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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5→Archive 10

Replacing

Infoboxes being replaced by this template

Generic

City specific

LGA

Neighbour/suburb boxes only

Categories regarding obsolete templates

Font size

After seeing Chuq's modification to the location field (to 90%), which I think looks quite good, is there a scope to alter the font size on more fields (or indeed on all of them)? I'm thinking of Local government and Fed/State electorates in particular. I realise this could be controversial so I'm putting it out there as an idea and seeing what people think.

(BTW: please feel free to play with the mocks under my user space - they'll get nuked anyway when this discussion is over. I've done the very messy way of putting font size in front of each bit, if we were doing this properly it'd be done using a style feature I suspect.)

I have currently changed it (dist/location) so it goes small when there is a list, but full size when there is only one --TheJosh 11:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Support a 90% font-size seems to be standard for most infoboxes. I also prefer having the infobox text smaller than the body text: especially if you have a lot of information to present. - 52 Pickup 12:17, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Town info boxes: max & min temperatures

I have been discussing the max and min temperatures with Ikeshut and thought it may be worth bringing the conversation here. I have copied the relevant section below

I just thought I should let you know that I've corrected the maximum and minimum temperatures in two of the info boxes you've added to Hay and Balranald. I'm not sure where your information is coming from but I've got the details from the Bureau of Meteorology web-site. For example the following link - Bureau of Meteorology: Balranald - gives the Balranald statistics. You've been getting the rainfall right, but for some reason the max & min temperatures you have added are way off. Ikeshut 23:52, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for letting me know about your changes to the infoboxes. I think we may have a terminology problem. I have been using the mean daily maximum temperature while you are using the Highest Max temperature. The guide for the infobox template Template:Infobox Australian Place specifies "max average annual temperature" for that field, which I have interpreted as the mean daily maximum. I would agree that the terms "Max Temp" and "Min Temp" are ambiguous and perhaps it may be worthwhile raising it with the group who created the template at Template talk:Infobox Australian Place. If you have no objections I will paste our conversation there for discussion. I have enjoyed watching your pages on the western Riverina take shape. Well done with those pages.Mattinbgn 00:26, 4 December 2006
Thank you for your comments. I can now see where the confusion has arisen. I have no objection to you posting our discussion to the group. Can I just give my opinion in more detail about all this. To me the mean daily maximum & minimum temperatures will perhaps give someone a rough idea what a spring or autumn day is like in these towns, but will give no idea of the variability of a particular place. On the other hand my use of the highest & lowest recorded temperatures gives the extremities of the temperature range, which actually over-emphasises the variability. I think, to strike a middle road, what we should be aiming at is the typical highest and typical lowest temperatures for the whole year - i.e., the mean temperature of the hottest month and the mean temperature of the coldest month. For Balranald for example the hottest ever recorded was 47.7, the mean for the whole year is 24.1, and the mean temperature for the month with the hottest mean (January) is 32.9. The minimum temeratures are -4.8, 9.8 and 3.5 (July). To me the mean temperature of the hottest month and the mean temperature of the coldest month seems more meaningful under a category that just says "Max" and "Min". Ikeshut 01:19, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I am quite happy to use any measure in the temperature fields but it should be consistent and perhaps linked to a definition to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Any thoughts? --Mattinbgn 02:46, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

