Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Telecommunications/Area codes RfC

I'm not certain we should include question 2 (naming) at all. It doesn't affect the notability of articles, and once we know which articles are or are not notable we can work with that at a country / individual article level. e.g. most NANP codes are likely to be primary for "Area code xxx" titles, and what makes sense for disambiguation will vary (e.g. the UK codes are generally known as "dialling codes" or the official but not that common "STD codes" (from subscriber trunk dialling) rather than "area codes"). Thryduulf (talk) 09:41, 7 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree, and I don't really think it affects much. I'll remove it now. JML1148 (talk &#124; contribs) 07:34, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Comment from, I'm viewing this from a UK perspective. I'm in favour of Option 1. The US precedent isn't very helpful because it was reached a long time ago, when Wikipedia had much more of an include-everything philosophy, and is heavily influenced by the US approach to populated places. Working backwards, Option 4 definitely doesn't work because we are a source of global information and don't have the right to assume that our readers are uninterested in Mauritian area codes. Option 3 is poor because there's no particular reason to assume notability correlates with the number of people; there might be some country that issues a special area code to its Presidential palace and parliament, or an area code might suddenly become subject of a huge legal argument or scandal, and these are better reasons to confer notability. The other way round, if the only thing we can say about an area code is that it is the area code for Birmingham, then no matter how many people live in Birmingham, we won't have anything to say about it that can't be said at List of dialling codes in the United Kingdom. In fact that goes to the heart of it: if we make area codes notable by default, we're going to end up with an enormous number of very boring "articles" that merely give a little map showing the boundary (possibly not up-to-date), and a piece of standardised text about the last area code reshuffle, all cited from the National Telephone Numbering Plan, and SamKnows. I think we should only write articles about topics where there is something to write. If secondary sources exist, for example where an area code has played a particularly important role in telecommunication history, where it had the first or last of some interesting exchange technology, and bits of its hardware have landed up in a museum and attracted attention, then we're in the position to write an interesting article. Otherwise, the routine information is far better put in List of dialling codes in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, some of our existing articles, such as 01633 don't even link to this list, while we also have a heavily overlapping Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom. I just don't think hundreds of individual articles is the best way to present this information to our readers. Elemimele (talk) 12:59, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The RFC isn't live yet (the page you wrote your comment on) is just the draft. I will leave a message here when it is live with a link to where it is being hosted (likely one of the village pumps) when it is live, probably in a couple of days. Thryduulf (talk) 16:14, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The RfC is now live at WikiProject Telecommunications/Area codes RfC. Thryduulf (talk) 18:48, 17 June 2023 (UTC)