User talk:Vaelor

Hi Vaelor, and welcome to Wikipedia.

Thankyou for finding the time to sign up and contribute to our little project. If you're in doubt about anything, you might want to check out some of these pages:

• Welcome, newcomers - a general introduction, and a good starting point
• The help centre and FAQs
• The Manual of Style - a guide to the community's writing conventions

It's also a good idea to sign the new user log and add a little about yourself.

When contributing to a talk page, you can sign your name by typing four tildes after your comments, like this: ~~~~. (Just so you know, some people won't pay attention to unsigned comments).

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me at my talk page, or at the Help desk or Village Pump.

Above all, make sure you be bold when contributing, and have fun!

You may also be interested in the WikiProject Melbourne, which is an effort to flesh out the articles about all things Melbourne.

– T.P.K. 05:11, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Syndal

Feel free to remove my welcome message above if you want, I usually insert it going by number of contributions, and of course, I cannot easily tell if someone is already familiar with Wikidom. I apologize if you feel patronized. As for your article on Syndal, I will admit that I am a bit peevish about Melbourne's suburbs and georgaphical areas. I felt that a local name for an area would not meet the standards for notability that are often used to delete an article. Yes, a lot of Melbourne's articles include information about local shopping strips, but most of them simply aren't visible enough to be dragged to VFD for it. I believe that any information regarding Syndal could easily find a home in the Glen Waverley or Mount Waverley articles, and that the shopping precinct does not need an article to itself, unless or until it is as famous as Lygon Street or Brunswick Street. Factoids on local areas should go into their respective suburb articles, such as Gardiner would fit into Glen Iris, Bellevue into Balwyn North, or Glenferrie into Hawthorn. This is my view of things anyway. █ T █ P █ K █ 06:45, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

OK, first off, thankyou for being so level-headed. It's very refreshing. As to the matter at hand: I do not believe that a local area/shopping strip does not merit an article because it isn't a suburb - as I mentioned, there are shopping strips that have articles, and they should. The problem is more of defining a threshold - if every shopping strip or local area in Melbourne, (and in every city for that matter), where to have an article, that would one hell of a lot of articles, most of them being of little to no use. (Not that I'm saying your article was a poor one). These kind of articles would only be of interest to a very small group, which is, generally, a reason to remove. As to any kind of "official" standing regarding all this, there are only mixed signals. See: Wikipedia:What's in, what's out#Cities.

What I would do is to bring this to the Australian Wikipedians' noticeboard, to get a few more opinions. Let me state that if it is agreed to keep the original article, I will be more than happy to keep it. But I will still say that, in general, local areas and shopping strips that are not well known beyond their local users do need to be mentioned outside their parent suburb's articles. █ T █ P █ K █ 05:18, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Your further VfD commentary

Just came across it trying to clear VfD /old. It's hard to answer conclusively, as there are a number of issues involved, but I'll try to give you my understanding of the apparent discrepancy. Also, please understand I am only trying to explain the views of the majority/consensus of the Wikipedia community (as I understand them), not necessarily my own views (tho' I largely agree). Yes, geographic articles (small towns, small lakes, etc.) are held to a different standard than many things, including companies. My speculation of at least part of why this is, is that geography things tend to last many generations (EG small towns), or even millenia (EG small lakes), while very few businesses do. Regardless of the reason, the community has, since long before I got here, fervently believed pretty much anything that would appear on a (relatively wide area) map (things that appear on a "map" of a zoo, for example, generally would not qualify) is "encyclopedic". The presence of the small town articles has been challenged a few times in the ~8 months I've been here, either on VfD, or the Village Pump, and the resounding result each time is 'keep'. For companies, size and market share seem to be the main considerations--all Fortune 500 (and equivalents in other countries) are generally considered automatically "in". The #1 seller of widgets, even if it is all in one country, would be kept, but the #10 seller of widgets, even if the sales were in every country in the world, probably wouldn't. Your station example gets to the other main point I want to make. Some station articles have been deleted, some have been kept, I believe for two reasons. One, the example you cited reads like it actually is more notable than most, having been re-opened after public attention. But the other point is that I find VfD frustratingly fickle--recently they voted to delete the main character in a 2 hour Star Trek universe episode, but during the same time period voted to keep a fictional substance that had a little to do with the plot of one Star Trek universe episode, and had been casually mentioned one or two other times. They've kept an article on an actress who had just one appearance in her filmography, in her husband's movie, but have deleted actors with two or three credits. Most VfD articles go mostly straight keep, or mostly straight delete. Of those that are mixed, however, the final result often seems to be a result of when it was nominated, and who's voting at that time--at least that's the only explanation I can come up with for the inconsistancies. Niteowlneils 17:36, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

