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Ranjit Singh

Ranjit Singh (13 November 1780 – 27 June 1839) was the founder and first maharaja of the Sikh Empire, ruling from 1801 until his death in 1839. He ruled the northwest Indian subcontinent in the early half of the 19th century. He survived smallpox in infancy but lost sight in his left eye. He fought his first battle alongside his father at age 10.

After his father died around Ranjit's early teenage years, Ranjit subsequently fought several wars to expel the Afghans throughout his teenage years. At the age of 21, he was proclaimed the "Maharaja of Punjab". His empire grew in the Punjab region under his leadership through 1839.

Before his rise, the Punjab region had numerous warring misls (confederacies), twelve of which were under Sikh rulers and one Muslim. Ranjit Singh successfully absorbed and united the Sikh misls and took over other local kingdoms to create the Sikh Empire. He repeatedly defeated invasions by outside armies, particularly those arriving from Afghanistan, and established friendly relations with the British.

Ranjit Singh's reign introduced reforms, modernisation, investment in infrastructure and general prosperity. His Khalsa army and government included Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Europeans. His legacy includes a period of Sikh cultural and artistic renaissance, including the rebuilding of the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar as well as other major gurdwaras, including Takht Sri Patna Sahib, Bihar and Hazur Sahib Nanded, Maharashtra under his sponsorship. Ranjit Singh was succeeded by his son Kharak Singh. Ranjit Singh also founded the Order of the Propitious Star of Punjab in 1837. Singh is known by several titles such as Sher-e-Punjab ("Lion of Punjab") and Sarkar-e Wallah (Head of Government).

Early years
Ranjit Singh was born in a Sandhawalia Jat Sikh family on 13 November 1780 to Maha Singh and Raj Kaur in Gujranwala, Punjab region (present-day Punjab, Pakistan). His mother Raj Kaur was the daughter of Sidhu Jat Sikh ruler Raja Gajpat Singh of Jind. Upon his birth, he was named Buddh Singh after his ancestor who was first in line to take Amrit Sanchaar. The child's name was changed to Ranjit (literally, "victor in battle") Singh ("lion") by his father to commemorate his army's victory over the Chattha chieftain Pir Muhammad. Ranjit Singh contracted smallpox as an infant, which resulted in the loss of sight in his left eye and a pockmarked face. He was short in stature, never schooled, and did not learn to read or write anything beyond the Gurmukhi alphabet. However, he was trained at home in horse riding, musketry and other martial arts.

At age 12, his father died. He then inherited his father's Sukerchakia Misl estates and was raised by his mother Raj Kaur, who, along with Lakhpat Rai, also managed the estates. The first attempt on his life was made when he was 13, by Hashmat Khan, but Ranjit Singh prevailed and killed the assailant instead. At age 18, his mother died and Lakhpat Rai was assassinated, and thereon he was helped by his mother-in-law from his first marriage.

Wives
In 1789, Ranjit Singh married his first wife Mehtab Kaur, the muklawa happened in 1796. She was the only daughter of Gurbaksh Singh Kanhaiya and his wife Sada Kaur. She was the granddaughter of Jai Singh Kanhaiya, the founder of the Kanhaiya Misl. This marriage was pre-arranged in an attempt to reconcile warring Sikh misls, Mehtab Kaur was betrothed to Ranjit Singh in 1786. The marriage, however, failed, with Mehtab Kaur never forgiving the fact that her father had been killed in battle with Ranjit Singh's father, and she mainly resided with her mother after marriage. The separation became complete when Ranjit Singh married Datar Kaur of the Nakai Misl in 1797 and she turned into Ranjit's most beloved wife. Mehtab Kaur had three sons, Ishar Singh who was born in 1804 and died in infancy. In 1807 she had Sher Singh and Tara Singh. According to historian Jean-Marie Lafont, she was the only one to bear the title of Maharani. She died in 1813, after suffering from failing health.

His second marriage was to, Datar Kaur (Born Raj Kaur) the youngest child and only daughter of Ran Singh Nakai, the third ruler of the Nakai Misl and his wife Karman Kaur. They were betrothed in childhood by Datar Kaur's eldest brother, Sardar Bhagwan Singh, who briefly became the chief of the Nakai Misl, and Ranjit Singh's father Maha Singh. They were married in 1797; this marriage was a happy one and Ranjit Singh always treated Raj Kaur with love and respect. Since Raj Kaur was also the name of Ranjit Singh's mother, his wife was renamed Datar Kaur. In 1801, she gave birth to their son and heir apparent, Kharak Singh. Datar Kaur bore Ranjit Singh two other sons, Rattan Singh and Fateh Singh. Like his first marriage, the second marriage also brought him a strategic military alliance. Along with wisdom and all the chaste virtues of a noblewoman, Datar Kaur was exceptionally intelligent and assisted Ranjit Singh in affairs of the State. During the expedition to Multan in 1818, she was given command alongside her son, Kharak Singh. Throughout his life she remained Ranjit Singh's favorite and for no other did he have greater respect for than Datar Kaur, who he affectionately called Mai Nakain.

Even though she was his second wife she became his principal wife and chief consort. During a hunting trip with Ranjit Singh, she fell ill and died on 20 June 1838. Ratan Kaur and Daya Kaur were wives of Sahib Singh Bhangi of Gujrat (a misl north of Lahore, not to be confused with the state of Gujarat). After Sahib Singh's death, Ranjit Singh took them under his protection in 1811 by marrying them via the rite of chādar andāzī, in which a cloth sheet was unfurled over each of their heads. The same with Roop Kaur, Gulab Kaur, Saman Kaur, and Lakshmi Kaur who looked after Duleep Singh when his mother Jind Kaur was exiled. Ratan Kaur had a son Multana Singh in 1819, and Daya Kaur had two sons Kashmira Singh and Pashaura Singh in 1821.

Jind Kaur, the final spouse of Ranjit Singh. Her father, Manna Singh Aulakh, extolled her virtues to Ranjit Singh, who was concerned about the frail health of his only heir Kharak Singh. The Maharaja married her in 1835 by 'sending his arrow and sword to her village'. On 6 September 1838 she gave birth to Duleep Singh, who became the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire.

His other wives included, Mehtab Devi of Kangara also called Guddan or Katochan and Raj Banso, daughters of Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra.

He was also married to Rani Har Devi of Atalgarh, Rani Aso Sircar and Rani Jag Deo According to the diaries, that Duleep Singh kept towards the end of his life, these women presented the Maharaja with four daughters. Dr. Priya Atwal notes that the daughters could be adopted. Ranjit Singh was also married to Jind Bani or Jind Kulan, daughter of Muhammad Pathan from Mankera and Gul Bano, daughter of Malik Akhtar from Amritsar. Ranjit Singh married many times, in various ceremonies, and had twenty wives. Sir Lepel Griffin, however, provides a list of just sixteen wives and their pension list. Most of his marriages were performed through chādar andāz. Some scholars note that the information on Ranjit Singh's marriages is unclear, and there is evidence that he had many concubines. Dr. Priya Atwal presents an official list of Ranjit Singh's thirty wives. The women married through chādar andāzī were noted as concubines and were known as the lesser title of Rani (queen). While Mehtab Kaur and Datar Kaur officially bore the title of Maharani (high queen), Datar Kaur officially became the Maharani after the death of Mehtab Kaur in 1813. Throughout her life was referred to as Sarkar Rani. After her death, the title was held by Ranjit's youngest widow Jind Kaur. According to Khushwant Singh in an 1889 interview with the French journal Le Voltaire, his son Dalip (Duleep) Singh remarked, "I am the son of one of my father's forty-six wives." Dr. Priya Atwal notes that Ranjit Singh and his heirs entered a total of 46 marriages. But Ranjit Singh was known not to be a "rash sensualist" and commanded unusual respect in the eyes of others. Faqir Sayyid Vaḥiduddin states: "If there was one thing in which Ranjit Singh failed to excel or even equal the average monarch of oriental history, it was the size of his harem." George Keene noted, "In hundreds and in thousands the orderly crowds stream on. Not a bough is broken off a wayside tree, not a rude remark to a woman".

Issues of Ranjit Singh

 * Kharak Singh (22 February 1801 – 5 November 1840) was the eldest and the favorite of Ranjit Singh from his second wife, Datar Kaur. He succeeded his father as the Maharaja.
 * Ishar Singh (1804-1805) son of his first wife, Mehtab Kaur. This prince died in infancy.
 * Rattan Singh (1805–1845) was born to Maharani Datar Kaur. He was granted the Jagatpur Bajaj estate as his jagir.
 * Fateh Singh (1806-1811) was born to Maharani Datar Kaur.
 * Sher Singh (4 December 1807 – 15 September 1843) was the elder of the twins of Mehtab Kaur. He briefly became the Maharaja of the Sikh Empire.
 * Tara Singh (4 December 1807 – 1859) younger of the twins born of Mehtab Kaur.
 * Multana Singh (1819–1846) son of Ratan Kaur.
 * Kashmira Singh (1821–1844) son of Daya Kaur.
 * Pashaura Singh (1821–1845) younger son of Daya Kaur.
 * Duleep Singh (4 September 1838 – 22 October 1893), the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. Ranji Singh's youngest son, the only child of Jind Kaur.

According to the pedigree table and Duleep Singh's diaries that he kept towards the end of his life another son Fateh Singh was born to Mai Nakain, who died in infancy. According to Henry Edward only Datar Kaur and Jind Kaur's sons are Ranjit Singh's biological sons.

