Talk:Royal College of Art

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[edit] Definite article usage

When a sentence contains a list of proper nouns, it is debatable whether the definite article should litter the list unless it is used by the particular names.

In other words:

Also close by are Hyde Park, Kensington Palace, Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College and Royal College of Music.

Not

Also close by are Hyde Park, Kensington Palace, the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College and the Royal College of Music.

– Pádraig Coogan 23:45, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

It is certainly debatable - the second sounds much better to me (and is what people say - eg http://www.rcm.ac.uk/content.asp?display=Courses&wp=7&pt= "Musicians from all over the world train at the Royal College of Music"). However life is perhaps too short to worry unduly about a 'the' here or there. roundhouse 01:29, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I am referring to a list, not to single-instance usage in sentences such as the example you are quoting here. – Pádraig Coogan 09:15, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I thought of that as soon as I'd saved the comment. (I was at Imperial College once upon a time.) Surely one says 'I am going to the Royal Albert Hall' (single instance). In 'I am going to the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Geog Soc' the second 'the' is optional, but the first 'the' seems required (to me). I did a google search on "Royal Albert Hall, royal" versus "Royal Albert Hall, the royal" and got the impression (there are examples with no 'the's, 1 'the' and a plethora of 'the's, and a few with the first 'the' and one or two intervening 'the's) that the cognoscenti do put in a minimal number of 'the's whereas most of us put in all the 'the's. Eg Albertopolis has an example of 2 Royals with 1 'the' in the penultimate para (plus a nifty way round the problem at the beginning). Another example is http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=6065&inst_id=64 which contains examples of one 'the' and maximal 'the's in paragraph 2. Anyway I now know much more about Albertopolis than I picked up in 3 years at IC, and am almost inclined to take a train to look round the place properly.

I've removed some 'the's in the article; and I wonder whether the phrase in the article 'and in 1896 received the name The Royal College of Art' is correct in the light of your remarks. roundhouse 11:19, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Not sure whether it acquired The at the beginning or not. However, if it did, the advice concerning university names at When definite and indefinite articles should be avoided is worth considering. – Pádraig Coogan 21:34, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of degrees

There is room for improving this article – especially the "lumpy" feel of the top – but this edit is not the way to achieve it. I fail to see the point of dumping a long vertical list of MA courses in an article such as this (see 18:25, 13 November 2006 edit). What is the context? It is misleading, for example, to imply that there is an MA in Film & TV, that really being a degree at National Film and Television School which RCA ratifies. And what of the research degrees such as MPhil and PhD? Should there not be a long list of courses for these degrees too, in the interests of balance? Other university articles in Wikipedia do not have long course listings. Please do not add information simply for the sake of it. – Pádraig Coogan 09:20, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] University ratings

(I'm posting this to all articles on UK universities as so far discussion hasn't really taken off on Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities.)

There needs to be a broader convention about which university rankings to include in articles. Currently it seems most pages are listing primarily those that show the institution at its best (or worst in a few cases). See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Universities#University ratings. Timrollpickering 23:52, 21 December 2006 (UTC)