This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I looked back in the history to see that this article was C Class way back when the translated text was noted on Talk page by Rotideypoc41352 in 2013 here. Sections from French Wikipedia were added in December 2015 here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and then in November 2015 here and here and here and on November 23 here, which is when I think the translations from French began that year. In July 2014, translation was added here and here and here and here and in March 2014 here and then jumping over many other translations brought to the article to this one in November 2012 here that may have been the first one. Working a long time on improving this article! As the translations from French were added in bits, we had time to be sure we understood the meaning and the sources, and put things in the style of an English language article. Lots of work was done on the references by Rwood128, so they are pretty well organized, and they are extensive. I looked at the list of Vital articles here to find Middlemarch rated as B Class, and at least on first glance, I do not see that article as better than this one. I admit I do not generally understand how articles get their ratings, well, specifically, the criteria applied by whoever adds the rating, and how all that work over years has not been noticed yet. Does any of the Great Expectations editors agree with me? When will someone from Novels come around to give the article a B Class rating? -- Prairieplant ( talk) 05:45, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
The article reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies.Great Expectations#Style, for example, could use a bit of beefing up, considering the amount of scholarship on Great Expectations, no? (This parenthetical's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think desperate students may find more info about that on Sparknotes or Shmoop than in this article!) Luckily, I've started a translation of that same section in my sandbox; unluckily, I've yet to finish it. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 04:40, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
My second point today, I do not know how to set up automatic archiving. This talk page is littered with very old comments now quite historical. Does anyone know how to do this for a talk page? Rotideypoc41352 or Rwood128 or Vanamonde93 or anyone who has edited the article --- a long list, I must admit, or who has never edited this page but is skilled in setting up automatic archiving. I think the Talk page was last archived in 2011, if my scanning of the history caught the correct year. Would someone set it up? We have just a few live discussions now, as Talk page subjects are called when I use my mobile phone to read Wikipedia. I think it would be easier to see the truly current topics if old and resolved topics were archived. So I ask for help or someone to do a job I do not know how to do. -- Prairieplant ( talk) 05:54, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the archives for this talk page - the question should, perhaps, have been put: How could anyone #prove# that Magwitch is Magwitch, even if they know who he is? AL Pluribelle ( talk) 15:17, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
See Archive 2 [ [1]] for earlier examples of this kind of pointless comment. As I noted previously (Archive 2) they always seem to come on a Thursday! Rwood128 ( talk) 16:58, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Shouldn't the bibliography contain mainly works about Great Expectation? A fuller bibliography belongs on the Dickens article. Rwood128 ( talk) 16:32, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I think it will be a task to compare the long list of books in the article about Charles Dickens, with the list compiled here. If the more general works about Dickens, and not at all about Great Expectations, then there might be a main article connection to the lists within the article on Dickens. -- Prairieplant ( talk) 15:38, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone think that this list is too long? Also BrightR suggests that every entry requires a citation. I argue that this isn't really necessary when an article exists to prove the noteworthiness of the entry. Rwood128 ( talk) 16:47, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I've merged the two per the deletion discussion linked at the top of the talk page but didn't find much text worth keeping. Kept the images and references, paraphrased the Renovation House bit, and deleted information only restating the novel without further commentary. Most of the information about the real Satis House already exists in King's School, Rochester. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 23:39, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
Chaosdruid, the characters in this example of a good article, called exemplary and a featured article about fiction, has the names in bold, or as subsection titles, which puts the names like bold, The General in His Labyrinth. It is an example in this article Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction. I do not see the page on boldface type as rigid guidance for articles on novels. If you look at articles about fiction, there are variations in the topics covered, whether there is a list of characters, so as to describe the novel and the critical evaluation of it in the clearest way, among the articles receiving highest ratings. I suggest restoring the bold names, and letting that be a guide for the articles about novels by Dickens. The author Charles Dickens is known for the number of characters in his novels and their particular descriptions. - - Prairieplant ( talk) 04:54, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
Rwood128 ( talk) 14:36, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
It will be quite a task,( Clarity, Chaosdruid, fixing all these "errors"; best of luck (have you surveyed the examples?). Anyhow this is the wrong place to be discussing this. Isn't there some overriding rule about ignoring rules–I'll check that out later. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
I saw this on the dispute resolution noticeboard. I was initially torn on this but came to a conclusion after looking into it in more detail.
