Talk:Cam Congregational Church

Unsourced content

@Torchbearer-Ted: I reverted to your removal of the maintenance templates you made with this edit because you seem to be misunderstanding the difference between a WP:CITATION and a WP:WIKILINK. While it's great to try and add internal links (i.e. Wikilinks) to other articles, Wikipedia articles aren't considered to be a reliable source for any purpose as explained here. What is needed are inline citations to reliable sources (perferably independent and secondary sources) to allow the article content to be verified. There's a lot of detailed content in the article that is not being properly supported by citations, which means it can be removed pretty much at anytime as explained here. In addition, some of the content seems excessively detailed; so, it still might not be encyclopedically relevant to the general reader even if supported by citations.

Since you're the editor who created the article and added most of the content to it, I'm assuming that you must have gotten your information from somewhere. Did you find it somewhere online, in books, or in anything else which might be considered a reliable source for Wikipedia? Are you somehow connected to the church (perhaps a parrishioner or maybe even an employee) and these are just things you know about the church? If you can clarify where you got your information from then perhaps another editor such as Theroadislong, Rodw, or even myself can help figure out what content can be reliably sourced and how to best add citations in support.

Right now, most of the sources cited are questionable at best since they only mention the church by name for the most part and don't really represent the type of significant coverage generally need to establish the Wikipedia notability of either the church building itself or the church as an organization, which means that the article is always at risk of being nominated for deletion; so, if you can clarfy where the article content came from, then such a thing probably can be avoided. -- Marchjuly (talk) 06:58, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

The main source for the content of the article is from a book called A Faith For The Future by Diana and John Snelling published by Dianthus Publishing in 2001 ISBN 0-946604-19-3 (I am not the author) but is now out of print. I did put a link to this book which is listed on Amazon but someone deleted it, I did the article so the history would not be lost as time passed. I have not been connected with the church for over ten years but did take the photos before then Torchbearer-Ted (talk) 09:51, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. As I don't have a copy of the book and there is no "search within" on Amazon, could you look up the page numbers for the claims which you have included and use the format below (replacing XX with the page number each time). If further formatting is needed I can help:

• <ref>{{cite book |last1=Snelling |first1=Diana |last2=Snelling |first2=John |title=A Faith for the Future |date=2001 |publisher=Dianthus |isbn=978-0946604197 |page=XX}}</ref>.— Rod ^talk 10:02, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Do I put the reference page numbers (in your html) in the relevant places in the article or just in one place say at the bottom of the article Torchbearer-Ted (talk) 11:44, 3 February 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Torchbearer-Ted (talk • contribs) 11:33, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

The citations should be placed directly after the content that they support. Thank you! Theroadislong (talk) 11:49, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

@Torchbearer-Ted: Thank you for finding some more citations and adding them to the article. It's OK though to add the citations to the ends of sentences if they are intended to support the entire sentence. If, for example, you add a citation after a prepositional phrase like "In 1975" that begins a sentence, then it's not so clear what the citation is intended to support. You can find out some more general information about adding inline citations in Wikipedia:Inline citation. Wikipedia doesn't have one preferred house style per se, but we should try to make clear the WP:INTEGRITY between cited source and content as much as possible. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:36, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Use of Rev

It seems the use of the word "Rev" is little excessive and probably falls under MOS:JOBTITLES and MOS:HONORIFIC, in particular when it's being used as "the Rev so and so". It also seems quite similar to MOS:DOCTOR. Maybe it's OK for the first mention of a person, but I'm not sure if it should "Rev" or "Rev." or whether even The Reverend should be used instead even if its OK to use. I get that it's being used a term of respect, but I'm not sure how appropriate its use is for Wikipedia. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

List of pastors

Adding an embedded list of pastors might be something worth considering. Currently, they all (or many of them) seem to be mentioned by name in the "Ministers" sub-section which seems OK, but may adding a simple list or table to the end of that section would help support the prose. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:20, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Restoration work

It might be better to move the content about the church's restoration/renovation to the "Architecture" section, perhaps as a sub-section. Photo related to the restoration could then be added in a simple gallery markup which might improve readability and formatting a bit. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:23, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I've moved the photos to a simple gallery format at the end of the "Architecture section" since they don't seem to be really related to any of the "Ministers". Perhaps there's an old photo of one of these ministers (ideally the founder) which could be found and added to the "Ministers" section. I'm going to guess that any such photo/image would be surely old enough to be in the public domain by now; so, it should be OK to upload to Commons. I also reworked some of the captions of these photos. Captions like other content needs to be supported by citations to reliable sources if they contain claims or anything which might be seen as contentious; so, it's probably better to keep them as simple and descriptive as possible and add the detail about the images (supported by citations) to the body of the article instead. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:26, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

