Wikipedia:WikiProject Sydney/Suburbs

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Aim[edit]

This is a project aimed at ensuring that there are high quality articles about the suburbs of Sydney.

Please see the list of Sydney suburbs, and help us improve articles by sharing your local knowledge!

Naming conventions[edit]

Suburbs of Sydney should be named {Suburb_name}, New South Wales.

Exceptions[edit]

  • Sydney - far too well known, and besides which there's really only one out there!
  • All the municipalities that are suburbs also.
  • If the name is unique then you can add a redirect, e.g. Bondi Beach, which redirects to the article at Bondi Beach, New South Wales. This is an especially good idea if the suburb is well known internationally and locally.
  • If a suburb name occurs in multiple states, then make {Suburb_name}, Australia into a disambigutation page, or redirect it to a disambiguation page (e.g. see Richmond, Australia).
  • If a suburb name occurs multiple times within the one state, then use {Suburb_name}, New South Wales (LGA) as the name for additional articles. (e.g. see Balmoral, New South Wales (Lake Macquarie) and Balmoral, New South Wales)

Minimum requirements[edit]

The minimum requirements for an article to be considered complete are:

  • An explanation of the suburb's location.
  • A history of the area, including (at a bare minimum) how it was created and when.
  • An explanation of the suburb's name.


For an article to be considered a featured suburb it must be of high quality. It must have all the attributes of a normal featured article (this means a good lead section, excellent prose, etc), and must also have the following information:

  • A map, showing where the suburb is located in Sydney. Tip: getting a good map under an acceptable copyright / license is not currently very easy, but attempts are being made to improve this.
  • Population statistics (can be found from the Bureau of Statistics Office). Tip: The ABS website is a very hard to navigate - so to find the right document, search google for POA2234 (replace "2234" with the right postcode for your suburb). Then you can either download the data for AUS$10, or the ABS site will let you download it for free if the computer you are using is in a University or a library.
  • Local Government Area statistics can be found via a google search of: suburbname "(statistical local area)" "this product is free" site:abs.gov.au (John Rotenstein 02:44, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC))
  • Transport information (e.g. does the suburb rely of buses, trains, ferries, etc).
  • Information about local events (e.g. community festivals, council-organised events, etc).
  • Information about local landmarks, along with pictures of these landmarks.
  • A more complete section on the suburb's history (e.g. notable historical events, times when the suburb grew quickly, etc).
  • Notable citizens who were born or lived in the suburb (optional, but if they existed then they should be in the article). Tip: they only need to be in list form, together with less than 20 words saying who they were.
  • A reference section. All facts need to be attributable to an external source of information (say a newspaper report/cutting, book about the town, local council document).
  • Information about any prominent local organisations (churches, historical societies, local clubs, etc). If you prefer, you can just include links to local organisations in an External Links section.
  • Added brownie points go to anyone who researches the area and puts in a section detailing the past aboriginal culture of the area. I'll (Ta bu shi da yu) give a barnstar to anyone who does this!
  • Optional: Politics (local issues, what state and federal electorate the suburb is in, who are the current local members, is it a safe Labor seat/safe Libs seat/marginal seat).

Don't let this hold you back, however! If you have more information than what is on this page then please, by all means add it! Also, if you only have a bit of information about the suburb, then please add it to the page and use the template below to mark it as a suburb stub.

Example articles[edit]

  • Summer Hill - this meets all the requirements, plus has images of significant landmarks (all licensed under the GFDL). This is our current example article due to its high quality and attention to detail.

List of suburbs[edit]

The following is a general list of Sydney suburbs that may or may not meet the above criteria. It may be a good place to start to help with a semi-complete article than to start a completely new one. However don't let this put you off starting from scratch!

Complete[edit]

Semi-complete[edit]

Some information[edit]

Templates[edit]

Categories[edit]

Suburb-mapping template[edit]

Tip: These should hopefully have now been added to all known Sydney suburb articles.

There is an Australian suburb-mapping template, based on the stuff the Americans have been doing (and which will soon be added to all or most of the RamBot articles). This template only needs a longitude and a latitude, and you can see an example of it here. The template itself is Template:Mapit-AUS-suburbscale.

This template currently includes:

  • Ausway (as "Street Map 1")
  • Sensis (as "Street Map 2", kept because it lets you zoom in much further than Ausway does) - I know, two street maps, which is redundant, but they've both got good points, so they're complementary
  • Google maps.
  • MSN maps.

The Americans also include a topographic map, but I don't know if such a thing is available for Australia. If it is, or if there are any other resources that should be included in this template, please feel free to add them in. A primary advantage of using this Template for your suburb page is that if additional resources are added, then you don't have to do or change anything, as you will now automatically have links to the correct maps or photos included when the template is updated.

For getting approximate longitude and latitude for most Australian suburbs, you have 3 choices, listed in order of preference:

Longitude and latitude figures from the above data sources are usually reasonably close (within 1/2 kilometre), although you might have to adjust them a little bit to make sure they're spot-on to the suburb's centre. Tip: Make sure that the latitude includes a minus sign, otherwise it will not work.