Wikipedia: Underground/Talk

Should this page perhaps be relocated to Metro? I am a bit uncertain... --Anders Törlind

nomenclature, again. What about an entry that begins with the fact that the words "underground" (British), "subway" (American - New York City and some others), and "metro" (French, American - Washington, D.C. and some others) are by way of being TRADE NAMES for the same phenomenon, which are public transportation systems with underground rail lines, though some of them have stretches of surface lines or even elevated lines as well. Set up at least 2 redirect pages, one for Metro and one for Subway. Leave the initial entry where it was. --MichaelTinkler

Thought as much. Ill do the redirect from subway then --Anders Törlind

Yay, Wiki at its best!

Does anyone know if the #2 and 3 uses of Underground are derived specifically from the London Underground? When is "Notes from Undergound" (and its concomitant usages of the term) first published? All ideas for expansion of the entry.

Ho hum. I should have known that a list of the worlds most famous undergrounds would turn into "oh, i'll add my local subway since this is a list". Facing the inevitable, i'll rephrase th listings heading. :-) --Anders Törlind

I removed the list of cities having undergrounds, which was totally worthless in my mind. Reinstate when you feel strongly about it, and state here why a list of all tube in the world is encyclopedia knowledge. Sounds more like the telephone book to me.

More useful may be some notable undergrounds (the first; the biggest; fastest; still operated by horse carriage; etc.) --Robbe

: I thought the purpose of the list was to list the different names of the subway systems. If no one cares about the aliases of such systems then I would propose removing the reference to metro because the name metro does not reflect the underground nature of the railroad like underground or subway do.

: To this i disagree. There is only a need to list the most commonly used names, in the same way as we do not list all translation in all languages to all world in this dictionary. The three most commonly used terms should cover 99% of what readers will search for, of this i am certain. If you wish, a Underground listing page linked from Underground (and vice versa) should do nicely. --Anders Törlind

: I disagree with your assumption. "Underground" and "Metro" should not be listed as the most commonly used names, though this article title uses "underground". If you judge by the number of passengers that call their local mass transit systems, then subway should be the common name by a big margin because there are multiple subway systems in the US and almost all American knows what subway means. Underground? What a strange name! If you judge by the population of the cities which runs a subway systems, then you cannot omit Hong Kong and Tokyo. Are you telling me these wo major cities only consist of 1% of mass transit riders?

: If you were to examine subway and metro, you would experience something interesting. Also, see the first line of the page and underground listing. Personally, I cannot fathom that this subject could evoke so strong feelings. If you are bristling for a fight, may I direct you to football or perhaps Gun/Politics? --Anders Törlind (oh, and by the way, I'm telling you that only 1% of the readers of the english wikipedia would not use either subway, underground or metro when searching for general information on this kind of public transportation system)

My. Folks. Nothing queerer. I guess we should have known it would turn into a list of all public transportations underground. --MichaelTinkler

: I see no problem with the list. There is a list of Cities in the world. Is that really necessary? No, but it serves as a centralized place to link all the cities on one page. Same for the Biography list, the Wikipedian list and so on. Then why are people so pissed off when the underground list was formed? I am really puzzled. Perhaps it is because of the phase of the moon!

There are certainly more-or-less useful lists of cities imaginable under different criteria: all the cities, cities with population above one million, cities more than 1000m above sea-level, cities with a subway system, etc. Of these the last definitely belongs to the lesser useful . All of these lists are arguably not traditional encylopedia material. --Robbe