Wikipedia talk:SGpedians' notice board

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Welcome to the talkpage of the SGpedians' notice board, where you can discuss about Singapore-related articles and issues. Enjoy! =)

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To-do list for Wikipedia:SGpedians' notice board:

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These are pending tasks based on previous discussion. Articles Nominate for Feature Article: Singapore Consolidate and organise articles of Singapore places according to Regions of Singapore Create articles on urban planning areas and constituencies Consolidate and organise school articles under MOE clusters More pictures and maps Clean up articles in Category:Singapore Chinese Dramas Others Vote and nominate articles for SGCOTF collaboration Meetup for SGpedians: refer to infobox below or see discussion here. Singapore Meetup Meetup 3 Date:10/11 March 2007 Time:1130 hrs - 2200 hrs NOTE:The meeting time has been changed from noon to 11.30 am. Please click here if you are interested in attending. v • d •  e

Contents 1 Collaboration 2 WikiProject Singaporean Arts and Entertainment - Redux 3 Singapore as a single-party state? 4 Navbar 5 SG politician infobox 6 Next meetup 7 Pedra Branca 8 Meetup infobox 9 Fann Wong for GA status 10 Infobox for names? 11 Languages and Singapore Changi Airport 12 {{Singapore topics}} 13 Four potential Singaporean GAs!

[edit] Collaboration

I've set up a new collaboration process. I'll expand in detail on the day of the meeting, and hopefully it will start working soon. - Mailer Diablo 10:54, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Hm...nice work and page, but dosent that really look alot like a Wikiproject extension? ;)--Huaiwei 15:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Great. I can't believe it won't work this time. When does the nomination day starts? Or can we start nominating article already? As for the objective stated on the collaboration page, shouldn't we reinsert the statement which says "to bring articles to FA standard"? I assume we have not abandoned that as a goal for the collaboration effort ;) --Vsion 15:54, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

When would this return? I miss this the most. --Terence Ong _{(C | R)} 16:02, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering about that as well. It seems that the new collaboration page is to replace SGCOTF, but it is not explicitly stated. --Vsion 17:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I wish to nominate I Not Stupid, Singapore 2006 and Singapore general election, 2006 for the collaboration, as I believe that with some work, we can get them to GA status. --J.L.W.S. The Special One 03:39, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Singaporean Arts and Entertainment - Redux

So I decided to be bold and create WP:SGAE after all! Feel free to help out, give feedback, yell at the things I should've done differently, whatever. Also expect to see a new project banner appearing on various talk pages soon. -ryand 14:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

So how do you pronounce SGAE? See-Gay? :D--Huaiwei 15:13, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I... I've never actually thought about it that way :/ It was "suh-jay" in my mind, if anything. -ryand 15:19, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I joined the WikiProject. I'll be working on articles on Jack Neo movies and some TV shows. --J.L.W.S. The Special One 03:38, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Singapore as a single-party state?

The issue has cropped up again over at the above page, with the reintroduction of Singapore there. See Talk:Single-party_state#User:Instantnood.27s_political_views_on_Singapore.--Huaiwei 22:46, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

• It's called dominant-party system. - Mailer Diablo 23:44, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Guys, check out what our friend is commenting over in [1]. His use of the word "evil" was particularly interesting.--Huaiwei 13:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Navbar

Now that it looks like the Singaporean WikiProject aspect is expanding beyond the SGpedians' notice board, I made a little navigational aid template to help navigation between the related pages. Feel free to modify it as you see fit:

Also, the only page it's not currently on is this talk page itself. The top of the page is kinda cluttered and I couldn't figure out how to put it there without making the whole thing look ugly. Enjoy! -ryand 07:26, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the intiative. Hold on a little on this thou, as we are considering setting up a true-blue Wikiproject and reorganising our collaborative system if need be.--Huaiwei 13:28, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SG politician infobox

I've been browsing through the articles on Singaporean politicians (it's really a mess in there) and I realize that what we really need is an infobox for Singaporean politicians. I am aware that {{Infobox Politician}} exists, but it's primarily US-centric, and a Singaporean infobox could better encapsulate the political scene in Singapore. I would do one myself, except that being the politically-apathetic Singaporean that I am, I have no idea what information would be relevant. Comments and/or offers to take up the challenge? -ryand 07:54, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I may be able to help abit along the way. I am thinking we need a wikiproject dept on Singapore politics anyway, which I will be glad to be a part of! ;)--Huaiwei 13:27, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Next meetup

