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Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board/Archive 56

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Minor ADB entries

I thought I’d throw this out here as I’m a bit torn... but there are a number of articles about “minor” people, of which I can find little to know information on. One example is Mary Sophia Alston... she seems to have contributed to society at the time, but despite a Trove newspaper search I just can’t find anything. I’ve removed her from my list but I was wondering if I was wrong to do so. Does anyone else think she is notable enough for an article? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 01:28, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

The "minor" or "shared" ADB entries seem to vary widely. You removed one the other day who just seemed to have been one of someone's wives and to have actually done very little of note (so I wasn't sure why they bothered listing it as a "minor entry"), but I can also remember someone nominating one for AfD on that basis who turned out to be an important suffragette with a comically large number of high-quality Trove hits. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:46, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
If you search Trove for "Mrs James Alston" you will find quite a few obituaries which provide details of the various hospitals etc and her involvement in charitable organisations. It's just a little tedious sorting through the "Mr James Alston" references. Oronsay (talk) 02:32, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
Yes, "Behind every good man is an even better woman?" Sign of times past, never forget to also search for the Mrs Husband's Name when looking for women over those historical periods. Aoziwe (talk) 09:18, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
@Oronsay:, @The Drover's Wife: and @Aoziwe: I really appreciate your feedback. It was very helpful, I found a lot of newspaper articles — though probably one of the most frustrating Trove searches I've ever done — and I have created the article Mary Sophia Alston. No, she wasn't "minor" at all! She was very, very involved in the community, to the point where I'm not sure how she had the time or energy to accomplish and fulfill all her commitments! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 08:52, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
@Chris.sherlock: I'm so glad you persevered, and you found an image. Good article. Well done. Oronsay (talk) 03:30, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Using Quadrant (magazine) as a reference

I discovered today that there was an RfC into the reliability of Quadrant as a reference. The decision reached in July 2019 was that it is "Generally unreliable for factual reporting". I found this out when an article I was following on Margaret Susan Brock had a Quadrant reference removed. The editor who made the change directed me to the RfC. I have subsequently observed from their contributions that they are systematically removing Quadrant references from many Wikipedia articles, e.g. Jimmy Sharman, Wendy Harmer, Miles Franklin Award. Surely it's ok to include a Quadrant article in the Further reading section of an article, as in the latter case? Any thoughts? Oronsay (talk) 01:02, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

In the case of Jane Harper, surely it's ok to have references to two reviews of a book she wrote? How can a review be anything but an opinion? Quoting only one could be seen as biased. I'm reverting this one. Oronsay (talk) 01:12, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
In the case of Margaret Susan Brock. It was stated that "Her work continues to be cited in national and international debates over indigenous policy". The fact that it was debated in Quadrant, surely reflects the truth of this statement (with respect to the "national" debate). (I reinstated the Quadrant reference). MargaretRDonald (talk) 01:50, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
I noticed a few (High Court, Boilermakers, Industrial Groups). In those cases the fact referenced was well known and numerous other sources exist, which made it trivially easy to use another reference. I have some issues with the small number of people contributing to the RfC, none of whom were able to quote a reliable source for their opinion. It also smacks of recentism - I would probably agree that its reputation has fallen considerably in the last 15 years, but prior to that a lot of the non-staff contributors were notable. --Find bruce (talk) 02:41, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
If it really is "trivially easy to use another reference", then please do so. Using Quadrant is a sign of someone deliberately looking for a biased source. (Whether they realise it or not.) HiLo48 (talk) 04:03, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a NPOV policy, HiLo. That doesn't mean that we stick straight down the middle. Biased views are perfectly fine where they are relevant and treated as per policy. For example, I note that in the Bob Hawke article we use his wife Blanche D'Alpuget as a source several times. You worked on this recently, where I didn't see you complaining of bias.
The discussion re Quadrant is mostly concerned about online contributions published without adequate editorial oversight. The publication contains occasional articles from scholarly or notable sources. Retired High Court justices or senior politician, for example. I note that you don't think historian Keith Windschuttle is an NPOV source for our article on the Stollen Generations, despite him having published books on the topic and being a regular contributor to the public discussion for many years. As editor-in-chief of Quadrant, I think we may be reasonably satisfied that his articles in that magazine are not unchecked online contributions from the general public! --Pete (talk) 04:41, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
I agree that there's a definite POV with Quadrant these days although I am not sure if this has always been the case. But I think it's a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" with these removals. I see no problem with even the most POV-y articles being cited as being someone's opinion on a topic (straight from the horse's mouth). And some articles might not be POV (my sense is that the earlier ones might not be). But I guess the benefit of this mass removal of Quadrant is that it forces the rest of us who see them disappear to make a careful examination of what was actually in that particular Quadrant article and restore it (perhaps with a comment) if we feel it is OK or seek another source. I am slightly irritated by removing the citations without leaving a reason in the citation-needed tag added as inevitably some random well-meaning contributor (perhaps a librarian during 1Lib1Ref) will go looking for a citation and re-add the same Quadrant article back as the citation. Kerry (talk) 05:06, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
The RFC has already covered it - It seems rather odd it has to be re-visited - the usage of the RFC result as a reason to remove edits is flagrant disruptive editing. It has been (quandrant) obvious as to their bias for over 20 years now, name lists of contributors simply line up the ducks without their even squawking - they have tendencies which are hardly neutral or NPOV, from whichever angle you look. JarrahTree 05:57, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
[edit conflicted] I'm on the fence on this one. On the whole, I think banning Quadrant as a source is a good thing: it removes a lot of questionable, spurious fringe crap in one hit, and a blanket decision saves having to have a bunch of arguments about it. On the other - as with the current discussion about News Weekly (the 80-year old publication of the National Civic Council, which was hugely important historically in certain quarters but is fundamentally a bunch of fringe nutters these days) - I think it sometimes involves throwing the baby out with the bathwater and means there's intelligent conservative commentary that we can't use because of where it was published. I checked a couple of sources being removed today and one was perfectly fine and one was absolute dreck. I think I'm just generally iffy about the practice of blacklisting sources that are potentially usable in some circumstances with appropriate context, but I also see the value of it as a means of mass crap removal. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
I'm fine with the "generally unreliable" tag for the current Quadrant. Looking at the site I notice some really abhorrent opinion pieces on what they call the "Wuhan virus". But over the decades Quadrant has published some first-rate material from respected Australians. Yes, tending to the conservative POV, but we do not exclude good scholarship as sources, and throwing out nuggets with the dross is a poor strategy. --Pete (talk) 06:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
Looking at this set of contributions, it looks like blanket removal of sources regardless of age or quality. Some I am fine with, but some are useful and should not be removed. As a rule of thumb, I suggest that if the author has a BLP here, then they are (by definition) notable, and their contributions should be examined rather than robotically removed. --Pete (talk) 06:53, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

HiLo48 your failure to verify your allegations of bias, by reference to the articles cited, is precisely the kind of shortcoming I am objecting to. The two articles cited in the three pages I mentioned were both by notable authors who do not have a reputation for conservative bias. The High Court reference [1] was to verify a fact about Owen Dixon & written by Philip Ayres a highly respected biographer, particularly in relation to his meticulous book on Dixon. The reference used in Boilermakers & Industrial Groups [2] was a biographical piece about a former president of the Labor party written by Stephen Holt, a well respected biographer with an interest in labor politics. Sure he does not have Ayres' reputation, not many do, but he is hardly a bastion of conservatism. I pretty much agree with Kerry & The Drover's Wife about removing the prejudiced drivel that the current Quandrant publishes, but that was not always the case. --Find bruce (talk) 11:36, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

FYI the Ferguson article was also the one I referred to above that I randomly stumbled across when checking some of these that made me go "hmm" about the blanket removals. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

RfC on bushfire seasons

There is an RfC on whether future Australian bushfire season article template start and end dates should use the official season or the beginning and end of significant fires. Please comment here --Pete (talk) 19:19, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Yawn. Please find something more important to argue about, one that you haven't yourself had three different opinions on in the past month. HiLo48 (talk) 23:55, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Categories in general

Just thinking about the above discussion, how many of these categories do we really need now we can just create Wikidata items and queries if people want them. Gnangarra 05:04, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata is inscrutable to the vast majority of editors, let alone readers, so the answer is "we do need them". Wikidata is not a substitute for categories in finding articles in any way, shape or form for most people. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:29, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
no ones using them, the above category has had 14 pages views in the last month, 10 since the discussion started so why do we need them? Gnangarra 05:45, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
Because they exist to aid editors in finding the content we have that they're looking for, even if those topics are niche and unlikely to attract large numbers of hits per month. Because intentionally making it difficult for readers to find relevant content is a Bad Thing. Because we're not here to indulge random fixations of individual editors (such as, in this case, a passion for a platform that's completely unusable to anyone but hardcore Wikipedians/data nerds), we're here to build an encyclopedia, and part of that is people being able to actually find the content they're after within it. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:53, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
If you're looking for people from Canberra, you're not going to dig down through 4 or 5 layers of categories, and especially not University categories if you dont where they studied. Looking for individual articles people use the search option not categories. Manys an article that doesnt get categorised into every possible association either. Oh and thanks for the laugh I'm not a hardcore Wikidata fan. Gnangarra 06:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
Gnangarra can you provide simple instructions here for running a Wikidata query for "people from Canberra" (or something similar, of the appropriate Wikidata items don't exist)? For this purpose, assume a reasonably experienced Wikipedia editor who has never used Wikidata. Mitch Ames (talk) 06:47, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/Wikidata_Query_Help Gnangarra 07:13, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
"No" would have been shorter. The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:02, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Australia national soccer team

Some recent edits (3 April 2020) have broken a birth date. The edits look dubious to me. Perhaps someone here would check if they need to be reverted. Johnuniq (talk) 08:35, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

  Task complete. thanks to WDM10. --Find bruce (talk) 09:46, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
All good. WDM10 (talk) 21:39, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 03:49, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

The Australian Destubathon

Hi, I was wondering if anybody would like to see articles destubbed for Australia like Wikipedia:The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon and cover every county of Australia? One for Australia is projected on Wikipedia:The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge. Hopefully it will give people more motivation to improve existing content. Feel free to put up improved Australia stubs on the 50,000 list in the meantime! † Encyclopædius 20:24, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

We already have Wikipedia:WikiProject_Australia/The_5000_Challenge which covers destubbing of Australian articles. I believe similar Challenges were established in some other countries around the same time, e.g. Wikipedia:The 10,000 Challenge for the UK, see Category:Wikipedia_article_challenges. Kerry (talk) 00:03, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Kerry, I know, I created them :-). Name change. I'm talking about a contest covering every county of Australia to fuel these challenges and get more people working on improving stubs.† Encyclopædius 10:15, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

We have 322 counties in Queensland (6th largest state in the world), 141 in New South Wales, 37 in Victoria, 49 in South Australia and I don't the other states have counties. So I think a county-based competition might spread our editing community a little thinly (given the rough metric I have seen is that we have an average of 200 active contributors to Australian content). Seriously I don't see a lot of evidence that these national article challenges are motivating people particularly (others feel free to say if you do find them motivating). Competitions and league tables can work in some circumstances (we have used them in 1Lib1Ref for example and they seemed to work there but that's a 3 week burst). Similarly the push to get to 6 million articles on en.WP before the birthday did impact positively on behaviour (never if the goal wasn't achieved in time) but again was only over a few weeks. Challeges like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Australia/The_5000_Challenge are just too long-term to motivate people. As the person who increments the percentage counter on the 5000 Challenge, the folks who are recording achievements appear to be "regular contributors". I am not seeing a lot of evidence of attracting new contributors nor accelerating existing contributors. The other point I would make is the highly manual nature of participating in these things. Every time you do the "challenge" thing, you have to manually record it. The percentage counter has to increment manually -- being so manual does not add to anyone's motivation. Again, 1Lib1Ref uses Outreach Dashboard for its league tables, which is done automatically (apart from setting up the campaign, the teams, and assigning the individuals to the teams). This replaced the manual system of relying on mostly new contributors to remember to add a hashtag into their edit summary (which they usually forgot to do and of course you can't go back and edit an edit summary). These are the reasons we made these changes to 1Lib1ref program and it has been successful in raising the number of contributors and contributions. The key is to take a user-centred design approach by trying to see it from the point of view of people you want to engage. Let's not make the same mistakes all over again. Kerry (talk) 04:06, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

New source for "pioneering women in Australia"

@The Drover's Wife, Oronsay, and Laterthanyouthink: I just stumbled over this National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame website. It claims to have over 1500 women with short profiles and often links to other websites that discuss them. They have also made a special effort to include Indigenous women. Since women and Indigenous people tend to be under-represented on Wikipedia, this is useful source material for anyone looking to write biographies. Kerry (talk) 03:31, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Good find, Kerry, thanks. I've bookmarked it for future use. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 04:18, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Kerry. I've just used it to update the article on MaryAnn Bin-Sallik. It's also useful for the sources it provides. @Chris.sherlock: You may find National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame website helpful, too. Oronsay (talk) 18:51, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
Oronsay and Kerry thank you! - Chris.sherlock (talk) 19:43, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
I have created User:Chris.sherlock/Australian Women In Red/Resources. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 20:53, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

possible hoax, Promatia

I smell a rat. There have been a number of edits e.g. [3] [4] [5] here on Wikipedia including the creation of article Secession in Australia as well as tweets, reddit posts and other social media promoting Promatia as some new micro-nation in Australia within the Gulf of Carpentaria. It has a website. All citations makes their way to this website or to this book "How to Start Your Own Country". It looks to me like a fairly clever strategy to "seed" the idea in social media and mentions in Wikipedia that this is real in the hope that the mainstream media will pick this up. Indeed I wonder if the book's author or one of its readers might be doing this as a prank to see if they can convince people that this is real movement. I have removed all mentions of it on Wikipedia (as far as I can tell) as the citations were (as I say) not to anything reliable. So just be alert for this. Kerry (talk) 02:16, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Useful links to detect activity: Special:WhatLinksHere/Promatia + LinkSearch. Johnuniq (talk) 03:48, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
It would not be the first time, eg, here. Aoziwe (talk) 10:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

How does one clear out wikidata? Aoziwe (talk) 23:05, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata items are hard to delete because they only require that an item exist—it doesn't have to be notable (disclaimer: that's my ill-informed understanding). This looks like an attempt to use Wikipedia to promote something. Mentions that I've found:
The history of d:User:SoaringMoon shows it was edited by the two new users who have created the above.
Arkovia was edited by one of the users (extract: "Arkovia ... is a micronation ... located on the Continent of Australia ... 24th of July, 2016 ... uses a fully digital currency called Arks")
This might need discussion elsewhere. Suggestions? WP:COIN? Johnuniq (talk) 02:13, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
Huh. Well, if they start talking about the Free Republic of Verdis, let me know. That's probably SwedenAviator. Dunno about the other stuff. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 02:31, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

I have no idea as the veracity of this ..!? Aoziwe (talk) 13:09, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Ministerial terminology

Did I get this correct enough? Aoziwe (talk) 01:41, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

PS Feel free to make it better without getting back to me. Aoziwe (talk) 01:42, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Billabong merge to Oxbow lake

There's a proposal to merge Billabong into Oxbow lake; the question is, whether a Billabong has sufficient independent notability to stand alone. Please express views at Talk:Oxbow lake#Billabong and Resaca (channel). Klbrain (talk) 21:10, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Discussion on this wasn't helped by the fact that there is nothing on Talk:Billabong and the merge template didn't include a link to the discussion on the other talkpage, which was actually started well before the merge template was added. I have now fixed that. --AussieLegend (✉) 23:12, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Review of article

Hey all, I’ve just finished writing the article on Ellen Atkinson. Anyone want to review it? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 14:28, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Government department articles

I am not sure about the government department/directorates articles in other states/NT, but the ones for federal, NSW and ACT are a mess, with much of the content being outdated, uncited or are not useful to a reader. In particular, the roles/priorities of the departments are often unverified and outdated, mostly because these information are hard to find online. Additionally, none of the department articles (that I know of) has a specific prominent history to that department, e.g. some event happened in xx year in the xx department. As such, the history sections are mostly confined to the previous names of the departments, which in my opinion, are relevant and useful to the reader.

