Forum:Parishes

No Watercooler item seems to contain reference to parishes. Wikipedia seemingly has no categories for church parishes (except at the national level) in England, where they are often no longer the same as the civil parishes in local government. It does have an alphabetical list of parishes in Scotland (which we now have), where there are fewer civil parishes.

We are seeing some appear as locations, with more to come, because before there were UK censuses and compulsory registration the parish register was often the only written indication of a birth, baptism, marriage, or death, and we will therefore be creating a growing number of pages for them and ought to have a workable category structure until SMW answers our prayers.

Small question of what to call them. We have Category:Parishes in England, which I recently (and now I think misguidedly) redirected to Category:Civil parishes in England. Apart from a Roman Catholic "Category:Parishes in ...", all our other dozen or so parish categories that are not "Civil parishes ..." are "Category:Parishes of ...", most if not all matching Wikipedia.

We have over thirty "Category:Civil parishes in ...", a few covering only single towns, so there's clearly much more scope there, as we gradually add more from Wikipedia (see the large number at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Civil_parishes_in_England).

I suggest:
 * 1) continuing to categorize the existing groups as Wikipedia does
 * 2) creating a set of church parish categories for England (and Ireland if it seems to work the same way), called "Parishes in ...", based on third-level and second-level subdivisions as we and Wikipedia use for categorizing many other things.

As the church parishes don't cover the whole country neatly and are not part of the administrative structure, the word "in" would be more appropriate than "of", and being the same as what is used for the civil parishes would be a little easier to remember.

A note on each such "Parishes ..." category would be desirable, to remind users that "parish" generally means "church parish", with a link to the corresponding civil parish category (if any).

All agreed?

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:20, January 29, 2013 (UTC)