It is said that Ishar Singh was not the biological son of Mehtab Kaur and Ranjit Singh, but only procured by Mehtab Kaur and presented to Ranjit Singh who accepted him as his son. Tara Singh and Sher Singh had similar rumours, it is said that Sher Singh was the son of a chintz weaver, Nahala and Tara Singh was the son of Manki, a servant in the household of Sada Kaur. Henry Edward Fane, the nephew and aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief, India, General Sir Henry Fane, who spent several days in Ranjit Singh's company, reported, "Though reported to be the Maharaja's son, Sher Singh's father has never thoroughly acknowledged him, though his mother always insisted on his being so. A brother of Sher, Tara Singh by the same mother, has been even worse treated than himself, not being permitted to appear at court, and no office given him, either of profit or honour." Five Years in India, Volume 1, Henry Edward Fane, London, 1842

Multana Singh, Kashmira Singh and Pashaura Singh were sons of the two widows of Sahib Singh, Daya Kaur and Ratan Kaur, whom Ranjit Singh took under his protection and married. These sons, are said to be, not biologically born to the queens and only procured and later presented to and accepted by Ranjit Singh as his sons.

Punishment by the Akal Takht
In 1802, Ranjit Singh married Moran Sarkar, a Muslim nautch girl. This action, and other non-Sikh activities of the Maharaja, upset orthodox Sikhs, including the Nihangs, whose leader Akali Phula Singh was the Jathedar of the Akal Takht. When Ranjit Singh visited Amritsar, he was called outside the Akal Takht, where he was made to apologise for his mistakes. Akali Phula Singh took Ranjit Singh to a tamarind tree in front of the Akal Takht and prepared to punish him by flogging him. Then Akali Phula Singh asked the nearby Sikh pilgrims whether they approved of Ranjit Singh's apology. The pilgrims responded with Sat Sri Akal and Ranjit Singh was released and forgiven. An alternative holds that Ranjit went to visit Moran on his arrival in Amritsar before paying his respects at Harmandir Sahib Gurdwara, which upset orthodox Sikhs and hence was punished by Akali Phula Singh. Iqbal Qaiser and Manveen Sandhu make alternative accounts of the relationship between Moran and the Maharaja; the former states they never married, while the latter states that they married. Court chronicler, Sohan Lal Suri makes no mention of Moran's marriage to the Maharaja or coins being struck in her name. Bibi Moran spent the rest of life in Pathankot. Duleep Singh makes a list of his father's queens which also does not mention Bibi Moran.

Historical context
After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal Empire fell apart and declined in its ability to tax or govern most of the Indian subcontinent. In the northwestern region, particularly the Punjab, the creation of the Khalsa community of Sikh warriors by Guru Gobind Singh accelerated the decay and fragmentation of the Mughal power in the region. Raiding Afghans attacked the Indus river valleys but met resistance from both organised armies of the Khalsa Sikhs as well as irregular Khalsa militias based in villages. The Sikhs had appointed own zamindars, replacing the previous Muslim revenue collectors, which provided resources to feed and strengthen the warriors aligned with Sikh interests. Meanwhile, colonial traders and the East India Company had begun operations in India on its eastern and western coasts.

By the second half of the 18th century, the northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan and parts of north India) were a collection of fourteen small warring regions. Of the fourteen, twelve were Sikh-controlled misls (confederacies), one named Kasur (near Lahore) was Muslim controlled, and one in the southeast was led by an Englishman named George Thomas. This region constituted the fertile and productive valleys of the five rivers – Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Bias and Sutlej. The Sikh misls were all under the control of the Khalsa fraternity of Sikh warriors, but they were not united and constantly warred with each other over revenue collection, disagreements, and local priorities; however, in the event of external invasion such as from the Muslim armies of Ahmed Shah Abdali from Afghanistan, they would usually unite.

Towards the end of 18th century, the five most powerful misls were those of Sukkarchakkia, Kanhayas, Nakkais, Ahluwalias and Bhangi Sikhs. Ranjit Singh belonged to the first, and through marriage had a reliable alliance with Kanhayas and Nakkais. Among the smaller misls, some such as the Phulkias misl had switched loyalties in the late 18th century and supported the Afghan army invasion against their Khalsa brethren. The Kasur region, ruled by Muslims, always supported the Afghan invasion forces and joined them in plundering Sikh misls during the war.

Rise to fame, early conquests
Ranjit Singh's fame grew in 1797, at age 17, when the Afghan Muslim ruler Shah Zaman, of the Ahmad Shah Abdali dynasty, attempted to annex the Panjab region into his control through his general Shahanchi Khan and 12,000 soldiers. The battle was fought in the territory that fell in Ranjit Singh's controlled misl, whose regional knowledge and warrior expertise helped resist the invading army. This victory at the Battle of Amritsar (1798) gained him recognition. In 1798, the Afghan ruler sent in another army, which Ranjit Singh did not resist. He let them enter Lahore, then encircled them with his army, blocked off all food and supplies, and burnt all crops and food sources that could have supported the Afghan army. Much of the Afghan army retreated back to Afghanistan.

In 1799, Raja Ranjit Singh's army of 25,000 Khalsa, supported by another 25,000 Khalsa led by his mother-in-law Rani Sada Kaur of Kanhaiya misl, in a joint operation attacked the region controlled by Bhangi Sikhs centered around Lahore. The rulers escaped, marking Lahore as the first major conquest of Ranjit Singh. The Sufi Muslim and Hindu population of Lahore welcomed the rule of Ranjit Singh. In 1800, the ruler of the Jammu region ceded control of his region to Ranjit Singh.

In 1801, Ranjit Singh proclaimed himself as the "Maharaja of Punjab", and agreed to a formal investiture ceremony, which was carried out by Baba Sahib Singh Bedi – a descendant of Guru Nanak. On the day of his coronation, prayers were performed across mosques, temples and gurudwaras in his territories for his long life. Ranjit Singh called his rule "Sarkar Khalsa", and his court "Darbar Khalsa". He ordered new coins to be issued in the name of Guru Nanak named the "NanakShahi" ("of the Emperor Nanak").

Expansion
In 1802, Ranjit Singh, aged 22, took Amritsar from the Bhangi Sikh misl, paid homage at the Harmandir Sahib temple, which had previously been attacked and desecrated by the invading Afghan army, and announced that he would renovate and rebuild it with marble and gold.

On 1 January 1806, Ranjit Singh signed a treaty with the British officials of the East India Company, in which he agreed that his Sikh forces would not attempt to expand south of the Sutlej River, and the Company agreed that it would not attempt to militarily cross the Sutlej River into the Sikh territory.

In 1807, Ranjit Singh's forces attacked the Muslim ruled Kasur and, after a month of fierce fighting in the Battle of Kasur defeated the Afghan chief Qutb-ud-Din, thus expanding his empire northwest towards Afghanistan. He took Multan in 1818, and the whole Bari Doab came under his rule with that conquest. In 1819 at the Battle of Shopian, he successfully defeated the Afghan Sunni Muslim rulers and annexed Srinagar and Kashmir, stretching his rule into the north and the Jhelum valley, beyond the foothills of the Himalayas.

The most significant encounters between the Sikhs in the command of the Maharaja and the Afghans were in 1813, 1823, 1834 and 1837. In 1813, Ranjit Singh's general Dewan Mokham Chand led the Sikh forces against the Afghan forces of Shah Mahmud led by Fateh Khan Barakzai. The Afghans lost their stronghold at Attock in that battle.

In 1813–14, Ranjit Singh's first attempt to expand into Kashmir was foiled by Afghan forces led by Azim Khan, due to a heavy downpour, the spread of cholera, and poor food supply to his troops.

In 1818, Darbar's forces led by Kharak Singh and Misr Dewan Chand occupied Multan, killing Muzaffar Khan and defeating his forces, leading to the end of Afghan influence in the Punjab.

In July 1818, an army from the Punjab defeated Jabbar Khan, a younger brother of the governor of Kashmir Azim Khan, and acquired Kashmir, along with a yearly revenue of Rs seventy lacs. Dewan Moti Ram was appointed governor of Kashmir.

In 1823, Yusufzai Pashtuns fought the army of Ranjit Sing north of the Kabul River.

In 1834, Mohammed Azim Khan once again marched towards Peshawar with an army of 25,000 Khattak and Yasufzai tribesmen in the name of jihad, to fight against infidels. The Maharaja defeated the forces. Yar Mohammad was pardoned and was reinvested as governor of Peshawar with an annual revenue of Rs one lac ten thousand to Lahore Darbar.

In 1835, the Afghans and Sikhs met again at the Standoff at the Khyber Pass, however it ended without a battle.

In 1837, the Battle of Jamrud, became the last confrontation between the Sikhs led by him and the Afghans, which displayed the extent of the western boundaries of the Sikh Empire.

On 25 November 1838, the two most powerful armies on the Indian subcontinent assembled in a grand review at Ferozepore as Ranjit Singh, the Maharajah of the Punjab brought out the Dal Khalsa to march alongside the sepoy troops of the East India Company and the British troops in India. In 1838, he agreed to a treaty with the British viceroy Lord Auckland to restore Shah Shoja to the Afghan throne in Kabul. In pursuance of this agreement, the British army of the Indus entered Afghanistan from the south, while Ranjit Singh's troops went through the Khyber Pass and took part in the victory parade in Kabul.

