Wikipedia and Shakespeare

[Tom Reedy]

I think one of the reasons for the authorship controversy is that
amateurs are looking for a way to contribute to Shakespeare studies. I
know for me, at least, the main attraction is the excuse to research,
and I like the exercise of constructing a good argument also.

If you have a penchant for research, the WikiProject Shakespeare at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Shakespeare is
looking for editors. While Wikipedia has some good Shakespeare
articles (the main article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
is likely as good as you'll find anywhere), it has many more that are
terrible and that could use some even-handed reporting. Some of the
play articles are merely stubs, and you will find lots of good
opportunities to lose yourself in something productive.

TR

[The Historian]

On Sep 14, 9:08 am, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think one of the reasons for the authorship controversy is that
> amateurs are looking for a way to contribute to Shakespeare studies. I
> know for me, at least, the main attraction is the excuse to research,
> and I like the exercise of constructing a good argument also.
>
> If you have a penchant for research, the WikiProject Shakespeare athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Shakespeareis
> looking for editors. While Wikipedia has some good Shakespeare

> articles (the main article athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

> is likely as good as you'll find anywhere), it has many more that are
> terrible and that could use some even-handed reporting. Some of the
> play articles are merely stubs, and you will find lots of good
> opportunities to lose yourself in something productive.
>
> TR

Has Wikipedia advanced from the days of 'edit wars' with idiots?

[Felix]

>
> Has Wikipedia advanced from the days of 'edit wars' with idiots?

>The Historian

I find it useful to visit the wikipedia pages, however dicey they may
sometimes be.
On the Shakespeare page you get that daft assertion again that there
is no sequence in the Sonnets. This can only be written by someone who
has never read them.

I tried the other link you gave, Tom, but had no luck with it.

I have some close academic friends who absolutely forbid their
students to look anything up on Wikipedia. What they should warn us of
is that most other sites are worse, so they should forbid all
navigating on the Internet, really. One of these friends was sitting
next to me and we were trying to find information about an English
composer. We clicked about everywhere until we were obliged to go to
Wikipedia, for the info we wanted. Since wki is a free for all, I find
they don't do so badly.

How come their Shakespeare page doesn't give links to the essays by
Hazlitt, Coleridge, Swinburne on Shakespeare? Goethe can only be found
in German.

I sent a few letters to Oliver Kamm of The Times half defending Wiki.
Oliver condemns it entirely and would probably rather have it
eliminated altogether. I pointed out to him that it was the only site
on which I could find out some basic information about him - none of
which he denied - and that their article included his attacks on them.

I use Wikipedia to pick up some basic information and don't really
mind if it's not all correct. Apart from other sites, even 'serious'
books on the composers and poets can get everything wrong. They have
to be used as a point of departure, like the notes I once read on LP
record covers - and Wiki is a decided improvement on these.

Hats off to the Wikipedians for their efforts!

Felix

[Tom Reedy]

Wikipedia has several problems: its treatment is woefully incomplete
for some important subjects and overly detailed on trivial subjects.
Its strongest point is the ability to cover a topic using several
different articles, the Shakespeare project being a good example,
although some article are just stubs waiting for some one to adopt
them.

TR

[The Historian]

On Sep 16, 3:56 pm, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:

My own experience with Wikipedia has been limited to watching edit
wars, and checking if I've been copied or quoted improperly in chess
articles. The big problem is that there's no oversight and no
ownership. Why would a writer want to contribute an article that will
be rewritten by anyone for any reason? See the posting below by
Margaret Mikulska, technical editor of the Journal of Seventeenth
Century Music.

*************

From a 2006 discussion of Wikipedia on rec.music.classical.recordings:

The current Mozart entry is indeed a vast improvement over what I saw
quite recently (which was a screaming disaster). One could correct
this
or that here and there, but overall it's really good. One truly
EXASPERATING thing is that the entry is disgraced by the portrait of a
Munich merchant and Hofrat J. A. Steiner, who never had anything to do
with Mozart. A Munich archivist, Richard Bauer, wrote a very good
paper
for Acta Mozartiana, available for download at least temporarily:

http://www.mozartgesellschaft.de/webEdition/site/dmg/html/acta_mozart...

proving very convincingly, based on solid archival evidence, that the
Edlinger painting represents the merchant and not Mozart.
Unfortunately,
such is the nature of Wikipedia that sometimes it is absolutely
impossible to correct blatant errors when they are part of somebody's
agenda -- in this case of a moron who insists with all the power of
his
ignorance and arrogance that he proved that the painting represents
Mozart. So this is a lost cause, and the readers of the English and
German entries on Mozart will be constantly misled into thinking that
they admire Mozart's last portrait. Because of such agenda-driven
vandalism I am very pessimistic about the whole Wiki entreprise.

