Talk:A few acres of snow

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I really enjoy a juicy bit of historical disambiguation, well told! This brief entry has perfect form. Wetman 20:01, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think people here are confusing what Voltaire thought with what the characters in his novel thought. What the characters say or think doesn't necesarily reflect what the author thinks. If Voltaire had written a novel about the colonies, and one of the characters said that "killing a negro is a light matter not even worth thinking twice over after it's done", would we conclude that Voltaire was racist?!! Hardouin 00:16, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi to anyone who might question my re-insertion (my first, I believe). I wish to state my reasons. In my original edit, I wrote "The Québécois have had a well-deserved revenge by punningly calling the French language edition of Trivial Pursuit "Quleques arpents de pieges" - a few acres of traps. One of the best selling board games of the 1980s, endlessly reinvented with new specialist editions, was invented in Montreal by anglo journalists." This was removed. On reconsideration, I can see that the second sentence is unnecessary, since the info can be conveyed by linking to the Trivial Pursuit page. However, I believe the first sentence does add something new to the Wikipedia page about this phrase of Voltaire's. It confirms its continued cultural and linguistic relevance, and Quebec (and indeed Canada's) sensitivity to being overlooked or undervalued. I hope we can agree to let this re-edit stand. If not, it would be interesting to discuss your reasons here. BrainyBabe 16:41, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure I completely agree with the statement that it is regularly quoted by Canadians. I happen to be one, and this is the first I have ever heard of it. Then again, it may not be a Western Canadian thing as much as an Eastern Canadian one. Dalef 05:03, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this is not as common a phrase in Canada as the first paragraph makes it seem, and it's not just people from the west who don't use it. I grew up in southern Ontario, have followed Canadian politics fairly closely since the early seventies, and even lived in Quebec for a short time and speak a little french, and I'm not sure I ever heard the phrase before today.--Tedd 22:04, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to add a comment -- and I'm not sure whether this may, in fact, need a disambiguation (that's a bit above my skill level): Quelques Arpents de Neige is also an environmental history network in Eastern Canada (it is an eastern Canada thing, I think, potentially even a Quebec-and-surrounds centred thing, at least mostly) and including New England. (They distinctly are using the amused tone in evoking this quote.) Their webpage can be found at http://www.arpents.ca. They've been in existence for several years now, with a reasonably large number of distinguished participants, so if anyone expresses interest in this alternate explanation of the phrase, I'll add something more specific when I have the time. Kvcad 17:40, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

No it does not need a disambiguation unless there exists another Wikipedia page named after the organization. There are several options you can use, depending if you want to write about the organization itself, or if you only want to mention its name as an additional example of a use of Voltaire's phrase. In the latter case, you can add the additional example to the list with the other examples in the appropriate section of the article. However, if you want to write something about the organization, then you would not be writing about the topic of this page but about a different topic and therefore this page would not be the appropriate place. In this case, if you come to the conclusion that the organization meets the Wikipedia notoriety criteria for deserving its own article, you can create such an article. (And then you would need to also create a disambiguation because Wikipedia would now have two articles about two different topics but with similar names.) If you come to the conclusion that the organization does not pass the Wikipedia notoriety test for having its own article, you can still write about it by adding your text to a more general article about that topic, such as an article about North-American environmental history, or an article about environmental history organizations, etc. You can, of course, do both, i.e. write something about the organization itself in the other article and include a mention of its name here in the list of examples. Asclepias 23:54, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

The introduction reads like an undergraduate essay, not an encyclopedia entry — and a mediocre one at that. Rewrite, anyone?--Spudstud 21:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Arpents

I jus added a new entry to the Trivia section of this article: "Although generally translated as "Acres", the term "Arpent" literally refers to an old French unit of land measurement, approximately 85% of the size of an acre. See Arpent." I don't know how important this delineation is to the article, but perhaps it should be included in the general article rather than only appear in the trivia? I leave the decision to those more well acquainted with wiki-editing. Simonus 13:20, 6 October 2006 (UTC)