Talk:Beachy Head (poem)

To the class project editing this article: please remember this is an encyclopedia!

I'm very glad to see so many people trying out wikipedia editing, and dedicating attention to such a wonderful and complex poem, but I notice that the article is now getting extremely long and including information that is more appropriate for an academic article than an encyclopedia. For comparison, see The Raven, which is a "Featured Article" (one of the best articles on Wikipedia). Some major areas of concern:

• The current article is WP:TOOBIG, at 74Kb 92Kb!! and growing -- the maximum is 60Kb, and 40Kb is more appropriate.
• Many pieces of information are in the wrong places, or appear several times. It's most notable in the summary, which includes analysis (see WP:PLOTSUM and MOS:PLOT for more info on how plot sections should be written), but the whole article as it stands should be read over looking at each sentence and asking "does this actually relate to the topic as defined by the section header"? Reorganizing will reveal duplications, e.g., fragmentation is discussed two or three different times.
• There is far too much quotation from the poem and from scholars. Replacing these with concise summaries is the best way to bring the article back down to an appropriate size -- since the material itself is very useful.

• Expanding on this: Encyclopedias are reference texts, meant to provide brief overviews of a topic. It is rarely appropriate to credit a particular person with an idea in the prose of the article. E.g., rather than saying "Scholar X argues that Smith does Y, and scholar Z adds U on the same line of thinking" you want to distill and summarize something like "Smith does Y", and cite the scholars in the footnote.
• If "Smith does Y" seems like an unsupportably bold statement, then the information probably doesn't belong in the article, or it might belong in the "Reception" section in a format like "Some critics interpret Smith as doing Y."
• If there isn't scholarly consensus, still don't use the lengthy version of quoting from multiple named scholars -- just say, "Some scholars interpret that Smith does Y.(footnote them) Others, however, see Z.(footnote them)"

• The references are a mess, using multiple different reference styles, and with some broken references. Wikipedia policy is that there are several acceptable ways of doing references but only one should be used within any given article. I guess I can just clean this up for you after you're all done, but it would be better practice if you chose one yourselves and applied it consistently. I think the normal WP:FOOTNOTES system is likely to be easiest for you.

You can post questions about the article here on the talk page and I am happy to help. I really am pleased to see so much activity, but it seemed fair to warn you in advance that I will probably delete at least half of what was written today, unless you edit and delete it yourselves. The article will be much, much improved from having so much well-sourced material added to it, but just adding things isn't what makes the best encyclopedia article -- it also requires a particular kind of synthesis and concision. It is inevitable that new editors will make mistakes, but please try not to just leave a big mess for others to clean up. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 18:37, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

From One of the Editing Project students

Hello, I apologize for the current state of the article. Please have some patience with us, as we are still in the process of editing the page. Over the next little while we're planning to shore in extraneous and repetitive content, and fix the errors in citations.

Threatening to delete information so quickly feels like an overreaction and discourages people from participating in Wikipedia editing. Especially when said threats are supported by factually incorrect statements about size limits on Wikipedia articles. According to the Wikipedia article size guidelines, the maximum is 2048 Kibibytes (which in Kb is 2097.152).

We plan to make this into a proper wikipedia page, but there are nearly two dozen of us. Coordinating this many people will take us a little extra time, and by deleting this without allowing us adequate time to properly edit the entry it just creates more work to try and re-implement content that did not necessitate removal.

Feel free to edit information if you find fault, and thank you for the helpful advice on formatting/content presentation. We will bear it in mind as we edit the article. We are excited that someone cares about this poem as much as we do! — Preceding unsigned comment added by EvanENGL3400 (talk • contribs) 19:04, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Hello -- thank you very much for your reply, and I can certainly be patient now that I know you do intend to edit the page down. Certainly the technological maximum for a page is extremely large, but as the guideline on what makes an article WP:TOOBIG indicates, any article over 50kB likely contains too much material for one article and likely needs to be subdivided -- if an article is that long, it indicates flaws in how it was written. (See also Wikipedia:Summary style.) The funny thing about an encyclopedia is that a longer article is often less useful than a shorter one, since too much detail distracts from the main point.

