Missed opportunity - regional forum groupings

Try it and find out.

Caissa wrote:

 I must have missed it but I can't find the Toronto forum. 8^)) After all, I was born there.

Can I post to the Prairies as my birth forum and Québec as my adoption forum? :)

What? No 'Ottawa' forum??? After all, it is our Capital City, and, ahem, I was born there!

I feel like if we give any one province its own forum, that might cause resentment.  But I don't want to create 13 forums and give each province and territory a separate forum.

I was thinking that perhaps people would consider BC and Alberta to be "the west", the territories to be "the north", Manitoba and Saskatchewan to be "the prairies", Ontario and Quebec to be "central Canada", and the Maritimes plus Newfoundland and Labrador to be "Atlantic provinces".

Please don't forget, these groupings are supposed to be for ease of searching and organization, not a political statement about whether any province has its own distinct culture or whatever.  So, for instance, I know that Ontario and Quebec don't have much in common (well, except that we both think we're the centre of the universe, of course), but it's easier to keep them lumped together since the vast majority of threads in that forum are about Ontario and Quebec already, and it's easy to find them there, and we are kind of a geographical "region" of Canada.

I don't think there should be hard and fast rules about where people post stuff.  So, for instance, if someone way up in the far reaches of Northern Ontario (or, say, the North Shore of Quebec ) wanted to post stuff about their area in the northern territories section, then why not?  Or, if someone from northwestern Ontario feels like they have more in common with the prairies than "central Canada" then they can post a thread about their area there.  Why not?

As for a Toronto forum - don't tempt me!  Mwa ha ha!  Of course, then there would be the eternal debate: "What counts as Toronto"?  Which, of course, we won't get into now.

(tiptoeing away...)

Seriously though - if there are better names for the forums though, or I've somehow been insensitive in the naming, please let me know.  I was simply in a rush this morning to do it before leaving for work and wanted to get it done. :) 

The purpose of having regional forum sections, it seems to me, is to distribute the threads so that (a) they are easier to find after they have ceased to be active and (b) they are balanced in numbers more or less evenly (so that one section will not have 50 new threads a week while another has only one or two), which also makes it easier to find a particular thread, active or otherwise.

So if one section - say, Central Canada - ends up having 90% of the "regional" threads, then we lose most of the benefit of having regional sections in the first place. In that case it would make sense to have separate sections for Ontario and Quebec, or even subdivide further.

The vast majority of the thread topics are not "about" the Prairies or Central Canada or the Atlantic Provinces, etc. anyway; they are almost always about a local or provincial issue within a single province. So the regional groupings are not based on "interest" groupings, but simply accidents of geography. A local story about Regina is, in most cases, going to be just as interesting to someone in Toronto as someone in Winnipeg. And sadly, stories about anything to do with Quebec are of little interest to anyone in Ontario or for that matter the rest of Canada.

So let's get over the idea that there is any "natural" way of grouping the threads, and dump the streotypical thinking about other provinces. Why should New Brunswick "naturally" be lumped in with Newfoundland but BC should not "naturally" be lumped in with Yukon or Alberta? Why do Ontario and Quebec "naturally" go together? 

But as I said in the third paragraph, the vast majority of the threads are not [b]about[/b] "regional issues" like western alienation, but about local or provincial issues. The only reason we have to have regional groupings is because there are too many provinces and territories to have separate forum sections for each.

Besides, there's no reason in principle why an "Alberta" forum section wouldn't be able to have a thread about western alienation, anyway. It's not as if there are Chinese walls around the sections preventing other babblers from posting in them, if they are interested.

Michelle wrote:

I just don't want to cause resentment (i.e. how come those self-centred Ontarians get their own forum while all of us in THIS region are lumped together?)

The obvious answer may well be that those self-centred Ontarians make up almost half the population of the country and almost half the population of babblers, and they account for almost half of the threads that are primarily of local or provincial interest. I don't know, I haven't done the math.

But basing it on the math should not cause resentment.

Good God, people, we're not redrawing maps here or forming political alliances. It's a frikkin' discussion forum, where [b]everybody is free to read and post in every forum, regardless of which province they happen to live in, where no province or region has any privileges or advantages that others don't have.[/b]

Why there should be any noses out of joint because of the titles of the forum sections is beyond my comprehension, unless it's just because people like to obsess and take offence over meaningless and trivial things, when there are so many other matters of consequence that we should be discussing.

