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Archive 1

This was adapted from my node created a while back on everything2.com http://everything2.org/index.pl?node_id=1477250 Avis Rapax 13:48, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Good evening, NSH! I thought I'd get the ball rolling. I have added a bit about the Roman remains at Seamill. Until this can be verified to Wikipedia standards, I have used the expression "it is said" to leave a measure of doubt. However, I am as confident as I can be that this is a genuine piece of local history! Kind regards from Avril.rennie 22:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)82.133.110.90 22:22, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

See WP:External links#Links normally to be avoided.

In general, external links sections should be kept short. I've pruned the external links section, deleting the following:

  • Simpson memorial (no reciprocal relationship, and pic is now in article anyway)
  • Yahoo weather (link doesn't work, need to go through main Yahoo site first; BBC weather site is better anyway IMO)
  • Golf club (already in "Notes" section, and borderline advertising)

None of the following belong here, as there is no reciprocal relationship. In any case, they are all present in their own articles (where they do belong, and where there is a reciprocal relationship) and can be easily accessed via the existing links to those articles.

  • FOPC
  • Law Castle
  • Clan Hunter
  • Nicola Benedetti

--NSH001 01:00, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Good evening, NSH
Thank you for your contributions. I agree that the pic of the Simson Memorial is better where you have put it. Please note that there is no "p" in Robert Simson's name.
However, I don't see the point of deleting so many of the external links. I had noticed that the Yahoo! weather wasn't working, but I hadn'thad time to do anything about it.
I'm not quite sure what is meant here by a reciprocal relationship. As to "borderline advertising", I don't see that either. I am not involved in promoting WK Golf Club, FOPC, Law Castle, Nicola Benedetti or, even, Craft Town Scotland. As Wikipedia recommends, I let the facts speak for themselves.
I appreciate Wikipedia's groundrules about a neutral point of view. By neutral, I understand "even-handed". ("Neutral" can also mean "bland", in some contexts.) In effect, we want our article to be even-handed, without being bland.
My interpretation is that it will be acceptable to write the article with a dash of what one might call civic pride. If we wanted to be really, really impartial, we could mention the drug-addicts in The Scheme (in Simson Avenue, no less!) who are seem to be striving to lower the tone of the community, as fast as others are trying to achieve a turnaround. I have already deleted the vandals from the station car-park. (If only it were so easy in reality!) Every community has its less seemly underbelly, as we know. But, surely, we're not seeking to be to West Kilbride what Ian Rankin is to Edinburgh (in the Inspector Rebus novels).
So, NPOV is a good principle. But writing an interesting, well-researched, accurate and up-to-date article that reaches a wide audience is important too. After all, we are not presenting a PhD to some dusty old professor. Our readers will come from many walks of life and I hope each reader will derive some benefit (and enjoyment) from our article.
Must press on. I think getting some more photos will be a worthwhile step forward.
Trust you are well and enjoying life!
Kind regards from Avril.rennie 00:06, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Good afternoon, Neil
I took a look at the WK article just now, and I think it is coming along superbly. Congratulations! The expanded entries about the Village Hall etc look really good. Very authoritative!
I was in WK this afternoon, and I had a chat with Councillor Liz McLardy who's one of the key people behind the Craft Town project. I urged her to go online and to see the Wikipedia article. She will do so, I'm sure. I asked her for information about Helen Keller's time in West Kilbride. Apparently, Helen Keller stayed in a large house called Sunnyside on Meadowfoot Road. The owner Mr McCrindle has pictures of her there, standing beside the gatepost. It would be interesting to have a copy.
I've been working on an article about my kinsman Phillip Clancey and another about Sandra Brown (campaigner). I'll return to the WK one as soon as I can. It's good to have a break sometimes, though. Also in the pipeline is a piece about the pioneering (woman) lawyer Dame Margaret Kidd whom I had the privilege to know. A lot of work still to do, brushing these up!
Trust all is going well for you. Tell me about your Quakerism sometime. I shall be very interested! Raising the consciousness of the human race is a vitally important task! Kind regards from Avril.rennie 16:10, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Accommodation section deleted from main page

This section obviously doesn't belong on the main page. Firstly, it's advertising (though not too bad, quite subtle). Secondly, it's not the job of an encyclopedia to maintain such a list -- that's the job of the tourist board or similar organisations. I've been reluctant to delete it, because it's actually quite useful info for someone like me to know, should I want to come back to WK for a few days. Nevertheless, it does have to go (sorry, Avril!).

