Yes, but it doesn’t help the casual reader who is trying to read the article on Pasiphaë. It’s possible to be TOO specific and to give too MUCH information.
Well, of course I didn’t achieve it. I’d have had to chuck the entire original introduction and started over. Not only would that have taken more attention that I was prepared to give the matter, but it would have been seen as vandalism by some and would have been reverted.
ETA: It occurs to me that, when I asked upthread why you’d want a long parenthetical digression in the very first sentence of an article, I phrased it in such a way that it would probably be seen as a rhetorical question. I didn’t mean it as such; I’m actually interested to know if you think such digressions are useful, and why, given that they so erode the readability of the passage.
Or a free web service, for that matter. I once encountered some Cars tie-in merchandise enthusiasts who wanted to designate official editors for “their” page, which has since been removed along with all the rest of the Cars merchandise articles.
Geez Skald, there’s no need to crucify (from Latin crucifixio, noun of process from perfect passive participle crucifixus, fixed to a cross, from prefix cruci-, cross, + verb ficere, fix or do, variant form of facere, do or make) them.
I must have gotten really lucky. I updated a broken link on the Drunk Driving (United States) page, and put in some cited statistics. Then wondered off.
I started three articles on authors without articles. All three had written and published at least two books. All three articles were deleted, the reason given was that they were stubs. The editor says that I should research more and develop a full article before I submit.
Well I put as much info as I could find and I understand you don’t want an encyclopedia full of stubs but they all are published novelists (fiction) and I figure other people may be too lazy to start an article but not to add to it. Maybe even the author him(her)self.
Then I just gave up.
I have also deleted links that give references that you have to subscribe to (these were paid links not merely sign up links) and the editor puts them back and says “I can get in.” I am like well you must’ve paid to do it.
The real problem is there is no real easy way to dispute anything, so the Wikipedia has become either very slanted or full of mish mash. I mean giving time to people that believe the earth is flat is one thing, but it also gives credibility to a totally wrong notion
I don’t see anything wrong with that; not all legitimate references have to be links to free sources on the internet. Lots of references are book titles that you would presumably have to buy in order to read. For that matter, a lot of scientific studies are not posted in their entirety on the internet, yet they are arguably the best references available.
Personally my eyes just pass over it (when it’s done right.) I want it for the same reason I want it in a dictionary before they give the definition. The title, etymology, and pronunciation are a set length. How long the description will be though, who knows. If you put the etymology in just wherever it naturally ends up, it could be anywhere in there and be a pain to find. If you put it at the end, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom for something that is very short and matter factual. And simply, it’s the accepted norm. I think it’s a bit late to move the pronunciation and etymology entries to the end of every encyclopedic entry in the English world even if it makes more sense.
Overall, it’s an encyclopedia. not a novel. Readability is of course of concern, but not at the cost of failing to be an encyclopedia, to contain the basic information that people expect in the format they expect it. My personal opinion of the matter is irrelevant because this is something that was decided centuries ago when everyone learned Latin in school and it’s just the way the world is.
I agree; links to paid sites are not (necessarily) a problem on Wikipedia. At the same time, I disagree with the editor who deleted Markxxx’s stub articles about authors. I know that I’ve seen articles for which I felt the subject deserved better coverage and gone to the trouble of greatly expanding them. (Coincidentally, the ones I worked on were for authors, although these were non-fiction writers and not novelists.)
Okay, despite the fact that this thread is, for no good reason, in the Pit, I am going to try to not be insulting. But the section I bolded makes doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. You seem to be implying that readability is less important in a reference work intended for general readers than it is in a novel. That is simply nuts. You can be subtle in fiction; you can be oblique in fiction; you can be deliberately ambivalent for artistic effect; you can experiment in tons of ways. the same is true in any sort of creative writing–personal essays, memoirs, and so forth.
But you DON’T do that in an encyclopedia. You present the information in a clear way, in a way that lacks ambiguity and poetic flourishes. You present the most essential information up front, and the further you get into the article, the more detailed and abstruse you can get. You DON’T overload your reader with information that does nothing but confuse him or cause her eyes to glaze over. As the passage in my OP was written before, the reader had to pause, figure out where the end of the parenthetical statement was, and struggle to make sense of the passage. That is simply stupid, and it’s a consequence of Wikipeidia’s hallmark: a dearth of true editing.
I agreed in my first post that the way it was written before was wrong. The parenthetical section after the title, in proper encyclopedic format, is not supposed to read as text. It bothered you when you read it because it contained an explanation rather than a listing.
But like I said, if you want to start killing off the encyclopedic format, then you’ve got millions of entries to go, not just in the Wikipedia, but in every other encyclopedia and dictionary currently published.
You leave me with no choice other than to record myself singing the entire score of “Man of La Mancha,” post it on YouTube, and send a link of the clip of me singing “The Impossible Dream” to everyone’s PM box. You have only yourself to blame.
