View text source at Wikipedia

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Melbourne/Archive 1

Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3→Archive 5

(untitled)

Shouldn't major streets and thoroughfares be broadened to include those such as Acland St, Brunswick St, Smith St, Bridge Rd, etc? All of those are significant, but they're neither in the CBD nor notable for being thoroughfares.

I think it might also be useful to look at setting up a template for the suburbs, following the idea of Blackburn South, and perhaps for other types, if we can get together a suitable example for them. Ambivalenthysteria 11:50, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've added a link to Blackburn South on the Suburbs subpage. Regarding the streets, prehaps the definition for inclusion should be "major streets in the CBD, major city-suburbs thoroughfares, and other streets with cultural significance, or streets that are a 'district'." I just don't want it to be too broad; unless people start adding the streets they live on out in the 'burbs. (Maybe that's a bit extreme, but there are plenty of major roads that are not that important, and you don't want them all being thrown in). Hypernovean 12:16, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I certainly see your point. I think adding in the cultural significance criteria solves that problem. Ambivalenthysteria 13:38, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

New subpages

If anyone wants to add a subpage for one of the streams (under Scope), feel free to do so. I'll propose that each page give at least the following headings/information:

Templates and welcomes

I remember seeing on another WikiProject the use of a MediaWiki/Template box that worked as something of a hitlist. Any thoughts on doing the same thing here? I think it'd be useful to pick, say, five articles, get them up to a decent standard, and pick another five that need doing, etc.. Ambivalenthysteria 07:26, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Like an open tasks box? I think focusing the work is a good idea, rather than the thinly spread mini-stubbing that's all that's really happened so far (some of which is mine, I admit). Where would the list go so that it would have a decent exposure? The talk pages of people listed as being from Melbourne? This whole Project needs more exposure before it will really pick up speed in my opinion. Hypernovean 11:10, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, that's what I meant. It could go on our talk pages for a start - at least then we can work from it. Maybe we need to do a bit of recruiting as well. Ambivalenthysteria 12:04, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I was thinking of making a template to put on the talk pages of users who have listed themselves as Melburnians, but not joined the project, to extend an invitation as it were. Hypernovean 01:04, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How's this? Hypernovean 01:37, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've placed a delete notice on this Template, as it was never used and not really needed after all.

And also, come to think of it, what about a talk page notice, similar to those at Wikipedia:Template messages#WikiProject notices? Hypernovean 01:42, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Nice. Might be good if it could be shrunk a little though. It'd be good to get one of those WikiProject notices as well. However, most of all, I'd like to get this article box going.
Also, do you think List of closed Melbourne railway stations needs an incomplete list marker? To my knowledge, there may be one or two stations from the 1860s that we don't have, and they're fairly insignificant if they even existed.
I put that there becuase of there being so many ?s left in the tables, not so much that the there were missing entries altogether. The default template might not be quite right for the situation then. I'll also try and squeeze down the size of the invite box, then start posting it if the rest of it is alright. TPK 07:17, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Here are some WikiProject Melbourne articles which attract a high number of "page hits" but are only rated as Stub Class, or otherwise need additional citations or attention:
Suburbs: Derrimut, South Wharf, Menzies Creek, Save Our State (Australia)
Landmarks: 101 Collins Street, 120 Collins Street, Bourke Place, Hamer Hall, Melbourne Mint
Events: Melbourne International Festival of Brass, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Great Bookie Robbery, Extreme weather events in Melbourne
Transport: All of the stations on the Puffing Billy Railway need expanding or merging to the main article, especially the request stops which are just tin sheds
Sporting Clubs: Caroline Springs George Cross FC
Streets: Little Bourke Street, Hardware Lane, Hosier Lane
People: Alannah Hill, Meek (street artist), Vexta
Institutions: Eltham High School, Glen Eira Town Hall, Boxing Day Test
Venues:
Miscellaneous: Collins St., 5 pm, Yarra Valley, Coops Shot Tower, Melbourne Talk Radio, Melbourne University Publishing, The Herald and Weekly Times,
Edit or discuss this list.

Is this okay for an open tasks box? Ambivalenthysteria 12:49, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I love it! I think we should just use that and a welcome message and it's set. The message ought to be personalised though, and I think now that my welcome box is unessecary. I've started placing these invites like this:
Hi, User. Seeing as you've listed yourself at Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Australia as being from Melbourne, why don't you drop by the WikiProject Melbourne and help add something to the Wikipedia about our city?
Be sure to visit the Project talk page, and if you are interested, you can become a member.
{WikiProjectMelbourneTasks}
TPK 13:40, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Glad you like it. I'll use that invite myself, if you don't mind - thanks! If you've got any suggestions for better lines/stations/landmarks/whatever, add them to the template - I just added those because I couldn't think of anything better. Ambivalenthysteria 16:05, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

