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Name

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I am currently working through a growing set of material and the starting point is to establish the correct name to be used for 'Weston Subedge' ... The Parish Council have asked that the title be 'Weston-Sub-Edge' but as yet have not supplied minutes of any meeting which documents that change. Weston Subedge appears on every official map and is the name used in genealogical records. It would seem that the hyphenated version was the invention of Reverend John Marius Wilson and one of the mistakes highlighted in Imperial_Gazetteer_of_England_and_Wales. So my current target is to find more citations as to the official name ... But I am still refinding my feet here Lsces (talk) 08:52, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

While we are stuck with a single heading for an article and referrals from alternate spellings, the context under which version applies is important.

Further research with the Gloucestershire Archive[1] and the other Genealogical Archives[2] has thrown a little more light on the confusion, but the starting point is one we still follow today ... replacing spaces with '-' in a URL because URLs do not allow spaces. When working with the transcriptions of the hand written census returns one often sees a hyphen added where there should be a space, and stripping them as some computer processes do becomes second nature, perhaps incorrectly. What does not help with internet searches is the removal of correctly places hyphens with spaces or nothing in google and bing in a sometimes irritating attempt to get around the problems of miss typing the search request. So property searches return Weston-Subedge in line with the Royal Mail PAF file which they use as a reference, while their maps show Weston Subedge. A search for Weston-sub-edge on the Bing map service pulls up a blank while Weston Subedge works since that is what is indexed by the Ordnance Survey.

When searching genealogical records one used the Weston Subedge format as identified for example in FreeReg which indexes all of the parish records and most genealogical sites follow the same format. However some time around 1860 to 1870 the Weston-Sub-Edge form appeared and searches in the 1881 census have to follow that format. Currently the first reference is in the National Gazetteer but while other books are available on-line as scans, this one is proving illusive. The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales seems to have borrowed from the National Gazetteer and perpetuated transcriptions errors rather than verifying the provenance. The Imperial Gazetteer then gets used as a 'reliable source' even creeping into the 1881 census, before the numerous problems are picked up and corrected by the 1891 census, restoring the Weston Subedge spelling. I failed to record the links that gave some 300 'Weston-Sub-Edge' search results all attributed to the 1881 census, while 'Weston Subedge' returned some 38,000 covering every other genealogical index so I know where to look. It would be useful to see if the National Gazetteer actually has the hyphenated 'Chipping-Campden' since this is one which is simply wrong.

I have no problem with having different spellings in different contexts, but would like to clarify why each version is being used actively today so more work yet Lsces (talk) 08:44, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Gloucestershire Archive
  2. ^ GENUKI index page for Weston Subedge
URLs do allow spaces, provided that they are percent-encoded - wherever you want to have a space, use %20 instead - some browsers will display this literally as %20, some (such as Firefox) will actually display this as a space.
But as I remarked at User talk:Redrose64#Learning wikipedia ropes, we have some core content policies that everybody needs to be aware of, and should follow as far as possible. These are: Verifiability, no original research and neutral point of view. Saying that a spelling or hyphenation is "right" or "wrong" is not neutral. It is better to write something like
In the Domesday Book, the village was listed as "Westone";[put ref here] maps of the 19th century show the name as "..."[ref] and the present-day parish council give the spelling as ... [ref]
By not judging the sources we remain neutral; by presenting the facts as given by the sources we avoid original research, and by giving references we satisfy verifiability. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:46, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
See for example York#Origin of the name. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:28, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is reviewing the original documents 'original research'? I've downloaded a couple of wills archived at Kew Will of Sir John Woodward of Weston Sub Edge, Gloucestershire and Will of Thomas James, Yeoman of Weston-Sub-Edge, Gloucestershire and the spelling in both documents is actually Weston Subedge. As with the indexing of the Doomsday Book reference, the text does not actually match the document. So it can be verified that the material being quoted is incorrect, but we can't link to the original documents since they are chargeable items. For someone doing in depth genealogical research, the dates that forms of name changed is important, but I think I've finally spotted the pattern here at least for Weston Subedge, and while anything relating to the judicial system is using the Weston Subedge spelling, it was the Anglican Church which started the Weston-Sub-Edge version and they use that format for ecclesiastical records. So the parish council is following the ecclesiastical lead, while anything with a legal basis even today is using 'Weston Subedge'.
Being practical, I think there should be a main page with both spellings in the title, and forwarding pages for the individual spellings, since in essence both spellings are actively being used today. I do have verifiable data to explain the addition of the Subedge element, but given that the indexes are wrong I would need to verify that by a trip down to Kew which may be a little OTT so I need to rework the Name section a little more like the York example using what new links I do have ... but is that the right thing to do here? Lsces (talk) 22:29, 19 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Until printed books became commonplace, spelling variations were extremely common, and none can be regarded as "correct" for the time: people wrote down what they heard, they didn't ask how it was spelled because there was a high probability that the person speaking couldn't read, let alone spell. With the advent of printing, spellings (even of common words) were still not rigidly enforced - indeed, William Shakespeare was inconsistent in the spelling of his own name. BTW the accepted spelling is Domesday Book.
Variant spellings are not a thing of the past, either. There's a village in Oxfordshire for which we have an article, Bletchingdon. But some of the village signs and notices - even some of those put up by Oxfordshire County Council - spell it Bletchington. You can drive along the B4027 road and see both spellings on signs of similar type within 200 yards of each other. The village was served by Bletchington railway station but we don't kick up a fuss over that spelling.
Don't create a second article. That would be speedy deletable under WP:CSD#A10. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:26, 19 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Redrose64: Bletchingdon is already documented properly in my book although the order may be wrong. GENIUK:Bletchington ( passed through there to avoid Oxford yesterday! ) but both Weston Subedge and Aston Subedge need corrections in GENIUK ... User:Lsces now has a little rant Lsces (talk) 09:03, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This one talk page has only four watchers: have you tried asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject England what the normal practice is for describing variant and historic spellings? --Redrose64 (talk) 09:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Lsces did post there, and they were not answered - eventually the post was archived. --20:11, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
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