Talk:Melbourne, Florida

I-95
"This 4 laned interstate passes through the city limits, but no exit ramps are located in the city." Okay, exit 180 on US 192 is in West Melbourne, but exit 183 on Eau Gallie isn't within Melbourne city limits? -DynSkeet (talk)

Last I was aware, this was still county jurisdiction. Mcmillen76 22:45, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Correct. Melbourne city limits on Eau Gallie start about 500 feet east of the Interstate. (JogCon 03:39, 30 May 2007 (UTC))

Location
There is a format that was used, which I removed that had indicators locating Melbourne near adjacent towns. This might be good for the whole US if we could agree on a standardized format. In some other cases, location was in the info box, which seems good to me. But arrows can be okay too. I would prefer that boldface be removed. It seemed to prominent. Geography is definitely the best place for it. And geography needs to be near the front of the article anyway. I would appreciate the opinion of others if they can be found! Student7 16:54, 12 July 2007 (UTC)


 * to quote the brain trust that is known simply as Bill and Ted - "Excellent" Cstella23 17:10, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Intersil
Intersil lies completely within the city limits of Palm Bay, not Melbourne.

Recreation
Other City articles contain info on theme parks & recreation -- see Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey or "Kissimmee is home to a 650-person capacity outdoor water park..." FieldMarine 23:26, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * These articles will be changed eventually. I'm not interested in these two places or I would change them myself. (Since you looked them up and found them in violation, please feel free!) It is not Wikipedia policy to promote an area. If an article sounds like it has been written by the c-of-c, it should be deleted and start over. It is spam. Student7 01:16, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Rethought this answer. Some things are "Too Big to Ignore." If it were Six Flags, it would have to be mentioned IMO, with probably a link to the probable article on Six Flags. I think the Kissimmee reference is appropriate if it gives NO external link to the water park. Might have an external reference/footnote though. The size of the attraction proportionate to the town needs to be considered. Andretti might have to be mentioned in Grant/Valkaria as a "car park" or whatever because it would be major in that small place. Hypocritical? Maybe. But I think justified.Student7 17:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Recent Changes and Formatting
I've been reading some of the recent changes to this article. It seems like there are things to consider when when expanding this article. First off, please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's writing style (link to Manual of Style is on top of the page now)

Instead of arguing over what should or should not be in an article... or whether a business listing should be placed into the article, keep in mind what this article's main goal is and where this article is placed. This is a Wikipedia article, not a yellow pages listing, so I seriously would not place things like Andretti's in there (I have nothing against Andretti's... I mean I go there frequently).

If you want to see what the "big" articles are doing, find a Wikipedia Community rated "Featured Article", which is an article that is written VERY well and was placed on the Wiki main page for "display". An example would be San Francisco, California. (You may cite WP:NPOV on me because I'm from there, but this is just to give you an example of what a good article should contain.

That being said - if you feel that attraction in Melbourne are really that interesting and you have enough information and sources to cite to certify notability, feel free to make a new article titled something along the lines of Melbourne, Florida Attractions. Attractions may include landmarks, museums, zoos, beaches, parks, entertainment, sports, famous food, shopping centers, and other points of interest.

If you need further help in the article, I'd suggest first writing the section in the Sandbox and place a link to this discussion page so it can be peer-reviewed before it gets deployed. This way your work won't get reverted by random users like User:Student7 (<- that's not a personal attack, only citing example from article history).

I'd also like users to discuss more on proposals on how to improve the article before making drastic changes, such as proposing new sections, proposing reverting an article to an earlier time. Afterwards, I'd give wikipedia users at least 2-7 days to respond. This way you can back up your reasons to change something instead of just seeing random changes.

I hope this helps. Jameson L. Tai 10:25, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Not to beat this thing, but how about if we change the Brevard Zoo external link to an internal link (I probably should have done that in the 1st place)? I noticed there was an article in Wikipedia on the Brevard Zoo. Also, I understand about the issue of lists, but my thoughts are this provides good material to later expand upon or create separate article with the list if there are enough items. FieldMarine 15:50, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah go ahead, I didn't realize someone took the time to write a Brevard Zoo article already. In this case, you might want to just see if there are other articles already made for the attractions section.  You can model San Francisco, having a "San Francisco Attractions" NaviBox and the bottom of the page.  If you need help making one, I just learned how to make that last week, so let me know.  San Francisco is a city as well as a county, so if you believe that there isn't enough attractions to make a Melbourne Attractions, then perhaps Brevard Attractions, which will give you much, much more to list on the NaviBox.  Good luck and happy editing!  Jameson L. Tai 16:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposed Reformatting of the Melbourne, Florida article
I would like to propose a series of reformatting to the Melbourne, Florida article so it fits the WikiProject Cities/Guideline.

To quote their article: This is a guideline for the structure of city articles on Wikipedia, as established through the years by consensus of WikiProject Cities. This guideline was constructed specifically for U.S. Cities, although could be used on virtually any other city in the world with some minor modifications.