Rather early to decide, but just to let you all know. Keep March 10 or 11 free if you are interested in the next meetup. It will be more organised and professional this time round. See here for more details. Only confirm the dates you are free after February 11 2007. If you are interested, do leave your name there. Any queries, ask Goh wz, Chaerani or myself. --Terence Ong _{(C | R)} 14:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pedra Branca

The above article was moved to Pedra Branca, South China Sea by an admin despite the fact that the dicussion mentioned both options as possibilities, but with more indicating Pedra Branca as the preferred version. I wonder if the community here sees a need for collaborative action in light of this prematured conclusion by an admin (and which a user even thanked for "helping out" there [2])?--Huaiwei 17:04, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

If you count both polls, doesn't concensus obviously tell that we want it moved back to Pedra Branca, not its current name. That was not much discussion about this move, it was so abrupt. --Terence Ong _{(C | R)} 17:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Meetup infobox

I'll like to propose setting up a meetup infobox a la Wikipedia:Meetup/Melbourne/Invite, Template:Meetup/LA/Invite, Template:SeattleMeetup and Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/Invite. It'll enable us to inform multiple users (not just SGpedians) (through their talk pages, this notice board, etc) without having to edit the individual pages. Please vote. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ZhongHan (talk • contribs) 15:53, 28 November 2006.

To add on, it should preferably be created at Wikipedia:Meetup/Singapore/Invite. If there aren't any issues, I will create it after 1 week. --ZhongHan (Email) 02:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• Support. —Goh wz 15:29, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
• Support --Terence Ong 16:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Please note that is has been done. Feel free to improve it. --ZhongHan (Email) 13:39, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fann Wong for GA status

After recent cleanup by Voda voda and myself, I believe that the Fann Wong article is almost ready for good article status! All it needs is a little more polishing and copyediting to prepare it for peer review and GA. Anyone is welcome to help; there's a to-do list on the talk page. -ryand 15:56, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Although the article is well-referenced, two major issues must be addressed if Fann Wong is to achieve GA status:

1. The article contains excessive lists. A list of films/dramas she starred in and awards/nominations she received will do.
2. The article lacks a section on Fann's "personal life". "Broad coverage" is a GA criteria.

As a member of the GA and SGAE WikiProjects, I am willing to help with writing, copy-editing and ensuring quality of prose.

I am currently working on improving I Not Stupid to GA status. Could you let me nominate Fann Wong and I Not Stupid at the same time (along with Singapore 2006, Singapore general election, 2006 and Daniel Brandt)?

--J.L.W.S. The Special One 09:26, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your points. I am aware of the first point and intend to clean it up soon. As for the second point... well, I guess it's back to research. Nominate both articles together if you like, but go ahead and nominate I Not Stupid first if it meets all the GA criteria before Fann Wong does (or vice versa). -ryand 13:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox for names?

SGpedians' notice board
Hangul:	인천국제공항철도
Hanja:	仁川國際空港鐵道
Revised Romanization:	Incheon Gukje Gonghang Cheoldo
McCune-Reischauer:	Inch'ŏn Kukche Konghang Ch'ŏlto

Lots of articles on subjects in Singapore start with a huge slew of names in English, Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Proto-Quechua, etc. While this information is useful for some, it adds a lot of clutter to articles and often makes the first sentence nearly impossible to read:

The Mass Rapid Transit or MRT (Traditional Chinese: 大眾快速交通 or more commonly known as 地鐵; Simplified Chinese: 大众快速交通 or more commonly known as 地铁; Malay: Sistem Pengangkutan Gerak Cepat; Tamil: சிங்கை துரிதக் கடவு ரயில்) is a rapid transit system...