On one hand: While I am generally opposed to overregulation in Wikipedia, I remember when the MOS was first introduced, and it was an important step forward. We should apply it unless there is a very good reason not to. Ignore all rules is policy (I am glad that's still true – there have always been attempts to demote it), but it is not intended for minor style issues like this one. It is for ignoring rules when doing so is necessary. But "It looks better" doesn't create a necessity. Neither does Other stuff exists. The existence of non-compliant pages is never a valid argument for ignoring a rule so long as they are not actually the majority of pages where the same question arises in a similar context. And even then, it's a reason to change the rule, not to ignore it.
On the other hand: The bolding looks pretty good, and I personally feel that removing it would not be an improvement. I believe that is because it has been used correctly, in a way that does not actually contradict MOS:NOBOLD and in fact interpolates positive examples that can be found in the MOS itself. By this I mean that we are not dealing with entries like the following:
But only with entries like the following:
In other words, we are dealing with understated section headings that double as the beginnings of sentences. The MOS is not explicit about this kind of thing. Neither does it say in MOS:LISTBULLET whether list items may start in bold, nor does MOS:NOBOLD directly apply in this situation. It tells us not to use bold text at all in article text. But this is not article text. We are dealing with hybrids of list items and text paragraphs that begin with something that can (not: must) be understood as section headings. It also tells us to use italics instead for introducing new terms. In most cases these character descriptions do introduce new terms, but that is not why the characters have been bolded. It would be silly to exclude a character from the bolding because it has mentioned before. They are being bolded because that's the natural thing to do for section headings.
Would the authors/maintainers of the MOS disagree? Probably not, because they themselves have done pretty much the same thing under the last item of MOS:LISTBULLET. This is a relatively recent introduction (the list used to use italics), may or may not have been noticed, but apparently has so far not been contentious. [3] Moreover, the character lists have pretty much the same function as a glossary. And in glossaries, the definition (which, like here, is essentially a low key section heading for a tiny one-paragraph section) is automatically bolded by the system, as MOS:BOLD itself reminds us.
Based on this, I think this can go either way because we are actually in one of the countless situations that are not definitively decided by the MOS. Here is what I think we should achieve, in order of desirability:
What could also help is input from featured article reviewers who are familiar with literature articles. I could not immediately find any featured article on a novel that has a list of characters. This almost suggests that such lists are not particularly welcome, but then of course Dickens novels are a bit special in that respect. Hans Adler 14:04, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
I don't know how much more time I have for this discussion, but I really want to say one thing: Wikipedia doesn't have a shortage of editors who are prepared to make tedious little formatting updates to countless articles. Some editors do nothing else all day and have special tools to speed up the process in certain common cases. It only gets tricky when slight rewrites are necessary, as would be the case, e.g., for converting pseudo-headlines that start sentences into inlined headlines that are each followed by a dash and a complete sentence or sentences. This kind of thing is easily messed up when you jump from article to article and arent't relly interested in the content.
The format- and consistency-oriented editors are an important part of Wikipedia's ecosystem, but they also tend to get into much the same kind of conflicts with content-focused editors that are known from the relations between nomads and the sedentary population around the world. It is important for both groups to develop strategies to get along with each other. It can be stressful, but ideally, what first looks like a conflict turns into a win-win situation. For content editors this means understanding the positions of format-oriented editors and knowing where to ask for help with tedious work the don't necessarily want to do on their own. By the way, there is nothing better for good relations than having asked someone a favour once and then thanked them for doing it. Hans Adler 14:29, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
Chaosdruid's comment above re Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Novels is a little misleading; this is what is actually said:
Chaosdruid that is one perverse conclusion, opposite to all the discussion here, and by the numbers, you are the only one who finds bold names in a character list to be the top problem in articles about novels. Hans Adler has laid out a more sensible plan, of taking your discussion to the people who write the MOS, on Bullet points, on bold text and on articles about novels, to gain agreement on major changes before you or anyone acts. You gained no agreement in the discussion here, on this plan to alter articles to suit your taste.
