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Speedy deletion nomination of James Blair Leishman
Hello Xover,
I wanted to let you know that I just tagged James Blair Leishman for deletion, because it seems to be inappropriate for a variety of reasons. For more details please see the notice on the article.
If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.
You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions.
I fixed the article for now but you should know better than to copy text from other websites. Please write the text yourself and add some sources for him. Regards SoWhy11:17, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
@Kudpung and SoWhy: I am, in fact, reasonably well familiar with both copyright law and the related policies and parts of the TOS, and take pains to avoid both technical and substantive violations of it. Granted my work on it on-wiki has mostly been in relation to images (NFCC here and general issues at Commons), but I am familiar with the issues also in the general case and as it applies to article space.In this particular case, though, the central point that seems to have slipped through the cracks is that mere facts do not rise to the level of copyright protection: only creative expression is afforded such protection (unless you want to get into database rights, which would be a whole `nother ballgame). And the original text in question (and our article, as it stood, too for that matter) is a condensed set of facts, listed in chronological order, with exceedingly little creative expression even possible, much less apparent. Where it was possible to rewrite it, it was rewritten: but there are only so many ways to list a set of facts without deviating from encyclopedic language or engaging in original research.In other words, yes, I contest the speedy, and please restore the revdel'ed revisions.And if there are concerns about notability—which I concede it is possible may be an issue—the venue for it is AfD, not speedy or supression. --Xover (talk) 12:38, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
I disagree. The text that was in the article was very similar to the one found in the source and there are plenty of ways to write it differently, e.g.
Leishman was born on 8 May 1902 and went to Rydak School as well as St John's College, Oxford. In 1928, the University of Southampton appointed him Assistant Lecturer in English Literature. In the following years, he received promotions to Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer before leaving Southampton for the University of Oxford in 1946. He taught as a Lecturer in English Literature Oxford until his death on 14 August 1963.
If you still believe your text should be undeleted, I will defer to admins with more knowledge in copyright manners though. Regards SoWhy12:53, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
@SoWhy: By way of illustration, the Oxford Who Was Who entry for Leishman would trigger Earwig and similar tools in a comparison with our text, despite the fact I hadn't even checked if Who Was Who had an entry on him when I stubbed it out. And, in fact, such tools would trigger on comparing Oxford Univeristy's Who Was Who with the University of London's database entry for the same reason: it's just a bunch of facts in chronological order. --Xover (talk) 13:07, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
@Kudpung and SoWhy: Wow. So both of you really feel that you don't need to engage further on this issue?
I suppose I shouldn't be shocked at that, really, but… well, I actually am, a bit. Let me try to illustrate with a rhetorical question: is this how you would recommend approaching content issues and article development in general, or is it only when exercising advanced permissions that you feel dropping a single note (or in SoWhy's case, responding once to explain their actions as is the minimum required by the admin policy) is sufficient to fulfill the goals of a "collaborative editing environment" where WP:CONSENSUS is a policy? (And, to be clear, I mean "rhetorical" literally: I'm not asking you to answer it; I'm just using it to illustrate why I find your disengagement here problematic.)
@Kudpung: While checking whether you'd been editing the last two days, I came across this. Can you tell why I found that message sufficiently ironic in this context to call it out? Because while (both of) you are clearly acting in good faith and trying to behave "as it becomes…" (etc.), from where I'm sitting it's clear you're not sufficiently succeeding in imagining what it's like on the other side of this interaction. There are good reasons why false accusations of various policy violations are considered to be actionable under WP:NPA: now imagine how I feel when being implicitly accused of copyvio. The WP:NPP instructions call for checking blatant copyvio, and even warns of false positives, so when you speedy here, rather than using the non-emergency community process at WP:CP that actually gives me a chance to respond, you're actually making a pretty strong accusation (that SoWhy further intensified with their subsequent chiding "…should know better…", but that's hardly your fault). Neither one of you wanted to discuss before taking action, and neither one of you saw any need to discuss after taking action. Can you see why it might be kinda crappy to be on the receiving end of that?
@SoWhy: What admins with more knowledge in copyright manners are you deferring to? There are no other admins here because you have acted unilaterally, outside of any community process (i.e. on your individual mandate as an admin), and, in content terms, enforced your preferred version using the advanced permissions (and I mean that descriptively, not as an accusation), and then disclaimed any need to discuss the matter further. This was clearly not a case of blatant or willful copyvio, and there was no urgent need to "deal with it". At the very worst (and I strongly dispute that that's the case), it was an editor of over 10 years of contributions making a simple mistake, and in obviously good faith. If I'm to take your "defer to admins with more knowledge in copyright manners" as anything but a copout, I must take it as tacit admission that you see room for a doubt that your expertise in the area is not sufficient to resolve. For editors without advanced permissions that's usually considered a signal that it's time to engage with the community and community processes: processes and forums like WP:CP, in this case.
