Talk:An Urchin in the Storm
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List of book reviews
editI removed the list of books Gould reviewed in this book here. I would have hoped that my edit summary ("Removed bullet pointed list. There is no need to list every book reviewed. The list should be replaced with a summary of the book's contents, in prose") explained this fully. However, an editor reverted me here with the comment, "if there is no point in listing the contents of an anthology of book reviews, there is no need for an article at all". That comment seems to reflect a simple failure to understand that the purpose of an article is to describe and explain important facts about its topic. If reliable sources have singled out some of Gould's reviews for special mention, then by all means let's mention them, and expain why they were important; that's what a properly written article would do. Listing each and every book reviewed, simply because it was reviewed, and without giving further explanation of why the book was reviewed or why the review matters, is feeding readers trivia. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:44, 4 August 2013 (UTC)
- The book is a collection of book reviews. The subject books were reviewed because someone asked the author to review them. There is not, and likely will never be, any reliable evidence about why these specific reviews were commissioned from this specific author, other than the obvious facts that Gould was a paleontologist and well-known in New York literary circles. What you are proposing is a recipe for a perma-stub which will never say anything about the book beyond reciting bibliographic information that can be trivially looked up in any number of databases. 121a0012 (talk) 15:42, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
- What nonsense. Gould's book will of course have been reviewed, and it ought to be a relatively simple matter to look up those reviews (such as Michiko Kakutani's, which rather contradicts your claim that the book should be seen simply as a collection of book reviews) and summarize them in the article. That is the way the article should be written. Or do you think that the article should be nothing but a list of the books it reviewed, with nothing to give it context or significance? FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 00:03, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- "Nothing but"? By no means. But it should include at least the minimal information on what this book is about. Just as any article about a record album will include listings of the tracks and the personnel performing, an article about a collection of book reviews is plainly incomplete without a listing of the books reviewed. Have Robert Silvers and the other magazine editors ever published an explanation of why they commissioned Gould to write these reviews? I don't think so, but am willing to be proved wrong. 121a0012 (talk) 03:41, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- I don't think a book can be compared to an album. But restore the list of reviews if you want to; I'm not interested in edit warring over this. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 04:08, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- "Nothing but"? By no means. But it should include at least the minimal information on what this book is about. Just as any article about a record album will include listings of the tracks and the personnel performing, an article about a collection of book reviews is plainly incomplete without a listing of the books reviewed. Have Robert Silvers and the other magazine editors ever published an explanation of why they commissioned Gould to write these reviews? I don't think so, but am willing to be proved wrong. 121a0012 (talk) 03:41, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- What nonsense. Gould's book will of course have been reviewed, and it ought to be a relatively simple matter to look up those reviews (such as Michiko Kakutani's, which rather contradicts your claim that the book should be seen simply as a collection of book reviews) and summarize them in the article. That is the way the article should be written. Or do you think that the article should be nothing but a list of the books it reviewed, with nothing to give it context or significance? FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 00:03, 12 August 2013 (UTC)