Wikipedia talk:WikiProject University of Oxford/Archive 1

List of University of Oxford people

I am not very technically minded so I'm not quite sure where this ought to be or whether people will see it where I originally posted it.

I've been steadily expanding and improving the page List of University of Oxford people, and since there haven't been any disputes about changes I've made I assume visitors to the page have agreed that they have been for the better.

One thing that needs to be done to keep the page looking good and functioning usefully is checking that new additions are made in the format that has been adopted so far. You would think that the current format would be easy to follow, but people do seem to be rather careless. Eg the person who helpfully added John Wordsworth (a 19th-century bishop of Salisbury) placed him at the very end of the list rather than in the category, "Other bishops". He/she also contributed the information that Wordsworth had been at Brasenose, but it was odd that, given this information, he/she didn't amend the article on Wordsworth, which, quite wrongly, had him as a sometime student and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Another task (which I am sure nobody relishes!) would be looking at the articles for the individual people listed and checking that they have all been categorised, "Alumni/Fellows of Qwerty College, Oxford" (or a general university category if the college, or status as alumnus/a or fellow, is not known).

I've tried to concentrate on adding people who seem particularly worth including, such as bishops, peers, and MPs. With MPs I've been searching by entering "UK MPs 19**-19**" Oxford site:en.wikipedia.org in Google, working back chronologically, to date as far back as the beginning of the 1974-79 cohort. MPs who are better known for something else should, I think, go under that category (eg Ronald King Murray, Lord Murray (Jesus) seemed to be more important as a Senator of the College of Justice and a former Lord Advocate than as an MP). However, they should be added to the running total of the number of MPs inlcuded on the page, except for those who subsequently became peers, in which case they are added to the number of peers (now mostly barons and baronesses, making no distinction for the purpose between hereditary and life peers).

I know there has been some discussion of whether this list should include former students only or also members of the academic staff, but I have considered that it ought to include anyone who has had a connection with the university, especially by matriculation, having an Oxford degree, or being a fellow of a college (these definitions may be somewhat elastic, especially as one delves back into the Middle Ages). If we only inlcuded former students it would mean creating a separate list for academic staff, and that would mean a lot of repetition, since many, if not most, Oxford dons were also students there. This mixed approach seems to be the policy adopted by pages such as List of Harvard University people and List of University of Cambridge members. This approach also reflects the fact that membership of the university is for life: for new students, by matriculation; for graduates, by taking a degree; and for non-Oxonian dons, by admission to the degree of MA (if not by incorporation of a Cambridge or Dublin degree). (This difference between Oxford and my other university, London, is illustrated by the fact that I can enter the Bodleian and attend lectures at Oxford in perpetuity, free of charge, whereas I am not entitled to similar use of such facilities at the University of London; in this way Oxford resembles a family, while London resembles a supermarket).

What we do not want to do is include people who have been honoured by the university, or one of its colleges, or who have held a purely ceremonial role. The page List of University of Bristol people at one time including Winston Churchill. Given that the page begins, "This page collects together some of the more notable among the alumni of the University of Bristol", this was actually false information. However, even if it included members of university staff as well I don't think the Chancellor should really be included. The List of University of Cambridge members does not include the Duke of Edinburgh, and nor do I believe anybody would think that it should. In practice this issue does not arise with Oxford because its ceremonial officers have tended to be Oxonians anyway.

There does not seem to be a list of the Chancellors of Oxford.--Oxonian2006 18:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

"List of people associated with..."

Oriel and Jesus both have lists of people associated with them, but the titles are of different forms. Is there a general opinion on which form they ought to take, and if so, could we standardise this? Cheers. Cricketgirl 20:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Agreed a common title form would be preferable. The Oriel page (List of Oriel College people) existed first, but I didn't want to call the Jesus page "List of Jesus College people" as this would be ambiguous (as there's a Jesus College in some other place, apparently!). "List of Jesus College, Oxford people" or "List of Jesus College (Oxford) people" seemed clumsy, as did "List of Jesus College people (Oxford)" etc. "List of people associated with Jesus College, Oxford" is a bit long-winded, perhaps, but was the clearest option I could think of at the time. I didn't feel sufficiently confident about the title that I wanted to switch the Oriel page's location though. Casper Gutman 20:12, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

When it was first created the Oriel list was at List of notable Oriel College people but as no-one should be included in the list who isn't notable anyway, I thought that was overkill and moved it to the more inclusive List of Oriel College people to be able to include the honorary fellows and provosts and some of the known Academics. I won't mind moving pages if consensus forms on a good name set for the pages.--Alf ^melmac 09:37, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I intend to start work on the Brasenose College page, and will use the Jesus page as my main guide. Jonathan A Jones 08:27, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Article statistics

I've just rated almost all of the unassessed articles, and it's very disheartening to return to the main page to find the 'Unassessed' articles tally still at 66. Is there no way of coding things so that the table shows the true number of articles in the various stages of quality and importance? Cricketgirl 20:47, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Is'nt it done with a bot? You might have to wait a day or so for the bot to update it. --Bduke 23:34, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Yup, it's done by a bot -- see Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Using_the_bot. If you've updated a good many assessment scores (which you had -- congrats and thanks!) and want to run the bot early, as it were, you can go to this page and enter "University of Oxford" in the box before hitting submit. Otherwise it'll run at 3:00 am UTC, apparently. Casper Gutman 20:17, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Academic "boosterism"

Oxford is sufficiently prestigious that there should be no need to resort to academic "boosterism.

