Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Canadian communities/Structure guideline

Guideline start
I started a sketch of a guideline, adapted from the section headings from WikiProject Cities/Guideline. Please feel free to adjust, improve, detail. --Qyd (talk) 03:08, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Notable Citizens?
Is it appropriate to include lists of notable citizens in articles on communities? If so, where should this information be included in the article?--Ducio1234 (talk) 21:48, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Why no Etymology section? (Origin of the name of the town)
The structure for USA cities - WP:City structure - includes etymology AND Notable People. Why does this one not include those topics?

"Etymology If there is sufficient material on the origin and meaning of the settlement's name to justify a section or subsection header, then it may be titled as Etymology (most common), Toponymy, or Name (least common). Etymology is a branch of linguistics that deals with origin and historical development of names and reconstructing their meaning where possible. It may be a distinct section rather than dealing with the name within the history section. When there is a section, it is either a sub-section of History or a distinct section placed above the History section."

Peter K Burian (talk) 19:14, 30 April 2017 (UTC)


 * For the vast majority of Canadian community articles, the name origin is presented within a single sentence up to a short single paragraph, if presented at all. Right now, this guideline suggests name origin in the lead. We are aware however that the lead should be a summary of contents within the article, so for it to be briefly mentioned in the lead it needs to be presented with a bit more detail elsewhere within the body of the article. The origin of a community's name is part of that community's history. Thus, it should be presented within the History section. If it amounts to no more than a paragraph, I see no need to nest an Etymology subsection under the History section. Hwy43 (talk) 23:42, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Historical population templates
The above on community articles provide excellent and succinct information on the most sought after demographic information on a community – population. It unintrusively and briefly provides historical population information so that our readers can quickly understand its growth path and trends over the years. If a community article's Demographics section is large enough to justify its own child article, it isn't justified to simply bury this in the child article where few will see it or where few will know to visit to find it. This type of historical info is a marquis supplement to the population counts from the latest or two most recent censuses in prose. Prose in place of tables or charts of more detailed demographics is understood especially if said tables and charts are in fact presented at the more detailed demographics child articles of community articles. Hwy43 (talk) 05:27, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Nice and simple.... we have no need to say the same thing in two or three different formats on one page. Since these are  main articles and prose is preferred and the articles in question have a main demographics articles with all these tables/charts already in them.... I propose just keeping the prose text. Also need to consider the recently added visible minority tables don't match the pros text already in the articles.... we say the same thing but give two different percentages....looks like the pros is  one with the right data. This should only happen on articles that have sub demo articles.... so basically we're just talkin about Calgary Ottawa Montreal Vancouver Edmonton.-- Moxy 🍁 05:41, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
 * It is unclear in the above response if my concern has been understood or acknowledged. Let's please put the tables/charts presenting visible minorities, language, ethnic origin, and other detailed demographics in the parking lot for now. A complete article on a Canadian community is to include history and demographics. A historical population history template satisfies both aspects of a complete article's scope. It should stay for this reason, the reasons mentioned above, the fact the vast majority of the content in the template is not already presented in another format in the article, and then also consistency across major city articles. Why should major cities X, Y, and Z have their historical population template pushed to their demographics child articles when major cities A, B and C have them? These template-based small tables present so much and having them in the same locations across community articles makes it the easiest for our readers to find and compare multiple communities. If there is a desire to also discuss the parking lot items, let's keep that issue detached and address it after the above concern at hand is addressed. Cheers, Hwy43 (talk) 06:21, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Youry concern with the pop table...not my main concern ...that was a duplication cleanup (there on demo articles). I am not a fan of raw data with no context (why pop spike?) but not a big deal to add those back....but at Montreal we have some table "Canada Census Mother Tongue" causing the whole article to sidescrool ....this type of detail would be more appropriate in the demo article....plus have sandwich text there again.-- Moxy 🍁 06:40, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

The historical population templates are absolutely critical for any city article, however I do agree with Moxy that strange spikes should be addressed in either a note or in the demographics section. I also agree that the removal of other (weird) demographics tables (some recent additions are "race") and almost all the time have several "races" with 0.01% of the population which is simply not useful. I think the paragraph as suggested by Hwy43 presents the information in a better way than giant ethnographic tables. Mattximus (talk) 12:55, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
 * thanks for your explanation and comments. Sounds like there is support then for retaining historical population templates. Agree strange spikes should be addressed either by those means expressed above or alternately within the History section. If the other detailed demographics tables are being removed because they are already on the corresponding Demographics of Foo child article, no concern so long as replaced with brief prose summarizing the most significant content. If not already on the child article, the tables should be moved to the child article, again replaced by brief prose to summarize what will be observed on the child article. If that is exact what you were doing, Moxy, outside of what I was concerned about, then I won't stand in the way. Cheers, Hwy43 (talk) 22:05, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

External links - Official link of the community only
It seems such a strange rule to exclude all other outside sources of information that could be useful. It seems counter to the purpose of Wikipedia, to limit information.

Otherwise for External Links, #3 at: What can normally be linked says "Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues,[4] amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks), or other reasons."

Prairie-Towns.com certainly fits the bill, containing many historical photos of many Canadian communities. Certainly, adding all those photos to Wikipedia would probably not be wanted, and would be a great amount of work, but to completely lack the ability to know about such photos that are on an external site in Wikipedia would be a great loss. It seems logical that when one looks up a community on Wikipedia, one would like to know about relevant information.

Windrider6 (talk) 19:39, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Proposed change to guideline
It's difficult to differentiate:

from
 * "Arts and culture (cultural venues, festivals and significant cultural events)"
 * "Attraction (museums and other points of interest, parks (local, regional, provincial parks), recreation venues)".

I noticed how problematic this was while attempting to structure St. John's, Newfoundland to comply with this guideline (to assist with Good article reassessment/St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador/1). Timmins is another example where untangling these sections would be difficult.

My suggested replacement would be:
 * Arts and culture (cultural events and venues, festivals, tourism, and attractions)
 * Parks and recreation

Readers benefit from articles uniformly organized in a familiar structure, and editors would benefit from clearer inclusion criteria. Thank you for your input. Magnolia677 (talk) 12:17, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * To be fair, part of the problem here is that "attractions" might be museums, but they might also be geography. Science North in my hometown would certainly be a cultural attraction — but the Grand Canyon would be an attraction in the geographic sense, and would still belong more with parks and rec than with arts and culture. So I'd say what we really need here is to do a bit more to detach the concepts of "cultural attraction" and "geographic attraction" — so your proposal's definitely a step in the right direction, but I think it needs just a bit more tweaking still. Bearcat (talk) 18:51, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Bronte, Ontario, is another mess. I'll seek input from the community again. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:30, 12 April 2024 (UTC)