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GA Sweeps Reassessment of Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 15:49, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

New stub type

Owing to the large number of stubs using the {{London-geo-stub}}, a new stub type has been made by WP:WSS which we hope will be useful to your project. There is now a separate {{London-road-stub}} and Category:London road stubs for roads and streets in London. This will hopefully make stubs on specific streets easier to find, as well as reducing the number of articles in Category:London geography stubs and Category:United Kingdom road stubs (of both of which it will be a subcategory). Grutness...wha? 00:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

It's populated now - 170 stubs, and the London geography stubs category's dropped to 450 as a result. Grutness...wha? 06:58, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Regent Street

I did some work to improve the Regent Street article in December, particularly researching the architectural history. Can someone do a Wikiproject London article rating? ProfDEH (talk) 20:47, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I've given it a "b" - as it has (some) refs, pictures and gives a good overview of the subject. This is probably the limit of the informal process. If you want to take it forward, then I suggest you put it in for peer review and then Good Article nominations. These normally highlight a number of problems; and suggestions for improving the article. I think, initially, at least, I would concentrate on referencing information in the text. Good luck with improving the article. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 23:29, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Actually, see above for an example of the process. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 23:29, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Where do you mean exactly-- "see above"? BrainyBabe (talk) 15:17, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
GA sweeps reassessment of Trafalgar Square - you can see there the article improvement process - and what it throws up. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 09:59, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Request for multiple eyes

This is the first time I have created a really substantial article, from scratch, and would appreciate feedback and improvements. It is Newington Green Unitarian Church, which is both a listed building, and a congregation with a 300-year history of political radicalism. (Most famous minister -- Richard Price, whose sermon stimulated the Revolution Controversy. Most famous congregant -- Mary Wollstonecraft, who listened to this and extended liberte, egalite, fraternite to women's rights too.) I have a "Did You Know" factoid in the list, and would like to take this to GA, but thought I'd ask here first. BrainyBabe (talk) 15:26, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

It looks excellent. It's certainly ready for progress to GA. -- The Anome (talk) 12:47, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Old St Paul's Cathedral GAR notice

Old St Paul's Cathedral has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 02:36, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Call for editors

It doesn't seem to get much traffic, so I hope no one minds me posting re: this call for editors here. London's Olympic Park article is shamefully short and uninformative, considering the huge amount that has already happened in terms of construction and political debate. Such a huge site and project, at the centre of an historic sporting event, needs far better. Grunners (talk) 16:52, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

London#Twin cities

The above section is pretty much unsourced, and in its current state I'm tempted to remove it. If sourced it would have a place in the article (plenty of Good and Featured Articles have then), but it's not essential and removing it wouldn't compromise the article. So unless references can be added, it should go. Nev1 (talk) 14:23, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

The likelihood is it would just be added back. There are a couple of problems with the section:
  1. 'London' is not actually an authority. London boro's are twinned; as is the GLA. I did go through and trim recently and try to ascertain the verity. A lot were 'aspirational' (a clue is when 3 cities in the same country try to twin with London!).
  2. verification - a lot of London boro's really can't be bothered anymore. Used to be you could get a couple of trips abroad out of it - that's been a no-no for councillors since about 2000. So, they're not listed in the boro info.
  3. more important are the informal twinning arrangements made between individual schools.

HTH Kbthompson (talk) 18:57, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Distance to Charing Cross

Hi all, just a nudge that User:Kbthompson has done some great work to the Template:Infobox UK place, meaning that all places in London that transclude this infobox can employ a field (or two) that displays the distance and direction to Charing Cross. This is in favour of what the rest of the UK uses—the distance to London, or central London, which is more loosly defined.

An example of how it works is found at this diff. It would be nice for our readers if all the places in London could make use of this feature. Distances and directions can be calculated and verified using genuki. --Jza84 |  Talk  18:49, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

[conflict]Distance to London never made sense for places within London for {{infobox UK place}}. I've implemented a 'simple' version. Use either 'charingX_distance= {{convert}}, etc' or/ 'charingX_distance_mi' or/ 'charingX_distance_km' handles the conversion for you. 'charingX_direction' = cardinal direction to Charing X. I could surround it by a #if Greater London to stop districts outside London using it - but it just increases the complexity of the template. See Hackney Central for an example. It should have no effect on 'other places in the UK' - but do let me know if I've cocked it up. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 18:57, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Monthly update on P:L

I've not been well recently, but have half done the update for July. Any comments, suggestions for future articles and particularly 'themed' 'did you knows' would be more than welcome. I hope to complete the July update over the weekend. cheers Kbthompson (talk) 18:57, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The July update is now in place, please see:

Please do take the time to vote on the content - if you don't I will make arbitrary decisions! Kbthompson (talk) 14:44, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I shall try to get an August update in place, but I am likely to be admitted to hospital next week. Can someone please check I've done something before the end of the month! At worst, pls copy a selection of earlier months into next months slot. ta Kbthompson (talk) 15:37, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

John Braham

I understand your project is for places. I was surprised to see that soemone had run a bot which tagged John Braham on the grounds that he was buried at Kensal Green. I have reverted this. Please watch your bots! Best ---Smerus (talk) 02:58, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

The bot tags as WP:LT anything in these categories, and as WP:LONDON anything in these categories that doesn't also fall into any London Transport category. There are some false-positives, but these will be weeded out when the articles are assessed. The "burials" categories, along with the "people from (borough)" categories, will result in some false positives, but I included them on the assumption that most of those included will have some connection to London. To be honest, I'd have to disagree with you if you say Braham's irrelevant to WP:LONDON – he was born in London, made his debut in London, and as owner of the Regents Park Colosseum and St James's Theatre was an influential figure in London. – iridescent 2 14:42, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
There is also the potential to propose him as the Portal's biography of the month! So, WP:London is also about people ... Kbthompson (talk) 15:34, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Category:Buildings and structures in Windsor and Maidenhead

Please forgive me putting this in what is almost certainly the wrong place - if anyone can divert to the right place it would be much appreciated.

AnomieBOT is currently tagging articles 'with WikiProject London based on membership in Category:Buildings and structures in Windsor and Maidenhead'. Given that RBWM isn't actually in Greater London, and as far as I can tell there isn't a similar tagging going on for buildings in (e.g.) Slough (if there was, it would suggest a wide definition of London), I think that Category:Buildings and structures in Windsor and Maidenhead must somehow have got wrongly listed as being in London. Can someone correct this please? I'd do it myself if only I knew where to look....

Many thanks Grblundell (talk) 09:45, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I would suspect it is because someone has added the category Category:River Thames to its parent category; and River Thames has a link to London ... I'll pass it on. There are always going to be some false positives in such a widespread exercise. Kbthompson (talk) 10:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Douglas Adams

I have nominated Douglas Adams for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Awadewit (talk) 16:25, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Coil (band)

I have conducted a reassessment of the above article as part of the GA Sweeps process. I am notifying you as the article has a banner for your project. I have found some serious concerns with the article which you can see at Talk:Coil (band)/GA1. I have de-listed the article but it can be brought back to WP:GAN when fixed. Thanks. Jezhotwells (talk) 17:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Historic mills in Greater London

I moved an article about historic mills in Greater London (List of windmills in Middlesex > List of windmills in Greater London) but it has sparked a debate here asking for it to return: Wikipedia_talk:MILLS#List_of_windmills_in_Middlesex MRSC (talk) 18:53, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

The Vine Street article, and the fact there are two London thoroughfares called "Vine Street"

I posted a discussion on the Talk:Vine Street, Westminster page. There are two thoroughfares in London called Vine Street;

  • the tiny, tiny one in Westminster near Piccadilly Circus
  • a longer one in Tower Hamlets, near Minories. One end is called Vine Street Crescent.

TWO QUESTIONS;

  • Why has only one street got an article, and why is it the least significant of the two roads?
  • How do we know which one is the one depicted on the Monopoly Board, surely it will be the latter?