As a compromise, I'm copying it here for future reference:

There are, at present, four places to stay in the West Kilbride area: -

Hotels

B&Bs


--NSH001 12:07, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

convenience break

Good evening, Neil! I really must congratulate you on the highly professional work you have done for the WK article recently. It is simply tip-top! You have excelled yourself!

WOW! I think WK should go for city-status now! (Only kidding!)

Seriously, you really have made a wonderful job of this. Your talents are wasted on Sun Alliance. (Or have you retired from the Horsham office?)

Naturally, I don't think the accommodation bit need have been deleted because the information could have been valuable to prospective visitors. I set it out in an entirely even-handed manner. Very fair. Accommodation-providers are commercial concerns, as we know. But so is the Golf Course and the Bowling Club (i.e. the one adorned with peacocks). The main thing is to set out the resources that WK offers.

However, what's done is done. And the good news is that the article is looking most impressive. This is almost entirely down to you, I'd say. THANK YOU!

The next thing we need is photographs. If I had a decent digital camera, I would take some myself. My mobile phone takes pictures - but what the quality is like, I'm not entirely sure. If you go onto Flickr, you will find some pictures of the Seamill and WK area, under my name.

Once again, congratulations and thank you! With kind regards, Avril.rennie 01:23, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words, Avril. Actually I haven't added anything for a while, and the impressive new infobox wasn't my work. Sun Alliance went downhill rapidy after their disastrous merger with the Royal, and I left them ages ago (the same date, in fact, that Diana died in that Paris car crash), with a very generous payoff and pension.
I still think there is a lot of work remaining to be done on the article, which I'll get round to when I can find the time.
--NSH001 11:26, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Discussion on lead paragraph

Straight to the point, here's my view: Having the first words of the article being "West Kilbride and Seamill are..." etc indicates that the article is about West Kilbride and Seamill, however in its current state it is not. However, with the shortness of the Seamill article, maybe its seriously worth considering renaming this page "West Kilbride and Seamill"? Would tie in better with the original opening paragraph, save any possible future duplication on the two seperate articles, etc. Seamill could then be redirected this this page.

Although this is a good page in the making, there are various sections throughout the article that are also "very unsatisfactory" in my opinion. Sections of the article, particularly 'Amenities', read more like a tourist information article than a encyclopedic article, but it can be easily fixed in due time. Can information like the six hairdressers ever be verified though?

