User talk:HJ Mitchell/Archive 72

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The Signpost: 01 October 2012

The Bugle: Issue LXXVIII, September 2012

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[majestic titan]
20:38, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Grade II* listed buildings in Coventry

Hi HJ. I noticed while reviewing the Grade I list that a Grade II* version will be forthcoming. In view of the error in the City Council's list (Dormer Cottage being incorrectly shown as Grade I-listed), you may want to check the National Heritage List for England database to verify the data on the Council list. At http://list.english-heritage.org.uk/advancedsearch.aspx, select Location > District/Unitary Authority/Borough > Coventry, then Grade > II* and ignore anything without "Listing" in the "Type" column. Incidentally I lived in Coventry for 3 years while at Warwick University, so am pleased to see these lists! Is a Grade II list planned in the future as well? Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 13:00, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll be sure to check them all against the English Heritage list before I move it to mainspace this time (it's currently at User:HJ/Grade II* listed buildings in Coventry). I can only assume that Dormer Cottage was a typo, but it's irritating because the council's PDF list is much easier to use than English Heritage's website. A grade II list is planned, but I'm debating how best to split it up (there are over 350)—any suggestions? Btw, it may be a bit of a distance for you, but we have occasional meetups and other Wikipedia-related things going on in Coventry, and we're getting together for a pint next on the 21st if you wanted to come along. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:19, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
I faced a similar challenge when I came to do Grade II listed buildings in Brighton and Hove. As there are over 1,200 (!), I needed to work out the best way of splitting it and how many to include in each part-list. After much thought, and guidance from FLC regulars (although I have not yet presented any of the lists at FLC) and other list experts, this is what I did; hopefully some of this will be useful to you as well:
  • After facing problems with slow load times and exceeding the template capacity on Listed buildings in Worthing, which has about 200 entries, I decided that 100-125 was about the right number of entries for any list of this type.
  • The possible ways of splitting appeared to be: (a) by suburb/area; (b) by date of construction of the building; or (c) alphabetically. I dismissed (a) because listed buildings are so unevenly spread throughout Brighton and Hove, and some do not have a precise geographical identity - so that's no good if you are trying to assign it to one list or another. (b) is better, but again there is an uneven distribution of "ages", some buildings are of unknown or debatable age (what date should be used for buildings that have been rebuilt, significantly extended, changed their use etc.?), and most importantly having lists by date range is not particularly reader-friendly. So I went with (c)!
  • Then we have the problem of buildings with no name, which are only identified by their street address. My solution, which I offered on one of the talk pages (possibly
    WT:FLC
    ) and which received general agreement, was to use the street address as the name: so for example 2 Boyce's Street counts as a "B".
  • This required quite a lot of pre-preparation, though, in the form of a big spreadsheet into which I dumped all of the records from the National Heritage List for England (luckily I like playing with spreadsheets!). I went down each row putting "A", "B" etc. in the first column based on the name of the building (if available) or the street name; then I assembled the entries for each letter into strict alphabetical order. So for example 2 Boyce's Street went between Boundary stone at Whitehawk Road and Brighton and Hove High School (Old Vicarage). Then I tried to find the best possible split so that each sub-list would have a similar number of records, none exceeded about 125, and letters were not split across two lists. Luckily the full list split quite neatly into 10 sub-lists: A–B, C–D, E–H, I–L, M, N–O, P–R, S, T–V and W–Z.
So in summary, that method requires a bit of spreadsheet work and data-sorting, but to be honest any method of splitting the list would need some preparation and fiddling around beforehand. Coventry would have similar problems to Brighton and Hove in the sense that its listed buildings are presumably grouped unevenly by geography (probably mostly in the city centre and Spon End, and possibly Binley and Ryton?) and age; so I would recommend a three-way alphabetical split.
One of these days I will get to one of the meetups, although probably one of the more southern ones. I'm hopeful there might be one in Brighton (or Hove!) in the future: there's quite a few appropriate venues around the city. I was in Manchester on the same weekend as one last year, but sadly it clashed with the other meeting I was up there for. Cheers, Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 15:03, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for advice. It'll probably be a while before I get to the grade IIs, but when I do, I'll be sure to dig this out of my archives! You're definitely right about the geographical distribution—all of Spon Street, parts of Upper Spon Street, and most of Allesley Old Road are grade II listed. Along with a so-named "quadrangle" that is actually a semi-circle, but alas, if I wanted something easy, I would have done Wolverhampton! ;) HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:21, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations

Congratulations on getting the

List of field marshals of the British Army up to featured list status. While the List of British Army full generals which I am currently working on is a long way off featured list status, any help you can provide in improving it would be welcomed. Greenshed (talk
) 21:56, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. The field marshals list was a labour of love, and I suspect this will be even more so. Heathcote was invaluable with the field marshals, so if you can find anything even remotely similar, it would make your life much easier. If not, you're reliant on the London Gazette, and their OCR isn't great once you start going back more than a hundred years or so. But all that is manageable, albeit tedious. Where you might struggle at FLC is in writing (or at least sourcing) a few paragraphs of prose. I'll look in on it when I get chance and see if I can offer a hand. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:30, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

AE appeal by Hearfourmewesique

Hello HJ. Please see this appeal at

Wikipedia:AE#Arbitration enforcement action appeal by Hearfourmewesique. You commented in the original ban discussion in December, 2011 so you may have an opinion on whether to grant his appeal now. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk
) 17:09, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Ed, I've left a comment there. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:30, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

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