Talk:Grapetree, Queensland

Population

The figure cited is the reported population according to the ABS. The body text sentence is worded so that it is not misleading. The figure gives an idea of how populated the area is and that includes Grapetree. The article now has no references which is undesirable. There are many articles with similarly worded population figures and similar referencing. It is better to include it. - Shiftchange (talk) 08:51, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

It isn't the reported population according to the ABS - the ABS doesn't report population for Grapetree. The figure tells you absolutely nothing about Grapetree, because it's the population of a large town that the ABS includes in the same census district. This is all the more so when it's referred to as "Grapetree and surrounding areas"; that suggests something totally different to the reality that there's minimal people in Grapetree and many in Crows Nest.

This is a recurring problem with Australian localities (as someone who also writes articles on quite a few), and I use the census data wherever the census district has anything to do with the boundaries of the actual town, but where there is Tiny Rural Locality merged in with Large Town, the ABS's figures are completely useless and quite misleading for anything to do with Tiny Rural Locality. This is a particular problem in a lot of the area I'm working on at the moment, where most of the localities are below the ABS's limit of 250 people to separately report it. Unfortunately, I think we just have to accept that there are no population figures for towns of this size; filling in a figure that isn't the population of that town just so we have something to put in the infobox is a bad idea. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:11, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

OK, what about "In the 2011 census, the population of Grapetree was not separately reported, but was included within nearby Crows Nest which had a reported population of HoweverMany.[cite]". The key point here is we do not say what the population was (because we don't know) but simply how it is reported (which we do know). I don't see we can do any better when that is all ABS tells us. Kerry (talk) 12:33, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm pretty happy with that outcome. My only concern would be the "not separately reported" rather than "too small to be separately reported". I'd be a bit concerned that Americans might read the more general wording as suggesting that it's a neighbourhood rather than a locality, and thus winding up in unnecessary deletion debates. I'm not going to sweat it too heavily though. I am also not sure if I'm keen on it going in the infobox without the clarification.

More generally, I do think that in cases where the census district differs substantially from the actual town boundaries, we need to roughly explain where the population figures are coming from if we're going to use them. (These can be compared by going to the Gazetted Locality pages on the ABS site.). Kerry's suggestion is a solution to cases like these, but as we discussed last time this came up, the ABS has done some deeply strange things with some other districts. The Drover's Wife (talk) 13:57, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm ok with saying "too small" as the reason for not being separately reported. Kerry (talk) 19:30, 4 November 2014 (UTC)