At what point should we take an article out of the open tasks done? IMHO, we should aim to get each article past stub length, and improve some of the existing ones. That's why I've added Federation Square and Flemington Racecourse under landmarks: there's articles there, but they need improvement. Ambivalenthysteria 11:12, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Prehaps seperate lists of requests and cleanups/expansions (beyond stub-length). Thing is it would be too cumbersome and would need to loose the categories like People, Landmarks etc. and I think they're more handy. TPK 07:15, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
IMO, I don't think we have to change the current system, but I do think we need to be a bit careful when removing them, to see if they're in decent condition. Ambivalenthysteria 07:22, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Project page categories

Ought the Project's main page have Category:Melbourne as well as Category:WikiProjects? Or is it convention to have only the latter? It just might improve the Project's visibility if it had the city's category on it too... TPK 03:09, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Talk page templates

I was thinking of creating a short template to go at the top of talk pages for suburbs, stations, etc.

For example, a general notice:

This article is related to the WikiProject Melbourne. This Project is an attempt to fill in, organize, and standardize articles about the city of Melbourne, Australia. You can discuss the Project at its talk page.

Suburbs:

This article is related to the WikiProject Melbourne. This Project is an attempt to fill in, organize, and standardize articles about the city of Melbourne, Australia. You can discuss the Project at its talk page. More specifically, this article is a part of the suburbs sub-project, which has its own talk page.

Railway stations:

This article is related to the WikiProject Melbourne. This Project is an attempt to fill in, organize, and standardize articles about the city of Melbourne, Australia. You can discuss the Project at its talk page. More specifically, this article is a part of the railway stations sub-project, which has its own talk page.

I think they would useful for showing people that the Projet exists for starters. Should talk pages be created though were they don't already exist, (like on most of the suburbs articles), just for these messages? The WikiProject Albums does for instance, but still, a lot of them might never be seen... There are definately places were they could be used though. TPK 12:50, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Does anyone else see the second two tables screwed up?! I can't find the problem in the code... TPK 17:00, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC) - Fixed TPK 13:22, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Progress bars

What do people think of the progress bars on the main page and a few of the subpages? Its a fairly subjective thing though; so I've worked them out basically as: (beware: maths!) 

"Number of articles created" as % of "Articles required"

where there are a lot of articles; and as: 

"Number of detailed articles" (each = 1 point)
+ "Number of stubs" (each = 0.5 point)
as % of "Articles required"

where there are only a few.

They mess up the main page a little, shifting [Edit] links and such, but that can be smoothed out. Every few weeks or so they ought to be updated by reappraising the formulas above. The way I see it, these visual cues about the progress of the Project are an important way to keep people involved: hopefully, where they can see there is a lot of work needed, they might help do it. That's the theory anyway...

TPK 12:27, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't think they're a bad idea, but there's a few problems. Firstly, in some cases (as with railway stations), adding an article for each one might be one thing, but there'll be a few different stages, IMHO, before that project is complete. Secondly, having a figure for things like streets seems a bit strange, considering that we haven't even made a list of ones to add yet. Thirdly, why are Lord Mayors and Town Halls at 50% when we barely have any? Ambivalenthysteria 13:11, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The things like streets that have no page are set at 0% for the time being, as are the Lord Mayors and Town Halls, or that's how they appear for me... although they should be slightly higher as there are some articles... I need to tinker with them. As for different stages, I guess there needs to be more tightly defined phases in the subpages, so that, e.g., a List of... article counts as say 10%, then every article that is created goes towards the remaining 90%, counting as 0.25 when a stub, 0.5 when partly developed, etc. to 1 when complete. I dunno, there just needs to be more specification of what needs to be done so it can be counted up more accurately. Or prehaps it could be updated via some sort of script. I doubt it though, but I have absolutely no idea :) TPK 13:21, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The 'progress' sections should be pretty useful for that, as long as they're regularly updated. Ambivalenthysteria 13:25, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Photos

Does anyone have any photos they want taken, either to illustrate current articles, or ones you plan to write in the near future? At the moment, I think I'm the only one of the regular contributors here (well, there is Robert Merkel too, but he's not really involved with this), that has a digital camera.

If you can let me know of ones you want taken, I'll make an effort to get them done. I'd like to get a bit of a list together, because I'm only in Melbourne every few weeks, and there's every chance I'll be moving to Canberra in a matter of months - so I'd like to get as many taken as possible before I go. Ambivalenthysteria 10:21, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've got a camera that I use for underwater photography -- essentially an expensive house that fits a cheap digital camera. I can take a few snaps around town, particularly of the northern suburbs. I'm far from an amazing photographer, but I'm certain they'll add a bit of colour to the pages. These will probably be on an opportunistic basis -- if I happen to be in the right place at the right time.
It's interesting that you mention Robert Merkel, as I went to Melbourne University with him, and still see him around from time-to-time.

