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Started

This project is tentatively created following a discussion on the Australian Wikipedians' notice board, May 2006. — Донама 07:49, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

How about renaming it Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian places to correspond with Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand places? --cj | talk 08:11, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I went ahead with the name change. The original was too much of a mouthfull.--cj | talk 08:22, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Given the name change, does anyone think we need a change of scope too. When I started this I explicitly wrote the scope as dealing with Australian cities, towns and other forms of municipalities with any official recognition.
  1. Now I see that this is really bound up with our local government areas. Should we include LGAs in the scope too?
  2. What about other natural divisions and features - I don't think we should include most of these, but places like Kangaroo Island and Carronade Island seem to fit in here?
Донама 00:45, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I think our scope should be as broad as possible: we might as utilise the project and keep discussion central. So I'm thinking we should interpret "place" as literally as possible. I'd like to see us cover regions as well. As for LGA's, I'm not opposed to covering them, but I wonder if there is an overlap with WikiProject Australian politics?--cj | talk 09:16, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Would you like to have a go at rewriting the scope section CJ? The risk is making it so general that we lose focus. Yes the LGA stuff could overlap with Aussie politics I guess. In that sense that project is a sister project -- but they look at it from a political perspective whereas we look at them as a way to provide more information about places -- and besides, LGAs are really more an administrative topic rather than political so it's a kind of shared responsibilty between projects. — Донама 10:08, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Standards

More than anything this should be about standards across articles. I've seen countless different infoboxes, layouts, etc. Everything across Aussie cities/towns has to be standardised. I might throw around some suggestions for suburbs / local government areas given time. Any advice? michael talk 08:35, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Villages

Does "village" mean something specific in New South Wales? We have a category Category:Villages in Australia which is not a subcategory of Category:Towns in Australia, but stands next to it and Category:Cities in Australia. All but one of the articles in it are in the subcat Category:New South Wales villages. Should these either be proposed to be merged into the towns categories or reparented under them? --Scott Davis Talk 13:45, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

During a recent trip to Bega, I noticed that what I would call a village was being called by the Bega Shire Council on the welcoming signs to the place as the Locality of XYZ.
As per Towns#Australia there is no legal definition for town in NSW or village. However, the ABS does talk about say Perisher Village[1] and Thredbo Village.
I believe that the present category status should remain, ie that the villages cat should stand next to towns as a category and not be reparented under the towns cat, just as towns should not be parented under cities. --A Y Arktos\talk 21:54, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
So it's really "alpine villages", not villages in the sense of English villages, which seem to be able to be quite big, but still smaller than towns? — Донама 00:19, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

This is a very good question. In the 19th century the small settlements in New South Wales were called villages (at least by Governments). In the 20th century there seems to have been a democratic tendency to call them all towns (or townships), maybe because they all hoped to be towns someday. There is a modern tendency to revive "village" for touristic reasons. I have moved some towns to villages, because the pages or their LGAs describe them as villages or townships. Some of them are ski resorts or ghost towns without significant populations (eg less than 50 at a guess). I have also thought of moving Carcoar and Mogo, which are usually considered as tourist villages and have a small permanent population (although the Mogo area is growing), but their sites describe them as towns. The ABS describes urban areas as places with more them 1000 people and, if we wanted to be rigorous. this might be a better cutoff (although this would raise the question of whether we are going to develop this idea in other states). I note also the terminology Shellharbour village to differentiate from the surrounding Shellharbour city or Balmoral Village to differentiate from Balmoral, Sydney. I think most of the places I have moved are touristic, or would like to be touristic (such as Marulan), possibly because there are few sites yet in in the backblocks, but I note that Pilliga had been reclassified as a village before I started looking at this.

All places I know of in SA with <1000 people are called towns. — Донама 02:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

There is also another question of what to do with the surrounding suburbs of Wollongong, Shellharbour, Port Stephens etc, which sometimes call themselves towns (but are more like suburbs, but not "suburbs of Sydney"). Should they just be categorised as "Wollongong" or "suburbs of Wollogong" etc? Should the "town of NSW category" be removed from them?Grahamec 00:33, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

