Wikipedia talk:UK Wikipedians' notice board/Archive 11

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Victoria of the United Kingdom is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 22:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

'Victoria of the United Kingdom'? Interesting - I've never heard that used to refer to Queen Victoria before! Matthew 11:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
The naming guidelines for royals have been getting rather tortuous for some time now. What we have currently is a strange mish-mash between the "common names" and the "don't use titles" conventions, made more tortuous by endless rewrites and instruction creep that make everything less clear at each stage. Alai 22:34, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

English parish nano-stubs

I've come across large numbers of almost content-free stubs on English RC parishes (or perhaps parish churches -- it's not entirely clear which. I've made two rather overlapping lists according to how they're stub-tagged, here, and here. Could someone have a look at these articles and tidy them up somehow: perhaps by expanding them somewhat to have some meaningful content, redirecting them to a "list of" article, or at the least, stub-tagging them more consistently. I've also left a note at WikiProject Catholicism. Alai 22:38, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Northern Ireland peer review

I have requested a Peer review on this article. --Mal 12:42, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Piccadilly Circus is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 22:01, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Curtural Icons

A whole swath of articles on my watchlist just popped up because the category "British cultural icons" has been deleted. I always found this a very useful category. Shame. Jooler 17:26, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I notice the Department for the Environment article is both lacking and perhaps wrong.

"The Department for the Environment was a British government department" - The DoE is still its own Department... well, perhaps not on the UK Mainland, but here in NI it's the DoENI (See: doeni.gov.uk) Slightly offtopic, I'll be starting my job there in September. :)

I added to the project page's improve list. --Dom0803 15:33, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Mary II of England is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 16:22, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Who's up for a London meetup sometime in the near future? :) Haukur 16:35, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

James Bulger is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 23:12, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I've moved the old "British and Irish current events" page to here, and updated it to the same style as the new Portal:Current events, plus added a few days content. Help keeping it up to date would be very welcome! the wub "?!" 09:47, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

England expects that every man will do his duty is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 00:19, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Instead of "Detailed concerns may be found here" shouldn't it be "Wikipedia expects that every English editor will do his duty here"? You missed the chance to be a wag there you know! :) --kingboyk 09:59, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Preferred unit of distance for British articles

Casting this question out to a wider audience, what's the preferred unit of distance to be used in British-oriented articles? Should we primarily be using miles, as these are the preferred unit of distance within the UK, or should we be using kilometres instead? I've had a skim through the WP style guide but can't find anything definite. What's better to use in UK articles: '100 miles (160 kilometres)' or '160 kilometres (100 miles)'? Thanks in advance! Matthew 19:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I think the general principal is to use both metric and imperial. Although seem as we still officially use miles in this country, using miles first seems logical. G-Man * 20:25, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
Use first whatever units the measurement was actually given as in the reference? - David Gerard 14:37, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
A lot of modern ones give both. Mind you I generaly use miles for canal lengths.Geni 14:49, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Fire service

There is a debate going on about the naming of the Fire Service in the United Kingdom article. User:Escaper7 insists that calling it Fire Services in the United Kingdom would be wrong? Just bringing this to people's attention. G-Man * 20:25, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Parliament Act is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 01:01, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

John Dee is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 21:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

House of Lords is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy 00:29, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

DYK

The DYK section featured on the main page is always looking for interesting new and recently expanded stubs from different parts of the world. Please make a suggestion.--Peta 02:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

RFC: constituency names

Anybody got an opinion on whether to use a disambiguation suffix on constituency articles, even when not ambiguous? We had a previous concensus not to, but that's being challenged, here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies#Summary of the issue. Joe D (t) 11:43, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Mary I of England is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 02:05, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 15:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Order of the Garter is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 20:17, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Hereditary peer is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 14:44, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedians may be interested in the debate at Talk:Metropolitan Borough of Wigan about whether the article Wigan should be merged and redirected to Metropolitan Borough of Wigan (the status quo was that they were separate articles.) Morwen - Talk 23:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Coordinates of UK locations

This List of United Kingdom locations contains coordinates for many UK locations. These can we added to articles with the {{Coor d at|DD|N/S|DD|E/W|}}, {{Coor d title|DD|N/S|DD|E/W|}} or {{Coor d|DD|N/S|DD|E/W|}} templates (See WP:DATE#Geographical_coordinates for template usage). Any help with disambiguation of the list is appreciated. GameKeeper 23:47, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Icons

