Talk:J. K. Rowling

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Template:HP-project Template:FAOL Template:Todo priority Archive 01 2003 - March 2006

Anyone else a little peeved that the German mirror of this page got featured?

I've been reading it in Google translation and it makes some pretty flagrant howlers; for instance, it says flat out that Harry Potter was inspired by Neil Gaiman's "Books of Magic," which even Neil Gaiman has said was unlikely. It also claims Rowling's statement that she was born in Chipping Sodbury was made for publicity, which would be pretty tough to verify. And, like every other Wiki article on Joanne Rowling, it gets her name wrong. Serendipodous 18:34, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

So fix it. We can edit the German site, just like everyone else. DJ Clayworth 20:25, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Love to, but I haven't spoken German in 15 years, and despite the fact that a number of people with at best a semi-coherent grasp of English still feel it is their right to edit English pages on this site, I don't believe I should attempt to edit a page in a language I don't fully comprehend. Serendipodous 21:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I suggest making a note on the Talk page, or, contact someone from the German Embassy on En or theEnglish Embassy on De and ask for their help, I imagine they'd be thrilled...I'm an "ambassador" to fr and noones contacted me, and I'd be thrilled if they did, so give it a shot. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 19:09, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Rowling helping children in Eastern Europe

How awesome. This warms out the cottles of my heart.

Sure lots of kids will help their fellow kids if they know their favourite author is doing this.

--EuropracBHIT 20:47, 4 March 2006 (UTC).

Uncited material

There's a fair amount of material in this article that is uncited. I am currently working on removing uncited material from Harry Potter articles. By Wikipedia:Verifiability, "Information on Wikipedia must be reliable. Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed." I am archiving uncited material from the article to J. K. Rowling/Uncited. Please contribute by providing references for this material and replacing it on the article page. Thank you. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 19:13, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I think you are being extreme in the interpretation of this policy. Removing the biography entirely from the article was close to vandalism and shocked me. I have replaced it with 2 general citations. We want to avoid libel but declared facts which cannot be immediately supported in the listed citations merely need the suffix added to begin a citation process. Lumos3 09:57, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm being extreme, but I still think I'm within the wording of the policy, as I am challenging uncited material. I basically am willing to accept material that is well established (for example, something like J.K. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter books is fine, but something like J.K. Rowling is the richest author in the world needs to be backed up). I'm sorry to remove good quality text, but I'm also not wanting unverified information in the article. It's my intention to spend time at some point working on finding citations for some of this myself, but it's my feeling that in the meantime, uncited information should be removed from Wikipedia articles until it can be verified. That's the first step, then it can be added in with citations. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 22:06, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

What I don't get is, why, instead of self-righteously deleting information you felt didn't adhere to your standard, did you not try looking for the citations yourself? It took me, oh, I'd say about ten minutes on Google to find the correct citations for the information you removed. It took me the better part of two hours to redraft the article after you savaged it. By the way, "challenged and removed," implies that the material should be challeged, then removed. You removed without bothering to challenge first. If you had simply made a request for citations on the discussion page, this issue would have been cleared up in minutes. Serendipodous 10:18, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

In my mind, challenged and removed can go together as one thing. There doesn't have to be a time gap in between them, in my interpretation of the policy. Part of why I feel this is so is because if I simply challenge the various assertions that need citation, 1. there's really no impetus on anyone to do anything about it and 2. Uncited material remains present on the article page. So by removing uncited material, what material that is there is well cited, and what material that is removed is present on the Uncited archive. As far as redrafting the article, I kept the content in sections and spaced out where there were gaps that I didn't remove on the Uncited page, so hopefully that provided some guide to you in re-working the article. As far as why I didn't find the citations myself, well that is the next step in the process, but it's one I simply hadn't gotten to yet, namely because I have some other articles in HP space and various others that I'm watching that I'm working on culling uncited material from first. I've also been working on a project to re-factor the categories within the HP scope, and having done that, I worked on clearing up citation issues on articles that were in the high levels of Category:Harry Potter, which would be mainly this article and the Harry Potter article itself. Future projects for me include going then through the lower levels of the categories and doing cleaning and removal of unsourced material. Additionally, a task I have pending with this article is to review your edits and citations, and work to line up this article with the Uncited page, ie removing text from the Uncited page that you've provided citations for, and working to make sure the citations are well placed and correctly formatted. It's just a question of when I have time to go through it in that level of detail. However, I do want to thank you for taking the time to locate the citations. If you'd wanted to make notes on the Uncited page with the citations you'd found, I'd be happy to work on re-factoring the material back into the article myself. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 03:45, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

