Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Cædmon/FACarchive1

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[edit] Cædmon

I am nominating this article, which I am largely responsible for, because a couple of people on the talk page recommended it be nominated. It seems to fit all the requirements: referenced, current, comprehensive, and, they say, well-written. At least one other page has been rolled into it.

It has also been very stable for the last six months orhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/C%C3%A6dmon&action=edit&section=1 so. —This unsigned comment was added by Daniel.odonnell (talk • contribs) .

• Abstain. Needs to have refernces converted to inline citations, something should be done about the lists that appear at the end of the article. RyanGerbil10 21:34, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm not quite sure what you mean about the inline citations: the references are inline, and author date. The actual bibliographic references need their dates moved forward, but otherwise they are straight chicago, as discussed in the citation page.
    • I've done more research on this, and as far as I can see, the answer should probably be de gustibus: personally I find footnote references appalling--and they are completely non-standard in the fields to which this article pertains: MLA depreciates footnotes, and a Chicago-ish author-year method is very common in the field. Coming from a family of physicists and working upstairs from a history department, I realise others use other styles, but as I understand the arbitration decisions on style, this is a case where live and let live is the rule. Despite my objections to the style, I've implemented it.
  • As for the list (I only see one), I suppose it depends on whether the manuscript names and details are considered important. Moved it to a footnote.
• Abstain Support. While it's a much better article than average, to be of the same level as current FA's, it needs additional work. The lead section should be three paragraphs. The footnotes probably should follow the in-line format (Wikipedia:Footnote), or possibly Wikipedia:Footnote3. Are there more external links of value? There are quite a few things without wikilinks that could have them. The manuscripts should be wiki-linked -- there is a standard format for the naming of manuscripts see Manuscript names (check with User:Dsmdgold if you need help he's the resident Wikipedia manuscript expert). -- Stbalbach 23:44, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Footnotes: done.
  • The manuscript names are in the standard format:
  • Three paragraph intro done.
  • External links: not really. Most I've seen are tertiary discussions (and a new google search suggests not much has changed). There are no websites comparable in content to print sources on this topic as far as I can see.

Ok thanks for the updates. I've made a couple additions for your review that hopefully are not incorrect. I think it's almost there, I concur with Durova below that the lead section needs to be filled out. According to the Manual of Style, the lead section should be a miniature version of the article in summary format, so that it would be possible to copy the lead into another article and have it stand-alone as a complete version of the article, in summary format. It should speak to the general reader who has no background, providing context and significance of Bede and the Hymn for the average person. Then if the readers wants to learn more they can drill down into the article. But I'm hesitant to write a fluffy generalization since this topic seems to have a lot of dispute (was it the only poem, was it the oldest poem) -- what can we say about Bede's significance for the average person? -- Stbalbach 17:09, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

• I've rewritten the proposed edits--Caedmon has served so often as a tabula rasa for modern interests, I've made a point of not going beyond what Bede (our only source) tells us (e.g. herdsman vs. cow herdsman). I've also tried expanding and making the beginning more user friendly. As far as I can tell it does now cover the entire content of the article.

Object Much improved; v. good article Tony 07:03, 21 March 2006 (UTC) , but I'll strike out when the prose is made kinder to the readers. In particular, there's a tendency towards overly long, complicated sentences. In some places, this is worsened by spelling out the references in-line, rather than using numbers. Needs a run-through by someone else to clear up a few remaining problems in the prose.

"Several scholars have suggested on the basis of this etymology, Hild’s close contact with Celtic political and religious hierarchies, and some (not very close) analogues to the Hymn in Old Irish poetry that Cædmon himself may have been bilingual (see in particular Ireland 1986, p. 238 and Schwab 1972, p. 48)."

It's a long, winding sentence; can it be simplified/split? If you give references at the end of it, why tell us that "Several scholars have suggested"? (Start the sentence with "On the basis of ..." or perhaps "Etymology suggests that ...").

"... an event dated in the E text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to 679 but after 681 by Bede." If there are two datings here, a comma after "679" would make it clearer.

"tested his gift by giving him"—undesirable repetition.

Consider using n dashes for page ranges—IMV, it's much more stylish, although others may disagree: e.g., "pp. 120-127 and 178-180" could be "pp. 120–27 and 178–80".

Please put the FAC notice on the discussion page, not the article page.

