Talk:Westminster School
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Listing of OWW
I've managed to locate a (substantially) longer list of OWW, which I have edited down to (what, admittedly, only I consider) more 'interesting' individuals, and reproduce below. However, as it's rather long, I've not put it in the main article...
[Snip: List of former persons, as it was long and of no real importance to a 'discussion' of the page]
Saying (1234-) rather than (born 1234) seems more suitable to me, being consistent with how the dates of those who are no longer alive are displayed, and so easier to read, as well as being (minorly) easier to edit when one of the list dies...
Also, I'm not sure why people are listed as 'English author' or 'British playwright' as opposed to merely 'author' or 'playwright'; is the nationality so terribly important? --jdforrester 23:47 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)
- Well done for finding all those people! Yes, it is a bit of a problem deciding what to do with lists when they get too long. We could have a separate page, List of former pupils of Westminster or some such thing, similar to List of notable Oxford students. I don't know. But I don't like the idea of cutting lists down based on a subjective view of who is "worthy" of inclusion. For one thing, it's inherently POV, and for another, it would be nice to have a complete index of everyone in the Wikipedia who went to the school, all in one handy list - or set of lists if it gets over 32K!
- Writing dates as "(born 1966)" rather than "(1966-)" is part of the Manual of Style: "it's clearer and less morbid to use the word 'born', rather than leaving a hungry space for the death date". I agree with the style guide. Writing the dates the other way looks terribly evil, almost as if we're impatient for them to die so that we can sort out that dangling hyphen...
- I put in the nationalities for consistency with how people generally seem to be described on their biography pages, e.g. "Seamus Heaney (born April 13, 1939) is an Irish poet", and so on. Usually, knowing the nationality of a historical figure is useful as a quick guide to the context in which they lived. I admit that it looks odd to do it on the page for Westminster School, since there won't be many people there who aren't considered to be British, but on the other hand, consistency is nice...
- Oh, and please could you tell me your source for Martha Lane Fox's year of birth? (Do you happen to have the exact date, for when she gets an article?) I tried looking for it in various places, but couldn't find a definite year! -- Oliver P. 01:05 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)
- Splitting off a list of former pupils seems like a good idea to me. But then, if we're leaving behind a list of 'notable' pupils, we've got the same argument again as to POV coming in to things. Also, shouldn't the heading 'Former Pupils' itself be a link to the listings page, as used elsewhere (though I forget exactly where)?
- Hmm, I suppose having the writers of the encyclopaedia looking vulture-like wouldn't be too good a thing. ;-)
- Possibly there could be a line saying "all persons listed below are/were British unless otherwise stated", instead of identifying each positively?
- Westminster School's own site lists Martha Lane Fox's year of birth as 1973, and I suppose they'd be most likely to know :-)
- --jdforrester 02:30 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
- I've put the past pupils, including those in your list, at List of former pupils of Westminster. Let me know what you think of that idea.. -- Oliver P. 01:28 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)
- As I've (just) said, it seems like a good idea to me.
- --jdforrester 02:30 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
I really think that Dido Armstrong should be listed as such, rather than as Dido, as that's her name. --jdforrester 02:33 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
- Thanks for the replies. I've just removed the list of past pupils from this page altogether! There's a link to the long list, under the heading now. Does it look all right? If there are pupils who played a major role in the history of the school, they can be woven into the general article, I think. Are any of the people on the list not British? I'm not entirely sure about Louis Theroux, for example, because he was born abroad, and his father is American, although Louis was brought up in England. I'm not 100% sure what the criteria for Britishness are, I'm afraid! -- Oliver P. 03:09 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
- No problem about replying.
- I think that there should be /some/ people listed os OWW on the main page; my point was that, as the editors of this encyclopaedia, we're exerting choice anyway, and listing persons who are 'major' to the extent of familiarity with many of the general public, either being very famous historical figures (e.g. Dryden, Hooke, Wren, Milne, etc.) or those currently part of pop-culture, such as Adam & Joe, Louis Theroux, Dido, etc. wouldn't IMO alter the NPOV-ishness of the article... Also, I was thinking that the (short) list of former pupils could be be-heading-ed as "== Former pupils ==".
