Talk:Travels with Charley: In Search of America

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[edit] Copyvio

The text being copied into the article comes from http://static.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/gems/americanstudies/TWCwikimodelprocess.doc --Stbalbach 03:43, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

This is original content and I (and my American Studies students) are the creaters. Please see our classroom site (central.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/americanstudies) to verify. Thanks —This unsigned comment was added by Tmchale (talk • contribs) .

Ok restored. There's a few things your doing in the article that are not according to Wikipedia standards, but that can be cleaned up. I've restored it. --Stbalbach 03:59, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copying from Wikibooks

I've started the copy from Wikibooks. The text is a mix bag, it contains a lot of research, but grammatically it shifts from present to past to future tense all over the place -- Ive tried to edit for past tense consistency per the MoS but may have missed some on the first try. There is also a fair amount of repeated material and stuff like "feels like" that needs to be copyedited to be more encyclopedic. --Stbalbach 16:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I voted to delete b:Travels With Charley: In Search of America from Wikibooks. The problem is that you Wikipedians seem to be using it not to expand an encyclopedia article, but to store it temporarily while you edit it here at Wikipedia. By Wikibooks policy, encyclopedia articles are out-of-scope at Wikibooks.
I want to suggest that when an article violates Wikipedia policy, but you Wikipedians intend to edit the article to fix it, that you keep the article at Wikipedia. We have an "Edit this page" feature to change a bad article into a better one, so be bold and use it! --Kernigh 07:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
The version at Wikibooks and the version at Wikipedia are very different. The question is, is the material on Wikibooks appropriate for Wikibooks? I have not seen a valid reason why not; it is a study guide. It's clearly been written by a teacher for students for educational purposes - the very mission of Wikibooks. You seem to be trying to teach people a lesson or commenting on your dislike of how things transpired, which is irrelevant to the question, is the material appropriate for Wikibooks or not. -- Stbalbach 16:08, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
As I was trying to point out, it was sort of half-way between being good for Wikipedia and Wikibooks. Single page articles generally are strongly discouraged on Wikibooks. It also still has hallmarks of being a Wikipedia article with all of the hyperlinks scattered throughout the page. This doesn't mean that you can't have them, just that it appears more as a Wikipedia article as presently constructed. Essentially, much more effort needs to go into the Wikibooks side of the content, and at the moment it is just a stub, with even page formatting that is needed.
If you had started the Wikibooks content concurrently, you might have perhaps a bit of justification to complaining about it being removed from Wikibooks. Unfortunately from what I saw with the edits here that it wasn't moved to Wikibooks until after it was deleted on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia and Wikibooks content were identical (other than a page edit here to cull some content that one editor didn't like). Sure, as time goes on they may be very different in terms of scope and content. But I will re-emphasis that Wikibooks is not a temporary holding area for working on Wikipedia content. If you are going to work on Wikibooks, it should be developed into a substantial text for Wikibooks. If you want an encyclopedia article, you need to follow content standards here. --Robert Horning 17:17, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Yeah but the way things transpired it was a newbie teacher with a class who started a (proto) study guide on Wikipedia. Study guides don't go on Wikipedia. Study guides go on Wikibooks. So it was moved over there so it could be further developed. That's all that happened. I'm currently working on adapting it to an encyclopedia version, maybe you can help them by showing them how to create a full-blow study guide. That would be more productive than deleting it entirely. -- Stbalbach 17:40, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm satisfied. I wish this whole issue would have been dealt with better on Wikipedia rather than trying to resolve the issue on Wikibooks, but that is another battle for another day. The book summary is certainly not original research, and is something that is common for other parts of Wikipedia, especially when related to other book content. This is clearly something that can be done with a Neutral Point of View, so I fail to see where the problem lies for including what is currently on this page. Some minor cleanup, perhaps, but this is a good article right now. --Robert Horning 18:32, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any problems at the moment. --Stbalbach 23:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fixing up footnotes

You might want to read the Wikipedia:Footnotes page on how to fix up the footnotes. There appears to be a new php script that has been added semi-recently that I wasn't aware of that can substantially help out with preparing footnotes even better than another system I was going to demonstrate to you. This allows for professional citations and helps even with the formatting of the footnotes. There are some manual ways to do this as well that work out pretty nice as well. It would be nice to clean up the citations that are currently just a simple number. I think you had some of the citations in the earlier version that were just raw links to web content hosted elsewhere. This allows you to also include things like ISBN numbers and traditional bibliographic references that are not HTML or web related. --Robert Horning 02:54, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Point of view

This article seems to pick only the "negative" comments about America in the book (and seems to agree with them)so that it seems as if he has nothing "good" to say about America at all- which is not the case.

[edit] comments

I first read this book as a very young man in 1965 or 66 and at the time found it an odd and difficult read, I was after all only 19 or 20 and a soldier serving overseas at the time. However, some 40 years on there were two small parts of the book that remained lodged in my memory. One was the vehicle that Steinbeck used for his journey which I was certain until my re-reading of the book in 2005 - was a British Land Rover. I remember this because I was of course driving them myself everyday as a soldier. I also remembered his comments about the noise the tyres made being over sized. Secondly, the description he wrote about the incident at a filling station where a State Trooper or Sheriff or policeman watches him and mistakes Charley for a Black man sitting in the front seat of his vehicle. The dialogue in the originally published book was far more shocking in its language and in the use of the "N" word than in this 1990's version I have just read. Can it be that the book has been edited to be more "politically correct" for the new new century....? Or, did I simply forget what I read?

I would love to know -- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.19.242.122 (talk • contribs).

I have a first edition and yeah the "n" word is used a bunch of times near the end. -- Stbalbach 18:43, 28 April 2007 (UTC)