In response to your removed comment, I don't think it was hypocritical, as I don't see how I allowed anyone else more time than myself. I removed the uncited content, so the content was just as not-on-the-article-page for me as for you. I'm saying that it's the first step to remove the uncited content..that is the short term solution that makes the fastest improvement in the article quality. I'd rather take out 75 percent of the article, leaving the 25 percent thats cited, and slowly add in cited material. That way, all of the article is cited, which makes it a much better article. It's much easier to take out the uncited material, then work in the background adding in citations, as well as patrolling the article to remove uncited additions. Check out Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film). When I started patrolling that article it was a miasma of various rumors and claims about who would and wouldn't be in the movie, none of which was backed up. I started off by moving every. single. actor. to the Unconfirmed section, and reverted any changes that placed actors in "Confirmed" that didn't have a citation. I also worked on keeping out uncited rumors. Guess what? Now every single confirmed actor in that article has a citation, almost all of the commentary about the movie is cited, and there's even a beautiful little References section down at the bottom that someone did. You may have delayed in posting citations, but doing so weakens the article. It's much better to add whatever content you add with some kind of citation, then someone else can come along and clean up the citation. This is a team project here, its not something anyone on their own can do. I'm basically just working to lay the groundwork for improving certain articles that I think are important and that I happen to patrol regularly. For what it's worth, I'm starting now to post comments to Talk pages in advance of culling Uncited material, in response to your critique. I'm also about to hit up two schools that I attended, which I'm not going to enjoy doing, but I feel that it's neccessary (and fair, ya know?). Understand that I'm just trying to improve article quality, and inspire others to make these articles higher quality to. In my mind, one of the first steps is getting Uncited material out of the article, and adding back in what is noteworthy and citable (and not speculation). Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 15:39, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Further comment

Just so you understand where I'm coming from better, I'm working my way through the edits you made adding content back in to the article. I just spent about an hour and a half or more, and I have made it through the first three edits that have been made since I culled uncited material, with about thirty or so to go, it looks like.Specifically, these edits. This is how I updated and linked those citations, and this is the corresponding series of edits I made to J. K. Rowling/Uncited to update for cited additions. Serendipodous, your edits were helpful in that you linked specific assertions to specific sites that had those claims. Lumos3, your edit simply restored the entire section, and merely linked in to Rowling's biography page without further citation. Going back and checking the information on Rowling's page, there was quite a bit of material that was not discussed in that reference. I then compared revisions, and located the further citations that Serendipodous provided, which helped further cite some of the information I would otherwise not have been able to put back in. However, there is still some information that is not cited, as it's not contained in the three references I've worked through so far.

I'm going through this to demonstrate the level of citation that I'm looking for. The Early Life section is now very well cited, and the references are clearly labelled. Now, as much as you can help me with this process, I appreciate. If you don't want to deal with the complications of using the {{ref}} template and all that, that's fine, I just need the links to reference in, and I can format the assertions. It would also help me if you would edit J. K. Rowling/Uncited as well, and remove any content you place back in the article from that page. The idea is that the article and the Uncited page are maintained as closely in line as possible, so that stuff listed on the Uncited page is assertions that are not in fact in the article, and that once material is properly cited it's removed from the Uncited page. However please dont just add wholesale sections back in, because not everything in that section is neccessarily referenced in what references we currently have listed. I hope this makes my intent more clear. Best regards, Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 21:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

All your crusade is accomplishing is making my life and the lives of the other writers on this page unnecessarily difficult. If you had any interest in looking up citations yourself you could solve your issue without deleting anything. If you have issues with citations, bring them up on the discussion page; stop taking perfectly good material and logging it on a virtually inaccessable subpage. You want a citation for Rowling's charity work in Bucharest? Try the front page of her own website. You want a citation that her daughter is named after Jessica Mitford? Try every interview she's ever given. For future reference, if you want a Rowling quote, try her website, then try here: [url]http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/index2.html[/url]Serendipodous 00:00, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't have any interest in looking up links. I have interest in editing text and formatting Citations. However I don't mind searching for links, but I'm not going to do that yet because I still have good links in the article itself that need to be formatted before I want to do that. You're a step ahead of me. That's fine, you finding links makes things a ton easier for me because then I can work on formatting links and making nice citations instead of looking for references that should have been provided in the first place. J. K. Rowling/Uncited is hardly a "virtually inaccessable subpage", I've linked it multiple times, on this Talk Page, in edit summaries, etc. It's available there as a resource, and it's helpful to me to keep track of what information I removed from the article that still needs citation. Not everything that you're making citations for works, because if you actually go and look at the sources, which is what I am doing, not every assertion is being discussed, so I'm removing the ones that aren't covered from the article. The front page of her website is not an acceptable citation because the front page will change, and ideally the citation will be to a page that is more permanent. But as I said before, I'm working on making the citations that are already in the article work, and making sure that they accurrately describe the content of the article, before I go and look up new citations. However the more citations you provide, the more I have to work with. Why don't you try checking out the use of the {{ref}} and {{note}} templates, they're not that hard to use. As far as me being on a crusade, we now have an article that's starting to look a whole lot better, and be much more substantially referenced. That's a good improvement in quality, and that's all that I'm after here. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 00:34, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