One potential solution is by having articles of existing government departments, with information of previous names/predecessors listed as a dot point in the paragraph, somewhat similar to the history section of the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE). If the said department is a merger of various portfolios, then the history section can be split up to the portfolios respectively. For example, the DPIE would have two subsections, one about planning departments in NSW, and one about industry departments in NSW. Doing so, will eliminate all the defunct department articles and remove most information duplication.

Another potential solution is to have history of main portfolios detailed in the list of agencies of the relevant government, e.g. List of Australian government entities, List of New South Wales government agencies. However, my concern is that it may get too lengthy and not really qualify as a list anymore. Marcnut1996 (talk) 04:35, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

I think our federal approach is ideal: we've got articles for each permutation of departments which explain what they were responsible for, and it's really useful for articles on related topics to be able to actually link the correct department at the correct time for further information, rather than being randomly linked to a modern department established to cover a related topic a century later. They could always be improved, but I think they're absolutely a net gain for our coverage of governmental topics. Trying to start history from the point of the last institutional merger never works as an approach, as often as people try it on Wikipedia, and it works particularly badly where portfolio areas are ripped apart and joined together with other areas over time making any kind of coherent history on the basis not possible. (It may well be that the overarching list might have gotten ignored because editors forgot it existed, but the articles themselves are in decent shape.)
That said, I'm not sure it's the best approach for the states. The federal approach works because someone went and really thoroughly did the job in the first place and enough editors are generally paying attention to keep it updated. The various state approaches have always been random and ad-hoc and, short of someone willing to thoroughly do the work so it doesn't become a mish-mash and enough ongoing interest to keep them updated, trying to do the same approach used federally is likely to result in a bit of a mess. I'm a bit indifferent as to what to do about the state departments because none of the alternatives are great: perhaps it might work to just have articles on the ones with any kind of coherent history over time (such as Treasury) and merge the ever-changing ones into the list. I also think there's a case for splitting departments and agencies into two lists because the list of agencies will always be less complicated. The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:10, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
For Queensland, the catalogue entries for "agencies" generally tells you the predecessor/successor story for Qld Govt departments, usually both as simple facts but if you scroll to the bottom there is usually a para or two telling the story (note this is CC-BY material so can be re-used without rewriting with attribution). Fore example see Department of Environment and Heritage Protection. But, like lots of things, it would take time to go through and write all those articles (but this might be a candidate for generation), but it's just not at the top of my priority list. But if anyone wants to work on it, please do. Kerry (talk) 00:17, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
I am working on a scraper-generator for Queensland. Aoziwe (talk) 10:11, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Scraper-generator

Kerry, et al: The content for both of the following has been 100% generated:

Some obvious things are:

  • getting the tense correct throughout depending on whether the agency is current or not
  • not sure what to do about linking agencies, ie, "..(Queensland)" or not, etc.
  • these are the only two I have looked at, so not sure at all yet what format variation there will be
  • need to add infobox
  • need template/s for attribution
  • prior and following agencies "timeline"

What next, ie, do I dump these under my sandbox and let people copy/edit and move them to main space?

Any suggestions please. Aoziwe (talk) 15:33, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm impressed at the speed you have done this (what toolset are you using -- might be a better subject for email discussion)? But you are right in your observations that you cannot just copy-and-paste the output of a generator into an article; a human needs to polish it -- as you say "get the tense right" etc. There are problems with putting drafts on-wiki (because you aren't allowed to have categories on draft articles). It has been my practice to share a few examples on-wiki for feedback as you have just done (with the categories neutralised by hand) but put the bulk of generated material onto Google Drive and have some kind of spreadsheet there for people to annotate that they have created the article from the generated material and what it ended up being called (as the generated title may be problematic -- need disambiguation etc). Absolutely yes, you need an attribution template and that's a place you can put a hidden tracking category as well. It is VERY important to have a way to quickly grab all the articles with content from a particular generator, in case you need to do some fix to all of them, so a tracking category and/or template transclusion mean various tools like AutoWikiBrowser can be easily directed at the correct set of articles. To deal with linking you need to establish a canonical title that will work for everything without the need for further disambiguation. This will probably involve "(Queensland)" at the end. You will probably need to put date ranges if an agency can get rebirthed with the same name (and I am pretty sure they did!). Once you have the canonical titles, generate links using that, but when any article is rolled-out, move it to a more minimal name (which leaves a redirect). That is the best solution. You could use successor boxes for the timeline (I've generated plenty of infoboxes but not successor boxes but assume it's much the same). You will probably find that trying to generate each article on its own in a single pass is not possible. I usually generate the whole set of articles using multiple passes. In this example, I'd probably do a first pass do the scrape into a mix of spreadsheets (for the facts) and files (for the freetext). Then I'd generate to get the canonical titles and stick them in a spreadsheet, then another pass to built the spreadsheet to contain the predecessor/successor info, and so on. The article drafts (the wikitext) are then finally produced from what is usually a large number of spreadsheets and files generated/manipulated by previous passes. Multiple passes makes it much easier to have separation of concerns and tends to make it easier to insert another phase in the process when you have done the facepalm as you realise there is yet another "gotcha" that has to be resolved at a certain point in the process. So a factory-style "assembly line" approach seems to work better in my experience. But if it is easier to email, please do. Kerry (talk) 21:51, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Kerry. I have not really kept track of time spent on it but I think some where around 12 to 15 hours in total so far (including one very blind alley), which I was thinking was a long time. I have used EXCEL/VBA/IE to grab the page, EXCEL/VBA/VBA-DOM/VBA to parse the page and get all the facts and components and regularise them, then EXCEL/VBA to structure, convert to wikitext, and collate. Not really a "tool set". It all runs from the one spreadsheet. So yes, two parse passes much as you describe. I had not thought of names being reused - thank you for the gotcha spoiler. I might not be able to get back to this for a couple of days (no it is not COVID-19 related). Aoziwe (talk) 10:01, 26 March 2020 (UTC)
I am using Python as it has modules for web scraping (Beautiful Soup) and spreadsheets (csv) And well as a regular expression (re) module which are the main things I find I need. Plus its free :-) Kerry (talk) 10:16, 26 March 2020 (UTC)
This section should be hidden with a with a warning - danger rabbit hole ahead. I'm now trying to decide if this is going to be quicker learning how to use python to extract the data for 50 years of NSW elections or continue with my semi automated process of copying the page for each electorate for each election, pasting it into a spreadsheet which codes it for wikipedia & pasting into the page. Repeat for 16 elections = 1,239 pages to scrape / copy. Please tell me Kerry that its easier to learn than AWB. --Find bruce (talk) 23:37, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
@Find bruce: Can you point me at the 50 years of NSW election data and I will have a look at it? Python is programming language so if you don't know computer programming, it's probably not the tool for you. Email me if this is easier to discuss that way. Kerry (talk) 00:27, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
@Find bruce: If you were worried about the time I advised above for the two examples I gave then please do not. It had taken me that time to develop the "tool" to that point. The time to start the new artcle, grab the source material and load the generated output into a WP article I think takes about 10-15 seconds per article. The "tool" I am building even puts the collated wikitext into the clipboard so that all you have to do is paste it into the new article (with only a <ctrl-v>). Aoziwe (talk) 00:37, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Aoziwe, my concern is for the time in educating myself rather than the actual development time. Kerry the NSW election site is [6], with the detail of each electorate using a URL system that adds /[year]/[electorate].htm. As far as I can tell the detail of votes for each candidate is not contained in any other page -in looking at the HTML I was surprised that it is actually coded for each page rather than a database lookup. The main manual work for me is correctly linking to the candidate's article using [Candidates of the XXXX New South Wales state/colonial election] - few too many similar names for me to be happy using fuzzy lookup. I will email you my spreadsheet Kerry - always happy if you spot any efficiency gains. --Find bruce (talk) 01:33, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Scraper-generator update

Ready for use ?

Article content

Content is generated from the scraped contents of individual Queendland State Archives search result items done at Advanced Search for agencies.

Not all information is provided in the returned results for all result items.

Tensing is attempted, ie, for no longer current agencies, had versus has, was versus is, etc.

Some wording is sometimes redundantly duplicated between the lead and other sections. (Because there is no AI to guess where and how it looks the best.) This will need to be rationalised by editors.

There are about 200 Department articles able to be generated. A number of these already have WP articles, and presumably may need merging. I think there are about 30 already in existence.

There are many many more agencies of other types that can be generated, but the vast majority of these will not be notable. These probably should be generated on a case-by-case basis as requested. So, let me know.

Content contraction / collapsing

Text block collapsing, ie, Hide/Show, is used if there are more than ten instances of:

  • Subordinate / controlled entities
  • Administered legislation

Only up to six controlled entities are shown in the infobox provided there are no more than six, but an intra-article link is provided from the infobox to the full list if so.

Only the last portfolio is shown in the infobox if there is more than one, but an intra-article link is provided from the infobox to the full list if so.

Only up to six preceding organisations are shown in the infobox.

Only up to six succeeding organisations are shown in the infobox.

Agency titles and linking

Any sequence of words, each starting with a capital letter, and optionally interspersed with words like "of", "in", "the", is identified as a possible link target. This gives false positives, but which are still often other potential items of interest.

Isolated single capitalised words are discounted. This gives some false negatives.

Agencies in structured data and have an allocated id:

  • if they have the word "Queensland" in their name they are named without modification.
  • if they do not have the word "Queensland" in their name they are disambiguated by appending " (Queensland)".
  • if the name is duplicated then the name is disambiguated with " (yyyy–yyyy)". Suffixes such as (I), (II), (III) are removed.

Agencies in free text:

  • if they can be uniquely matched with a structured name as above then they are linked accordingly.
  • if they can be matched to a duplicated name above then they are linked to "<name> (disambiguation)".
  • if they have the word "Queensland" in their name they are linked without modification.
  • if they do not have the word "Queensland" in their name they are disambiguated and linked by appending " (Queensland)".

Overlinking avoidance, ie, not linking to more than the first occurence, is attempted.

Names such as "Xyyzz Department" are matched against "Department of Xyyzz", and vice versa.

Attempts as also made to link cities, towns, etc., but this is fairly naive at the moment, and might be more troube than it is worth.

Categories

The generator links to a category page, ie, uses the link target prefix ":". It does not categorise the article. This prefix will need to be removed when the article is placed in to main space by an editor.

Categories are added as appropriate for:

  • "Government departments of Queensland" or "Former government departments of Queensland"
  • "Government agencies of Queensland" or "Defunct government agencies of Queensland"
  • "yyyy establishments in Australia"
  • "Government agencies established in yyyy"
  • "yyyy disestablishments in Australia"
  • "Government agencies disestablished in yyyy"

Some category instances as per above do not yet exist and will need to be created.

All generated articles are placed into the category:

  • "Articles incorporating text from the Queensland State Archives" by the template {{QSA-CC-2020}}. The template will not categorise if the article is not in main space, when it will link instead.

Some examples and next steps

There are some examples at:

These have been 100% generated.

Comments and suggestions please ...

Does any one want to be involved in the copy/editing of the generated articles in to main space, or even take charge of the process ... (I must admit I have some other priorites I should be working on at the moment. But, I can generate the articles quite quickly for anyone interested.)

Regards. Aoziwe (talk) 12:20, 4 April 2020 (UTC)


Any comments, likes, dislikes, don't care ...

I think I am now in a position to generate 100s of articles, for Departments, Statutory Authorities, and ministerships. Have not actually checked but well over 500. Have a look through User:Aoziwe/sandbox/qldgov for some samples.

Main changes to date from above is more linking. Linking I think will be the main issue to tidy up by editors, if people are okay with the layout. A lot of the red links will disappear as the generated articles are loaded into main space, ie, articles that refer to each other. A lot of the unlinked expected inter article links will also link after I do the next data dump.

Still not sure how best to handle the merge with existing articles.

Regards. Aoziwe (talk) 13:31, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@Aoziwe: - this is a great start but I think there's still a few things:
  • I think the main across-the-board issue are the lede sections. Getting into when a department was created and abolished before explaining where you're talking about or anything about it isn't very helpful. It really needs to explain what it was (and particularly where it was) before getting into dates.
  • The extent to which these need editing seems to vary quite a bit. The "Department of Agriculture and Stock" and the "Queensland Heritage Council" pages look basically ready to go with a lede and a quick copyedit; some of the others need a little more work.
  • I don't think the "establishment" and "abolition" subheadings under the history section are particularly necessary when they're usually very brief.
  • The "agencies controlled" section probably needs some consistent human attention: anywhere where you've got twenty departmental offices, Magistrates' Courts, etc., it essentially buries the agencies they actually controlled in the weeds of not-really-agencies. Departmental offices or Magistrates' Courts would be much better listed in prose, and bumping those sorts of things out of the agencies list would mean it rarely had to be put below a cut.
  • The "administered acts" section is similar: I can see a relevance for the Bjelke-Petersen-era Aboriginal and Island Affairs Department, which has six key acts, but I'm not sure anyone cares which fifty pieces of justice-related legislation the justice department was enforcing in 1994.
  • Some may need more copyediting than others - things like the function section transferred across much better for the two I mentioned above than they did for, say, the Attorney-General and Justice Department.
  • I'd caution to keep an eye out for places where it isn't appropriate to use the official content wholesale. This is particularly evident with the "Aboriginal and Island Affairs Department", where the official summary of the race policies of the Bjelke-Petersen government is...quite interesting and should definitely not be used without massive editing.
Just providing some feedback, anyway - absolutely don't want to discourage you because I think this'll be very useful with a little bit more work and a bit of attention during the rollout. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:15, 11 April 2020 (UTC)
The Drover's Wife Many thanks for the feedback and the time it would have taken you. I will work through the above over the next couple of days. Aoziwe (talk) 23:12, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Should Category:University of Canberra people be removed from Category:People from Canberra?

The Drover's Wife has suggested that University of Canberra alumni and chancellors are not necessarily "from Canberra". Should Category:University of Canberra people be removed from Category:People from Canberra?

Example of the edits to which I presume The Drover's Wife alludes appear in [7] and [8].

