User talk:Hertfordshire Chris

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Hello, Hertfordshire Chris, 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 messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Anemone Projectors  18:17, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
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Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. OhNo itsJamie Talk 16:51, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

I suspect that your decision to label the links I added to Wikipedia recently as spam were due to a misunderstanding – so let me explain.

The “Genealogy in Hertfordshire” web site was one of a number of community web sites which were set up in about 1997. It has never been a commercial site but was given the URL www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk because at the time the only URL options for a UK site were ,gov.uk, .ac.uk and .co.uk

Shortly after it was created I became the web master with responsibility for the site content, but not the software support, platform, or URL, which remain with the web master of the whole collection of community sites. The initial bulletin board format proved inadequate and in 2000 it was decided to switch to a more flexible format, which is still in use. The site is therefore older than Wikipedia, although the current format appeared a few months after Wikipedia. I have never received a penny towards the work of running the site but there is a standing invitation to donate to a mental health charity (via an independent charity collector) if people appreciate the service.

The aims of the website, and the way it has developed have been very much influenced by my very extensive experience, which included working on an experimental online journal in 1980. The purpose was to help people to research family and local history relating to the County of Hertfordshire by encouraging them to use a wide range of resources (nearly all of which were offline in 2001) in an imaginative way. The site was planned to contain a encyclopedic directory of the towns and villages of Hertfordshire prior to about 1900, reviews of important publications which could be used as sources, worked solutions to questions to demonstrate historical research techniques and sources, and tutorial material relating to some of the more important finding aids. Later some project reports on selected topics were added and in recent years a map interface has been added to the greatly extended towns and villages section and is referred to as “A Guide to Old Hertfordshire”. The newsletter, which reports on the changes to the web site, is now produced using a separate blogging service. The site is backed up with a large specialist paper library on the County of Hertfordshire, together with a collection of antique prints, old maps, and thousands of postcard views, together with many digitised sources.

The possible relevance to Wikipedia is that the site contains encyclopedic pages on the towns and villages of Hertfordshire – ranging from a single web page with limited information and perhaps a single picture (similar to a Wikipedia stub) to a mini-web site on some of the larger towns with twenty of more interlinked pages of information and a large number of pictures. In addition there are a number of specialist topics which are discussed in depth. In general the contents of the pages and the presentation are different to Wikipedia. The site is mainly concerned with the county between the Tudor period and the coming to the New Towns and modern boroughs. For most purposes the cut-off point is the First World War. Wikipedia (as far as Hertfordshire pages are concerned) seems mainly concerned with the towns as they are now, and a comparatively short history. In addition the purpose of my site is basically educational – and teaching research techniques by example wherever possible. The idea is to say enough to encourage the reader to become interested in knowing more and then directing them to other sources (links on the web, books, local history societies, records offices, etc.) For instance at the current time the site contains some 3500 direct outgoing links (about 10% of these are to relevant pages on Wikipedia) and the number is steadily increasing. There are also about 500 book reviews.

It might be worth looking at Shenley, which is one of the links which which you removed as spam. The relevant pages are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenley,_Hertfordshire and http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/places/places-s/shenley_/!-shenley-frame.htm but I may have used the shorter permanent link http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/links/shenley.htm provided as part of the map driven interface to the web site.

The Wikipedia entry is concerned with the modern civil parish and does not say anything about the ancient church, the change in parish boundaries, Salisbury Hall and the ancient manor, etc. There are no direct links to adjoining parishes – or to the relevant historical hundred (with antique maps) and union (with Victorian map), There are no links to key external sources – such as the online Victoria County History of Hertfordshire – or to any books.

At the head of the Wikipedia Shenley page it says “ This Articles does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed”.

I take the trouble to add to the value of a rather limited Wikipedia page by adding a citation to what I believe is a useful source – which makes a point of always properly acknowledging the origins of the material it uses, and which includes a lot of information that is not on the Wikipedia page (and some which is too parochial to be of interest).

Do you want me to assume that you don't want citations to sources external to Wikipedia, or make contributions in any other way? Or is the deletion of a number of citations a mistake?

Let me make it clear that I fully support the wiki ideals about information and any pictures or information on my site can be reproduced on Wikipedia as long as it is properly sourced, and fits into the Wikipedia guidelines. I notice that on Wikimedia Commons pictures have been transferred from Geograph with due acknowledgement – and it may be that some of the pictures I have posted on Geograph are now accessible in the same way.

Having said this, please do not ask me to spend a lot of time on Wikipedia simply transferring information. My site has been running very satisfactorily for over ten years and is providing a useful service. It has well over 200,000 thousand visitors a year, and the plan is for me to continue to run it. There may well be cases where some particular information would be better on Wikipedia (with links from my site) and this will be considered – but the appallingly non-intuitive mark-up language is a major obstacle.

I should point out that I started working on links on Wikipedia when I discovered that there were some 50 links from Wikipedia to my site and many of them were broken – so I corrected them. I posted a few new links as well and then posted a message somewhere on Wiki asking for advice and when I had no response I assumed there was no objection. If I have broken any rules I am sorry – but I did ask ... and feel that as I did ask the matter could have been handled more sensitively.

Hertfordshire Chris (talk) 21:50, 5 November 2011 (UTC)