Talk:Postcodes in Australia

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Would the table I did a few months back at States and territories of Australia (with postcodes, area codes, etc) be better suited here? Or linked from here? Or merged with this page, or something like that?

Perhaps all this would be better suited at Communications in Australia? (to follow the naming format of the CIA World Factbook, that many country pages on Wikipedia are developed from) --Chuq 04:33, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

I also notice that additional postcode list articles Postcodes: Victoria, Postcodes: Tasmania, etc. Have been made - not even capitalised, wikified, etc. Some sort of standardisation of this articles would be good. --Chuq 03:22, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Geez Chuq, that's a curly one. dunno how I missed the chat at the post codes page! never knew about the 9nnn post codes. If in doubt it sounds like you're better off with the CIA than at odds with them... a page on Communications in Australia sounds reasonable. more power to your elbow! Erich 10:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think it has a place anywhere in Wikipedia. No offence to its author, nor to Australians - hey, I live in 2350 myself! The thing is, WP is not a directory. If I need to look up this sort of info, my first thought isn't going to be to crank up the old laptop and come to wikipedia, its going to be to fetch the phone book, or call the post office, or maybe look it up online on a more appropriate site. The reason is that if everything that belongs in a directory somewhere ends up on wikipedia, it will swamp the rest of the content by a huge factor. I think this silliness should stop now and some sort of official policy should be evolved that dissuades entries of a directory-like nature. Or at least some sort of debate should be had. Graham 12:33, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
The Postcodes: Victoria, Postcodes: New South Wales, etc. pages ought to be deleted. All of those postcodes are available at List of localities (Victoria) etc. in a much better format, and are given as additional information after the place links, rather than being the focus, which they don't need to be. The List of Australian post codes page also is useless given that everything on it is posted at States and territories of Australia in a much cleaner and less verbose format. As all the information already exists, I say get rid of them. The List of localities pages serve the useful pupose of linking to places around the country, however I agree that there doesn't need to be anything more than that which would turn WP into a directory. Hypernovean 13:03, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
I think you miss the point. These are not simply lists of post codes. They are indexes and category schemes to relate items by location. Categorising information is part of what encyclopedias do and that's why there are links to articles about places in there. And presumably will be links from objects to locations so you can find other objects in a given location at some point - everything in post code A linking to post code A somehow, perhaps via the category shceme. Jamesday 01:25, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
The only index and category scheme I see regarding Australian post codes, is that each state has its own separate page. The pages themselves have obviously just been copied from somewhere else, and are not arranged in any obvious order apart from alphabetically. If they were sorted by region, or city, category (are they an overnight express post region, etc) then they would be offering something that wasn't available elsewhere, but at the moment they aren't even linked/wiki'ed, and are in all caps. --Chuq 02:57, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
I know I'm kind of reviving an old debate here, but I agree. If I was to go to the WA page, even though I've lived in this state all my life and have a very very good understanding of local geography, I've never even heard of many of the locations, and even checking the WA Government's official road atlas fails to turn up around 1/3 of them. If they were grouped by area - eg to use a NSW example have headings like Suburbs of Wollongong, Suburbs of Newcastle, Towns in the New England Region etc with anything likely to have its own article at some point listed and everything else pointed to Auspost, this would be far more useful. Fact is the list is not in any way useful in its present form, it's just a mass of names, many looking very similar to each other. I think this debate started in a very different environment as US, Canada, UK etc charge access to database for their much more complicated (often street-based) postcode schemas. Orderinchaos78 00:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What does this page need?

If anyone has anything needed on this page to expand it to a proper article, it can be listed here:

  • A section on postoffice boxes, which now have different postcodes in some places (eg. in NSW many of them are "1xxx" instead of the normal "2xxx".
  • The geographic coverage of different postcodes - this is best with a list showing the number of suburbs covered by different areas, but no one wants that. JRG 07:48, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] See Also section

We shouldn't pre-empt a AfD debate. JRG 00:04, 26 April 2007 (UTC)