Talk:Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes/Archive 1

Initial comments without section

I am a new professor to St. John Fisher College so I am not yet on the website. My email is kfasching-varner@sjfc.edu and we are building the Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes as a way for those who click on a Chris Crutcher link to understand more about this particular novel. Mr. Dolomite I am happy to discuss this with you. - Prof. Kenny Fasching-Varner. We meet on Tuesday's and Thursdays form 6:00 to 10:00 (which if youl ook on class schedules for the Summer under GRDG - Graduate Reading in the class schedules link on academics half way down the page or so that I am do teach and our class Developing LIteracy through Literature is a real class and we are really writing the content for this page. Please do not ruin our use of technology. Here is a direct link to the schedules and my class is GRDG 652 so you can see it yourself... Course Schedule --Litclass 04:11, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

What don't you get. It is a novel that dosent have a Wikipedia Link from Chris Crutcher...If you look on that Wikipedia page for Chris Crutcher you will see that the novel we are providing content for is one of his novels. We are going to make it so that people have access to content that goes along with the novel. It is no different than any other link off of an author. We don't need hositng - the university gives us webhosting - we are not making a webage for it, we are going to provide the same info that any novel has...

Um. Great. WIkipedia is still not free hosting. Alphachimp ^talk 04:18, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion

• Support Delete -- Please see Wikipedia is not a free host, etc.. A suggestion would be to use Scratchpad Wiki Labs to test internet collaborations on the Internet. -- MrDolomite | Talk 04:07, 25 July 2006 (UTC) and — MrDolomite | Talk 21:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment -- FWIW, there was no listing of "Fasching-Varner" on either of these pages [1], [2] at the school's website. -- MrDolomite | Talk 04:07, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

• My apologies, according to this and this, you do exist. :-) Sometimes I forget how slowly the computer wheels turn in education. -- MrDolomite | Talk 04:27, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

• Thank you...can you also please remove your support for the deltion. Chris Crucher is an author, which if you look on his Wikipedia link you will see the title Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes is listed as one of his novels. We are, as a class, goign to add the content for that novel becasue it is a shame that there was no Wikipedia link for the C. Crutcher novel. We are doing this to help others who, when they find Chris Crutcher on Wikipedia can also get information on his novels. THis is a rather important project for us to help the larger wikipedia community have access to the text.

Citation needed

I added a "Fact Tag" to the article indicating that it needs a citation from a verifiable source to document the controversy around the book. If the Litclass class project can provide a cite for this it will almost certainly save the article from deletion. Good luck :) --Doc Tropics ^{Message in a bottle} 22:32, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Complete rewrite

It's not perfect, but it's sourced and it's more encyclopedic in tone. It still needs work, either way, but I can't do much else where I'm sitting at this very moment. Sorry if there were students working on this. --badlydrawnjeff talk 12:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Much, much better. Close to a perfect stub, or more than a stub, now. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
• P. S. If students or other editors following the AfD discussion are concerned about the trimming of the long section on "why this book is notable," don't be. The bar for notability isn't high, and badlydrawnjeff has captured the important points and included them succinctly.

My $0.02 on further expansion

Old versions, still visible in the page history, e.g. this one, had material on characters and plot. The old material was far too detailed and not well supported by source citations. But it could be appropriate to say some things about a few major characters and major plot elements. What would be best would be to support these statements by actual quotations, using page numbers. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

See, I think I have the book at home, but I'm not sure. I'm not against a plot summary, but I'm simply sure I'm not the person to write it, I'm horrible at them. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:59, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't expecting you to do it... my comments was more for the benefit of 149.69.82.242, who added the character and plot material and might be bothered by its having been removed. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Special Request

This article is currently the focus of a class project. While I'm sure the students are currently learning a lot about how WP works (in more ways than one), I'd like to request that more experienced wikipedians take a "stand back" approach for the moment. I'm suggesting that rather than making edits and reverts ourselves, we offer suggestions here on the talkpage about how the class can work to improve the article on their own. After their experiment is complete, interested editors could then polish the article as they see fit. Since their work on this article represents a great opportunity to train new wikipedians, I hope that other editors would be willing to help them in this constructive fashion. Thanks, and happy editing. --Doc Tropics ^{Message in a bottle} 19:57, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

That's a great point, but IMHO, the interest of Wikipedia is to be an Encyclopedia and reference source, not a testbed for opinion. If they'd like to practice editing their article, they should either establish their own Wiki, or use a sandbox page. While it's reasonable to honor an editing in progress tag, I cannot accept the broad-reaching view of this professor that nobody else has the authority to edit this page. If we want to give them a true experience of Wikipedia, we should honor the following sentence (from the bottom of the edit page): If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it. αChimp ^laudare 20:02, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

LOL, I certainly can't argue with your last sentence! They are definitely getting an Authentic Wiki Experience; all we need now is a vandal and a troll to make their education complete :) -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Doc Tropics (talk • contribs)

I agree with Alphachimp: Class projects should not be entitled to greater rights than other editors. Still, the revert warring is getting us nowhere. I will try to create an intermediate version. Litclass' "Why Is This Book Noteworthy?" and "External Links" sections are horrible compared to the stub, they contain factual errors ("JSTOR's English Journal"), bad prose ("There is an argument that can be made that..."), flawed grammar, and typos, and they violate the Manual of Style's rules. I see no reason at all to keep them instead of the stub's corresponding parts. The "Characters" and "Plot" sections of, say, this version also have problems with typos ("Milddleton"?), grammar, bad style, and so on, but at least they add information (although unsourced). Whether or not we really need or want that much information is another question, but as a compromise I suggest keeping them, shortened, cleaned up and referenced. I didn't read the book myself and thus can't provide references, but I'll do a little of the rest. --Huon 20:18, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Good call. That's probably the most diplomatic solution. αChimp ^laudare 20:30, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

