Talk:Second city of the United Kingdom

Split from Second city article

This page has been separated from the main Second city article because of the controversial history of the title of "second city of the United Kingdom". The constant edits and reversions to the UK section were seen as damaging to the development of the other nations' sections, so it was decided to confine the heated debate to this separate article. This will then, hopefully, allow the main article to develop in peace. I would ask any future editors to think twice before merging the two articles back together again. Thank you. Road Wizard 17:20, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Past discussions

There has been a long series of discussions about which city deserves the title of "second city of the United Kingdom", many of which can be found on the Talk:Second city page. Road Wizard 17:20, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Great Idea!

This is a great idea seperating the United Kindom's Second City article because there is so much information to go with this and alot of edits are made to the old one!

Environmental factors

As I don't want to get in to a revert war with the anonymous user on 88.104.160.21 (talk · contribs) and 88.104.168.43 (talk · contribs) I don't want to revert his/her changes to the article for a second time, so I'm prompting a discussion here.

The 'Environmental Factors' paragraph basically boils down, once the hyperbole is taken out, to 'Manchester has more environmental initiatives than Birmingham'. I don't think this says anything particularly relevant about which is considered the 'second city', so I don't think it should be in the article. Any other opinions? --Nick Boalch 09:14, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I must admit that I am a little wary of this paragraph, as trying to decide which city has a better set of 'Environmental Factors' comes very close to breaking the no original research rule. Simply stating one of the possible factors and then saying that it shows Manchester is better is not really a balanced argument. To make it a balanced argument, you would have to include questions like:

Which city has the better air quality? (Manchester has a greater density of motorways than Birmingham, so this may adversely affect Manchester's claim).
Which city has more open spaces and park land? (Physical environment of the city would be very important).
What are the comparative levels of noise nuisance in each city? (Many people find a noisy city to be a poor environment).
What recycling facilities do the 2 cities offer?

There are other questions which could be asked about the Environment, but even trying to answer the ones above will break the no original research rule, unless you can find a source which has already studied them.

Having said that though, we can at least try to come up with a phrasing that is NPOV enough for the article. The current paragraph will need to be watered down tremendously, the sources removed, other possible factors mentioned and a conclusion that it is impossible to determine which city comes out on top on environmental factors. Road Wizard 09:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wrote the paragraph because the environment is very important and Manchester does have a larger stronghold on Environment. I added what I could find on Birmingham to make it NPOV but how can an article about two competing cities ever become NPOV as there is no fixed answer to the Question of what is the second city. I simply added this as today it has relevance to the potential of a city. This article should give facts from both cities and allow the reader to determin which is greater on all counts because if you tell them which is then that is completly biased. 88.104.168.43 (talk · contribs) 14:01, 7 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, thanks for adding the Environmental Factors section to the article, without your contribution we wouldn't even be considering including environmental issues in the article. Wikipedia is a collaborative effort and a lot of the advantage it gains is through editors having differing perspectives on an issue and coming up with new ideas.

Getting to your point above, I must agree with some of what you say. The environment of a city and its environmental policies often affect people's perceptions of that city greatly. It is useful to have this as a section of the article, and it is good that you have tried to make the section NPOV by including information about Birmingham. Even so, it is still an unbalanced argument. This is not meant as a criticism of you however, because as I said, Wikipedia is a collaborative effort - one editor adds a statement and another editor can come along and tidy it up. The problem I have with the section is that it only really mentions one aspect of the environment - biofuel. That one particular company has said it will trial a scheme involving one type of biofuel in Manchester, whilst being a useful fact, does not in itself give Manchester a greater claim to being second city. In fact, you could counter that argument by saying that Birmingham hosted the "Environmentally Friendly Vehicles Conference" in 2005. By hosting an international conference on how to move forward in cleaner fuels, you could say that Birmingham is the one to "lead the way in the UK" as you have claimed for Manchester. The only way I can see this moving forward is if we try to balance out the section as you cannot really prove which city's policies have had a greater effect on the environment without doing original research.

