Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (stations in Poland)

Material from WikiProject Poland talk
This was the discussion from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poland that led to the creation of this page. SeveroTC 07:48, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

It's come to my attention that we have a number of ways in which Polish railway stations are titled on Wikipedia. Now, there isn't a central naming convention on how railway station articles should be named. There are some at national levels and I would like to find some concensus on what we are using.

I've counted seven ways an article is marked as a railway station (to disambiguate from the place it is in). These are: (railway station), railway station, (PKP station), (SKM stop), (Warsaw Metro), station, Station and nothing. The majority are with (PKP station) but these were mostly created by a single user five years ago.

NB: numbers may be a little out as I made this lists a few weeks ago.

As for the Wikipedia guidelines we have, Naming conventions (stations) never reached concensus so the only active guideline is Naming conventions (UK stations). There the guideline is that railway stations should use railway station, but if they are also light rail/metro/tram stops then just station.

My opinion is that we should adopt a similar approach. The problem I see is that (PKP station) in particular assumes knowledge of who or what PKP are. Now my guess is that we all know who PKP are, but the majority of readers will not so it is better to use the perfectly good generic English-language alternative. In addition, PKP may be confusing because trains operated by other companies than PKP use PKP-owned stations.

I think it is fine to leave the Warsaw Metro articles as they are.

The SKM stop articles should be merged with the PKP station articles where they are the same station. SKM is not a closed system like the Warsaw Metro so for me there is no problem calling the remaining SKM stops railway station.

I don't know what we should do with articles of "Centralny"/"Głowny" stations.

SeveroTC 11:01, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yep, there's certainly a right old mess here. I basically agree with all of the above suggestions. Regarding the centralny/główny ones, I would just leave the names untranslated, unless there's a widely used or particularly helpful translation for a particular station. (But if we're going to translate them, then I wouldn't use semi-translations like Warsaw Centralna - should be either "Warsaw Central" or "Warszawa Centralna".)--Kotniski (talk) 11:40, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * There's another question on whether to translate Warszawa to Warsaw in station names or not, and then the second part of the name also... - we have Warszawa Gdańska but Warsaw Śródmieście, Warsaw Centralna, Warsaw Głowna, Warsaw Wschodnia Osobowa... SeveroTC 11:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Loooking at some stations in other countries, I'm seeing names left untranslated (e.g. München Hauptbahnhof (not Munich anything), various Railway stations in Rome with "Roma" rather than "Rome", so I guess we could stick with Warszawa and the original Polish names.--Kotniski (talk) 16:01, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I initially thought that was just for main stations, but at least for the German stations it seems that way for all stations (see and ). A quick Google search for webpages and books suggests that probably the most common names are Warszawa Xyz and the same for Xyz Główny. SeveroTC 06:09, 1 June 2011 (UTC)


 * My 2 cents . ..

Could change the articles to the following - Warsaw Centralna (rail station). . . so we don't get caught up in a nomenclature discussion. Technically they could either be a Railroad or Railway station. A rail-based corporate entity could be a Railway or a Railroad - so I wouldn't use the UK as the only solution. "A train station, also called a railway station (mainly British Commonwealth) or railroad station (mainly US), and often shortened to just station"

The metro stations should move to Słodowiec (metro station)

SKM (Gdansk, Warsaw, etc.) is just an operator on the rail network and should be converted to rail stations.

And don't use Warsaw Gdansk as an example ... I'm working my way around the ring railroad.

