Talk:Early life of Fanny Crosby

Unnecessary fork?

I note that an article of the same title was deleted on 25 July 2011. This recreation is pretty much a POV fork of Fanny Crosby, an article that was and perhaps still might be considered to be of inordinate length and trivial detail. There was much discussion at Talk:Fanny Crosby during a spate of drastic but necessary pruning, and attempts at forking some of that article at the time were deemed to be inappropriate. Please can you justify why this should exist? Should we mention that she ate grits for breakfast while a child, etc? - Sitush (talk) 23:26, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I should add that I cannot see the deleted article that preceded this one. Not being an admin, and all. - Sitush (talk) 23:31, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

It was a 37k (!) article by Smjwalsh and deleted by Fastily for all the right reasons: "(A10: Recently created article that duplicates an existing topic, Fanny Crosby)". Thanks, Fastily. Sitush, seriously--grits? Look it up: it's a southern food. She probably ate something like Cream of Wheat. Come on now. Drmies (talk) 18:43, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Yay, racial stereotyping by me ;) - Sitush (talk) 19:08, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I forked this content because I thought it was worth keeping (and it's all well sourced), yet obviously the main article is too large. But if this is really such a controversial decision then I back down; I've moved the content back. -- Peter ^{Talk page} 16:22, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

The problem is excessive detail. Your person is simply not that notable that she'd need a 250k article (now trimmed down some, but not enough), or a 130k article with a bunch of sub-sections. As I suggested elsewhere, spend your energy on publishing a monograph on her, that's a much more worthwhile pursuit. Drmies (talk) 18:43, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not really that involved in this article (I'm not a regularly contributor), I've just dropped by. The article does seem to be overly long and I thought I'd help by creating a fork, but perhaps the article just needs drastically shortening. Looking at the history of the article it only seemed to have expanded during mid-2011. Maybe we need to go right back and start again from there. I was probably too quick in making this page. -- Peter ^{Talk page} 21:05, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Or was that comment directed at Sitush?? Anyhow, the main contributor to the Fanny Crosby article (and the original version of this one apparently) appears to have been Smjwalsh - a kind of pet project I expect. Looking back to revisions from March 2011, it seemed to be an acceptable length back then and Smjwash expanded it to a reasonable length... but kept on going, writing an entire book! -- Peter ^{Talk page} 21:13, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

No, the comment was not directed at me. I am one of those who have been involved in attempts to bring some sort of Wikipedia reasonableness to the article, in terms of detail/length etc. And, yes, "reasonableness" is a rather subjective notion.

Smjwalsh has tried a few forks, off and on, but seems now mostly to be resigned to the situation (there have been discussions involving them at Talk:Fanny Crosby). Smjwalsh has a research potential that really might benefit a monograph, as Drmies has suggested. Alas, they have displayed similar tendencies towards excess on other articles but I simply do not have the time or inclination to wade through umpteen of the things. I have enough problematic articles on my watchlist already and, really, this one is pretty benign by comparison. I feel sure that your input regarding improvements to Fanny Crosby would be appreciated. - Sitush (talk) 23:24, 10 May 2012 (UTC)