Talk:Fir Clump Stone Circle

Bibliography width

From the Template:Reflist documentation:

Choose a width appropriate to the typical width of the references:

Automatic columns (default when no width is specified): Where there are only a few Footnotes; see, e.g., Silver State Arena (23:05, 28 December 2012)
30em: Where there are many footnotes plus a page-width Bibliography subsection: see, e.g., Ebola virus disease (02:02, 12 January 2018)
20em: Where Shortened footnotes are used; see, e.g., NBR 224 and 420 Classes (13:32, 1 August 2011).

There's no reason to use the width parameter unless there's a reason to use the width parameter, but the creator of this article insists otherwise. Please restore the appropriate typical width, a page-width bibliography (i.e., let the template do its job). Copy-and-pasting it from another GA article is not a reason. -- JHunterJ (talk) 10:43, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to the talk page, JHunterJ. My concern was largely that a change had been made to the formatting of an FA-rated article without any consensus, which is why I reverted your initial alteration. Regarding the formatting, from my perspective, the main issue is about consistency. We have quite a few articles on Britain's prehistoric monuments that are now rated as FAs (Nine Stones, Winterbourne Abbas, Porlock Stone Circle, Withypool Stone Circle, Coldrum Long Barrow, Chestnuts Long Barrow, Smythe's Megalith etc) and a number that are also rated as GAs. They all use the same formatting system as you see here, with the three columns. Thus, changing the system in this particular introduces inconsistency and I don't really see any compelling need for that. It makes things look messy. Midnightblueowl (talk) 10:51, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

It makes things look incrementally better. A foolish consistency is not what Wikipedia needs. You could make the other FAs consistent with the broader Wikipedia guidelines, but do not block incremental improvements just because other articles also need improvement. Dictating the width when a dictated width is not necessary is counterproductive. The template is coded to switch to column widths when appropriate. When it's needed to specify, specify, but "everybody else did it" isn't that reason. -- JHunterJ (talk) 11:11, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Survivor bias?

The article states that stone circles "are most densely concentrated in south-western Britain and on the north-eastern horn of Scotland", but also mentions that some of them have been destroyed. Are stone circles truly concentrated on those places, or are those simply the ones that have survived/that we know about? If it's the latter, the text should say so. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 14:37, 9 April 2020 (UTC)