User talk:Orderinchaos/Newcastle

For a while now, there has been a debate which seems to come back to several core areas of dispute, which I for some reason have gotten involved in since starting to edit on related topics. Essentially the questions boil back to:

What is the definition of the Newcastle metropolitan area?

(Note this is my attempt to sum up the issues and should not be interpreted as an attempt to write policy or determine future consensus)

• Metropolitan areas have been defined by the Wikipedia community in terms of their statistical region or district. Disputes at times have arisen over the boundaries of Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane and to a lesser extent Townsville, which have been settled by reliance on this consensus. Wikipedia policies clearly state that original research is forbidden, and we have to use definitions from a reliable source, even if this means that "truth" is sacrificed to some extent. Obviously, one would hope to agree on the most solid definition which most closely aligns reality with sources.
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines a statistical district, statistical region sector and statistical region of Newcastle as including the Local Government areas of the City of Newcastle, City of Lake Macquarie, City of Maitland, City of Cessnock and Port Stephens Council. [1] This is within a wider context of the Hunter Statistical Region which also includes Dungog, Gloucester, Great Lakes, Muswellbrook, Singleton and Upper Hunter. The defined district has a population of 493,466.
• Most people agree that Maitland, Cessnock and Port Stephens are not part of Newcastle.
• However a long standing dispute exists as to whether or not the City of Lake Macquarie local government area, or parts of it are within Newcastle's metropolitan area. Almost all of those who argue it is not live locally. The boundary runs through a contiguous urban area and in at least three cases splits a suburb in two - Adamstown Heights, New Lambton Heights and Rankin Park - and separates Kotara from Kotara South. Most areas in question are within 25km of Newcastle's central business district.
• The region is not demographically distinct - the entire region votes Labor at federal and state level (although independents did well at a recent state election), and the income distribution is similar across the range, although with the peaks and troughs one finds in any metropolitan area. State Government services such as Newcastle Buses service the eastern half of the City as far south as Swansea, and numerous pieces of legislation as well as government departments define Lake Macquarie as part of the Newcastle metropolitan area. (clean air legislation) (Rural Communities Impacts Bill 2005) (RTA) (Department of the Environment) (Department of Commerce) This definition includes an area with a population of 313,598 (2001) / 324,891 (2006).
• The ABS in 2001 provided an alternative definition - the Urban Centre/Locality of Newcastle [2], which has not yet been issued for 2006. This region had a population of 278,773 in 2001. However, from a point of view of measuring change, especially if the ABS do not revise this definition, it may be difficult to use.
• Lake Macquarie lacks one basic element of a city - a central business district. It has several defined town centres (Swansea, Toronto, Belmont, Charlestown etc) but none of these constitute the geographic or commercial heart of the city, and the one which comes the closest - Charlestown - is only 10km from Newcastle's CBD and has about the status of a regional centre within a larger metropolitan city (for example Parramatta or Hornsby). A comparable example in Queensland, Townsville and its neighbour LGA City of Thuringowa, which exhibits some similar features including the perception of local identity in what is basically a western extension to Townsville's suburban area, was settled recently when the State Government opted to merge the two. Among the grounds for doing so were that "unlike Townsville City, it does not have a city centre" and that "no natural barriers [exist] between Thuringowa and Townsville", noting that "the economies of both cities are inextricably linked. Together, the two cities make up a large diverse, regional city". [3]

The debate, in parts

This has been moved from my own archives, in order to keep the debate in one place.

August 2007

You seem to be pretty much on the mark with regard to populating city/town/LGA etc data so I'd appreciate your opinions on the Newcastle, New South Wales article if you have some time to spare.

The article seems aimed at Newcastle itself (ie Newcastle and its suburbs) rather than the Greater Newcastle statistical subdivision which incorporates a number of LGAs as you're well aware. (Thanks for tidying up the edits I did last night by the way. I just copied the list from the DLG website and for some reason it lists a lot of housing estates as well as "real" suburbs. You've save me the effort of having to eliminate the non-suburbs)

Anyway, yesterday somebody edited the population density figure because it wasn't correct so i did a bit of research last night and repopulated the Newcastle article's infobox with what I believe is the correct information, based primarily on info obtained from the ABS website. Since then another editor has reverted all the edits. He appears to be under the impression that the article refers to Greater Newcastle although his train of thought on this doesn't seem clear.