It is very reassuring to finally hear from someone from this class, since it was very alarming not to have the a notice posted on the talk page in advance, or a centralized class page in the WikiEdu system making the course's intent clear. It was particularly alarming to me that so many edits were taking place "live" on the article (rather than being developed in a draftspace, as is generally recommended for classes and for individual editors when undertaking major edits), since the "live" article is the "real thing" for anyone who will read it at the moment that they search. If you let me know how long your class intends to develop the article, though, it won't do much harm for the live article to be unpolished for a little while, and I'll know how long to wait. And as alarming as your class's way of editing the article is, I really am pleased to see so much high quality material and attention going to a work of so much importance -- it really will be a much better article than I was ever going to make it on my own, thanks to your efforts. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 19:43, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Starting some major revisions

Quite understandably given current events, it looks like this article is no longer a priority for the class editing it, so I'm going to start some slow-and-steady improvements to make the new material more encyclopedic. After looking at it for a while, I've decided that the best method will be to put together a new draft, using material piecemeal from the current version. I copied the article over to my draftspace here, and I'm deleting things from there as I add them to an in-progress revision here (also in my draftspace). I'll take a similar approach to my revisions of Kubla Khan, developing the new article in sections and moving those sections to the "live" mainspace article in chunks as I complete them. I invite feedback on these edits here on this talk page (rather than in my userspace).

My current plan is to restructure the article according to the following outline:

1. Poem
   1. Synopsis
   2. Structure
2. Composition
3. Style
   1. Romantic fragment
   2. Universalized speaker [this section needs a better name, but I want to do something on the speaker]
   3. Footnotes
4. Background
   1. Threats of French invasion
   2. Revolutionary philosophy
   3. Romanticism
5. Major themes
   1. Scientific approach to nature
   2. Expansive view of history
   3. Critique of imperialism
6. Influences
7. Reception
8. Adaptations

I think all of the current material can be encompassed in that structure, and moving similar pieces of information together will reveal repetition that can be eliminated. I plan to condense substantially as I go.

I also plan to change the reference formatting to the standard footnote style with named refs. I like short footnotes when many different page numbers are cited from a small list of sources (like at Ōyama Sutematsu), but that doesn't apply to this article.

If anybody else would also like to work on making this article more encyclopedic, I'd be delighted to collaborate -- just say so here and we can talk about how to divide up the work and avoid stepping on each others' toes. I'll probably be fairly slow working my way through this so you can also just make changes like normal to the article and I'll adapt if needed. I think this will be a really top-notch article eventually! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 03:50, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

May update: I've finished rewriting the "Composition" and now "Poem" sections. While working on these, I've decided that actually the "short footnotes" style does seem to be the best for this particular article; I've gotten that style working in the "polished"/"finished" sections, though the rest are still a total mess. I've also somewhat shifted my thinking about the structure and subsections, which can be seen in my ongoing draftspace version. I removed a lot of material from the synopsis section, some of which I have kept in my draftspace here to potentially use in other sections. I find this article a little overwhelming to work on, but hope to stick with it. Again, I invite any feedback here, and if anyone else would like to revise the article I would be happy to discuss dividing up the work. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 09:16, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Mid-June update: Finished rewriting the "Style" section. Got an acceptable first pass of a "Background" section (I'm happy with the French Revolution sub-section, but I can't decide whether the Romanticism section needs to be expanded, or deleted...). I think I'm about halfway done with the "Major Themes"; my sense of what needs to go here keeps changing, but right now I think I'll write two more, one about the sublime and one about anti-war sentiments. The stuff about the hermit I think will go in another section somewhere (background? another top-level section?) of "Differences from Smith's other works," which will also cover autobiography and melancholy.