Investigations would be appreciated. 86.158.164.15 (talk) 14:52, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Vine Street, W1 (e.g., the one in Westminster) is the "correct" one in terms of the Monopoly board. Other than the initial five places which are in the (then) suburbs, and the railway stations, the roads on the British monopoly board form a coherent route around Westminster. Look at the relative positions of Bow Street, (Great) Marlborough Street and Vine Street and things become clear. – iridescent 15:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Jean Charles de Menezes

The above article has this project's banner on its talk page. I have conducted a reassessment as part of the GA Sweeps process. I have found a large number of concerns with the article which you can see at Talk:Jean Charles de Menezes/GA1. I have de-listed the article. This decision may be challenged at WP:GAR or the article may be improved and re-nominated at WP:GAN. Thanks. Jezhotwells (talk) 19:05, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Task force

I would like to propose a task force. I want to get Bromley, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow, Hounslow, Kingston upon Thames, Ilford, Romford, Sutton, Uxbridge and Wood Green up to featured article status. These are all high-priority articles and it would be good to focus attention on them, perhaps developing a systematic approach we can apply to some of the other London district articles. Croydon is probably the most developed at the moment and I am currently doing some work on Romford. MRSC (talk) 08:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

This now exists here: Wikipedia:WikiProject London/London districts task force MRSC (talk) 15:17, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Population figures for locality articles

I'd like to form a consistent approach for adding population figures to London locality articles (including the infobox). There are some articles that have population figures for the ward the locality is in, or for a combination of wards if the place spreads out over more than one. This means our population figures are always going to be multiples of ~10,000 because the wards are drawn in order to have roughly equal numbers. I'm not sure if this is a problem? MRSC (talk) 15:04, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Cleopatra's Kiosk

Can anyone see any reason not to AFD Cleopatra's Kiosk? Despite whatever RIBA might say, this is not "a tourist attraction in its own right", it's a stall outside Embankment tube station. – iridescent 20:01, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree entirely. — Hex (❝?!❞) 13:38, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
Interestingly we don't have a separate article for the needle. Paris does (Luxor Obelisk) but not New York (included with London and Paris in Cleopatra's Needle). Perhaps if this became Cleopatra's Needle (London) the article could talk about the needle mostly and mention the kiosk as an aside. MRSC (talk) 13:48, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
The kiosk isn't even particularly close to the obelisk - it's the t-shirt stand of Embankment tube station, underneath the new footbridge - and it has nothing in common with the obelisk other than the name. Including it in an article on the obelisk wouldn't make any more sense than including Savoy Hotel or TS Queen Mary, both of which are nearer to the obelisk. If the kiosk is merged with anything, it should be Hungerford Bridge or Embankment tube station - or someone could create Victoria Embankment Gardens as a catch-all for the assorted buildings and objects in the area. – iridescent 16:48, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Templates for deletion nomination of Template:Nearest Over

Template:Nearest Over has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page.

A couple of other LT related templates have also been nominated there. Thank you.Kbthompson (talk) 12:59, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Category:River Thames

This category has been added to Category:London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and Category:Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. I guess because of the "upon Thames" suffix. This is a bit too random for my liking. Should we add this category to all boroughs with River Thames frontage? MRSC (talk) 12:05, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd say no - those buildings which front onto the Thames should be in Category:Thames Path, a subcat of Category:River Thames. (Yes, I do realise there's a discrepancy between "should be" and "is".) – iridescent 12:08, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
I see that Category:River Thames has 200+ articles in it, so perhaps it needs to be broken down into something like "Settlements on the River Thames" etc. This would also give the opportunity to review what is in there. MRSC (talk) 12:24, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
A quick look-see shows an extremely vague and general category. Unless it's much more focused, I would suggest that it has little use ... I'm not even sure about 'Buildings and structures on the ...' and 'Settlements on the ...'; yes, more than a little random ... Kbthompson (talk) 13:10, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

GA Reassessment of London bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics

London bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 17:15, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

GA Reassessment of A215 road

A215 road has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 18:10, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

GA Reassessment of Charlton Athletic F.C.

Charlton Athletic F.C. has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 12:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Categories for localities in London boroughs

Is there any support for having our borough localities articles in a more descriptive category? MRSC (talk) 16:34, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

At one time they were (Neighbourhoods of [borough]); and a rather large, tedious and half-baked scheme merged them into the higher level. There seemed no appetite at the time for maintaining the distinction. Kbthompson (talk) 07:49, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
I looked that up and it only had very limited support. As I understand it category names should be descriptive of what they contain. Not sure if the best thing to do is initiate the change or go through CFD. It is a fairly big task. MRSC (talk) 18:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

London station article naming

See here: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London_Transport#London_station_article_naming MRSC (talk) 11:23, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I've requested a page move to stimulate further discussion, see Talk:London Paddington station#Page move MRSC (talk) 08:53, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Districts task force update

The first of these articles has been promoted to GA (Romford). Croydon is currently the only B-class article and the closest to GA standard. It needs looking over by an experienced editor to tighten the paragraphs and finalise the references. I'd rather look at a less well developed article next, so I'm thinking of maybe doing Bromley. MRSC (talk) 16:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

London weather

The GA review of Romford has highlighted the fact we don't add weather information to district articles, other than the main London article. I am personally of the view that in future we should add weather information to the borough articles as it would be a bit repetitive adding it to every single district article, especially where neighborouring areas have identical data. MRSC (talk) 13:27, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd (weakly) oppose that. Romford is a funny case, as it's to all extents and purposes a separate town that happens to have technically been part of Greater London administratively since 1965 (and is far enough from London to have a potentially differing climate). I find it very hard to imagine the circumstances when anyone would be looking for separate weather information for Islington or Lambeth, and I'm not even sure how one would go about writing it, since the Met Office don't break information down to that level. The modern boroughs are purely lines-on-a-map recent artificial constructs for the purpose of dividing ratepaying areas into 32 areas of roughly similar population, not distinctive areas as the districts are - while a New Yorker might self-identify as being from Brooklyn, or a Brummie as being from Solihull, it's unlikely anyone from Chiswick would describe themselves as from Hounslow, or that someone looking for information on Kilburn would think to look at London Borough of Camden. – iridescent 15:19, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
These were my initial thoughts, but it is a requirement of GA/FA to be broad in coverage. WP:GM, who have lots of good and featured article under their belt have been applying weather information to every district they put forward. If we are going to get articles up to that standard, we are going to have to accommodate this somehow. We can obviously link from Kilburn to Camden re: the weather. MRSC (talk) 16:14, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
I disagree with you there. WP:GM's area articles at most include one-liners like "The climate of Altrincham is generally temperate, with few extremes of temperature or weather. The mean temperature is slightly above average for the United Kingdom; whereas both annual rainfall and average hours of sunshine are slightly below the average for the UK", and some like Trafford (a recently promoted FA) don't mention the topic at all. While I can see the use for de facto towns like Romford, Pratts Bottom, Chessington etc I really can't see where one would get separate climate information for Haringey and Hackney, even in the unlikely event that there was the slightest difference between their climates. – iridescent 16:30, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
Ok. We don't really have to worry about it right now as we don't have any other district articles (and certainly none in the inner area) that are approaching GA/FA. We can return to this issue when it is more than a theoretic problem (which could be some time). MRSC (talk) 16:33, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
The biggest problem with weather data is finding a reliable source. The map here shows have far apart Met Office weather stations are. When there is no weather station nearby, I don't see that there's much that can be done. (MSN has weather stats but I'm sceptical of where they come from.) It would be useful information for counties, but Dorset at least doesn't have a Met Office weather station and the nearest one is in neighbouring Somerset. As Trafford (FA), City of Salford (GA), and Tameside (GA) demonstrate it's not necessary to include weather information. WP:UKCITIES, the guideline (rather than a binding policy) for writing about settlements in the UK states "[i]f local data is available, consider using Template:Climate chart". If you make the case to the reviewer that there is no appropriate data that can be included, that should settle the matter.
What is done in articles such as Sale and Cheadle Hulme (both recently promoted FAs) is to have one or two sentences on generalised climate of the area, based on the information from the nearest weather station, with the caveat that it's not specific to the town. It's not ideal, but it's one way round the problem. Nev1 (talk) 16:49, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
[Out] see, where I was chided for including it. I think there should be climate information at the borough level. A 'see' should deal with individual settlements/districts within the boro'. London is not quite homogeneous with regard to weather - I think there are about five official weather stations and they do publish the information. Details need to be templated for at most five places, is that a problem? Kbthompson (talk) 17:22, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
OK, I just went to the MetOffice site, and guess what. They've closed all the London weather stations - including Greenwich. The nearest active data is at here. Kbthompson (talk) 17:26, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
The airports must still have their weather stations, surely? – iridescent 17:27, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Can't see where that data collection is aggregated and published, but yes, surely ... Kbthompson (talk) 23:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Stanley Green FAC

Stanley Green, the "less passion less protein" man who walked up and down Oxford Street for 25 years, is up for FAC in case anyone is willing to review it. See here. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 04:02, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Remarkable. I recall seeing Green on his mission in the 80s when I was a boy.... I wonder if Phil Howard will get a featured article a few decades from now? — Hex (❝?!❞) 08:10, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
I will add him as a see also. :) SlimVirgin talk|contribs 08:37, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

England at GAC!

