Talk:Canterbury

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Good article Canterbury has been listed as one of the Geography and places good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
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Someone might want to include this public domain 16th century map of Canterbury, http://www.cts.edu/FacHomePages/images/Rural%20England/Image16.jpg

--Imran


"Canterbury today is a major tourist centre, second only to London." (my emphasis) Does anyone know if this is true? I'd have bet good money that Canterbury would be a less popular tourist destination than Oxford, Cambridge or Stratford, for a start. Harry R

I don't know, but because Canterbury is so close to France it is always full of French tourists - it's a very easy day trip. So it's not so unlikely. Redlentil 22:21, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • Not according to the UK National Statistics 1. Have changed page accordingly. CheekyMonkey 17:02, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Hospital of St Thomas

Is it me, or does that section read like it has been plagiarised from somewhere? Even if it hasn't been, it feels out of place with the rest of the article as (1) the article doesn't go into anywhere near as much detail about anywhere else in the city and (2) the style of language seems far too formal. Perhaps it should be a separate article?

St Thomas Hospital

I've never read such a dreadful piece of purple prose in all my life! Can someone turn it into standard English and take out the floral twirls?

I've moved it to its own page, The Hospital of St Thomas, Canterbury, with a link from here and marked it for cleanup. It reads like something pulled from Edward Hasted's survey of Kent 200 years ago so I don't think it's a copyvio. adamsan 18:26, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Westgate Family

I'm a Westgate.

My family's history is one of scalliwaggery and mischief, so it does not surprise me that the westgate was built 1) after crusades, which we took part in, and 2)finished right before wat tyler's rebellion.

good timing, plus a little hate for poll-taxes...

woops, we left the gate open.

"my bad, the town is taken over by a band of do-gooder civil rights activists...i mean -evil- civil rights activists.....heh-heh"

69.148.120.165 07:14, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible copyright violation

While searching Google for info on Canterbury, I discovered that much of this article has been copied without attribution (and presumably, without permission) from http://www.vrcanterbury.co.uk/. 68.251.151.75 03:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC) C.S. Andreas


I think you'll find, if you check the dates on the VR Canterbury site, and look back through the logs in Wikipedia before those dates, that the Wikipedia article contained that information before the VR Canterbury and it is in fact the VR Canterbury site that has copied the information without acknowledging it. If you notice at the bottom of the VR Canterbury page, it actually says at the bottom that it is GNU public license and is from the Wikipedia article on Canterbury. So Wikipedia has broken no copyrights, they are copying us not the other way around. Ben W Bell talk 08:18, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Population of Canterbury

Can editors please stop adding a figure of more than 100,000 for the population. That figure, with the citation, is clearly for the whole district - what Canterbury City Council would call Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay and the surrounding villages. Anybody with any physical experience of Canterbury would know that the idea of there being more than 100,000 within the city itself is laughable.

If anybody wants to argue by using the 135,278 figure listed at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/pages/29uc.asp, as has happened before, then first look at the other areas listed under Kent and you will soon see the breakdown is to district council level - ie Swale, rather than Faversham, Sittingbourne and the Isle of Sheppey, for example:

Ashford Canterbury Dartford Dover Gravesham Maidstone Sevenoaks Shepway Swale Thanet Tonbridge and Malling Tunbridge Wells

Thanks Gretnagod 17:34, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Or even check this: http://www.upmystreet.com/local/my-neighbours/population/l/Canterbury.html

You'll notice the figures are from the same source and correctly listed as Canterbury City Council, giving the same population as 135,287. Gretnagod 21:53, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


OK but where do the current figures come from? I've noticed the source isn't cited at all... surely its better to have the figure from the GOVERNMENT'S OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS FOR CANTERBURY than an uncited source?

Hypnoticmonkey 21:56, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Best answer I can give is to check the Herne Bay, Kent entry and check the references at the bottom. There, neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk has been used to find the population of the individual district (ie Canterbury City Council) wards that make up Herne Bay.

But just to stress again, the Canterbury District figure and the Canterbury City figure will be completely different. Gretnagod 22:12, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] rail way service changes

reference 7 links to a southwest train web page that doesn't mention Canterbury as part of the 2009 changes that will see fast trains linking kent to London. As far as I know, no mention of Canterbury has been linked to a faster train service in the future. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.12.228.63 (talk) 06:06, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Canterbury/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

[edit] GA review on hold

GA review (see here for criteria)
  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    a (fair representation): b (all significant views):
  5. It is stable.
  6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic.
    a (tagged and captioned): b lack of images (does not in itself exclude GA): c (non-free images have fair use rationales):
  7. Overall:
    a Pass/Fail:

I've reorganised the article per WP:UKCITIES. I'm afraid there is a very significant problem with referencing in this article, there are too many uncited facts for this article to pass GA standards; I refrained from tagging each one with a {{fact}} template as there would be far too many, however if editors feel this would be helpful I will happily do it. This is not however the only issue, I will attempt to outline the problems.

