Talk:List of bus routes in London

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 17 August 2006. The result of the discussion was KEEP.
Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 18 December 2007. The result of the discussion was KEEP.
To-do list for List of bus routes in London: edit · history · watch · refresh
  • Remove overlinking of places and operators
  • Remove non-TfL routes
  • Adequate referencing
  • TfL categorises routes as "low" and "high" frequency. This distinction could be added to article
  • Complete links to performance stats
  • Review inclusion criteria for 600-699 section: many of these are just extra journeys on existing routes recoded for schools
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[edit] It wasn't "To do". It was "Done"

Operators now not linked, even for articleless routes and not easily relinkable with so many valid edits interwoven.--SilasW (talk) 15:03, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article size

Today WP protests the article's size. The article is hardly divisible except perhaps, inconveniently, by route numbers. I suspect the performance links are the cause. Isn't their place in each route's article? No figures appear in this article only a link to a display of the statistics so no comparison or rating is possible without a deal of clicking and flipping.--SilasW (talk) 15:17, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

As soon as this article gets cut up each new section will be deleted, one by one. -- Thanks, Arriva436shout! 15:57, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Why "Thanks"? You seem to have the local authority symdrome "We are right and are always right" - there are several "against my views and any sense"s on your userpage. Beware! Repent! The Great Reverter may be nigh. My reason for leaving links is valid. Try using the Ry companies, which are randomly linked or not, in the WP "List of closed railway stations in Britain" (which has been clobbered together by many editors) to hunt for a little information about stations with no articles and you'll see the benefit of link flooding.
WP advises selective not total archiving.--SilasW (talk) 16:52, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Excuse me! Please don't accuse me of being like that. The thank you in my signature is to be polite to people that have taken time to read my views. Obviously, if people are taking it the wrong way then I'll have to remove it. And if you look at my contritbutions you will see that I very rarely revert anything (apart from vandalism obviously), and I have never been in an edit war. The things on my user page were after I spent a lot of time decribing on talk pages why I had done what I had, only for it to be ignored and changed. I'll remove that if it makes you happy.
And when did ever say anything about the links? All I said about was about the article size. I also think that removing the links is stupid; I don't think having to scroll up from route 690 to route 2 to find any information on the link to Arriva London is a good idea. I also don't think the performance links are needed, especially when they are left with no name. Please next time think before you say anything. -- Arriva436shout! 17:40, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Sorry. It happened that you said your piece at the wrong moment after, as far as I could see, the links had been removed with no time for opposing thoughts. Your auto "Thanks" and a blue shout (and your forceful comment about some editing you disliked) misled me. Would that there were time to read everyone's edits and talks. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But leaving that wickedness of mine, most seem to agree that co. & place links should be here and that route details should not be.--SilasW (talk) 22:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
That's fine!! But I too agree that the co. links should be here. -- Arriva436talk 19:28, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re overlinking in lists

In lists which, unlike most other WP articles, are often not read through from the top, overlinking can be useful. If you look at a particular bus route then it would be a pain to have to scroll to find the linked first occurrence of a place or operator. Sure when the route does have its own linked article the overlinking might be (or should be) redundant except that it saves one layer of pages, but it is not uncommon for a few entries in lists to have no link. It is proposed to flag routes by service frequency, that may be good but, in the context of finding information by following a link, frequency is already there. As far as travel goes, are there low-frequency route fans? At any moment how good a bus route is for travel depends on the instantaneous position of the vehicles now, not on whether it's an alternate Wednesday.--SilasW (talk) 13:15, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this list has had some time to develop and should be aiming for Wikipedia:Featured lists status. I'm concerned that having 50+ links to articles from the list will be a problem in getting that status. This is the sort of thing people pick up on. Perhaps we could hold off removing duplicate start/end points, which are nowhere near as bad as the operators were. Perhaps adding {{Bus companies in Greater London}} to the bottom of the page would provide additional linkage to the articles, all in one place.
WP "Featured Lists criteria" seems not to count links. If people incline to see "too many" links then the benefit in Lists needs proclaiming.--SilasW (talk) 22:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if adding the frequency (Low/High) is good or bad. We should try to keep the information as encyclopedic as possible, so its inclusion should be to give a clearer impression of what London transport policy is providing. MRSC • Talk 19:49, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Would Hi/Lo frequency really reveal any policy? For me #, from, to, by are the four essentials to tabulate for this list with everything else in linked and "See also" articles

such as "Tyre sizes used on London buses"

[edit] School bus routes

I do feel that some listers have an idea of "purity" as stamp collectors reject stamps used non-postally on receipts. The article was Bus routes in London, it's become TfL-ish bus routes. Fair enough, but if I see 699 on a London bus I'd like this article to tell me about it. Are there any 6XXs that follow route YXX exactly without deviation? 681 is mainly part of 281, but extra "school" buses on R70 were still R70 though worked by a different operator. Any excision requires care --SilasW (talk) 13:15, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

It is probably worth going through these on a case by case basis on this talk page to decide what to do. There probably isn't a "redirect all" / "include all" answer. We can pull a copy of the table on to the talk page to flesh it out. MRSC • Talk 19:32, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Transport for London (TfL) contracted London Bus routes"

How do you find out which bus services are contracted? I mean, is there a source? Simply south (talk) 19:24, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Surprisingly they get a lot of talk about buses at Mayor's Questions. So you can search here: [1] Also they only produce performance data for their own routes: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/businessandpartners/buses/boroughreports/routes/performance-route-1.pdf ...just substitute the number before ".pdf" for the route you need to check. MRSC • Talk 19:30, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. That is very useful. Simply south (talk) 19:38, 27 March 2008 (UTC)