Talk:Scouting in Scotland

Merge of all Scottish Region and Area articles to Scouting in Scotland
After long discussions elsewhere all the County/Area articles for Wales, Northern Ireland and England have been merged into articles for the 12 government defined regions of the UK. These are Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and 9 English regions. Only Scotland has not been discussed yet. The articles for Scotland are:

New regions: South West Scotland Region, Old areas: Aberdeen, Angus, Argyll, Banff and Buchan, Borders, Caithness, City of Edinburgh, Clackmannan, Dunbartonshire, Dundee, East Lothian, Fife, Forth Valley, Gordon, Greater Glasgow, Inverness, Kincardine and Deeside, Lanarkshire, Lochaber, Midlothian, Moray, Orkney, Perth and Kinross, Renfrew and Inverclyde, Ross and Sutherland, Shetland, West Lothian, Western Isles

Note that one, Orkneys, does not exist. It was written, but deleted, and the content was nothing that we want to actually keep.

Note that there is one article for the new Regions, but the rest are for the old Areas. In part this arises from the lack of interest in UK Scouting on wikipedia recently, after good interest earlier. Nobody over the last few months has written articles for the new regions.

The earlier discussions have been at Talk:Scouting in England, Talk:Scouting in Wales and Talk:Scouting in Northern Ireland.

All this is in accordance with the discussion now archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Scouting/Archive 5. The idea is to use the 12 regions defined by the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics which are the 9 regions of England, along with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This process is completed for Wales, Northern Ireland and the 9 English regions. The idea is to cover all Scouting, but not Guiding, so that article for NI, for example, covers Scouting Ireland units as well as those for the Scout Association. Traditional Scouting organisations, such as the Baden-Powell Scout Association, will be discussed. Guiding is not included because the term in UK is not understood to be part of Scouting, so the Project convention does not work for the UK. Also the Guides have a small number of relatively large regions in their organisation and articles on these are developing. Girlguiding Scotland exists.

The proposal then is to merge all the articles above into Scouting in Scotland overwriting the redirect that this article is currently, in the same way as was done for Scouting in Wales. The same conventions as have been used for the other merges is proposed. There will be no lists of Groups or mention of individuals such as Commissioners. These have proved to be unmaintainable and prone to original research. I will be tagging the articles soon and will develop the new article in a sandbox in my user space, but that may take some time as I am at a conference next week. Please indicate support for this merge below. --Bduke (talk) 23:02, 6 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Support obviously as nominator. I have started a draft of the new article at User:Bduke/Sandbox by moving in all material from the Area articles, removing lists of Groups and names of Commissioners etc., and then doing some reorganisation and adding material. The situation on sources is a little better than when I did the one article on a new Scout Region earlier in the year, but only half of the regions have a web site. Sources remain a problem. The material in the old articles was really quite poor. In almost all cases there was nothing more than a list of Groups. I'm amazed that more were not deleted like the Orkneys article. BTW that Orkneys article is now on ScoutWiki. The others with their lists of Groups could be copied there as they welcome Group information, while wikipedia does not. OK, we have the basis. We now need to add the interesting stuff about history and notable events. We also need to add third party sources where others notice Scouting doing notable stuff. I'm going to leave this discussion open for 2 weeks from now. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  23:51, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I have completed the merge. While nobody came here to comment, several of the articles were edited during this period of discussion. Again, they were just original research about Groups. It goes without saying that there is still a lot of room to improve this article. In particular it needs information on non-SA organisations and on history. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  03:25, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Merge of Kincardineshire Scout District
The article has been prodded, there's not much to add but it should redirect here. --Chris (クリス • フィッチュ) (talk) 11:59, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't see any unique content, but the redirect would be appropriate. If I had a list of districts, I could create redirects like I did for the BSA and GSUSA councils. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:29, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Districts seem to be constantly being merged or split. It is difficult enough getting reliable sources for a list of Districts in each County/Area. County web sites are now all about recruiting young people and leaders, and details of organisation and history are often missing. I do not support the creation of hundreds of redirects. It might even encourage people to change the redirect to an article. I believe we should be getting tougher. If there is nothing to merge, we should just delete and not redirect, for all articles on Groups/Troops/Units and Districts. In this case I see nothing to merge. Chris, to support a merge, you should indicate at least roughly what material should be merged. You have not done that. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  21:33, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
 * OK. I keep forgetting the levels or organization for The Scout Association— I was thinking counties and areas, which are already covered. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 23:24, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

General discussion on these region Scouting pages
There has been a discussion at Talk:Scouting in South West England that could equally apply to this article and all other 11 region articles in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I have moved the discussion to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Scouting. Please take a look. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  11:37, 22 April 2010 (UTC)