PS After leaving this note, I came across Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/CellOpt_AFP, which at the end has a related back and forth between what appears to be a relative newcomer, and someone who's been here much longer than I. Niteowlneils 17:58, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have different categories that frustrate me, but I agree that inclusion/deletion policy, guidelines, and practice are somewhat arbitrary and too often are in conflict. There are plenty of other categories that have higher thresholds than geographic articles, such as bands have to at least released a CD or two thru a major (or noted indie) label. I think in some cases, it's based on how many items fit that category. For example, we don't want to try and be a web directory with over a million web site articles, so any site that has an alexa.com ranking of worse than about 100,000, or 200,000 in special cases, usually gets deleted. I've never heard it absolutely explicitly stated, but I think shear volume is part of why the vast majority don't want to include any primary or middle schools, except for a small number well-known for producing presidents or prime ministers, or that sort of thing (and high schools used to be deleted fairly routinely, tho' more recently are kept because 40 or 50% of the votes are to keep). If you are in a category shared by millions of other people/things, you have really clearly stand ahead of the pack. Going back to companies, I only said the largest are automatically included; General Maritime Corporation certainly isn't Fortune 500, but is a major player in its market. Talk:SoBe is an example of how contentious company articles are and how widely they have to be known. One of the sources I use is hoovers.com. It include both private and public companies, I don't give it 100% weight, but if they haven't heard of a company (at least US and some of Europe/GB), it takes a lot of other evidence to convince me that it isn't just yet another ____ company. The Fifth Dimension Computing article didn't make any effort to inform the reader that it had invented an entirely new product or service category or methodology; grabbed x% (where x would vary depending on the size and competitiveness of the market) of its market in a given year; been subject of significant, non-routine (IE not generated by press releases) media coverage, whether for curing the common cold or having an ad campaign showing your Prime Minister fornicating with farm animals (trying to go for positive and negative; wouldn't have to be that extreme); set particularly impressive sales or growth records; or anything else that made it stand out from what has to be hunderds of thousands, if not millions of online marketing companies. My former employer Rivio once had 150 employees and has customers across the US, but I don't consider them notable, they're just yet another dot com--their most successful domain has an Alexa rank of 252,190. I would argue that someone would have to "know" "quality food centers" to google it, but it gets 4000 hits because it has tens of thousands of customers in the Pacific Northwest--the biggest, most well-known independent (until recently) local grocery chain in the Seattle area. Anyway, I can understand your frustration, and even tho' the details vary, I have some similar ones, so I can also empathize. For me, at least, I had to decide to either let things go, or walk away, as staying and stewing wasn't going to do anyone any good. Actually, more specifically, to pick my battles; I consider Wikipedia housekeeping to be seriously broken and not scaling, and am working on supporting and suggesting ways to improve it, but my pet peeves about more specific areas I just try to ignore and not worry about them. Niteowlneils 04:57, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Syndal again

I'm sorry for any heavy-handedness I may have used over your article, and as I said I would, I'll not challenge its inclusion any more. It seems that prehaps I've set my level of 'granularity' for inclusion too high? Oh well, happy editing. █ T █ P █ K █ 04:30, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Shopping centre classifications

Broken off from VFD: the classifications are Super Regional (largest, serving the most wide-spread customer base), Major Regional, Regional, Sub Regional, and Neighbourhood (smallest). I can't find what the cutoffs, or for that matter, what the measurements are to determine a classification - probably some combination of retail space, turnover, customer numbers, etc. I believe they are set by the Property Council of Australia ([1]), or by the Shopping Centre Council of Australia ([2] - which is an arm of the PCA anyway). To find the classification for a centre though, I think we'd have to either find their leasing information online (like Chadstone's, which lists it as Super Regional), or email/phone the management, which slows things down quite a bit. It's also quite possible that local shopping strips (like Syndal's) could also be classified, (prehaps not all of them though), which could help. █ T █ P █ K █ 05:42, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Xavier College (Melbourne)

I've added a list of alumni now, you can decide whether the people there are notable enough for you to change your mind. No footballers included. ;) Shane King 06:29, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Re: Heading Capitalization

In answer to your questions:

• I chose to edit BI-LO while doing some disambiguation of Georgia.
• Consistent capitalisation is a writing style, which Stops pages Looking strange. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Headings.
• It's not demanding, and I tend to get interrupted a lot, so I choose to do a lot of small maintenance-type edits when I have the opportunity. Where I notice a spelling mistake or capitalisation error, I correct it. I like to think that the maintenance helps the project.

Perhaps you could humour me and explain why a Victorian chooses the spelling "capitalization"? :-) --Zigger 16:36, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

Propesting/Fauxtesting

Hi Vaelor, I see that you based your vote on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Fauxtest on the belief that these were independent events. I forgot to make it clear in the deletion nomination that all these events are coordinated through a single forum on the Something Awful Forums. silsor 16:23, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Further thots on company articles (if they still interest you)

If you want to help Wikipedia be more consistent with it's handling of company articles, you might consider trying to see if you can get some like-minded Wikipedians interested in working with you to resurrect the currently dormant Wikipedia:Companies, Corporations and Economic Information as a more comprehensive WikiProject. Niteowlneils 21:42, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Metcard Barriers at Frankston

http://www.railpage.org.au/metcard/html/barriers.html says:

"Electronic barriers were ultimately installed at all 5 city stations as well as Footscray (Centre platform), St Albans, Essendon, Glenferrie, Camberwell, Box Hill, Mitcham (Down platform only), Ringwood, Glen Waverley, South Yarra, Caulfield, Dandenong and Frankston. Those at Glen Waverley were the first operational barriers, installed in May 1997 and activated by late July."

That makes 13 premium stations with barrier gates. I could name quite a few premium stations without barrier gates. Somebody in the WWW 23:07, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Connex has nothing to do with the the Metcard machines/validators/gates, except having them installed at their stations. They have no say about where they are installed. Metcard gates are all managed by Onelink. Somebody in the WWW 23:21, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Mind contributing to Melbourne wiki?

Hi, I just found out that you have contributed some info for an article linked to Melbourne, Australia on Wikipedia. Maybe you're interested to contribute to the new Melbourne wiki as well. --Jsfan 03:47, 16 August 2006 (UTC)