Mitch Ames (talk) 02:33, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

And similarly, should Category:Australian National University people be removed from Category:People from the Australian Capital Territory? Mitch Ames (talk) 02:39, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

As fas I can tell, I would say that attending a place, or working at a place, does not mean you come from that place. So The Drover's Wife is correct in my view. Aoziwe (talk) 03:05, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
I agree with Aoziwe and The Drover's Wife. Attending an institution does not mean you come from the town in which that institution exists. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 03:14, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Support, particularly now that Australian universities have interstate and international satellites.[9][10] ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 03:15, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
attending a place, or working at a place, does not mean you come from that place.
By that logic we should also remove (for example):
(Do we need to distinguish between "attended" (eg school/university) and "working at"?)
Mitch Ames (talk) 03:38, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Other removals - I would think so. Aoziwe (talk) 05:32, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
If we're being pedantic about it, yes. They've obviously been placed there because they're likely to be relevant to readers browsing through that category even if they don't strictly belong within the overarching category without that being renamed. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:58, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
(edit conflict) For Canberra, tens of thousands of people who work and/or study in the ACT live in NSW and commute.[11]. You have similar border issues elsewhere (Albury/Wodonga, Tweed/Coolangatta, Jarvis Bay). Should ex-PM John Howard be classified as "from the ACT" during his time in office when he primarily lived in Sydney? Fly-in fly-out workers who live on the east coast but work in WA? ADF members who are posted all around? Sure these are edge cases, but there's a very large number of people. ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 06:01, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Howard avoided Canberra as much as he could. While he already had a home in Sydney, he took over Kirribilli House in Sydney as the primary Prime Ministerial home. So no, he's definitely not from Canberra. HiLo48 (talk) 21:33, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
There's a broader philosophical issue involved here. I grew up in a town in country Victoria. So that's where I came from. Then I came TO Melbourne to attend university. I've now lived in Melbourne for 50 years. So where do I come from? That country town, or Melbourne? Perhaps both, but when did I also become "from Melbourne"? Where is the line in the sand? (Or time?) HiLo48 (talk) 05:46, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
I don't know that we need to get into that. I moved somewhere to study and left, some people attend satellite campuses or study online and never live in the city the main campus of their university is in. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:58, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
@HiLo48: in the absence of any other information, probably Melbourne: "The place of birth ... is rarely defining from the perspective of an individual." Mitch Ames (talk) 06:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
The formative 20 years of my life is a lot more than "place of birth". If I happened to be notable enough for a Wikipedia article, I can guarantee some people in the country town would want to claim me. That's obvious if we look at the articles for most country towns. HiLo48 (talk) 06:09, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

... which is why I use the phrasing Notable people from or who lived in <wherever> include: when I work on Notable people section. Aoziwe (talk) 07:07, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

  • Every place a person lives become part of them, whether they were born there or just lived there. Over recent times a persons ability to study at one place yet not be in that place has grown. Where you were born whether its a country town or the city, being born in Bordertown probably had less influence on Bob than his time in Perth but we cant measure eithers impact Gnangarra 07:39, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
  • To say that a person is "from" somewhere is ambiguous. I think it probably helps to link the two categories. The people clearly have some link with the city. Of course the degree to which anyone would say the people are from Canberra will vary, but my experience of academic biography articles is that few of them say anything about where the person was born, grew up, or lived. Rathfelder (talk) 12:07, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
    • I'd be okay with that in general, but it becomes more of a problem for me because its presence as a subcategory in that category tree leads to people running bots removing people who are in fact, from Canberra, from the "People from Canberra" category.
      its presence as a subcategory in that category tree leads to ... removing people who are in fact, from Canberra, from the "People from Canberra" category. — That's the way category diffusion is supposed to work. If you think it appropriate, you could tag "People from Canberra" as {{All included}}. Mitch Ames (talk) 22:28, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
      • Except that that wouldn't make sense, because most of the subcategories there logically should be diffused (except for the bishops one, which is another situation equivalent to this). We should be thinking about category structure in terms of what is the most logical way to organise our articles and what most assists our readers, not on the basis of what triggers Mitch's bot because he's incapable of using his own judgment. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:19, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
... most of the subcategories there logically should be diffused ... — An alternative would be to mark some subcategories, e.g. Category:University of Canberra people, as a {{Non-diffusing subcategory}} of Category:People from Canberra. Why is "University..." a "special characteristic of interest"? Mitch Ames (talk) 04:55, 30 March 2020 (UTC)


Looking at my own circumstances, I was born in Newcastle and lived there for the first 18 years of my life. After that I did my training in a suburb of Melbourne, where I lived for 2 years. After that I worked and lived on a certain RAAF base for nearly 6 years. I then lived in Darwin for 21 months and then another RAAF base for 3.5 years. After that I went back to the original RAAF base for 8 years for a total of nearly 14 years. I've lived where I am now for 28 years. I'd say I'm from Port Stephens but originally from Newcastle. I would not consider that I'm from Melbourne, Darwin, either RAAF base or the Northern Territory. I don't see anything ambiguous about that. --AussieLegend (✉) 14:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Every large city, and many small ones, has a People from here category. No reason to treat Canberra differently. Rathfelder (talk) 11:17, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
People seem to like the "Notable residents" sections in place articles judging by their enthuasiam for adding things to it. If the article mentions they were born there or lived there on a permanent basis (which one assumes was a personal choice they made), then I take the view they qualify to be in the "Notable resident" in that place article. So I would take the same view about the categories. I am not sure it is about how a person self-identifies because the subject of the article isn't generally writing either the article (you hope!) or the sources from which we get the info that they were born or resided. Once upon a time doing a degree in a university pretty much meant you lived there but in the online world, this is not so true any more. And many universities have multiple campuses in different cities. And many universities offered some degrees by external studies even in the pre-Internet world. So I think we should not generally equate studying at a university as proof of residence in the city in which that university is headquartered. So I would agree that a "people from a uni" category should not automatically be part of a "people from a place" category. Kerry (talk) 23:52, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

OK I've removed the "X of Y" categories from "X from Y" for the categories that I mentioned in my original post, and subsequent bullet list of examples, and similar categories for other states. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:12, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

State Library of Western Australia offering free digitisation on demand

State Library of Western Australia is offering free digitisation (subject to copyright) at your request due to the library's closure due to COVID-19. Details here! Kerry (talk) 21:21, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Help with infoboxes please

A while ago I created Budj Bim heritage areas, as the article on Budj Bim (Mt Eccles), the volcano, didn't and really wasn't meant to cover the related protected areas. After spending quite a bit of time on the history and working out exactly which areas fall under which category, I think I've got the content more or less sorted now. But coming back to the infobox templates, not having used them extensively, I am finding them somewhat confusing. Apart from Infobox UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is fairly straightforward, I found Infobox designation list (which I have used by analogy with Gondwana rainforests), but also Infobox protected area (used for some national parks), and Infobox Australian place, with type=protected (used for e.g. Iluka Nature Reserve and Angas Downs Indigenous Protected Area). So, before I go any further, can anyone advise what is the best choice for this article, which covers a World Heritage (3 areas) and National Heritage area (2 areas), and within both, some Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs)? Laterthanyouthink (talk) 00:32, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

@Laterthanyouthink: It looks OK to me. You often get situations when there are multiple infoboxes that might apply. This happens a lot with heritage sites, as a heritage-listed bridge might use "infobox bridge" or "infobox historic site". Some infoboxes play nice with others by allowing embedding. As you have discovered "infobox designation list" is a way to add heritage listings to some other infoboxes. I tend to look at the notability or at least the reason I have created the article (more likely heritage than bridge in my case). Is it notable because it is heritage listed? Is it notable because it's a bridge? That can guide the choice. Similarly the information avaialable about the topic may mean you could fill in lots of fields of one infobox but not another. Finally there is no rule limiting an article to just one infobox so you can use multiple infoboxes. In that case though, I would suggest not repeating fields in the first infobox in the second infobox, but focus just on the additional fields of the second infobox. Kerry (talk) 21:09, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for that, Kerry. I'll review it again tomorrow. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 09:37, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Andrew Probyn article

Editors have added to the Andrew Probyn article lede:

'It is widely regarded within Australia that he does not, in fact, run the press conference, a sentiment shared by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Most Australians also believe that Katherine should be able to ask a question.'

i have reverted twice - Paul foord (talk) 04:05, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

lol! sorry, that is actually quite funny, even if totally inappropriate. I'll keep an eye on that article. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 09:31, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Australian Heritage Places Inventory is no longer supported

The Australian Heritage Places Inventory (AHPI) is no longer supported by the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. This is the message I got from them when I enquired about it:

Unfortunately the Australian Heritage Places Inventory is no longer supported by the Department and has been taken down. The site was taken down as the data for the site was not being updated by all states and could not be fully validated. We apologise for the inconvenience.

For project planning purposes related to National, Commonwealth or World Heritage places we recommend that you use the Australian Heritage Database: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl or the Protected Matters Search Tool: http://environment.gov.au/epbc/protected-matters-search-tool for your information needs. For state related heritage matters we recommend you search the relevant state heritage register.

{{cite AHPI}} is only used in 82 pages, so it shouldn't be too much to fix, but there may be more page which use the database directly. --Muhandes (talk) 06:54, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

It was a pretty crappy source as far as I recall, so not a big loss and probably not something too widely used I'd suspect. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:58, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
A search prefixed with insource: will find uses of "ahpi"[12]. There's a few non-Australian uses but definitely some links (including archived heritage.gov.au links. ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 08:07, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Actress categories

Hey all, another issue has come about - what do we want to do with Category:20th-century Australian actresses and Category:21st-century Australian actresses? I'm thinking that "actress" is an old term, why not just put them into Category:21st-century Australian actors and Category:20th-century Australian actors? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 13:23, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

A little more blurry as there is a history of individuals and events defining the subjects as actresses, and some who still choose that descriptive. Your right its an old term thats slowly moving from commons use, but there are still some mountains moving way faster for now it must be how the individuals characterises themselves, not what contributors chose by peeking under skirts Gnangarra 02:33, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Nonetheless, given the almighty shitstorm that the above moves managed to cause, probably best if this conversation is had at WP:CFD rather than here. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:35, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
its not worth going that far CFD is not a place to discuss meaningful change Gnangarra 02:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
CFD is the appropriate place on WP for this discussion, not here. The change Chris is suggesting is a significant one with several implications that need to be discussed with a number of stakeholders. MurielMary (talk) 04:55, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Its waste of effort going to CFD the change wont happen because the terms actor & actress have cultural and historical positions for which there is not yet even enough industry agreement to change. CFD is the last place to resort to for anything that doesnt fit in the neat little policy boxes Gnangarra 05:12, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
I won't ever be touching categories again. Period. We just lost two fantastic contributors, TDW has retired and Gnangarra is virtually gone (he's resigned from Wikimedia Australia, I assume over the abuse he suffered on AN/I). - Chris.sherlock (talk) 17:48, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
I had my time in the sun a decade ago, and successfully fought utterly stupid category "rules" (with heaps of help from many in here) proposed by a small self-appointed group within CFD, among which was their idea to replace "Port cities" (an actual term) with "Port settlements" (a meaningless bundling of two unrelated concepts), and a separate idea to have worldwide categories called "Universities and colleges" where the latter means different things in almost every English-speaking country. CFD while in less controversial cases playing a vital role, is sadly often where good sense goes to die. As for the two contributors, the sheer scope and scale of their contributions to this place has changed it for the better across many subject areas and areas of endeavour, and I feel sad they were so ridiculously mistreated over such a trivial issue in which they were only participants in conversations. Drama sucks the life out of this place and everyone in it - which in part accounts for my own reduced presence in recent years (along with real-world busyness). Orderinchaos 01:09, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
Concur with the above from OIC. CfD accounts for the most unpleasant and dogmatic encounters I have had on this project (even more than place name disambiguation!) and I avoid it like the plague and recommend others do the same. If I could be WP:BOLD and were given god-like powers on Wikipedia I would kill categories as a concept for all but maintenance purposes and just let Wikidata do its thing. That is a discussion for another time and place though. -- Mattinbgn (talk) 01:50, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Robert Garran FAR

I have nominated Robert Garran for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:34, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Australian women categories

Hey all, just getting a second opinion here. Category:20th-century Australian women is a non-diffusing category, which means that an article can be part of Category:20th-century Australian women and Category:20th-century Australian women writers, correct? Isn't that the whole point of a non-diffusing category? That's how I read Wikipedia:DUPCAT at any rate. Somone want to chime in here and tell me if I'm incorrect? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 07:45, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

