Place talk:Bexleyheath, Kent, England

Bexleyheath Revisions [20 July 2016]

Hi

Why did you take out references to Greater London in the write-up of Bexleyheath? Greater London is the official name for the complete area of London since 1965.

Greater London is made up of boroughs and Bexleyheath is a large part of the London Borough of Bexley. Granted Bexleyheath was in Kent until 1965, but it has been in London for 50 years--potentially a lot of BMDs to be accounted for in that period.

If Greater London is removed from Bexleyheath, it should be removed for every other section of London, both "Inner" and "Outer". Please read the Greater London page in WR. It contains a lot of information that I could not see how to replicate throughout the individual pages covering the parts of London. --Goldenoldie 04:42, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Good Morning. I am packing my children for camp today, so I cannot respond right away, but I will do so over on Place talk:Bexleyheath, Kent, England as soon as I get a few minutes. Regards, --cos1776 12:51, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

[Note: posts above were originally at User talk:Cos1776 ]

Hi Goldenoldie - In response to your original post above - I'm not sure if I understand which change concerns you. I was originally alerted to the page because it was placed into a non-existent category, namely Category: (London Borough), Greater London, England, so I took it out of that Category.

Then, in reading over the page itself, I noticed that the Wikipedia text on the page did not match the current Wikipedia entry, so it was outdated. This is a separate problem that still exists, having to do with how often the transclusion is performed. I'm not actually sure how often our Wikipedia transclusions are performed - perhaps you know?

I also noticed that, like you said, Bexleyheath was in Kent until 1965 when it became part of Greater London, but that was not reflected in the top description box (i.e. it was not linked to that Place page). So, I did not actually remove Greater London, but rather added it to the "Also located in" box, so that it is now linked to Place:Greater London, England. You can see it there under "Former village" and "Suburb", since that is how it is currently defined at WR. As an aside, Wikipedia now defines it as a "town", so perhaps that should be updated as well.

I hope that I understood and answered your concern. Best Wishes, --cos1776 20:44, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi First, I'm afraid I wrote you my first note in haste (and also during our first heat wave of the season which has eased off somewhat this morning). Please disregard it. I got some of my facts wrong.

When I sorted out the whole of Greater London last year I linked all areas, suburbs, etc. into the London Borough of which they are now a part. Bexleyheath does not have a administration of its own, it is part of Bexley. I also added the designation (London Borough) to each of the boroughs so that one can differentiate between the structures that existed before and after 1965.

If you investigate WR places in England you will find that the "See also" box (provided I have completed the work on that place) is a chronological list of all the administrations below county level that a place has been "attached" to over the centuries. This gives hints to users as to where further sources to that place might be found.

Categories. We had a discussion of categories in the OC-committee a few weeks back. Like everything else it did not come to a conclusion, but I got the impression that most if not all of us thought that the category principle had gone over the top, especially for automatically-made categories, and that perhaps they ought to be dispensed with. I was not aware of these automatically-made categories when I worked on London. What Bexleyheath was doing in a category called Category: (London Borough), Greater London, England, I have no idea. But it should be in the [[Category:Bexley (London Borough), Greater London, England]]. If that is an uncategorized category I shall have to be taught how to make it categorized.

I also discussed with the OC-committee that I quite often revised the information found in the introductory Wikipedia section. It is often not of interest to genealogists (e.g., we don't care about the "London Plan") and there is a glitch in Wikipedia software that drops references to distances when an imperial-metric conversion is involved. When I alter the wording I introduce the Wikipedia material with the phrase :the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia, instead of the one that comes as part of the wp-template. I may even use the word "condensed" if I have really taken the scissors to it. But I try to consider my changes cautiously.

The update (transclusion is not a word in my vocabulary) to bring in requested wp-templates used to be done on a weekly basis, but this stopped a couple of years ago when Dallan had other commitments and the need for a weekly revamp did not appear so great. At this moment in time it has not been done for months. The update mechanism does not pick up the alterations to the municipal administration which occurred all over the United Kingdom: in 1965 (for London) and 1974 (for the rest of the country), and this yet another reason why I have not used it. Some post-1965 London Boroughs were added to WeRelate database before I came along, but not all of them; most of the non-metropolitan districts in the rest of the country have never been picked up.

When working on London in Jun 2015 I was trying to remove all the places that were not London Boroughs from the list of places listed in Greater London. I worked on this, but the job did not get completed. Actually, without a major reorganization of the filters in the database, it was impossible. There should not be any urban districts, boroughs (municipal), boroughs (county), boroughs (metropolitan) or "types of places" beginning "former" in Greater London. (The boroughs and urban districts were abolished in 1965.) But when the same name is used for a place in both Greater London and in its former county, the "type of place" links to both the new and the old regime. I would love to fix this, but I don't know how. I am getting an idea, but it feels like it would be a major addition to the software. Because I couldn't work it out, I hit upon the idea of omitting the reference to Greater London in the "Also located in" box for places like Bexleyheath and adding the London Borough to which it now belongs to the "See also" box. This at least indicates its link to what is now considered as "London".

Towns. In WeRelate cities, towns and villages are combined together as "inhabited places" along with all sorts of other gatherings of people that no one has analyzed yet. In the UK towns and villages have never been defined in terms of population size or density. A city is still considered to be a place with a cathedral, despite the fact that some cathedrals are located in places with less than 5,000 inhabitants. Since I live in a "village" of more than 7,000 people, that's rather laughable. I have been trying to drop the reference to "towns" because it infers that the area has its own local administration, and that is not necessarily so. (If it has its own administration, it is called a civil parish, and civil parishes have defined borders.)

For different reasons Wandsworth and the City of London are still listed as Inhabited Places. Wandsworth was a village in the 19th century, but its name was never changed as it grew and it is difficult to define for that reason. I worked in toward the centre when doing London and gave up when I got to The City. Somewhere online there is a list of all the 600 or so original parishes and when groups of parishes joined together and what the name changes were (and a map to put them altogether), but I haven't transferred it to WeRelate yet. As I see it, there will be an awful lot of redirects, and this may not go down well with other people who want to link their emigrating families to 14th and 15th century parishes that covered no more than a city block.

I hope I have managed to explain some of the difficulties and confusions entailed in trying to sort out Greater London. I was learning as I went along and may not have been consistent in the way I went about alterations. Thirty-some boroughs and five counties was a lot to work with. And having arrived on this side of the pond in the year the changes were instituted, I didn't hear the discussions that led up to them.

There's a couple of other points that I must make through the OC-committee website later today.

Regards, Pat --Goldenoldie 10:27, 20 July 2016 (UTC)