Talk:Amish furniture

Protected

Locked for 24 hours due to revert warring by Col Warden and Delicious Carbuncle. Col W reverts per talk but doesn't actually say anything about it on the talk page. CD then reverts calling it vandalism. Oh please! My 9 years old is capable of a more collegiate and adult approach to disagreement then this. Please work it out her and let me or another admin know if you are done so we can get back to work. If the revert warring resumes after the protection expires/lifted I may well block someone as forcing protection of an article while it is being discussed at AFD is, a priori the very definition of disruption. Spartaz ^Humbug! 16:16, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I left a clear and polite message on Colonel Warden's talk page warning him that I would be reverting future removals of overtly valid tags as vandalism. I'm not sure what other action you would have had me take, Spartaz. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:35, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

• The talk in question was here. It seemed best to respond to Delicious Carbuncle there rather than starting a separate discussion. But now that we have one, let me state clearly my view that Delicious Carbuncle is engaging in tag abuse. Placing redundant cleanup tags upon an article which one is trying to delete indicates either a confusion of purpose or an attempt to game the issue by defacing the article. My original action was to replace assorted cleanup tags with the ARS template. The latter seems more appropriate during AFD and is a general invitation to improve the article which seems quite adequate in the circumstances. Colonel Warden (talk) 17:07, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid I have to call you on your bullshit, Colonel. You removed the cleanup and unreferenced tags with a bogus edit summary of "cleanup" before I nominated the article for deletion. I suspect your only reason for looking at this article at all was due to my involvement pointing out your deceptive use of sources in Clear heels, since your edits came immediately after that. Your addition of the rescue tag came after the AfD was started. That tag is not a substitute for tags which note specific problems to be addressed. Rather it is a call to arms for the "Article Rescue Squad" to pile on knee-jerk keep votes at the AfD. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:34, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

For the avoidance of doubt, I fully agree with Spartaz. Ultimately, if you're unable to conduct yourselves in acceptable manner, we will be forced look at stronger measures, such as an interaction ban. In this context, I advise you not to continue this argument. PhilKnight (talk) 18:04, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

• Very well, I shall leave it to Delicious Carbuncle to improve this article. He may take full advantage of the many sources which I have cited during the AFD discussion, together with the search links which I provided above. Colonel Warden (talk) 18:16, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Please stop with the threats, Phil. It's bad enough that I have to deal with Colonel Warden trying to annoy me with nonsense such as that detailed above without admins trying to resolve a dispute that is just one editor behaving badly (which is to say, as they usually do in their effort to win the war against "deletionists"). A bit soon to jump to interaction bans, isn't it? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:31, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Please also see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive648#Inappropriate cleanup tag removal, which ends with an agreement that Colonel Warden's removal of tags is disruptive (and oddly has no mention of me at all). Delicious carbuncle (talk) 14:31, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Improvement

• Though kept at AfD, the article needs much improvement. When the article was protected from editing briefly during the deletion discussion, I added a ton of potential sources to use to the discussion, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amish furniture, they are ripe for the taking.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 02:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I can see a three-part structure to this:

• Amish furniture, what is it? I see it as a cynical bit of marketing more than a style, but that still needs description.
• Where does it come from? Describe the Pennsylvania Dutch predecessors, even though they bear almost no relation to current production (vernacular paintwork is too expensive to sell today).
• What does it look like? What styles are they selling, what do they call them and how much relation do these pastiche pieces bear to the actual styles?

As you might gather, I have a rock-bottom opinion of this stuff. I've been looking at it for a week, and it's still plug-ugly. Much Mission and Shaker repro work today has been of fine manufacturing quality for a couple of decades now and even their design has now progressed beyond slavish copying (Much of what I make myself is Harvey Ellis Craftsman inspired). This Amish stuff though - it's decorator junk for yuppies. Andy Dingley (talk) 03:00, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from Andy. Even if you don't like the style or think it has merit, how is it a "cynical bit of marketing?" From whagt I've gathered, Amish people do actually make most furniture marketed as such, so it seems like a pretty truthful descriptor. EricERCC (talk) 17:00, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Cleanup

Can those who consider that this article still merits a cleanup tag explain why please? ϢereSpielChequers 11:44, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Same issues as before, toned down only a little:

• Unreferenced.
• What is "Amish furniture"? It's still unclear. The article talks about Mennonite styles, often painted, which are genuine and sourceable, but that's not what's on sale today. There is a brand of "Amish furniture" that's on-sale and sourceable, but it's not a style. The style of what's made and sold today is a mish-mash of non-Amish traditions, and should be described as such. Even where it discusses older Amish work, this article is ragged. It seems to confuse (yet again) Johanes Spitler with Jacob Strikler. It's not good enough to have an article claiming "Amish furniture" as something distinct and new, but pulling its only content as to the style from other traditions than the Amish. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:35, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not questioning the unreferenced tag, that belongs here until the article is referenced. But Wikipedia:Cleanup is for things like spelling, grammar and tone. Arguments about whether Amish furniture is a brand or a style are not really cleanup issues, they are certainly things worth discussing on the talkpage and perhaps consulting the relevant wikiprojects. But {{Cleanup}} tags are meant to attract editors who want to do a bit of copyediting, and I don't really see that here. Perhaps a {{dubious}} tag would be more appropriate? ϢereSpielChequers 15:26, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Isn't that just copyediting though, and cleanup is for the bigger picture, as this suffers from? Andy Dingley (talk) 15:45, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Well the difficulty there is if someone identifies things that need cleaning up but doesn't explain what their concerns are on the talkpage, then the Cleanup tag is liable to go. As it says on the documentation '"Because this tag is general, identify the specific problems on the page's talk page. The template may be removed if it is not possible for a subsequent user to identify what needs to be cleaned up." Which I read as entitling any user to remove a Cleanup tag if they don't see anything obvious that needs cleaning up or an explanation on the talkpage. ϢereSpielChequers 16:09, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Have you read the recent Afd? You might find the comments there useful. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:13, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Commercial link

At the end of the page is a advertisement link. Isn't that prohibited?

Read WP:ELand WP:ELNO. It's not "prohibited", as there's no simple blanket ban on such links.

However the general principle remains the same: this is an encyclopedia, not a directory. Articles should be self-contained, not rely on external content. If content is out there as source material and is useful, then write it up and add it to the article. We use references for supporting evidence of our own statements, we link to non-encyclopedic stuff, or copyright-encumbered stuff, that is still valuable to our overall goal. We don't just link because we can. We shouldn't even link because it improves the article, we should expand the article until it no longer needs this to be external (in the short-term though, many skip over this).

Does a commercial EL meet WP:EL, in that it adds something to the article that we can't get otherwise? If so, just being commercial isn't a barrier.

All that said though, this article should still be deleted. There's no such thing as "Amish furniture", other than a recently invented branding exercise. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:04, 3 May 2013 (UTC)