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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Vort (talk | contribs) at 02:36, 28 September 2017 (→‎Macintyre River: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Australian Wikipedians' notice board

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    22 May 2024 – 2024 New Caledonia unrest
    Australia and New Zealand begin evacuating their citizens from New Caledonia amid civil unrest. (AP)
    9 May 2024 – Australia–Tuvalu relations
    Australia and Tuvalu sign a new security agreement, whereby Australia agrees to protect Tuvalu during natural disasters, pandemics, or military aggression. (AP)
    5 May 2024 – Terrorism in Australia
    A man is injured in a stabbing at a car park in Perth, Australia. The 16-year-old perpetrator is killed by police officers and is described as a "religious radicalized individual". A possible Islamist motive is behind the attack. (DW)
    3 May 2024 –
    Mexican authorities locate the bodies of three tourists, one American and two Australians, in Baja California, where they were reported missing in April. Three people have been arrested and are being questioned in relation to the case. (Reuters) (BBC News)
    28 April 2024 –
    Nicole Kidman becomes the first Australian to earn the AFI Life Achievement Award for her contribution to American cinema. (Rolling Stone)
    19 April 2024 – 2024 Iran–Israel conflict
    The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade tells its citizens to leave Israel, citing a high threat of military reprisals and terrorist attacks. (Times of Israel)


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    9 June:

    Robert Brown, botanist
    Robert Brown, botanist


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    Quality watch:

    Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/WikiProject used

    Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey

    The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey article is under attack. Some editors will not follow our policy of writing prose in proper English and instead want to emphasise opposition through an embedded list. They are removing key facts from the lead on the basis of duplication or significance and removing referenced sentences explaining support from Christians with false claims that this is explained elsewhere in the article. There is also excessive use of quotations. The same poor editing practices were demonstrated last year on the Safe Schools Coalition Australia article. Please stand up for quality and for following our policies and guidelines. Please defend neutrality on our articles which attract religious fanatics. - Shiftchange (talk) 04:27, 26 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    There might be a BLP issue with the reporting of some tweets by Benjamin Law (writer) - more eyes would be helpful. --122.108.141.214 (talk) 07:11, 14 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Could I please get some assistance in the removal off-topic material and trivia from this article? A biased editor is disrupting by inserting trivial news reports. Discussion on the article talk page has achieved little. The issue has not been deal with. Again, I am asking for support on this from my fellow Australian editors. I plan on removing more of the silly insignificant commentary from this article. Please help. - Shiftchange (talk) 00:15, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Fairfax news archive is dead?

    I notice that the Fairfax archive is no longer freely available. When did this happen? Hack (talk) 05:28, 28 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Worked fine for me when I searched for something yesterday. I don't subscribe to Fairfax. Boneymau (talk) 21:35, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    The link I had bookmarked went to a syndication page, however the SMH archive (from which can search the Fairfax archive) still works. -- Paul foord (talk) 03:27, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Problem with existing news store links: An example, the old news store link for the obit of Winston O'Reilly goes to the syndication page, however, the smh news store link currently works. I do not have a subscription so can't check if the old link will take you to the article (ie subscription required) or is dead. -- Paul foord (talk) 03:42, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    A few articles that I've checked have been archived by the Wayback Machine. Hack (talk) 04:57, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    @Paul foord: that link's now redirecting to the subscription page. Hack (talk) 13:04, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Doesn't help a lot of us, but this library linked access may help some NSW or Victorian editors finding full offline refs for some now dead news store refs. The-Pope (talk) 17:05, 11 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    The National Library also has a similar deal going for NLA card-holders.SMH/Age/others 2006–SMH 1955–2006 Hack (talk) 01:38, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    For the SMH I often just use Google's archive, which is good up to 1989. They also have The Age Bjenks (talk) 15:44, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    The news store was good for providing online sources for the period from the late 80s until now. It looks like the SMH version of it still has the same functionality, just at a different URL. Hack (talk) 15:53, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    How much about the existing state of same-sex unions to include in Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey#Background

    Editors are invited to comment at Talk:Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey#Summary of current laws on same-sex couples as to how much coverage or detail about the existing state of same-sex unions it is appropriate to include in Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey#Background or History. Mitch Ames (talk) 10:51, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Mary Fairfax article used word-for-word in the Australian