Alerting all WikiProject London members that England is undergoing a reveiw for WP:GA status. Things you can help with are listed here. Please help if you can... England expects that every man will do his duty.... :) --Jza84 |  Talk  15:07, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

While it makes instant and obvious sense to anyone who knows the regions of England, you have to admit that "Most of England is lowland ... except in the North and the South" will draw odd looks from our colonial brethren. Annoyingly, I can't even think of a good way to rephrase it. – iridescent 15:51, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Upton

I am slightly confused about Upton in London and was wondering if anyone here knows about the place or has suggestions about what to do. Until today Upton, London was an article about an area called Upton in the London Borough of Bexley. It appears on the template for Bexley as a district, although the article talks about it in the past tense (was an area in.. etc unlike the other places listed as districts for Bexley)

Anyway today the article was moved to Upton, Bexley and Upton, London turned into a disam page because there is also a place called Upton in the London Borough of Newham. My first thought was Upton simply meant Upton Park in Newham which already has an article, but after talking with MRSC and looking at the maps it appears that there is a seperate place called Upton in Newham right next to Upton park. I checked the postcodes for a street in the area and its E7, but the Upton Park article only mentions E6 and E13. So either the stub at Upton Park is missing information, or we are missing a stub/article for Upton, Newham. Any thoughts please? I dont live in London so no idea on this area. BritishWatcher (talk) 20:42, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Although it's a historic place-name, and still appears in the A-Z, I'm not convinced anyone has called it "Upton", as opposed to "West Ham" or "the southern end of Forest Gate" for decades if not centuries. It would be impossible to write a viable article above the Southborough, Bromley level, anyway, as there is literally nothing there except terrace houses - no parks, no shops, no places of interest; the most you could say about the place is that Elizabeth Fry lived there for a while (and even she called it "West Ham"). – iridescent 21:42, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
see. It was the site of Upton House. "The botanical gardens of John Fothergill ...". My inclination is that "Upton House (West Ham)" -> "West Ham Park", as a note on the site's prior history. That "Upton" goes back where it belongs, and that "Upton (disambiguation)" explain the variants. As far as I am aware, Upton Park has nothing to do with Upton House, and is to do with the name of the football field - and by extension, the tube station. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 17:10, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
From a quick look at various maps (and from the OS data) it looks like Upton was in West Ham parish and Upton Park is/was in East Ham. I don't have a nice source explicitly stating this though, but it might exist. MRSC (talk) 13:26, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
The boundary was 'Green Street' - 'Upton' (house) was to the west of this - ie West Ham; 'Upton Park' to the east - hence East Ham. The station is on the west side of Green Street. Kbthompson (talk) 14:53, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Article Alerts

What happened to Article Alerts? Those were really handy. – iridescent 15:32, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

When MRSC revamped the project page in August (nice job by the way, it looks much better), it seems the template that tells the bot to run was deleted. This might have been because the bot wasn't running the first half of August and the template was just cluttering up the place.I've re-added the necessary template on the main project page as is suggested in the template documentation, so hopefully the bot should get round to WP:London soon. Nev1 (talk) 15:46, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
D'oh. I knew I would break something, although I thought it would probably be the auto archiving. MRSC (talk) 13:23, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
Still needs a fix - current parameter is a redirect to here. Kbthompson (talk) 08:01, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

East London

Hi, just doing my bi-annual clearout of this disambiguation page. Hit a snag.

  1. Used to be East London -> East London, England (mostly) [Now] -> East (London sub region)
  2. Reading the section on sub-regions, I notice they were changed in 2008. There is no 'East London sub-region'; its members were divided between 'North (etc)' and 'North-east (etc)'.

Basically, what I'm doing is no longer a simple AWB pass. We potentially have a big fix to do.

  1. All places in east London -> north-east London (except Hackney -> north)
  2. Central London - should include a definition of the Central (London sub region) (2004-2008) - but has been abolished in the 2008 amendment to the London plan, and the central district scattered to the periphery. The article should be updated to reflect the 'official' planning situation and the 'informal' defn (that's already largely there)
  3. South divides between SE and SW (most articles kind of make that distinction)
  4. West just adds K&C (from central) - but most people would continue to consider most of the district as informally central ...

Any thoughts? Strategy for roll out? Leave it until City Hall changes it back? All the best Kbthompson (talk) 09:08, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest we no longer link locality articles to sub regions and I have been removing the links as I edit articles (although leaving in the geographic description). MRSC (talk) 14:08, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I think it's useful in some contexts - potentially providing background to the locality. I don't think you'll ever stop editors linking to it - and at the moment the links - they will add - point to redirects at best, and more likely disambiguation. Better to link them to the 'official designation' for the district. Kbthompson (talk) 14:56, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I should press on and write the other sub regions. I did two and then got distracted. Definitely agree that if we should be pointing to anything, it should be the official sub regions. MRSC (talk) 15:43, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Marshalsea

In case there's any interest, Marshalsea is up for FA status. Please see here. Cheers, SlimVirgin talk|contribs 10:33, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I am going to request a list of our project's most regularly viewed pages from here. MRSC (talk) 13:16, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that; I noticed that and thought it would be a good idea ... Kbthompson (talk) 08:02, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Very, very early results are available here. I think it will take another full month before Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Popular pages becomes active. MRSC (talk) 08:24, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Photos required in Bromley

I am about to do some major work on Bromley and then I realised we have no photographs. Does anyone have anything suitable to save me a trip? Also, I understand you can bring over suitably licensed photographs from flickr. Does anyone have any understanding of how this works as I am rubbish at photo licensing issues. MRSC (talk) 08:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry - I don't go sarf of the river, at any time .... 8^)
You will need to:
  1. link to original image
  2. credit photographer and link to them if image not linked
  3. link to photographer's copyright statement - many are creative commons licenses ... avoid any where 'rights are reserved'.
  4. This process may need to be stamped 'verified by admin' - in which case, feel free.
  5. You may also wish to read WP:Upload/Flickr; which suggest uploading direct to commons. hth Kbthompson (talk) 08:43, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. That is just the sort of guide I need! MRSC (talk) 10:48, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

A lighthouse in London?

This photo is of a building adjacent to King's Cross Station (just across the road). Is this a London lighthouse? Wikimapia have this down as the "London Oyster House" [1]; there's a bit more info by the same author at [2]. As I understand it, it's a bit of a local mystery - no-one knows why it's there, or what exactly it was. Does anyone know anything about this building? Do we have an article on this - and if not, should we? Mike Peel (talk) 20:04, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

The lighthouse is nothing to do with it being a former oyster shop; that's hype from the developers, it was there long before. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about it; it's just an ornament on the parade of shops next to the original Kings Cross tube station. – iridescent 19:32, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Jewish Museum (London)

Could somebody take a look at this?

The museum's press officer has replaced our existing article with a verbatim dump of text from the museum's website.

There is probably material there that should be usefully be kept and added to what we have already, but for a couple of reasons I'd prefer not to get involved myself. Jheald (talk) 20:21, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Removing a few references in the process and possibly creating copyright violation. I've reverted, but as you say, there may be some text worth paraphrasing. MRSC (talk) 15:30, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Westminster disambiguation

Hello, I'm proposing some alterations to how we deal with cities and places within cities that share its name. The proposal, found at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_England#City_disambiguation, includes Westminster and the City of Westminster. I'm really hoping to gain a broad consensus for this proposal, and the rationale why is found at WP:ENGLAND too. Comments are welcome. --Jza84 |  Talk  10:49, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

A preliminary agreement seems to have been reached there; and I've been trying to properly direct some of the links to Westminster to more specific links - such as : Abbey, Parliament, etc - moving clear addresses to City of ..., etc. Hopefully I've got most of it right; I've left them where there is some lack of clarity in historical articles as to whether they're refering to the Abbey, or the Palace. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 19:10, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
OK, I did about 1500 out of 2300 references to Westminster before my computer rebooted itself because it's update Wednesday! Most were pretty straightforward. There's about 800 left to check - but I've lost me place! Kbthompson (talk) 09:39, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Restoration spectacular

Whilst i don't think i am good at reviewing, i have left some concerns at Talk:Restoration spectacular#4 years on. Simply south (talk) 14:47, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

North West London

Looks like a few articles in this area are getting some bias introduced.

