Talk:Mount Isa, Queensland

Naming of Mt Isa articles

@Kerry Raymond:

IMHO the naming of Mt Isa articles should be changed, as follows:

• This dab page should be Mount Isa
• The locality should be Mount Isa, Queensland
• The city (with its suburbs) should be Mount Isa City, Queensland
• The article on the CBD should be merged with the above
• The LGA article should remain as City of Mount Isa
• The redirect Mount Isa, QLD should be deleted

Cheers, Downsize43 (talk) 01:06, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

As you may have noticed, I have been working on getting all Qld localities onto Wikiepdia. Because there was so much to do to achieve that, when I hit a "tricky" situation, I left that locality without an article and moved on. However, I have now almost completed the task of creating articles for all the localities and now have to come back and tackle the tricky cases of which the surrounding locality of the town of Mount Isa was one of them, so I have been thinking about what to do with it for some time now. Aside, most of the tricky locality are not land-based (this is a relatively rare case), the bulk of the tricky cases relate to localities involving islands. Anyhow, I have been giving Mount Isa a lot of thought over some time as it is real mess in real life. We have two problems, clashes of official names, and common use. In particular, I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to name the surrounding locality (the "doughnut") "Mount Isa" when the town/city in the "hole of the doughnut" is also Mount Isa, so the same name applies to both the doughnut and the hole when they are completely different in character. The official name of the central suburb is Mount Isa City while the LGA is called both City of Mount Isa and not unreasonably commonly called Mount Isa City, and it is our practice to have separate articles to distinguish between a town/city (with multiple suburbs) and its central suburbs. However, I did create (as I have done in other cities) Mount Isa CBD as a redirect to Mount Isa City, which can be useful in avoiding reader confusion when referring to it in other articles, but cannot be the central suburb article title as that is not an official name. When most people say "Mount Isa" (as in "He was born in Mount Isa", then they mean the town (or city if you prefer the term). They do not mean the locality that surrounds the town. If you look in Wikipedia or more broadly, the term "Mount Isa" individually refers to the town/city so that is far and away the "common use", that's why it got the primary Mount Isa title. We need the name ", Queensland" to exist at least as redirects because that is our convention because that it more-or-less the outcome of every discussion on place naming where otherwise unique names are involved (either is acceptable as primary, the other is redirect). Given that, Mount Isa and Mount Isa, Queensland cannot be titles for different articles town/locality, hence why the "(locality)" is explicitly added to the article title and the pipe. Apart from the mine itself, not much happens in Mount Isa (locality), Queensland so very few articles need to mention it at all, really just the mine-related articles (beause it's their location), the adjacent suburb/localities in their adjacencies in the infobox, and perhaps roads/rail that pass through it, but as their destination is the town, generally I don't think they need the the locality surrounding the town as a rule. What didn't help is that while I was in the middle of trying to get other articles to refer to the correct Mount Isa article, some well-meaning person who didn't understand why Mount Isa was complicated, went through and changed a lot of the disambiguation links to be consistently to the town article, so I had to spend about 2 hours to unravel the mess they made. Kerry (talk) 01:44, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for that very detailed explanation. My confusion was whether the highway junction was in the locality or the city. Google maps very unhelpfully shows a border for either the city centre or the entire city, based on some random unknown. I mistakenly thought the smaller area was the city and the larger one (where the highway junction is) was the locality. Queensland Globe was more helpful but still confusing - a search on Mount Isa returns two results, one being the city centre and the other being the entire city within the locality. I have now placed the highway junction within the city by using a location_special parameter in the RJL, as the location parameter defaults to the dab article. What fun!! Downsize43 (talk) 02:38, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

I find that I have to use a combination of Google maps and Queensland Globe to resolve things as they have different strengths. Google Maps is easier to search for random places (not necessarily just current official names), and then I use the "right click, What's Here" to get me some digital geocoords, which I then use in Queensland Globe's search by lat/long with the locality and/or LGA layer turned on, to enable me to describe precisely where the thing is under official names and hence link to the correct Wikipedia article. I did clean up a lot of the Mount Isa-related links, but I realise that my "what links here" searches would not have found a lot of the road articles that you work on because they use that Qldcity template (which fools "what links here"). Kerry (talk) 03:08, 12 November 2019 (UTC)