Get a life, people!

I'm all in favour of clear and unconfusing section titles.

But that's not the issue I was addressing, and it's not what the topic post in the thread is about.

Caissa wrote:

My regional split of Canada would be: Atlantic Provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, BC and the North.

I second this, but I would put Quebec and Ontario together (which
worked fine in the old forum, the only difference being that Manitoba
is now not lumped in with them) and make it "BC & Yukon", "Prairies and
The North".

Good, it worked. 

<><>I don't think the changes have been made yet. I hope not, because Ontario and Quebec are not "Central Canada" by any measure I can think of - except population perhaps. Or centre of political power? That's arguable. Anyway I don't think Babble wants to use the centre vs. margins model for categorizing the topics of its participants. 

Southern Ontario and Quebec are nowhere near the geographic middle.
Quebec shares part of its geography with the Maritimes. How is that
"central" Canada?

Yes, if looking at a map challenges you.

And I agree with Left Turn, but suggest putting BC with Yukon, Prairies with NWT and Nunavut.

Left Turn wrote:

I recognize that Alberta doesn't have much in common politically with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but we don't get many threads about issues each of those provinces.  Plus, the term "The Praries" doesn't have the same offensive political connotations that "The West" does.

 

Are you serious? Who in Saskatchewan would be offended by being said to live in "The West?"

 

Damn, we define The West!

bagkitty wrote:

.... but as to how to divide the forums... not so much

Why? What's the attachment to "central"? Why
even have a forum confusingly named "Central Canada", which might
suggest that posts about Manitoba should go in there, when you can have
a forum called "Ontario and Quebec"? Like I said, BCers don't call
Ontario "central" Canada. Nor do Manitobans that I know of. Who does?
Maybe only Ontario-ians. 

Jas... think of the phrase "our Central Canadian overlords", then think of Manitoba... notice, they are different things. I think everyone in the periphery is quite aware who the Central Canadian overlords really are.

Malcolm wrote:

The three territories should not be split up and appended to the
southern regions. They have more in common with each other than with
the respective regions south of them.

Not sure. I think maybe Yukon and BC have more
in common than Yukon and Nunavut. But only Yukoners would be able to
say. In the interests of humility, it might be better also to have all
provinces share a forum with at least one other. Also, in the interests
of keeping the forums somewhat balanced in terms of traffic, combining
the prairies with the North would help boost the numbers mutually.
Also, if the mid-continent trade corridor gets established, it will be
in one of the prairie provinces. That will be a further geographic,
economic and political pathway linking the prairies with the north.

Michelle, the only griping I hear is from me and Malcolm. With logical
categorization, (perhaps based on how time zones are categorized across
Canada?) you're not going to have griping. If you don't want to take my
suggestions, that's fine. But others here had valid suggestions as
well. I think you know, as well, the headache this could cause for
people looking for specific threads, retroactively or currently, about
Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. This is the one area I can agree
with Malcolm on: leaving it as it is is not correcting the old problem.

Just resurrecting this issue (as, apparently, I have nothing better to do this evening). Despite the quibble about "central Canada" it seems almost unanimous, of the posters in this thread, anyway, that a minor change or two to the regional groupings is desired. It seems unanimous that there's no need for a regional grouping called "central Canada" nor one called "western provinces". It seems in fact, as bagkitty pointed out, that everyone here is in close agreement except for whether to group Ontario and Quebec together, and whether to group the North with the Prairies or with BC. I would add that there may be a temptation to just go with whatever currently named fora right now have the most posts, but that would just perpetuate the confusion and irritation over the long term.  The reason they have the most posts now is because they're broadly defined and vague. And threads about Manitoba are currently in three separate fora. Everyone here has agreed that clearly defined regional fora are preferable to unclear and subjectively defined fora, and everyone in this thread has provided reasonable suggestions based on firsthand experiences of living in those regions. 

Are there any other suggestions, or can we move to implement? Michelle, are you in agreement? It seems that if a change is to be made, earlier might be better than later, so fewer threads have to be transferred over.