    Hmmm. This sentence in Mary Fairfax Lady Fairfax was a Chairman, Founder and President of the Friends of The Australian Ballet and was the president of the Australian Opera Foundation during the 1970s appears word-for-word - capitalisation and all - in this article in the Australian Lady Mary Fairfax dies aged 95 (paywall). -- Mattinbgn (talk) 02:30, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    {{Backwards copy}} can be put on the talk page - Evad37 [talk] 03:47, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Gemma Ward

    This page may need to be watched for a while, as an IP had her deceased for bout 3.5 hours today, here.
    The deceased person found on a property owned by Ward was renting it. See [1]. 220 of Borg 06:28, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Malleys and Sunrise Dairy Utensils

    Interesting to find that Malleys or Sunrise Dairy Utensils dont have an article, neither does Francis Malley his twin sons Charles Malley and Clyde Malley though their brother Garnet Malley does for his war service and services advising China. Malleys brought Whirlpool to Australia under license Gnangarra 11:31, 20 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Our coverage of historical Australian business is pretty dire generally, I think. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:00, 20 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    yeah it seams to be, considering how many factories this one had across NSW & QLD along with agents in every state plus a few patents as well, it was suprising it wasnt even mentioned in any place articles just in passing in Garnets article. Gnangarra 12:18, 20 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    I would note a couple of points. Firstly, there are often limited sources for business histories. While significant govt info must be archives in the various national/state archives, there is no requirement to archive material of private companies, so often the main information sources are often produced by the company, which clearly is a bias. Secondly there is a lot of editor hostility towards articles about businesses. I've done a few stubs for prominent Queensland businesses and had other editors object that we shouldn't be advertising businesses or similar comments (I had no conflict of interest wrt to those businesses). Both of these issues contribute to our poor coverage of Australian businesses in Wikipedia. In Qld, for the past several years, State Library having noticed the lack of business history and has been working with some other Qld orgs to run the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame which recognises Qld businesses and businesspeople which have made a significant contribution to Qld. I note that, like all SLQ web content, the *text* (but not the images) is CC-BY licensed, so if anyone wants to write some business history, the SLQ Business Leaders website is "low hanging fruit". We also have the Queensland Greats which is honouring individuals and organisations for their contributions, although annoyingly that website is CC-BY-ND so the information is there but we cannot reuse it on Wikipedia as is. Does anyone know if other states have similar initiatives? Kerry (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:03, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Article need for "Young Australia" or similar

    Looking through the WP articles for the history of Oz 19th century, beyond the conversation around federation, we seem to be lacking something that discusses "Young Australia" (a.k.a. native-born 'white' Australians) and their actions and thoughts that progressed the political climate of the l9th century both to federation and independence. Looking at Patchett Martin's essay s:Australia and the Empire/Native Australians and Imperial Federation and articles like Australian Natives' Association, it seems to me that we are not capturing the essence of the time.

    While on that matter, if anyone is able to find a scanned copy of John Dunmore Lang's "The Coming Event, or Freedom and Independence for the Seven United Provinces of Australia" (1870) then please let me know as I would like to get it onto Wikisource. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:44, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    It's available on Google Books, but I am guessing that's not a suitable source. Kerry (talk) 09:41, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks. Sheesh, I had looked, who knows how I missed it, all I was seeing was preview versions. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:06, 22 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

    Hello,
    Please note that George Lazenby, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Today's articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing!
    Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 25 September 2017 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team[reply]

    Moved from redirect page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australia by Mitch Ames (talk) 01:16, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Wikimania 2017

    In August I attended Wikimania 2017 in Montreal, partly funded by Wikimedia Australia (thanks WMAU!).

    I have written a report which is available on the WMAU wiki at:

    https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Wikimania_2017_report_-_Kerry_Raymond

    for your enjoyment. I note that the Wikimania program:

    https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programme

    contains links to the more details of each session which include (where applicable) videos, slides, summaries of discussions (mostly on Etherpad) and/or other resources.