The world has long since disabused me of any delusions that I'm perfect, so it's entirely possible that my assessment in this case was wrong. Iff that was so, I'd be happy to apologize for my mistake, learn, and help clean up any relevant messes (in this case, I would have requested the revdels myself); which, regardless of conclusion, would have been a decent handling of the issue. Instead I'm sitting here feeling kinda dumped upon, and with the distinct impression that the biggest direct cause for our editor retention problem is the "last line of defence, without us the project would collapse" mindset among the new page patrollers and the admin corps. I appreciate that you (collective you) deal with a firehose of incoming crud, and take a lot of crap while doing so—and I'll reemphasise that I don't question your good faith, nor take issue with your actual conduct here (it's what's absent I'm questioning)—but an editor that has managed to keep on content-gnoming for over a decade without ragequitting really shouldn't be left pondering systemic problems, and wondering whether we shouldn't abolish NPP entirely, after an interaction with two experienced and well-respected admins. Or put another way, if you don't see that as a problem for the project, then your opinion of me must be pretty darn crappy!
PS. I'm about to request a G7 speedy of James Blair Leishman. I think a redlink to encourage someone to write the article is preferable to the useless sub-stub that's currently there, and I really don't care enough about the article's subject to expend more effort on it (I was just de-redlinking an author name in a cite from an unrelated article I was working on). Just letting you know so that it doesn't come across as POINTy.
PPS. While I'm bugging you, and on a somewhat more positive note, thanks for reinvigorating the Signpost! I enjoy it a lot, and think it's important for the project that we have it, so that effort is very much appreciated! --Xover (talk) 08:49, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
First of all, what was there more to engage? You added an example of what else would trigger the copyvio detector and that's it. You did not discuss the fact that I offered a version that was less like the original nor did you offer reasons why that version can't be used. I do maintain that close paraphrasing should be avoided if broader paraphrasing is possible without losing any information although I admit the line between copyright violation and allowed use of facts in text is hard to determine in such cases. That's why I was willing to defer to others and you are most welcome to bring this to WP:CP or WP:AN for review. After all, we are all fallible and I don't claim to be an expert. As such, I do apologize if my earlier comment sounded condescending. I always assume good faith whenever possible and I ask for you to do the same.As for the article in question, I would encourage you to retract the G7 and maybe use the text I provided. A stub will give readers more information than a redlink does and as you write yourself, you only wrote it "by accident", so what are the chances someone else will really write an article about him anytime soon? Regards SoWhy09:45, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
@SoWhy: First things first: thanks for responding, and for taking the time to do so substantively. Very much appreciated! Second: I took pains to make it clear above that I was not questioning (both of) your good faith here, or your conduct as such for that matter, even to the point of risking it getting ignored as a WP:WALLOFTEXT. If I still failed to be clear about that I would appreciate feedback on how I could have done better! Third: I also very much maintain that close paraphrasing should be avoided as that is very hard to to do without running into actual copyvio territory. It's hard to avoid in some cases (density of facts in the original, and paucity of breadth in available sources, making it doubly so), and it's very easy to fall into inadvertently, but pains should be taken to avoid it all the same.As for your point that I did not respond to your suggested alternate wording, that's a fair complaint; but my focus was on the original text and its status, as that was what you'd called into question. Absent an actual problem with the original (which was and is my position), an alternate phrasing was a side issue. I have no objections to your suggested wording (and in fact prefer it as it's much better prose-wise).But to expand on my point: consider the situation if you (both), instead of jumping to Tags & Tools, had dropped a note on my talk page outlining your concerns, and giving me the opportunity to address them. The focus of that interaction would have been not what was wrong with the original, and by extension what was wrong with me for having created it, but rather on how we could best improve it. And if, after giving me a chance to explain my position and rewrite the text that concerned you (which would have been a good idea on pure prose grounds, even without your copyvio concerns), you had lingering concerns, I could have requested precautionary revdel of of the old revisions myself (or a procedural AfD nom if notability was the remaining concern; neither option would have bothered me noticeably). That would have been a collaboritive effort to improve the article; would have cost you no more effort than the Tags & Tools approach; and would have left me feeling impressed with our dilligent, professional, and helpful NPP and admin corps. Rather than, in crude colloquial terms, feeling "butthurt" at being treated like the vandals and bad-faith editors I spend far too much of my own time dealing with. Put another way, that approach would have afforded me agency.PS. Oh, and I really would prefer a redlink to a sub-stub, as a general position. I just mentioned it here so the G7 wouldn't come across as POINTy. It wasn't really intended to be relevant to the discussion.PPS. I have off-wiki stuff keeping me busy today, so apologies if I am slow to respond. --Xover (talk) 10:39, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
