KDog1749

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Pseudo-haiku and senryu external links

The editor for the Open Directory Project haiku pages (Bill Higginson, author of The Haiku Handbook) has selected 37 websites for inclusion on the pseudo-haiku page [1], with only one of them rated with a star (and with your website not among the list--the one news haiku page is the occasionally interesting Guardian haiku contest). Beyond that selected list, there are literally thousands of pseudo-haiku websites on the internet, from the classic spam haiku pages to Bill Bixby Memorial Haiku to obscure blogs with really, really bad 'haiku'.

I checked for your Alexa rating, but you don't have one yet [2]. A google search for "news haiku" finds 938 webpages, with your website not in the top 50. You are also not in the Top 10 for either Yahoo! or Windows Live. I did find the website under "news haikus" (except using Wikdows Live), but the Japanese language has no plurals, so haiku is like sheep, both singular and plural.

On top of everything, I couldn't even get to your website earlier today. I considered all of that information and decided that there was nothing about your website that made it notable enough to be included in the external links for either the senryu or haiku articles on the Wikipedia.

From doing some of these searches, I've actually found a news haiku website that I think is worth including in both the senryu and haiku pages: Madeleine Begun Kane Daily News Haiku

If you want to argue the issue, please first read the Wikipedia guidelines on external links, and then state you case on the talk page for the haiku article. ^BlankVerse 14:40, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Besides the link I gave you to the Wikipedia policy on external links, you might also take a look at What the Wikipedia is not.

When I look the external links section in articles, I try to judge them on how useful will they be to the readers of the article. Here are just two of my criteria: Do they help provide additional insight or information? Do they have information or graphics that can't be included on the Wikipedia because of copyright?

The pseudo-haiku external links section in the haiku article regular gets links added to it. If it wasn't vigorously pruned, it would end up disproportionately large compared to its importance to the article. The links that are currently included are those that are best known (the spam haiku and the error-message haiku), or those that have been around awhile and do a much better job than average with the quality of their pseudo-haiku. It's the quality and longevity of Madeleine Begun Kane's Daily Haiku News website that impressed me. Although in the beginning I don't think that she had much understanding of haiku, her current news senryu have a much better sense of poetry and haiku-ness to them. And that, quite frankly, is where I think that your website falls flat.

You might want to look at some of the articles on senryu on the World Haiku Review website (for example [3]). Also, the World Haiku Club has a senryu mailing list which you can join [4]. You can post senryu and get feedback from other list members. Alan Pizzarelli, in my opinion, is currently the best writer of English-language senryu. He writes a senryu column for the Simply Haiku journal. You might read some of his articles there, such as [5]. And finally, there are a whole set of links on senryu on Ray Rasmussen's website that are worth looking at [6], although the list needs to be updated because some of the links are now 404'd. ^BlankVerse 04:48, 27 August 2006 (UTC)