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Anyone know exactly why these two towns are together and not split, not campaining for a split or anything, just wondering because its quite bizzare.
Cyberdemon007 (talk) 19:54, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
To be quite honest, I was offended to discover this. These are separate towns, with separate histories, and as someone who was born in the area, I know there is a fair rivalry between the two. Since no one has even noticed to bother responding to you, I'm proposing that we separate them into different articles. Macduff, Aberdeenshire redirects to this, as does Banff, Aberdeenshire. There would appear to be a very simple solution here. Tartan Nutter (talk) 15:22, 14 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just Wikipedia that's doing it. Have a look at this Aberdeenshire Council page. It includes the phrase "Business owners in Banff and Macduff, Portsoy, Whitehills and Aberchirder are invited to take part in a Business Needs Survey next month." — note, the position of the first "and". And the same page refers to Banff and Macduff's business community (singular), because of course there are many organisations which service both towns. I think the problem may stem from this administrative pairing. There are other examples in the UK. Brighton and Hoveare (IMHO) two separate towns with their own identities which were conjoined into a "city" by politicians and self-serving media types. Brighton and Hove is the ridiculous official name of this city. I wouldn't be surprised if the same sort of simplification for reasons of economy is what's going on unofficially in the minds of Aberdeenshire Council! Anyway, all that conjecture out of the way, I'd support the separation of the articles with a focus on the histories of both towns, but I think the present Banff and Macduff should explain their close association and have links to both, rather than becoming just a sterile disambiguation page with two links on it. – Kieran T(talk)10:15, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I too would support separation. It shouldn't be too difficult a task, as most sentences in the existing article refer to either Banff or Macduff — only a few refer to both. Keeping the present article to explain the relationship between the towns seems a good idea. --Deskford (talk) 20:54, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Right, this has been here for a good while and nobody appears to have objected, so we should go ahead. However, have a look at the what links here results and you'll see that we do have to take care to make sure that links go to the right place. And I expect some articles will have to be slightly rewritten in case they actually need to link to both. Perhaps people would like to begin going through them and pointing them to Banff and Macduff redirects for now, before we do the split? – Kieran T(talk)20:15, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I was afraid this might happen — a bot has already been along and reverted some of my changes because they created double redirects! --Deskford (talk) 00:13, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
@Boleyn:, @Deskford: And four years on, in response to the PROD of the article, I've added the attribution templates to this and the split articles, and stripped the article down to a ... sort of forked redirect, tagged as a dab page to stop people labelling it as an orphan, stub, etc. It shouldn't need to be read by any reader. WP:IAR if need be, but we need to preserve the history of the two pages. I think these attribution templates do the trick, and hope everyone's happy with this. PamD16:54, 1 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]