Geography of the Sikh Empire
The Sikh Empire, also known as the Sikh Raj and Sarkar-a-Khalsa, was in the Punjab region, the name of which means "the land of the five rivers". The five rivers are the Beas, Ravi, Sutlej, Chenab and Jhelum, all of which are tributaries of the river Indus.

The geographical reach of the Sikh Empire under Singh included all lands north of Sutlej River, and south of the high valleys of the northwestern Himalayas. The major towns at the time included Srinagar, Attock, Peshawar, Bannu, Rawalpindi, Jammu, Gujrat, Sialkot, Kangra, Amritsar, Lahore and Multan.

Muslims formed around 70%, Hindus formed around 24%, and Sikhs formed around 6–7% of the total population living in Singh's empire

Governance
Ranjit Singh allowed men from different religions and races to serve in his army and his government in various positions of authority. His army included a few Europeans, such as the Frenchman Jean-François Allard, though Singh maintained a policy of refraining from recruiting Britons into his service, aware of British designs on the Indian subcontinent. Despite his recruitment policies, he did maintain a diplomatic channel with the British; in 1828, he sent gifts to George IV and in 1831, he sent a mission to Simla to confer with the British Governor General, William Bentinck, which was followed by the Ropar Meeting; while in 1838, he cooperated with them in removing the hostile Islamic Emir in Afghanistan.

Religious policies

As consistent with many Punjabis of that time, Ranjit Singh was a secular king and followed the Sikh path. His policies were based on respect for all communities, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. A devoted Sikh, Ranjit Singh restored and built historic Sikh Gurdwaras – most famously, the Harmandir Sahib, and used to celebrate his victories by offering thanks at the Harmandir. He also joined the Hindus in their temples out of respect for their sentiments. The veneration of cows was promoted and cow slaughter was punishable by death under his rule. He ordered his soldiers to neither loot nor molest civilians.

He built several gurdwaras, Hindu temples and even mosques, and one in particular was Mai Moran Masjid, built at the behest of his beloved Muslim wife, Moran Sarkar. The Sikhs led by Singh never razed places of worship to the ground belonging to the enemy. However, he did convert Muslim mosques into other uses. For example, Ranjit Singh's army desecrated Lahore's Badshahi Mosque and converted it into an ammunition store, and horse stables. Lahore's Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) was converted into "Moti Mandir" (Pearl Temple) by the Sikh army, and Sonehri Mosque was converted into a Sikh Gurdwara, but upon the request of Sufi Fakir (Satar Shah Bukhari), Ranjit Singh restored the latter to a mosque. Lahore's Begum Shahi Mosque was also used as a gunpowder factory, earning it the nickname Barudkhana Wali Masjid, or "Gunpowder Mosque."

Singh's sovereignty was accepted by Afghan and Punjabi Muslims, who fought under his banner against the Afghan forces of Nadir Shah and later Azim Khan. His court was ecumenical in composition: his prime minister, Dhian Singh, was a Hindu (Dogra); his foreign minister, Fakir Azizuddin, was a Muslim; and his finance minister, Dina Nath, was also a Hindu (Brahmin). Artillery commanders such as Mian Ghausa were also Muslims. There were no forced conversions in his time. His wives Bibi Mohran, Gilbahar Begum retained their faith and so did his Hindu wives. He also employed and surrounded himself with astrologers and soothsayers in his court.

Ranjit Singh had also abolished the gurmata and provided significant patronage to the Udasi and Nirmala sect, leading to their prominence and control of Sikh religious affairs.

Khalsa Army
The army under Ranjit Singh was not limited to the Sikh community. The soldiers and troop officers included Sikhs, but also included Hindus, Muslims and Europeans. Hindu Brahmins and people of all creeds and castes served his army, while the composition in his government also reflected a religious diversity. His army included Polish, Russian, Spanish, Prussian and French officers. In 1835, as his relationship with the British warmed up, he hired a British officer named Foulkes.

However, the Khalsa army of Ranjit Singh reflected the regional population, and as he grew his army, he dramatically increased the Rajputs and the Sikhs who became the predominant members of his army. In the Doaba region his army was composed of the Jat Sikhs, in Jammu and northern Indian hills it was Hindu Rajputs, while relatively more Muslims served his army in the Jhelum river area closer to Afghanistan than other major Panjab rivers.

Reforms
Ranjit Singh changed and improved the training and organisation of his army. He reorganised responsibility and set performance standards in logistical efficiency in troop deployment, manoeuvre, and marksmanship. He reformed the staffing to emphasise steady fire over cavalry and guerrilla warfare, and improved the equipment and methods of war. The military system of Ranjit Singh combined the best of both old and new ideas. He strengthened the infantry and the artillery. He paid the members of the standing army from treasury, instead of the Mughal method of paying an army with local feudal levies.

While Ranjit Singh introduced reforms in terms of training and equipment of his military, he failed to reform the old Jagirs (Ijra) system of Mughal middlemen. The Jagirs system of state revenue collection involved certain individuals with political connections or inheritance promising a tribute (nazarana) to the ruler and thereby gaining administrative control over certain villages, with the right to force collect customs, excise and land tax at inconsistent and subjective rates from the peasants and merchants; they would keep a part of collected revenue and deliver the promised tribute value to the state. These Jagirs maintained independent armed militia to extort taxes from the peasants and merchants, and the militia was prone to violence. This system of inconsistent taxation with arbitrary extortion by militia, continued the Mughal tradition of ill treatment of peasants and merchants throughout the Sikh Empire, and is evidenced by the complaints filed to Ranjit Singh by East India Company officials attempting to trade within different parts of the Sikh Empire.

According to historical records, Sunit Singh, Ranjit Singh's reforms focused on the military that would allow new conquests, but not towards the taxation system to end abuse, nor on introducing uniform laws in his state or improving internal trade and empowering the peasants and merchants. This failure to reform the Jagirs-based taxation system and economy, in part led to a succession power struggle and a series of threats, internal divisions among Sikhs, major assassinations and coups in the Sikh Empire in the years immediately after the death of Ranjit Singh; an easy annexation of the remains of the Sikh Empire into British India followed, with the colonial officials offering the Jagirs better terms and the right to keep the system intact.

Infrastructure investments
Ranjit Singh ensured that Panjab manufactured and was self-sufficient in all weapons, equipment and munitions his army needed. His government invested in infrastructure in the 1800s and thereafter, established raw materials mines, cannon foundries, gunpowder and arms factories. Some of these operations were owned by the state, and others were operated by private Sikh operatives.

However, Ranjit Singh did not make major investments in other infrastructure such as irrigation canals to improve the productivity of land and roads. The prosperity in his Empire, in contrast to the Mughal-Sikh wars era, largely came from the improvement in the security situation, reduction in violence, reopened trade routes and greater freedom to conduct commerce.

Muslim accounts
The mid 19th-century Muslim historians, such as Shahamat Ali who experienced the Sikh Empire first hand, presented a different view on Ranjit Singh's Empire and governance. According to Ali, Ranjit Singh's government was despotic, and he was a mean monarch in contrast to the Mughals. The initial momentum for the Empire building in these accounts is stated to be Ranjit Singh led Khalsa army's "insatiable appetite for plunder", their desire for "fresh cities to pillage", and eliminating the Mughal era "revenue intercepting intermediaries between the peasant-cultivator and the treasury".

According to Ishtiaq Ahmed, Ranjit Singh's rule led to further persecution of Muslims in Kashmir, expanding the previously selective persecution of Shia Muslims and Hindus by Afghan Sunni Muslim rulers between 1752 and 1819 before Kashmir became part of his Sikh Empire. Bikramjit Hasrat describes Ranjit Singh as a "benevolent despot". The Muslim accounts of Ranjit Singh's rule were questioned by Sikh historians of the same era. For example, Ratan Singh Bhangu in 1841 wrote that these accounts were not accurate, and according to Anne Murphy, he remarked, "when would a Musalman praise the Sikhs?" In contrast, the colonial era British military officer Hugh Pearse in 1898 criticised Ranjit Singh's rule, as one founded on "violence, treachery and blood". Sohan Seetal disagrees with this account and states that Ranjit Singh had encouraged his army to respond with a "tit for tat" against the enemy, violence for violence, blood for blood, plunder for plunder.

Decline
Singh made his empire and the Sikhs a strong political force, for which he is deeply admired and revered in Sikhism. After his death, the empire failed to establish a lasting structure for Sikh government or stable succession, and the Sikh Empire began to decline. The British and Sikh Empire fought two Anglo-Sikh wars with the second ending the reign of the Sikh Empire. Sikhism itself did not decline.

Clive Dewey has argued that the decline of the empire after Singh's death owes much to the jagir-based economic and taxation system which he inherited from the Mughals and retained. After his death, a fight to control the tax spoils emerged, leading to a power struggle among the nobles and his family from different wives. This struggle ended with a rapid series of palace coups and assassinations of his descendants, and eventually the annexation of the Sikh Empire by the British.

Death
In the 1830s, Ranjit Singh suffered from numerous health complications as well as a stroke, which some historical records attribute to alcoholism and a failing liver. According to the chronicles of Ranjit Singh's court historians and the Europeans who visited him, Ranjit Singh took to alcohol and opium, habits that intensified in the later decades of his life. He died in his sleep on 27 June 1839. According to William Dalrymple, Ranjit Singh had been washed with water from the Ganges, paid homage to the Guru Granth Sahib, and was fixated on an image of Vishnu and Lakshmi just before his death.

