Talk:List of postcodes in the United Kingdom

This is the talk page of a redirect that targets the page:
• Postcodes in the United Kingdom
Because this page is not frequently watched, present and future discussions, edit requests and requested moves should take place at:
• Talk:Postcodes in the United Kingdom

Conversion from disambiguation page to article

Article page converted from disambiguation page to article, following discussion at User talk:MRSC#List of United Kingdom postcodes and User talk:Richardguk#List of United Kingdom postcodes. — Richardguk (talk) 13:04, 3 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree I don't see a reason for this article, it just duplicates contents that can pretty well go into Postcodes in the United Kingdom and List of postcode areas in the United Kingdom. capmo (talk) 04:29, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(Proposal discussed below. — Richardguk (talk) 18:00, 6 November 2012 (UTC))[reply]

Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was no consensus, because the current article serves a distinct purpose from both the proposed alternatives (i.e. guiding readers to external sources of all postcodes), even though it covers the same general topic (UK postcodes) and is not a conventional "List of..." article (because there are far too many individual UK postcodes to list on Wikipedia). — Richardguk (talk) 18:00, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@capmo:

While I accept that this article is uncomfortably similar to the above two articles, could you comment on the two main reasons from the user talk discussion which led to expanding it instead of redirecting:

many readers are likely to be seeking specific postcodes, or a complete list of postcodes (without realising that UK codes are more numerous than other countries': there are currently nearly 2 million in use), so it is helpful to point readers to external resources in this much narrower article without the distracting historical and technical detail at Postcodes in the United Kingdom;
the separate articles listing postcode areas ("AB" etc) and postcode districts ("AB10"...) do not list complete postcodes ("AB10 1AA"...); it would be unhelpful to preface long lists with the external resources set out in this article, and potentially misleading to imply that these lists amount to lists of complete postcodes.

Without being dogmatic either way, I think it is salutary to recognise from Article Feedback that most casual readers will have practical reasons for seeking specific postcodes and will therefore not be interested in the background information or summary lists set out elsewhere. Cramming this more practical information into the other articles would in turn dilute their current focus.

— Richardguk (talk) 06:33, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point. But maybe a slightly reworded disambiguation page would do it:

"A complete list of postcodes is not available on Wikipedia, but you may search for:
*List of postcode areas in the United Kingdom
*List of postcode districts in the United Kingdom

See also:
*Postcodes in the United Kingdom"

External links:
*Complete list of UK Postcodes on site X"

After writing the above I noticed that it's similar to what you had done initially on the page ([1]). I like how the page looked in that revision (perhaps without the UK codes template), but I leave the decision for you. Regards, capmo (talk) 15:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the constructive response. As you noted, a couple of months ago I briefly tried to make this article into an extended kind of disambiguation page, with links to external resources. Unfortunately, this breaches dab page policy (and messes up the dab categorisation). So, after discussing with User:MRSC, we changed it to the current "not a list" format. Of course, the current format does not really comply with the policy for "List of" articles (since the individual postcodes are not actually listed here); but list pages are more loosely regulated than dab pages, so it seems the lesser of two evils! Hopefully, the external links more than compensate for the title's misleading implication that postcodes are listed here.

From the reader's point of view, the principal disadvantage of the status quo is probably that the plethora of UK-postcode-related pages makes it less likely that this page will be found by those seeking the information to which it provides external links. But each of the current articles and list pages does at least serve a distinct and useful purpose, so the scheme has some merits.

— Richardguk (talk) 17:59, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As discussed, though this article sits uncomfortably as a standalone "List of" page, converting it back to a dab page would go against policy and categorisation conventions, and the existing pages have different scopes, so the current form may be the least worst available. Given the lack of further debate, and proposer capmo's concluding comment "I leave the decision for you", I propose to close the merger proposal as "no consensus". — Richardguk (talk) 20:14, 30 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.