User talk:Edmundparker

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G'day Edmundparker, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions; they have helped improve Wikipedia and made it more informative. I hope you enjoy using Wikipedia and decide to make additional contributions.

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Thank you for signing up! Kerry (talk) 22:26, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I'm new to the processes, but just jumped in the deep end last night to extend the Brisbane River page reach table. Before seeing this reply box, I added a discussion on your talk page about the Brisbane River page edits. Cheers, Edmundparker (talk) 14:43, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Testing sign-off by using 4 tildes Edmundparker (talk) 11:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC) Edmundparker (talk) 11:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Brisbane River page - tabular listing of Reach names
After I had extended the listing of Reaches and Creeks upstream from Mermaid Reach/Moggill Creek last night 10-Dec-2017 to Wolston Creek, I notice further edits have been made from there to Dalys Reach by others. Good work!

However, I note that Woogaroo and Six-Mile Creeks need to be inserted. Can't do tt just now as my PC is doing a major backup. Edmundparker (talk) 14:13, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Centenary Suburbs page
@Kerry_Raymond: Wondering why my updates and citations for 4074 population stats (Census 2016 and 2011) are being saved but do not display?

Here is the added source code: ''source code hidden from display view. Refer instead to Kerry's advice below re template for citing ABS data''.

Edmundparker (talk) 06:56, 13 December 2017 (UTC)


 * First thing. You don't get my attention by saying @Kerry_Raymond. You get my attention by writing which displays as

The reason I saw your message is because I am currently "watching" your Talk page in case anything is written there by you or someone else. I do this because you are new and may need help. But it's not something I will do indefinitely. You get another user's attention either by writing on their User Talk page or by "pinging" them.

Second thing. Templates (an infobox is just a special type of template) can only have one value for any field name. So what happened with what you wrote is that you first assigned pop to be 23,735 and then you overwrote it to be 23,272 etc. The infobox displays the last value you assigned. Now you might be thinking "but I'm sure I've seen something that appears to have two or more values in an infobox" and you are right. For situations where a field may have a number of values, there are multiple field names to accommodate that need, generally they are called field, field2, field3 etc. For a real example, look at Oxley, Queensland which is in two state electorates. In its infobox source code you will see:

| stategov             = Mount Ommaney

| stategov2            = Inala

as an example of a situation where the infobox accommodates multiple values for the "same" field. The only way to know if an infobox allows multiple values like this (and what the maximum is) is to look in the definition or documentation for it. In the case of this Template:Infobox Australian place, it allows just 2 values for population called pop and pop2 with corresponding pop_year and pop2_year and pop_footnotes and pop2_footnotes. However, generally we only put the latest population data in the infobox, and add any earlier population data into the History section. The reason for the two sets of population data in this infobox relates (I think!) to the fact that when you have a town and its only suburb with the same name (a common situation in many smaller towns, e.g. Goondiwindi), you can have the population as the Urban Centre/Locality (UCL) or as a State Suburb (SSC) which measure different things (e.g. Goondiwindi has 6000+ people within its boundary limits as a suburb but only 5000+ in the continguous urban area, or to put it more simply 5000+ people live in the town with another 1000+ close but outside the town on farms etc). But for postcode 4074 the ABS only gives you one population so just use that one. Again if you read the documentation, you will see that the pop value should be just a number (and nothing else). The pop_year can just be a number, although we usually use a template which makes a link to the 2016 section of the article Census in Australia (where you click on to find out fascinating things like the exact date of the census, etc). It is pop_footnotes where you put the citation. Because we have thousands of citations to the Census data, we have a template for that purpose Template:Census 2016 AUS and we typically use it something like this for Mount Ommaney:

The only thing that may not be obvious is where the SSC320237 and SSC comes from. When you look at the Quickstat page for Mount Ommaney, you will see the code number and the SSC immediately underneath the Mount Ommaney heading in bold. So if we repeat the exercise for the 4074 post code, the ABS gives us this data, so what we put in pop_footnotes is

It is quite important to get the id value correct or otherwise the URL which is constructed from it for the citation points to the wrong web page. The "quick=on" generates the URL to the QuickStats page (if you leave it off, you will get a different ABS webpage about the census); we normally have "quick=on".

Sorry for the long answer but there were multiple parts to your question. If anything isn't clear, please ask. Kerry (talk) 07:53, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Edmundparker (talk) 04:11, 14 December 2017 (UTC) Edmundparker (talk) 04:11, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you Kerry for your patience, and the further tips. Your various notes will be a handy reference for me to go back to, beyond what I can immediately assimilate. Have noted your update to the 4074 population figures and the tempkate for ABS data.