- Currently, the (legal) 'criterion for Britishness' is that the person holds (or is able to hold) a British passport; of course, that's not greatly useful :-) I don't think that any of the persons on the list were non-British when attending the school, but I'm not sure. Of course, Arthur Middleton signed the Declaration of Independence, and Charles Pinckney ran for POTUS-ship, so they arguably became American. Should we list them as American, though, given that no such label of nationality existed in the period that they went to the school? Perhaps "(American to-be)"?
- -- jdforrester 03:38 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
- I dislike links within headings almost as much as I dislike subpages, actually. :) And as for judging who is or is not "major", argh, I don't like it, since it's all just a matter of opinion... Is there a list on the school's website? If so, we could just put that in, and say, "The following former pupils are listed on the Westminster School website", and that would be a NPOV statement, and we wouldn't have to worry about making up our own criteria for inclusion in the list. Oh, and if people became American, we can call them "American", I think. -- Oliver P. 03:50 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
- Hmm, well, headings-as-links is used on at least 3 of the pages linked to from the Brilliant Prose page, so... I disagree that Westminster's own list would be NPOV, it'd just be SomeThirdParty'sPOV, and STPPOV isn't necessarily NPOV; however, yes, I have gleaned most of my list from Westminster's own listings, but also other places (many found from careful Google searches). And, really, they didn't so much become American as create Americanism, but hey... ;-) I would be uncomfortable with describing them as American with regard to thier schooling, however. Just my POV, of course.
- -- jdforrester 08:45 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
OWW re-selection
Here is a start at deciding which few names of alumni should go on the main page rather than the longer list only: rank by Google hits. It is rather crude, but at least a little objective.
Here is the raw list, with the search terms I used. I'll upload my ugly little perl script to Wikipedia:Ranking items by Google hit count.
This could be the basis of the shorter list, by taking the first few. However, exclude obvious overestimates due to common name or part of name: John Brown, maybe also William King. Cutoff below 20000 hits seems reasonably, (though this is my arbitrary POV).
| Term | Google hits |
|---|---|
| John Brown | 225000 |
| John Locke | 123000 |
| Andrew Lloyd Webber | 111000 |
| George Herbert | 77500 |
| Helena Bonham Carter | 64500 |
| A. A. Milne | 59300 |
| Peter Ustinov | 45900 |
| Charles Wesley | 45400 |
| Henry Purcell | 44500 |
| John Gielgud | 42100 |
| William King | 35500 |
| Ben Jonson | 34200 |
| Christopher Wren | 31400 |
| Jeremy Bentham | 28900 |
| Peter Brook | 25900 |
| John Dryden | 25000 |
| Edward Gibbon | 22800 |
| Tony Benn | 22500 |
| Gavin Rossdale | 18000 |
| Robert Hooke | 14000 |
| Charles Pinckney | 12900 |
| Francis Lewis | 12200 |
| Adrian Boult | 10200 |
| Imogen Stubbs | 9640 |
| Roger Norrington | 8340 |
| Robert Southey | 8120 |
| Ruth Kelly | 7720 |
| Thomas Bruce | 6580 |
| Kim Philby | 6220 |
| Arthur Middleton | 6180 |
| John Burgoyne | 6120 |
| Warren Hastings | 5680 |
| Charles Dodgson | 5600 |
| John Nelson Darby | 5540 |
| Lord John Russell | 4470 |
| Thomas Gage | 4340 |
| Louis Theroux | 4030 |
| Benjamin Hall | 3990 |
| Angus Wilson | 3910 |
| Anthony Howard | 3780 |
| Nigel Lawson | 3720 |
| Norman Parkinson | 3170 |
| Richard Howe | 2870 |
| Henry Pelham | 2680 |
| Dido Armstrong | 2350 |
| Stephen Poliakoff | 2280 |
| Martha Lane Fox | 1840 |
| Michael Flanders | 1560 |
| Donald Swann | 1550 |
| Matt Frei | 1420 |
| Joe Cornish | 1380 |
| Andrew Huxley | 1280 |
| Charles Montagu | 960 |
| Charles Chauncy | 937 |
| George Jeffreys | 936 |
| Henry Paget | 717 |
| Sir James Graham | 684 |
| Henry Tizard | 498 |
| John Carteret | 482 |
| Thomas Pelham-Holles | 464 |
| Adam Buxton | 407 |
| Fitzroy Somerset | 390 |
| Charles Watson-Wentworth | 385 |
| William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck | 368 |
| William Knox D'Arcy | 327 |
| Dan Topolski | 231 |
| James Waldegrave | 169 |
| Gilbert Abbott a Beckett | 136 |
| George Henty | 90 |
| Oli Bennett | 29 |
--Trainspotter 09:32, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- OK, that's in place now. I was half-tempted to remove George Herbert on grounds that a number of hits seemed to be to do with the modern horror writer, or the full name of President Bush senior, but on sampling some of the hits it still seemed that they were largely relevant ones so I left him in.