Let's have a nice cup of tea and relax.I'm happy that we are basically on the same page here. Again, I see that my initial comment was ambiguous and led to some assumptions of my intentions that should best be avoided. I will try and be more careful in future. My actions were merely guided by precaution, trying to avoid potential copyvio problems by removing them from sight as fast as possible. We can agree that communicating is superior to tools-based approaches when it comes to good faith creations and I am certainly not someone who prefers using (the) tools when editing suffices (which is why I regularly rescue articles tagged for speedy deletion by fixing them, 9 of which have subsequently appeared on the Main Page). So yes, my first comment was misplaced and could have been handled better but then again so could your creation of the article using closely paraphrased text. I hope all is good again now and we can have a nice cup of tea to relax Regards SoWhy17:53, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
I've read the the thread above because I was pinged. I also do not see the need to prolong this discussion, but I would point out that while SoWhy and I are very experienced admins, within admin discretion on notability he and I may differ. I probably do more new page patrolling than he does and I've never complained about his occasional reverts of my tags, but at the time I tagged the article, in my opinion it made no claims of notability in its single line of text. I personally do not consider that on an otherwise unsourced article, a list of the subject's publications to be a criterion for evidence of notability. However, in restrospect, I admit I could perhaps have sent the creation to Draft. Anyway, we've all learnt something. It's brakfast time here on Sunday in Thailand and I'm enjoying a good mug of English tea. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:47, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
@Kudpung and SoWhy: Thank you both for your gracious responses; and a cuppa is lovely (mine is actually fresh ginger with lemon and honey, to the utter horror of all purists, but I find the stuff entirely addictive!). In brief, I'll echo the sentiment that if we've all learned something then the exercise will have been worthwhile. Oh, and contrary to (possibly) appearances above, do please let me know if you have any concerns with my edits in future! I consider lack of feedback to be a problem, and very much welcome criticism. Please don't let my taking issue with meta-/process-type stuff above discourage that: the lack of an explicit claim of notability (per the CSD) is an entirely apposite criticism, it was just the snowballing that started with use of speedy (vs. alternate ways to the same goal) etc. I took issue with. Anyways, thank you both. --Xover (talk) 09:28, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
@Serial Number 54129: Leishman was an English scholar of Jacobean poetry—known especially for his work on John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Shakespeare's sonnets—and a translator of Rainer Maria Rilke. Of particular interest for me was his Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1961), in which he, among other things, provides material enough to flesh out Sonnet 25 a bit. Figured I'd just quickly de-redlink the author name in the citation list, but… well… that didn't go exactly as planned.I haven't tried turmeric yet, but I can imagine it'll work wonders there. Give it a chai-esque dimension (ooh! In fact, why not go all out with the spices here? I'll have to try that!). Thanks for the tip! --Xover (talk) 11:02, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
An interesting experiment would be to get a disinterested third-party to re-write it from scratch, using the same sources, and then see how Earwig scores them. Proof, as it were, by experimentation. A shame too, as our coverage of academics is not exactly comprehensive. Bloody good work on de Ros! Many thanks, that's looking pretty thorough :) Any joy with the Shakespearean section? No rush, just wondering. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room15:32, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
@Serial Number 54129: That would indeed be an interesting experiment. If any tps wants to have a go, I believe the only source used was the "Biographical note" section here. And Earwig's Copyvio Detector would be a good proxy for the ORES-based tool that's built into the WP:NPP dashboard (whose name escapes me at the moment. CopyPatrol? something like that.), which is, as I recall, only available to editors with the "patroller" flag. I think I may have a draft of the article sitting around somewhere if anyone wants to do a three-way comparison. But in any case, I still assert that that a mere list of facts does not meet the treshold of originality required to merit copyright protection in the first place, so the excercise would, in that sense, be pretty academic (i.e. interesting on its own, but probably can't be used for any practical matter).The edits on de Ros are actually fairly superficial: just the stuff that really sticks out as I read it. You'll probably want a moderately substantial copyedit of it before going to FAC. In any case, I'm just reading up on him to have some context when going through the sources I found. I have a bunch, but mostly they just reflect what's already covered in the article. I'll go through them as time allows and see if there is anything to be extrapolated