It should be the max average annual temperature. The 'Highest Max temperature' and 'Lowest Min Temp' shows the extremes, which are not as meaningful for an infobox context. The field descriptions could be amended to 'mean max temp' and 'mean min temp' or 'Avge Max temp' and 'Avge Min Temp', but personally I would not have expected it to be the extreme temp for the location but an average. Obviously it was ambigious enough for confusion to arise only weeks after the template was implemented - so a change might be beneficial. SauliH 03:02, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
This would be the source page for 'BALRANALD RSL' the very first line is - Mean Daily Max Temp and the 13th field ANN gives the temperature you need - 24.1. Further down you have Mean Daily Min Temp, and the temp you need is 9.8. You could argue that this is less meaningful, but without doing a winter min/max and a summer min/max etc (which I would argue crowds the infobox too much) we should stick with an annualised avge. Remember that you can (and probably should) do a whole lot more detail about weather/climate in the prose of the article. The HAY (MILLER STREET) data page is here. SauliH 03:14, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I have used the mean daily maxima and minima figures when adding boxes, and I am not as concerned as Ikeshut about their lack of variability; as you said and I agree, more information can be included in the prose if necessary (One drawback of info boxes can be that they are expected to carry too much information!). However, I do feel that the heading for the field should be mean max temp and mean min temp both when displayed and when editing to remove this ambiguity. --Mattinbgn 03:39, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I added the Mean to the infobox, to get some opinion on how it looks. If we could leave it up for a day or so, so that people get a chance to see it, it would be good. On my screen the title wraps to a second line, and Rainfall is at the top of it's header box. I don't mind it, but it certainly is not as tidy as before. Hmmm. what do you all think? SauliH 05:08, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I would argue that using the mean daily maxima and minima will produce figures that can be meaningless as it eliminates the extremes over the whole year. To gave an example the mean daily maxima for Moruya on the NSW south coast is 20.4, for Hay in the Riverina it is 24.2; the mean daily minima for Moruya is 11.3 and for Hay 9.9. On the face of it anyone looking at these figures would say temperatures at these two places are fairly similar with little difference between the two. However, looking at the mean temperature of the hottest month and the mean temperature of the coldest month for these two places we get Moruya (23.9 & 5.9) and Hay (32.9 & 3.5), a difference of 18 degrees C at Moruya and just less than 30 degrees C at Hay. To me, this is meaningful, the other is not. In my opinion if you continue using the mean daily maxima and minima I agree that the infobox should state this precisely, otherwise people will be confused. But in any case I don't understand why the mean daily maxima and minima are used at all; if the figures aren't expressing something meaningful why have them? Ikeshut 05:27, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I think the averages have a place along with the rainfall, which also gives some guide - however what may be needed here is a direct link to source (i.e. BOM) anywhere that these figures appear. Orderinchaos 06:22, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
OIC, there is no direct linking possible off of say, the postcode. Its like ABS, with weird codes and stuff that are too much effort. --TheJosh 10:48, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Could I suggest a possible modification to the infobox which might solve the problem. How about a cell that stretches across (above the three current cells) reading "climatic averages", and in each of the three cells underneath: "summer max", "winter min" and "rainfall"? Ikeshut 10:40, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Or Jan max, Jul max if above approach is adopted (calculating summer and winter would be too much work for the infobox coder and therefore open to error) Orderinchaos 11:58, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
The BoM page is not difficult to link to. All the coder requires is the station number for the location. For Balranald for instance it is 049002. To the front of this you append http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_ and to the end .shtml to get http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_049002.shtml. The coder simply needs the station number and that is right at the head of the table. The template can do the work of having the path name appended to it. Then leave it optional, so that those coders who do not know how to do it can leave it out, and the link does not get set. SauliH 14:47, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Features from Infobox City

The template {{Infobox City}} has a number of good features that might be of use here. One is the clear definition of images: one dedicated map image and one for a photo (there are also other fields for emblems, flags, etc). There are also various other fields for area (urban, water, etc) and population. Since Infobox City is intended to be a generic infobox for cities everywhere, perhaps some of these features should be introduced here.

Using Infobox City, I have made a rough version of what Sydney would look like here. If you look at the syntax, you can see that there are a lot of different fields available. If extra fields can present things better without being redundant, we shouldn't be afraid of having too many fields. Thoughts? - 52 Pickup 11:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Property Values

I have started a discussion regarding this on AWNB, right here. As it directly affects this template, I thought that people who monitor here but not over there might like to see. Basically, there is a consensus more-or-less to scrap this field, as in my opinion it creates more problems than it solves. But I'd like to hear your thoughts before I go and chop it out of the template.

Please comment over there, as opposed to here, so that the discussion remains centralised.

Thanks!

