Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Australian roads)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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RfC: WP:AURDNAME as an official guideline

The purpose of this RfC is to gauge whether enough consensus exists to designate these road naming conventions as an official guideline. These have so been far discussed at the Australian Roads Wikiproject and are built upon the pre-existing informal consensus created by most existing road names in Australia. The aim of the guidelines are to help assist editors in forming a consistent approach to roadway naming. The US Roads Wikiproject has a similar set of guidelines available at WP:USSH. We require a different scheme due to regional differences in the importance of road naming and route markers (also known as shielding). -- 11:44, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Affected Parties

I will shortly be contacting WP:AURD, WP:HWY, WP:RFC , and WP:AT via their talk pages; as well as posting on both WP:VPP and WP:VPR. -- Nbound (talk) 11:44, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

These parties have now been contacted. -- Nbound (talk) 12:02, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

Could you add where the appropriate "government gazette(s)" can be found? Thanks. AfricaTanz (talk) 12:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

 Done - Links added for each state with information if even further searching is required. It likely wouldnt be worth listing each of the other sources individually as the list would be extremely long. -- Nbound (talk) 13:08, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

What is with the small type? Non-normative bits? It seems hard to read, so it should be brought up to normal size and perhaps distinguished in a different way.

Also, the second bullet point in small type, relating to common names sometimes being allowed, could do with an example: such as, in Victoria, Airport Drive and Warrigal Road have official government names (Airport Connection Road and Warrigal Highway) that are literally never used, not even on signage. — EThis, that and the other (talk) 07:23, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

 Done Small text fixed, reformatted, added 3 examples of signposted name being preferred. -- Nbound (talk) 07:43, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

• Support – reflects the current naming practices for the vast majority of Australian roads articles. The issue I raised at WT:AURD (official but internal names only used by gov departments) has been addressed. - Evad37 (talk) 03:41, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
• Support - see Evad37 above. smileguy91^talk 03:37, 22 June 2013 (UTC)
• Support as per Evad37. - Jayadevp13 15:51, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose. The main section, on titles, contradicts existing policy; that is harmful. The rest - any part that does not contradict policy - is merely redundant instead of harmful. bobrayner (talk) 20:24, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
  • Can you be more specific? --Rschen7754 20:26, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
  • My guess is that bobrayner is referring to WP:UCN, the policy that states that articles' primary names should be based on that which is most commonly used rather than "official" names, as these guidelines propose. However, I could be incorrect, and I also request that he elaborate on what contradiction he refers to. On these grounds, though, I am going to have to Oppose --Jackson Peebles (talk) 00:26, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Bobrayner, please see my response to Jackson below :) -- Nbound (talk) 09:17, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes; my main objection is that the proposed guideline contradicts the "common name" bit of WP:AT. I'm not a stickler about policy for policy's sake; using common names genuinely benefits readers. Also, I don't think it's helpful to invoke WP:IAR as a way of enacting a new guideline which contradicts policy! ;-) bobrayner (talk) 02:21, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

When there's a good reason to not use the common name, we generally don't - for example, we always use "California State Route x" instead of "California Highway x" or whatever a individual route may be referred to as. --Rschen7754 02:36, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

As an aside, referring to the US highways arbcom case (many years ago) seems to be problematic too; that case mostly highlighted behavioral issues rather than gaps in naming rules - if anything it pointed out the problem of having multiple overlapping guidelines. Against that background, I feel that the proposal of another overlapping (and contradictory) guideline is part of the problem, not part of the solution. bobrayner (talk) 02:44, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Im not sure we should consider this and UCN contradictory (it already does state that other article titles are sometimes preferred). It should be noted that discussion is currently occuring that will remove the remaining ambiguity in the UCN text . See: Wikipedia_talk:Article_titles#WP:COMMONNAME_needs_copy-editing. The current proposition is:

"For an article title, use a commonly recognizable name. The preferred name is usually the most prevalent name used in reliable English-language sources. This preferred name may or may not be an official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked name.

In determining the prevalence of a name, consider the usage in the sources referenced in the article, and you may also consider other reliable sources. Also consider the choice made by other encyclopedias.

The most prevalent name used may be discounted in favor of another of significant but lesser prevalence, due to problems such as: ambiguity, inaccuracy, non-neutrality, vulgarity or pedantry."

which sums up fairly well the process used in this proposed naming convention. I have had no involvement in the discussion mentioned above upto this point. -- Nbound (talk) 00:16, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

• OpposeNeutral per WP:UCN disagreement with WP:AURDNAME and my reluctance to provide two official guidelines that are in direct contradiction with one another. --Jackson Peebles (talk) 00:26, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

UCN is not a universal rule that every article must adhere to or else, a quick reading of the section clearly shows that, its guidance towards a preferred name, infact using the "common name" for these roads is likely to cause confusion and disambiguation nightmares (all the major capitals have multiple motorways known commonly as "M<insert number here>", other examples such as the "F3" which is just the name of some shielding used in the 70s/80s (now the Pacific Motorway officially), and is actually shielded as the "M1"; so any junction list would then say " F3 (M1)". The US roads project had such a problem with common names for roads they were forced to go to ArbCom to sort out their differences and then create their version of this document at WP:USSH. Ideally we would like to sort it out here before the same issues rear their heads. The reasoning for the official names is self-evident even by editors not involved with the Australian roads project (WP:AURD is only a few months old), but the names we have used (and based this guideline off) have been around much longer. The point of any WP guideline or policy is to help sort out disputes and confusion, and if it doesnt work in a particular circumstance, it is to be ignored. Both the headers of WP guideline and policy pages state this, and this proposed guideline even says so explicitly in the text. WP:IAR is actually there to help :). I am happy to discuss this further if you would like more details on why this policy is appropriate or if you have any questions :) -- Nbound (talk) 09:13, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation - I have revised my opinion to neutral. I'm not huge on IAR, but if this largely matches the other highway systems around the world, I guess it doesn't do any harm. I'm still for compliance with wider guidelines, but I will defer to the judgement of those better versed in this area. However, I still don't support making this guideline, as I feel it could add to confusion if someone has read both WP:AURDNAME and WP:UCN. --Jackson Peebles (talk) 21:10, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Please see my reply above to Bobrayner. It should also be noted that this convention is infobox neutral, if IBR is selected over IAR at some future point in time, the parameters mentioned can be changed to their IBR equivalents. -- Nbound (talk) 00:16, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

@Nbound: I believe the IAR Jackson Peebles was referring to was WP:IAR, not Template:Infobox Australian road. - Evad37 (talk) 01:39, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, good spot, Ill redact that portion -- Nbound (talk) 02:22, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

• Support – reflects the current naming practices for the vast majority of Australian roads articles. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:35, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
• Support it's a logical guideline, and per Hawkeye7. --Rschen7754 02:49, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
• Support - per above. PantherLeapord (talk) 01:16, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.