Talk:Leeds/Archives/2008/November

introduction/scope

I think whoever took it upon themselves to take the decision that the Leeds article should represent an area that excludes so much of the city is very much mistaken. I would suggest the larger area be the focus of the article - it's blatant common sense. Every other city on the planet can't be wrong!

Why should someone searching for 'Leeds' be subjected to a bizarre introduction that seems only to serve as personal justification for the article's focus? There should perhaps at best be a paragraph on the boundary discrepancy, with a link to "the urban core of the city of Leeds", which you could safely assume is NOT what the majority of visitors to the page are interested in. It would seem akin to searching for Kansas City (the city in Missouri) and being directed to Kansas City, Kansas (a satellite city). Not the greatest example, but you get the idea.

The introduction should be concise and informative - this is neither because of the very nature of having to explain what the article represents! I refer to: The county borough of Leeds was awarded city status in 1893, but in 1974 this status was transferred to the larger new metropolitan borough named "City of Leeds". Thus Leeds, although commonly referred to as a "city", does not have this legal status unless the wider area is being discussed.

The nature of the article does a great disservice to the city, not to mention those unfortunate to live in those areas banished!

Those with any interest in the city may well find it difficult to find the information they're looking for amongst the confusion, which is completely unnecessary.

Thisrain (talk) 04:03, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Every other city on the planet? Like Salford/City of Salford, or Bradford/City of Bradford, or Wakefield/City of Wakefield, or Carlisle/City of Carlisle? It is not even slightly unusual where a local government area is larger than the settlement that it's named after - and there's plenty of other examples that I could give. Fingerpuppet (talk) 11:07, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

They are two different entities and should be kept separate as indicated above there are several examples in the UK where this situation exists. The confusion results from the naming of the entities if the main settlement and the borough did not have similar names then there would be no problem, such as Huddersfield and Kirklees. When articles try to cover two different things, mainly as the result of mergers, this also causes confusion and readers find it difficult to extract the information they are looking for. The complicated introduction was a compromise that came about because people did not like Leeds being called a city. Keith D (talk) 12:45, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Isn't one of the big problems with the present article that "Leeds, the settlement" isn't even a legal entity? Isn't that why we have so much trouble defining its boundaries and determining its population? In analogy to WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS the fact that other cities also suffer from schizophrenia is not a convincing argument for me. Keeping Leeds and City of Leeds separate looks to me like a bad case of pedantry. Almost every city in the world has the "problem" that its official boundaries don't coincide exactly with the natural boundaries of the settlement. Every town or city I ever lived in officially extended to areas that people felt were really separate villages (e.g. de:Seckenheim in Mannheim, de:Günterstal in Freiburg im Breisgau, Köpenick in Berlin, Vallvidrera in Barcelona). I admit that the typical case is more comparable to Pudsey than to Otley, but the difference is still quantitative, not qualitative. On the other hand, most cities grow beyond their official boundaries.

I think the right way to deal with this kind of situation in general is to deal with the settlement and the legal entity in the same article. Yes, this means there is some ambiguity. But people are used to it and can deal with it. The article chair is similarly ambiguous, but it's not being split into chair for one person and chair for one or more persons. What I haven't seen yet is specific evidence that the situation with Leeds (or Salford, Bradford, Wakefield, Carlisle) is qualitatively different from the situations of almost every other city. Instead there is a lot of evidence of confused readers, and there is duplicated material (Leeds#Twin towns vs. City of Leeds#Town twinning – note that these are officially twinned with the City of Leeds, but of course Otley has its own twin towns). --Hans Adler (talk) 14:11, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

To use local examples (Bradford, Wakefield etc) doesn't serve as any justification; these were doubtless edited in a similar way either through reference to the Leeds article or vice versa, or may well have been edited by the same people using a similar template. Are there any examples of this anomaly further than a 100 mile radius of the Pennines? Looking at the wider world - Birmingham, for example, the article refers to both the city and metropolitan borough, as does Wolverhampton. This is how most cities around the world, in my experience, have been laid out. I see no reason why cities in the North of England should be any different. Bristol, as a city and unitary authority, would be another example of how the Leeds article should appear, in my opinion.

I agree wholeheartedly with Hans on this - keeping the City of Leeds and Leeds separate is pedantic at best. Thisrain (talk) 16:51, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, both Birmingham and Wolverhampton local authority areas don't contain any rural areas, and indeed Wolverhampton (the city) extends outside the local authority boundary - and with the exception of Sutton Coldfield, neither of the local authority areas contain other ONS recognised settlements.

More than 100 miles away from the Pennines? Well, I don't know about that, but outside Yorkshire/Greater Manchester/Merseyside there's lots. Staying in the West Midlands Dudley/Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, Walsall/Metropolitan Borough of Walsall and Solihull/Metropolitan Borough of Solihull; whilst elsewhere in England off the top of my head there's the Carlisle example from earlier, Sunderland/City of Sunderland, Brighton, Hove and Brighton & Hove, Milton Keynes/Milton Keynes (borough), Middlesbrough/Middlesbrough (borough) and Chichester/Chichester (district). There's plenty more out there too. Fingerpuppet (talk) 21:46, 18 November 2008 (UTC)