Wikidata:Property proposal/historic county

historic county edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

DescriptionHistoric county or traditional county: the traditional, geographical division of Great Britain and Ireland
Representshistoric county (Q67770276)
Data typeItem
Template parameterhistoric county
Domainhistoric county of the United Kingdom (Q67376938) county of Ireland (Q179872)
Allowed valuesItems which are an instance of (Q21503252) historic county of the United Kingdom (Q67376938) or county of Ireland (Q179872)
Example 1Dufftown (Q1012028)Banffshire (Q806432)
Example 2Luton (Q203889)Bedfordshire (Q67387552)
Example 3Pen y Fan (Q1325530)Brecknockshire (Q547052)
Example 4Ballymena (Q805451)County Antrim (Q189592)
Example 5Carlisle (Q192896)Cumberland (Q23360)
Example 6Stanground (Q7598847)Huntingdonshire (Q67266168)
Example 7Sunbury-on-Thames (Q2194010)Middlesex (Q19186)
Source
Planned useData for towns and villages of the United Kingdom and Ireland
Expected completenessis complete (Q21874050)
See also
  • located in the administrative territorial entity (P131): the item is located on the territory of the following administrative entity. Use P276 for specifying locations that are non-administrative places and for items about events. Use P1382 if the item falls only partially into the administrative entity.
  • historical region (P6885): geographic area which at some point in time had a cultural, ethnic, linguistic or political basis, regardless of present-day borders
  • vice-county (P1887): geographical delineation utilized for biological records in the British Isles
  • Motivation edit

    There are 92 historic counties in the United Kingdom and 26 in the Republic of Ireland, together covering the whole land, so that every geographical feature in Great Britain and Ireland is in a historic county, or on occasion on the border of two of them. Each British historic county has its own data record already.

    The historic counties are geographical entities, not administrative areas. Many have administrative areas named after them, but the areas are different and accordingly so is the associated data.

    The historic counties are known just as “counties” or “shires” but for distinction from statutorily defined counties they are called “historic counties”, “ancient counties”, “counties proper”, “geographical counties” or “traditional counties”. The Office for National Statistics uses the term “historic county”, as does the Historic Counties Trust. I therefore propose that this be used on Wikidata.

    The ONS Index of Place Names in Great Britain’ User Guide clarifies this usage on page 13. This Guide can be accessed on the ONS website

    The Historic Counties Trust has published the Historic Counties Standard to clarify any questions about the identification of the historic counties

    The historic counties, as noted, are a unit used in the Office for National Statistics database, the Index of Place Names in Great Britain. The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016 authorise the erection of boundary signs for historic counties.

    More recently, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government published guidance on community heritage strategy specifically directing local authorities to celebrate the historic counties. The document is named ‘Celebrating the historic counties of England’.

    (This Guidance paper is applicable only to England in accordance with the Ministry’s geographical scope.)

    The Guidance observes:

    “The historic counties are an important element of English traditions which support the identity and cultures of many of our local communities, giving people a sense of belonging, pride and community spirit. They continue to play an important part in the country’s sporting and cultural life as well as providing a reference point for local tourism and heritage. We should all seek to strengthen the role that they can play.” With that in mind, and as authorities will wish to know the appropriate counties for any location subject to the guidance, it will be valuable to be able to include that information as a distinct Statement in articles on towns, villages and other locations. Hogweard (talk) 22:45, 15 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    Discussion edit