I think an infobox along the lines of the koreanname template to the left would be a good way of storing and displaying this info. Opinions? Jpatokal 04:50, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

• Agree --ZhongHan (Email) 14:29, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
• Disagree. There are plenty of templates on specific subject matter which does the same thing, so how useful will another box be?--Huaiwei 14:53, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Of course it's a generic box, if there's a more specific one then obviously use that one instead. Jpatokal 15:04, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Bumpity-bump. I am so not wading into that Changi Airport mess again, but let's see if we can get some more opinions on this. Huaiwei, please also understand that this is intended as a "default" infobox for cases when there is no appropriate specific template, so I'd like to hear if you have other objections. Jpatokal 09:02, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

• Weak agree − I would like to see how it looks like on the page itself, however. I think many users are used to seeing the language information in the topic sentence. -ryand 14:17, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Languages and Singapore Changi Airport

Do take a look at Talk:Singapore Changi Airport. Several editors have taken exception to the use of the four languages on this article (which is consistently applied throughout most of Singapore-related articles). I believe instead of making any change on Singapore Changi Airport based on any consensus on that particular talkpage, the issue of languages should be discussed here first, then applied across all our articles.

Some issues at hand (both for and against):

• English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are the official languages of Singapore and for the sake of equity, it is all or nothing for the latter three.
• All these languages are used in the signboards most (if not all) government-owned buildings.
• Having a string of languages makes the article lead rather cluttered.
• Some (if not the vast majority) of users worldwide cannot understand the other languages, and just skip them over.

Let's come to an agreement whether the names should stay, go, or be changed somehow. Once done, we can proceed from here. I do prefer that this issue is settled here rather than in Changi Airport's article, where the interested parties are not necessarily from here and so may not understand the issue as well.

For starters, here are my opinions:

• Drop the pinyin - if you know Chinese you probably can read the words as-is; if you don't, it's not going to help.
• Use <small> </small> tags to shrink the other names to take up less space. However, the Chinese characters are already quite hard to read at this font size so it might not be practical.
• Infoboxes with the other languages will just lead to even more clutter, so I object to a dedicated infobox for the names.

--Rifleman 82 22:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Rifleman, you yourself posted this on the talk page only moments ago:

"I think that the presence/absence/line drawn should be dictated by a consensus of the people in those wikiprojects tending to the articles."

While this notice board is useful (which I do not debate) and may "claim" jurisdiction over the article, WP:AIRPORTS would be the only actual WikiProject associated with the article, as apparent by the lack of other project banners on the article talk page. That is a more appropriate place to discuss this, as you have stated yourself. If there a WP:SINGAPORE (WP:SG?) existed, which would likely be extremely useful, I concede that would also have a say in it. But remember, Singapore Changi Airport is, by definition, an airport and its location is somewhat less important. However, I do agree that pinyin should be dropped entirely, as its not even one of the official languages to begin with that we've all been debating over for well past a month now.

You're right in that the vast majority of the world does not understand these languages. While they may be useful to some, they're most likely only particularly useful to those who only speak that language, as those who have enough understanding of the English language to comprehend the 85kb article itself should be able to understand the name in English. What percentage of the English Wikipedia's readers only speak Chinese, Tamil or Malay? Hopefully none—why browse this Wikipedia if you can't understand what's being written?—though there are probably a few lurking around. These readers are far more likely to be reading in whichever language suits their needs best anyway if they're actually interested in the subject at hand.

As for the <small> element wrapping you're proposing for the names, the template (used in every article under WikiProject Airports) has been written with a nativename, nativename-a and nativename-r parameter for longer than I can remember. I'll be making the changes to the template shortly after I post this, as its been long established on the airport infobox's usage page that these should be used. I hadn't noticed that they were hard-coded with HTML tags instead of following accepted format until you mentioned it.

Like I keep reminding every on the article's talk page, the proposal is to keep all of the names in the existing airport infobox, which it was designed to accomodate, and to remove the other names from the lead paragraph only. A section on the names in other languages may be useful, but so far none of the supporters for keeping them have stepped up to the plate and actually written it. thadius856_talk 23:05, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Pray tell, why should Singapore Changi Airport be an aberration compared with all the other Singapore-related articles then? --Rifleman 82 23:28, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

I find it nonsensical that jurisdiction over articles is now being fought over based on nothing but banners. I remember there was a time disagreements were so heated over the content of the article that the Singapore Changi page was even removed from the Airport project. Would you like us to go down this path once again? We very well might if this kind of provincial thinking persists. Wikipedia is a SHARED project. Try arguing against that.--Huaiwei 23:10, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