And yet on the same page:

As of March 2007, it seems that Oxford is not especially well covered on Wikipedia by comparison with some other (dare I say lesser) institutions

While it might not be academic boosterism, perhaps "boasterism" is a better description ;D —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Flaming Ferrari (talk • contribs) 06:09, Apr 3, 2007 (UTC).

Ouch! Point taken, sorry. In my defence, I think there's a key difference between the NPOV expected in the main article namespace and what is acceptable in the WP: space on a project page for those with an interest in a particular institution. Still, I think you're quite correct to remove that bit -- thanks. Casper Gutman 08:22, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes no hard feelings, I recognise it's a project page however I still felt it was slightly disrespectful to other institutions. Don’t suppose you mind if I join the project do you? Although not an Oxonian, I am a member of WikiProject Universities and have contributed to a number of Oxford University related articles and I am keen to contribute further in the future. --Flaming Ferrari 09:45, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

It would be great if you joined the project. It can only be a healthy thing to have someone with a truly neutral POV on board, rather than just a lot of Oxonians trying to pretend..... Welcome! Casper Gutman 10:31, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

St Mary's

Would University Church of St Mary the Virgin be included in the project's coverage, it did play a substantial part in the early days of the University.--Alf ^melmac 22:39, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I think it certainly should be included in the project's coverage. I would add that it continues to play a substantial part in the life of the university, though I suspect that it is rather under-appreciated.

Does anybody know where I would find the text of the prayers said before the University Sermon (printed on real paper or online)?--Oxonian2006 23:03, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

They are a slight adaptation of the usual form from the canon of the Church of England. I believe the print version is prepared by Gary Crocker (he may be able to give you the text if you email him (firstname.lastname) at admin (dot) ox (dot) ac (dot) uk or write to him at Wellington Square.--Alf ^melmac 17:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I was particularly fond of the bit that goes something like, "...and I am especially bounden to exhort you to pray for [the preacher's college(s) - best when the preacher is somebody like Henry Wansbrough, who includes the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem in his prayers]".--Oxonian2006 17:36, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Jesus College & Good Articles

consolidated from User_talk:AulaTPN and User_talk:Casper Gutman

Count me in! I'll surf the project pages to see which articles need some attention. AulaTPN 13:05, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to the project! I think an early objective of the project should be the improvement of the main University page to at least Good Article standard, as I'd be willing to bet it gets read as often as several dozen of the other project pages put together! However, I've not had any experience of the Good Article nomination process so I thought nominating a few of the college pages might be an easier way to start and useful experience. I have a personal interest in the Jesus article (and recently put it up for peer review), but I think it's only one of several college articles that could easily be WP:GA candidates. Casper Gutman

I think it would be useful to identify a shortlist of a few articles that are close to meeting the criteria. I suppose ideally they should be high on the project's importance rating scale too. Any personal favourites? Casper Gutman 21:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Obviously I have a vested interest in the St Edmund Hall article and am currently working to get that up to a level fit for GA nomination but I also have no experience of the Good Article process. The Jesus article looks like an excellent candidate to start the process rolling. Lurking around other projects on Wiki I think we should establish our own guidelines for what components a college article must have before it can be considered for nomination and even set out a template ordering. At a minimum I'd say we needed:

• 1 History
• 2 Coat of Arms
• 3 Location and Buildings
• 4 Student life
• 5 College Silverware
• 6 College Graces
• 7 People associated with the College
  • 7.1 Current Tutors and Fellows
  • 7.2 Notable Alumni
  • 7.3 Other Notable Figures
• 8 Notes & references
• 9 External links

• A completed Oxford College Infobox (name, latin name, motto, scarf, shield, figures, etc...)
• At least one high-quality image of the college, preferrably one of the main facade/entrance and one of the main quad.
• A picture of the Head of House/Principal/Master perhaps?
• It would also be really nice if we could rustle up a stanard map of the city over which we could indicate the position of the college.

what do you think? I think it would be a helpful process to establish requirements like these for other classes of article in the project and to then set those guidelines out in a specific project page for members to reference. Other than that, how would you like to proceed with the nomination process for Jesus? AulaTPN 08:15, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds a good idea to have some project-specific requirements/aspirations for articles about colleges. Some of the specific requirements you list might not be appropriate for all the colleges, e.g. will all colleges have silverware that's sufficiently notable? I particularly like the idea of a map; what area would it ideally cover? We'd want most of the colleges to lie in the area covered, but a few might have to be left out — Templeton for one, but what about e.g. St. Hugh's? Pictures of Heads of House might be tricky to get under open licences; could we justify using images from e.g. college websites as fair use?

