Talk:Hamilton Street Railway

Previous Fares

I was arguing with someone about the fare of the bus in 1999. I swear it was like 1.80. Does anyone know the previous fares? Would that information be useful on this page?Tydamann (talk) 09:53, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

External links modified

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Name of the HSR Hamilton Page

The name of this page should be changed to Hamilton Street Railway Company, as this is the official name of the transit system. GabrielBloom28 (talk) 01:25, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi there. Consider taking a look at Wikipedia:Article titles for the Wikipedia policy regarding the titles of articles. Wikipedia generally prefers the Common Name, even if it is not the same as the official name. BLAIXX 02:18, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

History vs. current status

@Blaixx, Julius177, and GabrielBloom28: Much of the HSR history is mixed into the Services and Facilities services. I would like to move history items (i.e. streetcars, trolley buses, old bus routes/facilities) from Services and Facilities into History with subsection titles such as "Former streetcar system", "Former trolleybus system", etc. Thus, the Services and Facilities sections would show only current status. I plan to later update HSR history. (I have already created Hamilton Radial Electric Railway to replace a redirect of the same name.) Any objections?TheTrolleyPole (talk) 16:24, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! Thanks, BLAIXX 23:34, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

The article used to have two tables for loops with some duplication of info. One of the two tables had a mix of current and former loops. I reorganized the loop tables with one for current loops and the other for former loops. Besides former loops, all historical info has been moved to Hamilton Street Railway#History. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 01:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

David Anthony Wyatt

User:SJ Morg has removed a citation saying: "remove a self-published web page as ref, per WP:SELFPUBLISHED (merely hosted by Univ's web server, not posted on Univ's website let alone "published by" the Univ.)". I believe the Wyatt site is reasonably reliable with events and dates that agree with hard-copy books I have on streetcar and interurban history. So far, I found only one discrepancy between Wyatt and another source. So it appears that the problem is not reliability but how it was published. WP:SELFPUBLISHED says "self-published material ... are largely not acceptable as sources" but not "never accepted" implying exceptions. Wyatt's resumé shows he once worked at the University of Manitoba, had articles on public transit published outside the Wyatt website, and that he is "Official Historian" in the Manitoba Transit Heritage Association. So can we accept Wyatt? @SJ Morg, Blaixx, and Julius177: TheTrolleyPole (talk) 20:50, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I support inclusion. Realistically I don't think use of these kinds of sources should be contentious for Canadian railway and transit history. You're realistically never going to see peer reviewed journal articles on things like Canadian bus systems of the 1970s, yet omitting that material creates giant coverage gaps. There's also the common Wikipedia editor bias against websites, especially Web 1.0 ones that "look" unreliable, versus books which can often be essentially self-published through boutique hobbyist publishers (ubiquitous in railway history as I'm sure you know). Often these books and websites are by the same people anyway. Charles Cooper (who died recently) is a good example of a bona fide Canadian railway history expert and prolific writer despite not being an academic historian. There is a paradox that at least in Canadian railway history coverage, if you excluded these people's work you'd end up falling back on the work of people like Ron Brown with his ghost town and ghost railway books, which are more like potted history tour guide books than serious history works, and can contain errors or brush over significant details. Brown often gets a lot of his material from these same avocational historians anyway.

In general I've found Wyatt to be accurate and corroborated by other sources in his transit history and it's very difficult in some cases to find a better source for some material, especially the history of local and regional bus systems. Julius177 (talk) 04:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I have mixed feelings about this. The fact that you say he has had (multiple) articles published in (presumably) print publications and your other points do raise confidence in his being a reliable source, although I have found at least a few errors on his website myself but accept your claim that you have only ever found one discrepancy between Wyatt's info. and another source. However, WP:SELFPUBLISHED really only gives one example of where such sources are acceptable, and that is where the writer is an "established expert" whose information has been published in reliable publications, and I don't really have enough info. to judge whether that applies here. I don't accept the argument that an absence of any better sources, meaning that the material would have to be omitted from Wikipedia altogether (or left unsourced) if we adhere to the aforementioned guideline, is a strong enough argument. Personally, I accepted long ago that a lot of transit-fan material that interests me will likely never be on Wikipedia, because it has never been published, and that I'll have to be satisfied to see such info. given only on websites other than Wikipedia. At the least, WP articles that use such sources are unlikely ever to pass a Good Article review. However, Julius177's point that nowadays a lot of books on narrow topics such as urban transit or local railway history are essentially self-published, by boutique publishers who don't really do any fact-checking or solicit proofreading by others in the author's 'field', is valid. In comparison to that type of book publisher, having information published in magazines is somewhat better in raising a writer's credibility, because magazines are edited and if a contributor proves unreliable an editor will decline future contributions or make more of an effort to fact-check them. Magazines are also usually published either by professional publishing companies or by non-profit organizations, which in both cases comes with some level of accountability for errors.

Overall, I am not really convinced that Wyatt is reliable enough that I would endorse opening the door to using his personal website as a source for WP on a recurring basis, but I also don't feel strongly enough about it that I would be likely to continue to contest such use (except, of course, where I found it to be in conflict with info. contained in books or magazines to which I have access). If another WP editor working on a specific article objected to the use of this source in that article, I would very likely side with them. – SJ Morg (talk) 09:24, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your answer. From it, I conclude that I may restore the Wyatt reference in the article but that the site is effectively on probation. In order to avoid an article's vulnerability to Wikipedia standards, I will cite books instead of Wyatt where the date/event can be found in both. Thus, I would use Wyatt only to fill in historical gaps not covered by other sources. I will also insert a link to the relevant Wyatt page in the article's external link section, as most readers would otherwise find it difficult to verify dates cited in books. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 18:51, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Suggested deletions

@Blaixx, Julius177, GabrielBloom28, and SJ Morg:I recommend that the following unsourced text be deleted from the article:

1. I cannot find a citation for "Hamilton-Wentworth Region began ownership of HSR in 1977, and in 2001 regional amalgamation placed ownership back to the city of Hamilton." It was added in 2008 by User:99.227.28.169, the creator of the article. Should we delete the clause?
2. The section Hamilton_Street_Railway#Former bus routes is completely unsourced and probably incomplete and uninteresting. Should we delete the section?
3. The section Hamilton_Street_Railway#Former loops is completely unsourced and probably incomplete. The interesting loops for streetcar and trolley bus loops are already documented elsewhere. I suggest that former bus loops are uninteresting. Should we delete the section?
4. The entry for Mountain Transit Centre used to show its dates of operation as "1984–1996, 1998–present". I could not find a source for a 1996–1998 interruption of service, so I have already simplified the dates of operation as "1984–present". I tried to find a source for the alleged interruption without success. These dates were entered by User:Supertrampfan in 2008.

Are there any objections to the proposed deletions? TheTrolleyPole (talk) 01:02, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I have added a reference for the 1977 info about the change in HSR ownership, but I don't have one for the 2001 claim. I agree with the other proposed deletions. SJ Morg (talk) 08:47, 27 March 2023 (UTC)