[Tom Reedy]

In my experience the Evil Interwebs cause attention deficit
Tourette's, and since I'm not going to give up my computer and quit
wasting my time I figure I might as well contribute and learn
something by doing so. In a way it reminds me of the old days at hlas,
when I would read three books to make a minuscule point and spend
hours researching to prove my opponent wrong. Plus you meet some damn
interesting and smart people.

Since original research is not permitted, the portrait in question in
your example could be successfully taken down, but you're right in
that a lot of time is wasted on agenda-driven edit warriors and the
way Wikipedia is set up favours persistence over expertise. I foresee
some kind of changes being made, especially in the more contentious
articles such as the Israel-Palestine articles and others.

TR

[Tom Reedy]

Damn, Neil. I just now noticed the example you gave was from 2006!
There's a completely different portrait now, which kind of undercuts
her complaint, don't you think?

TR

[Felix]

> > TR- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Bob Grumman]

I'm strongly opposed to Wikipedia because it is, or was last I heard,
effectually peer-reviewed. It also has rules I consider stupid, like
the one against a person writing an article on himself. I've always
felt that a much better encyclopedia would exist in three or more
branches. One would be Wikipedia as it is now. One would consist of
all material contributed except very obvious spam and contributions
repeating all or most of earlier contributions. Another might be of
serious unconventionality--uncertified theories of psychology like
mine, for instance. Eventually it'd be nice to have a personalized
branch, which would be one determined by the preferences of a single
person based on his answers to a questionnaire.

--Bob

[Tom Reedy]

I've had much the same thoughts on the transportation system. There
should be holes drilled through the earth so that we could get to the
other side of the world quicker, and there should be star ships to
take us to the other solar systems so we can see what's there. Also
I've always wanted a personal jet pack for short hops within the city,
maybe to go to the central instantaneous matter transporter set up at
major cities that would take us to other cities in the world. That
would solve a lot of pollution and traffic problems, which are stupid,
and also we wouldn't need to burn oil, which is also stupid.

TR

[The Historian]

On Sep 22, 12:48 am, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Damn, Neil. I just now noticed the example you gave was from 2006!
> There's a completely different portrait now, which kind of undercuts
> her complaint, don't you think?

Not really. Just because the 'right' side won the edit war doesn't
validate the fact there was an edit war.

[Bob Grumman]

On Sep 22, 7:17 am, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had much the same thoughts on the transportation system. There
> should be holes drilled through the earth so that we could get to the
> other side of the world quicker, and there should be star ships to
> take us to the other solar systems so we can see what's there. Also
> I've always wanted a personal jet pack for short hops within the city,
> maybe to go to the central instantaneous matter transporter set up at
> major cities that would take us to other cities in the world. That
> would solve a lot of pollution and traffic problems, which are stupid,
> and also we wouldn't need to burn oil, which is also stupid.
>
> TR
>

Tom, sometimes you come across the way Houlsby does--out to show
someone up instead of giving his opinions a fair consideration. So,
what would be so hard about (a) having a section of an Internet
encyclopedia run just the way Wikipedia now is; (b) having a second
section run the way my blog is--with something screening out obvious
spam (although letting me reverse any of its decisions), and letting
in everything else--with no revisions of an entry by anyone but its
author; and (c) a manager or managers who would keep track of the
section described in (b) and copy entries in it into a third section
that seem to be serious but uncertified about some subject--or perhaps
allow in or disallow texts sent to the address of the third section
judging only their apparent seriousness--again, with no revisions by
anyone but an entry's author permitted. Anyone could submit up to
five times, but would lose submission privileges if rejected five
times. I doubt such a section would ever fully satisfy everyone using
it, but it would make the encyclopedia ten times better than Wikipedia
now is.

Furthermore, Amazon has a way of personalizing the ads it sends a
person. Why couldn't something along those lines be put together to
give someone a personalized selection of entries EVENTUALLY? This
would take work, but I suspect would not be anywhere near as difficult
as making the things you list.

--Bob

[Tom Reedy]

Bob, I have given your idea the fair consideration it deserves, and my
dramatised reaction is that ideas are a dime a dozen.

> Furthermore, Amazon has a way of personalizing the ads it sends a
> person.  Why couldn't something along those lines be put together to
> give someone a personalized selection of entries EVENTUALLY?  This
> would take work, but I suspect would not be anywhere near as difficult
> as making the things you list.

Thinking up criticisms of what exists is easy, so easy that the world
is full of people who won't help make anything better for the reason
that it's not perfect. If critics were farmers, we'd all starve
waiting around for the perfect time to plant the perfect seed to grow
the perfect food. Thank God there's no chance of that, with them being
too busy jeering from the sidelines about how stupid things are.

TR

>
> --Bob

[Felix]

I tested Wikipedia's article on a composer I know very well, plus hsu
wife. I know their lives inside out, have read all their diaries and
letters. Wiki does get some things definitely wrong, but I won't bore
you with the details. The person who wrote the article does not know
his subject well.