History section

I'm not sure what the current purpose of the history section since it's not really about the history of the church per se, but more about where archives of church records might be found. In my opinion, the "History" section should be an overview of the history of the church and include such things as when it as founded, who founded it, and other significant events throughout the church's history. Perhaps some of the details in the "Ministers" subsection could be moved to the "History" section and information about the church records, etc, can be included in separate subsection called "Archives" or something. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:22, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Citation style

Since this article currently relies so heavily on one source, a "shortened footnote style" would seem like it would work quite well. A full citation for the Snellings' book would only need to be given once in the "References" section, and inline or short citations to the various pages could be formatted to show up in a "Notes" section that would look like the example given in WP:CITESHORT. The current format is OK, but it's kind of basic and might be mistaken for a type of WP:CITEBOMB since basically there's only four of five sources cited, but one of them is being cited about twenty times. The template {{rp}} is also an option here, but it can be confusing to readers not familiar to it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:51, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your help with this article it is my first one so I still have my L plates on — Preceding unsigned comment added by Torchbearer-Ted (talk • contribs) 11:52, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Everyone starts somewhere, but what I'm referring to above is covered a bit in WP:CITESTYLE; basically, Wikipedia doesn't not have a house citation-style and there are a number of different acceptable ways that citations can be added to an article.

Some other things that you're probably going to need to get in the habit of doing if you're planning on sticking around and editing not only this article but also other articles or pages: (1) please remember to always try to WP:SIGN your talk page posts; and (2) please try to remember to log in to your account when you edit just in case you haven't always done so (you don't need to acknowledge here whether you have). It's not the end of the world if you don't remember to do either of these things, but it does make talk page discussions a bit easier for others to follow when you sign your posts, and logging in makes it easier for others to see who made an edit and avoids any misunderstandings like this. -- Marchjuly (talk) 12:14, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I can change the citation style to sfn (will take a few mins) if that would be helpful?— Rod ^talk 12:28, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Done - can always be switched back if people don't like it.— Rod ^talk 12:41, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that. It looks OK to me. Since I wasn’t the one who originally added most of the content or chose the citation style, I was just following WP:CITEVAR in bringing it up for discussion. If others want to restore they original format, they can. Once again though this seems to work better (at least in my opinion). — Marchjuly (talk) 20:34, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Rev. J.R. Davison 1934 photo

@Torchbearer-Ted: Thank you looking for photos of ministers, but I’ve temporarily removed this photo because I think there’s a really good chance that it’s not within the public domain just yet. My post above in #Restoration work did mention the possibility of uploading such photos or images, but I was referring to much older ones from perhaps the really early days of the church. While 1934 is quite old in terms of 2021, it’s not nearly old enough for a photo to have become public domain in terms of the copyright law of the United States (see c:COM:HIRTLE) and most likely of the UK (see c:COM:United Kingdom). There might be reasons other than age for the photo to be considered public domain, but it simply doesn’t seem to be old enough yet. Since Commons policy requires that a photo such as this be “free” in both the US and the country of origin (which I’m assuming is the UK), it seems likely that this is going to end up being deleted. You can ask about this at c:COM:VPC if you want other opinions, but I think the best thing to do here would be to request speedy deletion per c:COM:CSD#G7. — Marchjuly (talk) 20:54, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Betty Langlay cast iron pillars

@Torchbearer-Ted: I've tried searching to see if there are any articles about this on Wikipedia, but have been unable to find anything at all. Is "Betty Langley" the name of a person? Is it a type of cast iron? I even tried Googling it and got no hits for pages about cast iron pillars or anyone named Betty Langlay who seem to somehow connected to pillars. I was able to find stuff about Sweetland organs and Parliament clocks, but I can find anything about these pillars. Since there's no way for me to check the original source, I'm wondering if the information is correct. Is it possible for you to check the original source and make sure this is correct? Maybe there's a spelling error like there was in the case of "dais". -- Marchjuly (talk) 15:16, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Is it possible that you meant Batty Langley? Per this article and this blog post, there seems to have been someone named Batty Langley who might be the person these pillars are named after. -- Marchjuly (talk) 15:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I think "Batty Langey" is what is meant. The Historic England listing citation says "U-plan balcony on slender 'Batty Langlay' cast iron columns.." It is likely to be about the style rather than made by that individual.— Rod ^talk 15:57, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes the above Historic England link is where the spelling came from Torchbearer-Ted (talk) 16:13, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Rodw and Torchbearer-Ted. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:01, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Added many citations from external links to verify content Torchbearer-Ted (talk) 11:49, 4 March 2021 (UTC)