Talk:Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

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[edit] Discussion of merge with The Little White Bird

Someone merged this article with the page for The Little White Bird, and I have changed that to put it back to separate articles.

The reason I changed it back is that they are not the same book at all. I own them both and they are quite different. The middle chapters of The Little White Bird are almost the same as the text of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, but some of it was changed to remove references to the parts of the other book that didn't fit in the shorter story.

Also, even though those parts were the same, there is a lot in the other book that is not at all part of the Peter Pan story and is definitely not written for children. The Little White Bird is a very unusual book and deserves it's own article.

The two books have been printed in many editions over the years and are not presented as the same story by any of the publishers. --Linda 23:23, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

This is not two separate books just because several chapters of it were published under a different title to capitalize on the name "Peter Pan" and to market it to a different audience. One publication is a subset of the other, and it makes more sense to have one article that describes the whole thing, and also notes that a section of it was reprinted. Creating separate articles for the two titles would require duplicating information between the two (as evidenced by the fact that you apparently copy-pasted most of the content from one to the other when you created them), which makes it more difficult to maintain that information in two places. If someone fixes the factual inaccuracies in the text in one article (as I started to do), they'd have to do it in the other, or we'd end up with contradictions between the two. That's a problem. If The Little White Bird were such a huge subject that covering Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens within the same article made it hugely unwieldy, splitting them would be a good idea. Doing so with such a slim volume (and frankly, one that's fairly obscure, compared to the other Peter Pan book) is premature at best. - JasonAQuest 05:47, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Just curious - Have you read the full story of The Little White Bird? It seems you and I have different ideas about what makes a topic worthy of a Wikipedia article. To me, they're separate books, because I can buy one of each, and they're not the same. One is a children's book, and the other is a strange surrealistic story for adults that has sadness and anger and significant passages of darkness.
On the other hand, I see your point also about maintaining the two articles with overlapping content. Rather than argue about it, I'm willing to go along with the merge if it clearly shows the differences between the Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens chapters and the other chapters of The Little White Bird. The merged article should have a separate section about the part of the book that was split off, to explore the content and how it relates to the other Peter Pan literature, and also, so that readers following a redirect don't get confused and can see which part is about the other book. The Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens book would need to be mentioned in the lead, along with an explanation that the full novel was written for adults whereas the excerpted section, when published separately, was intended as a children's book. Also, it's important to note that the other sections of The Little White Bird are completely unrelated to the later Peter Pan stories.
Regarding this that you wrote: several chapters of it were published under a different title to capitalize on the name "Peter Pan" and to market it to a different audience. - I have not seen any references that say that was his reason for releasing the chapters separately. The various analyses I've read have focused on Barrie's fascination with, and his desire to further develop, the Peter Pan character he had introduced in those chapters. If you have references for the profit motive, we can use that, but we should not speculate.
To sum up, I don't like the idea of merging these articles, but if it's important to you, I am willing to go along with it rather than argue. Since the two articles are no longer the same, please don't lose any of the info when doing the merge. Thanks. --Linda 07:41, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Yes, we have different understandings of what an Wikipedia article subject is. WP is not a book catalog; it's an encyclopedia, a place to bring information together. The fact that you can buy an illustrated excerpt of TLWB as a separate product is no more relevant to the question of whether they need separate articles than the fact that you can buy Naruto as separate volumes, or a reprint of just the Sunday strips of Calvin and Hobbes, or Shakespeare's sonnets in any variety of collections. It's still one (set of) work. I hope you aren't arguing that, because PPiKG was published in a version for children that we have to create a page for children about that package as well. I agree with your description of what a merged article would have to say in the intro; that's pretty much what I tried to do, though of course it could be improved. A section focusing on the Peter Pan excerpt and its publishing history would certainly be appropriate. I don't have references for why that section was republished the way it was (which is why I wouldn't put that in the article) but it seems pretty obvious to me: The play was hugely popular, especially with kids, and putting a fresh cover with the "Peter Pan" brand on it around those chapters and some lovely illustrations for them was a great way to meet that interest. You yourself pointed out that the reprint was done for children vs. adults (which I trust you have independent sources for). - JasonAQuest 18:34, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
The reference you're asking for, that The Little White Bird was published for adults and the excerpted chapters later published for children, is cited in the footnotes I included - it's in Peter Hollindale's introduction to the Oxford edition, on page xix. He's a professor of English and Education Studies at the University of York. --Linda (talk) 07:46, 5 December 2007 (UTC)