See also User_talk:Chris.sherlock#WP:SUBCAT and User_talk:Mitch_Ames#Stop!. Mitch Ames (talk) 07:56, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
Let's discuss this here. The page states that "there is no need to take pages out of the parent category purely because of their membership of a non-diffusing subcategory." I'm trying to keep a track of 18th, 19th, 20th century women in their own categories, and get a better idea of total numbers. That's the point of a non-diffusing category, right? I do want these in both categories. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 07:58, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
In general, categories are diffused by occupation, non-diffused by gender.
Category:20th-century Australian women is a non-diffusing sub-category of Category:20th-century Australian people, which means an article can be in both of those categories ("... women" and "...people"). But Category:20th-century Australian women writers is not a non-diffusing subcat of Category:20th-century Australian women, so an article ought not be in both "... women writers" and "... women".
("... women writers" is only a non-diffusing subcat of "... writers".)
Mitch Ames (talk) 08:18, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
OK, but that category is a non-diffusing category. It's been created that way, and I find it very helpful in keeping track of articles about Australian women. I'm going to have to ask you to revert your changes, if you want it to be other than a non-diffusing category then debate this but don't change the definition of what a non-diffusing category actually is. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 09:59, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I stand by my edits and the reasons, and politely suggest that you are mistaken. I shall defer any further related edits until we get some more opinions on the matter. Mitch Ames (talk) 10:05, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I appreciate your civility in this matter. I am happy to bow to consensus also, interested to hear from others. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 11:18, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
Being male, female, or some other descriptive is not a defining characteristic of a writer. The defining characteristics of writers are ficton, non fiction thats divided into specific genera. Additional characteristics are by audience, under pseudonym, by publishers, by formats, and thats assuming a journalist can also be a writer. @Mitch Ames: you are sailing close to the pointy end there because there are no mistakes just differences of opinion, everyone must work equally towards the communities consensus. Gnangarra 11:12, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Mitch's inevitable justification for making mass edits that simply don't make sense and cannot be justified is that someone hadn't pre-emptively thought that he might run his bot over a category tree and marked categories as non-diffusing where appropriate. It seems strange to me that the first time I think I've ever seen him affirmatively use his own judgement in a category issue that didn't first involve the reversion of his incorrect bot edits is him randomly deciding that a category that had been marked as non-diffusing lest he felt like running his bot over that tree, as per his perennial demand, is only non-diffusing over the parts of the category tree that he wasn't interested in running his bot over. The notion of whether it should logically be a non-diffusing category is a reasonable question that would necessitate an actual discussion, but Mitch's logic for declaring a non-diffusing category to not apply to his bot is absurd. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:20, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Category:20th-century Australian women is non-diffusing with regard to Category:20th-century Australian people; similarly, Category:20th-century Australian women writers is non-diffusing with regard to Category:20th-century Australian writers, not with regard to "Category:20th-century Australian women". Consequently, and to answer the OP's opening question: if someone is in "Category:20th-century Australian women writers", she shouldn't be in "Category:20th-century Australian women" per WP:SUBCAT. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:46, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
@Michael Bednarek: I don't see anything in WP:SUBCAT that would support that interpretation. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:13, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
Paragraph 3: "Apart from certain exceptions (i.e. non-diffusing subcategories, see below), an article should be categorised as low down in the category hierarchy as possible, without duplication in parent categories above it." The exception doesn't apply as the categories in question are not non-diffusing with regard to each other. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:22, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
So, there's actually no basis whatsoever for claiming that the categories are not non-diffusing with regard to each other when they're clearly marked as non-diffusing, and you're attempting to stretch something that says nothing of the sort to what you wish it said. If you can't make an argument that policy tells you to do what you want to do (because it objectively does not say that), you need to come up with a rational argument for it, not imagine that policy says something it doesn't and hope no one checks. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:37, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
Michael Bednarek What you quoted agrees with what I have stated and disproves what you just wrote! The exception it speaks about is non-diffusing categories, which is what the category in question is! - Chris.sherlock (talk) 08:57, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
Per WP:DUPCAT: if the pages also belong to other subcategories that do cause diffusion [e.g. "... Australian women writers" is a diffusing subcat of "...Australian women"], then they will not appear in the parent category [e.g. "... Australian women"] directly. ...
Also WP:DUPCAT: Note that some categories can be non-diffusing on some parents, and diffusing on others. For example, Category:British women novelists [or "...Australian women writers"] is a non-diffusing sub-category of Category:British novelists ["...Australian writers"], but it is a diffusing subcategory of Category:Women novelists by nationality [or "... Australian women"].
Just because a subcategory is non-diffusing of one parent (as is the case here) does not mean that it (or its parent or children) is non-diffusing of all parents. The "non-diffusion" only applies for the explicitly stated subcategory of the explicitly stated parent ("...women" is a non-diffusing subcat of "...people" in this case). Mitch Ames (talk) 12:44, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
A novelist is a sepcialist group of writers because one can be writer without writing a novel so the comparison is invalid. As the category is needed as a non diffusing category, you need to provide a method to address that need first. The policy is if policy is getting in the way of writing the encyclopedia then the policy can be ignored or changed. Rather than banging a drum on diffusing first address the need originally expressed. The solution may lie in having it as maintenance category Gnangarra 14:34, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
I disagree that "...Australian women writers" is needed as a non diffusing category of "...Australian women". However if such a non-diffusing category were required, there is already a well-defined methodology in WP:DUPCAT - tag the {{non-diffusing subcategory}} (e.g. "...Australian women writers") as non-diffusing of the desired parent ("...Australian women") and tag the parent ("...Australian women") as {{all included}}. I haven't applied these templates myself because I do not think that they are necessary; in particular I do not think that "writers" (and artists etc) are subsets which have some special characteristic of interest. I suggest that the onus of adding those templates is on those who think that they should appear, given that they are an exception to the general process of diffusion. Mitch Ames (talk) 23:23, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
  • You are trying to make the left shoe fit the right foot, being a 20th century Australian woman writer is not an occupation, nor is it a defining characteristic, or subset of 20th century Australians by occupation... there are people who wrote especially for women and or about women in various magazines, those writers were of all genders. 20th century Australian woman writers are a subset of the 20th century Australian women, and 20th century Australian women by occupation. Gnangarra 10:24, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
We don't have Category:20th-century Australian women by occupation, but perhaps we should. It might be prudent to wait until after the current diffusion-or-not discussion is resolved, to avoid complicating matters. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
women writers is in the wrong structure at the moment. Clearing that and re looking at the two trees might actually resolve the issue. Gnangarra 14:34, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
Gnangarra should we just do away with the subcategories altogether? It seems to me that the Australian 20th century women writers, etc should not exist at all, rather we make it two categories, Category:20th-century Australian women and Category:20th-century Australian writers. Would that resolve the structure issue? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 20:42, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
Removing the categorories "... Australian women writers" would certainly resolve the original disagreement, and would be consistent with WP:EGRS#General, which says Do not create categories that are a cross-section of a topic with ... gender ... unless these characteristics are relevant to the topic. - I don't think that gender is relevant to "writer". Mitch Ames (talk) 23:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
In that case, I think we have a way forward! I’ll get this done tonight. Thanks Mitch. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 00:36, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
@Gnangarra: could you offer a specific example of what you think the category tree should look like, including which subcats are non-diffusing of which parents. As you say, a different structure might resolve the issue. Mitch Ames (talk) 23:25, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Mitch Ames, Gnangarra, JarrahTree, The Drover's Wife - I have removed quite a few of the categories, if one of you is an admin could you delete the empty categories? Just want to thank you all for your thoughtful comments in all of this, and for finding a great solution to this thorny issue! - Chris.sherlock (talk) 13:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Mitch Ames, Gnangarra, JarrahTree, The Drover's Wife, we have a major issue developing. It appears a few uninvolved parties have decided that we, as a bunch of Australians, don't know how to structure categories around Australia. They have been reverting the changes we agreed on. Can I get some help when you get a chance? - Chris.sherlock (talk) 14:06, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
Ok, now I’m getting harassed by User:DuncanHill, who is attempting to start a revert war. If anyone wants to step in, it would be appreciated. I really don’t want to interact with that guy, he has been horrid to engage with from the very start and personally hates me to the point where it is impossible to deal with him. In fact, I have told him I want nothing to do with him and I asked him some robe ago not to post to my user talk page as he tends to harass me - I’m fairly certain he has gotten involved because he has my user talk page on his watch list and is doing this just to needle me. The point being is he will be quite happy to unravel all our food work. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 14:14, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
I'm not an Australian but I'd point out that you are now one of the few (only?) major omissions from the set of national categories in Category:21st-century women writers. Emptying and deleting Category:21st-century Australian women writers seems a strange move to make. I was about to create the category myself to fill this odd gap (for Lou Drofenik who is on my watchlist, who appeared on the list today because the category had been removed with the cryptic edit summary "fix cats" and the addition of a duplicate of a category already present) until I discovered that it existed, non-empty but labelled as about to be deleted because empty. I suspect that it will be re-created repeatedly by well-meaning editors who see that hierarchy and don't know why it doesn't exist. PamD 22:28, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
Agree with you (PamD) that Category:20th-century Australian women writers etc is a subcategory of Category:20th-century women writers and should not be emptied / deleted with minimal consultation Hugo999 (talk) 02:22, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
I think this was a predictable mess that probably wasn't very helpful. There were two better options here: either diffuse the general category, or if you really strongly want to keep the general category non-diffusing, tell Mitch to jump in the lake, given that his contributions are rarely, if ever, helpful to creating sensible category structures and his argument for his edits this time was, as usual, absurd. The ill-thought-out compromise attempt was probably the worst option, and Mitch being keen on category structures that are generally agreed to be bad by uninvolved editors as long as they don't trigger his bot is a regular occurrence, so shouldn't have been taken as useful encouragement. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:46, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
  • I wasnt advocating removal of Australian women writers, just that it wasnt part of the australians by occupation tree. I understand the need for these categories as practical collections to help address the gender bais. Structure of Category Australian people --> Australian women ---> Women who are writers is fine. What isnt Australians by occupation ---> Australian writers --- Australian women writers because women writers isnt an occupation. This would make the category non diffusing as its the end of the chain from Australian people. Longterm I recognise that Wikipedia really is going to have to address the binary gender assignment categories, and ask why we are creating women categories but not a corresponding men category and why no LGBTI+ categories in that structure. As for the issue Drover's raised that is something that needs to be community addressed separately. Gnangarra 02:26, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Wow, came here to find out why Jess Hill (writer) had been removed from the cat of 21st century Australian women writers to find that the entire cat has been emptied on the basis of a 3 day discussion involved a handful of editors. As per Hugo999 and PamD's comments above, this is a significant change to the structure of Australian biographies on WP and shouldn't/can't be decided in this manner. There's no evidence here of consultation with the Australian literature project, or GenderGap, or Women in Red, or the wider group of editors specialising in categorisation at "Categories for discussion" - all of these groups are stakeholders and deserve to be involved in this discussion. Suggest reverting everything back to the way it was 4 days ago and then Chris can put a suggestion up at "categories for discussion" and have a proper, full discussion with all interested parties present. In the meantime, I'll put Hill back into that category. MurielMary (talk) 03:13, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Wow it wasnt Chris's decision, its normal for a community to discuss how articles are structured. In this Case there was one editor tearing apart the Australian category tree it came to Australian editors for help, because this group of people have delt with the user in question for a long time. As for CFD its a waste of time and the wrong place to address wider issues around user behaviour. Gnangarra 03:44, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
I think the better point here is that our failure to address Mitch's behaviour head-on instead of just tiptoeing around it has inadvertently lead to Chris, in trying to deal with Mitch himself, winding up in this absolute clusterfuck of a situation. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:03, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I am not happy about a process which led to the emptying of a series of categories, and then to the deletion of the category (Category:20th-century Australian women writers), a process which lasted a little less than three days, and failed to notify the many interested parties (for instance members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red, Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian literature, Category:20th-century women writers (where it was a subpage) and which finally consisted of a "consensus" of approximately five people. Is it a appropriate that this apparent consensus should outweigh the "consensus" of the hundreds of wikipedians who, for a period of over three years, have used the category (and other related categories which are now being so assiduously depopulated.) Is the plan to remove all "women" categories? ( and if not why not when it is deemed ok for Category:20th-century Australian women writers.) The purpose of categories is to help the reader. In general the more granular the category, the better. And importantly, the use of the subcategorisation of human categories by sex, allows the possibility of easy counting by sex, which is important for the assessment of gender imbalances, whether real or as the result of bias. For those of us who wish to count women, gender is relevant to any human categorisation. Like MurielMary, Hugo999, and PamD, I believe various projects should have been notified and the issue discussed in WP:CFD. MargaretRDonald (talk) 04:24, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@MargaretRDonald: This mess has occurred from a whole sprawling series of misunderstandings. If you read above, there was no "consensus of approximately five people"; there was a dispute between Chris and Mitch Ames over a different category issue, Chris proposed the category removal as a solution Mitch would accept (and he did), and Chris acted hastily in rolling it out thinking that he'd solved that problem. No one is insistent about purging these categories (no one even gave it much thought apart from those two trying to solve a completely different problem), and I can safely say that it's highly unlikely anyone will persist with it now it's obvious it's accidentally created an even bigger problem. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:37, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
@The Drover's Wife: Thank you for elucidating the fact that there was no consensus. However, for two people to decide between them to remove a series of categories, remains an inappropriate (and outrageous) process for making such far-reaching change. MargaretRDonald (talk) 04:46, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Agree with Margaret. Regardless of arguments over user behaviour, and regardless of whether "anyone will persist with it", the outcome is that one editor has removed a number of categories without due process, consultation or consensus. Can we have everything restored to what it was 4 days ago and then have a reasonable discussion with all parties concerned getting time to express their position? MurielMary (talk) 04:51, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
@MurielMary: I think that sounds like an excellent idea. This desperately needs the content dispute to be put to bed and then for time to be given for cooler heads to prevail. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:53, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
When WP:WikiProject Women writers was created in 2014, we had a lot of discussions on the WikiProject talkpage regarding women writers' categories. We formed an understanding regarding the importance of making them non-diffusing categories based on a media expose regarding Category:American women novelists who had been ghettoized (removed from) Category:American novelists. At the time, there were multiple academics following our talkpage who contacted me off-wiki stating how important this categorization work was for their research as no one else on the net had done something like this before. So, as regarding "women writers", please retain categories such as Category:20th-century Australian women writers, and make it a non-diffusing category, which to our WikiProject means, please include all names that are in this category in a higher non-gendered category such as Category:20th-century Australian writers and/or Category:20th-century Australian novelists, etc. I'm not sure how other women's WikiProject handle this issue, e.g. WP:WikiProject Women scientists, WP:WikiProject Women artists, etc. but on the whole, I support more discussion and less deletion in this area. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:45, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
That’s what I did originally, actually, but Mitch reverted me and told me it was wrong so When it seemed a compromise had been discussed, I thought it would be ok to make the change. And in fact, despite Mitch being wrong about diffusing categories, he wasn’t wrong about the categories being discriminatory. The irony is that if you take the set of 20th century Australian women, and then take the set of Australian writers, and then take the intersection of the two sets, you get Australians who are female and who are writers. However, Rosie, given the fallout from this I’ve decided that in light of my error in judgement I will never touch categories ever again. I feel they are discriminatory and not salvageable. Others can update them but I will never modify a category ever again. That means when I create Australian articles, someone else will need to add them. We lost two editors now over this from abuse from non-Australians, and I refuse to support a system that classifies a person’s worth by their gender. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 18:20, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
P.S. the category system is antiquated and stupid. Wikidata does things correctly - a person’s gender is an attribute of their person, not their grouping classification. Any researcher who wants to vet the data you mentioned can reach out to someone in Wikidata and get a basic query to be run - with a bit of effort they can do this themselves. The entire reason for these categories seems to completely obsolete.
This is a data science problem resolved in the 70s. Wikipedia has a limited heirachical categorisation system that has hard built in limits. What we need is a relational system consisting of attributes, keys and constraints between the keys to link the records together. Which is the problem Wikidata solves as that’s exactly what it does. Ironically, shoehorning people into a hierarchical structure literally discriminated against them, so Wikipedia has an obsolete system that by its very design causes ghettoisation problems. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 18:41, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
but Mitch reverted me and told me it was wrong — The category edits that I made were removal of duplication in parents of diffusing subcategories, per WP:SUBCAT. In each case "women" was not the diffusing subcategory - "writers" or "artists" was. Example: [13][14] - Category:20th-century Australian women artists is a diffusing (on "artists") sub-category of Category:20th-century Australian women. I thought I'd made that clear in my posts above, and in User_talk:Chris.sherlock#WP:SUBCAT and User_talk:Mitch_Ames#Stop!. Mitch Ames (talk) 23:40, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

On a slight tangent, I notice there are two categories: Australian nurses and Australian women nurses with almost identical populations, with the few differences probably accidental. Should they be consolidated ? and if there's ever a notable male nurse to start a new cat. Doug butler (talk) 21:25, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Would Chris, or anyone willing to help him, please revert the removal of these categories? This can probably still be done with rollback, and it will put the matter to rest, for now at least. SarahSV (talk) 00:20, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Now that the dust has settled, and Category:20th-century Australian writers, Category:20th-century Australian women artists, etc have been repopulated, and given that Michael Bednarek [15] and BrownHairedGirl [16] apparently agree with my edits, and that Chris.sherlock no longer objects [17], can we consider the matter closed, and shall I continue on with the removal of the articles from the parent category (Australian women) when the article is in a subcategory (e.g Australian women writers) that is diffusing on occupation (writers) of that parent? (Example [18]) Mitch Ames (talk) 09:45, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree in principle for technical reasons, but object on moral grounds. We now have the absurd situation where a woman can be categorised by only her occupation. I find this to be unhelpful, and have decided to boycott categories altogether (I won’t change, add or remove them on any articles. New articles I create will have to be categorised by someone else. Wikidata does this better anyway, I will spend my limited time on that project). - Chris.sherlock (talk) 10:02, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
I'd suggest you dont, your actions are in dispute and that its best if you recognise that and back away. Come back in 2 or 3 years when people are better able to discuss the matter. Gnangarra 11:33, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
@Gnangarra: Your statement that "I'd suggest you dont, your actions are in dispute" is ambiguous in that it could apply to my proposal to remove articles from parent categories or Chris.sherlock's to boycott categories and spend time on Wikidata. The indentation implies that you are responding to Chris, but the edit summary implies that you are replying to me. Please clarify who you are addressing. Mitch Ames (talk) 13:08, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
WP:DUPCAT and WP:SUBCAT are not moral imperatives; they are long-standing guidelines that are overwhelmingly observed. Australians who are categorised by their profession, e.g. Category:Australian writers, ought not to be categorised also as Category:Australian people. The same applies to women: Category:20th-century Australian women writers ought not to be categorised also as Category:20th-century Australian women. Whether these intersecting categories are needed is another question (I think not). If people want to change the whole system of intersecting categories to a perfectly flat system, WP:CAT or WP:PROPS are probably better suited than this notice board. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:44, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
I have already asked the question at Wikipedia talk:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality#Women Writers. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 13:16, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Leighton Battery and Category:Recipients of Engineers Australia engineering heritage markers

I was thinking that Leighton Battery probably should be added to Category:Recipients of Engineers Australia engineering heritage markers, but strictly speaking that may not be correct. Possibly:

  • that category should be renamed to broaden its scope, or
  • separate subcategories (of a suitably named parent cat) should be created for the different types of awards.

See Engineers Australia § Engineering Heritage Recognition Program for the history and categories of awards. I'll have look in detail later, but any suggestions are welcome. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:52, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Actually the "engineering heritage markers" is sufficiently broad to cover all the awards. Mitch Ames (talk) 02:55, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

50,000 Destubbing Challenge Focus of the Week

Hello there. This is an invitation to join the 50,000 Destubbing Challenge Focus of the Week. £250 (c. $310) is being given away in May, June and July with £20 worth of prizes to give away every week for most articles destubbed. Each week there is a different region of focus, including the last week dedicated to Australia and Oceania, though half the prize will still be rewarded for articles on any subject. There's a potential £120 to be won in total for destubbing on any subject or region of your choice. Sign up if you want to contribute at least one of the weeks or support the idea! † Encyclopædius 12:01, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

RfC - Should Sydney have a montage?