Template:Melstub

I've created this template so it can be added along with Template:Stub, and it's What links here page used as an extension of the open tasks list. It'll probably be more useful when there are more detailed articles than stubs, but I'll start adding it now. TPK 17:00, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This'll be useful, methinks. Good idea. Also, I think the WikiProject page itself now looks a lot better (and a lot more useful) after your latest edit. Ambi 03:23, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Restaurants

Hiya! Finally decided to join the project. Thanks for the invite Hyper.

I run a restaurant review website for Melbourne, and thought that some of the information from there could be used here. (I also thought that some of the Melbournites here could help contribute there as well!) I may also be able to get some photos contributed to the project, not only of restaurants, but of the general Melbourne area as well.

For the people looking at skyscrapers etc, there is a really good website on the architecture of Melbourne at Walking Melbourne that might be useful. There are also some links from there to other interesting websites on Melbourne. It seems that Melbourne has a very eclectic and well-known style of building through the ages, and things that I pass on a daily basis, have suddenly become more visible to me after reading about them and learning more of the history.

I haven't included the link to my restaurant website here as I don't want to be accused of spamming, but if there is an interest, I'll happily post it for you to peruse.

Neolux 01:16, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Okay, well, since no one has responded and I'm not putting this on the main Melbourne page, I'll put it here so we can get an idea of what I'm talking about above. The website is FoodGod and I'm happy to get some information compiled on various areas and specific restaurants and cafes to be "used with permission" by WIkipedia. Let me know what you think. Neolux 12:55, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I think it'd be an interesting project - maybe even worthy of it's own Wikimedia project. However, I can't see it fitting as part of Wikipedia, and any such articles (unless on something very notable...I've considered writing an article on the Espy, for example, covering the whole development saga) would be fairly likely to end up getting deleted. Ambi 01:27, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Project page notice

I've created the Template:WPMNotice which can go at the top of talk pages for pages related to the city and the project, as is the norm with WikiProjects.

{{WPMNotice}}

TPK 14:07, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)

More and more members!

It's great to see we now have 10 members, the most of any city WikiProject (though there are only 4 :P) To try and get things kickstarted again, there are a few things we might try doing:

I think the news one is a great idea. There's clearly new articles being made, if you look through people's recent edit histories (as I tend to do), but otherwise, we wouldn't know about it.
What sort of articles were you thinking of, with the other idea? With the exclusion of the mess that is Federation Square, most of the other articles simply need writing in the first place, and aren't likely to be massively long. Ambi 10:31, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Well it doesn't neccessarily need to be an existing article that gets adopted, it could be an 'Adopt a Stub' or 'Adopt a Redlink' too... The idea would be to focus some research on the topic (that might not already exist) as well as focus on writing it, or expanding it if it does exist. TPK 11:44, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I thought that was the idea of the to-do box. ;)
Nah, I think I see your point...like, organising who's going to work on what, exactly? Ambi 12:35, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, like someone can nominate that they will work on article X to get it up to scratch, so things can be better focused. TPK 12:54, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Ah, yes. Good idea. Feel like starting us off? Ambi 13:01, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, howabout I "adopt" Queen Victoria Village, which is one of the largest changes to the CBD in a long time. I'll add a little something about this on the project page to see if anyone else wants to take up a page of their own. It can stay as an informal type of thing, I don't think it needs time limits or the like, just a posting on what everyone is doing and a mention when they think it's more or less 'done', and it could then be added (if deserving of course) to a list of Melbourne 'featurette' articles. Or whatever :p TPK 13:26, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Fine with me. I've followed suit - how could I have forgotten about the Queen Victoria Market? Now, to go pressure the other eight... and the news section? Ambi 13:45, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
You don't need to pressure me, either.
I'm going to adopt Acland Street and Toorak Road.
Maybe Collins Street too, and some of the people who 'made' Melbourne in the first place, like Robert Hoddle and Charles La Trobe.

EuropracBHIT 11:58, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC).

I hope you don't mind, but I've just changed the street article titles so that they fit with the format we've already used for Swanston St, Bourke St and St Kilda Road. Ambi 12:34, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Pride

You are invited to participate in Wiki Loves Pride!

Or, view or update the current list of Tasks. This campaign is supported by the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group, an officially recognized affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation. Visit the group's page at Meta-Wiki for more information, or follow Wikimedia LGBT+ on Facebook. Remember, Wiki Loves Pride is about creating and improving LGBT-related content at Wikimedia projects, and content should have a neutral point of view. One does not need to identify as LGBT or any other gender or sexual minority to participate. This campaign is about adding accurate, reliable information to Wikipedia, plain and simple, and all are welcome!

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the campaign's main talk page.


Thanks, and happy editing!

User:Another Believer and User:OR drohowa