Miscellaneous desk
< November 12	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 13[edit]

Articles on Major Streets of the World[edit]

I recently had occasion to read about Gloucester Cresent in Camden Town, London.

This got me to thinking what are the criteria by which Wikipedia judges whether or not a particular street is famous or important enough to deserve an article?

Secondly, how do I find a list of of all of the Wikipedia articles about streets? What are the search terms? Merely typing "street" into the search box takes us to

Street

What search terms can I use to refine the search to produce all of the articles that Wikipedia has on particular streets? Rivelle (talk) 00:18, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You could start by looking under Category:Streets. I haven't explored that to know how complete it is, though. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 01:36, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. That's certainly enough entries to give me plenty to work on!. Rivelle (talk) 03:04, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also try Category:Roads. When I tried to look up my own city under those top-level categories, I found that Category:Streets in Toronto has only a handful of entries (and is not linked from Category:Streets in Canada by city), but most of Toronto's main streets are under Category:Roads in Toronto. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 04:49, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The notability guidelines for streets do not differ substantially from the general notability citeria: streets are presumed to be notable if they have been the subject of multiple published secondary sources which contain significant coverage and are reliable and independent of the subject. --Lambiam 03:56, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rivelle, if you want to search for street inside an article, instead of just entering in the search box you need to click the option to search for results containing or includes in the drop down box. However as you might have guess this still isn't very effective, if you try, you will see a lot of the results are to do with real streets e.g. for me this [1] gives Sesame Street, List of former Coronation Street characters, 221B Baker Street, Wolf of Wall Street (a disambiguation page), List of Fear Street books as the 2nd to 6th result. Search results are also limited to 10000 [2] and although this searchs within pages and not just the titles, I think the search engine gives some priority to titles so even the last results still generally/always have street in the title perhaps as redirects meaning stuff like Karangahape Road are probably missed unless there happens to be a redirect. (I suspect Rue de Rivoli has a redirect so is less likely to be missed.) There are also interesting cases like Great North Road, Auckland which only includes 'street' in the body because of ~~references to~~mentions of other streets but might still be considered a street and is in street categories. Nil Einne (talk) 04:22, 14 November 2022 (UTC) 09:39, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, Rue de Rivoli is in Category:Streets in the 1st arrondissement of Paris and Category:Streets in the 4th arrondissement of Paris but not in any other general street or road categories. BTW, there are various wikiprojhects dedicated to streets like Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Streets and Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada Roads. Interesting enough, somewhat concuring with the IP's findings, there is also Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada Streets but it is inactive. Also Wikipedia:WikiProject Paris Streets became Wikipedia:WikiProject France/Paris Nil Einne (talk) 09:56, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's also Portal:Roads as a route to get to street/road related pages. Chuntuk (talk) 09:21, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Searching categories[edit]

Hi, if I wanted to search for players who are in the category "English rugby league players" and in the category "NRL players", how could I do that? Red Fiona (talk) 07:47, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

PetScan is supposed to allow you to do this, but personally I've never understood how it works. Maybe you will have better luck. --Viennese Waltz 08:22, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I figured it out. It can be very useful! Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:38, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. Red Fiona (talk) 00:38, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So, you enter "English rugby league players" as the first line of the box and "National Rugby League players" as the second line, select "Intersection", click "Do it" and 0 results are returned. But that's because categories have sub-categories, and articles are supposed to put the subject in the deepest applicable sub-category, or something. So if you change the 0 in the "Depth" box to 1 you get 106 results. The first of these is Martin Offiah. If you look at his article, he's in the "English rugby league players" category but not in the "National Rugby League" players category. But he is in the "Sydney Roosters players" category, which is a sub-category of the "National Rugby League" players category. You'll get even more results if you change the 1 to 2, 3 or 4, but I don't pretend to understand the niceties of what's going on there. --Viennese Waltz 10:20, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

1 only searches the 2 categories and their subcategories, 2 searches the 2 categories plus their subcategories plus subcategories of their subcategories but not subcategories of subcategories of subcategories or further down. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:52, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the extra work as well. I'll pass the info on to the person who was looking for the info - the other option was brute force and I told him that would be difficult. Thanks again. Red Fiona (talk) 00:39, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]