Talk:British Caledonian

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Contents

[edit] Cleanup tags

  1. The article is now almost 190kB, which is 6x larger than the recommended limit. Editors should either consider trimming material which isn't notable, or splitting the article over several pages.
  2. For an article this big to have only six external links and no citations is completely unacceptable. If it can't be verified externally it shouldn't be on Wikipedia. There's a hell of a lot of content here which is in danger of being deleted if it can't be cited elsewhere. No original research!
  3. Not tagged, but of concern, is the sub-heading "British Airways' revised bid backed up by bullying tactics carries the day", which probably violates our WP:NPOV policy.

--DeLarge 10:48, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the person who has written this article has included a hell of a lot of facts that have made it very long.
However, I came across several citations that person or somebody else must have included subsequently. I also found that there are now nine rather than only six sources at the bottom of this long article. And, by the way, why do you think that six sources are insufficient if they do happen to contain all relevant information? Therefore, I think you should amend or delete your second comment.
I have got a feeling that the article's author either must have worked for that company, known someone who worked there in an authoritative position very well or conducted several years of extensive research on it. This leads me to another question. What about information the author recalls from his personal experience but for which there are no sources because the event[s] happened a long time ago, especially in the days when there was no internet? I am of the opinion that it would be wrong to say that such information should not be included in an article only because there are no sources in the public domain if what is written is valid and can be verified by someone who was present at the time who had access to the same information.
krishnanr_iyengar@rediffmail.com (12-12-2006)


To take your points in order, the subsequently added citations are still insufficient. The whole point of citing a source is to allow third parties to check your facts. This is not currently feasible...
  • They don't follow any of the recommended styles at WP:CITE;
  • They're not nearly specific enough - there's numerous huge sections which still don't cite their sources. As an example, take a look at some featured articles. Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) is 43.8kB and contains 27 directly cited notes and nine other references. Ryanair is 43.9kB and contains 43 embedded citations (although that article also doesn't follow any recommended citation styles).
Where books, are cited, we need an ISBN number, author, publisher, date of publication, and if possible a page number as well.
As for the question about personal recollections, these are absolutely forbidden by two of the three basic policies governing Wikipedia's content:
  1. Wikipedia:Verifiability ("The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source.")
  2. Wikipedia:No original research ("Original research is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to material that has not been published by a reliable source. It includes unpublished facts, arguments, concepts, statements, or theories, or any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position — or which, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales, would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation.")
Please note these problems and try to solve them. Do not simply delete the maintenance tags at the top of the article, as I assure you I will continue to restore them indefinitely. --DeLarge 12:25, 17 December 2006 (UTC)


Here is my proposal for splitting this article into several interlinked sub-articles, following the example of the article about the US highway system.

Split it into 4 parts, i.e. The formative era covering the airline's creation until (and inclusive of) plan S (part 1), attaining commercial success covering the company's resurgence from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s - up to (and incl.) changing the game plan (part 2), the firm's decline from the 1986 crisis until its takeover by BA - up to (and incl. end of a tale [part 3]) and the analysis, facts of interest as well as accidents/incidents sections in the final part (part 4).

18-01-2007, 18.40 GMT

Dear moderator,

Please DO N O T re-insert the sections I have removed from the main article because I have just split it further to comply with your maximum length requirements.

Thanks.

Narayanaswamy, 22-1-2007

16.40 GMT

N.B. I am the author of this article.

I suggest trimming rather than splitting it. --Guinnog 16:44, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merging the other British Caledonian category articles into this article

I am of the opinion to leave the article as it is, including its sub-articles. One reason is the length. Other reasons are potential loss of valuable 'behind-the-scenes' information that enables interested readers to get the 'complete picture' of the key events that ultimately determined the airline's fate and which, in my opinion, makes this article refreshingly different from some of the articles about other airlines that seem to have been written by plane spotters for plane spotters, with very little informative value for people outside this group.

I also disagree with the classification of the 'Facts of interest' section as a trivia section. In my opinion it isn't (perhaps, apart from the last "fact" about the Bud Spencer movie) because it states facts relevant to the airline that are worth mentioning and have been referenced, but that break the chronolgy of the article if integrated into it. Therefore, I am of the opinion that we should leave as it is, apart from removing the Bud Spencer "fact" (because of its low informative value). Pimpom123 09:05, 09 August 2007 (GMT)

Some of the behind the scenes information in the sub-articles is very valuable. To simply say BCal was absorbed into BA would make the article shorter but not very useful for those trying to learn about the airline. Archtrain 19:37, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
I totally agree with your opinion and therefore think we should leave the sub-articles that are hyperlinked to the main article. I will try to integrate some of the additional facts that are worth mentioning into the appropriate sections of the main/sub-articles. To do this, I will revert to the additional facts section of the previous version as this version already omits some of these. Then we can see what to do with what will be left, i.e. whether to keep it as a shortened additional facts section, whether to integrate the remaining facts into the relevant sections of the main/sub-articles, or whether to simply delete it. Pimpom123 08:48, 13 August 2007 (GMT)

[edit] minor word changes to be more accurate

BCal had an unblemished safety record throughout its 17-year existence.

During that time there never was a fatal accident involving a BCal aircraft as a result of good airmanship and an extremely high safety consciousness throughout the organisation. - - The above is the old version. I added that it had an unblemished safety record as far as not having any fatalities throughout its 17... The airline did have some non-fatal accidents.

