Talk:History of Worcestershire

This is a stub. IHMO it should be merged to the history section of Worcestershire where it belongs. As far as I can see there is absolutely no justification of keeping it as a separate article whatever WP Guide lines or parent project policy may be. Common sense here is more important. Please discuss. --Kudpung (talk) 10:26, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm removing the merge tag after having visited some of the 51 pages in the category: History by Locality. I do not understand however why the category was created; the history of a place seems to be a perfectly reasonable section for a main article, and creatiing separate History articles just makes more work, and possible duplication.--Kudpung (talk) 01:21, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

"Worcestershire was the heartland of the early English kingdom of the Hwicce, one of the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England." Was the land not occupied before the Anglo-Saxon invasion?Eog1916 (talk) 13:11, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

It's been inhabited since prehistoric times. One of the most informative articles is the one about Malvern, Worcestershire. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:57, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

More content

Kind of hard to know where to start with this, so I've pulled over some content from the pages I've been working on. If anyone has a recommendation for a good general source or two do let me know. Jim Killock (talk) 22:13, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Getting this page into shape

TBH I think this is a very big topic and task and would benefit from help from more people. Meantime I am doing the very basics by grabbing relevant content from existing pages. Overall, content on history in Worcestershire seems quite thin, with a couple of very good exceptions. Jim Killock (talk) 09:42, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Update November 2018

There is significant work to do on this page yet. The main things that are weak or missing:

1. medieval, especially the role of the church estates in forming Worcestershire's land ownership character and weak aristocracy;
   1. Black Death basics now menionted
   2. social and economic
2. parts of the narrative around sixteenth and seventeenth century history now mostly done
3. nearly all of the history of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century industrialisation and agricultural mechanisation is missing
   1. Dudley and the Black Country need especial attention
   2. Stourbridge, Kidderminster's industrial history also
   3. Something on Droitwich and other salt extraction, the Salt Union, spa history
   4. Canals, railway construction
4. there is little or nothing on the
   1. first world war,
   2. twentieth century industrial changes,
   3. second world war, Malvern's role, Worcester's role, industrial relocation into Worcs
   4. Motorways, roads and decline of rail

Notes versus references versus sources

Hi there User:PBS first off thank you very much for tidying up the mess of citation issues due to some bad copy-pastes of other material (mostly but not all mine) from other articles. That has saved me a lot of work, thank you.

I wanted to explain how I intended to split out notes, references and sources. I copied the format from another history page, Henry III of England. Here, there are three kinds of end notes:

1. Notes that expand on points that may be helpful, but is distracting in the body of the text;
2. Short references, Harvard style, that refer to the main texts drawn on;
3. A list of full sources, which is entitled 'bibliography' on Henry III page but I called 'sources' here.

Does that make sense? If so it would be good to restore the title to divide 1 and 2. Thank you! Jim Killock (talk) 20:32, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

No it does not. What you call short references (usually called short citations eg in WP:CITESHORT). If short citations are included in ref...tag pairs (instead of inside intext parenthesis), then they are footnotes just the same as any other footnote. The only reason for separating them is that long sentences are easier to read if they spread across the screen rather than in a narrow column, and placing short citations on each line leaves a lot of blank space on a screen. So there is absolutely no need to place them in separate sections. -- PBS (talk) 20:41, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

I do not think that a bucket called "Bibliography" is a good idea. Lots of redundant long citations that are no longer cited tend to remain in them for a long time. Others either for commercial reasons or because they think a source may be of interest to some end up in the bucket. It is next to impossible to manage such a bucket. Splitting them out in to References and Further reading is much more manageable. -- PBS (talk) 20:44, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

As an example of what I mean look at the titles I have added to "History of Worcestershire#Further reading" they were mixed in with the Long citations. Is there any point in keeping them in the article? -- PBS (talk) 20:47, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

The Rolt book that is in further reading is one that I have and will be using for short citations. Possibly the thesis, also, but the others maybe not. Those are sources I expected to use but haven't in the end.Jim Killock (talk) 20:59, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