Worth keeping an eye on these and any others. MRSC (talk) 16:20, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

London FA

Conversation about a collaboration to get London to FA, Talk:London#Featured article. MRSC (talk) 06:00, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Categories

Put a comment here Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London/Categories#Listed_buildings but not sure if anyone looks at it....--Lidos (talk) 10:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Replied there. MRSC (talk) 21:15, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Thanks.--Lidos (talk) 08:11, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Anyone live near Richmond Library?

Resolved

I'm trying to get hold of a journal article, and the London Libraries Consortium Library Catalogue says that it's only held in Richmond Reference Library and isn't for loan. Lack of the journal article is currently scuppering an FAC. Can anyone help, and win my eternal gratitude? BencherliteTalk 10:20, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject London to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 04:17, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Here is a summary of what I think can be learned from this list:
  1. London (/Top)
  2. Arsenal F.C. (/Mid)
  3. Chelsea F.C. (/Mid)
  4. 2012 Summer Olympics (/Top)
  5. Tottenham Hotspur F.C. (/High)
  6. BBC (/High)
  7. Wembley Stadium (/Top)
  8. West Ham United F.C. (/Mid)
  9. London Underground (/Top)
  10. Tower of London (/Top)
  11. Big Ben (/Top)
  12. London Heathrow Airport (/Top)
  13. British Airways (/High)
  14. Buckingham Palace (/Top)
  15. Fulham F.C. (/Mid)
  16. River Thames (/Top)
  17. Greenwich Mean Time (/Mid)
  18. HSBC (/Mid)
  19. London Eye (/Top)
  • Most popular administrative division pages:
  1. City of London (/Top)
  2. Greater London (/Top)
  3. City of Westminster (/Top)
  4. Middlesex (/Mid)
  • Most popular roads and squares pages:
  1. Trafalgar Square (/Top)
  2. Piccadilly Circus (/High)
  3. Brick Lane (/Mid)
  4. Savile Row (/Mid)
  5. Whitehall (/High)
  • Most popular locality pages:
  1. Soho (/Mid)
  2. Canary Wharf (/High)
  3. Greenwich (/High)
  4. Notting Hill (/Mid)
  5. Whitechapel (/Mid)
  6. East End of London (/High)
  7. Covent Garden (/High)
  8. Brixton (/Mid)
  9. Dagenham (/Mid)
  10. Hampstead (/Mid)
  11. Camden Town (/Mid)
  12. Chelsea, London (/Mid)

I'm going to use this information to prioritise locality articles. It might be worth doing thematic reviews for other areas, such as buildings and structures or whatever we happen to be interested in. MRSC (talk) 09:20, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Cumberland Market

Hello. I work at The Crown Estate, and I was looking at the Wikipedia page about Cumberland Market today.

In the section on "Decline", it says " ... and in 1952, the Crown Commissioners sold the 32 acres ... " . I should point out that The Crown Commissioners administer the Legal system in Scotland, and are quite different to The Crown Estate Commissioners". This section also gives the impression that The Crown Estate sold ALL of its interests in Cumberland Market at this time, which is not true. It still owns a large amount of properties there (for example, all the buildings surrounding the allotment gardens, which used to be the canal basin.

I am really new at this, and wondered if someone could edit it.

Andrew 85.158.139.100 (talk) 12:33, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for contacting us. I have copied your message to Talk:Cumberland Market and will reply there. MRSC (talk) 13:40, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Ward populations

I have added a table of ward populations for all of Greater London. It can be found at {{London ward populations}}. Using the ONS coding system it is possible to call for the ward population, ward name and name of borough. The year and citation can also be called for. There are a variety of ways this data could be used, such as a table on a London borough article or added to infoboxes. MRSC (talk) 13:57, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Rising East

Hi all, i'm researching Rising East to try to grow the article. The editor is a current lecturer of mine, so i'm not sure if that creates a COI, what i could do is post my intended updated content on the talk page of the article first and then get some opinions as to whether that content is suitable. Let me know what you think, Cheers, Darigan (talk) 16:01, 5 November 2009 (UTC)p.s., i think i might have something within the next few days-ish (nothin yet) Darigan (talk) 16:06, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Renaming London sub-categories to remove "&"

There is currently a proposal here to remove occurrences of "&" from London sub-category names. To my mind, it seems non-controversial; your mileage may vary. Hopefully, the renaming can be done by a bot. Kbthompson (talk) 12:26, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. I didn't realise we still had some categorised this way and support the renaming. I notice someone has suggested adding "London Borough of" to categories. I think this would be unnecessarily redundant. MRSC (talk) 10:02, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
Uhmm.. Take for example Category:Streets in Kensington and Chelsea. If it would be unnecessarily redundant to add the full title here: then what if someone was to create a cat (and god forbid that they don’t) named Category:Streets in Ealing. Do you think that cat will be for the streets in the town of Ealing, or perhaps for the streets in the postal town of Ealing (W5), or for all the streets in The London Borough of Ealing?--Aspro (talk) 16:14, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
I think you are right that the category should not be created. We made a decision a while back to subdivide borough categories by feature rather than increasingly granular and ambiguously defined localities. MRSC (talk) 16:29, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Category renaming debate

There is a category renaming debate relevant to this WikiProject at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 November 26#Kensington_and_Chelsea. Hiding T 12:33, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

And another one at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 November 26#Barking_and_Dagenham. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:35, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
Plus one more at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 November 26#Barking_and_Dagenham. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:19, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

One Place

The audit commission's new website went live today. A lot of it is couched in 'aspirational speak' - but there is useful information in there - about the performance of councils and their local context. One of our own 'aspirations' should be to add summary detail on council performance to each borough article; and to mine the summary context for referenced content on the 'nature' of the borough. Of particular note are the 'green flags' for excellence, and the 'red flags' for poor performance.

The content is nowhere near as detailed as the actual audit commission reports; or the borough's annual reports - which remain useful sources, where available. (NB: care should always be taken in quoting from council annual reports!). Where crime is mentioned, it should always reference the local information from the Met Police authority - although I've had trouble identifying the comparative tables, which are probably the most useful. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 10:27, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

London map

FYI. A change was made to the image used for {{Location map United Kingdom Greater London}} which I reverted. MRSC (talk) 08:25, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

That's OK. I just think the background is a little too dark... Dr. Blofeld White cat 15:20, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

These maps cover all of England and are widely used via {{Infobox UK place}}. Any style changes should be consistently applied. Wikipedia:WikiProject UK geography is probably a good place to start a discussion about changes. Personally I am not that fond of the yellowish colour, but there may be a cartographic convention I don't know about. The "brighter" alternative IMO washed out details of the built up area and left only the borough boundaries. MRSC (talk) 16:02, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Lesnes Abbey

Does anyone know how to pronounce the name Lesnes Abbey, which has been tagged as needing pronunciation? Thanks in advance Lfh (talk) 13:04, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

I have always pronounced both syllables to rhyme with "less". MRSC (talk) 14:29, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
That's interesting, I would have thought "less-nəss" (with the second vowel a schwa like in "highness") more likely. I wonder if we can get a source. Lfh (talk) 20:40, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

West London

I redirected a month-old recreation of West London to West (London sub region). I don't believe we have any place for these vaguely defined area articles and they invariably do little more than duplicate/replace locality and borough articles. At least with the official sub regions we have published sources and data for the articles. MRSC (talk) 14:20, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

V for Vendetta (film) FAR

I have nominated V for Vendetta (film) for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 20:36, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Woodford has become disambiguation page (NOT)

Woodford has been moved to Woodford, London - without discussion. If this has become policy, then we can look forward to a lot of fixes being needed in the London area. This move has created several hundred links to a disambiguation page. I'm a bit tied up in real life for the foreseeable future; so anyone fancy fixing them - or, making an argument for the retention of the prior setup? Ah, it's back ... can we look forward to flip-flopping? Kbthompson (talk) 18:58, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Suggest WP:BRD as the edit summary "moving to disambig, like rest of places with the same name" appears to show a misunderstanding of disambiguation. MRSC (talk) 11:41, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Category:London organisations

I have proposed that Category:London organisations be speedily renamed to Category:Organisations based in London, as per the convention of Category:Organisations based in England and Category:Organisations based in the United Kingdom. If anyone objects, please note your objection at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Speedy#Add_requests_for_speedy_renaming_here and the proposal will be taken to a full WP:CFD debate. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:21, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

That makes sense. Cheers and seasons greetings to one and all. Kbthompson (talk) 10:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Requested images