    The trouble is that neither civil parishes in Scotland or historic counties in the United Kingdom at large are administrative entities. Returning to my Leeds example, we would then have an almighty mess of overlapping administrative entities which makes no sense logically. The existing vice-county (P1887) property is the ideal analogue here -- no-one is suggesting that vice counties are administrative entities, but they are independent geographical entities in their own namespace with a unique property to reflect that. Owain (talk) 14:06, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I think it's fairly clear for civil parishes in Scotland in Scotland that they had been and they way they are include makes it clean. --- Jura 14:16, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Logically, civil parishes should have their own property too as a non-administrative geography, but that is not the subject of this proposal! We should not be overloading an inappropriate property with lots of qualifying statements as it muddies the logical distinctions that they are supposed to create. There is a way to separate out overlapping non-administrative geographies and we should use it, as we have with vice-county (P1887). Owain (talk) 14:31, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, vice-county (P1887) is a bit of outlier. Civil parishes are prefectly suitable for P131. --- Jura 14:35, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    The vice-counties are an interesting one - they are used by naturalists and fit no other category. They are based of course on the historic counties.
    The historic counties are completely non-administrative, so again none of the suggested properties will fit. Although of no administrative significance, their value as 'cultural capital' cannot be overstated, which is the basis of the MHCLG paper I referenced, and a number preceding it. The Ministry organised the county flag display in Westminster last July with that cultural capital value in mind. Most of those counties are over a thousand years old, predating the formation of England itself, and together they form a comprehensive, coherent geography. There is nothing like them.LG02 (talk) 15:15, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    What are they based on? --- Jura 15:24, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I think you would have to ask a Saxon monarch to get an answer! The counties of England are over a thousand years old and there is no record of their creation - their names just start appearing in records. Those of Lowland Scotland are barely younger, and based on the English system. Counties in Ireland and Wales appeared as English rule spread there.LG02 (talk) 15:46, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    So they were used for government of the kingdom ? --- Jura 16:00, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    I might be able to answer that, as a scholar of the period. Digging back to the Dark Ages has its limitations though. The word 'county' postdates the Norman Conquest but the counties long predate it, and where known as 'scira' or shires. A few of the counties have their origin as kingdoms themselves or as 'underriciu' (underkingdoms). The system of shires as a whole is best dated from the Kingdom of the West Saxons. As far as we can tell, there were military formations based on the shires, and shire courts were established. That said, there were many boroughs created with their own courts and 'liberties' granted to great magnates and monastic houses which had their own jurisdictions, being geographically within the county but not within the power of its courts. This continued throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and accelerated in the Middle Ages, so the counties have never corresponded with the organisation of judicial functions. They were (and are) geographical divisions primarily, on which functions for the administration of justice and the raising of militias were organised, but did not define those functions. The administration of justice and the militia may have been the motive for defining counties, but it was more that those functions were hung upon an area, not the area defined by the function, as they simply did not correspond.

    We are in any evet after a thousand years a bit beyond that period of why they might have been devised - they have been a geographical reality for countless generations. Hogweard (talk) 18:23, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    I don't think those fit the position. Any 'administrative entity' property is wrong: they are not administrative at all, only geographical. Historical region is problematic, because 'historical' means 'in the past'. The counties are 'historic' in the sense of 'rooted in the past' in the same way that a building may be called a 'historic building', but it is not 'historical'. (We could have 'traditional county' as a name instead - I was just going by the terminology in official statistics.)
    The purpose of having the data is to allow applications and outside projects to interrogate the data. The traditional counties are unique and exact: an application looking the find the traditional county for any given town or village will want to get that single answer data, not a collection of unrelated regions and past regions. Hogweard (talk) 14:01, 22 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    I'm sure the ancient history was interesting for some but I am interested in the current use for the historic / traditional counties, and that reality is that they are unique, geographical areas, with no administrative significance but of importance for the cultural capital inherent in them. I appreciate the observation that the point is to be able to get the data. Any town, unless it is on a county boundary, will have one historic county only as they are a defined, coherent topographical system, and so it should spit that single answer out. LG02 (talk) 14:25, 22 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    Virtually the exact same discussion was had about the the vice-county property at Wikidata:Property_proposal/vice-county. Everything said about that property applies here. To wit: "vice-counties are not part of any hierarchy of administrative areas", "they don't represent any organisational unit at all", "they exist as entirely independent concepts that have exactly no relation to each other", "the boundaries of ceremonial and administrative counties can and do change, but vice-counties are static by design". Vice-counties are, for the most part, subdivisions of the historic counties, so to repeat myself, everything that was said about the vice-county property equally applies here. Owain (talk) 12:37, 23 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    We do have some pretty niche Properties already, such as GENUKI ID (P7352), and, as Owain points out, vice-county (P1887). Those are useful properties from a data-management perspective but still of narrow use. To have those and not to be able to have a label for the most fundamental and popular geographical demarcation in the British Isles would seem bizarre. Hogweard (talk) 17:31, 23 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]