Talk:Identification of Emily Dickinson poems

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[edit] List of poem first lines

A recent edit by User:Arcadian reverted my deletion of a list of Dickinson poems by first line from this article (as well as reverting many unrelated changes, which I find impolite). In accordance with the principle that Wikipedia is not a collection of source texts or arbitrary information, I don't see any reason to have such a list here. -- Rbellin|Talk 20:43, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just as a side-note, too, Arcadian's edit summary said "changes of that magnitude need to go to talk page first". This is just not the case. Wikipedia:Avoiding common mistakes, and common practice, suggest that deletions be justified when they are made, either in the edit summary (as I did in this case) or on the Talk page. Nowhere that I am aware does Wikipedia policy or common practice require that discussion come before deletions for ordinary articles (as opposed to core policy documents). In fact, the core principle Wikipedia:Be bold suggests just the opposite. -- Rbellin|Talk 20:54, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please counterpropose. Practically every artist of Dickinson's magnitude has a list of their works, either as a section on the main page for the artist, or split out on another page. I don't see how you can label that information as arbitrary. I'm not claming the existing list was perfect, and I don't have a problem if you wanted to present that information in a different way, but if you're claming that Emily and Emily alone does not deserve such a list, then please explain why you hold that position. To offer some compromises -- we could list, say, just the 20 most common ones. Or we could create a new page just dedicated to identifying her works, like Köchel-Verzeichnis, distinct from that page. Or maybe a table cross-referencing the Johnson numbers with the first lines. I'm flexible, and happy to work with you on this. --Arcadian 05:09, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have not run into such lists of each and every one of a couple thousand works by an artist elsewhere on Wikipedia -- the Köchel-Verzeichnis is an interesting example, and to my mind is actually sort of borderline non-encyclopedic. Usually, my impression is, the most notable works end up with articles of their own, and perhaps all major works or book-length products are listed. In general, it seems to me that, in keeping with the principle that Wikipedia is not a general information repository, it's a bit odd to provide a list of almost 2000 lyric poems (many of which are only a few lines long). All the same, if a list of Emily Dickinson poems is something you're interested in maintaining, it should really reside on a separate page by that name. I won't interfere with that project, though I can't promise to help either -- and ideally, to serve as a useful reference, this list would give at least Johnson's numbers and Franklin's for each poem, or even better, all the places of its publication. It's a potentially very large undertaking. -- Rbellin|Talk 05:35, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

My apologies, by the way, if the deletion caused offense. I am certainly not saying we ought to treat ED any differently from other major poets -- right now, though, I'm more concerned with getting the article on her up to snuff than with listing all of her work. Do stop by there and help if you like; I'll be working on expanding and rewriting it for a while now. -- Rbellin|Talk 06:10, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)