Ajh1492 (talk) 11:52, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * As the categorisation tree is and "railway stations" is used throughout I don't see a big issue about using "railway station". The closed systems (such as Warsaw Metro and Warszawska Kolej Dojazdowa - maybe some others, I don't know - where the operator owns and operates the line) seem to be treated a bit different on Wikipedia and usually are disambiguated with (Foo Metro) - I don't see why the Polish ones should be any different? SeveroTC 15:30, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Let's look at other countries for inspiration. For example in Category:Railway stations in Germany native names are used augmented by the English phrase "station", i.e. Angermünde station, Böblingen station, etc. In Category:Railway stations in France no English words are used at all, i.e. Gare d'Agen, Gare d'Aiguillon, Gare de Bayonne, etc. In Category:Railway stations in England all names include the phrase "railway station", i.e. Aspley Guise railway station, Biggleswade railway station, etc. In Category:Railway stations in the United States the mess is even bigger than here... My personal preference though would be the combination of German and British naming systems with Polish "place-name", i.e. Kraków Główny railway station (about 96,900 results, most popular by far), Warszawa Centralna railway station, etc. Please search online for more results if you want, with the Wikipedia "five principles" in mind. — Krakowski (talk) 16:49, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with you - but one question: you say a mixture of German and UK styles with the German style tending to be Böblingen station - what circumstances would we name a station Foo station rather than Foo railway station? SeveroTC 06:09, 1 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I meant to say, all Polish railway station should have a full name in their native language (like in Germany) with the city in Polish, augmented by the phrase railway station (like in England), with no parentheses. Please remember, "Kraków Główny railway station" is ten times more popular in search than "Kraków Główny station". However, the phrase "station" can also be used for other types of mass transit if need be. — Krakowski (talk) 23:38, 1 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't have a problem keeping the separate Warsaw Metro designation. I do think the WKD designation isn't necessary, we should keep the station names generic as possible and link them to the rail line(s) they serve. I did a sampling of PL:WP and it looks like the format is Warszawa Centralna (railway station) followed closely by Warszawa Centralna (station). My vote is for the latter since it's shorter in length. I think it would be better to have the parentheses. Ajh1492 (talk) 01:34, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * No other countries seem to use parentheses in this way - normally just putting station or railway station so I don't think that it is better to have parentheses. SeveroTC 06:09, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay then, so far I think we have:
 * Foo railway station for all normal (including SKM and WKD) railway stations (where Foo is the name in Polish e.g. Warszawa Centralna, Kraków Główny etc). Terms such as "Warszawa Centralna" and "Kraków Główny" have much higher hits than full- or semi-English language equivalents so qualify as the common name.
 * One exception to this may be airport railway stations where the airport often has an English-language common name and the station of the airport takes this also - compare Cologne/Bonn Airport station to the rest of the stations in . At the moment this only applies to Warsaw Chopin Airport railway station.
 * Foo (Warsaw Metro) for Warsaw Metro stations (again, Foo is the name in Polish, so Świętokrzyska (Warsaw Metro) rather than Holy Cross (Warsaw Metro).

I now propose the following:
 * We ignore the prospect of tram stops being notable for articles. A tram, trolleybus or bus stop next to a station is worth a mention in the article, but I don't think it should alter the article's name.
 * For mixed railway stations and Warsaw Metro stations, we use Foo station where Foo is the name of the railway station (e.g. Warszawa Gdańska station) as single article for both unless the article grows to big per WP:LENGTH and it is deemed most suitable to split the article in this way.
 * For places which have connected railway and PKS bus/coach stations (e.g. Warszawa Zachodnia), we could either make one article (Warszawa Zachodnia station) or have two (Warszawa Zachodnia railway station and Warszawa Zachodnia coach station). I'm not so such about this kind of example but I can see some of the same logic as mixed metro and railway stations i.e. having one article until the article is too long.

SeveroTC 09:10, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That all seems eminently sensible. If no-one's got any better suggestions, then I'd certainly be in favour of standardizing in accordance with this proposal. --Kotniski (talk) 11:02, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Standardization is much needed and this proposal is very reasonable. - Darwinek (talk) 11:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, it provides reasonable length of article names. Is the format Foo (Warsaw Metro) for Warsaw Metro stations still within the proposal? Ajh1492 (talk) 11:51, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, but only because the majority of other systems use the same format (see ), although there are some notable exceptions, namely: Athens, Amsterdam and Bucharest (Foo metro station) and London (Foo tube station). I think with Warsaw Metro, Foo metro station would also be perfectly acceptable - maybe even better? SeveroTC 12:41, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

I've now created Naming conventions (stations in Poland). I will drop a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stations and hopefully we can put it in place within the next week or so. SeveroTC 07:57, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Support
As discussed at WT:WPPL, I support this guidance. Perhaps it could be made into a section of the page at WP:MOSPOL, rather than being a separate page, just to limit the potential proliferation of pages for every country/topic combination.--Kotniski (talk) 08:13, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Merging naming conventions for stations
Hi. I am proposing a merger of all naming conventions for stations. Please give your opinion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. Thanks. Szqecs (talk) 15:19, 20 October 2018 (UTC)