Lankiveil 09:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it is an interesting field to use, and when I use a reference link to domain.com.au it gives interesting demographics about the suburb. If you put an access date in the reference then people can see if it is probably out of date. domain.com.au also has no results for statistically not reliable (SNR) data. If people don't want to use it they could just not use it. It doesn't need to be deleted. Zephyr103 06:11, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

<ref> tags

Can people please remove <ref> inside the template declarations. cite.php (the ref parser) doesn't work inside templates, and seeing ref tags keeps bugging me. Thanks --TheJosh 10:20, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Not quite sure what you mean? It seems to work OK from what I can see (eg on Hamersley, Western Australia where you can see refs at the bottom from stuff in the template) On thinking about it, I'm thinking you probably mean something completely different but I'm not sure what :) Orderinchaos 10:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
See m:Cite/Cite.php#Issues. --TheJosh 23:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Infomation Sources (Auto Links?)

I have been analysing ABS QuickStats. This is about as short as a url for abs can get. Notice also http://www8.abs.gov.au/ABSNavigation/prenav/LocationSearch?areacode=POA2086&producttype=QuickStats&action=401
This url is for postcode 2086. 29/6/07 - note this url no longer works

This means we can automate links to ABS, using the rather reliable postcodes, without requiring users to determine town codes, etc. And it has a small enough scope to be useful. How we use it? don't know. Perhaps an Infobox footnote? --TheJosh 10:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

As discussed previously, only should be used when better info is not available (i.e. suburb-level or even town-level) - the postcode of 6306 for example is one-half Beverley and one-half a very large rural region with quite a different demographic, while 6167 is the *entire* Town of Kwinana LGA, and Brisbane's postcode regions are quite generous as well. I note the link you gave does work by substituting the relevant code for the suburb - eg SSC51221 for Calista (a subset of Kwinana) Orderinchaos 10:52, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
The big advantage of using postcodes is that the _template_ can automate it, rather than requiring users (and therefore leaving it to human error) to do it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TheJosh (talk • contribs) 23:50, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

map for cities and suburb/mean temperature

2 suggestions here. :)

Can the red spot for the city map be more apparent? It appears no problem in its full size but when it's shrunk to a smaller size it's not that noticeable.

Also can the wording for "suburbs around xxx" and those about mean temperatures be standardise like other items such as "postcode", "LGA"? Afterall they're of the same category and should have same font size and background.

matt-(my page-leave me a message) 16:37, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Can you explain the red spot better - provide an example page. --TheJosh 23:55, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Basically it's about the map, let say Adelaide city.
Adelaide
South Australia
Population1,124,315 (5th)
 • Density615/km2 (1,590/sq mi)
Established1836
Area1,826.9 km2 (705.4 sq mi)
Time zoneACST (UTC+9:30)
 • Summer (DST)ACDT (UTC+10:30)
Location
Adelaide
South Australia
Population1,124,315 (5th)
 • Density615/km2 (1,590/sq mi)
Established1836
Area1,826.9 km2 (705.4 sq mi)
Time zoneACST (UTC+9:30)
 • Summer (DST)ACDT (UTC+10:30)
Location

vs It makes is more clear where Adelaide is especially for people with slight colourblind problems like me. Thanks matt-(my page-leave me a message) 14:18, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Oppose a dot of this size looks both strange, and loweres the value of the infomation, because its not accurate enough. --TheJosh 03:35, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I do see Matt's point but the dot proposed is massive and I agree with TheJosh - would an intermediate size be possible? As an aside, in the top example, I'm sure Elizabeth residents would be less than amused to discover they are at one with the fishes :) Orderinchaos 06:35, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe instead of a red dot - a red circle, or a red circle with a crosshair in it? -- Chuq 23:19, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Go with crosshair, ill develop one sometime --TheJosh 00:33, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Seems to me like it may be workable. SauliH 03:01, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
done --TheJosh 23:28, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Infobox formatting broken with references

Just thought I would let you know of two formatting problems with the infobox.

I reinstated the source from which the suburb area figure came from (using a <ref> tag) as it got removed by the person who replaced the info box. The new infobox places the superscript between the area and its unit (km), so the text gets incorrectly rendered as : 10.7[2]km². In the old infobox the text was rendered as 10.7 sq. km[2]. The new rendering is a problem as units are supposed to directly follow the numbers to which they apply, and the area would be strictly read as as 114.49 (= 10.7 squared) in the example given (or some other power in an arbitrary example).