I would like to request a photo of the BP headquarters in London. Should I start a "requested images" area on the main page of this project? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 07:13, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

You can add it to the existing list at Call for Editors page. I thought adding the {{photoreq}} also places it in a 'London' cat for missing pix - but can't find it at the moment - anyone else know? cheers Kbthompson (talk) 08:12, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
Every time I want to use that template I've forgotten how it works. The category is here: Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in London. MRSC (talk) 19:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Or, use the photo we already have, which doesn't show much of the building but is at least vaguely artistic. You do know this is possibly the most nondescript building on the planet? – iridescent 00:37, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
Oh, is that what that building is? Had one in my photo library, put a copy on Commons for you Alex Muller 15:04, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Category:People from Woodford

Following the move of Woodford to Woodford, London (see RM the discussion), I have proposed a renaming Category:People from Woodford to Category:People from Woodford, London so that category and article match. See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 January_2#Category:People_from_Woodford. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:40, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I think you can speedy that as one pretty much follows the other. MRSC (talk) 13:08, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
You also promised to fix the several hundred links to a DAB page that have now been created by the move. Thanks Kbthompson (talk) 13:51, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
Indeed I did, and it's already done. In these edits I disambiguated lots of them, and the remaining links appear to me to be those generated by the templates which refer to Woodford. I disambiguated the template links first, but in my experience it can take up to 3 days for the articles to be purged to reflect changes to the templates. I'll see what's left when that's done. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:17, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for that, I'll purge me'cache .... Kbthompson (talk) 15:18, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Phil Collins FAR

I have nominated Phil Collins for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:52, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Please could people look at WT:TWP#Removal of WikiProject London Transport as a sub-project or part of the banner? Simply south (talk) 16:12, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

It has been proposed that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (film) be renamed and moved to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007 film). Opinions are needed here. BOVINEBOY2008 :) 14:20, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Newsletter subscription

Another issue to be addressed is, please could people indicate in the next month at the feedback page, my talk page or in this discussion whether they still want to recieve issues of the metro. A lot of newsletters seem to be going to redundant pages. Simply south (talk) 20:14, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Charlie Chaplin GA Review

This project has a declared interest in the Charlie Chaplin article, which is one our most important and most viewed articles. It is being reviewed to see if it matches the criteria for a WP:Good Article. Among other issues it is poorly sourced. The review has been put on hold for seven days to allow time for the article to be sourced. Reference sources can be found on the "Find sources" notice on the talkpage. Further comments can be found at Talk:Charlie Chaplin/GA1. If you feel that Charlie Chaplin doesn't quite match this project's interests, please let me know, and I will remove the project tag from the talkpage. SilkTork *YES! 08:58, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Category:River Thames

In August 2009 I highlighted that this was a very large category containing 200+ members ranging from settlements, crossings, buildings etc. I've gone through the category and put all members into subcategories. One of these categories is Category:Settlements on the River Thames. Within that is the (very incomplete) Category:Districts of London on the River Thames. As I see it, we have two options:

  1. Expand Category:Districts of London on the River Thames to include every river-facing district of London; or
  2. Delete the category and place the London article in Category:Settlements on the River Thames.

Any thoughts? MRSC (talk) 10:43, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

I've discovered some precedent for this Category:River settlements, so I think I will probably expand it for completeness. MRSC (talk) 16:28, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

www.london.gov.uk

A recent update of the GLA website has caused the location of some documents to be updated, as in this example:

I might try to use WP:AWB to find and correct some of these, if I can. Note this only works for documents (PDF/RTF etc) not webpages. Not sure where exactly the press releases have gone. MRSC (talk) 07:58, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Note that documents with URLs starting http://www.london.gov.uk/thelondonplan/ have not been updated. MRSC (talk) 08:48, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Charlotte Gainsbourg

I saw that Charlotte Gainsbourg is tagged by WikiProject London. Her only connection to London as far as I know and as far as testified to by the article is that she was born there. Unless this project indiscriminately tags articles of everybody who was born in London, I'd recommend to remove the project tag from that article. Debresser (talk) 15:52, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that was the result of an 'auto tagging' run following the category tree 'people from London by borough'. There are important biographies that should be tagged; but, as you say, this is probably not one of them. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 16:52, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. Debresser (talk) 17:19, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Category:Categories by London borough

Spurred on by a recent CFD, I added the lead categories to the WP:WikiProject London/Categories page. I identified a number of cases where entries weren't in the above nomenclature-category tree. I amended where I could, and have listed three for CFD at CFD February 22. Please feel free to correct any of my errors and omissions; and do please comment at the CFD. Thanks Kbthompson (talk) 16:44, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Good idea. You might want to merge the three into one nomination. MRSC (talk) 19:08, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
I also added a new tree - Category:Former houses of London by borough - basically, these demolished structures were formerly lumped in with the remaining ones. There are enough of them. Probably confusing to conflate them. HTH

Speedbird House

Is this image on Flickr that of the Speedbird House? http://www.flickr.com/photos/15218213@N06/2787638135

If so I am going to ask this person if he would like to relicense it. It would be good for the BOAC and British Airways articles. WhisperToMe (talk) 00:57, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

One Canada Square

Throughout late 2008 and 2009, the One Canada Square article has been dramatically reduced to a stub, even though it is supposed to be a B-class article. The London WikiProject, however, rated this as Start-class. In July 2008, it has reached its peak of over 50,000 bytes, possibly nearing 60,000 at times. But afterwards, significant portions of the article started getting removed and now the article has only 3,500 bytes as of January 2010. The primary reason for the content removal is that several editors called much of the info "needless" and "unencyclopedic". An very short article should not be given B-class status. The user Towerbaby suggested that there should be a complete rewrite of this article and I agreed with him. The rewrite should involve restoring the removed content. The current revision looks like it's in the Simple English Wikipedia. None of the articles about the other buildings in Canary Wharf have received this treatment. I hope some Wikipedians in the London are will help me in the rebuilding effort in this article. Jim856796 (talk) 06:33, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Good luck with the article. Have a look at BankWest Tower. That is a WP:GA class article about a tall building and will give some guidance about what is suitable to include. MRSC (talk) 15:48, 28 February 2010 (UTC)
I added three sentences to the One Canada Square article. What other facts should be recovered from the drastic content removal? Jim856796 (talk) 07:22, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Churches

Is there a naming convention established for churches? MRSC (talk) 08:24, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I think we generally follow the 'official name of the church' - ie what the diocese calls it. They do seem to be of the form dedication, place which should disambiguate most cases (two St Mary's in Stoke Newington; two St John's in Hackney; etc}. I'm not aware of any other constraint. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 17:03, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

I see both Church of Dedication, Place and Dedication Church, Place used and wondered if there was any convention behind it. I think it is most likely following what the common name used by the church itself or other sources. MRSC (talk)

These changes were made yesterday. Instead of being sorted by dedication; some - but not all - churches are now sorted by a mixture of street (e.g. Bedford Row), parish (Kennington) and place (Garlickhythe). My inclination is to mass revert, but they do appear to be made in GF. Thoughts, anyone? Kbthompson (talk) 10:56, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
I reverted them ... in the end, it isn't a consistent taxonomy; and to some extent, the 'churches in london borough' category provides a geographical distinction.
I think most modern parishes have 3-6 churches - and as parishes were a forerunner of the civil administration, do not tend to cross borough boundaries. It may be worthwhile listifying the parishes by diocese (eg Diocese of London, Diocese of Chelmsford - covering churches east of the Lee). Ah, they're organised by deanery ...
There's a project in there for someone! HTH Kbthompson (talk) 10:39, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
I've added List of churches in the Diocese of London - of necessity, it's a bit of a mess; as we don't have a lot of the outer London churches filled in. I think it's quite a useful list .... HTH Kbthompson (talk) 14:30, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

People from <here>

I've occasionally been working on the (sometimes lengthy) unreferenced lists of people that get added to locality articles. Here is the process I have followed:

  1. Remove the lists from the locality article pages and move to borough wide list articles (such as List of people from Barking and Dagenham)
  2. Place a link to the list on locality article pages (if there is nowhere obvious I put it in "See also")
  3. Move all unreferenced entries to the talk page of the list article (this is sometimes the entire list)
  4. Add entries back in, each with a reference (ticking off on the talk page list when each is done)
  5. Zero tolerance to new entries without references: they get moved to the talk page with a polite note asking for references

This seems to work and has been fairly easy to maintain. Although there are still quite a few boroughs left to do. MRSC (talk) 07:13, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