Based on a quick look at some of the other work by this editor I fully expect him to revert again so I'd appreciate it if you'd have a look and let me know what you think. Is the article about Newcastle (and suburbs) or is it about Greater Newcastle? If the former then another point is raised. There is a separate article on the Newcastle LGA which is actually the same area. ie The LGA and the city have the same boundaries so do we really need two articles since they are about the same place? Couldn't they be merged into one? --AussieLegend 09:55, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

The article is on the Greater Newcastle city as can be already seen by the Demographics section of the existing article. The old population figure was a correct one based on the 2006 estimate, but the census has since updated that information; I have now fixed the figure according to the ABS statistics. We've already had this debate for every other city around Australia - the Sydney article of course refers to the Sydney metropolitan area, not just the City of Sydney area; in the same way the Newcastle article should refer to the whole area, not just the LGA. If the article needs to reflect the other LGAs more, then that's fine, but we have a consistency to write articles more on their metropolitan areas rather than just LGAs - we have separate articles for LGAs (hence City of Newcastle). JRG 10:20, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah it wouldn't make any sense for Kotara to be included but Kotara South to be excluded, or the two Adamstowns to be separated. Port Stephens does appear to be a bit of a strange one - only one contiguous suburb (Fern Bay) - as does Cessnock. The other area of confusion is Beresfield/Tarro/Woodberry/Thornton where part of the Maitland LGA is closely connected to Newcastle. Interestingly enough, if you look on the 2001 census stats, where Urban Centres/Localities are defined, "Newcastle" is taken to be all of the Newcastle LGA plus a shade over half of Lake Macquarie, taking in everything to Swansea on the east side of the lake and about as far as Toronto on the west. Orderinchaos 11:47, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the article "should be about Newcastle the way an outsider would see it - just a city with a general extension in various directions, its culture, social characteristics, attractions etc" and that's my point. Including information, especially statistics, which really doesn't relate to that view is misleading and non-encyclopaedic. Outsiders generally see Newcastle as Newcastle/Lake Macquarie, not Newcastle/Lake Macquarie/Cessnock/Maitland/Port Stephens and the outlying areas in those council districts. As I posted elsewhere, the stats refer to all of the Greater Newcastle area and include many areas that nobody, outsiders or locals, associate with Newcastle. Even various legislation defines the Newcastle metropolitan are as being the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie LGAs excluding Cessnock, Maitland and Port Stephens. Comparing to the Sydney article I note that it opens with "This article is about the metropolitan area in Australia. For the local government area, see City of Sydney." If we apply the same to the Newcastle area then we really can't include those areas that aren't part of the metro area and in that case we really shouldn't use the stats for the Newcastle statistical subdivision since they represent areas that aren't in the metro area.

The "demographics" section that JRG relies on is the only section that mentions anywhere outside the Newcastle LGA. The rest of the article focusses on the LGA itself and while I haven't actually counted the number of people who have edited the article it seems clear from the content that the majority of editors relate Newcastle, New South Wales to just Newcastle although I think that it should probably include something identifying the closeness of Lake Macquarie since Newcastle and Lake Macquarie are what I like to call siamese cities. Nevertheless, I still feel that using statistics that represent an area of about 4,000km² is not really appropriate in an article that seems to be about a city of only 183km² unless the article clearly identifies that it is about the Newcastle statistical subdivision and not Newcastle itself or even the Newcastle metro area.

Although it really needs a rewrite I feel that the article as written is very representative of "just Newcastle". If it was to be expanded to cover the area that JRG seems to want to support then the article would become huge and confusing, especially when a lot of the information is already covered in other articles.

Regarding the postcodes etc, I have a copy of the "Australian City Streets" software produced by UBD which covers all Australian capital cities as well as the larger regions on the east coast giving me, locally, complete and detailed coverage from just north of Raymond Terrace to south of Sydney. It includes well defined suburb and LGA/city boundaries as well as postcodes. The interface is a bit clunky but I've imported the maps into my GPS software (OziExplorer) which makes it a lot easier to use. I've confirmed a lot of the data against other sources and haven't found a single error yet. It's well worth having IMO, especially if you want to confirm locations.

