Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Radio Stations

Dravecky

I just wanted to take a moment to remember our good friend and a driving force behind this project, and others, Dravecky. We lost him 4 years ago today, April 23.

An admin, he was honored with 3 good articles and 145 DYKs, plus he had 104,715 edits to his name, including one (his last) the morning he passed. Dravecky was a friend to all, on and off Wikipedia. A SciFi fan above all else. He helped do the behind the scenes stuff (along with his longtime girlfriend Robyn) for FenCon, WhoFest, among many others and met many of his favorite actors and actresses. He loved his University of Alabama Crimson Tide football.

I think I can speak for everyone when I say he is still missed by all here. Roll Tide, Dravecky. :) - Neutralhomer • Talk • 15:39 on April 23, 2020 (UTC) • #StayAtHome

KKBW (FM)

Would someone from WPRS mind taking a look at KKBW (FM) and assessing it per WP:GNG or whichever notability criteria are applied to radio stations? It was created by someone claiming to be the owner of the station earlier today; first as a draft and then moved to the mainspace. I thought about draftifying, but I'm not too familiar with the notability requirements for radio stations and it's pretty much nothing more than a few-sentence stub at the moment. So, I decided it would be better to ask about it first here. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:32, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

@Marchjuly That's him, for sure. The station filed for its license to cover—as in, completed construction and signed on—today. But a radio station that is freshly born rarely meets the GNG in the year 2024. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:12, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for checking on this Sammi Brie. I posted some general information about COI editing on the page creator's user talk page and mentioned I was going to leave the notability assessment to WPRS. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Radio-Locator move to REC Networks

Radio-Locator was removed from Minneapolis recently. I would like to follow your best practices. Is this fair to say?

Of the 89 FM and 57 AM stations that can be heard in the city, 16 FM stations and 11 AM stations originate in Minneapolis.

References

Thank you. -SusanLesch (talk) 18:36, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

@SusanLesch, I would say "are licensed to" rather than "originate". A radio station may be licensed to Minneapolis but have its studios somewhere else, such as a suburb or even in the case of a noncommercial station somewhere far away. And yes, for this purpose this is fine as a replacement for the shaky Radio-Locator. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 19:12, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Excellent. Thank you, Sammi Brie. -SusanLesch (talk) 20:24, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

CDBS is going away

You had to know that this was happening someday (especially as the Media Bureau had hinted at this soon), and January 2, 2025, is the day: the FCC will close public access to the old Consolidated Database System (CDBS). This will affect a lot of links in broadcasting articles:

• {{FCC letter}} is probably on its way out, as these are all in CDBS. LMS has every attachment that links to this (consult the LMS link that should appear in the infobox), but all uses or links to imported letters (see [1]) will need manual repair, e.g. Special:Diff/1263443718. (LMS has UUIDs where CDBS used numerical IDs for documents.) I use {{Cite web}} now for history cards, as shown in the diff, in part to permit easier archival; don't touch archival links if they exist, as the documents are the same even if they were/are in different systems. Some letters may link to LMS already, but all of them now need to. This template is called more than 1,100 times, and I will start a TfD for it to make its disposal more orderly.
• We have many links to CDBS for consummation notices and other items (see [2]). From personal experience, these are tough to archive because CDBS generates these documents on demand. We will need to figure out a method to migrate to equivalents in LMS.
  • A big subcategory: post-1980 call sign history links, and LMS has some bugs with its presentation. The only alternative may be REC on these for now.

This is quite a large maintenance task given that CDBS was around so long; History Cards from {{FCC letter}} are the vast majority of the uses of that template. Projects we've undertaken in prior years (abandoning our query templates, expanding capability for LMS insta-calls to infoboxes of all active U.S. broadcast stations) will have vastly reduced the number of needed changes. Also cross-posting to WT:TVS. Pinging a variety of active radio and TV editors that need to know this: @HangingCurve, MrSchimpf, Mvcg66b3r, Nathan Obral, and Wcquidditch. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 18:31, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

• Adding some more pings to active radio-side editors: @Thomas H. White, DrChuck68, BlueboyLINY, Chuterix, Allreet, Waystolie1000, ViperSnake151, and Stereorock. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 18:54, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

  I have edited the WSB (AM) article using the {{URL|example.com|optional display text}} template. This may be a better solution than using {{cite web}}: Empty citation (help), at least in the External links section. BlueboyLINY (talk) 01:35, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

  That's a good point. I prefer to have History Cards as citations somewhere, but a lot of articles especially in radio use them as an external link. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 05:53, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

• Leave it to Michi at REC Networks for having possibly come in as our white knight here. This is a new development today, from what I can gather. REC seems to have mirrored the vast majority of the CDBS imported letters, not all of which transferred to LMS (e.g. the cards for deleted WTVK at WVLT-TV did not make it). The REC URL scheme would allow for a subst and replace of this template with some form of Cite web and of standalone links in other articles, as the URLs are in forms like https://cdbs.recnet.com/corres/?doc=97351 which in turn leads to a PDF at https://cdbs.recnet.com/importLetters/9/97351.pdf (The first digit, or first two-digits for six-digit CDBS letter IDs like 101401, is duplicated right before the full number). While most new links should still go to LMS, this will allow for replacement of this going-away CDBS linkset. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 15:46, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

parameter facility_id causing error

I raised an issue regarding articles about radio station at Village pump (technical). the usage of this parameter is linked to Technical information field and that causing citation error as the field is populated by Alphabets and line breaks in many article.––kemel49^{(connect)(contri)} 08:32, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

@KEmel49 I apologize for the delay in responding to this. I have been traveling and with family.

Since the thread has been archived at VPT, I want to quickly summarize the issue in a way that may shed light on what's happening. It used to be that facility IDs in radio stations were a freeform field, but in 2020 in preparation for the deployment of links that are generated using the facility ID as a variable (as part of a major overhaul of template functionality), it was specified that they should be numeric. In 2023, we deployed auto-generation of a reference for technical information. But some pages with unusual page needs are not handing an expected parameter to the URL. This PetScan shows the overlap of CS1 error URL in infobox radio station-using pages, 85 in total.

What these pages have in common (aside from one or two with other types of URL problems) is that they are complex infoboxes for simulcasts of two or more facilities. A look at one, like WNND, may quickly explain why this issue is present. That means two or more facility IDs and necessarily a non-numeric parameter. This can be handled in multiple ways, and I'd like your thoughts:

• Turn off advanced features by removing the |licensing_authority= parameter. The auto-generated links can be replicated in external links with templates.
• Moving information specific to one station to a child infobox that is embedded (not as useful here) or a second infobox.
• Possibly the development of a flavor of Infobox radio station designed for split historical and technical information for simulcasting radio stations. There are a number of AM-FM combos that likely would not sustain separate pages, pages like WJLE-FM.

Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 00:16, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

I also note that some pages are crying not for this treatment but for a table. Public Radio East had six facilities in one infobox until I converted to table format. Also notably needing this: Channel X Radio, Cadena Salsoul, Radio Kansas, Texas Public Radio. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 02:16, 23 December 2024 (UTC)