An RfC has been started at Talk:Sydney about having a montage in the infobox. The discussion may be found here. --AussieLegend (✉) 05:32, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Filing a request to a open data official for the numbers to use in COVID-19 pandemic in Australia

Many countries release numbers of cases and deaths by age cohort, and Wikipedians incorporate them into our articles, e. g. check the lower part in the Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Italy medical cases. Others (e.g., Russia) don't release anything like that, but Australia is kinda unique because it only release charts but not numbers. Could Australian Wikipedians please write a letter to a Chief Data Officer or some other official so that those numbers could be released? Ain92 (talk) 14:33, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

The charts from the Department of Health are derived using data from the NNDSS (National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System), and you can obtain this data for COVID-19 or any other notifiable disease using their summary tables. --Canley (talk) 23:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Unfortunately I couldn't find any death numbers in the NNDSS excerpts, so that doesn't allow to calculate the lethality by age cohort. Ain92 (talk) 10:12, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Do you need the data in a tabular format (i.e. for web scraping)? --Canley (talk) 09:45, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
  • I need it in any digital format that could be copied, regardless whether it's a table on the web, CSV, XLSX or JSON. Ain92 (talk) 14:53, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
  • It was very silly, but I found out that some diagarms on the discussed website are actually interactive and the numbers are there, I extracted the numbers and added them at Coronavirus disease 2019#Prognosis (unfortunately don't have time for the Australian page, already spending too much on updating that table). Ain92 (talk) 13:48, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Public Transport in Canberra

This article has been renamed Transport in Canberra without any previous discussion. I disagree with the move as the article only cover public transport and not transport as a whole. I have started a discussion about this on the talk page. I am looking forward to some further discussion on this. Fleet Lists (talk) 06:53, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Glenbrook Tunnel

I'm not sure that the recent splitting of Glenbrook Tunnel has been handled correctly. The edit history now at Glenbrook Tunnel should be at Glenbrook Tunnel (1892).--Grahame (talk) 05:02, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

And the Wikidata item will need to be sorted out too. Oronsay (talk) 05:25, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm on it. Graham87 07:12, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
All done, including the talk page and the Wikidata item, the latter of which was just moved automatically as a result of my history merge. Graham87 07:23, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for that, Graham87. I've now created the additional Wikidata items. Oronsay (talk) 18:38, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

"Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land"

Should this be discussed in one of the articles about Australian indigenous people? The phrase is common among the Greens, the left on university campuses and some Aboriginal activists, but is completely rejected by the LNP, the ALP and the majority of voters in the electorate. PAustin4thApril1980 (talk) 10:44, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

It's more complex than the implied political bias, if it can be done in a neutral manner rather than like this dismissive post it should be. Note that this is the theme of the 2020 NAIDOC week so its usage is wider than "some Aboriginal activists". https://www.naidoc.org.au/news/2020-naidoc-week-theme-announced-always-was-always-will-be Gnangarra 12:03, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
There are plenty of sources that the phrase is used by those in favour of Aboriginal rights, however, I can't find any for the latter half of the claim? Catiline52 (talk) 12:14, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
@Gnangarra: The notion of Aboriginal "ownership" of the land being unacceptable to the Coalition and the electorate at large is mentioned by Malcolm Turnbull in his book on the 1999 Australian republic referendum. Its why there was so much anguish about the proposed preamble text: "Aboriginal kinship" with the land was acceptable to the LNP Howard Government to put to the people. Aboriginal "ownership" of Australia was NOT. — Preceding unsigned comment added by PAustin4thApril1980 (talk • contribs) 12:54, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Are you suggesting any specific and properly sourced changes to specific articles? This page and Wikipedia talk pages more broadly aren't general discussion boards. Nick-D (talk) 02:12, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Draft AfC for Australian natural history film maker

I have twice had this AfC declined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:David_Corke. The subject is my father, and this is declared on my talk page but I understand it is considered "poor form" to write about family members. The draft page has a talk entry saying it is supported by this project, thank you. I have worked hard to improve the language removing NPOV etc. I would be very grateful for any help to get this over the line, or rewrite it from the source material here and submit it themselves.Peter.corke (talk) 22:46, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi Peter.corke. I've only had the briefest look, but will just make these comments in passing... There's quite a bit of content which is completely uncited. A couple of the citations I looked at do refer to the topic mentioned, but do not specifically mention David Corke, such as the Burke and Wills Society. (I see that their History page mentions a Richard Cork, coincidentally, I presume?) The transcript of the red kangaroo's birth films mentions David Corke as the last in a group of five, but does not mention any awards that I can see, which you have added as unsourced material to the citation. Also, the relative lack of hits returned by Google rather puts in question his notability by Wikipedia standards... I am not a page reviewer, but from what I know, this doesn't look like an article which is going to be passed in the near future, sorry. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 10:52, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

I have almost the same number of citations as there are lines in the article. It would help to know what parts of the article still need citations. For B&W Society see Commitee page. For red kangaroo, not sure what you mean by "last in a group of five", see 18:51 for credits related to camera and editing, mentions of awards can be found at IMDB but from what I've read WP doesn't consider IMDB to be authoritative. We're talking the 60s and 70s and so much from that era is sadly beyond the reach of Google.Peter.corke (talk) 10:01, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Sydney infobox image RfC

Please comment at Talk:Sydney#RfC: What image should appear in the infobox at Sydney?. Johnuniq (talk) 01:23, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

categories: People of the Australian frontier wars, People associated with massacres of Indigenous Australians

I recently created Category:People of the Australian frontier wars, and I notice that we also have Category:People associated with massacres of Indigenous Australians, and that the latter's parent Category:Massacres of Indigenous Australians is a subcategory of Category:Australian frontier wars.

Is Category:Massacres of Indigenous Australians correctly a child of Category:Australian frontier wars? I.e. are we saying that all massacres of Indigenous Australians are necessarily part of the frontier wars?

If that is the case, then Category:People associated with massacres of Indigenous Australians should probably be a subcategory of Category:People of the Australian frontier wars. Possibly the two should be merged, but presumably there could some people associated with the frontier wars but not any specific massacres of Indigenous Australians - including those people associated with massacres of non-Indigenous people during the frontier wars.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:43, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Is "of" the same as "associated with"? To me "of" means you are a part of the thing, whereas "associated with" is a much more loose relationship with the thing. For example, someone that took part in the frontier wars is clearly "of" and also "associated with", whereas a subject matter expert on the frontier wars, or judges and lawyers involved in cases about the frontier wars, are not "of" but only "associated with". Betterkeks (talk) 05:33, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Likewise, not every event that is a part of the frontier wars is also a massacre – or part of a massacre. Betterkeks (talk) 05:42, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
"associated with" categories are inherently bad (e.g. subjective and grouping dissimilar people such as victims and perpetrators). Some "People of" categories are not much better. The people and the topic will generally be linked by normal inter-article links. DexDor (talk) 05:52, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
That massacres category should not be under the war category (e.g. what if there was a massacre in a different time period?), but it would be reasonable to have Catrel links between them. DexDor (talk) 05:52, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Frontier wars is a loaded topic, there is a big discrepancy between War and Massacres, was the poisoning of wells with cyanide part of a war, a massacre, or simple racism. The use of war tends to glorify and justify the European settlers actions against Indigenous communities we see the use of combatants, battles, Australia was not America. Frontier wars is political spin thats come about to counter the rise of Indigenous rights. Then where does the stolen generations site are they prisoners of this war that started before the massacres finished. There been no peace settlement, theres been an apology and theres the Uluru agreement, what about Mabo, and land rights. There is no clear acceptance its divides the academic community, its not a universally accepted concept as only some historians use that classification its claim sits with John Howards white washing attempts when prime minister through the support of a single historian to rewrite history. Its not a category structure we should even be using, we definitely shouldnt be making decisions on what to include or exclude based on whether its called a massacre or something else. What about Noonkanbah would that not be part of a war that started 200 odd years ago and has never stopped, Indigenous people dying in prison and on the streets every day we shouldnt be belittling them by denying that they too are fighting a war. Gnangarra 13:43, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Some background: I created both Category:People of the Australian frontier wars and Category:People associated with massacres of Indigenous Australians (not at the same time) because I wanted to subcategorize the people distinctly from the events (wars/massacres), which I still think generally is a valid subcategorization (if the parent is a valid category).

I agree with Betterkeks and DexDor that "associated with" is vague - possibly it should be split into "victims" and "perpetrators" (I haven't check whether all the existing articles can easily be divided thus) - suggestions welcome - but in any case that is largely independent of the issue of whether "massacres" are necessarily a subcategory of "frontier wars". The category name "People of the Australian frontier wars" is for consistency with other subcategories of Category:People by war.

Hmains may care to comment, having put Category:Massacres of Indigenous Australians into Category:Australian frontier wars in the first place. [19]

Frontier wars is a loaded topic ... Its not a category structure we should even be using — @Gnangarra: do you want to raise a WP:CFD to delete the categories "Australian frontier wars" and "People of the Australian frontier wars"? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:35, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

why divide a discussion the question has been asked about the categories, who decides a person is/was aprt of the the wars or massacres when the experts are divided as what if anything is the frontier war, its a label that is very risky and depending on the source one that will get added and removed frequently enough that edit wars ensue. Gnangarra 12:47, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't like the term Frontier War for many reasons. Exactly where is this "frontier"? And what the Macquarie Dictionary has under "war" doesn’t seem right to me either. These aren't the right words to name the (terrible and shameful) stuff that exists IMO. Betterkeks (talk) 14:18, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
why divide a discussion the question has been asked about the categories — The original question was whether the "massacres" and thus "people associated with" them should be subcategorized under "frontier wars" and "people of...". However if "frontier wars" is not a category that we should be using at all (because it is ill-defined), and a CfD resolved that it should be deleted, the original question becomes irrelevant. Mitch Ames (talk) 23:41, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
@Mitch Ames: No, they should not IMO be subcategorized because (1) "frontier wars" is not a category we should be using, and (2) "associated with" is a superset of "of" whereas "massacre" is a subset of the contentious term "frontier wars". Betterkeks (talk) 01:49, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
"frontier wars" is not a category we should be using — does anyone feel strongly enough about this to propose deletion of those categories via WP:CFD? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:14, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Thinking this through, What if Frontier wars and Massacres are two separate category streams, when its agreed by all sources that a massacre was part of the frontier wars then it sits in both streams. With that we then have a pathway to also cover things like Hoddle street, port arthur..... Gnangarra 13:00, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
We could have independent category trees - in particular removing Category:Massacres of Indigenous Australians from Category:Australian frontier wars - but I'm not sure of the relevance of Hoddle Street massacre or Port Arthur massacre (Australia), assuming that's what you were referring to - they are already in Category:Massacres in Australia (via Category:Mass shootings in Australia), and (so far as I'm aware) are not "of Indigenous Australians" or related to frontier wars. Mitch Ames (talk) 13:31, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
ok thats the structure I was referring to massacres in australia. Though I do wonder if all massacres are mass shootings, lots of assumptions that one is also the other with that as well. Perhaps we spend too much time trying to make things fit where they dont rather than accepting they overlap instead. Gnangarra 06:19, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Ashbury, New South Wales

I have just deleted some badly formatted, controversial self promotion from this article. He had also added something to the talk page where I added a heading Self Promotion where he asked for comments on his added material. I am looking for comments from others about this.Fleet Lists (talk) 23:02, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Tony Rodi (talk · contribs) has since thanked me and has asked me for assistance on my user page (not my talk page) without creating an item heading. His formatting problems on this article go back some years see [20] in 2018 when I also had to do some sorting out to get the article back into an acceptable format. I am not really in a position to answer him. Can anyone help him please?Fleet Lists (talk) 01:23, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
Looks like a sound decision to remove the content, one notable person needs a citation for their connection to Ashbury. The section Heritage Architecture should really be removed and some minor aspect included in the other parts of the article. The section on heritage places says "a number of heritage listed places..." but it lists only one, this needs work on expanding to include more places even if they dont have articles heritage places are sufficient notable for listing, if they are private residence the article could just xxx private residences are list of federal/state/lga heritage registers. With regards to the User suggest he writes in the broader topics on the different styles, the feature spoken about occur in more than just Ashbury as an example I shot a residence(personal connection) in Lakemba that has the same features as it was built in the same period. Those features and styling weren't confined to Sydney, nor just NSW. Good luck in redirecting his knowledge to more suitable areas. Gnangarra 01:36, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Further

I note that Tony Rodi (talk · contribs) has close links to Ashbury - ie, a 2 second google search is all you need. I'm posting here to update my edits on a few other articles to cleanup Toni Rodi's contributions. It's just a note, in case other editors are interested.

There's no evidence provided of his notability in real life (not saying there isn't out the, but it hasn't bee provided - who knows?), however, his edits have shoe-horned himself into some notable articles such as Circular Quay and Jack Mundey. Including his own architectural conceptual drawings. My edits have cleaned up his contributions to make them in-line with WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:SPS, WP:COI (essentially, I've removed a lot of his stuff). Circular Quay diffs and Jack Mundey diffs. User:Toni Rodi inserted himself into Jack Mundey's article leading up to the latter's death which received a lot of publicity (and page views). It's always a shame for WP when a biography has bad quality content and the subject passes away...the article's get a lot of exposure. --Merbabu (talk) 00:52, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

And, I've just removed more Tony Rodi badly referenced self-promotion from Neville Gruzman's bio. --Merbabu (talk) 01:17, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

City of Canterbury-Bankstown

Prior to 2016 Bankstown and Canterbury were separate local government areas. There has been a continual problem since then using the above name and 'Bankstown-Canterbury Council' Hopefully I have sorted most of that out now. But there are a few templates which appear to be duplicating information and where I propose to redirect two of them to the third one which still needs to have some information added to make it complete, which I will be doing in the next few days. I have opened a discussion on this at Talk:City of Canterbury-Bankstown. Any comments welcome. Fleet Lists (talk) 07:22, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

I think it is now all City of Canterbury-Bankstown even Template:City of Canterbury-Bankstown suburb map with all articles which contain that map having had the links changed so no longer relying on the redirect. Even some changes to wikidata. Any comments welcomeFleet Lists (talk) 06:54, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Peter V'landys

Could someone look at the newbie account adding nicknames bestowed by comedians everywhere?? Thanks Bumbubookworm (talk) 11:35, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Fiery Creek (Victoria)

I have been looking at family history and found references to Fiery Creek, so of course came to Wikipedia. There seems to be no current place by that name in Victoria (Queensland and New Zealand may be just as messy, so lets do one first), and no links to either Fiery Creek or Fiery Creek, Victoria in English Wikipedia, however about 12 articles mention it. Streatham, Victoria says the post office was Fiery Creek from 1 Sep 1844 until 1 January 1854 (so could receive a redirect), but Beaufort, Victoria claims to have been supported by the gold diggings and doesn't mention Streatham. To add to the confusion, there appears to be a creek which rises in the forest east of Mount Buangor and flows broadly south to enter the eastern side of Lake Bolac. It appears to be represented by two wikidata items: Fiery Creek (Q21960908) in the middle and Fiery Creek (Q21910960) near the mouth. They have different Geonames and GNS IDs, and both have (probably generated) articles in Swedish and Cebuano, so it's not easy to merge the Wikidata items.

Does anyone have experience or advice on how to proceed? I have not identified whether there was only one Fiery Creek gold diggings, or several, and how far along the creek they were. I have not tried to determine if there is enough reference material for an article on the diggings, but there could be based on Trove hits. Should a new article be on the creek or the historic gold mining. I don't think the area is still mined at all? --Scott Davis Talk 09:45, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Fiery Creek (Victoria) is now about the watercourse and mentions the gold diggings. I haven't tried to merge the wikidata items for the upper and lower reaches yet. --Scott Davis Talk 06:25, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
It seems the term "Fiery Creek Diggings" is the way they used to refer to it, so I'd suggest that as an article title.. And there are a number of towns like Raglan, Beaufort, Ararat etc that appear to have been part of it (not sure if they pre-existed the gold rush or came into existence because of it) so it appears to be spread over a fairly large geographic area (in the same way as we talk about the Bowen Basin and coal mining today). This source specifically says that Beaufort was originally known as Fiery Creek. Kerry (talk) 07:23, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
This proclamation describes precisely the boundaries of the gold field for the purposes of the Victorian Government. I presume mining that took place within this proclaimed area was subject to some kind of specific regulation. Of course there may have been subsequent proclamations that extended it, but at least it's something. Kerry (talk) 07:30, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Kerry. I think Beaufort pre-existed the gold rush, and gold was found near Beaufort about two years before the Fiery Creek rush a little further north. I'm less certain of Raglan town. Fiery Creek itself crosses the Western Highway about half way between Beaufort and Buangor. As far as I have seen, the goldfields were all north (upstream) of the highway. I was contacted by a remote cousin who now lives in Queensland who is descended from the family that stayed in Victoria after the gold rush. --Scott Davis Talk 14:21, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
This and this suggest that although there were pastoral runs in the Beaufort area, the town itself developed in response to the gold rush. Kerry (talk) 00:33, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Hospitals that have been identified as being worked upon by paid COI editors

Please note that there is a discussion at: - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#St_John_of_God_health_care_system

Which basically involves:

As the discussion so far has involved editors who are not regular Australian editing community editors, and it seems to be simply a dialogue between the COI challengers and actual creators - there is potential for each of these articles to be rebuilt from material that removed any PR material -

If any one is interested - please help - as these sort of issues often move into redirects with little understanding of local context

In most cases - historically established locations are easiy traceable on Trove - such as https://trove.nla.gov.au/result?q=st+john+of+god+subiaco - establishments post trove cutoff requires a bit more research.

