Talk:Disused railway stations (Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway)

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[edit] Mass deletion of articles

I'm currently editing and helping with what i'm hoping will become a Wiki Project Rail Ireland at the mo. However, i was a bit disappointed, that the pages for Upton, Churn etc. had been deleted, and replaced with just a brief list. I mean, where are the grid references? Where are the categories like Disused railway stations in Oxfordshire? Your going to have to do this across the board for consistency! When Wikipedia first started, half of these pages didn't exist, they only came about when people noticed them. The whole purpose of a stub, is that it's something earmarked for expansion. Now in Ireland, only the currently open stations have pages, i've created a scaffolding of categories for organistation, relevant stubs and templates, and i'm giving these stations individual pages where i have enough information to warrant their existence. Which is 95% of them. I live in Didcot, and i have about 30 publications, some devoted to, some only with chapters on, the DNSR. Accidents at various points, maybe 200 photographs, campaigns to stop the closures, timetables. I couldn't do that on a page with a list of stations. I'm planning to create all of the Exeter to Penzance stations uniquely too. Now at the moment, the page looks fine. You've done a good job :), it captures the attention of people. No POV. It's not clunky like "this is a station. for trains. it was in compton. it was big. It flows. My only criticism is that it is restricting for future growth. As Wikipedia grows, we need to adapt to that. Why do you think i created the pages in the first place? And the main line stations between Swindon and Didcot? Abingdon railway station? As a temporary solution though, it's fine :) Halowithhorns89 (talk) 12:43, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

This has been a topic of heated discussion in the past in the UK Railways wiki project. The eventual consensus was that writing articles for every closed railway station in the UK (of which there are many thousands) was not an effective method. Most of these stations do not in reality meet the conditions of WP:NOTE and it was agreed that the best solution was to group the disused railway stations for each line into an individual article. There risk is that creating articles for individual stations will leave wiki littered with thousands of stubs that it is incredibly unlikely that anyone will expand. As with regards to the information that you might have, it is certainly possible to expand this article for each station from what it currently is. I would suggest that you look at Disused railway stations (Bristol to Exeter Line) for a guide of what can be achieved for these articles and I would suggest that you use any additional sources you might have to achieve something similar. Do note however, that any information you have which is related to the line and not the stations should go in Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. If I can make two further recommendations. Firstly, you could have a go at creating a template that would allow grid reference information to be placed on an article of this style (the rest of the information included within the disused station template can be easily included within the station subsections). Secondly, before creating individual articles for all stations on the Exeter to Penzance Route, consider creating couple of articles instead using this style or discuss the matter at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways. There are some very experienced users there who will be able to guide you in this fairly big project.Grizzlyqi (talk) 11:42, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Could you please point me in the direction of the discussion and the consensus that was reached? I seem to remember that the opposite conclusion was reached, namely that no one user has the right to decide what is WP:NOTE and what is not. Given that articles exist on fictional characters which have briefly appeared in American cartoon series, I find it difficult to believe that a railway station which lasted for 100+ years serving a local community which finds itself deprived from public transport, such as Churn, is not notable. Instead of deleting the articles without any discussion, you should have created your page with references to the station pages where they existed and then proposed your solution on the project page. The section on Churn is less detailed than that which had previously existed - with an image and grid references - which another user had spent time researching and putting together. Lamberhurst (talk) 20:38, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree with Lamberhurst on this one. May of these places have no transport these days, and there are a lot of information regarding the line, like the Worthy Down and Churn stations, how they were used, famous events that happened. The replacement page was good as aa summary, but it does miss out a lot of information that must have been painstaking to find. It makes editing very limited as well. I am curious as to where this Discussion took place as well, as as far as i am aware, in Scotland, if a station existed, and the place and dates are confirmed, it has a page, people are going to these sites, simply to photograph viaducts, stations, junctions etc. I think in England people are being too bureaucratic, and i dont think we'd be doing our job properly if we just gave a little paragraph Halowithhorns89 (talk) 13:18, 2 May 2008 (UTC)