As for the comment you made about suburbs, Fern Bay isn't as contiguous as you might think. Coming off the Stockton Bridge there is a turn to the right and back down in the direction of Newcastle to go to Stockton while Fern Bay is straight ahead. There is a fairly clear delineation between the suburbs even though a lot of people think Fern Bay is actually part of Newcastle. Theres a very similar situation at Beresfield/Tarro/Woodberry/Thornton. It's very obvious that you are moving out of one area and into another although a lot of people do assume that Beresfield and Tarro are part of Maitland because they are separated from the bulk of Newcastle in much the same way as Fern Bay is separated from the bulk of Port Stephens. It also confuses people when they learn that the body of water called Fullerton Cove is not part of the suburb called Fullerton Cove. The suburb is in Port Stephens while the cove is in Newcastle. Port Stephens is really confusing because it consists of a number of small suburbs, large rural localities and independent towns all spread across 949km². Most people don't realise this and assume that Port Stephens is just Nelson Bay and surrounds. The road signs don't help either.--AussieLegend 12:46, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Cool - my main bone of contention was with the exclusion of Lake Macquarie, so it seems we agree on that, and I agree that you actually do have a point with regards to the other three. (I intend to come to the region in late November, so I'll see it all for myself I guess - though with the limitations of public transport :P) So two possible definitions here - an area of 826.1 km² with a population of 313,598 (2001) / 324,891 (2006) (the two councils together), or an area of 259.8 km² with a population of 278,773 (2001) (not yet measured for 2006) per ABS Urban Centre/Locality, either of which would seem to work for any evaluative purposes. Orderinchaos 13:10, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

What you've suggested seems quite reasonable. We just need to ensure that the article clearly states that it is about the Newcastle metro area to avoid confusion. It's probably also worth moving some of the more Newcastle LGA specific information over to the LGA article.--AussieLegend 13:23, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I started editing the Newcastle page based on what we seem to have decided. ie that the article is about the Newcastle metro area which covers the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie LGAs. JRG has reverted again, claiming that the article should be about the Greater Newcastle area which never seems to have been that article's intent based on the original edits. Your comments are again invited and would be appreciated. Regards. --AussieLegend 07:49, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

With respect, this argument is really stupid. Every other city article is on the city in general, not some conceived definition of what we think constitutes the Newcastle area. Let's keep the article general, and AussieLegend can write his article on the smaller parts of Newcastle if he wants. I'm afraid that if we start writing our own definitions of "Newcastle" we'll start getting into original research. Let's stick with what's been decided already and keep it general. JRG 10:01, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately JRG, your definition of the city does not seem to be valid, based on available evidence. Let's try to make the article accurate and helpful to others. --AussieLegend 11:03, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

The main issue to date is finding an accurate definition of Newcastle. On talking to the ABS, they insist that the wider region they mark as the Newcastle Statistical District was constructed on economic and other data from governments, and we don't have a reliable source for anything else - therein lies the problem (I do agree with JRG on this particular point, that if we're going to use a different definition we must have an RS to back it up) Orderinchaos 11:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

There are several definitions for Newcastle already; the LGA, the Statistical District and the metropolitan area are just three. But which of them is the article about? That is the issue rather than the definition. I think we all agree now that it is not the LGA so that leaves that one out. There seems a lot of justification for the metropolitan area but not for the Statistical District. Why should the Statistical District be the definition of the City of Newcastle. What support is there for that? --AussieLegend 11:17, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Let's wait until the ABS release the 2006 Urban Locality data from the census - that seems to be a better indicator of what a "city" is. Although in any case, changing definitions based on something that is not the Statistical District will affect pages such as List of cities in Australia by population, where to say Newcastle is the 7th biggest city in Australia, for example, may not be correct. JRG 13:44, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

September 2007

(This followed this diff.)

This is where it's going to get confusing - the entire east side of Lake Macquarie, including Swansea (but not beyond it) are deemed to be within Newcastle by the 2001 UCL (see map above). Orderinchaos 15:57, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

To be honest I wouldn't rely too much on the ABS. According to everyone else Belmont is part of Lake Macquarie. People in the area pay their rates to Lake Macquarie City Council, Lake Macquarie City Council thinks the area is part of Lake Macquarie, Newcastle City Council thinks the area is part of Lake Macquare. So does the NSW State Electoral Office, Australia Post and a host of organisations. As I said, everyone else. The ABS is a statistics bank and is great at producing statistics but the areas it defines are its own for the purpose of producing statistics and often don't match the reality of the situation.