Four of his Hindu wives- Mehtab Devi (Guddan Sahiba), daughter of Raja Sansar Chand, Rani Har Devi, the daughter of Chaudhri Ram, a Saleria Rajput, Rani Raj Devi, daughter of Padma Rajput and Rani Rajno Kanwar, daughter of Sand Bhari along with seven Hindu concubines with royal titles committed sati by voluntarily placing themselves onto his funeral pyre as an act of devotion.

Singh is remembered for uniting Sikhs and founding the prosperous Sikh Empire. He is also remembered for his conquests and building a well-trained, self-sufficient Khalsa army to protect the empire. He amassed considerable wealth, including gaining the possession of the Koh-i-Noor diamond from Shuja Shah Durrani of Afghanistan, which he left to Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha in 1839.

Gurdwaras
Perhaps Singh's most lasting legacy was the restoration and expansion of the Harmandir Sahib, the most revered Gurudwara of the Sikhs, which is now known popularly as the "Golden Temple". Much of the present decoration at the Harmandir Sahib, in the form of gilding and marblework, was introduced under the patronage of Singh, who also sponsored protective walls and a water supply system to strengthen security and operations related to the temple. He also directed the construction of two of the most sacred Sikh temples, being the birthplace and place of assassination of Guru Gobind Singh – Takht Sri Patna Sahib and Takht Sri Hazur Sahib, respectively – whom he much admired. The nine-storey tower of Gurdwara Baba Atal was constructed during his reign.

Memorials and museums

 * Samadhi of Ranjit Singh in Lahore, Pakistan, marks the place where Singh was cremated, and four of his queens and seven concubines committed sati.
 * On 20 August 2003, a 22-foot-tall bronze statue of Singh was installed in the Parliament of India.
 * A museum at Ram Bagh Palace in Amritsar contains objects related to Singh, including arms and armour, paintings, coins, manuscripts, and jewellery. Singh had spent much time at the palace in which it is situated, where a garden was laid out in 1818.
 * On 27 June 2019, a nine-foot bronze statue of Singh was unveiled at the Haveli Maharani Jindan, Lahore Fort at his 180th death anniversary. It has been vandalised several times since, specifically by members of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan.

Crafts
In 1783, Ranjit Singh established a crafts colony of Thatheras near Amritsar and encouraged skilled metal crafters from Kashmir to settle in Jandiala Guru. In the year 2014, this traditional craft of making brass and copper products was enlisted on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. The Government of Punjab is now working under Project Virasat to revive this craft.

Recognition
In 2020, Ranjit Singh was named as "Greatest Leader of All Time" in a poll conducted by 'BBC World Histories Magazine'.

In popular culture

 * Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a documentary film directed by Prem Prakash covers his rise to power and his reign. It was produced by the Government of India's Films Division.
 * In 2010, a TV series titled Maharaja Ranjit Singh aired on DD National based on his life which was produced by Raj Babbar's Babbar Films Private Limited. He was portrayed by Ejlal Ali Khan
 * Maharaja: The Story of Ranjit Singh (2010) is an Indian Punjabi-language animated film directed by Amarjit Virdi.
 * A teenage Ranjit was portrayed by Damanpreet Singh in the 2017 TV series titled Sher-e-Punjab: Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It aired on Life OK produced by Contiloe Entertainment.

title: Ranjit Singh


text:
Domain-specific language

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging from widely used languages for common domains, such as HTML for web pages, down to languages used by only one or a few pieces of software, such as MUSH soft code. DSLs can be further subdivided by the kind of language, and include domain-specific markup languages, domain-specific modeling languages (more generally, specification languages), and domain-specific programming languages. Special-purpose computer languages have always existed in the computer age, but the term "domain-specific language" has become more popular due to the rise of domain-specific modeling. Simpler DSLs, particularly ones used by a single application, are sometimes informally called mini-languages.

The line between general-purpose languages and domain-specific languages is not always sharp, as a language may have specialized features for a particular domain but be applicable more broadly, or conversely may in principle be capable of broad application but in practice used primarily for a specific domain. For example, Perl was originally developed as a text-processing and glue language, for the same domain as AWK and shell scripts, but was mostly used as a general-purpose programming language later on. By contrast, PostScript is a Turing-complete language, and in principle can be used for any task, but in practice is narrowly used as a page description language.

Use
The design and use of appropriate DSLs is a key part of domain engineering, by using a language suitable to the domain at hand – this may consist of using an existing DSL or GPL, or developing a new DSL. Language-oriented programming considers the creation of special-purpose languages for expressing problems as standard part of the problem-solving process. Creating a domain-specific language (with software to support it), rather than reusing an existing language, can be worthwhile if the language allows a particular type of problem or solution to be expressed more clearly than an existing language would allow and the type of problem in question reappears sufficiently often. Pragmatically, a DSL may be specialized to a particular problem domain, a particular problem representation technique, a particular solution technique, or other aspects of a domain.

Overview
A domain-specific language is created specifically to solve problems in a particular domain and is not intended to be able to solve problems outside of it (although that may be technically possible). In contrast, general-purpose languages are created to solve problems in many domains. The domain can also be a business area. Some examples of business areas include:

 * life insurance policies (developed internally by a large insurance enterprise)
 * combat simulation
 * salary calculation
 * billing

A domain-specific language is somewhere between a tiny programming language and a scripting language, and is often used in a way analogous to a programming library. The boundaries between these concepts are quite blurry, much like the boundary between scripting languages and general-purpose languages.

In design and implementation
Domain-specific languages are languages (or often, declared syntaxes or grammars) with very specific goals in design and implementation. A domain-specific language can be one of a visual diagramming language, such as those created by the Generic Eclipse Modeling System, programmatic abstractions, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework, or textual languages. For instance, the command line utility grep has a regular expression syntax which matches patterns in lines of text. The sed utility defines a syntax for matching and replacing regular expressions. Often, these tiny languages can be used together inside a shell to perform more complex programming tasks.

The line between domain-specific languages and scripting languages is somewhat blurred, but domain-specific languages often lack low-level functions for filesystem access, interprocess control, and other functions that characterize full-featured programming languages, scripting or otherwise. Many domain-specific languages do not compile to byte-code or executable code, but to various kinds of media objects: GraphViz exports to PostScript, GIF, JPEG, etc., where Csound compiles to audio files, and a ray-tracing domain-specific language like POV compiles to graphics files.

Data definition languages
A data definition language like SQL presents an interesting case: it can be deemed a domain-specific language because it is specific to a specific domain (in SQL's case, accessing and managing relational databases), and is often called from another application, but SQL has more keywords and functions than many scripting languages, and is often thought of as a language in its own right, perhaps because of the prevalence of database manipulation in programming and the amount of mastery required to be an expert in the language.

Further blurring this line, many domain-specific languages have exposed APIs, and can be accessed from other programming languages without breaking the flow of execution or calling a separate process, and can thus operate as programming libraries.

Programming tools
Some domain-specific languages expand over time to include full-featured programming tools, which further complicates the question of whether a language is domain-specific or not. A good example is the functional language XSLT, specifically designed for transforming one XML graph into another, which has been extended since its inception to allow (particularly in its 2.0 version) for various forms of filesystem interaction, string and date manipulation, and data typing.

In model-driven engineering, many examples of domain-specific languages may be found like OCL, a language for decorating models with assertions or QVT, a domain-specific transformation language. However, languages like UML are typically general-purpose modeling languages.

To summarize, an analogy might be useful: a Very Little Language is like a knife, which can be used in thousands of different ways, from cutting food to cutting down trees. A domain-specific language is like an electric drill: it is a powerful tool with a wide variety of uses, but a specific context, namely, putting holes in things. A General Purpose Language is a complete workbench, with a variety of tools intended for performing a variety of tasks. Domain-specific languages should be used by programmers who, looking at their current workbench, realize they need a better drill and find that a particular domain-specific language provides exactly that.

External and Embedded Domain Specific Languages
DSLs implemented via an independent interpreter or compiler are known as External Domain Specific Languages. Well known examples include LaTeX or AWK. A separate category known as Embedded (or Internal) Domain Specific Languages are typically implemented within a host language as a library and tend to be limited to the syntax of the host language, though this depends on host language capabilities.

Usage patterns
There are several usage patterns for domain-specific languages:

 * Processing with standalone tools, invoked via direct user operation, often on the command line or from a Makefile (e.g., grep for regular expression matching, sed, lex, yacc, the GraphViz toolset, etc.)
 * Domain-specific languages which are implemented using programming language macro systems, and which are converted or expanded into a host general purpose language at compile-time or realtime
 * embedded domain-specific language (eDSL), implemented as libraries which exploit the syntax of their host general purpose language or a subset thereof while adding domain-specific language elements (data types, routines, methods, macros etc.). (e.g. jQuery, React, Embedded SQL, LINQ)
 * Domain-specific languages which are called (at runtime) from programs written in general purpose languages like C or Perl, to perform a specific function, often returning the results of operation to the "host" programming language for further processing; generally, an interpreter or virtual machine for the domain-specific language is embedded into the host application (e.g. format strings, a regular expression engine)
 * Domain-specific languages which are embedded into user applications (e.g., macro languages within spreadsheets) and which are (1) used to execute code that is written by users of the application, (2) dynamically generated by the application, or (3) both.

Many domain-specific languages can be used in more than one way. DSL code embedded in a host language may have special syntax support, such as regexes in sed, AWK, Perl or JavaScript, or may be passed as strings.

Design goals
Adopting a domain-specific language approach to software engineering involves both risks and opportunities. The well-designed domain-specific language manages to find the proper balance between these.