As part of squaring away the Major Themes I want to dig in to that "Reception" section -- to my mind, the goal of such a section is not to list critical interpretations in chronological order, but to summarize the arc of reception and major themes or trends in critical assessment. I know there's sourcing for that kind of zoomed-out synthesis because there's an amazing chapter on exactly this topic in Labbe's book (so no original research needed for the synthesis), I just need to get access to that book again. In the mean time I might remove a lot from the existing "Reception" section, which seems to miss the forest for the trees.

I think the article is now about halfway done being polished. I'm starting to wonder about going for GA or even FA status eventually. In the mean time there is still a lot of good work for other editors if anybody wanted to jump in. Otherwise I'll keep plugging away. ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 09:09, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Duplicated references section

Does anyone understand why this article contains a completely duplicated references section? It looks like it started in this edit by @Oulfis and has been getting worse (more duplicates) over time. Why shouldn't the duplicates be deleted? I'm asking because it's as if they're being curated for some purpose. -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:53, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Hello @Mikeblas:, sorry, it's a bit of a mess. Basically, the whole article needed a lot of clean-up, and I didn't feel like fixing the references for prose I was planning to rewrite anyway. So, everything I've revised is using sfn footnotes and makes up the first references list. Everything I haven't revised, exists as various duplicates. As I made my way through the article, the first list got longer, but I didn't trim the second list. So the first reflist is indeed curated on purpose but there's no good reason for the other duplicates to stay, I just haven't felt like fixing them separately from revising the prose. If you wanted to finish the switchover to sfn you are very welcome to! I will also surely get around to the last of it someday, there are only the last three sections left now... ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 05:43, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I've just realised, of course-- that second references list isn't automatically generated at all, the non-sfn inline footnotes show up in the "Notes" section (where they are ugly but at least not so obviously duplicated). The second manual list at the end, then, serves no function at all-- I have no idea how I overlooked that it was totally removable; it's gone now. Some of the sources it lists were never actually referenced within the article itself, so I kept a copy in my draftspace in case I want to go through those extra sources some day, but I don't see a role for it in the article. Thanks for bringing my attention to this! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 07:23, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Great, thanks for clearing that up. I figured it was a work in progress, but I didn't know which way it was progressing. A couple of references were damaged since my last edit, and I repaired those. -- Mikeblas (talk) 14:30, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you a lot for repairing the damaged references! It's really invigorating to have someone else improving the article. I have been trying to check and make sure I'm leaving things still tidy when I make edits, but it seems like I am still introducing referencing problems. Are you using a plugin or tool to spot reference mistakes? Or am I just blindly missing the big red text that shows up when a reference breaks? I'd like to make fewer messes as I go...! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 08:39, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Quotes or Italics?

I'm no poet (and I know it). My understanding is that "Beachy Head" is the name of a single poem. In this article, the title is represented in italics (Beachy Head) rather than in quotes ("Beachy Head"). At MOS:QUOTEMARKS, I read that poem names should be in quotations, not in italics. Are there some instances where "Beachy Head" refers to the name of a volume of published poems or a collection, rather than the individual poem? The lead of this article seems to identify the difference: "Beachy Head" is an individual poem, and Beachy Head and Other Poems is a volume that includes the subject poem and a few others. Shouldn't the formatting and nomenclature be made consistent throughout? -- Mikeblas (talk) 14:41, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mikeblas: This is a great detail-oriented question to ask, but in this case actually italics are right for the title. MOS:MAJORWORK indicates why-- short poems go in quotation marks as "minor works" (like a chapter or short story would), but long or epic poems (like Paradise Lost) get italics as "major works" (like a novel). Beachy Head is long enough and has enough "epic" flavour that the sources consistently use italics for it. (I spot-checked Kari Lokke and Jacqueline Labbe just now to confirm.) Thanks a lot for helping with the cleanup on this article! ~ oulfis 🌸(talk) 08:35, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, @Oulfis. Even with that information, after a careful read, it seems like there are a few spots where the wrong escapement is used. "The Critic quotes Beachy Head's long passage of personal lament" for instance, seems to refer to the poem rather than the place (or the battle), and therefore should be in italics. There are probably six or eight other mismatches in the article at the moment. -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:11, 8 December 2020 (UTC)