So whether this is a FYI or a call to editing, up to who ever feels like helping. Thanks if you do. JarrahTree 08:43, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

How do you solve a problem like Teviot Range?

The article Teviot Range has existed since 2009 and has listed a number of mountains (Flinders Peak etc) within it. To cut a long story short, it's wrong. The Teviot Range is much further to the southiwest and those mountains don't form part of it (see this map). Now I don't think it was written as a hoax as it does contain citations which support the claims it makes. It seems there is a widespread misunderstanding about where the Teviot Range is. It's so widespread that I asked the Qld Place Names team (who are the authoritative source) to double-check their coords (I have picked up errors before in the QPN so they are generally pretty helpful when I make such enquiries) but they have double-checked against their historic records and confirm their published coords are correct. So my question is what do I do to fix this mess? And I guess I am looking for some consensus on how to do it. This is what I'm thinking:

  • Since Flinders Peak Group is mentioned as an alternative name in the Treviot Range article, make that the new article title. [Easy]
  • Create a new Teviot Range stub with the correct coords. [Easy]
  • Put something on the Talk page of both articles to say "hey, something got badly confused here" etc to try to stop people re-instating the Teviot Range where it doesn't belong.
  • Seek out and fix every single link or mention of Teviot Range so it refers to the "correct" article, for which I may or may not have sufficient content in the other articles to know what they meant by "Teviot Range" (the real one or the popular-delusion one). [Hard, perhaps impossible at times]
  • Do I make some explicit statement about the confusion as part of some disambiguation hatnotes? Any thoughts on how I say that?
  • What do I do about the citations and content in the current Teviot Range article? On the one hand, a lot of the stuff about bushwalking trails etc is about the Flinders Peak area and hence correct info, but the article will be citing sources that call it Teviot Range. Do I put a note on such citations to say it uses the name Teviot Range erroneously?

Your thoughts? Kerry (talk) 07:09, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi Kerry, it looks like the confusion is not limited to wikipedia, but extends to what should be reliable sources, such as Ipswich City Council Brush tailed Rock Wallaby Plan p 7 The Teviot Range is also referred to as the Flinders Peak group That puts you in that difficult wikipedia situation of when reliable sources conflict. The problem you may run up against is that there are enough disputes about geographic names that there is a naming convention where there is a preference for colloquial usage over the official name. It seems to me that there is a risk of tedious debates about whether its an error or "local usage". It seems to me though that fundamentally though this is a disambiguation issue - whichever article the reader goes to, whether Teviot Range or Flinders Peak Group there should be a pointer to help them get where they want. Eg "This article is about the officially named range near Moogerah. For the range near Ipswich sometimes called Teviot Range, see Flinders Peak Group" and "This article is about the range near Ipswich sometimes called Teviot Range. For the officially named range near Moogerah, see Teviot Range" --Find bruce (talk) 13:19, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
@Kerry Raymond: The two Talk pages still need sorting as both refer to Flinders Peak Group article. So does Wikidata - only one entry labelled Teviot Range but linked to Flinders Peak Group article, plus ceb and sv WP articles on Teviot Range. Oronsay (talk) 21:20, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, Find Bruce and Oronsay, for your thoughts. I'll keep plugging away at it today. While it seems that there is widespread confusion in the real world, anything after 2009 may have been caused, or at least amplified, by the Wikipedia article's error. Certainly I see lots of websites that have copied the content of that article which also feed into the amplification of incorrect information. Certainly that Brush tailed rock wallaby material (publication date unclear but after 2013) appears to have taken content straight out of the lede of Wikipedia article (as it was) in relation to the Teviot Range (page 7). Yes, I do wonder if people will see material like Ipswich City Council as "reliable". It's not unreasonable to do so generally, but when it comes to place naming, the Qld Place Names database is legislated to be authoritative (which is why I have double-checked with them to confirm there was no error on their part). As for Wikidata, shrug. As for SV and CEB Wikipedia, shrug. All three platforms have pursued a strategy of quantity over quality, by casually uploaded data without having a good understanding of the data (failed to engage with any subject matter experts). I don't have the time or the enthuasiasm to fix up their mess. Wikidata is a great idea ruined by a lack of robust governance in relation to data quality. I didn't create this Teviot Range problem (nor the problems I have found in Teviot Brook and Teviot Falls which are not directly related to Teviot Range but yet another example of incorrect information that has been present from first creation, and all the work of the same contributor, suggesting there may be more problems out there in their other articles). I'm just the person who stumbled on these errors and is trying to fix it here on en.WP. Kerry (talk) 01:16, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
I've fixed up the Wikidata issues for what it's worth (which included our old "friend" the XXN-bot which added every QPN ID mentioned on the Wikipedia page). --Canley (talk) 03:25, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
@Canley: Thanks for doing that. How's your Swedish?! :-) Kerry (talk) 23:01, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

Flag of City of Perth

 – – McVahl (talk) 12:38, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Can anyone confirm the design of flag of the City of Perth?

As per Council Policy Manual, the official City of Perth flag has a red cross of Saint George on a white background with the City’s Coat-of-Arms superimposed in the centre of the cross.

A recent edit shows update on the flag in City of Perth article. Although an image from this reference used in the said article has a white disc bearing the City's coat of arms, I don't see such description in the policy manual. – McVahl (talk) 12:34, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Moving discussion to a more appropriate Wikiproject. – McVahl (talk) 12:39, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

NSW/QLD border towns

Postcodes in Australia says the following:

Three locations (Mingoola, Mungindi and Texas) straddle the NSW-Queensland border (so same town name and postcode on both sides).

However, the articles partly disagree. There's only one Mungindi article, but Mingoola is a disambiguation page for Mingoola, New South Wales and Mingoola, Queensland. Does this reflect reality, i.e. Mungindi has been gazetted as one locality and Mingoola has been gazetted as two, or is this a Wikipedia problem that needs to be resolved by merging the Mingoolas or splitting Mungindi? Also, Texas was the first article I visited — I saw that it was Texas, Queensland and that Texas, New South Wales was a redlink, so I created NSW as a redirect to QLD. But now I'm wondering if I messed up, so I'd appreciate input. I'll delete NSW if I shouldn't have created it. Nyttend (talk) 11:21, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

They are all gazetted as two places as gazetting places is done by state governments. How postcodes are allocated is an Australian Post decision and not made by any government. I note there are other communities that cross state borders but have different names on either side of the border, Wallangarra, Queensland and Jennings, New South Wales is a rural example, while Coolangatta and Tweed Heads is another one that has been much in the news lately due to the COVID-19 state border closure between them. If we look to other state borders, we have Albury, New South Wales and Wodonga, Victoria for example. There are mixed opinions about what do do about cross-border communities. Some people want them to have a single article, others do not. I am personally of the view that a state border is a significant thing (separate gazettal, separate census populations, separate laws, and separate in times of pandemic!) and I would prefer them to have separate articles (obviously talking about the other) for that reason. I note that nobody proposes to merge articles for cross-border communities with different names so I don't see that we should merge cross-border communities with the same name. If the criteria for merging is being cross-border communities for day-to-day life, then Wallangarra/Jenner, Coolangatta/Tweead Heads, Albury/Wodonga have to be part of that decision. As a technical issue, our Template:Infobox Australian place does not currently make provision for an article being in two states (so only one state is displayed in the infobox) but I guess that could be fixed but has not been when I have previously suggested it). I note we have other things like national parks that effectively cross state borders too (but again are subject to each state declaring their part to to be so and can name their side however they like). Rivers cross state boundaries too and again can be subject to different names etc (Darling River in NSW, Condamine River in Queensland). Against my own arguments for keeping them separate is the somewhat pragmatic argument for the smaller places with the same name "do we really need 2 articles for this tiny dot on the map?". It would probably be best if we came to some agreement on these things and documented it somewhere (unfortunately consensus tends to get lost in the archives of this or other Talk pages rather than summarised somewhere easy to find). Kerry (talk) 22:30, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
Oh, so there are two separate localities called "Mungindi" in that area? The article begins by saying that it's "a town and locality"; while "town" isn't particularly significant, not having a legal definition if I remember rightly, I figured that this meant it was a single gazetted locality. As far as the what-to-do, let me share a little of my experience with the USA. Americans tend to identify settlements more strongly with local governments, e.g. someone from a small satellite municipality in a large metropolitan area might identify as being from the metropolitan area when speaking with someone from far away, but that's for convenience; in uni I had a roommate who first said he was from Los Angeles, but he mentioned this because I wouldn't have heard of the municipality with which he identified, San Gabriel. Thus the Wikipedia articles are based on the local council. (The analogous situation would be if we had a single article covering both Mildura and Rural City of Mildura.) Consequently, there are separate articles when the locations have their own governments, e.g. Union City, Indiana and Union City, Ohio, but when a locality doesn't have any existence other than appearing on maps, we've done a single article, e.g. Glenrio, New Mexico and Texas. Of course, most US states have two overlapping tiers of local government (and in many states, there are large areas with only one of those tiers), so maybe a Canadian comparison would be better, since I get the impression they have a lot of single-tier municipalities like Australian local councils. Nyttend backup (talk) 05:18, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
@Nyttend: Just commenting on Texas, New South Wales, it is a locality (as defined by NSW it is a rural "suburb" of the Inverell LGA) on the border between NSW and Qld.[21][22] Since there is no article, redirecting to Texas, Queensland seems appropriate for now. --AussieLegend (✉) 08:55, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the Texas opinion. Nyttend backup (talk) 11:16, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
Towns still exists as a geographic concept in Queensland but the current terminology is "population centre" to indicate the centrepoint of a place surveyed at some time with a lot of small blocks usually in a grid. Population centres are not bounded, unlike suburb/localities. Thus a population centre can be the Brisbane metropolitan area spanning hundreds of suburbs and multiple local government areas though to now abandoned settlements (or ones that never developed) where you pass by and never realise it was there. Although the Qld Govt does not draw a boundary around population centres, the Australian census does for the larger ones as it publishes population counts based on the locality as a whole and any non-trivial town within it, the SSC and UCL data). Mungindi is a town and a locality in NSW and a locality in QLD, the boundaries of the two locaties meet at the border but do not overlap. Conversely Wallangarra is a town and locality in Qld while Jennings is a locality in NSW. You do notice the border if you are travelling through these places on a major road as there are normally signs saying "Welcome to QLD, watch out for crocodiles" in one direction and "Welcome to NSW, look up for drop bears" in the other. If you pass through the border on a minor road, it's not usually signed (as such roads are mainly used by locals who presumably know which side of the border they are on and the habits of the local wildlife). NSW has cities, towns and villages (making some kind of size distinction but not based on any specific criteria as far as I can see). NSW does not bound them, but NSW suburbs/localities are bounded (as they are throughout Australia). Kerry (talk) 07:21, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Commons category template changes

@Fleet Lists: Since a number of us have now noticed and been confused by the changes to the Template:commons category template family, I thought I should mention it more widely. You may now see when editing a Wikipedia artice, a message warning/telling you that the commons category does not match what is on Wikidata. If you are like me, you then click the commons link and see you are at the right Commons category and wonder what is going on. The answer is that it is wrong on Wikidata and there is nothing you can do on Wikipedia to make that error message go away; someone has to go and fix it on Wikidata (which tends to happen sooner or later if you do nothing). In particular if you add a new commons category to an article, you will get the message. Again, you have not done anything wrong. If you click through to Commons and it is OK, then you just have to ignore it. The people who made the changes to the template worked on the "interesting" assumption that any mismatch means it must be Wikipedia rather than Wikidata that has it wrong. One of the other consequences of this enforced alignment between Wikipedia and Wikidata is that Wikidata requires that all Wikidata items have separate commons categories, so if multiple Wikpedia articles use the same commons category, this creates problems for Wikidata so again Wikipedia must be changed to conform to Wikidata. What will happen is that additional commons categories will be created usually in some kind of sub/super-category arrangement, the existing files somewhat randomly distributed between them (since the people doing this are not in any way interested in the topic so unable to have an informed view on which image belongs in which new category), and then the Wikipedia articles are updated to point to these new categories. All of this appears to be happening without any announcement or any consensus. Not happy, Jan! Kerry (talk) 03:35, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Thank You - I raised the problem in Talk:Mungindi where I did not understand what was happening. But now that I am here I want raise another aspect about the "commons category" In most location articles it is just included as "commons category" or just one word "commonsgatecory" which appears to create the same result. But in New South Wales (and I think other states) railway station articles it is included as {{Commons category-inline|Punchbowl railway station, Sydney|Punchbowl railway station}} which creates it inline as an external link. Is there any reason why we have different standards for locations and stations?Fleet Lists (talk) 04:18, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
I found only two Western Australian stations that use "commons gallery" Perth railway station and Fremantle railway station both using the article format used elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fleet Lists (talk • contribs) 05:21, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
@Fleet Lists: By default, the commons category is rendered as box floating on the right. The "inline" version suppresses this and presents it as a line of text on the left, which is the preferred way if it is the only external link. It's a Manual of Style issue. No matter where it appears it still means "this way to the Commons category". Kerry (talk) 07:30, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Chief Medical Officer

Hi all. Given the recent prominence of the position as a result of COVID-19, an article has been created for Chief Medical Officer along with recent office-holders. Unfortunately, the trail of past office-holders runs out at the dawn of the internet age (in this case 1997). Would any of the research experts here have any ideas how to track down the names and periods in office for past CMOs? Thanks -- Mattinbgn (talk) 04:19, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

David de Souza appears to have held the role of Chief Commonwealth Medical Officer from about 1982 through the 1980s. Can't seem to find anything solid about start and end dates. Hack (talk) 05:02, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
I'm happy to have a rummage and try and build up a list. --Canley (talk) 05:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
According to an archived version of the Health website, de Souza was CMO from 1985 to 1988 and Tony Adams from 1988 to 1997. I'm not entirely sure the first date is correct but he may have been acting in the role prior to 1985. Hack (talk) 05:15, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Hack. David de Souza was awarded an AM in 1992 and was involved in an incident with Julian Beale in 1988. Quote from the article - "He claimed Dr de Souza had been told that he would be replaced by Dr Tony Adams, who was dismissed as head of the NSW Health Department when the Greiner Government was elected and was nowan adviser to the Federal Minister for Health, Dr Blewett." -- Mattinbgn (talk) 05:20, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Anthony Irvine Adams article exists! Not sure about the article title. -- Mattinbgn (talk) 05:22, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
You need to bear in mind not to confuse the Chief Medical Officer with the Commonwealth Medical officer (who advises on the health of individual public servants). The latter goes back to the creation of the Commonwealth public service, but my impression is that the Chief Medical Officer is a more recent innovation.--Grahame (talk) 07:07, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
I think that if there had been a Chief Medical Officer before 1985, the Department of Health would have listed it.--Grahame (talk) 07:48, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

There was also another Chief Medical Officer - in London since 1913 whose role was supervising the screening of immigrants. The current role of Chief Commonwealth Medical Officer was created in November 1982 because the newly Director-General of Health was not a doctor.[1] De Souza became acting Chief Commonwealth Medical Officer sometime between then and March 1983,[2] and was permanently appointed in April 1983[3] --Find bruce (talk) 07:55, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

There were also state level Chief Medical Officers at different stages - the Victorian one shows up in Trove fairly early as well and the role could deserve a stub, I would also suggest that the CMO at Australian House in London deserves a stub of its own in view of the role in relation to immigration and politics. JarrahTree 08:07, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Carlton, Jim (23 November 1982). "Top management changes in the Department of Health" (PDF). parlinfo.aph.gov.au. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  2. ^ "Appointment of person to act in the office of Director-General of Health". Commonwealth of Australia Gazette. 3 March 1983. p. 1114. Retrieved 15 June 2020 – via Trove.
  3. ^ "Health". Commonwealth of Australia Gazette. 21 April 1983. p. 2121. Retrieved 15 June 2020 – via Trove.