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
Does any Editor share my view that the phrase "a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip" is tautologous, given that link to the associated definition of 'bildungsroman' ? 124.171.109.158 ( talk) 09:49, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
As a Southern Gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South., so no explicit definition. That comes later in Genres section:
a bildungsroman, which typically describes the coming-of-age of the main character.Just food for thought.
I deleted the English version as it didn't make much sense: it lacked a clear subject (other than being about characters!) and therefore focus. A look at the original suggests that the problem is there, but my French is v. poor. I believe that there is a similar problem with "Le point paroxystique de l'être" – "The climactic point of being".
Sorry about these deletion, Rotideypoc41352. I struggled at times when translating David Copperfield with what I suspected was poor writing in the French article, but because I have very little French couldn't be totally sure. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:35, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
very little French, and the French encyclopaedic style with its long, complex syntax does not help us. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 05:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
Rwood128 One of the sections you removed for better translation was referring to Dickens and his macabre imagination to create Miss Havisham and Dickens' fantastic imagination (as in fantasy, not a generic compliment) to create Wemmick and his castle at home. The deleted paragraph was this one: Monod writes that eccentricity is often "abusive", clarification needed except Magwitch's and Orlick's, easily excused by their ignorance, and Jagger's extreme case of professional deformation that criticized the macabre imagination [1] that spawned Miss Havisham [N 1] and the boundless fantasies of Wemmick's castle. [N 2] [1]
References
References
I cannot find any acknowledgement of the French article from which material has been translated. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:44, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
|small=yes
. Prairieplant also provided a
more thorough attribution back in May 2018. While we're at it, I made
a comment back when I placed the template in 2013 (!).
Rotideypoc41352 (
talk)
05:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I looked back in the history to see that this article was C Class way back when the translated text was noted on Talk page by Rotideypoc41352 in 2013 here. Sections from French Wikipedia were added in December 2015 here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and then in November 2015 here and here and here and on November 23 here, which is when I think the translations from French began that year. In July 2014, translation was added here and here and here and here and in March 2014 here and then jumping over many other translations brought to the article to this one in November 2012 here that may have been the first one. Working a long time on improving this article! As the translations from French were added in bits, we had time to be sure we understood the meaning and the sources, and put things in the style of an English language article. Lots of work was done on the references by Rwood128, so they are pretty well organized, and they are extensive. I looked at the list of Vital articles here to find Middlemarch rated as B Class, and at least on first glance, I do not see that article as better than this one. I admit I do not generally understand how articles get their ratings, well, specifically, the criteria applied by whoever adds the rating, and how all that work over years has not been noticed yet. Does any of the Great Expectations editors agree with me? When will someone from Novels come around to give the article a B Class rating? -- Prairieplant ( talk) 05:45, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
The article reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies.Great Expectations#Style, for example, could use a bit of beefing up, considering the amount of scholarship on Great Expectations, no? (This parenthetical's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think desperate students may find more info about that on Sparknotes or Shmoop than in this article!) Luckily, I've started a translation of that same section in my sandbox; unluckily, I've yet to finish it. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 04:40, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
My second point today, I do not know how to set up automatic archiving. This talk page is littered with very old comments now quite historical. Does anyone know how to do this for a talk page? Rotideypoc41352 or Rwood128 or Vanamonde93 or anyone who has edited the article --- a long list, I must admit, or who has never edited this page but is skilled in setting up automatic archiving. I think the Talk page was last archived in 2011, if my scanning of the history caught the correct year. Would someone set it up? We have just a few live discussions now, as Talk page subjects are called when I use my mobile phone to read Wikipedia. I think it would be easier to see the truly current topics if old and resolved topics were archived. So I ask for help or someone to do a job I do not know how to do. -- Prairieplant ( talk) 05:54, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the archives for this talk page - the question should, perhaps, have been put: How could anyone #prove# that Magwitch is Magwitch, even if they know who he is? AL Pluribelle ( talk) 15:17, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
