Talk:Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives

Upcoming editing plans
Hi all

I've been speaking to the UK Migrated Archives Working Group at UCL. They have been putting together a seminar series on the FCO Migrated Archives, and are planning to do a small WP editing event as part of it, getting some academics and students in to overhaul the content. This will be on 9th November - please do feel free to join in or leave suggestions here! (I work at UCL but in a different bit of the university - I've been helping them plan the event and work out what's appropriate for WP.)

The plan at the moment is that they're reviewing the article, will work offline on drafting some updates and then we will get them added in on the day and integrated into the existing content. The main issue is that page seems to have been mostly written circa 2012 before most of the files had been released to the public, and has not been updated much since then, so it misses recent research and the tone is heavily driven by the initial news reports. Their aim is to generally update it, plus bring in more background, research on the collections & their impact, and recent developments.

One thing that has come out of the initial review is that the article is chronologically a bit confusing and could do with restructuring - provisionally this is the suggested outline -


 * Background
 * Removal and destruction
 * Development of Colonial Office policy (a bit more background and pre-1963 context)
 * The archives in the UK (a general section explaining the history of the collection after it was transferred)
 * Custody in various locations
 * Legal status
 * Opening of the collection (the court cases, independent review, etc)
 * Media reaction (taken from the existing 'reaction and contents' section and updated)
 * Claims for return/digitisation of the archives (new section)
 * Contents and use of the archives
 * country-specific material (the existing 'reaction and contents' subsections plus new sections on various countries, and an outline of what is known to be in the collection)
 * usage at TNA (including the recent closures)

Thoughts appreciated! Andrew Gray (talk) 15:12, 21 October 2022 (UTC)


 * As an update, this is going ahead on Wednesday 9th - 1500 to 1700 UTC, possibly a little longer depending how we go. I will refactor the article into the new framework tomorrow and start adding in the updated material on Wednesday - they have been drafted up offline. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:44, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Things to do
This is a suggested to-do list for the event on Wednesday 9th.

•	Other references to this collection elsewhere in WP may be based heavily on the early news reports – see if these may need to be updated.
 * Major edits and new sections
 * Create a new section listing and linking individual countries in the collection (there is a list in TNA Discovery)
 * Add short summaries of what is known to be in each country's part of the collection (see eg notes on Banton p. 20) – this may involve digging around in other sources to find any reference. Bear in mind that some countries may not have been studied at all. Some material for Kenya, Cyprus, and Botswana is already on this page but may need updated or revised.
 * Create a new section explicitly discussing what colonial material was kept in the UK but not in this collection, and where it is found – for example Indian material is in the India Office Papers at the BL.
 * Does any material from here need to be integrated into Operation Legacy? If so, check Copying within Wikipedia to find out how to do this


 * Section checks

Each section will need some check & cleanup to:


 * Check citations are in a tidy format (see Help:VisualEditor)
 * Check it is integrated into existing material
 * Check for any missing internal wikilinks
 * General proofreading


 * Smaller edits

Andrew Gray (talk) 23:14, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Add external links to the collection in the Discovery catalogue to a) the external links section and b) any references that mention specific files.
 * Check to see if the 'see also' material has been mentioned elsewhere in the article and delete if so.
 * Find some suitable illustrative images on Commons and add them to the article
 * The existing Botswana section may be more suited to another page with a short summary here – find out a suitable home for it and then check Copying within Wikipedia to find out how to do this
 * Find any other pages that may refer to this collection (perhaps as ‘migrated archives’, perhaps as FCO 141, etc) and check if they should be linked to this page.
 * Check all the contemporary reports referenced in the footnotes are still available and have not link-rotted


 * https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/uclwiki2022 Etherpad to sign up for tasks to avoid edit conflict Andrew Gray (talk) 14:25, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Future steps
Some discussion in the session today:


 * Some of the country-specific material may belong better in a general "usage of the collection" section
 * Need to expand with more detail on individual country collections

Andrew Gray (talk) 17:09, 9 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Evening update - I have:
 * integrated all citations from the new draft
 * converted some of the most heavily cited material to use the sfn short citation formats
 * integrated the material on declassification
 * Still to do are:
 * integrate the original "opening" section - I think all of this is now covered
 * integrate the original "reaction" section - not all of this may be included
 * Andrew Gray (talk) 23:14, 9 November 2022 (UTC)