by the context in which he's mentioned. Sonnet 25 is a case in point: Leishman strictly speaking only mentions Sonnet 25 in passing, but by relating it to the overall thrust of the book there was actually quite a bit that could be mined (ignore the awkward structure: the section isn't yet properly integrated into the overall article). I'm hoping there's some similar hook for de Ros on the theory that it's better to have a nice fat section that you can trim down to preference than a thin dangling one.Oh, and I assumed you'd have said if there was a particular timeframe you had in mind, so I've not particularly hurried. If you do have a timetable, please let me know. I don't have all that much time available for wiki stuff just now, but what of it there is I'm sure I could rejig if there's a deadline.PS. I also assume that you feel free to revert any change I make that you don't agree with, for whatever reason. The (one of the) nice thing about working on articles outside one's usual playground is that one's proprietary interest in the article is much easier to subdue. In other words, you should take the edits as mere suggestions and my acquiescence to your preference as given. In fact, I have one change in mind that I'll probably immediately self-revert and leave it up to you whether you want to reinstate it. --Xover (talk) 08:57, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
Absolutely re timelines, etc., and your edits, I went and copyedited it a bit, but hope I haven't reverted much of yours—I just did it blind, as it were, not knowing whose edits I was copyediting...and now hopefuly it's slightly tighter. See [1]—that's without the list of publications. But I agree with what you say about the threshold of originality: The way I've written it, the way the SAS page is written, is effectively a CV: no original treatment. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room16:57, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
@Serial Number 54129: Very interesting. Thanks! But, in fairness, SoWhy did a much better job then either of us above, and the criticism of my paraphrase is in itself fair. My main point, and thus my excuse for the poor prose job, is the lack of originality: absent copyright as an issue, there was no need for any greater effort.Incidentally, I appreciate hearing you agree with me on that score. I don't mind finding myself in disagreement with others, or even with the majority. But if you find yourself in disagreement with everyone you must necessarily consider whether you are in fact plain wrong. I find it reassuring that this instance is, at worst, an instance of "reasonable people may disagree" and not me being completely out of touch with reality.In any case, I'll try to get through the rest of the de Ros article this weekend and then start in on the Shakespeare related sources. --Xover (talk) 06:12, 1 June 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the move on the "break a log" talk page. Is it different for each talk page, or does the threading play a role? I had thought that new discussion comes first, so that pages are in reverse chron order. If I'm wrong, please don't hesitate to move my comment down one! THanks for setting me straight!!
MichelleInSanMarcos (talk) 00:24, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
@MichelleInSanMarcos: On Wikipedia, talk page messages are in threaded chronological order. That is, new threads go at the bottom of the page, under a new heading; and replies to existing threads go after the message they respond to, indented using : for clarity. For example, your message here started a new thread so it should have gone at the bottom and with a new heading (I've moved it to the correct place). This message, since it is a reply to your message, goes immediately after it, and is indented one level (with :). If you want to reply further, your reply would typically go below mine and indented a further level (with ::).These principles hold true even when there are multiple people participating in the same thread, responding to different points: when you reply to a message on the talk page you place it after the message you're replying to, indented one level further then the message you're replying to, and after any previous replies to that same message. For example, let's say a friendly talk page watcher notices this exchange and wants to explain some nuance I haven't covered. They would place their message immediately after mine, and indented the same amount (with one :) to show that they are replying to your message and not to mine. If you then wanted to ask a further question engendered by my message (this one), you would place it immediately after mine, but indented one level more.There is a general overview of how talk pages work at Help:Talk pages, and some policy for their use at WP:TALK. On the latter you'll probably notice that one of the strongest cultural taboos on Wikipedia is changing another editor's talk page message. There is, on the one hand, good reasons for this taboo, and, on the other hand, editors still do so all the time when needed for clarity (fixing an incorrect indentation level, for instance). But that's why you'll find others hesitant to move or change your talk page messages even if misplaced, and why those who do tend to go out of their way to explain their rationales in the edit summary when they do.In any case… Wikipedia's talk pages can be horribly confusing, and with a million weird rules and norms, but the necessary basics can be figured out by observation. And almost every experienced editor will be happy to help with such things if requested. Don't be afraid to ask! Best regards, --Xover (talk) 04:49, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
Regards SoWhy 17:53, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
