Talk:McLaughlin Planetarium

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McLaughlin Planetarium has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

• I altered the reference to it being "generally accepted" that the planetarium was closed because the Harris government was looking for a high profile cut to the ROM's budget. That's a strong claim, and while I suspect it is probably true, it should be sourced. The reference only contains the allegations of planetarium proponents, so I edited the sentence accordingly. If other more substantive references could be found, then it would be great if we could reverse the edit.

  The article also says that Toronto is the only major city in Canada without a working planetarium. Does that mean that Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal all have planetariums? Skeezix1000 12:32, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

• • I think your reasoning and re-wording to "generally accepted" is a good one, considering the possible bias of the source. Just about everything I've seen in my researches so far points very strongly in this direction, and this was the only source I could find that laid it out in black and white. If I find further corroborating evidence, will cite it here as well. As for the "major city" reference, I ran across it in one of the link article. I was meaning to find it again and flesh it out with references to each city and link to their respective planetaria, should they exist in Wikipedia. Left the statement in there as a placeholder to remind me to finish the work. Still very much a work in progress, but thanks for pointing out the things that need fixing. Ironically for a "dead" institution, the article for this already almost twice the length of that for its sibling institution, the ROM. Will have to address that in the future at some point as well. Captmondo 13:06, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Suggested outline for future article development

An outline for future plans for expanding this article, comments welcome:

• Add a detailed description of the Zeiss projector that was used, and possibly re-create an illustration of it, pointing out its various features.
• Has the land in fact been sold to the condo developer, or was that contingent on the condo project going ahead; what I have read on this is so far unclear.
• What were the technical features of the laser light show? So far all of the documentary evidence I have simply notes its existence, not its technical details.
• The Zeiss projector was sold to York University. There were plans on refurbishing it, but did that ever happen? Is the projector still there somewhere? (this could well be original research if there is nothing already published, which puts it out of bounds for Wikipedia)
• Talk about the temporary planetarium that the ROM established that took to the road and visited various southern Ontario schools.
• Mention the small planetarium facility located in the Ontario Science Centre, reference seating capacity, etc
• Take a look at the ventures for re-establishing a planetarium in Toronto in a NPOV way.

There are other interesting avenues for research that also come to mind, such as "what happened to the historical artifacts that were on display?", "where is the bronze bust of McLaughlin now?" "what, if anything is left of the old Planetarium facility in the current building?" are some obvious ones. However these would all likely constitute original research, which is verboten on Wikipedia itself. If anybody knows the answers to these questions, I would love to know, but would have to publish the material elsewhere for it to be a legit reference. Captmondo 13:59, 21 December 2005 (UTC)