Wikipedia:WikiProject Toronto

This WikiProject is an attempt to organize articles about Toronto, Ontario into a coherent format.

Scope
This WikiProject aims primarily to provide information in consistent format for articles on places in Toronto, Ontario. It is also a first test of the format established for WikiProject London, to allow for some feedback before the template is copied for use for other cities.

Parentage
The parents of this WikiProject are the WikiProject Cities and the WikiProject Canadian communities. The Toronto project will probably generate a simpler template than the London project.

Descendant Wikiproject
The descendant of this WikiProject is the WikiProject Toronto Blue Jays, which itself is also a descendant of WikiProject Baseball, and ultimately descended from WikiProject Sports.

Task Force(s)
This WikiProject current has one task force /Toronto transit task force. The taskforce is for everything related to the Toronto Transit Commission and other forms of transportation in Toronto. Is it believed to be currently inactive.

Similar Wikiprojects
Other
 * WikiProject Ontario Roads

Structure
Places are most neutrally defined by their ecological characteristics. This is particularly easy for cities as most of the ecology is man-made. A bioregional structure is suggested, with each river (Don, Humber, etc.) and its watershed providing the basis for articles on settlement and history. The modern place-names and political boundaries will be discussed in terms of how much they respect or disrespect boundaries which nature always, by definition, respects. Toronto is an interesting city on which to test this structure, as it has many rivers, a rich set of open ravine parks, and an extensive sewer system, all of which takes water from Lake Ontario (via pumps or rain) and sends it back to there. It is thus an extremely simple watershed.

Note: Any other structure is likely to yield to definition conflicts. See bioregional democracy for a discussion of why watersheds tend to be the most neutral boundaries for definition of place.

Motivation

 * 1) Toronto is one of the world's most diverse large cities, as over 50% of its population of over 2.7 million were born in some other country (than Canada). Like London, it is structured as a set of urban villages that have not quite lost their character or total control of street life, and each of these neighbourhoods needs an article in the Wikipedia, in the language that is spoken by its inhabitants, and which appears on its signs. Chinese, Italian, Polish, Greek, Indian and other communities are each associated with specific districts, which require articles in at least English and in those languages.
 * 2) Toronto has sufficient cultural treasures to be worth visiting on any visit to North America. Some of these, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario Science Centre and Royal Ontario Museum, are innovative and notable for their collections, and their public activity in education. Toronto is also a prominent centre for the study of library science and classification systems—the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto has some 1100 of these schemes in its collection. Articles on Toronto itself are most likely to motivate the participation of categorization scholars who work in these institutions.
 * 3) Toronto retains electric streetcars, has an extensive subway and semi-automated light metro network, and is experimenting with diesel-electric buses—probably the most technologically diverse transit system in North America, and so a testbed for transport technologies.

Naming conventions

 * Places: as Queen Street West, Toronto with a redirect from Queen West, Toronto, or a disambiguation page if there is more than one place or thing with this name.
 * Rationale for doing things this way round: many places have been named after places in London, including many places in Toronto, where this habit is simply out of control. There are many Queen and King Streets in Canada and Australia, and figuring out how to disambiguate them all effectively is going to be very necessary. So let's do it quickly and early.
 * Toronto subway stations: Spadina station, or Lawrence station (Toronto) if further disambiguation is required, as per WP:CANSTATION.
 * Union station (TTC) is an exception, as there's the nearby Union station (Toronto)
 * Cities: as their former official full names but recognized as part of Toronto (their current status), i.e. Borough of East York, Toronto, City of North York, Toronto, etc.

Framework
To do:
 * Auto-generate articles to create a trellis of linked pre-stub articles about places in Toronto, probably based on the phone book or a tour guide available in electronic form.
 * Hand-edit to merge with existing content, and to fill in the correct Toronto city name for each of these place articles.
 * The few places that actually are not in Toronto, but one of the surrounding regional municipalities, should be renamed, and the links to them fixed.
 * There should be an article on each of the Toronto Forward Sortation Areas, cross-linked to the articles describing the places in that postal district, mean income, etc. Statistics Canada will have this.
 * Articles on notable Toronto tourist attractions such as Rogers Centre should be put in the same format as other Toronto place articles.

Templates

 * ...First of two templates that may to be placed on talk pages of Toronto, Canada related articles (only one template needed)


 * ...Second of two templates that may to be placed  on talk pages of Toronto, Canada related articles (only one template needed)


 * Toronto...To be placed at the "bottom" of Toronto related articles.


 * '...To be placed in the "see also" section of Toronto related articles if appropriate'


 * canada-bio-stub

Tools

 * Main tool page: toolserver.org


 * Reflinks - Edits bare references - adds title/dates etc. to bare references
 * Checklinks - Edit and repair external links
 * Dab solver - Quickly resolve ambiguous links.
 * Peer reviewer - Provides hints and suggestion to improving articles.