What do they call themselves? And what is their legal classification. Having just gotten my head properly around the local government areas of SA, I found that (at lga.sa.gov.au) LGAs that are cities usually have city in the title, but it's not a legal definition so we stopped separating them out. Instead we separated the government areas by region (as categorised on the SA govt LGA website). One of these regions is the Adelaide metro region and all the LGAs from Adelaide Hills Council in the south to the Town of Gawler in the north are included in it. These are all cities except for Adelaide Hills Council, so any townships inside it are considered suburbs I guess. Seems likely that if Shellharbour falls under the local governance of the city of Wollongong that it is a suburb of Wollongong. If not, then it should be considered its own town/city in its own right. — Донама 02:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I think a judgement call can be made here. All local government areas could go in a LGAs/municipalities category. All towns could go in a towns category, and we can work out which places could be considered suburbs, and put that in a "Suburbs of X" category underneath the Towns category. Ambi 03:18, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Since at least one user has apparently not followed the link suggested where the legal status of towns is discussed, here is the content reproduced from Towns#Australia:
In Australia, the status of a town is formally applied in only a few states. Most states do define cities, and towns are commonly understood to be those centres of population not formally declared to be cities and usually with a population in excess of about 250 people.
The creation and delimitation of Local Government Areas is the responsibility of the state and territory Governments. In all states and the Northern Territory each incorporated area has an official status. The various LGA status types currently in use are:
  • New South Wales: Cities (C) and Areas (A)
  • Victoria: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Boroughs (B) and Shires (S)
  • Queensland: Cities (C), Shires (S), Towns (T) and Island Councils (IC)
  • South Australia: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Municipalities/Municipal Councils (M), District Councils (DC), Regional Councils (RegC) and Aboriginal Councils (AC)
  • Western Australia: Cities (C), Towns (T) and Shires (S)
  • Tasmania: Cities (C) and Municipalities (M)
  • Northern Territory: Cities (C), Towns (T), Community Government Councils (CGC) and Shires (S).
Reference: Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) 2005
There is apparently no legal entity as a village and in many states no leqal entity as a town. Above it is mentioned that Pilliga has been apparently reclassified as a village - reclassified by whom, under which legislation?--A Y Arktos\talk 07:37, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Moving on from legal definition to statistical definition, as Grahamec mentions above the ABS definitions for urban centres are defined around >200 and <1000 (Localities); > 1000 and <= 19,999 (urban centre); >20,000 (urban centre with >20k pop). Ref: 1216.0 - Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) - Electronic Publication, 2005: Chapter 6 Urban Centre - Locality Structure. Category: Urban Centres with population between 1000 an 19,999 population in New South Wales doesn't sound that flash though :-) Category:Localities in New South Wales does make sense, but village is the more common term. However, I noted above Bega Shire Council was referring to such places as Localities. I am more than happy to see another source of truth than the ABS, but it is their bread and butter and they are producing an Australia-wide view. Geoscience Australia does not distinguish between "Locality (bounded), Town, Village, Populated place, Local government town, Town site (no population)"; all are classified as LOCB.--A Y Arktos\talk 08:38, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Trunkey Creek, among others, is referred to by the NSW geographic name board as a village, so this terminology seems to be officially recognised in NSW, although it calls others localities.Grahamec 02:19, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

My reference to Piliga was that it had been recategorised as a village on Wiki, even though it is the backblocks rather than a potential tourist destination. I think this just reflects the fact that the article was created to discuss the Piliga scrub (which is an important subject) although Piliga is a place of no significance. I'm sure there is no official distinction between towns and villages in Australia (I understand that in England a village traditionally had a C of E church, but was not the centre of a parish, which would have made it a town, but this has never been relevant in Australia). The question is whether it is useful for us to have a separate category for villages and towns in New South Wales. I think it probably is useful to reserve towns for serious places but I'm not sure how this could be defined - maybe less than 1000 or less than 200. Incidentally is there an easily accessible place for ABS population counts for urban areas? Grahamec 10:16, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not inclined to base a definition on some population cutoff because for one there are villages with thousands of people in UK and secondly what to do with the towns that hover around the 200 mark which are numerous. Some alternatives: there must be something like a town charter, I think, because I know some of the towns in SA historically received a charter to be able to call themselves a town. Anything that doesn't have a charter would therefore be something else -- perhaps a village, perhaps a settlement, perhaps a hamlet. Alternatively, having (or sharing) a postcode is likely to be a kind of "official status" that the locality was, at some point in time, a town. I'd need to do some research to confirm this though. — Донама 02:35, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
Here, I would not ever use the word "village". That term brings to mind quaint olde-worlde kitsch. Almost any named group of houses ("centre of population") outside a metropolitan area would be called a "town". Donama's point above is probably more related to the place having had a post office at some time in history, rather than any indication of a town charter (which has to do with what we now know as an LGA). And to Grahame, an English village church could be the centre of a parish, it was a market that made a "town".
The issue here is whether Category:New South Wales villages should be left as is, become a subcategory of, or be merged with Category:Towns in New South Wales. The decision seems to rest on whether there is a widely accepted objective decision about the places are villages, towns, or both. --Scott Davis Talk 10:47, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Geographical Names Board and similar

