Ed1964

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reverted my changes for now. The labyrinthine refs and notes are longer than the rest of the page. Ed1964 (talk) 02:26, 21 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I see you have modified my text on Eccles Kent as follows.

I wrote that “There is also a church hall, which is used by the village pre-school, and a drop-in centre for the over-50s in Cork Street.”

This has become “The church hall on Cork Street is the village pre-school and over 50s drop-in centre.”

The Church Hall is not in Cork Street. Unless things have changed since I moved from Eccles the over 50s club is in a separate premises in Cork Street. (See the reference to Linda O’Halloran in the following link. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21319034/eccles-kent-village-ruined-new-homes/)

I do not understand why you have chosen to separate out the reference to the 2007 Tour de France. The original text linked the fact that the vineyard has claimed similarities to the Champagne region to the fact that the Tour de France included a section of Pilgrim’s Way that lies immediately along the northern boundary of the vineyard. This was intended as an interesting and amusing juxtaposition. Without this you might as well delete all reference to the Tour de France.

I am reviewing your other changes and may comment later. EcclesMan (talk) 01:48, 21 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I was trying to limit the number of external links and apply a more conventional, single history section to the structure, restricting the Roman material because the Villa has its own, separate page. I tried to put the sections about Kits Coty together in a shortened form because that too had its own page for detail. That, as far as I recall, left me wondering where to put the Tour information. What the original meaning of the section with the drop in centre was had confused me and I wanted to avoid an unnecessary exhaustive list of every premises in the village. The humour passed me by. No doubt you will find a form of words that suits. All the best. Ed1964 (talk) 02:17, 21 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I am sorry I didn’t pick up your response earlier, I had assumed that since I had posted on your talk page then you would respond on mine. To be fair, I had been monitoring the text regarding Cork Street under the assumption that you would revert or improve the text once you realised that your change was incorrect.

Some of the changes you have made to the history are welcome. I had felt obliged to respect the legacy structure and some of the content that I first encountered.

Your comments on Kit’s Coty are largely misplaced. For one thing the section was called Kit’s Coty vineyard, but someone, I assume yourself, has chosen to drop the ‘vineyard’. The vineyard is ‘Eccles vineyard’ in all but name. Someone in Chapel Down (rightly) decided that the name ‘Eccles wine’ would not be attractive for marketing purposes and so they co-opted the name of the nearby monument which is some distance away. (As you could have verified from Google maps.) Your edits have mitigated against the original underlying narrative which is that a field which was once destined to become a station car park is now THE most prestigious vineyard of the largest wine producer in this country. At one time it was producing the most expensive bottles of wine in the UK. If anything, the text should be expanded beyond its original length to emphasise the shortcomings of the UK planning system which classifies land according to its ‘versatilty’ rather than its potential yield in pounds sterling per acre. So, the land where the vineyard is situated is classified as only grade 2 agricultural land and for that reason there will soon be a housing development right up to its boundary.

The successful fight to divert the channel rail link should be given due emphasis since it was the most important event for Eccles in the second half of the twentieth century. The campaign was largely spearheaded by PEFT who were in fact the Eccles representatives on Aylesford Parish Council. For a long time, the alternative route (which was ultimately adopted) was known as the ‘Aylesford Option’ and eventually Eccles councillors and others were able to convince Ove Arup to divert the railway through a tunnel under the Downs at a cost of 140 million. I had always hoped that Wikipedia could be a medium that could be a repository of local history like this but I have become disillusioned. One can put in such information with citations but gradually the citations get deprecated and then you are asked to remove the information. If one can see that events are supported only by references that are likely to be transitory, then it is hardly worth the effort of recording them in the first instance.

Given the information that I have presented here, I would encourage you to go back and compare my original text to the current text and consider whether some reversion is in order. I have other priorities at present but if I decide to amend the text further, I will give full justification and I will let you know here of my reasoning. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EcclesMan (talk • contribs) 02:33, 23 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I appreciate your comment. If something is wrong, it just wants changing, there is definitely no need to check it here with me or anyone else!

