Talk:Ontario Place station

As a courtesy to other contributors, could we discuss complicated or controversial issues on the talk page, not in our edit summaries...

Contributor Blaixx unilaterally changed this article to a redirect, with the edit summary "Station articles normally aren't created until the line is under construction. Redirect for now".

I restored it, with the edit summary "As a courtesy to other contributors, could we discuss complicated or controversial issues on the talk page, not in our edit summaries..."

GNG should be what counts when considering whether or not a proposed facility merits its own article. Lots of proposed facilities won't merit a standalone article because RS haven't written about them, or haven't said anything other than that they are part of a plan. Ontario Place station merits an article because RS have written about the station, have written about controversial aspects of the proposed station. Geo Swan (talk) 05:14, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

The content about this could easily be contained in the Ontario Line article, without needing its own separate article yet. The Ontario Line is still just a proposal as of right now, so an article about the proposal is certainly justified, but it's WP:TOOSOON for us to need that article to be paired with separate articles about its proposed stations yet. For one thing, the Ontario Line proposal could still fail entirely or get pruned back or revised, so that some or all of the currently proposed stations never get built at all. So for the time being, just one article about the proposed line as a whole, including some information about the proposed stations but not spinning them off to their own separate articles yet, is all we need — the time to start spinning off separate articles about the new Ontario Line stations is once construction is actually underway. Notability is more complex than just the question of whether sources exist or not — for example, I've had human interest pieces written about me doing local interest stuff in my local media a couple of times, so we would have to keep an article about me if the existence of two sources was all it took to exempt me from having to achieve anything noteworthy.

So the question of whether this needs its own article yet, or is better discussed within the Ontario Line article, is not automatically finalized just because the article has footnotes in it — to justify its own standalone article as a separate topic from the line as a whole, the bar it would have to clear involves crossing the line from "thing that might happen someday, maybe, if an unfinalized proposal goes ahead in its proposed form" to "thing that is definitely going to happen because the plan has been finalized and construction is underway". The line will be permanently notable as a proposal even if it actually fails, but the individual stations won't be — by the same token, we do have an article about John Tory's dormant SmartTrack proposal, but not about every individual new transit station (e.g. Gerrard-Carlaw) that would have been built as part of it. The proposed stations can be discussed in the line's article, certainly, but to qualify for their own standalone articles separate from the line's article they would need to actually exist in the real world rather than just on paper. Bearcat (talk) 17:35, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Geo Swan, my apologies for being discourteous earlier, I am happy to follow the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle on this talk page here.
Similar to what Bearcat said above, I don't think there is enough material yet for a dedicated article on Ontario Place station. The sources generally describe it in terms of being the terminus of the Ontario Line and less as being its own entity (ex. discussion about where the station should be located is more about where the line itself should be located). At this stage, I think it is more logical to merge this article into Ontario Line until there is more information to justify a standalone article. BLAIXX 19:13, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

1. You write "The content about this could easily be contained in the Ontario Line article...". Sorry, I don't think that is the best way to think about wikipedia articles. Topics are linked to other topics. It is pretty common for the topics we consider notable, or should consider notable, to be linked to multiple other topics. Your argument that all the really notable information on Ontario Place station could be shoehorned into the article on the Ontario Line could just as easily be made that all the really notable information on Ontario Place station could be shoehorned into the article on Ontario Place. When a topic has RS to support its notability, and it has meaningful links to multiple other topics, I think temptations to shoehorn it into other articles should be forgotten.

   Please pause for a moment, and think about the reader's experience. I suggest readers rarely read articles from start to finish. Rather, I think it is typical for our readers to want to go directly to the places they can find the information they want. Navigating articles is best done through links. When a reader thinks a link may take them directly to the information they want, they can read a couple of sentences, and, if it looks like the information they seek isn't there, all they have to do to return to where they linked from is to click the back button.

   But when people with an overpowering urge to merge succeed, they are apt to navigate inside that one big article by scrolling around, or searching. They can't go back to where they started with the back button. This is an extremely strong reason for the wikipedia to be made up of relatively smaller articles, that are richly linked to related articles, instead of relatively huge omnibus articles, that try to address multiple articles.

   Whatsomore, when a perfectly adequate small article is shoehorned into a larger article, you can no longer put it on your watchlist. If Ontario Place station is what I am interested in, and you succeed in shoehorning it into the article on Ontario Place, can't I just put Ontario Place on my watchlist? I could, but it would mean I would get hits on my watchlist when there is new information on Doug Ford's plans to install casinos, or new information on the outdoor theatre, or new information about the Cinesphere. I don't want all those false positives.

   Finally, when coverage of a standalone topic is shoehorned into one of the larger articles it is related to, some of the information only relevant to other topics it is related to won't be relevant there. Geo Swan (talk) 19:58, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

   I noticed you used the word "shoehorned" six times in your reply, suggesting moving one or two sentences would be a messy affair but I don't think there's any reason to assume that. I'd like to point to WP:PAGEDECIDE because some of it's points are relevant here.