As a final point, you may wish to consider alternative forms of action when your edits have been reverted. Simply putting a section back into an article once someone has removed it won't really solve anything, as the other editor is likely to remove it again later. What is often a better way of handling the issue is placing a comment on the user's talk page asking for their reasons for reverting your work. Once you know their reasons you can try to find a phrasing of your statements that they won't object to and then put them back into the article. If for some reason you are unable to resolve the issue that way, you can also place the reverted statement on the article's talk page and ask for comments from other editors - if the other editors agree that your statements are justified then it is less likely that a single editor will be able to revert your work. I hope this advice helps you in your work at Wikipedia. Thanks. Road Wizard 14:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I did not want to do too much original research as then it would mean me writing paragraphs full of facts about one topic when this article is supposed to be about the Second City of the United Kingdom I just wanted to write a short paragraph outlining the main points each city has for researchers to decide for themselves which they believe to be the second city. There is no answer so again all we can do is give the facts which are important to a city's status. Manchester2k6 16:37, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other

Would it be possible for this article not to read like, for want of a better phrase, a pissing contest? It's not an essay to prove which city is the second city, but this seems to be the intent behind most of the points presented in the article at my time of writing. Matthew 10:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Matthew the only reason you say this is because you are from the West Midlands yourself and there are several more points for Manchester than there are for Birmingham. Please contribute to the article but remember to use NPOV and balance out the Manchester facts. User:Manchester2k6 16:29, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say it wherever I was from (which, incidentally, isn't the West Midlands - I just live here). It's quite tiresome to see the 'Rah rah rah Birmingham/Manchester is best!' arguments over and over and over again: it just goes round and round in circles and the lists of facts can potentially go on for just as long. Can't we simply stick to the point of the article and leave the incessant second-city supremacy argument for the pub? Matthew 18:57, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, leave this article if you do not like it nobody is forcing you to read it. Wikipedia is about giving the facts and just because you may have heard them more than once does not mean the whole world should not be able to view them.

Manchester2k6 20:29, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that what I'm trying to articulate is that there comes a point when all this points-scoring will overburden the article and any point will get lost in the detail. What exactly do all the minor points - especially those introduced with emotive words such as 'lead' or 'forefront', which cannot easily be quantified and proven - add to the overall theme of 'Traditionally Birmingham has been seen as the UK's second city but now some consider it to be Manchester'? Aren't the links to the BBC stories sufficient to demonstrate this? Matthew 20:51, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have to say that, as I've previously commented on Talk:Second_city, I largely agree with Matthew. I'm far from convinced that any of this extra detail is helpful. --Nick Boalch 21:38, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recent views of second city

I've reverted the wording of this to remove the wording 'many' and put something more NPOV. It's better to let the reader decide the scale of the recent views of Manchester's status. Matthew 21:58, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't think anyone should have a problem with this. --Nick Boalch 22:11, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We should find someone from London to write this article because the only people who write it are West Midlanders and Mancunians so there will never be a NPOV especially when the West Midlanders revert the comment that many believe that Manchester deserves the title it is just plain petty. ALSO the point that Birmingham has generally been considered the second city is not backed up. A book, written by somebody in Stroud which is not very far from Birmingham, is not very good evidence for this claim so perhaps we should all start to change this daily?

One's location is not a barrier to being objective and presenting the facts in such a way that the reader can make up his own mind over what they mean. 'Many' isn't a very good word to use in the context it was used - what does it mean? More than one? A million? Better to use something objective and to let the reader decide whether or not there are 'many' involved.

NB Stroud's about as far from Birmingham as York is from Manchester, and I wouldn't expect people from Stroud to identify with Birmingham any more than I would expect people from York to identify with Manchester (i.e., not much). I agree, though, that there could perhaps be a better source to verify that Birmingham has generally considered the second city: how about something like [[1]]? Matthew 18:43, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You would think that The Economist would be reliable but really they have done no research into what the second city is. They are not interested. They think the United Kingdom is made up of London and the rest of it. The magazine rarely has anything about business or economics outside the capital as if it doesn't go on anywhere else. As The Economist has nothing to back up the Birmingham claim in my opinion it is not massively useful.