If you read closely, I did not claim that since that project has the only banner on the page that it is the only one with jurisdiction. However, I can only assume such, as nobody has mentioned any other project that has even the slightest interest in the article. Even you have to understand that notice boards are not WikiProjects by definition. thadius856_talk 23:21, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Are you in the business of playing with words for the sole purposes of trying to exclude segments of the wikicommunity from participating in concensus building? Worse, are you claiming wikiprojects take greater ownership of wikiarticles, and have the final word over them? If this is what you are simply getting at, then no wonder you are part of that project. Its staffed by plenty of like-minded individuals like yourself.--Huaiwei 23:27, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Can we not at least be civil and observe ettiquite? We're discussing a couple hundred bytes on a remote server somewhere. thadius856_talk 06:03, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh sure we all wish everyone could be civil since we are talking about civil aviation (and bless User:Strom for dropping me a kind note just when I am getting really hot under the collar [3]), but I am particularly insinuated by aggreesive comments such as those above which clearly attempt to elevate the status of some wikipedians and exclude others, for no reason other than over disagreements on a couple hundred bytes. That suggestion is a full scale insult on my very existance in this wiki, where I filmly believe everyone has a fair say in its growth and development. In a site where even anons are threated with respect and their contributions valued, may I see some justifications for sidelining non-project members and dismissing their views?

May I repeat, that for all our existance in this wiki, and for all the work the sg community have done for any kind of topic, the only wikiproject which has continously run into problems with the this community is none other then Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports and Wikipedia:WikiProject Airlines, both led by more or less the same individuals. Is this pure coincidence, or does it tell you something else? Let is all try to assume good faith, shall we?--Huaiwei 08:33, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I'll try to actually answer the original question(s). In my opinion, the official languages are worthwhile but low-priority information and should hence be kept, but in an infobox to the side, not in the lead. If possible, the names should ideally be integrated with other existing infoboxes, not presented in a standalone box. In the odd case that the names differ radically or have interesting histories (eg. Tekka Market), a full explanatory section is of course warranted.

Incidentally, I believe that the most government buildings in Singapore consistently display only the English name. This is certainly true for Changi, which I pass through about twice per week: there's one prominent quadrilingual sign on the expressway coming in, and a whole lot of "Welcome!" type signs in all four (plus Japanese, Arabic, etc), but the overwhelmingly most common name is just the English "Changi Airport". Cf. the official home page, which consistently uses this name and doesn't even have Malay or Tamil versions. Jpatokal 09:14, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] {{Singapore topics}}

Question - is it possible to make it collapsible? --ZhongHan (Email) 07:01, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Can, but why? There's some template you have to use though. Terence Ong 07:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Because, my dear friend, I feel it's <insert list of expletives here /> long and because many other navigational templates are. The closest is {{Navigation with image}}, but makes the text align centre instead of align left, and can get a little messy, to put it nicely. --ZhongHan (Email) 14:49, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Four potential Singaporean GAs!

The following four Singapore-related articles are close to meeting the Good Article criteria.

• Singapore general election, 2006: This article is rated A-Class, and therefore should meet the GA criteria. However, Terence Ong mentioned that the article needs copyediting.
• Singapore 2006: This article is rated B-Class. It currently has 47 references. I do not see any reason why it does not meet the GA criteria.
• I Not Stupid: I have been working on this article for several months. It is currently B-Class. Once the "Production" section is complete, it should meet the GA criteria.
• Fann Wong: Ryan-D and Voda voda have been working on this article for several a few months. It is currently B-Class. Once the "Personal life" section is complete, it should meet the GA criteria.

On 16 December 2006, I will nominate all four articles, together with Daniel Brandt, for GA status. It usually takes about a week for an article to be reviewed. If minor changes or clarifications are needed, a reviewer may place the article on hold, giving you another 7 days to address their concerns.

I encourage all Singaporean Wikipedians to collaborate on these articles. We should address any issues that are raised, and improve the articles to ensure they meet the GA criteria. Having more Singapore-related articles achieving GA status means Wikipedia's coverage of Singapore has improved, and this helps to counter systemic bias.

Besides working on the production section of I Not Stupid, I will help copy-edit Singapore general election, 2006, and ensure NPOV and compelling prose in Fann Wong.

--J.L.W.S. The Special One 13:48, 7 December 2006 (UTC)