EP Standards - Great Britain

Profile manager: Steven Whitfield [send private message]

The England Project standards state:

Great Britain did not become an entity until 1707, and from 1801, it was superseded by the United Kingdom. Do not use Great Britain in an English location before 1707 or from 1801. Spell out Great Britain in full. Great Britain is in addition to England and does not replace it:

*Village or town, county, England, Great Britain''

As part of our March Locations Challenge, it has been identified that all profiles ending ‘Great Britain’ are held on the database as a ‘England Unknown Region’. As an example, a location field of ‘Manchester, Lancashire, England, Great Britain’ would be recognised as an England profile, but it would not be allocated to Lancashire. This is down to the way Ales has set up the Location Tables.

When I was clarifying the position with Ales, he was clearly extremely reluctant to amend the locations table pointing out that there were very few Great Britain profiles within the period.

Analysis shows (indicative numbers from last weekend’s data dump):

We will clean-up the 152 profiles outside 1707-1800, leaving 463 genuine Great Britain (assuming the Maryland and Virgina are correct, otherwise, we can remove the ‘Great Britain’ reducing the total to 456).

This will leave 456/463 Great Britain profiles for which the options include:

1. Remove Great Britain from the profiles and change the standards to make Great Britain an unacceptable variation
2. Ask Ales to add Great Britain to the Locations Table to allow these profiles to be allocated to the correct county.
3. Accept that these profiles will not be allocated to a county team

There may be other options that I haven’t considered.

Steve Whitfield

10 March 2023