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 To Autumn |
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| Ottava |
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Ãœber Pokemon
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I wanted to talk about changes to TFA as an introduction to something that is a major problem with Wikipedia - letting people mob articles that already have long standing consensus and the result is the destruction of an article. Correct version and the Horribly bad version. If you look at the two, you will see a few things: 1. The word "colonialist", pulled directly from a source by a major critic in an article later included in a book about Romantic Colonialism is removed. Instead, an imaginary connection to Byron that is not in any sources nor logically true is added. 2. The summary of the work from highly notable sources is removed and replaced with just a copy and paste from Wikipedia. No summary, no guidance, nothing "critical". 3. The themes section went from tightly organized and concise to a bunch of tiny and scattered paragraphs with no unity. 4. Material from Walter Jackson Bate, the most famous Keats's critic and winner of a Pulitzer for his Keats biography, was removed because the editor disagreed with it. The reason why Bate points this out is in its uniqueness in poetry as a whole. Keats was a sound based poet and the various techniques are very important when writing about the poem. 5. Removing a description of an image for the reason that the drawing isn't what his real hair color is, but the description is about the image and not reality. 5. Dumbing down the work in general by removing "deals more with sensual observations" because the editor believes this to be nonsense. Mind you, one of the most famous literary critics Harold Bloom was the one who said it was a "sensuous observation of he consequences of that [Autumn's] process" while the first is "aureate". 6. Removing stuff without care. He says there are no "individuals", but Bloom refers to the various singers as entities even if they are animal. But even if you want to say "individual", he removes the idea of motionlessness, which is essential to critical interpretations of the poem and have been deemed a fundamental part of Keats's poetry. 7. Moving the structure to the bottom. The structure is essential to understand what you would even be reading. It is the mechanics, the background to the format. In critical works structure and mechanics always come first and it is standard on Wikipedia. 8. Lack of understanding what is attributed or not. Fringe opinion is attributed, but Helen Vendler is one of dozens of critics saying the same thing there. Was there discussion? No. Were there phrases changed to the point that they contradict what the sources? Yes. The point - if this stuff happens on a small FA about poetry, what about incredibly technical and complex FAs? Why do they allow -any- changes during TFA instead of forcing everyone straight to the talk page? It seems as if Wikipedia -encourages- disruptive changes when the work is most prominent, making them magnets for embarrassing Wikipedia instead of showing off what is good. |
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| A Horse With No Name |
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I have as much free time as a Wikipedia admin!
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| Somey |
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Can't actually moderate (or even post)
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From: Dreamland
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I'd also have to say Ottava is right in this case, though considering the subject matter, it probably depends on your aesthetic sensibilities to some degree. There are those who would say that poetry is meant to be enjoyed, rather than dissected, but of course you don't have to watch the dissection taking place if you don't want to. My own aeshetic leanings are more towards surrealism and "absurdism," though I'm not too fond of the latter term. I prefer minimalism to ornamentalism, but consider both to be pretentious. Most English poetry just bores me - I prefer, say, Burmese or Hungarian poetry, because I don't know any Burmese or Hungarian and to me it looks like random collections of indecipherable characters lined up on a page. What it might actually be saying, I can only imagine - and I prefer imagining it myself to being able to read and comprehend it. So from my own perspective, Ottava still has the right idea here, but only to the extent that he's basically saying, "this article should only be 3 times as long as a sane person would make it, not 5 times as long." The unsupported idea that the poem "may be a response" to Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is also somewhat mystifying. It looks like most of that "damage" was done by one user, Amandajm (T-C-L-K-R-D)