Domain-specific languages have important design goals that contrast with those of general-purpose languages:

 * Domain-specific languages are less comprehensive.
 * Domain-specific languages are much more expressive in their domain.
 * Domain-specific languages should exhibit minimal redundancy.

Idioms
In programming, idioms are methods imposed by programmers to handle common development tasks, e.g.:

 * Ensure data is saved before the window is closed.
 * Edit code whenever command-line parameters change because they affect program behavior.

General purpose programming languages rarely support such idioms, but domain-specific languages can describe them, e.g.:

 * A script can automatically save data.
 * A domain-specific language can parameterize command line input.

Examples
Examples of domain-specific programming languages include HTML, Logo for pencil-like drawing, Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages, MATLAB and GNU Octave for matrix programming, Mathematica, Maple and Maxima for symbolic mathematics, Specification and Description Language for reactive and distributed systems, spreadsheet formulas and macros, SQL for relational database queries, YACC grammars for creating parsers, regular expressions for specifying lexers, the Generic Eclipse Modeling System for creating diagramming languages, Csound for sound and music synthesis, and the input languages of GraphViz and GrGen, software packages used for graph layout and graph rewriting, Hashicorp Configuration Language used for Terraform and other Hashicorp tools, Puppet also has its own configuration language.

GameMaker Language
The GML scripting language used by GameMaker Studio is a domain-specific language targeted at novice programmers to easily be able to learn programming. While the language serves as a blend of multiple languages including Delphi, C++, and BASIC, there is a lack of structures, data types, and other features of a full-fledged programming language. Many of the built-in functions are sandboxed for the purpose of easy portability. The language primarily serves to make it easy for anyone to pick up the language and develop a game.

ColdFusion Markup Language
ColdFusion's associated scripting language is another example of a domain-specific language for data-driven websites. This scripting language is used to weave together languages and services such as Java, .NET, C++, SMS, email, email servers, http, ftp, exchange, directory services, and file systems for use in websites.

The ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) includes a set of tags that can be used in ColdFusion pages to interact with data sources, manipulate data, and display output. CFML tag syntax is similar to HTML element syntax.

FilterMeister
FilterMeister is a programming environment, with a programming language that is based on C, for the specific purpose of creating Photoshop-compatible image processing filter plug-ins; FilterMeister runs as a Photoshop plug-in itself and it can load and execute scripts or compile and export them as independent plug-ins. Although the FilterMeister language reproduces a significant portion of the C language and function library, it contains only those features which can be used within the context of Photoshop plug-ins and adds a number of specific features only useful in this specific domain.

MediaWiki templates
The Template feature of MediaWiki is an embedded domain-specific language whose fundamental purpose is to support the creation of page templates and the transclusion (inclusion by reference) of MediaWiki pages into other MediaWiki pages.

Software engineering uses
There has been much interest in domain-specific languages to improve the productivity and quality of software engineering. Domain-specific language could possibly provide a robust set of tools for efficient software engineering. Such tools are beginning to make their way into the development of critical software systems.

The Software Cost Reduction Toolkit is an example of this. The toolkit is a suite of utilities including a specification editor to create a requirements specification, a dependency graph browser to display variable dependencies, a consistency checker to catch missing cases in well-formed formulas in the specification, a model checker and a theorem prover to check program properties against the specification, and an invariant generator that automatically constructs invariants based on the requirements.

A newer development is language-oriented programming, an integrated software engineering methodology based mainly on creating, optimizing, and using domain-specific languages.

Metacompilers
Complementing language-oriented programming, as well as all other forms of domain-specific languages, are the class of compiler writing tools called metacompilers. A metacompiler is not only useful for generating parsers and code generators for domain-specific languages, but a metacompiler itself compiles a domain-specific metalanguage specifically designed for the domain of metaprogramming.

Besides parsing domain-specific languages, metacompilers are useful for generating a wide range of software engineering and analysis tools. The meta-compiler methodology is often found in program transformation systems.

Metacompilers that played a significant role in both computer science and the computer industry include Meta-II, and its descendant TreeMeta.

Unreal Engine before version 4 and other games
Unreal and Unreal Tournament unveiled a language called UnrealScript. This allowed for rapid development of modifications compared to the competitor Quake (using the Id Tech 2 engine). The Id Tech engine used standard C code meaning C had to be learned and properly applied, while UnrealScript was optimized for ease of use and efficiency. Similarly, the development of more recent games introduced their own specific languages, one more common example is Lua for scripting.

Rules engines for policy automation
Various business rules engines have been developed for automating policy and business rules used in both government and private industry. ILOG, Oracle Policy Automation, DTRules, Drools and others provide support for DSLs aimed to support various problem domains. DTRules goes so far as to define an interface for the use of multiple DSLs within a rule set.

The purpose of business rules engines is to define a representation of business logic in as human-readable fashion as possible. This allows both subject-matter experts and developers to work with and understand the same representation of the business logic. Most rules engines provide both an approach to simplifying the control structures for business logic (for example, using declarative rules or decision tables) coupled with alternatives to programming syntax in favor of DSLs.

Statistical modelling languages
Statistical modelers have developed domain-specific languages such as R (an implementation of the S language), Bugs, Jags, and Stan. These languages provide a syntax for describing a Bayesian model and generate a method for solving it using simulation.

Generate model and services to multiple programming Languages
Generate object handling and services based on an Interface Description Language for a domain-specific language such as JavaScript for web applications, HTML for documentation, C++ for high-performance code, etc. This is done by cross-language frameworks such as Apache Thrift or Google Protocol Buffers.

Gherkin
Gherkin is a language designed to define test cases to check the behavior of software, without specifying how that behavior is implemented. It is meant to be read and used by non-technical users using a natural language syntax and a line-oriented design. The tests defined with Gherkin must then be implemented in a general programming language. Then, the steps in a Gherkin program acts as a syntax for method invocation accessible to non-developers.

Other examples
Other prominent examples of domain-specific languages include:
 * Game Description Language
 * OpenGL Shading Language
 * Gradle
 * ActionScript

Advantages and disadvantages
Some of the advantages:

 * Domain-specific languages allow solutions to be expressed in the idiom and at the level of abstraction of the problem domain. The idea is that domain experts themselves may understand, validate, modify, and often even develop domain-specific language programs. However, this is seldom the case.
 * Domain-specific languages allow validation at the domain level. As long as the language constructs are safe any sentence written with them can be considered safe.
 * Domain-specific languages can help to shift the development of business information systems from traditional software developers to the typically larger group of domain-experts who (despite having less technical expertise) have a deeper knowledge of the domain.
 * Domain-specific languages are easier to learn, given their limited scope.

Some of the disadvantages:

 * Cost of learning a new language
 * Limited applicability
 * Cost of designing, implementing, and maintaining a domain-specific language as well as the tools required to develop with it (IDE)
 * Finding, setting, and maintaining proper scope.
 * Difficulty of balancing trade-offs between domain-specificity and general-purpose programming language constructs.
 * Potential loss of processor efficiency compared with hand-coded software.
 * Proliferation of similar non-standard domain-specific languages, for example, a DSL used within one insurance company versus a DSL used within another insurance company.
 * Non-technical domain experts can find it hard to write or modify DSL programs by themselves.
 * Increased difficulty of integrating the DSL with other components of the IT system (as compared to integrating with a general-purpose language).
 * Low supply of experts in a particular DSL tends to raise labor costs.
 * Harder to find code examples.

Tools for designing domain-specific languages

 * JetBrains MPS is a tool for designing domain-specific languages. It uses projectional editing which allows overcoming the limits of language parsers and building DSL editors, such as ones with tables and diagrams. It implements language-oriented programming. MPS combines an environment for language definition, a language workbench, and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for such languages.
 * MontiCore is a language workbench for the efficient development of domain-specific languages. It processes an extended grammar format that defines the DSL and generates Java components for processing the DSL documents.
 * Xtext is an open-source software framework for developing programming languages and domain-specific languages (DSLs). Unlike standard parser generators, Xtext generates not only a parser but also a class model for the abstract syntax tree. In addition, it provides a fully featured, customizable Eclipse-based IDE. The project was archived in April 2023.
 * Racket is a cross-platform language toolchain including native code, JIT and Javascript compiler, IDE (in addition to supporting Emacs, Vim, VSCode and others) and command line tools designed to accommodate creating both domain-specific and general purpose languages.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Domain-specific language


text:
Samadhi of Ranjit Singh

The Samadhi of Ranjit Singh ( (Shahmukhi), ਰਣਜੀਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਦੀ ਸਮਾਧੀ (Gurmukhi); ) is a 19th-century building in Lahore, Pakistan that houses the funerary urns of the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780 – 1839). It is located adjacent the Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque, as well as the Gurdwara Dera Sahib, which marks the spot where the fifth guru of Sikhism, Guru Arjan Dev, died. Its construction was started by his son and successor, Maharaja Kharak Singh, after the ruler's death in 1839, and completed nine years later. It overlooks the Hazuri Bagh, built by Ranjit Singh, to its south.

History
Construction of the building was started by his son, Kharak Singh on the spot where he was cremated, and was completed by his youngest son, Duleep Singh in 1848.

Modern era
The funerary urns were removed from the marble pavilion and were replaced by a simple slab around 1999. This was done as part of the preparations for the Khalsa Tricentenary and the visit of Sikh dignitaries from India. It has been kept well by Pakistani government. The Samadhi was damaged by an earthquake in 2005 but was repaired soon.

