to this URL, although I've now removed it in favour of the site it looks like it copied from; should have checked more carefully earlier... HLHJ (talk) 20:16, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Beetstra:

Added to Spam blacklist. Enough warned, no reason to believe that they will stay within this set of wikis. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} (en: U, T) 03:53, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. HLHJ (talk) 20:12, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

thepavementlighting.com: Linksearch en (insource) - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • Spamcheck • MER-C X-wiki • gs • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced - RSN • COIBot-Link, Local, & XWiki Reports - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.com
thepavementlightcompany.co.uk: Linksearch en (insource) - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • Spamcheck • MER-C X-wiki • gs • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced - RSN • COIBot-Link, Local, & XWiki Reports - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.com

The spammer of thepavementlightcompany.com has reacted to their blacklisting by registering some more domains, now also blocked. HLHJ (talk) 22:14, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Smoke venting.

Got here from a Reddit article on 'what is this thing' asking about some of these in London, and a volunteer firefighter said that they were also used to vent smoke from a burning basement to allow firefighters access to it. The original reply from user s1gg0 is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/ios3bt/what_are_these_found_on_a_sidewalk_theyre_made_of/g4gmlit/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

and describes how the three teams involved would enter a basement, which could be over 1000 degrees where their protective equipment only handles up to 450 before it starts breaking down. (Not sure of the etiquette of snaffling text that way, so I didn't want to add it directly, but this should be mentioned as an alternate use for the lights. --StarChaser Tyger (talk) 19:20, 8 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, StarChaser Tyger, I've often wondered what caused the big spikes in the pageviews for this article. I guess the sudden ~hundred-times-average-hits spike in September was probably that Reddit post. If you can find any reliable source for the smoke-vent use, it would be excellent information to add to the article. HLHJ (talk) 03:03, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright patented and designed these lights for at least one firm, not surprising given his interest in windows with prisms, etc. Is this something that anyone sees as worth contributing to this article? I have photos of some of his light designs somewhere...

I think he is mentioned in prism lighting. If he also made pavement lights and people wrote about it we could certainly include that; feel free to mention sources here. Iamges would be very welcome. You can upload the photos you have here (if you took them; the photographer needs to upload them if they were taken at all recently; the upload wizard I linked to will give more specific guidance). Thank you for your help. I hope you see this, if you had a registered account I'd notify you, but as it's been over a year I'm not sure you'll check back... Apologies for not seeing this sooner. HLHJ (talk) 02:05, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]