Talk:Uffington White Horse
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Age
"The figure is believed to date back some 3,000 years to the Bronze Age, and was probably carved by the Dobunni, a local Celtic tribe. " Some problems with that - the date of 1400 BCE was arrived at by Optically stimulated luminescence dating, not by belief. The Dobunni, like other Celtic tribes, date to the late Iron Age not the Bronze age. I propose to reword, keeping the reference to the Dobunni (as references to other outmoded theories are retained, as interesting historical record), and then stating that recently, scientific dating has shown a date of 1400 BCE. Any issues with that?
Berkshire
References to Berkshire are far overstated.
The fact that it was previously in Berkshire is not particularly relevant, because the period of history relating to the historical counties is neither relevant to the creation of the White Horse, nor to a significant event in its history, nor to the present-day reader. By the same token, one could write (and in my opinion equally irrelevantly) that it was in "Wessex" during some point in its history.
Also the "Berkshire White Horse" as a name for the figure is implausible. Google shows at the most two or three independent hits for "Berkshire White Horse" (not including multiple copies of the same document, plus one or two pages containing word lists for search engine spamming which happened to contain that combination of words), consistent with that being a description which one or two people happened to use rather than its actual accepted name. By contrast, for "Uffington White Horse" Google finds well over a thousand matches.
I will leave "Berkshire Downs" but remove other Berkshire references.
- Good idea. The only terms it's generally known by are "Uffington White Horse" or simply "Uffington Horse" (which is a redirect page worth adding, come to think of it). Grutness hello? Missing image
Grutness.jpg
(I've been wanting to put my sig on this page :)
- I've placed it, for Wikipedia readers like me who couldn't have told what county it was in. (I knew it was England, but for all the context there was it could have been in Ireland-- or Nova Scotia.) Didn't occur to me that there might be an issue. H
- Say, how does that "Bronze Age billboard" theory square with the other turf-cut figures? --Wetman 05:25, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Not very well, I wouldn't think. I don't think the theory is that widely believed for Uffington, and I shudder to think what was being advertised at Cerne Abbas! Grutness...wha? 06:37, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
BCE
On a separate matter, I am also going to change BCE / CE, to BC / AD, because that is the usage which is more widely understood, and is also in general use in Wikipedia. I would suggest not departing from this usage on this individual page, inconsistent with the Wiki as a whole. Rather, look at / participate in the discussion on Talk:Centuries. If there is genuinely a consensus for use of BCE/CE (which I rather doubt) then let it be discussed there and then implemented consistently throughout Wikipedia.
(Addendum: Wikipedia:History / Wikipedia talk:History standards may be a better starting point than Talk:Centuries.)
--Trainspotter 13:27, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)