Timplee

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Happy editing! Fahads1982 (talk) 12:53, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Understanding the lead

I have just reverted your edit to Highland Clearances. There is a fuller explanation of why on the article talk page. However, looking at your first edit[1], I think you have made the same mistake in both of them. The lead is a summary of the article. An editor is not obliged to fully reference the lead because those references appear in the main article. In both the recent edit and your first edit, you appear to be asserting that you are dealing with unreferenced material, when the references (and a full discussion) are later in the article. Please do take a look at [MOS:LEAD]] ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:27, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

I was not aware that the lead does not need references, though references often are given. I've gone looking for writing guidance on this, could you point me to it please to aid my understanding. There is a certain logic to not needing references in the lead, provided a suitable reference exists within the body.

In the case of my first edit on cottage gardens, the assertion in the lead was contrary to the body text, though I did not make that clear. I assume that's why you didn't revert it?

I will take care to check the body text first, and ensure my edit comments are clearer on the point.

Regarding this reversion of my edit - I am uncomfortable with the language currently presented as it seems biased (contrary to the 2nd pillar). Perhaps there is better language that could express the circumstances and actions with less bias?

I have purchased the reference book to check what is asserted and am awaiting it's arrival.

Best regards,

Tim Timplee (talk) 16:55, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. WP:LEAD contains ...although it is common for citations to appear in the body and not the lead.. I am sure there is other guidance on this, but some of this stuff is quite fragmentary and not that easy to find.
I perhaps did not look too closely at the cottage garden edit, but it did seem worth a mention.
The point about the Highland Clearances edit is that either version, without suitably solid references, could be accused of being biased. The point that I take from a range of sources is that (a) bankruptcy and the risk of bankruptcy was very common for Highland landowners and (b) despite a few of them behaving appallingly to their tenants, the majority did the right thing. The work that reveals that most clearly is Devine's The Great Highland Famine. A historian who generally takes the side of those evicted, James Hunter, in the first edition of his The Making of the Crofting Community presents landlords in the Highland potato famine as heartless despots. Then Devine's highly researched book on the subject came out which demonstrated that Hunter's thesis was flawed. The later editions of Hunters book have a preface which accepts Devine's work – but strangely the main text of his book remains unchanged. Consequently that preface is often on the reading lists of students of Scottish history, so that they can see the historiographical process in action. It also demonstrates how the subject has moved on from John Prebble's work, which though venerated by the tourist guides who cater for American visitors (see Devine's book on the Scottish Clearances for a historian criticising the superficial beliefs involved) is essentially superseded by genuine historical research.
In short, it is biased to imply that Highland landlords were greedy, so evicted tenants to get more money, if, in reality, they were overwhelmed with debts and, however unwillingly, had to do something to avoid losing everything. These landlords may, in general terms, have had an amazing inability to handle their financial affairs prudently, but the evidence that they were, as a class, simply greedy does not stack up. Anyway, I will let you read your way into the subject. I suggest that you would need to cover several authors and several books by each for a full picture. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 21:14, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. You obviously know a great deal about the topic. As I've read more about it, I see there is a great tension and I have a lot more reading to do. Though it risks being a distraction from the subject I am formally studying! :)

Were there any landlords who sought to follow or strengthen the dùthchas?

I'm assuming they were unsuccessful or we would have heard more about them.

I've only recently been connected with Scotland; studying in Orkney and now bought a house there. It's been fascinating to see the cultural differences to England. It is far more Nordic in approach, and the historical dùthchas seems to have been an important part of that, something which appears to have been killed off in England with the Normans.

I wonder if the lead's forth paragraph (or parts of it) could be moved to be second place? This might shift the emphasis and set the context better for the two phases of the clearances, without negating the truth that there was a need for the landlords that had arisen due to cultural changes. What do you think?

And I'm curious - are you Tom Devine?

Best wishes, Tim Timplee (talk) 12:05, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Taking your points in reverse order:
No I am not Tom Devine, just an ordinary Wikipedia editor. Without really intending to, I seem to tackle a number of articles that seriously misrepresent the subject (many in the history of maritime technology, where there are also some common misconception). The Highland clearances article that I first saw was based largely on John Prebble and a big dose of unhistoric folklore. The first historian I went to for information was Eric Richards – hence him being quoted quite a bit in the article. (He also wrote a biography of Patrick Sellar which was highly acclaimed.)

The lead is often the only thing that people read in an article. So the balance here is critical. I think that differentiating the two phases of the clearances is important, because many of the misconceptions arise from thinking it was a homogenous process. So I think that is important to lay out from the beginning. I see the lead, currently, as follows

• (1) Gives the briefest of definitions, mentioning the phases.
• (2) Explaining phase 1 gets in a link to the Scottish agricultural revolution and gives links to run rig and enclosure to get across that this was part of a change in the agricultural system. It also explains what happened to the displaced people and mentions one cause of the resulting feeling. There is an obvious "why" to this, hence the mention of debt, which is probably the most common driver of phase 1.
• (3) The explanation of phase 2 introduces overpopulation (though we see from the article that this affected the first phase as well), emigration and the potato famine.
• (4) Here the lead tackles why the Highland clearances may be different from other agricultural revolutions. It introduces the different speed at which people's expectations changed and how landlord behaviour varied.

Logically, we have to say what happened before dealing with people's behaviour and expectations – otherwise the reader is seeing an analysis before the basic facts.

Orkney, etc. Orkney is, in my understanding, much more Nordic than the rest of Scotland/Highlands and Islands. It was, as you know, part of Norway for some while. I could wander off-topic here with the way boats in Shetland and Orkney were made in Norway (designed specifically for the sea conditions they were to be used in) and shipped to these islands for assembly.

Landlords who sought to follow...dùthchas. This is actually dealt with in the first footnote of the article.

Reading: the topic of the Highland Clearances seems to have reached a level of stasis now as historians perhaps feel they have covered the subject. (I will now be disproved on this as some new book comes out!) It can be looked at in various levels of detail. For the a technical look at how pre-clearance agriculture worked, Dodgshon is an interesting read – he is cited by both Richards and Devine. This article largely covers just the basics. There are some simplifications that one can be tempted to go beyond. For instance it does not cover: when the Sutherland estate were considering whether they were being harsh with those resettled to crofts, they asked the neighbouring estates what they did with displaced tenants. The answer was the the tenants were simply evicted and had no alternative accommodation offered. Given the resistance to the article being based on proper historians rather than Prebble, this would have been a step too far, as it shows that the Sutherland clearances were not the worst. (There are references to support this view, but I do not have the immediately to hand.) ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 14:07, 18 June 2024 (UTC)