The order of sections is also completely optional, and sections may be moved around to a different order based on the needs of their city. Editors are strongly encouraged, however, to at least begin with the lead/infobox, followed by history, geography, demographics, and economy, since these sections have some good basic information that might be sought after by readers first. Beyond that, editors working on city articles are advised to come to a consensus that works best for the city in question.

While it is just a guideline and there are no requirements to follow it in editing, it contains some of the basic elements of a city article, as well as useful tips that would help to bring the article to good article or featured article status.

Climate
== Demographics ==

Annual cultural events
=== Museums and points of interest === === Performing Arts ===

Further Expansion
The entries in the "Further reading" section should be moved to the "See also" section, and there are quite a few external links in the body of the article that need to be stripped out (consider creating Wikipedia articles on them). Addtionally, there are a lot of lists that need to be subpaged, converted to prose form, or simply deleted. In any case, however, this article is well past stub class. I have changed it from stub to start; it's fairly close to "B" class. Horologium t-c 17:28, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Didn't quite understand the "external links"...need to be stripped out..creating Wikipedia articles on them." This may be a learning moment for me!
 * Check with Horologium if you want. My thought, off the top of my head, is to summarize education and fork it. Maybe the same with healthcare. Maybe transportation too. I personally didn't see anything that needed deletion so maybe he needs to be asked. Of course, I share the same pov as the current editors! Student7 19:09, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * From External links (Part of the Manual of Style):

''2. External links should not be used in the body of an article. Instead, include them in an "External links" section at the end or in the appropriate location within an infobox.''

