Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of postcodes in Victoria (Australia)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. J04n(talk page) 00:57, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

List of postcodes in Victoria (Australia)

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

per WP:Directory. Australia Post maintains a correct list of postcodes. We have an incorrect list of no particular use with no added information and of no benefit to our readership, and we are providing possible incorrect info to those who come here thinking we are a directory. Crusoe8181 (talk) 10:56, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. sats 11:42, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete all per nom Nick-D (talk) 11:53, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 12:27, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Note The following related articles have all been nominated as well.
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that the nominator was unaware of how to bundle these requests. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 12:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep: The ACT one survived two previous AfD attempts. Useful information.  Lists of this kind are allowed on Wikipedia.   This information appears in many places in this form.  Article could use better contextualization, but as a topic appears notable and useful. --LauraHale (talk) 20:33, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Redirect all to Postcodes in Australia, where a link to Australia Post's postcode tool may be found. Australia Post's official tool is regularly updated (monthly apparently), unlike the lists here. That link also provides access to an iPhone and iPad app. These lists are completely redundant to the link. It simply doesn't make sense to keep these lists. Maybe it did back in 2004, but not now. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 21:11, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Redirect to Postcodes in Australia, as suggested above. These lists were quite useful years ago when they were full of redlinks, but now that they're for the most part filled in there's nothing on these pages that the Australia Post tool doesn't do better.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 08:21, 29 April 2013 (UTC).
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, czar   &middot;   &middot;  12:21, 30 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Strong Delete: It flat out contravenes the WP:NOTDIR policy, and I will add that the lists as construed are not very useful anyway in this format. If you look at the official postcode directory they print it's very large because there are thousands of localities and hamlets not included in these lists that nonetheless fall into a postcode, and not always that of the nearest town/suburb. I think any list Wikipedia generates of postcodes is going to be inferior to that maintained by the postal service - at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate or misleading. Unus Multorum (talk) 20:28, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Strong delete all WP has come a long way since the original AfDs. this is clearly WP:NOTDIR. there are 100s of thousands if not millions of postcodes worldwide, we are not in the business of creating directories for these. AussieLegend correctly points out there is an official postcode finder at Australia Post website, we don't need to be a postcode finding service. LibStar (talk) 01:34, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete all. Clearly, the concept of a postcode is notable, as is each country's implementation of the idea. However, individual postcodes are not notable: if they are referred to at all, it is as a convenient name for a small geographical area (e.g., lazy sports writers writing "SW18" because they've already said "Wimbledon" a hundred times in their article), and the discussion is not about the code itself. WP:CSC allows lists where all entries are non-notable but these ones are just directories so fall foul of WP:NOTDIR. Wikipedia is also not a mirror of Australia Post's website or anyone else's. I think it is best not to redirect as that increases the likelihood of the page being recreated and also provides a landing spot for search engine users. If we don't look like we have a full list of Australian postcodes in the encyclopaedia, people searching for that topic will end up at sites that actually do have one, instead of here. Dricherby (talk) 09:28, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Question Does Australia Post actually have a LIST of postcodes anywhere? A search tool is not quite the same. --99of9 (talk) 15:08, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The telephone books that are delivered to every property each year contain a list of postcodes. Full postcode data is available from the Australia Post website (here - there are 16,549 lines). A quick check of the articles showed up several inaccuracies. You're correct, a search tool is not quite the same, it's much better. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 17:06, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, so that's only free for non-commercial use. In which case maybe we can send our cc-by-sa lists to wikidata or similar.  Of course a community-maintained list will have inaccuracies or be out of date, but a user can sometimes live with that, and the freedom of use would be important for many types of use (e.g. putting names on geospatial census data indexed by postcode - something I'm trying to do for demographic maps on Commons right now). That's not something one can get with a search tool as far as I know, without spamming the query system. --99of9 (talk) 19:40, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * If the source of this article is only free for non-commercial use and we're licensing it more broadly than that, aren't we in WP:COPYVIO? Dricherby (talk) 20:51, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I haven't looked into how we got our list, so you could be right, but in principle it may have come from an earlier distribution with different terms, or was perhaps even crowd sourced. --99of9 (talk) 21:23, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * If we were updating the existing article using the Australia Post source, then yes, it would be a copyvio, but we can't do that. As for innacuracies, I tried regenerating the list in my userspace and found the existing list, which has 1,718 postcodes, to be missing 1,475 entries - the list is less than 54% complete and that's a lot of innacuracies to live with. Using the list for something like "putting names on geospatial census data indexed by postcode" is really pointless. Australian census data isn't based on postcodes. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has its own Census Collection Districts that often cross postcodes and these CCDs apparently only have limited availability. Available maps are low resolution and only show suburb boundaries for comparison. At anything larger, with the exception of LGA data there's a fair bit of guess work involved. For a rough idea of what I mean, go to this link and where it says "Enter a location", type in "Raymond Terrace", select "Gazetted Locality (GL)" from the dropdown list and click "GO". You'll note That the entire north west part of Raymond Terrace is missing, although the ABS does check the population along the shoreline of Grahamstown Dam, which is fairly easy because there are no people there. This is one of the good ones. Now try typing "2324" (the postcode) and click "GO" again to see the area covered by the postcode. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 21:51, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what you mean by "these CCDs apparently only have limited availability"? Are you saying that the data in the census data-packs that is tabulated by POA does not match with the boundaries the Post office uses, or that it's somehow wrong/guessed?  I clicked on 2324, is your point that it's an unusual shape, or it doesn't match the post office search tool (it seems to roughly match the towns at least)?  The boundary maps I'm using are also in the data packs, and are easily high enough resolution for my needs.  For sake of discussion, I'm talking about putting location names on maps like this, but perhaps coarse-grained by POA instead of SLA.  --99of9 (talk) 22:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm saying that the census data for a suburb often doesn't match the gazetted suburb, as can be seen from the fact that a large portion of Raymond Terrace is missing from the Raymond Terrace data. On the other hand, Swan Bay covers almost all of Swan Bay, but includes much of Ferodale, Medowie and Oyster Cove as well. For what you are doing, the Census Data Packs seem to be adequate, but these postcode lists are woefully inadequate for nearly everything. If you want to use postcodes, you're better off downloading the complete list from Australia Post for reference. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 23:25, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * keep. for one thing, it's a guide to what locations might need WP articles. The relevant principle is NOT PAPER. That the fundamental resource is even more detailed shows we;re not violating not directory,. 20:31, 2 May 2013 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (NYPL) (talk • contribs)
 * No, it's not much use at all. As I've indicated above, this article is missing more than 46% of the locations in Victoria, although admittedly some of these are postcodes within one location. At least some of the redlinks in the article are not valid locations, they're non-notable housing estates or other subdivisions within existing suburbs that already have articles. Some like Appin Park don't appear on the updated list. I don't follow your logic regarding WP:NOTDIR, which says nothing about fundamental resources offering more information that what we have here. WP:NOTDIR says that Wikipedia is not a directory. This article is a map between locality names and postcode values, and is therefore a directory, at least according to the definition in Directory (databases). "In software engineering, a directory is a map between names and values. It allows the lookup of values given a name, similar to a dictionary." That seems to apply here, since you've cited WP:NOTPAPER, which itself says "this policy is not a free pass for inclusion: articles must abide by the appropriate content policies". -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 22:45, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment. I agree with DGG about the potential usefulness of these lists for article creation. I didn't get an answer to the question I asked earlier at Articles for deletion/List of postcodes in the Australian Capital Territory (3rd nomination) so I will ask here:  In 2007, the consensus was to move these lists to project space.  Why wasn't that done?  Why not do it now? --01:32, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know the answer to your question, and I doubt anyone knew that was the case when the AfDs were started. Have you asked Fishhead64, the admin who closed the discussions? The reason not to do it now is that moving the articles serves no purpose. The articles fail WP:NOTDIR and in their woefully inaccurate state, which isn't likely to be fixed, they serve no useful purpose, as I've explained above. The arguments for keeping/moving them at the 2007 AfD, that thousands of articles link to them and that Australia Post doesn't provide a list of all postcodes do not exist any more. Other arguments, such that they provide a resource for spelling are specious. There are plenty of official sources that provide this information, notably Geoscience Australia, that provide this information in an up to date form. We shouldn't be using half-completed, 6 year old articles for references. In fact we're not supposed to. We're supposed to use secondary sources, which Wikipedia isn't. By keeping these articles we are deceiving our readers into thinking we have complete lists. Clearly we don't. There have been very few updates in the past 6 years and most of the changes were minor. The trend is likely to continue. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 02:55, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Rdirect  to Postcodes in Australia The list is incomplete but might lead a reader to believe it is complete, doesn't meet WP:NOTDIR, AusPost does it better and are the original source.FlatOut 11:04, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.