User talk:Jezzda

Welcome, Jezzda!

Have a plate of cookies!

Welcome to Wikipedia, Jezzda! I'm Mujinga, and I've been assigned as your mentor. About half of new Wikipedia accounts receive a mentor chosen randomly from a list of volunteers. It just means I'm here to help with anything you need! We need to have all kinds of people working together to create an online encyclopedia, so I'm glad you're here. Over time, you will figure out what you enjoy doing the most on Wikipedia.

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Again, welcome to Wikipedia! Mujinga (talk) 17:03, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Coordinates in Queensland

Hi! Anything to do with Australian place names and their coordinates is a state responsibility. In Queensland, the official source for such information the Queensland Place Names Database and every Queensland place article (e.g. Rochedale etc) should (and usually does) cite that source, usually withinin the first sentence or two. Unfortunately the online database is an "search" tool and it is not possible to provide the reader with a direct URL to a particular entry. As there may be multiple entries for places with the same name, to ensure the reader finds the correct entry, the citation usually provides information from the entry including the type of place (e.g. suburb for Rochedale), the local government area (e.g. City of Brisbane), and the entry number (50100). This way a reader looking up the citation can be sure if they are looking at the correct entry. Since that entry contains the coordinates (which we normally display in the infobox), that information has been cited in the article and doesn't need an additional citation. Although the Australian government does have various databases of Australian place information, that info is compiled from the state-supplied information and may be less up-to-date than the state databases, so use the state databases for citations for preference. Kerry (talk) 02:07, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi Kerry! This was very useful to know as most coordinates I was looking at didn't seem to have citations so I wasn't sure where to look for them. I'll make sure to use that database going forward. Jezzda (talk) 04:29, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Distances to places

In Brisbane, distances historically have been quoted from the Brisbane GPO and we continue that tradition here on Wikipedia, partly because it is a very precise startpoint. Having been writing Queensland content on Wikipedia for almost 20 years, I am well aware that we get misinformation put into these distance fields, almost always reducing the distance, because proximity to the city centre is a desirable attribute for people buying real estate, so a person selling a home or someone in the real estate industry has a financial motivation to misrepresent the distance in the Wikipedia article. By choosing a precise starting point for the measurement, it reduces the scope for arguing about what the "right" distance is. It doesn't really matter if it is done differently in Sydney or somewhere else, because people comparing these distances are likely to be doing so between suburbs of the same city not different ones. The conventions that emerge on Wikipedia don't just come from nowhere, they develop over the years for mostly good reasons. You will notice many Queensland articles include the specific comment in the infobox about the use of distances being "by road" as that is a frequent misunderstanding of new contributors and just wastes their time in changing it to "as the crow flies" (or whatever) and someone else's time changing it back again. A lot of new contributors do waste the time of existing contributors by making changes to things that don't need to be changed. As a new contributor, can I suggest you focus more on adding new content than changing or deleting existing content until you become more familiar with a topic space. I am happy to help new contributors with any advice about Queensland content. I am also a Wikimedia Australian trainer and do Zoom sessions with people wanting to learn how to use the Visual Editor, photo uploades, etc. Wikimedia Australia also run regular drop-in sessions and introductions for new contributors via Zoom (see here for details) Kerry (talk) 02:39, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the feedback, particularly the background on issues over 'as the crow flies' vs 'by road'. I did notice that the template mentions 'by road', so I made sure to only use that after seeing the note. I have to respectfully disagree that 'it doesn't really matter if it is done differently in Sydney or somewhere else' because Brisbane and Queensland are a part of Australia. The CBD is used as a point of reference across the country and it makes little sense to deviate from that standard (as can be seen across various articles of suburbs in major cities in Australia). It can create an incredible amount of confusion for a reader who understandably would expect that the default would be the 'centre' of the city, not a particular address. When I looked through the past edits, I can see the addition of 'GPO' was only added to Brisbane suburbs a year or two ago. While I absolutely appreciate and respect your experience, your extensive contributions to Wikipedia, and the fact you do have significantly more knowledge of the workings of Wikipedia than I (and many others) do, I don't think the choice for 'GPO' makes sense when readability and making sense of information is important in an encyclopedia. I disagree with it effectively reducing 'the scope for arguing' about the distance because a vague location is chosen as the end point, which would leave that argument wide open anyway, but applying an address to that would also be inaccurate, as the centre of any suburb doesn't have a street address. Again, I'd also stress that arbitrarily using 'GPO' instead of the standard set since 2007 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strathfield,_New_South_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=99547491 as the earliest entry of GPO on Strathfield, New South Wales and the change to 'CBD' six months later that's existed since, with the addition of 'Sydney' later on, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strathfield,_New_South_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=144566971 ) for a very specific part of the country, and a very specific part of Queensland, makes little sense and can lead to unnecessary confusion for readers. It's unique to Brisbane, having only been added a couple of years ago, with other Queensland cities' suburbs using what the rest of the country does (see Coolangatta, Jimboomba, Bundamba, for just a few examples). I do note that you are responsible for the addition of 'GPO' and I don't mean to personally critique your edits, especially given there was nothing there beforehand. My intention is just to bring up, what I believe to be, a more logical alternative to the current text on the relevant articles that would provide better consistency and well-understood language, which is already being used everywhere else in the country. It doesn't make sense to me that Brisbane specifically should have a completely different format for measuring distance when it is no more or less unique than other locations in Australia. Finally, while I may be a new contributor, I still believe my perspective should be considered and not dismissed based on my level of experience editing Wikipedia. Jezzda (talk) 05:14, 4 May 2024 (UTC)