By now I'm rather happy with the "Characters" section. I removed those not mentioned in the plot summary and cleaned up the rest. The "Plot" section needs further improvement, for example to remove redundancies, but that should probably be done by someone who has read the book. --Huon 20:53, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Huon. Very positive contribution, especially with your comments here to explain it. --Doc Tropics ^{Message in a bottle} 21:00, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I think it is interesting how little patience people have had with us. I am thankful to the handful that have had patience. We have been trying to do something that we would encourage educators and students alike to do -- contribute to Wikipedia. The real shame here is that threats and warnings and penalties are what is thought of as the first response instead of trying to let us participate with it and learn about it. I have gone to pages that some of our critics have contributed and am myself not overly impressed. In 2 hours -- which is the amount of time that a majority of the entry was put together, we did a fantastic job that of course is open to editing. Cutting it down like badlydrawnjeff did, to nothing, and changing it so much that it lost important information about the book that a potential reader or anyone looking for a citation or reference would need was uncalled for. Huon's attitude has been so much more appropriate in dealing with this, and trying to make it a good page that others can use. Alphachimp has done nothing to contribute to the viability of this page, yet in his own page he seeks to be an editor and someone with control at Wikipedia. Learning comes from teaching and doing, and while we have most def. learned a lot in this process, I wonder how much others who have been outright mean to us have learned about dealing with others. As much as you may think or try to be 'objective' no encylopedia or other reference is truly objective --- any author brings a piece of herself or himself to the project. If you have nto read the book, read the book before lodging mean attacks that are meant to discourage us from participating in the Wikipedia community. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.69.116.21 (talk • contribs)

It's unfortunate that your class has experienced some of the more negative aspects of Wikipedia so quickly. One of the guidelines we generally try to follow is "don't bite the newcomers", because WP can be very confusing place and it takes time to learn how to get along well here. What you've seen so far is definitely part of the "process" of building a good article, along with some of its weaknesses. Since this is by nature a collaborative process, it necessarily relies on communication between editors, usually in the form of good "Edit Summaries" and useful discussions on the talkpage in order to achieve consensus about how to write the best possible article on the topic. --Doc Tropics ^{Message in a bottle} 21:35, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup Section

I tagged the plot paragraph for section cleanup and the tag was removed (and then readded). I figured that I would explain my reasoning here. The paragraph is extremely long and somewhat rambling. At the time I tagged it had what anyone could call excessive overlinking. It had one POV statement, at the end of the paragraph, which was followed by an exclamation point. I think the whole paragraph would be better replaced by several sentences. By the way, this is an example of an article of a bestselling book. Note the very short plot description. Comments? αChimp ^laudare 12:31, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with everything in the above paragraph. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:45, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

The right way to include content about opinions

A sentence like

Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes is a story of hope, fear, identity, salvation, and life!

cannot go in as a simple opinion, supported only by the editor's authority... as the concept of "editor's authority" does not apply to Wikipedia. All this is explained in the verifiability policy, which is linked under every edit box and is important for editors to understand.

On the other hand, we can and should have properly sourced facts about opinions.

In other words, if a reviewer writing in a publication had said this, or something like it, then it could go in, in the form

Reviewer X called Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes "a story of hope, fear, identity, salvation, and life"

then it would probably be appropriate for the article. It should be accompanied by a citation showing where and when the review appeared... one good enough to allow someone to verify the citation if they wanted to. And it ought to be a fairly "real" publication, not, say, someone's personal blog or website.

In the case of a controversial opinion, you should be braced for the possibility that other editors might want to add source citations for other opinions. Nothing like this is at issue here...yet... but I thought I'd mention it, as I suspect it's quite possible conservative Christian publication somewhere might have taken notice of this book and said unkind things about it. If there are conflicting, reasonably widely-held bodies of opinion, the neutrality principle says all should be represented. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:01, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

"Byrnes" is a homophone for "Burns"

It doesn't seem as if this could be unintentional. If there are any good, citable source statements in which Crutcher or anyone else says anything about this it would be nice to have it in the article, as I'm sure I'm not the only person curious about it. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:03, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Just a note about Wikipedia:School and university projects

• I left a note on Litclass' talk page, but wanted to mention it here also for the benefit of those who may still have this page on their watchlist. At the time this article got started, I did not know about Wikipedia:School and university projects. I know it would have prevented me from any unintentional biting of newcomers. My apologies to the editor and his class. — MrDolomite | Talk 01:15, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

That's very interesting. The really big point that needs to be stressed is that nobody owns an article. Wikipedia is certainly a great resource, and we absolutely need more educated users, particularly those from colleges and universities. The steep learning curve can be quite frustrating.

(stepping onto my soapbox re: this article) As a little bit of a comment about WP:BITE. Even if a user is new, we have to stress that they follow the same rules everyone else does. These include, in this particular case, the removal of speedy deletion tags, and the violation of WP:3RR. If a user completely ignores warnings, something needs to happen to stop that. Not every user gets off to a great start here on Wikipedia, but its our responsibility to treat them well regardless of their situation. (/off the soapbox) αChimp ^laudare 02:06, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Moved here Litclass 19:38, 29 July 2006 (UTC)