Talk:House

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ok If this is a re-direct because house is the better word then house should be used on the mainpage. A mainpage category with a redirect is messy and unprofessional --BozMo|talk 16:00, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Image choice.

Is the image (Houses in Fishpool Street) a reasonably generic image of a house for most people? I live in Canada, and very few people in North America live in similar housing. In NA usage 'I'm going back to the house' could mean 'home', but 'a house' would usually mean a detached building with a yard. What's the usage for other english speakers? jericho4.0 17:53, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

These would certainly be called houses in England, and it's a very common style there and elsewhere in Europe. Most are not as old as those in the picture though (the white house is probably medieval). Most likely there is room in the article for images of a few other styles. - Anon

[edit] First sentence

I changed the first sentence to say "typically lived in by" as opposed to previous. I felt this avoided a logical conflict given that many homes are unoccupied...? (deaths, foreclosures, renovations, and condemnation). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.219.196.90 (talk) 05:53, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Treehouse

Should mention "treehouse." --Daniel C. Boyer 20:08, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Doghouse / kennel

Out of interest, what is the difference between a doghouse and a kennel? I'd say "kennel" for a little wooden shelter / house for the dog to sit in, is a doghouse something else? Could this be BE / AE? Saintswithin 21:11, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

While a doghouse is restricted to this type of shelter, a kennel can also include a large complex, "indoors" in the sense of a building human staffers may enter too, housing a lot of dogs, and everything in between; while "doghouse" is restricted to the one-dog shelter, "kennel" just means any kind of structure specifically used or intended for the housing of one or more dogs. --Daniel C. Boyer 16:21, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Home / House

Surely a lot could be said about the difference between a house and a home? The latter is merely a redirect here. Anyone wanting to take on the project? violet/riga (t) 23:42, 22 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Room listing minimum

nuts

(UTC)

[edit] OOPS!

It was a nice article, but you didn't talk about palaces in detail. Those are houses, right? Please consider. And where does Aid cantitades fit in for this pages categories?

[edit] Mention changing construction and use

Houses at one time were primarily storage and shelter. Outhouse latrines were located outside away from the home and kitchens were either adjacent or close by. Over time houses have gained bedrooms, plumbing, electricity, bathrooms, kitchens, and grown in size. Now houses often include many complex systems such as sensor activated lights, thermostats with multiple zones and time frames, automated washing and drying machines for people, hair, clothes, and dinnerware. April 19 08

[edit] Nobility and royalty

Royalty and nobility often refer to their kin while referring to a house, e.g. House of Plantagenet. Why is that? --Kebman 11:32, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cottage/Shelter - are you sure?!

I'm sure many people all over Europe - England especially, would be distraught to read that their wonderful, thatched, quirky old cottage is being referred to in an encyclpaedia as a "simple shelter". A cottage is most definitely a house type. --IanUK 10:12, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

Uhh... The Page has obviously been vandalised and I have no idea how to revert or delete it... 172.137.64.123 22:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC) Ralph

someone was probably in an ICT class and got really annoyed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.38.215.126 (talk) 18:54, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Someone deleted the page...

reversed deletion. 66.75.242.105 07:31, 10 December 2006 (UTC)Lucky

[edit] My edits

Hi, I'm a copyeditor and i just proofread some of this article. I did not remove the copyedit tag because I would like to have appproval over other wikipedians as well. What do you think? Does it need another copyedit. Please in form meShowmanship is the key 21:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyedit - Vandalism, really?

I'd like to know why my copyedit ( 01:26, 13 January 2007 172.147.131.46 ) was reverted and called vandalism?

Also, on a side note, the picture of A house in Pathanapuram, Kerala (India) by the introduction is not showing up; can anyone fix it?

[edit] The first house?

When was the first house build? I mean way back, out of natural materials, like wood, wheat, and hay, and fur.

Wow! That is a good question. I wonder where we could find it out. (Patricia Op 23:10, 31 August 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Images

I would like to suggest swapping the top image (house in columbia) with the next image (terraced houses in the UK) as I believe it better represents the term. Surely most people do not think of a large mansion when the term house is used? Random89 (talk) 07:09, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Opening Paragraph

Some consensus needs to be reached about the relationship of this article to a range of other words before this kind of Diff can be accepted. As it is, the first line needs to make it clear that the word 'house' is not only a noun but is also a verb, and can have adjectival formations as well. It also needs to be made clear that its meanings are related to Dwelling, Residence, Home, Abode, Accommodation, Housing, Lodging etc. etc. Otherwise it will become far too culturally specific.Eyedubya (talk) 09:39, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