The one issue I can foresee is with places that don't easily divide into borough boundaries; someone from Kilburn or Chiswick, for instance, could easily be from any of three different local authority areas and it's not always obvious which one. For instance, George Michael and Geri Halliwell live virtually across the road from each other in Highgate, but because of the borough boundary Michael lives in Camden and Halliwell lives in Haringey. It's one of those no-right-answer issues, and I suspect current boroughs are the only way to go without endless disputes, but it will lead to some odd results. (The Haringey list, lumping Highgate, Tottenham and Muswell Hill together, will I suspect produce some very strange combinations.) – iridescent 09:47, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
I did suggest before that List of people from Southwark is the kind of quality we're aiming for - notice there, it does make the association with specific districts within the borough. I'm quite impressed with that list - although, I think it still needs careful referencing.
I had a go with List of people from Hackney, but as you can see it's incompletely converted to that format - it's quite time consuming. Enforcing referencing is going to be quite difficult! Kbthompson (talk) 10:09, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) GA Review

I have reviewed 30 St Mary Axe if it qualifies as a Good Article and have found several issues, which I have detailed here. Since the article falls under the scope of this WikiProject, I thought you would be interested in contributing to help the article reach GA status. Elekhh (talk) 05:17, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Assessment

Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Assessment appears to be broken. Not sure how to fix, or who to call. MRSC (talk) 07:52, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

The problem is not unique to this project as all tables of this type are broken. It appears that the User:WP 1.0 bot, which updates the tables, failed when it ran early this morning (see list of edits here). The place to report it is User_talk:CBM, although the bot should rerun shortly and hopefully the problem will be fixed then. --DavidCane (talk) 23:09, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
In the meantime, I've reverted the bot edit that broke the table.--DavidCane (talk) 23:15, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

GA Review of Akmal Shaikh on hold

The GA review of the Akmal Shaikh article, which is tagged as being within the scope of this project, has been on hold for over 30 days. It is near to being passed, but the Akmal_Shaikh#Reaction section needs editing to reduce the amount of direct quotation as per Wikipedia:Quotations, and also to be trimmed in general to meet GA criteria 3(b): "stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail". Any assistance in this matter would be appreciated. See Talk:Akmal Shaikh/GA1 for more detail. (If you feel that the article does not fall under the scope of this project, please remove the project tag from the article talkpage). SilkTork *YES! 10:37, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

The article has now passed. As the article does not fall under the scope of this project, the project tag has been removed from the article talkpage. SilkTork *YES! 14:01, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Ruislip Lido

I have tidied up this article, following Hillingdon Council's £1.5 million investment plans, just announced.--Lidos (talk) 09:41, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Input requested: SE postcode area

Talk:SE_postcode_area#Redirects. Thanks. MRSC (talk) 08:07, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

See also Talk:WC_postcode_area#WC1. MRSC (talk) 11:35, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Clean up required

I created Category:London-related articles requiring clean-up. To place an article in the category add clean-up=yes to the WikiProject banner. The main reason I created this was that I often find articles with Manual of Style and layout problems, but I either don't have the time or inclination to do the clean up there and then, but might want to come back later or alert other interested editors. I found Category:London articles needing expert attention which may be of interest. I've posted links to the main project pages. MRSC (talk) 17:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

British Museum Wikipedian in Residence

Dear all,
Just this week the British Museum and I have confirmed a project that will be taking place in June this year - they will be letting me come on-site as an official "Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence". You can read all the details about the project (including project ideas and CoI stuff) here: http://www.wittylama.com/2010/03/the-british-museum-and-me/

As you can probably Imagine I'm personally thrilled to be able to do this but more importantly I think it demonstrates a great investment of good-will on their behalf. If we can make this pilot project work well then working with the BM and other museums worldwide in a free-culture way will become increasingly productive. Further, it's important for me to stress that this is not about me "owning" BM articles, but about me being a resource that you can use, and also as an advocate for the "wiki way" of doing things inside the organisation. If this pilot goes well, they may end up making the collaboration a more permanent thing.

So, there's three specific things I thought I'd mention/ask:

  1. I'm trying to organise a "behind the scenes" guided tour of the museum and "meet the curators" session for interested Wikipedians in the first week of June. Keep that free in your diary if you're in London!
  2. If you've got particular things you'd like to do on-wiki (or IRL) related to the BM, please tell me and maybe we can work together or I could put you in touch with the right curator.
  3. What do you think about creating Wikipedia:WikiProject British Museum (as a sub/sister wikiproject to this one and to Wikiproject Museums) in order to undertake an article assessment and also to be an HQ for future work? One of the best measures of success will be if we can show them an article assessment (like the one at this wikiproject, but specific to BM-related articles) and show how it has improved over time.

Sincerely, Witty Lama 05:07, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

No opinion on points 1 & 2. Point 3 I think has no chance; since Cari's semi-retirement WP:MUSEUMS itself is essentially dead, and certainly couldn't sustain a subproject. I suspect the number of people with an interest in the BM per se is minimal; people are interested in the Greeks, the Saxons, the Egyptians etc and some of the artefacts happen to be in the BM, but the BM doesn't have a "core audience" in the sense that the London Transport Museum, the Imperial War Museum, or even the V&A, have.
(I have to say, I've read both the above and your blog post, and I honestly can't understand what's actually going on here; it seems you're promising things you can't possibly deliver unless you're actually planning to get the museum staff to write articles about themselves, which opens a huge can of COI worms; having a 'Wikipedian in residence' isn't going to increase the number of people here with an interest in items in the BM collection unless you're going to be handing out "please join Wikipedia!" flyers to museum-goers. What does Liam’s underlying task will be to be to build a relationship between the Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities [...] these will include: creating or expanding existing articles about notable items or subjects of specific relevance to the collection and the Museum’s expertise; supporting Wikipedians already editing articles related to the British Museum both locally and internationally; and working with Museum staff to explain Wikipedia’s practices and how they might be able to contribute directly actually mean, and how does it differ from what got Greg Kohs banned?) – iridescent 15:54, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Clearly, a conflict of interest is a large potential problem here. Promoting the British Museum is a laudable aim, but close consideration will need to be given to any submissions from Museum staff on the museum itself to ensure that a neutral point of view is maintained. If you're considering enlisting experts from the museum's staff to your initiative, it may be best to review wikipedia's existing articles on important items from the Museum's collection. Off the top of my head, Lewis Chessmen, Sutton Hoo, Rosetta Stone and Portland Vase are all subjects that could be improved by specialist input, and I'm sure there are an enormous number of other, more obscure but equally important, artefacts for which new articles could be created. It may be worth considering asking each of the museum's departments to nominate their favourite/most importance/most interesting artefact for which an article could be written. Or you could take Neil MacGregor's BBC/British Museum History of the world in 100 objects as a starting point and produce articles for items from that. Elgin Marbles is probably best left alone as a politically contentious subject. The other area where input could be useful would be getting special access to items for copyright-free photography. --DavidCane (talk) 20:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
I for one am thrilled about this unprecedented "Wikipedian in residence" collaboration - it's a great opportunity to get the museum community more involved in Wikipedia (especially in regards to Wikipedia:Advice for the cultural sector.) I have a hard time understanding why the WP community is so against welcoming museum professionals into the mix. Were we all not newbies once? Why would we not want experts here contributing to articles? I think it's a great opportunity to teach an important set of contributors how to use Wikipedia effectively. Looking forward to seeing what comes of it, and hoping the Wikipedian community can keep a positive, open mind through the process. HstryQT (talk) 01:33, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
Iridescent, I understand your concerns and believe me, I'm working very hard to make sure that both communities understand the particular requirements of the other. The role of 'volunteer Wikipedian in residence' is not for marketing/promoting the organisation on Wikipedia as I tried to point out in my blogpost. I will not be working on the article about the museum itself, its staff or politically sensitive topics related to the collection - and I will be teaching the interested staff about best-practice editing as per the WP:CoI "subject and culture sector professionals" guidelines which I helped to write.
It is, in effect, the same thing as any normal volunteer Wikipedia work - but from a position of being in-house at the institution. This would hopefully make normal wiki-work (writing stubs about notable object, neatening categories, finding references, expanding sections, engaging in talkpage discussions) that much more effective because I will be able to call upon the expertise in the organisation that much more easily: 1) because I'll be physically there and 2) becuase the non-technically minded staff will feel more comfortable responding to requestst for references from an 'official' person.
Equally, much of the role will be behind the scenes working with the staff of the organisation - running training sessions on wikiquette, wikimarkup, free-licensing, NPOV etc. as DavidCane suggested. This won't be visible to the rest of Wikipedia but think of it as undertaking the kind of outreach that a Wikimedia Chapter normally does, just within one organsation. I will be working to arrange events for Wikipedians to have special access to the collection/venue, maybe some free tickets to exhibitions/vouchers for the book shop to give away, and perhaps a content donation.
All in all, the idea is to try and get the British Museum (and the GLAM sector in general) to see Wikipedia as an important place for sharing knowledge about their collection and expertise - not as a promotional thing, but as part of the core business of being a public cultural organisation. Let me also reiterate - this is a 5 week pilot project to see how effective (or not) this idea is, and I will be doing this as a volunteer. Furthermore, I am not an en.wp administrator, so I have no more powers than anyone else to affect the encyclopedia.
I take your point about the viability of the Wikiproject and will re-think my approach on that. Does this allay any concerns/clarify what I intend to do?
Witty Lama 02:29, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Congrats, Witty Lama, on this post. I think it's a brilliant project and will look forward to what is produced during your stay. For whatever reason, the first first thing many WP editors seem to do when considering museum folks contributing to WP is the potential for making COI edits (I'm not just referencing this conversation above, but others). And I'm not here to debate that, but to point out that if the aim of WP is to get more folks from the cultural sector interested in editing WP, perhaps less discussion early on about COI would be a good thing. Many in the cultural sector can't help but be aware of their often subjective decision making process and the complexity of ethical decisions. Some are even very good at it. I'd argue that there is in fact great potential for museum folks to be excellent WP editors, but right now there doesn't seem to be many interested in doing it. I think your work has the potential to change this. Kind regards, --Richard McCoy (talk) 12:31, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

