Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Peerage and Baronetage

Noble immigration to the United States

Hello. I need help with the title of Noble immigration to the United States. Nobility does not define "noble" to include royalty but I don't know what term would be correct. Thank you. Invasive Spices (talk) 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Noble immigration to the United States#Article title

Death of Leigh Rayment (c. 2019) and loss of site

Since our last discussion (in 2017) Leigh Rayment has died - but, as far as I know, we did not notice. [Even a genealogy.com/LeighRayment/bio.htm biography of him now requires Wayback to see the front page - and a trick to save the archive url, which you will need to re-assemble by hand]. Subsequently his website has expired, and the standard named templates have been redirected to archives.

It looks like a full (?) copy of his website is available at https://leighrayment.com.au Can we transition to using this?

Rest in peace, Leigh Rayment. You were sui generis.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 15:24, 1 March 2026 (UTC).

• @Rich Farmbrough: Sad news. But we should transition "away" from using Rayment references. {{Rayment}} is used on 2.1K pages, and the MPs template {{Rayment-hc}} on many more. Since no references are given, the pages do not pass WP:RS. These days there is plenty of material, for example on the Internet Archive and Google Books, that can serve as better references. For MPs https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ is good to 1832. The old works of Joseph Foster (genealogist), George Edward Cokayne, the Burkes, Debrett are classics. At Visitation of England and Wales there is full text access to 35 volumes; I have put up The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal, which is also potentially pretty interesting. We should be ad fontes about it all, going forward. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:20, 22 April 2026 (UTC)
  • Rayment is, in general, very well referenced. Usually to Burke's and Debretts (those, originally self published sources) but also to the Gazette and Hansard, IIRC. Effectively a tertiary source, of high quality. But certainly no objection if someone wants to validate all Rayment's sources, and then use those instead, except that Rayment has already provided a level of editorial control, which I would trust above that of many editors. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 15:57, 22 April 2026 (UTC).
    
    • @Rich Farmbrough: Rich - we may be at cross-purposes here. I don't doubt the material was carefully researched: in the thread below I call the imports in the past here "fairly accurate". But a page like https://leighrayment.com.au/baronetage/baronetsH1.htm does not do footnotes. It is good to know that those baronets pages, which were usurped quite some time ago, are back up so we can look at them without the Wayback Machine. See Template talk:Rayment for some now ancient discussion. Charles Matthews (talk) 06:26, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Walter_Monckton#Requested_move_25_February_2026

This move is perhaps of interest to the project, specifically around WP:NCPEER. Thanks. HundredVisionsAndRevisions (talk) 17:43, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Lord Mountbatten#Requested move 10 March 2026

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Lord Mountbatten#Requested move 10 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Jacksonvil (talk|contribs) 22:27, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Splitting baronetcies

Is the reader better served by a page like this which lists baronetcies of three creations, or by a set index from which they are directed to three separate pages? Does this project have a guideline on this?

I see that @Charles Matthews has made similar changes for other baronetcies - picking a random example from Category:Set index articles on titles of nobility I find this edit changing it from a comprehensive article to a SIA. It seems to me that the reader would find a comprehensive article more helpful, but I thought I would enquire here where the experts on baronetcies are to be found. (I'm not a peerages expert, but was alerted to changes which linked to Ripley Castle - though I now notice that my involvement there was to redirect the castle to the village in 2008, before someone else created the article on the castle five years later!) PamD 13:25, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Baronets are generally less notable than peers (not only because they are more junior in the hierarchy, but also because they didn't have seats in the House of Lords), and so there is generally a lot less to say about a particular baronetcy. Splitting up these articles therefore generally results in a lot of short articles that are little more than a brief explanation of why the title was created in the first place followed by a list of names. In addition, the territorial designations of baronetcies are very peripheral and often not known, and so the reader is not particularly assisted by disambiguation based on them. For example, if I know there is a baronet called "Sir James Dalrymple" and go to Dalrymple baronets to work out who he might be, I have to click through to all the pages linked there to find all the Jameses (it turns out he could be the 1st Baronet "of Cranstoun" or the 2nd or 4th Baronets "of Hailes"). It would be far easier for me if they were all listed on one page. I would therefore generally be in favour of the first type of article, unless there is a particular need to separate out a particular creation (e.g. because its holders also at some point held a peerage, and so the reader is better served by a link to the article on that peerage, which can then also list the baronets - see e.g. Shirley baronets and Earl Ferrers). Proteus (Talk) 15:16, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

@PamD:, @Proteus:: The history goes back to around 2008, and there was a burst of activity for four years or so. WP:SETINDEX was split from WP:DAB in 2014, but the idea was around already in 2008, and could have been used.

I would strongly defend the use of set index pages, on multiple grounds. Firstly, anyone who looks can see that the categorisation of the omnibus pages is chaotic. A very moderate article such as Cooper baronets used to have

Category:Baronetcies in the Baronetage of England

Category:Extinct baronetcies in the Baronetage of Ireland

Category:1622 establishments in England

Category:Baronetcies in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom

Category:Extinct baronetcies in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom

Which is just an unfixable mess.

Secondly, around 2012 Motmit started to add navboxes for baronetcies, but there is no sensible way to do that without separate articles. Doesn't scale.

Thirdly, infoboxes. It is not fair to say that there is a lack of content for baronetcies. Besides heraldry, which I have been adding at scale, there is basic data, seat, motto. This is all encyclopedic and in the standard reference books I use. The convention is bare bones for the family history, but surely more can be added. Look at Cokayne's books, for example.