   • "A decision to cover a notable topic only as part of a broader page does not in any way disparage the importance of the topic"
   • "Sometimes, a notable topic can be covered better as part of a larger article, where there can be more complete context that would be lost on a separate page" – this was what I was trying to say in my first response. "Ontario Place station" is not a standalone topic in my opinion, criticisms in the RS are about the alignment of a subway line and I think the information is more suitable there. BLAIXX 21:59, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

2. Notability is not temporary. You wrote: "...the Ontario Line proposal could still fail entirely or get pruned back or revised, so that some or all of the currently proposed stations never get built at all..." It is okay to not cover proposed facilities that have minor coverage, and never really rise to our inclusion criteria. But your comment seems to imply we have some obligation to erase the record of notable proposed facilities that are incomplete. Consider the Soviet Space Shuttle, the Buran, consider the Superconducting Supercollider the US was going to build in Texas, that would have been bigger than the CERN atom smasher. We don't refrain from covering proposed facilities simply because they don't ende up getting built. GNG is what counts here. Geo Swan (talk) 20:04, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
3. As to whether Bearcat would or wouldn't measure up to the wikipedia's criteria for a standalone article... Bearcat is not who should make this decision. If some other wikipedia contributor comes across the press coverage about Bearcat, and reaches the conclusion that that coverage belongs on wikipedia, they don't have to get Bearcat's permission. I started the article about local Toronto transit guy Steve Munro. I didn't ask his permission. I have no idea whether he may have contributed to the wikipedia. We have a tradition where the subject of an article, who, for reasons of shyness, or fear, requests we delete their article, we take their objections into account, if their notability is near the cusp of our notability criteria. And we turn down their deletion request, if their notability is solidly established, is far from the cusp. Bearcat, 2 articles about you, in, say, the Bayview Bulldog or the Brampton Guardian? I don't think that would be enough to measure up to our criteria. Geo Swan (talk) 21:08, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Having the Ontario Line article split from the Relief Line article is debatable as is; a separate article for a vaguely proposed station at Ontario Place on a barely planned line is absolutely redundant. —Northwest (talk) 04:16, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

We see editors try to start Wikipedia articles about people, buildings or things in their hometowns all the time on the grounds that the topic had been mentioned twice in the Brampton Guardian (or another city's equivalent to the Brampton Guardian) and thus "cleared" GNG — but again, we do not solely take the existence of press coverage into account when determining whether a topic clears WP:GNG or not. We also take into account the depth of the coverage that a topic gets, the geographic range of where that coverage is coming from, and the context of what that coverage is happening for. The reason I wouldn't qualify for an article is not the number of media hits I could show, nor the publications it appeared in (which were higher-calibre sources than the Brampton Guardian, incidentally) — it's that the context of what I got coverage for wasn't reasons why a person would qualify for an encyclopedia article. So even if somebody did try to start an article about me, the fact that a couple of media sources could be found is not a reason why the article would get kept despite my objections — it would still be deleted, because those sources weren't covering me in a noteworthy context that would make me a person the world was looking for information about.
Ontario Place station, meanwhile, is not getting its own standalone coverage as its own standalone thing — it is getting mentioned in coverage whose primary subject is either Ontario Place or the Ontario Line, and is not yet the subject of any significant standalone coverage independently of those larger contexts. None of the other proposed Ontario Line stations have their own dedicated articles yet, and none need them — right across the board, every "station" link in the Ontario Line article is either to an existing transit hub that already exists on the subway or the Eglinton LRT and is proposed to have the Ontario Line added to it as an additional service, or to the existing street or geographic feature that a proposed but not yet existing station has been tentatively named for. No other proposed but not yet existing new stop on the entire line already has its own separate article about it as a station, and no other proposed but not yet existing stop on the entire line needs its own separate article yet.
The proposed transit station is not in and of itself a topic of standalone interest or coverage in its own right yet — all of the sources here speak to the notability of either Ontario Place itself or the Ontario Line as a whole, and none of them make the Ontario Line's proposed Ontario Place station an independently notable thing of its own yet. It's not yet the subject of the sources, and it's not yet a thing people are independently interested in, separately from the overall line or Ontario Place itself. Bearcat (talk) 17:43, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Is Bearcat (wikipedia volunteer) notable?

Bearcat used him or herself as an example here. There have been a very small number of wikipedia contributors who established sufficient wikipedia notability for a standalone article, after they started contributing here. There are probably a larger number of contributors whose inherent notability is sufficient for them to merit some coverage in an article related to their main activity.

However, Bearcat, just as those other individuals aren't good judges of their notability, you aren't a good judge of your own notability. I wouldn't form an opinion of how much wikipedia notability the articles you mentioned confer, without taking a good look at them, and conducting my own web search, which, who knows, might find other references you didn't notice.

I suggest Ontario Place station is different than an article on Bearcat (wikipedia volunteer), since Bearcat implies that all the coverage on himself or herself focusses around a single notability factor, and Ontario Place station's notability revolves around several factors:

1. It is a station on a proposed line - this is the only notability factor for most proposed stations, and we all seem to be agreed that this, alone, is insufficient;
2. Unlike other stations, reliable sources suspect that the Premier's goal in building the station is to serve gamblers, not ordinary citizens;
3. Reliable sources have noted that both the endpoints of the Ontario Line, Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre, proposed by the Ontario Government, serve facilities owned by the Provincial government.

Bearcat, if you would like an uninvolved third party to give you advice as to how close you are to wikipedia notability, send me those links via email. Geo Swan (talk) 16:11, 4 May 2019 (UTC)