I have no objection to slimming down and removing any long citations that aren't in use. That is no problem at all. What I am confused about is removing the separation between the long form footnotes ("d. so and so did this by the way") and the numbered references ( 5. Willis-Bund (1910), p8 ). Please bear in mind that I took this format from other pages which seemed to have a high reputation, so I have assumed that I was follwing good practice, rather than inventing something that would seem idiosyncratic Jim Killock (talk) 20:53, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

It just looks rather odd at the moment with these two sections displayed with no explanation as to why and how they are different. I've been really glad of your help, it got me to start on this again. However this one minor thing doesn't seem quite right to me so I am hoping we can agree to something here. Jim Killock (talk) 21:01, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Looking at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Layout#Notes_and_references the scheme I employed seems to be valid and expected:

This section, or series of sections, may contain any or all of the following:

1. Explanatory footnotes that give information which is too detailed or awkward to be in the body of the article,
2. Citation footnotes (either short citations or full citations) that connect specific material in the article with specific sources,
3. Full citations to sources, if short citations are used in the footnotes
4. General references (full bibliographic citations to sources that were consulted in writing the article but that are not explicitly connected to any specific material in the article)

What I meant to do is per that description, that is to separate explanatory footnotes from citation footnotes. So hopefully we can agree to keep that distinction and maybe change the headings to reflect the WP styleguide? Jim Killock (talk) 21:11, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

"The Rolt book..." then keep it/thme in your sand box until you use them. I think that this is a good example of why a Bibliography that includes "references" and "further reading" is more time consuming to manage than splitting them out. "may contain" there is no reason to break them out into two. For anyone reading the article the separation is obvious it does not need separate headings they are both [foot]notes. -- PBS (talk) 21:34, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Hm. The style pages also say "Editors may use any section title that they choose" Then on the page about citations it also says: "Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference, to make it match other articles, or without first seeking consensus for the change … As with spelling differences, it is normal practice to defer to the style used by the first major contributor or adopted by the consensus of editors already working on the page, unless a change in consensus has been achieved. If the article you are editing is already using a particular citation style, you should follow it; if you believe it is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If you are the first contributor to add citations to an article, you may choose whichever style you think best for the article."

Given all that and your privileged status as an administrator, and therefore hopefully commitment to following WP good practice, can we defer to them established style and see if there is consensus for change if you really wish? Jim Killock (talk) 21:50, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of re-instating the notes-citations split, and removed the redundant "further reading" as you suggested. For further reference, this page Walter de Beauchamp (nobleman) uses the same formula, as does Henry III of England. I hope that is OK. I would be very grateful if we can discuss any changes to this layout here before making them. Jim Killock (talk) 23:47, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

There is no longer an established reference style. The one that was established on this page was a References section contains inline long citations, which was introduced with Revision as of 10:55, 9 August 2009[1] and lasted for 9 years until you unilaterally changed it with Revision as of 20:27, 18 June 2018.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of pages many with a range of different appendix layouts, for example I could point to Civil War in Worcestershire which is much more closely related to this article, but I won't because like the ones you mention it comes under "Other Stuff Exists". You need to explain your choices so that we can try to reach a consensus.

I do not think you have justified why you want two distinct section for notes given that the format of the two are distinct and are only created for ease of reading (as I mentioned above regarding column width).

Further naming one "citations" is misleading as the section does not contain full citation — they are only part of a citation (the rest is in the References section). They are however footnotes. So what is your rational for splitting footnotes into two sections?

I think it is important to keep a "Further reading" section with at least one source in it, because otherwise it is guaranteed that an inexperienced editor will add non-referenced sources into the references section.

-- PBS (talk) 19:27, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Specifically on the Further reading: I've no objection to this, but I have removed the sources you helpfully pruned from the main body as they are essentially there because I copied them across from my other work. They aren't needed on this page. If you want to add one or two things to a further reading section, that is ok by me.

At the point I changed the reference style on this page, the page was basically little more than a stub. It was clearly in bad order and needed a great deal of work. Nobody was actively editing it, it had not been touched for two years, was just 4k bytes, there were just three references, so there was not a need to seek a consensus for doing the references as I saw fit, it seemed to me.

