Talk:Hayfield

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[edit] Hayfield

(Copied from Dave.Dunford's talk page)

Dave, I feel we're about to enter an editing war regarding the Hayfield entry. To explain my position, I live in the village and I've been writing for Wikipedia since it first started. As a resident, I know many local people in Hayfield and am aware of most local references. I regularly walk the hills and know the OS map like the back of my hand. With this in mind:

• Kinder Scout: This is considered locally as a mountain. Ordnance Survey refer to it as a mountain. Local people are proud that it's a mountain! To edit the Hayfield entry to say otherwise is to insert your own point of view. Please don't do that. Yes, to all intents and purposes it's a big hill. But it's classed as a mountain, even if it's an unimpressive one :)

• Lantern Pike: I and many others have not heard of the term "outlier". Indeed, I had to get a real-life dictionary out to find out what the term means. Most online references (including Wikipedia's own) refer to "outlier" in the mathematic sense. Now that I do know what it means, I have to ask you provide evidence that Lantern Pike is actually an outlier. Maybe you can create an entry for Lantern Pike, and cite references? Anything else is, again, point of view editing. I really think you should change this reference in the Hayfield entry to something more easy understood, and more informal, as is the style of the rest of the Hayfield entry. 86.135.160.199

I won't get into a revert war if you insist on mountain—life's too short and the term too imprecise—but I do think you're wrong. I live in Hayfield too (we might even know each other in the real world!), I do a lot of walking too, and none of my hillwalking friends would refer to Kinder as a mountain. It's a hill. I don't believe it's really high enough to be considered a mountain, it's not prominent enough, and it's too flat (just not "mountainous" enough!). The mountain article discusses the lack of an exact definition, and suggests a minimum height of 2000 feet (610 metres), which Kinder just exceeds. I also think plateau is more informative and descriptive (and surely isn't an overly obscure word). I see the word mountain and I imagine a rocky peak like Snowdon or Mont Blanc—not a flat peaty plateau like Kinder. But as I say, if you feel strongly enough to change it back [Edit: I see you have], then I'll grit my teeth and leave it alone.

I'd dispute your statement "Ordnance Survey refer to it as a mountain" (do you have a citation?) See hill: "In the United Kingdom it is popularly believed that the Ordnance Survey defines a "mountain" as a peak greater than 1000 feet (305 meters) above sea level, a belief which forms the basis of the film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain; in fact the OS maintains no such distinction today. [1]" That link ([2]) bears examination: "The British Ordnance Survey once defined a mountain as having 1,000 feet of elevation and less was a hill, but the distinction was abandoned sometime in the 1920's...Broad agreement on such questions is essentially impossible, which is why there are no official feature classification standards." I read this as suggesting that in fact mountain is POV, whereas plateau is encyclopedic. I've got nothing against Kinder—in fact I love the place—and I don't feel that it's a slight to deny that it's a mountain.

I remembered the term "outlier" from geography lessons at school, as a (fairly loose) term meaning "a hill separated from a larger range"—but my dictionary (Collins English) indicates a more specific meaning that I wasn't aware of: "an outcrop of rocks that is entirely surrounded by older rocks". I've no idea whether this applies to Lantern Pike so I've changed it to something less specific.

An aside: if you're a long-term Wikipedian I do wonder why you don't use a handle...it might just be me, but I tend to be less respectful of edits made by anonymous users, and it makes responding to comments like this harder. As you've (apparently) edited the Hayfield article from three different IP addresses I didn't know where to respond, hence copying this here. Dave.Dunford 11:25, 19 September 2006 (UTC)