Getting round to referencing, while the initial content added was fairly accurate, it was very largely unreferenced, except in endnotes. And literally no one goes in and references pages with half-a-dozen baronetcies on them. It is an empirical fact that many baronetcies in the long pages have been left without inline referencing for a dozen years. No one even notices.

I understand exactly the point about "Sir James Dalrymple", but you can go to James Dalrymple. There is a link there that makes my argument for me: instead of Dalrymple baronets it could go to Dalrymple baronets of Hailes (1701) and then I think the criticism is dealt with.

I'm going on a bit, but to follow up from that: look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Cooper_baronets and the number of linking pages. Dab pages are supposed to have few incoming links. Pretty much every one of those links is a WP malfunction: a specific baronetcy would be meant. Splitting up the pages is sanity, as far as offering a fix is concerned. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:11, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

The thing is, those arguments would also apply to peerage articles, and yet we almost always combine those. Earl of Leicester, for example, combines information on seven different creations across three different peerages (England, Great Britain, United Kingdom), with a bunch of categories applying to one or more of those creations. What we do not do is have Earl of Leicester (first creation), or Earl of Leicester (1107 creation), etc, which is the equivalent of what you're doing with baronetcies. Proteus (Talk) 13:56, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Proteus: The short answer is that I have no plans to get involved with peerage titles. For one thing I already have taken on a large amount of work. For another, the "X baronets" article are mostly objectionable, because in most cases the topic is incoherent. For Campbell baronets, maybe not, and maybe someone could take that as a dissertation topic. I realise that I didn't directly address User:PamD's query: the technical flaws with the baronets articles seem to me unanswerable.

The short version of the history, in my view, is that the initial push of creations achieved the aim of bringing into enWP the baronets listings on the website of Leigh Rayment, now no longer with us. This was at the cost of creating hundreds of articles that constituted a "foreign body" here, of material not properly assimilated. Tryde left in 2012, Kittybrewster who was another major figure in the work died in 2021.

These issues are less serious for the peerage articles. I mean, there is a great deal to be done there to comply with WP:V and WP:RS, and all genealogical material can be problematic from the point of view of WP:BLP or WP:UNDUE. But not on my to-do list. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:46, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm afraid we can't base policy on what articles you want to edit. There has to be a coherent approach to related articles, and there is already a long-established way of doing things. Proteus (Talk) 14:28, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Well, to get to the point here, the baronets splitting is a case study for WP:BOLD. It can be discussed in those terms. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:30, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

The place to look if you have the name is James Dalrymple. James Dalrymple (baronet) would also be a valid dab, or redirect to section. In any case, this will give you lifespan, which should be enough to identify your person in most cases. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 16:26, 22 April 2026 (UTC).

Requested move at Talk:Walter Monckton#Requested move 25 February 2026

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Walter Monckton#Requested move 25 February 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 11:00, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Sir James Wylie, 1st Baronet

Could someone from this WikiProject take a look at Sir James Wylie, 1st Baronet? It appears to be ungoing a major revision by a newish WP:SPA who might be a decendent of Wylie. Most of the changes so far were almost certainly were made with the best intention, but I've noticed several MOS errors have been introduced. I've got zero knowledge about the article subkect so have no opinion on whether the new expansion is OK content wise, but I noticed several MOS errors and other syntax errors have been introduced. Since the article is currently marked with {{In use}}, I didn't go in and fix those. I've advised the user in question about COI stuff on their user talk page (nobody seems to have done so up until now), but perhaps someone more familiar with the subject matter could also help them out. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:07, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

@Marchjuly: This diff does show large additions by the editor in question. Most of those additions are referenced: those that are not should be looked at. Some of the text is over-written. Overall, I don't see that the invocation of COI is particularly relevant. There is some case for tightening up what is there, certainly. Where you raise the question on the Talk page there about length, I wouldn't necessarily agree: we can have zoomed-in biography, as long as the right standards are applied.

I'll try to look at Sir James Wylie, 1st Baronet in detail, but my first reaction is to do a copy edit dealing with some obvious issues, and then see where we are. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:58, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

The issue about article length was raised by a different person on the article's talk page. The article has been revised several times over since I first posted here, and the edits seem to be good-faith attempts to improve the article; so, feel free to remove the {{COI}} template I added to the top of the article if you want. -- Marchjuly (talk) 08:05, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Walter Montagu-Douglas-Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch#Requested move 17 May 2026

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Walter Montagu-Douglas-Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch#Requested move 17 May 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ASUKITE 00:46, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Years in Baronetcies article's titles

Hey all, there seems to be a burst of activity related to splinting out individual creations of Baronetcies (mainly sourced to the unreliable WP:WHOSWHO it seems; but that's by the by).

I've not much interacted with such articles before, so it surprises me that the titles of these articles are in the format Foo baronets of Bar Hall (1984), as the year seems like unneeded disambiguation. To take a random example from Category:Baronetcies in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom: There's not multiple articles called Boyd baronets of Howth House, so it seems strange to call it Boyd baronets of Howth House (1916) (going against WP:CONCISE).

My question is has this been previously discussed somewhere before (searching the archives here isn't turning anything up) or is there some guidance I've missed (I'm not seeing this on Wikipedia:NCNOBILITY or Wikipedia:WikiProject Peerage and Baronetage)? Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 09:54, 4 June 2026 (UTC)