There is something about your methods I don't understand. It is actually easier and less time consuming to simply go onto Google, type the necessary words, and then paste the resulting citation onto the article, then it is to delete the information and put it on a separate page. What you are doing makes what could be a thirty-second job into a laborious, five-to-ten minute process.Serendipodous 00:44, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I think that what you are not understanding is that I don't want uncited material in the article. At all. I want everything to be cited. The way to make sure that everything is cited is to remove everything that isn't cited, then go back through and add material back in with citation. The question is what to do with the material that isn't cited. My choice is to archive it, so that it's not lost in the edit history as it would be if I simply removed it. That way, as I go back through, and remove the material that citations have been provided for, I can account for what still remains to be cited, and what I still will want to look up citations for. But before that, I cite and format what's already in the article. I don't intend for you to do my work for me, it's not my work, it's Wikipedia's work. It's the work of making the encyclopedia better. I do appreciate your contribution however, as it is actually helping me get the article where I want it to. You're good at finding the information, I'm good at editing it and citing it and making it look good. That's all there is to it, but there's not pressure on you to look this stuff up, other than your choice to do so. I don't expect your help, but I do appreciate that it does help me. I just wish you'd understand that I really am doing this in good faith, and there is a logic and reason to what I'm doing. Where we are in disagreement, I think, is what order things should be done in, and what should be done with material that is uncited. I think it should not be in the article in any uncited fashion for any time, not when I'm working on getting this article through the Verification process.

Check out {{Opentask}}. Verify is one of the major steps on there, it's in there with things like Copyediting, expansion, and NPOVing. This article has been decently expanded, it's pretty well copyedited and NPOV, now I'm working on bringing the article through the Verification stage. It's not an easy task, I'm discovering it's really quite tedious. But it's worth the effort IMO. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 02:30, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Citation is not the issue here. Its your method of removing everything to another page and then expecting everyone else to put it back with citations. There are gentler methods like flagging each citation that is needed with the tag at the place in the text where its needed. The bigger issue is that you started this without any consultation or warning to the others who maintain this page. You’re not making yourself popular. Please work more collaboratively . Lumos3 15:59, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

J._K._Rowling#Nancy_Stouffer

In response to the comments I've been receiving, I'm going to post here first about some concerns I have about this section. The first citation provided, Entertainment Law Digest, appears to go to a site where payment is required to access the information, and the relevant information is not visible, which is less than helpful. I had some concerns about the other citation, but after double checking WP:NOR I'm fine with using that as a source. However even with that one I think it would be more helpful to have maybe an news article talking about the judgement rather than just the actual judgement itself, especially since it's the only citation in that section, and there's a lot of assertions that may not be specifically covered by the judgement. I'd really love any help you guys could give me looking for some more sources for this section. Thanks! Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 00:57, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Bibliography includes unpublished seventh book?

I noticed that Harry Potter: Book Seven is mentioned in Rowling's bibliography, even though it hasn't been published yet (or even named, for that matter). I don't think that a bibliography should include unpublished works (or even unfinished works, for that matter). I have several unpublished works of fiction, and if I were ever notable enough to get a Wikipedia article, you'd never see me list them in my bibliography. --Deathphoenix ʕ 17:29, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

This has been discussed before, and it was decided to retain it, seeing as, while it is unpublished, barring Rowling's sudden, tragic death, there is no chance of it NOT being published. Actually, even if she were to die, there would almost certainly be an attempt to ready the book for publication anyway, based on the notes and drafts she left. It's similar to actors and directors' pages listing films that they haven't completed yet. If there's no reason to assume they won't, then there's no reason not to include them. There are a number of other unpublished works mentioned in the article, such as her "political monster story" and her collection of short stories, that shouldn't be included in her bibliography, as there is no guarantee they will ever be published, but book seven, come hell or high water, will be.Serendipodous 18:22, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. I still disagree with the rationale, but since it's already previously-established consensus, I won't rock the boat any further by revisiting an old discussion. --Deathphoenix ʕ 18:53, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

The $1000 or $2000 advance? Anyone know?