Also the "Suburbs around" section doesn't allow a reference to be inserted. A reference is essential so the reader can verify that the suburbs claimed really do adjoin as claimed by Wikipedia. John Dalton 04:14, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

There are errors with <ref> in templates (see above). It is better to describe these things in prose anyway. --TheJosh 04:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Being a WP:V nazi, I hate to say this, but sometimes I think over-sourcing is a problem on short geographical articles. I've looked at the bottom ref section and seen a mess sometimes, not knowing what references are relevant to the topic at hand - therefore KISS should be employed. If a publication has been cited once, there's very little need to cite it again unless it's in a different section of the article. With the area, it appears at the top of every Basic Community Profile from the ABS so anyone checking the population will find the area there. I don't see the point of referencing street directories unless the street directory provides sourceable information - borders are set by local councils and the Geographic Names Advisory Board or equiv and as such the street directory may not strictly speaking be a WP:RS unless it's a government publication as WA's StreetSmart is. Orderinchaos 04:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
TheJosh: When you say "these things", what are you referring to, the source? Perhaps an example of what you are talking about will help?
I'm not keen on removing <ref> due to bugs in MediaWiki. If the tool is broken fix it, but don't compromise the content or its integrity as a half measure fix. There can be no compromise to backing up facts in Wikipedia with references. Personally I'd rather have rendering broken until the problem is fixed than remove references to make an article look pretty. If enough articles had broken rendering someone might get around to fixing the problem.
Provided the ref template is used correctly refering to a reference more than once does not result in cluttering the references list with repeated references Orderinchaos (it just results in multiple back links from a single reference list entry). With referencing it is important that a) an article is self contained, meaning that it can be copied from Wikipedia and have its references remain intact, and b) it is clear which fact came from which source so the reader does not have to trawl though the entire reference list to verify a single fact. a) means the reference can't be a link to another page in wikipedia, such as a "list of something", it has to be the source of the list. a) and b) demands that we be able to include a reference for all information in the infobox. As it is the reader has no clue where many of the numbers (such as area) have come from. If formatting is a problem, maybe include a ref tag for each tag, allowing the ref to be placed nicely? Eg. the area tag would be associated with a second tag area_ref and the number, ref and unit be rendered in a clear way. John Dalton 05:09, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Re Mediawiki, it's not ours to fix sadly. I'm aware of the use of named references (and do it myself often) to produce repeats, but when the two items are two lines apart, it seems visually cluttered from my point of view. The interesting thing re the suburbs is during this infobox conversion project I've seen references to street directories in the suburb boxes which seem to have simply been pasted there rather than suggesting they'd actually been checked, giving it an air of authenticity it didn't deserve when I checked the street directory. If you create too much work for the infoboxer they'll take shortcuts, is what I'm saying - which is why we cut out heaps of fields and tried to make it as easy as possible to fill in correctly. Orderinchaos 05:17, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
John Dalton: I am not saying remove <ref> tags, but I think that infoboxes should only supplement information in the article itself. As a result, there is no need for ref tags in the template declaration (the {{Infobox Australian Place}} you put in the article) and, better is to put ref tags in the article itself at the appropriate places in the prose, where it will make more sense, and will work. Also, having ref tags (especially big ones) makes the declaration difficult to read in the source. --TheJosh 05:20, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Also, ref tags in the declaration will not be very good if we wanted to calculate pop densities, etc, as it is non-numerical data --TheJosh 05:22, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

A problem with the suburban infobox for Mount Coot-tha, Queensland

Is there any way of modifying the Mount Coot-tha suburban infobox, where the name of "Mount Coot-tha" can be split differently, by having a break before the word "Coot-tha", so that the suburban infobox would show the name of Mount Coot-tha as:

Mount
Coot-tha

instead of as:

