Talk:Battle of Lens
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[edit] Lens is in Pas-de-Calais in France
Postal code 62300
There is no Lens in Belgian Flanders...
Edit: My bad, there is a small town called Lens in Belgium, but it's in Hainaut, which is part of Wallonia, not Flanders (unless one is speaking of ancient Flanders, which was a much wider region).
[edit] This article refers to the wrong Lens
Yes, there is a Lens in Hainaut, but the battle was fought near Lens in the Pas-de-Calais. The website of the city of Lens (http://www.villedelens.fr) and this website (http://bataillesdefrance.free.fr/periode_4/lens.html) leave no doubt that the battle had little to do with the Lens in today's Belgium. The latter site gives detailed information on troop movements through the environs of the French Lens (towns like Souchez, Liévin, Grenay, rivers like the Deule, etc etc). The wikipedia entries in French and Polish also place the battle in the Pas-de-Calais. (I am aware that other articles - notably the Spanish, Italian, and Russian wikipedia entries, and several across the internet - maintain the battle was fought at the Belgian Lens, but all of these articles seem to be translations or copies from the original English Wikipedia article.) Unless all the available French sites (and with them the denizens of Artois) are victims of inexplicable confusion, this English-language article is mistaken and should be fixed. Hubacelgrand 13:53, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
An examination of the article history tells the story of how Wikipedia got this wrong: on 5 August 2003, an anonymous user wrote "Lens is a fortified city in Flanders" (which given geographic definitions of the time everyone, including the primary French sources, agreed with), but then went on to oversimplify and assume anything in old Flanders was today in Belgium (yes, largely true - unless you're talking about this little slice of France). Somewhere along the line, someone discovered that there is a Lens in Belgium, understandably assumed it was the site of the battle, and linked to its article. This good-faith mistake leaked into the Russian (July 2006), Spanish (May 2007) and Italian (July 2007) articles, in addition to being propagated all over the web in wholesale cut-and-paste jobs. If I am somehow making a crashing mistake and the battle was actually fought in Belgium, please disregard all this bluster. Hubacelgrand 12:29, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
