Talk:Cofton Hackett

outstanding work on this article Leonig Mig (talk) 20:23, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Improvements

Various parts of the article have been tagged not as criticism, but in order to highlight areas that can be improved.
Obviously a lot of work has gone into this article which is well structured and already of the length and general scope of what the project hopes to achieve for Villages in Worcestershire.
However, although The Victoria History is an extremely valuable source and is used frequently by Wickipedians, wholesale copying of large chunks is probably not such a good idea - even if the work is out of copyright and correctly cited. The inclusion of such passages often goes beyond the required scope for an encyclopedic entry, and may defeat the purpose of inline citations - which this article still needs.
Some further research will show that much of the information can be cited, especially, for example, from John Baker's excellent Austin site; while checking in the Wikipedia if much of the info about the Longbridge works is not already covered in other Wikipedia articles (Longbridge and/or Austin Motor Company).

Possible contradiction between:
Cofton Hackett is odd in that there is no village in the usually accepted sense of the word. There is no village centre, high street or village green lined by a church, shops and older housing.
and
...the centre of Cofton Hackett could be accepted as being either near the old tram terminus and Fentons the newsagents, or the Post Office in Parsonage Drive, or the corner of Rose Hill and Barnt Green Road where the village hall stands.

News Item Burglaries:
This is a local news item only and most likely not of interest in an encyclopedic entry (MOS).

Genuinely unintentional weasel words or POV - (MOS): sentences need paraphrasing for neutrality.

Members of the Worcestershire project may be able to help bring this article to GA status.--Kudpung (talk) 03:56, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Copying and pasting

A significantly large proportion of this article has been copied and pasted without any attempt to turn the source material into an original Wikipedia article. Wiki is based on a system of citations of sources. The article needs severley pruning and re"writing quoting sources according to Wiki policy and guidelines.--Kudpung (talk) 18:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I assume this refers to the long section coppied from VCH, which has now been removed. Peterkingiron (talk) 22:46, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, along with a lot of other unsourced material and complete sections copied from Wikipedia topics that have their own articles. What's left is a fairly clean standard sized article for a small village of little notability.--Kudpung (talk) 03:43, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Isn't VCH way out of copyright? Leonig Mig (talk) 20:44, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

It might be, but encyclopedias don't get made by simply copying and pasting large chunks of other people's work. VCH is an excellent work, but not only is it out of date in many cases due to more recent research, but it's fine detail is largely of unencyclopedic value. The way the Wikipedia works, is to refer the reader to such detailed works so that if they want more detailed information, they can get it there. The usual practice is to synthesise anything that can be of value, and cite the source.--Kudpung (talk) 11:23, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

The position will vary from volume to volume. Some (like the Worcestershrie ones) were produced before WWI. Whether they are out of copyright will bepend on the dates of death of the authors. VCH Worcestershire remains a useful source, but much further research has eben done since. In other counties, volumes are still being produced. The older VCH volumes (at least) are on-line at [1]. It is much better to summarise and cite a source like this than to copy and paste from it. Peterkingiron (talk) 16:08, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Agreed on copy / paste / summary point. I had misunderstood, I thought the contents was being removed on copy-vio count. Leonig Mig (talk) 09:51, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Structure

What this article lacks is structure, in my opinion. There is some good stuff in there, some bad, some unreferenced and it is all comingled. Is there a "template" for the structure of such articles? Leonig Mig (talk) 10:21, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

LOL that's jumbled things up a bit! More logical for my money, hope people agree! Leonig Mig (talk) 10:32, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I would say each section needs some further attention still, but there's loads of good information in there, so it needs careful work. Some stuff could be dropped (indeed should be covered in other articles) but best not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in being "too scientific". Leonig Mig (talk) 10:40, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

What have you done? Yes there is a structure and format for settlements and the article conformed to it before you destroyed it. Please change it back to the correct subject headings. Please study and absorb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_UK_geography/How_to_write_about_settlements before making changes like this again. 21st CENTURY GREENSTUFF 19:23, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll set to work on restoring this article to the correct layout later this evening (if nobody else beats me to it). You are right, it should never have been changed this way. Jeni ^(talk) 19:33, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