  • The prehistoric and Roman history section is unreferenced.
  • The Saxon history section also needs more references, there are only two references given in a four paragraph section. WP:V states that "material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source"
  • "The bury element is a form of borough, which has cognates in words and place names in virtually every Indo-European and Semitic language, as well as others. For a fuller explanation, see under borough." This is perhaps too much detail, I think a simple "Bury is an Old English word meaning 'stronghold' or 'fort'", with a source of course, would suffice.
  • What is an "archiepiscopal see"?
  • The Jewish community section has a {{fact}} tag which needs to be dealt with. Also the section seems a bit short, perhaps it should be integrated into a new 'Medieval history' section which would also address my concern of a lack of medieval history being mentioned, for example Thomas Becket is only mentioned in the lead and not the main body of the text.
  • It's frankly ridiculous to have a one sentence section.
  • Did the Industrial Revolution pass Canterbury by? There's no mention of it at all. Even if it had no effect, that's worth mentioning.
  • The post 1900 section is completely lacking in references.
  • The article is missing a governance section. WP:UKCITIES will give useful pointers on what should be included in one.
  • The demography and landmarks sections are woefully short, they would benefit from some expansion. I would recommend looking at WP:UKCITIES for ideas. But while we're on the point, lists are discouraged when they could be converted into prose or perhaps displayed as a table, and there is a lot more to demography than merely population change, such as ethnicity.
  • I'm personally fairly weak at writing geography sections, but I'm sure there's more to say about Canterbury than "it has a river". For example, what is it's position relative to local settlements. Again, I'm going to refer you to WP:UKCITIES.
  • The economy section seemed solid enough until I read "Tourism is currently worth £258 million to the Canterbury economy and has been a cornerstone of the local economy for a number of years. The district attracts over 6.3 million visitors per annum of which nearly 50% are from overseas". This appears word for word in the source and is a violation of copyright. I have reworded it slightly, but it concerns me that there may be other parts of the article have been copied. Although I do understand that it's not easy to rephrase something which is essentially reciting facts. Also "the district attracts".. this article is about the city not the district.
  • The transport section is again lacking in references, when controversial statements such "despite claims by the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the Canterbury and Whitstable was the first regular passenger steam railway in the world" are made they 'must be sourced. I also think there may be too much detail here, it should be a summary of the past, present, and future changes to the transport system in Canterbury.
  • "Canterbury is legendary for traffic congestion". Is it really? Source please.
  • "The city has many students", could this be quantified? Also the education section probably needs further sourcing.
  • The local radio section could benefit from removing the bullet points.
  • Some peacock terms are beginning to creep into the prose, for example "legendary shows". A neutral tone is encouraged. Also, acts such as The Clash, Led Zep, and Ozzy Osbourne probably need referencing. As does the rest of the culture section.
  • I'm not sure what the point of having a section on mills is. Either the mills themselves should be integrated into the landmarks section, or they could be worked into a new Industrial Revolution paragraph of the history section.
  • Everybody in the notable people section needs a reference.
  • I will reiterate again that this article is about the city not the district, so I have removed the towns listed as being twinned with the district.

I believe this article has perhaps been nominated prematurely, once the above issues are addressed I'm confident it can pass GA, however these are not small issues. I will put the article on hold for the period of a week in case an intrepid reviewer wants to put in the effort required. I'd also recommend asking User:Epbr123 to have a quick copy edit of the article, he's participated in promoting a lot of Kent related articles and is familiar with the requirements of GA. I'm sorry if this seems harsh, if you disagree with my opinions you can take the article to WP:GAR. Good luck. Nev1 (talk) 17:28, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Many of the subsections under history are very short. I'd recommend combining some of these together; a separate subsection is not necessarily needed for each century, rather, see if you can combine these into distinct periods in the city's history (medieval, industrial, victorian, modern, etc). Lots of these subsections are very short, and in need of major expansion -- as-is, it's a serious issue with the completeness criterion of WP:WIAGA.
Promote the 'culture' section; there are other things (like transportation and education) that should come last, but culture is more important.
The way I see it, the article is a good, solid B-class, but quite far from GA at this point. Dr. Cash (talk) 17:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Mills - The point of the mills section was to partly to show the growth of the city, and how it citizens were fed. A total of sixteen wind and watermills are known in the city since Domesday. The article doens't even mention the mills now, except as an afterthought at the end. Mention ought to be made of St Martin's Mill, which is one of only twenty eight windmills surviving in Kent. Mjroots (talk) 15:32, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] GA passed

I'm delighted to say that I think this article passes the GA criteria. I'm astonished at the rate it's been expanded, it's been a fantastic effort by everyone involved. Nev1 (talk) 20:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow! Quite impressive at the improvements! Good work! Though the economy section could still use a bit more expansion -- probably ok with GA, though, but something to work on,... Dr. Cash (talk) 21:10, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm utterly impressed! Credit to Epbr123 for his ingeniousness. Well done ——Ryan | t • c 23:26, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Source

I think this source may prove useful to anyone trying to expand the article. Nev1 (talk) 00:57, 28 May 2008 (UTC)