Talk:Trinity College, Cambridge

The May Ball is officially titled the First and Third Trinity Boat Club May Ball, but long ago ceased belonging to the boat club. It is completely autonomous and shares only the name, flag and college. A bit pedantic perhaps. http://www.trinityball.co.uk/history.html So maybe the mention of the ball should be moved away from the boat club or at least rephraased. JTo

Anyone concerned that the piece about All Soul's being richer than Trinity is incorrect? I'm pretty sure Trinity is richer. Comments please. -ChariK

See the comment at the end of this discussion - All Souls apparently has more money per student. Bluap 09:52, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm concerned that this page is lacking a few very important people. It seems to be almost completely a copy of http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/smb1001/trin/alumni.htm , and this list misses out all Nobel Prize Winners, Masters, MPs and Olympic Gold Medallists - precisely the people who should be included.

I don't have to add all these people myself, do I? Tim

We should have something about the double chimes of the Trinity clock (and the Great Court Run, Chariots of Fire) and the "Wedding Cake" with the blank clock face in St. John's College. But what is the real story? Bovlb 21:40, 2004 Mar 16 (UTC)

I don't know if the stuff like the double chimes should go in: WikiPedia isn't a tourist guide. If you want the real history behind folklore the chairleg held by Henry VIII on the main gate (which was swapped for a sceptre more than a hundred years ago and since been replaced by the College with a new chairleg) would be a better story than the clocks? BozMo(talk)

"more than a hundred years ago"

I always heard 1950 myself.

Super richard 22:36, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Really? I heard 1970's. --Wee Jimmy 20:37, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually, correct that, apparently, according to the college lit, it was over 100 years ago, and they had to replace the leg in the 1970's because it presumably wasn't too well after 70 years of East Anglian weather... --Wee Jimmy 21:41, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

About the clock and chairleg, I suspect you can add a section in the wiki on folklore about Trinity College, can't you? this way people can choose to read it.

About the alumni list, I find this list to be misleading at best, or deceiving. Many people quoted as alumni never studied at TC. There is a real difference between training students and later they become Nobel prizes or whatever, or buying Nobel Prizes and the likes. The latter means TC is a rich college, the former that they have had some success as a teaching academic institution. Yarkout 12:37, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As the author of the webpage ([1] (http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=23)) from which the list used here was lifted wholesale (without permission, I might add!), I can assure you that your concerns are unfounded. To the best of my knowledge, all the alumni listed were either undergrad or grad students, and certainly all the Nobel winners were (I checked them all at source, and they were again checked by the University's Press and Alumni Office as it now forms part of their official list). If you know of a counter-example I'd love to know about it. In addition to the 31 Nobels here Trinity has had many others as visiting Professors or Honorary Fellows and I don't count any of them. Several US universities are very guilty of ramping up their Nobel counts in the ways you mention, but this simply isn't true of Cambridge, I promise you. There's a little more discussion of this at one of my other pages [2] (http://www.blanchflower.org/alumni/camnobel.html). Smb1001 17:38, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Junior Scholarship I've removed the statement that Junior Scholars get Great Court rooms in their 3rd year. When I was an undergraduate (1992-1995), Scholars received higher placings in the room ballot, were still unlikely to be able to choose Great Court rooms. Since then, I believe that the order of the room ballot has been changed, and scholars no longer receive preference. And this begs the question: why do we have a section about Scholarships at all? In my view the page would be better without it. Bluap 15:03, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Scholars are still at the top of the room ballot, and indeed all the scholars in my year studying my subject have Great Court rooms at the moment. Proteus (Talk) 15:30, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I second that - all the 3rd year scholars I know are in Great Court...--Wee Jimmy 00:21, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I changed the statement that we're the richest educational institution in per student terms. All Souls in Oxford (which only accept Oxford's top 2 graduate students after a prize exam) is far richer: in Hall they eat with golden cutlery!

Mallard

I've removed some dodgy information about the Mallard. Firstly, it would be incorrect to give names. Secondly, as far as I am aware, the duck has moved at least 4 times since 1992, and it always remains within the Hall. While I can't guarantee a date, I'm sure that at least one occasion was around 1997 or so. At one period it vanished for a year or so before returning, complete with radio-controlled "quacker". Fortunately, the remote control didn't have a long enough range to operate the device. On another occasion in recent years, the duck was replaced by a yellow rubber duck. Bluap 16:38, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Image Layout

There's been a bit of to-ing a fro-ing between myself and Olivier about the layout of the images on this page. Personally, I feel that it is better to allow the images to float down the right-hand side of the "Related Pages" and "Alumni" sections. Olivier seems to want to force the images to be displayed on the right-hand side of the page between the "Related Links" title and the list of the links. I find that this layout does not work well for IE (no idea about other browsers). To see the layouts, compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trinity_College%2C_Cambridge&oldid=12031352 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trinity_College%2C_Cambridge&oldid=12033664 Anyone else with a preference? Bluap 12:00, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The floating just does not work properly with Mozilla Firefox: the pictures are literally "floating": they are displayed in the middle of the page and cover the text. With IE, honestly, while the floating version is slightly better, I do not see much difference between the 2 versions. Given the growing success of Firefox, I believe that the floating version is not acceptable. There may be other better solutions for displaying a gallery of pictures, like creating a table for instance - I know that it has been done for other articles, but I am not an expert. olivier 12:48, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I can see, the mark-up is correct, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial Do you have this problem on other pages? If so, it sounds as if something has gone wrong with the Wiki as a whole, rather than just these pages, and you should bring it to the attention of one of the administrators Bluap 14:43, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't get why so many people complain about floating images "not working" in Firefox. I use Firefox and I've never had problems with them. Maybe some people have maltweaked their CSS or something? The site's main CSS clearly defines the right-floating thumbnails to "clear:right", meaning they display underneath each other along the right edge, and the text displays as normal on the left. — Reverting. — Timwi 21:28, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK guys, you are stubborn geniuses: you are wrong but you won! The display is pathetic with the Firefox version that I installed 2 days ago. I will not fight for it, but be aware that many people will have a very poor impression of both the College and Wikipedia by looking at this page. Timwi might wonder why "so many people complain with floating images not working in Firefox": you know, they might be right after all. olivier 13:02, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)

OK, let me rephrase: I don't get why so many people complain about floating images not working, but then fail to explain what exactly "doesn't work", or make a screenshot, or give more information about their set-up, their configuration, their preferences, or any other circumstances that might in any way be constructive in actually diagnosing the issue. — Timwi 23:46, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And, from my point of view, the mark-up appears to be done correctly in this page, so it's a wiki-wide problem, not one specific to Trinity College. Bluap 11:45, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)