Talk:An Intimate Knowledge of the Night

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Novels This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
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This page is one of a number of separate pages I have begun to create from the Terry Dowling main page. The reason I have begun to do this is because the page was tagged with a need for Wikification and cleanup. The text describing this volume is quoted verbatim from an entry I wrote on Dowling for [S.T. Joshi]'s Supernatural Fiction of the Wolrd; An Encyclopedia. Would it help if I reference this source on the page? I don't believe the page warrants removal. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hadit93 (talkcontribs) 14 June 2007.

There are two issues here, really. One is the question of copyright raised by quoting a significant portion verbatim from another work; I am not going to comment on that one at the moment. The second, which may render the first irrelevant, is that what is appropriate for a paragraph in a specialist article about the author is not necessarily appropriate for a general article on the work itself -- if this page isn't removed, it's going to have to be substantially rewritten, because as it stands it says things that it shouldn't and doesn't say things that it should. --Paul A 04:39, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
To elaborate on that a bit: One thing that is not considered appropriate for Wikipedia is critical essays and other expressions of personal opionion (see, for instance, Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought) and this page, at the moment, is little but. Add to that the fact that the opinion expressed is so approving, and one can see how it could have been mistaken for an advertisement. --Paul A 04:47, 16 June 2007 (UTC)