Talk:Australian Shield

Duplication
this article and Western Plateau are duplication of the same information and topic - but untouched for some time. The suggestion is that they are merged and made a little more intelligble. In Western Australia the Western Plateau is considered as a drainage division. This article it is considered a physyiographic division. Ok the same thing basically. The long see also lists suggest a shopping trolley approach to a subject that requires more elaboration in the article itself. sats 05:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Western Plateau
Duplicate material on same topic sats 06:07, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Very different topics
Western Plateau is an entry about the drainage division. It is one of a set of matching articles about each of the 12 Australian drainage divisions. This is why Western Plateau links to the other drainage division articles like (for example) Murray-Darling Basin or Australian south-east coast drainage division. There are also a number of recently added links in that list to physyiographic division articles. These are inappropriate in that context and should probably be removed.

Australian Shield is an entry about the physyiographic division and quite correctly links to other physyiographic articles about other physyiographic divisions. It is an accident of geography that in this particular instance a physyiographic division and a drainage division happen to be occupy more or less the same space on the map. Generally, drainage and physyiographic divisions do not coincide, and they are very different things. This fact could usefully be noted in the two different articles, but it should not led us up the blind ally of combining chalk and cheese just because we happen to have a lump of each in the same shopping bag today.

Obviously, both articles are neglected stubs and need working up into better shape.

Tannin (talk) 00:19, 8 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The Western Plateau is also much smaller. This article seems to conflate the two - which is why the lede says that it covers over half of Australia yet the infobox says it only covers 700,000 km2 (only about 10% of the continent). Grutness...wha?  00:01, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Merge?
Sorry, only looked at this talk page after seeing the other article's talk page and proposing a merge. The articles as they stand do not provide the info described by, and the other one is very poorly sourced, so something needs to be done... Could they not be merged, with info provided for both the drainage and the physiographic division in one article? If not, Western Plateau needs to be moved out of the first sentence here and explained seprately. , fyi. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 04:03, 7 April 2021 (UTC)


 * No idea why you tagged me in this - only thing I've ever done to this article was add a category six years ago... Grutness... wha?   02:26, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Oppose The Western Plateau is a geographic/physiogeographic term while the Australian Shield is a geologic term. N. Mortimer (talk) 03:16, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Closing, given the uncontested objection and no support, with stale discussion. Klbrain (talk) 09:53, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Confusion
How can the shield, at 700,000 square km, occupy more than half of Australia when Australia's area is 7,692,024 square km 675930s (talk) 14:12, 14 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for reporting this. Editors of this Wikipedia article seem to have confused the Australian Shield and the Western Australian Shield, incorrectly believing that they are the same thing. The Australian Shield covers more than half of Australia (that is, all of Western Australia, most of Northern Territory and most of South Australia). The geological region called the Western Australian Shield is a western part of the Australian Shield. The Western Australian Shield has an area of 700,000 km2 and is entirely within Western Australia. It includes the Yilgarn and Pilbara crustal blocks and some sedimentary basins e.g. Hamersley Range (but it excludes the Kimberley and Musgrave blocks). A physiographic division of Australia called the Western Plateau (a geographical thing of landforms and drainage) is sometimes referred to as the Australian Shield (a geological thing of very old rocks) because their boundaries closely coincide (because geology controls the physiography of landforms and drainage). I have edited the Australian Shield article and I hope my edits have reduced confusion. GeoWriter (talk) 22:22, 15 January 2023 (UTC)