You can just revert it, much quicker! I don't understand why it is so bad, I would say it is more logical as each subject is collected together, rather than the scattergun of issues before. Leonig Mig (talk) 20:12, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes just to expand on that, I've reviewed the headings and I'm not certain how far off they are. I've renamed them to make them more consistent with the guideline you cite. I think its unwise to insist on separating related content just to fill each section. Frankly Cofton is quite a small place. Leonig Mig (talk) 20:15, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

It is probably unusual for such a small settlement to be the subject of so much discussion. It is very unusual for contributors to make 40 (forty), possibly good faith, consecutive edits without any edit summaries. This may make it very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone else to follow what is going on. --Kudpung (talk) 08:05, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

• I think that Leonig Mig has done a good job in restructring the article. When I have so substantially amended an article, I have not tended to save my work so often, but doing so is understandable. If I had done this in one step (or a few), it would probably have had quite a brief edit summary, such as "major rewrite". Cofton is one of the commuter villages surrounding the Birmingham/Black Country conurbation(s) and has benefited from having an editor such as him willing to work on it. However there is (I think) still a lot of unreferenced material. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Long S

Sorry, my server went down just after I saved that, and I wasn't able to explain here.

The long s isn't the same thing as ʃ. The latter is an IPA variant, 'esh', which is coded differently. If the normal long es isn't legible, that's an issue with the reader's user prefs. However, the IPA esh is in a different part of Unicode, covered by different fonts, etc; to display it properly on IE, it might be necessary to template it as IPA. Besides being the wrong letter, like using a mid dot for a period because it shows up better, it messes up searches: I got here searching for improperly formatted IPA. — kwami (talk) 18:01, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Try bolding it ... see if that makes it stand out better 21st CENTURY GREENSTUFF 20:12, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

How's that? Either way looks fine on my browser. — kwami (talk) 20:50, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Well it does not look good on mine (IE 9)... with those silly arrows around it it looks like a tiny pictogram of a buttcrack. I am struggling to comprehend what it is you are trying to achieve here. The whole point of the paragraph is to explain to the great unwashed why Coston turned into Cofton because the long s looks just like a modern lowercase f . That is all, what is all this unicode and little arrows supposed to be achieving except make it look like incomprehensible nonsense? Can you explain what it is all about please? 21st CENTURY GREENSTUFF 21:16, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

The brackets indicate that we're discussing letters rather than the sounds those letters represent. I didn't know that was the problem. You can replace them with < and > if you like.

The point is that we shouldn't use A if we mean B. If we're talking about long es, we should use long es, not something else that you like better. Type the word "ехаmрlе" in your browser's 'find' window and tell me what comes up. Can you even locate that word in this discussion? That's the kind of thing that starts going wrong when we substitute letters in the text because we don't like the way they look on our browsers. Better to adjust the browser to display the page the way you want it to, and leave the page uncorrupted for other readers. — kwami (talk) 22:00, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

No no no ... there is no problem with the symbol for long s ... it is the correct one, but is so tiny it is confused by the bracketing arrows ... a space each side of the long s might help readability. Also, do we really need the arrows around words, such as costune and cosa? You know why they are there but the average reader/editor will not ... they will think it is a mistake and a constant revert/replace 'edit war' will follow. The average user does not know how to adjust their browsers ... they work on the wysiwyg principle. 21st CENTURY GREENSTUFF 22:38, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, spacing might help. I'll try if you haven't already.

No, we don't really need the brackets, but the general feeling is that we should try to be as exact as possible in an encyclopedia. The brackets are like appending [sic] to a quotation: they tell the reader we mean exactly this spelling, and no other. — kwami (talk) 01:11, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

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J R R Tolkien

Tolkien had very strong links with Cofton Hackett during his childhood and youth. Some research into his official biography would yield some fascinating information which would further greatly enhance this page; it is referenced in the relevant Wikipedia article. Just to whet the appetite of an editor here are two morsels: 1) He lived with his mother in the Post Office cottage at Rednal. 2) He conducted a clandestine love affair in the Lickey Hills. Sorry I am too old and decrepit to do this myself. Flying Stag (talk) 15:17, 30 March 2018 (UTC)