Building
The building combines elements of Sikh, Hindu, and Islamic architecture. Portions of the building are believed to have been plundered from the adjacent Lahore Fort.

The building has gilded fluted domes and cupolas, and an ornate balustrade around the upper portion of the building. The front of the doorway has images of Ganesh, Devi and Brahma that are cut from red sandstone. The dome is decorated with Nāga (serpent) hood designs - the product of Hindu craftsmen that worked on the project. The wooden panels on the ceiling are decorated with stained glass work, while the walls are richly decorated with floral designs. The ceilings are decorated with glass mosaic work.

Funerary urns
Ranjit Singh's ashes are contained in a marble urn in the shape of a lotus, sheltered under a marble pavilion inlaid with pietra dura, in the centre of the tomb. Surrounding him, in smaller urns, are the ashes of four Hindu sati queens and seven concubines.

Associated monuments
Two small monuments to the west of the main building commemorate Maharaja Ranjit Singh's son Maharaja Kharak Singh and grandson Nau Nihal Singh, along with their wives. The building is located adjacent to Gurdwara Dera Sahib, the place where martyrdom of Guru Arjun took place.

title: Samadhi of Ranjit Singh


text:
Winchester House

Winchester House may refer to:

 * in England
 * Winchester Palace, former residence of the Bishops of Winchester in London, also known as Winchester House
 * Winchester House, Chelsea, a later former residence of the Bishops of Winchester in London
 * Winchester House, Putney, 18th century private club in London
 * in the United States
 * Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, in Santa Clara County, listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)
 * Averitt-Winchester House, Miccosukee, Florida, in Leon County, NRHP-listed
 * Winchester House (Louisville, Kentucky), in Jefferson County, NRHP-listed
 * Winchester House (Natchez, Mississippi), in Adams County, NRHP-listed

title: Winchester House


text:
Talk:Liverpool Cathedral

Not Victorian
Although Giles Gilbert Scott was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, I think it is misleading to describe him as 'Victorian'.

Through the influence of his father (George Gilbert Scott) he was well versed in the neo-gothic style, characteristic of the Victorian museums in South Kensington. However he was only 23 when he won this commision. Gilbert Scott's later work is largely modernist. Solipsist 09:43, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

boyd?
Is "boyd" correct, or a tyop for "body"? If it isn't boyd (which my dictionary doesn't show) I'm dissapointed :) - we do need a word for "the main hall of a church", but I refrained from saying "body" myself, as it can mean "congregation". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:57, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

 * Oh, carp. Clearly a tyop, I'm afraid. I was aiming for "body" to avoid the rapid-succession repetition of "space", but you're right abõut the possibility of body/congregation confusion. Perhaps "nave" was the word we were both struggling for. –Hajor 01:08, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

 * No, the nave is just the central part of the long axis - see the (most excellent) Cathedral diagram. Body may have to do. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 01:20, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

 * (Yes, excellent diagrams.) I've just tried a wording with "spacious" and "interior". Pleae play about, revert, experiment. –Hajor 01:52, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

 * That's an excellent improvement, thanks (although it does sound ever so slightly estate-agenty) -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:54, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

 * The convention at Liverpool is that the "nave" is just the section to the (liturgical) West of the nave bridge. The section between the two sets of transepts is known simply as the "Central Space", although in other places "under-tower" would be a more usual term. (Scott is reputed to have said, "Don't look at my arches; look at my spaces" Entablature (talk) 15:32, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Diocese of Liverpool
In the process of editing I removed the following information on the diocese of Liverpool, largely because it seemed too much detail before any mention of the cathedral.

It is the seat of the Bishop of Liverpool, whose diocese covers Merseyside (except Wirral), Warrington, and West Lancashire. It is part of the Anglican province of York.

Is this sufficiently covered in List of Church of England dioceses or should it go somewhere else? -- Solipsist 09:49, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

 * I confess I put that in for wont of something "overview"-y to have in the opening sentence. I'll link the first mention of diocese to that, which should be fine.  Nice job on the Bodley article, btw. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 10:53, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Name
This building has several names the offical is Cathedral Church of Christ in Liverpool, so that is the one to use.--Jirate 23:26, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

Naming poll
Please indicate whether this article should be named "Liverpool Cathedral" or "Cathedral Church of Christ in Liverpool". Note that the article has been named "Liverpool Cathedral" until very recently, so unless there is a consensus for "Cathedral Church of Christ in Liverpool" it should be moved back to "Liverpool Cathedral".

Liverpool Cathedral

 * Rhobite 01:33, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
 * My reasoning is noted at User talk:Irate. — Dan | Talk 01:35, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * It's the common name. Samboy 01:42, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Chris 73 Talk 01:44, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
 * Geni 01:47, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * –Hajor 01:57, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC) Lpool Cathedral (this one). And Lpool Metropolitan Cathedral (the other one). Compare the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, the article on which is at Westminster Abbey.
 * Naming conventions suggest an article should be at the most commonly used name (so people can guess the correct link when wiki-linking). I would also argue that the policy should be changed for buildings, as with ships, such that we use the official or proper name for a building. A few buildings, such as this one, have more than one name and a couple of nicknames too, but in this case 'Liverpool Cathedral' seems to be both the most common and one of the official names. The only other name worth considering is 'Liverpool Anglican Cathedral'. - Solipsist 01:57, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Use common name. The opening paragraph clearly distinguishes it from the RC cathedral in Liverpool. (See Talk:Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King for a discussion on the name for that page.) Jonathunder 02:02, 2005 Mar 7 (UTC)
 * Use the common name. --Carnildo 02:08, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Use the common name; that is Wikipedia policy. Jayjg (talk) 04:14, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * User:Irate has also been moving Manchester Cathedral and Bristol Cathedral. When Wikipedia policy on using common names was pointed out to him, he immediately responded with an unprovoked personal attack along the lines of "only cretins like you" use common names (see  in the "Cathedral names" section).  As proof of common name usage by local media, see for instance http://www.icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk and do a search on "cathedral".  For instance, , ,  (these are all very recent newspaper articles, if they have disappeared from the site's archives by the time you read this, just do your own fresh search). In contexts where it is necessary to carefully distinguish between Liverpool Cathedral and the Roman Catholic Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral is sometimes called the "Anglican Cathedral", but usually it is simply called "Liverpool Cathedral".  When the Roman Catholic cathedral is mentioned alone, it is locally called by the common name "Metropolitan Cathedral"    (again, these are all very recent newspaper articles, do your own fresh search if they have disappeared from the site's archives by the time you read this). -- Curps 03:06, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Further comment There are exactly two cathedrals in Liverpool and the other one (the Roman Catholic cathedral) says in the very first paragraph of its official website: "it helps avoid confusion to refer to one as 'Liverpool Cathedral' and the other [itself] as 'The Metropolitan Cathedral.' " -- Curps 20:56, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * as per policy on common usage. Thryduulf 08:19, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * violet/riga (t) 09:44, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Either Liverpool Cathedral or Liverpool Cathedral (Church of England), the latter would clearly stop any confusion with the Catholic cathedral by those who don't know Liverpool. Gareth Hughes 13:08, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Michael Warren | Talk 17:11, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

Cathedral Church of Christ in Liverpool

 * Correct name, stand for ever, not confused with the Catholic cathedral, looks better at top of page.--Jirate 01:39, 2005 Mar 7 (UTC)

Discussion
If the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool was to be placed under its popular nick name (common usage!) then there would be on confusion ;-O --Philip Baird Shearer

 * It does worry me the ambiguity. What also worries me is the search argument, if I was looking for something in a city, I'd first go to the city and look from there. Typing in Liverpool Cathedral requires knowledge of Liverpool and Christianity. If something has a proper name it's better to use that, rather than a nick name based on geograph and function.--Jirate 20:36, 2005 Mar 7 (UTC)

 * To be honest I don't think there is any real confusion or ambiguity here. The Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool is the more signifcant cathedral, architecturally, historically, by size and by priority - the Catholic Cathedral wins on the importance of its stained glass and the speed of its construction. In any case the opening paragraph makes it clear that there is an alternative cathedral to consider (although the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral article should be updated to clarify the reverse connection). There is no need to obfuscate the page titles and the vote looks pretty clear. -- Solipsist 22:29, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

 * On the contrary, Irate, it is far more likely that someone will know that x city has a cathedral, than the name of it. In the past couple of years I have visited cathedrals in Bristol, Wells, Lincoln, Salisbury, Peterborough, Ely, Chichester, York and possibly others as well. I cannot give you the full official name of any of them. In the case of Liverpool where there are two cathedrals, the articles should provide any necessary disambiguation - which they currently do. Thryduulf 17:19, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

 * You seem to be missing the point. We are talking about how people find things on Wikipedia not in the real world. If soemone want to know about Cathedrals in Liverpool, they will first go to the page dedicated to the city, and then track it down. I think a lot of this shows a lack of understand of ergonomics and how people search on-line documents or even use index's in books. It just a pity that people on Wikipedia care more about their essays than they do about making the data accessable.--Jirate 18:34, 2005 Mar 8 (UTC)