I would like to hear some other opinions about this, and some other feedback about the page in general. I am not feeling like the considerale work I have put into this page is being appreciated or valued. PBS I remind you that you are a Wikipedia admin and with that ought to come some responsibilities, one of which is to make sure that contributors like me are respected and given useful feedback and encouragement. This debate isn't in my view helpful, is on a minor topic, as is one you could easily let go of. I am unsure why it is of importance to you, although it should be obvious why it matters somewhat to me, given the work I have put into this page and other Worcestershire history pages. I would greatly appreciate some feedback, perhaps from User:Ealdgyth and user:Kudpung Jim Killock (talk)

So basically, I don't have a strong opinion on the hierarchy or specific nomenclature of these three parts, being

1. Notes expanding on the body text
2. Short citations
3. Full references or sources

However I do think each should be given an explanatory heading. This is purely a visual aid for the reader to simply understand the role of each. It is also confusing to remove the titled distinction between notes and citations as the notes often need to have a short citation, so a reader can find themselves jumping about. It's also helpful to explain the distinction between the numerical and letter lists, which a title does.

That's all from me. I am entirely open to a discussion about what each should be called. When in Uni we used to call the full references "sources" when writing essays so I stuck with that, but I am open to persuasion about that. Jim Killock (talk) 04:57, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

The argument about jumping about is just as justified with short citations in general. It is also true whether the notes are in the standard ref...tag pairs or separate labelled ref...tag pairs. The obvious solution to that problem is to use Harvard parenthesis style (Author 2018, p. 1) in such notes. "This is purely a visual aid for the reader to simply understand the role of each". Apart from visual appearance (which I explained above), there is no difference between the footnotes. If someone really needed the difference explained: (1), they should probably be reading simple: and (2) having two sections labelled "Citations" and "References" is more confusing. -- PBS (talk) 15:46, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

I'm happy with the way it looks now. I agree that short citations and references go together naturally. Thank you. Jim Killock (talk) 18:06, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Summary style as an option

Further information: Wikipedia:Article size

I have yet to be persuaded that cut and pasting text from other article into this one is desirable. This article is now twice the size of that recommended in Wikipedia:Article size:

A page of about 30 kB to 50 kB of readable prose, which roughly corresponds to 4,000 to 7,000 words, takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed (information about a given page's size can be viewed by visiting the page and then clicking on the "Page information" link in the left column).

It seems more sensible to me to keep the sections smaller and and use "summary style". -- PBS (talk) 20:09, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps, but most of the material here is by now original. The material taken from other articles is only the top level information, although there is overlap with History of Worcester which I also basically wrote. I did this as a stop gap as this page lacked any coverage of any of the main topics in the county's history.

For the most part, therefore, I have kept to a 'summary style' by keeping the main points from elsewhere, and linking to those articles. Only a small part of the material from each has been kept, where I have taken material from other articles.

Probably there is one obvious exception, which is the section on the civil war, which could be cut back.

The key point here is that the history of a county is unfortunately a very large topic. Probably the right approach is to gather the main points onto the page, and then consider what ought to be moved into other subsidiary topics. At the moment there are only a couple of subsidiary pages, on the civil war, also incomplete, and one or two towns.

A good comparison would be to look at the history pages for other counties, for instance History of Yorkshire, History of London, etc. Looking at the shorter pages, eg History of Oxfordshire what you see is a very patchy coverage of the topic, missing out many periods and therefore not really doing the topic adequate service.

It would be good to here from User:Kudpung also as someone who has thought about what ought to be happening with the Worcester project, and perhaps also User:Ealdgyth as someone who has written some of the pages relevant to Worcestershire's medieval history. Jim Killock (talk) 22:34, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

• If a history section is rather long, the usual thing to do is fork it off in to a 'History of xxxx ' page. Something which for example is what I am consiering doing with Malvern, Worcestershire because I intend one of the days to get it to FA. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:20, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

On that principle, perhaps eventually, we could have "History of Worcestershire in the Middle Ages" etc, but it seems quite a way off before we reach that point. On the civil war section, that could be cut, but IMO the more important task is for someone to write the Worcestershire in the English Civil War in better detail. Again, this is on my long term todo list but this page seemed more important in the short term. Jim Killock (talk) 05:40, 14 November 2018 (UTC)