Talk:Wills Memorial Building

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Splash, thanks for the references and general improvements, including a judicious change from panegyric to objective description in the Features section (which I didn't write). It seems we're bumping into each other quite a bit.

However, I must take issue with a couple of your edits. I won't change them back until you've responded.

[edit] How to Describe H. O. Wills

Henry Overton Wills III was not the founder of Bristol University. A 'University College' was founded in 1876 by Rev. John Percival and Benjamin Jowett, and was granted its charter in 1909 following the efforts of many parties including Joseph Storrs Fry II, Richard Burdon Haldane (our second chancellor) and the Merchant Venturers. Certainly H. O. Wills provided a huge amount of money towards this, yet it is inaccurate to call him the university's founder. See [1]

It is far more accurate to call Henry Overton Wills Bristol University's first chancellor and a chief benefactor. That is in fact what I originally wrote.

Ok, yes. I struggled with how to refer to him, just because there was something...I didn't like about that sentence. But I think it's ok to change it back. -Splash^talk 00:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Construction and WWI

Also, saying that construction was suspended in 1916 due to the outbreak of WWI seems slightly fatuous, as if Bristol took two years to get the news. Construction had started in 1915, despite the war's outbreak a year earlier, but had to cease once it became clear that the war was to be a longer affair than had first been thought. Tim giddings 17:23, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, in fact, [2] says that it started in 1914 "but was interrupted by WW1" without saying when exactly this happened. Got a reference for your cessation reason? If you have, it can go in as you say it with a citation. -Splash^talk 17:56, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

The Whittingham book which is listed at the bottom of the article has a helpful precis at[3], which refers to the dates of construction in greater detail than your source, including the exact dates of interruption as stated above.

Great. I wonder if I can find a copy of that book lying around anywhere...it'd be nice to be able to cite the book itself, but we'd realistically need the page numbers to do that. -Splash^talk 00:46, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Oh dear

I have just located the source of this article: [4]. I'm going to have to brutalise the relevant sections of the article since, even after my recent edits, it is still a largely derivative work. -Splash^talk 17:56, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok, that wasn't as bad as I thought. I think a combination of your addition of information and my removals and rewritings now mean that the article is no longer a derivative work. I am tempted to remove the infringing versions from the article's history (the first several revisions are simple copy-pastes) but that would actually make maintaining a history of the non-derivative revisions very hard. So I'll leave them there until/unless we are ordered to remove them! -Splash^talk 18:18, 18 March 2006 (UTC)