Just tonight I've been trying to extract population data from the ABS site so I could populate some Port Stephens articles. I've given up because the ABS defined areas don't match the areas defined by the Geographical Names Board, Department of Local Government or Port Stephens Council. For example, a map of the Port Stephens LGA showing localities in the Port Stephens LGA is available from the Port Stephens Council website.[4] This is the same information you'll find at the Geographical Names Board website but in a more convenient form. When you look at (for example) East Seaham on the ABS website[5] you see that the data covers all of East Seaham, Balickera, Eagleton, parts of Raymond Terrace and Twelve Mile Creek and a tiny section of Ferodale. How do you add an accurate population figure to the Raymond Terrace article knowing that part of its population is accounted for in a different area by the ABS? Anna Bay[6] covers parts of Williamtown, Salt Ash, Bobs Farm, Anna Bay, One Mile, Nelson Bay and Fingal Bay. Obviously that makes it hard to, for example, put a population figure in the Anna Bay article because it includes population data from other areas and somewhere like Bobs Farm is a combination of Bobs Farm and part of Anna Bay.

Belmont may be part of the Newcastle Metropolitan Area but it is most definitely a suburb of Lake Macquarie. --AussieLegend 16:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

The problem, however, is this. We can't just make arbitrary definitions to suit one city, when the ABS definition has been adopted for the Australian project and is essentially the only verifiable source for this information. If we don't accept their definition, we have to accept somebody else's, and there's noone else around with that kind of authority. It would also require redefining all other Australian cities, for which consensus was reached years ago. I agree with you about the suburbs (had the same problem myself with the ones I was working on), although most of the areas in question are very sparsely populated areas. When in doubt you can always use the CCDs within the GNB boundary, such as I had to do with 2001 stats prior to the 2006 release for WA. As for what people say - within 20km of a city centre (in the case of Belmont) and clearly part of the same contiguous urban area, served by a bus company called Newcastle Buses, etc, strikes me as local parochialism. Orderinchaos 16:53, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

(AL) I'm not sure how WP:OR is the problem. Data confirmng that Belmont is in the City of Lake Macquarie is available on authoritative websites such as the NSW Geographical names Board and Department of Local Government websites which are NSW state departments that deal directly with the issue. If you're intent on using the ABS wesite, comparing the Belmont map to the Lake Macquarie map will show that Belmont is in Lake Macquarie.

(OIC) I think we're once again getting confused between local government areas and metropolitan areas. For example Leschenault is in the Shire of Harvey [7] and also within Bunbury Statistical District [8]. I've chosen Bunbury as a focus as it's a city of 54,000 people (about 1/6th Newcastle's size) and not a capital. Looking at a capital city, Lang Lang in the Shire of Cardinia is at the southeastern corner of the Melbourne statistical division. Don't know if you've been there, but it's a small town one passes through when the freeway to Phillip Island turns back into a highway. However, the Victorian Government *also* includes the Shire of Cardinia within the Melbourne region, presumably for future planning purposes. The GNB deals exclusively with LGAs, unlike the US our metropolitan areas are not incorporated, although the capital cities make it easier for us by having divisions of their planning departments devoted to a certain area.

Just as an interesting comparison : ""Newcastle Metropolitan Area" means the local government areas of Lake Macquarie and Newcastle." (clean air legislation) (Rural Communities Impacts Bill 2005) (RTA) (Department of the Environment) (Department of Commerce) Note that these don't even make the distinction we do with the UCL - they just include the whole thing down to Morisset and Wyee. This may actually be a safe definition to use as it comes from ample reliable sources, and resolves the ridiculous situation we have of a division which includes three local councils with only a tenuous connection to Newcastle at best. (I'm looking for a consensus here which respects both reality and WP:OR.)

(AL) The NSW government is the authority for place names and boundaries and, more specifically, which suburbs are part of which city, within NSW. The ABS is the authority for statistics, not place names. The place names that the ABS uses are based on the official names but the boundaries of the places don't always match the official geographical borders as you found. Port Stephens Council certainly won't be changing the borders of Anna Bay based on the ABS definition.

I think I might have been unclear here. I meant re the metropolitan areas, we're well aware of the issues with suburb boundaries (the reason for the suburb boundary issues is that they paste the suburbs together from CCDs, which are their basic commodity of statistical measurement). In Perth, for some reason, they do fully respect our suburb boundaries, and in most of metro Sydney they do as well. I've noticed the same issues when doing Geraldton, however - the boundary for Wonthella and its gazetted boundary are different. I have been known to use CCD values for suburbs, using the gazetted boundaries as printed. The NSW government appears pretty clear on what Newcastle is, as per above.