    I am happy to answer any questions you might have about Wikimania or my report etc. Kerry (talk) 01:21, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks for the report Kerry - it was very interesting. Nick-D (talk) 01:37, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    I think its wishful thinking on your part regarding VE usage and the declining numbers of active editors. I don't see the technical barrier as marking up text is not difficult. Motivation to apply yourself to building an encyclopedia, where much of the easy work is complete, is the issue. I believe the majority of edit-training workshop participants who mastered the editing have failed to contribute. This is not to say I don't support VE or edit-training. Because motivation is the main issue affecting participation I support the integration of an incentive reward system whereby editors can receive bitcoin micropayments on the basis of merit. This is what would take Wikipedia to the next level, to bring an influx of new users who could annihilate our backlogs, for example. Jimmy isn't interested. - Shiftchange (talk) 11:56, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Automatically generated infoboxes

    If anyone wants to see an impressive example of infoboxes generated from Wikidata, take a look at articles about telescopes, e.g. Anglo-Australian_Telescope

    See the lovely infobox? Go into edit and all you see is {{infobox telescope}}. Yes, the definition of the template infobox telescope entirely constructs the infobox using Wikidata. Then take a look at the Portuguese article on the same telescope.

    Again, a pretty Portuguese-language infobox visually but again in edit we find just {{Info/Telescópio}}. Again the hard work is done in the template definition on Portuguese Wikiepdia, drawing the data from Wikidata, so we get consistency of the data across the different language Wikipedias.

    Of course, both English and Portuguese templates are free to display whatever Wikidata they think interesting in whatever presentation they like (maybe one likes its coords as decimal and the other as DMS or something) as they each have their own template definition.

    And in an individual article about telescopes, the fully-automatic infobox can be overridden if necessary. In English Wikipedia, you write {{infobox telescope|field=value|…}} to provide additional fields or to override one of the values drawn from Wikidata. So individual articles still have flexibility where it’s needed.

    I do believe that Wikidata is important to the future of Wikipedia and that we should all make an effort to learn more about it and show our support when people propose to use it.

    Thanks to User:99of9 who first showed me these examples. Kerry (talk) 21:36, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    At Wikimania 2016, Mike Peel created an {{Infobox sportsperson/Wikidata}} for me. You can see it in use on Madeline Groves. The idea was that we could make better use of the many articles on Australian athletes that are created in other languages. Note how the infobox has been translated into French and Norwegian. (And how certain fields are overridden in the Englisdh vertsion.) But the use of Wikidata was controversial, and I didn't go ahead and mass-convert the Olympian and Paralympian articles. . Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:39, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you, I appreciate the positive feedback with this work. :-) The telescope infoboxes on frwp are also drawn from Wikidata (but using completely different code). It's fun to add info once in a central place, and it's instantly used on three+ different language Wikipedias. I'm slowly rolling the code out across other infoboxes, e.g. see {{Infobox World Heritage Site}}, {{Infobox artwork/wikidata}}, {{Infobox person/wikidata}}, amongst others, and I'm happy to help with adding wikidata support to other infoboxes. However, it is somewhat controversial with some users (see Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2017 State of affairs and Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2017_September_15#Template:Cite_Q as currently-running examples), and the roll-out does need to be done carefully to make sure it's always improving each article it's used in. But I think it's going to be very worthwhile in the long run. :-) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:59, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    It is exciting when you add data into Wikidata and then see it appear in other Wikipedias. I added Philip Ruddock's new role as Mayor of Hornsby to Wikidata and it automatically appeared in his French language infobox. Brilliant! I was a sceptic re: Wikidata, now a passionate convert. Very excited about seeing more use of Wikidata with Australian locality articles in particular. -- Mattinbgn (talk) 00:33, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    These ones might work, but expect trouble ahead. The system for coding these does not appear to communicate with en.WP editors. Tony (talk) 02:00, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    How so? Genuinely interested in your concern as a newbie to using Wikidata. -- Mattinbgn (talk) 02:26, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    @Tony1: As an enwp editor that has been working on coding these, I'd also like to know what you mean here please. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 23:03, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Mike, like most en.WPians I've communicated with on this matter, I have only a foggy understanding of the very things about Wikidata we all need to know. I believe that's Wikidata's and the WMF's fault, not ours.

