Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Petrarch's and Shakespeare's Sonnets

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was No Consensus to delete. A diversity of opinions are expressed below but no consensus emerges from them. Some, at least, of this material probably belongs on Wikipedia, but the article should probably be renamed and perhaps rewritten for style and clearer sourcing. On the other hand, (selective) merging to the articles on the sonnets of the individual authors has also been suggested. None of these options requires deletion and so further discussion should take place on the article's talk page. Eluchil404 (talk) 05:14, 12 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Petrarch's and Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Original research, full of POV statements, hardly any references to reliable sources. I suggested a merge at Talk:Sonnet, but no one replied. On second thoughts, there is nothing worth merging in the article in its current state. NotFromUtrecht (talk) 18:08, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Additionally, we already have articles on Shakespeare's sonnets and Petrarchan sonnet, and the article listed for deletion does not justify having another article on these topics. NotFromUtrecht (talk) 18:14, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - There's too much original research, we already have Shakespeare's sonnets and Petrarchan sonnet and a redirect would not be helpful to readers. ItsZippy ^{(talk • contributions)} 18:33, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Which bit's the original research, then, considering the article Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare's Sonnets by Gordon Braden, professor of Renaissance Literature, that is cited in the article? Please name the novel theories or novel ways of addressing this subject not in established scholarship that the article has. That's what original research is, remember. I should caution the unwary that it will look very silly, in the face of things like Braden, Billone 2012, Roe 2006, and Leishman 2005, to simply assert that no-one and no encyclopaedia has ever mentioned Petrarch and Shakespeare in the same breath before. A one-sentence mention-original-research-and-hope-no-one-calls-me-on-it rationale just won't cut it here.
  - Billone, Amy C. (2012). "Sonnet". In Burwick, Frederick; Moore Goslee, Nancy; Long Hoeveler, Diane (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781405188104.
  - Roe, John (2006). "The Sonnet in the Renaissance". In Kastan, David Scott (ed.). The Oxford encyclopedia of British literature. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195169218.
  - Leishman, J. B. (2005). "Shakespeare and Petrarch". Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Routledge. ISBN 9780415352956.
- Uncle G (talk) 23:22, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Everything below the 'Ovidian Influences in the Sonnets' heading is supported only by references to primary sources. Perhaps such observations are supported by good secondary sources (one could say the same of all original research), but the article has been here for several years and no-one has added them. Nobody is asserting that no-one has 'mentioned Petrarch and Shakespeare in the same breath before', so I'm not sure why you raise this point. I suppose the question is whether the secondary sources justify having an article which compares Petrarch and Shakespeare -- in that case, we might be able to use the small amount of useful content in this article as a starting point. So, would you support a move to something like Comparison of Petrarch and Shakespeare's sonnets? NotFromUtrecht (talk) 10:17, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - I raised the point because I knew ahead of time from what you both wrote that neither of you knew what original research constitutes, and wanted to stave off the sillier arguments to that end before they even began. (I've seen a lot of very silly arguments about what original research is, over the years.) Whether something is original research isn't determined by looking at footnotes. It's determined by comparing what the article says against what established scholarship on the subject says. The article makes it relatively easy here by citing the sources that the article's author very clearly used. Picking a paragraph from that section at random, paragraph 6, and checking it against Braden alone — of the sources cited, let alone of the reams of scholarly literature on this subject — one can easily find that Braden supports the content of the paragraph on pages 103 and 104. I'm not going to go over this paragraph by paragraph, because you haven't. You've just looked at the article only and attempted to make a determination of what's original research solely by what <ref>...</ref> tags there are in it, without even reading the literature cited. That's wrongheaded. For starters, a lot of Wikipedia isn't written that way.
      As to the name: Notice that the article was originally entitled Shakespeare and petrarch, just like Leishman 2005. Clearly there's flexibility here. The right place to raise the question is Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Literature where people who work on this sort of thing can decide how best to slot this in to some sort of overall framework.
      As to the bogus no-one-has-added-anything argument: Well neither have you. Even here, you approach the article entirely superficially, without even reading the sources that it already handed to you on a platter. Make yourself not a part of that problem, and do what we — as people who claim to be encyclopaedists — are all supposed to do: find, read, evaluate, and use scholarly sources. I've done paragraph 6 for you.
      Uncle G (talk) 13:15, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very persuasive argument -- clearly the article is more salvageable than I thought. So I suppose my current view is keep the article, with the ultimate aim of either refocussing it as a comparison of Petrarch and Shakespeare, or producing content which can be merged into the article we already have on sonnets by those authors. NotFromUtrecht (talk) 13:52, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - I can't imagine why this is here. We have too few editors writing about literature and too few well-written articles about literature; we don't need to get rid of the ones we have. At any rate, I think Uncle G made the point, so per Uncle G. Truthkeeper (talk) 00:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- If Petrarch or Ovid had an important influence on Shakespeare's sonnets, then that can be discussed in the article on Shakespeare's sonnets, which is hardly so long that it needs to be split into separate articles. Why do we need an article on 'Petrarch's and Shakespeare's Sonnets' when we already have articles on Petrarch's and Shakespeare's Sonnets? (But see my comments about a move as a compromise) NotFromUtrecht (talk) 10:17, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep The nominator tells us that he came here because no-one responded to his merge proposal. That's not a reason to delete and the nominator now seems to agree that we can do more by means of ordinary editing and so has effectively withdrawn. Warden (talk) 19:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Poetry-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:18, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

KEEP This is an original piece comparing two previous entries. There is no point to delete this page if it provides a knowledgeable comparison, which it does. Why delete something that provides useful information backed up by many sources (this article is full cited). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.193.225.20 (talk) 08:08, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This is an essay, not an encyclopedia article. I may as well quote the keep !voter right above me, since his or her argument actually supports deletion. I'd also like to ask that the speedy keep !voter withdraw their vote or at least add a real argument, since it's very clearly intentionally missing the point of the deletion arguments.--Yaksar (let's chat) 06:02, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What point do you think is being missed? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:38, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The concept that an editor once feeling an article should be merged before deciding that the material is not suitable for a merger is an absurd reason for such a discussion to be procedurally closed.--Yaksar (let's chat) 04:10, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

But in this case the nominator has since changed opinion again. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:01, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.