(AL) Which is more important, consensus or accuracy? Regardless, I don't think there is an issue. The 2001 UCL simply shows the limits of contiguous population, ie what would be regarded as the Newcastle metropolitan area. It doesn't define what suburbs are in which city. Interestingly, the UCL seems slightly contradictory. To the west it includes areas that aren't really contiguous but to the north it excludes Fern Bay which is probably more closer to Stockton than some of the suburbs out west are to their adjoining suburbs.

(OIC) The UCL gives a list of related CCDs which, when pushed through twice on "related information", come back with a list of state suburbs. I have this documented somewhere from when I did it. The UCL also leaves out Hexham and Beresfield which are within the City of Newcastle. Re consensus vs accuracy - WP:CON and WP:OR are Wikipedia policies. If we were doing an academic work we might have more freedom to speculate, but we aren't and don't. Also see WP:V: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." (emphasis in original).

(AL) That should demonstrate to you that reliance on the ABS data should be made with some caution. You're actually the first person I've ever known that would say that Belmont is a suburb of Newcastle.

(OIC) Their reliability on non-metropolitan suburbs aside (which I would argue is not something most people outside Wikipedia care about that much), they are an official arm of the Government and their data for statistical districts/divisions is used heavily in planning and in other fields. The NSD, unlike the State Suburbs (many of which were only defined this year), but as with all other divisions and districts, was defined in 1976 and has been used ever since.

(AL) Having Newcastle Buses serve lake Macquarie is a convenience. It doesn't make sense to have a separate organisation just for Lake Macquarie. Which bus company serves your area really has no bearing on which city a suburb is located within. It's certainly not parochialism whenevery governement department says that Belmont is in Lake Macquarie. It's commonsense. And remember, 20km in somewhere like Sydney is not far. In Newcastle it's a long way. Belmont is not all that far from the southern extremity of the contiguous population.

(OIC) Yes, at Swansea, where the bus finishes. I'm curious as to what Lake Macquarie fanatics propose regarding this - either a renaming of the bus service to Newcastle-Lake Macquarie Buses, or a peculiar arrangement where commuters all get off one bus and get on another at approved border posts in Adamstown Heights. If it's a city in its own right, surely it would have its *own* bus service, if even a city the size of Geraldton (~25,000) can have one.

Oh, and re the organisations - I live about 15km from Perth's CBD in the City of Stirling, to whom I pay rates. I do not pay rates to the City of Perth. But if I claimed I was therefore not part of Perth, I'd be laughed out of a shop. I am also within the Division of Stirling (not Perth) and the Electoral district of Balcatta, and I have a postcode quite different to Perth's (for the record, the entire Hunter area is treated as one entity - "17 Hunter" - by Australia Post according to their online postcode spreadsheet, while the entire Central Coast right up to Wyee is under "21 Pymble"). Orderinchaos 17:55, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

(AL) On the other hand, if you lived in Belmont and said that Belmont was a suburb of Newcastle you'd also be laughed out of a shop. Anyone from Wyee who said they were part of Pymble would probably be thrown out.

(OIC) True, I knew someone who worked in a call centre in Pymble once.

(AL) I think the issue that you're missing is that Newcastle is not treated (by anyone) like the capital cities. The capital cities, with the exception of Darwin, generally cover a number of LGAs and it's common to refer to the whole lot as Sydney, Melbourne, Perth etc. The Newcastle metro area covers less than two so it's more common to refer to the LGAs separately. The the average person probably has very little if any idea of the actual borders between Newcastle and Lake Macquarie. Most people from outside the area who refer to Newcastle probably think that Newcastle is what is shown in the 2001 UCL map. This, however, doesn't mean that Belmont is a suburb of the city of Newcastle. --AussieLegend 02:21, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

(OIC) I think it comes back to, and this is essentially the core of the problem - Newcastle wants to be different. In other cases like this, it's been that one set of residents look down on another and so want to distinguish themselves - I'm aware Newcastle is a fairly industrial city. This is fine within a local context, but when we're trying to build an encyclopaedia readable by the whole world, it doesn't make an awful lot of sense. What would happen, as well, if NSW decided to go into a fanatical bout of LG reform as Queensland recently has and Victoria did back in the 1990s, and created a "Council of Greater Newcastle" seizing bits of LM? All of a sudden the "city" would change overnight. This is why I don't like using LGA boundaries, as they change all the time, and they are purely arbitrary - I know of one that splits a suburb into *four*. Orderinchaos 11:07, 5 September 2007 (UTC)