Proceeding with WP:GA on Jesus (or any other article) will need to involve:

• adding any sections that are missing, unless there's a good reason not to;
• making sure there aren't any obvious missing references;
• nominating the article;
• dealing with any objections raised by reviewers.

At least, such is my understanding.... Casper Gutman 11:12, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

That's a very good point, perhaps the section should be loosened to College Assets, College Artifacts or even College Assets & Artifacts? That could even provide scope for including information on their reported endowments.

As far as the map goes, I can remember from my days as an undergrad, that there was a very good map floating around on the OUCS servers; I've found a low-res version on the Biophys servers [1]. I was thinking we would cover much the same area - central oxford - and in a similar but cleaner style. I'll look for a better version and, failing that, crack out a prototype for comment. As far as Templeton and such... I think we'd probably have to cheat and either not have a map or create custom maps. Of course we could actually solve it by having 'local area' maps for each college with a link to a much bigger, all-inclusive map (although Templeton would still be a problem). User:Durin is an expert on fair use images. I can get in touch and seek advice about that if you like?

Good idea to ask someone more experienced re. fair use images. I had a few thoughts of my own on the map idea, and agree we'll most likely need to cheat for out-of-centre locations. I've been kicking a few map ideas around at User:Casper Gutman/Sandbox, if anyone would like to look. Thoughts? Casper Gutman 14:42, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Maps

There was some talk (above) about adding maps to articles; I've tried implementing something to add a map to the infobox by providing latitude/longitude data on the article pages -- see Jesus College, Oxford for an example. I'm not entirely happy with the way the infobox looks with the map just now though, to be honest -- it seems a little cluttered. Any thoughts on (1) whether the map is useful and (2) how it could be made to look a bit more at home in the infobox would be greatly appreciated! Casper Gutman 16:43, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Chancellors

Can anyone add to the List of Chancellors of the University of Oxford? There doesn't appear to be any complete list on the internet that I could find. The current list was culled from Google and may be apocryphal in places... Ian Cairns 08:27, 30 April 2007 (UTC) (Exonian, not Oxonian)

An hour on Google can save a few minutes in a library (-: I've added the (many!) Chancellors from the 13th century using the out-of-copyright Historical register of the University of Oxford and hope to get round to adding the remainder. Omassey 13:00, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Infobox

Noticing the recent changes on the Template:Oxford College Infobox, I wonder if a new format could include a super-heading as with the Isaac Asimov article (apt, as I've just been editing it :)), the Science Fiction Writer link could be links to The colleges of Oxford University, have I capitalised those right :s ? .--Alf ^melmac 20:31, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Sounds a good idea, Alf! Maybe we can omit the definite article though: Colleges of Oxford University is shorter and also avoids any need to think about whether to capitalise "college" or not! Casper Gutman 07:26, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Works for me! I must admit I did like the overall style of the new template but I'm wondering whether there's scope to expand the template such that the Oxford Blue bar at the top can be coloured to the primary college colour.... (runs and ducks for cover) AulaTPN 07:59, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Ouch, my watchlist has just been splatted :p nice work Casper. AulaTPN, you're right to run and duck for cover... :) --Alf ^melmac 10:02, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

As Alf's spotted, I've reinstated the new style for the template and fiddled about with the name parameters a bit. This is discussed at Template talk:Oxford College Infobox. I really ought to write some basic documentation for the infobox template some time, or at least a list of the parameters and how they should be used. Of course, if anyone else is looking for a way to pass their time....... Casper Gutman 10:48, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

←The version I'm looking at now looks really good across the pages I've sampled, nice stuff boys and girls.--Alf ^melmac 20:30, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Well Alf... I couldn't resist! I've added support for the primary college colour. If you wish to leave modify the background colour for the template then add the primary_colour parameter to the infobox: e.g. adding "primary_colour = #801213" give the following result at SEH. If you do not supply the parameter then it defaults to Oxford blue. Now if I could just sort out the damned vertical alignment in the table cells... AulaTPN 21:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Changed the borders to be in the primary_colour too, as some of the colours didn't look so good with the blue borders IMHO. If we ever get round to documenting the infobox template we should note that primary_colour should be dark. Casper Gutman 14:55, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Nice stuff Casper. I don't think it will be a problem as (off the top of my head) I can't think of any Ox colleges whose main colour wasn't fairly dark. AulaTPN 19:44, 15 May 2007 (UTC)