...as a result of good airmanship... This is an assumption and is probably true but unprovable. I've put "involving a BCal aircraft. The airline has been regarded as having pilots exercising good airmanship and an extremely high safety consciousness throughout the organisation"

These are minor changes but are made to improve accuracy. Archtrain 19:37, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the changes to the accidents/incidents section, which I totally agree with you makes this section of the article more accurate. Pimpom123 08:43, 13 August 2007 (GMT)

[edit] Issues

Here are thie issues i can see with this article.

  • Some sections are possibly too long and just need to be reworded.
  • Some sections it would be goods if there was a small summary in each of those to explain about them
  • Possibly some more images or move the current ones to throughout the page.
    • I agree with you that the article and its sub-articles could have more pictoral illustrations. It would be nice to have images of the airline's BAC One-Elevens, both in its original as well as in its revised livery, and of the company's DC-10s and 747s as well as these aircraft constituted an important part of its fleet. Is anyone in a position to supply these? Pimpom123 13:35, 23 August 2007 (GMT)
  • Although it may look fully referenced, most of these seem to be from one book and so a few more sources would be good.
    • Further to this, if this is all taken from one book, the information needs to be summarised a lot more.
  • It seems to read like a story or news article, minor, but possibly change some of the titles to make things more clear.

Simply south 21:40, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

  • Although it may look fully referenced, most of these seem to be from one book and so a few more sources would be good.
    • Further to this, if this is all taken from one book, the information needs to be summarised a lot more.
      • You are wrong on this one user Simply south. The entire article contains citations from eight different publications, not just one. Even though one of these may have been cited far more often than the others, you will come across the other references as well when you read through the entire article (including the hyperlinked sub-articles). I personally feel that there is nothing wrong with this. In addition, there are also nine external link that contain a lot of useful and interesting background information. (I have accessed and read through all of these.) Pimpom123 13:37, 23 August 2007 (GMT)
Sorry, i was thinking about changing this message this morning on the sources as i know i got it partly wrong. However, it still looks trange, at least to me, to look at one page with a large amount of the refs section filled up with citations from only one or two souces. Or if some are fom the same page in that book, you could use <ref name=blah>(source)</ref> and so the whole source does not need to be typed out again as you only have to use <ref name=blah></ref>. Or this could be used to show one source if the collection of information is scattered around the place.
Could some of these external links be used as sources or parts of the other sources be used more? Simply south 16:33, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Hi user Simply South. I have actually done some research on this by borrowing some of the books cited in the reference section, i.e. High Risk: The Politics of the Air (written by the late Sir Adam Thomson, the BCal founder and chairman), Fly me, I'm Freddie (the late Sir Freddie Laker's biography co-written by Berry Ritchie and Roger Eglin), The Spirit of Dan-Air and The Story of Air Europe (both written by Graham Simons, an aviation book author), from my local library and read through the passages cited as references. I am of the opinion that the author[s] has[/have] referred to these passages correctly, using their own words. Hence, there shouldn't be any copyright problems. As to your comment concerning most of the citations coming from one book only (High Risk: The Politics of the Air), I have to admit that it initially surprised me as well. But after actually reading these citations, I feel that the book from which they were taken is the most appropriate source for this article as it is most relevant to the subject matter, i.e. British Caledonian Airways, having been written by the most authoritative person in that company. To do justice to the airticle's author[s], he/she[/they] has/[have] also included relevant citations form the other books and external links where appropriate. If you read through the entire article, including all hyperlinked sub-articles - especially, the "Changing the game plan" and "Three-way battle to win control of crisis-stricken airline" sub-sections of the "The 1980s roller coaster" sub-article, you'll find that in several instances there is more than one citation, referring to the other referenced sources - other than High Risk: The Politics of the Air - including the external links. This has been done whenever the relevant issues were described by different people - including those working for BCal's rivals at the time - from different angles in the cited sources. You will find a lot more of these in the hyperlinked sub-articles than in the main article because the main article mainly deals with the airline's formative era (1970/'71 - 1975/'76) when there were relatively few instances where the histories of the other Gatwick-based Independent airlines overlapped with BCal. This is why you'll only find the odd reference to the books concerned where Dan-Air's and Laker Airways' histories overlapped with BCal and where referring to it enhances the understanding of this article - for instance, where Dan-Air's launch of a Gatwick-Newcastle scheduled service in 1974 helped improve BCal's network connectivity by making its scheduled flights from Gatwick accessible to people living in Newcastle, or where the Government's decision to grant Laker a licence to commence Skytrain scheduled "no frills" services on the former BCal routes from Gatwick to New York JFK and L.A. undermined the Government's much vaunted Second Force aviation policy by adversely affecting BCal's future ability to reach the minimum size it needed to become an effective competitor to the generally much bigger, established flag carriers of that era. (Remember, this was the time when most established scheduled airlines where wholly or majority government-owned and protected by highly restrictive bilateral air services agreements that made it extremely difficult for wholly privately owned, Independent airlines such as BCal to compete with these airlines on a level palying field - something this article clearly conveys in my opinion.) On the other hand, as these airlines' histories became more intertwined with BCal's development at Gatwick during the latter part of the 1970s and the early to mid-1980s - BCal's most productive and profitable era - including Laker's demise and Air Europe's rise, you'll find more citations from different sources in the sub-articles that deal with these stages of BCal's development. Pimpom123 14:25, 25 August 2007 (GMT)