Earlier on this page you might note that I flagged up the fact that someone had decided to delete the British cultural icons category. Well if the argument was that it was an arbitrary list, there is now some justification to an English cultural icon category, see BBC story and Icons a portrait of England Jooler 16:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I proposed all the cultural icons categories for deletion, and there was near-unanimous support for this. The Culture of... categories cover a similar field, but without the POV-minefield of "icon" status. The first link you provide might perhaps make for a useful category (I suspect that an article would be a better starting point), but I suspect that there might be copyright issues. The second link doesn't work for me, so I can't comment on it. Warofdreams talk 21:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
Try http://www.icons.org.uk Note that this site is part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. If there were any copyright issues (and I can't see how flagging an article as being part of a category could have any anyway) then its covered by Crown Copyright. Jooler 13:07, 11 November 2006 (UTC) - Quoting from [1] The project is supported by an advisory board and commissioned by Culture Online, a part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Jooler 13:14, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for those links. This list of icons was widely reported, so I think that an article would definitely be of interest. The problem with copyright (and Crown Copyright is no different here) would be that duplicating a list, or a substantial part of it, which is based on selection, infringes copyright (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles for an extensive discussion of a slightly different case). While an encyclopaedia article could be written with just a few examples given, clearly the point of a category would be to categorise all or a substantial section of the list. The DCMS would probably be only too pleased to see this list circulated widely, but to be on the safe side, were we to consider putting it up here, we should get permission. Warofdreams talk 02:06, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
You can't copyright an unordered list. We have numerous examples of such lists. See FIFA 100 for example. Jooler 10:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, if you look at the discussion on the talk page for FIFA 100, the conclusion is that the list is subject to copyright, but we have permission from FIFA to claim fair use (and could perhaps claim fair use even without their say-so, but several editors were unhappy about the legality of that). Warofdreams talk 00:20, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
The concept of "hav[ing] permission from [the copyright holder] to claim fair use" makes no sense, since claiming fair use neccessarily implies that one is doing something without the copyright holder's permission. If a list is copyrighted (and I don't know whether such a list is copyrightable - the author claiming it is doesn't make it so) then we either need to be able to use it under the terms of the GFDL (either by the copyright holder licensing it under the GFDL, or by them releasing it under other terms which allow us to relicense it under the GFDL (eg "do what you like so long as you give us credit" permission)) or we need to be able to claim fair use. -- AJR | Talk 01:51, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
You cannot copyright an unordered or a logically ordered (e.g. alphabetical) list - the selection process does not show enough creativity to make it copyrightable A list with annotation is a different matter. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service - which is highlighted on the page you originally cited. On talk page for FIFA 100 there is certainly no clear conclusion stating "that the list is subject to copyright, but we have permission from FIFA to claim fair use" at all. Jooler 18:31, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
No, that's true, the discussion rather petered out, and I agree that the closest it came to a conclusion doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not a discussion I've been involved in, rather I was citing it as evidence that the article's existence does not provide evidence that lists of this type are not subject to copyright. IANAL, but my reading of our article on Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service is that the phrase "copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude..." is key here. The court seems to have raised the point that the phone book was not copyrightable because there was no selection process - a selection process, it seems, would make it copyrightable. Don't get me wrong, if lists such as these are not subject to copyright, I'd be delighted, but that's not how the situation has been viewed on Wikipedia in the past. Warofdreams talk 01:38, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
This issue had been discussed as nauseum all over ther shop and I have been part of this discussion (when I used to use another name) and no-one has ever been able to state with any conviction whatsoever that a mere list can be copyrighted. Selection is not enough to give creativity. Someone selects the members of a cast for a film, and IMDB reports the cast list. Copyright problems? No. Pele selects 125 footballers and the Daily Mirror reports it? Copyright problems? No. The Department of Media Culture and Sport gets the public to select a list of icons. There are no copyright issues with reporting the existance and contents of mere lists. It's when the annotation and presentation shows creativity that the problems arise. Jooler 08:05, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
If that's true, then great. But it does contradict our article on Feist v. Rural, and various decisions to delete material of this type. The IMDB example is different; they list all members of the cast, so there is no selection. The report of Pele's footballers might breach copyright, but I suspect that FIFA press released it to the newspapers and gave explicit or implicit permission to reprint it. Warofdreams talk 10:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
As an observer looking in, why should a US ruling (the case you cite) affect UK copyright? I don't even begin to understand the copyright situation with regard to Wikipedia! Matthew 13:02, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
The US case doesn't affect UK copyright, but Wikipedia as an entity is based in the US and therefore only needs to be concerned with US copyright law. Those of us in the UK are potentially affected by UK copyright law (as, indeed, is any editor, affected by the law where they are living) but that is a matter for us as individual editors, not for Wikipedia as a whole. -- AJR | Talk 16:16, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I note that Wikipedia also has servers in Amsterdam and Seoul (see article). Does this mean it is also beholden to Dutch and South Korean copyright laws? Matthew 17:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
What you are quoting is the Judge's comments, he also said "If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data." and "the fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law". These are only a selection of course from a much longer ruling which can be viewed here. I've not bothered to read the whole thing, but it does appear to give protection for a minimum amount of creativity in selection, but the protection is extremely thin and can be destroyed simply by rearranging the list or by the inclusion or exclusion on one or more item. At the end of the day as was hinted at on the [Talk:FFIFA 100]] page reporting the contents of such a list amounts to fair use anyway. If you look at the talk page you'll note that recipes (a selected list of ingredients that lacked a "creative narrative" ) cannot be copyrighted. "A recipe is a process or procedure, and its list of ingredients a statement of facts". If someone could find a single example of someone winning a court case regarding the re-publication of a mere list it would settle the matter. Without such an example we are in the same position as trying to prove that there isn't a teapot orbiting the Sun. Jooler 20:42, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Bath is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 19:05, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