Party political imagespam by SPAs

Earlier this month DavidGriffiths94 uploaded a number of portrait shots of SA state Labor politicians to Commons, and added them to the infoboxes of the articles on the respective politicians on WP, including that of current Opposition leader, Peter Malinauskas. He subsequently submitted a deletion request to Commons to have my own photo of Malinauskas deleted, giving as the reason: "I work for Peter Malinauskas and he wants this photo deleted." (which he subsequently deleted). Although I've alerted him to his COI, he has not yet responded to this on his WP talk or user pages. His first lot of uploads were deleted from Commons because their copyright status was unclear, but he has recently uploaded another couple of low-res portrait shots of Malinauskas, including one from the Labor party's Election Campaign Candidates website, which at its Contact Us page states that: "Note: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."

Nearly two years ago another editor, User:Niepce2018, did something similar to articles on sitting SA state Liberal politicians.

How widespread is this practice, and is it acceptable in relation to the spirit of WP policies of objectivity and neutrality? I've had a look at WP policies on advertising and promotion and find them directed at text contributions, and not to images as such. I find it particularly troubling that these editors are altering WP content to align with their party political advertising, rather than with the aim of improving the encyclopaedia. It might possibly be acceptable if no other suitable photos exist in Commons (but, personally, I find these particular photos of the Labor politicians rather bombastic). Cheers, Bahudhara (talk) 07:05, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Attempting to delete a photo with a valid license is clearly wrong. I don't think there is anything against appropriately licensed photographs provided by associates of the subject of an article. I got some nice photos for a page about a popular SA tourist destination a couple of years ago, but it took a few rounds with the staff member to get the photos released with a suitable license (and OTRS) and have someone else (me, not her) pick which ones are on the page. Good photos of politicians are a significant addition to their articles, and often quite difficult to get by other means. Most of our historic politician photos are official portraits, so I have no objection to the current ones being the same way. In the specific Malinauskas case, File:Peter Malinauskas.jpg looks better than File:Peter Malinauskas.png because his hairline disappears into the artistic background. It's possible the other election photos suffer from the same background. --Scott Davis Talk 05:19, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Agree. It is so hard to get photos of living people that I don't see a problem with photos uploaded by them or their staff, so long as they aren't surrounded by party political advertising (or we do some crop of the photo to remove it, generally their head and shoulders will not be obsured by it). It's absolutely COI if they re-write the articles though. But if it's purely factual. "He completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Wherever, majoring in Political Sciece", then I would not be too worried. The worrying stuff is the removal of well-sourced negative commentary and the introduction of WP:PUFFERY, "His primary interests is the well-being of the residents of his electorate", "He fights for the rights of workers", "He is cutting the red tape that strangles small business", and other political yadda yadda. I get emails from most of my federal/state/local politicians and they are all just mouthing the current party messaging, along with "I visited the Such An Such School in my electorate and awarded the prize for the Best Essay Competition". There is truly little to say about most politicians as it is their party that is really running the show in terms of encyclopedic content. Kerry (talk) 21:56, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

“Northern Suburbs (Sydney)” - Edit Proposal

Hello. After much research of this page (Northern Suburbs and the discussion board (which had some personal opinions without any citation or supportive references), and recognising the warning mark for it to be edited with more citation, it’s come to my attention this Wikipedia page provides some confusing and conflicting information that easily confuses the public. Information on this page is also very minimal, and the only sources found to call this “region” of sydney “The Northern Suburbs” were provided from a newspaper name, which isn’t a viable source for the name of a region. Much of this region is also, with references to support it, part of the “Hills District”, “Greater Western Sydney” and “North Shore” regions. The only suburbs that would be questionable would be the following listed: -Ryde -West Ryde -Denistone -Denistone East -Denistone West -Eastwood -Putney -Meadowbank All other suburbs have sources to claim they’re part of distinctive regions. I also must stress that having a page named “Northern Suburbs (Sydney)” should have a body of text to describe the entire northern side of sydney and it’s distinctive regions, which already have their own pages with viable information well resourced such as the “North Shore” and the “Forest District”. “Northern Beaches“ is distantly east of northern sydney and suburbs in that region are almost always referred to as “Northern Beaches” or occasionally, “North East”. However, would still be relevant to this page if edited correctly.

I’m looking into editing this page to include all suburbs across the northern region of Sydney, to avoid confusing readers, and add the different regions in a section named “Unique Districts” or something rather similar. After all, these regions are all classified as “North” and to have a body page to describe it all together will create a much better understanding when studying the suburbs of Sydney with the standard citations included. A great example would be the wiki page for “Greater Western Sydney”, where it emphasises the distinct parts of the western region of Sydney and includes information on their own relevant pages.

I’d also like to stress that while many tend to edit these pages with personal opinion without sources, we must remember that much of Sydney’s unique regions have changed greatly; for instance the North Shore use to only be referred to suburbs as far north as Gordon up until the last century, we now see suburbs as far north as Hornsby and as far North West as Beecroft being referred to as the North Shore, as the term is known internationally to be “A place north of the shore”. Sydney’s Hills District as another example, is a new region which was once only known as the “North West”.

Before I make this edit, I’d like some insight and cited knowledge, so please feel free to share your ideas so I can create a much better Wiki page for future readers and researchers. Cheers. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 11:09, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't be too concerned about use of "region" as regions are often poorly defined and often have conflicting borders. Sydney itself is subject to this with the Australian Bureau of Statistics definition of Sydney in conflict with the general definition of Sydney. My own area is very clearly located in the Hunter Region but my council has decided that it's also part of the Mid North Coast. There's even a road sign 900m from the Hunter River to perpetuate the myth. No comment of the rest of your post at this time. --AussieLegend (✉) 11:19, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks AussieLegend. Unfortunately this page particularly is very confusing as “Northern sydney” is far larger than what this page describes to the viewer; it makes it very confusing and there’s hardly any reference to support it. I agree with what you have to say though. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 11:51, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
That aspect is a problem throughout Sydney. For instance the region Canterbury-Bankstown does not coincide with the City of Canterbury-Bankstown and to take that a step further the locality Canterbury, New South Wales is defined in the Canterbury Bankstown region as well as the Inner West region. And that has caused many changes to that locality with people moving it continually between the two regions with only in the past week someone changing it to read that it is NOT in the Inner West region.Fleet Lists (talk) 12:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
I understand, however with many resources that coincide with Wikipedia’s standards of editing and articles, I can simplify at least this part of Sydney on Wikipedia to end debate on personal opinions and confusion from the reader. The reason why people have debated so much about certain regions of Sydney on Wikipedia is because of the sophistication editors have created, without any viable source. The best page based on a Sydney metropolitan region I have found is Greater Western Sydney. I’d like that to be an example of what other pages for Sydney should look like. As I said, it’s only to end confusion for the Northern Sydney Page, and will have much more citation and will describe the breakdown of unofficial subregions. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 12:26, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Finished rewrite of article. The only issue I have left is the interactive image of a map of sydney with regions. I can’t work out how to edit it but that in itself is slightly messy. If anyone knows how to change the interactive map, please let me know how. Cheers. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 08:18, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

I noticed that several suburbs have been redefined as part of the Upper North Shore - specifically Beecroft, Cheltenham, Normanhurst, Pennant Hills, Thornleigh and Westleigh. I grew up in this area and have never heard these suburbs referred to as being part of the North Shore, which is in my experience at least considered to be the suburbs running North between the Lane Cove River and Middle Harbour Creek, along the North Shore railway line. The Upper North Shore itself pretty much aligns with the outline of the Federal Division of Bradfield, which is one the reasons it has a very specific reputation within Sydney as a Liberal-voting area. I'm also confident that most locals would agree with this definition. I can see that several Real Estate websites have been used as citations for the change of definition for these suburbs, though I would suggest these are unreliable and reflect the desire of Real Estate Agents to re-label suburbs in the interest of generating larger sales (as the Upper North Shore is sometimes seen as a desirable area to live). There's really not a lot of hard evidence that I can find to back up one single definition of this area, it's more of a loose definition based on local opinion, which is why I think including these specific suburbs is misleading because I suspect it doesn't represent most local definitions. Maybe they could be re-classified as 'sometimes' being grouped with the Upper North Shore. Newspaper articles might be useful for finding a clearer definition. I did find a few sources which limit the Upper North Shore to the suburbs along the train line as I described: [1] [2] [3] [4]. PopCultureLinguist (talk) 16:29, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
I made exactly the same point about using promotional website run by real estate agents from the areas in question as resources. They are not reliable and should not be used as sources. If anything, it seems like the agents are trying to get their area considered as North Shore. My experience is the same as yours...the "North Shore" is along the railway between Milsons Point and Hornsby, with the addition of Neutral Bay, Cremorne, Mosman which make up part of the Lower North Shore. --Merbabu (talk) 06:56, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
  1. ^ https://www.domain.com.au/news/liveable-sydney-upper-north-shore-ranked-279806/
  2. ^ https://mapcarta.com/Sydney/Upper_North_Shore
  3. ^ https://gsc-public-1.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/six_district_map_book_part_1.pdf?7jedZ1zjV7pcPbfRXnCEfJ5B5rox6eDU
  4. ^ https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sydney/Upper_North_Shore
I am not a fan of the use of vague "region" terminology at all. We can say precisely if a suburb is in a local government area because suburbs have precise boundaries as do local government areas. Regions are vague and you cannot say precisely whether a specific suburb is or isn't in it. Some "regions" do have an obvious geographic basis, e.g. one side of a river or other. My preferred solution is not to mention vague regions at all in articles for suburbs. By all means create an article for the region name but make sure it is clear that it is a vaguely defined thing. "Traditionally the WhatsIt region is centred around the suburbs of This and That, but, lacking a formal definition or boundary, it may be used informally to describe a far wider surrounding area." And yes real estate agents do like to edit Wikipedia articles for the suburbs in their area and some are amazingly persistent. Kerry (talk) 22:58, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
I did see the recent edits but just saw this now - unfortunately it’s highly debatable - it’s taken a lot of research to understand what is considered to be “North Shore” but from locals perspectives it varies greatly. Unfortunately newspaper articles cannot be used to cite whether a suburb is part of the North Shore or not - it’s a general term to describe Northern Sydney, and maybe the best thing to do is remove the region from Wikipedia named “North Shore” if it’s going to be debated too often. I’ve grown up on the Lower North Shore and locals around me have the impression anything west of Artarmon and north of Chatswood is considered “North West”, so it’s becoming more confusing. What if we just remove the term “North Shore” from suburbs and maintain “Northern Sydney”, keep the “North Shore (Sydney)” article as informative information without a list of suburbs? HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 00:49, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
It is a tricky thing because there is a degree of indeterminateness around regions, and certainly some kind of caveat as suggested could be included - "... may be used informally to describe a far wider surrounding area" is a good addition. However the terminology (in this case North Shore/Upper North Shore) is in real use by people on the ground, and I think therefore justifies an article and a list of suburbs, which should surely reflect real usage certifiable through reliable sourcing. Is there a reason why newspaper articles cannot be cited here? Having done a large amount of searching, there is a clear correlation between certain suburbs being described in the SMH as belonging to the North Shore, and others never being described as such. Not only in the Real Estate section but in all kinds of journalistic writing. Surely these sources are the most reliable when trying to determine belonging to a region? The page as it is now includes suburbs such as Epping in the list of North Shore suburbs - this really has no relation to any definition of the North Shore that I can find in any reliable source, and ends up constituting misinformation more than anything else. The sources cited to include suburbs such as Beecroft, Pennant Hills etc. are unreliable in my opinion. From my research it seems there is a relatively clear geographical boundary for the area, lying between the Lane Cove River and Middle Head - the article as it is now even references this definition, then goes to include several suburbs which clearly lie outside it. Perhaps as suggested specific suburb pages could link to "Northern Sydney", with the caveat that they are sometimes considered part of the "Upper/Lower North Shore"? Though I suspect over time other users will end up re-labelling them as purely North Shore suburbs. Either way it should be consistent and based on reliable sources. PopCultureLinguist (talk) 12:22, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
Indeed it is tricky, and a lot of the sources were edited as they were a bit more reliable than previous ones that were dead (no longer existed). Newspapers have their own definitions and journalists tend to take a guess. Many news articles even claim Ryde is the north shore which baffles me and others personally, however suburbs such as Macquarie Park and North Ryde directly next to the National Park are often called simply “North Shore”. The article already mentions that the term North Shore is amorphous and unofficial, that’s why the article “Northern Sydney” was created as the base page describing that it tends to be split between “North Shore” and “Northern Beaches”, however there are much stronger resources to claim all of these suburbs are simply “Northern Sydney”. This article clears confusion for readers, and “North Shore” was placed in articles for suburbs that have the term given quite frequently. Some suburbs were simply given the term “North Shore” if they were given multiple different terms by different sources such as Epping and Asquith (sometimes simply referred to as “North” or “North Shore”). In general though, it’s just a term given to suburbs north of Port Jackson and east of what’s considered the “Hills District” and Greater Western Sydney, instead of simply saying “North Sydney”. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 03:41, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
From a quick search in the Sydney Morning Herald Digital archive, I can't find a single mention of Ryde belonging to the North Shore - actually there are several articles which specifically differentiate it from the North Shore, as one example:[1]. The same goes for Macquarie Park: [2]. (You may need to have a Library card number to log in/view these articles). By contrast, for each of the suburbs between Chatswood and Hornsby there are thousands of results in the SMH archive listing these as belonging to the "Upper North Shore", the same goes for the suburbs currently listed on the page as the "Lower North Shore". While the North Shore area is maybe amorphous as the edges, it seems pretty undeniable to me based on the wealth of evidence that these suburbs can and should be included/listed as belonging to the North Shore. As further evidence, these are the suburbs serviced by the "North Shore" railway line, by the "North Shore" Times, and their local council areas were at one point going to be amalgamated into one "North Shore" council. This can't be said of the suburbs that were added to the list recently, namely: Normanhurst, Thornleigh, Westleigh, Pennant Hills, Beecroft and Cheltenham. This all points to the region "North Shore" being more specific than the greater "Northern Sydney" area, rather than being synonyms.
As to the validity of sources used to cite all of this, from Wikipedia's own page on Verifiability (WP:SOURCE), articles should be based on "reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy", with newspaper articles specifically mentioned as one example of this. I think the wealth of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald constitute reliable sources, while the websites that are currently cited in the article are not subject to the same level of fact-checking. There is a reliable sources noticeboard that can be used to get input on whether given sources are reliable.
So basically, I propose: removing the newly-added suburbs (Normanhurst, Thornleigh, Westleigh, Pennant Hills, Beecroft and Cheltenham) from the list of Upper North Shore suburbs, or moving them to an additional list of suburbs that are only occasionally included in the North Shore.
I think for individual suburb articles, all should be described as either "Northern suburbs of Sydney", or "suburbs in Northern Sydney", with a link to the Northern Sydney page. Then at the end of the intro paragraph an extra note can be included saying something like "X suburb is often/sometimes described as being on the North Shore". The specific wording can be changed, but I think this solution highlights that all the suburbs belong to the greater Northern Sydney region, while moving the evidently contentious categorisation of North Shore or not further down the article. I'm happy to wait for any other input before making any changes. PopCultureLinguist (talk) 04:43, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
I understand where you come from in that context but Sydney Morning Herald is definitely not based on accuracy with fact checking. The reason why you’re finding “Upper North Shore” and “Lower North Shore” suburbs in that news paper is because of the dedicated newspapers for those groups of suburbs being “North Shore Times” and “Hornsby Advocate”. They specifically mention north shore constantly for their own benefit or consistency, and are known to release a lot of controversial articles as “news”. As such, because it is an amorphous term, it should be stated what suburbs are often referred to as part of the region. The north shore railway line runs to Berowra and to greater western sydney - that doesn’t make those suburbs part of the North Shore. The “Northern Line” runs through inner western Sydney such as Rhodes and Concord West - that doesn’t make them Northern Sydney. Also, the council amalgamation was to merge the Hornsby Shire Council and Ku-ring-gai Council’s in their current boundaries as “Upper North Shore”... and that would’ve meant part of Dural which we know is clearly nowhere North or nearby. I think it’s best we leave it to how it is, as it is just for expression of the location of the suburbs. It was also mentioned at one point “different income and social class status” made a difference, which is not true. Suburbs such as Beecroft, Cheltenham and North Epping have some of the highest average household incomes in the upper northern region, so that doesn’t make a term more or less valid. Normanhurst as well, shares the postcode with Wahroonga, so I’m not sure why it would be so differently labelled. Mind you, this has had so much debate on Wikipedia in the past which is why different pages and names for these articles have been executed constantly and it is arguably the most reliable and consistent now than it ever has been, unless we remove the article and terminology of “North Shore” altogether for Sydney. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 06:25, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
I'm happy to wait for some input from another editor, though I think that the Sydney Morning Herald can definitely be considered a reliable source, regardless of your personal opinion of its quality. By Wikipedia's own standards of verifiability newspapers are considered more reliable than websites which have undergone no fact-checking, which are the references currently being used to justify the inclusion of these suburbs. The archive that I'm searching is purely made up of articles from the Sydney Morning Herald, so it doesn't include the North Shore Times or Hornsby Advocate which are separate papers. I'd be happy to search their archives, and the Daily Telegraph as well - I'd imagine we would find similar results in all the papers. I agree that the article for "North Shore" should list the suburbs "often referred to as part of the region" but I can't find any reliable sources suggesting Normanhurst, Thornleigh, Westleigh, Pennant Hills, Beecroft or Cheltenham are referred to as such. I think these have been included without reliable published sourcing, if you can point me to a reliable published source justifying their inclusion on the list then please do.
Regarding your point about the railway lines, the term 'North Shore Line' only refers to the portion of the T1 North Shore & Western Line running between Central and Hornsby, as per Sydney Trains 2019[3][4]. I agree that household income has absolutely no bearing on these distinctions. Regarding Normanhurst, I think that is the one suburb where there is at least some of a case for including it on the list, because it shares the Wahroonga Post Code as you mentioned and because it borders Wahroonga/Waitara, though I would point out that there is still nowhere near the amount of published evidence supporting this as there is for the other suburbs between Hornsby and Chatswood.
While I appreciate there is some debate, I think there is a clear basis for including the suburbs between Chatswood and Hornsby on a list of "Upper North Shore" suburbs, based on an overwhelming amount of published, reliable sources (i.e., thousands of articles in the SMH alone, not to mention other newspapers). For whatever reason there seems to be less debate about the Lower North Shore, but just as a side note all the suburbs currently listed as forming the Lower North Shore on the North Shore page are backed up by my research in the SMH archive. Seeing as "North Shore" is a term which is clearly still in current usage throughout Sydney, I don't think it makes sense to remove the whole article from Wikipedia - instead we should just ensure the contents are based on reliable, published sources.PopCultureLinguist (talk) 06:54, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
Like stated beforehand, the Sydney Morning Herald isn’t a reliable source to choose the regional names of Sydney, and break down names by simply fast research, guess or use the term north shore to describe the majority of northern Sydney. We cannot use a newspaper to distinguish an entire region of Sydney. There are sources that can verify what the suburbs are often referred to, however there are not government resources that can help distinguish what is the north shore and what isn’t. I’m not quite sure why this is such a sensitive topic to so many as well, as the term “North Shore” is a simple term to describe something “North of the shore”, even though the vast majority of the North Shore is nowhere near a shore. A few months ago multiple suburbs Articles on the North Shore we’re labelled with two different regions (one region being removed as an article since it had no reliable sources to support it’s existence) since editors were in constant debate and war over the term, which only leads to a lot of confusion for readers - most readers would read Upper North Shore as simply “North of Sydney” and not view it as a region. Most articles simply state the suburb as for instance; “Wahroonga is a suburb on the Upper North Shore of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia.”. Most viewers simply read this as basic location knowledge, not as a region. Also, with the railway line, the suburb articles of Asquith, Mt Colah, Mt Kuring-Gai and Berowra are constantly edited to say “is on the Upper North Shore” because these suburbs are on the train line, when the Welcome to Sydney sign is at Mt Colah on the Pacific Motorway. This is why the articles were given a reference as “Sometimes/often simply referred to as North Shore” to end debate. Beecroft, Cheltenham, Pennant Hills and Thornleigh have lots of sources to support being labelled as part of the Upper North Shore for e.g. Businesses (local and major), Media (notably Daily Mail, Channel Nine News etc.), Domain, Real estate websites and Suburb Review websites, Yellow Pages, White Pages, Microburbs and many more. Government sources such as local police area commands (Ku-ring-Gai and Ryde police commands) simply refer these suburbs as “North-West”. The term North Shore is subjective, which is why I think the best options are to leave it the way the articles are now, which were shaped to avoid constant editing and debates, or remove the “North Shore” as a term in Sydney altogether. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 08:03, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
The latest SMH reference added to the article is by subscription only.Fleet Lists (talk) 08:17, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
Just to add to what Fleet Lists stayed, unfortunately Sydney Morning Herald is also media requiring paid subscription, making it less reliable as citation. I forgot to mention that earlier, my apologies. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 08:22, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
Ah yes, sorry I didn't notice that there is a specific reference template for sources requiring subscription - I will update. Though I should also point out that the Wikipedia Verifiability guide specifically notes "Do not reject reliable sources just because they are difficult or costly to access", so by my understanding the subscription requirement does not make these sources any less valid or reliable.
Regarding your points HornsbyBBSyd, while I understand your perspective, I still disagree and think there is enough evidence to justify the existence of a specific region known as the "North Shore" (split into "Upper" and "Lower") - this is reflected through the thousands of articles that refer to it in the SMH and other newspapers. Based on my research there is enough evidence to support this, and it is certainly not a purely subjective definition. I don't think we should make assumptions about how readers will interpret information, and in any case we should aim to make the information clearer by using reliable published sources, and linking to other pages where relevant. In this case, by including links to the page for "North Shore (Sydney)", readers who click through will find that it refers to a specific region, and is not simply a geographic description, so I can't imagine why there would be any confusion there. I would appreciate if you could add additional references for Beecroft, Cheltenham, Pennant Hills and Thornleigh - as I stated earlier I think some of the sources currently being cited are unreliable. Thanks for your hard work and I'm sure we can end up with a strong article with a good amount of reliable sources.PopCultureLinguist (talk) 08:51, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