- I don't claim that the list is the be-all-and-end-all. There may be other considerations determining what is interesting to people. For example, the name Oli Bennett -- despite the fact that he wasn't personally famous, and indeed his Google hit count is indeed the smallest on the above list, his name may be still be of general interest as it shows how the WTC tragedy thousands of miles away touched even this most British of institutions...
- Nonetheless let's run with the Google count unless folk have better ideas.
- --Trainspotter 10:03, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- Hmm; good work. :-) There also might be an issue with referencing Dido Armstrong as such, as she is normally referred to plainly as 'Dido'. I'd suggest, however, that Google-listings aren't 'objective' per se, merely a summary of subjective viewpoints...
- Personally, I think we should keep in both Dido, and also Robert Hooke, as he was very important in the foundation of modern science and so on; however, I'm not going to edit my viewpoint back in as it might start an edit-war (though I would hope not ;-)).
- Of course, given that the school has (non-House) parts of it or traditions named after Tizard, Middleton, Jonson, Gibbon, Hooke, Boult, and Purcell, perhaps we could use that as a guide (though, of couse, this again is STPPOV).
- Thoughts?
- James F. 11:14, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Sorry, 'objective' was bad choice of word. But something approaching definition of NPOV.
But by all means put back in some names that seem apt. You won't start an edit war (with me at least), because I fully recognise that the Google count has its flaws (not least because of difficulties choosing suitable search terms), and was just intended to be a starting point. The hit count for plain Dido (446,000) clearly justifies inclusion, and I tend to agree with Hooke (admittedly partly my own pro-scientist POV, but also e.g. 24,900 hits for "Hooke's law" | "Robert Hooke".)
--Trainspotter 11:44, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Post-nominal letters?
Does anyone know if Westminster has a Royal Charter to grant post-nominal letters to former pupils? (I had heard that using 'OW' as PNLs for former pupils was correct, but not to a sufficent level of factualness for my liking.) A citation or somesuch would be great. -- jdforrester 08:50 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
Whether proper or not, OW is rarely used as a postnominal outside the school itself. I am one and have never used it. The same is true of the other major public schools. Jonathan 13:41, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
To-do list
This is more of an aide memoir rather than a prod to others:
- A description of the nature of the Shell and its significance in public schools (e.g. Harrow's use of the term 'The Shell' to describe their Vth Form, &c.)
- Note on the effect of the Blitz on the School (architecturally done, really; move to Surrey...?)
- Discipline (SAP/SEP as-was, detention; referals &c. in WUS)
- Newest purchases (3 & 3a of Dean's Yard, Millicent Fawcett Hall, etc.)
-- James F. 23:57, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
More:
- The Royal Pardon on murder charges from Charles I
- List of Headmasters? Hmm.
-- James F. 11:32, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Yet more:
- Slang specific to the school
- Academic results, rankings, rivalries with Winch./St. Paul's...
-- James F. (talk) 15:20, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I am planning to add
- School and Abbey (which should IMHO be a single section rather than spread across history and customs and other places)
- Links to Oxbridge (Trinity Cambridge and Christ Church)
--Jonathan 13:41, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
Good. The history section needs some cleanup - the coverage of the public schools act is woefully inadequate - Westminster might have gained final independence from the crown (and arguably it hasn't, given that the Chairman of the Board of Governers is a royal appointment) - but the real issue is independence of the Abbey.
--Giles Robertson [19:04, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)]
- College Garden, strictly refers to the College as in the Collegiate Body of the Abbey. Or so the canons say.
- Giles Robertson 23:25 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)