Mount Coot-
tha

which is how the name of "Mount Coot-tha" is shown at present. Thanks. I have tried to correct this myself, but have found the problem impossible to fix up because the name of "Mount Coot-tha" is not listed within the suburban box. Figaro 04:39, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Shows up fine on mine - then again, I do have a large monitor. Orderinchaos 07:45, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Broken up on two lines on mine. SauliH 03:27, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
My Firefox shows it OK (ie. two lines broken after Mount), but my IE7 shows it broken at the hyphen, which I agree does look ugly. Both at 1024x768. —Moondyne 03:52, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Use something else such as an en-dash (– &ndash;) --TheJosh 04:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I changed the article with ' Mount <div style="break:nobreak;">Coot-tha</div>'. Not sure if this is the most elegant way of doing it but it fixed the issue in my IE7. —Moondyne 04:09, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Using ndash didn't fix it. I replaced with 'Mount <span style="white-space:nowrap">Coot-tha</span>'
Who cares for elegant. It worked for me! Good job. SauliH 04:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


Automatic categorization

Could we get rid of whatever is adding the category cities in state from the template, it adds the rightfully non-existent category Cities in the ACT to the Canberra article. --Peta 01:45, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Removed for act only --TheJosh 23:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiBreak

Hey,

I would just like to inform everyone I am going to go on a short WikiBreak. This is only of importance here because I feel like the unofficial leader of this group. I therefore unofficially promote Orderinchaos as the unoffical leader of this template management (for the next few months, until everything is running real smooth)

When I get back, I am thinking of creating a wikiproject, Wikiproject Infoboxes, mabey...

Until then,
TheJosh 23:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Only just noticed this comment about setting up a wikiproject for infoboxes. By coincidence, I had the same idea and recently made a proposal for such a project here. My idea is to set up a central place for infobox designers to come together to help each other out, share ideas, etc. - 52 Pickup 15:17, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

propval not showing up in a suburb...

Fixed. You had the propval field listed twice in the infobox code, so it did not show up. In the future please copy the code from the Blank Infobox Template Page into the article and all should be ok. ◄§ĉҺɑʀκs► 11:48, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Sippy Downs
Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Postcode(s)4556
Location88 km (55 mi) from Brisbane
LGA(s)Maroochy
Suburbs around Sippy Downs:
Parrearra Mountain Creek Parrearra
Tanawha Sippy Downs Parrearra
Tanawha Palmview Palmview

neighbours: limit to suburbs, lga, oceans

Some people put large national parks, etc, in the neighbours. Those national parks can be in multiple locations rather than one place like an lga or suburb. I think it's better to put [[suburbname|(national park name) suburb name]]. Zephyr103 05:38, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Challenge

Thanks to a CFD debate on 3 January, Category:Suburbs of Perth will be renamed to Category:Suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. This is going to break the template for the Perth suburbs as it'll be pointing to a now-nonexistent category. Any ideas/thoughts? Orderinchaos 03:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Update the template? -- Renesis (talk) 03:43, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Bug?

This:

{{#ifexist:List of {{{city}}} suburbs| [[List of {{{city}}} suburbs|Suburbs]] | {{ #ifexist:Category:{{{city}}} suburbs| [[:Category:Suburbs of {{{city}}}|Suburbs]] | Suburbs }}}} around '''{{{name|}}}'''

looks like a bug to me. I read it as saying

IF there's a [[List of {{{city}}} suburbs]] THEN link "Suburbs" to [[List of {{{city}}} suburbs]]
ELSE
IF there's a [[:Category:{{{city}}} suburbs]] THEN link "Suburbs" to [[:Category:Suburbs of {{{city}}}]] <--WTF???
ELSE don't link "Suburbs" at all.

Why check if there's a category of one name, only to link to a category of a different name? Hesperian 04:12, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Formatting error

Can someone explain the formating problem regarding the edit links on Blinman, South Australia. The first 3 are grouped together at the bottom of the infobox. Any ideas? Sorry if this has come up b4 ...maelgwntalk 09:58, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Not quite sure what the formatting problem is? Looks OK to me... If you could let me know what you see and where that would be of great assistance Orderinchaos 11:38, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
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