See Archive 2 [ [1]] for earlier examples of this kind of pointless comment. As I noted previously (Archive 2) they always seem to come on a Thursday! Rwood128 ( talk) 16:58, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Shouldn't the bibliography contain mainly works about Great Expectation? A fuller bibliography belongs on the Dickens article. Rwood128 ( talk) 16:32, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I think it will be a task to compare the long list of books in the article about Charles Dickens, with the list compiled here. If the more general works about Dickens, and not at all about Great Expectations, then there might be a main article connection to the lists within the article on Dickens. -- Prairieplant ( talk) 15:38, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone think that this list is too long? Also BrightR suggests that every entry requires a citation. I argue that this isn't really necessary when an article exists to prove the noteworthiness of the entry. Rwood128 ( talk) 16:47, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I've merged the two per the deletion discussion linked at the top of the talk page but didn't find much text worth keeping. Kept the images and references, paraphrased the Renovation House bit, and deleted information only restating the novel without further commentary. Most of the information about the real Satis House already exists in King's School, Rochester. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 23:39, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
Chaosdruid, the characters in this example of a good article, called exemplary and a featured article about fiction, has the names in bold, or as subsection titles, which puts the names like bold, The General in His Labyrinth. It is an example in this article Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction. I do not see the page on boldface type as rigid guidance for articles on novels. If you look at articles about fiction, there are variations in the topics covered, whether there is a list of characters, so as to describe the novel and the critical evaluation of it in the clearest way, among the articles receiving highest ratings. I suggest restoring the bold names, and letting that be a guide for the articles about novels by Dickens. The author Charles Dickens is known for the number of characters in his novels and their particular descriptions. - - Prairieplant ( talk) 04:54, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
Rwood128 ( talk) 14:36, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
It will be quite a task,( Clarity, Chaosdruid, fixing all these "errors"; best of luck (have you surveyed the examples?). Anyhow this is the wrong place to be discussing this. Isn't there some overriding rule about ignoring rules–I'll check that out later. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
I saw this on the dispute resolution noticeboard. I was initially torn on this but came to a conclusion after looking into it in more detail.
On one hand: While I am generally opposed to overregulation in Wikipedia, I remember when the MOS was first introduced, and it was an important step forward. We should apply it unless there is a very good reason not to. Ignore all rules is policy (I am glad that's still true – there have always been attempts to demote it), but it is not intended for minor style issues like this one. It is for ignoring rules when doing so is necessary. But "It looks better" doesn't create a necessity. Neither does Other stuff exists. The existence of non-compliant pages is never a valid argument for ignoring a rule so long as they are not actually the majority of pages where the same question arises in a similar context. And even then, it's a reason to change the rule, not to ignore it.
On the other hand: The bolding looks pretty good, and I personally feel that removing it would not be an improvement. I believe that is because it has been used correctly, in a way that does not actually contradict MOS:NOBOLD and in fact interpolates positive examples that can be found in the MOS itself. By this I mean that we are not dealing with entries like the following:
But only with entries like the following:
In other words, we are dealing with understated section headings that double as the beginnings of sentences. The MOS is not explicit about this kind of thing. Neither does it say in MOS:LISTBULLET whether list items may start in bold, nor does MOS:NOBOLD directly apply in this situation. It tells us not to use bold text at all in article text. But this is not article text. We are dealing with hybrids of list items and text paragraphs that begin with something that can (not: must) be understood as section headings. It also tells us to use italics instead for introducing new terms. In most cases these character descriptions do introduce new terms, but that is not why the characters have been bolded. It would be silly to exclude a character from the bolding because it has mentioned before. They are being bolded because that's the natural thing to do for section headings.