 * If I was looking for information on Cathedrals in Liverpool the first place I'd look would be Liverpool Cathedral. If there was more than one, I'd expect either the article to alert me to this by the end of the first paragraph, or Liverpool Cathedral to be a disambiguation page. Thryduulf 13:42, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Suggests you no nothing about how people use these kind of systems, or computer systems in general, or indexed or catlogues.--Jirate 14:14, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)
 * Then enlighten me. What is more logical than looking for a cathedral in Liverpool under the name Liverpool Cathedral? Thryduulf 14:31, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Going to the city of Liverpool and then looking for a cathedral is what most people will do. They will use index, lists, search engines etc. There is no logic behind your assumtion that people will simple type in a phrase and expect that to take them to the correct page. The most logical approach is to ignore the random guessing phase, and start from a known. In this case the city. Large amounts of money have been invested in HCI labs to find out what people actually do in front of cimputers, because one things is sure, it's not what they think they are doing. This isn't just idle speculation I spent many years writting retail apps for PC's and did a lot of the UI.--Jirate 15:29, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)
 * In my experience of Wikipedia, "Random guessing" has led me to what I was looking for, or to a page that directed me to there, in almost every case. The only examples I can think of recently are some of the place names I've looked up for user:Thryduulf/Geonamesongs (my reworking of List of songs whose title includes geographical names); and Telex which used to be what is now at Telex (band) but has since become a disambiguation page between the band and teleprinter. In the first case the occasions where I didn't get what I was after were caused by (in decreasing order of frequency):
 * my needing the disambig page (see User talk:Thryduulf/Geonamesongs for why)
 * the article not existing
 * vandalism.
 * Anyway, this is beside the point that wikipedia policy says use the most common name for article titles. If you disagree with that policy, make your point on the talk page of that policy or at the village pump. Thryduulf 16:48, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A thought occurs to me. This might be deemed superfluous to some, but why not have a disambiguation page for cities with more than one cathedral, with appropriate links? Then set up a series of redirects so that anyone looking for cathedrals in those cities are redirected to this new page? Then we can remove any ambiguity once and for all. This seems to me to be a suitably encyclopedic approach, and also gives users the opportunity to jump to other like cities if they so wish at a single mouse click. Just a thought! Calilasseia 14:12, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Image
I had to remove the image under detail, as it is non free and will be deleted. It shouldnt be hard to replace with lots of much better ones. Justinc 20:51, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Hope Street
Regarding this sentence "Appropriately, in view of the divisions within Christianity, and particularly between the Anglican and Catholic Communions, the cathedrals are linked by Hope Street." Would it be appropriate to note in the article that Hope Street is actually named after a slave trader? Maltaran 22:16, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

 * The reference to 'appropriate' was in reference to the meaning of the word hope, rather than any association with the person after whom the street was named, which in itself is not within the scope of this article. --JohnArmagh 18:30, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Records
So is it the largest Protestant cathedral by area or not? I came to the article hoping to find out and I'm none the wiser. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.225.202.127 (talk) 12:17, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Dimensions of the Cathedral
The article has a section called "Dimensions" but the information in it seems to be at variance with what is in the official Cathedral website. For example

length: Official website: 188.67m;     article: 178m area: Official website: 9687.4m2       article: 8400m2

As the discrepancy is considerable I am putting a "citation needed" note on this section of the article. Michael Glass (talk) 09:33, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

On second thoughts, the best solution to this issue is to replace the unreferenced information with referenced information from the official Cathedral website. Michael Glass (talk) 11:13, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Longest cathedral in the world?
Article text says: "The total external length of the building, including the Lady Chapel, is 189 metres (620 ft) making it the second longest cathedral in the world" with a link to List of longest church buildings in the world.

Since the first building listed, St Peter's Basilica in Rome, is not a cathedral, is Liverpool Cathedral then the longest? Torontonian1 (talk) 20:07, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

 * Good point! Since no-one has argued otherwise in the last ten months, I shall make the appropriate changes. Vilĉjo (talk) 20:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

 * Sorry, but it is a foolish point. In terms of building you cannot draw a distinction between St Peter's and any other very large church that might officially be a basilica or an abbey. The form of the building is the same.  And claiming that a particular church is the longest "cathedral" simply because St peter's doesn't have cathedral status will look ridiculous to any person who doesn't realise that St Peter's is not actually a cathedral.  Rather than saying "It is the longest cathedral in the word, but only on a technicality", it would be preferable to say that it is the second longest church in the world, after St Peter's Basilica. Amandajm (talk) 14:11, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * No, words have meanings, and "cathedral" does not just mean "big religious building". It is neither "point scoring" (I have no dog in this fight, being neither a Liverpudlian nor a Roman) nor a "technicality" to point out that St Peter's is not a cathedral. By all means compare Liverpool Cathedral with other churches in general – I have no problems with your edit – but if (as the article did prior to my edit of last year) one is to compare cathedrals, then that is what one should do, and not include things which happen to look a bit like a cathedral and could conceivably be mistaken for a cathedral by those who imagine, wrongly, that the word refers to the building's general architectural type rather than to its function. Vilĉjo (talk) 12:33, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Pasting this here is response to the reversion of my edit.

Facts/POV
User:RodCrosby, I find your edit comment (that my edit was POV) offensive. It is not about POV. Architecturally, the designation "cathedral" is meaningless. Similar claims are made to the effect that Cologne Cathedral is "the tallest cathedral in the world". It is a hollow claim dependent on the organisational designation of the building, not its structure or style. The term "cathedral" is irrelevant when comparing large churches. St Peter's is Longer than Liverpool; Ulm Minster is taller than Cologne. To the many ignorant people out there who will argue that "the dictionary say that 'cathedral' can also mean 'big church' ", then the distinction between "cathedral", "basilica" and "abbey" is meaningless. Scoring a point which is a technicality of "religious organisation" doesn't really mean anything at all, and no-one ought to have to look up the footnotes in order to find out "Oh it is only the biggest "cathedral" (whatever that mens precisely) and they are not actually saying it's the biggest 'church'". Regardless of how technically accurate your "fact" might be, it is misleading to the average reader. Amandajm (talk) 04:05, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

 * I observe that Torontonian1 is among those who have been misled by the insistence that "cathedral" is somehow a different class of building to St Peter's.
 * Let me make the point, strongly, that "cathedral" is not a different class of building. A cathedral can be as tiny as St Michael's Cathedral, Wollongong. You have to compare like with like. "Seat of a bishop" and "mother church of a diocese" are not architectural designations. LIverpool Cathedral cannot reasonably be compared to St Michael's Cathedral, because one was built to be a very large church from the outset, and the other was designed as the parish church of village. Architecturally, you can compare Liverpool Cathedral with St Peter's Basilica, because both were designed, from the outset, to be very large churches.
 * Amandajm (talk) 04:21, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

List of musicians at English cathedrals
Could Vilĉjo or some other interested person please go over to the page listed above and make the entry on Liverpool Cathedral comply with the other entries, so that the list pertaining to this cathedral links to the cathedral's article.

NOTE: In the context of an article, you cannot link a heading, as I have done on this talk page, because it doesn't comply with the MOS. So what was done with the original entries was that every single cathedral had a short sentence, in which the name of the Cathedral is linked e.g. "Organists at Barchester Cathedral have included Septimus Harding." Amandajm (talk) 14:11, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Height
The article clains "The belltower is the largest, and also one of the tallest, in the world (see List of tallest churches in the world)". On the referenced list Liverpool Cathedral is only 7th (extant) tallest in England, and 100+ down the world list. Suggest this is a long way from "one of the tallest in the world? In the UK, yes. Entablature (talk) 10:31, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

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Length
There is such a big difference between the stated external and internal lengths that I suspect that the latter excludes the Lady Chapel. If this is so perhaps it should be made clear. Is the porch also excluded? It would also help if someone could produce a scale plan of the building. Exbrum (talk) 08:55, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Liverpool Cathedral


text:
User:Gugilymugily

Trypa Grevlek DarkSerge Shmigheghi

Disambiguate stuff. Revert stuff. Other stuff.

SamEric Collaboration Bookmarks.

List of Battles Generalfeldmarschall

title: User:Gugilymugily


text:
Regnecentralen

Regnecentralen (RC) was the first Danish computer company, founded on October 12, 1955. Through the 1950s and 1960s, they designed a series of computers, originally for their own use, and later to be sold commercially. Descendants of these systems sold well into the 1980s. They also developed a series of high-speed paper tape machines, and produced Data General Nova machines under license.

Genesis
What would become RC began as an advisory board formed by the Danish Akademiet for de Tekniske Videnskaber (Academy of Applied Sciences) to keep abreast of developments in modern electronic computing devices taking place in other countries. It was originally named Regnecentralen, Dansk Institut for Matematikmaskiner (Danish Institute of Computing Machinery ) After several years in the advisory role, in 1952 they decided to form a computing service bureau for Danish government, military and research uses. Led by Niels Ivar Bech, the group was also given the details of the BESK machine being designed at the Swedish Mathematical Center (Matematikmaskinnämndens Arbetsgrupp).

The group decided to build their own version of the BESK to run the bureau, and formed Regnecentralen in October 1955 to complete and run the machine. The result was the DASK, a vacuum tube-based machine that completed construction in 1956 and went into full operation in February 1957. DASK was followed in 1961 by the fully transistorized GIER, used for similar tasks. GIER is an acronym for "Geodætisk Instituts Elektroniske Regnemaskine" (Institute of Geodetics Electronic Calculator) and was introduced there on September 14, 1961. GIER proved to be a useful machine, and went on to be used at many Danish universities. Bech also sold GIER machines to the Eastern Bloc nations, starting with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, and later Romania, the East Germany, and Yugoslavia.