Next sunny day I'll try and get some photos taken of the area for the article. --Dreamer84 09:45, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Hallo Dreamer, good to see someone new getting involved. Excellent job you've been doing on the infoboxes, BTW.
Yes, the thought of merging Seamill had occurred to me, but there is so much work remaining to be done on the WK article, that I think that has to be the priority for now; we can worry about Seamill later. My current thinking is that it could well be very useful to keep a separate article for Seamill. If nothing else, it will make room for more photos of the area, and with care duplication shouldn't be a problem. Best to wait and see how things develop, I think.
I think part of the problem lies with the ambiguous nature of the term "West Kilbride": it can sometimes mean the village of West Kilbride on its own, but it can also mean Seamill combined with West Kilbride. Thinking about it now, it's obvious that that ambiguity ought to be mentioned in the lead. (Maybe it was there before, but only implicitly.)
I think what upset me most was the re-categorisation back to "village". I thought long and hard about this problem before I changed the category from "villages" to "towns". Basically, it seems ludicrous to refer to WK as a village in the context of other North Ayrshire towns and villages. Whenever you drive into WK/Seamill, it seems more like a small town than a village. However WK is usually referred to locally as "the village". Often that just means the shopping area in Main Street/Ritchie Street, though. And of course the lead refers to WK as a "village" (how inconvenient!). Then you have the rather hazy distinction between the definition of "village" and "town". So I looked up the populations of all the towns in the N Ayrshire category on the Census website (and added the info to the relevant articles if it wasn't there already). All of the mainland N Ayrshire towns had a population greater than WK/Seamill (though not by much in some cases). However Millport is definitely a town, although it has a much smaller population. There are also several towns in the S Ayrshire category with a smaller population. Overall, I think it makes sense to put it under "towns" rather than "villages".
Do you have a source for the statement that WK is "officially" a village? That would be very helpful.
Moving on to other problems with the current version, far and away the biggest one at the moment is the lack of a decent history section. I've been hoping for months that someone will come along and write one. Maybe you could find a local teacher or librarian, with access to sources, who would be willing to help? Just a thought. If no-one else jumps in, I will (eventually) have a go, but it won't be easy as I only have access to the WKAS(2002) book and online sources.
The second big problem is the lack of adequate citations. I've been chipping away at this slowly, but again not easy without access to a local library. Seems to be an intrinsic problem for this sort of article, though.
The third problem is that I'm not very happy with the current organisation of the sections. My strong feling is that the history section needs to be written first, and it will then become clearer how the rest of the article should be organised (I would have changed it long ago if I had a clear feeling about what the right organisation should be).
Some of the problems with the current organisation are:
  • not sure that any of the stuff under (early) history really belongs there at all, except for the bit about the town's name (and we need to fix the disambiguation there)
  • not sure that churches belong under places of interest
  • castles might possibly go under history, or they could stay where they are, or perhaps under some new section. Not at all sure until the history section gets written. Maybe add something about Crosbie castle.
  • "shops and businesses" ought to be moved from "amenities" to "local economy". The description there needs to be made more precise, and needs to include some mention of the effect of supermarkets, car ownership, etc on the decline of shopping facilities (and possible revival?). I can't do this, as I don't have the current local knowledge.
  • the remaining bit of "amenities" can probably be expanded (I'm with you 100% on the need to cut out the flowery tourist-brochure language - but there's not that much now).
  • there are probably too many sections and sub-sections as the article currently stands
By all means cut out the hairdressers bit, if you want (I nearly cut it out, but left it in to see what would happen!).
Good luck with the photos. There are some excellent photos in the WKAS book, BTW, and I've been thinking of writing to them to ask if they'd make them available, with copyright permission. The panoramic picture on the front cover would be ideal for the top of the article (after the infobox and TOC), using the {{wide image}} template. See Bristol and Stockholm for examples.
In general, I think galleries should be avoided. Photos should illustrate the text as much as possible.
--NSH001 16:09, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
Some interesting thoughts in there. I can't really find anything I disagree with! The town/village subject is an awkward one. The signpost upon entering West Kilbride saying "West Kilbride, incorporating Seamill" doesn't help! WK is referred to as a "Craft Town" on signposts, yet there are other signs such as "Village Nursery" and "Village Hall". Basically for every reference to a town there is a reference to a village. Suppose we could have both categories for the time being, since it would be more or less accurate!
Re: History. The information on the Hunterston Brooch (detailed enough that it must have a source from somewhere?) could probably go on a Hunterston-based article, Hunterston Castle perhaps? Talking of which Hunterston Castle, and Portencross Castle aren't in WK so I'd suggest that after the information about Law Castle there should just be a sentence along the lines of "Hunterston Castle and Portencross Castle are also nearby" or words to that effect. The cup and stone is more trivia than than important history so could probably come later. I've got a few books handy that I might be able to get some kind of substantial history, will see what I can dig up. I agree about the too many subsections etc, makes the article look more like a list than, well, an article!
I might create a sandbox duplicate of the article to experiment on, will post the link if/when I do.
--Dreamer84 16:47, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
It was Avril who posted the info about the Hunterston Brooch, and I did ask her if she could provide citations (see her user page -- we did get a bit distracted!). There is enough info in the WKAS book to cite it to there, but I'm reluctant to do so as it's not an ideal source (effectively self-published). I think it's OK to include Hunterston and Portencross castles in the WK article. Portencross Castle is part of the coat of arms, after all, and I have happy memories as a boy of playing there. Also of walks/bike rides around Ardneil/Portencross/Hunterston. Can remember the cannon next to the castle (and I think there were some cannonballs as well, but my memory is hazy). I think the level of detail about the castles is about right, but any more detail should go in their own articles. There isn't any other town or article they belong to (or maybe we could hive them off into the Seamill article?). They certainly "feel" part of WK to me. Actually more so than Law Castle, as it was a very high-risk venture for me to try to go anywhere near Law Castle (I'd just get beaten up by louts from "the Scheme").
From looking through the WKAS book, the funeral route could be a useful and interesting part of the history, and the cup & ring stone could get a mention there, as it lies on or near the route. Talking of the ancient Kings and their last mainland resting place, it seems to me from the dates that if they "rested" at Portencross castle, it would have been the old one on Auld hill, and not the present castle. But again, I haven't been able to check the sources.
--NSH001 19:26, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

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