Talk:Pile (heraldry)

useful examples
Lauterbrunnen: Per fess ... three piles wavy issuant from base. —Tamfang (talk) 03:08, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mich Taylor (talk • contribs) 09:53, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

external links in body
(Copied from our respective Talk pages.)

Sadly you missed the point about the examples given in the gallery (and by the normal way of things that use of 'see' is perfectly normal) - the examples to see in each box match the sort f exam[ple given in the box - they are not just odd examples but reasonably carefully chosen to increase the readers appreciation of that particular case

Mich Taylor (talk) 22:21, 5 August 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mich Taylor (talk • contribs)


 * I knew what you intended. Don't mistake my disagreement (in preferring the Manual of Style over your idiosyncrasies) for incomprehension.
 * And I still say it's odd to write "This is a pile — see (elsewhere)." If the picture doesn't adequately explain what a pile is, how is another picture going to help?
 * Do you think it is "unreliable" to define a well-known heraldic ordinary without referring to a hundred random pictures elsewhere?
 * It's clear that you have nothing but contempt for the precedents evolved by the thousands of people who have been working on Wikipedia for years. You're not the first editor to say "My version should stand because I'm right."  The rest of us can wait for you to get tired. —Tamfang (talk) 22:33, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Dear Tamfang

I am pretty sure that you think I am an obstructive, contemptuous and wilful person.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating - are the articles, as a result of my editing, fuller, better illustrated, more technically correct, more introductive of and linked to reasonably reliable, trustworthy and even authoritative sources of information. Does the reader get a better deal? Is the reader led on to other things?

If not then I must pack up and go home.

If so, then am I not a useful resource - even if you don't care for it?

Wikipedia is free and Wikipedia is imperfect.

I am not trying to make it bend to my will and thus unfree - I only contribute on heraldry and then only because the standard is so low.

I am trying to help produce a Wikipedia that is richer and fuller for the reader. That is the bottom line in the Wikipedia enterprise - the reader.

I' ll give you a little example of my approach -

In ' Variations of ordinaries' is the sentence "The chevron éclaté has each end with roughly-made points or spikes on it".

Now, it rings a vague bell. But searching my two databases of Anglophone blazons (including almost all Scots ones from the 17th century) produces nothing. A content search of all the files on my computer (including several Francophone glossaries) produces nothing. I check Parker - "Eclaté, (fr.): broken, applied by French heralds to a lance". I check Elvin - no entry. I go to Google France. Searching with 'éclaté blason OR armoiries' produces just two dictionariues with entries - one about lances and batons, another about chevrons and other ordinaries. As for images not a single one. So I search with 'chevron éclaté': not a single picture; words - back to the two dictionaries. So try 'chevron brisé' (which is used even in Scots heraldry). Loads or word entries, and, perhaps much more telling, a good number of pics. So try 'chevron rompu'. Same result. (Francophone chevrons rompus are different from Anglophone ones).

I draw the conclusion that a chevron éclaté is one of those things heraldic that simply don't exist in practical heraldry - Francophone or Anglophone.

But I still haven't edited out that sentence. But I will very shortly. Or perhaps 'llI leave it in - with a warning not to be misled by what dictionaries and encyclopedias tell us.

What would you rather have for the reader's sake (and that really is the bottom line)? Someone who has produced editings that are fuller, better illustrated, more technically correct, more introductive of and linked to reasonably reliable, trustworthy and even authoritative sources of information (than Wikipedia is). (And someone who is linked into the very heart of a national heraldic authority that dates back hundreds of years). Or someone so brassed off with negativity that they leave it all alone - and leave the reader to the mercy of those who get it wrong much too often, because they don't actually do any checking - even easily online.

I don't claim "My version should stand because I'm right." I very rarely think I am right - hence the stuff on éclaté. Ijust try very hard to get things better than they were before - for the reader's sake.

(Please note that the pile article uses words, at the very beginning of the article, and a picture, at the very beginning, to show what a pile is. I don't think there's any question that " the picture doesn't adequately explain what a pile is, how is another picture going to help?". And it's going to help maybe because it takes people to thoroughly trustworthy external sites - something very necessary given the state of Wikipedia's heraldic unreliability and untrustworthiness. When Wikipedia's heraldry gets to the stage of some other parts of Wikipedia then it won't be necessary to use 'external links in body' - to reassure the reader! Unlike the results of an editing of yours that left more than one totally incorrect pictures of piles, added an incorrect statement about piles meeting in a point and one about the width that piles should be drawn to avoid confusion. Some quick checks to reliable sites online before writing etc would have avoided those errors.)

Mich Taylor (talk) 09:46, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Five pillars


 * (Leaving the broader quarrel to our personal talk pages.)
 * When you say something is incorrect, please specify how it is incorrect.
 * Which pictures of piles are totally incorrect? They vary so widely in the wild that I'm surprised you think they can be totally incorrect ;) particularly given your willingness to cite the remarkably eccentric US Army Institute of Heraldry.
 * The bit about multiple piles converging is in Fox-Davies and/or Boutell (1977). (Can't get at my library now, alas.)  If the text says they meet in a point (rather than converge toward a single point), such wording does need adjustment.  It should also specify (did it not?) that free variation between parallel and converging piles is a feature of early armory.
 * Please expand on your objection to the statement about width. —Tamfang (talk) 18:05, 6 August 2010 (UTC)