RC was also home to Peter Naur, and DASK and GIER became well known for their role in the development of the famous programming language ALGOL. After the first European ALGOL conference in 1959, RC began an effort to produce a series of compilers, completing one for the DASK in September 1961. A version for the GIER followed in August 1962. Christian Andersen and Peter Schyum Poulsen, another RC employee, wrote the first introductory text on the language, Everyman's Desk ALGOL, in 1961.

Peripheral business
To support higher throughput at their own service bureau, RC developed several high-speed input/output devices. One of their most popular was the RC 2000 paper tape reader, introduced in 1963. Feeding the tape at 5 meters per second, the 2000 could read 2,000 characters per second (CPS), storing the results in a buffer while the computer periodically read the data back out instead of stopping the tape to wait for the computer to get ready. The machine was later upgraded as the RC 2500, increasing speed to almost 7 meters a second, improving read speed to 2500 CPS. The RC 2000/2500 became a major product for RC during the 1960s, selling 1,500 examples around the world. Several related devices were added to the line, including a high-speed punch and a dedicated data conversion machine that would "massage" data between formats to ease the burden on the host computer.

In 1964 Regnecentralen was taken public. Most of the firm's shares were held by its biggest customers.

New computers
In the mid-1960s, RC began the design of a small integrated circuit-based computer system for industrial control and automation needs, initially to fill a request by a Danish company to automate a chemical factory they were building in Poland. The RC 4000 design emerged in 1966 and was completed for the factory the next year. When combined with appropriate peripherals, almost always including an RC 2000 along with several rebranded devices from other companies, the RC 4000 was a highly reliable minicomputer, and went on to be sold across Europe. The RC 8000 from the mid-1970s used newer-generation integrated circuits (ICs) to shrink the RC 4000 into a single rack-mount system. The last in the series, the RC 9000, further shrunk the machine and improved performance to about 4 MIPS, and was sold in versions that could run either RC 8000 programs, or Unix.

The RC 4000 is famous for its operating system, developed by Per Brinch Hansen. Known as the RC 4000 multiprogramming system, it is the first real-world example of a system using a very simple kernel along with a variety of user-selected programs that built up the system as a whole. Today this concept is known as a microkernel, and efforts to correct for microkernels' poor performance formed the basis of most OS research through the 1970s and 1980s. Brinch Hansen also worked with Charles Simonyi and Peter Kraft on the RC 4000's Real-time Control System.

RC also began selling the Data General Nova under license in 1970 as the RC 7000, later introducing their own updated version as the RC 3600 the next year. This series filled a niche similar to the RC 4000, but for much smaller installations. The RC 3600 became a fixture of many Danish schools and universities.

During the 1980s, RC produced the RC700 Piccolo, the RC750 Partner, and the RC759 Piccoline systems, which were sold to Danish schools mostly, and to some businesses in Denmark and abroad. The Piccolo was powered by the Zilog Z80A CPU, while the Piccoline was powered by the Intel 80186 processor.

Regnecentralen was acquired by International Computers Limited (ICL) in 1989.

title: Regnecentralen


text:
Talk:Gun Owners of America

GOA divered from the NRA
How about some of the ways GOA has diverged from the NRA? Where do they disagree? --BDD (talk) 03:19, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Advertising
I was wondering how I might go about buying advertising space on wikipedia in much the same way that the Gun Owners of America seem to have done here. Nino137.111.47.29 (talk) 02:14, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

You start an organization that 3 million people believe in enough to join and pay dues to. Your organization should uphold at least one of the constitutional amendments that are under siege by our current leftist administration. Simple. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.41.173.15 (talk) 23:46, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant 3 hundred thousand members, not 3 million. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.41.173.15 (talk) 23:49, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

So the page reflects a political agenda advanced by 0.001% of the population of the US, rather than presenting facts about the organisation. Interesting. Ninahexan (talk) 06:14, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Just because only (?) 300,000 people actually sign up and PAY dues doesn't mean they represent the views of only 300,000 people. How many folks pay money (directly) to Planned Parenthood?? I guess many more people believe in Gun Rights than abortion. GOA should do like PP and just get congress to mandate that everyone in the U.S. is taxed to support them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.36.76.34 (talk) 18:44, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

At the very least, this article ought to be flagged for being a pure puff piece. There is no balance, there is no objectivity here. Neutral tone, anyone? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.221.98.4 (talk) 13:56, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Folks, don't just complain. Be bold and edit the article, or tag it as having issues (which I have just done). This article relies on one source: the subject of the article. All other sources cited are either press releases from this organization or stories on friendly websites (e.g. WorldNetDaily) about press releases issued by this organization. The two other sources cited have dead links. This article needs major surgery. Janus303 (talk) 03:50, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I tried to add some balance, at least with some statistics. For some reason the formatting for the cite isn't coming out right though. Ace-o-aces (talk) 14:37, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi guys. I will encourage you to explore WP and examine other articles. Also checkout POV and  RS. Its appropriate to ref the organization's press releases to cite positions it has officially taken, things it has said, their 'ratings' for people. If the GOA makes certain points in its info campaigns, linking to one of those campaigns is the way to go and is actually encouraged in the policy (WP:V).
 * =Digiphi (talk) 14:19, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

article critical of GOA
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/gun-activists-take-aim-obamacare —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.248.251.195 (talk) 11:29, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Contested fact
I removed the following text from the article: "In California last year, two children died—they were pitchforked to death by a crazed drug addict—because a resident in the home could not access the household firearms in time. The guns were locked up in deference to California state law." - I would argue this is a contested fact. You might argue that the children died because the social care system let "a crazed drug addict" to be in a situation where they might harm children. You might argue that children would not have been killed if the local law enforcement agencies arrived more quickly on the scene and were able to resolve the situation. You might argue that the term "a crazed drug addict" needs to be clarified and is not appropriate for wikipedia. Overall I think this sentence should withdrawn for two reasons 1. It cannot be proven as a clear case of cause and effect and 2. the terminology is inappropriate for wikipedia. --87.194.211.85 (talk) 13:42, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Interesting, but Wikipedia is not courtroom, and not democracy. Please see WP:POV. Contested facts are fine, and are encouraged per policy. If you can find a source that describes them as contested or describes an opposing viewpoint then you should add that to the article as well.
 * -Digiphi (talk) 14:19, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Here are two refs talking about the incident, and each describes enough that MOS would prescribe mentioning that the facts are contested. See if you wan work them into the article without misrepresenting the section about the GOAs info campaign. They'll have to be outside it. My advice would be to create a page about Jonathon David Bruce and link to it. See what you can do.
 * 1) NYDailyNews article

 * 2) TYsknews piece
 * -Digiphi (talk) 14:38, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Aurora, Colorado shooting
I removed the text regarding Pratt's claim about the Aurora, Colorado shooting. His quote is included in full in the source that was cited, and nowhere did Pratt say that the shooting was done as "part of a plot" as the text here claimed. All Pratt said is that the shooting has been exploited by politicians, which is a very different claim. ROG5728 (talk) 18:54, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Obama's anti-gun stance
The statement that "The [Obama] administration in fact has taken no steps to limit gun ownership" is patently false and it is contradicted by the first citation, which clearly says that the Obama admin created a multiple rifle sales reporting requirement in border states (for which the admin was quickly sued by the NRA). It also mentions that Obama has appointed two vehemently anti-gun Supreme Court justices, Sotomayor and Kagan. I went ahead and removed the statement. ROG5728 (talk) 19:02, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I am unaware of any anti-gun rulings by either Justice Sotomayor or Kagan. Could you provide a cite? Paul, in Saudi (talk) 06:24, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

@Paul - just google it. they lie when they are up for nomination, like all liberals. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.36.76.34 (talk) 18:39, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

both obama and holder are on videotape admitting they want to ban all guns in America. the audio from these has been played over and over on conservative talk radio. holder talks about wanting to brainwash americans into believing guns are bad iirc. why the national media dont report on them? use your own judgement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.36.76.34 (talk) 18:35, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

While the statements you make are true NOW, they were not true when the article was created in 2008. The facts can change over time, jumping up and down (figuratively) and screaming LIBERAL! LIBERAL! like a 1950's era cartoon of a woman standing on a chair screaming mouse! mouse! is not necessary. As a matter of fact we don't need people with this attitude on our side. You just perpetuate the anti-gun nuts view of gun owners as being those "crazy gun owners". --75.17.193.238 (talk) 17:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC) Doc Ock

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Recent news in 2022
Here's an article from USA Today with some current data, and their responses to incidents like Uvalde. There are lots of stories like this on the internet.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/31/gun-control-lobbying-groups-nra/9994447002/ Beyond NRA: Other gun rights groups spend millions in Washington to influence laws DONOVAN SLACK, CHELSEY COX USA TODAY May 5, 2022

"The Second Amendment is about defending yourself from an attacker, be it a criminal, or a tyrannical government," Johnston said. "And so Americans need to have the same weaponry as the military."

He said no legislation would have prevented what happened in Uvalde, arguing that a determined shooter would have found a way to get a weapon, regardless of age limits or background checks or bans.

-- Nbauman (talk) 17:28, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

GOA victories section
Addition for consideration in this section.

"Gun Owners of America, a nonprofit lobbying organization that promotes gun rights, wrote about the elimination of the ban on X, formerly Twitter. "Congressional deal cuts funding to the ATF," the organization said, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, "and eliminates a 20+ year old gun ban for veterans. It also temporarily reauthorizes the archaic Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988." Newsweek

Cheers. DN (talk) 20:23, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Gun Owners of America