Apart from these issues, it's an excellent article. Tony 01:23, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

• Object, primarily on the basis supplied by Tony1. —Eternal Equinox | talk 18:00, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
• Object (leaning toward weak support) The very scholarly nature of this article seems to be raising the citation standards above what applies to other FACs. I agree the article needs a fuller introduction. More background would help the general reader. I gather that Cædmon lived in a double monastery under the direction of an abbess. It asks too much of the average person to presume that level of background knowledge in the early paragraphs. While parts of this article cannot be accessible to nonspecialists, the biography should be easy to understand. Durova 07:14, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
• Support—I love this article. Everyking 05:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
• Support - It seems sufficiently referenced to me, the lead is appropriately sized... if the objections above were previously valid, I do not believe they are anymore. Fieari 19:10, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
• Object: I object to two aspects of the structure of the article. One, it has an awful lot of one-paragraph subsections. Basically, this makes it read more like an outline or Powerpoint presentation than an encyclopedia article. The paragraph is a unit of structure and so is the (sub) section; they should fill disjoint roles. Two, I don't like the organization of the article by source . This is essentially a biographical article, and it should treat his life as the central topic. As it stands, it feels a lot more like the article is about the sources referring to Cædmon, rather than about Cædmon himself. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 04:00, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Life would be wonderful if important figures came with multiple, undisputed sources of information. As it stands, there is one source for Caedmon's life, Bede. There has been lots of speculation about sources and analogues, to the point that a commonly repeated canard is that there are many analogues in world literature, even though it has been known since the 1970s that this is not true. So, we have a major poet--it is hard to be more major than first attested and mentioned in pretty much every anthology--who is known from one source only, but whose story is often said to be a folk-myth. Since what we know about Caedmon's life is central *to* his life, it doesn't seem unreasonable to discuss the evidence (the source we have thinks he learned to compose as the result of a miracle). Of course, it would be much easier to write a biography of Jim Morrison: but the problem with dealing with very earlier poets like Caedmon is that they are half-myth and attested by a limited number of sources. Sometimes that's interesting too. 209.107.97.72 02:29, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

• Weak Object. The content seems nice, although I would like to see more extracts and quotes of original sources- but the real killer for me is the atrocious formatting. I mean, "Works Cited"? A full line between each reference? And a single External Link? Is that for real? Is Caedmon really such a non-entity on the Internet? &etc. --maru (talk) contribs 06:10, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

As I understand it, external links should be to secondary or primary material. If that is the criteria, then yes: there is nothing of use on the net. There is tons repeating the information in this article in less cited and/or less up-to-date ways, and there must be thousands of copies of one or more versions of the Hymn. But there is basically no real original research. That's the problem with a poet who's known from a single short source but is taught in every intro to poetry class.

Since there is only one original source, I'm kind of puzzled about what options there are for more... especially since we apparently don't like a works cited list. Should we make some sources up? Should we just ignore the problem of the evidence because it reads better to be sure of the validity of what we know regardless of whether that is true or not? Sometimes, encyclopedias need to address what they don't know.

209.107.97.72 02:29, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

• I'm not ready to vote yet, but I wanted to take the temperature a little bit here. Of course I love the account in Bede and the poem -- both are masterpieces in their genres -- but the article has some stretch marks just now from reaching just a bit beyond its grasp. Also, there are some syntactic knots, possibly caused by too many hands in the pie or excessive revision, where pronoun reference and verb objects are not direct or clear. In the section on sources and analogs, for example, most of the discussion is of a search for analogs rather than sources and yet the phrasing could leave an inexperienced reader suspecting that all of those accounts were candidates for source. Obviously, the original author did not mean to suggest such a thing. I very much want to see Caedmon receive an FA, but I'm not comfortable with this attempt at this time yet. Geogre 17:59, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

• Object IMO, there should be no citation references in the lead section as the lead section is only a brief summary of the main salient points of the article. This means that all sourced information in the lead section should actually be in the main body of the article. I am also confused by the following sentence:

"The abbess ordered her scholars to teach Cædmon sacred history and doctrine, which, after a night of thought, Cædmon would turn into the most beautiful verse."

Does this mean that Caedmon actually turned sacred history and doctrine into "most beautiful verse" (if so this is POV!!) or does this mean that this was what Caedmon was meant to do after a night of thought?

Since " ... which, after a night of thought, Cædmon would turn into the most beautiful verse" is a description of what Bede wrote about Cædmon, I do not believe it constitutes a POV problem according to Wiki standards. Polaris999 22:20, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

The line about the most beautiful verse is a paraphrase of what Bede tells us. Most modern people don't think the poem is all that great. It is important that this view be represented though: Bede's account is the only example of evaluative criticism of a surviving Old English poem.209.107.97.72 03:04, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Also concerned about the sentence "subsequent research has, perhaps ironically, instead ended up demonstrating the uniqueness of Bede’s version" - perhaps ironically is expressing a POV, which is against NPOV.

I do agree with Ta bu shi da yu's reservations about "perhaps ironically". Couldn't this sentence be improved? Polaris999 22:20, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

As the author of the sentence, I'd have said the PoV is if anything the premise: presumably the people who tried to show this don't think they demonstrated the opposite--however, subsequent research has made a strong case that they failed to show what they thought they did (I hasten to add that this is not real PoV in the wiki sense, since all scholarship ultimately involves dischronic disagreement about the meaning of evidence). If you accept the premise, however, then it is not PoV to say it is ironic that scholarship aimed at showing how commonplace the story is actually demonstrated the opposite.209.107.97.72 03:04, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Other than this, great article! I'll support if these issues can be resolved. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:57, 1 April 2006 (UTC)