Would the authors/maintainers of the MOS disagree? Probably not, because they themselves have done pretty much the same thing under the last item of MOS:LISTBULLET. This is a relatively recent introduction (the list used to use italics), may or may not have been noticed, but apparently has so far not been contentious. [3] Moreover, the character lists have pretty much the same function as a glossary. And in glossaries, the definition (which, like here, is essentially a low key section heading for a tiny one-paragraph section) is automatically bolded by the system, as MOS:BOLD itself reminds us.
Based on this, I think this can go either way because we are actually in one of the countless situations that are not definitively decided by the MOS. Here is what I think we should achieve, in order of desirability:
What could also help is input from featured article reviewers who are familiar with literature articles. I could not immediately find any featured article on a novel that has a list of characters. This almost suggests that such lists are not particularly welcome, but then of course Dickens novels are a bit special in that respect. Hans Adler 14:04, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
I don't know how much more time I have for this discussion, but I really want to say one thing: Wikipedia doesn't have a shortage of editors who are prepared to make tedious little formatting updates to countless articles. Some editors do nothing else all day and have special tools to speed up the process in certain common cases. It only gets tricky when slight rewrites are necessary, as would be the case, e.g., for converting pseudo-headlines that start sentences into inlined headlines that are each followed by a dash and a complete sentence or sentences. This kind of thing is easily messed up when you jump from article to article and arent't relly interested in the content.
The format- and consistency-oriented editors are an important part of Wikipedia's ecosystem, but they also tend to get into much the same kind of conflicts with content-focused editors that are known from the relations between nomads and the sedentary population around the world. It is important for both groups to develop strategies to get along with each other. It can be stressful, but ideally, what first looks like a conflict turns into a win-win situation. For content editors this means understanding the positions of format-oriented editors and knowing where to ask for help with tedious work the don't necessarily want to do on their own. By the way, there is nothing better for good relations than having asked someone a favour once and then thanked them for doing it. Hans Adler 14:29, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
Chaosdruid's comment above re Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Novels is a little misleading; this is what is actually said:
Chaosdruid that is one perverse conclusion, opposite to all the discussion here, and by the numbers, you are the only one who finds bold names in a character list to be the top problem in articles about novels. Hans Adler has laid out a more sensible plan, of taking your discussion to the people who write the MOS, on Bullet points, on bold text and on articles about novels, to gain agreement on major changes before you or anyone acts. You gained no agreement in the discussion here, on this plan to alter articles to suit your taste.
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
Does any Editor share my view that the phrase "a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip" is tautologous, given that link to the associated definition of 'bildungsroman' ? 124.171.109.158 ( talk) 09:49, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
As a Southern Gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South., so no explicit definition. That comes later in Genres section:
a bildungsroman, which typically describes the coming-of-age of the main character.Just food for thought.
I deleted the English version as it didn't make much sense: it lacked a clear subject (other than being about characters!) and therefore focus. A look at the original suggests that the problem is there, but my French is v. poor. I believe that there is a similar problem with "Le point paroxystique de l'être" – "The climactic point of being".
Sorry about these deletion, Rotideypoc41352. I struggled at times when translating David Copperfield with what I suspected was poor writing in the French article, but because I have very little French couldn't be totally sure. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:35, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
very little French, and the French encyclopaedic style with its long, complex syntax does not help us. Rotideypoc41352 ( talk) 05:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
Rwood128 One of the sections you removed for better translation was referring to Dickens and his macabre imagination to create Miss Havisham and Dickens' fantastic imagination (as in fantasy, not a generic compliment) to create Wemmick and his castle at home. The deleted paragraph was this one: Monod writes that eccentricity is often "abusive", clarification needed except Magwitch's and Orlick's, easily excused by their ignorance, and Jagger's extreme case of professional deformation that criticized the macabre imagination [1] that spawned Miss Havisham [N 1] and the boundless fantasies of Wemmick's castle. [N 2] [1]
References
References
I cannot find any acknowledgement of the French article from which material has been translated. Rwood128 ( talk) 11:44, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
|small=yes
. Prairieplant also provided a
more thorough attribution back in May 2018. While we're at it, I made
a comment back when I placed the template in 2013 (!).
Rotideypoc41352 (
talk)
05:47, 7 November 2019 (UTC)