, just yesterday - shortly before Ottava started this thread. But one thing I do like about the newer "damaged" version is that it doesn't insert any commentary into the poem itself - that looks a bit too didactic to me, possibly even disrespectful to the poet. It also makes it look more like a "dissection" than it already does... This may be what Ottava means by "moving the structure," and if so, I might disagree with him on that score. But that's just me! (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif) QUOTE(Ottava @ Sun 10th October 2010, 10:48am)  The point - if this stuff happens on a small FA about poetry, what about incredibly technical and complex FAs? Why do they allow -any- changes during TFA instead of forcing everyone straight to the talk page? It seems as if Wikipedia -encourages- disruptive changes when the work is most prominent, making them magnets for embarrassing Wikipedia instead of showing off what is good. Well, to paraphrase something Jon Awbrey once wrote, it's not about marking up the content, it's about getting the marks into the con-tent. |
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| Milton Roe |
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Known alias of J. Random Troll
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QUOTE(gomi @ Mon 11th October 2010, 11:30am) QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Mon 11th October 2010, 10:37am) I was always fond of The Cremation of Sam McGee. ( The Cremation of Sam McGee (T-H-L-K-D)). Ah yes. There is something special about sitting around a fire in the wild: no radio, no TV, no iPODs, no internet. Just some alcohol. And perhaps somebody who knows some Service or Kipling poem by heart, and can recite it like they did in the days before our electronified entertainment culture hit us. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/happy.gif) Of course, those places are shinking in size. In most of Yellowstone National Park your iPhone will now work fine, and you can be streaming the next movie off your personal Netflix queue while some poor bastard recites The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Stop me before I start to sound like Andy Rooney again. |
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| Somey |
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Can't actually moderate (or even post)
Group: Moderators
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QUOTE(Ottava @ Tue 12th October 2010, 10:14am) Damn that guy is getting on my nerves... Just to clarify a bit, Amandajm (T-C-L-K-R-D)
claims to be female, i.e., "Amanda J.M." She seems to be either from the UK or Australia, most likely the UK, and says (on Commons) that she's "a retired person with experience in museum practice and education, art and architectural history and conservation." (So what about poetry?) The addition of the Constable reference is definitely "WP:OR" - I wouldn't call it "vandalism," but at the very least, someone with admin rights should probably demand that she cease and desist on that one. (Edit) - I also noticed that Amandajm spends a significant amount of time on Commons fighting against people who upload "enhanced" versions of famous paintings and, on occasion, photographs. She prefers the "aged look," and considers most attempts to digitally "clean up" such images to be "abhorrent" and "ghastly." Here's a good example. (Scroll to the bottom third of that page.) I'm not sure I disagree with her, but I will say she does seem awfully insistent about it! |
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| GlassBeadGame |
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Dharma Bum
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| Ottava |
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Ãœber Pokemon
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The page is now at FAR with predictably clueless statements by the guy trying to say his major changes were helpful. He still insists that the poem is in iambic pentameter when 14% of the beats being spondee show that it is way too high for that to be possible. The odes in general were not iambic pentameter! They have an Anapaestic structure which violates the whole "iambic". You would have to butcher the music of the poem to force an iambic structure. If you bother to read a poem like Ode to Psyche, you will see that there is very little "standard" meter. This is my statement on the FAR and how the guy destroyed the page and brought it below C level. I enjoy how he bashed the language (language that met with the approve of many scholars and a lot of Wiki people) but put in far worse language or absolutely made the page not reflect what the sources said... that is, when the sources weren't sparksnotes. http://books.google.com/books?id=7kYebGhLA...tameter&f=falseJack Stillinger (major critic) on page 15 points out (regarding "To Autumn"): "of course the conrasts and interchanges originae spontaneously, according to ear rather than principle. The same is true of the rhythmial qualities of the lines. Departures from the metrial norm occur almost everywhere... Caesuras and enjambments--the rhetorical pauses within lines and the run-on continuations of sense from one line to the next-- are similarly varied. One can count up and tabulate these things... but the results never explain, except in the bare fact of is existence, how or why suh variation creates pleasure." The guy removed the percentages showing how majorly significant these alterations were. 14% of spondee is -unique- in English. It is a very impressive amount that shows that the poem is not -normal-. This post has been edited by Ottava:
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