    First, we need an easy manual-type explanation of Wikidata's aims, processes, procedures, and where it's up to at the moment. Minimally technical and as brief as possible given the task, with tech stuff linked where appropriate to avoid too much clutter. Front and centre of this should be information about how as editors it will affect us, and how we might be involved. For example, can we edit what is churned out of Wikidata in infoboxes and elsewhere. Is there a liaison person at Wikidata? Is there a central noticeboard (in English) that we can view and contribute to?

    Second, it's patently obvious that Wikidata people don't communicate with the style-guide community on en.WP. This augurs very badly for future relations. Tony (talk) 01:58, 27 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Hi Tony, the first thing you need to understand is that "Wikidata people" are mostly the same en.WP editors you have worked with for years (such as myself), so an us-and-them approach should not apply. Your comment at Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2017 State of affairs#Wikidata and the English Wikipedia's stylistic integrity seems to indicate you have a concern that Wikidata (the content, its deployment or maybe both) is coming from a cadre of German programmers with scant regard for Manual of Style issues or consensus on the English Wikipedia. This is not the case—the data and its use is community generated either from the articles themselves or curated by editors who pay the same care and attention to the MOS as any experienced enWP editors. Also, as it's almost all linked data (concepts and items linked by properties), there is very little scope for style issues to arise (things such as date formatting, thousands separators can be handled in the infobox coding). That said there is some controversy about the style, scope and use of labels and description fields. In fact, it would actually be easier to address and fix MOS issues on a faster and broader scale with Wikidata and infobox coding than has been possible before—let's say there is consensus in the MOS community to amend the style guide: a single tweak to the infobox code or updates to the underlying data on Wikidata and it's done, rather than making hundreds or thousands of edits to the affected articles.
    This is not some massive automated edict being globally forced on projects without communication or consensus by the WMF or Wikidata—there are clear benefits to some careful, managed Wikidata use on Wikipedia such as population updates, language translation, styling and formatting and so on, and there is a clear desire to use Wikidata only where it will make things better and easier whilst making it possible for users to override and edit the data. Changes to coding of infoboxes and other templates, what data they present and how they present it has been happening for years—rather than asking for some kind of Wikidata liaison officer or noticeboard to talk to the "Wikidata people", such issues can be dealt with by contacting the editor(s) who made the change and discussing it as it always has been. Communication can be improved of course—it always can on every project—but feel free to contact myself or other editors who work on Wikidata if you have any further queries or concerns. --Canley (talk) 03:07, 27 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm a big fan of Wikidata, and I've made a number of contributions over there. But I do think that there are some further technical developments that need to be made before it can be adopted widely into Wikipedia, the most important of those being inclusion of (relevant) Wikidata changes into Wikipedia watchlists so that vandalism can be picked up more easily. There are a lot of criticisms of Wikidata that are unwarranted, but I feel that (along with the lack of a specific Wikidata BLP policy) are two that are serious, yet also actionable. Lankiveil (speak to me) 09:58, 27 September 2017 (UTC).[reply]
    I'm getting Wikidata changes showing up in my enwiki watchlist. Don't they appear for everyone? -- Mattinbgn (talk) 22:57, 27 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    I think they might be off by default? There's a checkbox for displaying them, along with "my edits", "bots", etc. Sam Wilson 00:27, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Also, you need to install a user-script to make them readable, otherwise you get a whole lot of P- and Q-numbers with no indication of what they mean. - Evad37 [talk] 00:42, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    WA BMD records

    I've been looking at the Western Australian birth-marriage-death register, as published by the WA Dept of Justice, and have written a little thing to scrape the data in order to see what's there and how records interrelate etc. I'm still tweaking it, but so far it's got about a million records. You can download them as CSV files if you're interested. Sam Wilson 07:14, 27 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Sharing log ins

    For paywalls the solution is to share log ins, among whoever wants them. Could someone email me a Courier Mail website log in please? How could we set this up properly for everyone so it doesn't just happen on an ad hoc basis? I wouldn't be interested in any concerns regarding news web sites and their proprietary interests as that is not relevant to our work here. - Shiftchange (talk) 01:54, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    Macintyre River

    Hello. Please fix the length of Macintyre River. 319 km is a wrong number (cited source describes only one part of the river). More correctly woulde be to sum up 156 km and 319 km as done in de-wiki, or at least to take 380 km from here. — Vort (talk) 02:36, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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