Category talk:Airport rail links in London

Archived renaming discussion

 * Category:Airport rail links in London to Category:Airport rail links in the London region; more accurate description, as most airports serving London are technically outside London but considered to be in the London Region; will also be consistent with parent Category:Airports in the London region Cnbrb (talk) 22:50, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Oppose. @Cnbrb: there is no Category:London region. The parent cat should be renamed. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:56, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment: true, but then how should the parent category be renamed? It presents the problem that Gatwick, Luton and Stansted airports are not themselves in Greater London, so how are they to be sensibly categorised? London region is understandable to the reader, and I'm not sure that it follows that there must be a London region category. The word "in" is perhaps problematic - "Airports serving London" might work, but it is not consistent with the other categories in Category:Airports by city. Cnbrb (talk) 16:31, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * @Cnbrb: Category:Airports by city is a bit of a mess. It contains several categories which are not by city, e.g. Category:Airports in the San Francisco Bay Area relates to San Francisco Bay Area.
 * It seems to me that the best solution would probably be to rename the lot to Category:Airports serving Foo. That would be better than inventing a region, with is what has happened here. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:48, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * How would you define "serving"? Some airports have a practical catchment area of multiple cities and then there's the annoying habit of rebranding some distant little airport to include the name of a major city that's nowhere near - to take a couple of extreme examples, does "Paris-Vatry (Disney)" serve Paris? Does "London Oxford" serve London? Timrollpickering (Talk) 19:57, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Fair point, Timrollpickering.
 * But the current name puts Oxford in the "London Region", which is also nonsense.
 * So I wonder if the answer isn't more fundamental: that the whole concept of Category:Airports by city is broken, because airports are a) often outside the city limits, and b) usually serve huge catchment areas.
 * For example, Heathrow and Gatwick are pretty much national airports for England. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:06, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Looks like I've inadvertently opened a can of worms! Well, some interesting comments here. I agree that Category:Airports by city should be revisited, and I agree with @User:BrownHairedGirl to go for Category:Airports serving Foo. Yes, airports do also serve other towns or regions, but the common understanding is that an airport is associated with a large city like London or San Francisco. "Airports serving London" makes immediate sense to the reader. And yes, in southern England there is now a tendency for some regional airports to rebrand themselves with the "London" name to make themselves seem more attractive ("London Oxford"), and while I agree that this is a bit tenuous, I don't think Wikipedia should pass judgement on how ridiculous these may be. There may be some grey areas, but we can work around those. Cnbrb (talk) 11:55, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
 * It goes a lot further than southern England and also isn't always the airports themselves - sometimes airlines tack on the name of a popular city without mentioning the lengthy connection (just google "London Prestwick" for one of the more notorious cases) and in both the examples given above the city name isn't actually in the formal name of the airport. Invariably there would have to be judgement because different sources will say different things. Timrollpickering (Talk) 13:03, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
 * @Cnbrb: sorry to be annoying, but I think that @Timrollpickering has effectively demolished my suggestion of a Category:Airports serving Foo. I think he has demonstrated very clearly that it wouldn't be viable without masses of WP:OR by editors.
 * So I think that the only solution is to categorise airports by their actual location, according to whatever geographical categories we use for other topics. It seems to be the only way of avoiding either a) using madey-uppy geography like "London Region", or b) encouraging editors to make slews of subjective judgements about marketing claims.
 * Europe's biggest airline Ryanair systematically associates airports with cities which can be up to 3 hours travel away. Their efforts alone would make any such category tree a nightmare of editorial disputes. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:23, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I appreciate the arguments, but this outcome will create the situation where Gatwick Airport will not be categorised as a London airport, but as a Surrey airport, when it is in every common understanding London Gatwick Airport. I don't know how we can square that particular circle, except to create a categorisation scheme that is not intuitive to the reader. All I can think of is to create list pages in their place.Cnbrb (talk) 20:11, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Lists sounds like the way to go, @Cnbrb. Every alternative seems flawed in one way or another.
 * A List of airports serving London could add a lot more info than a category conveys. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
 * So the (unintended) upshot of all the above discussion is that Category:Airports by city needs to be deleted and all child categories need to be renamed or removed. It sounds like that needs a fresh CFD entry. Anyone want to sort that out? Cnbrb (talk) 12:27, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Going back on-topic - I have no problem with - the question is not whether the airport is in London, but one end of the rail link. View it as a daughter of  or something, the airport bit is not relevant. Going back to the "serving" question - London region is not a thing, it redirects to Greater London which is not what's intended. Not least because eg Heathrow serves Swindon and Coventry as much as it serves Beckenham. The "reach" of big airports really doesn't map well to individual cities, it can be entire countries or at least NUTS1-sized regions (and Heathrow reaches several such regions, as Greater London is one on its own). I'd suggest the best approach would probably be to make international airports in (country or possibly NUTS1/state) as a subset of airports in (country or possibly NUTS1/state), to avoid the subjectivity of "serving"?Le Deluge (talk) 14:57, 27 December 2018 (UTC)