The point isn't that The Economist has performed research into which city is the second city. Rather, it is that The Economist has used 'second city' to refer to Birmingham in a context that is not concerned with evaluating which city is the second city, thus reflecting the traditional view of Birmingham as the second city. Scanning the first few pages of results of searches for '"second city"' on other national UK news websites (e.g., The Guardian, BBC News, and The Telegraph shows a continuation of this trend. In these returned results I don't see any that use 'second city' to refer to Manchester - the only items that come up are those that report the recent surveys noted in the main Wikipedia article. Matthew 22:31, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I did a googlefight on 'Manchester second city' and 'Birmingham second city'. Manchester won 19.5 million to 19.3 million. Pretty conclusive evidence... and you can hardly get more up to date!!

Two points:

1) Try Googlefighting 'Manchester "second city"' and 'Birmingham "second city"', to prevent sites with text such as 'Manchester City scored their second goal in the 59th minute' from being recorded in the scores. Doing this I get 115,000 returns for the first search term versus 195,000 for the second.

2) Googlefight makes no reference to the quality of the results - look at what exactly is being returned, and you'll see a very high number of it of it is the same news reports about those surveys being recycled over and over again across different sites. This doesn't reflect any changes in usage or the general view held. See comments further up for how the media at least is using the term 'second city'.

So not exactly compelling. Matthew 21:52, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My research was a little tongue-in-cheek! Merely a comment on the state of the argument. Maybe the nebulous defintion of a second city should be pinned down to the most number of comedy clubs per square mile or would a one mile radius of the town hall be better. I'm living in Buenos Aires at the moment. Down here nobody has really heard of Birmingham, (and I do mention it as I went to university there). Everybody talks of Manchester United (of course), and knows Manchester music. Regarding a city's importance, is that observation any less valid than another? I did another googlefight on "Manchester, UK" and "Birmingham, UK" (just to rule out any interference from those US namesakes). Manchester returns 16.2 million to Birmingham's 5.7 million. London returns 95 million. The web has spoken!!

Article stance

Once again I don't want to breach a personal 1RR by reverting the edits of 88.104.165.91 (talk · contribs), although I must say I'm becoming more than a little fed up of having accusations of vandalism thrown at me by this user.

We need to have a clear plan for this article. In the past there has been a clear consensus to maintain as balanced a coverage as possible between Manchester and Birmingham in order to avoid precisely what's happening now: anonymous users with non-NPOV agenda pointlessly lengthening the article with arbitrary facts and statistics intended to assert the dominance of one city over the other.

Can we please reaffirm that this is the stance we, as editors, intend this article to take? --Nick Boalch 11:40, 15 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Balancing between Manchester and Birmingham does not mean you have to delete peoples facts or else this article will never develop. Do something constructive for once and add stuff about Birmingham to balance rather than being destructive and destoying other peoples work. It repulses me to the core when people behave like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.47.2 (talk) 09:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary, random and often unencyclopaedic facts transparently intended to bias the article one way or the other can hardly be described as 'constructive' (or, for that matter, 'work'). Believe me, we've been fighting the NPOV battle on this article for a long, long time. --Nick Boalch 11:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Population edits

I disagree with the recent edits to the Population section for the following reasons:

1) People in Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall, etc. do not think of themselves as part of the same 'city' as Birmingham. These towns all have perfectly well-defined centres of their own, though they. Residents would think of themselves as part of the same conurbation, but one wouldn't ever catch someone from Wolverhampton saying that he was from Birmingham and he certainly wouldn't think of himself as a Brummie. I am just supposing here, but I would expect residents of Bolton, Stockport, Oldham, etc. to think along similar lines with regard to being part of the same 'city' as Manchester.

2) The claim that the Greater Manchester conurbation is significantly larger than the West Midlands conurbation does not stack up with Largest_urban_areas_of_the_European_Union, which shows the two conurbations to be of such similar size that I don't think the difference is worth noting (it states that there is a difference of only 38,000 people between the two conurbations).

