Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sonnet 17

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was Keep. Deathphoenix ʕ 21:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sonnet 17 et.al.

I am nominating a series of new Shakespeare sonnet articles because they only contain the sonnet text and no description. Such articles run contrary to the guideline "do not write an article that consists only of lyrics" in Lyrics and poetry. Since I think that the sonnets make fair enough subjects for encyclopedia articles, I am listing up the articles which have no description and which probably should be transwikied to Wikisource unless they get some encyclopedic text on them. If anyone wants to expand any of them to make real encyclopedia articles, please do so and cross it off the list.

1. Sonnet 17
2. Sonnet 19
3. Sonnet 20
4. Sonnet 21
5. Sonnet 22
6. Sonnet 23
7. Sonnet 24
8. Sonnet 25
9. Sonnet 26
10. Sonnet 27
11. Sonnet 28
12. Sonnet 31
13. Sonnet 32
14. Sonnet 33
15. Sonnet 34
16. Sonnet 35
17. Sonnet 36
18. Sonnet 37
19. Sonnet 38
20. Sonnet 39
21. Sonnet 40
22. Sonnet 41
23. Sonnet 42
24. Sonnet 43
25. Sonnet 44
26. Sonnet 45

Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:55, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

• Transwiki all to Wikisource. --Coredesat talk. o.o;; 10:20, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete all, no need to traswiki to Wikisource, since Wikisource already has all of the above sonnets [1]--TBCTaLk?!? 10:26, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep all as there's an informal project going on to get these articles up to scratch see Talk:Sonnet_1 for some early discussion. Some of the sonnets have been updated within the last couple of days, and though it's a big task I think it might be able to be done for all the sonnets. MLA 10:40, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep all Give them a couple of months to get them up to scratch with some background. Viridae^Talk 10:59, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Transwiki. Merge any analysis into Shakespearean Sonnets. -- GWO
• As written, I understand the desire. However, Keep with massive rewrites, as Shakespearean sonnets undoubtedly have plenty to be said about them from entiely reasonable sources. Perhaps stub them by removing the actual text for now? --badlydrawnjeff talk 11:18, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep for now. If nothing has been done to clean them up in a month or two, I'll vote for deletion. But I'm confident these can be improved. It shouldn't be hard finding verifiable info on Shakespeare! Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 11:40, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
  • There is no information here to delete! There is just the text of the sonnet. These are not "important articles", because they are not articles! They are just pages containing the text of the sonnet. If someone wants to write articles, that's great! But they should write the article and then create a page to contain it, not just create a page and say "please don't delete this empty page, I might get round to writing an article in it one day". (Delete, by the way. Create pages when you have text to go in them, not before.) — Haeleth Talk 13:34, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Transwiki (or delete if Tree Biting Conspiracy is right). If someone wants to write a real article about these, nothing is lost in having them start from an empty page. Also, a sonnet is only 14 lines. If you go so deep as to be able to write an extensive article about that, I think wikibooks is the place. On Wikipedia I would think two or three lines about each sonnet is enough, in which case they'd better fit in some combined form. - Andre Engels 13:10, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete unless the massive rewrite Badlydrawnjeff refers to happens in the next 5 days. It appears these were all created by someone who was unaware of the division between Wikipedia and Wikisource. To me, it would be preferable to just have someone start from scratch if they want to write encyclopedic articles about each of these sonnets (obviously I have no predjudice against article recreation of the namespace with different content) rather than wait several months and go through an AfD again. On a side note, is it possible to create a navbar that links out to Wikisource? If so that could be done with the nav bar at Shakespeare's sonnets in addition to the already existing link to Wikisource... allowing someone to quickly access individal sonnets. Somehow though, I remember someone telling me that interwiki linking like that doesnt' work...--Isotope23 13:35, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete all per nom. I wish people would stop writing stubs, and promising (or just leaving the stub) to come back and flesh it out later. Is this a race? Is someone losing because they didn't place a stub first to get editorial dibs? Why not write the full article and get it right the first time, and then post the complete article? Yes, writing articles for an encyclopedia is a lot of work - it should be. Tychocat 14:20, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Dr Zak 14:47, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• No vote yet on the general series. Strong keep any that have text besides the template and source. I assume all of these are already at Wikisource. The "analysis" link contained in the stubs I visited suggests that each of these articles could be fleshed out. The noteworthiness of each separate sonnet seems beyond doubt to me. Not sure I agree with some comments that say that it would be no harder to write articles about the sonnets if the pages that now contain only a template and the source text are removed; the template and text are indeed a start. Smerdis of Tlön 15:22, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep all. It's the nature of the project to be a perennial work in process, and even the barest stubs among these begin at the logical beginning. Smerdis of Tlön 16:28, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