Take a look at the three Good Article cities in Florida for examples of subpaging. Fort Lauderdale, Florida is a good example (I am extremely familiar with the Fort Lauderdale article because I did a lot of the work on that article; Coral Springs, Florida and Miami, Florida are the other two.) Any list that does not have any information other than the listed items should not be included on the main page. Separate it onto a new page and link it from the article (for example, List of Mayors of Fort Lauderdale or List of schools in Fort Lauderdale). Take that big, totally unreferenced chunk of famous people and make that an article of its own (and reference it as well). The schools section (after that list is moved off the page) can mention the School District, the performance of the schools in the city on the FCAT, and make mention of the universities in the city. (Take a look at Coral Springs, Florida for an example of a summary in prose form). The transportation section needs to be converted to prose, and many of the one-sentence paragraphs need to be combined or expanded; one-sentence paragraphs are not an example of polished writing. The Television and Radio sections can be expanded by noting the ACNielsen and Arbitron market rankings for the area (Orlando market for TV and Melbourne-Titusville for radio), and perhaps noting that many popular radio stations in the city broadcast from neighboring markets (WWKA and WJRR, the Melbourne market's third and fourth most-popular stations, are from Orlando, and number five WOSN is from Vero Beach). The article also needs a lot more references; Miami has 38 different references, Coral Springs has 69, and Fort Lauderdale has 80. I'll take a whack at correctly formatting the references currently in the article; only four of them use the proper format for citation. Try to find a more diverse selection of references as well; 10 of the 23 citations are from the Melbourne city website. Sorry if I'm coming across as a jerk; that is not my intent; I'd like to see this article improve even more, and it doesn't seem to have the problem with tendentious editors that some of the neighboring cities' articles have experienced. Horologium t-c 20:45, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Wow... that's a lot to digest. I didn't even realize this article suddenly caught attention... lol.  Although I agree that the topics Horologium mentioned to fork out into sub-articles, I believe that the topics by themselves wouldn't satisfy the notability for it to survive by itself.  I'm actually trying to follow the example San Francisco, California, a FA, did for their structuring as well as use the standard WikiProject Cities set out.  I do like the rankings on tv and radio you suggested.  I'll look into it.  As for the lack of outside sources (besides the City of Melbourne website), the city's really too small to make any major breaking news except for the occasional fire.  But I'll start looking into more variety of sources to supplement the current material.  Thanks for the feedback!   - Jameson L. Tai   talk  ♦  contribs   20:59, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Heh. I've had the article on my watchlist for a while; I added it back when I cleaned up the infobox and juggled a few sections around last month. My first edit was actually the day after you originally addressed reworking the page (I made the changes without checking the talk page; oops). I think the schools page should be big enough to survive an AFD, especially if the article is beefed up enough to justify moving the data to a separate page; I'm not so sure about the healthcare section (look at converting it to prose like I did with the Fort Lauderdale page; a lot of the data in that section is really non-notable and can disappear, such as clinics, nursing homes, and healthcare services). For the notable residents, if you are concerned about the viability of the list, you can separate them into the sports, culture, and history sections (similar to what was done with Coral Springs, Florida, which had only eight people on its list). Lists generally have a slightly lower threshold for inclusion as long as the criteria are clearly defined and not an odd intersection; List of left-handed people from Melbourne, Florida would not work, but List of schools in Melbourne, Florida does; it is a clearly defined, finite list that can be verified. (You'll need to use "Melbourne, Florida" on all sub-articles because of the other Melbournes out there.) Take a look at the Florida Today archives; I am sure that something noteworthy has happened in the city's 120-year history. It's older than all of the GA cities (in Florida), and has a much richer history than Coral Springs (a new suburb of a medium-sized city); for a long time, Melbourne was the hub of the county, and there must be information on some of the unsourced stuff currently in the article. Horologium t-c 21:27, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you for taking the time to answer. I agree on external references, of course. The reader should not be thrown out of Wikipedia in the middle of an article. I think I understand most of the other comments. Will look at your examples in detail. I was disappointed in your suggestion about taking media, etc. from other areas to use in the Melbourne article. I've been telling everyone just the opposite: Ignore outside influences. Emphasize your own! Melbourne is not a "gateway to the beaches," or "gateway to the space center", there are reasons people visit here. Emphasizing outside influences, it seems to me, has residents (bored with local stuff) trying to import value from other articles. I don't think that is a good idea. WJRR, if echoed in Melbourne, is one thing, but a channel beamed from Orlando in our direction (cable,eg.) should be ignored. Their content can be listed under the channel's article, I suppose. Student7 23:58, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I didn't necessarily advocate "advertising" other media market stations in the Melbourne article; I was simply pointing out that it might be mentioned that (because of the rather dense concentration of markets in Florida, due to physical constraints) that Melbourne has the advantage of being covered by stations in multiple markets (Melbourne, Orlando, and Vero Beach-Fort Pierce; possibly Daytona Beach as well). After all, the two top stations in the market (as measured by Arbitron) are both local stations. You're right that the article should focus on the city itself, but since there is no daily newspaper or TV station in Melbourne, that does not mean that we should ignore those two aspects of media; by the same token, we can't ignore that the newspaper and broadcast TV stations are from elsewhere. Media markets, by their nature, tend to be covered by more than one article. There are not daily newspapers for each city, nor are there local TV stations, since there are only about 320 radio markets and 250 TV markets (for the entire country). Horologium t-c 00:33, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Wait...isn't Florida Today based in Melbourne?  - Jameson L. Tai   talk  ♦  contribs   00:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmmmm. It is now. It was originally known as Cocoa Today, and was based in Cocoa. I had to go look that up, because I remembered its old name, and a little digging revealed that it changed its name to Florida Today in 1987. I don't know when it moved to Melbourne, however. Horologium t-c 01:36, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, this makes sense... because I remember that The Florida Tech Crimson (My next project...See User:Jamesontai/Sandbox04) uses Florida Today to print their newspaper. Didn't know Florida Today had a name change though.  I mean I wouldn't... since I was born in '87... that and I had no idea about anything in Melbourne until... say... August 2005?  hahahaha    - Jameson L. Tai   talk  ♦  contribs   06:53, 15 November 2007 (UTC)  PS: OK... 5 indents are enough... we really need to stop getting sidetracked... hahahahahaha My focus on this article was mainly to get it to at least Start-Class, if not B-Class, like Florida Institute of Technology.  I'll be working on Melbourne International Airport and The Crimson.  List of Florida Institute of Technology Colleges and Laboratories is taking way too much of my time and not a lot of information is available to me to create one single article that covers generally the same topics.  I swear...Florida Tech tries too hard to make themselves unique... I mean... they're trying to make each department, lab, even the different programs so unique they could start segregating themselves... lol.  Anyways, now I'm getting sidetracked.  If you guys need an extra eye on this stuff, let me know.  And Horologium, I just requested a book from the Florida Tech Evans Library on Melbourne's Economic Growth or something like that... it was published in 2005, so it's recent enough.  The rest of the books were published pre-1990s, so they're useless...  Oh, and I couldn't find information on Melbourne from the American Civil War either on the Florida Tech database.  I might ask a friend who has connections at UF and see if he can dig up anything in the UF library.   - Jameson L. Tai   talk  ♦  contribs   06:53, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

(Outdent) Or you could ask me; I live in Gainesville, and have spent a good deal of time in the P.K. Yonge Florida history collection at the UF Library (I used a lot of print references in the History of Fort Lauderdale, Florida article). The older references you mention are not necessarily useless, although they might be a little bit limited. They might have interesting tidbits of information that are not in any of the other sources, things that have been overlooked by more contemporary authors. I'll head over to the library tomorrow and see if I can find anything about Melbourne, along with a couple of other projects I'm working on for Florida cities. Horologium t-c 13:52, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

History
The FloridaToday Fact Book contains info about the naming of Melbourne. I propose we add the following sentence in the History section: "Another version on the naming of the city was that in 1880, the daughter of homesteader Richard W. Goode “drew its name on the longest of three broom straws." This would follow the sentence "The city was mistakenly named Melbourne, after what the locals believed to be the first postmaster's home city (Melbourne, Australia); he was really from New Zealand."