Talk:Gilgel Gibe III Dam

Restoration of content on environmental and social impact

On October 22, 2009, User:Dreamlij - a user without a user page and with hardly any previous and no later editing track record - has apparently deliberately removed important content from this article concerning expected negative environmental and social impacts of the dam, as well as the corresponding sources. The two most important sections that were removed are the following:

"Impact on Lake Turkana. According to Friends of Lake Turkana, a Kenyan organization representing indigenous groups in northwestern Kenya whose livelihoods are linked to Lake Turkana, the dam could reduce the level of Lake Turkana by up to 10 meter affecting up to 300,000 people, This could cause the brackish water to increase in salinity to where it may no longer be drinkable by the indigenous groups around the lake. It could also drastically reduce the number of fish in the lake, which the people around Lake Turkana depend on. According to critics, this "will condemn the lake to a not-so-slow death." The total storage volume of the reservoir of Gibe III dam is 11.75 billion cubic meter. Based on a surface area of Lake Turkana of 6,405 km2 the filling of the reservoir would reduce the level of the lake by less than 2 meter, with environmental and social impacts that are difficult to predict. According to data on the World Lake Database, the historic level of Lake Turkana fluctuated significantly over the last 125 years. It declined from a high of 20m above today's level in the 1890s to the same level as today in the 1940s and 1950s. Then it increased again gradually by 7 meters to reach a peak around 1980, and subsequently decreasing again."

and

"One prominent critic of the dam is the Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey who said that "the project is fatally flawed in terms of its logic, in terms of its thoroughness, in terms of its conclusions"."

The deletions apparently remained undetected until December 20, 2009, when they were reinstated.--Mschiffler (talk) 20:33, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

References

Section merging

I haven't read through this article since last year and it has bulked up a lot, particularly in regards to the controversy. Sections like "Problems and controversy", added here can be merged into a whole controversy section along with the environmental and social impacts. Also, the current problem and controversy section covers "Award of construction contract" and "Financing" as well. The "Financial costs" and "Financing" sections can also be merged too. I am not terribly familiar with this project but want to clean this article up in the next week or so. IPs and SPAs are usually attracted to controversial dam articles like this one and sometimes they use the article to promote a cause rather than the encyclopedia. If anyone has any ideas to better organize and remove redundancy, please discuss.--NortyNort (Holla) 07:30, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree. When I started the article it had a clear structure. Since then a lot of information has been added in new sections or somewhere in places where it did not fit. Also, a lot of duplicate information was inserted. I started cleaning up a bit. Your help in further improving the article along the lines you mentioned would be helpful. In doing so, I would suggest to move the information from the controversy section to the appropriate sub-sections of environmental and social impacts and then delete the controversy section. Let us see if more people react to your comments. If not, I suggest that you just move ahead.--Mschiffler (talk) 08:02, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

The more I read through the article; most of it is controversy, even in the design section. Don't get me wrong, this dam is controversial and deserving of criticism, but the article needs to give more due weight to the subject. There is hardly anything covering the dam's engineering specifications or construction progress specifics. I will add more of that in the coming days and start cleaning this article up.--NortyNort (Holla) 15:22, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for adding more information on the dam's design. This information is very useful. Please continue editing it and feel free to request feedback if you are not sure how to treat a specific issue.--Mschiffler (talk) 13:44, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

No problem. Next I want to hash out the "Problems and controversy" section into the controversy section. After that, add some info on the background and construction of the project.--NortyNort (Holla) 11:40, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Controversy on external links

There has been a controversy between NortyNort and Maziotis about whether to add an external link to the "Stop Gibe 3 Dam" on-line petition to this article. So far this is the only external link placed in the article. Wikipedia:External links says that external links should be kept to a minimum. It also says that sites that should be linked are those "that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (...), or other reasons." It also says that links that are "mainly intended to promote a website" should "normally be avoided". While I did not pay attention to the link to the petition before, it seems to me based on the information available that the links should not be included. This being said I believe that the term "spam" in this context is probably misleading. Still, in my view the link should be taken out. I suggest that interested users post their arguments on this dicussion page instead of editing the main page until the issue will hopefully be settled. After that I hope we can focus our attention on improving the article itself, including through the addition of relevant information on the dam that is not included in the article and that may be included in the petition website. Once that will be done, of course it the website can be linked from the footnote pertaining to that specific information.--Mschiffler (talk) 14:01, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing and taking the time to comment. Maybe I should've posted here as well, but I started a discussion at WP:ELN yesterday if you would like to provide input there or just move your entire comment.--NortyNort (Holla) 21:47, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Is the dam now producing electricity?

The article gives the impression that the dam's generators are not yet operating. But some websites refer to its output. Even if some construction continues, it may already be generating electricity. Has it began to do so? Pete unseth (talk) 14:15, 25 September 2023 (UTC)