Arrrgh! Three times have I attempted to add citations, only to have to abort each laborious edit because another user has simultaneously started editing same page section! Remember seeing something about forcing a lock on concurrent editing of a page by others, but can't find that option. Edmundparker (talk) 07:29, 14 December 2017 (UTC) Edmundparker (talk) 07:29, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Kerry, I see you have re-ordered my paragraphs, and before I finished adding citations. The re-ordering changes the flow of my intended writing, and the context in which I was placing the YoungP references. Was there something wrong with what I had spent the last hour(s) writing? The intention was to close out with the Young reference, not to open the whole section with it.  Is there a way one can lock other editors out while doing an edit? I'd prefer to complete a session and then save/leave the completed contribution for subsequent review of the completed session and amendment by others, if needed. Edmundparker (talk) 07:43, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * First, concurrent editing. Looking at the history of Centenary Suburbs, nobody else appears to have been active at that time you were (certainly they didn't save anything which is necessary for an edit conflict), so I suspect what happened if that you may have had the article open for edit in more than one browser tab or more than one browser window (that is, an edit conflict with yourself) OR you had the article open in edit all afternoon so it was my edits in the late afternoon that caused the conflict. The secret to Wikipedia is short edits (i.e. Save/Publish very frequently) not long edit sessions. You can warn off (but not prevent) other editors with  at the top of the article which puts this message on the article

but only use it if you are intending to be actively working on the article for an hour or so. Don't put it on and then head off to the bed, just to keep others away overnight. Remember the article is visible to the public throughout the process, so we don't like to have them in messy in-between state for too long. Kerry (talk) 12:37, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Secondly, I re-ordered the paragraphs because this is an article about the Centenary Suburbs, not about the Brisbane River and not about Young, so it isn't clear to me as the reader why it is pertinent to discuss Young's prophetic comments in this article. I assumed it was relevant because his comments in 1990 directly led to the development of such groups in the Centenary Suburbs from 1991 onwards. But if that is not the case (that is, the groups formed independent of Young's remarks), then I think leave out Young as he's irrelevant to the Centenary Suburbs story. Words like "pertinent" and "prophetic" tend to be opinions not a fact and Wikipedia doesn't want our opinions (the relevant policies are Original Research and Neutral point of view); this is why I eliminated them. This is an important difference between writing for Wikpedia and writing as a sole author of a book, newsletter, blog etc. In Wikipedia, we don't tell the reader what conclusions they should come to. If we were writing an article about Young, it might make sense to point to his comments in 1990 and then a list of community groups that formed, but you would still leave it to the reader to think to themselves, "wow, that Young dude totally predicted that, what a legend!". Of course the reader might also think "yeah, well, that Young was stating the bleeding obvious, the government was never likely to do anything about it, so of course it was left to community groups to get the job done". Same facts, different conclusions. Do you see the point I am making? Kerry (talk) 12:37, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Kerry, just wanted to thank you for all your patience and useful tips during my renewed foray into WP contributions after several years lay-off! To explain my context, I was keen to get some things done quickly while I was laid up from physical activity. However, having achieved what I wanted for now, and learnt a lot in the process of jumping straight in, I'll step back now for a bit and reflect on the content of my contributions.

Importantly, I'll review and absorb the detail of your very useful advice, both general and specific. For now, I can assure you that I certainly see the relevance of what you are saying, and will reflect on that. On fact-based vs opinion-laden writing, I had understood WP protocol and writing style for objective facts not opinions. So I will reconsider my words around my reference to the Young quote; will get back to that in next day or so to avoid imparting either opinion or that Young was some prophetic mystic! And yes, the community env groups did form in 1991+, before we caught up with Young's 1990 quotes. It's just that the Young reference not only validates what the groups sought to achieve, but also happens to be so geographically specific to the Centenary suburbs.

You have left me much material to review, absorb and retain for my future reference, and for that I am most indebted and appreciative! So thank you again for that and for putting up with my, let's say, enthusiastic exuberance. Now for some reflection!

PS: Edmundparker (talk) 02:13, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Brisbane meetup: Saturday 13 January 2018 at The Edge, State Library of Queensland
If you are in or near Brisbane, please join us on Saturday 13 January 2018 any time from noon to 4pm at The Edge at the State Library of Queensland. For more details and to sign up, please go to the meetup page. See you there!