But the Wiki ghost writers are not the only ones who get things wrong.
The 8th of June this year was Schumann's 200th birthday and the BBC
(radio 3) put on a special Schumann week. Among the commenting guests
there was his 'biographer,' who uttered one lie after the other. And
you can get worse if you go to other sites, writers with a feminist
bias who simply reinvent the story of Robert and Clara.

I still think Wiki is more useful than useless. You just have to read
it with a pinch of salt. Considering the way it's put together I'm
surprised it's not much worse.

Felix

[Bob Grumman]

On Sep 22, 9:38 am, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:

First off, there's a difference between constructive suggestions like
mine and worthless jeers like your reaction to my ideas. Should one
not express ideas for improving something that seems not that hard to
improve because one is not able to carry them out on one's own?

Actually, I did make an attempt to do something like I proposed
above. Because I didn't like the way the poetry establishment lists
poets *i.e., entirely on the basis of what establishment publications
had published their work"), I set up an Internet biographical
dictionary of poets, allowing any entry on anyone calling himself a
poet or poetry critic regardless of who sent it in. I encouraged
people sending entries to include samples of the poet's work. I
didn't get much response (although I think there are more than fifty
entries in the thing now), and no help, and I was doing other things
to try to further the cause of poetry, and lacked money, etc., so I
soon stopped overseeing the dictionary. It's still somewhere on the
Internet, and I would revive it if I suddenly got rich.

--Bob

[hj]

Okay everone! Of topic! Off topic! Off topic!

(BTW: I kind of like Wikipedia)

hj

[Bob Grumman]

What's better: off-topic stuff or the absence of discussion? Wikipoo
is on-topic, though, as a source of Shakespeare information that is
worth analyzing. I think it as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica
and other reference books I've read, just think it could be improved,
in other ways than simply revising articles, although that's worth
doing.

--Bob

[hj]

By the time I got on the thread there were roughly (actually
*exactly*) thirteen consecutive posts about Wikipedia itself, and none
on such topics as ... oh ... is the real reason Ron Rosenbaum hates
Harold Bloom a mixture of the following? (1) Both of them are
thoroughgoing Bardolators (Bloom admits it). (2) Both think
Shakespeare is infinite/bottomless. (3) And both want to be
pontificator-in-chief.

hj

[Bob Grumman]

On Sep 25, 2:15 pm, hj <h_jekyll2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> By the time I got on the thread there were roughly (actually
> *exactly*) thirteen consecutive posts about Wikipedia itself, and none
> on such topics as ... oh ... is the real reason Ron Rosenbaum hates
> Harold Bloom a mixture of the following? (1) Both of them are
> thoroughgoing Bardolators (Bloom admits it). (2) Both think
> Shakespeare is infinite/bottomless. (3) And both want to be
> pontificator-in-chief.
>
> hj

All those reasons apply, I agree, but there are others.

I also agree that the thread quickly stopped having a direct
connection to Shakespeare. I contend (as an "inveterate illiterate,"
according to Mark Houlsby, sadly barred from the Forest but zealously
keeping up with it at HLAS) that the thread did not go off-topic
because the topic was, basically, the value of Wikipedia to people
interested in Shakespeare, which leads naturally to the topic of the
value in general of Wikipedia. It'd be like a post about the value of
Stratford to Shakespeare that quickly led to a discussion of small
towns.

Anyway, I have no problem with off-topic posts considering how few
posts on anything are made to this group, and because this group is
really a sort of sewing circle, or should--I believe--be considered
that--until such a time as it becomes another Shaksper, where it makes
sense to limit posts.

--Bob

[Tom Reedy]

I see nothing at all off-topic on this thread. The topic is "Wikipedia
and Shakespeare", and it began with my attempted recruitment of
Ardenites to edit Wikipedia Shakespeare articles, so any discussion
about why one should or should not do so are certainly on-topic, IMO.
Your former thread "To Make Up For Art's No longer Posting Much Here "
was much more off-topic, not because of the subject matter (poetry),
but because Art has never posted here. As long as something pertains
to Shakespeare, theatre, writing, etc., there's no reason to be a
tight-ass about it. Religion and politics, though--unless they pertain
to Shakespeare and his times--that's another matter.

TR

>
> --Bob

[Bob Grumman]

On Sep 26, 2:16 pm, Tom Reedy <tom.re...@gmail.com> wrote:

That's pretty much what I said.

> Your former thread "To Make Up For Art's No longer Posting Much Here "
> was much more off-topic, not because of the subject matter (poetry),
> but because Art has never posted here.

Actually, its title (I'm pretty sure) was "OT--To Make Up For Art's No
longer Posting Much Here," and it wasn't supposed to be posted here,
as I later said--I had postied it thinking I was at HLAS instead of