User talk:Alexpayne

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Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Alun 06:03, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
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English people
Hi, please don't remove material from the page that has been verified. Any material that has not been properly verified can be removed at any point, but if an editor has provided a proper citation from a reliable source then the information should not really be removed. Conversely if you want to include information, can you please provide a citation from a reliable source. I see you are a newbie, so it's not a big problem. Please be aware that the related ethnic groups section in the English people article has been a bone of contention for a very long time, no one has as yet managed to produce any reliable supporting material for which groups constitute related ethnic groups, personally I think this is a red herring, English people are a nation more than an ethnic group, and they probably started to think of themselves as a single people at some time in the late nineth-early tenth centuries when they had a common enemy in the Danes. Prior to this I don't think it is necessarily right to think of English people as a single group. I have been starting to think in terms of relatively late origins for the nations of Great Britain generally, for example I'd say that Welsh people started to think in terms of being a single people at about the time of Offa of Mercia, again due to the presence of a common enemy. So if we are talking about the origins of the English, I think we should talk in terms of the unification of the various 'Anglo-Saxon and Danish-Viking peoples into a single people, with the subsequent inclusion of people like Normans. The other thing to consider is that this is about English people as a nation, it's not a history page, we are talking about English people as they are today. I don't see that English people think of themselves as related to Dutch or Frisian people, the vast majority of English people identify as British, as do the vast majority of Welsh and Scots people. In the report Devolution, Public Attitudes and National Identity, 83% of English identify as British to some extent, 69% of Scots identify as British to some extent and 79% of Welsh identify as British to some extent. No mention is made of Frisians or Dutch people, I fail to see any connection between English people and Frisian or Dutch people, you are basing this on the belief that Anglo-Saxon people were ethnically related to the precursor groups to these people (Frisian and Dutch), this may indeed be correct, but English people are not ethnically Anglo-Saxons and modern Dutch and Frisian people are not ethnicaly the same as their ancestors 1500 years ago. Be aware that this is abut ethnicity, not about descent or origins or history, there's a perfectly good page on the History of England if you are interested in History. Alun 06:03, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion regarding related ethnic groups
Hi. I have made a proposal on the English people talk page. It goes something like this: I think it is impossible to verify what are related ethnic groups for English people. So I have proposed a section in the infobox that is entitled Contributing ethnnic groups. Here we can list ethnic groups thought to have contributed to the English sense of identity. I think we can then include Anglo-Saxons, Ancient-Britons, Danish-Vikings and Normans. We could even think about including West Indian, Indian and Pakistani peoples as more recent contributors (the curry hous is a feature of most English and British towns and cities these days for example). I think this section would be far easier to verify. I also think that the origins of the Anglo-Saxons correctly belong on the article about Anglo-Saxons. Whatever you may think there is no consensus about the origins of the Anglo-Saxons in academic circles, and I think this lack of agreement should be properly reflected. I see no real reason to include this on the Engish people page, just link to the relevant section on the Anglo-Saxons article. I'm sorry that you think I have been difficult or patronising, it was never my intent. I appologise for any offence I have caused. Please see my suggestion on the English people talk page and see if you could live with it. All the best. Alun 08:12, 19 October 2006 (UTC)