James II of England is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 21:53, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject England

I've created a basic project over at User:RHB/WikiProject England. Its currently in the development stage, so feel free to edit the project page, add and format to the to do list etc. Thanks, RHB 21:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

London Underground is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 02:09, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Birmingham election trial

Does anyone know if there is an article about the election trial in Birmingham where the judge ruled there was massive corruption? I believe it was last year and hinged on postal voting irregularities? Thanks, Kurando | ^_^ 09:52, 30 November 2006 (UTC) [2] This is what I am talking about. Kurando | ^_^ 09:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I can only find a sentence at the end of the third paragraph in Postal voting and at the end of the History section of Electoral fraud. -- Roleplayer 10:00, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Currently this page is just a list of events. If you want to see how this page should be done just go to the exquisitely done & featured article (deservingly so I might add) Military history of France -- UKPhoenix79 10:51, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi

Recently I've been trying to clean up List of world records, and one of the things I've done is more national records to subpages, for instance List of records of the UK. Currently the page is rather depressingly empty, so if anyone has any content, or suggestion of pages to which the new {{records}} template can link then please go right ahead!

Neo 19:10, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

"List of records of the UK" seems a rather awkward title in any case - wouldn't List of British records be better? ("List of UK records" would do I suppose if there was argument about whether "British" included Northern Ireland, but wouldn't look as nice). Loganberry (Talk) 23:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
There were a couple of reasons that I (who fist made the page) choose to use UK over British - firstly as its a less controversial and better defined term, secondly as the page is supposed to relate to facts within the country as well as those held by its citizens - 'highest mountain in the UK' sounds better to me than 'highest British mountain', and finally as I intended the page to have world records held by the country - i.e. 'the UK has the world's largest GDP per capita' (of course this is not true... but you get the idea).
However, having said that the title is slightly awkward, and I'm welcome to moving the page if a better title can be found. --Neo 08:29, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay; fair enough. I must admit that I can't think of a better term that incorporates "UK". Loganberry (Talk) 12:31, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone else think this should be reclaimed as Hokey Cokey? Jooler 21:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

From the talk page, it looks like fair game to me. Matthew 22:29, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Boggle. How weird. "This is something that has a US copyright 1950, but it is demonstrably much older and from somewhere else in the world". If that's the case, why does the article not start at the beginning in the UK? I would love to see more information and cites on this. (Is there even a WP:FAC in this?) The reference from Talk:Hokey Pokey from The Times is worth putting into the article properly. And yes, if all the cites work out, it should certainly be Hokey Cokey. Telsa (talk) 23:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
First reference apparently in Dancing Times from 1943 - a British bandleader called Jerry Hoey apparently claimed to have written it. It looks like the Yanks nicked it. Jooler 13:10, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Lifestyles magazine

I am writing to ask the name of one or more "lifestyles magazines" in the UK which are akin to "Boston magazine" and other American publications of its ilk. Magazines with Wikipedia articles are preferred. I have an article about lifestyles magazines in my sandbox but want to gives some non-North American examples. Thanks very much. HouseOfScandal 21:00, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

I dont know of any directly, but I can point you to Category:British magazines. The BBC has LOTS of magazines. RHB 23:25, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Australian admin in the UK!

Hi all, my wife and I have arrived in London, in Hammersmith, near Fullham. If anyone wants to catch up or meet me, they can email me via the email user feature. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:58, 28 December 2006 (UTC)