Talk:Sydney/Refactoring

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Note that the current consensus on the Sydney hierachy is on Talk:Sydney.

Discussion[edit]

First up, reasons why I did the proposal this way:

  1. (WT-en) Evan's and (WT-en) Mark's comments in various places (on London in the pub, for example) made it sound like we were misusing districts. We were imagining huge swathes of Sydney as part of a single district, whereas a district is really meant to be a neighbourhood, like the Haight in San Francisco, which is about ten blocks.
  2. Sydney really does cover a huge land area and there's quite a lot to see in it, together with an enormous population probably justifying the use of several regions, even if it takes a while to fill in some of the cities. As a friend in the US pointed out to me, Sydney is more like the Bay Area than it is like San Francisco.
  3. The existing districts structure seems really unbalanced, with some areas of Sydney (like the Sutherland area) entirely missing, and some of the districts covering a single suburbs, like Darling Harbour and Darlinghurst, but others covering an enormous number, like the Outer West.
  4. With different parts of Sydney as different city articles, we can focus on completing the major tourist areas without feeling like we're leaving a city article incomplete.
  5. (WT-en) Pjamescowie feels that there are suburbs (like Manly) that really justify their own article. And I agreed, but it was very weird to be linking to a city article like Manly from a district article like Sydney/Northern Beaches -- wikivoyage's hierachy has no mechanism for entire cities being within districts. (Which makes sense, if districts are meant to be small.)

I used local government boundaries primarily because they're a good way of making sure we didn't miss anything. New South Wales has had this problem a few times, with Lithgow and Dubbo being left entirely out of the set of regions given. Potential problems with using local government boundaries:

  1. Some of the names are badly known: Bondi (part of Waverly) is far better known than Waverly, and inhabitants of the Lower North Shore only know that they live in Willoughby when they vote in council elections.
  2. Some of the local government areas overlap names with a suburb: so Parramatta is a well known suburb that is part of Parramatta the local government area. There is some potential for Parramatta/Parramatta weirdness.
  3. Individual suburbs are still technically a bit large to write up as districts if we interpret the guidelines strictly. In some ways, each suburb of Sydney ought to be an article. But while there are some suburbs that absolutely justify this (Manly, Bondi, Newtown) there are many that are purely residential. (A North Ryde article would be pretty short.) So I figured that when suburbs deserved their own writeup, a district page would work.

There's still some ways Sydney doesn't really work as a region: few travellers think of it that way; and few Sydneysiders (at least in Inner Sydney) think of it that way.

I'd really appreciate feedback on:

  • whether this proposal works (of course!)
  • potential alternative names for the regions
  • whether naming after council areas is really sensible

Thanks -- (WT-en) Hypatia 05:29, 8 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Some possible amalgamations:

-- (WT-en) Hypatia 13:33, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)

-- (WT-en) Hypatia 13:35, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Possible renaming:

Hi there. As a long-time contributor to Sydney, thanks for inviting my opinion on this matter. I think a number of things: 1. that we need to accept flexibility in naming locales - given the geographical complexity of Sydney, "one size won't fit all" in creating district / suburb names - sometimes local council names will work, sometimes they don't (redirects will probably take care of any ambiguities); 2. that we must avoid creating a 3+ level hierarchy of articles within one city - we need to preserve a fairly flat structure; 3. that we don't need to create a page for everything immediately (there are some parts of Sydney that don't really warrant coverage)....

Just as an example, I don't think we need to create a separate region page for Sydney (City) within Sydney (top) - all of the various City / CBD+ districts can be created as needed and subsumed within a summary page (and a simple list on the main article page) without resorting to an elaborate hierarchy that will create confusion and potential argument.

What we need, I think, is something like this for the city centre (as an example):

Sydney (main)

a summary page and main page list called City (as in "I'm going into the City today".... a fairly common expression in Sydney that everyone would understand as meaning the CBD and immediately nearby)

a series of Sydney/.... articles that can be listed on the Sydney/City page and on the main page within a Districts sub-heading BUT without an intermediate hierarchy page (we don't need / want Sydney/City/Circular Quay, for example; rather, simply Sydney/Circular Quay):

I foresee continuing difficulties, however.... Where do the Domain and the Botanical Gardens fit in, for example? This could really be open to argument.... Oh well, let's keep talking..... (WT-en) Pjamescowie 17:21, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)

I'm a bit averse to "some parts of Sydney aren't worth visiting" arguments. Sure, if someone was coming to see the sights of Sydney I wouldn't recommend the Camden area as a must see. On the other hand, wikivoyage will presumably also be used at some point by people who are visiting an area because they have friends, family or work there, and thus have sufficient motivation to be there, and just want information on where to eg get a motel room, and a nice place for a drink.

In any case, I wasn't thinking of creating all the articles, just all the links. :)

Wikivoyage style on "embedded" districts seems to vary a lot: New York (city) has three levels.

Sydney's problem is that it is (as wikipedia points out) a simply enormous land area for a city of its size.

Another is that there definitely are missing districts. There's a few attractions I want to write up in the Sutherland Shire for example, but it isn't there...

The way you seem to be moving would be something like:

That's probably a better idea than mine, but I would like to rework the top level structure a little at least.

Proposal for top level in this scheme:

Preserve existing:

Start moving some of the smaller districts linked from the front page into being linked from those articles (Darlinghurst and Kings Cross maybe into Eastern Suburbs)

Add:

and:

  • Sydney/Hornsby or similar for the area to the north of the North Shore.

-- (WT-en) Hypatia 05:17, 11 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Original proposal by User:(WT-en) Hypatia[edit]

Note: current consensus is on Talk:Sydney, this is an archived copy of the original proposal

Ok, if districts are really meant to be local neighbourhoods rather than suburbs or collections of suburbs, then Sydney's current districts are way too big. Hence, this proposal for considering Sydney as a number of cities based on local government divisions, with much of the existing work on Sydney actually fitting nicely into Inner Sydney or whatever that region would be called.

Please comment on this as much as you like on Talk:Sydney/Refactoring. I'll discuss the reasons I chose this particular representation there rather than here -- (WT-en) Hypatia 05:04, 8 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Initial proposal based on local government boundaries (I used this map of Outer Sydney for every region except Inner Sydney, this map of Inner Sydney, and this City of Sydney map for the Sydney (city) districts:

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