User talk:Jamincan

Welcome to the Wikipedia

Here are some links I find useful:

Feel free to ask me anything the links and talk pages don't answer. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, likes this: ~~~~.

Cheers, Sam [Spade] 17:25, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Incorrect page placement.

I've just moved the page that you created to User:Jamincan/Propose separating Ottawa Valley from Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben

Proposals to fork an article should be discussed on the talk page of the parent article (or even just be bold and do it.

Proposals must NOT be created in article space. Mayalld (talk) 20:20, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Population

For what it's worth, we are familiar with the fact that StatsCan typically assumes a 3-5% undercount in the "official" census data, which is adjusted for in the intercensal estimates. However, there are a few reasons why the intercensal estimates aren't ideal as the primary source:

we do need to have at least one source present in the article that's available as a consistent "same time" source across all census entities. There aren't a comprehensive set of intercensal estimates published for every municipality, county, designated place, First Nations reserve, etc., right across the board — they're published for major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Saskatoon and Sudbury, for example, but not for small towns;
the "official" data from the 2006 or 2011 censuses is published to StatsCan's website as a comprehensive set of "community profiles" that includes a very thorough breakdown of ethnic, financial and other demographic data, land area and other statistical details that can also be used to reference other Wikipedia content in addition to the raw population figure alone — whereas the off-year estimates are published in a single table which just lists each city and its estimated new population number with no additional detail;
it's enough of a hassle keeping our articles properly and consistently and correctly updated as it is; before it was instituted as "policy" to insist on actual census data, what we used to see was that big cities like Toronto or Vancouver would have their population updated five or six times a year, every time someone decided to perform their own statistical analysis to estimate how many more people had been added since the last time somebody updated the page (or sometimes just to pull a completely random number right out of their own gopherhole), whereas smaller towns sometimes hadn't even had their populations updated at all since the 2001 census (and people also used to frequently disregard the distinction between "City of Vancouver" and "Metropolitan Area of Vancouver", frequently asserting that around two million people lived in the city proper, instead of 600,000 in the city proper and another 1.4 million in places like Burnaby and Delta and Richmond and Coquitlam.)

At any rate, the policy as written does allow properly sourced intercensal estimates to be added to the article as a supplement to the most recent "official" census data; that supplementary data just isn't allowed, for the reasons I listed above, to fully replace the "official" data. For our purposes as an encyclopedia, we need to have access to at least one complete, detailed, consistent data reference that's available right across the board for every single population entity that StatsCan counts, regardless of what additional data may or may not be available for some places between censuses — so the "official" census figure is the starting baseline that has to be present in every article, and then the intercensal estimates can be added as secondary data where and when available. Allowing the intercensal estimates to be the primary data would certainly be more current at the level of an individual municipality — but from the perspective of the project as a whole, it would actually undermine the effort because it fails to meet several of our "big picture" needs. In principle, Wikipedia is far more concerned with our information being verifiable in reliable sources than we are with it always being shiny and new; while of course the ideal would be information that's both current and well-sourced, if we have to compromise then well-sourced information that's technically a year or two out of date is preferable to information that's right up to the minute but relies on a weak or non-existent source.

Hope that helps to clarify things a bit. Bearcat (talk) 19:15, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]