Was it Bloomsbury that gave her the tiny advance to publish her book. The article just says a 100k auction, but I'd read that the advance was only one or two thousand dollars. So I'm guessing the Bloomsbury company was the one who gave her the small advance. Does anyone know? DyslexicEditor 19:29, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

The precise amount Rowling recieved in her initial advance from Bloomsbury isn't clear; different sources quote different numbers, and they're all most likely based on hearsay anyway, but the generally accepted figure seems to be about £2000, or just under $4000. Serendipodous 19:40, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Footnotes

There seems to be some problem with the numbering of the footnotes, the one marked ^[n] does not correspond to footnote n at the bottom. --80.129.76.120 19:24, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

The footnotes are in alphabetical order. Some footnotes refer to more than one citation. Serendipodous 20:27, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

It is ok to have them in alphabetical order, if one wishes. But then it would be good not to insist on ^[n] as the nth footnote appearing in the text, because the footnotes don't appear there in alphabetical order, of course. Can this be achieved somehow? It is a bit weird to follow the last some ten footnotes (wrt the alphabetical order), because they are not shown as the first line after using the hyperlink within the text. --80.129.76.120 21:26, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't the new procedure described in Wikipedia:Footnotes work out properly? --80.129.122.28 22:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I have to say it is extremely difficult to follow the current method of citations. For example, under section "New York Daily News", when i click on citation ^[69] i'd expect to see footnote #69 to be what i'm looking for, and then realized there's no footnote#69 at all. Took me a while to find out what i'm searching for is footnote#44. I'd disagree sorting the footnote in alphabetical orders + ^[n] in the text

If you click on the citation, it will automatically take you to to the appropriate reference. Your browswer should outline the appropriate footnote if it doesnt happen to scroll to the top of the page. Yes, it would be possible to do the supposedly newer and better system. However, as the person who wrote the citations, and maintains them, I prefer alphabetical. That's all there is to it really. Also, please sign your posts. Thanks. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 22:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

The conversion to Cite.php using Ref converter has solved these concerns. --Cyde Weys 20:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Man you guys are really challenging my ability to remain civil while discussing this. I'm so close to getting some serious Rogue Admin points by blocking the everloving goodness out of the next person who comes along here and converts this article. I started an entire discussion on Wikipedia talk:Footnotes, where multiple people have complained about articles they've worked on being converted to this new system. Cyde you participated in that discussion, did you not read the comments there? Please do not convert this article to cite.php. I do not want this article in that format while I'm maintaining it, and I am maintaining it.Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 01:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I for one am reluctant to second-guess the regular contributors to this article as to what note numbering system is most appropriate, so I've added a comment to that effect to the references section. Frankly, I don't care, even if I do think the new system has more advantages. But, Evilphoenix, I'm rather concerned about the statements you made here. Saying "I do not want this article in that format while I'm maintaining it, and I am maintaining it." appears to clearly violate WP:OWN, and threatening to block those who disagree is even more worrying, for reasons I think I need not go into when talking to an administrator. Please elaborate. Sandstein 06:27, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Like I said I was rather irritated at the time. I was merely expressing my temptation, but thus far I haven't actually blocked anyone over this. If you think I'm violating the Owning Articles policy, well then, ok, but, I spent several weeks working on those citations, which is an ongoing project of mine. I've repeatedly stated my reasons for disliking the cite.php system, reasons which I believe are valid and that I am not alone in holding. I'm open to quality content changes to this article, but vandalism to this article and radical changes to the formatting of the citations section I will fight with utter tenacity. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 16:47, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Evilphoenix, you are blatantly violating WP:OWN with this statement: Please do not convert this article to cite.php. I do not want this article in that format while I'm maintaining it, and I am maintaining it. Consider this a strong recommendation to stop "maintaining" this article because you are doing more harm than good. --Cyde Weys 18:03, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

The Hogwarts School Scarf

In the films, a lot of the Hogwarts sequences are shot in and around Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. I haven't been following very attentively, but in Chamber of Secrets, I noticed that the Hogwarts scarf is purple and gold, the colours of the ancient flag of Northumbria (King/Saint Oswald's flag)as described by Bede in the 7th century AD. This is the oldest flag description we have, and the flag is displayed by patriotic Northunmbrians today.

Ms Rowling admired Jessica Mitford, of the Northumberland Redesdale family, and I was wondering if anyone can tell me more on this subject. Is there anything about this in the books?

Bandalore 21.25 15 April 2006