Template talk:Rayment

Reliability
Unfortunately, some of the information on that website is (apparently) claimed to be unreliable by the author himself! See. I think I have noticed at least one such error: at, he calls the First Baron Montacute (1299) "John de Montacute" whereas TCP and (which references TCP and Burke's) calls him "Simon". Ardric47 01:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


 * How accurate do you think anyone could be about some obscure peer who lived approximately 700 years ago? Not to mention that I'm sure Debrett's, Burke's, The Complete Peerage, and whatever other sources people might use would probably contain conflicting information - probability dictates that if you're trying to cover the life of *every single peer* since the 11th century, you'll make a few mistakes and have a lot of inconsistencies. :) – ugen64 02:34, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed with Ugen. Rayment is right about 99% of the time. Mackensen (talk) 02:38, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not saying that Debrett's et al. don't have as many mistakes—it's just that their mistakes are unintentional. Ardric47 06:02, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The content of my link "[1]" above is no longer directly available, due to a redirect. It is still available through the history, though, at . It includes a statement by Mr. Rayment that he knew that Wikipedia was using his material because he had included copyright traps. Ardric47 03:34, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

It is noticeable that, at least for the moment, Mr. Rayment's site has disappeared. In terms of accuracy, Mr. Rayment's site is highly reliable, for the most part, when checked against the Complete Peerage and Burke's. He may have included some copyright traps, as he claims, and we should try to replace him as a reference wherever possible with more reputable sources. john k 16:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


 * When citing Rayment, please be so kind as to specify the *exact* page cited. I will remove any template which does not do that.  Without specifying the page, it makes the claims almost impossible to check by the average editor. Thanks for your adherence. Wjhonson (talk) 23:12, 2 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I second that, there are Rayment citations all over the place which don't specify where on the site the information comes from. This is lazy editing and a violation of our reliability policies. I don't like this template because its existence encourages people to slap this on all over the place and it bears no relation to te full citation format which we get from e.g. cite web. Any article using it unqualified needs refimprove until the author can be more specific. Rovaniemi-5 (talk) 12:33, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I posed the question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Peerage and Baronetage#Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages whether these pages were a reliable source. My reading of the comments made there and those above, is that the pages are not a reliable source, but that information the pages contain has been often been found o to be accurate and that it is better that the template remains until a better source is found. I have therefore appended two templates Self-published inline and Better source to the template so that readers and editors are warned about the source and requested to proved a better one.

Because this template may also be placed in an "External links" section I have included a named parameter to allow the warnings to be turned off (see the documentation).

To help those who want to check whether this template is being used with one or two unnamed parameters, I have added various hidden categories under Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating a Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages template which allows an editor to check this. It is included in the documentation.

-- PBS (talk) 06:32, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * My opinion is basically that of john k at oldid=478993911: "We should try to replace citations to him with ones to actual reliable sources, but we shouldn't delete accurate information because he's the source." I agree with the addition of the "Better source" template, but I have doubts about the other. Is the concern really that it might be unreliable because it's self-published? Ardric47 (talk) 17:32, 4 March 2012 (UTC)


 * It is an unreliable source (however accurate it may be) because it is self published by a non expert who does not cite his sources. -- PBS (talk) 11:41, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

How about we make up our minds? It is unnecessary to have both templates. Any rational human being will see the "self-published?" and realize that we could have a better source. -Rrius (talk) 19:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I think both are descriptive and useful. -- PBS (talk) 15:10, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Dated templates
See AutoWikiBrowser/Dated templates The Rayment tempates are automatically dated -- PBS (talk) 22:31, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Turn this into a citation wrapper template
I propose to alter the format of this template so that it looks like other similar ones. So I have placed a proposed replacement in the sandbox. Does anyone have objections to this being implemented? -- PBS (talk) 14:26, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Reliability, redux
Aren't we being more Catholic than the Pope here? Hansard cites Rayment as an authority for their various summary pages about politicians. Isn't it absurd to consider him an unreliable source when the most obvious authority on the subject in question is happy to use his research? Should we instead be citing Hansard citing Rayment? john k (talk) 16:33, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you have a source for this usage by Hansard? --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:39, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
 * e.g. here, as the first result I randomly googled. The note at the bottom is
 * Information presented on this page was prepared from the XML source files, together with information from the History of Parliament Trust, the work of Leigh Rayment and public sources. The means by which names are recognised means that errors may remain in the data presented.
 * It's in every biographical reference page I've looked at. john k (talk) 17:09, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Website domain expired
The domain expired on 21 February 2020 and currently displays a GoDaddy holding page, pending renewal or deletion. Consequently thousands of article citations using this template are now effectively rendered useless to readers. Can the template be edited to link to archived web pages, or to not render at all? The best case scenario is that the website returns shortly, this is just an oversight, and any precautionary measures can be rolled back; but the worst case scenario is that the domain is purchased and used for questionable purposes and Wikipedia helps in directing traffic to the new site. Editing with Eric (talk) 14:15, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I second this, we really need to send the link to an archive, or at least get rid of it if it doesn't go to the intended site. O-dog222 (talk) 21:15, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ Done. https://web.archive.org/web/20191024165310/http://leighrayment.com/ -- PBS (talk) 11:48, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Copied from Talk:Viscount Baltinglass: 
 * == Leigh Rayment - reference ==

All Leigh Rayment web pages are now inactive following his reported death 1 Feb 2019 Peter Clarke  09:40, 26 March 2020 (UTC) -- PBS (talk) 08:25, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! However, on the -hc, whenever you link to anything but the main page it gives a 404 and -hc-ie doesn't work at all. I think you just need to change the date for the wayback machine, but I don't know how to edit templates. --O-dog222 (talk) 15:55, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * using a link to archive 20141009160839 seems to have fixed it. Please post here if there are any more problems. -- PBS (talk) 19:54, 22 May 2020 (UTC)