In my view the "subject and culture sector professionals" guidelines should be helpful to avoid COI. I understand DavidCane's concern, but if a large potential problem becomes reality, it's good to know there's an experienced Wikipedian already on site and able to help. --ThT (talk) 05:39, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects provides a list, updated daily, of unreferenced living people articles (BLPs) related to your project. There has been a lot of discussion recently about deleting these unreferenced articles, so it is important that these articles are referenced.

The unreferenced articles related to your project can be found at >>>Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Archive 6/Unreferenced BLPs<<<

If you do not want this wikiproject to participate, please add your project name to this list.

Thank you. Okip 00:39, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

We might like to consider if we really want to support biographies at all and detag some articles. London politicians and people involved in London's social history I am happy with. Famous people who just happen to be born or have lived in London, I'm less keen on. Project tagging is cheap however, so if there are voices that think we should retain all biographies in the project, fair enough. Some form of trimming however, might help us prioritise the remaining articles. Thoughts? MRSC (talk) 07:47, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
This bot only examines already tagged articles, it does NOT tag new articles. If your project is ever interested in tagging more articles with a bot, please see: Category talk:WikiProject tagging bots
Let me know if you have any questions.
Your project may consider subcategories instead of de-tagging, this is common in large wikiprojects.Okip 05:03, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Update: Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Archive 6/Unreferenced BLPs has been created. This list, which is updated by User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects daily, will allow your wikiproject to quickly identify unreferenced living person articles.
There maybe no or few articles on this new Unreferenced BLPs page. To increase the overall number of articles in your project with another bot, you can sign up for User:Xenobot_Mk_V#Instructions.
If you have any questions or concerns, visit User talk:DASHBot/Wikiprojects. Okip 22:55, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

London buses

We have some discussion of articles about London buses at places such as

As the bus is a notable feature of London, editors may be interested in these topics and discussions.

Colonel Warden (talk) 12:12, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

also:
Conversations:
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London_Transport#Update
Okip 15:27, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

General election

As you may be aware there is going to be a general election. The biggest impact on this project is that there are going to be some changes to constituencies. Some are split and merged, there are renamings and some seats that keep the same name are now made up of different wards. [3] [4] This will impact on locality article politics sections and infoboxes. MRSC (talk) 13:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I had a look at Hackney North and South; and they seemed to be correct. I added the ref in, as the wards were unreferenced. Looking at Barking and Dagenham opens up a can of worms. The whole political articles need to be restructured, with a lengthy table taken out of the article - moved to Politics of Barking and Dagenham? - and keyed to the ward results, which are there from 1998-2006 (only 2006 in Hackney). Some of this is already in Barking and Dagenham local elections.
So, there's three things to do:
  1. Remove retiring MPs from infoboxes when parliament is proroged. My understanding is that sitting MPs remain MPs for their constituency until the new parliament is called.
  2. Check the constituency information and correct in infoboxes; correct in articles.
  3. Define a suitable structure and content for grouping borough politics articles. Much seems to be there for LB B&D, just badly structured. Much seems to be missing from (say) LB Hackney; but it has a better structure.
The other thing we need to do is hold the line about links to political parties - ie ensure if one is mentioned all get a look in. Hm, thanks for bringing this up (I think), there's a lot of work there ... all the best Kbthompson (talk) 16:06, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
FYI :- London Borough elections. Candidates, etc ... results will appear after the count. Kbthompson (talk) 10:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
I emptied (and deleted) Category:Future parliamentary constituencies in London; the replaced constituencies I moved to Category:Parliamentary constituencies in London (historic). I got some of the dependencies on the replaced seats, but it would be good if other eyes could have a go from a different angle to confirm my omissions. Kbthompson (talk) 17:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
If you haven't already, you may want to ask BrownHairedGirl if she's planning to do these; in the past she's mass-updated the constituency articles (if you check the histories, about 75% of British and Irish MP and constituency articles were originally started by her), and may have a set of bulk templates just ready to drop into place once the figures are released. – iridescent 19:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

BP head office photo request

Hi! Has anyone yet photographed the BP head office at St. James's Square?

If one does not know which building it is, BP posted a copyrighted photograph here: http://www.bp.com/popuppreviewthreecol.do?categoryId=121&contentId=7003057

We need a Wikipedian to have a freely licensed photo of the building. BTW I checked Geograph and Flickr and couldn't find anything there. WhisperToMe (talk) 03:44, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

That photo looked as if it had been taken with an proper architectural camera. Even then, the horizontal convergence is extreme, so I looked on Google street view and sure enough the building is taller than the street is wide. Standing far enough back to get it all in will be impossible with and ordinary SLR. Even stitching several shots will be a bit of a challenge. I point this out, so that who ever goes, can plan the shot out before leaving home.--Aspro (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
I visited London, and so I took a photo of it (see File:BPheadoffice.JPG). If someone wants to take a higher quality photo or a better photo, he or she is welcome to get a better photo. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:47, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Backstage Pass tour of the British Museum - invitation.

Dear all,
Following the above thread about the British Museum, I'm pleased to announce the first real activity of the project - the BM is offering a "backstage pass" tour to any Wikimedians who wish to come along on Friday the 4th of June. Details below, copied from the Announcement by Mike Peel from Wikimedia UK. All London-based (or those who can make it there) Wikipedians are very welcome to come along. The crucial info and signup page is all here http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Backstage_Pass.
Sincerely, Witty Lama 23:35, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

From Mike:

Wikimedia UK and the British Museum would like to invite you to a very special event taking place from 11am on Friday 4 June - a "Backstage Pass" to the British Museum!

"You may have heard of the British Museum’s exciting initiative, a Wikipedian-in-Residence, with Liam Wyatt joining us in June to work with museum staff and Wikipedia editors to encourage mutual understanding and improve the encyclopaedia in areas relevant to the Museum’s collection. In order to kick off the residency, I’d like to invite you to join us at the British Museum Wikipedia Backstage Pass Day, on Friday 4 June.

In the morning we have arranged a number of behind-the-scenes and gallery tours for Wikipedians. Then, after lunch together in the staff canteen, we will get together in the Clore Education Centre to talk about collaboration, have a question and answer sessions, hear pitches for adding notable objects and developing featured articles, and hopefully also forming some relationships for future working, during and beyond Liam’s residency.

