Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 June 9

Moving churches

I just copy pasted this from User Cyde's page, not knowing what else to do with it, not being part of the procedure and not having received reply. Amandajm (talk) 07:04, 19 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

What on earth is going on?

These categories "9th century church" etc are completely artificial and extraordinarily confusing! The implication is that the actual church, i.e. the building, dates from that time. That is very rarely the case, except with 19th century foundations.

The previous category "Churches of 9th century foundation" (or however it was worded) was meaningful. The current categorisation doesn't work As a major contributor to church and architectural articles, I am totally oppose to it, but I didn't know it was happening.

Amandajm (talk) 15:33, 17 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

Oh no. It's even worse than I thought! It actually states "9th century church building" ! Do you realise how utterly ridiculous that is? It means that Lincoln Cathedral one of the greatest Gothic cathedrals in the world, with only a few remnants of it 11th century work left in the facade (the rest was burnt down) is labelled "11th century church building". This is too stupid and has to stop! Amandajm (talk) 15:39, 17 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

Basilica of St. Severin. Here's another case that makes the problem very obvious:

St. Severin was established in the late 4th century[2] as a memorial chapel and extended several times. The oldest parts of today's building date back to the 10th century. It was designated a Basilica Minor by Pope Pius XII in 1953.

So with this information clearly stated in the text of the article, it has been transferred from being categorised as a building of "4th century foundation" to a "4th century church building"! There is a gap of five or six hundred years between the original church and the present building!

The other problem we run into here is that while many churches in Europe tend to have a fairly consistent building style, those in the UK rarely do. Even among parish churches (if they are not of Victorian foundation) the majority of churches show a variety of dates and sometimes span 1,000 years. This is particularly the case with English cathedrals where the norm is that the building will have taken not less than 400 years to construct.

Canterbury Cathedral has been labelled as a 7th century church building, because it was founded by Augustine of Canterbury in the 7th century, and regardless of the fact that the text of the article says that it was entirely rebuilt in the 11th century. It was then almost entirely rebuilt again, piecemeal, in subsequent centuries so that only the crypt and a couple of small towers remain from the 11th century. In other words, it can't be simp[y classified as an 11th century church building either. It is an 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th and 19th century church building, having important parts of its vast and varied structure dating from all those centuries. What it is not is a "7th century building".

The Cathedral of Cordoba is another very difficult one. There is probably not a remnant of the 7th century Christian church which was overbuilt with a mosque. During the Gothic period (can't remember the exact date) a Christian cathedral building was inserted bang in the middle of the mosque. But the mosque that surrounds it is considered to be "part of the cathedral building". It certainly cannot be described as a "7th century church building".

There is no simple way of doing this. You can't just transfer the churches from one list to another. If they are going to be categorised as building of a particular century then it is going to require researching every single building to find out which category it belongs to. And then, in the case of a building like Canterbury Cathedral (most English cathedrals) it will have to be categorised under several different centuries.

I would prefer "Church buildings of ?th century construction".

Amandajm (talk) 00:40, 18 June 2011 (UTC)Reply