The NSW GNB [2] administers the Geographical Names Act 1966 [3], which defines "Place" (s2) as meaning "any geographical or topographical feature or any area, district, division, locality, region, city, town, village, settlement or railway station or any other place". It doesn't appear to throw any further light as to the difference between a town and a village. It recognises Manyana, New South Wales as a village and a suburb under the name Manyana and as a village and a beach under the name Manyana(h) Beach. I think we can recognise as villages places that the Board calls villages, but on the same basis Berrima, New South Wales should be changed back to a town. Grahamec 13:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

  • The Geographical Names Board (GNB) is a really useful site, thanks. I had used it once or twice for names derivation, but more usually use Geoscience Australia (GA) to verify a place. GA doesn't distiguish between types of places but is of course Australia-wide, however there are equivalents for the GNB for each state. You can search the NSW GNB on just designation and the result for Village is 676. Not all of these are current villages. For example Alfred Town near Wagga was a village to 1988 and is now a suburb of Wagga.--A Y Arktos\talk 21:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

ABS data on Pop counts for urban localities

This ABS page should allow you to search 2001 Census Data by Location Name - I always wonder when it is an involved link whether it is related to a specific serch and the link works later by another viewer.--A Y Arktos\talk 11:13, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Add Brisbane to your watchlist!

Hello. I just logged in today to notice that some anon had changed the population of Brisbane to 700,000 and it went unreverted for 12 HOURS so I think more people should add this to their watchlist. Regards, ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! - review me 00:58, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Suburbs are not towns

I think suburbs such as category:Suburbs of the City of Blue Mountains are not towns and that the category:Towns in New South Wales should be taken off them. Do you agree? I have been recategorising Wollongong suburbs on this basis.Grahamec 13:03, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree it's not intuitive, but legally I guess they are equivalent. Since Wikipedia's for humans not computers we should try and categorise them the way a human-written query of the future would want to search on them.— Donama 14:33, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Infoboxes

Ronan.evans appears to feel he is free to remove info boxes (Queanbeyan, New South Wales) at will. I would have thought the LGA infobox was Wiki policy and that his infobox does not have all the information in the LGA infobox. Grahamec 00:51, 2 June 2006 (UTC) I am also not convinced that contributors are not entiled to list Letchworth as a suburb (Talk:Queanbeyan, New South Wales). It used to be a suburb, once had a railway station and it is still a known location. (NSW GNB entry). I am aware that emotions run high on what is a suburb in Queabeyan, for reasons unclear to non-residents. --Grahamec 01:09, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

That means it is a historical suburb, current locality. As such I don't think it ought to appear on a list of suburbs of Queanbeyan. Also, this information you've written here should be in the article about Letchworth if that's the case. I know there is a similar case in South Australia -- an article about a historical electorate or town or something, but I forget. Can anyone remember what I'm talking about? — Donama 04:10, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure that Letchworth, New South Wales deserves an entry. Nevertheless somebody has added one and then attempted to link it the Queanbeyan page, which I would have thought was reasonable and Ronan.evans has then removed the link to it. Besides I would have thought the Queanbeyan Council's peculiar behaviour in relation to its subsurbs names was of some interest (as was the information in the LGA box that Ronan.evans deleted. --Grahamec 07:04, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
An infobox generally carries official information only -- information that is not controversial. Of course sometimes even official information is quite controversial (like in Northern Ireland's infobox!) but shouldn't be the case for Queanbeyan. Probably adding a new section to the Queanbeyan article about its historical suburbs (which are no longer official) would be fine -- just not in the infobox. — Donama 07:19, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
OK I will create a separate Queanbeyan LGA page and recreate the LGA infobox on it.--Grahamec 01:31, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Suburb infoboxes

As you know there is already an Australia city infobox template, but I haven't found many standardised infobox templates for suburbs yet. I just found {{Adelaide Suburb}} in the wild though and used it in Salisbury East, South Australia. Hope it's helpful. I'm not sure how much it is used, but it looks kind of nice. — Donama 06:44, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

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