I hope you can come; there’s a lot of interest here at the Museum about it. I look forward to welcoming you to the Museum. Matthew Cock, Head of Web, the British Museum

This will be an exciting, incredibly important, and - most of all - fun event, so I would encourage you to attend if you are able to. You can find out more information about what will be happening, and sign up to say that you are coming, at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Backstage_Pass

Thanks, Mike Peel, on behalf of Wikimedia UK

The British Museum wants to give you money and help you write articles!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend the aforementioned Backstage Pass event at the British Museum. It was part of a wider project of engagement with Wikipedia (see WP:GLAM/BM) that has seen them take on a temporary Wikipedian In Residence, User:Witty lama. They see Wikipedia as sharing many of their aims, and they want to encourage involvement by Wikipedians with the museum, and vice versa. They have even offered 5 prizes of £100 at the BM shop for featured articles on BM topics - in any language.
Most Wikipedians probably don't know that the BM has curators dedicated to answering phone/email questions about their specialist areas, and most of their department libraries welcome visitors doing bona fide research - and they now seem to recognise that editing Wikipedia articles, especially about items in the BM's collections, counts for those purposes. I know that the first question most people will have is "Can we have images of all their stuff?" and I'd just ask people to be patient on that front. Let's just say that the museum are well aware of our hopes there, there are staff who see advantages to the museum in doing something, and it's being discussed at the highest level. On the other hand it's a very complex area that needs to be handled diplomatically. Literally in some cases - foreign governments can get very touchy about the dissemination of images of artifacts relating to their cultural history, and the museum needs to respect those concerns.
So for the moment the focus is on using the BM's huge resources of books, expertise etc to improve article content, and Londoners should be well-placed to visit the museum to do this. Hopefully we will also see articles being peer-reviewed by BM staff. Some of them are quite nervous about doing stuff on Wikipedia, a mixture of fear of professional ridicule, nervousness about the technical aspects, stories of rapid reverts of good-faith edits and just general culture shock - it's a very different world to the one they come from. So I'd ask everyone to look after any BM people that you see around the place, Wikipedia can gain a lot from their involvement and it would be a shame if they're discouraged for any reason. As I mentioned above, WP:GLAM/BM is the clearing house for the BM's involvement with Wikipedia, and I suggest that further questions/comments are directed there. Le Deluge (talk) 14:24, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

"They have even offered 5 prizes of £100 at the BM shop for featured articles on BM topics - in any language" – in what way does this differ from what got MyWikiBiz globally sitebanned? – iridescent 16:13, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
This is quite disheartening as this is the second time you've accused me of being the same as our troll-in-chief. MyWikiBiz was an attempt to use Wikipedia as an paid advertising platform for commercial organisations. The nascent relationship with the British Museum is an attempt to find ways that we can work together for mutual-benifit because we have, at base, the same ideals. I have taken pains to make sure that, whilst there is always a potential for CoI/Advertising/SPAM/Corruption (whatever you want to call it) that this risk is minimised by the nature of the way the project is run. In this instance, with the 100pound vouchers, there are some quite important points:
  • They are prizes/rewards for writing content on Wikipedia with no demand or expectation editorial control from the British Museum - they will accept Wikipedian's own definition of "Featured Quality".
  • There is no restriction on the subject matter or Wikipedia language edition other than it be an article of strong relationship to the museum, ideally an article about one of the "notable" collection objects. This is quite different to requiring that we write about the institution itself.
  • They are a knowledge-institution who have staff members who are world-experts in the specialist subjects who are willing to receive inquiries from Wikipedians to help improve free-culture content about those subject.
I hope this allays your concerns. Witty Lama 15:16, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Leaving aside the likelihood that you wrote this to be deliberately provocative, I think that the distinction in both intent and outcome is blindingly obvious to anyone bothering to expend more than a modicum of intelligence. One case involves paying an advertising agency to write about your company, with the intention of improving that company's business (with concessions made to editorial standards in order to skirt deletion or sanction). The other case involves a non-profit with whom we share a mission (to share knowledge), who generously offers incentives for contributing to our collection of knowledge. The result is high-quality, informative articles about objects contained in the British Museum which have real providence. It is my polite recommendation that you continue to contribute in areas in which you can make constructive contributions (like RfA) instead of making provocative comments in lieu of contributing to others. — Andrew Garrett • talk 12:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

File:King's Cross Fire.jpg

FYI, File:King's Cross Fire.jpg has been nominated for deletion. 70.29.212.131 (talk) 04:11, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Rewrite of Tower of London

I’ve rewritten the article, complete with references. I’ve got rid of a lot of trivial fluff and imbalance (especially towards recent events). There may be further additions – a paragraph here or there, perhaps some different images – but I expect this is the main body of the article. I’m going to let the dust settle for a couple of weeks before taking it to FAC; I’d like to see this get onto the front page eventually. If anyone has any comments, now would be the time to make them. Nev1 (talk) 09:16, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

By coincidence I'd already started work on the Tower's "twins" to the west - Baynard's Castle and Montfichet's Tower. You may be able to chip in some sources Nev1. It's taken me a wee while (and I've still got some work to do on the photos, but that's in hand) but I've now got them up. I'm not going for anything as fancy as FA, but I'll stick them into WP:GAR in a few weeks time. I don't suppose anyone can track down a non-watermarked version of William Herbert's lovely print of Baynard's Castle? Le Deluge (talk) 18:02, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Station naming conventions

From what I can see there are five naming conventions used for stations in London. x underground station, x railway station, x station (where the station is both underground and national rail), x DLR station and then the tram stop one. What I don't understand is that we have underground and DLR, but no distinction between national rail, overground and future crossrail stations. Should we not add these (Dalston Junction railway station to Dalston Junction overground station and Canary Wharf railway station to Canary Wharf crossrail station) or just use the catch all "station" for these?- J.Logan`t: 15:22, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (UK stations) is the standard used. London Overground is just a railway franchise like any other, and thus its stations are "Foo railway station" when they stand alone, and "Bar station" when they interchange with the Underground or DLR. – iridescent 20:00, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
Discussion is now at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (UK stations)#Overground. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:44, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

London: Its districts, divisions and regions

Initial section moved from User talk:MRSC

Hello MRSC. I'm contacting you with regards to the status of various regions and districts in London. I'm a student of urban planning and urbanity, and no doubt you are very well-learned on the subject. We tend to disagree somewhat on a few aspects of the regions and sub-divisions of London, disagreements which I would like to iron out for the benefit of the articles on Wikipedia.

From my understanding, the London Plan was introduced primarily for planning purposes. Hence, the sub-regions were introduced for these purposes. The sub-regions of the London plan, however, don't correspond to the informal sub-regions of London, and should not be confused as such. Example is as follows:

  • Since its inception, Islington has always been considered a North London borough. From the London Plan's creation in 2004, to 2008, it was in the Central sub-region, then from 2008 onwards in the North sub-region. Throughout this time, however, it has always been considered a North London borough. (It wasn't suddenly considered part of Central London between 2004-2008)

My point is, the newly created and constantly changing sub-regions of London, are very distinct from the informal divisions of London. Furthermore, it is the informal divisions of London which hold more 'power' as regions.

  • Stratford, Bow, Poplar etc. are always referred to as East London, despite currently being located in the 'north east sub-region'.
  • Between 2004-2008, places like Deptford and Battersea were always considered 'South London', despite being located in the 'east' and 'central' sub-regions respectively.

In Wikipedia articles, shouldn't it be the long-standing informal regions of London that take precedent over the arbitrary and constantly-changing London plan sub-regions? (eg: "Hackney Central, located in East London", as opposed to "Hackney Central, located in North London").

I would love to hear your feedback on this subject. Thanks, Mkimemia (talk) 10:07, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

End of section moved from User talk:MRSC
I say no; we should use whatever the current official usage is. Otherwise, it opens the door to eternal editwars over peoples' preferred wordings, particularly on the Essex and Kent periphery. (Starter for 10: without reference to the arbitrary official lines on the map, explain to a visiting Martian where North Ockendon, Highgate, Downe and Harefield are.) – iridescent 13:14, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
Hello. Interestingly I agree with much of what you say, in particular the key point The sub-regions of the London plan, however, don't correspond to the informal sub-regions of London. However, Wikipedia articles can only mirror facts that are made available in reliable published sources. Therefore we have articles about the London Plan and its sub regions, because we have published sources about that. We also have articles about SE postcode area etc. Crucially we do not present either as corresponding to informal subregions, and we do not attempt to define the informal regions either. This would be original research.
The fact you consider Homerton, Hackney Central, Dalston and Lower Clapton as "always referred to as 'East London'" is your own point of view. They can just as legitimately be described as North London. I would suggest the best practice is to use lowercase "north" "south" when describing these places. We very deliberately don't have an East London article or a West London article as there are no official definitions of either. South London and North London we have the boundary commission definitions which we can report.
Does that clear it up? MRSC (talk) 13:16, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
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