Talk:Street magic

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Magic hat Street magic is within the scope of WikiProject Magic, which aims to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to magic on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the project page (Talk), where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

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[edit] Expanding street magic

Thank you Krash for your literate interventions on this page. I saw your correction to the link on 'lower case ' aladin and was impressed that you followed through to the page on aladin and had made an addition there too. Meanwhile, it is a shame that Jeff Sheridan does not have a page to himself and I am also keen to get some content about street magic elsewhere. Presumably prior to the Mayflower making landfall on the Western side of the Atlantic there used to be magicians not only there but Asia and so on as I reminded readers. Lynrdandersen 21:11, 17 September 2005 (UTC)Lynrdandersen

Well, now he does. But it's rather stubby at this point, so we should endeavor to fix that in time.
Also, what is parlor magic and does it need its own article? I would contrast it with stage magic (which redirects to magic (illusion)) and street magic. But there aren't really clear-cut definitions and many classifications seem to overlap each other. The main magic article makes no particular mention of parlor or street magic, even in this section.
-- Krash 13:06, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Krash, the difficulty with definitions is that geography determines who or what counts as street magic. aladin may be known in some circles and probably does cross over into the category of non Western street magician, but it is not enough to have a sole representative of that side of it; we must seek greater balance. Ironically Jeff Sheridan and aladin are best placed to contribute! But certainly contributions and contributors from further afield are needed. As for parlor magic - this seems to be a genre including 'Close Up' surely? Or perhaps 'Parlor Magic' dignifies the other?! Lynrdandersen 01:40, 21 September 2005 (UTC)


[edit] External links

The link to StreetMagicBlog.com i thought was relevant because it's a site I use to learn street magic, it teaches you for free and doesn't ask for any money of any kind. I'm trying to learn to use Wiki better and become a better editor. Please explain why it was a bad link so I can understand for future references.

Thanks, Joe

Generally, links to blogs are avoided because they are not reliable sources; there is no fact-checking in them. Veinor (talk to me) 18:22, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


Look at the magic tricks section, the site clearly tells how to do street magic tricks, and the blog is about how he does street magic and what he thinks about it etc. just my 2 cents Preston

[edit] Term??

Anyone familiar with the term this article referenced: "guerilla magic"?? I've never seen it published in any reputable publication. Buddpaul 22:47, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright violation

I hate to "challenge" someone like this, (particularly with an article intro that's so beautiful), but this "sounds" like copyright infringement.......it's just too perfect: "The first definition of street magic refers to a traditional form of magic performance - that of busking. In this, the magician draws an audience from passers by and performs an entire act for them. In exchange, the magician seeks remuneration either by having a receptacle for tips available throughout the act or by "passing the hat" at the end of the performance.

Street magic most often consists of sleight of hand, card magic, and occasionally mentalism, though the ability to draw and hold an audience is frequently cited by practitioners as a skill of greater importance than the illusions themselves.

Anthropologists chronicle this form of street magic from approximately 3,000 years ago - and there are records of such performers across the continents, notably Europe, Asia/South Asia and the Middle East. While it is a very old performing style, its history is not particularly well documented in print. In his diary, Samuel Pepys mentions seeing magicians performing in this fashion and one can see street magicians in depictions by Hieronymous Bosch, William Hogarth, and Pieter Brueghel. Chapter XIII of Reginald Scot's "Discoverie of Witchcraft" (1584) describes magic tricks of the type performed by buskers in the 16th century."

If I'm wrong, I'll adamantly re-nig.....but this just sounds too darned perfect to've been written from the ground up for wikipedia. Buddpaul 23:01, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

The text you're referring to was originally added to the article in this edit on 13 January 2006 (part of a longer sequence of edits by the same IP).
Now, the usual way of detecting copyvios from online sources is to take the earliest version of the suspected text, pick some distinctive phrases and Google for them. Once you find a match, however, you should check archive.org to make sure the phrase was there before it was added to Wikipedia. For example, in this case I found this page, which contains several similar phrases — but it dates from February 2006. Thus, it looks more likely that the author of that page copied the phrases from Wikipedia rather than vice versa.
Of course, it's still possible that our version is copied from somewhere else, perhaps from a print source which is not available online. But until and unless we do find the source, or have some other significant reason to suspect the text of being copied, we should assume that the anonymous contributor simply happens to have been a fairly good writer. It does happen, you know. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:04, 11 November 2007 (UTC)