• STRONG KEEP This is part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry. Over about the last month or so, 26 articles have been written on different sonnets, as well as significant changes being made to other Shakespeare related pages and a template being created to unify the discussion of these. It is much easier to work collaboratively on these if the shells are set up and then additional work done. There are 154 to do, and it is much easier to keep the format consistent if they are done in batches like this. And, yes, I expect you will see many of the existing articles grow as the project continues to broaden and deepen. I myself have not been writing original articles, but have worked on improving the ones that are put up. Sam 17:22, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep All - pending further improvements. Let's give these folks a chance to do some more work :) --Doc Tropics 17:40, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Comment I also note that much of the specific work being done here was done by one of several newcomers who have been attracted to recent WikiProject Poetry projects, and that a notice of this process was not put on their page (just a note that the creation of the articles was inappropriate). A gentle reminder to everyone: Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers -- Sam 17:46, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Call me biased, but keep all - I added these sonnet texts myself, and, not unexpectedly, I think they ought to stay. Having the sonnet's text online is better than having nothing, especially considering their significance to classical English literature. It would be embarrassing for Wikipedia to post links to all 154 sonnets, only to have 90% of them completely missing. Some of you may disagree, but my personal opinion of "getting it right," as Tychocat called for, is getting it done right, not getting it done fast. Of course it's not going to be done in a day. No one is suggesting that and I think the very fact that Wikipedia has stub templates implies that some articles are going to start out wanting. I understand that Wikisource already has the same content, but the fact remains that Wikipedia gets boatloads more traffic than Wikisource, and if I were to search Wikipedia for an article on a certain Shakespearean sonnet, I'd rather find the sonnet's bare text than nothing at all. The whole point of Wikipedia is for different people to add, little by little, and slowly expand and improve content. If all I have time to do right now is post the sonnet texts, that's certainly better than waiting for 154 individual people to write 154 individual articles, one at a time. So what if the synopses, analyses, and other encyclopedic content isn't all going to be written en masse, straight away? --Sean Parmelee 19:53, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Keep for now, good faith stubs. Sean Parmelee, I would suggest focusing on actually turning your stubs into real stubs. I.e. having at least one or two sentences in the body of the article and having some context such as "Sonnet 17 is the 17th sonnet of 154 known shakespeare's sonnets."--Nick Y. 21:45, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Here's the deal. Eventually I am going to create articles for all of the sonnets. I usually get about 1 or 2 a day. So, there's really no point in deleting them, folks. Keep them. In a month or two each page will be back anyway. So, if you want to delete them, fine. But I'd rather you didn't because it makes it alot easier for me not having to re-write all of the skeleton. AdamBiswanger1 22:40, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
    • Why don't you move the unfinished ones into your userspace and move them back once you are down writing the article? Dr Zak 23:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
      • So far, Adam's been in the lead on this, the project was his brainchild, but he's had a bunch of collaborators in the project - Sean is helping, I've futzed around with a couple, Stumps and others have added bits and pieces. It is easier to collaborate with the template set up so we can look at the active editing and all kibbitz. Some of these are pretty raw stubs, some are starting to really develop, most are still empty. But a ton has been done in the last month, and I think the activity is attracting a number of new people to WikiProject Poetry. If this sits in Adam's userpages, we lose many of these benefits, and we'd have to completely redo the template to fit the userspace instead of the article placement. So, sticking it in one user's space would be, in my mind, very un-wiki. Sam 00:32, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
        • Putting up raw, uncommented text is very un-wikipedia; people will complain that Wikipedia isn't Wikisource, and they are right! Hey, how about putting those articles without any commentary under Wikipedia:WikiProject_Poetry/To_do? This would make them easy to find and would stop the "not-even-a-stub" complaints. Dr Zak 04:21, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Right now, there's reference to it under Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry#To Do and Portal:Poetry/Things you can do. I think I will, though, improve the descriptions and make clearer where the work needs to be done. Thanks. Sam 12:32, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. Patience. --Alex S 00:02, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - If we can agree to keep the sonnets up, I think a standardized template needs to be established first, and all existing sonnet pages (stub or otherwise) need to be edited to conform to that standard before I or anyone else creates any text-only articles or any full articles. I noticed that the WikiProject Poetry page suggests using Sonnet 1 as just such a template, but I just wanted to make sure, if indeed Adam is going to contribute quite a great deal of time and effort, that he doesn't waste his time using a template that will only be modified later. As a side note, I personally would be willing (and planned from the start) to contribute some quantity of articles detailing the individual Shakespearean sonnets. Hopefully there is some way to coordinate contributors' efforts before there is any unneeded overlap. --00:52, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Assuming good faith and have some patience, my love, patience..., appears to be work in progress SM247^{My Talk} 01:31, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
• Weakest Keep. I'll be interested in what can be done that makes each article worthwhile in itself while also not being OR. I'll watchlist some of these. (An idea for other people who voted keep?) Shenme 04:16, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
• Weak keep per Nick Y. Penelope D 04:26, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.