  • That grossly mistaken view is apparently in effect, but no such effort at such a narrow consensus would be appropriate, per WP:CONEXCEPT.
  1. By the kind of deep and long-standing consensus we call policy (in contrast to the more common guidelines) WP is not a dictionary, despite a few valid articles that give detailed attention to etymology and usage.
  2. House is a suitable article to cover houses, in the normal modern English sense of "house", which is a single structure designed to provide living space for one or a few units of one or more people, where those within each unit share the facilities convenient for sharing (probably cooking, eating, toilet, and washing facilities, perhaps leisure facilities, but, except in pairs, probably not sleeping/sex facilities). (Actually, i agree that being fully enclosed is probably not a requirement for a house: i suspect, for instance, that "My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii" qualifies, even if a similar structure would not be a practical house, and thus would not be a house at all, in Schenectady.) English-speaking people who've lived in cultures where English is the first language recognize houses when they see them in that context, but the problem of analogs in other cultures, and recognizing with certainty in other cultures what "house" does or doesn't mean does not keep the topic from being encyclopedic: a topic needs to be clear enough to be an established unit of discourse, but a commitment to convert imprecise common-sense topics into philosophical universals (rather than discuss those universals, or perceived universals, elsewhere) would be a serious barrier to effective work on WP.
The boundary between houses and apartment buildings is not a clear one, but it is clear that a high rise apartment building is not a house, and that a typical dormitory, frat or sorority "house", or hotel or motel, is not a house. My impression is that pueblos were too apartment-like to treat as houses; i am guessing that relevant research and thot would indicate that tipis, single "room" tents, and most traditional yurts are not similar enough to houses to be efficiently covered in an encyclopedic article on what a house is and what the consequences are of living (or not) in a house, in a society that considers houses and apartment buildings the norms for housing; but all of that involves PoV, and subtleties that should stand in the way of explicating the fairly concrete topic of houses, in the sense of the colloquial modern English term.
On the other hand, English does have a word that embraces the scope contemplated by the preceding talk contrib, and by the misguided prose in the lead secn and in the first titled section of the accompanying article: that word is "housing", and it avoids the inherant cultural specificity of "house". As long as dict-defs are kept to the brief phrases appropriate to the lead sentences of most WP articles, housing can be an article (moving the current Dab to housing (disambiguation)) that addresses those concerns and uses some of the current language that is unsuitable to House.
--Jerzy•t 01:45, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
  • The initial note in this section fails to describe the circumstances of the edit it objects to, and the reference to requiring a "consensus" invites the inference that the editor, Otolemur crassicaudatus (talk · contribs), had replaced material sanctioned by a clear consensus process with something new. In fact, the edit logged as
21:18, 2 March 2008 Otolemur crassicaudatus ... (16,378 bytes) (sorce please?)
could have been better summarized (per another diff) with
(rv to last by User:DeadEyeArrow: no source given)
especially since what it reverted to is essentially the most recent variant of a long-standing approach to the intro of the article.
It must be admitted that for its part, Oto's summary invited the assumption that a source was all that was needed to justify the reverted edit by Zariane (talk · contribs), when in fact the source is grossly inadequate to justify it. In fact, it is not only common sense about what a house is, that makes Zar's innovation inappropriate, bcz the very title of the work cited (aside from the question of whether an editor added a zero, or shifted the comma in a paleo-archeological study spanning 60,000 years) screams it: Norbert Schoenauer did not write 6,0000 Years of Houses but [however many] Years of Housing, which suggests that the choice to use "house" as a synonym, in this one work by one author, for (i guess) "housing unit" or "housing structure", is evidence for nothing more compelling than a quirk or whim to which he chose to subject not potential purchasers, but only those sitting down to read after the purchase of the book had been effected.
Consequently, i am proceeding as follows:
  1. Reviving Housing as a stub for an article (rather than as a Dab), and transferring there the material that most obviously is not about the house, the housing concept of usually free-standing buildings, roughly single-family in capacity, traditionally constructed either independently of neighboring structures or with limited consultation about maintaining access, and usually vertical-walled and peaked-roofed.
  2. Simply removing material about other housing-related senses of "house", rather than undertaking to decide whether there is enough material beyond dict-defs, to justify an article on House (word) and/or one on the relationship between House and home. I'll collect that material on this talk page for the convenience (with the accompanying vandalism-ridden page, where the history of reversion of vandalism obscures that of article development) of interested editors.
  3. I'm considering working up an extract from the article's history, essentially a faked-up edit-history page, with all the vandalistic edits ignored.
  4. The massive "See also" section is symptomatic of inadequate editing; most of these should be replaced by prose references to the articles in question, and the rest, on an individual basis, either eliminated unless the need for their retention there can be explained on this talk page.
--Jerzy•t 06:22, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
  • I should mention that there may be longstanding material in House that is not about houses per se, but merely about functions inherent to housing that must be fulfilled whether it is provided by apartment buildings, hotels, group housing, portable dwellings, or (in rudimentary fashion) by street living. Those functions belong in this article only where their fulfillment is substantially different bcz it's done in a house rather than in other forms of housing.
    --Jerzy•t 06:43, 13 March 2008 (UTC)