Thoughts?

(For an indication that User:131.111.8.102 may not be writing according to NPOV, I note that he has been playing silly buggers recently on the Birmingham page with regard to the second-city debate, but not on the Manchester page. Sigh.) Matthew 00:25, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been bold and updated the population information to compare conurbation with conurbation, and - fingers crossed - made this part of the article relatively future proof (assuming the two conurbations remain approximately equally sized). What seems to have been happening previously was the comparison of a county to a conurbation, with the concomitant anomaly being produced.

I'm still uncomfortable with the wording with regard to the conurbations being thought of as 'cities', though, at least on the part of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Matthew 11:40, 4 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've added 2001 Census data about both populations. In my view, the fact that some residents dislike being thought of as Brummies or Mancs does not negate including a poulation comparison of the two conurbations. Conurbations are generally formed as the result of an influencial central city. In light of this, I believe the paragaph about the London parallel should be revised. --Adzz 07:52, 5 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed - people around these parts (I'm in the Black Country), at least, don't think of themselves as being part of Birmingham or even 'Greater Birmingham', which seems to imply to the locals that they are somehow less than the residents of Birmingham. They're quite happy to accept, however, that they're part of the same conurbation as Birmingham. London seems different in that a resident of a given borough seems to identify as part of a rather large city, and hence I do not think the parallel stands on a West Mids:London basis at least. Matthew 18:21, 5 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I live in Bromsgrove and would be more than happy to be labelled as Greater Birmingham, it makes sense as all bus routes and rail routes seem to lead into Brum, most people seem to speak the same, have the same brands of shops, head to Brum for entertainment etc, I have friends in other parts of the black country who feel exactly the same, the only acception I can think of is Coventry. I don't see Greater Birmingham as taking anything away from the smaller towns or their identities, it just seems to make great sense? When you abroad the discussion goes.. "where are you from?" - "England" - "where in England?" - "Walsall" - "where?" - "by Birmingham" - "Ok" then you tell them everything great about Walsall Nick Boulevard 11:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nick - I think that this just serves to prove my point. People would say that they are from Walsall, Wolverhampton, etc., and then further pinpoint where this is (if the other person doesn't know) by saying that they're by Birmingham, rather than considering themselves part of the city. This doesn't preclude acceptance that they're all part of the same conurbation, centred (however wonky this centring actually is! ;-)) around Birmingham.

I can't speak for our north-western cousins, but the impression that I get is that they're more likely to say that they're from Manchester right off the bat, perhaps in good part due to the county being named Greater Manchester and therefore containing the name of its main city.

NB My ears can tell a definite difference between Brummie and Yam-Yam, and I've only lived in the region for under three years! ;-) And at work (in Brum) there's a fair bit of friendly banter between the two sides about the respective accents. Matthew 14:00, 25 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm afraid most people from the larger Black Country towns (and the city of Wolverhampton) do not consider themselves to be part of Birmingham, and get rather uppity about the suggestion. Comparing like with like, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Walsall are rather larger than, say, Bolton, Stockport and Oldham and so have more "gravity" of their own. Indeed, according to List of English cities by population, Wolverhampton is the 13th largest urban area in England, Dudley is 19th and Walsall is 28th, with the largest of the "other" Greater Manchester towns being Bolton at 37th.

West Midlands is pretty much a true multi-centred conurbation which is less and less dominated by Birmingham (which is off the to SE of the centre) the more northerly and westerly that you go, whereas Greater Manchester is centred on Manchester which dominates the surrounding towns more fully. Steven J 00:49, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wilmslow Road bus route

Is this claim actually verifiable by reference to any kind of statistics? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a student urban myth to impress freshers; I recall a few similar - equally unsubstantiated - claims about where I was at university (York).

And is a single busy bus route of any real relevance to this article?

PS I have made some edits to this article today to try to make this article a bit more objective than it is. Your thoughts are appreciated - see the edit history for details. Matthew 00:25, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]