My edits on the article were somewhat limited in intent.

1. My starting point was to go through the long list of ext links. Many of the Kent village pages ext links were stuffed full of dead links; those usurped by gaming adverts; people's adverts for their own books; pages that were already refs, and links to subjects that have their own pages - in this case like the villa, and kit's coty. You are a programmer, you know the benefits of reífactoring your code and decluttering stuff down into functions or whatever, it is just the same here.

2. To simplify / summarise material in the sections on topics that have their own pages.

3. (very limited) Generally to try to make the material clearer for someone who wasn't from Eccles by stating what would have been too obvious to a local and de-emphasising some of the detail.

4. Move to a more conventional section layout to make it easier, again, for people who didn't already know Eccles. It does ultimately make it easier for other people to add / change information and maintain the page

Please bear that in mind and forgive the instances where I simplified things and made 2+2=5. I am obviously not from Eccles, but sometimes that might just help.

I largely worked from the remaining references I could make accessible again and absolutely share your frustration with dead links.

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Following is just a few personal thoughts / rant.

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Pretty much every WP settlement page I have seen carries the scars from some battle with developers, either lost or won. Disputes over major developments are just not locally distinctive. Occasionally there has been a resident, national journalist (like David Hewson at Wye, Kent) and so there is a good quality reference to draw upon, but even in those cases I tend to wonder whether the material belongs in a separate page - Wye's was offloadable to Wye College. In this case, with the villa and kit's coty stuff summarised down, would the vineyard and development stuff sit better in its own page? The WP page for the firm that runs it was pretty grim and provided no real help - as I vaguely recall it was all cut and pasted press releases about its brewery and Tenterden operations.

Sometimes I have idly wondered whether all WP settlement pages should have something like a 'planning disputes' section. Time after time, I have simplified multiple paragraphs, otherwise overwhelming pages, into 'in spite of protests' or 'following a local campaign' and patched in / archived the best couple of refs I could spot from the dozens on the page chronicling every grisly moment of the battle. Doncaster Sheffield Airport was an example, but at least in that case the airport had its own page and there was no need to clutter a settlement page. It is dispiriting chopping out text thousands of characters at time when you know others have laboured so hard on those words and collected so many (now dead and unarchivable) references.

I'm glad you took less offence at my changes to the brick and cement works. We had a couple of good, archivable references including the journal one. Mostly I was just copyediting the material down, but I did try to make the point that for the majority of its life it had moved on from Cubitt's.

Plainly when there is something locally distinctive and tidily sourced like that, you easily end up with a WP page more interesting than the usual, unremarkable contrived references and 'it has a church, it has a shop', dare I even say 'it has a drop in centre on xyz street' :-)

Don't get me started on flaws in agricultural land classification...

Maybe the simplified page does emphasise the importance of the railway battle to a reader not familiar with Eccles?

WP does not, as you point out, remotely work well as a repository of local daring do against developers, and community websites don't either, usually just becoming advertising directories and grandstands for nutters. I have tried / seen many approaches to this and invariably I wrongly thought technology was a shortcut. It makes things easier, but in the end I don't think there is any alternative to electronic things that look like books, journalism, journal articles or compilations of information on a topic. Wikipedia is a good way of very briefly summarising; linking as reference; surfacing; cross hyperlinking, and crucially archiving (WP's frontend to archive systems is I humbly, probably controversially, think is its best feature) all that, but someone still has to put the graft in to produce and 'publish' good quality, underlying material elsewhere.

Please don't get too disillusioned with WP, or other editors 'refactoring' and 'code reviewing'. I'll try to leave your talk page on my watchlist so that next time you get exasperated with another editor I can wade in on your side. All the very best. Ed1964 (talk) 10:02, 23 January 2025 (UTC)Reply