Talk:Great fire of Hamburg

Revert of formatting

RE: Edit summary: "Reverted almost all good-faith changes; specifying width for rebuilding photo defeats purpose of "upright", map requires large size to be comprehensible, letting pictures arrange themselves on right allows for different monitors and settings, 30 em stdd?"

The unilateral reversal of my recent (and – I might add – somewhat time consuming) format work on this article is troubling on several levels, beside the obvious Article Ownership being exhibited by the one article contributor so far. I spent a bit of time making relevant, and informed changes (I started doing layout work back in the late seventies—so I understand and know what good article layout is). To have my efforts summarily, off-handedly, and so quickly reverted is annoying.

Foremost is the apparent disregard by the person who made the reversion to Wikipedia's Manual of Style guideline's. To illustrate, I'll refer you to these excerpts from the section on Image Formatting:

• 1 ...Images should ideally be spread evenly within the article, and relevant to the sections they are located in;
• 2 When placing images, be careful not to stack too many of them within the lead, or within a single section...;
• 3 As a general rule, images should not be set to a larger fixed size than the 220px default. ... Lead images should usually be no wider than "300px";

All three of these items I corrected in the article, which balanced the page nicely; only to have the changes reversed.

Secondly, to address the points made in the edit summary:

• 1 "...specifying width for rebuilding photo defeats purpose of "upright" ; this is nonsense, the maximum image width works the same on "upright" or "standard" thumb images, it affects only the width of the image with the height remaining proportional;
• 2 ...map requires large size to be comprehensible,...; again, this is nonsense. The lead map at 500 px is too large and overwhelms the lede paragraph. Also, even at that width it is still largely non-comprehensible. The reader simply has to click on the map (no matter what the thumb size is) to pull up a larger, easily viewed map.
• 3 ...letting pictures arrange themselves on right allows for different monitors and settings...; Where does this idea even come from? Not the Manual of Style. I simply refer you to point two, above, regarding the over-stacking of images on the right side of the page;
• 4 ...30 em stdd. please indicate where in the MoS it is stated that 30em col width for references is considered standard. My edit changed this to 25em, which reduced the over-all white space, reduced the section depth from 23 lines to 18 lines, and the section was still easily readable.
• additionally, the caption of the one picture should read: "Contemporaneous (not Contemporary) illustration of the burning Nikolaikirche." (The former is the correct adjective, latter is the incorrect noun.)

As explained here, I believe the edit I made should not have been reverted and I would like to understand the policy-based reasons for your doing so, before I make further alterations to the article. Regards, GenQuest ^{"Talk to Me"} 22:11, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

This lead image is exceptional: it's a highly detailed map and should be as large as possible for clarity. There is no reason to make it small and require the reader to click through except MOS adherence for the sake of MOS adherence; even the MOS says "as a general rule". 30em rather than 25em and allowing the reader's browser to arrange the pictures both respond to the wide variation in monitor size and settings; the amount of white space, in particular, is highly affected by the browser. I have in the past attempted to alternate images between right and left, but because some readers will then see text sandwiched between images, and because many editors find both displacement of section headers to the right by images and images immediately under section headers to be jarring, this arrangement has always been reverted by someone to all the images on the right. In this case since there was no major advantage to grouping the images next to specific text passages, I adopted that arrangement. The rearrangement you made, by not having the one image "upright" (smaller), gives it undue prominence; it's not tremendously informative. Short version: I disagree with your editorial decisions, partly because you give the MOS a lot more deference than I do, partly because you appear not to appreciate how different the article will look on the page depending on settings.

I may be wrong about "contemporaneous" vs. "contemporary", but I believe "contemporaneous" implies the picture was created as the church burned; it's merely from the period.

I'm going to take another look and probably change some of it back, for those stated reasons. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Hamburg-Bergedorf Railway Company

You mention it in effects, but its part of the fire as such. The railway was among the first in Northern Germany and was not opened as scheduled (two days after the fire). The first trips were actually held prior to 7 May: they were used to transport fire-fighting equipment and fire-fighters to Hamburg and to evacuate the homeless. Therefore, no opening ceremony took place. Polentarion Talk 16:50, 18 December 2015 (UTC) PS I recommand to add "Große Brand devastated more than a quarter of the urban area of the time " to the last paragraph of "Fire" or the effects as such. One needs a relative variable to get things into perspective. Great article ! Polentarion Talk 16:50, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

@Polentarion: Thanks. I think I said somewhere that approximately one third of the city was destroyed. I thought I had said exactly that about the railway - will check. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:24, 6 January 2016 (UTC)