I understand however Sydney Morning Herald don’t have articles to describe what is part of the North Shore. They’ll simply use the phrase to describe the location of a suburb, which they’ve done selectively. There is no real heavily supported reference for the region name at all, and that’s why it’s mentioned in the North Shore article that it is amorphous. I feel like we are now typical North Shore locals debating on what suburbs obtain the title ha ha! But look, I’ll give you some references however they’re quite endless when you do some research so here’s a few as some examples; I’d recommend doing some research yourself. Here’s a few examples of these suburbs being classified as “North Shore”; you’ll see Beecroft and Epping likely have the most references when you do the research, Epping simply being named “North Shore”. Transdev busses labels the suburbs of Pennant Hills and Thornleigh as part of the Upper North Shore.

https://sydneysuburbreviews.com/beecroft/

https://www.microburbs.com.au/NSW/Sydney/Upper-north-shore/Hornsby-Municipality/Beecroft

https://www.qreal.com.au/projects/71/

https://raywhitebeecroft.com.au/about/about-beecroft

http://www.fencingsydneynorth.com.au/about.html

https://www.transdevnsw.com.au/services/timetables/upper-north-shore/

I’d also recommend checking out the Yellow Pages as all businesses in the suburbs between Epping and Thornleigh are labelled “Upper North Shore” and you’ll find an endless count of businesses named North Shore so&so from these suburbs. Also, thank you for your appreciation and support! HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 09:39, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Folks, this seems to be embarking on Original Research. It seems pretty clear from the foregoing conversation that the SMH and other newspapers are not inherently reliable sources as to these regions, because they are an echo chamber for the wider use (or misuse in the case of advertisers and real estate agents) of the terms. As I have previously commented, the motivation for widespread use of terms like "North Shore" is probably as "codeword" for "desirable", which puts it into conflict with WP:PEACOCK. The advice with such terms is generally stop using the term and instead present the underlying facts with citation. Instead of using "North Shore" and "Upper North Shore" etc as descriptions, why not say "It is a beachside suburb, X km north of the Sydney CBD [or North Head or whatever]". Those are facts you can see (and cite) from a map. If it's not a beachside suburb, then you can say "It is X km from the beach at Some Other Suburb" (although I would not be putting such a statement in the lede para but more likely in a section on local amentities or attractions), but again, this is a citable fact. I don't think one mention of North Shore or wherever in the SMH or anywhere else makes it a "fact". Instead of arguing about the inclusion of non-facts, how about putting the same energy into adding actual facts to articles? Kerry (talk) 21:46, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
Hey Kerry, thanks for the input. I agree that “North Shore” is not an officially named region, however the description of the area named “North Shore” is used more often as description as it is “North of the Shore” (being Sydney Harbour). By the way, it does not have beaches nearby - strange, I know. The way all of the North Shore suburbs articles are written now, is probably the best way to read it as a place up North. for instance; the article for the suburb of Wahroonga, says “Wahroonga is a suburb on the Upper North Shore of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 17 kilometres north-west of the Sydney CBD”. The way the “North Shore” is implemented into articles is more to describe its location from the CBD. If the reader wishes to visit the article for Sydney North Shore, they may do so; the article, just to help, describes it as a subjective reference or term used towards a group of suburbs in the Northern Sydney region. How it is right now is the best way to describe it in most articles it’s mentioned in, as it’s descriptive of location, and not written as a region. The official region of the area is all a part of Northern Sydney. The article for Northern Sydney also explains, that Northern Sydney has its own groups of areas split up such as “Northern Beaches”, “Forest District” and “North Shore”. This is used to simply divide the unique parts of the region just like Greater Western Sydney, where they have subjective terms such as “The Hills District” and “South West Sydney”. HornsbyBbSyd (talk) 23:37, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://libraryedition.smedia.com.au/lib_s/SharedView.Article.aspx?href=SMH%2F2019%2F10%2F24&id=Ar00112&sk=4549D546
  2. ^ https://libraryedition.smedia.com.au/lib_s/SharedView.Article.aspx?href=SMH%2F2007%2F07%2F07&id=Ar06600&sk=E5EEFE71
  3. ^ https://railsafe.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/39753/North-Shore-Line-Central-to-Hornsby.PDF
  4. ^ https://www.nswrail.net/lines/show.php?name=NSW:north_shore

On the topic of the ABC

Hi all! There seems to be a rather unholy amalgamation of articles on the ABC, covering topics that are just crazy and out-of-scope and policy. For example:

  • there is ABC News (Australia) which brands itself as the ABC's national news program, then a plethora of state/territory-based articles (like ABQ or ABN) which says that ABC News is regional, not national, and operates independently. Ohh, and a quick Google search shows that Wikipedia is the only site which seems to mention ABQ...
  • apparently ABC (TV station) is also different from ABC Television which is different from ABC (Australian TV channel)
  • there are 53 articles on ABC Local Radio stations, most of which have no primary coverage and which only cites one page, that station's ABC website (ABC Shepparton etc, which doesn't even have a single reference and is only two sentences, one of which is useless to any reader since it's so ambiguous)

There just seems to be a huge mess. Would anyone be interested in helping me to plan and reorganise all the ABC articles into a streamlined set of articles of distinguishable topics/entities? I'm starting to draft out a categorical structure of these over here. ItsPugle (talk) 11:10, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, I know what ABQ is (the ABC television station in Brisbane from 1959) and so does the National Archives (here's the the logo from the test pattern (remember them!) and they built a large new building in about 2010 in the middle of Southbank in Brisbane so somewhat hard to overlook quite literally. I think you have to look at that history of ABC over time. We take it for granted that we can simultaneously broadcast a TV program at the same time across all of Australia but that was not always true and once ABC television stations operated quite independently based on where their transmitter reached, and therefore they all had their own names and a lot of local content (a lot of it went live to air). Then they started shipping content between them as rolls of film. Then later they started transmitting program content over computer networks (but still took some time to get between two cities) etc. Even today while we share a lot of content between the various ABC stations, there is still local content (news in particular). But obviously with the greater ability to share content, that has tended to concentrate a lot of functions performed by individual stations into nationally coordinated functions, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne (e.g. commissioning shows). While there might be better names for some of them, of the three you mention ABC (TV station) is the Canberra TV station (the "C" is for Canberra not for "Corporation" -- yeah, a bit confusing, but it is reality that is at fault). ABC Television is the current situation (4 channels with iView) which is different from ABC (Australian TV channel) which harks back to the days of 1 channel but with central coordination and refers explictly to ABC1 as we might now call it (the one with the 7pm news!). In terms of your proposal, there's nothing wrong with it but its perspective is that of the "current viewer", which is just the tip of the iceberg, as it overlooks the regionalisation of the ABC for both TV and radio and the history and all the shows, the people, the buildings (curiously there isn't an article for their major studio in Ultimo in Sydney, some of its studios and former studios are heritage-listed) etc. But I agree with the idea that having some kind of consistent approach to where we cover certain topics and how we name articles would help. Certainly ABC (TV station) and ABQ should probably be renamed for consistency with others in Category:Australian Broadcasting Corporation television stations. Having taken a glance at the category structure at Category:Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it doesn't look too bad. It looks more like issues of how individual aricles are named and categorised (and perhaps what content they cover) and perhaps what topics have been overlooked, e.g. studios, outside broadcast, ... I guess I am saying I'm interested :-) Kerry (talk) 14:59, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
Great! Do you think it'd be worth combining all the ANx articles into a single article, like Local channels of ABC, would be a good option? They don't really appear to have a huge amount of unique content in each of them, and might be better suited by being rewritten into one article. That would also clear up the issue with the title name for ABC(anberra) vs ABC(orporation). And you're right, I'm approaching this in terms of being useful for current 'consumers' of the ABC; would having a separate but significant History of the ABC article be a good compromise? There would be sections for each overarching category, and other pages like History of the ABC on radio - there's more options on these at the previous User:ItsPugle/ABC page. ItsPugle (talk) 00:59, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Know My Name - Australian women artist edit-a-thons

Just letting you know that today and next week, there are 3 edit-a-thons happening at the National Gallery of Australia (via Zoom) focussing on Australian women artists. I will be doing an initial training session with each group after which they will expand existing articles as part of the session. After the organised session, they are invited to start new articles in their own time (all should be autoconfirmed by then so able to create new articles from that perspective). The gallery has prepared a list of artists for these purposes (those with and without Wikipedia articles) and has also curated a set of source material for the organised sessions where we will be expanding existing article, so I don't expect notability or reliable source issues should arise during the organised sessions. Anyhow, this is my usual request for people to be nice to any new editors dabbling in that topic space, e.g. welcome messages, thanks for edits, try not to bite them, ... everyone should be "good faith". Thanks Kerry (talk) 20:32, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

How did the edit-a-thon go Kerry? I'm happy to have a look at any of the articles to see if I can help with the things like formatting references, templates etc that new editors often struggle with. --Find bruce (talk) 03:33, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
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